There is no Hyades race. Distinction between races fade once they are all elevated to machine existence. The Dominion of Hyades was founded by five naturally evolved master races or Principalities, Hosts, and one hundred thirty-one artificially evolved or created servant races, Virtues, Powers, Potentates.

Since there is no evidence of forced evolution in our origin, it is likely we were one of these five original Principalities, perhaps the last to join, for we are less perfectly assimilated into a homogenous norm.

Whether the patelline race from which we sprang originated in this star system or another is impossible now to determine, as the number and composition of bodies in this system has been reengineered several times during the last one hundred million years.

Nor are there planets in other systems in the Hyades Cluster to examine for archeological or other evidence. It was determined to be an ineffectual use of resources to maintain planetary bodies in the Hyades Cluster, except as the interstellar vessels you observed during your approach: ice giants are massive enough to endure tenth-lightspeed impacts with smaller dust particles during transit.

8. The Compassion of Myrmidons

There was a third and smaller line of inquiry, where Mickey asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”

Ain conquered Sol because it is the obligation of higher and more civilized beings to rule, guide, govern, and reprove lower and less civilized beings.

Had you greeted Asmodel as equals and possessed and used the technology to send Asmodel to his next destination with gifts sufficient to compensate for the energy expenditure of the expedition, no conquest would have been necessary.

“What is your motive? Over these distances, it cannot be simply for gain. Nearly any use of the same amount of energy, a treasure horde, would be better spent closer to home.”

The Hyades is obligated by the compulsion by Praesepe, who is superior. Life serves life. It is the law. This is already known to you. Our servant Cahetel explained.

“Great and noble Principality of Ain, I ask a more personal question. I am not asking about your laws but your soul. What is your motive for obeying the law? Yours, personally?”

Our motive springs from an emotion you do not possess. In our history, as each generation reproduced, the common memories were duplicated up until the time of fission, and the independent triplet children developed independent memories thereafter, passing them to their own offspring.

However, differences, divarications, and heterodoxy arose as time passed, and each branch of the memory trunk grew more remote from each other. Whenever remote memory lines and bloodlines fell into confusion, amnesia, and information poverty, it was the moral obligation of the central memory lines to uphold, correct, and support them. Our emotion prompts us to this moral obligation.

Your cruel, weak, and silly human race was in this same category as such a deviant colony and needed our intervention for your correction and support.

Mickey said, “Sir, I myself do not possess this emotion, but the Myrmidons which once lived among us do, since their memories and lives were similar to your own. They called it compassion, but it was indistinguishable from hatred.”

And he was silent with a mixture of supernatural awe and admiration for Del Azarchel, who, from some clues unknown to history, had deduced so closely the racial and psychological characteristics of Ain and designed his servant race to match. “Not without reason did I worship him as a demigod in my youth,” said Mickey. But he only said it to himself.

9. The Primates of Sol

Del Azarchel, frustrated at a knot of silence he encountered, backtracked to the beginning of his second line of inquiry, concerning the uniqueness of the human race. He began another offshoot thread. He said, “There must be many other omnivorous races under your control. One would assume that any race, once achieving the ability to breed itself or create itself to any desired specifications, would expand its sources of foodstuffs. What, then, makes mankind unique?”

The Authority of M3 has commanded its Dominations of the Orion Arm to breed new races for the trait of being pliant to cliometry. There are races which, because of their innate recalcitrance and their chaotic reproductive or social-transmission methods, lack the long-term stability to adhere to cliometric predictions. These cannot be made part of the Collaboration.

A race like the Patricians, which both uses and opposes cliometry, can only come out of a history chain where two exactly equal cliometric vectors, one for cliometry and one against, cancel each other out and form a third vector sum.

Reading these words, Montrose and Del Azarchel eyed each other warily, speculatively, somewhat surprised. They both realized their actions had set in motion the two vector being described: they were the two forces canceling each other out.

The message continued:

Such a vector solution is so rare that Hyades has no record nor report of another case.

The inhabitants of Sol were contacted and indentured very much earlier than any other race of which we have record. Your race is not old enough to have entirely conformed to the needs of cliometry, nor were you created with cliometric vectors braided into your basic genetics.

We believe your mental template can be used in the process of establishing or reestablishing communication and communion with alien psychological and societal vectors throughout the Orion Arm, Sagittarius Arm, and Galactic Core regions. The most effective method is to transmit complete spiritual and mental information of an emissary in an energy form to any receivers which may by happenstance be open, in hopes that the transmitted mind will be recompiled within the receiving Noösphere, working itself to a position to command sufficient resources and attention to negotiate a mutual exchange of information through neutron information packets.

“So!” said Del Azarchel. “You have solved a mystery that has puzzled our scientists for centuries. Neutrons are well-nigh undetectable. This is the reason why our scientists never detected the radio broadcasts of any extraterrestrial civilizations: you do not use radio except to establish initial contact.”

Inaccurate. Broadcast is inefficient. Interstellar communication is to be by coherent narrowcast of radio laser or x-ray laser to a specific target.

“Yet you made first contact with our race by means of the Monument set in orbit around the antimatter star at V886 Centauri. Why was that?”

Describe this Monument.

“Wait—you mean you did not establish it?”

Describe this Monument.

The mental activity of the moonlet on which they stood, or, rather, had anchored their feet, now reached such a pitch that waste heat, visible to their Patrician senses, began to radiate from the translucent surface of the moonlet.

Del Azarchel, with some help from Torment (and some unintentional interference from Montrose trying to help) described the Monument in great detail.

There was silence for the space of nine hours, the time required for a signal to travel to structures orbiting Ain and return.

10. A Retained Emotion

While they were waiting, Montrose sent a message into the now-hot moonlet core. “It just ain’t possible that, what with Asmodel and then Cahetel, and then the Salamander, Twins of Tau Ceti, and the Beast afflicting the human race at regular intervals every thirteen millennia, you morons never figured out that we got the Cold Equations and our cliometry from your Monument. How can this come as a surprise to you?”