Any insufficient model of the universe will contain information gaps. Surprise is an emotion we retain. Our model of recent events is grossly inaccurate.

Montrose and Del Azarchel sent basically the same message at the same time: “But you knew we had the cliometry equations!”

Of necessity. All civilizations above the first ascension eventually develop them. It was on that basis that Asmodel predicted to cultivate you would produce a return on investment. However, Cahetel argued that your race was grossly and unpredictably underdeveloped in all other areas, indeed, was below ascension, and took only the minimum required tools and armaments for an absolute victory, whereas Asmodel had overestimated your capacities, wasted resources overarming and overequipping, and was duly punished by disintegration.

Montrose was not sure if this referred to something like dissolving a corporation or something like dissolving a man in acid. He did not ask. He was not sure if, to postbiological creatures, there was a distinction.

Instead, he sent, “Didn’t any of your clouds and planets and ice giants you sent across space to us ever report back?”

Of necessity, interstellar expeditions are thrifty to the extreme. Efficiency did not require the remote expeditions to report to the Principality of Ain in precise detail.

Torment said, “There is a translation inaccuracy. Each time Ain says efficiency, we should read the Cold Equations. They are speaking of a legal constraint, not an economic one.”

Both men retroactively rewrote and reread the conversion threads accordingly.

11. The Celestial Beasts of Hyades

Mickey stepped into another aside. He said, “Ask the Principality if its servants were of the same racial origins as itself. Were Asmodel or Achaiah the Beast mound-dwelling limpets like you? Or any of the Virtues you sent?”

No. Asmodel’s remote biological ancestors was a motile epiphyte vine or bromeliad that moved and grew through a larger coral-like forest organism coating its gas giant home world, developing intelligence due to the evolutionary pressure imposed by the need to strategize growth and vampirism throughout a semi-intelligent host without killing or maiming it, and against the vicious competition of others like itself.

Cahetel’s ancestors were evolved from a buried ambush predator akin to your trap-door spider or devil scorpionfish, and this was reflected in its preferred strategy of approach.

Shcachlil’s remote biological ancestors were akin to a vestimentiferan tube worm that bores through the bones of larger organisms and uses them for concealment and protection. Its retreat into the interior of your star may have been based on subconscious racial associative logic at a level unknown to us.

Lamathon was developed from a choanoflagellate sessile fungus organism that is cryptically sexual. As such, it understands both asexual and sexual sociopsychology. At the time, Lamathon presented itself as able to bridge the lack of commonality between your species and ours.

The composition or history of Nahalon is unknown. Any query would of necessity be directed to 20 Arietis, or whoever the ultimate originator of that expedition was within the Hyades hierarchy.

Achaiah was descended from cursorial hunting creatures whose practice of pack cooperation and endurance hunting made them, of all candidates available to the Principality of Ain, the most akin to your own in psychology and social organization. Unfortunately, as with most carnivorous races, their social strategies are of limited range and somewhat antisocial.

Mickey said aloud, “The star monsters were a vampire orchid, a trap-door spider, a bone worm, a mushroom, and a hyena, all sent to our world by their master, a colony of whelks and winkles. Even if, for a million years, their biological ancestors have all been ghosts, these machine beings would still continue to be insurmountably different from each other. I have a strange intuition that the agents Ain sent to Sol did report back but that Ain did not understand the reports.”

12. Finite Games and Infinite

Montrose said, “My whole life, all these years—the aliens never knew we had translated the Monument. They did not know there was one. Hyades is not the Monument Builders, nor Praesepe, nor M3. What does it mean?”

Torment said, “It means all our lives have been based on a falsehood.”

Montrose and Del Azarchel, each in a different way, and with different degrees of obscenity said, “I don’t understand.”

Mickey said, “I do. Nobilissimus, Meany, divine Torment, my conversation with Ain revealed that there was no reason to send Rania to M3. The Cold Equations allow for a second method to prove our ability to cooperate with a star-faring civilization—all we had to do was cooperate. The invasion of which we were warned was only a last resort, should we refuse to share the burden of the expense for any expeditions approaching our world. That we were obligated to greet them with gifts, as equals greet equals, was an expression missing from the notation, and therefore neither of you, nor the Swans, nor the Myrmidons made any such attempt.”

For once, Montrose did not swear. He wept, and the tears turned to ice on his cheeks.

For once, Del Azarchel had no notion of how he should appear before other men or before the eyes of history. His face was utterly blank, like the face of a man who suffered a lobotomy. Eventually, after what might have been a short time or a long, Montrose whispered, “It was all unnecessary? Every damned thing we did?”

Del Azarchel said, “We knew the Monument had been redacted, edited, and yet we did not know what was missing. The Cold Equations are based on mathematical models of the mind—there were no missing steps, no errors, and the equations balanced! An interstellar civilization must be ruthless and pitiless if it is to maintain itself across such an abyss, across such spans of time. What did the redactors leave out? What was missing?”

Torment said, “The time value was set artificially low.”

Del Azarchel said, “What?” It was a snarl.

Torment showed them several of the cliometric equations she had stolen from the newborn human Dominion, Triumvirate. Then, she ran a trial of the same equations, again and again, each time increasing the amount of time under consideration until it was infinite. With each trial, the Concubine Vector, the margin where a certain degree of exploitation and sharp dealing was allowed between unequal partners, slowly shrank and shrank.

Montrose said, “It’s the long run. In the long run, honesty is the best policy, eh? But mathematicians have known about that little curiosity for years, centuries, longer. The long-run conditions never obtain, because the cost for waiting for the long run get higher the longer the long run runs—”

Torment said, “A child could have seen it.”

Montrose said, “So how come we did not see it? How come all us genius thinkers missed it?”

Torment said, “We failed to question our assumptions, which is a mental knack that does not depend on intelligence for operation but on innocence of perception.”

“What assumptions?”

She said, “The Concubine Vector equations were written on the Monument as if they seemed to be a logical corollary, and the only logical corollary, the basic mathematical expressions of law, morality, semantics, and logic. But we were reading a Monument with a crucial bit of logic missing. The missing axiom is the difference between a finite and an infinite game.”

She showed them a simple game-theory equation, where the final move of any game, being anticipated by the players, would be taken into account in the penultimate move, and that move again be anticipated by the antepenultimate move, and so on for all the moves.