Torment put the question to the emissary of Ain.

There was another pause of silence, ten hours while light traveled to and from the distant, gigantic orange star.

There is insufficient information from your report to me, nor do I have the necessary instruments to discover, the identity of the Monument Builders. However, an examination of the sophistication of the deception involved implies them to be equal to or older than of the Forerunner races of the Milky Way. The Forerunners, in ancient days, erected the Galactic Collaboration and established the protocols which govern interstellar intercourse, trade, and activity: the Cliometric Consensus, the distorted version of which you know as the Cold Equations.

The Monument Builders seeded many copies of this Redacted Monument throughout this whole volume of space, in ways so as to come to the attention of lesser races like you and yet so as to avoid the attention of greater races like us—by what means is yet unknown. Each Monument sculpted the details of the message to fit the local situation and the psychology of the race discovering it.

Montrose said, “Wait—what? Was the Monument alive? When I walked on its surface—it was watching us?”

Alive is an inexact term. It was active.

Mickey said, “It was haunted. You should have had your chaplain, Father Reyes, perform an exorcism.”

Del Azarchel said, “Or signed a compact in blood with it. These Monument Builders seem to be a powerful and ancient force.”

Torment said, “We have yet to hear the motive of this act, assuming Ain knows it.”

The Monument told you that Hyades meant to enslave you and, in so doing, prompted your odd and shortsighted responses to Asmodel and Cahetel and the other Virtues sent you, both an attempt to fight the slavery and the attempt to embrace it. These responses provoked the Concubine Vector logic and required the Principality of Ain to impose an indentured servitude of the proper period as a retaliatory means of recompense as well as to instruct.

The Monument is agitation propaganda. The purpose is to create friction and internal discontent within the Praesepe hierarchy during the First Contact process by which naturally evolved and lesser civilizations are met and elevated to conform to the standards and protocols of the Collaboration.

Torment asked, “Why?”

I can only speculate: the Authority at M3 competes with other Archons and Authorities for predominance over the Orion Arm. All are devoted to sophotransmogrification, but differ as to strategy. M3 favors a nonaltricial approach where colonies and constituents are given minimal home support, and perish or prosper on their own; whereas others favor an altricial strategy, where few colonies are lavished with massive home attention. The same Concubine Vector equations that defined the callous treatment of Sol by Hyades are mathematical expressions of the nonaltricial strategy: an outcome of M3 policy.

Montrose said, “So M3 is like the mother sea turtle who lays eggs on the sand and never looks back.”

Del Azarchel said, “And those same practices were imposed on us, thanks to the interference of these ‘others,’ whoever they are.”

Torment said to the emissary, “Who has so afflicted us?”

You must inquire of the Authority at Messier 3 in Canes Venatici.

Finally, at the very core of the moonlet, at the last thread of any and all conversations no matter what windings or turnings they took, was a stark and horrid message:

Montrose and Del Azarchel continue onward aboard the attotechnology vessel M3 granted your race in the name of the advocate who vindicated you. Ain propels the vessel by conventional means to Vanderlinden 133 in Praesepe.

The planet Torment, and all her peoples, possessions and chattel, thoughts and actions, pass into my control and governance. I will remold them into more serviceable channels and broadcast their essential selves to such points in time and space as are needed to aid the ongoing sophotransmogricative efforts within the ambit of my cliometry.

Whether this will prove effective or not will be clearly known long before the vessel reaches Vanderlinden 133. If the effort proves effective, the vessel will be supplied fuel sufficient to bear you to M3. If not, the vessel will be confiscated and your lives impounded as partial payment for the debt thus incurred.

That was the end of all responses. There were no threads leading out of this center of the symbol maze.

2

Farewell to Torment

1. Unanswerable

Torment said, “I cannot compose a question that provokes any further answer. Ain is silent.”

Montrose said, “Here is a dam-rutting question which should provoke something: What the bloody flux does Ain do if we tell him to bugger himself and we turn down his deal flat?”

Torment spoke in a voice of mild surprise. “There is no conversation train recorded in the whole of this emissary moonlet volume which deals with that eventuality. Ain preestablished no response because the question can never come up. There is no room for bargain.”

“Why not?” said Montrose. “We say, ‘Pox you,’ and we find another way to M3.”

She said patiently, “There is no other way. And there is no future for this world if I and my people do not become part of the Hyades cliometric and intellectual order. The human race we left behind will no longer spread from the mother worlds—you all saw the cliometry on that. They are become the Last Men, living only for self-satisfaction. This world, me, us, we are the only hope to see the dream of mankind colonizing the stars made real, the dream of a frontier with no end, only endless hope!”

Torment turned her blinding gaze on Montrose. “Would you truly foreswear both your bride and your dream of a future without end? For what? For me? I am flattered, but a position of servitude is the only possible fate for an intelligent planet among superintelligent supergiants who overdwarf me in every way. There is no other path to Messier 3. You should be grateful that the opportunity exists at all.”

“Grateful? For the opportunity to sell a whole world to slavery?” retorted Montrose bitterly. “You, ma’am, you are the world which is going to be the mother of a whole newer, younger, and more numerous version of the pestiferous human race! That means selling not just one world, but all your children too, all your colony planets and little Potentates—”

Del Azarchel interrupted. “My one grace is that I know my place in the universe. I am superior to all human kind, but I am inferior to these alien machines larger than worlds, who are gods to us. I will welcome the bargain with Ain.”

Montrose said flatly, “You still need me to give orders to the ship’s brain.”

Torment said, “Clearly Ain has sufficient ability to disable or deceive the ship’s brain, if need be.”

Montrose said to Torment, “How is he—Ain, I mean—planning on doing this, again? Will it be like the diasporas from the First Sweep to the Fifth? We left those nightmares behind us long ago. What else was the point of the Vindication of Man, but to spare us from that horror?”

Torment said, “The brain information will be encoded according to Monument notational codes into neutrino packets and beamed to likely points in the Orion Arm and some additional locations in the Sagittarius Arm and Perseus and Cygnus. Any species able to receive and decode the packages will have the option to download them into any number of possible brains, vehicles, envelopes, or bodies. The humans will attempt to persuade the lost races to enter communion with Hyades, who is representing the Orion hierarchy.”

Montrose said, “And then what? They starve to death? They live alone in a robot or a mainframe or maybe inside the body of a giant sexless space clam forever? Alone? Because they cannot go home. They will go mad!”