“Yeah, well, looks like someone transposed an omicron for a zero or a doughnut or something, because I am looking at the spot where our mother planet, Earth, is supposedly s’pose to be, and I ain’t seeing nothing but a whole lot of nothing.”
“The Hyades are not the enemies of man, but our natural masters! They will guide us upward to evolutionary heights undreamed.”
“Or blast us to atoms, if’n we ain’t no damned use to them.”
“You know nothing of them!”
“Nor you. Nor anyone, human or posthuman or whatthehell.”
“I know no man shoots his own hounds.”
“Unless the hound is a mad dog, mad enough to want to die free rather than live the slave of his so-called natural masters.”
The reason for having this storage locker act as the bridge was that, with the aft bulkhead gone, there was no interface between either man and the ship’s brain. Neither trusted that if the brain information were piped in through some indirect means, a control panel, a touchscreen or wand, that the other man might not bug or jinx the datastream. Both men were wary of the other, and both were gentlemen enough not to let the mutual hatred and suspicion rankle them. Little compromises made things easier: each man designed his own interface, and just sent a maser or laser into the depth of the crystal mind core at whatever arbitrary spot he chose. Neither man knew the one-inch-wide interface volume the other had claimed as his base of operations in the million-gallon multiton mass of seething thought-crystal.
Montrose observed, “On second thought, I am going to back off my Fried Earth theory. You’d think there’d be debris.”
“What if they used contraterrene?” asked Del Azarchel. “The Virtue had the mass of Uranus. Enough to hold one earth-sized mass of antimatter.”
“Hm. Total conversion would have made a flash we’d have seen while we was cowering like rats out at your old hidey-hole at Jupiter, Blackie.”
Ximen del Azarchel, with a mental command, pointed a microwave laser at the input-output port on Montrose’s coffin, and sent text with a parallel verbal channel for voice expression, and a wireframe for body language and facial expression. Del Azarchel sent a cartoon image of his lean, goatee’d, devilishly handsome face wearing a supercilious glance of doubt. “Jupiter was in conjunction, so Earth was 6.2 AU from us, masked by Sol.”
Montrose sent back a shrug, a scowl on his bony, big-nosed, lanky, and lantern-jawed face. “The whole mass of Earth turning instantly to photons? We’d have seen the reflection from the other planets, Sol or no. Odds are you’d see it from Andromeda galaxy in two million years or so, something that bright. You want to check my figures?”
“No, Cowhand. Do you want to check mine?”
“Nope, I trust your math more than I trust opening an unshielded data channel. Do you think the Earth is hidden? Shielded somehow?”
Blackie put a thoughtful look on his cartoon face and sent that. “When we departed the Earth the first time, the human-cetacean group-mind had occupied the entire nickel-iron core of the planet, which you so thoughtfully turned into a gigantic logic crystal for them. They are what a man named Kardashev long ago called a level K-One race: a civilization that controlled the total energy and resources of a planet.”
“What Rania called a Potentate.” Montrose reminded himself with a mental frown what the scale and magnitude was of these monsters they faced. He knew that, by the Kardashev scale, a civilization controlling the whole output of a star was called K-Two, and of a galaxy, K-Three. The Hyades was between K-Two and K-Three, controlling the total output of matter and energy in a small star cluster, and an intelligence in the hundred billion range: what Rania called a Domination. In her scale, a civilization that totally exploited the mass and energy output of a gas giant was called a Power. The servant of the Hyades dispatched to Sol, large as a gas giant but much more finely organized, was called a Virtue, and was above K-One but below the K-Two level, controlling more mass-energy than a rocky planet but less than the total mass-energy of a star system.
Blackie was sending: “Like an ugly duckling finally reaching its own, the Earthly civilization was the first human race truly to supersede humanity. You saw how quickly the Swans reestablished the ancient weather control of the Sixtieth Century, how rapidly they converted the interior mass of the moon to logic diamond, and created the Selene Mind. It’s been four hundred years since last we were allowed on Mother Earth but you saw the rate of development.”
“I sure did.”
“They were evolving from something at the edge of what we could comprehend to something beyond that edge. The growth rate was asymptotic.”
“Always is, during a boom, Blackie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean in real life, and not in daydreams, things got a natural growth rate until they run into a natural growth limit. Then the asymptote flips over: sure, advanced societies still advance, but always slower. Lookit how quick the fastest a man could go went from the speed of a sailing ship to the speed of a supersonic jet. And then in the decades after—what happened? Man did not keep getting faster and faster. Lookit how free mankind got during the Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution, and the abolition of slavery. And then what happened? Natural limits began to set in, and people didn’t keep getting more free and more, they started losing their liberty by sips and dribbles in my country, and by gulps in yours. What makes you think intelligence growth doesn’t have built in limits?”
“Merely because I know that an ape could not imagine a human. We are not discussing a merely linear increase in thinking speed, but a revolution in the quality of thought, the use of means beyond our imagination. Do you, ah, ‘reckon’ that the Swans, while we were absent, might have passed beyond an event horizon of asymptotic growth, and evolved beyond our reckoning?”
“And do what? Invent a technology that allows them to bend light around the entire globe?”
“Nothing so dramatic. Merely a layer of ash and dust brought up from the interior would lower the albedo. Let us never forget, just because we are dealing with entities that crossed one hundred and fifty-one lightyears to conquer us, that even something so small as a solar system is unimaginably vast, even for imaginations such as ours. If the Earth were not reflecting light, if we were out of estimated position by a few hundred thousand miles…”
“So where is Selene, the intelligent moon? Every crater and pothole was supposed to have a weapon inside. She was going to be the great offensive fortress, our rock of Gibraltar in the sky. The face of the moon lights up like a Christmas tree when she fires her main beam, and all the smoke from all the secondary launchers gets ionized in the hash. Where is she now?” Menelaus sent a sigh. “What if the ash and dust got kicked up not from the Potentate masking the Earth? Weapon damage would do the same.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t want to believe it, Blackie. Those Varmints are evil.”
“The Virtue is meant to introduce us into the Galactic Civilization!”
“As serfs. Or all-meat patties. And if they was here to introduce us, where is they?”
“They who? You mean the Virtue?”
Not long ago, while orbiting Ganymede, the long-range telescopes of the Emancipation’s astronomy house had captured an image of the intruder as it passed into the Solar System.
It had been a globular mass the size of a gas giant, adorned with silver clouds swirled into storm systems large enough to swallow smaller worlds. The clouds covered a liquid surface black as sin. They had seen the black mass drifting like a soap bubble toward the blue loveliness of Earth, moving with no visible means of propulsion. Fourteen immense machines or organisms that looked like trees in winter or naked umbrellas had been in orbit around it. These were the orbit-based space elevators or “skyhooks” whose blueprint had been seen on the surface of the Monument: the instruments used for deracinating whole populations of one planet to another. These skyhooks had had the decency to have reaction-drive engines, and move according Newtonian principles, even if the mother mass had not.