Nonetheless, where the beam touched, there was a point of light brighter than the sun, and an expanding sphere of destruction, and another, and another. The scattering particles ignited like fireworks. The screens tuned to the X-ray and cosmic-ray bands of the spectrum went white and fell blind. On the visible wavelengths and on radar lengths, the cloud expanded like a smoke ring from the playful mouth of a cigar smoker. The core of the cloud was briefly visible. There were five Earth-sized globes inside, coated with dark ice, arranged in a gravitational pattern called a Kempler’s Rosette. In their middle was a ringworld. The globes acted as shepherding moons to stabilize the spin of the ringworld. In the middle of the ring was glittering the star Ain.

For the first time in thousands of years, the star Ain, Epsilon Tauri, was visible to observers within the Solar System without the Cahetel cloud to obscure it. In the screen image, the star seemed as bright as a nova, for its stellar beam was pointed directly at the cameras and recorders of Pluto. But the star was reddened and distorted, surrounded by arcs and smears of light, as the photons shed by stars behind Ain suffered metric warp passing through the ring. The ring was rotating, creating a circular space warp, the frame-dragging effect. Only Ain, in the precise center of the distortion, was undistorted.

The solar beam of destruction glanced across the cloud like the beam of a warship’s searchlight. For a moment, less than a second, it shone straight, an unbent ray. Then, instantaneously, part of the cloud mass imploded, and a volume of particles larger than a gas giant collapsed suddenly into a pinpoint, smaller (so the instruments Montrose saw reported) than the diameter of an atom. This microscopic black hole bent the solar beam, and focused it into the direct center of the spinning ringworld.

But when the beam, charged with all the output of Sol, struck the center of the Cahetel ring, there was a flare of energy that crackled like lightning out from the ring surface, and traveled up the arms of the vents and filmy extensions of the cloud, as if these were antennae.

“I was saying,” Montrose said softly, in a dull, stunned voice, “that the technology the cloud uses for decelerating inside the beam from Ain will allow them to control our beam as well. That is why they did not come in the same shape as the Asmodel entity.”

And then the last thing Montrose could have expected or imagined happened. The cloud vanished, replaced by the peaceful and gleaming stars of empty space. Ain winked brightly in the middle.

Or, rather, it seemed to vanish. It was not the constellation Taurus he was looking at. It was the constellation Scorpio, and the bright star in the middle was not Ain, but Sol, shining with the deadly emission of the solar beam. Montrose shouted for the Sedna Mind to recalibrate and give him a closer view. The serpentine (which was still embracing him) said softly that Sedna was no longer able to answer.

“What the pox is going on, Big Me?”

There was no reply from behind him, but a ghastly smell. He put his hand on the serpentine to turn himself around.

The figure of the larger Montrose still loomed behind him, but his vast skull was on fire. Flares of a sparks, gushes of heat, and smoke were pouring from the holes where once mouth and nose and eye sockets had been.

The black substance of his brain was now running out of the eyes and nostrils and mouth of what had once been Big Montrose and spreading over the surface of his burnt and blackened head, crawling upward and backward. It looked like a flower opening. The black murk coated the globe of the head, and dripped in inquisitive ropes down his neck and shoulders.

The outline of the skull was visible through the coating of creaking black substance, holes like the fingerholes in a bowling ball marking the position of the eye sockets and mouth, which continued to emit fragments and worms of the murk material from which the brain of Big Montrose had been constructed.

The body of Big Montrose, in one last convulsive movement—almost as if the nerves of his arm and hand had been preprogrammed to perform this action if signals from the central brain were cut—gripped a cylinder of metal from his coat pocket, and extended it unsteadily toward Montrose. It was a standardized brain-storage biosuspension unit, bright green metal marked with a red cross. It slid from the dead man’s giant fingers and fell with dreamlike slowness toward the crystal floor of the domed chamber.

And the floor was no longer the golden white crystal of the Myrmidon Aurum. Starting from the feet of the titanic black-skulled corpse, the floor turned dark. A black snowfall of tiny particles of the murk substance dripping from the skull, eyeholes, and throat-pit of the vast corpse were falling to the floor, and where they touched, the picotechnology was altering the nanotechnology, and the floor grew wrinkled and dark.

The chair next to Montrose flexed, turned black as India ink, and grew wrinkled and crooked all across its surface. Montrose, in a swift reflex, yanked the serpentine in his hand out of the socket connecting serpentine with the chair arm. There were other serpentines connected to the back of the seat. They turned black, writhed in a momentary spasm, and froze in position, looking like strange undersea weeds. The serpentine in his hand remained silver, apparently unaffected.

7. Everything Talks

“What the hell is going on?” Montrose said aloud.

The serpentine answered him and said, “We are receiving a signal from the survivor on Pluto, a subaltern from the Vingtener memory-chain.”

“Survivor?” There had been hundreds of men and thousands of minds aboard Pluto.

“Only one survivor. He reports that all of our technology based on murk pseudo-atomic logic patterns has been absorbed by control signals from Cahetel. The supersymmetrical particle breaking system allowed Cahetel to reflect all photons back toward the source. The emission point sources accelerated rapidly during the broadcast and blue-shifted the visible light into the radio spectrum, on the wavelengths to which the murk was inherently reactive. The solar beam signal which Cahetel reflected will reach Jupiter four months from now, and Earth, who will be nearly in opposition at that time, forty-nine minutes later.”

Montrose, standing with his fists clenched and the muscle in his jaw twitching as he ground his teeth, twice had to override the automatic rage and fear reactions triggered in his parasympathetic nervous system. (He enjoyed being able to do that: he recalled how often his natural body just plunged him into a rage or a panic without so much as a by-your-leave.)

But perhaps some panic was reasonable now. The agents of Hyades had left behind the murk traces and the interstellar beam elements deliberately. They were confident that even an attack coming at the speed of light, with no warning, could be parried, manipulated, and flung back at the attacker in the specific wave-forms needed to paralyze and mesmerize and enslave an entire civilization.

And anyone not using the murk, anyone backward enough to rely on nanotechnology rather than picotechnology, was probably not able to think quickly enough and carefully enough to form a threat anyway. What could technology on the biochemical level of artificial life do against technology on the atomic level of artificial elements?

And who would use anything other than the starbeam praxis to launch an interstellar-level attack?

But the kind of mind Cahetel commanded, the sheer thinking power needed, to catch a destructive torrent of energy, and transform it into control signals, and reflect it back across the entire diameter of a star system was appalling in its magnitude. It was beyond monstrous. It was godlike. Montrose adjusted his nervous system carefully, to let a moderate degree of awe and terror grip him.