“Mankind is now strong enough to help Cahetel or hurt it. For the first time, we are not just livestock. We just graduated to being slaves. And like all those black Africans who captured their fellows and sold them to Arab traders on the east coast of Africa, or Spaniards on the west coast, we slaves can now ask for something before we stuff our brothers into the slave ships.

“I can act against my own self-interest, and even kill myself, and Cahetel knows it. He just saw me commit suicide.

“Cahetel cannot act against his equations, and I know it.

“So I know I cannot make any sort of bargain with it to stop the forced colonization of hell planets out there with mutated versions of humanity. But I can twist his arm to make it talk.

“So it has got to talk to me. In fact—come to think of it—you tell him to increase whatever energy budget and mental resources he is using to determine how to talk to me. He can damn well learn how humans think and learn to express itself more clearly. He has not had to be clear before because the Equations forced him to conclude it was inefficient. But it is efficient now.

“So you tell that damn bastard to talk or else.”

2. The Second Sweep Stars

Montrose saw on higher and lower bands of the spectrum the increase of electronic activity in the dripping murk clinging to the dead skull, and also saw heat radiate from the black floor on which the giant stood. Other signals showed that the Sedna brain that was woven throughout the volume of the little world, the brain which was also made of murk, also now part of Cahetel, increased its activity.

“Is English that hard to learn?” muttered Montrose.

“Artificial beings tend to be quite logical, sir,” said the serpentine delicately.

Now the screens of the dome lit up with diagrams of a volume of space centered on Sol.

Montrose saw stars that he recognized from the extensive atlases lodged in his eidetic memory: He recognized 107 Piscium and 41 Arae and Alula Australis, variable double star. Here was Wolf 25 in Pisces and HR 4458 in Hydra and Zeta Reticuli orbited by a vast ring of debris. There was Tabit, and Chi Orionis and 61 Ursae Majoris famed in ancient tales. Montrose recognized Zeta Tucanae and Xi Boötis and Beta Canum Venaticorum Formalhaut surrounded by its many disks of debris, and a dozen others.

These were all stars of Sol-like characteristics known to hold Earth-like worlds. All rested within twenty to thirty-three lightyears. Cahetel was presenting the targets of the Second Sweep.

Next, were displayed certain of the stars of the First Sweep. Lines indicating possible shipping flight paths connecting the second group of stars to the first. Perhaps Cahetel was indicating that eleven more colonies survived than anyone knew, surviving only as a few wretched and starving stragglers unable to mount an interstellar-strength radio laser. Or perhaps Cahetel was indicating that the Black Fleet, now impressed into service as deracination vessels, would visit and recolonize the failed worlds en route to the new colonies.

Lines issuing from Delta Pavonis and Epsilon Eridani indicated that Cahetel had indeed read and understood the message capsules left in his path by the humans, and knew that these colonies had survived. These worlds, too, would be forced to contribute a certain large percentage of their populations into the deadly maw of interstellar colonization.

Now the view on the major screen moved outward, and maps and navigation charts displayed a larger segment of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Again, lines and spheres showing the growth over millennia and billennia of colonies were displayed, but these were not the human colonies.

Montrose straightened up, eyes wide.

He was being shown the presence of other alien races, and their plans for expansion.

3. The Potentates and Powers

Here was the Hyades Cluster at 151 lightyears away, the cluster of civilizations Rania had christened The Domination.

There were other lesser planets, Powers and Principalities, reduced to servitude by expeditions of Virtues sent out by Epsilon Tauri. Mankind’s fellow slaves.

One was HD 28678, a single star with a single gas giant, some seven hundred forty lights from Sol. The gas giant was alive like Jupiter, and had absorbed all the lesser planets and asteroids in the system to itself.

Another was 49 Eridani, which Earthly astronomers thought to be a blue subgiant star. There was a semi-permeable Dyson sphere around the star, which absorbed wavelengths useful to the civilization there, and only let pass through the vibrations not useful to them. The star hence appeared cooler and older than its true temperature, classification, and age. The star also appeared larger than its real size, since the diameter was that of the outer layer of Dyson sphere plates.

A third was T Tauri, a young and brilliant variable star some 420 lightyears beyond the Hyades cluster. The information showed twenty or thirty separate races had evolved on the surfaces of asteroids, planetoids, centaurs, and plutinos in the dozen belts and archipelagoes in that system, as the immense energy of the star apparently created an immense evolutionary fecundity. All but ten of the alien races of T Tauri had reformed themselves into machinelike forms of life, and blended with each other. There was cliometric information listed as well. The system was in the midst of an engineering project, and all the matter of the many belts and clouds was being broken down and reassembled.

Another: he saw the star Beta Tauri, called Alnath, a near neighbor only 131 lightyears from Earth, but far beyond the thirty-three lightyear diameter the Hyades defined for the Second Sweep of mankind. The gas giant there spawned a race of beings whose civilization radiated radio signals which might have been detected from Earth, had the proper instruments been orbited in the late Neolithic. But Ain discovered the emissions thousands of years ago, sent an emissary, and the wasteful radio noise was stopped, as new energy systems and new communication systems were imposed. By the time Marconi on Earth invented the first crystal radio set, Alnath was silent.

And there were twenty more. Only two polities (one Archangel, one Potentate) were thriving on solid planets, but these were small worlds, like Mercury, cinders huddled near their gigantic suns, and their civilizations had grown outward from the bottoms of boiling lakes and steaming oceans of chemicals never seen on Earth outside of a metallurgical laboratory.

The other lesser races enthralled by Hyades were born in gas giants of the “Fire Giant” type unknown to Sol: bodies larger than Jupiter nearer their home stars than Venus.

Apparently life did not often arise on planets like Earth. Its atmosphere was too thin, and its temperature too cold, to aid in the formation of the most useful and most likely of organic chemicals.

And none of the planets, not one, depicted a race of beings that evolved to dwell on the surface of their worlds. All were aquatic. They were either Mercury-creatures shaped like swarms of motes smaller than viruses swimming through seas of molten metal or else were Jupiter-monsters larger than archipelagoes swimming through methane hydrospheres thicker and darker than any oceans of Earth.

In neither case were there any images or specifications of the biological forms of the subject species. Listed here were only energy outputs, locations and number of communication centers, volume of calculation power. Hyades did not record any information about the shapes and biological limitations of bodies.

Montrose saw the cliometric information on evolution rates, if “evolution” were the proper word for artificial changes. He assumed there was no more point to tracking the bodily shapes of creatures scores or hundreds of lightyears away, information decades or centuries in the past, than there would have been to track changes in lady’s fashions. Brain information could at will be edited, redacted, copied, or transcribed directly into bodies (biological or mechanical or both or neither) that could be created, altered, and shed at will. The individual members, across interstellar distances, were as insignificant as the individual cells in a human body. These civilizations were Noöspheres now. According to the Cold Equations, the only thing that really mattered about them was the volume of matter and energy in spacetime they could transform from useless to useful forms: how much work they could do.