LONG, LEAN, HUNGRY ONES

In 1245, Pope Innocent IV composed a letter to Güyük Khan, requesting that the Mongols cease attacking Christian lands in Eastern Europe. This letter was carried all the way from Lyon to Karakorum, where it was read to the Khagan himself in his imperial court:

“You ought not accordingly take up the audacity of ravaging further, because, as the sword of your power rages against others, the all-powerful Lord has so far permitted diverse nations to be laid low before you; but He in our age frequently passes over chastening the proud until the right time, so that if they neglect to become humble of their own accord, He may not hesitate to punish their wickedness in time and may exact more serious retribution in the future.”

The Franciscans who had carried the letter endured brutal conditions on their long return journey to Lyon in 1247, and brought with them the Khan’s much less veiled threat in response:

"You must say with a sincere heart: ‘We will be your subjects; we will give you our strength.’ You must in person come with your kings, all together, without exception, to render us service and pay us homage. Only then will we acknowledge your submission. And if you do not follow the order of God, and go against our orders, we will know you as our enemy."

The impulse to assume universal authority, cast against itself, is as fascinating as it is terrible; both men believed they were the primary vector by which God’s will would be impressed upon the known world. Entire continents remained unknown to them, let alone the soil of other planets, yet they would have demanded control immediately upon word of their existence.

Several centuries later, in 1919, Charles Fort published his Book of the Damned. This came a year after the end of World War I, where ages of similar imperial ambitions heaped upon one another had culminated in nothing more than craters and irreversible ruin. Fort imagined, in that moment, a hierarchy of galaxies like the Milky Way where such horrors were merely routine, and among which ours was deeply outmatched:

"Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space—but then data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers—which have come here and pounced upon civilizations of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or temples and monuments—for which later historians have invented exclusionist histories. But if something now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all exploitation.”

It is not so strange to imagine that this type of conflict is universal. Place a mirror in front of a solitary betta’s aquarium, and the size of the its known universe doubles, yet it now contains a recognized threat. More often than not, it will choose to fight its reflection, and some of us clearly exhibit similar behaviors. If Super Tamerlanes do not yet exist beyond Earth, we are viable to become them. 

Speculative fiction authors have written of many such star-enthralling empires and their inevitability, but we must be careful in doing so, as even in a work such as this one, we expand the hypothetical space they can covet. Perhaps someday we will find ourselves desperately expanding reality to exceed transcendent hordes, writing of faraway worlds just to ensure there is something they cannot yet reach.

Perhaps we will do it at their behest.