On the other hand, the Melody is utterly hostile—genocidal, in fact—toward any intelligent species which cannot trace its lineage back to the Ekhat. All non-Ekhat species are an obstacle to the Ekhat’s “divine emergence,” considered by them to be static or noise impeding the “perfect melody.” The Melody envisions a universe in which the transformed Ekhat are all that remains.
Scholars suspect the Melody’s eventual goal is to exterminate all non-Ekhat life of any kind. The Melody believes the Ekhat were well on their way toward “divine emergence” when the sudden and unexpected treason of a faction which they call (translating roughly) the Cowardly Retreat or the Deaf Lesion launched a vicious campaign of sabotage which brought down the Network and collapsed Ekhat civilization across the galactic arm.
Human scholars believe that the Cowardly Retreat is essentially identical with the faction known in the modern era as the Interdict. What can be determined of current Melodic policy seems to substantiate that belief—the Melody is utterly hostile to the Interdict and will slaughter them on sight.
THE HARMONY
The Harmony arose after the collapse of the Network and can be considered the “revisionist” wing of the Ekhat. They believe the civil war which produced the great collapse was due to the anarchic and disorderly nature of Ekhat civilization which led up to it, an era they do not consider to be a “golden age” so much as a “bronze age.” (Keep in mind that these are very rough human approximations of mental concepts which, in the case of the Ekhat, are difficult for other intelligent species to analyze.)
In the view of the Harmony, all Ekhat are not equal. Basing themselves on what they believe is a true genetic picture of Ekhat evolution, the Harmony ranks different branches of the Ekhat genus (or family) on different levels. All Ekhat have a place in the new “Harmony,” but, to use a human analogy, some get to be first violinists and others belong in the back beating on kettle drums.
The Harmony ranks different Ekhat branches according to how closely they fit the original Ekhat stock. The closer, the better; the farther apart, the more inferior. Not surprisingly, they consider the Ekhat branch which inhabited the planet where the Harmony first began spreading as the “true Ekhat.” In fact, they seem to believe that theirs is the home planet of the Ekhat (which no one else does and the claim is apparently very threadbare).
The Harmony advocates a genetically determined hierarchy, in which all Ekhat will have a place, but in which (for most of them) that place will be subordinate.
To complicate things further, the Harmony is split by an internal division of its own. The True Harmony believes the rankings of the Ekhat species are permanent and fixed. The Complete Harmony believes all Ekhat, no matter how lowly their genetic status at the moment, can eventually be uplifted into “complete Ekhat-dom.”
This division, whose ideology is murky from the outside, does have a major impact on the external policies of the different wings of the Harmony. The True Harmony shares the basic attitude of the Melody toward non-Ekhat intelligent species: they are destined for extermination. The Complete Harmony, on the other hand, believes that non-Ekhat species have a place in the universe. The process of uplifting all Ekhat will require replacing the “sub-Ekhat” strains with other intelligent species to, in essence, do the scut work. The flip side of “improving” all Ekhat is to subjugate and enslave all non-Ekhat.
It was this wing of the Harmony which uplifted the Jao into full sentience.
THE INTERDICT
Of all the Ekhat factions, the Interdict is probably the hardest to understand. The closest equivalent in human terms would be something like “fundamentalist, Luddite reactionary fanatics.”
The core belief of the Interdict is that the Network was always an abomination. Some human scholars think that the origins of the creed were scientific—i.e., that some Ekhat scientists became convinced the Network was placing a strain on the fabric of spacetime which threatened the universe itself (or at least the portion of the galaxy where it had spread).
Whatever their scientific origins might have been, the Interdict, as it developed during the long years after the Collapse, became something far more in the nature of a mystical cult. From what can be gleaned from their extremely murky writings, the Interdict seems to believe the speed-of-light barrier is “divine” in nature and any attempt to circumvent it is “unholy.”