“Acknowledged.”
“Over a hundred,” Ashly said. “That makes quite a civilization all told. How many Tyrathca do you think one of those diskcities could support?”
“With a surface area of twenty million square kilometres, I should think anything up to a hundred billion,” Sarha said. “Even with their level of technology, that’s a lot of area. Think how many people we cram into an arcology.”
“Look at it from the population perspective, and no wonder the Anthi-CL dominion wanted exclusivity,” Liol said. “The demand on resources must be phenomenal. I’m astonished they managed to survive this long. By rights they should have drowned in their own waste products a long time ago.”
“Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling,” Samuel said. “This close to the star, the diskcities are extremely rich in energy. There can be few waste molecules that cannot be reprocessed into something useful.”
“Even so, they must have strong prohibitions on reproducing. I see a circle of life like this, and all I can think about is a culture growing in a dish.”
“That analogy doesn’t hold for sentient life. The Tyrathca nature is inclined to logically empowered restrictive behaviour. After all, they regulated themselves perfectly on a ten thousand year arkship voyage. This situation is no different for them.”
“Don’t assume their dominions are uniform,” Sarha said. “I’m detecting some areas on the disk with a much higher temperature than the others, their thermal regulation has completely broken down. Heat from the star is flowing straight through. They’re dead.”
“Maybe so,” Beaulieu said. “But there’s still a lot of activity down there. We’re being bombarded with radar signals from every section. A lot of dominions are very interested in us.”
“Still no ship launch,” Joshua said. “No one’s trying to intercept us before we reach Anthi-CL.” He accessed the sensors to watch Tojolt-HI growing against the radiant crimson expanse of the giant star. Apart from the scale involved, it was similar to their approach to the antimatter station. A jet-black, two-dimensional circle cutting right into the photosphere. The cold light of the nebula behind them was unable to illuminate a single feature on the back of the diskcity. Only Lady Mac’s sensors could reveal the topography of mountainous towers pointing blindly away from the disk’s median level. The flight computer’s cartography program was having trouble compiling an accurate chart; the glare of electromagnetic emissions aimed at them was interfering with their radar return.
“What are they all saying?” he asked Oski.
“I’m running a keyword discrimination program on the datatraffic. From the samples so far, it’s all pretty much the same. They all want us to dock at their own section of the diskcity, and each claims to have the greatest resources, as well as unique information.”
“Any threats?”
“Not yet.”
“Keep reviewing it.”
Lady Mac flipped over and began decelerating.
Sensor data on Tojolt-HI built up slowly during the approach phase, giving the crews on Lady Mac and Oenone a good idea how the massive diskcity was constructed. The median sheet which formed the actual disk itself was an amalgamation of dense webs made up out of tubular structures, varying from twenty to three hundred metres in diameter.
Though closely packed, they didn’t touch except at end junctions; the gaps between them were sealed over with foil sheets, preventing any of the red giant’s light from penetrating and diluting the umbra. Individual web patterns were principally circular, also varying enormously in size, and overlapping in contorted tangles. Spectrographic analysis found the constituent tubes were mostly metallic, with some silicon and carbon composites stretching across large areas; over five per cent were crystalline, radiating a wan phosphorescence out towards the nebula.
There were regions, spread at random over the darkside, where the tangle of pipes swelled out into complex abstract knots several kilometres wide.
It was as if the tubes had been subjected to severe lateral buckling, though the radar image couldn’t determine any fractures.
The dense shade of the darkside was inevitably dominated by the thermal transfer machinery. Radiator panels stacked in kilometre-high cones stood next to circular fan towers of faint-glowing fins, minarets of spiralling glass tubes with hot gases rushing through them competed for root space with encrustations of black pillars like a spiky crystal growth, whose sheer ends fluoresced coral pink. Their meandering ranks formed mountain ranges to rival anything thrown up by planetary geology, running for hundreds of kilometres along the webs. Straddling the valleys between them on long stilt-like gantries were giant industrial modules. Dark metal ovoids and trapezohedrons of machinery, their exterior surfaces a solid lacework of pipes and conduits, rising to a crown of heat-dissipation fins or panels (a direct ancestry could be traced to the machinery on Tanjuntic-RI). Although the diskcity had an overall uniformity bestowed by its basic web design, no region or structure was the same, technologies were as heterogeneous as shapes. The standardisation and compatibility synonymous with the Tyrathca had clearly broken down between the dominions millennia ago.
As they drew closer, more movement became visible across the darkside.
Trains, made up from hundreds of tanker carriages and kilometres in length, slid slowly along the valleys and embankments between the thermal transfer systems. Their rails were an open framework of girders; suspended above the tubes and foil sheets of the disk, undulating like a roller coaster track, dipping down to merge with the larger tubes, allowing the trains to run inside them, then rising up the stilt legs of industrial modules to pass straight through the middle.
“Who the hell built this place?” Ashly asked in bemusement as the grey pixels built up into a comprehensive image in this neural nanonics.
“Isombard Kingdom Brunel?”
“If it works, don’t try and fix it,” Joshua said.
“There is more to it than that,” Samuel said. “Tojolt-HI is not a declining technology. They have selected the simplest engineering technology which can sustain them. Whilst humans would no doubt progress to developing a full Dyson sphere over fifteen thousand years, the Tyrathca have refined something that requires the minimum of effort to maintain. It does have a kind of elegance.”
“But it still fails repeatedly,” Beaulieu said. “There are dozens of dead sections across the disk. And each failure would cost them millions of lives. Any sentient creature should try to refine its living environment to something less prone to accident, surely?” Samuel shrugged.
The Anthi-CL dominion began issuing instructions for Lady Mac’s final rendezvous coordinate. A blueprint they transmitted identified a specific section of the rim, which the flight computer matched up to the sensor image. The Anthi-CL dominion wanted them to keep station two kilometres out from a pier-like structure protruding from the edge.
“How is the translation program update coming on?” Joshua asked Oski. “Do we know enough to communicate directly now?”
“It’s integrated all the new terms we’ve encountered so far; the analysis comparison subroutine response time is down to an acceptable level. I’d say it’s okay to try and talk to them.”
Lady Mac’s drive thrust was reducing steadily as she drew level with the plane of the disk. In comparison to the desolate solidity of the darkside, the rim appeared to be unfinished. It bristled with slender spires and protruding gantry platforms wrapped in cables. Clumps of tanks and pods were attached to various open frame grids.
“At last,” Sarha said. “That’s got to be a ship.”
The vessel was docked to the rim a hundred kilometres along from their rendezvous coordinate. It had a simple profile, a pentagon of five huge globes scintillating with a soft gold and scarlet iridescence under the gas-giant’s illumination, each one at least two kilometres in diameter.
They surrounded the throat of an elongated funnel m
ade from a broad mesh of jet-black material; its open mouth was eight kilometres across. There was no recognizable life support section visible from Lady Mac’s current position.
“Picking up a lot of very complex magnetic fluctuations from that thing,” Liol said. “Whatever it does, there’s a lot of energy involved.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a Bussard ram-scoop,” Joshua said. “It was a neat idea, pre-ZTT era interstellar propulsion. Use a magnetic scoop to collect interstellar hydrogen, and feed it direct into a fusion drive. A cheap and easy way to travel between stars, you haven’t got to worry about carrying any on-board fuel. Unfortunately it turns out the hydrogen density isn’t high enough to make it work.”
“In our part of the galaxy, maybe,” Liol said. “What’s the hydrogen density in space between a red giant and a nebula?”
“Good point. That could mean they’re in contact with the closest colony stars.” He didn’t believe it; there was some missing factor here. What would be the reason to travel to a nearby star? You couldn’t trade over interstellar distances, not with slower-than-light ships. And given your destination would have the same technology and society as your departure point, what could be traded anyway? Any differences or technological improvements that sprung up over the millennia could be shared by communication laser. “Hey,” he exclaimed. “Parker?”
“Yes, Joshua?” the old director responded.
“We thought the reason for Tanjuntic-RI losing contact with Mastrit-PJ was because civilization failed here. It hasn’t. So why did they go off-air?”
“I have no idea. Perhaps one of the colony worlds relaying the messages round the nebula collapsed.”
“A Tyrathca society failed? Isn’t that a bit unlikely?”
“Or it was killed off,” Monica said. “I’d like to think the enslaved xenocs finally rebelled and wiped them out.”
“Possible.” Joshua wasn’t convinced. I’m missing something obvious.
Lady Mac fell through the plane of the disk. It was a deliberate overshoot, allowing them to see Tojolt-HI’s sunside. Here, at last, they found the invariable conformity they’d grown to expect from the Tyrathca.
On this half of the disk, every tube section was made from glass; a trillion corrugations held together by black reinforcement hoops like the roof of God’s greenhouse. Light evaporating from the photosphere below was thick enough to qualify as a crimson haze; it gusted against the diskcity, only to be rebuffed by the burnished surface in copper ripples longer than planetary crescents. This was a hint of how sunset over eternity’s ocean would appear.
“Jesus,” Joshua crooned. “I guess this makes up for Tanjuntic-RI.”
They held position for several minutes with every sensor boom extended to gather in the scene, then Joshua reluctantly fired the secondary drive rockets to bring them back into the disk plane and back towards the rim.
He locked Lady Mac’s position in the coordinate Anthi-CL had given them, and initiated a barbecue roll. The starship’s thermo dump panels were spread out to their full extent, glimmering cherry red whenever they turned into shadow.
As soon as Sarha confirmed their on-board heat exchangers could handle the sun’s heat, Joshua opened a direct communication channel to the Anthi-CL dominion.
“I would like to speak with Quantook-LOU,” he said.
The reply came back almost immediately. “I speak.”
“Again, I thank the Anthi-CL dominion for receiving us. We look forward to beginning a prosperous exchange, and hope that it will be the first of many between our respective species.” Make them believe that others will be coming, he thought; that implies any forceful action on their part would ultimately have to be accounted for. Pretty unlikely given the scale of things around here, but they don’t know that.
“We too have that anticipation,” Quantook-LOU said. “That is an interesting ship you fly, Captain Calvert. We have not seen its like before. Those of us who disputed your claimed origin no longer do so. Is it a subsidiary vessel of your starship, or did you cross interstellar space in it?”
Joshua gave his brother a disconcerted look. “Even if this translation program is getting creative on me, they’re not responding like any Tyrathca I know about.”
“That’s a leading question, too,” Samuel cautioned. “If you confirm we travelled round the nebula in Lady Macbeth they’ll know we have faster-than-light travel.”
“And they’ll want it,” Beaulieu said. “If we’re right about the pressure on local resources, it’s their escape route out past the surrounding colony worlds.”
“No it’s not,” Ashly said. “I lived through the Great Dispersal, remember. We couldn’t even shift five per cent of Earth’s population when we really needed to. ZTT isn’t an escape route, not even with the industrial capacity of a diskcity. Everything is relative. They could build enough ships in a year to transport billions of breeder pairs away from Mastrit-PJ, but they’d still be left with thousands of billions living in the diskcities. All of whom would be busy laying more eggs.”
“It might not solve their problem, but it would certainly give star systems where they propose to settle one hell of a headache,” Liol said. “We’ve seen what they’ll do to aboriginal species occupying real estate they want.”
Joshua held up a hand. “I get the picture, thank you. Though I think we have to consider ZTT technology as our ultimate purchasing power to get the Sleeping God’s location. The Hesperi-LN Tyrathca already have ZTT. It might take decades to reach Mastrit-PJ, but it will spread here eventually.”
“Try not to,” Monica said forcefully. “Try very hard.”
Joshua held her stare as he reopened the channel to Quantook-LOU. “The nature of our ship is one of the items of knowledge we can discuss as part of the exchange. Perhaps you would like to list the areas of science and technology you have the most interest in acquiring.”
“What areas do you excel in?”
Joshua frowned. “Wrong,” he mouthed to his crew. “This is not a Tyrathca.”
“I agree, this is not a response I would expect from one,” Samuel said.
“Then what?” Sarha asked.
“Let’s find out,” Joshua said. “Quantook-LOU, I think we should start slowly. As a gesture of good faith, I would like to give you a gift. We might then start to exchange our histories. Once we understand each other’s background we should have a better idea where useful exchanges can be made. Are you agreeable to this?”
“In principle, yes. What is your gift?”
“An electronic processor. It is a standard work tool among humans; the design and composition may be of interest to you. If so, duplication would be a simple matter.”
“I accept your gift.”
“I will bring it to you. I am eager to see the inside of Tojolt-HI. It is an astonishing achievement.”
“Thank you. Can you dock your starship to one of our ports? We do not have a suitable ship to collect you from your present position.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Liol said. “They can build habitats the size of continents, but not commuter taxis.”
“We have a small shuttle craft we can use to reach the port,” Joshua said. “We will remain in spacesuits while we are inside Anthi-CL to avoid biological contamination.”
“Is a direct physical encounter between our species dangerous?”
“Not if adequate precautions are taken. Our species is very experienced in this field. Please don’t be alarmed.”
Joshua piloted the MSV himself, ignoring Ashly’s snide remarks about union rules. It was cramped in the little cabin; Samuel and Oski came with him, as well as a serjeant (just in case). He had to promise the others a rota for visiting the diskcity, everyone had wanted to come.
The port which Quantook-LOU had designated was a fat bulb of grey-white metal four hundred metres across, which flared out from the end of a web tube. Its apex was taken up by a circular hatch seventy-five metres in diameter, open to sho
w a dimly-lit interior.
“Looks like one big empty chamber in there,” Joshua said. He fired the thrusters carefully, edging the little craft inside. Gentle red light shone from long strips that curved round the walls like fluorescent ribs.
Between them were rows of almost-human machinery. It put him in mind of the docking craters in Tranquillity’s spaceport.
Directly opposite the main outer hatch was a stubby cylindrical grid, with much smaller airlock hatches at the far end. Joshua steered the MSV towards it.
“Your datavise carrier is starting to break up,” Sarha reported.
“That’s to be expected, though a good host would offer us a constant link. We’ll start to worry if they actually shut that hatch.”
The MSV reached the top of the cylindrical grid. Joshua extended one of the vehicle’s waldo arms to grip it in the clamp. “We’re secure,” he reported, using the band to Quantook-LOU.
“Please proceed to the airlock ahead of you. I await on the other side.”
Joshua and the others fastened their space armour helmets into place.
They assumed the Tyrathca didn’t have programmable silicon, so they wouldn’t know about SII suits. The armour would appear to be their actual spacesuit, reducing the risk of offending their hosts at the same time providing a degree of protection. The MSV’s cabin atmosphere cycled and the four of them slid out.
There were three airlock hatches at the end of the grid. Only one of them, the largest, was open. The chamber behind was a sphere six metres across.
“Those other hatches were too small for the breeders,” Samuel said. “I wonder if one of the vassal caste has been bred for a higher IQ; they certainly weren’t capable of useful engineering work before.”
Joshua didn’t reply. He stuck his boots to what could have been the chamber floor just as the atmospheric gas started to hiss in. Suit sensors told him was a composition of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, argon, and various hydrocarbon compounds, the humidity level was very high, and there were several classes of organic particulate in circulation. He made a strong effort to keep his hand away from the innocuous-looking cylinder on his belt which was actually a laser.
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