by Ian Douglas
Collins was staring out into the star-clotted pinwheel of Andromeda now, studying the microwave-colored haze.
It had been she who’d alerted the expedition’s commander to the dark matter haze and its peculiar behavior a week before. She’d alerted him to the fact that the alien mass was accelerating toward them apparently at superluminal speeds. How that might be possible Collins could not even guess.
Thanks to her warning, though, a probing attack by the Andromedan Dark had been beaten off, and the humans had begun working out theories about the stuff. It seemed likely that the mass was part of the so-called dark matter that permeated the universe; there was, possibly, an entire realm of dark-matter biology and physics for the most part undetectable by beings of normal matter. That ultra-alien biology seemed to use microdimensions in a way that kept it from interacting with normal matter save gravitationally . . . and that allowed it to take superluminal shortcuts that bypassed normal, four-dimensional space.
As she looked into the haze now, focusing on the densest areas of the mass, she was aware of brilliant, sharp-edged pinpoints of that same microwave color, five of them stacked up one in front of another.
She couldn’t tell how far away that cluster of points might be, but she could see it rising out of the microwave portion of the spectrum as it accelerated, see it shifting up and up and up, becoming deep infrared in color . . . then near infrared . . . then red in the visible spectrum.
Whatever it was, it was coming in one hell of a hurry.
St. Clair was becoming bored.
He and the others remained in what for all the world felt like a kind of large, open shopping plaza or mall, lined with what might be stores or businesses, and with an immense central courtyard dotted by the enigmatic gateways. Alien beings of every imaginable description—and quite a few of utterly unimaginable shapes and forms as well—moved around and past them, apparently taking no notice of the little group of humans. St. Clair recognized more Kroajids and Dhald’vi, as well as Xam and !!!K’tch.
But there were many, many others, a teeming, seething zoo of life-forms and things that might have been alive . . . depending on how you cared to define that notoriously slippery word. What, St. Clair wondered, was a human supposed to make of something that looked like interpenetrating geometrical figures made of pure light? Or something the size of an elephant on its hind legs, but with an upper body that mixed—quite unpleasantly—a hammerhead shark and a writhing mass of exposed intestines? Or a four-meter plant walking on naked roots and sporting four perfectly formed vertical bulbs like flower buds. Or things like bright blue blankets scrunching along on the floor under their own power?
Most individuals of that menagerie remained in the distance; the expanse of open floor stretched for kilometers in two directions, and the brightly lit, translucent ceiling arched hundreds of meters above their heads.
St. Clair felt like a bug on an empty plate.
“I wonder,” Kiel said, rubbing his jaw, “if there’s someplace around here where we can get a drink?”
“You really want to risk tangling with alien biochemistries?” Dumont replied. “There are life-forms that require arsenic for good health and vigor.”
“I feel sure the local technology would be able to accommodate us,” St. Clair said. “The trick is for us to recognize what we’re seeing.”
They’d tentatively tried exploring some of the, for lack of a better term, “shops” nearby. They’d agreed to call them that to give some context to their surroundings, though St. Clair had seen no indication that the locals were actually buying merchandise in them. Each tended to be an enclosed space filled with incomprehensible shapes and lights and objects and sounds. They’d entered several of them. Invariably, each shop was quite a bit larger on the inside than it appeared to be from outside, extending back into the labyrinthine windings of the alien structure in rooms and passageways that seemed to go on forever. Alien species moved or stood or quivered or vanished from sight seemingly at random within those spaces. In one, a group of five Dhald’vi had been arranged in a circle, bodies split open, tendrils joined, as they intoned a low, throbbing bass note.
Many areas were completely empty . . . or were nearly so save for a few Kroajid or Xam or Dhald’vi or !!!K’tch or things even more unlikely. Some were filled with gleaming shapes and structures of iridescent crystal; some were enveloped in pitch-black darkness. One had opened into a kind of theater with a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the brightly lit surface of Ki. Still others were filled with liquid behind yielding, invisible membranes, or by enigmatic shapes and pillars and monolithic devices in constant motion or changes in form.
It was impossible to even begin to speculate about what the various rooms were for, or what their occupants were doing.
“So what are we supposed to do now?” Garrett asked, looking around with a kind of vague annoyance. He’d been trying to engage some of the aliens in conversation with Newton as translator, but with little success. Communication with the locals was possible, it turned out, but the ring’s denizens simply didn’t appear to be interested. Many moved away rapidly, as though afraid.
St. Clair had decided that if six strange-looking beings had materialized inside a shopping center or university or religious compound on Earth and begun trying to speak with the people there at random, they likely would get cold shoulders as well. The ID tags and access codes the six humans carried within their in-head circuitry were not linked into any local network; even if each of them was carrying an electronic identification label, it probably didn’t say much more than “alien visitor.”
The ring’s inhabitants might also be a bit on the xenophobic side. St. Clair had already noted at least a dozen wildly different species in the place, but none were even remotely like the humans. The pale-skinned Xam were the closest, but they were different enough that none of the others could possibly mistake the humans for one of them. It could be that they were unafraid of species familiar to them . . . and terrified of strangers.
Something like a three-meter mass of tangled, bright scarlet worms writhed across the transparent floor twenty meters away. It rippled as it entered one of the archways . . . and vanished.
“This,” Mercer said, “is a waste of time.”
“I agree,” Dumont’s telepresence said. “Without a cultural context to go on, without even understanding the technology of what we see, there’s nothing we can learn here.”
“I’d still like to arrange a visit to the planet itself,” St. Clair said. The idea had formed earlier, as he and the others had looked out through that floor-to-ceiling transparency at the orange-illumed ochers and whites of Ki’s surface. The more he saw of this place, the less it seemed like Earth, even an Earth removed from Humankind by 4 billion years of planetary evolution.
But if he or a research team could get to the surface, they might find ruins . . . or something else that would give them some definite answers.
He decided he would need to talk to Na Lal or another representative of this civilization to see if he could arrange a visit.
“Newton?” St. Clair said in his mind. “I think it’s time to call for our ride back to the ship, don’t you?”
“I have been told to wait, Lord Commander. The others will be returning soon.”
“What others? Na Lal and his friends?”
“No,” Newton said. “I believe my contacts are referring to—”
And then the memories came flooding in, a torrent of sensation that nearly knocked St. Clair to his knees. “What the hell?”
Chapter Seven
For a shuddering, dissociative moment, St. Clair was two people, with two sets of side-by-side memories. He clearly remembered spending the past hour wandering the alien concourse and exploring the “shops,” and he clearly remembered stepping through the portal into a starscape between the colliding galaxies.
It was clear what had happened . . . or at least it became clear as he sorted through the blizzard of
conflicting memories. They had successfully made an electronic copy of him and uploaded it into their virtual reality. That copy had experienced things, seen things, been told things, and now that copy was being reintegrated into his brain, its memories merging with his own.
“They want us to help them against the Andromedan Dark,” St. Clair said. “Damned if I can see how. . . .”
“Their technology,” Dumont said slowly. “It’s . . . astonishing. Utterly beyond anything we’ve even dreamed of.”
“Maybe,” Christine Mercer said, “they need us as cannon fodder.”
“Charming thought,” St. Clair said. But he’d been wondering the same thing.
With the advent of the Graal Tchotch, the Andromedan Dark Mind, those outside of the vast digital networks were the only defense available—a tiny portion of the galactic civilizations they’d thus encountered. And if that defense failed, the Andromedan Dark would overwhelm the networks present within Dyson clouds and matrioshka brains, and the virtual reality realms would die. Trillions upon trillions of intelligent beings, snuffed out as if by the throwing of a switch. A culture with a history and a technology reaching back hundreds of millions of years at least, gone in an instant as if it had never been.
Again, though, St. Clair couldn’t help but think: What the hell are we supposed to do to stop that?
Na Lal appeared in front of them. How did he do that? St. Clair wondered. The being’s upright body split open, tentacles stretched wide. “Lord Commander St. Clair?” the being said. “Ambassador Lloyd and I have arrived at an understanding. I wonder if you and I might have a word?”
“Of course.”
“It won’t take long. We will arrange for the rest of you to be transported back to your ship.”
A silvery bubble closed over St. Clair, and a moment later, with no sensation of movement, it vanished. He was standing outside, on a deck or observation platform extending above a verdant hillside. Alien towers, white and needle-slender, rose from the jungle below. Above, Ki stood at half-phase, filling the sky almost from horizon to horizon, threatening to fall and crush him.
He forced himself to look away. He knew that the sky couldn’t literally fall, but the effect was overwhelming nonetheless. This, he realized, was the open ringworld encircling Ki at an altitude of 4500 kilometers from the planet’s surface, and the ring’s velocity kept it in place. The planet’s surface drifted by slowly overhead as the ringworld completed its once-per-three-hour orbit. Even with that speed, the gravity here, created by the ring’s spin, felt low. He flexed his knees, testing his weight. It was pretty close, he thought, to the surface gravity on Mars, say a third of a G.
The air was cool, and smelled quite fresh, as though it had recently rained.
He forced himself to look up once more, at the surface of Ki slowly drifting past. He could see enormous areas of blinding white across the flat and mostly ocher surface. Vast fields of salt, marking, perhaps, the basins of long-vanished oceans. Much of the white, though, was drawn out into streaks, some long enough to girdle half of the world. Perhaps the salt had been shaped by eons of steadily blowing winds.
He thought again of the idea that Ki might be Earth, but from just a few thousand kilometers away the notion seemed preposterous. There were no similarities, nothing he could grab hold of and say “Yes! That is the Earth!” If anything, it looked like Mars, though there weren’t nearly as many craters. He didn’t see any mountains, either. The entire visible surface looked flat, if a bit crinkled, like the surface of a rotting apple. Salt flats—endless salt flats—with very few clouds and no snow or ice that he could see made him think of a vast desert, a dying world. There were seas—small ones—and scatterings of lakes and rivers, but they only served to emphasize the extent of planetary desiccation.
The night side of that globe was utterly dark. No city lights, no illumination. The place felt . . . lonely.
Na Lal stood behind him; St. Clair gave a small start as he turned and saw the alien. The being had not been in the transport bubble with him; St. Clair decided that what he was seeing most likely was some sort of projection. He’d touched one of the thing’s tentacles when he’d first met it, so he didn’t think the Dhald’vi was some sort of projection of one of the ring’s digitally uploaded inhabitants. It certainly had seemed solid and real, but this culture’s technology bordered on outright magic, and anything might be possible.
“Thank you for speaking with me,” Na Lal told him. The Dhald’vi’s English was perfect and without accent . . . but then it would be, since Newton was translating.
“Not at all. What can I do for you?”
“Your Ambassador Lloyd has suggested a formal alliance between your people with mine. But I am told that he does not speak for all humans.”
“Well, that’s true,” St. Clair replied. “We have a governing council—”
“The United Earth Civilian Directorate Council,” Na Lal said, interrupting. “He told us. But he indicated that you were the military leader.”
“Technically, yes. I’m in command of the naval and Marine elements on board . . . and I make the decisions when we are in combat, or under a state of alert.”
“That seems . . . cumbersome.”
St. Clair laughed, surprised at the alien’s observation. “I suppose it is. But we have an important tradition of civilian leadership in government. Bad things happen when the military is in control of civilian life.”
“But doesn’t that lead to confusion? Uncertainty? A lack of united purpose and direction?”
“Yes, it does. But the alternative is much worse.”
“I do not understand.”
“How do you make decisions?”
“All of us together, over the electronic networks. We build consensus. We decide. We act.”
St. Clair nodded. “We have something similar. We can discuss important decisions electronically. But a decision made by a majority is not necessarily the best one. That’s why we have the governing directorate. Theoretically, they’re better informed about what needs to be done than the general citizenry.”
“Ah. And this system works well?”
“It . . . works,” St. Clair admitted. “Not always. And sometimes not all that well. The council seems to have more than its fair share of idiots, more often than not. But, like I said, it’s better than the alternative.”
“I am not encouraged,” Na Lal said. “Your people must decide quickly to help us, and be solidly of one accord in this. The Dhalat K’graal is coming, and it will be here soon.”
Newton didn’t translate the name, but St. Clair had heard it before. Dhalat K’graal meant something like the “Minds from Higher Angles,” and it was a part of the Andromedan Dark, a kind of second-tier physical manifestation of the Dark beneath the Dark Mind itself and above the so-called Dark Raiders, the hordes of fighter-sized ships piloted by Xam and other species. The Dhalat K’graal had attacked a number of Ad Astra’s personnel, coming at them from the twists and corners of alien dimensions. It had been the Dhalat K’graal that had driven Günter Adler insane.
That Na Lal feared them, too, sent shivers down St. Clair’s spine.
“What do you mean, they’re coming?”
Na Lal reached out and gently turned St. Clair, gesturing with a glistening black tentacle. He was pointing at a section of black sky halfway between the rim of the ring and the ocher-and-white limb of the sky-filling planet.
It took him a moment to see anything but the glare from the planet . . . but as his eyes adjusted he could make out a tiny, bright blue star.
“They’re coming,” Na Lal repeated.
“The reports of my insanity,” Günter Adler said, “have been greatly exaggerated.” Who’d said that, or something like it, he wondered? He wasn’t sure. The quote wasn’t stored in his personal RAM, but he’d heard the phrase somewhere before.
“Perhaps,” Jeffery Benton told him. “But the people have a long memory. They question your ability . . . not to ment
ion the state of your mental health.”
“That . . . was someone else,” Adler said, angry. “That wasn’t me!”
“I’m afraid that this is about what people think,” Gina Colfax told him, “not about what is. That, after all, is the essence of politics.”
“The ‘essence of politics,’ as you put it,” Adler said, “is what we decide in this room. The people will accept whatever we tell them.”
His stress of the word we was deliberate and calculating. He watched the emotions flicker across the faces around the room, emotions ranging from disdain to pity to “Oh, dear, he’s going to make this difficult, I’m afraid.”
Well, damn them all.
They were seated in a lounge in Government Center, the sprawling complex in the Port Hab endcap hills in the outskirts of Seattle, not far from Adler’s villa. If Tellus Ad Astra could be said to have a civilian capital, this was it. The upper canopy of the surrounding forest rustled and shifted in the ambient breeze. Three kilometers overhead, a monorail flashed along its shaded rail just beneath the suntube that ran the length of the habitat cylinder.
Adler continued to study the other Cybercouncil members, seven of whom were present physically. Four more were there in telepresence, their images projected around the conversation pit by the large room’s sophisticated electronics. Their shift in allegiance seemed arbitrary, senseless, and mind-numbingly abrupt. He had to remind himself that time had passed since he’d seen them last. So far as he could remember, his last meeting with them had been just a couple of days ago, and there’d been no question then that his was the senior and commanding voice of this council. Still, for them to change in just over a week . . .
And they had shifted. Now they were treating him as an outsider, a nobody. Because of that lost time—because over a week had been stolen from him . . . a week during which he’d been a raving lunatic locked away in the Ad Astra medical facility.