“There was more to that story than what you could see and hear,” said Alistair.
“You had to be here,” said one of the marines.
Without the impediment of a face shield, their voices carried through the ship.
“Explain that.”
The members of the scout team exchanged glances, as if trying to confirm they all had the same impression. It was Katherine who finally responded.
“I don’t think they were the ones who built this ship.”
***
“We’re not going to find anyone else here,” said Alistair as his still awed gaze roamed about. “If they were here, they would have greeted us.”
Lost in her own reverie, Katherine was not paying close attention to him, but the sound of his speech prompted her to give voice to her related thoughts.
“This ship didn’t destroy Kaldis.”
Her brother nodded. “We did.”
“And there are no resistors on Aldra,” said Louise. “Just side effects of the Overlay.”
The great chamber swallowed her words, and they fell into silence. The group stood before the next dais, twenty yards or so from the first. They deferred to Katherine and Alistair, standing a bit back and leaving the Ashley siblings alone at the edge. Alistair deferred to Katherine, allowing her to move out front. Like before, as soon as Katherine placed her first foot on the dais the display at the center lit up. Less nervous and uncertain, she moved directly to the display and, just like before, images began to appear and disappear on it.
Another intelligent being was displayed. The last stages of evolution leading to its birth were shown, leaving a creature most resembling a bipedal reptile. After that, in all the broad details the story was the same as for the ruddy species. A society came to allow coerced relationships to predominate, eventually institutionalizing that form of relationship. They colonized the Milky Way while the precursors of the ruddy species still roamed their planet on four legs, and while primates were only newly arrived on Earth. The difficulty of maintaining suitable conditions on unsuitable worlds came up against the pressure of economic crises fomented by side effects of the Overlay, war and other government intrusions. Artificial ecosystems decayed, leading to a flight of persons and capital back to the homeworld, leading to ecological collapse, leading to mass immigration. With the species now returned to its homeworld, dependent on a system of interstellar trade that no longer existed, strife reigned. Conflicts were, by an institution founded on violence, combated with violence. Eventually, through misuse and overuse of the Overlay, the star exploded and the species was no more.
When the images disappeared and they were off the dais and once again in low light, Alistair said, “This is a museum.”
“It’s a mausoleum,” said Katherine. “A harbinger of extinction. It comes to collect our finger prints before we die.”
“Horse shit!” cursed the sergeant, having nothing with which to rebut their deduction save for his earnest desire that it not be true.
When the echoes of the sergeant’s curse subsided, Louise ventured a question. “Is this all we do, then? Not that it’s not fascinating but… it’s not what we wanted when we came.”
“What we want doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight,” mumbled a man from the science team.
The despondent tone of his voice gave them pause. Some bit their lips, others stared at the floor. It was during this lull that they heard the sound of footsteps coming from deeper in the chamber.
Without conscious thought to do so, they closed ranks, withdrawing into a compact group. They spied a figure coming around the bend. Its soft, bipedal footfalls would have gone unnoticed had they continued their conversation. They saw it only indistinctly, and after a breathless minute of watching it advance, they realized it had no distinguishing features to see. It was a blank, grayish thing, not unlike a dreadbot except that, for all its broad similarities, it obviously was not patterned after the human form. It carried something in the shape of a square, something black like the color of the ship.
It approached them at an even, unconcerned pace, and when it drew within a few yards, turned and went to the wall. There was a missing section into which it slid its black square. After it shone a light over the area with a small tool in its hand, the new section of wall melded with its surroundings until it was impossible to determine that this section was only recently added. Its work finished, the figure left the way it came. The humans did not move until it rounded the bend and was out of sight, its footsteps no longer detectable.
“What in the goddamn hell was that about?” demanded the sergeant, looking through the scope of his rifle.
“It’s a repairman,” said Louise.
“Well,” said Alistair, casting his gaze over the group and shrugging, “I say we follow it.”
***
They had entered the chamber at one extreme. In following the repairbot, they came to its middle. Before arriving, they became sensible to a light source around the bend, and when they reached the middle they were greeted by the sight of an enormous machine. Emitting only the faintest of hums, it nevertheless pulsed and throbbed and its parts spun and pumped. Its appearance was akin to a mountain of metal boxes piled on one another, with various tubes and disks poking out of the jumble. Two repairbots were standing on it several levels up, but they gave the party of humans no notice. Their attention was drawn to some part of the machine.
At floor level, on the edge of the machine, was yet another dais with a display at its center. This dais was larger than the others, and its display towered fifteen feet high, encompassing far more space. The displays having proven safe, the other members of the team overcame their trepidation and gathered around its edge as Katherine stepped onto the platform. The display lit up and when she stepped forward, images began to play.
She was confronted with an enormous image of a spiral galaxy, majestic and beautiful. Surrounding it was the blackness of space and a few smaller dwarf galaxies caught in its orbit. The matter in the galaxy, almost entirely hydrogen, occasionally condensed and formed stars, most small ones living for many billions of years. A few were gigantic stars that lived far briefer lives. These gigantic stars converted much of their hydrogen into other elements: helium, oxygen, carbon and others. Then they exploded and flung the newly created elements into space, where they would mix with clouds of hydrogen until finally participating in another star birth. Through this constant recycling, the composition of the galaxy changed over time.
Eventually, the heavier elements became abundant enough that planets would form around a new star. They came in many varieties, and orbited at any number of distances from their host sun. The rocky planets closer in were bombarded with chunks of material from out in space, and these chunks brought water and amino acids. Eventually, this bombardment abated as debris in the young solar system was vacuumed by the gravitational pull of the orbiting bodies. After that, surfaces cooled, and the amino acids eventually configured themselves into a self replicating form, evolving on every world where the conditions were right.
There were certain, extremely rare worlds where conditions were such that the life forms would occasionally acquire greater complexity. This did not happen often, as the conditions required much fine tuning of parameters: planet size, composition, amount of water, a satellite companion of sufficient size, large gas giants in the system but in stable orbits. Also critical was the size of the star it orbited and its location in the galaxy: away from the densely packed center and metal-poor edges.
Even these conditions were not sufficient for intelligence to arise. What really caused fundamental changes in the evolutionary pathways was a planetary ecological crisis. A deep freeze of a planet hitherto in a temperate realm of the solar system put the kind of pressures on life forms that raised the survival threshold and thus, with fewer survivors of any given species allowing greater and quicker changes in the populations, produced radically new forms, often more complex forms. Often, the chan
ges helping populations survive proved useful in all environments.
As Katherine watched, the Milk Way collided with another galaxy. This did not cause any planetary crises, for the distance between stars was vast and no two stars collided while their galaxies were merging, but it did set the stage. The collision caused the interplanetary dust and gas to compact, increasing the rate of star births. A few million years later, the biggest of these new stars died. With the increased rate of star death came an increase in cosmic rays shooting through the galaxy, which seeded cloud formation and cooled temperate planets.
With the collision of the two galaxies, however, it wasn’t just one planet that cooled down. Every terrestrial planet at a distance from its sun permitting liquid water, and therefore Earth-like weather, became cloudy and froze. It was this precise sort of crisis that had, on Earth, produced its first eukaryotes. What had not been anticipated before, and what she and the others learned for the first time, was that this led not to the evolution of eukaryotes on just one planet, but every candidate planet which was temperate before, now became an icehouse, and eukaryotes made their first appearance in the galaxy on many planets at the same time.
She gasped at the idea, tearing her gaze from the screen and finding her brother, whose awestruck expression mirrored her own. Unable to look away for too long, she returned her attention to the display.
Eventually, the rate of star deaths slowed and the planets warmed up again, allowing the new eukaryotes to spread. Billions of years later, after the Milky Way swallowed and assimilated the other galaxy in a prolonged and complex dance, another galactic collision occurred. Once again, within a few million years the temperate rocky planets cooled. This time, two things happened. First, a second generation of eukaryotes arose on planets that had not yet had bacteria, or possibly did not even exist, during the first collision. Second, the first generation of eukaryotes, under pressures not normally present on their planets, formed the first multicellular organisms. Multicellular life arose during the second icehouse phase.
After the second collision, there were two generations of more complex life forms, one having just arrived as eukaryotes and the other having become multicellular life forms. In the older generation, the oceans became saturated with oxygen, a byproduct of the physical processes of most of its life forms. The oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, a deadly phenomenon for many, but there were some who took advantage. A few animals used the oxygen to drive their metabolism. At this point, the stabilizing moon that kept the planets’ climates from chaotically changing became a barrier to evolution adding more complexity. However, a few of them, despite the moon, tipped over, such as happened on Earth, provoking the Cambrian Explosion.
With the planets tipping during the course of a mere several thousand years, the phosphorite and other minerals buried in ocean sediment were released, due to changes in ocean currents, into the ecosystems of the worlds. Chance mutations allowed some organisms to take advantage of this, and the result was shells and skeletons. These developments allowed larger and more complex body structures, the kind requiring control by more complex brains that could be exploited for other purposes.
Intelligence finally arose in the Milky Way. On one planet, a species evolved and, through the now familiar process, destroyed itself. They had no extant neighbors, but discovered evidence of an earlier species that had died out. In an improbable coincidence, the homeworlds of the two species were within a couple hundred light years of each other. Consequently, when the second species colonized a new world, they frequently found the ruins of the first.
What they learned served as a warning, though not effective enough to prevent the process of decay and collapse. There was, however, one group that recognized the process when it began. Motivated by despair, a scientific interest in recording history and a desire to help – even though the help might be to another species in the distant future – they put together an army of self-sustaining robots and built a ship for them, and it was on that very ship that Katherine, Alistair and the others were now standing.
There were other ships that escaped destruction, other individuals and groups who delayed the day of their demise, but it was only a delay. The robots survived because their capacities were greater and their needs fewer. They worked without tiring. Life support systems were not necessary for them. Neither was leisure. Neither was gravity, the absence of which was detrimental to life. Every robot could be programmed to perform, at an expert level, the tasks of resource extraction, construction and repair. The robots spent their time replacing worn down parts and collecting raw materials from other worlds without breaks. For the living creatures, it was a simple equation: their ability to produce lagged behind the rate of decay. Small populations could not benefit from extended divisions of labor, reducing their productive capacity. Many of the conditions on the homeworld, conditions provided for billions of years at a time, had to be reproduced through labor. They were like sailors dumping out buckets of water into which a river was pouring. A new homeworld was the only chance of survival, but a search of the galaxy meant abandoning established mines; even more labor would need to be diverted, every time raw materials became scarce, to establishing new resource extraction sites. The lifespans of these last populations of intelligence were measured in decades, and when they went, the last of the species became extinct.
In a lonely galaxy the ship of robots wandered, exploring and recording. Left with a basis of technology and some hypothetical speculation from their makers, the robots found a way to use the Overlay to increase their speed of travel. Later, millions of years after the extinction of their creators, they detected a signal in the Overlay coming from the other side of the galaxy. They rushed to it, arriving to find a species in its last hours. Though they had explored for thousands of millennia, they had visited less than one percent of the stars in the Milky Way and had no way of knowing of the existence of that other race until they detected the Overlay signal. They arrived too late to save them, but they recorded the history of the species. Many millions of years after that, they detected a second signal and sped to that unexplored corner of the galaxy. They found another race on the edge of extinction, and they recorded its history too. A third signal reached them, and a fourth after that, but then a great calamity occurred.
There was a third collision between galaxies, and for a third time the temperate planets of the galaxy were plunged into frigid cold. A third generation of eukaryotes arose, while the planets with second generation eukaryotes saw multicellular life arise. However, on those planets with first generation life, the generation from which evolved the species that built the robot ship, the icehouse conditions no longer served to tease greater complexity out of evolutionary processes. Instead, the complex organisms died out, leaving only a few tucked away in warm oases of their worlds and setting them back to the first part of the multicellular stage. In effect, the first generation life merged with the second generation life, leaving in the Milky Way one stage of multicellular life composed of two separate generations, and another generation of merely eukaryotic life.
There was no longer intelligent life in the Milky Way. When the burst of star deaths finally diminished and the icy worlds became temperate again, there would be more opportunities for intelligence to evolve, but this was a question of many millions of years. The robot ship, in the meantime, left the Milky Way, visiting what would, hundreds of millions of years hence, be called the Andromeda Galaxy. Crossing the distance in mere decades, the robots found it to be a lonely place. Like the Milky Way, it had much bacteria, but little in the way of complex creatures. They discovered the galactic collisions which provoked increases in complexity in the Milky Way occurred with far greater frequency in the Andromeda Galaxy. While this provided ample opportunity for eukaryotes and multicellular life to arise, it also too frequently wiped out complex species. They would evolve again when their planets warmed, but another collision come too soon continually wiped out these species.
/> Over vast stretches of time, the robot ship visited the galaxies of the local cluster. Galactic collisions between large galaxies were common, and the Milky Way, through blind chance, experienced a paltry number of them. This paucity of galactic crashes left long intervals of time in which evolution could add complexity, and in a few rare cases this led to intelligence. No such lengthy and peaceful intervals were experienced in other galaxies, where one galactic crash was followed by another a mere hundred million years later. In all its vastness, the Milky Way had produced, as far as they could tell, a mere six civilizations, and it was the only galaxy in the local cluster to have produced any at all.
There was a risk to traveling between galaxies, for though a million years was not a terribly long period on the time scale in which they were operating, a decade was a fantastically long time for the machinery of which they were composed and on which they depended. A trip of decades or a century between galaxies was a trip over nearly absolute emptiness. It was not attempted without a thorough stocking of provisions and materials. A trip of a millennium between galactic clusters was out of the question. Had the robots been mortals, they might have cast a wistful gaze out over the universe, at the billions and billions of galaxies they dared not visit, in all probability could not visit, and wonder if there were any suitable galaxies out there, which had partially, though not entirely, escaped crashes and therefore might have produced intelligence. There was no way to know: even through the Overlay they could not, at that distance, detect any signals.
From the Milky Way, however, they could detect signals, and eventually one came to them. The first intelligent species after the third collision of the Milky Way arose. Like before, the robots arrived to find them in rapid decline. A few dozen million years later, they met the red species. Three million years after that, Homo sapiens emerged.
The marines and scientists tore their attention from the narrative to look at their surroundings with a new sense of respect. Just as with an adult’s body, which contains none of the material present at its birth, the ship had no doubt been recycled many times over. Nothing of the original ship remained, yet there was a continuum of nearly two billion years represented there. The realization that the vessel was built before the emergence on Earth of the first multicellular organism produced a profound and reflective state in the passengers.
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