Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "I didn't think of it as propaganda," Kara said. "It all seemed to be pretty much open and honest to me. The straight hont."

  He grinned. "Propaganda is the spreading of any information, true or false, to further one's own cause. The best propaganda is always the truth . . . slanted so that it doesn't look slanted."

  "Maybe. Most of it was looking at the old question about what being human really is. The question's always fascinated me."

  "And me," he said, the grin turning wry. "For obvious reasons."

  She cocked her head to one side. "I suppose I shouldn't ask," she said, "but I can't help wondering. Are you human? Still?"

  He raised an eyebrow. "That's a rather personal question, don't you think?" He laughed, turning it into a jest. "And all I can honestly say in answer is . . . I still feel human. I exist in an electronic world as 'real', whatever that means, as what you experience in a ViRsim. Maybe more so. I perceive myself as human. Sometimes I think of myself as the universe's first virtual human, but even so I tend to define humanity by what's going on—" He stopped and tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. "Up here."

  "I don't mean to pry."

  "Not prying just to ask." He looked thoughtful, and once again Kara had to remind herself that every expression he made, every seemingly casual gesture or look, was done deliberately and for specific effect. Like propaganda. "Are the people who download themselves into virtual worlds still human?"

  That stung. She thought of Willis Daniels and the others, patterned and downloaded that afternoon, because the trauma of the battle on Core D9837 had made them dissociate from both their physical brains and their Naga Companions. She wouldn't know for several days yet whether they would become communicative again; the hope, of course, was that they could wear imaginary bodies in a virtual world until a way could be found of rejoining them with their real bodies. This was a brand-new aspect of psychomedicine, however, and one that still had a rather low success rate. They, like so many others recently, might be condemned to spend the rest of their lives in a virtual world.

  "They're human," she said quietly. If they weren't, then those people were as dead as Miles Pritchard and Pel Hochstader, and the patterned minds stored now in Gauss's databases nothing more than a cruel hoax. Straightening, she faced the image of Dev. "Just what is it you want from me?"

  "You're going to visit your mother."

  "Yes." She felt her guards going up again. Her mother, she knew, still had strong feelings for Dev, and she didn't want her hurt.

  "I want you to tell her all about that probe. And I want you to suggest that the Gauss begin initiating experiments in using the Nova Aquila Gate . . . as a time gate."

  She gaped at him. "You're serious!"

  "We're discussing the survival of the human species," he told her bluntly. "That's not something I would joke about."

  Dev had given the problem a lot of thought and was by now convinced that he was right. "We have no direct proof, of course," he told Kara, "but the Stargates were almost certainly constructed by the Web. You've demonstrated that anyone can use them, however. If we're to win this thing, we're going to have to use them against their creators."

  "There's been speculation that the, um, predecessors of the Web . . . an advanced organic species that created the machine intelligence that later became the Web . . . that they built the Gates."

  "Or built the first ones and passed the process on to their high-tech offspring. Yes. You know, when the DalRiss explorer fleet first came here, we found evidence that this star system had been inhabited when their sun went nova. It's circumstantial evidence, but that kind of cold-blooded genocide points rather strongly to the Web, a machine intelligence that doesn't care about or perhaps doesn't even recognize organic life."

  '"Or just plain hates the stuff," Kara put in.

  "Possibly."

  "The Stargates are constructed of degenerate matter," Kara said thoughtfully, "like in a neutron star. A spoonful of the stuff weighs thousands of tons. We think that the Web deliberately seeks out double stars and triggers novae to create the conditions for forging the things. But we don't know."

  "One of the things we should establish is whether or not the Web is building new Gates. There's been some evidence that they're building something at Alya." Alya A and B were the home suns of the DalRiss, which the Web had detonated in a twin nova two years before. "But we have no hard data. And the Imperials aren't eager to scout aggressively."

  "They're afraid we might stir them up," Kara said. "They've not been real thrilled about the Core Peek operations, for just that reason." She cocked her head to one side. "We've known that devices like the Gate might allow travel in time. According to Dr. Norris, back aboard the Gauss, the theory has been in place since the twentieth century."

  Dev nodded, pleased that Kara seemed to be dropping her reserve and allowing the distance between them to close, that she was listening to him and to what he had to say. He knew she didn't like him, and he hadn't been sure that he was going to be able to communicate with her on any meaningful level.

  "By my estimate," he told her, "the Stargate at Nova Aquila contains roughly the mass of a super-Jovian gas giant, compressed to near-neutron star densities." He opened a new window in her mind, filling it rapidly with scrolling equations and with a detailed, three-dimensional diagram of a Stargate.

  "In Einsteinian spacetime," he continued, as animated pathways drew themselves in red and blue, "and under certain conditions, spacelike translations and timelike translations can be viewed as different aspects of the same thing. Time and space are two different aspects of the same thing. We've known all along that the paths leading into a Stargate could be spacelike, timelike, or both. It turns out that vectors leading into the Gate more or less along its axis of rotation tend to translate as vector changes in time."

  "Hold it," she said. "Let me look at this. Dr. Norris was trying to tell me about this earlier, and it zipped right past me. I want to understand it."

  "Certainly." Dev had long ago grown used to the fact that humans—real humans, as he thought of them, people still in their physical bodies—thought far more slowly than he did. Existing now as patterns of electrical charges riding the circuits of computers, both human-made electronic and DalRiss-grown Naga-organic, his own mental processes were far faster and more efficient than those of any purely human, organic brain. Holding conversations with humans was becoming more and more tedious for him, much like communications across distances of several light minutes or hours had been like before I2C had eliminated the problem of speed-of-light time lag.

  His attention shifted to the three-D diagram of the Stargate. That stirred memories, and not all of them pleasant.

  Twenty-seven years before, he'd been aboard a DalRiss living starship at the Second Battle of Herakles, linked in through a Naga communications net that was dispersed throughout the DalRiss-human fleet. The DalRiss ship housing his body had been destroyed. Somehow, though, his mind had survived.

  Or had it? Dev considered the question sometimes, especially when he was in a lonely frame of mind. If what had survived was only a copy of his original mind, right down to the memories and the slightest emotion, then the original Dev Cameron had died in that battle, and what lingered was a copy with memories too numerous and too sharp.

  After his "death" —he still didn't know how else to think of the destruction of his physical body—he'd found both refuge and purpose by remaining with the DalRiss cityships whose Naga computer nodes had been serving as a distributed network for his linked mind at the time. For the next twenty-five years, he'd accompanied a DalRiss fleet at their request, exploring out from the space known to humans and DalRiss, following the curve of the galactic arm spinward toward the constellation men called Aquila.

  At Nova Aquila they'd discovered the Stargate, a one-thousand-kilometer long needle rotating at the gravitational balance point of two closely orbiting white dwarf suns that, eighteen hundred years previously, had g
one nova. The light from that cosmic explosion had reached Earth twelve hundred years later, shining brilliantly in the night skies of Earth in the year 1918.

  Theory made it clear enough what the Stargate must be. Tippler and others, as far back as the twentieth century, had suggested that degenerate matter formed into such a cylinder and set rotating at velocities approaching that of light would open pathways within the savagely twisted spacetime within which the cylinder was embedded . . . pathways through space, and stranger by far, pathways through time.

  For a moment, he turned his attention from the diagram to the glorious background of stars at the Galactic center, the pearly smear of encircling nebulae, the warm gleam of a far-off supernova, the icy smudges of countless ice worlds turned comet by the radiance of the nearer suns. The Great Annihilator looked much the same as it had looked to him two years before, when he'd become the first human to penetrate the core's secrets.

  Well . . . the first human mind, at any rate, and it had not been his, not exactly. He gave a small, internal grimace at the memory, a piece of his personal history that still pained him when he thought about it.

  Faced with the need to find out who had built the Stargate, and where those builders were coming from, Dev and his DalRiss hosts had prepared a probe. Constructed almost entirely of Naga cells packed into the form of a small ship only a few meters long and given DalRiss control and propulsion systems, the vessel had possessed storage capacity enough to hold a copy of Dev's downloaded mind, a duplicate possessing all of Dev's intelligence and many of his memories, that could occupy the Naga probe as observer and pilot.

  This Dev duplicate had piloted the Naga craft through the Stargate, following the departing path marked out by the uncommunicative alien vessels. It had emerged close beside an identical Stargate at the Galactic Core, some hundreds of astronomical units from the Great Annihilator itself.

  The probe had been almost instantly discovered and attacked. The Dev-duplicate had been able only to record its brief memories of that place and launch the remnants of the probe back through the Core Stargate before being destroyed. Those memories had been reintegrated into the waiting Dev-original's mind; he now "remembered" the events on the other side, just as though they'd happened to him.

  In a way, they had. Part of those memories included the Dev-duplicate's anger and sense of betrayal at what had happened. So far as it was concerned, it had been the Dev-original, so perfect was its duplication. Those memories had raised some ethical questions in Dev's mind, questions dealing with how he perceived himself and other humans.

  Questions about whether or not he was still human. Sometimes, it seemed as though he had less and less in common with them. . . .

  "Okay," Kara said softly, interrupting the viciously circling ring of self-doubtings that more and more darkened Dev's conscious thoughts. For Dev, it felt as though she'd been studying the data for hours, but in fact it had only been a few seconds—impressive for any organic human attempting to wade through math that heavy with nothing but personal RAM. "This says we should be able to navigate even pretty large ships through time. And of course, we already demonstrated that, with the probe. But what could we hope to accomplish? Not changing the past, surely. We'd run the risk of editing ourselves out of existence, of creating a paradox."

  "Maybe not. It depends on how the universe is wired."

  Her brow furrowed. "When we were looking at the probe, the probes, I should say, Dr. Norris was wondering what would happen if we decided not to send it out. If we changed the history of the second probe, in effect. Would it disappear?"

  "I submit," he told her, "that we need to find out. And that's why I waylaid you this way. We need to mount an expedition through the Gate and into time. Actually, I wasn't thinking so much about traveling into the past and changing it. You're right. That could have, um, unfortunate consequences for us, if we weren't careful. I was thinking of going into the future. For information."

  "A recon op into the future?" She pursed her lips. "Wow. I'm not sure I've even got a link with all this yet. In any case, I can't make a decision like that."

  "Exactly why I intercepted you."

  "You want me to—"

  "To convince your people of the importance of this. To get them to put together an expedition that can go through the Gate into the future." He frowned, a shaping of the image that he held before his thoughts in Kara's mind, like a mask. "And it's got to be carried out in secret. I'm worried about our Imperial friends, and what they might think. Or do."

  "The Imperials?" It was Kara's turn to frown. "You really think they'd be against this?"

  "I'm concerned about densetsu."

  The word, depending on how it was used, meant tradition or traditional. Specifically, and in this context, it meant the Japanese tendency to prefer traditional, tried and true means of doing things. They were already gravely concerned, Dev knew, about the new dependency on Naga Companions among the cultures of the Periphery, and they frowned on such new faces of technology as virtual worlds, patterning, and personality downloading.

  "Time travel would really shake them up," he continued, "especially if they began wondering if gaijin were dreaming of rewriting history, rewriting it, perhaps, out from under Imperial Dai Nihon."

  "Yeah. If we use it against the Web, we could use it against the Empire."

  "Tampering with history that way may not be a good idea," Dev said, "as any techfantasy ViRdrama buff could tell you. But yes, the Imperials may be concerned about us using time travel against them." He hesitated. "That's why I wanted to meet with you this way. I know the Imperials are watching closely everything you're doing at Nova Aquila. They're taking part in the Unified Fleet, I think, as much to keep an eye on you as to watch the Web. This is not the soundest or warmest of alliances, you know."

  She laughed, the sound brittle. "You're telling me that? Most of my striderjacks hate them, and they hate us just as much."

  "I've been trying to keep tabs on them by accessing their milnet. Something is brewing in their high command, but I don't know what."

  She grinned. "You interest me. You can tap the Imperial Military Net?"

  "Parts of it." In truth, he'd ranged through much of that virtual world of data and flickering communications links, probing and exploring. There was much the Imperials knew that they had not yet shared with their gaijin allies. Dev was still cataloguing that data, establishing its limits, and learning how best to verify it. It would be an important addition to the Confederation's data net someday. And it might prove to be an invaluable part of the Overmind.

  At the thought, Dev could feel the faint, far-off shudder of the Overmind, a slumbering superconsciousness residing now within the vast and far-flung network of human computer systems and communications links. Called into being two years before when a kind of critical mass of separate consciousnesses had linked together during the Battle of Nova Aquila, it had emerged as an entity similar to Dev, though on an immense scale, a patterned mind resident on the Net composed of billions of separate minds.

  The Overmind's intervention had won that battle, as it took over and shut down vast numbers of Web machines within the space of a heartbeat. Since then, it had been . . . sleeping was the best analogy Dev could think of, though the word was unsatisfactory and imprecise. It was more as though the superintelligence had retreated into the distance, somehow, waiting, perhaps thinking about problems utterly beyond human comprehension. Dev could sense its presence . . . or sense its potential, at least.

  "Time travel," Kara said, looking thoughtful. "I'll be damned. . . ."

  "The whole idea may be impossible still," Dev told her. "But it's worth investigation. Basically, the idea would be to see what the future knows about the Web. Who wins? Why? If we win over the Web, maybe we can learn how it happened and save some false steps . . . and maybe the loss of another star system. If the Web wins in the future, well, we might learn what mistakes we made, and how to avoid them."

  "We?"
>
  "I'll be coming along," Dev told her. "You don't think I'd get this thing started, then wait here while the expedition sets off, do you?"

  "But how could you . . . ?"

  The image grinned at her. "I'm pretty adaptable. I'll need a pretty large memory to reside in, but a Naga–DalRiss node would work fine. First we need to talk to the New American government about organizing an expedition."

  "New American government. By that you mean my mother."

  "She would be an excellent place to start, yes. If anyone could get a project like this moving, it's Katya."

  "I'll talk to her, certainly. I can't make any promises."

  "I'm not expecting any." He hesitated. "I will say one thing, though."

  "Yes?"

  "There is a need for haste. If time travel is possible, remember how we learned about that possibility in the first place."

  Her eyes widened. "The Web—"

  "Might already have time travel. You know, there's a mystery in what we've seen so far. At Nova Aquila, they appear to be funneling gigatons of plasma off into nowhere, using what appear to be timelike paths near the Stargate. At the Galactic Core, they're dropping whole stars into the Great Annihilator . . . but the twisted space-time fields at the thing's center might be used for time travel, just like a Stargate. Where are they sending it?"

  "You think they could be sending it . . . into time? Why?"

  "Unknown. One unknown among many. Also, they don't appear to be that . . . imaginative. But if they do already use the Gates for time travel—"

  "They could use that against us first."

  "If they consider us a serious enough threat, Kara, that's exactly what I mean. Mankind, Imperials and Confederation both, might find ourselves wished right out of existence by a time-traveling alien machine intelligence.

  "And there wouldn't be one damned thing we could do about it."

  Chapter 10

  Of course, those early experiments and entertainment center rides created no more than the illusion of telepresence, a shadow of what was to come later. The person at the Earth-side theme park could see what the robot he was driving '"saw" through its camera, and simple feedback controls allowed him to sense the tug and bump of the rover through the joystick control that steered it.