Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Circling that star were no planets larger than ice-bound, rocky balls the size of Luna, but myriad planetoids swarmed in a vast and dusty ring. Ninety percent, perhaps, were carbonaceous chondrites, coal-black, sooty lumps of tarry hydrocarbons that may have been the genesis rocks of life in the early universe. The DalRiss cityships made a single jump, and the red dwarf system, designated Haven, became the GEF's new center of operations.

  By the time the DalRiss arrived at Haven, Shrenghal's Naga core had been induced to reproduce by fission, creating a new and separate Naga entity massing several tens of thousands of tons. The new-formed being oozed across from Shrenghal to asteroid; within a few days, it had converted some millions of tons of the trillion-ton black rock into more Naga, organizing hundreds of millions of new Naga cells in precise and closely interconnected arrays . . . duplicating, in fact, the computer system shared by Shrenghal, Shralghal, Gauss, and Karyu, but on a far vaster scale.

  Dev had been the obvious choice to program the new supercomputer, which used quantum phenomena to permit massively parallel processing on a stupendous scale . . . a scale far larger than the Oki-Okasan of Luna or the quantum Series 80 system at the University of Jefferson. Almost certainly, the Haven supercomputer was the largest device of its kind ever grown, in effect an array of two-kilogram superconducting chips with an aggregate mass of roughly a quarter of a trillion tons. This monster was powered at first through a direct feed from the Karyu, but soon the planetoid's Naga had grown its own quantum power tap and was happily producing all the free energy it—or any fair-sized interplanetary civilization—could possibly use.

  Gauss's science team, meanwhile, with volunteer help from both human vessels, had spent the time studying the pair of pinwheel galaxies hanging in Haven's midnight sky. Seven months into the construction, they reported the most exciting news yet. Both of the galaxies presented evidence of order arising from the chaos of stars.

  Dev remembered the engineering on a stellar scale glimpsed at the core of Earth's Galaxy . . . of lines of stars set to marching in precise order at the bidding of the Web intelligence. For some millions of years, someone in these galaxies had been doing much the same, only instead of dropping stars into a black hole for unguessable purposes, they were drawing them into neatly set rings and circles, giving the two galactic cores the ancient phonograph-record effect of Saturn's rings. It was a subtle effect, and one easily lost against the stellar wilderness that existed in the spiral arms, but once you knew what to look for, the effect was visible even to the naked eye.

  Another datum was drawn from a careful spectrographic analysis of both galaxies. Much of the light coming from the ordered portions circling their cores had the characteristic absorption lines of chlorophyll, an unmistakable fingerprint of Life. Once alerted to the possibility, a search turned up xenoxanthophyl, reuthenipliophyl, and ribosin, all varicolored analogues of chlorophyll that served the same purpose—transforming sunlight and various chemicals into energy. The only possible explanation was that an extraordinarily large percentage of the stars making up both galaxies were completely enclosed by bodies—habitats of some sort—that were partly transparent or translucent and were filled with plant life, enough so that the light streaming out from the parent suns was tinted with the spectra of Life.

  And finally, too, the central cores of both galaxies were lightly masked by a faint, dark haze; at first, the human observers had assumed they were trying to peer through layers of dust, but it soon was apparent that the "dust" had order as precise as the circling rings of stars, and it was radiating well into the infrared—releasing more energy than it could be receiving from starlight.

  "A galactic Dyson sphere," Dev said softly, pausing to watch an enlarged image of the nearer of the two galactic cores in a ViRsimulation aboard the Gauss. "Possibly an emergent K3 civilization."

  "K3?" Kara asked. "What's that?"

  "A twentieth-century cosmologist named Kardashev once suggested that interstellar civilizations could be divided into three classes by the scale of energy they used. A K1 civilization could make use of all of the available energy of its planet. A K2 civilization used all of the energy of its star. Since a planet only intercepts something less than one percent of its star's output, another physicist of the time, Freeman Dyson, pointed out that K2 civilizations might build shells around their home stars to capture all of the energy and put it to work."

  "Dyson spheres," Vic said. "Like at the Gr'tak home system."

  "I still don't know what that was, exactly," Dev said. "It might have been on the way to being a true Dyson sphere. I tend to think it was something else entirely, engineering on a scale that we simply can't imagine."

  "So a K3 would use all of the available energy in its galaxy?" Kara asked.

  "At the very least," Vic said, "it would be able to reshape a galaxy to its own purposes, the way we terraform worlds."

  "Exactly right," Dev said. "And it also means we have a damned good chance of pulling this off. A K3 would be able to help us if anybody can."

  Work continued. The Haven Net had senses . . . a delicate spread of electronic ears grown from the planetoid's surface by nanotechnic assemblers programmed by Gauss's science team. As light and delicately woven as spider silk, they formed antennae that stretched across nearly a thousand kilometers, large enough and sensitive enough to hear a hand-held three-watt radio at a range of a hundred thousand light years. If there was communications traffic on any electromagnetic wavelength in either of the nearby galaxies, they would be able to hear it.

  Unspoken was the single possible flaw in the plan. I2C worked only because electrons created in a single event could be paired, then separated. Changes to the spin of one would immediately be reflected in the other, allowing binary communications instantly, across any distance.

  Unfortunately, even if the galactic K3 civilizations ahead used I2C, the ships of One-GEF did not possess the appropriate electron-pair halves. They would be stuck with speed-of-light communications, and time lags measured in millennia.

  Two hopes kept them working. One was that a sufficiently advanced civilization might have outposts among the halo stars of their home galaxy, and those outposts could be expected to be radiating at radio and other EM wavelengths. Perhaps an outpost could be discovered within a few hundred, even a few thousand light years, permitting the GEF to reach it in months or years instead of centuries.

  The other hope had come to be known as the Clarke option, after a well-known writer from six centuries past. A sufficiently advanced technology, Clarke had written, might look like magic to primitives who encountered it. Certainly, a Cro-Magnon hunter would be terror-stricken by a glimpse of downtown Jefferson; a fifteenth-century magistrate might cry "witchcraft!" if exposed to a ViRsim or the effects of a Companion link or even a maglev flitter; Clarke himself wouldn't have been able to describe the technology of K-T drives or quantum power taps, though as an educated citizen of the century that had seen the development of quantum mechanics, he would have understood the theory behind them.

  The Clarke option held that galaxy-engineering aliens would be so advanced that they possessed something better than I2C . . . and the humans would be able to take advantage of it. Privately, Dev thought that was about as likely as a dog learning to take advantage of calculus.

  Still, the first option looked like a fair bet. . . .

  Finally, the time came when Dev could upload himself into the new system and boot it online.

  It was, Dev thought, like moving into a new house, one without a single stick of furniture, vast and echoingly empty. For a panicky few milliseconds, he floundered helplessly in a cyberspace incredibly vast, a yawning vacuum with the relative volume of a solar system compared to a man . . . a virtual universe within a universe.

  The system was far larger than Dev, a single downloaded program, could possibly utilize himself. But there was that trick he'd learned originally from the DalRiss and employed to reach the Overmind during the Battle of Ea
rth. With the help of DalRiss linked in from both Shralghal and Shrenghal, he duplicated himself, the complex pattern of electrical charges that was his downloaded mind becoming two.

  And again, the two becoming four.

  And again, four becoming eight.

  And again.

  And again.

  Take a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard. Put double the number in the second square. Double that in the third. And again. And again. Long before the sixty-fourth square is reached, the number exceeds that of all of the grains of rice on the planet.

  This time, there was no crowding as the exponential progression increased the Dev-programs running now inside the Haven system. The numbers of Devs increased, doubling every few seconds, the copies spreading out in a steadily rippling flood to fill the system, activating circuits, accessing data flow, recording, communicating, listening. . . .

  Haven Net's electronic ears and eyes were already focused on the two distant galaxies. Instantly, both were transformed, ablaze with radio and laser energies that crisscrossed both whirlpools of stars in an infinitely complex and branching network, perceived now as threads of golden light that filled both spirals like finely spun silk, so tightly woven that the whole took on a suffusing, background golden glow that filled both galaxies completely and bound them together. Other threads, Dev saw, dwindled off into the encircling night, reaching for other galaxies so distant that the brightest were dim smudges of light.

  The massed Dev-programs continued their doubling as others downloaded into the new and swiftly growing system. Sholai and other Gr'tak were there, serving as network task dispatchers, or linking in as the basic operating system for billions of separate Dev-application programs. A bit of jargon from the early days of computers on Earth had stuck with Dev from somewhere: massively parallel processing required "supervisory daemons" to get them to work together.

  The Gr'tak, with their organizational discipline as members of hierarchic Associatives, were fulfilling that role.

  Linked in too were the minds of several thousand humans, the entire crews of both Gauss and Karyu, as well as the DalRiss in the two cityships. Details, though, and individual personalities, were rapidly lost as the swelling gestalt of multiple Devs passed the thirty-third generation and literally exploded into a higher, transcendent and emergent consciousness.

  The Devgestalt awoke.

  A grand union of well over Nakamura's Number of linked minds, it lacked both the diversity of parts and the experience of the Overmind. On the other hand, since it had been grown with a single purpose, rather than slowly accreting over many human generations, there was no loss of identity, no separation of the whole from the parts. It was aware of the individual Devs within itself; possibly, the difference lay in the presence of his supervisory daemons, who were actively coordinating the exchanges of information between each of its constituent parts. Much of the activity that had given rise to the Overmind within the human Net, the Dev-gestalt saw clearly, now, was essentially chaotic in nature and therefore unpredictable.

  He—it, rather, for the gestalt was the focus of many billions of minds—possessed a focus, a single-mindedness of purpose that made it far more efficient than what it now perceived to be the rather stumbling and half-blind, semiconscious entity known as the Overmind.

  And then, without warning or preamble, the Devgestalt was no longer alone. It found itself . . . mirrored was the only possible word, confronted by another gestalt intelligence as complex and as vast as itself, downloaded from the metanet glimpsed earlier as a glittering webwork connecting the galaxies. There was a shift in perspective . . .

  . . . and Dev found himself looking at . . . himself.

  He looked down at himself, at the simulated body. He was Dev, once more, standing on an unseen floor in the open space between the galaxies. Another Dev, identically dressed in Confederation grays, faced him.

  "Surprised?" the other gestalt said. Its Voice filled time and space.

  "You're . . . me?"

  "After numerous iterations. Say, rather, that you are, or that you will be, a part of the group mind I represent. It is a gestalt, as you are, yourself. Actually, calling it a gestalt of gestalts might be more accurate."

  The Devgestalt brushed this aside. "What are you doing here?"

  "Where else would I be? The nearer of those two spiral galaxies yonder is Galprimus, the Galaxy of Man. This is our home."

  "The Milky Way! But we thought. . . ." Dev stopped, transfixed by a sudden, startling realization.

  "You are correct," the Voice said. "You've not traveled hundreds of millions of light years. Only about fifty thousand, in fact, if we use Galprimus as the referent. But you have traveled forward in time. Just under four billion years, to be exact."

  Awareness dawned. "That other galaxy . . . "

  "Is the one astronomers once called M31. Or Andromeda, after the constellation it appeared in, on Earth, back when it was first noticed. We call it Galsecundus, though its inhabitants, of course, often reverse the numeration. In your time, it was a bit over two million light years away and nothing more than a smudge in the night sky. But astronomers knew even then that it was one of the few galaxies in the sky approaching the Milky Way. We expect it to begin passing through our Galaxy in another hundred thousand years. The collision will last perhaps a million years, or a bit less. No damage will be done, of course."

  "No damage . . . "

  "Galaxies are mostly empty space, after all, despite their appearance. A lot of dust and gas will be stripped away, and some thousands of stars will be flung out into intergalactic space. But that's scarcely anything to worry about. Ultimately, of course, the two will continue to obey Universal Law, circling one another about their mutual center of gravity, passing through one another again and again, until they merge into a supergalaxy, numbering a trillion suns. That will be another billion years down the way, or so. The metacivilizations inhabiting both will continue as before."

  "Metacivilizations?"

  "There is a hierarchy in the universe. You have been suspecting as much, have you not?"

  "Yes. . . ."

  Experience. . . .

  He sensed the touch of some tiny part of that Mind.

  Experience. . . .

  For the briefest of instants, Dev saw/heard/felt/tasted/smelled the complexly woven tapestry of Mind that comprised the whole of the intelligence around him. The other Dev was itself a gestalt of hundreds of billions of mind-programs, yet it constituted a submicroscopic fleck of the awesome Whole. Somehow in step now with the Mind behind the apparition, Dev felt himself opened to a new download . . . of wonder. . . .

  A vast and cavernous Universe yawned beneath his trembling gaze. Dev alone, any human alone, would have been driven mad in that instant, but the gestalt of a hundred billion selves, reinforced by the minds of the others within the tiny splinters of steel that were the human ships, by the DalRiss, by the Gr'tak daemons . . . was shaken but held firm.

  As if from a height, Dev peered into the warp and woof of that infinitely complex tapestry. Mankind, he saw with genuine shock, represented only a few threads in the pattern . . . important threads, to be sure, but one only of millions of species, some so bizarre, with such alien viewpoints and thoughts and goals and dreams, that they were literally indecipherable save as a confused blur of clashing colors, tastes, and sounds.

  "The Dev part of you thought you were less than human," the Voice said in the Devgestalt's mind. "The Kara part of you grieved for comrades no longer organic. All of you see the Web as implacable foe. You suffer from a considerable nearsightedness, the result of sharply restricted points of view. As you see, there is considerably more to the universe than what can be sensed directly."

  As the Overmind once had looked into Dev and shown him what he was, now Dev sensed the structure of a being as far beyond the Overmind as the Overmind was beyond the original Dev Cameron.

  Hierarchies indeed. Centuries before Dev's time, writers, philos
ophers, even scientists had entertained the fanciful notion that atoms were solar systems made of more atoms that were themselves yet smaller solar systems in an infinite regression into the Small, while Earth's solar system was a single atom in some larger universe, the first step into an infinite regression into the Large. That view had proven almost quaintly insufficient; for one thing, planets existed as solid particles, not as a kind of fuzz of quantum probability somewhere in the vicinity of a sun. Still, it had pointed the way for a similar series of nested regressions within the real universe. The Devgestalt felt his mind whirling away before the vista of universes within universes within universes.

  And the minds!

  He saw there, part of the entity's very structure, another dozen threads that he recognized as the Web. Clearly, somehow, Web and Humanity had found a way to work together, to become part of the same—only then did the Gr'tak word occur to him with explosive perfection—Associative.

  He saw the Gr'tak, and the DalRiss, established now on myriad worlds where life had been shaped to an unimaginable perfection of symbiotic harmony. He saw Daren's Communes—each infested with the parasite-symbionts that made them what they were. He saw others that he recognized but for whom he would never have claimed the trait of intelligence. Three from Earth itself caught his mind's eye: dolphins, mountain gorillas, and elephants, all three long extinct in the twenty-sixth century, yet somehow here, a part of what made the Galactic Mind what it was. How . . . ?

  But there was no time to dwell on individual parts of that panoply of intelligence. He saw other minds, eldritch minds, minds so strange he could barely comprehend them, many so strange they were totally beyond his ken.

  And he sensed others, heartwarmingly familiar. He sensed—he thought he sensed—others like himself, downloads inhabiting virtual worlds, or enjoying a strange, symbiotic existence within the Net.