“I, uh, don’t know if anyone’s noticed,” Vic said after a long moment’s silence. “But there’s no stargate here.”
“God, no,” Latimer said, her voice low. “We made a blind leap and came out at random.”
Kara glanced around the vault of heaven, confirming that simple, stark pronouncement of doom. So stunning was the view of two near-entangled spiral galaxies that everyone had momentarily missed that small and all-important datum.
Fact. DalRiss Achievers needed a mental map of the place where they were going, in order to shift a cityship from one spot to another.
Fact. Without DalRiss transport, human starships were limited to their K-T drives, which could carry them along at a pseudovelocity of something like a light year per day.
Fact. Neither of those glorious spirals could be Earth’s galaxy, for the simple reason that the Milky Way did not have such a close and large companion. Therefore, the Achievers would be totally lost, unable to navigate.
Fact. At a guess, the tiny GEF was something like fifty thousand light years from the nearest galactic spiral arm. That translated to something on the order of 140 years of travel… with a death sentence executed long before the ships’ crews died of old age. The huge Naga fragments aboard the DalRiss ships could generate all of the food, water, and air that the humans could possibly use from sufficient raw materials—an asteroid of carbon, water ice, and frozen gases, for instance. Unfortunately, the human K-T drives couldn’t be incorporated into the DalRiss ships, nor could human ships carry supplies enough to last their crews more than a year or two at most.
The relentless march of facts seemed to have doomed GEF.
“There are alternatives,” Vic said at a ViRsimmed conference of department heads and senior officers several hours later. “Not many, and not good, but they’re there.”
“What alternatives?” Daren demanded. “A choice between dying of starvation, thirst, or asphyxiation?”
“The most attractive possibility,” Dev said, “is to find ourselves an asteroid. A fairly big one, fifty or a hundred kilometers in diameter. We dock Shrenghal and Shralghal with it and turn their Naga fragments loose, with appropriate reprogramming that we could work out aboard Karyu and Gauss.
“We all know the Naga talent for burrowing through rock and converting it to other things. That’s what they were designed for, after all, a few billion years ago. They could eat out the center of the asteroid, core it like an apple, and convert the rock to things we need. Air. The fixings for a power plant and a way to illuminate the ’troid’s interior. Hell, even life, if we have good enough patterns in Gauss’s data banks.”
“We do,” Daren said. “DNA mapping patterns, anyway, of most Earth life forms.”
“Fine. It’ll take years, of course, but we’d end up with a world. A small world… and it would be inside out. We’d give it enough rotation to create spin gravity.”
“An inside-out world?” Kara said. “Sounds like the Naga were right all along!”
“We’ll have to develop an even closer symbiosis with both the Naga and the DalRiss,” Dev said. “Maybe the Gr’tak, too. We’d move ourselves and enough Naga core fragments and raw materials to manufacture whatever we needed. We’d hitch the DalRiss cityships to the outside and give the whole thing a boost. I have no idea how long it would take to reach one of the galaxies, but it would be a sublight voyage and require a good many millions of years, I expect.”
“Hell, that doesn’t help us!” Barnes exclaimed.
“No, Admiral. Our descendants might one day migrate to one of the worlds of those galaxies yonder, but for us, well, the asteroid would be our new home. For the rest of our lives.”
“You said that was the good choice,” Taki pointed out. “What else is there?”
“We could leapfrog,” Dev admitted. “We send one of our K-T-drive ships ahead… oh, let’s say one hundred light years. It carries an Achiever or someone like me, able to map space the way the DalRiss need, and sends the data back by I2C. The two cityships and the other human ship then use Achievers to leap one hundred light years. The process is repeated… and repeated. It would take longer than simply traveling by K-T drive all the way, because it takes extra time to map as you go. Say… two hundred years to reach the nearest galaxy. It still doesn’t help us, and it’s a damn sight harder on our descendants, since they would have to be born, raised, and live their whole lives aboard Karyu and Gauss. It would be crowded. There’s also the need to stop every now and then to find another asteroid and let the Naga cores at it to manufacture more consumables. However, we, they, rather, might reach galactic space within a few generations.”
“Carefully monitored generations,” Taki pointed out. “Our birth rate would have to be sharply controlled.”
“We might combine the two ideas,” Barnes added. “Build a small asteroid habitat, a few hundred meters across, small enough to be strapped to Karyu as extra living accommodations.”
“Reaction mass would still be a problem,” Dr. Norris said. “The thrust-weight ratio would kill us.”
“We might also look at putting most of the crews into suspension,” Daren suggested. “Have them link into a program that would let them sleep, have the life-support systems take care of their bodies. Maybe most of us would make it.”
“I’ve never seen any hard studies on that kind of life suspension, Daren,” Vic said. “Have there been any?”
“Not really. It used to be a hot idea for long-distance travel, of course, but K-T drives, then the DalRiss Achiever ships, kind of obviated the need. It ought to work, though.…”
“I’m not sure I want to be a guinea pig,” Norris said.
“There’s another option,” Kara said.
“What’s that?” Dev asked.
“That we carry through with our original mission.”
“What do you mean?” Taki wanted to know. “That’s not our galaxy out there. We might be hundreds of millions of light years from home.”
“And who says that Humankind—or the Web, for that matter—are limited to the one galaxy? Or that other galaxies don’t have their own communications networks? We could try to listen in, see if we can find the local equivalent of the Net, and tap in. We might find help. We might find friends.”
“Damn.” Latimer said. “She’s right.”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” Vic said. “Dev?”
There was no immediate answer.
“Dev?”
“Uh… sorry. Kara is absolutely right. We’ll need a very large and very powerful Net of our own to do it, especially if we need to crack an alien language or computer code… but yes! We can do it! At worst, it’ll add a few months to our schedule.”
“Seems to me,” Vic pointed out dryly, “that we’re not in any particular hurry to get anywhere now. What do we need to get started?”
“An asteroid,” Dev said. “Preferably a carbonaceous chondrite.”
“We can use Gauss and Karyu as scouts to find the thing,” Vic said. “Let’s do it.”
It took eight months to build the computer matrix that would support the new Net. Gauss, probing far in advance of the GEF, located a cool, dim, red star several hundred light years ahead, one of the billions of lonely halo suns slowly circling the two galaxies; and by good fortune aided by long range spectroscopic analysis, the star proved to be Population I—meaning that it possessed elements in its makeup heavier than the hydrogen-helium-only mix of Population IIs.
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 fi
ssion, 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 handheld 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 Earth. 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.
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