by Ian Douglas
Exactly how the Gykr fleet was choosing to interpret that treaty, or our activities, was unknown as yet. Captain Summerlee felt, however, that anything other than an immediate attack counted as a positive step. She’d ordered the Haldane to land on the ice near the dome, and for several hours now, the two sides, human and Gykr, had been warily watching each other.
Yes, the Skipper was back in command. Chief Garner had used the ship’s medical 3D printer to run off a batch of hESC—human Embryonic Stem Cells—and injected them into her brain to repair the damage there. Her in-head implants were still down, and she would need to have partial replacements regrown when she got back to Earth. There was nothing to stop her from resuming command, however. After all, she had plenty of people on her command staff who could access AIs, navigational and engineering data, and ship’s departmental reports and handle them for her . . . and she could call up paperwork on her office viewall rather than within open mental windows. Her toughest problem would be remembering manual overrides for things like shipboard elevators and coffeemakers.
She was waiting for me at the entrance to the Haldane’s mess deck when I walked in. “Captain Summerlee! Ma’am!”
“Welcome back, Carlyle. I’m told that you’ve been busy.”
“Busy enough, Captain. I’m afraid I may have committed Humankind to a new long-term project.”
“Well, it’ll have to be ratified by the Commonwealth Senate. They normally take a dim view of enlisted personnel forging diplomatic agreements with aliens. In this case, though, I think they’ll be willing to overlook the embarrassing details, in exchange for a solid peace treaty with the Gucks.”
I blinked at her for a moment, not quite comprehending. “Actually, ma’am,” I managed after a slack-jawed moment, “I wasn’t talking about the Gykr.”
She gave me a Look. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and established diplomatic relations with someone else! First the Qesh . . . then the Gykr. Now who?”
“The Abyss Deep,” I told her.
“The what?”
So I explained.
It was actually a bit embarrassing, because once I actually started describing my exchange with the Deep, I realized that I didn’t have any actual proof that what I’d seen was . . . real. The whole exchange could so easily have been a hallucination, something I’d imagined in vivid detail, perhaps, while unconscious.
“He’s right,” Gina Lloyd said, at least partially validating my wild story. “I could hear parts of the conversation in the Walsh. I couldn’t see anything, though.”
“You were halfway back to the surface,” I told her.
“And inside a cuttlewhale,” she agreed. “But I think we were . . . on the same wavelength? Like when it was asking about Dr. Murdock. And . . . when it said it was a billion years old, I had shivers going down my spine. I think maybe it has some kind of channel open in us, y’know?”
“That’s as good a theory as anything else I’ve heard,” Summerlee said. “Come on. We’re going to have an emergency pow-wow.”
“Emergency?”
“The Gykr have asked us to leave the system,” the captain said. “They did ask nicely . . . for them. But they want us out of here in one orbit of Abyssworld around its sun. That’s one day, fourteen hours, or thereabouts. And we have to decide how we’re going to respond.”
The mess deck was crowded. Garner was there, and Doob and McKean. Gunny Hancock was there, looking wan and pinched, his stump wrapped in a surgical sealer that told me they’d already started working on growing him a new left arm. Kemmerer was present, and most of the other Marine officers, too, as were Haldane’s department heads. All seven Brocs—our three, plus the four rescued from the sunken base, were occupying a far corner like a thick clump of small trees. It was a full crowd, and apparently no one cared to telecommute this time.
“Thank you all for coming,” Summerlee said, taking her spot at the head of the longest mess table. “Before we get started, I know you’ll all join me in welcoming HM2 Carlyle back from the Murdock base. While there, Mr. Carlyle was instrumental in defusing what was potentially a very nasty situation with the Gykr, and got them to accept a scheme that allowed both our people and them to leave the sunken base.”
There was applause from the audience, and a few shouts of “Go, Doc!” and similar sentiments.
Summerlee held up her hands, motioning for silence. “In addition,” she said as the ruckus quieted, “I’m given to understand that Mr. Carlyle also, while inside the Murdock facility, made contact with an alien life form, an extremely large and extremely intelligent life form, native to this world. Mr. Carlyle has provisionally named this organism ‘the Deep.’ Mr. Carlyle? Perhaps you’d tell us all about this . . . this extraordinary being.”
I stood, awkward and unsure of myself, and began talking. I described the Deep, my hallucinogenic impressions of it, and what I thought it actually was . . . an immense, sessile thermovore evolved from dirty exotic ice under inconceivable pressure.
“The creatures we call cuttlewhales,” I concluded, “appear to be artificially fabricated somehow by the Deep inside the exotic ice mass. For probably some millions of years, it has been using the cuttlewhales as a kind of sensory system, letting it see itself from the inside. More recently, it has learned that there is an outside as well, and begun sending the cuttlewhales up to Abyssworld’s surface, as remote probes.
“As a result—and partly because of the Deep’s, ah, unexpected interface with me—it has learned that this world is tidally locked in close orbit around its star . . . and that in a short time, cosmically speaking, the heat from that star is going to strip this planet of its ocean. When that happens, the Deep, which depends on both water and on intense pressures, will be killed.”
“You say this Deep thing is immortal?” Ortega said.
“Except for the fact that its environment is going to go away soon, yes, sir.”
“Does it reproduce?” Montgomery asked. “Can it reproduce?”
“Where? It makes up three-quarters of the volume of this planet!”
“I don’t know. I was wondering about being able to transfer germ cells to a new home, somehow.”
“As far as I could tell, ma’am, no. It . . . developed awareness, sentience, a long time ago as a result of various ebbs and flows of heat, minerals, and so on deep inside its substance, its body, if you will. I imagine parts of that body replace themselves over the centuries . . . although, really, there doesn’t appear to be anything like a genome with a built-in timer or destruct sequence, like human DNA.”
“We should probably think of it,” Lieutenant Ishihara said, “not as a life form, but as a kind of natural AI . . . an enormous computer, in fact.”
“It takes in nutrients and energy, sir,” I told the engineering officer, “and it generates order out of chaos. I would say it’s alive.”
“So does a computer, young man,” Ishihara told me, “if by order you mean accumulating and storing useful information. Oh, I’m not saying this thing isn’t worth saving! The mathematical information it has stored within its matrix alone must be staggering!”
I didn’t reply to that. Ishihara hadn’t been there, hadn’t felt himself wired in to the Deep’s emotional processes. It was alive . . . and it was self-aware. Computer AIs were neither. They could simply act as though they were self-aware with the appropriate programming, and we humans were too slow to tell the difference.
Or . . . did he have a point? Was that what was going on in the Deep, a system that mimicked what we thought of as sentient self-awareness?
Well for that matter, what proof did we have for human self-awareness? We thought we were, sure, but there was no way to prove that it wasn’t a kind of all-embracing illusion, like the old philosophical chestnut that said we only thought we had free will in a fixed, predestined timeline.
“Well, whether it’s alive or not, how the hell are we supposed to rescue it?” Chief Garner asked.
“That,” I told t
hem, “is the easy part. The hard part will be waiting it out.”
I’d given the problem a lot of thought, and checked in with the Walsh’s AI during our ascent to the surface. Haldane’s larger and more powerful AI agreed with me. We could save the Deep.
It would just take some time.
The concept of the “gravity tractor” has been with us for a long time. Back in the early twenty-first century, as humans became aware of the terrifying threat posed to civilization, even to all life on Earth, by asteroids like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we examined a lot of schemes for changing the orbit of an incoming cosmic missile. You couldn’t just blow the thing up with nukes; the individual fragments would continue on the original trajectory, and might even end up doing more damage than the original intact flying mountain.
One promising mechanism was the idea of parking a spacecraft near the asteroid and keeping it there, possibly with solar sails, possibly with a steady, low-thrust ion drive, and letting the gravity of the spacecraft deflect, ever so slightly, the path of the asteroid.
Oh, it would take a long time, of course . . . centuries, perhaps. The thrust provided by that tiny gravitational impulse would be microscopic, but over year upon year upon year, the effect would add up. Catch the killer asteroid early enough, and you would be able, eventually, to deflect its course just enough to miss Target Earth.
We also, back then, were beginning to learn just how chaotic early solar systems were. As accreting worlds formed around their parent star, planetary bodies interfered with one another, collided with one another, nudged one another gravitationally into entirely new orbits. We now know that in our own Solar System, four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter and Saturn had developed a one to two resonance with each other, Jupiter circling the sun once for every two orbits of Saturn. As a result, Jupiter had been nudged closer to the sun while Saturn had been pushed farther out, and that dual migration had generated the cascade of orbital changes leading to the late heavy bombardment of the inner system 600 million years after its birth.
Orbital resonance could remake or destroy a planetary system, could move gas giants from the remote outer portions of the star system in to tight, close orbits—the “hot Jupiters” discovered in such numbers in the early days of exoplanet discoveries a couple of centuries ago, because they were so massive and had such short periods.
And in the same manner, worlds could be summarily ejected from their home star systems entirely. The Gykr Steppenwolf homeworld, a rogue and sunless planet adrift in interstellar space, was an example.
So what did that have to do with saving the Deep?
Everything, really.
There were several outer gas giants orbiting GJ 1214, together with GJ 1214 II, a Mars-sized world 10 million kilometers out from the star, and with an orbital period of just over sixteen days. What if we could change Planet II’s orbit, actually nudge it into a period of, say, precisely half that of Abyssworld—to nineteen hours or so? Properly calculated and executed, the two-to-one resonance would bump Planet II in closer to the star, and shove Abyssworld farther out. By working out the numbers to enough decimal places, we could plop Abyssworld down in just about any orbit we pleased . . . one where the dayside was pleasantly habitable . . . or even one far enough out that the entire world-ocean froze over. That wouldn’t bother the Deep one bit.
It would take a hell of a long time of course, but so what? A million years? Ten million? Hell, even if readjusting Abyssworld’s orbit took a hundred million years, the Deep had time. A million centuries is a mere 10 percent of the billion years it would take the planet’s ocean to finally boil away.
And there was the additional promise that human technology would rapidly advance to the point where slinging planets around a star system was child’s play. What would we be capable of in just a few thousand years? Generating artificial black holes, perhaps, and using directed gravitational singularities to change planetary orbits? Or perhaps we would command even more advanced and magical technologies as yet undreamed of.
A billion years was plenty of time. . . .
The downside was that we humans have a pathetically brief attention span, and a political will that rarely extended past the next elections. What if we simply never got around to doing something about it? After all, there was lots of time left. I reflected that what constituted lots of time for humans was something else entirely for an all-but-immortal being that had been a couple of hundreds of millions of years old back when sex had first been invented on Earth.
“An . . . audacious idea, Carlyle,” Ortega said. “Moving planets around to order . . .”
“We’ve known as a species that we were going to have to do stuff like that someday,” I replied. “In another few hundred million or a billion years, our own sun will be getting hotter and brighter. Unless we decide to abandon Earth entirely, we’ll need to figure out how to move the planet to a cooler orbit.”
Of course, a few billion years after that, the sun would expand into a red giant, engulfing the inner planets of the Solar System, then dwindle to a white dwarf barely larger than Earth herself. Unless we were real quick on the uptake, able to move Earth farther out on short notice, then move her much closer in, our homeworld would likely die.
By then, of course, if Humankind still existed in anything like a recognizable organic form, we would be firmly out among the stars, reshaping the entire Galaxy to order. Perhaps we would by that time be independent of planetary surfaces entirely.
“But you question . . . what did you say?” Kemmerer said. “Our political will?”
“Compared to the Deep,” I said, “humans are mayflies. Ephemera. While we’re waiting for the technology to move whole planets to come along, we could forget all about this place.”
I wasn’t claiming that humans were either callous or forgetful, or anything like that. But civilizations do not last forever, no more than do worlds, and each time a civilization falls, so much information is lost. That might be less of a problem now that we had colonies on other worlds, but humanity wasn’t solidly established as a multiworld species yet. A bad interplanetary war with the Gykr or the Qesh, and Humankind could easily find itself back to chipping flints among the crumbling ruins of New York or Singapore or, looking out-system, Hope, out on Tau Ceti IV.
“Well, our problem at the moment,” Summerlee said, “is these folks. Mr. Walthers, if you please?”
A vid image came up on the viewall behind her, called up by her exec. A squat, angular, flat-topped structure, startlingly black against the surrounding icescape, appeared in the middle distance. A Gykr ship hovered above the building—ugly, complicated, looking something like a tailless stingray with the wings cocked downward at a sharp angle. A column of air beneath the ship shimmered with unknown energies as the vessel held its position against gusting westerly winds.
“The Gykr commander has given us one local year to pack up and move out,” Summerlee said. “Any agreement we have with HM2 Carlyle’s Deep will be entirely contingent on whether we can maintain a presence on this world . . . or whether the Gykr will be taking over from us completely.”
“That may be a problem for the Deep,” Montgomery pointed out. “The Gykr aren’t exactly on good terms with the locals.”
“Carlyle?” Summerlee said. “Do you have any observations on that?”
“From the Deep’s perspective? Nothing hard and fast. I did have the impression that the cuttlewhales have a lot of trouble telling the difference between humans and Gykr. And . . . I gathered that the first Gykr to land opened fire on some cuttlewhales more or less without provocation. That’s why the cuttlewhales attacked us, later.”
“They can’t tell the difference?” Lieutenant Walthers said, chuckling. “Humans, two legs, Guckers, eight or ten or twelve, depending. Can’t the damned cuttlewhales count?”
“If you saw something this big,” I said, holding up my thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart, “wiggling and mult
ilegged and squishy looking . . . would you stop to count the legs?”
“Well, I wouldn’t just step on it.”
“Some people would,” Kemmerer said. “And if it was shooting lasers or plasma bolts at you, you might not want to stop and try to have a conversation.”
“We know the Gykr have a . . . a tendency to shoot first if they feel threatened,” Montgomery observed. “But what do they think about the cuttlewhales now?”
“Right,” Ortega said. “Maybe we could pass the Deep and its problems off to them.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said. “At least, not from the Deep’s point of view.”
“Surely a species that evolved in a similar environment—in an under-ice ocean—would be best for dealing with something like the Deep,” Ortega said.
“Would the Gykr do anything to help?” Montgomery asked.
“That may not be our problem,” Walthers said.
“Well if it’s not our problem,” I asked, “whose problem is it?” I looked at the skipper. “Ma’am . . . it’s in our best interests to help the Deep. Whether it’s a life form or some kind of planet-sized organic computer, it has information that spans a billion years! It may have mathematical insights that we can’t even dream of, yet! We can’t just . . . just turn it over to the Gucks!”
It was a dirty trick, I know, throwing in the human self-interest angle, but it felt like I was losing the group. Some of them were perfectly okay with abandoning the Deep to the tender mercies of the Gucks, and I didn’t want to do that. I hadn’t exactly promised the Deep that we would help it—at the time, I’d not seen how we could—but now that I knew it was possible, I wanted to see it through.