Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  Across the galaxy, species with technological prostheses like Humankind were far, far outnumbered by marine species that would never leave their planets.

  Yet according to the data now available on the Glothr, this species had evolved within an ice-capped ocean exactly like the one within Europa. And they clearly had star travel, had robots and advanced electronics, had a vast array of technologies demanded by the existence of this one starship.

  There were work-arounds, of course. According to the Agletsch, a marine species called the Kanatl had learned to smelt metals within the intense, high temperatures around deep-sea volcanic vents, and even developed plastics through high-pressure chemistry. And the free-floating H’rulka had been given technology by an unknown race of advanced star-faring aliens, the so-called stargods. Who or what the stargods might be was still a completely open question; some thought they were the ur-Sh’daar themselves, the pre-Singularity ancestors of the Sh’daar Collective—but that was still just a guess. In any case, technological evolution among intelligent marine species was extraordinarily rare. One had only to look at terrestrial whales and dolphins or at Osirian kraken to learn how unlikely it actually was.

  Starships and robots . . .

  Gray could see how the cylindrical robots might have been derived from the Glothr as rough caricatures. Something had been nagging at him ever since he’d first seen them, and he wondered, more than ever, if these beings could possibly be part of the Sh’daar Collective. The Sh’daar prohibition against robots and artificial intelligence seemed to argue against the idea.

  There was always so very much to learn in an encounter with an unknown species like this one.

  Klaatu was still exchanging data with the Glothr robots at high speed, at baud rates far too swift for mere humans to follow. He opened a new in-head window and got a rough, running commentary scrolling down one side of his mind’s eye.

  At the same time it was talking with the aliens, the FiCo robot was sending a readout on the environment inside the airlock now—a gas mix of nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane at about three atmospheres and minus five Celsius. Those droplets condensing on the bulkheads weren’t water, obviously. Gray thought that they were probably ammonia . . . or possibly water mixed with ammonia. The Glothr were carbon-based, like humans, but evidently they used ammonia as a solvent rather than water.

  Judging from the data now downloading into America’s computer network, the Glothr had evolved on a world not like Europa, but more like Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Or . . . correction. Not on such a world, but in it, within a deep, subsurface ocean. Again, Gray had to wonder how such a species could have evolved. Not only would ocean conditions have been a giant obstacle for the development of the technological advances now on display, but the production of fire without oxygen—which wasn’t in the makeup of Glothr’s natural atmosphere—was impossible.

  And yet, obviously, the Glothr had somehow made the leap, evidenced by the massive starship before America.

  Other Glothr were approaching the airlock entrance, gliding along with a slow, stately presence. Everything about them was slow, Gray realized; they were sluggish compared with humans. Lights flickered within the transparent mantle of the first one, and patterns of color shifted, formed, and dissolved along some of the translucent surfaces.

  “What’s he saying?” Gray asked.

  An in-head window, a new one, opened to display a running translation, but at the moment all it said was “Building vocabulary and syntax.”

  An impression formed within his mind—a suggestion by America’s AI network. The passage of time for the Glothr is different than it is for us. No . . . that wasn’t quite right. It was their perception of time that was different.

  And Gray thought he understood why.

  Human metabolism chemically burned organic molecules with oxygen pulled from the atmosphere, utilizing the carbon and other elements to create proteins, lipids, other biochemicals, and energy, and expelling carbon dioxide as one of several waste products. The Glothr, on the other hand, were hydrogen breathers, taking in H2 and reducing acetylene—C2H2—to generate methane—CH4—in order to create carbon, and to power their metabolisms. They used some of that energy to crack ethane—C2H6—producing more hydrogen and, again, releasing methane as a waste product.

  Utilizing hydrogen to run a metabolic process, however, was not nearly as efficient as using oxygen. Its advantage was that it worked well in cold environments; at one atmosphere, acetylene and ethane both were gases above roughly minus 80 to minus 90 degrees Celsius, while methane was a gas above minus 161. The major disadvantage was that having less available energy in the reaction meant that the organism was slow. It moved slowly, reacted slowly, and intelligent organisms would think slowly. Humans must look like flickering speed demons to the Glothr.

  According to scans of the alien ship, they were able to warp the passage of time to some degree. Had that been developed because oxygen breathers they’d encountered were incomprehensibly fast?

  The question was worth investigating.

  Also worth investigating was just how they managed that in the first place.

  QUERY ENEMY.

  Gray puzzled at that for a moment. Was the Glothr telling Gray to ask him, the enemy, something?

  “Transmit for me,” Gray told the AI. “Ask: ‘What do you want me to ask?’ ”

  He couldn’t see Klaatu’s face, but he knew the FiCo robot was displaying patterns of light and color on its own forehead.

  QUERY COME ENEMY? Was the silent reply.

  Then Gray understood. The slow-moving alien was asking him a question: Do you come here as an enemy? A hopeful sign, that: asking first, shooting later. Very hopeful.

  “Tell him,” Gray said, “that we’d rather have him as a friend than as an enemy.”

  That was a complex thought, and the translation software might not be up to that level just yet. But Gray recognized here a valuable opportunity. Perhaps the Glothr didn’t want to fight Earth any more than Humankind wanted to fight them. The fact that they’d been working with Geneva bolstered that idea.

  And slowly, haltingly, a dialogue began.

  Emergency Presidential Command Post

  Toronto

  United States of North America

  1720 hours, EST

  Koenig relaxed back in the recliner in his office, allowing the software to insinuate itself through his cerebral implants, linking him mind to mind with Konstantin. In fact, he was linking through to what he thought of as Konstantin’s little brother, a smaller iteration of the original Konstantin resident at SupraQuito. The round-trip time lag between Toronto and the USNA naval facility at synchorbit was a negligible quarter of a second—too short for human perceptions—where the two and a half second delay for a there-and-back exchange with Tsiolkovsky on the lunar far side could be distinctly annoying. “Little Brother” was in continuous contact with the main Tsiolkovsky network, though, with data constantly shuttling between the two, and no human on Earth could tell that he wasn’t conversing in real time with the entire network.

  Konstantin had assumed one of his human-looking avatars for this conference—not the image of the historical Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but the fictional persona of Constantine d’Angelo, the religious guru of Starlight.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” Konstantin said. “I was disappointed that you did not stay in Washington for my presentation.”

  The mild chiding surprised Koenig. Did the AI really care? It was supremely difficult to tell whether it was simply very good at mimicking human emotions and responses . . . or whether it actually felt something.

  “Yes . . . well, I’m sorry about that. My security people were nervous and wanted me back underground as quickly as possible.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did your speech go?”

  “Well, I believe. It seeme
d well received at any rate. I noted no fewer than twelve periods of sustained and spontaneous applause, one lasting for a full thirty-eight seconds.”

  “Impressive. You beat me.”

  “It was not a competition, Mr. President.”

  Koenig smiled. Konstantin could take things extremely literally at times. “Of course not. The important thing is to keep the momentum going with Starlight.”

  “An observation, Mr. President?”

  “Yes?”

  “You may wish to scale back the . . . emotional enthusiasm of this religious movement. Things may be going too far, too quickly.”

  “That was always a significant risk,” Koenig replied. “But we needed a popular peace movement that would sweep the Confederation—Pan-Europe, especially—fast.”

  “Indeed. And the Starlight movement appears to have worked better than we originally thought possible. I am concerned, however, that the movement may have unanticipated consequences, especially within the United States of North America.”

  “The emphasis was on Pan-European atrocities—the nano-bombing of Columbus in particular.”

  “There are wider perspectives, though, Mr. President. There always are in war. Remember that the first two nuclear strikes in history were carried out ostensibly to save the large numbers of lives that would have been lost on both sides in the event of an invasion of the home islands of Japan.”

  Koenig felt a flash of anger. “Damn you! Are you justifying the Confederation attack on Columbus? That was mass murder!”

  “No. However, from the point of view of Janos Korosi, the annihilation of Columbus may have seemed as necessary as Hiroshima seemed to the United States.”

  “That’s . . . a rather disturbing analogy.”

  The image of Constantine d’Angelo within Koenig’s in-head window gave an eerily human shrug. “Humans always justify their actions, however unjustifiable they might seem to others. My point, however, was that Starlight is taking hold within the North American union. Its two basic messages are peace and self-determination.”

  Koenig nodded. “Stop the civil war and don’t force us to give up our technology and follow the Sh’daar. Exactly.”

  “As a popular meme, the concept worked well. However, one should always remember a basic truism: memes change. The core beliefs of Starlight could mutate, will mutate, most likely gravitating toward an extreme.”

  “What extreme?”

  “Most likely would be total pacifism. War is wrong—the human concept would be evil—and it is wrong under all circumstances. Another possibility, though, would be a shift toward hyper-individualism. We might see a complete breakdown of the concept of government or the state.”

  That startled Koenig. Despite being president of the USNA, he strongly disliked the idea of big, intrusive, or heavy-handed government. He believed that government had a natural tendency toward such heavy-handedness simply because people—government leaders—were unlikely ever to agree to give up any degree of power once they acquired it. That power was maintained by laws, and as a direct consequence, more and more laws were constantly added to the way a government governed. Only very rarely, though, were they repealed. As a result, laws became more complex, more intrusive, more demanding, the state bureaucracy grew more unwieldy and intrusive, and individual liberty inevitably dwindled until only a revolution— most likely a bloody one—allowed the population to start over.

  And yet . . . no government—or any government that was weak, ineffective, or otherwise hamstrung—was just as much of a problem. When the USNA had abandoned the Periphery, the citizens living in those regions had been left in squalor and anarchy, without law or protection from brigands, without basic services like power or Global Net access, without health care or the most necessary of utilities. Koenig had always been fascinated by one historical fact—that when government collapsed within the Periphery, the people still living there had recreated it. Often, those new governments had been gang rule by whichever local mob of thugs was best-armed. But in each local region, the vacuum of power had been very swiftly filled . . . to the point where the USNA government was now having to negotiate with local leaders as it began reassimilating the Periphery.

  The ideal, Koenig thought, must lie somewhere between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. Finding that ideal, though, had always been difficult, but he knew that the anarchy Konstantin was envisioning was not something he wanted to see manifest.

  “So what would you suggest?” he asked.

  “That you remain focused on your original goal. Why was the United States of North America engaged in civil war against the Earth Confederation?”

  Koenig did not reply immediately. He knew Konstantin was testing him, that the AI knew the answer—the answers—as well as he. Sometimes, the Tsiolkovsky network could be downright patronizing.

  Finally he said, “The Confederation government was trying to take over USNA territory . . . and they wanted to give in to the Sh’daar demands.”

  “More than that,” Konstantin added, “you were in effect declaring that Geneva does not speak for all of Humankind.”

  “Well . . . no. They don’t.”

  “Who does?”

  “For something like dealing with aliens? Nobody does. Nobody could . . .”

  “Which logically suggests that since we have just dismantled the Confederation as an instrument of human policy, it will be up to us to deal with the situation ourselves.”

  “Konstantin, we’ve been trying to do exactly that for fifty-eight years.”

  “No, you have not. You have been meeting threats, responding to isolated attacks and provocations. Beta Pictoris. Rasalhague. Anan. Sturgis’s World. Arcturus Station. Eta Boötis—”

  “Okay, okay. We’ve been on the defensive all along. But what other choice has there been? Damn it, we’re up against a galactic polity that may number thousands of different species, most of them far more advanced technologically than we. Every time we fight off one set of alien badasses, another comes at us from someplace else.”

  “Indeed. The Turusch. The H’rulka. The Nungiirtok. The Slan—”

  “Right! Earth against the galaxy.”

  “Have you asked yourself what might have happened had all of those Sh’daar clients attacked Humankind in concert?”

  Koenig hesitated. “Well . . . of course. There’s no way we would have been able to stand against anything like that. One attack by anything even approaching a unified Sh’daar fleet would have overwhelmed us. But our xenosoph people have explained why that didn’t happen. The different alien species are so different from one another—with such varied cultures and biologies and mutually alien forms of communication—that they can’t work with one another with anything like precision.”

  “And do you believe that, Mr. President?”

  It sounded like a challenge. “Well, I think luck had a lot to do with it, too. . . .”

  “Exactly once,” Konstantin told him, “Humankind did not simply react, but took the fight to the enemy.”

  “Twenty years ago,” Koenig said. “The N’gai Cloud.”

  “And despite being significantly outnumbered, the Sh’daar sued for peace.”

  “Yes.” He hesitated for a moment. “We kind of had them by the short hairs then, didn’t we?”

  Konstantin ignored the colloquialism, and pressed on with his point. Artificial intelligence didn’t mean artificial sense of humor. “Specifically, they agreed to cease hostilities against us in the present, if we ceased operations against them in the past.”

  “That worked for both sides, though,” Koenig pointed out. “We could have erased our own existence.”

  The details were still highly classified, but Koenig knew them, both as president of the USNA now and as commander of the battlegroup that had forced the Sh’daar to negotiate in the remote past. Following enemy units th
rough the complex hyperspatial twistings of a TRGA cylinder, the America battlegroup had emerged in a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years in the past. The N’gai Cloud had proven to be the home galaxy for an association of some hundreds of technological species; when they’d entered a transition called the Technological Singularity, most individuals had vanished—apparently entering a completely new phase of existence—but many had been left behind. Traumatized by the Singularity, the stay-behind remnant had become the modern Sh’daar as the N’gai Cloud had been devoured and shredded by the Milky Way, its central core ultimately becoming the Omega Centauri globular cluster sixteen thousand light years from Earth.

  Earth’s intelligence services believed that the Sh’daar capitulation had been due to their fear that the America battlegroup was going to do something in the N’gai Cloud of 876 million years ago that would change the future—Earth’s present. No one knew quite what the result would be if humans tampered with the past—especially in Deep Time, almost a billion years ago—but Koenig certainly didn’t want to experiment to find out. Eight hundred seventy-six million years ago, life on Earth was just beginning to discover a wonderful new way of passing genes on from one generation to the next: sex. Would destroying the Sh’daar that long ago alter or destroy the course of events on the young Earth?

  No one knew. Not for certain. Koenig himself didn’t think modern Earth would be affected by the Sh’daar’s long-ago demise. There was no evidence that the ancient Sh’daar had ever reached Earth or had any effect on the evolution of life there . . . but there was one possibility. Suppose editing the Sh’daar out of existence by changing the past meant a complete reboot of the entire cosmos? The string of events leading to the Earth of today, and its biosphere, and its modern civilization all were such extraordinary long shots. Resetting the universe a billion years in the past might mean that every die roll on the evolving Earth since then was recast.

  And Koenig didn’t want to play God with the Earth’s evolution.

  “All of that depends on the true nature of time,” Konstantin told him. “Quantum theory is not clear on the matter. Does a change in time here and now change the entire universe? Does the fall of the Geneva government today affect, say, life evolving throughout the Andromeda galaxy a billion years from now?”