Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  In the meantime, she pulled a data download from her personal RAM and popped it onto the local shared net, where all of them could see it. The ghostly outlines of a three-dimensional navigational chart floated above the table, but was visible with far more clarity and detail in-head.

  “Wait, what’s this?” Schmitt wanted to know. “Charlie One’s course?”

  “Yeah.” Connor shrugged. “I did a quick AI analysis of the alien ship’s course during the chase,” she told them. “Turned out it was aligned perfectly with M44.”

  “M44?” Dobbs asked. “That another galaxy?”

  She shook her head. “No. An open star cluster. It’s a clot of around a thousand stars about five hundred and some light years out. It’s known both as the Beehive and as Praesepe.”

  “Praesepe? What the fuck’s that?”

  “Latin for ‘manger.’ ” The Romans, apparently, had seen in the scattering of dim stars not a crab, but two donkeys, and thus the central cluster represented the manger from which they were eating.

  Gregory was studying the chart on his in-head. “The Triggah,” he said. “They were headed for the Praesepe Triggah.”

  “Triggah” was fighter pilot’s slang for “TRGA,” or “Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly.”

  “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Connor said. “I think our Glothr friends might not only be from a long way away. I think they’re from a long when away. Here. Have a look.”

  Agletsch Data Download 019372

  Stellar Systems and Clusters: Beehive Cluster

  Classification: Green-Echo

  OBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODE: A9: Open Star Cluster

  NAME: Beehive Cluster

  OTHER NAMES: Praesepe, M44, NGC 2632, Cr 189

  Location:

  Constellation: Cancer; Right Ascension/Declination: 08h40.4m, 19o 41’

  Distance: 577 light years

  Number of Stars: At least 1,000

  Total Mass: ~580 Solar Masses

  Stellar Makeup: M-class red dwarfs: 68%; F, G, and K-class sunlike stars: 30%; A-class stars: 2%, including 42 Cancri, an A9 III giant; K0 III giants: 4; G0 III giants: 1.

  Age: ~600 million years

  Core Diameter: ~22 light years

  DESCRIPTION: With the Hyades and the Pleiades, Praesepe is among the closest of the open star clusters to Sol. It also has a somewhat larger population than most other clusters. From Earth, it is a faint and fuzzy patch of light just barely visible to the naked eye that has been known since ancient times, and was among the first astronomical objects to be studied by Galileo Galilei through an early telescope. . . .

  Planetary Systems: Two planets discovered in the year 2012—“hot Jupiters” at that time designated as Pr0201b and Pr0211b—were the first exoplanets to be discovered circling stars within a star cluster. Current estimates suggest a total planetary population of well over 6,000. To date, no direct human explorations of the Praesepe cluster have been carried out. . . .

  Alien Stellarchitecture: Analyses of Agletsch galactic records in late 2424 indicate the presence of a modified Tipler cylinder at the Praesepe cluster’s heart, one of the so-called Sh’daar Nodes. Known as TRGA artifacts and presumably constructed by a now vanished galactic civilization perhaps as much as a half billion years ago, these massive cylinders, rotating at close to the speed of light, provide shortcuts through both space and time, and may serve as highways, of sorts, connecting the modern galaxy with the home galaxy of the Sh’daar Collective some 876 million years in the past. . . .

  Where the great globular clusters like Omega Centauri were densely packed balls of millions of stars crammed into spherical swarms more than a hundred light years across, open clusters were less dramatic. The Beehive cluster was perhaps forty light years across, a loose gathering of about a thousand stars estimated to be 600 million years old, and was thought to have had the same origin as another open cluster, the Hyades.

  No human expedition had yet ventured into the Beehive, however, and the cluster was not thought to be a likely place for inhabited worlds. If those stars were only a half billion years or so old, any planets circling them would still be harsh, young, and either sterile or possessing only the most primitive beginnings of single-cell life. When Earth was that old, life had only just begun appearing within the newborn world’s churning seas. The Beehive cluster would be no different.

  And yet . . .

  Connor slipped through several gigabytes of data, following up on the mention of the TRGA. That enigmatic object might well change everything.

  TRGAs were Tipler cylinders, theoretical structures first proposed as a solution to general relativity equations by the Hungarian mathematician and physicist Cornel Lanczos in 1924. Fifty years later, physicist Frank Tipler analyzed the equations and proposed that an ultra-dense cylinder rotating at extremely high speeds around its long axis might make travel through vast expanses of space and even through time itself possible. Later calculations had ruled out the time travel aspect; apparently, using a Tipler machine, as they were called, to move through time was possible only for a cylinder of infinite length.

  There proved to be a loophole, however. Incorporating exotic matter with negative energy into the structure would generate the closed timelike curves permitting travel back in time without requiring a cylinder of infinite length.

  But Tipler cylinders were purely hypothetical, useful for balancing relativistic equations but with no more physical reality than tachyons, which had been imagined back in 1967 for the same purpose.

  Then the first TRGA was encountered at a star called Texaghu Resch, 112 light years from Sol. This Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly, first noted in Agletcsh records as one of a large number of so-called Sh’daar Nodes, was described as an “inside-out Tipler machine,” a titanic and obviously artificial structure that appeared to focus space- and time-bending forces within the lumen of a hollow rotating tube. At first, it appeared to be a part of a vast network of interconnected nodes providing a kind of trans-galactic subway system permitting instantaneous travel across thousands of light years. Among other places, the Texaghu Resch Cylinder permitted ships from Earth to jump across 16,000 light years to the Omega Centauri globular cluster in an instant instead of months.

  Eventually, though, by tracking the movements of Sh’daar ships through that first cylinder, the America battlegroup had discovered a particular path across space and time, one connecting with the N’gai Cloud, a pocket-sized galaxy just above the plane of the Milky Way some 876 million years in the past. That small galaxy had been absorbed by the Milky Way perhaps 200 million years later; its corpse—its central core—existed still as the giant globular cluster Omega Centauri. The battlegroup had passed through the TRGA cylinder to the heart of the N’gai Cloud, confronting the Sh’daar on their home ground in the remote past.

  The Sh’daar, who’d been using the TRGA cylinders to attack or absorb galactic cultures in their future—Earth’s present—had agreed to stop their cross-time predations, perhaps because they feared that the humans would interfere with their past and wipe them out.

  And yet, their predations had begun again twenty years later.

  What, Connor wondered, had changed?

  “Scuttlebutt,” Martinez said with the air of one making a holy proclamation, “says that America is going back to Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear, and seriously kicking some Sh’daar ass.”

  The Tee-sub-minus phrase referred to the remote past time America had visited once before. It was clumsy and of real use only to physicists, but Martinez had rattled it off perfectly. He must have been practicing.

  “Yeah,” Ruxton said. “But will it be Tee-shub-mine . . . uh, wha’ he said. With the Sh’daar? Or the ur-Sh’daar? Makes a subshtansh . . . makes a . . . a big difference, y’know.”

  “I don’t see how,” Caswell said. “Sh’daar? Ur-
Sh’daar? They’re all the same.”

  “Not anymore,” Hathaway said, chuckling. “The Urs are gone.”

  “Sure,” Gregory said. “But what if we went back in time to before the ur-Sh’daar Singularity? If they knew that they were going to leave behind such a mess . . .”

  “I doubt they’d be able to do anything about it, Don,” Connor told him. “I mean, what would they be able to do? Stop whatever happened before it happened? That probably wouldn’t even be possible.”

  “No,” Gregory said, “but they might hang around long enough after the transformation to help the stay-behinds.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think we understand what happened, myself. Not really. It’s hard enough understanding non-human behavior when we’re on a more or less level playing field, like with the Agletsch. We know they trade in information—data they have for data we have, plus a few heavy elements like rhenium and neptunium two thirty-seven. Good old-fashioned capitalistic enterprise. We can understand that, right?

  “But when we’re trying to understand a collective of space-faring civilizations with a much higher technological quotient, and living hundreds of millions of years ago in an entirely different galaxy . . . how are we supposed to even begin to understand them?”

  Gregory laughed. “Your problem, Megan, is that you don’t believe in the Singularity at all.”

  They’d had this conversation before. “No,” she replied. “I don’t.”

  Sometimes known as the Vinge Singularity, after the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who popularized the concept in the late twentieth century, the Technological Singularity—first described as a possibility in the mid-1950s by the brilliant polymath John von Neumann—was supposed to be that point in a civilization’s development where organic intelligence merged with artificial intelligence in ways that would utterly and forever transform the very concept of intelligent life. For humans, the GRIN technologies, as they were popularly known, were seen as the drivers of this inevitable change: Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology.

  But was the change, the transformation into an entirely different order of life and intelligence, really inevitable? All attempts to predict Humankind’s transcendence into a higher intelligence had so far failed. Futurist Raymond Kurzweil had predicted that the Technological Singularity would occur, had to occur, no later than the year 2045. Vinge himself had predicted—in the 1990s—it happening after 2005 but before 2030.

  And yet, four centuries had passed since then, and there’d been no apotheosis of Humankind, no transcendence to a superhuman state.

  Hyperintelligent AIs were commonplace, and humans carried circuitry within their brains and peripheral nervous systems that let them connect to electronic networks, to machines, to AIs, and to other humans in astonishing and powerful ways. Human minds had been augmented by technology, but not replaced by machines, not rendered obsolete, and not transformed into something unrecognizable. Nor had humans elected to have their minds digitally uploaded to artificial realities, a form of immortality that might benefit the copy but not the original, which, after all, remained in the real world to age and die. People could piggyback their consciousness in remote robotic vehicles, but when the link was switched off, they awoke back in their bodies of flesh and blood.

  In short, they were still human.

  And because of this, Megan Connor was convinced that the Technological Singularity was all hype, speculation, and imaginative nonsense, and would be so for the foreseeable future. She didn’t know what had happened to the ancient ur-Sh’daar . . . but it seemed more likely to her by far that modern humans simply didn’t understand an alien civilization that had existed that far back within the deeps of Time.

  Humans weren’t gods, and they weren’t about to become gods. Transhumanism was a myth. Next question, please. . . .

  “I think the big question,” Hathaway said, pulling them back into the current discussion, “is what the Glothr think about us intercepting their ship . . . and what they’re likely to do about it.”

  “If they were here to make peace with the Confederation,” Martinez said, “they’ll just have to make peace with us now.”

  “I wonder,” Connor said, “if they can even see any difference between us and Geneva.”

  “Interesting point, Megan,” Gregory said. “Of course, any alien who knows us well knows we’re a fractious bunch. Always at each other’s throats . . . unless outsiders give us something to unite against, that is.”

  “Ha!” Schmitt said, slapping the table. “It didn’t work this time, did it? I mean, we’ve been fighting a dozen different races from the Sh’daar Collective for almost sixty years, but that didn’t stop us from getting into a damned nasty little civil war.”

  “Semper humanus,” Connor said, shaking her head. “Always human.”

  “Well that’s a depressing thought,” Hathaway said. “You’re saying we can’t change. . . .”

  “Oh, we’ll change,” Dobbs said, ordering another drink for himself. “The Singularity is coming, brothers.” He raised his empty glass in salute. “Hallelujah!”

  “Can I hear an amen?” Gregory added, laughing. They both looked at Connor, who just shrugged them off—she knew they were saying this not just out of belief, but because they knew it would bother her. Not tonight.

  “Watch it, you two,” Schmitt said. “They haven’t rescinded the White Covenant yet.”

  “Oh, they will, they will,” Hathaway said. “The way Starlight is spreading across Europe, and even over here now? They’ll have to.”

  “Yeah, and when you look at it, old Dobbs here has a point.” He glanced around the restaurant’s interior, as though checking for eavesdroppers. “If Starlight was a religious virus, it sure as hell ended the war in a hurry, didn’t it?”

  “I’ve heard those rumors,” Connor said. “I don’t believe them.”

  “No?” Gregory asked. “Damn, Lieutenant. What do you believe?”

  “That the USNA is still very much alone in the universe,” she said, “and we still have a long way to go. Forget the transhuman crap and Singularity and all the rest of that stargod shit. Right now we need to focus just on surviving as a species.”

  “Nah,” Ruxton said. “Tran . . . tran-shumans’ll win out. Homo shuperioris! Homo . . . Homo techno . . . uh . . .”

  “Easy there, Rux,” Caswell said. “You’ve been hitting the juice pretty hard tonight. You okay?”

  “Coursh I am, fuckin’ bitch . . .” He sagged, his face dropping to the tabletop.

  Caswell looked up at the others. “His wife left him,” he explained. “He got word from her this morning.”

  “His . . . wife? You mean he’s a monogie?”

  “ ’Fraid so. They were from the Boston Periphery, y’know? Apparently, she got in with a transhumanist associative.”

  “Ah,” Martinez said, nodding. “Some transhuman groups reject the whole idea of marriage or long-term partnerships.”

  “Well sure,” Gregory said, nodding. “If you’re a transhuman and going to live forever, you don’t want to be stuck with the same partner for eternity, do you? Eternity is a hell of a long time!”

  Connor arched an eyebrow, leaning back in her chair. She wasn’t sure what she thought of monogies, though fleet scuttlebutt had it that Admiral Gray himself was one. Most Prims were, though they tended to have the rough edges smoothed off when they entered polite civilization.

  The poor bastard. No wonder he was trying to drink himself into oblivion. Ruxton was facedown on the table, snoring loudly. “Shall we shoot him up with dryout?” Schmitt asked.

  “Nah,” Caswell said. “Let him sleep. We’ll hit him when it’s time to get him back up to the ship.”

  “So . . .” Schmitt said, trying to change the subject. “Any bets on how the Glothr thing’s gonna shake out?”

  “Maybe,�
�� Gregory said, smiling, “our new Glothr friends will show us the way.”

  “Sure,” Connor said. “If we can ever figure out what this means.” She raised her hands, opening and closing her fingers quickly to mimic flashing lights.

  Chapter Ten

  16 July, 2425

  Emergency Presidential Command Post

  Toronto

  United States of North America

  0910 hours, EST

  “The channel will be open in a few moments, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you, Konstantin.”

  Koenig glanced at the other people in the room—General Nolan, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Armitage, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Lawrence Brookings; Sarah Taylor, the new secretary of Alien Affairs; Admiral Vincent Lodge, head of USNA Naval Intelligence; and Philip Caldwell, the National Security advisor. All of them were in recliners grown from the floor in a circle, facing inward. His chief of staff, Marcus Whitney, and several aides, technicians, and secretaries hovered in the background.

  “I understand the quality of the translation has improved quite a bit,” Koenig said.

  “Definitely, Mr. President,” Admiral Lodge told him. “Agletsch pidgins are good as far as they go, but the translation AIs at Crisium filled in a lot of blanks.”

  “And the aliens themselves have helped a lot, working directly with our AIs,” Taylor added. “It’ll be like talking to a human,” he smiled, “not something in a bad adventure sim.”

  “Good. I’ve seen the transcripts recorded by . . . Klaatu, was it? Lots of room for misunderstanding, there.”

  “What’s the alien’s name, anyway?” Caldwell wanted to know.

  “Joe,” Koenig replied.

  “ ‘Joe’?” Brookings repeated. “For something that looks like a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish?”

  “The name was assigned by the AI running the translation, Mr. Secretary,” Lodge explained. “You think ‘Joe,’ and the program will fill in the critter’s real name for it.”

  “Which actually is a particular pattern of rippling lights that can’t be expressed as sound,” Taylor added. “Just so long as the program knows what’s going on, it’ll keep track of the details for us.”