Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  “Any idea yet what the Glothr want from us?” Eugene Armitage asked.

  “Presumably,” Koenig said, “to be allowed to go home. That’s likely where they were going when we stopped them.”

  “Be nice to know what they were doing in North India, too,” Nolan said, scowling. “Too many unknowns, here.”

  “But we know that, surely?” Armitage said. “The last Confederation holdouts were looking for help from the Sh’daar, to beat us.”

  “Maybe,” Taylor said. “But we can’t rely on easy answers, not with beings as different as these.”

  “We’re checking with some of our assets in New Delhi,” Lodge told them. “No answers there yet. But I would have to agree with Secretary Taylor. There may be something else going on here, more than a simple alliance.”

  “Gentleman, Ms. Taylor,” Konstantin’s voice said in their heads. “We’re ready to commence the link. I remind you all that only President Koenig will be addressing the Glothr directly, in order to minimize confusion. If you all are ready, we can begin. . . .”

  A window opened within Koenig’s mind, and he found himself looking at the alien.

  He’d known what to expect, of course. He’d seen one of the aliens first in recordings shot through the electronic eyes of a contact robot on the Glothr ship out beyond Neptune. Later, he’d watched their arrival at the xenosophontology labs at the Mare Crisium, on the moon. And Konstantin had kept him up to date on what they’d been learning about the Glothr since.

  But to see them up close . . . Koenig had to admit he was taken aback just a bit.

  The creature revealed on his in-head was ethereally beautiful: a filmy translucence revealing patches, dots, and stripes of inner light . . . most of it blue, but with some green and yellow. It currently was underwater—or, rather, in a salty mix of water and ammonia at near freezing temperatures, and its mantle and gently undulating tentacles formed a filmy halo that surrounded what might have passed for a face.

  There had been a lot of speculation on how these underwater beings had developed their technology, but a bigger question came from the result of that technological advancement: namely, their robots. The Glothr appeared to be expert roboticists. Those gleaming, upright cigar-shapes with their multiple eyes and tentacles were everywhere on their ship, and had been essential in cracking the aliens’ use of Agletsch Trade Pidgin. Yet, the Sh’daar restricted the development of robotics among their clients, the species within their collective. Why didn’t the rules apply to the Glothr?

  It was something Koenig hoped to get to the bottom of.

  “You are the leader of the humans,” a computer-generated voice said within Koenig’s head. At the same time, the words wrote themselves down the right side of his in-head. Koenig was immediately impressed. The translation had improved, and markedly so. There was no ambiguity in the words at all.

  “The leader?” Koenig said. “No. Not of all humans. The United States of North America.”

  “We do not understand. We were told you speak for Earth.”

  Koenig wasn’t sure how best to represent himself. How much of human politics did the Glothr understand? How important was it that they understand?

  “Humans are . . . divided into a number of separate nation-states,” he said. “Some have been attempting to come together, to unify as a single group called the Earth Confederation. But others don’t like the idea of the Confederation making decisions for the rest of us about things to which we haven’t agreed.”

  “Like joining the Sh’daar Collective,” the Glothr said.

  The being was damned quick. Maybe it understood more than Koenig had been giving it credit for.

  “Exactly. We don’t want the Collective telling us how to run our business.”

  “Despite all of the benefits? That is what we truly don’t understand . . . that you humans, or at least some humans, would reject the benefits of joining the Collective.”

  “What benefits?” Koenig snapped back, more forcefully than he’d intended. “To have our scientific inquiry stifled? Our curiosity blocked? Our technological advancement throttled? Our growth and our economy frozen? The way we choose to develop our civilization kept static and unchanging?”

  “All of which are trivial when compared to becoming part of a billion-year-old empire spanning the galaxy. And that “throttling of technological advances” you mention—that would be for your own good.”

  “And who determines what is in our best interest?”

  “The Collective, of course.”

  “Shouldn’t we have a say in anything that’s going to shape our culture?”

  “But you would, of course. Once you are part of the Collective.”

  Koenig decided that it would be futile trying to argue the point further. He had no idea how the Sh’daar Collective governed itself, or how internal decisions were made, and he didn’t think this was the time to learn.

  Even so, he was pleased. This was the first time, so far as he knew, that a Sh’daar species had actually talked to humans about what it was they wanted. Even when Koenig and the America battlegroup had forged a treaty of sorts with the Sh’daar in the N’gai Cloud, the beings he’d talked with over a computer link had not tried to sell him on the advantages of joining their Collective. Discussion at the time had been limited to “leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.” By contrast, the Glothr seemed . . . approachable, even friendly. It felt like an enormous change in attitude.

  Or was this perceived change simply a reflection of the outlook and attitude of this new species, a kind of racial trait? Koenig didn’t know . . . but he was willing to believe that the Glothr might be important friends for Humankind.

  God knows we need one.

  “Humans are a stubborn bunch, Joe,” Koenig said. “We don’t like surrendering our independence to anyone . . . even our own. And we really hate it when someone puts a gun to our head and says we have to do anything, even if whatever it is is supposed to be good for us. But maybe if you could answer some questions, help us get to know you better, some of the barriers to understanding could come down.”

  Promise nothing, he told himself. But get him to talk. . . .

  “We will answer what we can, within reason,” the Glothr replied. “Better understanding between any two cultures works to the advantage of both.”

  “We’ll see. I’m not entirely ready to concede that,” Koenig said. “But . . . look. The Sh’daar Collective would have us give up robotics, among other things, right?”

  “Not give up, necessarily,” the Glothr replied. “But we do want to moderate the speed of advancement.”

  “We can’t help but notice that the Glothr have some quite sophisticated robots. Why would your Collective allow you to build such robots, but deny us that privilege?”

  “Each case, each species, is different,” the alien told him. “And there are no absolutes. The Zhaotal Um helped us establish a technological civilization in the first place, hundreds of millions of years ago, and robotics were instrumental in our transition from a marine environment to a gaseous atmosphere, and then again, later, when we made the transition to space. Robots, both as artificial intelligences and as remote bodies and sensory organs for our observers, were already a deeply integral part of our civilization when the ur-Sh’daar first contacted us.”

  Koenig caught his breath. The talkative alien had let slip several important revelations just now. Thank God everything was being recorded and stored for later analyses.

  He opened a sidebar window and queried Konstantin. “Do we have a reference to Zhaotal Um?”

  “Possibly,” the AI replied. “There is a forty percent chance that the phrase is related to a term in one of the Agletsch trade pidgins.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Roughly . . . ‘Stargods.’ ”

  “Ha! I thought so!”

 
This meant that, like the H’rulka—without access to metals, fire, or smelting technology—the Glothr had had help. And “Joe” had clearly stated that they’d received that help long before being contacted by the Collective . . . which meant that the stargods definitely were not the Sh’daar. Most xenosophontologists had already arrived at that conclusion, but many, in the name of keeping things simple, still argued against it. The Sh’daar were an advanced galactic technic species with a penchant for meddling in the affairs of other races. Ergo, they must be the mythic stargods.

  And then something else sank in, something startling enough that Koenig ran back through the written transcript of the conversation so far. Ur-Sh’daar! The being had said they’d been contacted by the ur-Shdaar!

  There was something else there, too: an admission that the Glothr civilization was hundreds of millions of years old. That seemed starkly impossible.

  “Tell me, Joe,” Koenig said, “just where do you come from? The Milky Way? Or the N’gai Cloud?”

  “We are not prepared to share that information with you as yet, human.”

  “Maybe I should ask you when you’re from, then. I find it hard to believe that your species is hundreds of millions of our years old. But if you traveled forward through time to get here—perhaps from the N’gai Cloud before it was assimilated by our galaxy—the idea becomes more reasonable.”

  “The biggest problem with you humans,” Joe said, his lights pulsing and rippling as the words came through Koenig’s in-head, “is that you are true ephemerals. Your species can’t take the long view, can’t plan for things a few million years down the line, can’t think in terms of evolutionary periods of time. You worry that the Sh’daar demand that you slow your explorations of robotics and genetics and the rest, because you don’t see that a delay in the development of those technologies means nothing against a vista of ten million years . . . a hundred million . . . a billion. . . .”

  “Are you telling me the Glothr as a species have been around for a billion years?”

  “I’m telling you that your species is less than half a million years old, and has been technologically proficient for a mere instant, the snap of a tentacle tip.” One of the Glothr’s translucent tendrils rippled and flicked, as if in demonstration. “A race of immortals might take an eon or two to arrive at an important decision, and why not? They have the time, and they know it. They can afford not to be . . . hasty.”

  “Is your species immortal?”

  “True immortality may be impossible. The universe itself will die at some point, bringing all life to an end.”

  The alien had not, Koenig realized, answered his question. Although it was always difficult—and usually impossible—to judge nonhuman motives or emotions across an AI translation link, he had the distinct impression that the near transparent being floating in his in-head window was trying to sell him a bill of goods.

  “If we’re so primitive,” Koenig said, “why does the Collective want us? Surely we can’t add that much to your civilization.”

  “Perhaps not. But you could be disruptive if your technology leads you into a state of Schjaa Hok.”

  Koenig knew the term, an Agletsch translation of data his battlegroup had accessed eight hundred million years in the past. It meant, very roughly, “The Transcending,” and referred to the sudden vanishing of perhaps hundreds of billions of inhabitants of the pygmy galaxy called the N’gai Cloud.

  There were still human religions here on Earth who expected their members to one day be snatched away by God, an event Christian fundamentalists called “the Rapture.” Eight hundred million years ago, a quite literal rapture had occurred within the ur-Sh’daar civilization in the N’gai Cloud. The Transcending had not been brought on by a messiah’s return, but rather appeared to be a true technological singularity, with a majority of the civilization’s members turning into . . . something else. What that something else might be—life on a higher plane or around the corner of a different dimension, perhaps, or a digital existence within computer-generated pocket universes—was still unknown.

  What was known was that those members of the civilization that had not made the transformation, the Refusers, had become the modern Sh’daar.

  “Mr. President,” Admiral Armitage whispered in his head, “ask it what it was doing on Earth, in North India.”

  Koenig mentally waved the Navy CNO off. He was more interested in what the Sh’daar wanted from Humankind . . . and if there were grounds for negotiations.

  “The Sh’daar Collective,” he said to the alien, “agreed to leave us alone when we visited the N’gai Cloud twenty of our years ago. Lately, you have resumed your attacks. Why?”

  “You seem to be under a misapprehension,” the alien told them. “The Collective is a . . . loose association of very different species and cultures. It is not a . . . I believe the term you might use is empire. There isn’t a strong central government or a single leader. There is no capital world, no ruling emperor. How could such a thing possibly function in a galaxy as vast and as complex as this?”

  Koenig smiled. Back when he’d commanded a star carrier battlegroup, he’d chastised subordinates for using the term “Sh’daar empire” for precisely that reason. Just how many species the Sh’daar controlled in the Milky Way Galaxy now was unknown. Agletsch sources mentioned thirty in their Encyclopedia Galactica . . . but those were just the civilizations for which humans had purchased data from those supreme traders in galactic information. According to the best current estimates, there were 50 million intelligent species in this one galaxy alone, and perhaps several thousand actually controlled by the Sh’daar across a volume of space variously described as between a tenth of the galaxy . . . and half.

  “So when the Sh’daar tell their client races to do something, they might not.”

  “It is not so simple a task as giving an order and expecting it to be carried out,” the alien told them. “We do regret the problems this has caused your civilization.”

  “What if we humans entered into negotiations with the Sh’daar directly?” Koenig asked. “Perhaps if we opened trade negotiations with—”

  “Your civilization has nothing we wish to trade for,” the Glothr said, cutting Koenig off. “We have access to the raw materials of much of the galaxy, and manufacturing technologies that make your current nanotech seem primitive by comparison.”

  And that, of course, had long been the argument against such cherished myths and fictional accounts as interstellar trade routes and conquest. With the basic elements both of any manufacturing process and of life itself common in every solar system, and with nanotechnology or its equivalent to assemble those atoms into literally any end product desired, there was absolutely no reason to invade another star system . . . not in terms of the acquisition of worlds, goods, or raw materials. Even living space could be grown from asteroids or cometary bodies out in a system’s Oort Cloud, enough for tens of trillions of beings. Or existing inhospitable worlds could be terraformed into paradise. Only information appeared to have any value in the galactic marketplace, as the Agletsch had demonstrated.

  “We must have something that interests you,” Koenig told the alien.

  “We want your cooperation,” the Glothr said, blue flashes undulating up its rippling tentacles. “We want to avoid a second Schjaa Hok, one occurring in this galaxy in the near-term future. And with your participation, perhaps we can provide a united front against . . . this.”

  A new, inner window opened in Koenig’s mind, and in the minds of the others who were linked into the conversation. He saw—again—the strange and eerie starscape of the Rosette, the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster with its titanic space- and time-bending stellarchitecture, enigmatic structures of light, all of it embracing the close-set whirl of world-sized black holes in a tightly circling orbit around a common center of gravity. In the background, 10 million stars formed a glowin
g backdrop, an impenetrable wall of starlight.

  The so-called Rosette Aliens had emerged from that gravitational whirlpool and begun creating the surrounding webwork of mysterious and titanic structures—stellarchitecture. Speculation as to who or what they were ranged from visitors from a parallel universe, or from the far future, to the original ur-Sh’daar, newly emerged from the remote past. Those six co-orbiting black holes, physicists knew, were the modern form of six giant blue stars at the center of the N’gai Cloud 876 million years in the past, an artificial gravitational rosette used like an impossibly vast Tipler machine to cross enormous gulfs of space and time.

  “Do you know who these visitors are?” Koenig asked.

  “We do.”

  “It’s the ur-Sh’daar, isn’t it?”

  “Your empty speculation serves no purpose. If you wish to learn the true nature of the cosmos, you would do well to join with us and become a living part of the galaxy’s transformation into biological existential reality!”

  The Glothr’s terminology seemed oddly phrased and awkward to the point of clumsiness. Biological existential reality? What the hell did biology have to do with a term out of ancient philosophy?

  “Is that what you were discussing with the Earth Confederation recently?” Koenig asked. “Existentialism?”

  “We were discussing the Earth Confederation’s formal assimilation into the Sh’daar Collective. It seems a shame that your divisiveness—your faction—has prevented that.”

  “As I said, we don’t like surrendering our independence.”

  “The representatives of your Earth Confederation seemed willing enough to do so.”

  “I’ll just bet they were,” Koenig replied, laughing.

  “Which proves your statement about not wishing to surrender independence is not true.”

  “They might be willing to do so,” Koenig replied, “if they thought they could get some help from you against us. We’ve always had trouble with giving up freedom in exchange for a little security.”