As with any life-form, change forced adaptation. The underground seas dried up; the One manufactured its own water and, ultimately, adapted the subunits of its form to the harsher environment by wrapping each in gelatinous, water-filled shells. The planetary core continued to shrink and cool; the One expanded its caverns, learned to use electromagnetic fields to warp rock into easily traversable paths, learned to remake rock, atom by atom, into shapes that suited its needs.
Ultimately the One must have converted most of the planet’s crust into a vast machine for collecting and transmitting heat.
“But their world was dying,” Dev said. “They got some heat from their sun, but they must have known that, sooner or later, the planetary core would be cold and dead, and that would be the end of them.”
“And that’s when they learned how to build starships?” Katya asked. “I don’t see how they could without heavy industry. You can’t make K-T drives out of cells.”
“The DalRiss grow their ships,” Dev reminded her. “And they don’t use the K-T plenum. In the case of the One, it was simpler still. Remember the travel pods?”
“Those are the Xeno spaceships?” Katya asked.
“Or something like them.”
“But at sublight speeds, it would have taken years. …”
“Millions of years, Katya. They did it blindly, flinging pods filled with life into space.
“You see, they didn’t know about the stars. And the… the living component of the symbiosis was crippled because it didn’t know, couldn’t know what the universe was really like.
“They couldn’t see. They couldn’t sense position the way we can tell where our arm is even with our eyes closed. All they knew was warmth and Rock and empty space and Self. They constructed a picture of the universe that was essentially an infinity of Rock. Inside that Rock is an enormous empty space. Going out from that empty space, it gets warmer… and warmer, until it’s too hot and the pressures are too great to sustain life.”
“Like the people who once thought Earth was flat,” Katya said, “balanced on the shell of a tortoise.”
“Exactly. When they launched their life pods toward the stars, what they thought they were doing was launching them out into that huge central cavern they thought of as a kind of Void of Not-Rock. They were trying to reach another part of Rock, a place not yet occupied by Self. Thousands of pods must have been sent out. Maybe millions. They drifted through space for millions of years, guided—maybe—by nanotechnic machines on board that could sense magnetic fields. Nearly all of them must have been lost, out there among the stars. Lots more must have homed on stars… and found more heat than they bargained for.
“Or maybe they could recognize the danger, and had control enough to find cooler, more habitable pieces of Rock.”
“Planets,” Katya said quietly. “Like Loki.”
“And GhegnuRish and all the others. Those that survived the trip landed, the pods opened, and the passengers started tunneling.” He shook his head. “Other parts of the vast cave in the heart of the universe.
“I think a kind of life cycle evolved. What we call Xenophobes land on a planet, dig themselves in, and begin spreading through the planet’s crust looking for heat, tunneling deep on cold planets like Loki, spreading out near the surface on warmer planets like GhegnuRish. They take the world over, fill it with life, their kind of life. When the crust is filled… they launch another generation to the stars.”
“I still don’t understand why we’ve never seen their travel pods in space,” Bayer said “They’d be easy enough to detect.”
“Sure. But we haven’t seen them because they arrived a long time ago. How long do you think it takes for a handful of organisms to spread through the planetary crust of an entire world? I think the first Xenos must have landed on Loki hundreds of thousands of years ago. Maybe longer.”
Katya looked startled. “Like an infection. They could have spread through this entire part of the Galaxy. They could already be on Earth, in Earth, buried deep.”
“A distinct possibility. They’d only make themselves known if they rose from the warm depths looking for heat from the sun or raw materials from our technology. We were right, Katya. They don’t think in terms of, oh, refining iron into steel. Or manufacturing their own nano films or durasheathing. But if they can get at it, their nanotechnic disassemblers can take it apart and reuse it elsewhere. They found our cities to be quite useful that way.”
“They never even knew we were there.”
“Oh, they knew there was something there. They knew when they were being attacked, when parts of the Self were dying. And they adapted. They took pieces of our own equipment, modified it to fit the surroundings—”
“Alpha stalkers were never our equipment. Or magnetic travel pods. And we got the idea for nano-D shells from them! Where did they come from?”
“Katya, these… beings have been spreading from system to system for a long time. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of years. The machine we call a Fer-de-Lance might be technology remembered from a war with some other species a million years ago. The travel pods were part of their original nanotechnology, capsules for moving through the rock where temperatures and pressures would be too much for unprotected organisms. The patterns are all stored in their computer memory, and passed on with each new wave of colonists. Each new world is a new One. One world doesn’t communicate with another. They simply utilize their world, send another generation of colonists toward the sky, and… think.
“The tragedy was that, with their inside-out worldview, they could never conceive of another intelligence, outside of their own. As far as they were concerned, they were simply utilizing the resources of their universe. Adapting. Surviving. They could never even approach their full potential with the baggage of their old, organic philosophy.
“But by the same token, they never had the… intuition that would let them overcome that philosophy. They couldn’t innovate, only react. Maybe, in the end, they were more like machines than organic life after all.”
Dev looked at the cavern walls surrounding the little group of humans. The One, the tiny part of it that he could see, was quiescent, patiently waiting.
“Now, though, it’s come into contact with a different worldview. It’s learned something new, maybe for the first time in millennia. And I think… I think it wants to know more about the universe.”
Katya reached out, touching his arm. The contact was warm. Reassuring. “It could tell what you were thinking?”
Dev nodded. “It saw, through my link, a little bit of the way we see the universe—how we see space, a Galaxy of three hundred billion stars, planets, other galaxies beyond ours. And people. Relationships. Change. Variety. I don’t think it understood even one percent of what it saw. What it felt. But…”
“But what? What was it feeling?”
“More than anything else?” He closed his eyes, feeling again that alien tide. “Wonder…”
Chapter 35
Compared to what’s Out There, every human culture and somatotype, from Imperial Japanese to New American Outback Ranger to !Kung to gene-tailored Freefaller, is identical. To most of what’s Out There, humans, planaria, and tree ferns are as similar as makes no difference. Maybe, someday, that realization will be the salvation of our species.
—Life in the Universe
Dr. Taylor Chung
C.E. 2470
Dev sat in the most luxurious room he’d ever seen in his life, despite the fact that there was little furniture. The awards ceremony was over and he ached to get back to his assigned quarters and out of his dress grays, but the invitation, unprecedented as it was, could not possibly have been refused.
He sat tatami-fashion on the padded floor before the low, richly ornamented table. Katya knelt beside him on his right, with General Varney next to her. The silhouettes of guards stood motionless behind translucent walls.
Opposite, an old and wrinkled man sipped tea from a perfect cup.
He did not, Dev thought, look much like his portraits. “The Empire,” he said, carefully placing the cup before him, “owes you a debt of gratitude, Chu-i Cameron-san. A debt that can never be truly paid back. Certainly not with trinkets.”
His new rank still felt uncomfortable, as did the starburst at his throat.
The Imperial Star.
The Emperor seemed to read his thoughts. “I remember your father, Cameron-san. He was a brave, an honorable man. His loss is deeply felt. I wish he could be here with us now, to share your honor, and to see how his son has brought an end to the Human-Xeno War.”
Dev looked hard at the Emperor but could detect no deeper meaning beyond the simple words. Strange. A thousand years before, this man would have been revered as a descendant of the sun god. Now he was just a man… but an immensely powerful one, a man who could make or break an officer’s career with a word. It would not be wise to contradict him.
“The war is not over yet, Your Majesty,” Dev said. “All I really learned out there is that it may never be over.”
That was true enough. The One of GhegnuRish knew nothing of its offspring, blindly flung against the stars, or of other Ones hidden in the worlds of neighboring suns, even suns as close as Alya A and B. Dev’s discovery had proven only that each separate world-entity would have to be approached and shown the reality of the universe separately.
How many worlds did the Xenophobes occupy already? Dev had never been able to determine just how many generations of space-faring life pods there’d been, or how distant the original Xenophobe homeworld had been. Xenophobes—unconverted Ones—might inhabit every planet in the Galaxy with a molten core and a significant magnetic field.
And there was no way to tell how those other Ones would react when they were contacted. Each One was an individual, reacting to its own environment, unaware of the Ones of other worlds. Each had a long and bloody heritage, a racial memory written in the genocides of entire species, to overcome.
Genocide on a planetary scale. On a galactic scale.
The Emperor had been silent for a long time. He stirred now, as if throwing off some troubling thought. “Are you familiar with the novae of Aquila?”
Dev leaned back on his haunches, extracting data from his RAM. Yes, he’d picked up something about that, one of the tidbits acquired years before when he’d read everything that he could about the stars. There was an area of Earth’s sky, he’d learned, in the direction of the constellation Aquila the Eagle, where there’d once been a higher-than-expected number of novae—exploding stars. During one forty-year period in the first half of the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the bright novae observed from Earth had appeared in an area equivalent to a quarter of one percent of the entire sky; two had appeared in one year alone—1936—and Nova Aquila of 1918 had been the brightest recorded in three centuries, outshining every star in the sky but Sirius.
“I’ve been thinking about those exploding suns,” the Emperor said quietly. “They’re much farther away than Alya A and B. Nova Aquila, I believe, was twelve hundred light-years distant. But all lie in the same general direction from Earth.”
True. Eagle Sector embraced the neighboring constellations of Aquila, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Scutum, Sagittarius—a tiny part of the sky lying in the general direction of the Galactic Core. Alya—Theta Serpentis—lay right on the border between Serpens and Aquila, only three degrees from the site of the nova of 1918. In galactic terms, the line from Nova Aquilae to Alya to Sol was almost a straight line.
Had someone else been confronted by the Xenophobe threat in C.E. 700 and sought to deal with it in a direct and uncompromising fashion? How many of the Xenophobe pods that had spread to worlds of the Shichiju had been fleeing the wholesale destruction of their planets’ stars? The memories passed on by the One were still confused and tangled, but Dev saw there images of warfare and titanic struggle, age following age of genocidal war.
Dev saw little reason to be hopeful. The Xenophobes might be the closest thing Man had to natural enemies in the Galaxy—outside of himself, of course—and the war might go on year after year on world after world. On each planet, the resident Xeno intelligence, the “One,” would have to be individually approached, contacted, and converted to a different way of looking at the universe.
“As I said, Your Majesty, the war might not be over for a long time yet. We will have to deal with each planetary intelligence one by one. Just contacting them may be difficult. Certainly it will be all but impossible on worlds where we’re actively fighting them.”
“True. Still, the One of Lung Chi has been at peace for a number of years now. Perhaps we could approach that world in peace, now that we know what to look for, how to communicate with it. The DalRiss have offered to help. They’re already intrigued by the possibility of reoccupying their own homeworld. We may yet return to the colonies like Lung Chi and An-Nur II, to worlds lost to Man for decades. With the intelligent cooperation of each world’s intelligence, terraforming will be miraculously easy.”
Dev tried to imagine an organism that girdled a planet, busily converting raw materials to human-breathable air, adjusting the planetary temperature, even manufacturing entire cities to spec, all in exchange for intelligent conversation with the Not-Self organisms inhabiting the surface.
There was so much to be gained from peaceful contact. The alternative was genocide… and the exploding suns of Aquila.
“So you see, Chu-i Cameron-san, we have much to thank you for. True, communication alone will not end the war, but it is a beginning. Perhaps the most important beginning there is. That medal cannot repay what we owe you. Nothing can. But perhaps we can reward you further.”
Dev reached up and touched the Star. “I am content, Your Majesty.”
“Indeed? My staff has been going through your records. I gather that only last year you were seeking transfer to the Hegemony Navy. Certainly you have amply demonstrated your talents, both in linking and in tactics. According to your records, you possess that blend of psychological attributes that would guarantee your success as a naval officer. Perhaps you would consider a transfer to the Imperial Navy? A more tangible reward for your services, one that could see you with a command of your own within a few short years.”
Dev grinned. Glancing to his right, he caught Katya’s eye, warm with understanding, and maybe just a bit moist as well.
It was definitely a breach of protocol, but Dev reached out, taking Katya’s shoulders and giving her a hug.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” he said. “But I already have everything I could possibly want.”
TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY
AI: Artificial Intelligence. Since the Sentient Status Act of 2204, higher-model networking systems have been recognized as “self-aware but of restricted purview,” a legal formula that precludes enfranchisement of machine intelligences.
Alpha: Type of Xenophobe combat machine, also called stalker, shapeshifter, silvershifter, etc. They are animated by numerous organic-machine hybrids and mass ten to twelve tons. Their weapons include nano-D shells and surfaces, and various magnetic effects. Alphas appear in two guises, a snake-or wormlike shape that lets them travel underground along SDTs, and any of a variety of combat shapes, usually geometrical with numerous spines or tentacles. Each distinctive combat type is named after a poisonous Terran reptile, e.g., Fer-de-Lance, Cobra, Mamba, etc.
Alya: Naked-eye star Theta Serpentis (63 Serpentis) 130 light years from Sol. A double star with a separation of 900 All (5 light-days), Alya A is an A5 star, Alya B an A7. Alya B-V is the homeworld of the DalRiss, who know it as GhegnuRish. Alya A-VI is known as ShraRish, a DalRiss colony.
Analogue: Computer-generated “double” of a person, used to handle routine business, communications, and duties through ViRcom linkage.
Annaisha: “Guide.” Term for Imperial liaison officers who coordinate military or political activity between the Empire and Hegemony military forces.
AND Round: Anti-nan
o disassembler. Tube-launched NCM round that bursts almost as soon as it is fired, releasing an NCM cloud.
Antigenics: Nanotechnic devices programmed to hunt down and destroy disease bacteria and parasites inside the body.
APW: Armored Personnel Walker. Any of several large, four-legged striders designed to carry unlinked passengers. VbH Zo (“Elephant”) can carry fifty troops. Kani (“Crab”) can carry twenty.
Ascraft: Aerospace craft. Vehicles that can fly both in space and in atmosphere, including various transports, fighters, and shuttles.
Beta: Second class of Xenophobe combat machine, adapted from captured or abandoned human equipment. Its weapons are human-manufactured weapons, often reshaped to Xeno purposes. They have been known to travel underground.
Bionangineering: Use of nanotechnology to restructure life-forms for medical or ornamental reasons.
CA: Combat Armor. Light personal armor/space suit providing eight hours’ life support in hostile environment.
Cephing: Also linking. Derived from cephlink. To operate equipment, computers, striders, etc., through a cephlink.
Cephlink: Implant within the human brain allowing direct interface with computer-operated systems. It contains its own microcomputer and RAM storage and is accessed through sockets, usually located in the subject’s temporal bones above and behind each ear. Limited (non-ViR) control and interface is possible through neural implants in the skin, usually in the palm of one hand.
Cephlink RAM: Random Access Memory, part of the micro-circuitry within the cephlink assembly. Used for memory storage, message transfer, linguistics programming, and the storage of complex digital codes used in cephlinkage access. An artificial extension of human intelligence.
Ceramiplas: Plastic-ceramic composite used in personal armor.
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