Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  But with O-G humans it was different. Psychologists thought it had to do with establishing different ways of communicating with others, ways creating distinctions of them as opposed to us; they certainly were aware of the differences between the species caelestis and sapiens, and seemed to want to accentuate those differences for psychological reasons of their own.

  Related to this was their preference for orienting themselves upside down with respect to any O-G they happened to be speaking with. This one, Michael Collins, had reached out to grab a handhold that positioned her head-down, from St. Clair’s perspective. Of course, there was no up or down in microgravity—the celestimorphs just seemed to enjoy emphasizing that fact.

  “Okay, Mike,” St. Clair said. He pulled himself over to the command chair and maneuvered himself into it. The seat immediately attached itself to his uniform, holding him in place. Collins continued to hang nearby like some bloated four-armed spider. “Now tell us again . . . what did you see out there?”

  “Andromeda is alive,” Collins told him. “We could see it moving.”

  St. Clair wished he could read the being’s expression. Little that an O-G human would recognize as emotion showed through those thick, protective lenses. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Believe me, I know. But it was like these things, like tentacles reaching across toward us.” One of the being’s foot-hands rippled in imitation of something crawling. “It was damned scary, let me tell you . . . my lord.”

  St. Clair smiled at the hesitation before the honorific. Celestimorphs were markedly egalitarian in their social interactions, and didn’t seem to have much use for the titles and heavy-handed formalities of address and demeanor used within the United Earth Directorate.

  Something I have in common with them, then.

  “You have a recording?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  A new window opened inside St. Clair’s mind, and the recording came up. He struggled to understand what he was seeing. Recording software was standard in most in-head implants, allowing one person to show another exactly what he’d seen or otherwise experienced. The pebbly-skinned celestimorphs, however, experienced the universe around them quite differently from O-G humans, with optical senses extending from deep in the infrared to far into the ultraviolet, and with other senses overlaying them in odd and sometimes hard-to-interpret ways.

  And yet . . .

  Yes—he could see the tendrils Collins had described on his in-head, a kind of purplish overlay to the view of the Andromedan disk that writhed and shifted as he watched. In the lower part of the scene, much closer to where the central cores of Andromeda and the Milky Way began to merge, a number of violet pseudopods seemed to be pouring across the narrow gulf in slow motion, a kind of oozing of color and texture that did, indeed, suggest that something was moving from one galaxy to the other.

  “That purple stuff,” St. Clair said. “That’s mass?” He wanted to be certain he understood.

  “Mass as delineated by gravity,” Collins told him. “We think it might actually be dark matter.”

  The thought chilled, uncomfortable and unpleasant. The oozing motion made St. Clair think of something alive.

  Could dark matter have its own biochemistry?

  That thought led to another, even more uncomfortable. Could dark matter possess Mind?

  “Upload everything you have to Newton,” St. Clair told the little being.

  “We already have.” And without anything like social niceties, it pushed off from its perch and flew toward the bridge entryway.

  “Do you believe her?” Symm asked after Mike left.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Those things . . . they think in peculiar ways.”

  “But I’ve never known one to hallucinate,” St. Clair replied. “They’re pretty matter-of-fact about everything. If they have anything like an imagination, they keep it well under control.”

  “The vid she showed us could be some sort of sensor malfunction,” Anna Denisova said.

  “It was assembled from the in-head data of three caels,” St. Clair replied. “Three identical hardware malfunctions?”

  “That’s not very likely.”

  “No. It’s not. Can you set the ship’s mass sensors to show gravitational mass visually?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Denisova replied. “Our gravitational scanners already show the data, but as alphanumerics. We could direct the department AIs to translate to visual.”

  “Do it. I’m thinking it would be a smart idea to be able to see what the caels see.”

  HOURS HAD PASSED. “All departments, stand by for shift.”

  “All stations report ready for transition, my lord.”

  “Subcommander Rand. Are all of our people back aboard?”

  Gerard Rand had been Francesca’s second-in-command in PriFly, replacing her as CAS after her horrific death.

  “All fighters and auxiliary craft have returned and are secured, my lord.”

  “Are you doing okay down here?”

  There was a pause. “Yes, my lord. I do miss her, though.”

  St. Clair had been asking about how well Rand was dealing with the new cybernetic links, not his emotions concerning Francesca, but decided not to push it. The telemetry at his bridge station showed all in readiness.

  “So do we all, Jerry. Okay, First Navigator. Let’s go places.”

  The sky ahead, dominated by the interpenetrating cores of two spiral galaxies, shimmered . . . then shifted. There was little visible change. A few of the nearer, foreground stars vanished or jumped aside. A blue-black nebula edged with silver and gold expanded, becoming more dominant.

  And NPS-024 took center stage.

  “What the hell is that?” Symm asked, her voice touched by wonder.

  St. Clair stared at the object for a long moment. It seemed to be a sphere, appearing at a range of several AUs as metallic and a dark, charcoal gray.

  “Give me a higher magnification.”

  The sphere jumped, filling the screen. At the new resolution, St. Clair could see a lacy pattern across the surface—loops, whorls, and empty spaces. The empty spaces appeared to be filled with a tenuous haze.

  And through the haze, within the outer shell . . . another shell, with more designs that made it look like an exercise in the mathematics of spherical projection.

  “Can we zoom in any closer?”

  Again, the sphere jumped in size. The outer surface appeared granular at this resolution, and filmy rather than solid, as though it were made of clouds of precisely ordered grains of sand.

  And within the second shell . . . more shells, layer upon layer of them, with just a hint, at infrared wavelengths, of a sun peeking through all of that obscuring matter from the central core.

  “My God . . .” St. Clair said quietly. “An honest-to-God Dyson sphere.”

  “Not exactly,” Newton’s voice said in his mind. “A true Dyson sphere would have only a single shell, either as a solid component, with the habitable zone spread across the inner surface, facing the star . . . or with a cloud of either orbital habitats or statites within the star’s habitable zone. This could more accurately be called a Dyson swarm.”

  St. Clair stared into that hazy vastness. He was familiar with the concept of both Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms, which had been around as speculation since the twentieth century. Named for the mathematician and physicist who’d come up with the idea, they’d been suggested as a logical step in the history of any highly technical space-faring species, a means of trapping all of the energy radiated by that civilization’s sun, rather than the fraction of a percent intercepted naturally by the day side of a planet. Though usually pictured as a solid shell—which would have been inherently unstable—Dyson in fact had suggested that such a sphere might consist of tens of billions of habitats similar to the Tellus portion of Tellus Ad Astra—either in orbit around their sun, or suspended in place by enormous solar sails—statites.

  �
��Okay . . . a Dyson swarm, then,” St. Clair said. Damn AIs and their picky insistence on the right word.

  “Not a Dyson swarm, either,” Newton replied. “Analysis of the structure ahead suggests that the non-stellar component—the orbitals—extend clear down to very nearly the surface of the star. Only a tiny fraction of these will be hab modules as we know them. The structure is not, primarily, for habitation.”

  “Then what is it?” St. Clair demanded.

  “Possibly a matrioshka brain.”

  St. Clair had to search the ship’s database for that term, but found it almost immediately.

  And the concept was far more stunning than a mere Dyson sphere.

  “I HATE to say it,” Adler said, “but it looks like St. Clair was right. That object is clearly a Dyson sphere, which means an extremely advanced technology occupies it. Kardashev 2, at the very least.”

  He was standing in the sunken entertainment room of his residence-office in Tellus’s port hab, a holographic projection of the object ahead filling half of the space. Lloyd was linked in with him, as were several of his fellow Council members—Gressman, Noyer, Hsien, Reinholdt, Benton, and a few others.

  “And what is a Kardashev 2?” Hsien Tianki asked. “Or do you use phrases deliberately intended to obfuscate?”

  “Not at all. Here is the link to the encyclopedia article,” Adler replied. “In brief, though, a man named Kardashev once described potential galactic civilizations by the amount of energy they utilized. A Kardashev 1 civilization would use all of the available energy of its home planet. A Kardashev 2—a K-2 civilization, rather—would use all of the energy of its home star system. And a K-3 would utilize all of the available energy of its home galaxy. The British-American physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that a K-2 civilization might enclose its home star to trap every erg of available sunlight, and so created the idea of a Dyson sphere.”

  “Ah,” Hsien said, and Adler felt him nod. “I do know the concept, but didn’t remember the name.”

  “The important thing here is that these beings must have disassembled their entire solar system—every planet, asteroid, moon, everything—to build that cloud of habitats. They will be thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of years in advance of us technologically.”

  “And so, perhaps they would be able to send us back to our own time,” Aren Reinholdt put in.

  “Perhaps,” Adler agreed. “Certainly they’ll be able to tell us about this time at least—the names and identities of the major players, the galactography, that sort of thing.”

  “The location of Earth?” Kallista DePaul put in.

  “If Earth still exists in this epoch, my lady. But keep in mind, all of you, that after the passing of some billions of years, we may not wish to see what our planet has become.”

  They sat there quietly, absorbing what the Cyb director had just said. Finally, Lloyd spoke.

  “We should take steps,” he said, “to guarantee civilian control of the torpedo. What are they calling it?”

  “ ‘Roceti,’ ” Adler told him. “And, yes. I agree. But we’ll need to move quickly on that . . . before the military can mess things up.”

  “A special committee, perhaps,” DePaul suggested. “Headed up by Dr. Dumont, or people from his department.”

  “I think,” Adler said, “that I should be able to arrange that.”

  “A MATRIOSHKA BRAIN,” St. Clair said quietly, staring into the bridge projection.

  “It’s beautiful,” Symm said.

  As Ad Astra continued her slow drift toward the object, light refracting from the structure’s depths smeared into rainbow-tinted moirés.

  “We have ships approaching, Lord Commander,” Denisova said. “It’s the moon-ship again.

  “And this time they’ve brought along some friends.”

  The ships appeared to be emerging from the swarm ahead, four spheres crater-pocked and gray, save where fresh ice showed as dazzlingly white dimples and rays stretched across their surfaces. “Excomm,” St. Clair said, leaning forward. “Run a pattern comparison—”

  “Already done, my lord.” Red brackets highlighted one of the moons, the nearest one. “That one shows the same pattern of surface features as the one we encountered the other day.”

  “The one that gave us the Roceti torpedo.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The nearest mobile moon swelled dramatically, until the swarm-structure ahead was blotted out, and the entire thirty-kilometer length of the Tellus Ad Astra dropped into the black of the approaching moon’s shadow. St. Clair stared up at the rugged, cratered surface hanging above him. Station chatter flowing through the background noted the object’s hundredth-G surface gravity . . . its fifty-kilometer range . . . its internal power flux. . . .

  “Subcommander Jablonsky,” St. Clair called, opening a channel to the AI department. “Is your new toy on-line?”

  “I think so, Lord Commander. I hope so. . . .”

  “You don’t sound very certain.”

  “According to Newton,” Jablonsky replied, “the damned thing’s been connecting to our AI networks, scanning files, downloading language modules, that sort of thing. It appears to be self-directing, curious, and highly intelligent. But it hasn’t been talking to us. Just Newton and the rest of the AI network.”

  “Newton? What has Roceti been talking to you about?”

  “Not ‘talking,’ precisely, Lord Commander. We’ve learned to access its encyclopedia functions, and we’ve received a great deal of basic information about the Cooperative.”

  “ ‘Cooperative?’ ”

  “The Roceti translation of Xalit Ta. It appears to be their name for the overall galactic civilization of this epoch.”

  St. Clair was impressed. They’d learned a lot since they’d begun tapping into the Roceti torpedo. He just wished there’d been time for him to download that data, but of course there never seemed to be time. Especially not when I have to waste it at parties for strutting peacocks who think that politics and survival are the same thing.

  “However,” Newton continued, “we have not yet engaged in what could be properly called conversation.”

  “We believe,” Jablonsky added, “that Roceti is a high-level AI with an extremely narrow purview. It may not be able to do anything but facilitate communications between organic species. We won’t know until we are in a First-Contact situation.”

  “Well, here’s your chance. See if you can link through to those ships out there.”

  “Yes, my lord. Initiating. . . .”

  St. Clair felt the channel open. Every human on the Ad Astra felt it . . . an inner shock or jolt. Every person saw the being’s image: paralyzing, nightmarish, uncompromising . . .

  “My God!” Denisova said. “I hate fucking spiders.”

  “Especially when they’re a couple of meters across,” Webb added.

  Several people on the bridge screamed or gasped. Several abruptly disconnected from the channel.

  “Steady, people,” St. Clair said. “Subcommander Holt! Get back on-line.”

  “It’s huge!”

  “We don’t know how big the thing is. And in any case it can’t really be a spider.”

  “It looks like one!”

  “Parallel evolution, then,” Dumont’s voice said. “Remarkable.”

  The being looking back at them from their in-head windows did indeed show at least a superficial resemblance to terrestrial spiders—specifically a face-on close-up of a wolf spider or tarantula, one covered by hairs or bristles. Eight eyes stared at them from a mass of dark brown fur, two huge ones, six smaller and of varying sizes, all round, glassy-black, and unblinking. Hairless labia below the eyes seemed to mask a complex mouth set within a ring of jointed, twitching palps. Hairy legs, thick and massive rather than spidery, were visible to either side, extending out of the viewing area.

  “A Kroajid,” Newton said. “One of the races of the Xalit Ta. Despite its appearance, it is not at all related to t
errestrial arthropods.”

  “Tell that to my racing heart,” Denisova said.

  “A spider would not be able to grow to over two meters long in a one point three G gravity field,” Newton explained, “or, indeed, be able to breathe. Unlike terrestrial spiders or insects it appears to have an internal skeleton, a complex brain, and it breathes through a series of gas bladders analogous to mammalian lungs. It communicates—”

  The hairs around its face bristled, coming erect, then began to vibrate. A loud buzz or hum, almost like the growl of an internal combustion engine, sounded as the hairs formed wave patterns circling the being’s eyes, moving clockwise. The engine noise varied irregularly, from a low, idling purr to a staccato roar.

  “. . . by vibrating certain stiff hairs on its body,” Newton finished.

  “We are the Kroajid Speaker,” sounded in St. Clair’s mind, the translation coming through from Roceti. “Welcome, humans, to the Mind of Deep Paradise. May you know joyous pleasure in all of its myriad forms . . .”

  IN HIS office-residence in the port-side cylinder, Adler stared into the spider’s face and wondered if it was too alien for human sensibilities . . . or not alien enough. The image certainly seemed designed to jolt the emotions and innermost terrors of arachnophobes throughout the human population. When Clara had seen it, she’d shrieked and run from the room. Tina, of course, being a robot, had been unaffected, but any human with an ingrained fear of spiders, insects, or hairy, nightmarish faces with too many eyes would have been terrified. St. Clair, he reflected, was an idiot for broadcasting that image throughout the colony.

  Possibly he could use that.

  He was going to keep watching, but the signal abruptly cut off. Perhaps someone else up the chain of command had decided that the broadcast wasn’t in the best interests of the community.

  It was time, Adler decided, for decisive action.