by Ian Douglas
“First, this other galaxy is right next door,” St. Clair said, pointing at the wall display where Andromeda towered like a vast cliff of stars and glowing gas. “We’ll be ten, twenty thousand light years away, tops. I just want to see if they’re as hostile as Gus says they are, or if we can reason with them. Second—you forget that I’m still in command. You can’t tell me what to do with my naval assets until I relinquish that command. Do we understand one another?”
“Damn it, St. Clair—”
“Take it or leave it. Or would you rather tag along with the entire civilian population to explore Andromeda?”
“Of course not! If the Kroajid said—”
“That the Dark is extremely dangerous—that you can’t talk with it, can’t reason with it, can’t even interact with it physically in any way except on its terms, when it chooses—then yes, it wouldn’t make any sense for all of humanity to come along.”
“That’s not a choice.”
“Actually, Lord Director, it is. I’ve heard a lot of scuttlebutt making the rounds lately about how we need to form an alliance with the inhabitants of this era.”
“Of course! We’d be all alone otherwise, and some of the more advanced civilizations might be able to provide a means for getting us home.”
“So you want to ally with the spiders?”
“Well . . .”
“They’re quite advanced,” St. Clair said. “Only down side is that most of them are blissed out on brain-feed sims, artificial reality. So maybe we need to check out these so-called Dark Raiders, and see if they’re as evil as Gus claims they are.”
“They attacked us! When we first arrived! For no reason!”
St. Clair nodded. Gus had identified images taken of the three needle ships that Ad Astra had encountered after being flung forward into this epoch. They were, he said, Dark Raider sliverships, piloted by corporeal beings from Andromeda, but under the noncorporeal control of the formless, poorly understood Dark. In a way, he was surprised to hear Adler finally admit that. But it also helped his cause. “Right. But what if Gus isn’t telling us the truth?”
“You think he’s lying?”
St. Clair shrugged. “I don’t know. And that’s the point. I can’t read the expression on the face of something that looks like a wolf spider enlarged a few million times. So far, we have only his word that the raiders are bad guys.”
“St. Clair, you’re being paranoid again. Xenophobic, like you were back on Earth.”
“Not at all. If I were truly being xenophobic, I would advocate not allying with anyone. We should just go off and find a small, unoccupied star cluster somewhere and hope no one finds us. I actually agree that we should find some technically proficient species and see if we can get them to help us. But I want to be damned sure we get the right ones. Anytime someone comes along asking us to join them in their war, I get nervous.”
“So I’ve heard.” Adler thought for a moment. “Okay. You’ll come back for us?”
“Of course. A lot of the naval personnel have families on one or the other of the habitat cylinders—they’re not going to let me run off and abandon them.” He was also thinking about Lisa, about leaving her on the Tellus habitats.
“Okay,” Adler said. “It makes sense doing it this way. Gives us a chance to establish diplomatic relations with the Kroajid . . . and maybe with some other advanced technological species as well. You just be careful with the Ad Astra on the other side of that gulf. If you don’t bring her back, we’re stuck here.”
“There are worse places to be stuck,” St. Clair told him. “The Kroajid appear friendly—the ones who aren’t inside a simulation, anyway, and they just won’t talk to us. From here, with their help, you would probably have access to any number of Earthlike worlds. With a million humans, you’d have a good shot at starting the human species going again.”
“The Kroajids still make a lot of people nervous, you know. I mean, the way they look . . .”
Now who was being xenophobic? “They’ll have to get over it. The Krojies are not spiders, and they don’t bite.”
No matter what Vanessa Symm might have to say about it, Gus was not a “giant ugly spider.”
Not really.
THE MAGNETIC clamps released and slowly, gently, Ad Astra backed clear of the rotating habitats. The process was observed by three of the Kroajid moon-ships. St. Clair wondered what interest they might have in human technology, which must, to them, seem laughably primitive.
“We’re clear, Tellus,” Symm said over the flight control channel. “We’ll see you in a few days.”
“Copy that, Ad Astra,” came the reply. “We’ll keep a light on in the window for you.”
The Roceti’s encyclopedia had identified some thousands of possible targets of interest scattered across the Andromeda Galaxy, neutrino transmitters and sources of infrared or gamma and X-ray frequencies that appeared to be artificial in origin. The nearest of those lay above the Andromedan galactic plane some thirty thousand light years distant from Galactic Node 495—another neutrino source that might well be another matrioshka brain. It had been designated as NPS-1018.
Or it might be something else entirely. That area was also a part of the other galaxy that had been filled with the oozing, exotic mass-effect noted by the caels. Now that they knew what to look for, O-G humans could throw up filters that showed the same effect. St. Clair had one up now on the bridge. It gave the area of space into which they were about to leap the ominous look of a red-violet thunderstorm.
“All stations report ready for jump, Lord Commander,” Symm told him.
“Thank you Excomm,” he replied. He hesitated, staring into the sullen red storm in the distance. “Astronomy department.”
“Yes, my lord,” Dr. Tsang replied.
“Any guesses yet on what that red hazy stuff is?”
“Oh, guesswork is unnecessary, Lord Commander. The vacuumorphs had it right. It’s dark matter.”
“A term that means exactly nothing, Doctor. Dark matter—fine. But what is it?”
“Well, this is all speculation at this point . . .”
“Guesswork, in other words.”
“If you like,” though it was clear from his tone that Tsang certainly didn’t like. “But some of the people in the astrophysics lab—Tina Sandoval and Anton Dvorsky—have formulated a working hypothesis. Dark matter may be an entirely distinct physical array of WIMPs made of quark-analogs they call quirks.”
“ ‘WIMPs?’ ” St. Clair said, bemused. “ ‘Quirks?’ ”
“WIMP stands for ‘weakly interactive massive particle,’ ” Tsang explained. “They’ve been hypothesized since the mid-twentieth century as an explanation for dark matter. Quirks used to be called strange anti-quarks, and are a component of so-called strange matter.”
“Okay . . .”
“Strange matter is a component of normal nuclear matter, and may even be more stable. When a proton or neutron decays, it may release a small bit of quark matter—what we call a ‘strangelet.’ That’s another candidate for dark matter.”
St. Clair wasn’t tracking Tsang very well. All he could do was record the conversation so he could look up some of the terms later. Advanced particle physics was a bizarrely eldritch world, more akin, in his estimation, to fantasy than reality, with its vast zoo of particles, antiparticles, and dimensionless fields within eleven-dimensional string arrays. He understood a lot of the basic theories, but what Tsang was throwing out at the moment went well beyond his studies. And, more to the point, didn’t seem that relevant at the moment. “And what does any of that have to do with red extragalactic clouds?”
“Okay,” Tsang said, and St. Clair could hear him take a breath. “Super-quick Particle Physics 101. In classical physics, quarks join together to form basic matter—baryons like protons and neutrons, leptons like electrons and neutrinos, right?”
“Yes.”
“Right. And different arrangements of protons, neutrons, and electrons form
ordinary baryonic matter and the entire periodic table, everything from hydrogen clear up to Element 224.”
Element 224 had been created in the sub-selenic Procellarum Fusion Accelerator on Earth’s moon only months before Ad Astra’s departure, and had not yet been named.
“I understand all of that.”
“This new hypothesis suggests that there’s an entire . . . call it an alternate periodic table, a shadow table, a whole collection of different elements, exotic elements made up of WIMPs and axions the way normal matter is made up of baryons and leptons.”
“ ‘Axions?’ ”
“Another candidate for dark matter. Lower mass than WIMPs. They might act like exotic electrons. More likely they’re something completely different.”
“So what you’re saying is there’s a whole alien universe out there, complete with its own mass, its own chemistry, its own life—but it wouldn’t interact with ours.”
“That’s the idea, Lord Commander. Except, of course, that in some circumstances it does interact with normal matter. As Subcommander Francesca and Private Patterson both discovered.”
“Right.”
And Ad Astra would be flying into the heart of that strangeness.
Yet it was the only way to find out what they were facing out here.
“Helm,” he said, “execute our first jump.”
“Aye, aye, Lord Commander.”
And the Ad Astra vanished into the truly unknown.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
From SHOD-2, the Number 2 Starboard Hab Observation Deck, Lisa looked down into infinity.
You could get a better, clearer, and electronically enhanced view from the habitats’ direct network feeds, of course, views that weren’t panning across the cosmos once every forty seconds. But humans seemed to get something from the obdecks; at any given time of artificial day or night, there were people here . . . sometimes large crowds of them. And Lisa often came here in an attempt to understand what made them . . . human.
SHOD-2 was nearly four hundred meters long and forty wide, a transparent window in the hab module’s out-is-down floor much larger than the more numerous vista windows scattered around each hab. Broad, white walkways edged with safety railings ran the entire length of the window, connected by gently rising archways to the solid-ground foundations at either side. By looking over the walkway’s edge, you looked down into the fast-sweeping drift of stars. Every forty seconds, the port-side hab module rolled into view, blocking the stars . . . but then it moved on and the densely packed glory of the galactic core replaced it: teeming suns with light-limned clouds of gas and dust casting long shadows across the stellar plane.
And a few seconds later, that vista was replaced by the swarming beehive of the matbrain, trillions of habitats—many as large or larger than Tellus itself—orbiting in concentric shells that didn’t quite block the radiance of the structure’s central sun.
Lisa was intrigued to notice that there were only a few people on SHOD-2 this morning—eighteen, to be precise. When she used her telescopically enhanced vision to zoom in on several other obdecks and vista windows visible in the sky-embracing curve of the inner habitat, she saw the other scenic overlooks were poorly populated as well.
Why?
The simplest explanation likely was that humans became so easily jaded. You could get any exterior view you wished directly in-head with a thought . . . and she suspected that day after day of beauty and wonder quickly took the edge off somehow.
But there was a deeper answer as well, Lisa decided, one resident within a bizarre peculiarity of humans—an unwillingness to look—in this case literally—at things that made them uncomfortable. Rather than confront the strange or the threatening or the overwhelming head-on, most humans possessed a tendency to avoid confrontations with anything that might challenge their preconceived notions of what was real.
The fact that the Kroajid were vaguely similar to terrestrial arachnids had resulted in one type of avoidance—the outright panic in a sizeable percentage of the expedition’s population. More threatening by far, however, was the nature of the matrioshka brain outside.
The sophontologists and xenotechnologists were still studying the structure, of course. They’d designated it as a LIO—a “large intelligent object”—even though it wasn’t in fact one object, but trillions. But most of the Tellus population seemed to be studiously ignoring the thing, as if looking too closely at it would reveal certain flaws or inefficiencies within human nature.
There was, after all, a Mind in the depths of that Dyson swarm, a Mind that far transcended anything human—including AI minds created by Humankind, like Newton. The Kroajid had said little about it, simply calling the Mind Isid 495, the same as the matbrain itself. From the little they had said, it was easy to get the impression that they thought of the matrioshka intellect as a kind of god. With 95 percent of the Kroajid locked away within virtual electronic worlds, that god became a caretaker of sorts, using its unfathomable powers to protect and nurture its sleeping pets.
Evidently, this was not a comfortable thought for most humans.
And with that concept had come another. Just as uncomfortable, in some ways, was the realization that living in a hedonistic dreamworld—a kind of digitized paradise where there was no struggle, no loss, and no sorrow—was similar in some ways to the Tellus culture: pleasure loving, self-centered, mildly sensualist in its rounds of elaborate parties, orgies, and social receptions. For many humans, the point of modern life was pleasure, and how was that different from the digitized Kroajid deep within their matrioshkan processors?
And so those humans not actively studying Isid 495—the swarm or the Mind—ignored it. They continued with their parties and soirées—or, more recently, their demonstrations and protests and occasional riots—and stayed away from vistas that might jar their complacent certainty that they were right.
Humans, Lisa thought, could be appallingly shallow.
“Helm,”—St. Clair’s voice came over the electronic link in her brain—“execute our first jump.”
“Aye, aye, Lord Commander.”
She felt Ad Astra vanish from Tellus’s electronic ken.
Lisa suppressed a most un-machinelike twinge of fear.
THE VAST, double-cylinder bulk of Tellus vanished, and Ad Astra emerged in a new place.
St. Clair wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. It occurred to him that in his native time, the thought of traveling to another galaxy was complete nonsense. Andromeda, in that long-ago epoch, had been two and a half million light years distant, well beyond the capabilities even of the seemingly magical technology of the Coadunation.
In 4 billion years, however, Andromeda had come to the Milky Way Galaxy, the two rushing together and closing the gulf between them until the two galaxies were actually intermingled now, each passing through the other. And jumping from one to the other was as simple as giving the command.
The starfields in Andromeda looked much the same as back in the Milky Way. The galaxy M-31 in Andromeda was larger than the Milky Way—120,000 light years across, roughly, and containing well over a trillion stars, compared with the 100,000-light-year-diameter and 4 hundred billion stars of Humankind’s home galaxy. But the vaster scale was simply invisible from a human perspective. The starscape here might have been a little thicker, a little more densely strewn, but that could easily be because they simply were closer here to the galaxy’s central core.
The encircling sky blazed with stars. As in the Milky Way, the gravitational interaction between the two titanic spirals had triggered spectacular star formation within the thunderhead masses of gas and dust orbiting the core, resulting in gleaming clusters, streamers, and unfolding clouds of brilliant blue-white stars.
So similar. And yet . . . so different.
“We’re here,” St. Clair said over the main comm channel. “Welcome to another galaxy.”
“NPS-1018 is dead ahead, Lord Commander,” Subcommander Adam
s told him. “Estimated range . . . two hundred light years.”
St. Clair saw the graphic on the star display projected across the bridge’s interior, a bright point of light rapidly winking against the star-frothed background ahead. Another neutrino channel point-source, it would have been invisible to unaided human vision.
“Very well,” St. Clair said. “Take us in closer, please.”
Two more short jumps, gradually narrowing the range, and Ad Astra emerged in the light of a new sun.
The star was a red dwarf—type M0 or M1—and from half an AU out it appeared to be surrounded by a doughnut-shaped cloud of wispy fuzz.
“It looks,” Symm said with the slightest edge of disgust to her voice, “like a colossal hairball.”
“Newton?” St. Clair asked. “What do you make of that?”
“Quite possibly,” the AI replied, “it’s a topopolis. Some human sources refer to it as ‘cosmic spaghetti’ or a ‘macaroni world.’ ”
“Stop it,” Symm said. “You’re making me hungry.”
“And what the hell is cosmic spaghetti?” St. Clair asked.
“Like the Alderson disk, it is an extremely large artificial habitat, with a livable surface area of some billions or trillions of Earths. What appear to be extremely fine hairs or threads at this distance are, in fact, hollow tubes rotating to provide artificial gravity.”
Cautiously, Ad Astra approached the tangle of threads, sending out fleets of robotic drones to study the structure. Data flooded back. Damn, the thing was huge.
Just once, St. Clair mused, it would be interesting to come across something small on this mission.
This thing certainly wasn’t small. And as St. Clair truly took it in, all joking was put aside. Simply put, he was stunned at the audacity of the thing. The Alderson disk had been enormous, true, but somehow the scale escaped you. This was different, because it started off looking like a tangle of thread, and only as St. Clair studied it did he realize that the thing was enormous.
It was as though someone had taken a habitat module like one of the two cylinders that make up Tellus—about five or six kilometers wide, thirty-something long, and hollow, rotating around its long axis to provide artificial gravity—and then had made the cylinder bigger—much bigger, almost a hundred kilometers wide. Then had stretched that cylinder out along its long axis—longer . . . longer . . . still longer—until the thing was a hollow tube billions of kilometers long that connected with itself around its sun like a tail-eating ouroborus snake. The thread-thin tube continued looping, then, until it weaved its tangled way hundreds, even thousands of times, around its star.