The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “You speak of change,” Sinon said. “And you know of souls. Is your kind of existence the answer to our problem? Should our race learn how to transform itself into an entity like you?”

  “It is an answer, certainly. Whether you would be ready to sacrifice what you have to achieve our actuality, I would doubt. You are a young species, with a great deal of potential ahead of you. We were not. We were old and stagnant; we still are. The universe of our birth holds no mysteries to us. We know its origin and its destination. That is why we came here. This realm is harmonious to us; it has our tempo. We will wait out our existence here, observing what comes our way. That is our nature. Other races and cultures would take the path to decadence or transcendence. I wonder which you will select when it is your time?”

  “I like to think transcendence,” Sinon said. “But as you say, we are a younger, less mature race than you. Dreaming of such a destiny is inevitable for us, I suggest.”

  “I concede the point.”

  “Can you tell us of a valid answer to the problem of possession we currently face, how we can send our souls safely through the beyond?”

  “Unfortunately, the Kiint were correct to tell you such a resolution must come from within.”

  “Do all races who have resolved the question of souls apply this kind of moral superiority in their dealings with inferior species?”

  “You are not inferior, merely different.”

  “Then what are our options?” Stephanie asked.

  “You can die,” Tinkerbell said. “I know you have all expressed a wish for that. I can make it happen. I can remove your soul from the body it possesses, which will allow this realm’s nature to take its course. Your host will be restored, and can return to Mortonridge.”

  “Not too appealing,” she said shakily. “Anything else?”

  “Your soul would be welcome to join me in this vessel. You would become part of my multiplicity.”

  “If you can do that, then just give each of us our own vessel.”

  “While we are effectively omnipotent within this realm, that ability is beyond us. The instrument which brought us here, and assembled our current vessels, was left behind in your universe long ago. We had no further use for it, so we thought.”

  “Can’t you go back?”

  “Theoretically, yes. But intent is another thing. And we don’t know if the instrument still exists. Moreover, you would probably be unable to adapt to such a vessel by yourself; our psychology is different.”

  “None of those are very attractive,” she said.

  “To you,” Choma interjected quickly. “To most of the serjeants, transferring ourselves into a new style of multiplicity is very attractive.”

  “Which opens up a further option,” Tinkerbell said. “I can also transfer your souls into the empty serjeant bodies.”

  “That’s better,” Stephanie said. “But if we go back, even in serjeant bodies, we’ll still wind up in the beyond at some later time.”

  “That depends. Your race may decide how to deal with souls that become trapped in the beyond before that happens.”

  “You’re giving us a lot of credit. Judging by our current record, I’m not sure we deserve it. If you can’t shoot it, people aren’t interested.”

  “You are being unfair,” Sinon said.

  “But honest. The military mind has infiltrated government for centuries until they became one,” Rana said.

  “Don’t start,” Cochrane grunted. “This is like important, you dig?”

  “I don’t pretend to predict what will come,” Tinkerbell said. “We abandoned that arrogance when we came here. You seem to be determined. That usually suffices.”

  “Did you come here purely to circumvent the beyond?” Sinon asked. “Was this your racial solution?”

  “Not at all. As I said, we are an old species. While we were still in our biological form we evolved into a collective of collectives. We gathered knowledge for millennia, explored galaxies, examined different dimensional realms coexisting with our own universe—everything a new race does as fresh insights and understanding open up. Eventually there was nothing original for us, only variations on a theme that had been played a million times before. Our technology was perfect, our intellects complete. We stopped reproducing, for there was no longer any reason to introduce new minds to the universe; they could only ever have heritage, never discovery. At such a point some races die out contentedly, releasing their souls to the beyond. We chose this transference, the final accomplishment for our technological mastery. An instrument capable of moving the consciousness from a biological seat to this state was a challenge even for us. You can only sense the physical aspects of this vessel, and even those can be at variance with what you understand. As I think you realize.”

  “Why bother with an instrument? We came here by willpower alone.”

  “The energistic power you have is extremely crude. Our vessels cannot even exist fully in the universe, the energy patterns they support have no analogue there. Their construction requires a great deal of finesse.”

  “What about others? Have you discovered any life forms here?”

  “Many. Some like us, who have abandoned the universe. Some like you, thrown here by chance and accident. Others which are different again. There are visitors, too, entities more accomplished than we, who are charting many realms.”

  “I think I would like to see them,” Choma said. “To know what you do. I will join you if I may.”

  “You will be welcome,” Tinkerbell said. “What of the rest?”

  Stephanie glanced round her friends, trying to gauge their reaction to the offers Tinkerbell had made. Apprehension persisted in all of them, they were waiting for her lead. Again.

  “Are there any other humans here?” she asked. “Any planets?”

  “It is possible,” Tinkerbell said. “Though I have not encountered any yet. This realm is one of many which has the parameters you desired.”

  “So we can’t seek refuge anywhere else?”

  “No.”

  Stephanie took Moyo’s hand in hers and pulled him close. “Very well, time to face the music, I suppose.”

  “I love you,” he said. “I just want to be with you. That’s my paradise.”

  “I won’t choose for you,” she told the others. “You must do that for yourselves. For myself, if a serjeant body is available I will take it and return to Mortonridge. If not, then I’ll accept death here in this realm. My host can have her body and freedom back.”

  Chapter 10

  To a civilization innocent of regularised interstellar travel, the arrival of a single starship could never be viewed as a threat in itself.

  What it represents, the potential behind it, however, is another matter.

  A paranoid species could react very badly indeed to such an event.

  It was a factor Joshua kept firmly in mind when Lady Mac emerged from her jump a hundred thousand kilometres above the diskcity. The crew did nothing for the first minute other than running a passive sensor sweep.

  No particle or artefact was drifting nearby, and no detectable xenoc sensor locked on to the hull.

  “That original radar pulse is all I’m picking up,” Beaulieu reported.

  “They haven’t seen us.”

  “We’re in clear,” Joshua told Syrinx. All communication between the two starships was now conducted via affinity, the bitek processor array installed in Lady Mac’s electronics suite relaying information to Oenone with an efficiency equal to a standard datavise. The bitek starship had searched through the affinity band, its sensitivity stretched to the maximum. It was completely silent. As far as they could tell, the diskcity Tyrathca didn’t have affinity technology.

  “We’re ready to swallow in,” Syrinx replied. “Shout if you need us.”

  “Okay, people,” Joshua announced. “Let’s go with the plan.”

  The crew brought the ship up to normal operational status. Thermo dump panels deployed, radiating
the starship’s accumulated heat away from the gleaming photosphere; sensor booms telescoped up. Joshua used the high-resolution systems to make an accurate fix on the diskcity, not using the active sensors yet. Once he’d confirmed their position to within a few metres, he transferred the navigational data over to a dozen stealthed ELINT satellites stored on board. They were fired out of a launch tube, travelling half a kilometre from the fuselage before their ion drives came on, pushing them in towards the diskcity on a pulse of thin blue flame. It would take them the better part of a day to fly within an operational distance when they could start returning useful data on the artefact’s darkside. Joshua and Syrinx considered it unlikely the diskcity could detect them in flight, even if their sensors were focused on space around Lady Mac. It was one of the mission’s more acceptable risks.

  With the satellites launched, he brought the starship’s active sensors on-line and conducted a sweep of local space.

  “We’re now officially here,” he told them.

  “Aligning main dish,” Sarha said. She followed the grid image, waiting until the coordinates matched the diskcity.

  Joshua datavised the flight computer to broadcast their message. It was a simple enough greeting, a text in the Tyrathca language, spread across a broad frequency range. It said who they were, where they came from, that humans had cordial relations with the Tyrathca from Tanjuntic-RI, and asked the diskcity to return the hail. No mention was made of the Oenone being present.

  There were bets on how long a reply would take, even of what it would say, if all they’d get back was a salvo of missiles. Nobody had put money on getting eight completely separate responses beamed at them from different sections of the diskcity.

  “Understandable, though,” Dahybi said. “The Tyrathca are a clan species, after all.”

  “They must have a single administration structure to run an artefact like that,” Ashly protested. “It wouldn’t work any other way.”

  “Depends what’s tying them together,” Sarha said. “Something that size can hardly be the most efficient arrangement.”

  “Then why build it?” Ashly wondered.

  Oski ran the messages through their translator program. “Some deviation in vocabulary, syntax and symbology from our Tyrathca,” she said. “It has been fifteen thousand years after all. But we have a recognizable baseline we can proceed from.”

  “Glad to see some sort of change,” Liol muttered. “The way everything stays the same with these guys was getting kind of spooky.”

  “That’s drift, not change,” Oski told him. “And take a good look at the diskcity. We could build something like that easily; in fact we could probably do a much better job of it like Sarha says. All it demonstrates is expansion, not development. There’s been no real technological progress here, just like their colonies and arkships.”

  “What do the messages say?” Joshua asked.

  “One is almost completely unintelligible, some kind of image, I think. The computer’s running pattern analysis now. The rest are text only. Two have returned our greeting, and want to know what we’re doing here. Two are asking for proof that we’re xenocs. Three say welcome, and please rendezvous with the diskcity. Uh, they call it Tojolt-HI.”

  “Give me a position on the three major friendlies,” Joshua said.

  Three blue stars blinked over his neuroiconic image of Tojolt-HI. Two were located in the bulk of the disk, while the other was at the edge.

  “That settles it,” he said. “We concentrate on the rim source. I don’t want to try and manoeuvre Lady Mac anywhere near the interior until we know for sure what’s there. Do we know what that section’s called?”

  “The dominion of Anthi-CL,” Oski said.

  “Sarha, focus our com beam on them, please, narrow band.”

  Joshua ran through the message from the rim to get a feel for the format, and composed a reply.

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT

  TOJOLT-HI, DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL.

  MESSAGE

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. WE HAVE TRAVELLED HERE IN THE ANTICIPATION OF EXCHANGE OF MATERIALS AND KNOWLEDGE BENEFICIAL TO BOTH SPECIES. WE REQUEST PERMISSION TO DOCK AND BEGIN THIS PROCESS. IF THIS IS ACCEPTABLE TO YOU, PLEASE PROVIDE AN APPROACH VECTOR.

  CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  COMMUNICATION TO

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  MESSAGE

  YOU ARE WELCOME TO MASTRIT-PJ. IGNORE ALL MESSAGES FROM OTHER TOJOLT-HI DOMINIONS. WE RETAIN THE LARGEST DEPOSITS OF MATERIAL AND KNOWLEDGE WITHIN OUR BOUNDARIES. YOU WILL GAIN THE MOST BENEFIT BY EXCHANGING WITH US. CONFIRM THIS REQUEST.

  QUANTOOK-LOU

  DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES

  “What do you think?” Joshua asked.

  “Not quite the kind of response you’d get from our Tyrathca,” Samuel said. “It could be their attitude has changed to adapt to their circumstances. They seem to be tinged with avarice.”

  “Resources would be scarce here,” Kempster said. “There can be no new sources of solid matter for them to exploit. A kilo of your waste may well be more valuable to them than a thousand fuseodollars.”

  “We’ll bear it in mind when we start negotiating,” Joshua said. “For now, we have an invitation. I think we’ll accept.”

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  MESSAGE

  WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR INVITATION, AND CONFIRM THAT WE WISH TO EXCHANGE EXCLUSIVELY WITH YOU. PLEASE SEND APPROACH FLIGHT VECTOR.

  CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT.

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  COMMUNICATION TO

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  MESSAGE

  ARE YOU UNABLE TO COMPUTE APPROACH VECTOR? ARE YOU DAMAGED?

  QUANTOOK-LOU

  DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES

  “Could be they don’t have traffic control here,” Joshua said. He ran a search through his neural nanonics encyclopaedia file on Hesperi-LN. “The Hesperi-LN Tyrathca didn’t have any formal control system before they started receiving Confederation ships.”

  “You also need to have a lot of ships flying before that kind of arrangement becomes essential,” Ashly said. “We haven’t even detected one ship around Tojolt-HI yet. I’ve been running a constant scan.”

  “They’re certainly scanning us in return,” Beaulieu said. “I’m registering seventeen different radar beams focused on us now. And I think there’s some laser radar directed our way, too.”

  “No ships at all?” Joshua asked.

  “I can’t find any drive emissions down there,” Sarha said. “With our optical sensor resolution, we ought to be able to see even a chemical reaction thruster flame inside that umbra.”

  “Maybe they’ve used something like the voidhawk distortion field,” Dahybi suggested. “After all, Kempster said mass was precious to them. Maybe they can’t afford reaction drives.”

  “Gravitonic detectors say you’re wrong,” Liol said. “I’m not picking up any kind of distortion pattern in this neck of the woods.”

  “They’re not going to tip their hand this early in the game,” Monica said. “They won’t show us what they’ve got, especially if it’s combat capable.”

  Sarha shifted under her restraint webbing to frown at the ESA agent.

  “That’s absurd. You can’t suddenly shut down all your spacecraft traffic the instant you detect a xenoc. You’d leave ships in transit. Besides, they don’t know how long we’ve been watching them.”

  “You hope.”

  Sarha gave an exasperated sigh. “They don’t have ZTT technology, so the only interstellar ships they can conceive are arkships. And if one of those used its fusion drive to decelerate into this system, they’d be able to track it from half a light-year out. They must be curious about us and how the hell we got here, that’s all.”

  “Never mind,” Joshua grumbled.

/>   STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  MESSAGE

  WE ARE NOT DAMAGED. WE HAVE CAPABILITY TO COMPUTE AN APPROACH VECTOR TO YOUR LOCATION ON TOJOLT-HI. WE DID NOT WANT TO BREAK ANY LAW YOU HAVE CONCERNING APPROACHING VEHICLES. ARE THERE ANY RESTRICTIONS COVERING APPROACH SPEED AND SEPARATION DISTANCE FROM YOUR PHYSICAL STRUCTURE?

  CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  COMMUNICATION TO

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  MESSAGE

  NO RESTRICTIONS CONCERNING YOUR APPROACH. WE WILL PROVIDE FINAL HOLDING POSITION COORDINATE WHEN YOU ARE WITHIN ONE THOUSAND KILOMETRES OF DOMINION TERRITORY.

  QUANTOOK-LOU

  DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES

  STARSHIP LADY MACBETH

  COMMUNICATION DIRECTED TO

  DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL

  MESSAGE

  UNDERSTOOD. EXPECTED RENDEZVOUS TIME 45 MINUTES.

  CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT

  Joshua datavised the flight computer to ignite the fusion drives. Lady Mac headed in towards the diskcity at a half-gee acceleration. He refined the vector so they’d finish the main burn a hundred kilometres out from the rim. If fusion drives weren’t in common use in this system, Lady Mac’s exhaust might prove disconcerting. A smile touched his lips at what they’d think of the antimatter drive.

  “Joshua,” Syrinx called. “We’ve found another diskcity.”

  “Where?” he asked. Everyone on Lady Mac’s bridge perked up with interest.

  “It’s trailing Tojolt-HI by forty five million kilometres, inclined two degrees to the ecliptic. Kempster and Renato were right. The odds of us emerging so close to the only inhabited structure are non-existent.”

  “Jesus, you mean this redoubt civilization is strung out all around the star’s equatorial orbit?”

  “Looks that way. We’re scanning probable locations for more of them. Assuming the separation distance is constant, and they’re not in wildly high inclination orbits, that would mean there’s well over a hundred of the things.”