by Ian Douglas
He thought of the AI as Achilles2, a subset of the larger program, and was grateful to have someone else with whom to talk. Not only that, but virtual reality was the AI’s natural habitat. He would have been lost without the intelligent software’s ability to interface with the alien signals.
“Is this their native environment?” he asked. “A representation of it, I mean?”
“It seems likely,” Achilles2 replied. “I cannot be certain that details such as color are correct, but the data is coming from the surrounding structure…from the asteroid-habitat itself. Their computer system is extremely sophisticated, almost invisible.”
“Invisible?”
“The most advanced technology,” Achilles2 informed him with something that almost sounded like pride, “is that which interfaces so smoothly with the user that he is unaware of its actions. The Eulers appear to live here.”
It still seemed strange, naming an alien race after a long-dead human mathematician. Especially since it was hard to imagine anything more alien than this.
Ramsey was most aware of the being’s…face; it had what he assumed were eyes, six of them, so “face” was as good a term as any. The eyes, three above, three below, encircled a clump of multi-branchiate tentacles, something like the branches of a tree limb.
It reminded Ramsey rather strongly of an octopus, though the tentacles were nothing like the tentacles sported by that denizen of Earth’s oceans. The body, however, was utterly unlike anything Ramsey had ever seen before, a transparent to translucent gray mass, something like the body of a huge, flattened worm or snake, but with six bulbous appendages that might be legs, each sprouting long and interweaving tentacles that faded away into the surrounding darkness. The body itself appeared boneless and changed shape as he watched, from long and thin to short and squat. And were those three triangular extensions small wings, or large fins…or something else entirely? He found himself fascinated by what he assumed were the being’s hearts, five of them running in a line from just behind the head to deep within that monstrous translucent body, pulsing in series, one after the next.
He found he could only study the creature for a few moments before the sheer strangeness began to overwhelm him, and he had to look away for a time. The surroundings weren’t that much better, though. He seemed to be standing underwater, very deep underwater. It was like being enmeshed in liquid blackness. The only light came from the near distance, where something like a sphere of bubbles churned and pulsated, seeming to emit a cool greenish light. Nearby, a forest of scarlet feathers waved gently in the current.
In this sim, he noted, he wasn’t wearing armor, but plain black utilities. His boots were planted in viscous mud; he could not feel the cold, the wet, or what must have been a crushing pressure from the surrounding water. How many kilometers of ocean, he wondered, looking up into blackness, were supposed to be piled up on top of him?
The alien continued to watch him. Nearby, he noted, were two of the spidery creatures the Marines had encountered in the chamber earlier, but there was no question in his mind that the tentacled being directly in front of him was the controlling intelligence here. There was something about its eyes, something radiating awareness, calm, and assurance. Intelligence.
The question was, how did the alien perceive him? As intelligent? Or as a computer-simulated icon within the alien computer net, a manifestation of software expressions that could be…anything?
He thought for a moment, and the alien watched him, its tentacles drifting and weaving with a current Ramsey could not feel. The Marines had been briefed before being deployed to this rock. The Eulers, the xenosophies thought, knew mathematics, even identified themselves by means of a math equation.
Okay. Ramsey wasn’t a math wiz, but he knew a few things. Reaching up, he slapped his chest with his right hand, paused, then slapped twice. Then three times. Then five. Then seven. And eleven. Not a simple counting sequence, but counting in primes, whole numbers that could only be divided evenly by themselves or by one.
Wondering how long he should continue the sequence, he started slapping his chest to count out the number thirteen…but then he felt something like a series of light taps on his forehead…thirteen of them, as the Eulers picked up the sequence.
Good, he thought. I couldn’t have kept on slapping myself all day.
The exchange of prime numbers, perhaps, had been a test…or maybe it was simply an Euler’s way of saying a polite “hello.” He waited….
And then images began to form, unbidden, in Ramsey’s mind. They were fragmentary, at first, and incomplete, but he sensed that the alien was uploading information to him, a very great deal of information, and at a staggering rate. Language, of course. History. Strange images that Ramsey couldn’t even grasp as they slipped past.
But he opened himself, and watched…and learned.
So…this was another marine race, an oceanic species like the N’mah, amphibious beings with a two-stage life cycle. N’mah juveniles were true amphibians, walking erect on more-or-less human legs but able to return to the sea. After perhaps forty to forty-five years, the juvenile forms lost their legs, grew considerably bigger, and never again emerged from the depths; they also seemed to lose much of the questing inventiveness of their young, preferring instead a quiet life of contemplation in warm, shallow, sunlit seas. In N’mah civilization, it had been the amphibious juveniles that had discovered dry land, tamed fire and stone, metal and electricity, and eventually built the ships that took them to the stars. Sometime around 6000 B.C.E., the juveniles had visited Earth, helping re-establish civilization in the Fertile Crescent after the Xul had wiped out the local An colonies. The N’mah had been remembered in myth as the Nommo.
The Eulers, he saw, were like the N’mah in the scope of the problems they were forced to overcome as an aquatic civilization. No fire, an understanding of chemistry limited by water and pressure, and not even the first glimmer of understanding concerning astronomy or cosmology.
And yet, given enough time, given billions of years, perhaps…
Ramsey wasn’t sure how long it had taken. The thought-images flowing through his mind conveyed the sense of passing time, a lot of it, but he couldn’t begin to put a meaningful figure to it. The Eulers learned, eventually, to use the intense heat found in the throats of volcanic vents to smelt metal, and they appeared to develop an advanced understanding of chemistry as well, especially the chemistries of sulfur, methane, and certain salts. It was in biology that they excelled, however, breeding new species, then altering the genome of the flora and fauna of the extreme depths to suit their needs.
The spider-things, he saw in a succession of images, had been created by the Eulers, who gave them extremely dextrous, three-fingered manipulators at the end of each of twelve jointed legs. They could swim as well as walk, using directed bursts of water to jet forward like armored squids, and they appeared unaffected by changes in pressure. Achilles2 whispered to him an aside that certain terrestrial sea animals—sperm whales and seals, for example—could dive to extreme depths without being imploded by the pressures of the abyss. Somehow the spiders did the same trick in reverse, and it was through them that the Eulers, many ages ago, had discovered the ceiling of their watery world, and broken through to the land and skies beyond.
Through the spiders, which Achilles2 dubbed “Manipulators” because of their obvious dexterity, the Eulers eventually reached the surface of their world. Ramsey saw pictures of that world unfold in his mind and was immediately reminded of Europa in the Sol System, the iced-over ocean world that was one of Jupiter’s major satellites. The Euler home world, evidently, was similar, an icy moon kept liquid by tidal stresses as it circled its vast, gas-giant primary. Unlike Europa, this world possessed solid land, however, scattered across an ice-free equatorial zone.
For untold millions of years, Euler civilization grew both on the sea floor and in pressurized cities built on land, where an inborn propensity for mathematics led them, in time
, to add astronomy to their growing repertoire of skills. Long before, in the cold dark of the benthic deep, they’d developed abstract mathematics to an astonishing degree—or so Achilles2 suggested—but the full flowering of math and physics began when they first saw the stars.
Eventually, they and their Manipulator creations learned to leave their world entirely, traveling in immense ships filled with highly pressurized seawater.
By that time, the Euler-Manipulator partnership was a true symbiosis. Manipulators, in their rigid, jointed exoskeletons, were unaffected by extremes of heat or cold, by radiation, even by hard vacuum. By wearing a kind of body harness that provided methane-rich, sulfur-laden water under pressure to the respiratory spiracles along its sides, a Manipulator could work in open space for long periods. Ramsey and the other Marines had seen several of the Manipulators tasked with maintaining the pressurized cylinders in the chamber they’d entered. He’d seen the respiration harness, though he hadn’t realized then what he’d been seeing.
Driven more by curiosity than by a need for living room, Euler explorers had eventually left their original star system and ventured to the planetary systems encircling other nearby stars. If Ramsey was understanding the charts he was being shown, they’d visited worlds across a swath of the galactic starscape far larger than that now occupied by humankind. Among those stars they’d found ice-roofed ocean worlds similar to home, and colonized many of them. At this point in their history, they’d not possessed faster-than-light travel. They hadn’t needed it. The Eulers were immensely long-lived and they took their civilization with them in immense city-ships.
But in time they’d encountered the Xul.
Ramsey easily recognized the characteristic lines of the Xul hunterships…the slender gold needles 2 kilometers long, the even larger disks and flattened wedges, each the hardware “body” of an electronic community dedicated to Xul survival, and the utter extermination of any competing species.
The war, Ramsey sensed, had been a long one. The Eulers were not warlike; indeed, from what they were able to communicate through Achilles2, they didn’t even have a concept for war. They learned, however, as the Xul began a bitter and implacable campaign to eradicate each of the worlds occupied by the Eulers.
With the Xul as teachers, however, the Eulers had learned, and learned well. The Xul had bombarded their icy worlds with high-velocity asteroids until whole oceans had boiled away; the Eulers had learned how to reach down into the Quantum Sea and adjust such basics of Reality as inertia, mass, and velocity, and bombarded the Xul hunterships with asteroids in return. The Xul had possessed overwhelming tactical superiority in their FTL ships. The Eulers had worked out how to wrap space around their ship-habitats and travel faster than light as well, using a system that, if Ramsey understood the animated schematics he was being shown, was identical to the Alcubierre Drive developed a few centuries ago by Humankind.
But the Xul kept coming, pounding world after world into crater-gouged ruin.
And then, if the images were to be believed, if he was understanding this right…the Eulers stopped the Xul.
And they did it by blowing up stars.
That, it seemed, was the secret of Aquila Space. Ramsey could see how they did it, too, as the Euler showed him another set of animated schematics. They would wait until an entire Xul battlefleet had entered a star system and begun hammering the local Euler colony. An Euler ship under their equivalent of Alcubierre Drive would elude the Xul fleet and dive into the local sun.
Every star, Ramsey knew, was poised in a delicate balance between its own radiation pressure, which threatened to tear the star apart, and its own gravity, which sought to pull it together. The Alcubierre Drive sharply warped space, compressing the space ahead of the ship, and attenuating it behind. Put enough of a warp into it, and that fast-moving bubble of distorted space actually compressed the tightly packed matter at the star’s core. As the ship tunneled through the core of the star, more or less shielded from the awesome heat and pressure by the warp field around it, it triggered a wave of compression that shattered the balance between radiation and gravity. The core partially collapsed, then rebounded, hurtling outward.
Nova…
Ramsey watched the wave-front of white-hot plasma sweeping out through a star system, watched it catch the Xul fleet as it hung above the frozen moon of a gas giant, watched even those massive constructs soften, crumble, soften and melt, and finally vaporize in the intense blast of star-stuff. The blast savaged the moon as well, of course, turning it into a short-lived and massive comet as the ice vaporized in a long, brilliant tail, even as it stripped away much of the atmosphere from the gas giant primary.
As the wave-front continued to expand, everything in the system died.
Ramsey found himself breathing harder, his heart pounding. My God, they destroyed themselves to kill the Xul. But, then, perhaps they rationalized the exchange as a good trade, with the Euler colony doomed in either case. Would humankind have shown the same single-mindedness of purpose, he wondered?
“What can we show them in exchange?” he asked Achilles2. “This guy just uploaded their whole damned history to me.”
“I have been sending them animated schematics showing our ships in combat against the Xul,” Achilles2 replied. “I fear more detailed conversations must wait until we can work out a common language.”
Right. The thing floating in front of him wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t be able to form words the way humans did, so communication wouldn’t be a matter of just learning one another’s language. Deep sea life forms…maybe they communicated via sonar, like whales and dolphins. Or through changes in color and patterning, like octopi and squids. Or by electrical fields. Or by sensing changes in pressure in the surrounding water. Or bioluminescence. Or through some other sense entirely.
“Can you tell him…tell him that we’re sorry we damaged that tank?”
“Sorry is a rather advanced concept,” Achilles2 replied. “I do not have the required symbology. However…he…she, rather…has just showed me what those tanks are for.”
“They’re like cybe-hibe canisters,” Ramsey said. “The Eulers are hibernating in those things.”
“Not hibernating,” Achilles2 told him. “Not quite. Again, I lack adequate symbols for full understanding, but I believe the beings inside those tanks are alive and aware. They apparently share an extremely rich virtual world, within which they interact with one another as a viable culture.”
Ramsey digested this. It made sense, in a way, rather brilliant sense, in fact. In creating asteroid habitats like this one, or starships crewed by Eulers, they could hollow out a mountain and fill it with water under high pressure—in effect taking a part of their seafloor world with them. Or, much simpler, much safer and more efficient, they could encapsulate each Euler in just enough pressurized seawater to keep him alive, pipe in nutrients and pipe out wastes…and free his mind to interact with his fellows in a virtual reality that could be as vast, as rich, and as varied as their computer network could allow.
And judging from the way this Euler was using a virtual reality sim to communicate with him, the alien computer net must allow a very great deal indeed.
“How advanced do you think the Eulers are, Achilles?” he asked. “How far ahead of us are they?”
“That question is meaningless, Gunnery Sergeant. The two cultures, Euler and human, are so different in so many ways, there are few benchmarks against which both may be measured. The evolution of their science and technology took considerably longer, and more effort, than did those of humankind. However, I estimate that the Eulers as an intelligent species have been in existence for something in excess of one hundred million years…and quite possibly much longer still.”
“Jesus…” When the Eulers had first mastered the ocean depths of their homeworld, dinosaurs still stalked the Earth.
It was interesting, though, that the Xul had taken that long to notice the Eulers. The first appearance of the Xul wi
th which humans were familiar had taken place half a million years ago, with the extinction of the commonality of advanced civilizations variously known as the Ancients or the Builders.
The fact that the Eulers hadn’t encountered the Xul until a mere two thousand years ago—when the novae in this region of space had been deliberately triggered—strongly suggested a weakness in the way the Xul thought and acted.
That weakness had been suggested before, and it had to do with a kind of short-sightedness on the Xul’s part when it came to understanding life. The Xul seemed to understand and expect civilizations on worlds like Earth, worlds at a comfortable distance from the local sun, with liquid water and Earthlike climates.
But life, as was well known by now, was not constrained by concepts like Earthlike. Life had taken hold and thrived in myriad places—from deep-sea volcanic vents on Europa to the subsurface Martian permafrost to traces found in Oort-Cloud cometary nuclei. For eight centuries, human science had been redefining what the very word life meant; the search for life in a new solar system was no longer confined to the star’s so-called habitable zone.
And what was true for life in general, it seemed, was also true for whole civilizations.
When the Xul had destroyed the interstellar empire of the An several thousand years ago, they’d overlooked one An colony—the satellite of a gas giant at Lalande 21185 far from the meager warmth of the system’s red-dwarf primary. By chance, a few An and their human slaves had survived there, unnoticed by the marauding hunterships.
And the amphibious N’mah—a marine species, like the Eulers, with only a limited presence on solid land—had been overlooked as well. Eventually, the N’mah worlds had been discovered and destroyed, but the N’mah, too, had survived…by living inside the hollow structures of a Stargate, and, more recently, in asteroid habitats hollowed out for the purpose.
