Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  “Just like human politics,” St. Clair replied. “There’s always one. . . .”

  But something had been nagging at St. Clair . . . something the Kroajid Speaker had said earlier. What was it? Yes . . . You humans were brought to this place because of your combat skill.

  Something about that had been nagging at the back of St. Clair’s mind for several moments, but he’d not had the opportunity to pursue it. Brought here? What did Speaker mean? The human expedition had learned about this system from the Kroajid, who’d identified Ki as an important node in the Cooperative network. Was that what the Kroajid had meant? Or had he meant that Tellus Ad Astra had been brought here deliberately from their own time?

  And just how would the Cooperative know of Earth’s martial history? Well, the Roceti torpedo they’d used to establish contact and to serve as an interpreter had included in its memory banks elements of Earth history. Maybe that was enough. Maybe . . .

  No, St. Clair didn’t buy that. Maybe they’d learned something of human history, human military history, from their exchanges with Newton, but that wouldn’t have been enough to convince them of human prowess in the military arts. What the hell could have convinced any of these beings that humans would be ideal for fighting the Andromedan Dark? That just didn’t make sense.

  But St. Clair was beginning to suspect that there was more to the Tellus Ad Astra human community being present in this epoch than they’d suspected at first. A lot more. . . .

  On an impulse, he asked Newton to feed him a list of data entries from the Roceti Encyclopedia. The sheer bulk and complexity of the material meant that only a superficial glimpse was available, but he didn’t have time for in-depth research in any case.

  One in particular he’d already studied, and he brought it up now.

  Xenospecies Profile

  Sentient Galactic Species 10544

  “Kroajid”

  Star: F9V with M1 companion at 21 AU; Planet: Fourth a = 2.25 × 1011m; M = 8.5 × 1027g; R = 8.5 × 106m; p = 5.527 × 107s

  Pd = 5.65 × 104s, G = 13.06 m/s2; Atm: O2 20.1, N2 79.6, CO2 0.3;

  Patm 1.37 × 105 Pa

  Biology: C, N, O, S, H2O, PO4, Cu; TNA Genome: 3.2 × 109 bits; Coding/noncoding: 0.051.

  Cupric metal-chelated tetrapyrroles in aqueous circulatory fluid.

  Mobile heterotrophs, omnivores, O2 respiration; decapodal locomotion.

  Mildly gregarious, polyspecific [1 genera, 5 species]; sexual.

  Communication: modulated sound at 150 to 300 Hz.

  Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.6 × 1014

  T = ~280o to 310o K; M = 0.9 × 105 g; L: ~3.5 × 1010s

  Vision: ~150 nanometers to 820 nanometers; Hearing: 5 Hz to 19,000 Hz

  Civilization Type: K 1.77 Technology: FTL; genetic, somatic, and cerebral prostheses; radical life extension; electronic telepathy and virtual immersion; advanced AI. Numerous planetary and deep space colonies. Climate control. Gravity control.

  Societal Code: Technological/Hedonistic Dominant culture: loose associative/post-singularity/virtual world upload

  Cultural library: 8.91 × 1019 bits; Intrascended hedonists: 0.98

  Identity: Gatekeepers of Paradise Member: Galactic Cooperative

  St. Clair zeroed in on the Kroajid life span, which was listed as L: ~3.5 × 1010s. That translated as roughly eleven hundred years. He assumed that that was the life span of organic Kroajids, those living outside of the virtual worlds of Kroajid computer networks.

  Deliberately, he pulled up another.

  Xenospecies Profile

  Sentient Galactic Species 15992

  “Tchagar”

  Star: G8III; Environment: Gas toroid forest/Dyson swarm

  Atm: O2 12.5, N2 84.5, CO2 2.9, Ar 0.1; Patm 8.6 × 104 Pa [stellar ring]

  Biology: C, N, O, S, Si, H2O, PO4, Fe; GNA Genome: 8.7 × 109 bits; Coding/noncoding: 0.077.

  Iron-chelated tetrapyrroles in aqueous circulatory fluid.

  Mobile heterotrophs, omnivores, CO2 respiration.

  Non-gregarious, polyspecific [3 genera, 32 species]; hermaphrodites.

  Communication: modulated EM field at 20 to 100 Hz.

  Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.9 × 1013

  T = ~270o to 340o K; M = 2 × 106 g; L: ~1.5 × 1015s

  Electrical Sense: ~800 V at 1 ampere, oscillating field; Hearing: 2 Hz to 12,000 Hz

  Civilization Type: K 2.11 Technology: FTL; mobile planets; genetic, somatic, and cerebral prostheses; radical life extension; electronic telepathy; advanced AI. Numerous Dyson-type colonies. Climate control. Gravity control.

  Societal Code: Technological/Rational/Militant Dominant culture: loose associative/post-singularity; no intrascendency.

  Cultural library: 9.52 × 1018 bits

  Identity: Principle Associative Member: Galactic Cooperative

  Interesting. If he was reading the data right, the Tchagar lived on Dyson-swarm worlds orbiting their stars within immense toroids of gas, what xenosophontologists referred to as a “smoke ring.” Possibly each worldet was an asteroid, a kind of island open to the sky and sharing its atmosphere with a few billion similar bodies. That had to be an artificial setup, another example of the far-future megaengineering the human expedition had encountered here in such profusion.

  But St. Clair was more interested in what the data had to say about the Tchagar life span. He scanned down to L and nearly choked on his surprise. He ran that figure—1.5 x 1015 seconds—through his in-head math processor twice . . . then did it a third time because he still didn’t believe the answer.

  Five hundred million years.

  Hell, no wonder they thought of themselves as gods. Any being with a biological life span of half a billion years was as close to immortal as St. Clair cared to imagine. How did such a creature deal with the memories?

  Maybe it didn’t. Maybe they were all insane. Or maybe they had some technological means for editing their memories. What he found most interesting, though, was the fact that the Tchagar didn’t appear to digitally upload themselves—“no virtual world upload,” the readout said. These beings lived in the real, material world of stars and galaxies and matter and energy, not within computer network constructs or artificial matrioshka brains.

  And as St. Clair compared the two downloads in his mind, he saw what it was the aliens wanted, specifically why they wanted the humans to do their fighting for them.

  Several long moments had passed while St. Clair conferred with Newton and examined the Roceti Encyclopedia data. Gudahk remained at eir seat, unmoving; others conversed quietly among themselves. Members of this culture, St. Clair thought, were used to the momentary loss of focus when someone turned inward to retrieve information or talk to someone else.

  “Excuse my distraction, Gudahk,” he said. “I was pulling up some important information. I . . . understand now why you want us to do your fighting for you.”

  “Indeed? You are self-evidently the best suited in terms of military—”

  “No. With respect, that’s not it at all. You know the real reason, but I don’t think any of you permit yourselves to examine it too closely.”

  “What do you mean?” Speaker asked.

  “You’ve been calling us ‘ephemerals.’ I’ve been looking at some of your biological data, and ‘ephemeral’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Individual Tchagar apparently exist for half a billion years. Is that true?”

  “We are living gods,” Gudahk said.

  “So you’ve told us. With appropriate medical support, my species can expect to live healthy and productive lives of, oh, a century and a half, maybe. Your life span is over 3 million times longer! I’m still trying to assimilate that.”

  “And what is your point, ephemeral?” Gudahk said.

  “Obviously, you feel that your lives are more valuable, more precious than ours, because they are so much longer. And you Kroajid . . . the tiny fraction of you that exists outside of the virtual worlds of your matrioshka-brain computer networks, y
ou ‘Gatekeepers of Paradise,’ you don’t want to die and jeopardize your chances at enjoying millions of subjective years inside your virtual heaven, do you?”

  He didn’t wait for them to answer.

  “So with the Andromedan wolves at the door, you want to hand the job of protecting your civilization off to someone else. Someone who doesn’t have as much to lose. Right?”

  No one responded at first, though the Thole seemed puzzled. “What is a wolve?” it asked a Kroajid at its side.

  The Kroajid Speaker at last confirmed St. Clair’s insight. “We mean no insult, but the members of your species are ephemerals, alive for only a brief span of time, then dead and gone in an instant. The fact that you fight wars, that you actually try to kill one another at all indicates . . .” The Kroajid gave a kind of shudder before continuing. “It indicates that you yourselves don’t value life, existence, as we do.”

  “No doubt it is difficult for you to accept,” Gudahk said, “but you ephemerals, while obviously sentient, are not yet truly sapient.”

  “From your perspective, perhaps.” St. Clair was rapidly becoming more angry. Gudahk’s condescension was worse than ey’s naked hostility.

  “From any perspective that matters,” Gudahk responded. “After some millions of years of self-directed evolution with the appropriate somatic and neurological enhancement and improvement, perhaps you will be worthy of open association with your betters.”

  “We are not mindless animals, Gudahk. We have—”

  “Your minds are of no interest for us, nor are your naïve and uninformed beliefs concerning your own status. Your single potential for useful service is that of tools, of weapons that might at least slow the advance of the Dark. You are a resource, nothing more.”

  “You certainly do have a winning way about you,” St. Clair said. He doubted that the sarcasm was getting through to ey. “Yes . . . how to win friends and influence people. . . .”

  “I do not understand.”

  “No, I don’t expect that you would. And since you don’t understand, I don’t see why we should offer ourselves to you as a resource.”

  “We had the impression,” Speaker told him, “that humans liked to fight. . . .”

  “A warrior species,” another Kroajid added.

  “We fight when we must,” St. Clair said, “but we don’t care to be used. And we will not be owned, not ever.”

  “Then,” Gudahk declared, “it is as the Principle Associative has been telling the Cooperative all along. These creatures, these ephemerals are of no use to us.

  “Discard them.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Now just one damned minute!” St. Clair said, rising from his seat. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Ey is only saying that we cannot use you,” the Kroajid Speaker said. “As you yourself attest.”

  “You are free to go elsewhere,” Na Lal told him, “and do whatever it is that ephemerals choose to do. You have no place in this affair.”

  St. Clair took a deep breath. It sounded as though he had just won the debate, that the Tellus humans would be able to walk away from this encounter and make their own future.

  But the Cooperative clearly represented the dominant civilization of the Galaxy in this epoch, and the alternative, the Dark, clearly was worse. Would Tellus Ad Astra be able to find some out-of-the-way corner of either the Milky Way or Andromeda where they could put down roots?

  He frankly doubted it. The Andromedan Dark was on the ascendency, had been so for hundreds of millions of years if the scraps of data they’d accumulated so far were true. The Dark was relentless and it was Absolute . . . moving through the spiraling star clouds of two galaxies and absorbing or annihilating every star-faring culture they encountered.

  There was no safety in running and hiding, not in the long run. It might be centuries, millennia even, before the Dark caught up with them, but the descendants of the Tellus colonists would meet the Andromedan horror again.

  And there was another aspect to this confrontation, one with which St. Clair was only just coming to grips. The Cooperative represented absolutely magical levels of technology . . . and there’d been at least a hint that they’d been the ones somehow responsible for bringing the Tellus Ad Astra 4 billion years into Humankind’s future. He didn’t want to slam the figurative door on the possibility that the Cooperative might have a handle on the one advanced technology that might give them a chance of getting back to their own time. He scarcely dared think the words.

  Time travel . . .

  “Your problem,” St. Clair told the assembly around him, “is that you’re black-or-white in your thinking. It’s all or nothing with you people, isn’t it?”

  “Nothing an ephemeral has to say is of the slightest interest to civilized beings,” Gudahk told him. And the Tchagar winked out of existence.

  Several others vanished from the simulation as well, severing their electronic links with the meeting. “Just hold on a moment,” St. Clair said. “We are not going to allow ourselves to be used as cannon fodder . . . but that doesn’t mean we can’t help!”

  “What,” Speaker asked, “is ‘cannon fodder’?”

  “Troops—fighters—that can be thrown into a conflict, and you don’t care whether they survive or not. Expendables.”

  “And how can you help, if you will not allow us to . . . spend you?”

  “First, let me ask you something.”

  “Of course.”

  “Newton?” he asked the ever-present AI watching from within him. “Can we see the two galaxies? Display them, I mean?”

  “With this display technology,” Newton replied, “we can see anything. Simply focus on what you wish to see.”

  And the darkness high above within the vaulted chamber congealed into light . . . twin spirals interpenetrating one another, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the far larger mass of Andromeda. Ki was marked by a bright blue star between the galaxies, and just above the zone where they were passing into one another, a vast sweep of colliding gas clouds giving rise to an explosion of brand-new stars. Newton provided the Cooperative’s name for those stellar nurseries: starblaze clouds.

  “In all of these two galaxies,” St. Clair said, swinging his arm to embrace the double spiral above and around them, “are you saying there is only the Cooperative and the Andromedan Dark? No other civilizations? No other minds, no one else who can help you?”

  “I’m afraid you have a somewhat limited grasp of what civilization means, Lord Commander,” Na Lal told him. “The Cooperative has existed for an extremely long time, longer, indeed than our own records can reveal. Hundreds of millions of years, perhaps billions of years . . . some tens of millions of mutually alien species working together in this dance of mind and culture.”

  As the being spoke within St. Clair’s thoughts, the two galaxies overhead separated, and the starblaze clouds of stellar creation faded away. St. Clair was looking, he realized, at the two galaxies as they’d been hundreds of millions of years ago, before they’d begun their slow-motion clash.

  And within those spiraling arms of stars, points of green light appeared scattered thickly across both of the galaxies. The lights were so numerous that they swiftly began massing together, until entire spiral arms and the vast and ponderous starclouds at both galactic cores appeared to glow solid green.

  But St. Clair noticed something else, something interesting. The mass of solid green appeared to be more or less constant . . . but some individual specks of green would appear, glow for a time, then wink out. He had no way of gauging the time spans he was witnessing, but a majority of the civilizations he was seeing appeared to come into being, last for some millions of years, then vanish. Individual cultures had limited life spans; civilization persisted.

  “Are all of these star-points different cultures?” St. Clair asked.

  “No,” Na Lal replied. “Remember, every galactic species is different, truly alien in myriad ways from every other. Some are starfa
rers . . . but choose not to colonize other worlds of other stars. Here is one . . . the Thole.”

  All of the green light overhead vanished. A single brilliant green star remained, gleaming within the depths of the Milky Way, several tens of thousands of light years from Ki, in toward the Milky Way’s teeming core. “The Thole are an old and well-established species and a member of the Cooperative, but they have never been interested in colonizing large numbers of planetary systems. A majority of cultures across both galaxies,” Na Lal went on, “occupy a single world within a single solar system. Here is one.”

  Another green star winked on as the Thole home system vanished.

  “The B’hal are a marine species—deep benthic. They evolved within the sub-ice ocean of a frozen moon orbiting a gas giant.”

  “Like Europa or Enceledus in our solar system,” St. Clair thought in a quick aside to Newton.

  St. Clair felt a surge of motion, as though he were hurtling up into the star-strewn sky. It was, he realized, an illusion, but it was an incredibly detailed and coherent one. There was a blur of rapid motion, and then he seemed to be in black water facing a small creature similar to a terrestrial octopus, pasty white in color, with eleven sinuous arms, a gelatinous body, and no eyes that he could see.

  “In fact,” Na Lal continued, “the B’hal are now associate members of the Cooperative, but only because other galactic species located them, and built contact centers in their world’s deep oceans. While they have the option of travel elsewhere, most choose never to leave their world.”

  “Parallel evolution again,” St. Clair said, staring at the blind octopus. How did it see? How did it think of the Galaxy beyond its deep-benthic world? “I wonder if this kind of intelligence is common?”

  “The data we are collecting on the Cooperative,” Newton replied, “suggest that the vast majority of intelligent species throughout the Galaxy did not evolve on open, land-surfaced worlds like humans, but in environments precisely like those of Europa and other gas giant moons. This being we are looking at is far more typical of life throughout the Galaxy than are humans.”