by David Brin
The remaining refugees weren’t finished changing and dividing. Again, ripples of light shimmered along the hulls of several huge ships, which began losing some of their jagged outlines. Hulls that had been jumbles of overlapping spikes seemed to melt and flow, then recoalesce into smoother, more uniform shapes … the familiar symmetrical arrangement of hyperdrive flanges used by normal vessels in the Civilization of Five Galaxies.
Like before, each metamorphosis concluded in a dazzling burst at the foremost end. Only this time, when the glare faded, Sara saw another symbol replacing the nest of concentric rings — a rayed spiral glyph. The same one Streaker carried on her bow.
“These others, apparently, do not consider their racial spirits advanced enough yet for transcendence. They, too, have chosen to surrender their retired status, but this time in order to rejoin the society of ambitious, fractious, starfaring oxygen breathers.
“Perhaps they feel there is unfinished business they must take care of before resuming the Embrace of Tides.”
Gillian nodded soberly.
“That unfinished business may be us.”
She turned toward the bridge. “Kaa! Be sure to stay away from any ship bearing a Galactic emblem!”
From the water-filled control room came a warbling sigh in complex Trinary — the expressive, poetical language of neo-dolphins that Sara had only just begun to learn. Rhythmic squeals and pops seemed to voice resigned irony, and several of those in the Plotting Room chuckled in appreciation of the pilot’s wit.
All Sara made out was a single elementary phrase—
… except the one biting our tail!
Of course. There was already one ship — bearing the rayed spiral crest — that wouldn’t be shaken easily. Sticking to the Earthling vessel like a shadow — far closer than most navigators would call safe — the Jophur dreadnought loomed in the rear-facing viewer. Without the new, dense layers coating Streaker’s hull, Kaa might have unleashed his full suite of tricks, evading the battle cruiser in a mad dash among the twisting threads. But that wasn’t possible with Streaker weighed down this way, maneuvering as sluggish as an ore freighter.
Well, without the coating, we would have fried the first instant those disintegrator beams struck, Sara thought. And we’d be easy prey for the Jophur. So maybe it evens out.
Turning back to the main magnifier screen, she watched the refugee flotilla break up once more. Those that had reclaimed the spiral galaxy symbol began peeling off, aimed toward heading back to the vigorous goals and passions of a younger life phase.
“From this t-point nexus, there are several routes leading eventually to the other four galaxies. The beings piloting those vessels are no doubt planning to rendezvous with former clan mates and clients.”
Gillian sniffed.
“Like Grandpa and Grandma coming home from Happy Acres to move back in with the kids. I wonder just how welcome they’ll be.”
The whirling hologram halted briefly, its expression perplexed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.” Gillian shook her head. “So we’ve seen a retirement home shatter before our eyes, and its residents divide in three directions. What about those?” She pointed to the craggy ships remaining in the flotilla, the ones who retained their original emblem of concentric circles. “Where will they go?”
The Niss resumed spinning.
“Presumably to another criswell structure. Truly retired species cannot long abide what they call the ‘shallow realm.’ They dislike space travel and crave instead the feel of solar tides. So they prefer hunkering deep within a gravity well, next to a tame star.
“In fact, I am picking up considerable short-range traffic right now … intership communications … inquiring if anyone in the area knows another fractal community that has spare volume and insolated—”
“In other words, they want to find out which other retirement homes have vacancies, to replace the digs they just lost. I get it.”
“Indeed. But it seems they are having little luck. A majority of the vessels we glimpse now, streaking across the nexus, are asking the same question!”
“What? The ones coming from other entry points? They’re also looking for a place to live? But I thought there were tens of thousands of other retirement habitats, each of them huge enough to—”
“Please hold awhile. Let me look into this.”
Silence reigned while the Niss delved deeper, coiling its mesh of spinning lines ever tighter as it listened acutely. When it finally reported again, the synthetic voice was lower, sounding somewhat astonished.
“It seems, Dr. Baskin, that the catastrophe we observed at the Fractal World was not an isolated incident.”
Another long pause followed, as if the Niss felt it necessary to check — and then double-check — verifying what it had just learned.
“Yes,” the machine resumed at last. “The bizarre and tragic fact is confirmed. Criswell structures appear to be collapsing all over Galaxy Four.”
It was hard for Sara to imagine. The devastation she had witnessed — a fantastically enormous edifice, an abode to quadrillions, imploding before her eyes — that could not possibly be repeated elsewhere! And yet, that was the news being relayed in sputtery flashes by refugee ships blazing past each other along the Gordian twists and swooping arcs of the transfer point nexus.
“But … I thought all that fighting and destruction happened because of us!”
“So I also believed, Sage Koolhan. But that may be because my Tymbrimi makers filled my personality matrix with some of their own exaggerated egotism and sense of self-importance. In fact, however, there is another possible interpretation of the events that took place at the Fractal World. We may have been like ants, scurrying beneath a burning house, convincing ourselves that it was happening because our queen laid the wrong kind of egg.”
Sara grasped what the Niss was driving at, and she hated the idea. As awful as it felt to be persecuted by mighty forces, there was one paranoiac consolation. It verified your importance in the grand scheme of things, especially if all-powerful beings would tear down their own great works to get at you. But now the Niss implied their suffering at the Fractal World was incidental — a mere sideshow — spilling from events so vast, her kind of entity might never understand the big picture.
“B-but … b-but in that case,” asked the little, crablike qheuen, Pincer-Tip. “In that case, who did wreck the Fractal World?”
Nobody answered. No one had an answer to offer — though Sara had begun ruminating over a possibility. One so disturbing that it came to her only in the form of mathematics. A glimmering of equations and boundary conditions that she kept prim and passionless … or else the implications might rock her far too deeply, shaking her faith in the stability of the cosmos itself.
Tsh’t, the dolphin lieutenant, intervened with a note of pragmatism. “Gillian, Kaa reportsss we’re nearing a junction that might take us to Galaxy Two. Is Tanith still your aim?”
The blond woman shrugged, looking tired.
“Unless anyone sees a flaw in my reasoning.”
A sardonic tone once more filled the voice of the Niss Machine.
“There is no difficulty perceiving flaws. You would send us charging toward violence and chaos, into the one part of the universe where our enemies are most numerous.
“No, Dr. Baskin. Do not ask about flaws.
“Ask instead whether any of us has a better idea.”
Gillian shrugged.
“You say the Jophur could figure out how to defeat our new armor at any moment. Before that happens, we must find sanctuary somewhere. There is always a slim hope that the Institutes—”
“Very well, then,” Tsh’t cut in. “Galaxy Two is our goal. Tanith Sector. Tanith World. I will tell Kaa to proceed.”
In theory, clients weren’t supposed to interrupt their patrons. Though Tsh’t was only trying to be efficient.
At the same time Sara thought—
We’r
e heading toward Earth. Soon we’ll be so near that Sol will be a visible star, just a few hundred parsecs away, practically round the corner.
That may be as close as I ever get.
Gillian Baskin answered with a nod.
“Yes, let us proceed.”
Harry
ABOUT ONE SUBJECTIVE DAY AFTER SETTING forth, pursuing the mysterious interlopers, Harry learned that an obstacle lay dead ahead.
Hurrying across a weird province of E Space, he dutifully performed his main task, laying instrument packages for Wer’Q’quinn alongside a fat, twisty tube that contained the entire sidereal universe. All the galaxies he knew — including the complex hyperdimensional junctions called transfer points — lay circumscribed within the Avenue. Whenever he paused to stare at it, Harry got a unique, contorted perspective on constellations, drifting nebulae, even whole spiral arms, shimmering with starlight and glaring emissions of excited gas. It seemed strange, defying all intuitive reason, to know the domain inside the tube was unimaginably more vast than the constrained realm of metaphors surrounding it.
By now he was accustomed to living in a universe whose complications far exceeded his poor brain’s ability to grasp.
While performing the job assigned to him by Wer’Q’quinn, Harry kept his station moving at maximum prudent speed, following the spoor left by previous visitors to this exotic domain.
Something about their trail made him suspicious.
Of course what I should be doing is lying low till Wer’Q’quinn’s time limit expires, then collect the cameras and scoot out of here before this zone of metareality transmutes again, melting around my ship and taking me with it!
So dangerous and friable was the local zone of eerie shapes and twisted logic that even meme creatures — the natural life order of E Space — looked sparse and skittish, as if incarnated ideas found the region just as unpleasant as he did. Harry glimpsed only a few simple notion-beasts grazing across the prairie of fuzzy, cactuslike trunks. Most of the mobile concepts seemed no more complex than the declarative statement — I am.
As if the universe cared.
His agile vessel made good time following the trail left by prior interlopers. Objects made of real matter left detectable signs in E Space. Tiny bits of debris constantly sloughed or evaporated off any physical object that dared to invade this realm of reified abstractions. Such vestiges might be wisps of atmosphere, vented from a life-support system, or clusters of hull metal just six or seven atoms wide.
The spoor grew steadily warmer.
I wonder why they came through here, he thought. The oldest trace was about a year old … if his Subjective Duration Meter could be trusted, estimating the rate at which protons decayed here, converting their mass into microscopic declarative statements. From dispersal profiles, he could tell that the small craft in front — the earliest to pass by — was no larger than his mobile station.
They must have been desperate to come this way … or else terribly lost.
The second spoor wasn’t much younger, coming from a bigger vessel, though still less massive than a corvette. It had nosed along in evident pursuit, avidly chasing after the first.
By sampling drifting molecules, Harry verified that both vessels came from his own life order. Galactic spacecraft, carrying oxygen-breathing life-forms — active, vigorous, ambitious, and potentially quite violent.
The third one had him confused for a while. It had come this way more recently, perhaps just days ago. A veritable cloud of atoms still swirled in its wake. Sampling probes waved from Harry’s station, like the chem-sense antennae of some insect, revealing metal-loceramic profiles like those associated with mech life.
As an acolyte of the Institutes, Harry was always on the lookout for suspicious behavior by machine entities. Despite precautions programmed into mechs for billions of years, they were still prone to occasional spasms of uncontrolled reproduction, grabbing and utilizing any raw materials in sight, making copies of themselves at exponentially increasing rates.
Of course this was a problem endemic to all orders, since opportunistic proliferation was a universal trait of anything called “life.” Indeed, oxygen breathers had perpetrated their own ecological holocausts in the Five Galaxies, sometimes overpopulating and using up planets much faster than they could restore themselves. Hence laws of migration that regularly set aside broad galactic zones for fallow recovery. But machine reproduction could be especially rapid and voracious, often beginning in dark corners where no one was looking. Once, a wave of autonomous replicators had built up enough momentum to seize and use up every small planetoid in Galaxy Three within the narrow span of ten million years, converting each gram into spindly automatons … which then began disassembling planets. The calamity continued until a coalition of other life orders intervened, bringing it to a halt.
Nor were machines Harry’s sole concern. At times like this, when oxygen-breathing civilization was distracted by internal struggles, it was important to keep watch lest the rival culture of hydrogen breathers take advantage.
Still, the traces Harry picked up seemed more strange than dangerous. The lavish amount of metallic debris suggested that this particular mech could be damaged. And there were other anomalies. His sensors sniffed amino acids and other organic detritus. Perhaps small amounts of oxy-life were accompanying the machine-vessel. As cargo perhaps? Sometimes mechs used biological components, which were more resistant than prim logic circuits to damage by cosmic rays.
At the stroke of a midura, he had to halt the pursuit in order to lay another of Wer’Q’quinn’s packages, aligning it carefully so the cameras peered straight into the Avenue, collecting data for NavInst technicians. Harry hoped it would prove valuable.
Of course his boss had plenty of measurements already, from probes that laced each transfer point, as well as hyperspatial levels A, B, and C. Moreover, travelers routinely reported conditions they encountered during their voyages. It seemed obscure and unconventional to send Harry all this way gathering information from such a quirky source. But who was he to judge?
I’m near the bottom of the ol’ totem pole. I can just do my job as well as possible, and not try to second-guess my chief.
In pre-mission briefings, Harry had learned that strain gauges were showing increased tension along nearly every navigable route in the Five Galaxies. Ruptures and detours had grown routine as commerce began suffering noticeably. Yet, when Wer’Q’quinn made inquiries to high officials at Navigation Institute headquarters, the response consisted of little more than bland, reassuring nostrums.
• • •
These events are not unexpected.
Provisions have been made (long ago) for dealing with the phenomena.
Agents at your level should not concern themselves with causes, or long-term effects.
Perform your assigned tasks. Protect shipping. Safeguard the public. Continue reporting data. Above all, discourage panic. Hearten civil confidence.
Maintain your equipment at high levels of readiness.
Cancel all leaves.
It wasn’t the sort of memorandum Harry found exactly inspiring. Even Wer’Q’quinn seemed disturbed — though it wasn’t easy to read the moods of a land-walking squid.
The situation prompted Harry to wonder again about his current mission.
Perhaps Wer’Q’quinn didn’t clear my trip with his bosses. He may have sent me to get a look at things from a perspective that no one at HQ could co-opt, anticipate, or meddle with.
Harry appreciated his supervisor’s confidence … while at the same time worrying about what it implied.
Could everything be falling apart? he pondered. Maybe the Skiano proselyte is right. If this is the end of the world, what can you do but look to the state of your own soul?
Just a midura before taking off on this mission, with some mixed feelings and trepidation, he had accepted an invitation from the Skiano to visit its small congregation of converts. Entering a small warehouse bay in o
ne of the cheaper quarters of Kazzkark, he found a motley assortment of creatures following the strange new sect.
There had been a pair of portly synthians — creatures traditionally friendly to Terran customs and concepts — along with several little wazoon, a goggle-eyed pring, three por’n’aths, a striped ruguggl, and …
Harry recalled rocking back in surprise, dismayed to see a cluster of terrifying Brothers of the Night! With muscular, streamlined arms and sharklike faces, Brothers were famed for their intense though fickle religious impulses, sampling different creeds and pursuing them fanatically — until the next one came along. Still, it shocked Harry to see them in such a gregarious setting, worshiping alongside beings who had no relationship at all with their race or clan.
The variegated faithful had gathered before a symbol that Harry found at once both quaint and unnerving … a holo portrait of Earth, homeworld to his neo-chimpanzee line, depicted with cruciform rays of sacred illumination emanating outward. As the hologram turned, the planet seemed to swell … then burst apart, donating its own substance to the brilliant rays, enhancing the gift of enlightenment with an act of ultimate self-sacrifice.
Then, moments later, the world recoalesced in a feat of miraculous resurrection, beginning the cycle once more.
“We are taught that the aim of life is its own perfection,” preached the Skiano, speaking first in a flashing dialect of Galactic Two, with glitters from its lower pair of eyes, then almost simultaneously via audible Gal-Seven through a vodor held in one hand.
“This wisdom is true, beyond arty doubt. It crosses all boundaries of order or class. Once sapiency is achieved, life must be about more than mere self-gene-ego continuation. Long ago, the Progenitors taught that our highest purpose is to seek a sense of purpose. For existence to have meaning, we need a goal. A target at which to aim the projectile of our lives.
“But what in the universe is perfectible? Surely not matter, which decays, eventually reducing even the greatest artifacts and monuments to a dim glow of heat radiation. Any individual organism will age and eventually die. Some memories may be downloaded or recorded, but true improvement grinds to a halt.
