Netlink

by William H. Keith

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, but he found it almost at once. The rock cliff, extending several meters above the ice, was rough-hewn and rugged, split in places by deep cracks, and could easily have been natural after all, could have been… except for the corroded, outstretched fingers of metal embedded in the rock’s face.

  Gently, he reached out one of his manipulatory tendrils, stroking the length of one of those bars. It felt like metal—bitterly cold, of course, and so brittle from millennia-old oxidation that parts of the surface flaked away at his touch. There were six curved, flat bars, appearing eerily like rust-brown human ribs protruding from the stone. What had they been like, the people who had built here once? Nothing remotely like humans, he was certain of that much. He wished they could take the time to excavate and explore, and knew it was impossible. He wanted to know them, know something concrete about them.

  This much they’d had in common with the children of Earth, he knew already: they’d been builders, manipulators of their environment. And perhaps that was kinship enough, for it made them more like humans in at least that way than humans were like either the DalRiss or the Naga.

  He wished there were some way of running an analysis on the metal. The ribs might be highly oxidized iron, or they could be the remnants of some more sophisticated alloy, but he couldn’t tell by touch alone, and the DalRiss weren’t very good with nonbiological assays or tests. A Naga might be able to tell—they were superb at chemical analysis—but a Naga unprotected in this environment would freeze solid in seconds. Perhaps he could break a piece off and give it to a one aboard ship later.

  Breaking a chunk of the metal off, though, seemed like sacrilege, a defacing of a monument that had stood here unchanging for two millennia. There was no other way to tell what the things were, no way to even guess at what they might once have been a part of… but he didn’t want to commit that desecration.

  But there was no denying the fact that they were artificial.

  “This is what you sought?” the voice said in his mind.

  “Yes. Someone built here, once.”

  “I… don’t understand what I am seeing.”

  He moved a tendril along one of the metal ribs. The DalRiss were at a serious handicap here. They could directly sense unliving metal only through their Perceivers, and their own experience did not include building large structures. They grew everything they needed, from houses to entire cities to starships. How to explain? “There is no natural process I know that could have caused this. I think it may be part of the framework of a building.”

  “Like a skeleton?”

  “Like a skeleton, exactly.”

  “And those who grew it were native to this world?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it could have been a colony, or an outpost. But the fractal images suggest that this planet was fairly heavily built up. Lots of very large structures. That means a large population.”

  A large population that had been incinerated.

  Deliberately?

  There were still too many unanswered questions. The builders of this structure on Frost might have been long gone by the time their stars exploded; there was even the possibility that they had been the builders of the Device, that the Device itself was unrelated to the nova.

  But »DEVCAMERON« could not shake the feeling, as cold and as chilling and as bleak as the glacial landscape about him, that the double sun had been deliberately exploded to feed the Device, that someone was feeding it now for reasons only its builders knew… and that whoever had done the deed had done so either in complete ignorance of, or with a complete lack of concern for, the beings living on Frost.

  And »DEVCAMERON« wasn’t sure which possibility was the more terrifying.

  Chapter 8

  Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the mid-twenty-sixth century was the incredible diversity of separate evolutionary systems. And this diversity was expressed not simply in alien biologies, but in mutually alien philosophical outlooks as well. Human, DalRiss, and Naga, it was clear, each possessed worldviews that diverged remarkably from one another, in part because of differences in their physical senses, in part because of their origins and their environments. And in some ways, the Web’s picture of the universe proved more disparate still.

  —Reflections of Intelligence

  DR. C. NELSON BRYCE

  C.E. 2575

  »DEVCAMERON« had remained on Frost for the equivalent of several standard days, probing among those ruins that were free of the vast plains of encroaching ice. He’d found nothing that told him more about either the inhabitants of the dead world or the calamity that had overtaken them; and, in the end, he’d been glad to shed his artificial DalRiss body and return to the freer, more spacious life within the DalRiss cityship.

  An Achiever died; the immense vessel vanished from the ice plain, rematerializing in space a few thousand kilometers from the enigmatic Device.

  The Device remained in space, midway between the two white dwarf suns, still funneling the infalling streams of glowing star stuff into nothingness. The other DalRiss cityships were where he’d left them, watching. There were no answers here, either, it seemed. Not yet.

  “Five more spacecraft have emerged from an area close to the Device,” a DalRiss voice said in »DEVCAMERON’S« mind. “They traveled directly toward one or the other of the dwarf stars.”

  “Was there any reaction to your presence?”

  “None. We tried again to communicate on a wide variety of channels. It is possible, however, that they use frequency bands unavailable to us.”

  “And no sign of life on the vessels themselves?”

  “No. Of course, we would not be able to sense life hidden behind dead matter.”

  “I understand.”

  Still, it was curious. Surely those vessels could sense the strange fleet slowly orbiting the Device, eighty flat disks, each one hundreds of meters across, sprouting multiple arms and radiating energy signatures that spoke emphatically of life.

  »DEVCAMERON« decided to do some research.

  Each DalRiss vessel possessed a sizable fragment of a full-grown planetary Naga, a kind of organic communications network that invisibly bound the fleet together. When linked by radio or lasercom beams, each fragment became one node of a massively parallel organic computer with impressive stores of memories. He’d spent considerable time after his return interrogating that organism, which he thought of as the fleet Naga. While not nearly so massive as a planetary Naga, and with only a fraction of a planetary Naga’s hand-me-down memories, the being possessed enough memory chains among its far-flung nodes to enable »DEVCAMERON« to trace back through several generations of the being, searching for some link between the Naga and the ships glimpsed traveling between the Device and the white dwarf suns.

  Full understanding by Man of the life form once known as Xenophobe had come slowly and only through the communication made possible by DalRiss biotechnology. Nagas began as small lumps of compact and tightly organized cells, molecule-sized organic machines that penetrated a planet’s crust, assimilating rocks and minerals and reorganizing them into more Naga cells. Debate still raged among human researchers as to whether the Nagas were a naturally evolved life form or the runaway end product of an evolving alien nanotechnology, and the Nagas themselves could not say. Certainly, Naga cells behaved much like a thinking version of human nanotech, able to sample, manipulate, pattern, and even replicate complex molecules at the atomic level.

  With a metabolism driven by the planet’s interior heat, the thermophilic being tunneled deeper and deeper into the crust, finding an ideal habitable zone several kilometers down, one balanced between the cold surface and the great deeps where the temperature was so high that even Nagas couldn’t survive, and spreading out in all directions.

  Eventually, the Naga occupied vast expanses of underground real estate, existing as concentrated pockets of tissue interconnected by vast networks of tendrils; the comparison
to the interconnected neurons of a brain had not escaped the researchers studying Naga physiology. Ultimately, the entire Naga massed as much as a fair-sized planetoid and was spread throughout the planet’s upper crust. Its tendency to detect and assimilate large concentrations of refined metals and alloys had led to the confrontations between Man and Xenophobe on a dozen Frontier worlds and to the assumption by humans that they were being attacked by a spacefaring race. Only after fifty years of sporadic “war,” the loss of several human colony worlds and tens of thousands of people, and the eradication of the planetary Naga infesting Loki, was the truth finally learned.

  Each planetary Naga was an independent organism, completely unaware of the Nagas occupying other worlds. Its “acquisitive phase” might last tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years as it grew, permeating its planet’s crust. Eventually, however, as its nodes became more closely interconnected and parts began overrunning the planetary surface, the Naga shifted modes, becoming quiescent—entering its “contemplative phase.” Using its ability to draw on enormous reserves of energy and to produce and manipulate powerful magnetic fields, the Naga hurled tiny packets of itself into the interstellar deeps at high velocities. Most of these packets were lost in the immensities of space; some few, guided by a primitive kind of programming that recognized the heat and magnetic fields of suitable planets, fell onto the worlds of other, nearby suns… and the cycle was begun anew.

  Perhaps strangest from Man’s limited point of view, however, was the curious way the Naga had of looking at the world around them. Restricted by their underground isolation from the rest of the universe, the Nagas perceived the cosmos as endless rock. Outward the rock grew hotter, providing life; inward, at the center of all, was a vast, hollow cave, a yawning blank emptiness that the Naga, in its binary logic, thought of as not-rock. Pods of new life launched into space crossed not outer but inner space, the gulf at the center of all.

  From the human perspective, the Nagas literally saw the universe inside-out. Their perceptions of humans were just as skewed; if Nagas divided their cosmos into rock and not-rock, they separated their awareness into self and not-self. Wild Nagas were always astonished to learn that it was possible for not-self to think and reason, just like self.

  But communication was possible. Once contact had been achieved with one Naga, through DalRiss biotech, it had been learned that fragments of that Naga could pass on what it had learned to wild Nagas. If human culture had been undergoing a revolution thanks to peaceful contact with the Naga, it was nothing like the revolution in individual Naga thought and understanding. Though their feelings, if they had any, couldn’t be expressed in words, it seemed as though they were allowing themselves to be integrated into the DalRiss fleet through a simple lust for wonder, for input on a cosmic scale.

  And that, after all, was much of the reason »DEVCAMERON« was here as well.

  “I need to see the past,” he said in his mind, focusing on the matrix of the interlinked Naga’s flickering, eldritch thoughts. “I need to know if you’ve been here before.”

  “I do not understand what you mean by ‘here’.…”

  »DEVCAMERON« uploaded images of the Device, a thread-thin needle of brilliant silver rotating about its long axis beneath the light of two shrunken suns.

  He received a blurred storm of warped and fragmentary images in return.

  Despite the differences both in their perceptions and in their way of reasoning, humans linked with Nagas had managed to secure tantalizing glimpses of the beings’ remote past. Given that Naga reproduction was essentially asexual fission on an enormous scale, it was no surprise to find that one Naga possessed memories of a succession of previous worlds… even though it didn’t think in those terms. Some researchers thought that the Nagas must have first evolved as much as seven or eight billion years earlier, that they might not even be native to the galaxy humans called the Milky Way. Direct evidence of such time scales was lacking, however, and even memories from recently assimilated worlds could not be pinned down in time. Nagas, it turned out, had a different perception of time as well as space, one based on subjective events rather than on objective units of time.

  It was the past, as perceived by the Naga, that »DEVCAMERON« was interested in now. His initial contact with the Naga at the DalRiss world of ShraRish had demonstrated that the Nagas had approached the bubble of human-occupied space from that part of Earth’s sky toward eighteen hours’ right ascension, somewhat to spinward of the galactic core, roughly in the direction of the constellations Serpens, Ophiuchus, and Cygnus. He’d known about the curious Cygnan anomaly—the fact that so many novae had been recorded in the same small patch of sky—since long before his transformation into a program within an alien computer matrix. Somehow, it seemed to demand too much of random chance to expect that Nagas and multiple novae should both emerge from that same tiny patch in Earth’s sky and not be related somehow.

  His original guess had been that someone in this direction had been fighting the Xenophobe menace just as the Terran Hegemony had done, but with weapons of considerably greater destructive power. He’d pictured alien civilizations sterilizing worlds contaminated by the Xenophobe by exploding their suns.

  Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The Naga were restricted—by their requirements for specific ranges of temperature, crust composition, and magnetic fields—to worlds similar to Earth. They seemed equally at home within planets that had been terraformed and possessed oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres as they were inside prebiotic worlds still shrouded in carbon-dioxide, but in general they could survive only within fairly narrow limits of magnetic field, internal temperature, and mass. In short, they preferred the types of worlds that men preferred, though for different reasons… a preference that had contributed to human impressions of a systematic alien attack throughout the years of the Xenophobe Wars.

  Images filled his mind, most disjointed and virtually impossible to comprehend, images cast not as sight so much as impressions… impressions based on the taste of magnetic fields or the rich tang of pure metal, and the lovely, satiating warmth of the outer heat, or the delicious tickle of flowing information. As always, he found it impossible to pull any real sense of time from that jumble of impressions; the centuries, the millennia between one event of note in the age-long and slow-changing existence of a Naga and the next, passed as a blur, as if Nagas could willfully skip over or edit out the uninteresting parts of their existence. Too, until very recently indeed, Nagas had been almost totally ignorant of the universe; most still thought of interstellar space as the void at the center of their universe.

  There is Self… and not-self, the Cosmos sundered. The not-selves that are aware, as Self, surround and penetrate. And beyond… wonder.…

  Its attention seemed focused on the spinning Device, though it was hard to be certain. Memories washed through »DEVCAMERON’S« awareness, most incomprehensibly strange. A few, a very few, bore familiarity; he caught the grass-life-sweet scent of Katya and felt an unendurable pang of homesickness. The scent was gone an instant later, washed away by an avalanche of the strange.

  God, I miss her.

  “There is something…” The Naga’s inner voice filled his mind, his soul. »DEVCAMERON« waited, listening. “Something similar to what the not-self calls the Device. A similar taste.…”

  He tasted it, metallic-sharp and bright. Magnetic fields. Intense magnetic fields, unlike anything »DEVCAMERON« had ever experienced. The spinning Device generated inconceivable magnetic energies as it spun; once, long, long ago, one or more of the Naga’s ancestors had sensed a field similar in scope and in strength.

  There was nothing more.

  “»DEVCAMERON!«” one of the DalRiss voices called, intruding on the turbulent mingling of alien thoughts.

  “I’m… here.” It always took a moment or two to disentangle himself from the bizarrely twisted thought patterns of a Naga.

  “An unliving vessel returns!”

 
Breaking his mental link with the Naga, »DEVCAMERON« opened again an inner window on the volume of space between the white dwarf suns. With enhanced vision, he could see the mottled gray shape of an alien craft, its inverted shark’s fins unlike anything he’d seen before, traveling swiftly out from one of the stars, falling toward the Device.

  “Record this!” he snapped… needlessly. The DalRiss recorded everything they sensed within the vast reserves of their Naga-linked organic computers. As he watched its passage, he downloaded what he’d missed—the same ship rising out of the star’s photosphere, radiating furiously in the high ultraviolet.

  Dwarf stars were composed of what human physicists called degenerate matter, with the mass of Earth’s sun packed into a volume no larger than a planet’s, a millionfold smaller. A cubic centimeter massed uncounted tons; the density was only somewhat less than that within the strangely twisted physics of a neutron star’s interior.

  It was not possible.

  But then, neither was the Device, where similar energies and masses were held captive. Again he wondered: who are these beings? What are they doing here?

  In moments, the mystery ship had retraced its course inward from the star, plunged into the strangely twisted space near the Device, and vanished.

  A thought occurred to »DEVCAMERON«. “That vessel. Did it disappear at a spot close to where it emerged?” He couldn’t tell for sure without exact measurements, but it seemed to him that it had.

  “As nearly as can be determined by our Perceivers, yes.” An oval drew itself in blue light close to one end of the Device and encircling the area where the lone ship had vanished. Seven blue stars appeared scattered within the oval, the points at which the aliens had emerged from otherwhere. A star of a lighter blue marked the entry point of the ship they’d just seen.