Netlink

by William H. Keith

  “I wonder…” »DEVCAMERON« was reviewing once again the information he had stored on theoretical space-time machines such as this one. While no one had ever put such theories to the test, the best mathematical models suggested that large masses such as that before them, rotating at relativistic velocities, opened specific pathways connecting places remote from one another in space and time. Where you ended up after passing through the gate was not random but depended on your approach vector. Some models assumed that gateways to and from a distant spot would be different, but »DEVCAMERON« had just seen evidence that this wasn’t so, that a single gateway might be two-way.

  In other words, follow the same path, arrive at the same place. If they could follow the track recorded by that departing ship with sufficient accuracy, it ought to be possible to follow it back to where and when it had come from.

  “Is it your plan to follow the vessel?” a DalRiss asked in his mind.

  “They don’t seem inclined to notice us otherwise,” »DEVCAMERON« replied. “Unfortunately, maneuvering down that path could be a problem.”

  DalRiss city ships were not really designed for maneuver through space. They traveled from point to point through the effort—and death—of one of the gene-tailored lifeforms they called Achievers, creatures that somehow visualized two widely separated places in space and made them one… first in their minds, then in reality, allowing the DalRiss vessel to slip from one point to another past space. The city ships were capable of limited maneuver by expelling matter at high velocities through powerful magnetic fields, or by reshaping and riding local magnetic fields with fields of their own, but accelerations tended to be quite low, a few tenths of a G at most. Steering one of these million-ton monsters through the tortured space alongside the whirling Device would be by far more a matter of luck than skill. With no clear picture of space at the other side, Achievers would be useless here… and missing the path could end with the living ship emerging uncountable light years from where it wanted to be.

  In any case, »DEVCAMERON« didn’t like the idea of jeopardizing one of the DalRiss city ships and the thousands of DalRiss aboard it. If nothing else, there was a fair possibility that a ship would emerge on the other side light years from the nearest twin to the enigmatic Device. There were no guarantees.

  But—just possibly—there was another way to explore the gateway provided by the Device.

  “I need you to grow something special from the Naga,” he told the DalRiss. “Here’s how it will work.…”

  Mind, Dev had learned, was best defined as a particular patterning of information; his survival at the Second Battle of Herakles, as mind alone quite distinct from his biological body, proved as much. In a sense, the »DEVCAMERON« now inhabiting the DalRiss exploration fleet was a copy of the original Dev Cameron’s mind, an original that had died when the body creating it had vaporized.

  Or… was it? When his body had been destroyed aboard the DalRiss city ship Daghar, his awareness had been elsewhere, not within the ship that had been destroyed. Certainly, he didn’t feel like a copy. His memories were intact, up to the moment of the explosion, and afterward. Since the memories themselves were a part of that information pattern, however, he couldn’t put a lot of store in their purely subjective revelations, but his impression was that his mind had been at another node, aboard another DalRiss ship, at the instant Daghar had vanished in a nuclear fireball.

  It was not something he cared to examine too closely. He still didn’t know whether he should think of himself as dead… or merely mislaid.

  Time passed, and the DalRiss fleet continued its orbit about the Device, watching. Three times more as they waited, lone alien ships rose impossibly from the corona of a dwarf star and vanished into emptiness and twisted space without acknowledging the fleet’s presence.

  Throughout that time, meanwhile, the object »DEVCAMERON« had requested continued to grow, deep within the interior of one of the DalRiss cityships. As for »DEVCAMERON,« his attention was elsewhere.

  He was linked once more with the Naga, busily reproducing himself.

  Chapter 9

  A computer program, any program, can be duplicated. Sophisticated programs can duplicate themselves as they run and can even improve on the original design. Given an advanced enough biotechnology, there seems to be no reason why the human mind cannot be duplicated the same way and transferred as a living program to another, possibly artificial body.

  There is considerable question as to why anyone would want to create a duplicate of his or her own mind. The most frequently advanced suggestion is that personalities could be downloaded and stored in this way from time to time against the possibility of death, as a kind of emergency backup life.

  Of course, this would do the original personality no good; from his point of view, he would still be quitedead, while his duplicate lived on, complete with his memories of everything that had happened up to the moment of replication.

  —Never-Never Mind

  DR. ANN CECIL MULGRAVE

  C.E. 2556

  What »DEVCAMERON« was attempting to do was similar in principle to what had happened to him by accident twenty-five years before, at Second Herakles. His mind—soul, ego, self-awareness, whatever he chose to call it—existed as patterns of information within the Naga fragment nodes aboard one or another of the DalRiss city ships. The Naga that had patterned his mind in the first place could make a second pattern, a copy that could be downloaded into the Naga-fragment probe that was being grown inside one of the largest of the DalRiss ships.

  “Okay,” he thought to the Naga. “Let’s do it.”

  He could feel the process, though the sensation was literally indescribable, a kind of stretching or thinning of self and self-awareness and a panicky moment when it felt like he was going to lose his grip on Self entirely. For a time, »DEVCAMERON« hovered on the edge of consciousness, clinging to… what? To the mental image he held of himself, he supposed, as distinct from the strange and alien flows of consciousness that surrounded him.

  It was curious. When he was linked aboard one of the living ships—as opposed to downloaded into an artificial DalRiss body—there was a definite sense of space and freedom, a vast expanse within which he could move and imagine almost without limit. That, he realized with a shock, had just ended. He felt… cramped, almost as though he’d just been downloaded into a DalRiss body again, and in another moment he saw why.

  A whale giving birth to a minnow, the DalRiss cityship Sirghal released the probe, a forty-meter, trilaterally symmetrical wedge of absolute blackness.

  Shock gave way to anger. “Wait!” »DEVCAMERON« called out over the radio link with Sirghal. “You downloaded the wrong one!”

  “No,” the voice of »DEVCAMERON« replied in his mind. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”

  The sound of his own mental voice almost panicked him; then, as full realization swept through him, »DEVCAMERON«, the second »DEVCAMERON«, saw what had happened and was forced to accept it.

  Planetary Nagas frequently budded off small pieces of themselves, creating a self as opposed to the far vaster and more powerful Self. Riding in nanotechnically grown bodies inherited from civilizations destroyed in ages long past, those fragments could sally forth into the great gulf at the center of the universe to explore. When a self returned, it melded with the parent once more, and the knowledge it had gained while separate pooled with the ocean of knowledge that had remained behind. »DEVCAMERON« had just done something similar, duplicating his mind and downloading it into the Naga probe ship. Unfortunately, his memories were a part of that mind; from his point of view, he’d somehow just mysteriously changed places with the duplicate.

  His new body had been grown about a core of hydrogen and was powered by an ingenious device grown by the DalRiss in mimicry of human quantum power taps. Using a pair of tuned microsingularities to draw power from the quantum energy fluctuations of hard vacuum, the QPT produced energy enough to turn hydrog
en into white-hot plasma constrained by magnetic fields within the Naga fragment’s body. Released astern, a thin, hard, stream of matter expelled at relativistic velocities, the plasma had sufficient thrust to drive the Naga wedge forward, a living rocket.

  »DEVCAMERON« experimented with his new body for a moment. Damn it, it felt like just a few hours ago he’d been safely aboard the Sirghal, thinking about how he could duplicate himself, providing an expendable human mind for the passage through the Device.

  The coldness of his own rationalizations surprised him. He’d been well aware that his duplicate would be expendable, something that could be sent through the Device to the other side with only a faint hope of recovering it later. Hell, he’d been thinking at the time that he could create tens, even hundreds of duplicates and keep sending them through until one, at last, was able to get back with some useful information.

  Dev Cameron—and for the first time in many years it was not »DEVCAMERON« who was examining the question—saw himself, saw what he had become, in a new light. Being the expendable duplicate could change your entire perspective.

  Hell, he thought a bit wildly. It could ruin your whole day.

  “Don’t think of it that way,” »DEVCAMERON« told him from the fastness of Sirghal, looming above and around him now like a vast, black mountain.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” he told himself. “You’ll be nice and safe here while I’m dropping down the throat of an alien time-and-space machine.”

  “You know you want to find out what’s on the other side.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You and I didn’t part that long ago. I want to know what’s over there. Don’t you?”

  He thought about it, but only for a few seconds. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “I envy you.”

  “You might not if you were sitting where I am.”

  But the bitterness was gone. The initial shock, anger, even disappointment, he was realizing, had been caused mostly by the surprising shift in his point of view, so firmly had he expected to be back aboard the Sirghal, launching his second self aboard the probe. Now that he was the probe, however, he found he was looking forward to this. His exploration would be dangerous… but the greatest danger was that he might emerge in an area of space-time far removed from another Device. If that happened, he would be marooned; his Naga probe had no starfaring capabilities of its own. Even his reserves of reaction mass, the hydrogen used to propel him forward and adjust his pitch, yaw, and roll, were sharply limited. If he couldn’t just turn around on the other side and come back, he would die… eventually.

  Eventually might be a long time, too. Once powered up, his quantum power tap was self-sustaining and would provide energy indefinitely. He no longer depended on such bulky inconveniences as food or air. He could live for quite a long time on the other side, even after his hydrogen ran out. He wondered what the limiting factor was. Proton decay? The disintegration of his Naga’s cellular structure?

  His destination was sure to be a place of wonder. He would not be bored.

  Maybe that’s what being an optimist is, Dev thought wryly. You find the best way to look at something no matter which side of the argument you’re on.

  He found he enjoyed the irony of arguing with himself. Once the initial surprise had worn off, it was much like downloading a jig program—software that allowed you to have simulated discussions with imaginary fragments of your own personality. This was the first time, however, that Dev Cameron had ever experienced both sides of the conversation as two separate people, each a coherent, complex, and integrated personality in its own right.

  As he began accelerating toward the end of the Device, outlined still in blue light cast by the Naga across his perceptions, he realized that he did want to go. For days, now, he’d been hungering for information on who had built this structure, and why, and what they were doing in a dead star system. Soon he would know.

  He refused to say good-bye to himself. »DEVCAMERON« was a bastard, and he was still angry at his other self’s cavalier attitude toward another intelligent being.

  Thinking about that drew him up short. The attitude he was seeing—experiencing, rather—was identical to that of the DalRiss. For humans, perhaps the most alien feature of the DalRiss was the—literally—inhuman way they used other life forms… their Achievers, for instance, tailor-made to open paths for the DalRiss ships across light years, yet doomed to die upon accomplishing that feat. The DalRiss used life forms, both those they had created and those they merely encountered, the way humans used metal ores or stones or the raw materials converted by nanofabrication technology.

  Was he losing his humanity? Had he been apart from other humans for too long?

  Was there anything he could do about either?

  The path of the alien ship had already been downloaded into the Naga probe’s navigational storage. Firing short, precisely timed bursts from his main thruster, Dev descended toward the Device. He took a last look behind at the swiftly receding masses of the Sirghal and dozens of other DalRiss ships. The white dwarfs wheeled across the sky, trailing spiraling rivers of red fire. He was reminded of zero-G rhythmic gymnasts, swirling crimson streamers as they leaped and tumbled; the memory of Earth and New America was painfully sharp, and he turned his full attention to the growing silver needle ahead.

  Time passed. He had to be careful in applying thrust, for the star-hot plasma from his main drive could have fried DalRiss ships with a careless flick of his tail. At last, though, he was on the proper track and accelerating inward, matching exactly the alien vessel’s speed of approach. So little was known about the technology they were borrowing here; speed might well be as important as path in determining where—and when—he emerged.

  So, too, might mass, for that matter. The probe possessed only a tiny fraction of the mass of those alien ships.

  Well, it was too late to do anything about that now. The other Dev Cameron would correct it next time around, if he failed to report back.

  It occurred to him that he needed a name for his living vessel, something more than “the Naga probe.”

  “Katya,” he said.

  “Sorry, Brother,” his other self said. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “I’ve named the probe ‘Katya,’ ” he said.

  There was a long silence from the DalRiss fleet. “It seems appropriate.”

  “Listen. If you make it back and I—” He stopped, flustered. Here he was, giving himself a message. “Staticjack,” he said. “I think I’m schizzing out.”

  “Hold it together a little longer, Brother. You’re almost there. We read you nearing the horizon where the aliens vanished.”

  The Device swelled in front of him, an immense wall of mercury-bright silver rotating so quickly that there were no details of surface at all. All of his Perceivers’ eyes were trained on the thing; strain as he might, Dev could see only silver and a wavering of vision at the edge of the ultraviolet that might be some sort of force field or even a twisting of light through strangely bent space.

  Lights appeared, ahead and to either side… an artificial effect, he decided, designed to serve as a guide for inbound ships. The lights receded into the distance, outlining a tunnel that appeared to go on and on forever into the depths of the Device.

  Then he realized that he could no longer see the Device at all. It had vanished as light flared around him, the beacons shifting into streaks of rainbow glory.

  He plunged into strangeness. Stars filled his universe.

  And more stars… and more.…

  Cascades… waterfalls… blizzards of stars.Dazzling hosts of stars, many brighter than Venus seen at its brightest on Earth, though most of these were tinted in orange or crimson instead of the blue-white diamond brilliance of Venus. They shouldered one another across the heavens in crowded choruses, embedded in diaphanous streams and rivers and isolated tags of star stuff.

  A globular cluster! he thought. I’ve emerged ins
ide a globular cluster! Then he began studying the almost painful brightness encircling him more carefully and recognized the truth. This was no mere star cluster, but the heart of the Galaxy itself. He was adrift in a star-filled bubble at the Galactic Core.

  Excitement throbbing within and behind the center of his awareness, he extended his Perceivers’ range to check his entire surroundings. First things first. Could he return?

  A blurred, silver wall stretched across Heaven at his back, a Device identical, so far as he could see, to the one suspended between Frost’s double suns. There was no sign of the stellar gas stripped from the two stars. Then again, perhaps that wasn’t so strange after all. Both streams were being funneled into different gates; with the near-infinite choice of paths available in the bent space near one of those ultra-massive spinning cylinders, it would have been astonishing had the star plasma appeared here as well.

  He was as awash in strangeness as he was in the light of myriad suns. Stars and impenetrable walls of glowing dust and gas created the impression of a vast, distant wall, a globe, really, enclosing him, impenetrable in a cloudy ring about the globe’s equator, thinner to the point of star-thick translucency at the poles. Other senses were bombarded besides the visual. He tasted X-rays sleeting past the Katya, and with them came the bite and sting of high-energy particles, electrons, and free protons whirling through the Galactic Core. Radio shrilled, a hiss like ocean surf but unending and monotonous. High and to his left, a pulsar strobed, synchotron radiation flickering in pulses measured in hundredths of a second, a steady and annoying buzz mingled with other sounds and sensations and impressions too varied and too intense to assimilate all at once. It was sobering to realize, however, that had he still been organic he would have been dead within seconds of emerging from the gate. The radiation filling that volume of space would have thoroughly cooked any creature evolved for existence on the tame and sheltered surface of a planet.