by Ian Douglas
It was probably too late in any case. The cylinder struck the protective shell, the magnetic bottle inside switched off, and five tons of antimatter came into abrupt contact with normal matter in a spectacular and lethal blossom of pure, annihilating energy.
The black, protective shell about the central sun was the generator for a large quantum power tap; the tiny sun was vacuum energy drawn from the Quantum Sea and focused within the shell, which also harvested it. The antimatter blast not only disrupted the magnetic fields holding the sun in place, it nudged the entire shell to one side, bringing it into contact with the sun.
As with the far larger Core Detonation centuries before, the infalling matter generated a runaway cascade, momentarily drawing more energy from the vacuum, and igniting a catastrophic explosion that swiftly began devouring the nearby walls of the cavern. Safeguards and baffles were vaporized. The power tap was running now out of control, an avalanche of unimaginable energy pouring through from elsewhere to fill and consume the shuddering, crumbling minor planet.
And throughout the tiny world, digital life forms, the Xul, beings who had as a CAS collective ruled the Galaxy for perhaps ten million years, died by the hundreds of millions, by the billions, by the unimaginable trillions.
Amanda Karr, all of her, along with the iterations of Captain Valledy and the AI Luther, did not have time to escape the holocaust. Instead, they broadcast all that they’d experienced and recorded back to the Nicholas, until the surface of the world beneath them dissolved into blue-white brilliance, and then the out-rushing plasma shell ignited the trillions of objects comprising the world’s rings and wiped them away, snowflakes before the blast of a blowtorch.
A three-hundred-meter long ship just emerging from one of the minor world’s tunnels was overtaken by the blast and consumed. Other Xul warcraft in the immediate vicinity were overwhelmed before they could escape.
Silently, its cratered and blast-pitted surface brilliantly illuminated by the swelling and brightening micro-nova, Nicholas rotated out of the Quantum Sea.
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
1002 hours, GMT
“My…God…”
The flash of the exploding minor world had been dazzling, blinding in its intensity. An instant later, they’d felt the stomach-dropping sensation of the transition up out of Dimension0, and the light had been blotted out.
Now the great, blue-hued spiral of the Great Annihilator hung against the radiance of the Core Detonation.
Garroway looked up at the spiral. His first thought was, We made it!
His second was, how many of our people got out?
It was not immediately clear that the battle was over, however. The Xul planet had grown intolerably bright, but at the moment they could only assume that the enemy was destroyed. There might be more of them around, like hornets after their nest has been knocked down.
Something rippled through space….
“Hey,” Ranser said. “Did you see?…”
The Great Annihilator turned bright, and Garroway was, again, someplace else.
He stood again on the shores of an alien sea.
At first, he thought it was the illusory world where he’d first met the Tarantulae. There were similarities—a dark, purple-blue sea, and masses of vegetation in the distance, the edge of a jungle, perhaps. The sky was dark blue, deepening to indigo overhead.
A single yellow sun, tiny against the sky, hung above one horizon.
The world he’d seen before had circled a double star, red and green.
And the buildings in the distance—massive constructs, like smooth-sided mountains—were unchanging, static.
“Do you recognize this world?” a familiar voice said, speaking within Garroway’s thoughts. “It’s changed a lot in five hundred thousand of your years.”
Garroway was about to say that, no, he didn’t recognize it. But…half a million years. That gave him the clue he needed.
“Mars,” he said. “The fourth world out from the sun in my own solar system. As it was when the Builders were here.”
The Tarantulae materialized in its column of gold-glowing motes. “Very good, General Garroway. Impressive.”
“And you are the Builders.”
“Very impressive. What makes you think that?”
“You’re showing me Mars as it was then. When you were there.” He shrugged. “Natural assumption.”
“Keen insight, rather. Tell us, please…what do you know of us?”
Us. Like Rame, the being in front of him was a composite, an assembly many minds within a single artificial body. If, indeed, this simulation had any bearing on reality at all.
“We know the Builders—we also call them the Ancients, sometimes—had a fairly large interstellar empire half a million years ago. We’ve found their…your cities, empty, mostly in rubble, on worlds as close as Chiron, around Alpha Centauri A, and as far away as several thousand light years. We know you came to our solar system when my species didn’t yet exist. You terraformed Mars—gave it oceans and air and enough of a greenhouse effect to be shirtsleeve-comfortable. And you civilized some of the savages you found living on Earth, trained them, and brought them to Mars as workers.”
Archeologists at Cydonia, on Mars, had found the skeletons of Homo erectus, still wearing jumpsuits of some synthetic material that had survived the millennia.
“We also think, think you tampered with the genome of those early proto-humans. Homo sapiens appeared suddenly, almost as if out of nowhere, half a million years ago. A much bigger brain. More powerful intellect. You did all of that, didn’t you?”
The being said nothing, and Garroway continued.
“At some point, you encountered the Xul. You fought a long and terrible war that left your worlds devastated by planetoid bombardment.” Garroway had seen the ruins on Chiron—crumbling, broken ruins extending from horizon to horizon. “We think there was a battle over Mars, that the Xul dropped an asteroid there that blasted away the air and upset the delicate balance of your artificial ecology. Mars died.
“But the Xul overlooked Earth. They went elsewhere, chasing you, and the early humans on the planet survived. We thought they’d wiped you out. Apparently we were wrong.”
“A natural mistake. We left the Galaxy. Most of us.”
“Most of you?”
“Some stayed behind.”
“How?”
“We built…new bodies for ourselves. At the time, we were housed in machine bodies. Very much like the Xul, in fact. Cybernetic organisms are a logical next step in sapient evolution. Once a species learns to pattern minds and upload them into a machine brain, they effectively achieve immortality. Of course, the Xul were hunting for machines. We needed to develop…organic bodies.”
“Organic…” Garroway stopped, his eyes widening. “You…were us.”
“Again, you show admirable insight. We designed the species you refer to as Homo sapiens, and a number of us uploaded our minds into their brains.”
Garroway snorted. “So it was the Adam and Eve scenario after all!”
“I don’t understand?”
“A lot of things about where we came from never quite added up,” Garroway said. “There used to be a popular idea, in fact, that speculated that the first humans might have been the survivors of an interstellar shipwreck. ‘Adam and Eve’ is a reference to an old religious creation myth. The first humans.
“But once we developed our various sciences, and began taking a close look at ourselves, we realized that we had to have evolved on Earth. Humans share over ninety-eight percent of our genome with our next nearest relatives in Earth—the chimpanzee. We share sixty percent of our genome with starfish, for God’s sake. There’s no question that we evolved on Earth, within Earth’s evolving ecosystem.”
“And the physicality of Homo sapiens did indeed evolve on Earth,” the being said. “We just helped it along a little. But the mind…” The being paused. “Te
ll me, General Garroway. Have you wondered, ever, at your species’ fascination with the heavens?”
Garroway nodded. It seemed that humans had always been looking at the stars, weaving them into their stories and their religions. Stonehenge—a colossal calendar and astronomical computer. Religions that placed heaven in, well, the heavens. A feeling that home was out there, somewhere….
“Half a million years ago,” the being said, “Earth’s moon orbited your world considerably farther out. Before we left, we adjusted your moon’s orbit.”
“Why?” Garroway asked, puzzled. Then the answer struck him, and his mind reeled for a moment. “Oh. Eclipses.”
“Exactly.”
One of the great and unlikely coincidences of history was the fact that, from Earth’s surface, both the Sun and the Moon appeared to be about the same size in the sky—about half a degree across. The distance of the Moon varied in the course of its orbits about the Earth. Sometimes farther and smaller, and an eclipse was annular—a ring of sun in the sky. On average, though, it was just far enough to exactly cover the face of the Sun when it passed directly between Sun and Earth, creating the spectacular and awe-inspiring display of a total solar eclipse.
“We felt,” the being continued, “that the occasional total eclipse would help focus the descendents of those we left behind on the stars.”
Of course. Solar eclipses had been important business thousands of years ago. Court astrologers in China had been executed when they failed to predict one. One of the purposes of Stonehenge, he remembered reading, had been to predict eclipses, and the same was true for numerous other Neolithic constructions in both the New and Old Worlds.
They’d moved the fucking Moon….
“If you could do something like that…” he began.
“Why didn’t we stay and fight? A number of reasons. The war was wrecking many of the more habitable worlds across the Galaxy, worlds on which intelligence was either then emerging, or would emerge one day. The Xul are…were paranoid sociopaths. As your xenosophontlogists have speculated, they evolved with a strong bias toward xenophobia. Any species they encountered that might one day pose a threat, they eliminated. By chance, they encountered us after we’d already established a large and fairly secure interstellar empire, one embracing some tens of thousands of worlds, and so the war of extermination was long and it was bloody. We elected to migrate—most of us—to other galaxies, where we could continue to develop and grow in peace.”
“What galaxies? The Magellanics?”
“Outposts,” the being told him, “from which we could keep an eye on things. I don’t think you need to know precisely where we live just now.”
“Of course not.” But we know you’re out there, he thought. And one day, we’ll meet you again.
“By that time, we will be happy to welcome you,” the being said.
Damn. Garroway had forgotten how easily the thing read minds.
“So why are you talking to me now?” Garroway wanted to know. “You could have just let us go our way, thinking you guys were just another super-human intelligence out among the galaxies.”
“For one thing, we are related, as you have just discovered. For another, the elimination of the Xul has freed certain communications channels that have been blocked to us for some time.”
“Communications channels? Oh, the black holes.”
“The black holes. The Xul have been using a number of them, as well as the singularities within the star gates, for their own communicative experiments.”
“‘Communicative experiments.’ You mean spreading their xenophobia?”
“The Xul worldview, yes. That different is a threat. That alien must be destroyed. I see your Associative has been having trouble with this.”
“To tell the truth, we were having trouble with it long before the Xul started tinkering with our heads. Humans don’t need help fearing different.”
“You seem to be adapting well, overall.” The glowing being hesitated for a moment. “There is a third reason for this…interview, General Garroway.”
Something in the way the words hardened in his mind stirred fear. “And what would that be?”
“With the end of the Xul, the Associative is the dominant cultural group within your galaxy. And meta-humanity—Homo sapiens and all of the newer branches of your family, Homo superioris, Homo telae, and the rest—is currently the driving force within that culture. How will you handle that?”
“I don’t think I see what you mean.”
“It is the natural order of things, that sapient species evolve from the nonsapient. Despite appearances at time, intelligence is a survival trait in what you know as Darwinian selection. Given enough time—three to four billion years is usually enough—and sufficient stressors within the environment, the ecosystems of most habitable worlds develop intelligence, usually several times in their histories.
“Of those, only a fraction develop technology, of course. Many intelligent species are restricted by their environments, unable to discover fire, for instance, and through fire, the smelting of metals.”
Literally tens of thousands of Galactic species, Garroway knew, lived under water, or in world-oceans locked beneath global ice caps, or in reducing atmospheres where open flames were impossible.
“Some of them overcome those restrictions,” Garroway suggested. “The Eulers, for example.”
The coleoidian Eulers, evolving within the abyssal depths of their ocean, seemed unlikely prospects for interstellar voyagers. Over the eons in their lightless depths, however, they’d genetically altered creatures not unlike crabs and used these as surrogates to explore the land, to develop an advanced technology, and, eventually, to explore the stars.
Such dogged persistence in the face of evolutionary adversity, Garroway knew, was the exception rather than the rule.
“Indeed they do,” the being said. “Many more choose not to leave their own worlds. This may be for philosophical or religious reasons, for astronomical reasons, or for reasons that we may categorize as a failure of vision.”
“They become too involved in their own planet-bound problems, you mean.”
“That would be one possibility, certainly. But for that fraction, that tiny, precious fraction of technologically gifted sapient species that leave their worlds for the ocean of space, nothing is impossible.”
“Unlimited resources,” Garroway said, nodding, “as they learn to mine asteroids or planetary satellites for raw materials. Abundant living space in orbital habs or other, terraformed planetary surfaces. Sooner or later, a space-faring species will develop solar power, fusion power, antimatter, and quantum power taps. Literally unlimited energy, which is the key to technological growth.”
“Precisely. Spaceflight is a key marker in the development of any intelligent species. Without it, a species is doomed to senescence and decay…and in any case will become extinct when its world dies or its sun explodes. With it, a species will ultimately fill its home star system, then move on to other stars, exploring, colonizing, utilizing. As your species is doing now, General.”
“What’s your point?”
“That any technological species will overrun the entire Galaxy—four hundred billion suns, billions of habitable worlds—in the space of a few million years.”
Garroway had heard the argument before. “You’re talking about the Fermi Paradox,” he said. “Until we reached the stars, we wondered where everybody was.”
“And you discovered the answer to the paradox.”
“Yes. The Xul. Every time a species achieved space flight, they tracked it down and destroyed it.” He cocked his head to one side. “How did you guys escape?”
“The Galaxy is quite large. The Xul were not perfect. In fact, by the time we met them, the Xul were more a network of adaptive systems than intelligence. A force of nature reacting to key stimuli.”
“We’ve seen that as well. They missed plenty of opportunities along the way to destroy us.”
The being was driving at something. Garroway wondered what. “So intelligence is free to spread through the Galaxy again.”
“Is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What will you do, General, when your species encounters a young race, one with aggressive and expansionist tendencies, one that, for whatever reason, decides to take what you have and make it theirs?”
Garroway started to answer, stopped, then shook his head. “I was going to say that the Galaxy is big enough for everyone.”
“And it is not. Life and intelligence will grow and reproduce and evolve, and it will fill every niche, change every world, fill the Galaxy and beyond with itself. It might take a few million years…but that is a scant moment, an eye’s blink compared to the billions of years of the Galaxy’s lifespan.
“There is also the matter of cultural differences. You will meet intelligent species who care nothing for your worlds, but who are driven by such powerful belief systems that they will feel compelled to either force their culture upon you, or to destroy you.”
Garroway nodded. The Xul were proof enough of that. And just within the history of Humankind there’d been so many religions demonstrating the being’s point: the Fascists, the Soviets, the Muslim fundamentalists, the Hegemonists, the Pan-Europeans, the Technophobe extremists, the Divine Sons of God. It was a very long list, and a bloody one.
“How will you respond the next time your way of life, your very survival, is threatened?”
“I…don’t know. I don’t speak for the future.”
“But you do, General. The future is you.”
“It’s in our nature to fight to survive,” Garroway said. “Are you asking for a promise that we not defend ourselves?”
“No. You don’t have the power to make such a promise, for your species or for yourself. But I do want you to consider…options.”
