by Ian Douglas
But they could taste the concentration of Mind close by, and were drawn by it, relentlessly, inexorably, hungrily. . . .
And like a brood of vast and eldritch spiders, they began to weave their webs of dark-matter gossamer.
CHAPTER
NINE
“So let’s see what’s on the agenda for today,” St. Clair said.
He was on the veranda outside his home, looking down on the sprawl of the village of Bethesda shrouded in trees beneath his cliff-side perch. The sunbeam high overhead was always on, of course, but it was shrouded in a half-sleeve that rotated in synch with the ship’s 24-hour day. At the moment, the sunbeam was being filtered through the leading edge of the sleeve, bathing this part of the starboard hab in a deep, golden hue that was supposed to imitate the light immediately after sunrise. St. Clair didn’t think it looked much like dawn; the spinward horizon curved up and over into the sky, bathed in full daylight, ruining the illusion.
It was beautiful nonetheless.
St. Clair wasn’t watching the faux dawn, however. With his eyes closed, he was scanning through a list prepared by his personal avatar overnight—issues that had been forwarded to him for his approval, review, or simply need-to-know awareness.
Most related in one way or another to his position as commander of the Ad Astra, of course: requests, requisition approvals, the schedule for a number of upcoming captain’s masts, plans for drills and systems upgrades—the minutiae of running a large military command far from any hierarchy of official authority. There were also social functions listed, starting with a party at the Lloyds’ residence tomorrow night. He scowled at that one. He certainly had no desire to go.
He found, though, that “desire” and “duty” rarerly intersected.
Unhappily, then, he mentally checked that one as “accept” and sent the RSVP. It was vital to keep up appearances just now.
The most urgent point on the list was a political problem, and one he’d frankly been expecting. A delegation of politicos, infrastructure technicians, and scientists wanted to talk to him about what the hell was going on.
Mixed in with the almost-million civilian techies—as the naval personnel called them—aboard Tellus were a few thousand politicians, assistants, diplomats and diplomatic staff, plus about fifty thousand infrastructure specialists—the plumbers, electricians, AI programmers, agrospecialists, nanotechnologists, assembly and repair workers, and all the others who made the immense Tellus cylinders work.
Günter Adler, as the senior representative for Earth’s UE Cybercouncil, was in overall charge of this motley group, though his actual position was more of that of an advisor to the Tellus Government Council. The Council’s actual head was the mission’s senior ambassador, Clayton Lloyd, with a number of elected officials representing the entire civilian population.
It was an unwieldy system, as could only be expected with a mix of military and civilian populations and separate hierarchies of command. St. Clair had been happy that the journey to the galactic core was only going to last a few days at most, and he only now was beginning to come to grips with the realization that the ad hoc dual government—with all of the overlapping responsibilities and infighting and politicking among the various factions—was something he was going to have to deal with for a long time to come.
Possibly a very long time.
At least the current situation offered a semblance of order. Without it there would have been sheer chaos, and most likely a need to put the entire population under direct military control.
And St. Clair knew how popular that idea would be.
Somehow, you expected scientists and technicians to be reasonable, rational, and willing to cooperate in the interests of the greatest good. In St. Clair’s experience, however, that was rarely the case. They could be a fractious, loud, and obnoxious lot . . . and the more senior and respected a scientist, the more likely he was to be trouble.
That, however, was Adler’s problem, not his. Or, at least, it should be. He made a note to talk to both Adler and Lloyd later, and see if they could handle this demand for a meeting instead of him. He had other things to worry about, things that didn’t involve playing babysitter for a million disgruntled researchers and politicos.
Such as . . .
He saw a message that had come through from the bridge watch last night, and scanned through it with interest. Ad Astra’s long-distance sensors had picked up a number of neutrino beacons, point sources that likely marked centers of civilization—inhabited worlds, artifacts like the Harmony Habitat, and so on. One, it turned out, was relatively close, about twelve hundred light years. That was why the request for maneuvering last night; Ad Astra’s navigation department had shifted a hundred light years to one side in order to get a parallax shift on the object, and simple geometry, then, gave the object’s exact distance.
Astrogation and the astronomy department had turned optical and infrared sensors on the object, expecting to image a planetary system. What they’d found, however, was something different.
St. Clair studied a series of false-color images. The object appeared to be a typical star system in the process of being born—a flat accretion disk around a fairly normal K-class star. Analysis of the disk, however, suggested that it was not a dust cloud, but a solid object, hot at its inner edge, close to its sun, cold farther out. The whole thing was about 1.6 astronomical units across.
He opened a channel. “Bridge, this is St. Clair.”
“Go ahead, my lord.” That was Symm, already at her station. Did that woman ever sleep?
“Good morning, Van. Are we still locked on to that disk or whatever? I just read the report.”
“We are, sir. All systems are ready for shift at your order.”
“I’ll be right up.” He could have given the order, but he wanted to be in his command seat when the shift took place. He wanted to see this thing with his own eyes.
That . . . and to be ready if there were any unpleasant surprises awaiting the Ad Astra when she made the jump.
Lisa appeared at his shoulder with a cup of coffee for him. He accepted it, thanked her, and admired her lithe form as he took a sip. Neither of them had bothered to dress yet, and he was deeply tempted to take her back to bed.
But, damn it, it looked like they’d been waiting on him since 0300 hours that morning.
While there was no immediate rush, he was disinclined to hold up the entire show any longer than necessary. He took another swallow of coffee, handed Lisa the cup, and kissed her. “Gotta run, babe. Thanks.”
Twenty minutes later he floated onto Ad Astra’s bridge and maneuvered himself into the command chair. The deck, bulkheads, and overhead all were set to display the exterior view—the titanic embrace of two colliding galaxies filling heaven with light. A bright red reticule floated directly ahead, with a flashing red dot at its center. Alphanumerics identified it as NPS-076—Neutrino Point Source 76, their destination.
“All stations ready?” he asked.
“All departments report ready for jump, my lord,” Symm replied. “Power is at optimal levels. Sensor and weapons stations at full readiness.”
“Very well. Kick it.”
For a long moment, the titanic energies within Ad Astra’s belly grew . . . gathered . . . took form. Power drawn from the vacuum itself tugged at the fabric of space, twisting them through higher dimensions.
The sky went black . . . then flashed on again.
Little had changed; even the nearest stars, most of them, were so distant that a shift of a hundred light years hadn’t changed their apparent positions at all—a measure of just how vast this volume of space actually was.
But one thing had changed. There was a horizon now.
AMBASSADOR CLAYTON Lloyd was having breakfast with Günter Adler. He accepted a plate of eggs and stir-fry from one of Adler’s naked robots, and smiled at his host. “Nice place you’ve got here, Günter.”
“Thank you. One does the best one can with what
one has available.”
“Why did you want to see me?”
“Straight to the point, eh? I like that.” A robot brought them both coffee. “Thank you, m’dear. Yes, well, the situation has changed drastically in the last twenty-four hours. We need to . . . coordinate our actions.”
“Actions to do what?”
“I’m sure you must realize that the chances of our ever getting back to our own time are miniscule. As close to zero as makes no difference at all.”
Lloyd nodded, taking a bite of eggs. “Mm. Yes,” he said, chewing. “There’s already talk in the diplomatic staff about starting a colony on our own out here. Might not be so bad.”
“You don’t have anyone waiting for you at home?”
“A brother and his family. But, you know, I wasn’t expecting to leave Harmony for at least ten years. All of us were volunteers for the long haul.”
“I don’t think any of us expected it to be quite this long, though.”
“Four billion years? No. It’s strange, you know. Everything and everyone we knew and loved back on Earth is dust. Earth herself may no longer exist. And yet we talk about people ‘waiting for us at home.’ ”
“You know what I mean. If the physics boys can crack the time-travel problem, we might be able to get home. To the world we left.”
“Maybe. But in the meantime, we could do worse.” Lloyd gestured at the sky arching over the deck, a sky filled with landscape—trees, paths, streams, villages, all seen from above. “Humanity could start again.”
“Indeed. Either way, though, we’re going to need help.”
“Help? You mean from aliens?”
“Precisely. We need to find a local civilization, one technically advanced enough to help us. They might have the key to time travel. At the very least, they’ll be able to tell us about the galactic culture in this epoch, if there is one. Who’s friendly. Who’s not. That sort of thing.”
Lloyd picked up his coffee. “I can’t argue with that.”
“And that means we need to decide what we’re going to do about the military component of this expedition.”
“Well, the Marines will be useful. For keeping order, if nothing else.”
“Actually, I’m talking about the Navy.”
“St. Clair? Is he a problem?”
“He might be. He’s . . . independent. Not what you would call a team player. And he may not be willing to just step aside when we—you and I—decide that it’s time to dispense with military law and set up our own, ah, state.”
“You think it’ll come to that, Günter?”
“We need to be ready for the possibility. Just in case St. Clair doesn’t see reason.”
“I see.” He took another bite and chewed thoughtfully for a long moment. “I will say I’ve noticed that he tends to rely on, shall we say, a martial frame of mind when dealing with aliens. He didn’t trust the Coadunation, you know.”
“I’ve seen his records.”
“If we do meet an advanced technic species, if he decides to shoot first and ask questions later—”
“Precisely my point, Clayton. We may need to move quickly to take any military options off the table.”
“Hm. Agreed.” A slight tremor ran through Lloyd. He looked up, startled. “What was that?”
“A shift. We’ve jumped.”
“Where?”
“Let’s see.” Adler gave a mental command, and a holofield display opened next to the table. “Display exterior view,” Adler said, and the image took on form and color—deep space, the frozen mingling of two galaxies . . . and something else.
Lloyd gasped, nearly dropping his coffee mug.
Adler studied the image for a moment, then nodded. “It appears to me, Ambassador, that we’ve found our technically advanced civilization.”
“Ob-obviously,” Lloyd said, picking up a napkin and dabbing at the coffee spilled on his clothing. “But what is that thing?”
“AN ALDERSON DISK,” St. Clair said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper. The object ahead evoked that level of awe.
“A what, my lord?” Anna Denisova asked.
“A very, very large artificial world.”
“It looks like a vinyl record,” Hargrove said.
“What the hell is a vinyl record?” Symm asked.
“An old form of data storage,” Hargrove replied. “For music, from a couple of centuries ago. I collect them.”
St. Clair had seen historical images of what Hargrove was talking about, and the comparison was apt. The hole in the disk ahead was considerably larger than the one in an old-fashioned phonograph record, so it looked more like a flat halo, but he could understand why Hargrove had made his comment. One difference, though, was that a K-class star, a little less massive than Sol and with an orange hue to it, hung suspended at the precise center of the central hole. The surface, which was mottled dark and light gray, didn’t have the spiral grooves of a record, but instead showed numerous tiny variations in color, a kind of graininess that gave a sense of texture, and which hinted at large—very large—geometric shapes and designs.
“We have some figures coming through,” Denisova said, staring at the holoprojected virtual screen in front of her. “My God . . .”
“Let me see them,” St. Clair said.
A channel opened, and the data began scrolling through a window newly opened in his mind.
He suddenly understood Denisova’s reaction.
The disk was almost one and a half astronomical units wide, from one edge to the other, and some four thousand kilometers thick. The central hole within which the star resided was just over half an AU wide, which meant that the inner edge of the platter was a quarter of an AU—over 37 million kilometers from the surface of the star. The total mass was on the order of 12 × 1030 tons.
Or almost three thousand times the mass of Sol.
Ad Astra currently was about one AU from the outer edge of the disk, and slightly above its plane, looking down on a surface that from this distance seemed as smooth and flat as the surface of a 2-D map. Subtle shadings and pixel-like mottlings, though, suggested a much higher level of detail that would become visible from closer in.
“Somebody made that?” Cameron said. “Why?”
“I’d say a more pertinent question would be how,” Symm said.
“I doubt we’d be able to understand how,” St. Clair said. “That artifact must represent a technology tens or hundreds of thousands of years ahead of ours. As for the why, living space comes to mind.”
“People actually live on that thing?” Cameron asked.
“Well, not people, probably. Not unless we’re looking at something Humankind’s remote descendents built. But Alderson disks were proposed in the twentieth century as a possible example of ultra-large-scale mega-engineering—cosmic engineering, like Dyson spheres or ringworlds.”
The concept had first been proposed in the 1970s by a scientist named Dan Alderson as a means for an advanced civilization to create a lot of living room for a variety of species. Beings adapted to a cold environment would find a comfortable climate farther out on the disk, while thermophiles would be happy closer in to the sun. In between was a Goldilocks zone millions of kilometers wide, where humans, or beings like humans, could live in comfort.
The living area of the moderate-climate zone might be as high as 50 million times the total surface of the Earth.
Perhaps strangest of all, the gravity on such a world would be perpendicular to the plane. There would be odd edge effects near the inner and outer rims, but a disk of this size would have a surface gravity of around one G . . . and both sides of the platter would be habitable. The sun, gravitationally locked into the center, could be set to bob up and down, illuminating first one side of the disk, and then the other.
“Three thousand times the mass of the sun,” Denisova said, reading the data. “Hell—where did they get all the building material? A star is going to hold ninety-nine percent of the system’s mass. The
y couldn’t just disassemble the planets.”
“A civilization with transmutation,” the voice of Francis Dumont pointed out, “could have mined stars for hydrogen, then manufactured heavier elements from that. Or they could have tapped a nearby molecular cloud, which can be made up of millions of solar masses.”
“I’m glad you’re on line, Dr. Dumont,” St. Clair said. “I’m curious about something, and I’d like your take on it.”
“You mean other than the impossible on the screen before us?”
“Yes—other than that.
“I assume you’re talking about the lack of clouds, then?”
“Exactly. Our sensors are picking up some atmosphere down there . . . but it’s damned thin, about twenty percent of a standard atmosphere. Mostly nitrogen and oxygen, but there’s also a lot of hydrogen and helium.”
“That may be stuff picked up from the local solar wind,” Dumont said. “The original atmosphere may have been mostly stripped away a long time ago.”
“Wait a minute,” Holt said. “That thing had an atmosphere?”
“Of course,” St. Clair told her. “That’s the whole idea, right? Build a whopping big world, generate an atmosphere, and live there. Maybe put up big walls so that you could have different gas mixes for different biologies. But the sensor readings are showing what must have been a fairly earthlike atmosphere once.”
“Yeah,” Denisova said. “Very thin and very dry.”
“It’s been a dead world,” Dumont added, “for a very, very long time.”
“How long, Doctor?”
“Hard to say. Tens of millions of years? Possibly hundreds of millions. The amount of hydrogen that’s accumulated from the stellar wind suggests at least that long.”
“Then there’s no one here after all,” Symm said. She sounded sad.
“Probably not,” St. Clair said. “But we won’t know for sure until we go down and see for ourselves. CAS!”
