by Ian Douglas
Whatever it was emerged from the vortex of movement and sound . . . a black tentacle unfolding . . . then collapsing into a sphere once more.
And then Patterson was dragged down the steps and St. Clair lost that instant’s glimpse of indescribable strangeness.
Quickly, he changed channels once more, looking through the camera on the flight deck bulkhead. Seconds after the Marines departed for a lower deck, the flat, rotated section of the image pivoted sharply, like a door slamming shut. The wind ceased abruptly and the fog dissipated.
Whatever that thing on the lander’s bridge had been, it was now gone.
“Newton,” he said in his thoughts. “What the hell was that?”
“Unknown,” the AI replied. “I don’t have enough data to form a conclusion.”
And that, St. Clair thought, summed up a key difference between human intelligence and AI: humans could make guesses and jump to conclusions on no data at all, something that was difficult to impossible for machine minds.
Except that he had no idea what he’d just seen either.
SUBCOMMANDER JABLONSKY stared into indescribable wonder.
His e-link through Newton to the Newton emulation gave him full, direct, and immediate access to what he was already thinking of as the Encyclopedia Galactica. And Tomasz Jablonsky realized that he was seeing things—knowing things—that no human had ever witnessed before.
Encyclopedia Galactica. The term had been invented by Isaac Asimov, the author of a twentieth-century science-fiction series called Foundation. Later, scientists working to discover evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations had suggested that technically advanced galactic cultures might put all of their history, science, and culture into nested radio transmissions that other civilizations listening across the cosmos might discover and interpret.
Such a collection of data had never been found, a silence leading many SETI researchers to assume that Humankind was alone in the Galaxy. Not until the encounter with the Coadunation at Sirius was the true reason learned: galactic civilizations tended to abandon radio as a means for interstellar communication early in their technic histories, preferring the far sharper and clearer neutrino channels to the static-blasted noise of the electromagnetic spectrum. More advanced civilizations usually abandoned all speed-of-light transmissions entirely, using instead systems involving quantum entanglement to signal instantly across vast gulfs of space.
What SETI researchers had called the Great Silence was due almost entirely to what had become known as the jungle drum effect. Human scientists, even as late as the early twenty-second century, had been like primitive tribespeople in the jungles of New Guinea, listening for jungle drums while utterly unaware of the radio and TV signals flooding down out of their sky every second.
The Coadunation reportedly had a kind of Encyclopedia Galactica on-line, but human researchers had only glimpsed a few entries. One of the goals of the Tellus Ad Astra expedition had been direct access to that data.
The Coadunation E.G. was now lost, but a different one appeared to be accessible through the torpedo. Jablonsky let his mental focus enter the in-head imagery, where an array of corridors or tunnels had unfolded in his mind, each brightly lit and extending off into infinity, each lined with myriad doorways opening into otherness. There were worlds in there, millions of them, each described in exacting detail of physics, chemistry, and biology . . . and sophont species . . . and technologies . . . and cultures and metacultures, a bewildering profusion of ideas and information.
Jablonsky didn’t know where to begin.
Hell, he couldn’t even figure out how the information was organized. There was an index, but it wasn’t alphabetical, certainly. The data was catalogued by symbols appearing in his mind, but it wasn’t related to English, or even anything like a spoken language. Think a question, and the appropriate gateway appeared.
Picking a virtual gateway at random, he entered.
A gas giant, banded and multi-hued, hung in space beneath the glow of a distant, shrunken sun. A ring system, as he focused his attention on it, proved not to be one of rock debris or ice, but comprised billions upon billions of discrete orbital facilities, colonies like Tellus, as well as factories, power plants, computer nodes, and structures for which there was no easy definition. A dozen natural satellites had been reworked, becoming either machine-city worlds or artificially constructed and maintained biomes. Hundreds of billions of sophonts lived in this one artificial system, though only a fraction was biological in nature.
There were minds here of a scale and depth and scope that mere humans could never grasp or understand. . . .
Jablonsky jerked back from the inner vision of that world-system with a gasp, as though awakening from a nightmare. For a fraction of a second, he’d been looking into other minds, and those minds had been looking back.
It was time to call in the ship’s skipper.
“TO SEE technology on such a scale,” Dumont said. “Incredible.”
The sun was very slowly setting, the light deepening to a bloody hue. As darkness fell on this side of the Alderson disk, dawn was breaking on the opposite surface, the sunrise witnessed by a handful of subNewton probes and teleoperated remotes. St. Clair rode one of those remotes, along with the electronic presence of Dr. Dumont. The probe was drifting just above a titanic gray wall rising nearly 115 kilometers above the disk’s surface. To one side were the heat-baked plains of the disk’s inner section, shadowed by that wall now from the early morning light. On the other side was the empty gulf within which, 60 million kilometers away, the orange sun shone.
Though minute compared to the vast expanse of the Alderson disk, the wall was a titanic engineering accomplishment all by itself, completely encircling the local sun on the inner edge of the disk. Together with a similar, smaller wall at the outer edge, and with counterparts to both walls on the disk’s reverse side, it served to help physically contain the enormous structure’s atmosphere.
But evidently it did more than that.
“And you think this is how they generated power?” St. Clair asked.
“I don’t know if the builders used other types of power generation,” Dumont said. “They certainly had the technological know-how for nuclear fusion and vacuum energy taps. But our instruments show that energy is still flowing out from the central void, almost certainly from the wall itself. It appears that a large percentage of the disk’s energy is produced by the thermoelectric effect, and that it’s produced on an almost inconceivable scale.”
“One side of the wall is hot,” St. Clair said, translating techspeak to English, “and the other side is cold. The temperature difference generates electricity.”
“Precisely.”
“Shouldn’t the cold side warm up after a few million years?”
“Maybe after a few billion,” Dumont replied. “Maybe not even then. The north and south poles on Mercury still have shadowed pockets at minus two hundred after four and a half billion years.”
It was funny, St. Clair thought, how even members of the scientific community continued referring to Earth and the worlds of the solar system as if they were just the way Ad Astra had left them, untouched by the passing of eons. It was as though human minds, no matter how bright, simply hadn’t yet been able to assimilate what had happened.
In truth, things had been happening so quickly since Ad Astra had emerged in this far-future time that no one had had the time to assimilate much of anything. Since the attack on board the lander—there was no other way to describe the incident—St. Clair had ordered the surface exploration team to return to Ad Astra. Any remaining investigation of the surface would be carried out through remotes, at least until the humans knew just what they were dealing with.
“We’ll need to get inside the structure to see what’s actually going on,” Dumont continued.
“Can we fly down closer? Get a closer look?”
“In about five minutes we could. Time lag . . . remember?”
; St. Clair bit off a bitter imprecation. Caught out again! He and Dumont were mentally riding the subNewton probe, which was some five light-minutes from Ad Astra’s current position and the location of their bodies. They could order the probe to go in closer to those monumental engineering structures below . . . but it would be five minutes before the signal reached the probe, and another five minutes before they saw a response back at Ad Astra.
“Remote teleoperation,” Dumont said with somber deliberation, “sucks.” He hesitated, then added, “My Lord Commander, pulling us off the disk was a mistake. There is so much more we can learn about alien technology here.”
“Perhaps. But I won’t jeopardize the lives of more of our people. Not until we know what’s going on down there.”
He felt Dumont’s smile. “The monster?”
Rumors had been flying for hours about the thing that had appeared inside the first lander.
“That’s right.”
“Obviously some sort of defensive show,” Dumont said, dismissive. “Probably a programmed hologram.”
“Holograms don’t suck the air from a pressurized spacecraft, Doctor,” St. Clair said. “And they generally don’t drive a combat-veteran Marine insane.”
“You don’t know that, Lord Commander. Maybe the hologram was a recording of something terrifying.”
“Terrifying enough to send a Marine off beam? I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he’s not insane. Maybe he’s just in shock.”
“It’ll do as a working definition of ‘insane’ until Ad Astra’s medical staff tells us otherwise.” St. Clair had heard the man’s screaming. Dumont had not.
The Marine, Patterson, had been brought back off the disk and was being kept in sick bay, heavily sedated. Initial medical reports were not encouraging. The man had sustained physical damage to portions of his brain—in particular to regions in contact with his electronic interface implants.
And he appeared to be suffering from some sort of extreme schizophrenic break with reality.
A second Elsie had been dispatched to the surface—despite Dumont’s vocal protests—and the human members of the team all were now back on board the ship. Dumont had agreed to continue his explorations by way of e-linking with remotes, but he wasn’t at all happy about it.
“Lord Commander,” Dumont said patiently, “higher forms of life can’t survive on this artifact. Atmospheric pressure is less than a quarter of an atmosphere. There are some forms of vegetation, a variety of microscopic life—single-cell organisms like bacteria and protozoans—and nothing else. Whatever Patterson saw, it was not a ‘monster’ within the accepted definition of the word. I really can’t say what caused the pressure drop on board the lander. At a guess, I would say a meteorite impact breached the hull, and that the breach was subsequently sealed by the lander’s own damage-control systems. The shock might well have caused a young, impressionable Marine to hallucinate.”
“Hallucinate? Come on, Doctor—”
“Every one of us had been shaken by the sight of that statue, or whatever it was . . . and Patterson had a fright when he accidentally made it collapse. Suggestion can be quite powerful under the right conditions.”
“And what did I see, Doctor? I was watching through the flight deck camera, remember, and through Patterson’s helmet cam.”
He felt Dumont’s discomfort at the question. He obviously didn’t want to call St. Clair a liar or suggest the mission commander was hallucinating, but clearly he also couldn’t bring himself to believe in that space-twisting boogeyman apparently recorded by the lander’s instrumentation. “I don’t know. An electrical fault, perhaps, generated by the meteor strike? Or an artifact of the failure of the lander’s AI. The incident requires further investigation, I agree, but I promise you it was not some sort of encounter with a creature native to the disk.”
A chime sounded within St. Clair’s head, a recall request. Damn. “Excuse me, Dr. Dumont. They’re after me again.”
Dumont grunted. “You know where to find me, my lord.”
And St. Clair woke up.
He was back in a virtual projection chair in his office on board the Ad Astra. One bulkhead showed the Alderson disk below, superimposed against the alien magnificence of the colliding galaxies. A red light winked on his console.
“I’m here,” he said. “What is it?”
“Urgent call from Subcommander Tomasz Jablonsky,” a computer’s voice told him.
He sighed. His unsatisfactory discussion with Dumont had left him irritable and impatient. “Put it through.”
“Lord Commander? This is—”
“Yes, Jablonsky. What is it?”
“We’ve established a neural linkage with the alien torpedo, my lord. You wanted to know.”
“Excellent, thank you. What have you learned?”
“As we suspected, it contains a rather extensive database. It should enable us to interface with local AIs. And . . . it may serve as a communications device.”
“ ‘May?’ ”
“I’m not sure about that, my lord. But as I was poking around in the thing’s virtual space, I had the definite impression that I was being . . . watched.”
“A virself?”
“Something like that, my lord. I’m not sure. I pulled out. I didn’t want to initiate contact without orders.”
St. Clair caught something in Jablonsky’s words, an undertone of . . . what? Fear? Or awe? Something had shaken him, though.
“Quite right. Okay, Jablonsky. You have a research team in mind?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Put me on it. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
“Aye, aye, my lord.”
The news was exciting. It suggested that they might be able to directly communicate with some of the sophonts inhabiting this far-future era. That Jablonsky had felt something was strongly suggestive.
When you were communicating with someone through a neural link, you were always aware of them, a sense that someone was there beside you even when you couldn’t see them. The sensation, generated by neural implants within the temporal lobes of the brain, was called virself, the expression of a virtual self. When St. Clair had been sharing the robot probe with Dumont a few minutes earlier, he’d clearly felt Dumont’s presence, even sensed both a smile and some emotional discomfort, as though the xenotechnologist had literally been there beside him.
If he’d felt something similar from a presumably alien presence, it suggested that the artifact could be used for real-time communication with its owners.
And that was precisely what they needed right now, if they were going to make any sense of their situation.
SUBCOMMANDER MARIA Francesca hung suspended within her electronic web, monitoring the operations of several dozen spacecraft in Ad Astra’s immediate vicinity. As CAS, she oversaw all flight operations within a hundred thousand kilometers of the Ad Astra, providing necessary human judgment and input for an operation that might otherwise have been delegated to an AI. As a cyborg, Francesca provided both the machine precision and the human discernment required by the job, and to a degree considerably greater than that possible for ordinary implant technology. Francesca’s neural implants were far more extensive than those used by most twenty-second-century humans. Virtually every part of her brain was hardwired into the computer network that supported her.
As she herself liked to say, for Class-3 cyborgs it was almost impossible to tell where the human organism stopped and the purely machine began.
PriFly—Primary Flight Control—was located in a zero-gravity section of the engineering module, close to the flight deck. There, Francesca floated in the center of a cramped and industrial-looking compartment, nude, connected to the surrounding bulkheads by cables growing from her torso, the back of her neck, her shaved scalp, her groin, ankles, and wrists. There were no visual displays in the compartment, but they weren’t necessary. In-head displays gave her the illusion of floating in empty space, with a navigation gri
d extending off into infinity in three dimensions. Icons marked the various Ad Astra spacecraft currently deployed in nearby space. A glance at any icon and a thoughtclick, and she was there, the spacecraft hanging like a toy beneath her gaze, her mind in direct communication with the pilot or the controlling AI.
“Blue Seven, you are clear for approach,” she said in her mind. “Come to one-three-niner by three-three-four and reduce velocity to two hundred meters per second.”
“Copy, PriFly,” the fighter’s pilot replied. “Coming to one-three-niner by three-three-four. Velocity two-zero-zero mps.”
The pilot’s voice showed stress. Sublieutenant Ogden Maxwell had been on perimeter patrol for more than seven hours. He was tired . . . fried was the term used by the pilots. His med readout showed his reactions down by almost 20 percent.
“You’re in the slot, Seven,” she said. “Call the ball.”
The terminology was from ancient wet navy carrier approaches, when the aviator would visually line up a round light—the “ball”—with other lights to put himself on the proper glide path. The procedure was automated now, with no visual cues, but in his head Maxwell was lining up on a circle of virtual landing lights and nudging his fighter in.
“Ball,” Maxwell’s voice said.
“Confirm ball, Seven. You’re good. Reduce velocity to—”
Something hit her.
The shock knocked her out of her e-connections to the ship’s systems and brought her shrieking into full awareness of her compartment, her electronic links with Maxwell and the ship’s AI arrays gone. Pain avalanched through her entire being, synapses firing randomly as her body twitched and jerked, a puppet tangled in its strings, the spasms so violent she tore free from several of her electronic feeds.
