Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  St. Clair scrolled down through the Roceti data readout for the Kroajid. Even in abbreviated, ephemeris format, there was a lot to absorb.

  Xenospecies Profile

  Sentient Galactic Species 10544

  “Kroajid”

  Star: F9V with M1 companion at 21 AU; Planet: Fourth

  a = 2.25 x 1011m; M = 8.5 x 1027g; R = 8.5 x 106m; p = 5.527 x 107s

  Pd = 5.65 x 104s, G = 13.06 m/s2; Atm: O2 20.1, N2 79.6, CO2 0.3;

  Patm 1.37 x 105 Pa

  Biology: C, N, O, S, H2O, PO4, Cu; TNA

  Genome: 3.2 x 109 bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.051.

  Cupric metal-chelated tetrapyroles in aqueous circulatory fluid.

  Mobile heterotrophs, omnivores, O2 respiration; decapodal locomotion.

  Mildly gregarious, polyspecific [1 genera, 5 species]; sexual.

  Communication: modulated sound at 150 to 300 Hz.

  Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.6 x 1014

  T = ~280o to 310o K; M = 0.9 x 105 g; L: ~3.5 x 1010s

  Vision: ~150 nanometers to 820 nanometers; Hearing: 5 Hz to 19,000 Hz

  Civilization Type: K 1.77

  Technology: FTL; genetic, somatic, and cerebral prostheses; radical life extension; electronic telepathy and virtual immersion; advanced AI. Numerous planetary and deep space colonies. Climate control. Gravity control.

  Societal Code: Technological/Hedonistic

  Dominant culture: loose associative/post-singularity/virtual world upload

  Cultural library: 8.91 x 1019 bits; Intrascended hedonists: 0.98

  Identity: Gatekeepers of Paradise

  Member: Galactic Cooperative

  THE ROCETI version of the Galactic Encyclopedia listed an enormous number of galactic species—the Xalit Ta, or Galactic Cooperative, yes, but a very large number of other species as well. St. Clair was already anticipating finding the time to “play encyclopedia,” as he thought of it . . . simply wandering through its electronic pages to see and marvel at what was there.

  Even limiting his attention to the Kroajid, though, there was a lot of information here. He’d elected to scan the abbreviated version, a kind of digest format that let him hit the high points without becoming bogged down in a sea of data.

  On a separate in-head window, other members of the expedition were questioning the Kroajid Speaker, and responding in turn to its questions about humans. Newton was moderating the discussion, on the theory that a powerful AI might be able to keep track of the intricacies of the conversation while managing to keep the human participants from looking like complete idiots.

  The Kroajid, it appeared, were from a homeworld slightly larger than Earth, with a surface gravity of about 1.3 Gs. Their star was hotter and a little brighter than Sol . . . but the planet was 1.5 AUs out, and surface temperatures were similar to Earth’s. Slightly higher atmospheric pressure, but the gas mix would be breathable by humans.

  So far, so good.

  A Kardashev-1 civilization, they’d learned to utilize all of the energy resources of their home planet but were not yet able to harness the energy of an entire star system. That datum caught St. Clair’s attention right off. It meant the Kroajid were not the builders of the Dyson swarm ahead. So who was?

  Just one more thing to follow up on. Despite their disturbing appearance, their biology was quite similar to humans, with only a few major differences: copper-based blood instead of iron, and a genetic code based on threose nucleic acid instead of DNA. They were heterotrophs: they breathed oxygen and got their food from their environment, rather than manufacturing it through photosynthesis. They possessed ten legs—or leg analogues, at least. Both hearing and vision were better, registering more frequencies, than humans’. An adult massed about ninety kilos, and each had a life expectancy . . . God. It worked out to over ten thousand years. Not quite immortal, but close enough from the human perspective to make little difference.

  And then there was the real kicker: the number of neural connections or their equivalents—it worked out to a hundred times more than those resident within a human brain. Not only did they live for a long time, but these things were smart.

  A lot of questions remained. First, the Kroajid called themselves the Gatekeepers of Paradise. What the hell did that mean? And their society was described as technological/hedonistic. What was that—an observation that they used technology to create pleasure? How could that apply to society on a galactic scale?

  The enormous spider’s face stared at St. Clair within his head, enigmatic and devoid of any emotion that he could read. That, St. Clair reflected, was always the toughest part of First-Contact scenarios. Without emotional cues—the equivalent of emoticons in electronic messages—it was extraordinarily difficult to fully understand an alien speaker. In a way, it was similar to the problem humans experienced with their own sociopaths. With no emotional context, with no understanding of an alien’s histories, myths, social mores, customs, or traditions, it was possible to horribly misunderstand what was being said.

  St. Clair was all too aware that such a misunderstanding now could have disastrous consequences for Ad Astra’s tiny human community adrift in this alien future.

  “We are,” the spider’s inner voice was saying, “in desperate need of your help. We—all sapient life in the Galaxy, in fact—have been under a sustained and escalating attack for some hundreds of millions of years. And we find ourselves helpless in the face of this existential threat. . . .”

  “And what is the nature of this threat?” St. Clair’s Excomm asked. Vanessa Symm had a way of cutting through the crap and getting to the heart of a question.

  “What we know is encoded within the translator mind we gave you,” the Kroajid replied. “We call it the Graal Tchotch.”

  Newton supplied an immediate translation of the alien term:

  “Andromedan Dark.”

  Of course, the Cooperative was 4 billion years removed from the name Andromeda or the ancient myth from which it had come. For hundreds of millions of years, now, Andromeda must have loomed huge in the skies of worlds across the Milky Way, incrementally growing larger eon by passing eon in a slow-motion collision that ultimately would take a billion years to complete. The vast spiral had been called Graal by those verbal species who’d witnessed its approach over the past few million years; the word, according to Roceti, carried a kind of double meaning—the idea of Mind or Life or Consciousness, and also the vast array of intelligence and alien civilization that filled the sky.

  Tchotch, according to the Roceti mind, meant “darkness,” in the sense of a loss of sensation or awareness, an ending; “death” might be a fairer translation. For the Galactic Cooperative, Andromeda signified an approaching darkness that would end sapient life within the Milky Way.

  And the Cooperative wanted Ad Astra’s human population to help in this struggle?

  St. Clair felt an inner stab of doubt. The Humankind of the 23rd century had been given a choice—to avoid alien entanglements and galactic politics, or to embrace them. He’d essentially ended his career by siding with the xenophobes, as the popular media had called them, urging that Earth stay clear of galactic politics until they were better understood. He’d actually experienced a small measure of relief once he’d learned that Ad Astra had been removed from the equation and would no longer have to choose joining a galactic war.

  It appeared that the humans of Ad Astra still faced that unpleasant choice of possible futures after all.

  “My Lord Commander,” St. Clair’s personal secretary whispered in his mind, “the Lord Günter Adler requires a meeting with you.”

  Requires? Requires?

  “Not now, damn it,” St. Clair snapped. “I’m a little busy at the moment.”

  “I will tell him.”

  Personal secretaries were great at keeping schedules and general adminstrative tasks—even going so far as to get to know—and mimic—their organics quite well.

  Bu
t they possessed very little in the way of common sense.

  “Do that,” St. Clair growled.

  The interview with the alien, meanwhile, was continuing. They hadn’t yet learned if the being possessed a personal name; they weren’t even sure yet of its sex, though the encyclopedia reference indicated that Kroajids had at least two. In any case, how were human vocal chords supposed to pronounce a name consisting of the clicking buzz of rapidly vibrating hairs?

  So by general agreement, the humans called the Kroajid Speaker “Gus.” Vanessa Symm had suggested the name on a back conversation channel, calling it an acronym for “Giant ugly spider.” St. Clair had very nearly shot the suggestion down; if the Kroajids heard about the meaning they might get really ugly, and not in a merely physical sense. But the name had already caught on among the bridge personnel and it seemed unlikely that Gus would ever know what a spider was, let alone care about human preconceptions.

  In any case, St. Clair trusted Newton and the translation AIs to exercise a certain amount of discretionary control over the data being exchanged with these rather disturbing-looking entities.

  As it was, Gus was talking about the Xalit Ta’s problems with the Graal Tchotch—the Andromedan Dark.

  “They came out of the Abyss between the Great Spirals hundreds of millions of years ago,” it said. “We—the Cooperative—didn’t recognize them for what they were. We still know almost nothing about their origins or their motives—why they did what they did. At first they came as raiders—as ships and heavily armed warriors, conquering, enslaving, looting. But eventually, the exotic mass streamers came. And the Madness. . . .”

  The Madness. St. Clair’s thoughts jumped to PFC Patterson. The man was still completely psychotic despite the psychnet’s best efforts, wracked by nightmarish terrors and by waking demons no one else could see, his language reduced to gibbering word salad.

  Was that the answer to what had happened to Patterson and Francesca, these “exotic mass streamers” Gus was talking about? And Mike, the vacuumorph, had recorded something that looked like tendrils or streamers reaching across the gulf from Andromeda. . . .

  “Their appearances were rare,” Gus went on. “Perhaps one raid in a hundred thousand years. But they gradually became more frequent. One appearance every ten thousand years or so. Then a thousand.”

  “But you knew you were under attack, right?” St. Clair shook his head, trying to understand. “And you had time to organize a defense.”

  “At first there was nothing against which to defend,” Gus replied. “Pinpricks, easily ignored.”

  St. Clair’s mind came up with a seemingly appropriate analogy: mosquito bites.

  “But with more and more attacks—” he said.

  “Things . . . were not so easy,” Gus replied. “Many times, the Lessers united in the common defense, mustering vast battlefleets, establishing empires or political unions embracing millions of worlds, building fortresses, developing weapons. But the invaders were stronger, more numerous, and possessed technologies far in advance of theirs. And always, always the Madness came. . . .”

  “Lessers?”

  “Sapient species that have yet to Transcend.”

  “And by ‘Transcend,’ I assume you mean what we call the Technological Singularity.”

  Gus hesitated, and St. Clair realized the being must be internally seeking information from the data already garnered from Ad Astra’s files.

  “A point of extreme technological disequilibrium,” Gus said after a moment, “with certain technologies increasing asymptotically to the point where the definitions of Life and Mind have been substantially transformed, yes. In particular, the rapid evolution of what you call AI and SAI, the transformative effects of nanotechnology allowing individual immortality, and the development of digitized life within an electronic environment are all factors. Most technic civilizations go through numerous singularities over the course of some thousands or millions of years, not just one.”

  “AI,” of course, was artificial intelligence, while “SAI” was artificial super-intelligence, electronic minds godlike in their power, scope, and abilities, at least from the human perspective.

  “So even these Transcended civilizations couldn’t stop the raids?”

  “Can’t . . . or won’t. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which is the case.”

  “Won’t?” Symm asked.

  “For millennia, some of us fought them,” Gus said. “But the vast majority of the Galaxy’s population had ascended, intrascended, or parascended. The machines the various organic races left behind had supported civilization for eons in perfect peace, an eons-long galactic golden age. They didn’t know about . . .”

  “War?” St. Clair said, supplying the word.

  “Yes. We’ve seen mention of it within your electronic records. A strange and gruesome concept. An aberration . . .” The Kroajids had learned a fair amount about Humankind in the preliminary exchange of data, but apparently they were having difficulty with some of the concepts. St. Clair found himself with the same problem.

  “You used a couple of terms there I’m not familiar with,” St. Clair said. “Intrascended? Parascended?”

  “You are obviously familiar with Transcendence—the term you used was technological singularity.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are many different possible directions toward which a technic civilization may turn. Ascension generally refers to physical discorporation. Beings discard their bodies and emerge as pure mentality. Intrascension is when the civilization creates an interior, digital realm for its members, one richer and more rewarding than the original universe. I believe you refer to uploading to a virtual reality. Parascension involves moving into a higher dimensional plane or parallel universe. Euphoriascension is when a civilization physically withdraws from everything except individual pleasure. There are others. . . .”

  “I see.”

  St. Clair was impressed. The translation AIs appeared to be quite handy at making up neologisms to describe things beyond human experience. He was also becoming concerned, however. What was it the Roceti Encyclopedia readout had said? He pulled up the relevant portion and read it carefully.

  Technological/Hedonistic

  Dominant culture: loose associative/post-singularity/virtual world upload

  Intrascended hedonists: 0.98

  “The translator device you gave us,” he said, “calls you Kroajids ‘intrascended hedonists.’ You don’t look like you’re jacked into a pleasure machine.”

  “Of course not. About two percent of my species has not yet intrascended. We protect the nest nodes, help maintain the machinery of civilization, and perform our reproductive duties for the race. After about a thousand years, we will enter the nest, and our young will take over the guardianship.”

  “Ah. The ‘Gatekeepers of Paradise.’ ” It made sense now.

  “Precisely.”

  Just how many galactic species had crawled into their own pleasure centers and abandoned all involvement with the rest of the cosmos? From the way Gus had described the different types of transcendence, the percentage might be high . . . very high.

  On the Earth that had been St. Clair’s home some 4 billion years ago, a growing number of people had become wireheads or pluggers or jackbrains; the slang terms were many and varied. With in-head implants chelated onto the surface of the cerebral cortex and deeper, within the subcortex, it was relatively simple to use specially programmed nano to open electrical connections directly into the pleasure center of the human brain. That kind of nano programming was illegal, of course; thousands died every year when they stopped eating because the continuous orgasms they were experiencing seemed so much better than life.

  There’d been serious speculation that such technologies might explain the Great Silence. Now, it seemed they might actually have confirmation.

  In St. Clair’s era, the idea that the sky truly was filled with life and intelligence and far-flung alien civilizations
was brand new. In fact, until the Sirius Expedition, which had launched just thirty-eight years before the Ad Astra had left Earth orbit, Humankind, so far as anyone could tell, had been alone in the Galaxy, and the night sky had seemed starkly, uncompromisingly empty of other minds besides Man’s. That had been the essence of Fermi’s famous paradox: Where is everyone?

  St. Clair had been a child then—he was forty-seven now—and had experienced the persistent mental itch of the Fermi paradox firsthand. The premise was simple. In the 13 billion years since the big bang, life and intelligence could have, should have arisen on billions of worlds within the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Even without faster-than-light, each intelligent species could have explored the entire Galaxy and colonized every available world within a few million years—an eye’s blink compared to the vistas of Deep Time available to them. With the development of gravitic FTL, the question became more pressing still.

  Where were they?

  He still vividly remembered the celebrations—the fireworks and parties and We-Are-Not-Alone broadcasts and downloads—when news returned from Sirius about the Medusae and the Coadunation.

  He also remembered the paranoia, the fear of alien invasion or the imminent extinction of humankind.

  As it turned out, Fermi’s paradox had possessed a reasonable explanation—a series of them, in fact, nested together like Russian matrioshka dolls. Many galactic species never developed advanced technologies—in particular those like terrestrial dolphins, evolving within marine environments or on worlds without free oxygen, which never developed fire or the smelting of metals. A small percentage—like the Medusae—managed to develop technology despite such handicaps, but those who made it out of their oceans or anoxic atmospheres still faced a long series of filters. Many vanished into extinction due to war or planetary disasters or technological mischance. Many more turned inward, uninterested in the colonization of a galaxy or in interaction with other species, or they were more interested in the pursuit of pleasure or the inner workings of the mind than in other physical worlds.

  Which brought speculation about the Fermi paradox down to the Hedonistic Imperative.