by Ian Douglas
“Are you a Prim?” he asked.
“Hell, no. Born and raised in Harlan, Kentucky. I used to go hiking in the Appalachians.”
“Sorry, Harriet. I didn’t—”
“Hey, it’s okay! Not a problem. But there are monogies who didn’t grow up in the Peripheries, you know.”
“I do now.”
“You’re from the Periphery, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “That was a long time ago, though.”
“I thought I’d seen something about it in your bio.”
He wanted to change the subject, wanted it a lot.
“So . . . do you think the Sh’daar will succeed where we’ve failed?” he asked her.
She sighed. “Damned if I know. It’s a long shot . . . just because the Sh’daar, almost by definition, are pre-singularity. The Rosette Aliens . . . well, we don’t understand them, but that’s probably because they’re post-singularity.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought about that.”
She shrugged, which did delightful things to her exposed anatomy.
“Well, it kind of stands to reason, doesn’t it? There was a lot of talk at first about how the Rosette Aliens might actually be the original ur-Sh’daar, the ones who transcended, coming forward into our time.”
“I’ve heard that idea. It would explain why the Sh’daar are so afraid of them.”
“Right. But the only link between the two—the Rosette Aliens and the Sh’daar—is the Rosette itself.”
He nodded. “Most xenosoph people are discounting that now, though.”
“What? Why?”
“To start with, the Sh’daar deny it.”
“They could be lying.”
“Maybe. But the Agletsch and the Slan both are pretty definite about that. The Rosette Aliens are g’rev’netchjak, but they claim they don’t know who these guys are. And the Slan call them something that translates as ‘sin,’ meaning something that breaks all of the rules, that’s unnatural. Again, though, they don’t know who the black-hole aliens are.”
The Agletsch word g’rev’netchjak, Gray knew, meant something so horrible that it could not even be described. “Usually when the Sh’daar get upset about something,” Gray said, “it’s because they’re afraid of time travel. That seemed to be why they caved when America came to this epoch twenty years ago.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m still not sure I understand why, though. They’re terrified of temporal paradox? But if it happened, they wouldn’t be aware of it, right?”
“Hard to say,” McKennon replied. She pursed her lips, thoughtful. “Using the TRGA cylinders automatically implies travel through time as well as space. That’s how we got back to the N’gai Cluster in the first place . . . and it’s how the Sh’daar have been infiltrating our own time. It’s built into the physics.”
“So they ought to be aware of how it works,” Gray said. “There’s no grandfather paradox because of parallel branching.”
For a long time, time travel—at least into the past—had been thought to be impossible, if only because of the problem of temporal paradox. Go back in time, kill your grandfather . . . but then how can you be born in order to do the deed?
The answer appeared to be that the multiverse—the totality of many, many parallel universes side by side within what cosmologists called the bulk—prevented that sort of embarrassing paradox by simply splitting off a whole new universe. Parallel branching: you go back and kill your grandfather . . . and when you return to the future you find yourself in a slightly different universe where you were never born in the first place . . . because years ago some stranger appeared out of nowhere and killed your grandfather. As for the friends and family you originally left behind: so far as they knew, you departed for the past and vanished forever.
“I think,” McKennon said, “that they simply fear the whole idea of temporal warfare. That we might go back into the past before we ever met them and do something to make it so they never exist.”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Gray said. “The ur-Sh’daar were so far beyond us in technology . . .”
“A few hundred thousand years ago,” she told him, “the ur-Sh’daar were gone, and the races that became the Sh’daar didn’t even have space travel. When their civilization collapsed, some of them got knocked back to the stone age.”
“Huh. I didn’t realize things got that bad for them.”
She nodded. “You can imagine how vulnerable they felt, how vulnerable they feel now. If we could get a line on an exact time within, oh, say a thousand years or so after their civilization’s collapse, we could wipe them all out.”
He shook his head. “I don’t buy it, though. I don’t think travel through the TRGAs can be that precise. We don’t have a problem following a single known spacetime pathway back to here, but I can’t begin to imagine how we would adjust things to open a gateway to a time a few thousand years earlier. And if that sort of thing is possible, why don’t they go up to Tee-sub-prime, but just a few thousand years in our past? Wipe us out from orbit? Or take us over before we develop spaceflight ourselves?”
“As you say, I don’t think it’s possible to fine-tune things that much. Certainly it’s not easy. Besides, they wouldn’t be changing things. The original universe—with us going to the stars—would still be there. It would just be out of their reach.”
“Which suggests that they have a use for us, even if we are too damned much trouble.” He stopped as something new occurred to him. “Shit . . .”
“What?”
“I just realized . . . there’s no way we could use time travel to wipe them out, or even change their history to any degree. Because their history is bound up with ours. Has been ever since 2367!”
“God, I didn’t even think of that. You’re right, though.”
“If we do something to knock out the Sh’daar back here, then we can’t go home . . . not to the home we came from. We’d find ourselves in a universe where the Sh’daar War never happened.” He rubbed his forehead. “My head hurts. . . .”
“But that means . . .” Her eyes went wide. “God . . .”
He nodded, following her thoughts. “Right. Even coming back here and making peace-establishing nonaggression pacts and trade agreements—we’re running the risk of changing our future. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of looking forward to getting back home. Our home.”
“No . . . wait,” she said. “That shouldn’t make any difference. The war still happened. Admiral Koenig ended it twenty years ago—in this time and in our time—and things have gone on from there. It would just be a problem if we went back twenty-one years ago and changed something. Right?”
“I . . . I think so.” He thought the logic through. “Man, I can understand why the Sh’daar don’t care for the idea of time-traveling humans, though. We could really screw things up for everybody. Us included!”
“I wonder if we’ll be able to convince them that we’ll stick by our agreements. That we’re not a threat.”
Gray laughed. “I wonder if that’s true!”
“What do you mean?”
“Humans aren’t so good at keeping promises. Just ask the North American aborigines.”
“Well, we’d better honor these. The Sh’daar intend to keep an outpost—a military outpost—in our spacetime. If we do something stupid . . .”
“They’ll come down on us like a ten-kilometer dinosaur-killer asteroid. Maybe with a ten-kilometer asteroid. I know.”
“We’ve assumed all along that the ancient Sh’daar had an outpost of some sort in our time,” she told him.
“Of course. They would at least have some kind of presence with the various species they’ve established agreements with. They could build on that until they had a major presence . . . like our Deep Time base here.”
“Maybe the Agletsch?”
“Possibly. They don’t have much in the way of military capabilities, though. More likely it would be the Turusch or the Sl
an . . . one of those. Tough customers.”
“You don’t want the Sh’daar in our time.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“In a word, yes.”
He shrugged. “I don’t trust them. I’d feel better if they stayed in their own time.”
“Why?”
“They make no secret of wanting us to be part of their empire. That’s been their goal since we met them, almost sixty years ago.”
“Maybe. And maybe we just don’t understand what it is they want.”
He thought about this a moment. “Nope. Not buying that, either. They attacked us first, remember? They delivered their ultimatum, ordered us to join them and give up our GRIN technologies. When we rejected it, they attacked.”
“Because they were afraid—”
“No! Not then! We didn’t discover the TRGA cylinders for another . . . hell, almost forty years! We’d showed no sign of threatening them with time travel when they attacked us, okay?”
“We may have scared them just because we’re so . . . aggressive. Argumentative . . . combative . . . quick to take offense . . .” She shrugged again. “They must have learned something about us from the Agletsch. We made first contact with them . . . when?”
“In 2312. At Zeta Doradus.”
“Okay . . . that was over fifty years before they delivered their ultimatum.”
“Fifty-five.”
“Fifty-five years, fine. See,” she said, smiling. “Argumentative.” Gray rolled his eyes, but grinned himself as she went on. “Plenty of time to learn about us, about what we’re like, about our character from the Agletsch. Maybe, so far as they were concerned, they figured we couldn’t be trusted with GRIN tech.”
“They’re thousands of years ahead of us in their technology! What the hell are they afraid of?” Gray was shouting now.
“Ask the people of Columbus.”
Right . . . Columbus. And that got Gray thinking. Three centuries before that, a Chinese Hegemony ship had steered a small asteroid into the North Atlantic, causing untold devastation as tsunamis slammed into the USNA East Coast and the western coast of Pan-Europe.
Search through Humankind’s history, and it was possible to find dozens of similar examples, cases where the devastation and loss of life were limited only by the limits of the available technology. And, just maybe, that was what the Sh’daar in fact feared most: a star-faring species with factions and political subgroups and rogue states crazy enough to use such weaponry.
But there was more, Gray realized, and worse. It wasn’t just the high-tech weaponry, but the cheerful willingness of humans to engage in wholesale slaughter, often on a colossal scale. How many times had humans engaged in genocide? There’d been the extermination of the Cathars by the Catholics, of the original native peoples of the Americas by Europeans and by Americans, of the Armenians by the Turks, of the European Jews by the Nazis, of Muslims by the Bosnian Serbs, of the Israelis by the Iranians . . .
The bloody list ran on and on and on.
It might be that the aspect of Humankind’s character that most disturbed the Sh’daar was the human tendency to slaughter millions of their own kind simply because of minor differences in ideology, religion, or culture. For the first time in his life, Gray saw humans as the various alien species might see them . . . and the revelation was like a punch in the gut.
“I’m . . . sorry, Harriet,” Gray said. “I didn’t mean to yell. I wasn’t yelling at you. I’ve been fighting the Sh’daar for a long time . . . I guess that I’m just not ready to trust them yet.”
McKennon was silent for a long moment, then sighed. “It’s okay, ” she said, finally. “I don’t agree with you . . . but I understand what you’re feeling.”
“Still, I shouldn’t have lost my damned temper.”
“Maybe you had reasons. I gather you were ordered to deliver your message to the Sh’daar? An invitation to come up to Tee-sub-prime and help us face the Rosette Aliens?”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“If it’s any consolation, the alien Sh’daar don’t trust us, either.”
“I was just realizing that. We don’t trust what we don’t understand. But . . . maybe the alien sons-of-bitches understand us all too well. And that means that they have their reasons to mistrust us. Shit . . .”
McKennon turned, rolling over until she was partly on top of him, her hands restlessly caressing him. They embraced.
They kissed. . . .
Later, Gray wondered why. He’d not exactly shown the woman his most endearing side. Yes, they’d flirted, but he was feeling thoroughly disreputable and awkward . . . definitely damaged goods. Sex with her in the hours that followed did seem to make it all better, leaving him relaxed and more self-possessed, more confident.
But the conversation with McKennon, he knew, had exposed a raw nerve.
Gray was going to have to do something about that if he was to work with the Sh’daar in the future.
Chapter Eight
30 November 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Admiral’s Office
1512 hours, TFT
America and her battlegroup were on the final leg toward home—five days out from emergence into the Sol system.
And Gray was feeling ill.
It had started the day before with the symptoms of an oncoming cold: aching joints, headache, and a running nose. He’d linked in to America’s sick bay suite from his quarters and updated his biological virus protection. The medic program had recommended that he increase his consumption of fluids and wait for the upgrade to take effect.
Twenty-four hours later, it not only had not taken effect, but Gray had gotten distinctly worse. He was running a temp of 38 degrees—a low-grade fever—and the joint pains were worse. So was the headache, and the runny nose had turned into a sore throat and congestion in his chest.
He placed the palm of his hand onto the link pad at his office workstation and requested a full medical scan. Damn it, he shouldn’t be feeling like this. . . .
One of the immediate benefits of the so-called Nanotech Revolution in the late twenty-second century had been the development of ultra-small medical devices that could move through the human bloodstream or camp out among the body’s cells. They could monitor the person’s health, allow direct interfacing with external medical AIs, and download programming that could deliver treatment or even perform nanosurgery. Nanoscale medicine had resulted in the elimination of scores of diseases and conditions, and the various anagathic regimens had greatly extended the human life span. No one knew how far life extension could go, but there were some millions of people on Earth now in their third century and billions in their second, while showing no sign of aging or age-related disease.
But Gray felt like he was coming down with the flu. That shouldn’t have been possible—the medical nano in his system would have detected any flu virus and eliminated it long before he could begin to show symptoms. “Connect me with the ship medical AI,” he said.
“Ship’s primary medicAI,” a voice said in his head. “You are showing signs of a bacterial infection. Please wait while I conduct a complete scan.”
There were human doctors on board the America, but they generally remained as backup for the extremely sophisticated medical AIs. America’s chief medicAI—the word was pronounced medic-eye—was nearly as powerful as Konstantin, was fully Turing-capable, and maintained a medical database far more extensive than any general AI like the one at Tsiolkovsky. Like Konstantin, it could communicate through speech as well as by impressions and background awareness.
And as with Konstantin, the Primitive in Gray sometimes wondered if humans could trust it. Its workings were far faster and far deeper than those of humans . . . so much so that its workings largely were incomprehensible. Gray had considered requesting one of the human physicians, but decided against it. Trust, he reasoned, was something you strengthened by using it.
He felt a sudden, sharp sting at the base
of his thumb. The automed unit had just taken a sample of blood.
“Ow,” Gray said. “Warn me next time, huh?”
“Normally I would use the nanobots already circulating through your system to identify the infectious agent,” the AI told him. “I need a direct sample, however. One moment . . .”
“What do you mean, ‘infectious agent?’ I have a cold.”
“You have what appear to be coldlike symptoms. A cold would have been automatically treated by the medical nano already in your body. This may be more serious. One moment . . .”
Gray waited as the silence dragged on. More serious? What the hell was the AI telling him?
Damn it, he hated waiting on test results like this, hated the uncertainty, the not knowing . . .
“You have been infected with an alien microorganism,” the medicAI told him after a moment. Gray heard deep surprise in the inner voice . . . startling in an artificial intelligence.
“How? I haven’t been to any alien planets . . . hell, I haven’t been off the ship except through virtual reality.”
“Indeed. Eight other personnel on board America have been infected as well.”
“Wait . . . you said alien?”
“I did. And I do know how remarkable that statement is.”
Remarkable? Well, yes. That might be one way of saying it. “Has there ever been a case of an alien microorganism infecting a human before?”
“No, Admiral. The TBB has held up since humans first ventured into space.”
When the first astronauts to walk on Earth’s moon had returned to Earth, they’d entered a three-week period of quarantine as soon as they returned. The chances of their picking up a pathogen on the moon were considered extremely remote . . . but the existential threat to the entire human species if they brought back pathogens to which humans had no natural immunity was considered serious enough to require the precaution. Quarantine procedures were enforced for Apollo 11, 12, and 14; by Apollo 15, NASA biologists had decided that the lunar surface was sterile and the mandatory quarantine was dropped.
