by Ian Douglas
And then he saw the edge of the world . . .
The virtual image, he realized, was within one of the titanic cylinder habitats. The edge of the world was the nearest end of the cylinder, a circle of blackness dusted with the stars of the N’gai central core, stars that were slowly moving as the cylinder turned on its long axis. Opposite, a much smaller circle was all but lost in the haze of distance, thousands of kilometers away.
The rock ledge, Gray saw, was a part of the foothills of the ice-capped mountains, perhaps 100 kilometers high, that ringed the opening and kept the atmosphere from spilling out into space.
Gray looked back down at the city.
It was burning.
“Our records tell us that the Schjaa Hok lasted for several of your years,” their guide told them. “But the first wave of Transcendings was the worst. . . .”
The scene shifted, and the small group of humans stood in open parkland in the center of the city, towers and domes and twisted abstract shapes of gold and silver rising about them. A number of Adjugredudhra were moving along on a slidewalk nearby, multiple starfish shapes growing one atop the other, with twisting tendrils and weaving eyestalks.
With shocking suddenness, one of them collapsed where it stood . . . followed by another . . . and then a third. The bodies, rag-doll limp and lifeless, continued along on the slidewalk, as other Adjugredudhra nearby emitted shrill chirps and chitters in an agitated frenzy.
“The scenes we saw before showed individuals just winking out,” Gray said. He was trying to relate what he was seeing now with the brief glimpses he’d had of Schjaa Hok years before.
“These images . . . of the dead . . .” Ghresthrepni said, “we find . . . extremely . . . disturbing. . . .” Even in translation, Ghresthrepni’s voice sounded shaken, as though it was having trouble continuing to speak.
“And that’s why these records were edited?” Truitt asked.
Ghresthrepni didn’t answer directly, but Gray sensed affirmation in its silence.
Around them, more and more of the Adjugredudhra collapsed.
“But what is happening to them?” Kline asked.
“Their souls are leaving,” was the being’s answer. “They leave the shells behind.”
The scene seemed to blur, a fast-forward of sorts, Gray thought. The city was burning now, as seething mobs of Adjugredudhra surged through city streets and parklands. Aircraft fell from the skies, their pilots dead. Gray was puzzled by this at first, since much of the traffic would have been controlled by AI minds, and any decently advanced aircraft could land itself if the organic pilot became incapacitated.
But then he understood. “Their minds are being uploaded,” he said. “And not just organic beings. Your AIs are Transcending as well.”
“Of course. The first to go were the cyborgs, those with massive machine augmentation. The Groth Hoj were almost entirely taken in the first hours of the Transcendence, since so many of their species were reshaped with genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancements.”
Gray remembered the Groth Hoj—beings like three-meter-tall squids with single, saucer-sized eyes. They communicated by changing the color patterns on their bodies, but a great many had transferred their minds to machines of various types, and now looked nothing like their organic predecessors.
“So those beings who already had a predilection for high-tech enhancements . . .” Mallory began.
“They were taken first,” Ghresthrepni told them. “Yes.”
“You say they were taken,” Truitt said. “Who took them?”
“Do you understand the concept we call Draleth Ja?”
“That didn’t translate,” Gray said. “Try again.”
“We think of it as a higher dimension,” Ghresthrepni said. “One created artificially by the interaction of electronic media, interacting fields of information—”
“Ah,” Gray said. “I think you mean what we call the Godstream. A virtual world open to those with the necessary electronic prostheses.”
“This realm,” Ghresthrepni continued, “is inhabited. By patterns of information, patterns of consciousness, with an interest in the worlds from which they came.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Truitt demanded.
“Mind,” the voice of Konstantin put in, “is information. Though the term may seem needlessly religious in nature, a being’s soul might be described as a particular pattern of information that normally resides within the physical instrumentality of neurons and synaptic pathways. Information can be recorded and uploaded. It can also be transmitted, leaving nothing behind but the dead physical infrastructure.”
“That’s what happened with the Baondyeddi,” Mallory said. “They uploaded their minds into computer-generated virtual realities.”
“You know, of course, that the civilization you call ur-Sh’daar underwent the Transcendence,” Ghresthrepni told them. “But not all were transformed. The Refusers were left behind . . . perhaps one individual out of every fifty.”
“We know about the Refusers,” Kline said.
“Do you think so? Do you know how long a civilization lasts, when the vast majority of scientists, technicians, manufacturers, educators, farmers, government leaders, healers, artists, musicians, historians, electronics specialists, and even !!! all are taken away?”
That last word had been rendered in Ghresthrepni’s own language, a chittering set of clicks, and probably represented some concept utterly untranslatable into standard English—something so alien that there was no human concept for it at all.
“The technologists were taken,” Gray said slowly. “And the cities burned.”
“Indeed. The Refusers were reduced to struggling remnants squabbling in the rubble over scraps of food. The warlords . . . the disease . . . the famines . . . the chaos . . . all lasted for a thousand years.”
“How many Refusers were there?” Kline asked.
“A few trillion, scattered through the worlds and habitats of N’gai.”
“So many?” Truitt sounded skeptical.
“The progenitors of the original Sh’daar numbered in the hundreds of trillions,” the being said, and even in translation the words sounded wistful. “An entire galaxy bursting with life and with the brilliant light of interstellar civilization.”
One in fifty, Gray thought . . . that was two percent. Out of 100 trillion that still left a couple of trillion, a pretty fair-sized population for any star-faring civilization. But the idea of that many beings fighting among themselves for technology and resources was a terrifying thought.
“The infrastructure of that civilization would have completely collapsed,” Konstantin said on a private channel, following Gray’s thoughts. “There was a roughly similar event in Earth’s history.”
“The Islamic Wars of the two-thousands?”
“What I was thinking of was earlier than that—the mid-1970s. A communist dictator who called himself Pol Pot exterminated over a quarter of his country’s population, specifically targeting professionals, doctors, educators, and businessmen. The collapse of the social order resulted in devastating famine and the deaths of several millions out of an original population of only about 8 million.”
“And how does this have a bearing on what happened to the N’gai civilization?”
“Obviously, the individuals who left would have been comprised of the better educated portion of the population, the scientists and technical people especially, those with an affinity for new and advanced technologies. The people who programmed the machines that kept civilization going. I suspect that the Refusers were—not less intelligent, perhaps, but more set in their ways, less adaptable, less flexible, and less willing to embrace new ideas and new technologies. There is always a small subset of any population that distrusts technology or modern medicine to the point of irrationality.”
“Anti-vaxers.”
“They were one example, yes. The nineteenth-century Luddites were another.”
“Or the peopl
e today denying that the Singularity is coming.” Gray sighed. “It doesn’t give me a lot of hope for our species.”
“It is inevitable that in any given population, a subset will prefer to remain as it is, where it is. Not everyone will be . . . ‘taken.’”
“And when heaven was offered to them, they refused to go.”
“When the ur-Sh’daar Transcended,” Konstantin told them, “the Sh’daar remained, perhaps justifiably distrustful of the science that had destroyed civilization.”
“But why?” Kline said. “It doesn’t make sense!”
“It is possible,” Konstantin told her, “that the Refusers saw the Draleth Ja not as heaven . . . but as hell.”
Chapter Fourteen
21 April, 2429
Quito Space Elevator
160 kilometers up
1115 hours, EST
The elevator capsule was beginning to fall.
People screamed, knowing that it was far too soon to experience weightlessness. Some began to unstrap from their seats.
“Everybody stay put!” Koenig bellowed. “Stay strapped in!” Microgravity, he knew, would not last for long.
Even at this altitude there was still atmosphere outside, and as the pod dropped, picking up speed, those traces of atmosphere would become thicker . . . and thicker. Within seconds, the passengers began feeling the jolt and increasing weight of deceleration. They would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at several thousand kilometers per hour.
“Give us some options, Konstantin,” Koenig snapped. He already felt as though a large person was seated on his lap. “What can we do?”
“I can see none,” Konstantin told him. “These elevator pods have no cockpit, no controls.”
“They have parachutes, don’t they? For emergencies?”
“Generally they do. However, I have checked the emergency descent system on this capsule, and it appears that the parachute has been removed.”
Koenig felt a cold knot in his gut. “Sabotage?”
“More likely it was a matter of shoddy maintenance practices,” Konstantin replied. “There have been no emergency descents from any space elevator for over a century. The parachute may have been removed some time ago to give the capsule extra cargo capacity.”
Was it as simple as that? Careless maintenance and cutting corners? Enough people, Koenig knew, wanted him dead. It was hard not to see deliberate calculation here. “Tell whoever is in charge of safety inspections for this capsule that he’s fired.” He felt the G-forces building.
“I see one possible solution,” Konstantin told him. “I am dispatching fighters and SAR tugs from SupraQuito. They may be able to use their grav drives to slow your descent.”
Koenig glanced out the transparent bulkhead. A faint haze of orange fire was beginning to glow around the capsule’s lower end. The vast, round sweep of Earth was still visible, but air friction was beginning to create a plasma sheath around the falling pod. Very soon now, communication would be cut off by the ionization, and he would lose contact with Konstantin.
And not long after that, he and every person on board the falling capsule would die.
USNA CVS America
CIC
N’gai Cluster
1123 hours, FST
Gray awoke in his command chair in America’s CIC, blinking away the mists of the dreamlike alien virtual world. He could still see those McKendree cylinders burning . . .
“How’d it go, sir?” Mackey asked him. “You were out for two hours.”
“Pretty well,” Gray replied. He had to focus on what he was saying, speaking the words out loud rather than simply thinking them. “The xenosoph and xenotech departments are still over there, putting together some records we can take back with us. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“We learn anything useful?”
Gray sighed. “I wish I knew. A lot of it we already knew. Some of it . . .”
What the alien had told them about the Sh’daar equivalent of the Godstream was new, and it made Gray wonder if Earth wasn’t closer to their own Schjaa Hok than anyone had guessed.
What they had not learned was if there’d been some sort of trigger to kick the whole process off. Sometimes, when all the conditions were right, you could have a supersaturated solution simply waiting for an event, a seed that would cause the entire solution to precipitate or crystalize. Water in a bottle might be cooled to just below freezing . . . and then the slightest bump would turn every drop of liquid to a solid mass of ice.
What had triggered the Sh’daar Schjaa Hok?
What might trigger a similar Transcendence for Humankind? That, more than anything else, was why Koenig had sent them out here on this pursuit of wild migratory waterfowl.
“Make all preparations for getting under way, Captain,” Gray told Mackey. “Lieutenant West? Pass the word to the rest of the squadron.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “We need to get home.”
He could still see those burning cities.
Quito Space Elevator
120 kilometers up
1129 hours, EST
The interior of the elevator pod was growing hot. The G-forces had peaked at nearly seven Gs, then gradually lessened as the falling pod approached terminal velocity. The view outside was almost completely masked by orange-hot plasma.
“Konstantin! Can you read me?”
Koenig thought he heard fragments of a reply, broken words and phrases, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. The pod was increasingly shrouded by that layer of ionization that cut off radio communications.
Was the same true of laser communications? The pod had receivers and transmitters for laser-com telemetry, he knew, but he had no control over them, no more than he could use his long-dormant military piloting skills to bring the capsule under control. Never in his life had Alexander Koenig felt so completely and uselessly helpless.
“—SAR—” he heard in-head. Konstantin was trying to tell him something, but only fragments were coming through. “—pod—” “—speed—” “—and—”
Search and rescue. Was a SAR shuttle from SupraQuito trying to rendezvous? They had their work damned well cut out for them if so. The pod was a blazing meteor now, its passengers slowly being cooked by the fierce heat of re-entry. For a SAR tug to have any chance of grappling the elevator pod, it would have to match the capsule’s velocity . . . which meant undergoing the same heat and vibration of re-entry that Koenig and his fellow passengers were enduring now.
And SAR tugs weren’t designed for atmospheric re-entry. They were workhorses deployed strictly for operations in hard vacuum.
Gradually, the bone-shaking vibration of their descent reached a kind of steady plateau as minute followed minute through the terrifying descent. The pod was streamlined to facilitate its passage up or down through the atmosphere along the elevator cable, with top and bottom tapered into slender points. So far, the capsule had maintained its up-and-down orientation, but now Koenig and the others felt a tremendous shock, as if something massive had hit them from outside, threatening to tip them over. Deceleration dragged at them and the raging plasma inferno outside faded, just for a moment. Koenig had a moment’s clear view of the Earth spread out below.
And as the plasma faded, Konstantin’s voice crashed through the static. “—ident Koenig, do you copy?”
“I’m here, Konstantin,” Koenig replied.
And in the next instant, the elevator pod, stressed far beyond its design tolerances, fell into a savage tumble, exploded like a white-hot bolide, breaking into dozens of burning fragments as it disintegrated forty kilometers above the Pacific Ocean.
Nungiirtok Warship Ashtongtok Tah
Fighter Bay
Deep Space
1250 hours, FST
The scoutship Krestok Nin had rendezvoused with the far larger Ashtongtok Tah at the stargate leading to the Nungiirtok homeworld and been taken aboard. Inside the cavernous hangar bay, Gartok Nal and Shektok Kah faced a Tok Iad, ex
tending their long, jointed lower jaws in a gesture of supreme respect.
“Do you know where these Nungiirtii were taken?” the Tok Iad demanded. The phrase meant simply “Tok Lord”; the Nungiirtii knew no other name for them and did not know what they called themselves.
“No, Lord,” Gartok Nal replied. “But the cry for nesheguu was clear and urgent.”
Nesheguu meant, roughly, “vengeance,” but the concept was deeply rooted in Nungiirtii codes of honor and responsibility—what each individual tok owed both to those above it in the social order, and to those below.
“We must answer that cry, then,” the Tok Lord replied.
Tok Lords were of a completely different species than the hulking Nungiirtok warriors. A pale gray cone one meter high, balanced on three muscular tentacles and possessing a trio of slender, branching tendrils around the cone’s base, their larval forms were parasites, gestating inside the body cavities of Nungiirtii and eating their way out once they were mature. Like many parasites on Earth, the larvae directly affected the brain chemistry of their hosts, making certain the slowly growing implanted larvae were kept safe and healthy. Taken into the Tok Lord community for education and indoctrination, the adults served as leaders and warlords for most Nungiirtok cultures and commanded Nungiirtok ships and ground elements in combat. The relationship of Nungiirtii with Tok Lords had lasted for so many hundreds of thousands of years that the arrangement was never questioned.
It simply was the way things were.
“We shall answer the cry of nesheguu, then,” Gartok Nal said.
