Authors: William H. Keith
Then, they were down the rabbit hole, plunging through night…
Chapter 22
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—
Clarke’s Third Law
A
RTHUR
C. C
LARKE
science and techfantasy writer
late twentieth century
C
.
E
.
… and emerging once more, this time into unspeakable glory.
For long seconds, no one aboard either
Gauss
or
Karyu
spoke. Wonder caught hold of brain and voice—even the mental voice of Companion links—and enforced an awe-stricken silence.
They floated several tens of thousands of light years above and beyond the plane of the Galaxy, of
a
galaxy, rather, for there was no way to be certain that this blue and dusty whirlpool of light was the familiar Milky Way of Earth’s sun, not from
this
vantage point.
Shralghal
and
Shrenghal
hung suspended well above the great spiral’s plane, looking down on a vast and infinitely detailed swirl of dust and gas and stars. Looming huge opposite that stellar whirlpool was a second spiral, larger and more tightly wound, cocked at a different angle from the first and very nearly touching it. She could see the distortions in the outer spiral arms of both galaxies, where mutual gravitation had begun distorting the perfection of their respective shapes. With a jolt, Kara realized that there was nothing like that second galaxy in the skies she knew, nor were the two tiny attendants of the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, in evidence; they must have covered an incredible distance in space, some hundreds of millions of light years, at least.
“I, uh, don’t know if anyone’s noticed,” Vic said after a long moment’s silence. “But there’s no stargate here.”
“God, no,” Latimer said, her voice low. “We made a blind leap and came out at random.”
Kara glanced around the vault of heaven, confirming that simple, stark pronouncement of doom. So stunning was the view of two near-entangled spiral galaxies that everyone had momentarily missed that small and all-important datum.
Fact.
DalRiss Achievers needed a mental map of the place where they were going, in order to shift a cityship from one spot to another.
Fact.
Without DalRiss transport, human starships were limited to their K-T drives, which could carry them along at a pseudovelocity of something like a light year per day.
Fact.
Neither of those glorious spirals could be Earth’s galaxy, for the simple reason that the Milky Way did not have such a close and large companion. Therefore, the Achievers would be totally lost, unable to navigate.
Fact.
At a guess, the tiny GEF was something like fifty thousand light years from the nearest galactic spiral arm. That translated to something on the order of 140 years of travel… with a death sentence executed long before the ships’ crews died of old age. The huge Naga fragments aboard the DalRiss ships could generate all of the food, water, and air that the humans could possibly use from sufficient raw materials—an asteroid of carbon, water ice, and frozen gases, for instance. Unfortunately, the human K-T drives couldn’t be incorporated into the DalRiss ships, nor could human ships carry supplies enough to last their crews more than a year or two at most.
The relentless march of facts seemed to have doomed GEF.
“There
are
alternatives,” Vic said at a ViRsimmed conference of department heads and senior officers several hours later. “Not many, and not good, but they’re there.”
“What alternatives?” Daren demanded. “A choice between dying of starvation, thirst, or asphyxiation?”
“The most attractive possibility,” Dev said, “is to find ourselves an asteroid. A fairly big one, fifty or a hundred kilometers in diameter. We dock
Shrenghal
and
Shralghal
with it and turn their Naga fragments loose, with appropriate reprogramming that we could work out aboard
Karyu
and
Gauss.
“We all know the Naga talent for burrowing through rock and converting it to other things. That’s what they were designed for, after all, a few billion years ago. They could eat out the center of the asteroid, core it like an apple, and convert the rock to things we need. Air. The fixings for a power plant and a way to illuminate the ’troid’s interior. Hell, even life, if we have good enough patterns in
Gauss’s
data banks.”
“We do,” Daren said. “DNA mapping patterns, anyway, of most Earth life forms.”
“Fine. It’ll take years, of course, but we’d end up with a world. A small world… and it would be inside out. We’d give it enough rotation to create spin gravity.”
“An inside-out world?” Kara said. “Sounds like the Naga were right all along!”
“We’ll have to develop an even closer symbiosis with both the Naga and the DalRiss,” Dev said. “Maybe the Gr’tak, too. We’d move ourselves and enough Naga core fragments and raw materials to manufacture whatever we needed. We’d hitch the DalRiss cityships to the outside and give the whole thing a boost. I have no idea how long it would take to reach one of the galaxies, but it would be a sublight voyage and require a good many millions of years, I expect.”
“Hell, that doesn’t help us!” Barnes exclaimed.
“No, Admiral. Our descendants might one day migrate to one of the worlds of those galaxies yonder, but for us, well, the asteroid would be our new home. For the rest of our lives.”
“You said that was the good choice,” Taki pointed out. “What else is there?”
“We could leapfrog,” Dev admitted. “We send one of our K-T-drive ships ahead… oh, let’s say one hundred light years. It carries an Achiever or someone like me, able to map space the way the DalRiss need, and sends the data back by I2C. The two cityships and the other human ship then use Achievers to leap one hundred light years. The process is repeated… and repeated. It would take longer than simply traveling by K-T drive all the way, because it takes extra time to map as you go. Say… two hundred years to reach the nearest galaxy. It still doesn’t help us, and it’s a damn sight harder on our descendants, since they would have to be born, raised, and live their whole lives aboard
Karyu
and
Gauss.
It would be crowded. There’s also the need to stop every now and then to find another asteroid and let the Naga cores at it to manufacture more consumables. However, we, they, rather, might reach galactic space within a few generations.”
“Carefully monitored generations,” Taki pointed out. “Our birth rate would have to be sharply controlled.”
“We might combine the two ideas,” Barnes added. “Build a
small
asteroid habitat, a few hundred meters across, small enough to be strapped to
Karyu
as extra living accommodations.”
“Reaction mass would still be a problem,” Dr. Norris said. “The thrust-weight ratio would kill us.”
“We might also look at putting most of the crews into suspension,” Daren suggested. “Have them link into a program that would let them sleep, have the life-support systems take care of their bodies. Maybe most of us would make it.”
“I’ve never seen any hard studies on that kind of life suspension, Daren,” Vic said. “Have there been any?”
“Not really. It used to be a hot idea for long-distance travel, of course, but K-T drives, then the DalRiss Achiever ships, kind of obviated the need. It
ought
to work, though.…”
“I’m not sure I want to be a guinea pig,” Norris said.
“There’s another option,” Kara said.
“What’s that?” Dev asked.
“That we carry through with our original mission.”
“What do you mean?” Taki wanted to know. “That’s not our galaxy out there. We might be hundreds of millions of light years from home.”
“And who says that Humankind—or the Web, for that matter—are limited to the one galaxy? Or that other galaxies don’t have their own communications networks? We could try to listen in, see if we can find the local equivalent of the Net, and tap in. We might find help. We might find friends.”
“Damn.” Latimer said. “She’s right.”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” Vic said. “Dev?”
There was no immediate answer.
“Dev?”
“Uh… sorry. Kara is absolutely right. We’ll need a very large and very powerful Net of our own to do it, especially if we need to crack an alien language or computer code… but yes! We
can
do it! At worst, it’ll add a few months to our schedule.”
“Seems to me,” Vic pointed out dryly, “that we’re not in any particular hurry to get anywhere now. What do we need to get started?”
“An asteroid,” Dev said. “Preferably a carbonaceous chondrite.”
“We can use
Gauss
and
Karyu
as scouts to find the thing,” Vic said. “Let’s do it.”
It took eight months to build the computer matrix that would support the new Net.
Gauss,
probing far in advance of the GEF, located a cool, dim, red star several hundred light years ahead, one of the billions of lonely halo suns slowly circling the two galaxies; and by good fortune aided by long range spectroscopic analysis, the star proved to be Population I—meaning that it possessed elements in its makeup heavier than the hydrogen-helium-only mix of Population IIs.
Circling that star were no planets larger than ice-bound, rocky balls the size of Luna, but myriad planetoids swarmed in a vast and dusty ring. Ninety percent, perhaps, were carbonaceous chondrites, coal-black, sooty lumps of tarry hydrocarbons that may have been the genesis rocks of life in the early universe. The DalRiss cityships made a single jump, and the red dwarf system, designated Haven, became the GEF’s new center of operations.
By the time the DalRiss arrived at Haven,
Shrenghal’s
Naga core had been induced to reproduce by fission, creating a new and separate Naga entity massing several tens of thousands of tons. The new-formed being oozed across from
Shrenghal
to asteroid; within a few days, it had converted some millions of tons of the trillion-ton black rock into more Naga, organizing hundreds of millions of new Naga cells in precise and closely interconnected arrays… duplicating, in fact, the computer system shared by
Shrenghal, Shralghal. Gauss,
and
Karyu,
but on a far vaster scale.
Dev had been the obvious choice to program the new supercomputer, which used quantum phenomena to permit massively parallel processing on a stupendous scale… a scale far larger than the Oki-Okasan of Luna or the quantum Series 80 system at the University of Jefferson. Almost certainly, the Haven supercomputer was the largest device of its kind ever grown, in effect an array of two-kilogram superconducting chips with an aggregate mass of roughly a quarter of a trillion tons. This monster was powered at first through a direct feed from the
Karyu,
but soon the planetoid’s Naga had grown its own quantum power tap and was happily producing all the free energy it—or any fair-sized interplanetary civilization—could possibly use.
Gauss’s,
science team, meanwhile, with volunteer help from both human vessels, had spent the time studying the pair of pinwheel galaxies hanging in Haven’s midnight sky. Seven months into the construction, they reported the most exciting news yet. Both of the galaxies presented evidence of
order
arising from the chaos of stars.
Dev remembered the engineering on a stellar scale glimpsed at the core of Earth’s Galaxy… of lines of stars set to marching in precise order at the bidding of the Web intelligence. For some millions of years, someone in these galaxies had been doing much the same, only instead of dropping stars into a black hole for unguessable purposes, they were drawing them into neatly set rings and circles, giving the two galactic cores the ancient phonograph-record effect of Saturn’s rings. It was a subtle effect, and one easily lost against the stellar wilderness that existed in the spiral arms, but once you knew what to look for, the effect was visible even to the naked eye.
Another datum was drawn from a careful spectrographic analysis of both galaxies. Much of the light coming from the ordered portions circling their cores had the characteristic absorption lines of chlorophyll, an unmistakable fingerprint of Life. Once alerted to the possibility, a search turned up xenoxanthophyl, reuthenipliophyl, and ribosin, all varicolored analogues of chlorophyll that served the same purpose—transforming sunlight and various chemicals into energy. The only possible explanation was that an extraordinarily large percentage of the stars making up both galaxies were completely enclosed by bodies—habitats of some sort—that were partly transparent or translucent and were filled with plant life, enough so that the light streaming out from the parent suns was tinted with the spectra of Life.
And finally, too, the central cores of both galaxies were lightly masked by a faint, dark haze; at first, the human observers had assumed they were trying to peer through layers of dust, but it soon was apparent that the “dust” had order as precise as the circling rings of stars, and it was radiating well into the infrared—releasing more energy than it could be receiving from starlight.
“A galactic Dyson sphere,” Dev said softly, pausing to watch an enlarged image of the nearer of the two galactic cores in a ViRsimulation aboard the
Gauss.
“Possibly an emergent K3 civilization.”
“K3?” Kara asked. “What’s that?”
“A twentieth-century cosmologist named Kardashev once suggested that interstellar civilizations could be divided into three classes by the scale of energy they used. A K1 civilization could make use of all of the available energy of its planet. A K2 civilization used all of the energy of its star. Since a planet only intercepts something less than one percent of its star’s output, another physicist of the time, Freeman Dyson, pointed out that K2 civilizations might build shells around their home stars to capture all of the energy and put it to work.”