Center of Gravity (24 page)

“The ONI became interested in your group,” Koenig told the two, “because they were already watching the two Agletsch.”

“They called them intelligence targets, sir,” Gray said. “I thought the bugs were on our side.”

“Those two were… . We think. Most Agletsch living inside Confederation space are… . We think. But we don’t
know
, because no human can really understand how a nonhuman thinks, what it feels, what it really believes. That’s part of the definition of the word
alien
. The surveillance was routine. The request that you help intelligence operatives was also routine. In a case like this, you
do
have the right to refuse to be involved. What I recommend is that in future, you be more… politic in your refusal. Telling a superior officer to ‘fuck off’ is not a career-enhancing act. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Clear, sir.”

“Very well. In light of the fact that we are going on deployment, and you’ll not be going ashore at SupraQuito for a rather long time… I think we can let this whole matter quietly drop. I’ll file a report with Fleet HQ that you’ve both accepted nonjudicial punishment—let’s say restricted to the ship for one week, except for flight operations in the normal observance of your duties. NJP does not go on your records… and if you keep your noses clean, stay out of trouble when you return to Earth, nothing will be said.”

“Restricted to the ship, sir?” Ryan said, surprised. “We can’t go anywhere anyway!”

“Exactly. Just stay out of trouble. CAG and the exec are going to be keeping an eye on both of you. Dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

The virtual office vanished, and Koenig again was strapped to his seat in
America
’s CIC. In point of fact, he fully agreed with Gray’s and Ryan’s attitude. He didn’t like the specter of government surveillance of the general population either.

Life in the Navy was subject to plenty of rules and regulations, but for the most part, privacy was respected.

There were times when Koenig was
very
glad to be casting off from port and deploying into the Great Abyss.

Chapter Twelve

7 January 2405

Fleet Rendezvous Percival

Pluto Orbit, Sol Kuiper Belt

1214 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray watched the surface of the ice-locked world on a bulkhead display in the squadron ready room.
America
was over the night side, now, but he could see a tiny constellation of lights gleaming in the darkness one hundred kilometers below.

The run to Fleet Rendezvous Percival took just over nineteen hours. Early in the morning on January 5, according to shipboard time, the Star Carrier
America
decelerated into orbit around the dwarf planet Pluto, some forty astronomical units out from Earth within the icy wilderness of the inner Kuiper Belt.

Pluto remained a strange and somewhat controversial object circling far out at the limit of Sol’s planetary system. Described as a planet for seventy-six years after its discovery, it had been reclassified as a dwarf planet early in the twenty-first century, a status periodically challenged and reconfirmed as scientific tastes changed and astronomical conventions were upheld or overturned. The worldlet itself didn’t seem to care what humans called it. A little over 2,300 kilometers in diameter, with a mass less than two tenths that of Earth’s moon, it swung about a dim and distant Sol once every 248 years. Like the far larger Uranus, Pluto lay on its side; its axial tilt of 120 degrees meant that darkness lasted in much of the northern hemisphere for over a century, followed by an equally long north-polar summer where the surface temperature never rose above 55 degrees Kelvin. The surface actually was some 10 degrees colder than it should have been at that distance from the sun; when nitrogen ice sublimated to a gas with the growing heat of summer, creating a temporary and very thin atmosphere, it actually drew heat away from the frigid surface in what was called an anti-greenhouse effect.

Despite this, there
was
a human presence on Pluto. That cluster of lights sliding past beneath
America
’s keel was the PDBP Base—usually pronounced “peed-beep”—housing a few dozen lonely xenobiologists and nanodrilling experts from the Confederation’s Department of Applied Xenobiology.

Radioactive decay within the dwarf planet’s small, rocky core actually generated enough heat to create a salty ocean at the boundary between core and mantle, a layer of warm water some fifty kilometers thick and buried beneath two hundred kilometers of solid ice. Wherever liquid water existed, there was the distinct possibility of life. The idea that a place as cold as Pluto might actually have a native biosphere would have shocked the xenobiologists of three or four centuries earlier, but the discoveries of thriving populations of organisms beneath the ice caps of Europa, Callisto, Enceledus, Triton, deep in the permafrost layers of Mars, and beneath the antarctic ice cap on Earth had demonstrated the incredible resiliency, scope, and sheer, dogged determination of life.

The Pluto Deep Biosphere Project, an attempt to bore a sterile hole through two hundred kilometers of ice in order to explore Pluto’s deep ocean, had been under way for just over thirty years now.

The lights of the Pluto facility slid off over the horizon astern and, a few moments later, the sun rose above a white-lit crescent of ice. At a distance of just over forty astronomical units, the sun was little more than a very bright star; a crescent bowed away from the sun near Pluto’s horizon, its largest moon, Charon. The drilling project had been set up on an ice plain ninety degrees around Pluto from Charon, which was tidally locked with Pluto in its six-day-long rotation. The tidal pull of Charon had made the ice mantle above the Plutonian ocean thicker on the worldlet’s Charon side and at the antipodes, thinner at the ninety-degree points.

The crescent grew thicker as the sun slowly rose higher. Gray could see colors now in the ice, ranging from charcoal black to reds and oranges to brilliant white, and the curl of occasional wisps of cloud. Most of the surface was nitrogen ice, with small amounts of frozen methane and frozen carbon monoxide. Up close, the world showed as much surface contrast, however, as Iapetus, the starkly black-and-white moon of Saturn.

Gray wondered what caused the rich blend of colors. A download request to
America
’s library simply mentioned eon-long accumulations of dust, and the fact that Pluto’s surface features changed with each partial surface melting, when the oddball dwarf swung slightly closer to the sun than did the planet Neptune. The project had begun at the beginning of the planetary summer, when Pluto’s highly eccentric orbit actually slipped it inside the orbit of Neptune, and surface temperatures actually struggled to as high as 55 degrees Kelvin. Pluto’s last warm period had ended in 2395, just ten years earlier; it might be another ten years before human machines would swim those stygian waters, searching for native Plutonian life.

“Why so serious?” a voice said behind him.

He started. It was one of the new pilots, Ryan.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

“Obviously. What has you so transfixed? We can’t go down there, you know. We’re still restricted to ship!”

He chuckled. “It’s not like Pluto is a decent liberty port.”

“Not unless you’re into freezing your ass off.”

“I was just wondering if they’ll find anything alive down there. It seems pretty impossible.”

She shrugged. “So what if they do? Join the Navy. Travel to distant worlds. Meet exotic alien life forms. Kill them.”

“I downloaded an article from the shipnet last night,” he told her. “A xenobiologist named Dr. Kane is suggesting that, given what we’ve found so far, the most common type of life in the universe might be aphotic deep marine forms, living beneath the ice caps of places like Europa and Pluto.”

“What’s ‘aphotic’?”

“No light. They live in oceans deeper than anything on Earth, beneath tens or hundreds of kilometers of solid ice.”

“Shit.”

He looked at her. “Why ‘shit’?”

“They would never be able to look up at the stars.”

He was surprised by the sentiment. Ryan seemed to be hard and bitter in some ways, and she often made cracks like the old join-the-Navy joke she’d just rattled off.

“Well, yeah. I guess so. Of course, mostly we’re talking about bacteria or fungi,
maybe
critters as advanced as jellyfish or shrimp. But nothing that would look at the stars and
think
about them, anyway.”

“But there
might
be intelligent life down there.”

Gray nodded. “Possibly. Very unlikely. They would be atechnic sophonts, like whales or woolimarus.”

One of the most astonishing revelations of the past few centuries had been the realization that the concept of
intelligence
had been rather too narrowly drawn. As more and more species had been discovered off world, sophontologists had been forced to reexamine their criteria for just what constituted intelligence. Whales, the larger dolphins, elephants, great apes, even surprises like gray parrots and large octopi all now qualified as thinking species. It was just too bad that so many of those species had gone extinct before their special status had been recognized.

On other worlds, meanwhile, a bewildering number of species had been cataloged that appeared to exhibit intelligent behavior, including language use and strategic thinking, but without developing anything like a recognizable technology. The hexapodal arboreal mollusks called woolimarus, on Epsilon Eridani II, were just one of thousands of such; the dividing line between
intelligence
and
animal
had turned out to be completely fallacious.

“So why such deep thoughts?” Ryan asked him.

“I don’t know. Just feeling philosophical, maybe. Talking with those Agletsch the other evening got me thinking, I guess. The Sh’daar don’t want us to develop high technology… but our technology tends to grow and evolve just by its own nature. A million years or so ago we picked up a rock and invented the hand ax… and there’s been no turning back since. I don’t think we
could
turn back, even if we wanted to. I was wondering if people could give technology up entirely, go back to being clever apes.”

Ryan chuckled. “Most people think folks in the Periphery are like that already. You know—primitives. Living in shells of old buildings, no computers, no electronics, no nano. They think we’re stupid. Like animals, almost.”

“Most people confuse
ignorant
with stupid,” Gray said with a shrug. “When we were in the Ruins, we didn’t have cerebral implants, so we couldn’t have downloaded educations. But the first guy who invented the hand ax… or the spear… or who figured out how to start a fire, he didn’t have implants either, but he had to have been one hell of a sharp Prim.”

“Do you think people will give in to the Sh’daar? Give up high tech?”

“Like I said, I don’t know how we could. And I guess that’s why we’re out here—making sure the Sh’daar aren’t going to dictate to us what we can and can’t do. Right?”

Outside, two more moons—Nix and Hydra, far beyond the orbit of Charon—were rising now, minute crescents just above the sunlit horizon.

“Even with our technology,” Ryan said, “we’re still just clever apes. We’d find a way to get back at them. Somehow.”

“Against beings who are as far ahead of us as the Sh’daar are supposed to be?”

“Maybe they’re not.”

“Not what?”

“Maybe the Sh’daar aren’t that far ahead of us. I mean… if they’re worried about us becoming more advanced than them, getting fast enough that we could kick their asses…”

“It’s a thought. The Agletsch said… what was it that one said? That the Sh’daar had already transcended? I still don’t know what she meant by that.”

“Maybe the Sh’daar are… are kind of what was left behind.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were going along like us, their technology growing and improving. Then they hit the Technological Singularity.
Whoosh!
They turned into pure energy or pure thought or pure information on their equivalent of the net. But
what if they didn’t all go
?”

Gray wrestled with the concept. “Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t… oh.” He got it.

“Right. When we were Prims, we weren’t part of the technological mainstream. We are now, of course… but what if the Technological Singularity had hit five or ten years back, when I was fishing for a living in the D.C. swamps, and you were doing whatever you did in the Manhattan Ruins? All of Humankind would be off on another plane or dimension or wherever transcended beings go…”

“And we’d be right back there on Earth wondering why we’d been left behind.”

“Exactly.”

“I think… I think I’m going to need to give that one some thought,” Gray said.

Humans tended to think of the Sh’daar as some sort of monolithic empire of godlike aliens… but wasn’t it likely that they would have their dissenters, their rebels, their neo-Luddites, their
Prims
, just like Humankind? The idea put a whole new face on the Confederation’s unseen enemy.

The two of them sat in silence for a long time after that, watching the cratered, dusty, dimly lit ice of Pluto’s surface drift past below.

Admiral’s Office, TC/USNA CVS
America

Fleet Rendezvous Percival

Pluto Orbit, Sol Kuiper Belt

1412 hours, TFT

As it happened, Admiral Koenig was also thinking about the nature of intelligence, and of transcendence. Earlier that morning, an intelligence update had been broadcast through the solar fleetnet, based, it appeared, on the information uncovered by several of
America
’s pilots in a bar at SupraQuito.

It was possible that the mainstream Sh’daar culture had reached Technological Singularity, possibly millions of years ago, and that the Sh’daar the Confederation faced now were castoffs, rebels, or Luddites left behind for some reason.

Koenig found the theory less than compelling, but intriguing nonetheless. It might explain why the Sh’daar seemed afraid of certain technologies, but not of others—specifically why they feared the GRIN technologies that served as drivers for transforming biological species into something else.

There was no way of testing the theory, though, not when the Sh’daar were in short supply. Perhaps at Arcturus or, deeper into the galactic night, Alphekka.

Koenig was seated behind his desk in his office, the overhead and two bulkheads set to display the appalling emptiness of space outside, with Pluto in half phase below. The sun was so small, so dwindled in light and heat, that it emphasized the terrible loneliness of this remote corner of Sol’s dominion.
America
and thirty-four ships… against so much emptiness… .