Center of Gravity (4 page)

“The Turusch have mentioned the H’rulka during a number of sessions,” a third voice put in. “They state that the two species share key philosophical concepts.”

The invisible speaker was a specialist AI variously called Noam or, sometimes, “Chom,” after the twentieth-century linguist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Avram Noam Chomsky.

“There was nothing else in Alan’s recording?” Wilkerson asked.

“No. The AI known as ‘Alan’ effectively ceased to exist upon partition.”

Wilkerson nodded understanding. An artificial intelligence like Noam, or like the smaller and more mission-specific AI on the Arcturus recon probe, required a certain size, a certain complexity of internal circuitry and processing power in order to maintain the electronic version of consciousness. Details were still sketchy, but the ISVR–120 interstellar probe apparently had elected to split itself into four separate parts. The probe hardware was designed to allow such a division in order to guarantee that its memory made it back home… but the circuitry carrying those memories simply wasn’t adequate to maintain something as complex as a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence.

The AI Alan Turing had in effect committed suicide in order to get its information back to Sol.

Kane dragged down a virtual window, which glowed in the air in front of him and Wilkerson. The data file with what little was known about the H’rulka scrolled down the screen. “Floaters!” Kane said, reading. “The presumption is that they’re intelligent gas bags that evolved in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”

“Interesting, if true,” Wilkerson said, reading. “I’d like to know how they managed to develop a technology capable of building starships without access to metals, fire, smelting, solid raw materials, or solid ground.”

“What is it they’re supposed to share with the Tushies, Chom?” Kane asked.

“It is difficult to express,” Noam replied, “as are most Turusch concepts. It appears, however, to be a philosophy based on the concept of
depth
.”

“Yeah, yeah. They order things higher to lower, instead of the way we do it.”

“It’s no different than when we say something is second class,” Wilkerson said, “and mean it’s not as important or as high-up as first class.”

“It’s still bass-ackward,” Kane said.

“The three conscious minds of a Turusch are considered by the Turusch to range from ‘high’ to ‘here’ to ‘low,’ ” Noam pointed out, “with ‘high’ being the most primitive, most basic state of intelligence, and ‘low’ the most advanced and complex. For the Turusch, something called the
Abyss
represents depth, scope, danger, and tremendous power. We think the Turusch evolved to live on high plateaus or mountaintops on their world, with lower elevations representing sources of wealth or power—maybe a food source—as well as deadly windstorms.
Abyssal whirlwinds
, they call them.”

“So, if the H’rulka
are
Jovian-type floaters,” Wilkerson mused, “they might relate to the idea of the Abyss as the depths of a gas giant atmosphere. Hot, stormy, high energy, and definitely dangerous. A point of cognitive contact or understanding between them and the Turusch.”

“Sounds far-fetched to me,” Kane said. “Besides, intelligence
couldn’t
develop in a gas giant atmosphere. Absolutely impossible.”

“I’ve learned in this business to mistrust the phrase ‘absolutely impossible,’ Doctor,” Wilkerson said. “Why do you think that?”

“Because the vertical circulation of atmospheric cells in a gas giant atmosphere would drag any life form in the relatively benign higher levels down into the depths in short order,” Kane replied. “They would be destroyed by crushing pressures and searing high temperatures. There’d be no way to preserve culture… or develop it, for that matter. No way to preserve historical records… art… music… learning. And, as you just said, they wouldn’t get far without being able to smelt metals or build a technology from the ground up.” He smirked. “No ground.”

“But we do have lots of examples of Jovian life,” Wilkerson said.

“None of it intelligent,” Kane replied. “It can’t survive long enough.”

“Maybe.” Wilkerson moved his hand, and the columns of writing on the virtual window were replaced by the image received by the ONI a few hours before… a transmission from a burned-out interstellar probe that had dropped into the outskirts of the Sol System and beamed its treasure trove of data in-system that morning.

An alert with raw-data footage had been passed on to a number of government offices and military commands a few hours ago; the fact that the H’rulka were at Arcturus was
big
news. It meant, potentially, disaster… .

“Whether they’re gas bags from a Jovian atmosphere, or something more substantial,” Wilkerson observed, “they mean trouble. We’ve only met them once, but that was enough.”

The ongoing exchange of hostilities known as the First Interstellar War had been proceeding off and on for the past thirty-six years. It had begun in 2368 at the Battle of Beta Pictoris, with a single Terran ship surviving out of a squadron of eight. In the years since, defeat had followed defeat as the Turusch and their mysterious Sh’daar masters had taken world upon human-colonized world, as the area controlled by the Terran Confederation had steadily dwindled.

Most of those defeats were suffered by Earth’s navies at the hands the Turusch va Sh’daar, a species that appeared to be the equivalent of the Sh’daar empire’s military arm. Once, however, a dozen years ago, a Confederation fleet approaching a gas giant within the unexplored system of 9 Ceti, some 67 light years from Sol, had been wiped out by a single enormous vessel rising from the giant’s cloud layers. A single message pod had been launched toward the nearby human colony of Anan, just seventeen light years away, at 37 Ceti.

The Agletsch, the spidery sentients who’d been Humankind’s first contact with other minds among the stars, had looked at images from that pod and identified the lone attacking ship as
H’rulka
. The name was an Agletsch word meaning, roughly, “floaters.” They’d claimed that the aliens were huge living balloons that had evolved within the upper atmosphere of a distant gas giant like Sol’s Jupiter. The term
H’rulka va Sh’daar
suggested that the H’rulka, like the Turusch and like the Agletsch, were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar.

No one knew what the H’rulka called themselves, what they looked like, or anything at all about them. Many human researchers, like Kane, were convinced that even the information about a gas giant homeworld was either mistaken or deliberate misinformation.

What
was
known was that a few weeks after the fleet at 9 Ceti was lost, all contact with Anan was lost as well.

If the H’rulka were at Arcturus, apparently working with the Turusch, it suggested that the Sh’daar had just upped the ante, bringing up some big-gun support for their Turusch allies.

“We could start talking to our Turusch about whether they’ve worked with the H’rulka before,” Wilkerson suggested. “It might give us some insight into how they fit in with the Sh’daar hierarchy.”

Three millennia earlier, Sun Tse had pointed out that a man who knew both himself and his enemy would be victorious in all of his battles. That might have worked for the ancient Chinese, but complete knowledge simply wasn’t possible—certainly not of beings as completely
alien
as the Sh’daar, the H’rulka, or the Turusch.

“Do you think that’s important?” Kane asked.

Wilkerson shrugged. “At this point,
every
datum is important. We’re not even sure why they’re attacking us.”

“I thought it was because the Sh’daar wanted to limit our technological growth.”

“So the Agletsch told us. But how accurate is that? And if it is,
why
? We call the Sh’daar polity an empire… but is it? Do the Sh’daar really control all of their client species, tell them what to do, who to trade with, who to attack? Or are the Turusch, and now the H’rulka, attacking us on their own?
We don’t know
.”

“The term
empire
serves well enough,” Kane said. “We may not need to know the details.”

“Maybe not… but we won’t know what we need to know until we winkle it out, translate it, and analyze it.”

“Well, let’s see what the slugs have to say,” Kane agreed.

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“Enthusiastic? No. Those big gastropods give me the creeps. I keep wanting to reach for the salt shaker… a very
large
salt shaker… .”

Chapter Two

21 December 2404

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1725 hours, EST

The spaceport’s pubtran flier touched down lightly on the landing platform, a broad concourse suspended several hundred meters above the ground in front of the Grand Concourse. Trevor Gray stepped out of the flier and stopped, momentarily transfixed by the spectacle below, a dazzling constellation of lights stretching from horizon to horizon. Near at hand, concentric circles of lights, illuminated buildings, glowing red and green holiday decorations and animations, and the shifting displays of adwalls all combined to create a bewildering tangle of moving light. In the distance, toward the southeast, lay an ominous swath of darkness punctuated by the light—Columbia, Manhattan, and on the horizon, the ocean.

Someone thumped his shoulder hard from behind.

“Move it, Prim,” Lieutenant Jen Collins snapped. “You’re blocking progress.”

Gray turned sharply, fists clenched, but then stepped aside as the others filed out of the flier. Lieutenant Commander Allyn was coming off the flier last, and was watching him. “Uniform, Lieutenant,” she reminded him. “This is a formal affair.”

“Ah, you should have let the Prim wear his jackies,” Collins said with a bitter laugh.

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Kirkpatrick added, grinning. “The dumb-ass doesn’t know any better. It’ll be fun watching him try to mix with
our
kind.”

“Hey, back off,” Lieutenant Ben Donovan said. “We’re all a bit nervous tonight.”

Gray looked down at his uniform, which was currently configured for flight utility—the plain and unadorned dark gray skinsuit worn by pilots jacked into their fighters—“jackies,” in flight-line slang. Angrily, he slapped the set-patch on his left shoulder, calling up a menu within his inner display. Mindclicking on
Full Dress, Formal
engaged the nanotechnic interface. With a somewhat tingling sensation, his clothing rearranged itself, tightening, unfolding, and taking on texture and color.

Confederation Navy formal full dress was a glossy black skinsuit, throat to soles, with an intricate layer of bright gold knotwork sheathing the left third of his body—arm, side, and outer leg, extending all the way from shoulder to ankle. His rank tabs glowed to either side of his throat, and a panel over his left breast displayed a fluorescent animation of awards and decorations. He’d only been in for five years, so the cycling award display was a short one: Confederation Military Service, the Battles of Everdawn and of Arcturus Station, and the newly awarded Legion of the Defense of Earth, with cluster for distinguished service.

“That looks better!” Donovan said, grinning.

“I feel like a damned adwall,” Gray replied, referring to the ubiquitous multistory display panels serving as animated or live-action advertising displays on the walls of arcologies and city buildings.

“But a squared-away, Navy adwall,” Donovan said. He slapped Gray on his gold-entwined arm. “C’mon! Let’s check out the party!”

The Grand Concourse was an immense, domed-over plaza of light, crowds, and color. At the near end, the boulevard wrapped around a depression, a terraced bowl well over two hundred meters across, with standing, sitting, and reclining room for some thousands of people at once. A touch and a thought could grow a chair from the floor, soften to a sunken lounger, or extrude tables complete with a seemingly endless variety of food and drink. Everywhere there was light; the Yule celebrations marked the holy seasons of at least three major religious groups, all of them festivals of light, and the air was filled with twisting, cascading, and shimmering veils of liquid radiance and starbow hues.

“Best behaviors, Dragonfires,” Allyn’s voice whispered in their heads. “Corders, secmons, and deets on at all times, and we
will
know if you switch them off.”

Several of the pilots nearby grumbled at that. Corders were recording sensors grown within the weave of military uniforms. If anyone got into trouble tonight, there’d be a full audiovisual record of the incident for the court-martial afterward. Secmons were security monitors, non-AI software routines designed to warn personnel about possible security breaches. Deets were detoxifiers. There were quite a few sense-altering drugs, scents, and beverages on display, but the micrometabolic processors nano-grown within each pilot’s brain would sample chemicals in the bloodstream, monitor sensory input, and harmlessly filter out the offending chemical before he or she developed more than a light buzz.

For the Navy,
professionalism
and
decorum
were the watchwords.
Always
.

As Gray descended into the crowded concourse bowl, he felt momentarily disoriented. Walls were grown as easily as chairs or appetizers, and could be called into being to create small and cozy alcoves or private spaces, creating a labyrinthine effect, and as walls and rooms came and went, it became difficult to navigate. Some walls appeared to be solid, carved stone; others were screens apparently of wickerwork or painted panels, or of woven vines or other vegetation. The air seemed to grow hazier, the deeper into the bowl he traveled. At the moment, the air glowed with a deep red light, though an ultraviolet component was making the black of his uniform fluoresce with a deep, electric shimmer of ultramarine. Overhead, constellations of lights gleamed brightly, mostly in red and green, for some reason.

There seemed to be no particular theme, save that of
people
.

The crowd within that one hall must have numbered five thousand—roughly the same as the crew on board
America
. He saw a few other military uniforms, most of them the richly patterned black and gold of senior naval officers, or the ancient red, white, and blue of Marine full dress. They stood out within the far, far larger number of civilians, who wore a bewildering array of costumes, from brilliant, swirling plumage, much of it glowing under the UV light, to swirling patterns of iridescent skin nano to complete nudity.

The men seemed to be more conservatively dressed, he noticed—formal skinsuits or robes, though there were a few bright-colored ones aglow in light or with pulsing animations writhing about their bodies. The women, though, all were spectacular in their multihued displays. One strikingly attractive woman in front of him was wearing a startling, meter-high headdress that appeared to be a spray of suspended fiber-optic threads, the light shimmering in a halo effect around her—and nothing else. She saw him looking at her, raised her glass in a mock toast, and winked.

The woman she was talking with appeared to be wearing nothing but white light, as though her skin has become brilliantly luminous, with stars set in her hair and hovering about her head.

“Someone is pinging you,” his personal assistant told him.

“Who?”

“I’m sorry. Her id is blocked.”

“ ‘Her’? A woman? Where is she?”

An inner tug gave him a direction.
That
way. “Range: eighty-seven meters,” his PA said.

Odd. Personal ids—the term was pronounced as a word, rhyming with “lid”—were normally open to all within the electronic world of personal assistants and implanted communications and information hardware. The ping might mean she was interested in him, or it might mean she was just curious, tagging his personal information. That she was not revealing her own personal data, though, meant she wanted to remain anonymous, at least for now.

Who would be looking for him here? If it was Allyn or another shipmate, their military ids would have registered with his PA immediately, a kind of personal IFF. A civilian, then… but he didn’t know anyone at this gathering.

Nor, really, did he care to. The only time in his life when he’d actually sought out civilians in the civilized parts of New York had been when he’d taken Angela to the Columbia Arcology in a desperate attempt to save her when she’d had a stroke. The inhabitants of the Periphery—the fallen-away outer fringes of the old United States, which included the Manhat Ruins—weren’t considered to be full citizens, and normally they didn’t have access to modern medical services. All but the most severe cardiovascular emergencies were easily treated in a modern medical center like the one in Columbia; in a Prim community in the Periphery, a stroke could kill you or leave you helplessly paralyzed.

He’d gotten Angela to the med center while she was still alive… and they’d repaired her. The cost, however, had been
him
, a ten-year term with the Confederation military.

Of course, the treatment had also cost him Angela. They’d done something to her brain while saving her… something that had shut down her affection for him. Or, maybe that had been an effect of the stroke. That’s what they’d told him, anyway, that that sort of thing often happened when old neural pathways were burned out, new paths channeled in. Whichever it had been, his once-wife had chosen to leave him rather than going back to the canals and vine-covered islands of the Ruins.

Hell, he couldn’t even blame her for that. She’d downloaded the skill sets allowing her to become a compositor, a career classification completely unknown to him. She’d moved north to New New York City’s Haworth District, he’d heard, and was living with an extended family there.

At least she hadn’t been in Columbia when the impactor wave had brought the arcology tower down. Or at least, so he hoped. He hadn’t heard from her since he’d left for the Naval Training Center five years earlier. He’d been told she’d moved to Haworth and that she didn’t want to see him… but he didn’t
know
.

“Shall I reply?” his PA asked.

“Negative,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this crowd having anything
pleasant
to say to him.

He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board
America
, that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.

“Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”

That
again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though
ma’am
would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”

“And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”

And here he was.

In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.

Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt
so
damned out of place here… .

Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would
anyone
want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?

Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for
him
. The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.

A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of them things he actually recognized.
America
had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.

He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting…

“You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said,
That
way
, toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”