Center of Gravity (7 page)

“I know,” Carruthers said. “But the Senate majority feels that we don’t have a viable alternative.”

“But we do. Operation Crown Arrow.”

Carruthers gave a grim smile. “Not all of them see it that way. Especially if it turns out that these H’rulka are involved. They don’t wish to leave Earth open to attack. Not again.”

They were standing in a small temporary alcove within the concourse bowl. Carruthers and several of his aides, along with Rand Buchanan, Koenig’s flag captain, had retreated to the relative privacy and soundproof isolation of the alcove as the party outside continued to throb into high gear. Carruthers had asked Koenig to join them there. He’d ordered a martini from the local assembler, and was sipping it in an attempt to rid himself of the bitter taste of his electronic doppelganger’s speech earlier.

“But a special AI designed to negotiate with the Turusch? We’ve had Turusch POWs on Luna for two months now, and communicating with them is still a problem. What makes the Senate think we can pull off something like that?”

“I suppose,” Carruthers said slowly, “that they see it as an alternative to extermination.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum,” Koenig said, looking at his drink, “as delivered by their Agletsch toadies, made it pretty clear what the enemy wants of us. An absolute freeze on all technological development, especially GRIN technologies… and a limit to our expansion to other, new systems. Too high a price.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum was… what?” Carruthers said. “Thirty-seven years ago? And we’ve been steadily losing the war ever since it started. The Peace Faction is beginning to think that the price of admission may not be too high after all.”

“The Senate,” one of Carruthers’ aides put in, “is afraid.” Her name, Koenig could see from her id, was Diane Gregory, and she was a Navy captain. “The enemy got entirely too close to Earth last October,” she continued, “and the Peace Faction feels that it is only a matter of time before they succeed in an all-out attack on Earth’s technical infrastructure.”

No one was sure why the mysterious Sh’daar—the presumed overlords of an interstellar empire in toward the galactic core—had insisted that Humankind give up its love affair with a steadily and rapidly increasing technology. The presumption, of course, was that there were weapons just around the technological corner that might pose a threat even to the unseen masters of the galaxy, that the Sh’daar, through their subject races, were putting a cap on the technologies of emerging species in order to preserve their place at the top of the interstellar hierarchy.

But like so very much else about the Sh’daar, that was just a guess. So far as was known, no human had ever seen a Sh’daar; some human xenosophontologists had even suggested that they were a fiction, a kind of philosophical rallying point for diverse species like the Turusch, the Agletsch, the Nungiirtok, and the H’rulka.

But that, too, was just a theory… and not, in Koenig’s estimation, even a particularly likely one.

And not even the super-weapon idea managed to explain the Sh’daar concern with human science, specifically with genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the so-called GRIN technologies. GRIN had been the driving forces of human technical progress for four centuries, now, so much so that in many ways they defined human culture, technology, and economic growth. That was why it had been unthinkable, at least to the Confederation leaders of thirty-seven years ago, that Humankind surrender its fascination with those particular technologies.

It was difficult to imagine a weapon system relying on
all four
technologies that might pose a threat to godlike aliens inhabiting some remote corner of the galaxy. Nanotechnology? Absolutely. Robotics? Possibly, but not very likely. Genetics? Again, possibly… though what kind of biological weapon could threaten a species that itself must long ago have mastered the most intimate secrets of biology? Information, computer, and communications technologies? Certainly a necessity, at least for controlling such a hypothetical super-weapon.

But… why those four? Why not another “G”—gravitics? Projected singularities made possible both inertia-free acceleration and the space-bending Alcubierre Drive, which reduced a 4.3-year voyage to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light to something just less than two and a half days. Being able to make micro black holes to order might well lead to some interesting weapons systems one day.

Or how about adding an “E” for energy? Artificial black holes within a starship’s quantum-tap power plant extracted seemingly unlimited amounts of raw energy from the vacuum fluctuation of the zero-point field. If it could be harnessed, that kind of energy release could almost certainly be developed somehow into a truly nasty super-weapon.

No, there was something specific about GRIN technologies that the Sh’daar didn’t like, that they
feared
. But what?

Koenig had always opted for the super-weapon theory. Think-tank study groups, he knew, had been working on that angle ever since the Sh’daar Ultimatum had been delivered, but with no solid leads so far. The notion that advanced technologies a century or two hence might enable humans to snuff out a star or transform the nature of reality itself would remain sheer fantasy until some idea could be developed showing where GRIN was taking the human species. The exact nature of the innovative leaps, the inventions, the unexpected technological advances of even the next fifty years simply could not be anticipated.

There was no way, even with the most powerful virtual simulations, to predict what was going to be discovered, and when.

“So… tell me about this virtual diplomat,” Koenig said.

“They’re calling it ‘Tallyrand,’ ” Carruthers told him. “They’re supposed to be programming him now at a facility on Luna.”

“Tallyrand?”

“A historical diplomat. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century… France.”

“They called him the ‘Prince of Diplomats,’ ” Gregory said. “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord is widely regarded as the most versatile and influential diplomat in Earth’s history.”

“You seem to be up on your history, Commander.”

She grinned. “The admiral has had me over on Luna as an observer at the software labs where they’re writing him. So, yeah. I downloaded a lot on the original Tallyrand, at any rate.”

“I suppose they’re being hopeful with that name,” Carruthers said.

“They can be as hopeful as they like,” Koenig said. “How do they expect this… this virtual diplomat to communicate with the Sh’daar?”

“It will be an advanced AI residing within a starship,” Carruthers said with a shrug, “probably something like an ISVR–120 or a 124. No organic crew, just the software. The idea would be to send it into Agletsch space, out in the direction of Canopus, where we think their stellar polity is centered. And the Agletsch would pass it on to the Sh’daar.”

Koenig chuckled at that. “Good luck to them, then. Considering that computer technology is part of what the Sh’daar want to restrict, I’d say that Tallyrand would be a great way
not
to impress them. Or, maybe a better way to say it… it would impress them, but in exactly the wrong way!”

The others laughed.

“But how can they even consider caving in to the Sh’daar?” Buchanan asked. “Hell, nanotech alone is wrapped up one way or another in just about everything we do, in medical science, in assemblers, in retrievers, in nanufactories… .”

“Even more so for information systems and computers,” Koenig said. “We’ve been inextricably entangled with our computers for four centuries now. Giving up computers would be to give up being human!”

“Not entirely, sir,” another of Carruthers’ aides said. His id identified him as Commander Jesus Vasquez. “There are people out there today who don’t rely on computer technology.”

“Squatties,” Gregory said, making a face. “Prims.”

“Exactly. In any case, the Sh’daar seem to just want us to stop
further
technological development.”

“This far and no further, eh?” Carruthers said.

Koenig shook his head. “And I would argue, Commander, that
that
means giving up an essential part of our humanity as well. We’re always going to be tinkering. We find a way to make a hotter fire… and that in turn leads to discovering copper and tin when they ooze out of the rocks around the campfire. We play with those, find we can mix them, and we discover bronze. Meanwhile, someone builds an even hotter fire and learns how to smelt iron. Technological innovation started with knocking chips off the edge of a piece of flint, and it hasn’t stopped since.”

“But progress can’t keep going on forever, can it?” Gregory asked. “There has to be a point where there’s nothing more to be discovered. No more inventions, no more improvements to be made.”

“Can’t it? I wonder. Have you ever heard of the technological singularity?”

“No, sir. What’s that?”

“Old idea, late twentieth century. Back then, science and technology were improving at a steadily increasing rate, at an exponentially increasing rate.” Koenig moved his hand as though following a line on a graph, going up gradually, then more steeply, then straight up. “At some point, it was theorized, technological advancement would be accelerating so quickly that life, that humanity itself, would become completely unrecognizable within a very short span of time. It was called the technological singularity… or sometimes the Vinge Singularity.”

Carruthers got the faintly glassy, distant look of someone pulling data down from the local Net. “Ah,” he said. “Vernor Vinge, right?”

“That’s the guy. Of course, we haven’t hit the singularity
yet
. . . at least not to that extent. Someone from five hundred years ago would still be able to relate to the world we know today. Nanassemblers might seem like magic, sure, but with a little training and some minor surgery to give them the necessary implants, they’d get along in our society just fine. Life hasn’t changed fundamentally, not to the extent some theorists envisioned.”

“I’m beginning to think some sort of new super-weapon is going to be our only hope,” Carruthers said. “But we’re going to need to develop it damned fast, because if the Sh’daar Empire doesn’t take us down pretty soon, I’m beginning to think the politicians will.”

“So what is the current status of Crown Arrow?” Koenig asked with blunt directness.

“On hold in committee in the Military Directorate,” Carruthers told him. “The vote has been delayed again, indefinitely, this time. I was told two days ago that we don’t want to provoke the Sh’daar into hasty action.”

“What, they don’t want us to make them mad?” Koenig asked. He laughed. “I’d say they’ve been royally pissed at us for thirty-seven years!”

“Maybe. And maybe an empire of some billions of worlds is so big they move slowly.”

“And maybe we need to buy ourselves time, which is what Crown Arrow was supposed to do in the first place!”

Operation Crown Arrow was a strategic concept originally presented by Koenig to the Senate Military Directorate ten months earlier, shortly after the previous year’s twin defeats at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. The ONI had tentatively identified a major Turusch staging base at Alphekka, a star that, from Earth, was the brightest star in the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown.” Koenig’s plan called for a large-scale carrier strike against the enemy base there, seventy-two light years from Earth. By taking the war deep into enemy-held space, the Sh’daar’s timetable might be thrown off, and forces now being gathered for an assault against Sol and its inner colonies might be drawn off.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given the oplan their unqualified support, but for the past ten months, the Military Directorate had dithered, passing it through various committees and subcommittees, requesting clarifications and revisions, running it through virtual simulations to determine likely military, political, and economic outcomes, and always failing to bring it to a final vote.

Carruthers palmed a contact on the table next to them, and the assembler inside produced another drink, which seemed to rise up out of the table as though extruded from the hard black surface itself. He picked up the glass, studied it for a moment, and then downed it in a single gulp.

“I hear you, Admiral,” Carruthers said after a moment. “Believe me, we all do. We have allies in the Senate who are doing their best, but…” He shrugged and set the glass back on the table. After a moment, it seemed to dissolve back into the tabletop from which it had been nanufactured. “We’re going to have to be patient,” he said, finally.

“Just so long as the Sh’daar and their allies are patient as well,” Koenig said. “I do know one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“We humans are a technic species. Our technology, the pace of our technological advance, is a part of us, a part of everything we do. If we surrender our ability to make our own technological decisions to the Sh’daar…”

“We can’t do that, damn it,” Buchanan put in.

“No,” Koenig agreed. “For us, that would be racial suicide.
Extinction
. . . .”

“Slow extinction if we surrender to the Sh’daar Empire,” Carruthers said, “and quick extinction if we keep fighting them, and lose. It seems our species has damned few alternatives open to it.”