Dark Mind

For a couple of years, now, Gray had enjoyed a close relationship with Laurie Taggart, America’s weapons officer … but Laurie had been offered a chance to advance her career, as exec on board the new battle carrier Lexington. It was an excellent opportunity for her; in a couple more years, she might have a chance at her own command.

But it left Gray missing her—and Angela—more than ever. Damn, damn, damn …

He considered asking if McKennon wanted to come over to America for dinner later … then sharply cut the thought off. He would be returning to Tprime soon, while she stayed here, 876 million years in the past. That was a hell of a burden to put on any relationship.

An Agletsch materialized in the room just a few meters from where Gray and McKennon were sitting, intruding on Gray’s increasingly unhappy thoughts. Her ID tag, which popped up in Gray’s mind alongside her image, identified her as Aar’mithdisch, one of the spidery, four-eyed Agletsch liaisons who’d come in on board the Glothr vessel. He knew it was a her; Agletsch males were small, leechlike creatures that adhered to the female’s body, like male anglerfish on Earth. After a time, they actually became a part of the female’s body, and eventually were absorbed completely.

At least, he thought, they didn’t have to worry about courtship and dating.

“Admiral Gray!” the translated voice of the being said when she swiveled an eyestalk in his direction and saw him. “The great moment is upon us, yes-no?”

The Agletsch had been the first nonhuman civilization encountered by humans as they spread out into interstellar space, an encounter in 2312 in the Zeta Doradus system, just 38 light years from Sol. Zeta Doradus was not their homeworld. No human knew where they’d come from originally; the price the Aggies put on that piece of information was literally astronomical. Called spiders or bugs by many humans, their oval sixteen-legged bodies vaguely resembled some terrestrial arthropods … in a bad light, perhaps, or after too many drinks.

Few humans trusted them. Some of that was due to their phobia-triggering looks, true, but for most Navy men, it was the fact that many carried nanotechnic storage and communications devices called seeds planted by the Sh’daar, which made them little better than spies. Gray had worked with them on numerous occasions, and didn’t think they would willingly betray their human clients, but he also knew that understanding nonhuman motives and mores was a tricky bit of guesswork at best. For a time, human warships had stopped carrying Agletsch advisors despite their obvious usefulness as translators and as sources of Sh’daar insight and galactography.

But Gray had insisted that Agletsch be brought along on this mission to assist in translating for the Sh’daar. The Joint Chiefs and President Koenig had agreed, but only if the beings were restricted to the Glothr vessel. That suited Gray just fine. He’d wanted someone over there that he could trust handling translations between humans and the Glothr anyway.

“The great moment is indeed here, Aar’mithdisch,” Gray replied. “I’d like to stress that it is vitally important that we have accurate translations of both sides of the negotiations. This may be the most important bit of diplomacy in my world’s history.” He grinned. “No pressure.”

“We do not understand this last comment,” the alien said. “The gas-filled portions of the Glothr vessel maintain an internal pressure of—”

“Never mind, never mind,” Gray said. “It was just a humorous expression.”

The Agletsch’s four weirdly stalked eyes twitched in complicated patterns, a rapid semaphore of sorts. Gray still couldn’t read the emotional overtones that eye movements conveyed to other Agletsch. No doubt, they had the same difficulty understanding human facial expressions, like the grin he’d just tossed into the conversation when he’d said “no pressure.” The Agletsch built very good electronic translators, but no translation system or artificial language could possibly take into account all of the subtle differences among cultures, biologies, and worldviews.

Considering how truly alien different species were when compared to one another, it was a wonder anyone could understand anything that another species was trying to say.

“We translate, Admiral Gray. Accurately … though we note that humans sometimes have trouble understanding other humans even when they share the same terrestrial language.”

“You understand us disturbingly well,” Gray said.

The being responded with a dip in two of its eyestalks—a gesture, Gray assumed, of agreement or, possibly, one simply of acknowledgement. Two more Agletsch materialized alongside the first, and the three of them appeared to be in close conversation among themselves.

“Look what just dropped in,” McKennon said, nodding toward the front of the room. The image of another being had just materialized. It looked like a stack of starfish three meters tall, smaller at the top, larger—almost a meter across—at the bottom. Several skinny arms with multiple branchings, like the branches of a tree, emerged from different points along and around that body, while eyes gleamed at the tips of myriad highly animated tendrils.

“Well, well,” Gray said, his eyes widening. “My software is flagging it as Ghresthrepni … one of the Adjugredudhra.”

“One of the senior spokesbeings for the Sh’daar,” McKennon said, nodding slowly. “And commander of the Ancient Hope.”

“Ah. That’s the ship that warped us in here. Big sucker.”

Like so much about this mission, not a great deal was known about the Adjugredudhra. They’d been prominent, Gray knew, among the ur-Sh’daar before the Transcendence … a species that had delved deeply into advanced nanotechnology. From what few records he’d seen, acquired during America’s visit to the N’gai Cluster twenty years before, the original Adjugredudhrans had developed nanotech to an astonishing degree, building smaller and smaller machines of greater and greater power, machines that allowed them to transform their own bodies molecule by molecule, to literally remake those bodies into any shape or form they desired.

But very few galactic cultures, it seemed, were completely monolithic. Some species organized along the lines of ant or bee colonies, perhaps, could maintain a laser-sharp focus in the way they saw themselves and the universe … but for most, sapient cultures usually contained diversity and variability, subcultures and factions, even misfits and renegades, refusers who did not drink too deeply of the background culture of their civilization. When the Transcendence came … the Schjaa Hok, the Time of Change, there were millions of refusers left behind. Their civilization collapsed, technologies were lost, and wars—survivor remnants squabbling in the ruins of a galactic civilization—destroyed what was left.

Over the course of thousands of years, however, those who remained pulled together and rebuilt much of what had been lost, including worldviews, traditions, and imperial ambitions … until the Sh’daar rose anew from the wreckage that the vanished ur-Sh’daar had left behind.

Another nonhuman being had appeared alongside the first … a huge squid standing on its head was Gray’s first thought, its tentacles spread across the floor holding semiupright a two-and-a-half-meter brown-mottled body curled at the end. A single saucer-sized eye—plus other sensory organs of more dubious uses—peered out from the base of the tentacle mass. Those tentacles flashed and shifted in their color patterns and textures; like the Glothr, they communicated with color and light in vivid visual displays.

Gray’s in-head database filled in the Agletsch name of the species: Groth Hoj. According to what humans had learned with the Koenig Expedition, the Groth Hoj had been masters of robotics, manufacturing massive robotic bodies for themselves … imitations of their natural bodies, at first, but then more and more outlandish machine designs.

Not all Groth Hoj had followed that route, which many apparently thought to be an evolutionary dead end. The refusers had stayed behind. And that must be who was here, today.

Another nonhuman appeared … but with this entity Gray drew a complete blank. He’d never seen anything remotely like it in any downloaded report or description of the N’gai civilizations.

His first impression was that it was a dinosaur—a long-necked sauropod—but it was held off the ground by six legs, not four. No tail, either, and the extra legs were unusual, set along the being’s center line, one behind, and one ahead; its walking pattern, Gray thought, would be … odd.

The hide looked like broken rock, the flanks like the side of a cliff, the neck like a cantilevered crane.

Most of all, the image he saw before him looked like it must be of a creature absolutely titanic in size, hundreds of meters long, perhaps, and massing tens of millions of tons. The head, broad, flattened, and wide, like the head of a hammerhead shark, swung ponderously at the end of that massive neck. Eyes—Gray thought they were eyes—glittered within the shadows underneath the head. A forest of what might have been a tangle of hair hung from the head’s underside like an unkempt beard. As the hairs twitched and writhed, Gray realized that they were manipulatory appendages. They almost hid a pulsing, V-shaped orifice that might be a mouth …

No. Not a mouth. A breathing orifice, perhaps? A creature that huge would have to eat continuously to feed that ponderous bulk, and a mouth that small just wouldn’t be up to the task. So how did the thing eat? And what?

For some reason, he really didn’t want to find out.

“What,” Gray said, “is that?”

“The Agletsch call it a Drerd,” a voice in his head said, and Gray realized it was Konstantin speaking to him through his implants, not McKennon.

“Hello, Konstantin,” he transmitted. “Getting settled into your new base of operations okay?”

“Everything is most satisfactory, Admiral,” the AI replied in its maddeningly calm and precise voice. “I have managed to interface with the Sh’daar systems of data storage and begun downloading information on their civilization. There are a number of species here in the files which we have not previously encountered.”

“I suppose that’s to be expected,” Gray replied. “When America paid her last visit here, we didn’t hang around for very long.”

“No. There are some hundreds of mutually alien species that evolved within the N’gai Cloud over the course of some billions of years. We knew of only a handful.”

Gray looked at the gathering aliens in the virtual meeting space and wondered why they had been chosen, as opposed to, say, the F’heen-F’haav symbiote pairs, or the sluglike Sjhlurrr.

It begged the question: who the hell was calling the shots for the Sh’daar?

Before he could figure that out, he realized the Drerd appeared to be speaking:

We give formal greeting to our visitors from the future …

The voice was a deep baritone and clearly human, or more likely an AI human avatar. According to data now appearing in side windows in Gray’s consciousness, the huge being was rumbling at infrasound frequencies, producing sound waves down around 8 or 10 Hertz, well below the 20 Hz limit of human hearing.

Ghresthrepni, the Adjugredudhran ship captain, responded, in a smoothly blended medley of clicks, chirps, trills, and tinkling bells.

We note, too, the being said in translation, the presence of an associate from our Collective’s future, whom the Agletsch name Glothr. We would know the reason for this conclave.

Lights shimmered and pulsed within the Glothr. We bring warning from your future, ran the translation.

We would hear, rumbled the Drerd, from the humans. It was they who requested this gathering of Mind.

“You’re up,” McKennon said.

“I guess so.” And Gray stood.

The virtual image around him shifted as he did so. Rather than in a classroom of some sort, he now stood on an endless flat plain. The sky remained the same—vast clots of stars, nebulae, and scattered artificial worlds. Now, however, a circle of beings stood on that plain, facing one another. The Drerd, Gray saw, was bigger than he’d even imagined—a ponderously mobile mountain, a mountainscape all in its own right. He was the only human, and the other species were represented by just one apiece. The Glothr, he saw, was standing a couple of meters to his right, an Agletsch just to his left, while the Drerd towered above him perhaps fifty meters ahead, on the other side of the circle.

The others—Adjugredudhra, Groth Hoj, and perhaps thirty or forty others—gathered around. He saw here several that he recognized but he’d not seen in the classroom simulation: the Baondyeddi, like massive, many-legged pancakes ringed about with eyes; the monstrous but beautiful Sjhlurrr, eight meters long and mottled gold and red; and a swarm of silvery spheres hovering together in midair, the intelligent component of the F’heen-F’haav hive-mind symbiosis.

So they are here. Interesting. Most—not all, but most—of the beings in that circle towered over Gray: the Groth Hoj by a meter or so, the Drerd by literally hundreds of meters. Individual F’heen were a few centimeters across, but that flashing, shifting sphere of hundreds of closely packed individuals was easily ten meters across. The Agletsch was smaller than a human, perhaps half of Gray’s height, and there was something to his right that looked at first glance like a glistening and flaccid pile of internal organs a couple of meters long and half a meter deep. Those few smaller beings, however, didn’t lessen at all the impact of standing with so many giants. Gray felt dwarfed, less than insignificant. It didn’t help that every single entity there belonged to a civilization more mature, more technologically advanced, than Earth’s. He felt like a child in a roomful of very tall, very old adults.

And how could it have been otherwise? Humankind had emerged from pre-technological darkness only the blink of an eye ago. It had been ten millennia since the invention of the plow, a mere six hundred and some years since the discovery of radio, and half that long since the first human faster-than-light voyage. The chance that any star-faring aliens encountered would be younger than humans was nil.

He thought of the assembly as the Sh’daar Council, though how accurate a description of the group that might be he had no idea.

“I have information for this Council,” Gray said, speaking through his cerebral implants. “Information acquired from the remote future—from a time twelve million years beyond my own epoch, and about eight hundred eighty-eight million years from this time we’re in now. We learned this from the Glothr, on the sunless world we call Invictus.

“And I think all of you, the Sh’daar Collective Council, need to know this …”

Chapter Six

2 November 2425

Virtual Reality

N’gai Cluster

1212 hours, TFT

Konstantin-2 fed recorded imagery to the Sh’daar Council as Gray continued to speak. The powerful AIs on board America had, 12 million years in Humankind’s future, tapped into the vast and intricate web of Glothr information networks. The information and imagery found there had been returned to Konstantin in the year 2425, analyzed, and translated. Those records, now imbedded within Konstantin-2’s memory, created a visual backdrop shared by all of the entities present as Gray spoke.

“This,” Gray said, “is the galaxy, my galaxy—we call it the Milky Way. This is what it looks like in my own time.”

The plain and its looming circle of giant beings had vanished. In its place, the Milky Way hung in silent, glowing splendor against Night Absolute. The central hub showed a faint reddish tinge while the spiral arms around it glowed faintly blue. From this vantage point, it was easy to see that the galaxy was, in fact, a barred spiral, its hub elongated in its ponderous revolution about the super-massive black hole at its heart.

Four hundred billion stars … forty billion Earthlike worlds … some millions of intelligent species, many with star-faring civilizations—all within that single soft glow of tangled, nebulae-knotted, spiraling starlight.

“A wise human named Sun Tzu once said, ‘Know your enemy,’” Gray told the others, “and so we humans have been learning as much as we can about the Sh’daar Collective. We know you evolved within this dwarf galaxy you call the N’gai Cluster, that your civilization was destroyed by the Schjaa Hok, the Transcendence, and that you rebuilt it from the ashes.

“We know that as the N’gai Cluster was devoured by the larger Milky Way, you spread out to create a new empire, one spanning both space and time … and that you were determined that the Transcendence would never again threaten your culture, or the cultures of other species that were interacting with you. We know that you found ways to travel from your epoch to mine, where you gathered many more species to your cause … the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, and others. And when we humans refused what you offered—and what you demanded in return—you urged those species to attack us, either to force us into obedience, or to destroy us …”

Thunder rumbled, deep and insistent—the Drerd interrupting. You humans are balanced on the precipice, the translation informed him. You are closer to Schjaa Hok than you realize. If you fall, you threaten us all.

“We have never understood your fears about this,” Gray said. “If a single species in this entire, vast galaxy goes extinct—or if it enters its own transcendence and vanishes entirely—how does that threaten you?”

The spinning gateways give access not only to far expanses of space, another being—the one like a golden slug, the Sjhlurrr—reminded him, but to the deeps of time as well. Causality can be broken. Whole universes of creativity and creation, of experience, of suffering and of ecstasy, of Mind can be made void in an instant. What thinking being could not fear such an eventuality?

Spinning gateways. That must be what the Sh’daar called the TRGA cylinders. He felt the Agletsch within his implant, confirming his guess.

“There may be,” Gray said, “greater fears. We recently traveled twelve million years into our own future, and encountered the Glothr. We learned a great deal from them.

“And we learned about the end of galactic civilization … or at least of that aspect of civilization that includes the Sh’daar and Humankind.”

And the virtual image of the Milky Way … changed.

That vast whirlpool of hundreds of billions of suns, young and bright and vital, its spiral arms picked out by the long, knotted battlements and parapets of black dust and by the piercing gleam of young, hot stars, faded away to shreds and tatters, to be replaced by … something else, a pale shell of its former beauty. The mathematical perfection of those spiral arms had been torn apart, the nebulae devoured, the myriad stars vanished or somehow dimmed—a handful of stars surviving of the myriads visible before. The galaxy had become a wan, dim shadow of its former light and strength.

And at the galactic core something strange was visible, nestled in among the remnant suns. Something shadowy, with just a hint of golden light. It was difficult to see, difficult to interpret, to understand, but it looked like an immense translucent sphere fully ten thousand light years across, forged, perhaps, out of the clotted clouds of suns that had been there before.

A scant handful of species, according to the Glothr records, and including the Glothr themselves, were in full flight from the ravaged galaxy behind them, fleeing to other galaxies across the empty gulfs of space. A number of dark and frigid worlds—a fleet, a pack of Steppenwolf worlds—were fleeing out into darkness.

“We think,” Gray told the Council, “that what we’re seeing in there engulfing the galaxy’s central core is a full-blown Kardeshev III civilization … a galactic Dyson sphere.”

As he said this, Konstantin-2 shared with the Council the background information to what must have been untranslatable terms to the alien species:

In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev had lent his name to his proposed method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological development. A K-I civilization used all of the available energy of its home planet. A K-II used all of the energy from its star, and physicist Freeman Dyson had suggested how that might be possible: a hollow sphere, or, alternatively, a cloud of orbiting satellites, that collected all of the energy emitted by the civilization’s star.

Which meant that a K-III civilization would use all of the energy available within an entire galaxy.

When Gray suggested the possibility of a galactic-scale Dyson sphere—and as they accepted the AI’s data—he felt an uneasy stir move through his audience.

Why, the Groth Hoj asked him, should we fear this? This … event lies nearly a billion years in our future. And it could well be our own remote descendents who do this …

The ephemeral is correct, the Adjugredudhran said. Its branching arms gestured sharply. A mere four galactic rotations is a brief space of time for a truly mature civilization.

The being’s use of the word ephemeral almost jolted Gray out of the simulation. How long did the Adjugredudhra live?

And that question raised another. Presumably, they possessed long life spans—possibly even functional immortality—because they’d learned how to manipulate their own genome. But genetics was one of the proscribed technologies—the “G” in “GRIN,” knowledge that could lead to the Tech Singularity. Supposedly, the Adjugredudhra, like the rest of the Sh’daar, were doing everything in their power to avoid another one.

Were all of the members of the Sh’daar Collective hypocrites on such an astronomical scale?

That thought disturbed him even as he answered their question. “Eight hundred seventy-six million years is more like three galactic rotations, not four,” Gray said. “A mere instant!” He meant the statement as a joke, but sensed a kind of impact, an increasing sense of unease, among the alien listeners. Maybe they did casually think on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. “And in my time, my epoch, we might be seeing the first arrival of the galactic Dyson sphere makers. We believe them to be the Rosette Aliens.”

At Gray’s mental signal, Konstantin-2 loaded another set of images into the collective, virtual consciousness—images originally returned to Earth from the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster. “A lot of ephemeral lives were lost,” he said, “getting this information.”

Konstantin was showing the gathered beings images collected by America, and by various survey ships and probes sent into the cluster’s heart. The six black holes the Council were seeing—cosmologists were now certain—were the far-future embers of the Six Suns of the remote past.

The beings gathered about the virtual circle stared up, with wildly different sensory organs, into utter strangeness. Not all of them had eyes … but the imagery had been made available in a wide range of formats.

The Six Suns all were hot, young stars, each some forty times the mass of Earth’s sun. Such large stars were profligate and short-lived. They burned through their stores of nuclear fuel in just tens of millions of years before ending their relatively brief lives as Type II supernovae and collapsing into black holes. The various star-faring beings around him had to know what these images implied, but he said it aloud anyway.