Netlink Page 5

  The Device raised so many, many questions, all thus far unanswerable. Foremost, however, were who had built it… and why.

  “Humans have records of this star exploding,” »DEVCAMERON« told the DalRiss-Naga fusion that was his host. “It was seen in the skies of Earth in pre-spaceflight times, in the spring of 1918, Current Era. It was the brightest ordinary nova ever witnessed, outshining every star in the skies of Earth’s northern hemisphere except for Sirius.”

  “The DalRiss, too, have such records,” a voice replied in his mind. “A bright star appeared in the night skies of GhegnuRish some forty sixes of seasons ago. We were involved with the Gharku at the time, however, and could pay scant attention to stars, however bright.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Gharku” was what the Riss had called the Naga, before human contact with one of the entities had opened new possibilities in understanding and being. The name could be translated, roughly, as “The Chaos.” Before peaceful contact, which the being that was now »DEVCAMERON« had first initiated almost by accident, humans had known the Naga as Xenophobes, an assumption about motives that later proved to be quite wrong.

  “We’re about twelve hundred light years from Earth,” he thought. “Eleven hundred from GhegnuRish. The star went nova almost two thousand years ago, sometime around 700 C.E.”

  “What is the significance of the time?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Except that I’m wondering if whoever made the Device also made Nova Aquila explode in the first place. If they did, it means the Device is two millennia old. Has it been eating these stars the whole time?”

  “The designers could be opportunists who arrived long after the detonation. The date of the explosion does not logically fix their place in time.”

  “No.”

  But »DEVCAMERON« was being gnawed by a terrible fear.

  Some of the information he’d downloaded included an interesting datum about novas seen on Earth, something he’d picked up long, long ago when he’d downloaded anything at all that he could find about the stars. It was basically a meaningless piece of trivia, not germane to affairs closer to home.

  The appearance of a “new star,” a nova, had always been cause for wonder… and occasionally fear. Some few, like the brilliant beacon that illuminated the skies in C.E. 1054, were spectacular stellar deaths, the supernovae that collapsed a sun into a tiny, fast-spinning neutron star at the heart of an expanding cloud of dust and gas. The vast majority were not so violent. Ordinary novae, like Nova Aquila, blew off vast amounts of their outer shells, leaving behind shrunken remnants, planet-sized white dwarfs. Most were double stars, as in this system; it was hypothesized that the novae were caused by the expansion of one star’s atmosphere, launching a torrent of gases on the companion star and triggering a detonation, which either tore away the first star’s substance or triggered a second explosion in turn.

  That much, at least, was known about novae.

  There was one mystery, though, that had dogged the subject for centuries, almost since the beginning of astronomy as a technical science. Novae should be more or less evenly distributed across the entire sky, with a slight clumping, perhaps, along the path of the Milky Way where the concentration of stars was thicker. Instead, a disproportionate number of stars had exploded all in the same general region of the heavens, toward the Earth-sky constellations of Aquila, Cygnus, Scutum, Serpens, Ophiuchus, coreward from Sol and slightly to spinward in the great wheel of the Galaxy.

  This was far more than any statistical fluke. During one brief forty-year period early in the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the novae seen on Earth had appeared in roughly two percent of the sky. Two of the brightest novae ever recorded had blazed forth in the same year—1936—and the nova of 1918 in Aquila had been the brightest ordinary nova ever recorded.

  In the six centuries since, the percentage had fallen and the area of sky expanded, but the records still showed something like ten percent of all novae occurring in about five percent of the sky. The chances of that kind of clustering occurring randomly were in this case literally astronomical.

  And here was possible proof that that apparent clumping was not an accident of statistics… but the result of deliberate and intelligent action.

  What kind of intelligence would destroy a star?

  What need would drive them to destruction on such a massive scale?

  “Are there planets in this system?” he asked suddenly. If this star had once possessed worlds, even life…

  “We need your help to determine that, »DEVCAMERON«,” the host replied. “You will need to guide our Perceivers.”

  “Link me in.…”

  The DalRiss had evolved with a very different set of senses and perceptions than humans. Their primary sense was one that felt the shape of electrochemical fields generated by living tissue. They “saw” life, while inorganic matter was a kind of emptiness, a void they were aware of only by its shape. The DalRiss had engineered other life forms to extend the range and clarity of their visual perception. “Perceivers” were small artificial creatures that were eye and brain and little else. When connected to the interwoven nervous systems of several DalRiss, they provided a kind of sight.

  But little understanding. That was one reason the DalRiss had invited »DEVCAMERON« to join them, after he’d lost his body. »DEVCAMERON’S« brain had evolved the ability to make sense of his surroundings through light-sensitive organs. The DalRiss fleet, numbering eighty of the huge living ships, was as dependent on Dev for his knowledge of what a star was as it was on the Perceivers who actually saw its light.

  »DEVCAMERON« extended his optical senses, enhanced by the sensitive organic optics of the Perceivers. If this double star had been the center of a planetary system two thousand years ago, those worlds would be remote indeed from the tiny, planet-sized white dwarfs that circled one another today. Scored by nova’s heat, then left to freeze in the icy wastes far beyond the reach of those wan dwarfs, if those worlds had ever been touched by life, they were dead now.

  He searched for long minutes, sensing only emptiness beyond the wan light of the suns. That proved nothing, for any worlds out there would be dimly lit indeed. Leaving several Perceivers to continue an automatic search, he turned his attention back to the Device.

  “How would such a thing work?” the DalRiss voice said in his mind.

  “I don’t understand all of the math,” he replied. “But just as a rotating black hole could theoretically open up pathways—wormholes, we call them—to distant points in space or time, a cylindrical mass like this, rotating at relativistic speeds, should open up… gateways in the space around it. A number of these cylinders could have paths lined between them. Or you could send a ship through to a point in empty space, light years away.”

  His DalRiss hosts—and of course the Nagas who rode with them—had never imagined such a thing and could not follow the concept as he tried to explain it. If he’d had the math, possibly he could have done a better job, but as it was, all he could do was observe and try to describe what he was sensing to the others.

  “You are saying, then,” the DalRiss continued, “that this is a machine for traveling instantly from point to point. Like our Achievers.”

  “That’s right,” »DEVCAMERON« replied.

  Achievers were artificial, DalRiss-grown life forms that could visualize a distant point in space and somehow—no one, not even the DalRiss themselves, was quite certain how it worked—move the ship in a blink across tens or even hundreds of light years, killing the Achiever in the process. When humans first contacted the DalRiss, there’d been speculation that their mode of travel through interstellar space was far superior to the slower, shorter-ranged abilities of human K-T ships, and there’d been discussion about how humans could adopt the DalRiss method.

  That was unlikely, at least in the short term, no matter what the advantages might be. DalRiss starship-cities were immense living organisms grown for the p
urpose; so far as human experimentation had been able to determine in the years since First Contact with the DalRiss, the process they used to move their ships from point to point required that the vessels be organic, their lives meshed symbiotically with those of the Achievers in ways human biotechnology didn’t yet understand. Someday, living human ships might be grown as well, but in the meantime, the only way to use DalRiss technology was to get them to literally carry human ships inside the far larger DalRiss ship-creatures. And, for their own reasons, the DalRiss rarely agreed to do that. Humanity would have to learn how to grow its own ship-creatures.

  The DalRiss themselves were the product of artificial symbiosis. The “Riss” portion of the joint creature was a roughly crescent-shaped, many-armed rider atop the bulky, six-legged starfish shape which was the “Dal.” The two were extremely closely linked, sharing one another’s sensory perceptions, a single organism in fact.

  Something moved across »DEVCAMERON’S« field of view—not in deep space but in close to the Device, a black shape flickering into existence some tens of kilometers above the spinning silver cylinder. “What is that?”

  “We perceive nothing—”

  “Quickly! On my scan! Enhance! Enhance!”

  Two more shapes followed the first, as quick as thought. His first impression was that they were alive, so fast and agile were they… but the reality was swiftly apparent. The three were dissimilar in details of shape, yet alike, organic-smooth forms, jet black in color, with a line of wickedly curved blades down one side, like saw teeth, or the fins of some aquatic creature, but angled to stab forward instead of trailing behind.

  “Ships!” »DEVCAMERON« announced. “I’ve never seen their like! They just materialized out of the space close to the Device.”

  He could sense more of the DalRiss hosts shifting linkages within the network, their equivalent of standing on tiptoe to see as they switched to their Perceiver arrays for primary input.

  The alien ships were moving almost too quickly to follow, and once they were clear of the Device they were virtually impossible to see against the blackness of space. In seconds, however, they’d streaked toward the nearer of the two white dwarfs and were visible once again as dust-mote silhouettes against the raw, pearly white glare of the star’s surface.

  “They seek to end their existence,” a voice said in »DEVCAMERON’S« mind.

  “I don’t think so. Why would they come here, from wherever they came from in the first place, to do that? Can we signal them?”

  “We are attempting to get their attention, using both radio and laser communications. There has been no response.”

  “Keep trying.”

  It was difficult to follow the alien vessels’ descent into the stellar corona. The Perceivers’ optics had not been designed to handle such light levels, and several of the creatures went off-line, their vision destroyed.

  Then the mystery ships were gone, vanished into the star.

  “Have they been destroyed?” a voice asked.

  “I… I still can’t believe they deliberately destroyed themselves,” »DEVCAMERON« said, but his thoughts were unsteady, uncertain. Various possibilities occurred to him. They were probes of some sort, sent to plumb the star’s depths. They were starminers, seeking energy or raw materials.

  A third possibility was more chilling. If these were the people who’d once made a star explode, perhaps they were trying to do so again.

  But minute followed minute, and there was no change in the white dwarf’s complexion as it continued its swing about the Device, paired with its opposite number on the far side.

  Were these the same people? The ones who’d destroyed a star? Were they the same as the builders of the Device?

  So many questions and not answers enough by half.

  “The Perceivers’ scan has found planets,” the voice announced. “Four. They are far beyond the star’s zone for liquid water, however.”

  “They would be. These dwarfs don’t shed much more than a few percent of the light and heat they used to. Where?”

  A silent thought indicated direction and distance. Piggybacking himself onto the nervous system of a battery of DalRiss and Perceivers, he focused on one world, then another. Three were gas giants, so distant that at the highest magnification they showed no detail at all.

  A fourth was closer, about three astronomical units away. It was a rocky world, its surface a patchwork of ice and rock, without even a trace of atmosphere. But »DEVCAMERON« felt a stirring as he watched that distant world, for his DalRiss senses indicated that the planet possessed very nearly the mass of the Earth.

  “I think,” he said, “that that ice ball should be our next stop.”

  “There is no life.”

  “No. But I’d like to know if there was life there once.”

  “We go, then.”

  The host accelerated out from the enigmatic, rapidly spinning whisker and all of its hidden secrets.

  Chapter 5

  To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

  —The Divine Comedy,

  Inferno, Canto XVI, l. 79

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  C.E. 1320

  Dr. Daren Cameron stopped, pausing for breath as kata vines dripped scarlet beneath a lowering orange and green sky. On the horizon, beyond the swells of a shallow sea, a volcano rambled, staining the sky with a pall of greasy blue-gray ash as lightning played and flickered about the mountain’s crest. Sulfur tainted the air, giving it a burned, unpleasant taste.

  He knew the world as Dante, though that was not its true name. The second world of a type K3 star cataloged as DM-58 5564, some thirty light years from Earth and over seventy-six from New America, it had originally been named Dantai, a Nihongo word meaning, roughly, social organization or group. Western survey team members, however, had twisted the name in literate wordplay, pointing to the world’s sweltering heat, its sulfurous air, its bizarre and, at times, demonic inhabitants.

  Dante was the more apt name, Daren thought, looking about at the raw, young landscape. He couldn’t actually claim that he was experiencing any discomfort at the moment, but the sulfur-laden air, the evil-looking sky, the beach of black, volcanic sand, all contributed to the atmosphere of a place that Dante Alighieri or his Virgil might well have recognized as the gateway to hell.

  Damn it, where was Taki?

  The air was warm and humid, promising a storm, and a salt tang hung in the air. Boots crunching in the black sand, Daren strode across the beach, then scrambled to the top of a spray-slick boulder to get himself a better view of the land- and seascape encircling him.

  East was ocean, deep green-gray in color and patched with whitecaps. West, behind the tumble of breakwater rocks, the land was a low and fetid swamp, rising through tangled matari trees and traveler roots to higher ground. Beyond, the land moved higher still, rising through rolling blue-green foothills that vanished into the blue mist walling the Airy Mountains, white-streaked purple walls of granite so sheer they looked like a painted backdrop.

  Daren was alone.

  Frowning, he turned slowly on his boulder perch, scanning the coastline north and south. As a precaution, he set his Companion to recording the scene in full sensory detail. The world was slightly smaller than Earth, with eight tenths of Earth’s gravity. It was younger, too, and with a hotter core; volcanism was extensive, plate tectonics active. The Airy Mountains to the west topped twelve thousand meters; there were mountains at the equator half again taller.

  At the same time, the atmosphere, at 1.2 bars, was slightly denser than Earth’s and had a much higher carbon dioxide content, nearly two percent. The seas and air were warmer, the storms vaster, wetter, and longer-lived. Erosion proceeded at a faster rate, wearing down mountains and using them to thicken the coastal oceans with silt. There were eig
ht rivers on Dante the length and breadth of Earth’s Nile, four Amazons, five Mississippis. The seas, shallower, smaller, and more landlocked than Earth’s, carried higher concentrations of sediments and dissolved chemicals washed down from the highlands.

  North lay his destination, a clustered and interlocking series of gleaming white towers, rising stepwise from sea and beach, with curving sides and curiously twisted, angular faces, the tips of the highest fully a kilometer above the surf breaking at their feet. The cluster looked much like images of arcologies or large-scale hab units in one of the more modern cities on Earth.

  And so they had looked to the planet’s first explorers. The men and women of the initial Japanese survey team to visit Dante over two centuries before had been convinced they’d discovered another sapient species. Eighteen years of unrelenting work to establish communication had ended in frustration and failure. Private groups and foundations had continued the work, which was proceeding even today. After more than two hundred years, however, it still wasn’t possible to know for sure whether the Communes, as they ultimately became known, were intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. Like the ants and termites of Earth, the Communes were social creatures, living in vast lime-cement structures accreted out of seawater, rising like terraced buildings above the shores of Dante’s shallow, brackish seas.

  They appeared to be a littoral species, limited by their adaptation to their environment to the planet’s coastal regions. Extensively researched by terrestrial xenozoologists, they carried the scientific name Architectus communis, the social builders, though individuals came in so many different shapes and sizes that the scientists were still arguing over whether the Communes were one species with hundreds of extreme variants or hundreds of different species living in close communal symbiosis.

  Each of those towers enclosed thousands of kilometers of hollow tubes, and intricate nonmechanical valves and pumps driven by differences in temperature between air and sea. Seawater drawn in at the base was circulated throughout the tower; calcium carbonate and other dissolved chemicals were precipitated out along the way and used as building materials where needed. The towers were elegantly cast, their faces angled to take best advantage of the moving sun, the walls stronger than conventional concrete.