Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (12 page)

What
was
known was that those members of the civilization that had not made the transformation, the Refusers, had become the modern Sh’daar.

“Mr. President,” Admiral Armitage whispered in his head, “ask it what it was doing on Earth, in North India.”

Koenig mentally waved the Navy CNO off. He was more interested in what the Sh’daar wanted from Humankind . . . and if there were grounds for negotiations.

“The Sh’daar Collective,” he said to the alien, “agreed to leave us alone when we visited the N’gai Cloud twenty of our years ago. Lately, you have resumed your attacks. Why?”

“You seem to be under a misapprehension,” the alien told them. “The Collective is a . . . loose association of very different species and cultures. It is not a . . . I believe the term you might use is
empire
. There isn’t a strong central government or a single leader. There is no capital world, no ruling emperor. How could such a thing possibly function in a galaxy as vast and as complex as this?”

Koenig smiled. Back when he’d commanded a star carrier battlegroup, he’d chastised subordinates for using the term “Sh’daar empire” for precisely that reason. Just how many species the Sh’daar controlled in the Milky Way Galaxy now was unknown. Agletsch sources mentioned thirty in their
Encyclopedia Galactica
. . . but those were just the civilizations for which humans had purchased data from those supreme traders in galactic information. According to the best current estimates, there were 50 million intelligent species in this one galaxy alone, and perhaps several thousand actually controlled by the Sh’daar across a volume of space variously described as between a tenth of the galaxy . . . and half.

“So when the Sh’daar tell their client races to do something, they might not.”

“It is not so simple a task as giving an order and expecting it to be carried out,” the alien told them. “We do regret the problems this has caused your civilization.”

“What if we humans entered into negotiations with the Sh’daar directly?” Koenig asked. “Perhaps if we opened trade negotiations with—”

“Your civilization has nothing we wish to trade for,” the Glothr said, cutting Koenig off. “We have access to the raw materials of much of the galaxy, and manufacturing technologies that make your current nanotech seem primitive by comparison.”

And that, of course, had long been the argument against such cherished myths and fictional accounts as interstellar trade routes and conquest. With the basic elements both of any manufacturing process and of life itself common in every solar system, and with nanotechnology or its equivalent to assemble those atoms into literally any end product desired, there was absolutely no reason to invade another star system . . . not in terms of the acquisition of worlds, goods, or raw materials. Even living space could be grown from asteroids or cometary bodies out in a system’s Oort Cloud, enough for tens of trillions of beings. Or existing inhospitable worlds could be terraformed into paradise. Only information appeared to have any value in the galactic marketplace, as the Agletsch had demonstrated.

“We must have
something
that interests you,” Koenig told the alien.

“We want your cooperation,” the Glothr said, blue flashes undulating up its rippling tentacles. “We want to avoid a second
Schjaa Hok
, one occurring in this galaxy in the near-term future. And with your participation, perhaps we can provide a united front against . . .
this
.”

A new, inner window opened in Koenig’s mind, and in the minds of the others who were linked into the conversation. He saw—again—the strange and eerie starscape of the Rosette, the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster with its titanic space- and time-bending stellarchitecture, enigmatic structures of light, all of it embracing the close-set whirl of world-sized black holes in a tightly circling orbit around a common center of gravity. In the background, 10 million stars formed a glowing backdrop, an impenetrable wall of starlight.

The so-called Rosette Aliens had emerged from that gravitational whirlpool and begun creating the surrounding webwork of mysterious and titanic structures—
stellarchitecture
. Speculation as to who or what they were ranged from visitors from a parallel universe, or from the far future, to the original ur-Sh’daar, newly emerged from the remote past. Those six co-orbiting black holes, physicists knew, were the modern form of six giant blue stars at the center of the N’gai Cloud 876 million years in the past, an artificial gravitational rosette used like an impossibly vast Tipler machine to cross enormous gulfs of space and time.

“Do you know who these visitors are?” Koenig asked.

“We do.”

“It’s the ur-Sh’daar, isn’t it?”

“Your empty speculation serves no purpose. If you wish to learn the true nature of the cosmos, you would do well to join with us and become a living part of the galaxy’s transformation into biological existential reality!”

The Glothr’s terminology seemed oddly phrased and awkward to the point of clumsiness.
Biological existential reality? What the hell did biology have to do with a term out of ancient philosophy?

“Is that what you were discussing with the Earth Confederation recently?” Koenig asked. “Existentialism?”

“We were discussing the Earth Confederation’s formal assimilation into the Sh’daar Collective. It seems a shame that your divisiveness—your
faction
—has prevented that.”

“As I said, we don’t like surrendering our independence.”

“The representatives of your Earth Confederation seemed willing enough to do so.”

“I’ll just bet they were,” Koenig replied, laughing.

“Which proves your statement about not wishing to surrender independence is not true.”

“They might be willing to do so,” Koenig replied, “if they thought they could get some help from you against us. We’ve
always
had trouble with giving up freedom in exchange for a little security.”

“That seems internally contradictory.”

“If you’re into human existentialism,” Koenig said, still amused, “you must enjoy the absurd.”

“I do not understand your meaning.”

Good
, Koenig thought.
Keep him guessing
.

“Joe, I have a proposal for you. I assume you’re eager to get home.”

“We were on our way home when your ships . . . detained us.”

“Yes, well, we’re sorry about that. Your ship was escaping from a member state of the Confederation, our enemies, just when those enemies had been defeated. It was possible that some members of those states were traveling with you.”

“None were. We were on Earth, at your Confederation’s explicit invitation, to discuss Earth’s future association with the Collective.”

“That was my assumption. How did those discussions go?”

“You will need to talk to the humans with whom we met on Earth.”

“We already have a list of names,” Lodge whispered in Koenig’s mind. “People in the Confederation government, in their State Department and ambassadorial service. We’ll be questioning them in short order.”

“We’ll do that, Joe,” Koenig said. “In the meantime, we have no reason to keep you or your ship here.”

“We are free to go?”

“Possibly. But we would like to send some ships along with yours.”

“What ships?”

“A star carrier and her escorts. What we call a carrier battlegroup of ten or twelve ships. We would like to meet with representatives of your government, and with the Sh’daar Collective.”

“That is not possible.”

Koenig considered his options. He had a bluff in mind as a last resort, but wasn’t sure how far he could take it.

“I know,” he told the being, “that you’ve come here across
time
as well as space.”

“Travel at velocities approaching that of light by its very definition entails travel through time.”

“Perhaps. I suppose relativity could be defined as a kind of time travel. But I think you know that I mean something different. Travel forward
and backward
in time, as distinct from travel through space.”

“What could possibly lead you to draw such a conclusion?”

“First of all, we know that you can tinker with the flow of time, at least to a limited extent. An interesting technology. You slowed down the time for
Concord
—that watchship you took on board—by a factor of at least a thousand to one. That was to control the crew, wasn’t it?”

“That has nothing to do with travel across time,” the alien said. But the Glothr sounded . . . hesitant? It was difficult to tell, listening to a translation produced by an AI intermediary, but Koenig had the impression that “Joe” was worried by this line of questioning.

“You’re a time traveler from our remote past, and you’ve come here through one of the TRGA cylinders . . . specifically a TRGA cylinder located in the star cluster we call the Beehive.”

The being in the window within Koenig’s mind said nothing. It appeared to be simply watching him, perhaps waiting him out. What, Koenig wondered, was it thinking right now?

“We could attempt to find your homeworld, your civilization, but there’s no guarantee that we would arrive at the same general time that you’ve come from. A small variation in vector through a TRGA’s spacetime matrix can result in an error of centuries, true? I wonder what would happen if we showed up in your planetary neck of the woods before you left to come here?”

That definitely got a reaction. The lights within the alien’s translucent form were pulsing wildly now, creating an intense glow.

“No!”

Koenig pushed on. “We humans are internally contradictory, you know. And divided. And absurd. I’m giving you the option of taking us directly to your superiors, rather than having primitives like us showing up at random, and blundering around in your history.”

The Glothr appeared to be quite agitated. Its translucent arms shifted and waved in the water, and patterns of yellow and green lights pulsed and throbbed, overwhelming the constellation of blue bioluminescence.

Koenig found the display fascinating; the Sh’daar of the N’gai Cloud—876 million years ago or twenty years ago, depending on how you looked at it—had seemed panicked by the idea of humans mucking about in their past. The mere threat of human warships exploring the N’gai Cloud in earlier times had brought about a considerable change of heart among the Sh’daar . . . and the promise to suspend hostilities against the Earth.

Apparently, the Glothr had the same terror.

Temporal paradox might well be the ultimate of all possible weapons. If, in a war with another civilization, you could go back in time and edit your enemy out of existence, you could win the war before it even started, and there would be nothing you could do to protect yourself from such an attack.

The downside was that any change you made in history might affect you as well as the enemy. The possibilities had been discussed in a number of strategy planning conferences and meetings ever since the possibility had been raised two decades earlier. Suppose Koenig sent the
America
back in time 876 million years to the N’gai Cloud and did something to edit the Sh’daar out of existence. If that happened, then Humankind would not have received the Sh’daar Ultimatuum in 2367, and almost sixty years of warfare would never have transpired. Millions, no
billions
who’d died both on Earth and among Earth’s colony worlds would now be alive. The civil war between North America and the Earth Confederation almost certainly wouldn’t have happened . . . and that, in turn, meant the city of Columbus and hundreds of thousands of citizens would not have been nano-devoured. At the very least, those thirty alien races described by the Agletsch would not have been conquered by the Sh’daar, and their histories would have been vastly different as well.

The catch was, editing the Sh’daar out of existence would also edit the recent history of Humankind.

How could Koenig—how could
anyone
—take the responsibility for that kind of meddling?

The possibility had been discussed in various military and scientific circles, of course, and a few years ago it had even been debated in the USNA Senate. The consensus held that tinkering with the past was too dangerous even to consider. And yet the possibility remained as a kind of ultimate doomsday scenario.

If Humankind was about to go under anyway . . .

None of that made any difference at the moment, however. What was important was that the Glothr didn’t
know
that humans wouldn’t meddle.

And they appeared to be terrified by that possibility, which represented, Koenig thought, the only advantage Humankind possessed in this galactic—and
temporal
—war.

The rippling lights shifted from greens and yellows back to blue, and the writhing being seemed to grow more calm.

“Very well, human,” the Glothr said. “We agree to your terms.”

Koenig nodded. “I will give the necessary orders.”

And the link with the alien was broken.

“What the hell was all that stuff about existential philosophy?” General Nolan said after a long moment of silence in the room.

“Existentialism starts off as a sense of confusion or disorientation in a world that is absurd or meaningless,” Koenig replied, thoughtful. “At least, that was the claim of its proponents, six hundred years ago. And it’s up to the individual to make sense of things, not religion or society or the state.”

“I don’t get it,” Brookings said.

“I’m not sure I do either,” Koenig replied. “But our friend was talking about ‘biological existential reality’ as it related to life in the galaxy. I was just trying to draw him out.”

“Well, you confused him, at least,” Sarah Taylor told him.

“Hell,” Caldwell said, “he confused
me
. You know, I really don’t think that a human philosophical system can have any bearing at all on an alien intelligence.”

“I think it has all kinds of bearing,” Koenig said. “As long as you have mind—consciousness, self-awareness, and intelligence—you’re going to reflect on and act upon the world as you perceive it. We may perceive the universe in different ways from one another, but at least philosophy can let us compare notes.”