B009NFP2OW EBOK (22 page)

“Okay, so the damned Covenant’s still in force. But I
need
to talk about this, Trev. Suppose the Sh’daar
are
the creators? Suppose we’re rebelling against the gods?”

Gray sighed. The fleet faced so many more pressing problems right now . . . not the least of which was establishing some sort of working long-term truce with the Slan. Things looked good so far, but the Slan were so
different
in the way they thought, in how they saw the universe. In any given exchange, it was incredibly difficult to understand them, and harder still to be sure that they understood you.

“The Sh’daar are not God, Laurie,” Gray told her. “If they were, I think they would have found a way to tell us. Something a little more persuasive than sending their client races to attack us.”

“But we know that eight hundred million years ago,” she said, “the Sh’daar were raptured. . . .”

That
again. Certain Christian sects on Earth, Gray knew, were convinced that one day the faithful would be snatched up into heaven, leaving the unsaved to face God’s wrath. They called it the
Rapture
, an odd twist to Christian eschatology first developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most Christian sects held that the Rapture—a term never mentioned in the Bible—simply referred to the final judgment at the end of time. But a few held that believers would be “caught up in the clouds” prior to the end, with nonbelievers left behind to face terrible suffering, the “Great Tribulation,” as their world came apart. Gray, curious about the terminology, had downloaded several essays on the topic.

Records
America
had accessed within Omega Centauri T
-0.876gy
had shown the physical forms of hundreds of mutually alien species belonging to the ur-Sh’daar federation simply . . .
vanishing
from their worlds. Human researchers hadn’t yet figured out the mechanism for that disappearing act, and couldn’t even agree on what they were seeing, but all agreed that the records showed the moment of the ur-Sh’daar Technological Singularity, when their levels of technology reached a point where the outward form and nature of those beings had somehow changed beyond all recognition or understanding.

It had been inevitable, Gray knew, that some of those fundamentalist religious sects would take that transformation as evidence of an alien rapture.

“We don’t know what happened to the ur-Sh’daar,” he told her. “All we know is that a number of them were left behind at the moment of Singularity, the ancestors of the modern Sh’daar, and that they were terrified by what happened.”

“Yes . . .”

“So terrified they’ve been trying to block advanced technological progress in every species they meet.” Gray hesitated. The White Covenant expressly prohibited attempts by one person to change the religious beliefs of another . . . but he very much wanted Taggart to understand. “Can I ask you something? Something that might violate the Covenant?”

“Of course.”

“First off, the AAC believes that what happened to the ur-Sh’daar was a kind of Rapture, right? God’s chosen snatched away and never seen again. Well, the Sh’daar were the ones left behind. That tells me they aren’t God and they weren’t His chosen.”

“I see where you’re going. . . .”

“Maybe you don’t. Because my question is . . . if what you mean by ‘God’ is the creator of the universe, someone who cares about his, her, or its creation, why were so many of the ur-Sh’daar left behind? Think about the emotional scarring inflicted on an entire interstellar civilization, scarring that’s driving them to conquer and to wage war on other species almost a billion years later. Does that sound like a loving God?”

“We’re not supposed to question—”

“
Bullshit!
If we’re not supposed to question, why do we have minds? Logic? Reason? What happened in Omega Centauri a billion years ago was a tragedy, not an act of love, and certainly not an act of creation!”

She didn’t reply. She sat in the chair, staring at her knees.

“If aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago,” Gray went on, relentless, “if they changed the human genome to create us . . . it was an act of technology, not of love or caring.

“And as far as we can make out, the Sh’daar used time travel through an artificially constructed gateway into their future to enter our galaxy . . . we’re still not sure when, but it probably was well over a hundred thousand years ago. They set up a base somewhere in this time and began conquering or absorbing every species they encountered, until they finally got to us fifty-some years ago.

“If they
were
our creators, what the hell took them so long? What, did they make us, then go away, only to come back in the twenty-fourth century? Damn it, Laurie,
it doesn’t make sense
.”

“But we know that the creators work in mysterious ways. . . .”

“They give us brains to figure out the universe, to develop science and discover how things work and to use logic and reason to make deductions about who and what we are . . . and then slap us down for believing what we’ve learned? Right. . . .”

“That’s not the way it is!”
She was almost in tears.

“Laurie . . . your personnel files say you have a base IQ of one thirty-two, enhanced to one sixty. You have a Logic Quotientof one twenty, and a Reasoning Aptitude Score of point nine five. You’ve got a
brain
! Okay?
Use
it!”

After a time, Gray widened his chair and she sat next to him, his arm around her shoulders.

“What . . . do you believe, Trev?” she asked him after a long while.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I grew up in the Manhat Ruins, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry much about God. Then my wife developed some health problems, and I took her to the nearest facility that could treat her, on the other side of the Line.”

“ ‘Wife’?” She repeated the word as though it had a faintly unpleasant taste.

“Periphery culture. I was a monogie. One partner, in a relationship called marriage.”

“I’ve heard of it. Some folks in Chicago practice that too.” She shook her head. “But why?”

“Life in lots of the Periphery areas can still be pretty touch and go. Small family units have good survival value.”

“And some people just like exotic relationships.”

He looked away. The topic still hurt a bit. “Well, in any case, the treatment . . .
changed
her. She didn’t . . . didn’t feel anything for me any longer, and she went off on her own. Joined a line marriage somewhere Upstate.” He shrugged. “I guess I had a hard time seeing God or God’s love in any of that.”

“That’s the
traditional
view of God,” she told him. “The AAC teaches that extraterrestrial gods made Humankind, but still watch us from beyond the Veil . . . and that they’ll return someday. . . .”

“An all-powerful spirit who
could
banish evil, sickness, loss, and suffering but chooses not to—or high-tech aliens who use magical technology to snatch their own into the clouds . . . they’re both just versions of the man behind the curtain, you know? And both scenarios cause a lot more trouble intellectually than they’re worth. They rob us of free will, and promise us that we can’t possibly make it on our own, individually or as a species. I think that if there’s something or someone out there that we can call God, it’s going to make more sense than anything we’ve been shown so far.”

“I wonder about that,” Taggart said. “Who was it who said the universe is stranger than we imagine, but it’s stranger than we can imagine?” Her gaze went distant for a moment. “Ah. Haldane.”

Gray nodded. He was accessing the historical data from
America
’s AI as well. “J. B. S. Haldane,” he agreed, scanning through the available data. “ ‘Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can
suppose.’ ” The quote had gone through a lot of variations and mutations since 1927, with riffs on the same theme from Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and others.

The data on Eddington included a number of quotes as well, and one in particular caught Gray’s attention. “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And it is our own.” The quote was from Eddington’s
Space, Time, and Gravitation
, first published in 1920.

Reaching through her link with the AI, he pointed the paragraph out to Taggart. “You wanted to know what I believe, Laurie?” he asked her. “What about the possibility that our technology will advance to the point where someday, to all intents and purposes,
we
are God? We don’t need aliens to fill the role. Just time.”

She smiled at him. “People have been burned at the stake for ideas like that.”

“Well . . . if you see a crowd with torches and pitchforks on the way to my quarters, let me know.”

They enjoyed a companionable silence for a long time.

Gray caressed her shoulder. He found himself . . . wanting her.

Generally, he kept such impulses under a tight and unyielding control. While the social conventions of both the USNA and of the Confederation as a whole viewed sex between consenting adults as natural, healthy, and something to be celebrated, people in positions of authority—such as the captain of a Navy ship—still had to be careful of
anything
hinting at favoritism or an abuse of power.

And even more to the point, as he’d just reminded her, Gray himself had grown up as a monogie prim.
One
partner . . . or at least only one at a time.

Gray had not been celibate in the twenty-some years since Angela had left him. He’d had other partners, a few cautious sexual liaisons, but always discreetly, tentatively, and with a certain degree of guilt. . . .

“They say the captain of a ship is God,” she told him after a time, “at least of his own little world.”

Gray closed his eyes. “Not really,” he said. “Too many constraints and too much bureaucracy. Maybe we’re just godlike aliens.”

He opened his eyes, and her uniform was gone.

He drew her close, using his link to lengthen and widen the chair beneath them.

And a long time later, he realized that he didn’t feel guilty at all.

Chapter Nineteen

14 November 2424

TC/USNA CVS
America

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

0925 hours, TFT

Once again, Gray stood within a virtual world, an imaginal space generated by two mutually alien sets of computer networks, human and Slan. The AI and
America
’s Xenosophontology Department together had learned an enormous amount during the past twenty-four hours, piecing together aspects of Slan biology and psychology to get a better idea of how they saw the universe around them.

The tunnel walls, for instance, now to Gray’s eyes glowed with a kind of multilayered luminosity of oily rainbow color that represented, very roughly, the effects perceived by the Slan when they scanned their underground surroundings with sonar. Tunnel walls black and featureless to human eyes—or ears—to Slan sound organs glowed rich with layered information and reflected subtle harmonics that evidently were pleasing to their aesthetic sense.

“Thank you for meeting with me again, Clear Chiming Bell,” Gray said.

“These exchanges are mutually beneficial,” the Slan replied, its voice sounding in Gray’s mind. “We should continue, whether we end the fighting or ultimately decide to end this conflict.”

“It is our hope to end it.”

“A possibility, one among many. Our navigators have been . . . surprised to learn of what you term cosmology. Further explorations of this cosmos might better wait until we better understand this thing you call space.”

For the Slan, the aching gulf between one world and another, between one star system and another, simply didn’t exist. How could it, when there was no atmosphere to transmit sound? Thadek’ha was a vast series of enormous rooms or caverns, the surface of Thadek’ha was simply a cavern without a clear ceiling or walls, and Arianrhod was merely another cavern located someplace else that could only be reached by entering a ship and manipulating the controls. For them, the entire universe as just a collection of such places, and terms like
planet
,
star
, and
galaxy
had no meaning for them.

“We can help,” Gray pointed out. “Evidently, the Sh’daar chose not to tell the Slan much about the universe. They used you. Like a tool.”

“Tools,” the Slan commander said, “are intended for use.”

“But when the tool is intelligent,” Gray replied, “shouldn’t it have a say in how it is used? Ignorance distorts our understanding of our surroundings. It robs us of our ability to make informed decisions. It
enslaves
us.”

“In conclave,” the being told him, “we have determined that withholding information about one’s surroundings is equivalent to deliberately distorting that information. It is . . . immoral.”

Gray played back a single word of the Slan’s speech, isolated and recorded by
America
’s AI.
“K’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k.”

“Exactly,” Clear Chiming Bell replied. “This information has been . . . disturbing. Deeply so.”

“Have you found the devices we told you about yet?” Gray asked. “The Sh’daar Seeds?”

It was clearer than ever that the near-blind Slan had had substantial help leaving their world. The records
America
’s AI had been able to access didn’t give many clues to who or what had provided that help. One distinct possibility, however, was the implanting of Sh’daar Seeds.

Sh’daar Seeds had been discovered twenty years before during the engagements with Turusch and H’rulka forces at Arcturus and Eta Boötis. They were tiny devices—a millimeter or less in diameter—planted within the tissues of individuals of various of the Sh’daar client species. Their function and their mechanism were not yet well understood, but it was clear that each Seed wired itself into the nervous system of its host, allowing it to record that host’s experiences, and to transmit that data elsewhere to any Sh’daar receiver within a set range—a few million kilometers at most.

At Omega Centauri T
-0.876gy
, far away and in the remote past, the Koenig Expeditionary Force had discovered that the Sh’daar were not, in fact, a distinct race, but a kind of cooperative gestalt of many mutually alien species—the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, the Groth Hoj, the F’heen-F’haav Symbiosis, the Sjhlurrr, and many, many others. Known collectively now as the ur-Sh’daar, all of those species had gone through a Technological Singularity . . . but all of those species had also included individuals who’d rejected much of the high technology that had brought the Singularity about. Called “Refusers,” they’d gone on to become the Sh’daar known to Humankind today, who, through conquest or through coercion, forced myriad species to reject certain technologies. They seemed to keep tabs on their client races through the Seeds, which monitored technological developments and reported back to the Sh’daar Masters at frequent intervals.

There was another possibility, however, one arising from speculation about current Sh’daar technology. What if the Sh’daar Seeds did more than simply spy on the Sh’daar clients? What if they could offer advice . . . make suggestions . . . or give orders? What if the Sh’daar group mind could actually reside within billions of individuals scattered across a large portion of the galaxy?

Sh’daar Seeds did not exist in every member of every client race, but they did appear to have been planted within each race’s leaders—those that had distinct leaders, at any rate. For some, like the Turusch, they served as a kind of guiding overmind. For others, like the Agletsch, they appeared to be nothing more than listening devices.

But what if every being carrying a Sh’daar implant was a potential robot, a kind of zombie slave carrying out orders from distant masters? That a Sh’daar gestalt mind existed was beyond dispute. But what if that group mind extended much, much farther than anyone had yet suspected?

Gray doubted that the Sh’daar reach was that long. Transmission of seed data did not appear to be possible over more than very short planetary distances, and sending data across interstellar gulfs might only work by storing it within seeded individuals on board starships.

But Gray was uncomfortably aware that every detail of this in-head conversation might be being recorded by a tiny computer buried within Clear Chiming Bell’s mantle.

“We have,” the Slan replied after a long moment. Had it been trying to decide whether or not to tell him? “Mine rests . . . here.”

In the simulation, a brilliant blue star winked on just above and behind the Slan’s light-sensitive organ, between the bases of the two writhing sound organs. “It was implanted when I took command of
Vigilant
.”

Of course it would have been. Leaders included
military
leaders, and the Sh’daar would be particularly interested in the activities of ship commanders exploring or attacking enemy-held star systems.

“We,” Gray said, “have not accepted the Sh’daar implants.”

“That
is
why this war is being fought,” Clear Chiming Bell replied. “To force your compliance with Sh’daar reason.”

“And why should we comply?” Gray asked in what he hoped sounded like a reasonable tone. “We perceive the universe differently than do they. We have the right to determine our own future.”

There was another long pause. “The term ‘right’ does not translate.”

Would a species living as a part of a vast hive ever develop the concept of individual rights? What about the rights of a species to self-determination?

And how could he explain the idea to a being that could not even imagine the possibility? “Rights are the . . . expectations of beings derived from their own natures, and recognized by others of that species. “You have a right to eat. To ingest nutrients?” Gray thought about last night, and smiled. “Or the right to engage in reproductive activity. . . .”

“The ingestion of nutrients is a biological function, and a basic requirement of life,” the Slan said. “I do not see how that could be subject to the recognition of others. As for reproduction, that is a biological function of certain castes within Slan society. Again, how would this be subject to the recognition or approval of others?”

“For my species,” Gray replied, “there are what we think of as . . . as unalienable rights, rights granted by nature.” He hesitated, wondering if he should get into the difference between
un
alienable and
in
alienable rights . . . and decided against it. If many humans didn’t know the difference between the two, he wasn’t about to try to explain it to a Slan.

“But . . . a right to reproduce? Surely that would apply only to those chosen by the community as breeders.”

Gray decided to sidestep that one. “A right to be
free
. A right as a culture to determine our own path. A right to choose to develop our own culture and technology.”

“Your words are being translated by the network,” Clear Chiming Bell said, “but I am having trouble grasping the sense.”

“We may be too different, you and I, for perfect understanding,” Gray replied. “But . . . if the Slan have the right to experience their surroundings without deliberate distortion by others, without . . .” and he played again that snippet of sound drawn from a recording,
“k’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k”
—the fringe of tentacles around the Slan’s base twitched in apparent reaction—“then my species,” Gray continued, “can decide for itself its own future, without interference by the Sh’daar, without interference from
you
.”

“The seeds,” Clear Chiming Bell said, “speak to us. It is they that guide us to . . . new places in our ships.”

Confirmation. AI probings of the Slan vessel’s TNA computer systems had shown that they possessed the technology to capture incoming electromagnetic radiation and translate it into sound pictures; they
could
see the stars . . . or hear them, rather. They’d first become aware of EM radiation thanks to The Mystery . . . and to the perceived heat and light of their own sun, but it was a hell of a long way from those clues to the ability to navigate among the stars.

They
had
to have had help . . . and evidently that help had been provided by the Sh’daar.

“The Sh’daar were your guides, bringing you out among the stars,” Gray suggested. “Is that true?”

“The Voices led us,” Clear Chiming Bell agreed.

“But the Voices didn’t give you the whole truth, did they?”

“We are learning . . . a very great deal from your computer systems,” the Slan captain agreed. “Such vast, such
aching
distances between these bodies you call stars and planets. The seeds never told us. . . .”

Gray played the recording once again.
“K’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k.”

The translated voice Gray was hearing over the network link carried no emotional inflection, of course, but he imagined that he could hear something like anguish behind them.

Or perhaps it was only a longing, a wistfulness.

“We were told only what we needed to know,” Clear Chiming Bell said.

“So that the Sh’daar could use your species,” Gray said. “For
their
purposes.”

How much of a sense of personal individuality did the hive-dwelling Slan possess? Could they experience outrage at having their entire species drafted as a kind of military tool, as cannon fodder to fight Humankind . . . to die for an alien cause that they had never chosen?

“And in what manner,” the Slan asked, “does your species wish to use us?”

“ ‘Use you’?”

“I suspect,” Clear Chiming Bell said after a long hesitation, “that each species has its own version of the truth. Humans. Slan. The Sh’daar. What is true for you may be
k’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k
for the Slan.”

That simple statement seemed to demonstrate that the Slan were more rational in certain ways than were humans. The concept of situational ethics was difficult for most humans . . . and impossible for some.

“We always seek to exchange information,” Gray said. “And we want the fighting between your kind and mine to cease. Beyond that . . . we believe that all species should be free to develop in their own way. We have no claim upon the Slan.”

“If we agree to help you,” Clear Chiming Bell said, the words coming slowly, “you will help us learn more of worlds and stars?”

“Absolutely.”

“We must discuss this further, myself and my fellows. This current cessation of hostilities . . .”

“The truce.”

“Yes, the truce. You agree that this state of affairs should continue?”

“Of course. We would rather talk to you as friends than fight you in battle.”

“An interesting distinction. And one that I believe I do understand, one with which I agree.”

And the virtual tunnel faded away in Gray’s mind.

He wondered if the negotiations had just scored a breakthrough.

With the Slan, it was hard to tell.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Arianrhod Space

1020 hours, TFT

They were bringing in the European Union fighters.

Lieutenant Gregory banked left, bringing his Starhawk into formation with an incoming flight of ten Franco-German KRG-60 Todtadler fighters originally off the
von Metternich
, Death Eagles roughly the equivalent of USNA Velociraptors in design and capability. There were seventeen of them, morphed into winged landing configurations, and they were on a direct vector for
America
.

“Keep in tight,” Commander Mackey said over the squadron tac channel. “Let ’em know we care.”

“Fuck, Commander,” Kemper said. “I don’t trust these puppies.”

“Neither do I, Happy. That’s why we keep it tight.”

Rumors had been sweeping through
America
’s flight deck since the abdication of the fleet’s non-USNA contingent. The possibility of all-out civil war had been an oft-discussed topic for months, now, but the scuttlebutt had really begun flying when Lavallée’s squadron had refused to begin deceleration, sending them on a trajectory past Arianrhod and into deep space.