B009NFP2OW EBOK (4 page)

“The Chinese Hegemony, on the other hand, has surplus agronanufactory capabilities, but, seeking a buffer against Russia, will demand political concessions from Astana in the East—in particular the arcologies at Almaty, the largest Kazakh population center.

“A serious confrontation is developing between your United States of North America and the Earth Confederation government . . . particularly with members of the European Union. The Verrazano Seacrete project is nearing completion, making possible the full-scale renovation of the Manhattan Ruins. The Potomac Dam has made possible the draining of the Washington, D.C., ruins, where approximately forty percent of the submerged land has already been reclaimed.

“Geneva, however, is arguing that since the North American government renounced all claim and control over the Periphery centuries ago, control and ownership now legally reverts to the planetary government, under laws designed to allow the annexation of failed states as legal wards of Geneva. More worrying still, there is currently a bill within the Geneva Senate calling for an invocation of the Confederation’s Military First Right, which would put the USNA Navy under the direct control of Geneva. I estimate a thirty percent chance of armed conflict breaking out between the United States of North America and the Earth Confederation. If such a conflict escalates beyond regional clashes, and if neither party backs down, the exchange could become a full-blown civil war fought in space as well as on Earth, leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.”

“And why are you telling me all of this, Konstantin?”

Again, that hesitation. It made the old-man avatar seem more human. “To be certain that you understand the complexity of the global balance at this point in time. Humans are not rational creatures when it comes to either politics or to claims of national sovereignty. They are not rational in terms of perceived external threat. The destruction of the
Endeavor
can only further complicate matters, and could easily lead to a full break between the USNA and Geneva, with consequences that would threaten human civilization.”

“I understand that. I also understand that there are no easy solutions.” He wondered, though, if Konstantin grasped that fact.

“If the Chinese hegemony were to donate nanufactured food to Kazakhstan as a humanitarian gesture, without demanding recompense in land and population centers, famine would be averted without forcing a political crisis. If, rather, Kazakhstan cedes control of her eastern provinces to the hegemony, including the city of Almaty, famine will again be averted, since the feeding of the citizens of Almaty would then be the responsibility of the Hegemony government. Unfortunately, neither outcome is likely.” Konstantin paused, a distinctly human affectation. “I despair, sometimes, of you humans. Your passions may well destroy you.”

“My concern right now is that we might be destroyed by the Sh’daar.”

“A valid concern.”

“The Sh’daar seemed worried about the possibility that humans could defeat or destroy them by somehow accessing the past.
Their
past. I’d like you to tell me if this is possible, and how we might bring it to pass.”

“Ah,” Konstantin said. “The time-travel option.”

“Is it possible?”

“Time travel is possible, yes, at least within certain constraints. The Sh’daar Node, certainly, clearly allows access to both past and future, within certain limits.”

Koenig started to give a sharp reply, but bit it off. “I know,” he said instead, with a mild shrug. “I was there, remember?”

Twenty years earlier, Koenig had led Carrier Battlegroup 18 through the Sh’daar Node and emerged within the central core of Omega Centauri T
-0.876gy
, almost a billion years in the past. The fact that the Confederation military had been able to reach so far back into time appeared to have caught the Sh’daar utterly off-balance, to the point that they’d requested what amounted to a truce rather than risking a temporal war.

And that was what had led Koenig to link with Konstantin. If the Sh’daar were afraid of something, that implied that it could be used as a weapon.

Time travel as a weapon. The obvious possibility, there, was that humans might travel back to some point
before
T
-0.876gy
and somehow edit the Sh’daar out of existence. That course, however, carried considerable risks for both sides. The Sh’daar had first interacted with Humankind almost sixty years earlier, in 2367. If that bit of history changed,
all
recent human history would be rewritten as well—the Battles of Beta Pictoris and Rasalhague, of Hecate and 9 Ceti, the loss of Sturgis’s World, Mufrid, and Osiris, and even relations with other star-faring species—the Agletsch, the H’rulka, the Turusch, and others. How much else might be edited into nonexistence?

With a different history, people alive now—like Koenig—might be dead. But people who’d died during the war with the Sh’daar would be alive, and people never born in Koenig’s universe would also be alive.

Koenig felt an icy, inner shock. Karyn—Karyn Mendelson—would not have died in the high-velocity impactor attack at Mars.

Yes . . . so
very
much would be different.

But the change would also run full-boost into that hoary puzzle central to all discussions of time travel: the grandfather paradox.

A man uses time travel to go back and kill his father’s father—or otherwise divert him—so that the man’s father is never born. The man himself is never born . . . and so cannot go back in time to change the flow of history. But then . . . granddad lives, the man travels back into time, and on and on, around and around, a paradox without end.

Only in this case, entire civilizations were on the wheel. If CBG-18 succeeded in editing out the Sh’daar, the Sh’daar War would never be fought, CBG-18 would never have found the Sh’daar Node and used it to change the past, so the Sh’daar would live . . . on and on and . . .

Karyn Mendelson would be alive. . . .

But Konstantin was speaking to him, dry words within his mind. “The possibility of a serious paradox, of a so-called grandfather paradox, would not be an issue, at least not to human civilization at large.”

“Eh?” Had Konstantin somehow been eavesdropping on his inner thoughts? “Why not?”

“Quantum theory predicts that any change to the flow of time as we experience it would simply result in a branching through to another parallel universe, one of what may be an infinite array of universes where every possible determination and outcome not only may occur, but
must
occur.”

Koenig was startled. He’d heard that theory, but so far as he knew it was
only
theory. “Is that proven?”

“Proving it would require experimentation that would eliminate access to the original universe and strand the experimenters in the product of a different causal outcome.”

In other words, the man who went back and killed his grandfather would find himself in a universe where he’d never been born. The universe from which he’d originally come would be forever closed to him, since further attempts at time travel would carry him back and forth only along this
new
time stream.

And if CBG-18 managed to eliminate the Sh’daar in the remote past, the fleet’s personnel might take comfort in existing in a universe cleansed of that enemy, but they could never go
home
to the universe and time line from which they’d come. If they were somehow able to return to 2424—and that in itself would be a real problem without the Sh’daar Node time machine—it would be to find a completely different world. Karyn would be alive . . . and in a relationship with
another
Alex Koenig, assuming the two had gotten together in a universe without the looming threat of the Sh’daar.

Even so, it was tempting.
Karyn
. . .
alive
 . . .

“You’re saying that it’s all futile,” Koenig said after a moment’s unhappy thought. “If we managed to stop the Sh’daar in the far past, we, the squadron, would find ourselves in a different universe . . . but
this
universe, the one we left, would not have been changed at all.”

“Obviously,” Konstantin said, “since it would be necessary to travel through a Sh’daar Node to effect the requisite changes.”

“So far as this universe was concerned, CBG-18 would have just disappeared . . . and the Sh’daar would still be here.”

“Precisely.”

“So what would be the point?”

“None, really. According to the many-universe hypothesis of quantum physics, all possibilities, all possible outcomes exist, each within its own universe. This would be the case whether you traveled through time or not, and the only witnesses to such change would be you and those traveling with you.”

“It’s not my intent to be some damned time-traveling
tourist
,” Koenig said, angry. “The point is to stop the Sh’daar . . . in
this
universe.”

“Indeed.”

“So my question for you is . . . is there any way to use time travel—or the
threat
of time travel—to influence Sh’daar intentions? To make them back off . . . or to defeat them on a strategic level?”

“That will depend, President Koenig, more on the Sh’daar than on us. We don’t know exactly what it is that the Sh’daar fear . . . or why they asked for a truce twenty years ago. And if the
Endeavor
and her escorts were destroyed by Sh’daar action—and I should point out that we do not as yet know that it was the Sh’daar who attacked our survey squadron—we do not know what their current motivations might be.”

That gave Koenig pause. He’d not thought of this new possibility. “You’re saying the
Endeavor
might not have been destroyed by the Sh’daar?”

“We know only that there was an attacker,” Konstantin told him, “not who or what that attacker was.”

“But the Sh’daar . . . damn it, Konstantin. Who else could it be?”

“President Koenig, you humans
must
learn to take the longer and larger view, and not assume that all of the cosmos centers on your small experience. There are something on the order of 50 million species in this galaxy alone that humans would probably recognize as intelligent. We know of two that are so highly advanced that humans would be justified in thinking of them as quite literally godlike—the ur-Sh’daar and the Starborn.”

Koenig considered this. Little was known about either culture. What little information they
did
have had been acquired by a fighter pilot twenty years ago—“Sandy” Gray—during a mind-to-mind encounter with the Sh’daar.

The ur-Sh’daar—the prefix
ur
was from the German, and carried the meaning of “original,” “primitive,” or “proto.” According to Gray, during his intelligence debriefing, the ur-Sh’daar had been a multispecies interstellar culture occupying a small galaxy—Gray’s Sh’daar source had called it the N’gai Cloud—that possibly had been ejected from the Andromedan galaxy during a collision billions of years before. That cloud eventually had been captured and devoured by the Milky Way, and all that was left of it now was the star cluster known as Omega Centauri.

At some point close to a billion years ago, before Omega Centauri was absorbed by the far larger spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, the ur-Sh’daar had entered something known as the Technological Singularity. In brief, their technological prowess had advanced so far, so fast, that they had become—to use Konstantin’s word—godlike. Though the details were still poorly understood, the ur-Sh’daar had all but vanished . . . into another dimension, into higher planes, into the remote future . . . no one knew for sure. What was known was that the Sh’daar were the residue, the lower-tech cripples, the ones left behind when the gods blinked out of the here and now.

As for the Starborn, even less was known about them. One of the Sh’daar client races, a very powerful, technically advanced civilization of huge gas bags that had evolved in the atmosphere of a planet much like Jupiter in Earth’s solar system, was known as the H’rulka. The question was how a species resembling titanic Portuguese men-of-war adrift in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant could possibly have developed mining, smelting, and advanced spaceflight when they had neither free oxygen in their atmosphere to support fire, nor a solid planetary surface from which to mine metals.

The H’rulka themselves spoke of the “Starborn,” an advanced species that had come to them before they’d joined with the Sh’daar, taught them how to filter metal from the atmosphere, and given them the technology to reach, first, their world’s system of moons, and then the worlds of other stars. Confederation Intelligence assumed that the Starborn were the Sh’daar . . . but Koenig had never bought that. The Sh’daar, apparently in terror of the technic singularity that had taken the ur-Sh’daar beyond their ken and left them behind, seemed driven to
prevent
the development of high technology, not foster it. Koenig was pretty sure that whoever or whatever the Starborn were, they were not Sh’daar, and most xenosophontologists seemed to agree with him.

Nor did it seem likely that they were related to the ur-Sh’daar, evolved in a different galaxy some billions of years in the past. The H’rulka, though the xenosophs weren’t sure of the details, had been given their technological boost something like twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, after which they were contacted—and subsumed—by the modern Sh’daar, who’d found a means of reaching from the N’gai Cloud of 900 million years ago to the Milky Way galaxy in the recent past.

“You’re saying we need more data,” Koenig said after a long moment.

“That would certainly help, Mr. President. We have no way of evaluating the threat with little or no hard information. I would recommend deploying a carrier battlegroup to Omega Centauri to confront whatever it was that destroyed the
Endeavor
. Once we know whether we are facing Sh’daar, ur-Sh’daar, Starborn, or something else entirely, we may be able to formulate a more comprehensive plan of action.”