Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (11 page)

In short, they were still
human
.

And because of this, Megan Connor was convinced that the Technological Singularity was all hype, speculation, and imaginative nonsense, and would be so for the foreseeable future. She didn’t know what had happened to the ancient ur-Sh’daar . . . but it seemed more likely to her by far that modern humans simply didn’t understand an alien civilization that had existed that far back within the deeps of Time.

Humans weren’t gods, and they weren’t about to
become
gods. Transhumanism was a myth. Next question, please. . . .

“I think the big question,” Hathaway said, pulling them back into the current discussion, “is what the Glothr think about us intercepting their ship . . . and what they’re likely to do about it.”

“If they were here to make peace with the Confederation,” Martinez said, “they’ll just have to make peace with us now.”

“I wonder,” Connor said, “if they can even see any difference between us and Geneva.”

“Interesting point, Megan,” Gregory said. “Of course, any alien who knows us well knows we’re a fractious bunch. Always at each other’s throats . . . unless outsiders give us something to unite against, that is.”

“Ha!” Schmitt said, slapping the table. “It didn’t work
this
time, did it? I mean, we’ve been fighting a dozen different races from the Sh’daar Collective for almost sixty years, but that didn’t stop us from getting into a damned nasty little civil war.”

“
Semper humanus
,” Connor said, shaking her head. “Always human.”

“Well
that’s
a depressing thought,” Hathaway said. “You’re saying we can’t change. . . .”

“Oh, we’ll change,” Dobbs said, ordering another drink for himself. “The Singularity is coming, brothers.” He raised his empty glass in salute. “Hallelujah!”

“Can I hear an amen?” Gregory added, laughing. They both looked at Connor, who just shrugged them off—she knew they were saying this not just out of belief, but because they knew it would bother her.
Not tonight
.

“Watch it, you two,” Schmitt said. “They haven’t rescinded the White Covenant yet.”

“Oh, they will, they will,” Hathaway said. “The way Starlight is spreading across Europe, and even over here now? They’ll
have
to.”

“Yeah, and when you look at it, old Dobbs here has a point.” He glanced around the restaurant’s interior, as though checking for eavesdroppers. “If Starlight
was
a religious virus, it sure as hell ended the war in a hurry, didn’t it?”

“I’ve heard those rumors,” Connor said. “I don’t believe them.”

“No?” Gregory asked. “Damn, Lieutenant. What
do
you believe?”

“That the USNA is still very much alone in the universe,” she said, “and we still have a long way to go. Forget the transhuman crap and Singularity and all the rest of that stargod shit. Right now we need to focus just on surviving as a species.”

“Nah,” Ruxton said. “Tran . . . tran-shumans’ll win out. Homo shuperioris! Homo . . . Homo techno . . . uh . . .”

“Easy there, Rux,” Caswell said. “You’ve been hitting the juice pretty hard tonight. You okay?”

“
Coursh
I am, fuckin’ bitch . . .” He sagged, his face dropping to the tabletop.

Caswell looked up at the others. “His wife left him,” he explained. “He got word from her this morning.”

“His . . . wife? You mean he’s a
monogie
?”

“ ’Fraid so. They were from the Boston Periphery, y’know? Apparently, she got in with a transhumanist associative.”

“Ah,” Martinez said, nodding. “Some transhuman groups reject the whole idea of marriage or long-term partnerships.”

“Well sure,” Gregory said, nodding. “If you’re a transhuman and going to live forever, you don’t want to be stuck with the same partner for eternity, do you? Eternity is a hell of a long time!”

Connor arched an eyebrow, leaning back in her chair. She wasn’t sure what she thought of monogies, though fleet scuttlebutt had it that Admiral Gray himself was one. Most Prims were, though they tended to have the rough edges smoothed off when they entered polite civilization.

The poor bastard. No wonder he was trying to drink himself into oblivion. Ruxton was facedown on the table, snoring loudly. “Shall we shoot him up with dryout?” Schmitt asked.

“Nah,” Caswell said. “Let him sleep. We’ll hit him when it’s time to get him back up to the ship.”

“So . . .” Schmitt said, trying to change the subject. “Any bets on how the Glothr thing’s gonna shake out?”

“Maybe,” Gregory said, smiling, “our new Glothr friends will show us the way.”

“Sure,” Connor said. “If we can ever figure out what
this
means.” She raised her hands, opening and closing her fingers quickly to mimic flashing lights.

Chapter Ten

16 July, 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0910 hours, EST

“The channel will be open in a few moments, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, Konstantin.”

Koenig glanced at the other people in the room—General Nolan, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Armitage, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Lawrence Brookings; Sarah Taylor, the new secretary of Alien Affairs; Admiral Vincent Lodge, head of USNA Naval Intelligence; and Philip Caldwell, the National Security advisor. All of them were in recliners grown from the floor in a circle, facing inward. His chief of staff, Marcus Whitney, and several aides, technicians, and secretaries hovered in the background.

“I understand the quality of the translation has improved quite a bit,” Koenig said.

“Definitely, Mr. President,” Admiral Lodge told him. “Agletsch pidgins are good as far as they go, but the translation AIs at Crisium filled in a
lot
of blanks.”

“And the aliens themselves have helped a
lot
, working directly with our AIs,” Taylor added. “It’ll be like talking to a human,” he smiled, “not something in a bad adventure sim.”

“Good. I’ve seen the transcripts recorded by . . . Klaatu, was it? Lots of room for misunderstanding, there.”

“What’s the alien’s name, anyway?” Caldwell wanted to know.

“Joe,” Koenig replied.

“ ‘Joe’?” Brookings repeated. “For something that looks like a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish?”

“The name was assigned by the AI running the translation, Mr. Secretary,” Lodge explained. “You think ‘Joe,’ and the program will fill in the critter’s real name for it.”

“Which actually is a particular pattern of rippling lights that can’t be expressed as sound,” Taylor added. “Just so long as the program knows what’s going on, it’ll keep track of the details for us.”

“Any idea yet what the Glothr want from us?” Eugene Armitage asked.

“Presumably,” Koenig said, “to be allowed to go home. That’s likely where they were going when we stopped them.”

“Be nice to know what they were doing in North India, too,” Nolan said, scowling. “Too many unknowns, here.”

“But we know
that
, surely?” Armitage said. “The last Confederation holdouts were looking for help from the Sh’daar, to beat us.”

“Maybe,” Taylor said. “But we can’t rely on easy answers, not with beings as different as these.”

“We’re checking with some of our assets in New Delhi,” Lodge told them. “No answers there yet. But I would have to agree with Secretary Taylor. There may be something else going on here, more than a simple alliance.”

“Gentleman, Ms. Taylor,” Konstantin’s voice said in their heads. “We’re ready to commence the link. I remind you all that only President Koenig will be addressing the Glothr directly, in order to minimize confusion. If you all are ready, we can begin. . . .”

A window opened within Koenig’s mind, and he found himself looking at the alien.

He’d known what to expect, of course. He’d seen one of the aliens first in recordings shot through the electronic eyes of a contact robot on the Glothr ship out beyond Neptune. Later, he’d watched their arrival at the xenosophontology labs at the Mare Crisium, on the moon. And Konstantin had kept him up to date on what they’d been learning about the Glothr since.

But to see them up close . . . Koenig had to admit he was taken aback just a bit.

The creature revealed on his in-head was ethereally beautiful: a filmy translucence revealing patches, dots, and stripes of inner light . . . most of it blue, but with some green and yellow. It currently was underwater—or, rather, in a salty mix of water and ammonia at near freezing temperatures, and its mantle and gently undulating tentacles formed a filmy halo that surrounded what might have passed for a face.

There had been a lot of speculation on how these underwater beings had developed their technology, but a bigger question came from the result of that technological advancement: namely, their robots. The Glothr appeared to be expert roboticists. Those gleaming, upright cigar-shapes with their multiple eyes and tentacles were everywhere on their ship, and had been essential in cracking the aliens’ use of Agletsch Trade Pidgin. Yet, the Sh’daar restricted the development of robotics among their clients, the species within their collective. Why didn’t the rules apply to the Glothr?

It was something Koenig hoped to get to the bottom of.

“You are the leader of the humans,” a computer-generated voice said within Koenig’s head. At the same time, the words wrote themselves down the right side of his in-head. Koenig was immediately impressed. The translation
had
improved, and markedly so. There was no ambiguity in the words at all.

“The leader?” Koenig said. “No. Not of all humans. The United States of North America.”

“We do not understand. We were told you speak for Earth.”

Koenig wasn’t sure how best to represent himself. How much of human politics did the Glothr understand? How important was it that they understand?

“Humans are . . . divided into a number of separate nation-states,” he said. “Some have been attempting to come together, to unify as a single group called the Earth Confederation. But others don’t like the idea of the Confederation making decisions for the rest of us about things to which we haven’t agreed.”

“Like joining the Sh’daar Collective,” the Glothr said.

The being was damned quick. Maybe it understood more than Koenig had been giving it credit for.

“Exactly. We don’t want the Collective telling us how to run our business.”

“Despite all of the benefits? That is what we truly don’t understand . . . that you humans, or at least some humans, would reject the benefits of joining the Collective.”

“
What
benefits?” Koenig snapped back, more forcefully than he’d intended. “To have our scientific inquiry stifled? Our curiosity blocked? Our technological advancement throttled? Our growth and our economy frozen? The way we choose to develop our civilization kept static and unchanging?”

“All of which are trivial when compared to becoming part of a billion-year-old empire spanning the galaxy. And that “throttling of technological advances” you mention—that
would
be for your own good.”

“And who determines what is in our best interest?”

“The Collective, of course.”

“Shouldn’t
we
have a say in anything that’s going to shape our culture?”

“But you would, of course. Once you are part of the Collective.”

Koenig decided that it would be futile trying to argue the point further. He had no idea how the Sh’daar Collective governed itself, or how internal decisions were made, and he didn’t think this was the time to learn.

Even so, he was pleased. This was the first time, so far as he knew, that a Sh’daar species had actually talked to humans about what it was they wanted. Even when Koenig and the
America
battlegroup had forged a treaty of sorts with the Sh’daar in the N’gai Cloud, the beings he’d talked with over a computer link had not tried to sell him on the advantages of joining their Collective. Discussion at the time had been limited to “leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.” By contrast, the Glothr seemed . . . approachable, even friendly. It felt like an enormous change in attitude.

Or was this perceived change simply a reflection of the outlook and attitude of this new species, a kind of racial trait? Koenig didn’t know . . . but he was willing to believe that the Glothr might be important friends for Humankind.

God knows we need one.

“Humans are a stubborn bunch, Joe,” Koenig said. “We don’t like surrendering our independence to
anyone
. . . even our own. And we really hate it when someone puts a gun to our head and says we
have
to do anything, even if whatever it is is supposed to be good for us. But maybe if you could answer some questions, help us get to know you better, some of the barriers to understanding could come down.”

Promise nothing
, he told himself.
But get him to talk
. . . .

“We will answer what we can, within reason,” the Glothr replied. “Better understanding between any two cultures works to the advantage of both.”

“We’ll see. I’m not entirely ready to concede that,” Koenig said. “But . . . look. The Sh’daar Collective would have us give up robotics, among other things, right?”

“Not give up, necessarily,” the Glothr replied. “But we do want to moderate the speed of advancement.”

“We can’t help but notice that the Glothr have some quite sophisticated robots. Why would your Collective allow you to build such robots, but deny us that privilege?”

“Each case, each species, is different,” the alien told him. “And there are no absolutes. The
Zhaotal Um
helped us establish a technological civilization in the first place, hundreds of millions of years ago, and robotics were instrumental in our transition from a marine environment to a gaseous atmosphere, and then again, later, when we made the transition to space. Robots, both as artificial intelligences and as remote bodies and sensory organs for our observers, were already a deeply integral part of our civilization when the ur-Sh’daar first contacted us.”

Koenig caught his breath. The talkative alien had let slip several important revelations just now. Thank God everything was being recorded and stored for later analyses.

He opened a sidebar window and queried Konstantin. “Do we have a reference to
Zhaotal Um
?”

“Possibly,” the AI replied. “There is a forty percent chance that the phrase is related to a term in one of the Agletsch trade pidgins.”

“Meaning?”

“Roughly . . . ‘Stargods.’ ”

“Ha! I
thought
so!”

This meant that, like the H’rulka—without access to metals, fire, or smelting technology—the Glothr had had help. And “Joe” had clearly stated that they’d received that help long before being contacted by the Collective . . . which meant that the stargods definitely were
not
the Sh’daar. Most xenosophontologists had already arrived at that conclusion, but many, in the name of keeping things simple, still argued against it. The Sh’daar were an advanced galactic technic species with a penchant for meddling in the affairs of other races.
Ergo
, they must be the mythic stargods.

And then something else sank in, something startling enough that Koenig ran back through the written transcript of the conversation so far.
Ur
-Sh’daar! The being had said they’d been contacted by the
ur
-Shdaar!

There was something else there, too: an admission that the Glothr civilization was hundreds of millions of years old.
That
seemed starkly impossible.

“Tell me, Joe,” Koenig said, “just where do you come from? The Milky Way? Or the N’gai Cloud?”

“We are not prepared to share that information with you as yet, human.”

“Maybe I should ask you
when
you’re from, then. I find it hard to believe that your species is hundreds of millions of our years old. But if you traveled forward through time to get here—perhaps from the N’gai Cloud before it was assimilated by our galaxy—the idea becomes more reasonable.”

“The biggest problem with you humans,” Joe said, his lights pulsing and rippling as the words came through Koenig’s in-head, “is that you are true ephemerals. Your species can’t take the long view, can’t plan for things a few million years down the line, can’t think in terms of evolutionary periods of time. You worry that the Sh’daar demand that you slow your explorations of robotics and genetics and the rest, because you don’t see that a delay in the development of those technologies means nothing against a vista of ten million years . . . a hundred million . . . a billion. . . .”

“Are you telling me the Glothr as a species have been around for a billion years?”

“I’m telling you that your species is less than half a million years old, and has been technologically proficient for a mere instant, the snap of a tentacle tip.” One of the Glothr’s translucent tendrils rippled and flicked, as if in demonstration. “A race of immortals might take an eon or two to arrive at an important decision, and why not? They have the time, and they know it. They can afford not to be . . .
hasty
.”

“Is your species immortal?”

“True immortality may be impossible. The universe itself will die at some point, bringing all life to an end.”

The alien had not, Koenig realized, answered his question. Although it was always difficult—and usually impossible—to judge nonhuman motives or emotions across an AI translation link, he had the distinct impression that the near transparent being floating in his in-head window was trying to sell him a bill of goods.

“If we’re so primitive,” Koenig said, “why does the Collective want us? Surely we can’t add that much to your civilization.”

“Perhaps not. But you could be disruptive if your technology leads you into a state of
Schjaa Hok
.”

Koenig knew the term, an Agletsch translation of data his battlegroup had accessed eight hundred million years in the past. It meant, very roughly, “The Transcending,” and referred to the sudden vanishing of perhaps hundreds of billions of inhabitants of the pygmy galaxy called the N’gai Cloud.

There were still human religions here on Earth who expected their members to one day be snatched away by God, an event Christian fundamentalists called “the Rapture.” Eight hundred million years ago, a quite literal rapture had occurred within the ur-Sh’daar civilization in the N’gai Cloud. The Transcending had not been brought on by a messiah’s return, but rather appeared to be a true technological singularity, with a majority of the civilization’s members turning into . . . something else. What that something else might be—life on a higher plane or around the corner of a different dimension, perhaps, or a digital existence within computer-generated pocket universes—was still unknown.