Netlink (12 page)

Full understanding by Man of the life form once known as
Xenophobe
had come slowly and only through the communication made possible by DalRiss biotechnology. Nagas began as small lumps of compact and tightly organized cells, molecule-sized organic machines that penetrated a planet’s crust, assimilating rocks and minerals and reorganizing them into more Naga cells. Debate still raged among human researchers as to whether the Nagas were a naturally evolved life form or the runaway end product of an evolving alien nanotechnology, and the Nagas themselves could not say. Certainly, Naga cells behaved much like a thinking version of human nanotech, able to sample, manipulate, pattern, and even replicate complex molecules at the atomic level.

With a metabolism driven by the planet’s interior heat, the thermophilic being tunneled deeper and deeper into the crust, finding an ideal habitable zone several kilometers down, one balanced between the cold surface and the great deeps where the temperature was so high that even Nagas couldn’t survive, and spreading out in all directions.

Eventually, the Naga occupied vast expanses of underground real estate, existing as concentrated pockets of tissue interconnected by vast networks of tendrils; the comparison to the interconnected neurons of a brain had not escaped the researchers studying Naga physiology. Ultimately, the entire Naga massed as much as a fair-sized planetoid and was spread throughout the planet’s upper crust. Its tendency to detect and assimilate large concentrations of refined metals and alloys had led to the confrontations between Man and Xenophobe on a dozen Frontier worlds and to the assumption by humans that they were being attacked by a spacefaring race. Only after fifty years of sporadic “war,” the loss of several human colony worlds and tens of thousands of people, and the eradication of the planetary Naga infesting Loki, was the truth finally learned.

Each planetary Naga was an independent organism, completely unaware of the Nagas occupying other worlds. Its “acquisitive phase” might last tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years as it grew, permeating its planet’s crust. Eventually, however, as its nodes became more closely interconnected and parts began overrunning the planetary surface, the Naga shifted modes, becoming quiescent—entering its “contemplative phase.” Using its ability to draw on enormous reserves of energy and to produce and manipulate powerful magnetic fields, the Naga hurled tiny packets of itself into the interstellar deeps at high velocities. Most of these packets were lost in the immensities of space; some few, guided by a primitive kind of programming that recognized the heat and magnetic fields of suitable planets, fell onto the worlds of other, nearby suns… and the cycle was begun anew.

Perhaps strangest from Man’s limited point of view, however, was the curious way the Naga had of looking at the world around them. Restricted by their underground isolation from the rest of the universe, the Nagas perceived the cosmos as endless rock. Outward the rock grew hotter, providing life; inward, at the center of all, was a vast, hollow cave, a yawning blank emptiness that the Naga, in its binary logic, thought of as
not-rock.
Pods of new life launched into space crossed not outer but
inner
space, the gulf at the center of all.

From the human perspective, the Nagas literally saw the universe inside-out. Their perceptions of humans were just as skewed; if Nagas divided their cosmos into
rock
and
not-rock,
they separated their awareness into
self and not-self.
Wild Nagas were always astonished to learn that it was possible for
not-self
to think and reason, just like
self.

But communication was possible. Once contact had been achieved with one Naga, through DalRiss biotech, it had been learned that fragments of that Naga could pass on what it had learned to wild Nagas. If human culture had been undergoing a revolution thanks to peaceful contact with the Naga, it was nothing like the revolution in individual Naga thought and understanding. Though their feelings, if they had any, couldn’t be expressed in words, it seemed as though they were allowing themselves to be integrated into the DalRiss fleet through a simple lust for wonder, for input on a cosmic scale.

And that, after all, was much of the reason »
DEVCAMERON
« was here as well.

“I need to see the past,” he said in his mind, focusing on the matrix of the interlinked Naga’s flickering, eldritch thoughts. “I need to know if you’ve been here before.”

“I do not understand what you mean by ‘here’.…”

»
DEVCAMERON
« uploaded images of the Device, a thread-thin needle of brilliant silver rotating about its long axis beneath the light of two shrunken suns.

He received a blurred storm of warped and fragmentary images in return.

Despite the differences both in their perceptions and in their way of reasoning, humans linked with Nagas had managed to secure tantalizing glimpses of the beings’ remote past. Given that Naga reproduction was essentially asexual fission on an enormous scale, it was no surprise to find that one Naga possessed memories of a succession of previous worlds… even though it didn’t think in those terms. Some researchers thought that the Nagas must have first evolved as much as seven or eight billion years earlier, that they might not even be native to the galaxy humans called the Milky Way. Direct evidence of such time scales was lacking, however, and even memories from recently assimilated worlds could not be pinned down in time. Nagas, it turned out, had a different perception of time as well as space, one based on subjective events rather than on objective units of time.

It was the past, as perceived by the Naga, that »
DEVCAMERON
« was interested in now. His initial contact with the Naga at the DalRiss world of ShraRish had demonstrated that the Nagas had approached the bubble of human-occupied space from that part of Earth’s sky toward eighteen hours’ right ascension, somewhat to spinward of the galactic core, roughly in the direction of the constellations Serpens, Ophiuchus, and Cygnus. He’d known about the curious Cygnan anomaly—the fact that so many novae had been recorded in the same small patch of sky—since long before his transformation into a program within an alien computer matrix. Somehow, it seemed to demand too much of random chance to expect that Nagas and multiple novae should both emerge from that same tiny patch in Earth’s sky and
not
be related somehow.

His original guess had been that someone in this direction had been fighting the Xenophobe menace just as the Terran Hegemony had done, but with weapons of considerably greater destructive power. He’d pictured alien civilizations sterilizing worlds contaminated by the Xenophobe by exploding their suns.

Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The Naga were restricted—by their requirements for specific ranges of temperature, crust composition, and magnetic fields—to worlds similar to Earth. They seemed equally at home within planets that had been terraformed and possessed oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres as they were inside prebiotic worlds still shrouded in carbon-dioxide, but in general they could survive only within fairly narrow limits of magnetic field, internal temperature, and mass. In short, they preferred the types of worlds that men preferred, though for different reasons… a preference that had contributed to human impressions of a systematic alien attack throughout the years of the Xenophobe Wars.

Images filled his mind, most disjointed and virtually impossible to comprehend, images cast not as sight so much as
impressions…
impressions based on the taste of magnetic fields or the rich tang of pure metal, and the lovely, satiating warmth of the outer heat, or the delicious tickle of flowing information. As always, he found it impossible to pull any real sense of time from that jumble of impressions; the centuries, the millennia between one event of note in the age-long and slow-changing existence of a Naga and the next, passed as a blur, as if Nagas could willfully skip over or edit out the uninteresting parts of their existence. Too, until very recently indeed, Nagas had been almost totally ignorant of the universe; most still thought of interstellar space as the void at the center of their universe.

There is Self… and not-self, the Cosmos sundered. The not-selves that are aware, as Self, surround and penetrate. And beyond… wonder.…

Its attention seemed focused on the spinning Device, though it was hard to be certain. Memories washed through »
DEVCAMERON’S
« awareness, most incomprehensibly strange. A few, a very few, bore familiarity; he caught the grass-life-sweet scent of Katya and felt an unendurable pang of homesickness. The scent was gone an instant later, washed away by an avalanche of the strange.

God, I miss her.

“There is something…” The Naga’s inner voice filled his mind, his soul. »
DEVCAMERON
« waited, listening. “Something similar to what the not-self calls the Device. A similar taste.…”

He tasted it, metallic-sharp and bright. Magnetic fields. Intense magnetic fields, unlike anything »
DEVCAMERON
« had ever experienced. The spinning Device generated inconceivable magnetic energies as it spun; once, long, long ago, one or more of the Naga’s ancestors had sensed a field similar in scope and in strength.

There was nothing more.

“»
DEVCAMERON
!«” one of the DalRiss voices called, intruding on the turbulent mingling of alien thoughts.

“I’m… here.” It always took a moment or two to disentangle himself from the bizarrely twisted thought patterns of a Naga.

“An unliving vessel returns!”

Breaking his mental link with the Naga, »
DEVCAMERON
« opened again an inner window on the volume of space between the white dwarf suns. With enhanced vision, he could see the mottled gray shape of an alien craft, its inverted shark’s fins unlike anything he’d seen before, traveling swiftly out from one of the stars, falling toward the Device.

“Record this!” he snapped… needlessly. The DalRiss recorded everything they sensed within the vast reserves of their Naga-linked organic computers. As he watched its passage, he downloaded what he’d missed—the same ship rising out of the star’s photosphere, radiating furiously in the high ultraviolet.

Dwarf stars were composed of what human physicists called degenerate matter, with the mass of Earth’s sun packed into a volume no larger than a planet’s, a millionfold smaller. A cubic centimeter massed uncounted tons; the density was only somewhat less than that within the strangely twisted physics of a neutron star’s interior.

It was not possible.

But then, neither was the Device, where similar energies and masses were held captive. Again he wondered:
who are these beings? What are they doing here?

In moments, the mystery ship had retraced its course inward from the star, plunged into the strangely twisted space near the Device, and vanished.

A thought occurred to »
DEVCAMERON
«. “That vessel. Did it disappear at a spot close to where it emerged?” He couldn’t tell for sure without exact measurements, but it seemed to him that it had.

“As nearly as can be determined by our Perceivers, yes.” An oval drew itself in blue light close to one end of the Device and encircling the area where the lone ship had vanished. Seven blue stars appeared scattered within the oval, the points at which the aliens had emerged from otherwhere. A star of a lighter blue marked the entry point of the ship they’d just seen.

“I wonder…” »
DEVCAMERON
« was reviewing once again the information he had stored on theoretical space-time machines such as this one. While no one had ever put such theories to the test, the best mathematical models suggested that large masses such as that before them, rotating at relativistic velocities, opened specific pathways connecting places remote from one another in space and time. Where you ended up after passing through the gate was not random but depended on your approach vector. Some models assumed that gateways to and from a distant spot would be different, but »
DEVCAMERON
« had just seen evidence that this wasn’t so, that a single gateway might be two-way.

In other words, follow the same path, arrive at the same place. If they could follow the track recorded by that departing ship with sufficient accuracy, it ought to be possible to follow it back to where and when it had come from.

“Is it your plan to follow the vessel?” a DalRiss asked in his mind.

“They don’t seem inclined to notice us otherwise,” »
DEVCAMERON
« replied. “Unfortunately, maneuvering down that path could be a problem.”

DalRiss city ships were not really designed for maneuver through space. They traveled from point to point through the effort—and death—of one of the gene-tailored lifeforms they called Achievers, creatures that somehow visualized two widely separated places in space and made them one… first in their minds, then in reality, allowing the DalRiss vessel to slip from one point to another
past
space. The city ships were capable of limited maneuver by expelling matter at high velocities through powerful magnetic fields, or by reshaping and riding local magnetic fields with fields of their own, but accelerations tended to be quite low, a few tenths of a G at most. Steering one of these million-ton monsters through the tortured space alongside the whirling Device would be by far more a matter of luck than skill. With no clear picture of space at the other side, Achievers would be useless here… and missing the path could end with the living ship emerging uncountable light years from where it wanted to be.

In any case, »
DEVCAMERON
« didn’t like the idea of jeopardizing one of the DalRiss city ships and the thousands of DalRiss aboard it. If nothing else, there was a fair possibility that a ship would emerge on the other side light years from the nearest twin to the enigmatic Device. There were no guarantees.

But—just possibly—there was another way to explore the gateway provided by the Device.