Netlink (7 page)

“Ships!” »
DEVCAMERON
« announced. “I’ve never seen their like! They just materialized out of the space close to the Device.”

He could sense more of the DalRiss hosts shifting linkages within the network, their equivalent of standing on tiptoe to see as they switched to their Perceiver arrays for primary input.

The alien ships were moving almost too quickly to follow, and once they were clear of the Device they were virtually impossible to see against the blackness of space. In seconds, however, they’d streaked toward the nearer of the two white dwarfs and were visible once again as dust-mote silhouettes against the raw, pearly white glare of the star’s surface.

“They seek to end their existence,” a voice said in »
DEVCAMERON’S
« mind.

“I don’t think so. Why would they come here, from wherever they came from in the first place, to do that? Can we signal them?”

“We are attempting to get their attention, using both radio and laser communications. There has been no response.”

“Keep trying.”

It was difficult to follow the alien vessels’ descent into the stellar corona. The Perceivers’ optics had not been designed to handle such light levels, and several of the creatures went off-line, their vision destroyed.

Then the mystery ships were gone, vanished into the star.

“Have they been destroyed?” a voice asked.

“I… I still can’t believe they deliberately destroyed themselves,” »
DEVCAMERON
« said, but his thoughts were unsteady, uncertain. Various possibilities occurred to him. They were probes of some sort, sent to plumb the star’s depths. They were starminers, seeking energy or raw materials.

A third possibility was more chilling. If these were the people who’d once made a star explode, perhaps they were trying to do so again.

But minute followed minute, and there was no change in the white dwarf’s complexion as it continued its swing about the Device, paired with its opposite number on the far side.

Were these the same people? The ones who’d destroyed a star? Were they the same as the builders of the Device?

So many questions and not answers enough by half.

“The Perceivers’ scan has found planets,” the voice announced. “Four. They are far beyond the star’s zone for liquid water, however.”

“They would be. These dwarfs don’t shed much more than a few percent of the light and heat they used to. Where?”

A silent thought indicated direction and distance. Piggybacking himself onto the nervous system of a battery of DalRiss and Perceivers, he focused on one world, then another. Three were gas giants, so distant that at the highest magnification they showed no detail at all.

A fourth was closer, about three astronomical units away. It was a rocky world, its surface a patchwork of ice and rock, without even a trace of atmosphere. But »
DEVCAMERON
« felt a stirring as he watched that distant world, for his DalRiss senses indicated that the planet possessed very nearly the mass of the Earth.

“I think,” he said, “that that ice ball should be our next stop.”

“There is no life.”

“No. But I’d like to know if there was life there once.”

“We go, then.”

The host accelerated out from the enigmatic, rapidly spinning whisker and all of its hidden secrets.

Chapter 5

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

—
The Divine Comedy,

Inferno, Canto XVI, l. 79

D
ANTE
A
LIGHIERI

C
.
E
. 1320

Dr. Daren Cameron stopped, pausing for breath as
kata
vines dripped scarlet beneath a lowering orange and green sky. On the horizon, beyond the swells of a shallow sea, a volcano rambled, staining the sky with a pall of greasy blue-gray ash as lightning played and flickered about the mountain’s crest. Sulfur tainted the air, giving it a burned, unpleasant taste.

He knew the world as Dante, though that was not its true name. The second world of a type K3 star cataloged as DM-58 5564, some thirty light years from Earth and over seventy-six from New America, it had originally been named Dantai, a Nihongo word meaning, roughly, social organization or group. Western survey team members, however, had twisted the name in literate wordplay, pointing to the world’s sweltering heat, its sulfurous air, its bizarre and, at times, demonic inhabitants.

Dante was the more apt name, Daren thought, looking about at the raw, young landscape. He couldn’t actually claim that he was experiencing any discomfort at the moment, but the sulfur-laden air, the evil-looking sky, the beach of black, volcanic sand, all contributed to the atmosphere of a place that Dante Alighieri or his Virgil might well have recognized as the gateway to hell.

Damn it, where was Taki?

The air was warm and humid, promising a storm, and a salt tang hung in the air. Boots crunching in the black sand, Daren strode across the beach, then scrambled to the top of a spray-slick boulder to get himself a better view of the land- and seascape encircling him.

East was ocean, deep green-gray in color and patched with whitecaps. West, behind the tumble of breakwater rocks, the land was a low and fetid swamp, rising through tangled matari trees and traveler roots to higher ground. Beyond, the land moved higher still, rising through rolling blue-green foothills that vanished into the blue mist walling the Airy Mountains, white-streaked purple walls of granite so sheer they looked like a painted backdrop.

Daren was alone.

Frowning, he turned slowly on his boulder perch, scanning the coastline north and south. As a precaution, he set his Companion to recording the scene in full sensory detail. The world was slightly smaller than Earth, with eight tenths of Earth’s gravity. It was younger, too, and with a hotter core; volcanism was extensive, plate tectonics active. The Airy Mountains to the west topped twelve thousand meters; there were mountains at the equator half again taller.

At the same time, the atmosphere, at 1.2 bars, was slightly denser than Earth’s and had a much higher carbon dioxide content, nearly two percent. The seas and air were warmer, the storms vaster, wetter, and longer-lived. Erosion proceeded at a faster rate, wearing down mountains and using them to thicken the coastal oceans with silt. There were eight rivers on Dante the length and breadth of Earth’s Nile, four Amazons, five Mississippis. The seas, shallower, smaller, and more landlocked than Earth’s, carried higher concentrations of sediments and dissolved chemicals washed down from the highlands.

North lay his destination, a clustered and interlocking series of gleaming white towers, rising stepwise from sea and beach, with curving sides and curiously twisted, angular faces, the tips of the highest fully a kilometer above the surf breaking at their feet. The cluster looked much like images of arcologies or large-scale hab units in one of the more modern cities on Earth.

And so they had looked to the planet’s first explorers. The men and women of the initial Japanese survey team to visit Dante over two centuries before had been convinced they’d discovered another sapient species. Eighteen years of unrelenting work to establish communication had ended in frustration and failure. Private groups and foundations had continued the work, which was proceeding even today. After more than two hundred years, however, it still wasn’t possible to know for sure whether the Communes, as they ultimately became known, were intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. Like the ants and termites of Earth, the Communes were social creatures, living in vast lime-cement structures accreted out of seawater, rising like terraced buildings above the shores of Dante’s shallow, brackish seas.

They appeared to be a littoral species, limited by their adaptation to their environment to the planet’s coastal regions. Extensively researched by terrestrial xenozoologists, they carried the scientific name
Architectus communis,
the social builders, though individuals came in so many different shapes and sizes that the scientists were still arguing over whether the Communes were one species with hundreds of extreme variants or hundreds of different species living in close communal symbiosis.

Each of those towers enclosed thousands of kilometers of hollow tubes, and intricate nonmechanical valves and pumps driven by differences in temperature between air and sea. Seawater drawn in at the base was circulated throughout the tower; calcium carbonate and other dissolved chemicals were precipitated out along the way and used as building materials where needed. The towers were elegantly cast, their faces angled to take best advantage of the moving sun, the walls stronger than conventional concrete.

And yet the creatures that had built them were small, few larger than Daren’s hand, most the size of his thumb, not counting the legs. They reminded most humans of insects—spindle-legged, spiny, and iridescently delicate—though most had but two body sections and they breathed with lungs. Warriors could be deadly; some were the length and breadth of a strong man’s arm. With dozens of clawed legs and powerful tripartite jaws armed with acid sacs, they appeared by the millions when the nest was threatened, and they could strip a human to the bone and then dissolve the bones in something less than ten seconds.

The question remained: were they intelligent? They cooperated and they built; so did terrestrial ants, though perhaps not on so grand a scale. They communicated with one another, if not with human zoologists, using sophisticated pheromones and scents; so did Earth’s social insects. They controlled their environment, adjusting the temperatures inside their towers with a precision measured in tenths of a degree; so did termites and, to a lesser extent, bees. At times they were capable of astonishing group collaborations, moving and acting like a single organism, extending immense pseudopodia across kilometers of open ground; the same could be said of Earth’s driver and army ants.

There were many who continued to insist that the Communes were an intelligent and self-aware species, that they were simply too different for humans to find common ground sufficient for communications. Most now held that their monumental engineering achievements were purely instinctive, honed and polished by the hand of Darwin across some twenty million years.

Daren had been studying the Communes for only four years now, as part of his ongoing postdoctoral research at the University of Jefferson, and he was trying to keep an open mind. It was impossible to watch Commune activities closely, however, and not get the clear if subjective impression that they acted with a conscious and self-aware volition.

There’d been that time a year ago, for instance, as he’d been moving through the swamp west of the main group of towers, picking his way carefully across a narrow ribbon of solid ground, when he’d encountered the leading tip of a questing Commune pseudopod. For several moments, he’d stood there, unmoving, watching the writhing mass of tiny shapes a few meters in front of him. Abruptly, then, the pseudopod had heaved itself erect, forming a pillar two meters tall composed entirely of the interlocking, finger-sized creatures. For moments more, the two, human and colony, had regarded one another, each using senses indescribable to the other. For Daren, it had been a transcending moment, an instant of certainty that he was confronting intelligence.

Then the pillar had dissolved, the pseudopod had retreated, and he’d been alone in the swamp once more, with no solid proof at all, nothing, in fact, but his personal and highly subjective impressions.

The AI running that simulation had later informed him that lone encounters with Commune ’pods initiated such reactions some twelve percent of the time.

Someday, Daren told himself, he would have the money, the backing, and the status to organize an expedition of his
own
to Dante. He slid down off the rock; it
felt
hard and wet, and it scraped at his seat as he rode it, but then, these full ViRsimulations were designed to be as lifelike and as realistic as possible, right down to the whiff of sulfur in the breeze. All that was edited out were some of the more unpleasant consequences that would have accompanied standing on the real Dante—such as the fact that a two-percent CO
₂
level in the air would have killed him in short order had he actually been breathing it.

But damn it, sims added nothing to the total of human knowledge. Every detail was there because it had been programmed into the AI running the show. It was a splendid training device, but it lacked the possibilities of broader discovery. You couldn’t learn anything
new.

Turning, he eyed the towers in the distance. There was so much to be learned yet, so many worlds to explore that couldn’t be explored from inside a goking simulation.

At its greatest extent, before the Confederation Rebellion, the Shichiju had embraced a ragged-boundaried sphere a hundred light years across, seventy-eight worlds in seventy-two star systems so far terraformed and colonized by Man, as well as several hundred outposts, mining colonies, research stations, military bases. In all those worlds, Humankind had encountered three species showing behavior that might be interpreted as intelligence. There were the Nagas, of course; everyone knew about them. The other two were more mysterious—the enigmatic Maias of Zeta Doradus, and the Communes, and it still wasn’t known for certain whether either of those was even self-aware. Beyond the Shichiju, one other intelligent species had been encountered, the undeniably intelligent and self-aware DalRiss, but they were in the process of leaving, abandoning their world in a great ongoing migration that humans still didn’t fully understand.

Man needed to see a wider cross-sampling of intelligent species… needed more friends, a broader outlook on the cosmos.