figuring out just what made the Sh’daar tick.
2 November 2425
Deep Time Orbital Facility-1
N’gai Cluster
1020 hours, TFT
Gray was seated in what appeared to be a large classroom or lecture hall. Concentric rings of comfortable benches overlooked a central well a dozen meters across. A dome overhead looked out into the heart of the N’gai Cluster, filled with stars, with artificial worlds, with the enigmatic gleam of the Six Suns. McKennon, the lead xenosophontologist of the Deep Time facility, was seated next to him … or seemed to be. In fact, Gray was back in his office on board America, while McKennon was in a communications chamber on board DT-1. AI software created the illusion—the virtual reality—of their conversation within their cerebral implants.
Other conference attendees—all human, so far—were scattered through the room, waiting for the start of what promised to be a very interesting meeting.
“Yes,” Gray said, “but we weren’t sure of that. All we knew was that if we were just a hair off course during the passage through the TRGA cylinder, it could screw both with where and when we emerged … possibly by quite a lot.” Gray chuckled. “You have no idea how terrified I was that we might emerge before Koenig arrived here … twenty years ago. That would have done a job on causality, let me tell you!”
“Twenty years out of eight hundred seventy-six million?” McKennon said, and nodded. “You would need a degree of precision good to within one part in forty-three point eight million. You’re right. That’s pretty tight! Fortunately, it looks like there’s some leeway built into the thing.”
“We suspected as much when we took our initial temporal navigation readings,” Gray told her. “But it’s good to hear it from someone who knows what she’s doing.”
“Who, me?” She laughed. “Just about everything we’ve done since we got here has been pure guesswork!”
Gray looked up at the apparent dome covering the virtual classroom. Beyond, high in the sky and made tiny by distance, those six brilliant, blue-white suns locked together in a hexagram served to mock mere human science, math, and technology. They represented an obviously artificial engineering on an interstellar scale, one that utterly dwarfed human ideas of what was possible … human ideas of scale and scope and sanity.
“I’d say your team has done a pretty good job so far,” Gray said slowly, “given that you’re working with ideas and capabilities that we can’t even begin to understand.”
She followed his gaze up, up and out into the distance to the tightly ordered gleam of the Six Suns. “Every time I see that … thing,” she admitted, “I wonder how it’s even possible that we’ve survived as long as we have. The Sh’daar could have wiped us out easily, at any point since our first encounter with them. Instead, we’ve fought their proxies piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Did the Sh’daar build it?” Gray asked. “I thought there was some question about that.”
“Well, if it wasn’t them, it was the ur-Sh’daar. Before they transcended. Same thing, really. The Sh’daar are the ur-Sh’daar … leftovers?”
“Maybe,” Gray replied. “Or maybe there was a still earlier civilization.”
“Please, Admiral,” McKennon said, raising her hands in mock pain. “We don’t need to complicate things by imagining whole pantheons of mystic ancient Stargods!”
Gray laughed. “Of course not. But still … the universe started thirteen point eight billion years ago …”
“Thirteen point eight two,” she said, correcting him.
“Thirteen point eight two billion years,” he agreed. “Subtract four and a half billion years, which is how long it took to evolve a tool-using, spaceship-building species on Earth. That leaves well over nine billion years to play with. How many species can evolve; develop spaceflight, computers, and nanotechnology; and reach the point where they …” He stopped, looked up, gestured at the alien sky. “… where they can move stars around just to create a titanic objet d’art?”
“The Six Suns are probably a transportation system, like the TRGAs,” McKennon said. “Those rotating stellar masses twist spacetime, and open a gate to … I guess to somewhere else. Maybe somewhen else, too. We have no idea what it does. But I know what you’re saying. Whoever built the thing did it so … so casually. Like it was nothing for them to set six stars orbiting around a common center of gravity.”
“Uh-oh,” Gray said. “Looks like the Glothr just linked in.”
The image of one of the Glothr, presumably their equivalent of an ambassador, had just materialized off to the right side of the virtual classroom. Three meters tall and very roughly resembling a terrestrial jellyfish, the being stood on a writhing mass of tentacles, with a filmy mantle at the top, like a parasol. Much of the being was transparent or translucent; you could see the brain within a circle of twenty-four jet-black eyes. Its body, a column intermittently glimpsed behind the tentacle mass, was transparent, encasing its translucent internal organs.
Gray was glad that the writhing tangle of tentacles usually hid the being’s interior from view. Those tentacles—the thicker ones used for locomotion, the thinner ones for manipulation—tended to be translucent near their bases, but shaded into opaque grays and browns. The translucent parts shimmered with rainbow colors, like a shifting, oily sheen, and clusters of blue and green lights gleamed and winked within the glassy depths of the body. The Glothr, Gray knew, communicated with others of its kind by changing color. Translation to a spoken language could be a real bear … but one of the numerous Agletsch trade languages had been designed for beings that communicated visually. You just needed a computer to handle the actual color-to-speech part.
“That’s a Glothr?” McKennon asked. She seemed intrigued. But then, in her line of work, she would be.
“Yeah. That’s the Agletsch name for them, anyway. We ran into them something like twelve million years in the future.”
“You mean twelve million years after 2425?”
“That’s right.”
“We need a special grammar to handle time travel.”
“We certainly will need one.”
She laughed. “Okay. I downloaded one preliminary report, but I haven’t had a chance to follow through on them, yet,” McKennon said. “What are they like?”
He thought about the Glothr.
Twelve million years in the future—counting Gray’s home time as the present—a rogue world had given rise to a spectacularly advanced technic civilization. Sunless—adrift in emptiness with no star to call its own—the world named Invictus by humans was frigidly cold, at least on the surface, and eternally dark. Five times the mass of Earth, its surface chemistry was similar to that of
