Dark Mind - Ian Douglas

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Gray said. “If a single species in this entire, vast galaxy goes extinct—or if it enters its own transcendence and vanishes entirely—how does that threaten you?”

      The spinning gateways give access not only to far expanses of space, another being—the one like a golden slug, the Sjhlurrr—reminded him, but to the deeps of time as well. Causality can be broken. Whole universes of creativity and creation, of experience, of suffering and of ecstasy, of Mind can be made void in an instant. What thinking being could not fear such an eventuality?

      Spinning gateways. That must be what the Sh’daar called the TRGA cylinders. He felt the Agletsch within his implant, confirming his guess.

      “There may be,” Gray said, “greater fears. We recently traveled twelve million years into our own future, and encountered the Glothr. We learned a great deal from them.

      “And we learned about the end of galactic civilization … or at least of that aspect of civilization that includes the Sh’daar and Humankind.”

      And the virtual image of the Milky Way … changed.

      That vast whirlpool of hundreds of billions of suns, young and bright and vital, its spiral arms picked out by the long, knotted battlements and parapets of black dust and by the piercing gleam of young, hot stars, faded away to shreds and tatters, to be replaced by … something else, a pale shell of its former beauty. The mathematical perfection of those spiral arms had been torn apart, the nebulae devoured, the myriad stars vanished or somehow dimmed—a handful of stars surviving of the myriads visible before. The galaxy had become a wan, dim shadow of its former light and strength.

      And at the galactic core something strange was visible, nestled in among the remnant suns. Something shadowy, with just a hint of golden light. It was difficult to see, difficult to interpret, to understand, but it looked like an immense translucent sphere fully ten thousand light years across, forged, perhaps, out of the clotted clouds of suns that had been there before.

      A scant handful of species, according to the Glothr records, and including the Glothr themselves, were in full flight from the ravaged galaxy behind them, fleeing to other galaxies across the empty gulfs of space. A number of dark and frigid worlds—a fleet, a pack of Steppenwolf worlds—were fleeing out into darkness.

      “We think,” Gray told the Council, “that what we’re seeing in there engulfing the galaxy’s central core is a full-blown Kardeshev III civilization … a galactic Dyson sphere.”

      As he said this, Konstantin-2 shared with the Council the background information to what must have been untranslatable terms to the alien species:

      In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev had lent his name to his proposed method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological development. A K-I civilization used all of the available energy of its home planet. A K-II used all of the energy from its star, and physicist Freeman Dyson had suggested how that might be possible: a hollow sphere, or, alternatively, a cloud of orbiting satellites, that collected all of the energy emitted by the civilization’s star.

      Which meant that a K-III civilization would use all of the energy available within an entire galaxy.

      When Gray suggested the possibility of a galactic-scale Dyson sphere—and as they accepted the AI’s data—he felt an uneasy stir move through his audience.

      Why, the Groth Hoj asked him, should we fear this? This … event lies nearly a billion years in our future. And it could well be our own remote descendents who do this …

      The ephemeral is correct, the Adjugredudhran said. Its branching arms gestured sharply. A mere four galactic rotations is a brief space of time for a truly mature civilization.

      The being’s use of the word ephemeral almost jolted Gray out of the simulation. How long did the Adjugredudhra live?

      And that question raised another. Presumably, they possessed long life spans—possibly even functional immortality—because they’d learned how to manipulate their own genome. But genetics was one of the proscribed technologies—the “G” in “GRIN,” knowledge that could lead to the Tech Singularity. Supposedly, the Adjugredudhra, like the rest of the Sh’daar, were doing everything in their power to avoid another one.

      Were all of the members of the Sh’daar Collective hypocrites on such an astronomical scale?

      That thought disturbed him even as he answered their question. “Eight hundred seventy-six million years is more like three galactic rotations, not four,” Gray said. “A mere instant!” He meant the statement as a joke, but sensed a kind of impact, an increasing sense of unease, among the alien listeners. Maybe they did casually think on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. “And in my time, my epoch, we might be seeing the first arrival of the galactic Dyson sphere makers. We believe them to be the Rosette Aliens.”

      At Gray’s mental signal, Konstantin-2 loaded another set of images into the collective, virtual consciousness—images originally returned to Earth from the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster. “A lot of ephemeral lives were lost,” he said, “getting this information.”

      Konstantin was showing the gathered beings images collected by America, and by various survey ships and probes sent into the cluster’s heart. The six black holes the Council were seeing—cosmologists were now certain—were the far-future embers of the Six Suns of the remote past.

      The beings gathered about the virtual circle stared up, with wildly different sensory organs, into utter strangeness. Not all of them had eyes … but the imagery had been made available in a wide range of formats.

      The Six Suns all were hot, young stars, each some forty times the mass of Earth’s sun. Such large stars were profligate and short-lived. They burned through their stores of nuclear fuel in just tens of millions of years before ending their relatively brief lives as Type II supernovae and collapsing into black holes. The various star-faring beings around him had to know what these images implied, but he said it aloud anyway.

      “This is the ultimate fate of your Six Suns,” Gray told them. “Six black holes spinning in a rosette. Those masses, rotating that quickly, distort spacetime in the same way as the TRGAs … what you call the Spinning Gateways.”

      Gray knew, though, that the most intriguing part of the images humans had recorded weren’t the black holes themselves, but what was within the central opening at the Rosette’s heart: starscapes.

      Different starscapes.

      They changed with the changing angle of the recording sensors as they passed the opening, and Gray thought about how a slight change in the angle of approach through a TRGA cylinder could change your destination in both time and space. Here, one view of a sparseness of stars—a stellar desert—gave way to the teeming myriads of suns at the heart of a cluster or a galaxy, which in turn gave way to tangled, knotted curtains of nebulae … to the emptiness of intergalactic space … to a view of a binary star from relatively close … to a view of a spiral galaxy—quite possibly the Milky Way—seen in all of its spectacular beauty from Outside.

      Some of those different views, those different realities, were alien in the extreme. One appeared to be a realm of searing, white-hot energy … the core of a sun, perhaps … or the chaotic incandescence of an instant after the big bang … or even a cosmos of completely different laws and makeup.

      Cosmologists studying the changing scenes had concluded that each different starscape was looking into a different universe—alternate, parallel realities, some very like this one, some completely other.

      “We believe the Rosette Aliens came through this gateway,” Gray told the assembly. “They might be from the remote future. More likely they’re from an alternative universe, a different reality. Some of our cosmologists have speculated that they’re from a universe that is nearing the end of its lifetime, a universe in the final eons of cold, entropic decay. If so, the Rosette Aliens might be seeking a younger, healthier universe. They would

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