David Brin - Heaven's Reach

In an age of rising chaos, sometimes the weak and friendless have no sanctuary but the law. Humans and their clients had to keep faith with Galactic institutions. To do less would be to risk losing everything. Unfortunately, Gillian’s quest for a neutral power to take over the relics had proved worse than futile.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. After the Great Institutes proved untrustworthy at Oakka, Gillian had what seemed (at the time) an inspired notion.

Why not pass the buck even higher?

She decided to bring the relics here, to a citadel for species that had “moved on” from the mundane, petty obsessions plaguing the Civilization of Five Galaxies. At one of the legendary Fractal Worlds, harassed Earthlings might at last find dispassionate advice and mediation from beings who were revered enough to intercede, halting the spasmodic madness of younger clans. These respected elder sapients would assume responsibility for the burden, relieve Streaker of its toxic treasures, and force the bickering oxygen alliances to share.

Then, at long last, the weary dolphins could go home.

And I could go searching for Tom, wherever he and Creideiki and the others have drifted since Kithrup.

That had been the theory, the hope.

Too bad the Old Ones turned out to be as fretful, desperate, and duplicitous as their younger cousins who still dwelled amid blaring hot stars.

It’s as if we were a plague ship, carrying something contagious from the distant past. Wherever we go, rational beings start acting like they’ve gone mad.

Monitors focused on the nearest edge of the great wound, revealing a shell several thousand miles thick, not counting the multipronged spikes jutting both in and out. Dense haze partly shrouded the continuing tragedy but could not mask a sparkle of persistent convulsions. Structural segments buckled and tore as Gillian watched. Fractal branches broke and went spinning through space, colliding with others, setting off further chain reactions.

The massive spikes on the sunward side glittered in a way that reminded Gillian.

Windows. When we first came here … after they opened a slim door to let us through … the first thing I noticed was how much of the inner face seemed to be made of glass. And beneath those immense panes—

She closed her eyes, recalling how the telescope had revealed each branchlet was its own separate world. Some greenhouses — larger than her home state of Minnesota — sheltered riotous jungles. Others shone with city lights, or floating palaces adrift on rippled seas, or plains of sparkling sand. It would take many millions of Earths, unrolled flat, to cover so much surface, and that would not begin to express the diversity. She might have spent years magnifying one habitat after another and still routinely found something distinct or new.

It was the most majestic and beautiful place Gillian had ever seen.

Now it was unraveling before her eyes.

That haze, she realized, aghast. It isn’t just structural debris and subliming gas. It’s people. Their furniture and pets and clothes and houseplants and family albums … Or whatever comprised the equivalent for Old Ones. What human could guess the wishes, interests, and obsessions that became important to species who long ago had seen everything there was to see in the Five Galaxies, and had done everything there was to do?

However abstruse or obscure those hopes, they were dissolving fast. Just during Streaker’s brief passage through the gaping wound, more sapient beings must have died than the whole population of Earth.

Her mind quailed from that thought. To personalize the tragedy invited madness.

“Is anyone trying to stop this?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

The Niss Machine paused before answering.

“Some strive hard. Behold their efforts.”

The monitor view shifted forward as Streaker finally arrived at the habitat’s vast interior space.

Just like the last time, Gillian abruptly felt as if she had entered a vast domed chamber of bright corrugated stalactites and measureless shadows. Although the farthest portions of the vault were several hundred million kilometers away, she could nevertheless make out fine details. The imaging system monitored her eyes to track the cone of her attention, highlighting and amplifying whatever she chose to regard.

Directly ahead — like a glowing lamp in the center of a basilica — a dwarf star cast its warming glow. The visible disk was dimmer and redder than the spendthrift kind of sun where nursery worlds like Terra spun and flourished. By stripping the outer layers for construction material, the makers of this place had created a perfect hearth fire, whose fuel ought to last a hundred billion years. To stare straight at the disk caused no physical pain. But its plasma skin, placid during their first visit, now seemed covered by livid sores. Dazzling pinpoints flared as planet-sized gobs of debris tumbled to the roiling surface.

Yet, Gillian soon realized such collisions were exceptional. Most of the jagged chunks were being intercepted and burned by narrow beams of searing blue energy, long before they reached the solar photosphere.

“Of course even when they succeed in pulverizing rubble, the mass still settles downward as gas, eventually rejoining the sun from which it was stripped so long ago. The star’s thermonuclear and atmospheric resonances will be adversely affected. Still, it reduces the number of large ablative impacts, and thus many actinic flares.”

“So the maintenance system functions,” Gillian commented, with rising hope.

“Yes, but it is touch and go. Worse yet, parts of the system are being abused.”

The monitor went blurry as it sped to focus on a point along a far quadrant of the criswell sphere, where one of the blue scalpel-rays was busy with less altruistic work, carving a brutal path across the jagged landscape, severing huge fractal branchlets, shattering windows and raising mighty gouts of steam.

Gillian cried an oath and stepped back. “My God. It’s genocide!”

“We have learned a sad lesson during this expedition,” the Niss Machine conceded. “One that should very much interest my Tymbrimi makers, if we ever get a chance to report it.

“When an oxygen-breathing race retires from Galactic affairs to seek repose in one of these vast shells, it does not always leave behind the prejudices and loyalties of youth. While many do seek enlightenment, or insights needed for transcendence, others stay susceptible to temptation, or remain steadfast to alliances of old.”

In other words, Gillian had been naive to expect detachment and impartiality from the species living here. Some were patrons — or great-grandpatrons — of Earth’s persecutors.

She watched in horror as some faction misused a defensive weapon — designed to protect the whole colony — against a stronghold of its opponents.

“Ifni. What’s to keep them from doing that to us!”

“Dr. Baskin, I haven’t any idea,” the spinning hologram confided. “Perhaps the locals are too busy in their struggles to notice our arrival.

“Or else, it could be because of the company we keep.”

A screen showed the great Zang ship — floating just ninety kilometers away, quivering as the grim, sooty wind brushed its semiliquid flanks. Clouds of smaller objects fluttered nearby. Some were machine entities. Others qualified as living portions of the massive vessel, detached to do errands outside, then quietly reabsorb when their tasks were done.

“I’ve confirmed my earlier conjecture. The hydrogen beings are coordinating efforts by the harvester robots and other machine beings to help shore up and stabilize the Fractal World.”

Gillian nodded. “That’s why they were at Izmunuti. To fetch construction material. It’s an easy source of carbon just one t-point jump away.”