Future Weapons of War

us,” Selan snapped. “I see no point in continuing this discussion.”

“Nor I.”

Within the Solar culture of that epoch, “partner” referred to a long-term relationship that had little to do with sex or reproduction, and much to do with philosophical concerns and a symbiosis of avocation and point of view. Their disagreement proved to be the first serious rift between increasingly divergent world views; a few centuries later, Selan and three like-minded partners—all of them Homo extraterrestrialis, as it happened—left the partnership. Valova’s larger group eventually migrated to the Oort spomeswarm, the still thinly populated fringe of the System, where the view of the Galaxy was unimpeded by Sol or the glow of the Dyson cloud.

Of interest from this new vantage point was the Andromedan galaxy. To the unenhanced vision of Homo sapiens, it had long been just visible to the naked eye as a small patch of haze— little more than a faint and fuzzy star—taking its name from a long-vanished constellation. To the optics of beings like Valova, however, it covered an area over six times that of Earths moon as it had been seen from ancient Earth—before that satellite had been disassembled to fuel the growth of the Dyson cloud. To its eyes, the spiral arms were quite visible. It was easy for Valova to imagine that vast spiral of starlight hurtling down upon it at thirty five kilometers per second. And epochs passed.

* * * *

Ygal24.85

Within the vast and complex tapestry of Galactic his tory, the history of Humankind was a single, almost microscopic thread. Civilization was not, could not be, a constant. Civilizations rose, matured, aged, fell. Like vir tual particles arising from the background foam of the Zero Point Field, unions of thought and world view and purpose came and went, an ephemeral flickering against the Night. More and more often, however, like subatomic particles gathering an illusion of stability, metacivilizations took form, coherent wave forms arising from the background chaos. The Galactics, so disliked by Selan, had been one of these.

But a truly enduring civilization requires a delicate balance between the static and the dynamic.

To grow too swiftly means an inevitable collapse into chaos; to remain static is death. The group of cultures inhabiting the Dyson cloud about Sol, like many tens of millions of other civilizations across the Galaxy, found stability in its sheer diversity. Individual civilizations came and went, none enduring more than a few million years, each adding somewhat to the growth and knowledge of the whole before fading and being replaced by a new outlook upon the cosmos.

And slowly, the metacivilization of the Galaxy as a whole took firmer and deeper root. A billion years or so after the time of Selan and Valova, a loose association of very long-lived cultures had emerged as a kind of Caretaker civilization, though its antecedent cultures had first appeared long before Earth or its sun had emerged from their stellar nursery. Physically located within a swarm of world-sized habitats drawing energy from the black holes, massed suns, and intense radiation fields of the Galactic Core, they were primarily focused on extending and deepening the reach and scope of a genuine K3 civilization, a confederation of Mind known by a symbol that might translate as “the Conclave.”

To employ imperfect metaphor, if the Galaxy was the body and the Conclave the brain, Sol and its teeming trillions were a single cell within the body’s far-flung nervous system. Sol, by this time, was the heart of a thriving, stable K2.0 civilization; Galactic civilization as a whole, as represented by the myriad worlds of the Core, might have been pegged at K3.1.

Despite advances in physics that would have seemed godlike to ancient Humankind, the speed of light remained the ultimate barrier to communication. A signal sent outward from the Core still required two tenths of a galactic rotation to reach the Outer Rim.

The Caretakers didn’t think in terms of galactic years, of course. They tended to measure such relatively brief periods in terms of radioactive decay; Ygal0.2 was roughly the equivalent of two half-lives of plutonium-239. The concept of a fixed galactic year equal to 225 million years could apply only to the Dyson cloud of Sol and other systems 26,000 light-years out—the length of time it took stars at that distance to orbit the galactic center once.

Still, a tiny fraction of the extremely remote descendents of Humankind had slowly spread throughout the home galaxy. Almost a billion years after Humankind had first ventured from the surface of his world, some hundreds of millions lived on and within a number of artificial worlds and structures scattered along the fringe of the Galactic Core, and took part in many of the principal deliberations of the Conclave.

“What we need,” one of those descendents told the Group Mind, “is a weapon. A very, very powerful weapon.”

The being was not genus Homo—was not, in fact, even remotely organic. The majority of sentient beings throughout the Galaxy—those with a corporeal existence, at any rate—were machines: highly intelligent, long-lived, supremely rational, and capable of taking a very long view of things indeed. Outward form and the physics of reproduction were unimportant; what counted alone was Mind.

“What,” another machine mind inquired, “is a weapon?”

“A device,” the first mind replied. “A tool for applying energy in such a way as to stop or divert a threat. Check your oldest records. Within primitive organic systems, they are used to acquire other organic matter as food, or to acquire political advantage so that one system can impose its will upon another.”

“And how does that relate to the threat we face?”

The emotive equivalent of a shrug crossed the light-years. “Our metacivilization faces destruction when the Andromedan galaxy merges with ours some four point three five half-lives of Uranium-235 hence.”

“A very long time.”

“Not so long. Fewer than ten complete rotations of our Galaxy. And the longer we wait, the more energy we must employ to safely alter Andromeda’s vector. In considerably less time than that, a critical point will be reached, after which harmlessly diverting Andromeda will be impossible, and damage—perhaps catastrophic damage—to the metacivilization becomes inevitable.”

“I yet fail to see why this is of serious concern,” another member of the Conclave put in. Its particular civilization occupied the warm and salty seas beneath the ice crusts of a number of moons circling Jovian-type gas giants, a vantage point less than conducive to an outlook along astronomical scales. “As we understand it, no stars will be harmed by the interpenetration of the galaxies.”

“But the component stars of our metacivilization will be so completely scattered,” the descendent of Humankind replied, “that communication between the individual systems will become impossibly long. Worse, the collision of gas clouds will initiate a period of intense star formation. The newborn suns will be massive and short lived, leading to an epoch of supernovae that will flood ambient space in deadly radiation. Many of us can shield our home systems from the high-energy flux, even use it, but countless organic worlds would be rendered sterile.”

“Of more serious concern,” another Mind said, “is the limiting of available data. We predict that a metacivilization such as ours, in the absence of a viable interstellar data exchange, would inevitably collapse to Type K2.4L within what remains of the galactic cores. Individual star systems flung into the Void could maintain civilizations no higher than approximately K1.9J.”

For eons now, the scope and depth of Civilization had been measured by the amount of information it processed and stored. A primitive tribe wandering the surface of a world, with no written language, might process 10 bits of data, and be classified as Type A. Each tenfold increase in available data represented another step up the scale. The ancient world of Kardeshev, with all of its books and com puter hard drives storing something like 10 bits, would have been classified as a K0.7H. The metacivilization of the Caretakers, with access to the stored data of 10 worlds, was currently a Type K3.5Q.

The machine intelligence was pointing out that after the collision with Andromeda, any surviving metaculture would be able to draw upon the massed data of no more than 104worlds, and would therefore be limited to 1017bits—a Type L. Single worlds flung clear of the Galaxy, isolated andalone, would be able to handle no more than the data available to a solitary star system—its data processing capability forever limited to a paltry 1015bits.

The information stunned.

“And the vast and increasing gulf between the individual star systems,” the first machine mind continued, “would guarantee that a true metacivilization would never reform, that the highest communicative element would be a single star and its population of worlds and habitats. That is the challenge that