“How far back do your recollections go?” asked Selene. “You said you are watching this system for signs of life. How long have you been doing that?”
“What time units would you prefer me to express the period in?”
Good question. Most of the measures people used were completely arbitrary: the length of time their planet took to rotate on its axis or orbit a star. She needed a more universal yardstick. “Are you aware of the galaxy's rotation?”
“I am aware of it, the concept of the galactic day, but I do not perceive the actuality. Much detail of the outer reality is invisible from within the cloud, and my attention is always upon what happens here.”
“You never go outside?”
“No.”
Ondo said, “The radio wave bursts emanating from the poles of the dead star – you can see their spin?”
“I can.”
“In terms we would understand, the neutron corpse of the star spins at a rate of a little over one hundred times per second. How many spins have you counted since you began your watch in this system?”
Without pausing to calculate, the entity gave them a number in the ten to the power of sixteen range. Selene calculated rapidly. The number she got was high – the equivalent of thirty million years.
It took Ondo a little longer to make the same calculation, but he got there. A look of confusion passed across his features. “You're … you're sure of that number?”
“It has obviously increased slightly since I answered, but yes.”
Ondo switched to direct-brain communication to talk to her. His brows were creased in puzzlement. “That can't be right; this entity has to be malfunctioning just as the one in the Depository was. Nothing could remain active for that length of time, organic, artificial or hybrid.”
“Nothing we understand,” Selene replied, “but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It's just as likely that our understanding is flawed.”
“That age is many orders greater than anything we've theorized for galactic civilisation,” said Ondo.
“Then our theories are wrong,” said Selene. “The metaspace tunnels, the Depository, the Cathedral ships and now this engineered supernova. Other things, too: the way the Warden said it had been talking to the Radiant Dragon's Mind by some mechanism we simply don't understand. These all seem like the remnants and signatures of a truly ancient civilisation. Not just predating the Coronade culture by a few centuries, but distantly prehistoric to it. You remember what the Warden said: 'I waited while the galaxy aged.' That doesn't sound like a few hundred years to me.”
It was a familiar debate between them. To Selene, Ondo was too enamoured with his discoveries centred around Coronade. He preferred to believe that everything they'd unearthed was more evidence of how glorious that civilisation had been, and that the so-called Great Enemy, the Morn/Omn threat, was something completely external, a force powerful enough to end the golden age once Vulpis and the Magellanic Cloud brought the two into contact.
As she saw it, however, Omn was an aspect of a progenitor galactic civilisation – ancient, incomprehensible – that had clearly been capable of engineering technological marvels. Once, she'd thought that Concordance had built the Depository to store looted treasures, but that seemed more and more unlikely. Too much didn't add up. The existence of the metaspace gateways upon the capital planet of Coronade had given her some doubts, but she still believed that they were uncovering evidence of a deep-time culture perhaps barely known to the people subjugated by Concordance. And if Vulpis had made use of ancient weapon technology, then perhaps she and Ondo could, too. Turn it against Concordance.
Ondo did, at least, keep an open mind. He was always the scientist. Enough evidence, and he would change his views. “We are missing too much data to know for sure,” he replied. His words were directed at her, but his gaze was back on Surtr. “This entity … yes, I believe it's a product of the same technology as the Warden, that seems clear. Whether this was early on in the golden age, or prior to it, I'm really not sure. It's a mistake to think of something as huge and long-lasting as a galactic culture as a single homogeneous thing; it would have varied enormously over time and between places. I also think that, in some ways, Surtr is the opposite of the Warden. The Depository entity was definitely a mechanism, malfunctioning as a result of its age and long periods of inactivity. This, however, appears to be something more complicated; I believe it's been on a journey in the opposite direction.”
“The opposite direction? It hasn't gone anywhere.”
He peered closely at a spot upon the entity's torso for a moment as if some explanation was written there, then he stepped back. “I mean, an opposite evolutionary journey. My guess is that it started out as a rudimentary mechanism, or perhaps a hybrid lifeform, a guardian set to watch this system. Over time, it evolved. Its entropy-reversal technology, presumably something like that built into the Radiant Dragon, means that it doesn't die given sufficient energy inputs, and over a long period of time it has grown and learned, transcending what it was. It has become intelligent when perhaps once it was merely an automated system. That would explain why it doesn't know the truth of its origins. Whether its ascent to sentience was supposed to happen, I don't know. Perhaps the Aetherals – if there are others – might all be mistakes: artificially intelligent entities that arose from mere mechanisms.”
“Come on,” she said, “I know of no biological system where that's possible without reproduction and gene mutation taking place, and this entity is completely alone.”
She looked up at it, spoke out loud. “Are you alone in this system?”
“I am.”
“I'm going to send you images from locations and objects we've found around the galaxy. I'd like you to tell me if you recognize any of them. Is that okay?”
“I will try.”
She relayed scenes from her brain
