The virtual image, he realized, was within one of the titanic cylinder habitats. The edge of the world was the nearest endof the cylinder, a circle of blackness dusted with the stars of the N’gai central core, stars that were slowly moving as thecylinder turned on its long axis. Opposite, a much smaller circle was all but lost in the haze of distance, thousands of kilometersaway.
The rock ledge, Gray saw, was a part of the foothills of the ice-capped mountains, perhaps 100 kilometers high, that ringedthe opening and kept the atmosphere from spilling out into space.
Gray looked back down at the city.
It was burning.
“Our records tell us that the Schjaa Hok lasted for several of your years,” their guide told them. “But the first wave of Transcendings was the worst. . . .”
The scene shifted, and the small group of humans stood in open parkland in the center of the city, towers and domes and twisted abstract shapes of gold and silver rising about them. A number of Adjugredudhra were moving along on a slidewalk nearby, multiple starfish shapes growing one atop the other, with twisting tendrils and weaving eyestalks.
With shocking suddenness, one of them collapsed where it stood . . . followed by another . . . and then a third. The bodies,rag-doll limp and lifeless, continued along on the slidewalk, as other Adjugredudhra nearby emitted shrill chirps and chittersin an agitated frenzy.
“The scenes we saw before showed individuals just winking out,” Gray said. He was trying to relate what he was seeing nowwith the brief glimpses he’d had of Schjaa Hok years before.
“These images . . . of the dead . . .” Ghresthrepni said, “we find . . . extremely . . . disturbing. . . .” Even in translation,Ghresthrepni’s voice sounded shaken, as though it was having trouble continuing to speak.
“And that’s why these records were edited?” Truitt asked.
Ghresthrepni didn’t answer directly, but Gray sensed affirmation in its silence.
Around them, more and more of the Adjugredudhra collapsed.
“But what is happening to them?” Kline asked.
“Their souls are leaving,” was the being’s answer. “They leave the shells behind.”
The scene seemed to blur, a fast-forward of sorts, Gray thought. The city was burning now, as seething mobs of Adjugredudhrasurged through city streets and parklands. Aircraft fell from the skies, their pilots dead. Gray was puzzled by this at first,since much of the traffic would have been controlled by AI minds, and any decently advanced aircraft could land itself ifthe organic pilot became incapacitated.
But then he understood. “Their minds are being uploaded,” he said. “And not just organic beings. Your AIs are Transcendingas well.”
“Of course. The first to go were the cyborgs, those with massive machine augmentation. The Groth Hoj were almost entirely taken in the first hours of the Transcendence, since so many of their species were reshaped with genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancements.”
Gray remembered the Groth Hoj—beings like three-meter-tall squids with single, saucer-sized eyes. They communicated by changingthe color patterns on their bodies, but a great many had transferred their minds to machines of various types, and now lookednothing like their organic predecessors.
“So those beings who already had a predilection for high-tech enhancements . . .” Mallory began.
“They were taken first,” Ghresthrepni told them. “Yes.”
“You say they were taken,” Truitt said. “Who took them?”
“Do you understand the concept we call Draleth Ja?”
“That didn’t translate,” Gray said. “Try again.”
“We think of it as a higher dimension,” Ghresthrepni said. “One created artificially by the interaction of electronic media,interacting fields of information—”
“Ah,” Gray said. “I think you mean what we call the Godstream. A virtual world open to those with the necessary electronicprostheses.”
“This realm,” Ghresthrepni continued, “is inhabited. By patterns of information, patterns of consciousness, with an interest in the worlds from which they came.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Truitt demanded.
“Mind,” the voice of Konstantin put in, “is information. Though the term may seem needlessly religious in nature, a being’s soul might be described as a particular pattern of information that normally resides within the physical instrumentality of neuronsand synaptic pathways. Information can be recorded and uploaded. It can also be transmitted, leaving nothing behind but thedead physical infrastructure.”
“That’s what happened with the Baondyeddi,” Mallory said. “They uploaded their minds into computer-generated virtual realities.”
“You know, of course, that the civilization you call ur-Sh’daar underwent the Transcendence,” Ghresthrepni told them. “But not all were transformed. The Refusers were left behind . . . perhaps one individual out of every fifty.”
“We know about the Refusers,” Kline said.
“Do you think so? Do you know how long a civilization lasts, when the vast majority of scientists, technicians, manufacturers,educators, farmers, government leaders, healers, artists, musicians, historians, electronics specialists, and even !!! all are taken away?”
That last word had been rendered in Ghresthrepni’s own language, a chittering set of clicks, and probably represented someconcept utterly untranslatable into standard English—something so alien that there was no human concept for it at all.
“The technologists were taken,” Gray said slowly. “And the cities burned.”
“Indeed. The Refusers were reduced to struggling remnants squabbling in the rubble over scraps of food. The warlords . . .the disease . . . the famines . . . the chaos . . . all lasted for a thousand years.”
“How many Refusers were there?” Kline asked.
“A few trillion, scattered through the worlds and habitats of N’gai.”
“So many?” Truitt sounded skeptical.
“The progenitors of the original Sh’daar numbered in the hundreds of trillions,” the being said, and even in translation thewords sounded wistful. “An entire galaxy bursting with life and with the brilliant light of interstellar civilization.”
One in fifty, Gray thought . . . that was two percent. Out of 100 trillion that still left a couple of trillion, a prettyfair-sized population for any star-faring civilization. But the idea of that many beings fighting among themselves for technologyand resources was a terrifying thought.
“The infrastructure of that civilization would have completely collapsed,” Konstantin said on a private channel, following Gray’s thoughts. “There was a roughly similar event in Earth’s history.”
“The Islamic Wars of the two-thousands?”
“What I was thinking of was earlier than that—the mid-1970s. A communist dictator who called himself Pol Pot exterminatedover a quarter of his country’s population, specifically targeting professionals, doctors, educators, and businessmen. Thecollapse of the social order resulted in devastating famine and the deaths of several millions out of
