Deep Space. Ian Douglas

need for privacy when they ate, for example. These two seemed to have been around forever, and had aged, outwardly at least, not at all. He didn’t know how their life span compared with that of humans. Were they still young? Old? Did age even make a difference for entities so alien, so different physically and emotionally from Humankind?

      Generally, the Agletsch seemed friendly, unassuming, and at times eager to help … though they were not always forthcoming with important information. The Agletsch were interstellar traders. What they traded was information, exchanging data about star systems and life forms and interstellar civilizations for information about Earth and humanity, occasionally leavened with the stores of heavy elements that appeared to be a common medium of trade throughout the known galaxy, in particular platinum, iridium, rhenium, as well as some of the longer-half-lived artificials—neptunium-237, and californium-251.

      And they gave nothing away for free.

      “There are times,” Koenig told them, “when we do not ask you to sell us information because we do not know what to ask. If there is a threat to my species—whether it’s the Sh’daar or some other predatory race out there, I want to know about it.”

      “This we understand, Mr. President Koenig,” Dra’ethde told him. “And if we had something definite to trade to you on the matter, we would be certain you were aware of the fact, yes-no? But in this instance we are … bleep!”

      Koenig smiled. Agletsch translators sometimes encountered concepts they couldn’t handle in English, and the result was a brief, shrill, electronic tone. In twenty years, the Agletsch had gotten a lot better with English, but they still occasionally bleeped out.

      “We are as ignorant as are you,” Gru’mulkisch supplied.

      “I see.” Agletsch translations could also sometimes come across as blunt to the point of rudeness.

      “The destruction of your Endeavor,” Dra’ethde continued, “may well have been caused by Sh’daar forces … possibly by elements of the Sh’daar Network in disagreement with current policies.”

      “The Sh’daar don’t speak with one voice?” Koenig said, feigning surprise. “How very … human! I never would have thought it of them!”

      “The Sh’daar Network is unimaginably vast,” Gru’mulkisch told him, missing the irony in Koenig’s voice, “extending, as it does, across a large part of this galaxy, and across an immense gulf of time. There can be, there often is … dissonance among disparate parts of the system.”

      “They have my sympathies,” Koenig said with dry amusement.

      Who speaks for Earth? That had been the cry of Carl Sagan, a late-twentieth-century cosmologist and philosopher. After four centuries, it was still an open question. It was interesting that the galaxy-spanning Sh’daar, unimaginably more advanced than Humankind, had the same problem.

      “What you call the Black Rosette, however,” Dra’ethde said, “remains a mystery to us. Over hundreds of millions of years, it has evolved into something quite beyond its builders’ original intent … beyond even their imaginings, yes-no?”

      “Evolved how?”

      The two Agletsch went into a momentary huddle, conversing with each other in a rapid-fire burst of eructations. Native Agletsch speech was produced by a kind of controlled belching impossible for humans to imitate. Their translation devices handled English fairly well … and also translated burps to Drukrhu, an artificial trade pidgin that had established the Agletsch as the galaxy’s premier data traders, diplomats, and interspecies liaisons.

      The two faced Koenig again. “Since there is no certainty,” Gru’mulkisch said, “since the information is largely supposition, we expect only first-level compensation.”

      Koenig opened a window in his mind and entered a thoughtclicked notation. Trade with the Agletsch was based on a well-established scale of prices for specific types of information. Some things—a complete description of a previously unknown alien star-faring civilization, for instance, including their location within the galaxy and a description of their world, were classified as Level Eight, and had a base price of some tens of tons of rhenium, or slightly less of artificial heavy elements. If Geneva could add new information to the exchange, the price in metals came down … but in fact there was surprisingly little that Humankind knew that the Agletsch did not. Earth depended on heavy metals as the medium of exchange with the interstellar trading network.

      And as head of the USNA, Koenig had to check large transfers of metal with the government in Geneva.

      This time, though, he could make the decision by himself. Level One information could be obtained for only a few hundred kilograms of rhenium or iridium, an amount easily within the reserve capabilities of North America.

      “Done,” he said. “Is half platinum, half iridium okay?”

      “Satisfactory,” Gru’mulkisch said. “As you put it … done.”

      “You are aware, of course,” Dra’ethde told him, “of the Six Suns located within the N’gai Cloud of nine hundred million years ago …”

      The virtual panorama around Koenig shifted, showing now a view recorded by the America twenty years earlier, within the core of Omega Centauri T_-0.876gy. The planetary surface was gone, and Koenig now drifted in open space, a space completely filled by brilliant stars. Ahead, six particular stars blazed in a hexagon flattened by an off-center viewing perspective, each blue-hued and intensely brilliant. They burned so brightly that the near-solid wall of millions of bright background stars faded into the haze of light, lost in the glare.

      Looking away, Koenig saw silhouettes against the encircling haze—several small worlds visible as perfectly black disks, along with a number of smaller, more complicated structures—deep-space factories or bases, perhaps—along with several immense starships. Two minute knots of gold and blue-white fuzz marked a pair of artificial singularities—Sh’daar Nodes leading to other, distant locations in space and time.

      “Of course,” Koenig said. The image, he realized, was being stopped down to tolerable levels by the software running this digital illusion. Had he been seeing those brilliant stars as they really appeared from that distance—roughly 300 million kilometers, two thousand times the distance between Earth and Sol—he would have been immediately, searingly blinded.

      “These stars,” Dra’ethde continued, “were artificially created by merging lesser, older suns together, yes-no? Each of those stars masses some forty times the mass of your Sol. They were positioned roughly fifty astronomical units from one another, and set into motion about their common center of gravity.”

      Koenig nodded understanding. Human astronomers had known of the phenomenon within globular clusters called “blue stragglers” for centuries. Stars were so close-packed within the heart of such clusters that collisions were fairly common at the core. When two ancient red giants merged, they formed a single new star, a blue-hot stellar resurrection, young and hot, an anomaly among millions of ancient red suns.

      “The ur-Sh’daar,” Gru’mulkisch said, “engineered the merging of old stars to create more massive, younger stars. Our supposition is that they created the stellar hexagram you see here to create multiple gateways through space and time.”

      “The rapid rotation of these super-massive stars would distort the region of space between them,” Dra’ethde added, “opening a myriad of what you call wormholes, and allowing rapid passage from one region of spacetime to another.”

      “We’d already figured that much out twenty years ago,” Koenig told them. There was even a term for the process now: stellarchetecture, using entire stars to build artificial structures or devices on a literally astronomical scale. “But the TRGA cylinders—the Sh’daar Nodes—those already do that. How are the Six Suns different?”

      “A Sh’daar Node is only about one of your kilometers wide,” Dra’ethde told him, “and involves the mass of one star the size of your sun.