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the moment, a wooded glade and waterfall somewhere on Earth. Humanoid robots served food and drinks ordered in-head, and twenty-second-century chamber music played discreetly in the background. The room was located in Hab Three, and under a half G of simulated gravity.

“I’d say the most important thing,” Kline said after a moment’s thought, “is that the Sh’daar are a lot more reasonable thananyone’s given them credit for. Ghresthrepni was positively cheerful as he was talking with us.”

“Probably because they’re all happy to be getting away from the Consciousness,” Truitt said, picking at his imitation fish.“The Sh’daar were all terrified of that mad mind. Now they’re able to vanish into the wilderness of a galaxy far larger thantheir own N’gai Cluster and lose themselves in time as well.” He shrugged. “In my opinion they’re well out of it.”

“Makes you wonder, though,” Mallory said, “what’s going to happen to them. I mean, they’re on course to colonize our galaxy,right? But in this time, our time, all we’ve encountered are the Baondyeddi on Heimdall, and they were only there because they’d slowed down the passageof time for themselves inside their private, virtual world. Where are all the rest of them? The Sjhlurrr and the Adjug . . .Adjugred . . .” He made a face. “You know the ones I mean. Composite starfish.”

“On Earth,” Kline said carefully, “any given species generally lasts for 1 to 2 million years before it goes extinct or evolvesinto something different. After 800 million years? I doubt that any of them would look even remotely like the originals.”

“They must be here,” Truitt said. “Their remote descendants, I mean. Somebody went and recruited all of the Sh’daar client species—the Turusch and the H’rulka and the Nungiirtok and all the other races we’ve been fighting with the past sixty or seventy years.”

“More likely the Sh’daar just used time travel,” Mallory said. “After all, they have the TRGAs, just like us. In fact, wenow know definitively that they built the things.”

“Time travel, yes,” Truitt said, nodding. “They would have to have that in order to infect modern species with Paramycoplasma.”

Gray finished the last of his nano-grown lobster, leaned back, and picked up his coffee cup. “I think we can assume that ifthe Sh’daar still exist in our galaxy today, they’ve evolved into something as different from their ancestors as we are differentfrom trilobites.”

“Exactly,” Mallory said. “That or they’ve gone through additional singularities. Maybe they eventually made peace with theidea. Maybe they all turned into immortal hyperdimensional gods and wouldn’t be caught dead hanging around this universe.”

“All very interesting,” Gray said, studying his coffee. “But I was really asking what we’ve learned that has a bearing onour mission.”

“All of that does have a bearing on the mission,” Truitt said. “We went out there to learn what might be in store for us with the Singularity.We know the Sh’daar will colonize the galaxy, our galaxy, but then eventually vanish somewhere in the hundreds of millions of years between then and now. The point is thatthey survived.”

“Meanwhile, we have riots on Earth. Nations threatening each another. Fleets being mobilized. Anti-AI movements. Anti-alienxenophobe movements. Terrorism worse than anything we’ve seen in three centuries. Wars—more wars, I should say. And we haven’t even entered the Technological Singularity yet! God, what’s it going to be like when wedo?”

“Hell on Earth,” Truitt said, grim. “Nothing less than hell on Earth.”

 

The New White House

Washington, D.C.

1500 hours, FST

“Five minutes, Mr. President.”

President James R. Walker nodded and finished downloading his speech from the White House server. It was a good speech, hethought. Powerful, to the point . . .

. . . and promising nothing.

To judge from the news feeds, the whole country—hell, the whole world—was in an uproar over what they were calling Towerfall.The underground nuke had utterly destroyed Port Ecuador, and it had cut the space elevator cable a few hundred meters abovethe mountain peak. Since then, the elevator’s dangling loose end had been drifting slowly west. Attempts were being made toreattach the end to the alternate anchor point, but so far the reports coming in had been less than encouraging.

Casualties in Port Ecuador were horrific, tens of thousands, at least, and possibly much, much more. From the news feeds he’dseen earlier, it looked as if the entire top of Mt. Cayambe had slumped down into a vast caldera and taken the Skyport withit.

Who the hell had done this thing, anyway? There hadn’t been a terrorist attack like this since the dirty bomb that had takenout Dushanbe. That had almost certainly been the Chinese, but Walker was reasonably sure the Hegemony wasn’t behind the Quitodisaster. They had as much to lose from this as did the USNA . . . maybe more, since they’d constructed their big microgravityfactory at SupraQuito.

No, everything seemed to point to a smaller, independent group. The damned Huffers, possibly . . . or one of the newer xenophobic anti-spacer organizations who insisted that Humankind was better off staying out of space. Even Dr. Michaels was a possible suspect, though his primary interest seemed to be in banning AIs. He was a Humankind Firster, and most of them felt humans were better off staying on Earth . . . even if he did have that fancy low-G mansion at Midway.

In any case, Walker’s intelligence advisors didn’t yet have a clue as to who’d done it, and had recommended that the Presidentwait before making an announcement in order to see if anyone came forward to brag or to make demands.

Screw that. Walker would not let the political initiative pass to others. His broadcast this afternoon would prove to both the nationand to the world that he was still very much in control.

“One minute, Mr. President.” A makeup technician lightly dusted his face with a brush and removed the bib. “You look good,sir,” he said. “Break a leg!”

Off expression, that. He wondered where it was from.

“You’re on, Mr. President.”

Walker strode out of the backstage alcove and onto the press conference stage. The pressroom was filled, both with human reportersand with robotcams and drones. He would be going live on nearly eight hundred channels.