Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

Symat thought he picked out questions
and responses, handshaking, a kind of dialogue. The Curator said,
’The Guardians are very old. They have long since got used to making
their own decisions. When a ship like this comes sliding into their
space, they get very suspicious. Can’t you tell, from the way the
drones are swarming around us? All that’s keeping us from being
destroyed right now is our flitter’s responses to the Guardians’
continual interrogation.
    ’And when the Ascendents decided to move Earth here - Lethe, a
whole planet sliding across Sol system - one false word and the home
of mankind might have been blown to bits by machines meant to protect
it.’
    Symat said, ’We’ve been at war with the Xeelee for a million
years. What can these Guardians have that’s so powerful it could make
a difference now? And why hasn’t it been thrown into the war
before?’
    ’I think I can answer that.’ Mela’s eyes clouded, and there was a
sheen about her face, a waxy unreality. She screwed up her forehead
as she tried to integrate the information pouring into her head.
     
    Long ago, as mankind advanced across a Galaxy, under a purposeful
programme called the Assimilation, whole alien cultures were
eradicated or subsumed, their technology and learning purloined. Most
such treasures, as Symat had guessed, had been thrown into the vast
war effort. But some had been secreted away by the patient undying.
Insurance for the future, they thought of it.
    One such was the technology called the Snowflake. It had been
found in orbit around an ancient star in a globular cluster out in
the Galaxy’s halo. It was a stunning artefact, a regular tetrahedron
measuring over fourteen million kilometres along its edges. Humans
gave it this name because like a snowflake the structure had a
fractal architecture, with the tetrahedron motif repeated on all
scales. And the Snowflake, it was discovered, was full of
information: it was an iron-wisp web of data, a cacophony of bits
endlessly dancing against the depredations of entropy.
    The Snowmen, the human label for the vanished builders of this
lacy monster, had an utterly alien motivation. The Snowmen decided
that to record events - and only to record - was the highest calling
of life. They took apart their world and rebuilt it as a monstrous
data storage system. After that they watched time unravel - and
waited for the universe to cool, so they could capture even more
data.
    Thus the Snowflake had hung in space for thirteen billion years.
Then, during the Assimilation, a human ship came.
    The Navy crew, intent on plunder, had been unsubtle - but their
ship had been devastated by an unexpected blow, broken apart by a
beam of directed gravity waves.
    It had taken some time to work out what had happened, how the
Snowflake had struck back.
    Mela lacked the vocabulary to express the concepts downloading
into her mind, and she looked at the Curator. Reluctantly, he closed
his eyes, and began to speak deliberately. ’There is a profound
principle at work. Once it was known as the Mach principle. Mach,
Marque, something like that. Every particle in the universe is linked
to every other. That is why inertia exists; when you push something,
the universe itself drags it back.’
    Symat frowned. ’What connections? Gravity?’
    The Curator frowned. ’That, and quantum wave functions, and, and -
I can see it, I can’t say it! The ancients understood. If you use
complex arithmetic to extend most theories of cosmology - ’
    Symat held up his hand. ’Just tell me what happened.’
    ’The Snowmen had a defensive system. They found a way of
manipulating these cosmic linkages. A way to use them as a
weapon.’
    Symat barely understood enough to be amazed. ’How?’
    ’Does it matter? I guess you learn a lot in thirteen billion
years.’
    Thanks to its Mach-principle weapon the Snowflake was saved from
the Assimilators, that first time. But the humans returned, of
course, evaded the weapon, and took what they wanted. They used the
technology of the Snowflake itself in their own information-storage
systems across the Galaxy.
    And they took away the strange global-manipulation weapons system,
but that turned out to be much harder to understand. When it didn’t
yield early results it was reduced in priority, shuffled from one
research centre to another, until it became so obscure, despite its
potency, that a clique of undying were able to spirit it away and
develop it for their own