Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [1]
Be careful what you wish for—
Now, the Enterprise was approaching “the Great Wall of Dyson,” about one hundred light years distant from the Sphere. It was a wall of stars-an actual wall, beyond which no stars at all could be found. No planets. No comets. No meteoroids. Nothing except…
Picard shivered, recalling his now prevailing, probably correct theory about what had happened to the hundreds, perhaps thousands of star systems that must once have existed on the other side of the wall.
Will there come a time when we know such power? Such arrogance? Picard wondered.
“We shall pass through the wall in fifteen minutes,” Data announced over the desk screen.
“I’ll meet you on the bridge in five,” the captain said and tensed for a moment, then shut the desk-screen off. He was suddenly and acutely aware that his fellow officer was, like the Dyson Sphere, but the handiwork of a clever species, of a momentarily very successful species, that might or might not become as extinct as the Dyson engineers one day.
Dyson was already an artifact. Data might yet become one.
Clever species, Picard thought, then thought again of all those missing stars between the wall and Dyson, and thought again of power and arrogance.
“What are we going to do with the universe?” he said to the empty room, and winced. “Wherefore, what shall we do?”
The universe was full of belittling timeframes. For the Horta named Dalen, the last third of her life, all of those years, had passed so quickly that they seemed only a Vulcan lifespan.
How many more years lay ahead? the Horta wondered.
Maybe fifty thousand?
Yes. Fifty thousand, perhaps, but no more.
This was a mere chip of time, scaled against the age of her homeworld, Janus VI, whose oldest rocks had solidified more than seven billion years ago.
“Only the rocks live forever,” said the humans. She could scarcely dream what time must mean to them-to Picard, and to his predecessor, Captain James Kirk, whom her people would always remember as one of those who had brought them out of the darkness.
When Dalen’s ancestors already had many millennia of history behind them, there had existed only a few thousand people on Earth, and they had scarcely begun to wrap their minds around the concepts of building huts and milking goats. Yet during the lifetimes of the oldest of the Horta, billions of them had come and gone. Whole empires had come and gone. And the humans, understanding, now, how to milk power from antiprotons and subspace, had come to the stars and showed no intention of ever going away.
And they had carried with them, in their first deep-range exploratory vessel; the Vulcan named Spock, who was said now to he approaching the end of his own unimaginably short lifetime.
Captain Dalen, for her part, barely perceived the paradox. For her, there was only satisfaction in the realization that some part of the Vulcan who had saved her entire species-had managed to live a little while longer, if only in crude snippets of DNA.
A little while longer…
It was more than a thousand light years, the Horta knew, from her starship, the Darwin, to the Beta Niche nova. Curiously, that distant sun could still be viewed starboard and aft, as a dim star circled by a thriving Class M planet.
To the Horta-turned-Federation archaeologist and starship commander, this was the best and worst of times. She oscillated wildly between regret at leaving her quiet life in the caverns of Janus VI, and celebration of escape from her quiet life in the caverns of Janus V1. She was getting used to discovering strange paradoxes in every