Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [4]
Geordi turned toward Picard. “I’m with you, Captain,” the chief engineer said, “I can’t believe that they just left all of this behind. They built a sea wider than four thousand Earths. What happened to them? I can’t help thinking it must have been a terrible accident of some kind.”
“Hard radiation could have left the Sphere in-tact,” Data said, “while destroying all life. Maybe their sun flared suddenly, driving the creators out and producing a barren landscape resembling Earth after the death of the dinosaurs.”
“But some of the islands appear to be covered with highly evolved forests,” La Forge objected. “To judge from the heights given by radar imagery, we’re talking about trees, big trees, possibly even with animals in them.”
“The forests could have come through a disaster by the dormancy of their seeds,” Data pointed out. “Or they might even have evolved afterward from mere grasses, or from lichens, and a few other stragglers that managed to hold on. The situation here may be similar to what a dinosaur would see, if it could be brought back to Earth today.”
Geordi let out a laugh. “You mean, ‘Look what happens: I go away for a few million years and the rats take over-and they’ve evolved!”’
“Exactly,” Data said. “So I would not throw the catastrophe theory overboard quite yet.”
“Perhaps the Dyson inhabitants were not driven out by anything,” Troi suggested. “Maybe they found something more important to do.” More important, Picard thought, would have to be vastly more important to qualify as a reason to leave.
“Or something less appalling to do,” said Beverly Crusher. “I find this place extremely fascinating but still disturbing. To build something on such a scale eating up whole sun systems in the process. What could have moved them to do it?”
“That,” Picard replied, “is one of the things I hope to learn.” Disturbing did not seem an apt characterization of the artifact; neither did bizarre, the words just weren’t big enough. The right words, he decided, simply did not exist.
“Captain,” Geordi said from his station, I don’t think there’s been enough time for trees to evolve from grasses. That would have required millions of years, but if you look at the cave of stars-“
Geordi brought the view-aft onto the right side of the bridge screen. “You’ll notice that-” the engineer began.
“-it still has a clearly defined edge in all directions,” Data finished for him.
Data marveled at the sharp edge revealed by the viewscreen. It was moments like as this that made the android long to be fully human. While the humans envied his positronic memory that contained the accumulated knowledge of multiple civilizations, he was not as skilled as they were at connecting disparate and seemingly unrelated facts. And he sensed something that might be called envy for them, envy for their gift of intuition, as he waxed encyclopedic: “Aft and ventral, Alpha Powell A and Beta Noyes C are moving toward the Great Wall at 5.3 kilometers per second. The normal motion of stars in the galaxy should have blurred the wall’s edge relatively quickly, in the same way that constellations will change in the sky of any world in a matter of a few tens of thousands of years.”
“I see,” Picard cut in, “that such blurring is not even visible here-“
“Yes, Captain,” Data continued. “This cave hewn out of the star field cannot be much more than a hundred thousand years old, so by association the Sphere is the same age. As stars measure time, the Dyson Sphere was built only yesterday.”
“Built by whom?” Picard asked. “That’s what troubles me. Is there a race we know that could trace its ancestry to a people who would scoop out a volume of space two hundred light years across to complete an engineering project?”