The Elder had gone very still. “Which is?”
“That it’s nothing but the Coreline,” I said. “There’s something inside that fancy packaging that makes the whole thing work. Some kind of quantum thread, I’d guess—I don’t know enough physics to even take a stab as to what kind. The point is that once you’re in motion, the closer you get to the Coreline the faster you move. Quadrails move at a light-year per minute; information cylinders, which I gather get somehow kicked up onto that mesh framework around the Coreline, go a hell of a lot faster.”
I looked at Bayta. “You saw it, didn’t you? My accidental hop, when I was briefly disconnected from direct contact with the Quadrail. Even a fraction of a centimeter closer to the Coreline sent me leapfrogging nine cars ahead before I came back down.”
She nodded soberly. “I was hoping you wouldn’t realize what had happened.”
“So it’s true,” the Elder said, a strange melancholy in his voice. “The secret is lost.”
“Well, no, not necessarily,” I cautioned him. “There’s no reason that information has to leave this room. Because I think I also know why you went to all this trouble in the first place.” I waved a hand out toward the stars. “Back on the Quadrail, the Modhri tried to spin me a nice little spindrift about how he wanted peace for the galaxy. You Chahwyn, on the other hand, have actually done something to create it.”
“We had no choice,” the Elder said in a low voice. “We’d seen what uncontrolled access to the Thread led to. The Shonkla-raa were conquerors, arrogant and violent. Once they gained control of the Thread and learned how to ravel bits of it off to other star systems, there was no stopping them. They built huge warships and sent them rushing between worlds, dominating or destroying all other life.”
“So what finally stopped them?” I frowned as a sudden thought struck me. “Or is the Modhri the Shonkla-raa?”
The Elder’s eye-ridge tufts quivered. “Not at all,” he said. “The Modhri was merely the Shonkla-raa’s final weapon.”
Weapon. The word hung in the air for a moment like a scattering of black dust. I looked at Bayta, back at the Elder. “Maybe we’d better take this from the top.”
The Elder nodded. “Sixteen hundred years ago, after a thousand years of slavery, there was a carefully coordinated uprising of the other races of the galaxy, a revolt long planned and long concealed. It ultimately cost the lives of many, including at least five entire races, and in the end all races had lost the capability to travel even within their own star systems. But the victory was worth the price, for our oppressors were finally and utterly destroyed.”
“You sound like you were there,” I suggested.
His alien face twitched. A smile? Or a grimace? “The Chahwyn were there, certainly,” he said. “But we were merely one of many servant races, genetically created by the Shonkla-raa to be their technical laborers. We had been made incapable of aggression or combat, and thus were necessarily kept in the background during the war. As a result, our people survived better than most.
“But as I say, all peoples were beaten back to pre-space-flight levels, some to even preindustrial levels. So matters remained for three hundred years. The Thread still existed, but no one had the capability to reach it. Indeed, for most peoples even the rumor of its existence was lost.” He paused. “Then, by chance, the Chahwyn discovered a cache of Shonkla-raa technology that had been hidden before war’s end. With it we were able to reach again into space; and with access to the Thread, we gained the stars.”
“Only the Shonkla-raa had made sure to breed all the fight out of you,” I said. “Which meant that anyone you ran across could beat you silly if they had a mind to and take all the goodies for themselves.”
“And the whole cycle would begin again,” the Elder said. “We knew that before we approached the other peoples of the galaxy, we had to find a way to make interstellar war and conquest impossible.”
“And so you built the Tube.”
“And so we built the Tube,” he said. “But we needed assistance, so first we created the Spiders. For that we used the Shonkla-raa’s genetic equipment and our own flesh. We didn’t dare mingle with other races ourselves—there was too much risk that our weakness would be discovered and that we would again be enslaved.”
“Couldn’t you have used the equipment to eliminate your passiveness?” I suggested. “Then you could at least defend yourselves if necessary.”
“Or we could become a second Shonkla-raa,” he countered darkly. “No. Even if we knew how and where to draw such a delicate line, we would not dare take the risk.”
“Very noble of you,” I said. The words came out with less sarcasm, somehow, than I’d actually intended. “So you and the Spiders built the Tube. How long did it take?”
“Very long,” he said. “Even with the spatial distortion near the Thread working in our favor, it still took six hundred years to complete.”
“At which point you set up Quadrail service and invited the rest of the galaxy to come out and play,” I said. “Which brings us back to the Modhri.”
The Elder’s face quivered in yet another unreadable expression. “He was to be the Shonkla-raa’s final weapon against the Grand Alliance,” he said. “Genetically engineered to be a group mind that could infiltrate, subvert, and ultimately control the leaders of the forces arrayed against them.” A doglike shake ran briefly through his body. “Fortunately for us all, the war ended before he could be properly deployed, and for centuries he lay dormant within the coral formations of Modhra I.”
“Then, two hundred years ago, the Spiders opened a station for the Halkas in the Sistarrko system. We know now that during their explorations the Halkas discovered the coral, and with that the silent war began. Within sixty years, we believe, the Modhri had spread his tendrils throughout the Halkavisti Empire and taken partial control of its leaders. At that point he turned his attention outward, sending Halkan walkers out into the galaxy to sell Modhran coral to the other species.”
“Pricing it out of reach of everyone except the upper business and governmental echelons, naturally.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Though at this point his expansion seems to have been more for information-gathering than conquest. He established outposts for future use, but still seemed interested mainly in bringing the Halkavisti Empire more firmly under his control.
“Within the next thirty years, though, the Spiders began to notice his influence among the Halkas, though they as yet had no idea what it was or where it came from. Growing increasingly concerned, they approached the Juriani, themselves relative newcomers to the galactic community, and asked if they could discover what was happening to their neighbors.”
“And bang go the Juriani,” I murmured.
“Yes,” the Elder said grimly. “Their investigation was detected and the investigators infected. And because the team members were part of a military chain of command, the Modhri was able to use thought viruses to quickly leap himself up those contact lines to the very top of the government.”
He gestured with his long fingers. “We hadn’t known about this particular Shonkla-raa weapons program, but when we saw the same subtle influence now spreading among the Juriani we suspected some such evil was involved. We redoubled our efforts to search Shonkla-raa archives, trying to learn what it might be.”
“Why didn’t you just close down the Sistarrko Station?” I asked.
“At that point we had no idea where the Modhri was located,” he said. “Nor did we know the mechanism of the attack, particularly how emotional connections allowed him to spread so quickly among a society’s elite. Even more worrisome was the fact that he seemed to be increasing the pace of his conquests. It had taken nearly sixty years to conquer the Halkas, but only fifteen to reach the same level of control of the Juriani.”