Khouri eased him from the pilot’s position. ‘Then let’s use it,’ she said. They nosed out of the swarm of Inhibitor machines and arced towards space. On the radar Khouri watched the shell fall behind, fearful that it would smother the flickering red marble and come after them again. But they were allowed to leave. It was only later that something came up hard and fast from behind, with the same tentative radar signature that they had seen before. But the object only zipped past them at frightening acceleration, heading out into interplanetary space. Khouri watched it fall out of range, heading in the general direction of Hades, the neutron star on the system’s edge.
But she had expected that.
Where did the great work come from? What had instigated it? The Inhibitors did not have access to that data. All that was clear was that the work was theirs to perform and theirs alone, and that the work was the single most important activity that had ever been instigated by an intelligent agency in the history of the galaxy, perhaps even in the history of the universe itself.
The nature of the work was simplicity itself. Intelligent life could not be allowed to spread across the galaxy. It could be tolerated, even encouraged, when it confined itself to solitary worlds or even solitary solar systems.
But it must not infect the galaxy.
Yet it was not acceptable to simply extinguish life wholesale. That would have been technologically feasible for any mature galactic culture, especially one that had the galaxy largely to itself. Artificial hypernovae could be kindled in stellar nurseries, sterilising blasts a million times more effective than supernovae. Stars could be steered and tossed into the event horizon of the sleeping supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core, so that their disruption would fuel a cleansing burst of gamma rays. Binary neutron stars could be encouraged to collide by delicate manipulation of the local gravitational constant. Droves of self-replicating machines could be unleashed to rip worlds to rubble, in every single planetary system in the galaxy. In a million years, every old rocky world in the galaxy could have been pulverised. Prophylactic intervention in the protoplanetary discs out of which worlds coalesced could have prevented any more viable planets from forming. The galaxy would have choked in the dust of its own dead souls, glowing red across the megaparsecs.
All this could have been done.
But the point was not to extinguish life, rather to hold it in check. Life itself, despite its apparent profligacy, was held sacrosanct by the Inhibitors. Its ultimate preservation, most especially that of thinking life, was what they existed for.
But it could not be allowed to spread.
