Free The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois

million square kilometers.
    But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. “So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts—not that much even assembled yet. How’s it know we’re building something hot ?”
    Because it is very, very smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this— organism seems far too limiting a word—can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?
    â€œMaybe’s not the first gate it’s seen,” Dix suggests. “Think there’s maybe another gate out here?”
    I shake my head. “We’d have seen the lensing artifacts by now.”
    â€œYou ever run into anyone before?”
    â€œNo.” We have always been alone, through all these epochs. We have only ever run away .
    And then always from our own children.
    I crunch some numbers. “Hundred eighty-two days to insemination. If we move now, we’ve only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.”
    â€œWe can’t do that,” the chimp says. “We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.”
    â€œMove the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don’t even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.”
    â€œEvery one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.”
    â€œAnd what about the fact that there’s an intelligent being in our path?”
    â€œI’m already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.”
    â€œOkay, first off, there’s nothing potential about it. It’s right fucking there . And on our current heading, we run the damn thing over.”
    â€œWe’re staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits. We’veseen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.”
    â€œThat’s because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere !” But I’m wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times, but if there’s nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?
    There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.
    I try another tack. “Consider the threat potential.”
    â€œThere’s no evidence of any.”
    â€œLook at the synapse estimate! That thing’s got order of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We’re assuming it’s asking us to move the gate. What if that’s not a request? What if it’s just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?”
    â€œDoesn’t have hands,” Dix says from the other side of the Tank, and he’s not even being flippant. He’s just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.
    I try to keep my voice level. “Maybe it doesn’t need any.”
    â€œWhat could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn’t even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation’s too slow.”
    â€œWe don’t know . That’s my point . We haven’t even tried to find out. We’re a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can figure out some basic physical parameters, but we don’t know how this thing thinks, what kind of