Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  “I sure hope next time you saddle somebody else with the scanner,” Toby said, passing an aromatic zucchini casserole.

  Killeen allowed himself a slight smile. “Cermo makes minor staffing decisions,” he said curtly.

  “Oh, come on, Dad,” Toby said. “You’re frappin’ over.”

  “I’m what?”

  “Frapping over,” Besen explained, pronouncing the words carefully. “It means dodging.”

  “New lingo for young Turks?” Shibo asked.

  Toby and Besen looked blank, but the second young guest, Midshipman Loren, said brightly, “Well, guess we sorta have our own way, y’know, talkin’ things out.”

  “Turks?” Toby persisted.

  “Old expression,” Shibo said. “The Turks were an old Family who lived vibrantly.”

  This was news to Killeen, who had never heard the term either, but he did not show this. He was fairly sure that if the Turks had been a Family, it must have been long before humankind came to Snowglade. Perhaps they had inhabited the Chandeliers, or even had come from ancient Earth. Shibo had made good use of the years of voyaging, communing often with her Aspects, learning much. Along with tech help, Aspects and even the lesser Faces prattled about their own lost times and traditions.

  “Yeasay,” Killeen said, “the Turks fought hard, ran swift.” He saw Shibo give him a skeptical glance but kept on. “They never had a better day than the one you brought off, though.”

  “Yeasay, we blasted ’em,” Loren said, eyes bright.

  “Took those mechs clean,” Toby agreed.

  Besen nodded. “New kind mechs, too.”

  “You noticed,” Shibo said approvingly, passing a platter of mustard-laced ship’s biscuits.

  Toby looked insulted. “Why, course we did. Think we can’t remember, can’t tell a navvy from a Snout?”

  Besen said mildly, “Those were Snowglade mechs. Why should here have same mechs?”

  Toby answered, “Mechs’re ever’where, that’s why.”

  Loren was taller than Toby but thinner, and this gave the steep planes of his face a look of studious care. “Who says?”

  Toby snorted. “Family lore. Mechs’re all over Galactic Center.”

  “Maybe they’re adapted for each star,” Loren said reasonably.

  Toby had no answer to this, but Besen pursed her lips and observed, “Mechs could adapt faster on a planet, sure. It’s life that has a hard time.”

  “Life?” Toby asked indignantly. “We can zig and zag faster’n any mech ever did.”

  “No,” Besen said patiently, “I mean real adapting. Changing the body, stuff like that.”

  Killeen gave Shibo a veiled look of approval. For midshipmen they knew a lot more than he had at that age. “How were these mechs here?”

  Toby snorted. “Slow as sundown.”

  Loren said more judiciously, “They seemed disorganized. Couldn’t form up right.”

  “Don’t think they were fighters,” Besen said.

  “They sure fought enough,” Toby said. “I ’member you dodgin’ plenty bolts.”

  Killeen leaned forward quizzically. “Besen, why you think they weren’t fighters?”

  She paused, aware that the Cap’n had been letting them pour forth their own ideas, and now suddenly feeling self-conscious. “Well…they had grapplers, screwjacks, poly-arms. Work ’quipment.”

  “They tried fryin’ us,” Toby pointed out.

  Besen held her ground. “Those microwave disks were prob’ly comm gear, not weapons.”

  “How ’bout that thing almost caught us at the main-mind?” Toby pursued.

  Besen paused reflectively. “I’m not sure.”

  Killeen watched her carefully. Whatever had been lurking near the mainmind had disintegrated when the cluster charges went off. The Family had found only meaningless fragments. There had been chunks of fleshy stuff, but mechs on Snowglade had used compounds which mimicked the self-repairing chemistry of life.

  Besen went on, “Don’t think we’ll savvy out the answer till we meet the mechs who made the station.”

  “C’mon, you’re just inventin’ boogeymen.” Toby chuckled.

  “I know navvy-class mechs when I see ’em,” Besen said. “That’s all we saw in the station. The higher-class mech was at the mainmind.”

  “You dunno that,” Toby said. “We never got a good look.”

  “Stands to reason.” Besen gave Toby an affectionate, bemused look. “Station was already damaged. Prob’ly some mech faction took it from another. We caught ’em before they could build up defenses again, I figure.”

  Killeen watched Toby wrestle with the idea. The boy was bright but he let his enthusiasm cloud his thinking—or replace it.

  Toby began, “Even if it was a manager mech or some-thin’, we were faster.”

  “We got lucky, is all,” Besen said.

  “Luck?” Toby looked insulted. “We were quick!”

  “If Cap’n hadn’t made us drop everything and run, we’d be mechmeat.”

  Killeen was glad to see Besen not meekly following whatever Toby said. There was in the Family a regrettable tendency of adolescent females to accept their boyfriends’ views of the world. The generations of sedentary life in the Citadels had somehow instilled that. The Long Retreat after the Citadel Bishop fell had seemed to erase this, but a scant few years aboard Argo now threatened to bring such customs back. He wanted his midshipwomen to give no ground to the usual swaggering male self-assurance, to develop their burgeoning ability to lead. In a battlefield crisis, such timidity could prove fatal.

  Killeen shared the Family’s traditional view that females usually made the best Cap’ns. Conventional wisdom held that once women were through their adolescent-romantic phase, and had reared children, their abilities could again come to the fore, especially diplomacy and compromise. They could ripen as mates and executive officers into Cap’ns. But the Family had no time now for such extended, subtle, and probably wasteful methods. He had to encourage independent thinking in everyone, and to hell with the ageold mating dance.

  “I think the same,” Killeen said.

  Besen brightened. Toby looked surprised, though he quickly covered it by slurping at his cold potato soup. “But Waugh and Leveerbrok might disagree.”

  Besen’s face darkened. Killeen instantly regretted being so blunt. He couldn’t get the hang of handling young crew. “But you’re right. I think they made mistakes.”

  Loren nodded soberly. “Didn’t stop, didn’t fix up their suits when they took hits.”

  “True,” Shibo said emphatically. Killeen caught her veiled glance, which told him that she was coming to his rescue even though she saw what a clumsy lunk he was. “Got laser punctures into circuitry. Didn’t slap-patch. Voltage found ’em.”

  Killeen was still unclear about the difference between Volts, the powerful spirits that inhabited mechs, and Amps, the mysterious sense of quick flow that somehow aided the Volts to seek and move within the world of the machines. Volts embodied intent, and Amps were the runners who carried out those intentions, against the Ohms. He expected he never would fathom such lore. He had heard the scientific explanation but couldn’t keep it straight.

  Instead, like all the Family, he treated the scientific underpinning of his world as a set of colorful spirits and personalities, elementary animations and wills which orchestrated events he could not see. Learning to use them meant boring study of the proper rituals—connecting leads, punching in numbers and commands, arranging wires and knobs and minute chips—which induced proper behavior in the entities who inhabited the interior of the Argo’s myriad complexity.

  He sensed living motivations inside dead matter, but imagined that this came from humanity, animating the ancient human tech with fresh force. Mechtech, though, was inherently dead and beyond human understanding. It came from more recent and higher evolution of the galaxy, he knew, but he despised it for what it did to humanity—and for its indifference to the pain and anguish
and inexpressible poignancy of what every human felt instinctively and mechs in their remorseless certainties so clearly could not.

  “Yeasay,” Killeen added. “The Volts hid in the shafts. Like mines; the mechs didn’t have projectors themselves. Carelessness killed Waugh and Leveerbrok.”

  This pronouncement brought silence and stony, downcast glances to the table. Killeen bit his lip, wishing he could have made the point more smoothly. Better to get it over soon, though, before the experience faded. “So it went,” he said cheerfully. “But you three—you were fast and sure and damnfine.”

  He raised a glass of alky-laced cider and they all followed suit. There was a traditional toast at every post-Witnessing dinner, and this seemed a good way to break the mood. They murmured assent and Killeen said, “Clean the table, too.” They all cast puzzled glances at him.

  “Didn’t Family Knight have such a custom?” he asked Shibo.

  “Eating all food?”

  “After a Witnessing, yeasay. It shows confidence in the future, gathering energy for coming battles and victories.”

  Shibo shook her head. “Family Bishop big eaters anyway.”

  “Porkers,” Toby put in timidly, “compared with Knights.”

  “Guess it got started in the bad years at Citadel Bishop,” Killeen said. “I was small, barely ’member ’em. Ending the meal was the best—crunchy, salty.”

  Shibo arched an eyebrow at him. “What was?”

  “The food? Crawlers. Insects.”

  They all looked shocked. Shibo said disbelievingly, “You ate?”

  “Oh, yeasay. Times were when that was all we had.”

  “Ate crawlers?” Toby asked open-mouthed.

  “Was fair—ate only ones that crawled onto our crops, tryin’ eat our own food. Turnabout’s fair, yeasay?”

  To their continuing shocked looks he added, “Had ’em salted, crisped up over the Family fire. In big baskets, mixed in with whatever crop they were tryin’ eat themselves.”

  Loren swallowed with difficulty and the others looked down at their plates. “Eat up, now,” Killeen said, and could barely suppress his impulse to laugh.

  Shibo’s lips played with a smile and then took a solemn, thin line as she caught on. This bit of foolishness had gotten their minds off Waugh and Leveerbrok. Further, Killeen judged, the midshipcrew would all soon hear of how the Cap’n had eaten crawlers and been glad of it. It did no harm to have stories of the hard oldtimes circulating, and it helped build the tenuous communality that they would surely need.

  Killeen finished the scraps of fleshy black eggplant and stringy beans on his plate. He said nothing as the others started up smalltalk again, for without his anticipating it, a dark mood had stolen over him.

  He had enjoyed this meal in the company of his son and friends, but throughout it he had been unable to remain simply the father. He could not shuck off the role of Cap’n merely by shedding his tunic and emblem. Loren and Besen were Toby’s friends but they were midshipcrew, too, and a good Cap’n had to seize every chance of training them. Comfortable though they had all gotten during the long voyage, there was no room for easeful life now.

  The experience of watching his son dodge and dart through murky alien passages had filled Killeen with horror. He had suppressed it then, but now it all came out in a black and foul mood that fed on him even as the others resumed their bantering. They were speculating on what lengths Families might’ve gone to for gruesome victuals in the past—or themselves, in the future—and he knew they were trying to draw him out. But he could not get the images of the assault from his inner eye.

  To these three midshipcrew, happily joshing one another, the action had been an exciting triumph. To Killeen it had conjured up memories of dozens of battles and all the anguish they brought. The young had not yet learned that death was not a dramatic outcome of a heroic charge. Instead, it came with a sudden sound and a Family member nearby falling, already crisped or fried or spat by a projectile weapon. They were gone before they knew they’d been hit. And who got hit depended on a thousand factors you could never judge in advance: positions, terrain, speed, color of body armor, vagaries of mech movements and aim, endless details that shifted every moment. So death was random and meaningless—that was what you learned on the field. And all the Witnessing and ceremonial dinners could not erase that penetrating fact.

  How had his father handled this knowledge? Abraham had never seemed bothered by the losses suffered on the raids he led out of the Citadel. Even the worst moments had not seemed to damp that wry spirit. Yet they must have. That was the difference between him and Abraham, Killeen thought. He had to struggle to keep up the facade of Cap’n. To Abraham there had not been any falsity. Abraham had been the real thing.

  He saw he had been silent too long, and opened his mouth to rejoin the conversation. Before he could speak, Cermo’s signifier beeped from his finger-coder. All at the table heard it and fell silent, knowing that Cermo, who was on watch, would not call unless it was important.

  Killeen tapped his wrist. “Report?”

  —Cap’n, there’s something happenin’ on the planet.—They all could hear the tension in Cermo’ s voice.

  “Another shuttle coming up?” Already a shuttlecraft from the surface of the planet had arrived. The Family had easily overpowered the two mech pilots. The ship had been filled with machined parts.

  —Nossir, it’s—it’s—you come see.—

  “I’m on my way,” Killeen said, getting up. Having to end a meal this way irritated him and he added, “You should sharpen your descriptive powers.” The phrase had the right edge of old-style Cap’nly speech, and he felt a certain pleasure in that.

  —Sorry, Cap’n.—Cermo’s small voice was chagrined.—What it is…well, there’s some ring around the planet. And it’s gettin’ brighter.—

  Killeen felt a cold apprehension. “It’s in orbit?”

  —Nossir. Looks like it’s…it’s cuttin’ through.—

  “Through what?”

  —Through the whole damn planet, sir.—

  ELEVEN

  At first Killeen did not believe that the image on the large screen could be real.

  “You check for malfs?” he asked Cermo.

  “Aye-aye, sir. I tried….” The big man’s forehead wrinkled. Cermo labored hard, but to him the complexity of the command boards was a treacherous maze. Shibo gently took over from him, her hands moving with rippling speed over the touch-actuated command pads.

  After a long moment she said, “Everything checks. That thing’s real.”

  Killeen did not want to believe in the glowing circle that passed in a great arc through free space and then buried a third of its circumference in the planet. Without understanding it he knew immediately that this was techwork on a scale he could never have imagined. If mechs did this here, they had blundered into a place of danger beyond his darkest fears.

  “Magnify,” he ordered curtly. He knew he had to treat this without showing alarm.

  The hoop was three times larger than New Bishop. Its brilliant golden glow dimmed even the crisp glare of Abraham’s Star. As the image swelled, Killeen expected to see detail emerge. But as the rim of New Bishop grew and flattened on the screen, the golden ring was no thicker than before, a hard scintillant line scratched across space.

  Except where it struck the planet’s surface. There a swirl of fitful radiance simmered. Killeen saw immediately that the sharp edges of the ring were cutting into the planet. New Bishop’s thin blanket of air roiled and rushed about the ring’s sharp edge.

  “Max mag,” he said tensely. “Hold on the foot, where it’s touching.”

  No, not touching, he saw. Cutting.

  The bluehot flashes that erupted at the footpoint spoke of vast catastrophe. Clouds of pitted brown boiled up. Tornadoes churned near each foot—thick rotating disks, rimmed by bruised clouds. At the vortex, violence sputtered in angry red jets.

  Yet even at this magnification the golde
n hoop was still a precise, scintillating line. On this scale it seemed absolutely straight, the only rigid geometry in a maelstrom of dark storms and rushing energies.

  Toby and Besen and Loren had followed them to the command vault and now stood against the wall. He felt their presence at his back.

  “It’s moving,” Besen whispered, awed.

  Killeen could barely make out the festering footpoint as it carved its way through a towering mountain range. Its knife-edge brilliance met a cliff of stone and seemed to simply slip through it. Puffs of gray smoke broke all along the cut. Winds sheared the smoke into strands. Then the hoop was slicing through the peak of a high snow-topped mountain, not slowing at all.

  He peered carefully through the storm. Actual devastation was slight; the constant cloudy agitation and winds gave the impression of fevered movement, but the cause of it all proceeded forward with serene indifference to obstacles.

  “Back off,” he said.

  Shibo made the screen pull away from the impossibly sharp line. The hoop pressed steadily in toward the center of New Bishop. No longer a perfect circle, it steadily flattened on the side that pushed inward.

  “Lined up with pole,” Shibo said. “Watch—I’ll project it.”

  A graphic display appeared alongside the real image.

  Cleaned of clouds, the planet’s image shone brightly. The hoop’s flat side was parallel to the axis of New Bishop’s rotation.

  “Not natural,” Cermo said.

  Killeen smothered the impulse to cackle with manic laughter. Not natural! Why, whatever makes you say that, Lieutenant Cermo?

  Yet in a way his instincts warred with his intelligence. The hoop shared a planet’s smooth curves, its size, its immense uncaring grace. Killeen struggled to conceive of it as something made by design. This was tech beyond imagining. Mechs, he knew, could carve and shape whole mountain ranges into their strange, crackling cities—but this…