by Gregory Benford
The Hive had seen cause to outfit both Quath and Nimfur’thon with the latest in advanced cybertech, whole subsystems of handsomely self-powered organs and limbs and antennae. They were honored to be so chosen, but that did not leach from them the free high spirits of the young.
Nimfur’thon sent in sharp chatter. In parallel she lifted a singsong, I, we have!…I, we have! on a sour sideband of her carrier, taunting.
Quath’s bravado rang false. Like all her ground-burrowing race, she was terrified of heights. And even more of flying. Her subminds pealed their alarm. She mustered all her courage.
With a lurch Quath birthed a rosy egg of flame beneath her. She jetted up a granite-flecked cliff face. All through Nimfur’thon’s chiding Quath had been planning, vectoring. Now, expending all her reserve in one spurt, Quath arced up the stony wall and—fuel guttering out in black fog, rockets choking down—she scrabbled at the boulders of the peak.
Clutched.
Teetered on the brink.
Fanned the blue air—
—and caught.
—Jitjitjit-eeeee—screamed a linkage, but Quath scrambled to safety, feeling the safety-warmth as her center of gravity slid into snug position above solid ground. Her hot fear changed to pride.
Quath barked.
Nimfur’thon was a squat disk on the plain below.
Quath felt suddenly exposed on this high point. She spied sheets of phosphorescence hanging in the air—near, chillingly near.
Nimfur’thon’s rippling signal now betrayed a thin thread of doubt.
Quath cried.
Yellow steam gouted from far hills. Mudworked buildings crescented that ridgeline, temporary housings for the fluxtube formers.
Quath scrambled downslope, sending boulders clattering with her bumpers.
—Nimfur’thon squirted a vectored grid image—
Quath gave a heaving grunt as she geared up in haste.
Nimfur’thon called boisterously,
Quath ignored these repeated justifications and focused on the skittering gang of rocks that herded before her, racing and leaping downhill. No moment to be buried in the embrace of pebbles, no. She skirted a ledge, made a grinding controlled slide—
Quath turned and crosshaired Nimfur’thon on the plain. Dots jiggled about her graywhite disk.
Nimfur’thon fired flame into the dots. They blackened and tumbled.
Quath felt real fear. They had vanquished the main forces, but vagrant mechs still roamed the hills.
Quath lurched at full gear down a narrow ravine.
Nimfur’thon cried.
Chuffing, clenching, she jounced down the steep cleft.
The sky crinkled. Golden wealth spun toward them.
The sky shattered.
Quath skidded to a stop, tucked in pods, and—snick!—clapped fast her ports and shields. Rushing air sang an ionized blue.
From beyond the low hills a golden wall advanced. The glowing line had passed to the north as its revolutions increased. The grand Cosmic Circle revolved faster, its beats making a blur. The spinup had formed a steady cutting pressure. Now the wall of gold moved outward from the pole, a nearly perfect cylinder that stood and pointed through the sky.
A nearby flux station sent forth its strumming magnetic whorls, which seized the passing distant string and flung it on its way. Thousands of similar stations all tugged and pushed the spindly, rushing line on its path around the planet’s pole.
This tube of dancing light, the Syphon, bled color into the bruised sky, fed ripening pink to red to orange. Wind howled and clutched at Quath’s rim, thin fingers to tip her over. Quath tuned frantically to the brood’s channel, to call out. Instead she was flooded by the brood’s view from the far ridgeline.
The fluxtube grew straight and true from the skirt of hills. It bit the ceiling of clouds, boiling them away in a purple flash. Dark mottlings shot up, up—in an instant heat had cleared the ivory clouds.
Now the black of vacuum appeared, a spot forming high above, a target coming into being as the arrow shot through it. Stars winked new.
The upper link was forged as the tube opened on the clean vacuum of space. Quath watched writhing amber and gray motes climb, her eyes smarting, awed. The brood sent forth a chorus of applause, popping and frizzing song.
*Complete!* came the Tukar’ramin’s warm signal.
Now the Syphon hummed with new life deep in the rock. The tube walls kept back the pressing solid rock on all sides—except at the core. There immense pressures forced more metal into the tube with each revolution. Vast stresses fought along the tube walls. The strumming tube gnawed, burning a cylinder of stone free of its mother world. The top faced vacuum, while below liberated pressures pushed the freed rock upward.
*Flowing is,* the mellow, unhurried voice of the Tukar’ramin came—and the fluxtube suddenly filled.
Pearly, transparent walls of force dulled to gray. A plug of rock was streaming out.
Quath called, in the roaring, pelting gale. The wind’s pebbled teeth clattered on her skin.
A rolling blast burst over the hills. The fluxtube brightened. The cylinder filled, gold to red to white.
—And out it spurted.
Their lance had now struck to the treasure of this world. The tube throat was artfully shaped, fattening slightly as the whitehot metal funneled up. The gusher of molten metal rushed from the vast core pressures into the void of space. Riches squirted up and out, fleeing the groaning weight.
Quath squinted. The fluxtube walls’ glow hurt her many eyes. She submerged in the flood of the Tukar’ramin’s view.
Delicate streamers of green and amber danced—precious metals, the only hoard this wretched world boasted. The Tukar’ramin’s view tilted, following a black fleck of impurity up the glowing pipelin
e, starward, into sucking void, high beyond air’s clutching.
There, flexing magnetic fields peeled away streamers, finding orbits for the molten pap. The yellowing, shuddering fluid, free of gravity’s strangle, shot out into the chill. Returned to the spaces it once knew, the metal coldformed, mottled, its skin crusted brown with impurities. The birthing thread creaked and groaned in places as it unspooled. It fractured in spots, yet kept smoothly gliding along its gentle orbit.
Cooling, it grayed.
Graying, the threads wove.
Dazed, she fixed on Nimfur’thon. But the signal cut off.
She sent a burst to the Hive through a haze of noise. An answering tone came, and the brood view at once tilted back down the glowing strand of metal, veering into the slumped hills. A hurricane wind had flushed clear the air. The eerie light of the core metal dappled the plain with shadows. But something wavered—
The tube. It twisted, hummed, curled into a helix, straightened again. Light surged the walls.
A bulge formed. Grew.
Quath watched the image, awash in it. The fattening flux-tube rippled. Flexed. And looped suddenly, faster than the eye could follow. Out, across the plain. Its metal soup escaped. A blinding white ball spilled over, splintering rocks, spreading.
The gray pancake of Nimfur’thon crouched in a shallow draw. Rock above her singed where the bubbling liquid touched. The tide hesitated and then lapped over, blackening, blackening, blackening everything.
Now the images came too fast to comprehend.
The legs jerking. A ripping scream. Footpads melting where they touched bubbling white. Nimfur’thon turning, her pods splintering. Skin popping open. Guts pouring out—to flame into brown smoke.
Nimfur’thon’s walking pods melted slowly into the ooze. Her manipulating pods clutched frantically at the sky, as if to pull herself up.
Orange plumes cracked the upper bulkhead. Armpods beat at the flames in spasms. Yellow tongues ate. A bulkhead blew open. Gobbets spattered.
This was the way Quath would remember Nimfur’thon. The vision seared away all other memories. For what seemed a long time Quath could see nothing but this licking moment of death. Her opticals registered other inputs, but her mind rejected them. She stood frozen. Silent. She began to tremble.
TWO
The Syphon guttered out. Colossal magnetic knots crimped the flow. The glowing wall of pressure became again the lone cosmic string, its golden razor beauty hanging at the poles of the planet. A calm returned. Above, a dark tangle of coldhardened core metal orbited. Forms moved among this newly grown maze, polishing, cutting, making vast works.
The helical instability was diagnosed. There was indeed sign of Nought interference.
Labor parties crossed the plain toward the fluxworks. They carried Nimfur’thon’s remains, sectioned, back to the Hive. Few spoke to Quath, not because they considered her shamed—inspection of Nimfur’thon’s tracer log showed the risk was her own—but rather because they were busy restoring the fluxtube projectors, which had fused to slag.
As the teams labored, Quath sloughed back to the Hive. Her joints and seams ached from pinprick damage. Danni’vver, assistant in training to the Tukar’ramin, sent beeping questions during Quath’s march, asking details of how the two had maneuvered so close, and—from supple dartings of phrases—sensed the cloud that now descended over Quath.
There followed a rest period which Quath tried to embrace. She failed. She felt in the warren walls the strumming of motion from other multipodia, who did not rest. She listened to the urgent, fever-shot data that would not let her sleep.
The looping instability was a setback, throwing off their schedule. Legions of their fellow strandsharers orbited far in space beyond the Cosmic Circle. They awaited the gouts of metal to begin their weave. The pace in the Hive must quicken, then. Finally she silenced her subminds’ irksome voices. She fell into a slumber gratefully, legs folded close and tight in the slick webbing; for something dark pursued her.
Quath woke panting, pods tangled, the speckling of her tracheae bulging red, yellow, red again in hasty rhythm. A buzzing call for her echoed through the groined alcove. Quath answered and found a summons from Danni’vver.
She dismounted anxiously. Her mind was a snarled maze. Her hydraulics knotted and filled with a pressing ache.
Hastily she smeared a vomit drop on an acid spore. This eaten, Quath hobbled forth, favoring one leg which had splintered a knee. She limped through vaults astir with work. A pentapod hailed, but otherwise she was ignored. This was nothing new, and in fact was what Quath desired this day. The weight that had descended upon her did not welcome company.
droned Danni’vver at the entrance to the central chasm.
—Danni’vver consulted her slate, rather than look directly at Quath—
Danni’vver flicked open a port in her barnacled hide. Moistly she studied Quath for a long moment and said,
Quath felt the spaces within her suddenly burst. Fear flooded out. Awe squeezed her spiracles shut until the air wheezed through tight slits. Embarrassed, she was sure Danni’vver would notice. The wall parted with a soft rumble that covered Quath’s rasping breath. Quath teetered forward on stiffening limbs. She knew she would be seen for what she was.
*Terror pins you.*
The shimmering thought came as she gazed up, tilting to register the height. A vast bulk moved in the webs. Moist beads drifted in a tingling cloud. Massive arched stoneworks gave the hushed air a pressing weight.
Quath began,
*Do not attempt to state your inner self. I see.*
Vibrant light played in the Tukar’ramin’s body, which spanned the upper chasm. Quath had never been alone with such an august being. She struggled to take it all in. The bulbous presence bristled with uncountable legs.
She felt a probing. Fine wires laced through the muddy inside of her. She dully sensed a phantasm dancing, spinning—and then gone, evaporated.
*It is not Nimfur’thon’s death that infests you.*
The words rang cold though they floated awash and welcoming in Tukar’ramin’s warm sea.
*Cease. The weight you carry must be lifted by degrees. Immersion in our Path will help.*
*No myriapod can trace more than a branch or two of the Path, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon. Do not add arrogance to your burden.*
The pressing fear welled up again and Quath sucked in breath to cry out.
*I see it. Know it. But you must journey through that mossing.*
*The Factotum will show you the Chronicle to a depth you have not seen. Explore it. See the sweep of us. This will restore you.*
Quath left, stumbling on numbed pods, spiracles sucking and bristling in agitation.
THREE
Within the Chronicle, time engulfed Quath.
The Factotum—a dry, fussy sort—had left her moored in a cloying mesh that reeked of use by many bipodia. This place was usually used for the elementary education of the very young, the slow-witted.
Quath could barely remember that phase. She had been totally natural, then, with no machine-augmented capacity. Weak, soft, dumb. She had memorized the Verities of the Chronicle, of course. Now it all felt useless to her. She had lost her faith.
So now she was back here. Among the smells of youth. Helmeted, pinpricked in all her senses.
And before her gaze the vast story opened. />
She knew the outlines, had learned this lore without ever truly thinking about it. Images of antiquity flitted by. For the ancient multipodia life was uncaring, a sweet gambol. Even myriapodia lounged amid luxuriant sticky strands. They basked, pap-gorged.
Yet in time the race spread over the homeworld. The sciences and philosophies of those distant times were numbed by the pervading slackness.
The podia had not always been this way. In early drawings fierce, long-extinct animals took the pincer in their throats, struggled mightily, went still. Lazy though they had been, the ancients had cleared their world of such vermin.
Unchallenged, the race lounged. But their parent star had arced into the inner precincts of the Galactic Center. Mechs began to foray into the realm of the podia. The enormity of mech purpose became clear. Only by reproducing at a fevered pace could the podia match the mechs’ expansive verve.
Their slit-eyed spirit revived. After that came scientific discoveries that made sense of all things.
What is your concern? The Factotum was ever alert, feeding Quath a torrent of data, all encoded in hormonal tangs and filigrees.
You would like some educational facet of the Chronicle?
Quath was in a vagrant mood. Her mind skittered on the surface of a teardrop that shimmered like a planet, surface tension tugging her to skate on its icy sheen. She braced herself as finely orchestrated scents began singing “Harnessing the Collapsed Stars.”
The introduction quickly shuffled through conventional lore. Suns’ deep fires inevitably ebbed. The nearly burntout stars imploded, their pyre a flash seen across the galaxy. The smaller ones left cores of pure neutrons. Spinning, their polar caps spitting out particles, they beamed frantic search- lights, pulsing steadily: galactic lighthouses. A useful source of energy.
Once the spinning slowed, podia could approach. Teams of strandsharers blocked the circling streams of particles, dammed the energy, silencing the pulsar, converting it to useful purposes.
They had found that mechs were drawn to pulsars, not only for their wealth of energy but for gargantuan scientific experiments. The purpose of these elaborate works, carried out above the poles of pulsars as they gushed electron-positron plasmas, remained unknown.