Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  Dreamlike, he thrashed. Swam. Punched angrily at torpid air that caught his fists in cobwebbed resistant softness, blunting every movement.

  Like a baby in an awful ambient pouch, he thought. Helpless and fearing birth.

  His skin was a stretched, livid thing. The burning he had suffered now returned doubly. A searing, itching sheet covered him, tight, a livid seethe. He ran numbed hands over his chest and thighs, and each touch brought an angry, prickly dart that launched small storms of heat across him.

  Something scratched at his mind.

  A clawing itch that worked its way inward. A stuttering run down his spine.

  Cool liquid pain. He braced himself against this sudden brute invasion.

  A tentative, telescoped presence slid by him in murky shadow.

  Tiny warm breezes licked him, feathering his hair.

  Something massive and deliberate circled. It moved in tides of light, filigreed by dancing shadows that flittered like small mad birds against the windowpanes of his mind.

  Abruptly he was not in the tight, rubbery air. Before him welled a streaming aura. Red and pink scraped and rustled. Shifting blobs drifted, eclipsing each other like sluggish planets. Their shadows played among blue traceries.

  He squinted, or thought he did. His arms and legs still swam in the gurgling, patient fluid that forgave all movement, but he smelled an acrid wind. Heard harsh clacks and clatters. Tasted blood and a biting, cool jelly. Glimpsed a tunnel projecting away from him in ruddy, smoldering splendor.

  He realized that the cyborg had tapped into his sensorium. It was sampling him—he could feel a blunt, chilly, awkward rummaging. Astringent light played along rumpled walls nearby. Slithery harmonics played somewhere, lurking just beyond clear hearing.

  And he had gained symmetric access to its warped world. A ledge studded with ornately shaped protrusions swept by. Without something he knew for comparison he could not tell how quick this motion was, but a sickening tug in his stomach told him of lurching acceleration, wrenching turns around corners, abrupt surges up seemingly impossible wall slopes.

  Gobbets brown and sticky rained down everywhere. They were languid, oscillating spheres that blew on a warm wind, voluptuous and fat. Killeen realized that a dim echo of the cyborg’s hunger had leaked through to him, making his mouth water. A savory drop struck the wall and bounced, wobbly and fat and beckoning.

  The cyborg ate it. A rasping tang shot through him, not in his mouth but somehow up and down his chest, striking hard into his cock, squeezing his ass tight in an exquisite, ungovernable reflex. Killeen felt a stretched sense of something plunging through him, blundering.

  The cyborg accelerated. Kileen felt himself rushing with a rolling yaw toward a snub-nosed cylinder of white and orange. The cyborg did not slow and Killeen instinctively braced himself for a collision—which did not come.

  Instead, the cylinder swallowed them. What had appeared to be a protruding point was instead an opening. As they sped through hexagonal tunnels, banking up onto the side faces with centrifugal ease, Killeen began to get a sense of the place outside. Arthur said:

  Your eyes saw the cylinder as pointing toward us, because of the cast of shadows. Grey points out that the human eye has evolved to see by light from the sky, remember, and reads shadows with that bias. Here the glow comes from the floor, and more weakly from the walls. The shadows are therefore reversed, and mean the opposite of what your automatic reactions assume.

  “Can you change that?”

  No—such matters are buried deep in the brain. The cyborg sees by infrared, I gather. On a perpetually cloudy planet, the ground would often be warmer than the sky, and thus more luminous in the infrared. Such an evolutionary aspect would explain why these tunnels are floor-illuminated. Since we are receiving this cyborg’s raw data, we process it with our bias and get exactly the upside-down result. To see as it does we would have to invert your accustomed perception patterns.

  “Look, how can I get quit of this?”

  Consider—such an ability probably implies that the original species, which has now cyborged itself, often lived underground. It no doubt foraged above ground, but infrared vision would allow it to see from the warmed walls of its burrows. Once occupied, their own body heat would allow them some dim wall radiance. Such ecological niches stress skills at construction and three-dimensional spatial abilities. Perhaps this explains why they are building the huge things in orbit.

  “Guttin’ this planet, just so they can build bigger anthills?”

  Perhaps so; evolution is destiny, I’ve always believed. But there are other implications.

  “Somethin’ we can use?” Killeen had listened to enough empty talk.

  My first conclusion is that we’re underground, doubtless. If we leave this pouch we’re in, we’ll wander quite blindly through a maze of tunnels. Hopeless to escape, I fear.

  Killeen grunted sourly.

  I advise caution.

  “Don’t see it much matters what I do.”

  Until we know why it brought you here we should remain flexible.

  Killeen tried to distance himself from the sensations that washed through him, tried to think. Despairing, he wondered what had happened to the Family. He had gotten a distant impression, as the cyborg ship reeled him in, of other craft moving swiftly in the sky. His comm had squawked twice with human voices, faint and unintelligible.

  Has anyone survived? It was one thing for a Cap’n to die in a chance encounter with a mech, or with a thing like this huge assembly of living and mechlike parts, and quite another to be cut off from your command, still alive while everyone you loved and honored was dead, killed by your own incompetence.

  He made himself envision possibilities. The cyborgs might not have bothered to get Jocelyn from the Flitter. But unless she got to the surface, the Cap’ncy would go to Cermo automatically. He wasn’t quick to lead in a crisis. The man would try, of course, but Shibo would probably have to make the hard decisions. She and Cermo could hold the Family together on alien soil.

  If any of them still lived…

  PART FOUR

  Such Men Are Dangerous

  ONE

  The pouch clenched and split and spewed him out.

  Killeen gasped for breath, as though he had been holding a single lungful the entire time—days? weeks?—he was enclosed. The featherlight emulsifying fluid that had held him somehow managed to bring air and food in through his lungs, for he felt no hunger.

  He got to his knees, expecting to see tunnels in the cyborg warren. Instead a fresh, sharp breeze brought him smells of fragrant mold and dusty hills. His eyes cleared. Fuzzy patterns telescoped into crisp images, the world seeming to stretch and draw closer to him.

  He stood in a field of crumpled stone, weaving unsteadily. His ankles ached with the memory of slamming into the cosmic string’s sheen of magnetic pressures.

  The cyborg rose like an unlikely natural encrustation behind him. Its double-jointed arms smoothed a fast-healing seam.

  Useless to run, he thought. He shook himself dry—though the moisture he felt seemed to be beneath his skin, not on it—while the cyborg clicked and hummed and watched him. They were alone together in a blasted landscape. In the distance Killeen could see what appeared to be a malformed hill but he instantly knew it was an entrance to some mech structure. Craters pocked it. It had the empty, defeated look of a skull.

  He felt a tickling throughout his body, like cold wires drawn slickly out of him, letting his arms and legs relax into smooth sausages of muscle. He wobbled.

  Images cascaded in his mind—silent, meditative, embroidered. Section views of Argo. A striking picture of something large and sticky-white, attached to descending, puffy-pale strands.

  Then, like a swift slap in the face out of nowhere, it let him go. His mind lost its pervasive, leaden fog. He felt a grimy wind stir his hair.

  The cyborg’s massive bulk moved away. It had a long, lizardy tail that ended in an antenna, like t
he bulb of a leathery flower.

  The cyborg simply walked away, moving with surprising speed. Its many legs clacked and hummed.

  Killeen limped away across the broken land, sore and tired. Slanting sunlight brought a twilight glow to a far rumpled ridgeline of tawny hills.

  He stopped and leaned over to shake his head. Some milky stuff oozed from his ear and his hearing sharpened. Slime dripped from his suit.

  The cutting yet spongy-sweet smell of the cyborg’s interior spaces clung to him. He began trotting. Soon his own sweat washed away the alien scent.

  For hours he made his way down a crushed valley. The cosmic string hung just above the horizon, its dull ruby-hued curve cutting across the shimmering of a frayed molecular cloud. Killeen remembered the perceptions he had gotten (accidentally?) from the cyborg—something about a temporary halt, stilling the cosmic string, to allow construction to catch up with the supply of vacuum-formed nickeliron. Now magnetic fingers held the loop steady, a smoldering cut in the sky.

  Without its bright golden glow the slow coming of sunset allowed the far reaches around Abraham’s Star to display their fitful life. Faint flashes wriggled deep within the glowering banks that hung beyond this cramped solar system. Quick bursts of saffron yellow seethed against a slowly gathering wash of blue. Vibrant pink discharged energies within a cloak of sullen brown dust. Spidery scarlet filaments formed and died and swelled again, as though beads of blood caught the setting sun and glinted with evil beauty.

  Killeen wondered if these momentary effervescences that washed through dark sinews of dust were mechworks, or natural storms and tossings brought forth by the constant whirl of matter in the Galactic Center. Or could unimaginable tools like the cosmic string be at work there?

  He moved cautiously, using natural cover. There was plenty of it among the upturned stone slabs and jutting hummocks. The cyborg had returned to him all his equipment, even his shortarm rifle. His shanks were fully fueled. His Arthur Aspect commented:

  Indeed, they have far greater capacity. Your suit reading says there is more than one hundred kiloJoules stored in each fuel gram—far higher than anything Snowglade tech achieved. The cyborg has outfitted us well.

  Killeen moved cautiously, ignoring the tiny pleadings of his Aspects. In this strange world he relied on the instincts of his youth. His hunting senses were still tuned to the subtle graces of Snowglade. Here each detail was slightly skewed. He automatically searched each gully for a trap, sniffed the breeze for oily clues. A distant cone-shaped mountain gave the air an acidic tinge with a long, charcoal plume.

  The land needed rest. Everywhere once-proud cliffs had slumped. Layers of rock splayed out like decks of cards tossed aside by a bored gargantuan. Dust covered every ledge and narrow, and fat dirty clouds of it drifted lazily on the horizon.

  Yet here and there tinkling springs leaped into the air, frivolous fountains among ancient upturned strata. He stopped by one and let the stream play over his hands. Scooping some into his face, he tasted a distant, rusty echo of waters he had drunk on Snowglade so long ago.

  The internal heat liberated from the infall has worked outward from the core. I suspect deep-buried ice deposits are melting, providing this water.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Killeen was not in a mood for techtalk from Arthur. Still less welcome was the piping voice of Ling. He needed to flee the clogged, solemn pockets of his mind; the cyborg had left a damp, musty smell there.

  It was time also to let go the control he had sustained for so long, while the cyborg rummaged through him.

  All that while he had run his mind from the top down, keeping consciousness in the foreground, a hard layer which his lower minds could not penetrate. Now he let his inner self emerge and relax, beginning to digest his wrenching experience and make his mind’s peace with them. The simple fact of living, of survival, was a continuous miracle. He gave himself over to it. From Snowglade’s raw battles he knew the sensation well, and relished it. Pain, grief, fear, rage—all had to flourish and ebb and find their places.

  Bemused, be released his Aspects—Ling, Grey, Arthur, even the lesser Faces like Bud—and allowed them to play joyfully in a cloistered pocket of him, but without letting their squeaky voices snag his attention. They frolicked as they tasted the chilling air of New Bishop, caught the dusty fragrances. They talked to and through one another, minute presences strumming through his sensory net, streaming by integrating nodes and causative factor points.

  So much had happened to him! To avoid crippling disorder, he had to enlist his Aspects and Faces in at least a partial integration of his torments. Without the Family he was an odd scrap wandering this smashed world…but he did not know if the Family lived. He had to keep himself together until he knew, even if that meant years of questing.

  So he focused on the crushed forests that he picked his way through, on the gutted plains and ruptured ridgelines that swept beneath his fast-flying boots. The limp was gone, his servos responded again, and now he was gnawingly hungry.

  Family Bishop had always been deft foragers, and he called up an old woman’s Face to help him locate edible berries and leaves. She was a cranky sort, full of curt advice. Much of her lore did not apply to this strange world. She found tasty roots but squawked with alarm at the acidic leaves and ellipsoidal fruit he found. Tentative bites told him they were suitable.

  He prowled the wrecked forest. Trees had been slapped and mangled by a vastly casual malice. They slanted crazily, exposing their bowls of snaky roots. Leaves of exact, pale green circles piled high in streambeds, and small things skittered deep in them. Damp flats were covered with tracks: three-toed, seven-toed, split-wedged, with some broad smooth pads. Killeen had never seen traces of such large creatures, and they filled him with respect for the past wealth of this place. His Arthur Aspect put in:

  All the cyborgs’ work, of course. They emptied the tube we fell through. That kilometer-wide shaft caused the land to fall only the length of a finger here.

  “Huh? Take that much rock and metal out, seems like there’d be a big drop here, too.”

  Not at all; it is a property of simple geometry. The loss is spread over the much larger surface area of the planet. Watch—

  The three-color diagram that sprung into Killeen’s right eye made sense, once he studied it, but even so—“Droppin’ a finger’s length did all this?”

  All layers felt it. Seismic adjustments occur unevenly.

  “I’ll say.”

  Killeen was crossing a clearing. Suddenly a tan fountain sprayed up, showering water and sand on him.

  Ah yes. Hydrostatic forces still being released. The vibrations have made the soil here more like a slurry.

  Rolling, sea-swell tremors drove Killeen to make for more solid ground, drowning out the Aspect voice in his own panting. He found edible leaves and chewed them down with relish. The ground continued shaking and bucking, as if trying to throw off the scum of persistent life.

  Filled for the first time in what seemed like days, he began to feel better once he broke into a steady, loping trot. Over the next line of hills lay a mech city. It had been torn to pieces. Explosions had ripped apart immense factories. Much of the destruction seemed to have come from charges planted inside, as though someone had smuggled in bombs.

  Brown mech carapaces lay strewn everywhere. Something had scavenged the bodies for parts. Cyborgs, he guessed.

  He wandered in the hush of the ruined streets. No mechs labored to put this right. Nothing moved. At some intersections towers of ornately worked alloys rose. Killeen remembered the art of the Mantis and could not tell if these spindly things had some function or were intended to ornament the city.

  He felt uneasy in the mechworks and did not try to find food among the ruins. At sundown he still had not crossed the sprawling mechplex. That night he hid in a parts shed and slept. He awoke several times, pursued by fevered dreams. His time inside the alien returned and he strangled in jellied air, vainly swimming up
ward, his lungs scalded. Each awakening left his arms and legs clenched tight as though he had been fighting in his sleep. And then he would doze off and again the dream would come.

  Before dawn something moved nearby. He carefully peered out. A large animal was creeping closer. The largest creature he had ever seen was an old orange chicken back at the Citadel. This thing could easily eat the chicken in one gulp. Something about its large teeth told Killeen that this idea might be pleasing to the animal.

  Plainly it had scented him. After all his years of hunting mechs and being hunted by them, he had no idea how to deal with the animal. It came nearer. Its ears flattened. Killeen held his rifle at the ready. Silently he stepped from the door of the shed and stood watching. The animal froze. They remained that way for a long time. A strange sense of communion stole over Killeen. Its yellow eyes were clear and deep.

  Pale dawn seeped around them. The animal finally licked its lips with bored unconcern and walked away. It stopped at the corner of a storage bin nearby and looked back at him once and then went on.

  As Killeen set out walking again he realized his rifle was set for an electromag pulse. It would have had no effect whatever on the animal.

  Without thinking about much of anything, he felt conflicts within him flare and simmer and die. Beneath this world’s calm, the natural clasp of life pealed forth its own silent message.

  TWO

  The day was sharp and clear. He found berries and edible leaves and kept going. Faint sounds from a second destroyed mech city made him skirt around it until he could find another route.

  From a distance the buckled ramparts reminded him of his last sight of the Citadel, at the Calamity. Innumerable times he had replayed that day in his dreams. The very air had seemed to roil and stretch, he remembered. Rippling radiances had washed the clouds even before the mech attack on Citadel Bishop began, giving them some warning. Not enough, though, for the mechs had thrown immense resources into their assault. His father had been at the center of the Citadel’s defense. Despite the desperation that crept over them all as the first reports came in, all bad, Abraham had kept a calm, unhurried manner. Killeen had been nearby when the mechs breached a Citadel wall. Abraham had direeled an effective flanking attack on the intrusion. Killeen had not even comprehended the mech purpose until his father’s deft sally cut off the head of the mech advance and chopped the remnants to pieces.