Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  Raucous laughter streamed through the comm. Let them celebrate. The Family needed some release. And they would still have to watch the pursuing craft carefully.

  He allowed himself a grin. Maybe, just maybe, they were going to escape.

  To what? He looked ahead at the yawning bluehot majesty of the disk that surrounded the Eater. It was a long voyage away. They would have to prepare for whatever lurked there.

  The Family… So much had changed since Fanny had led a scrap of Bishops away from Abraham’s wrecked Citadel, into Snowglade’s bleakness. That remnant had joined with dregs of Knights and Rooks. They had slipped free of their world and had seen it as a speck in an ocean of night.

  Now, here, the Family had been seared again… only to cleave anew with new members who brought their own scarred heritage. A new whole. A greater sum, perhaps.

  He turned and walked back along the hull, boots thumping down on magnetic anchors. The slowly expanding cloud thinned and let in a little light. He could just make out the small golden circle that lay far behind. It was more distant than the enemy, but Quath said it was accelerating strongly. It would catch up with Argo soon.

  Killeen tried to imagine what vessels could transport the enormous mass of the cosmic string. Well, he would see. All in good time.

  That great scythe would follow them toward the Eater, Quath said. So the Illuminates had decreed. They had stopped the gutting of a world to send the ring along with Argo. Halted the building of their gray warrens. Interrupted the labors of millions of Cybers. For what, no one yet knew.

  And after? There was still the enigma of the electromagnetic being. Somewhere ahead it lurked, tied to the disk of the Eater.

  His brushing contact with that mind, back on New Bishop, had implied much while explaining nothing. It had spoken of his father. Maybe Killeen had tempted fate by naming the star that waned behind them for Abraham. But perhaps Abraham was a key to all this. Yet how could his father, lost at the fall of the Citadel, figure in the deliberations of a tenuous magnetic mind? Could such a being revive those long dead?

  His Grey Aspect droned for attention. Her voice came slowly, as though working across the abyss of time that separated Killeen from the High Arcology Era.

  There were records… I once saw… incomplete… from a time long gone… Some said… before the Chandeliers… before even the First Comers…from… a culture of legendary origin… called Earth. That too was a time… when men lived… beneath the will… of beings vaster. Gods moved the heavens… determined… fate of men… and beasts… In those times… humanity scratched out its destiny… in soil… under tortured skies… where huge things… in comfort… dwelled. Some thought these superior beings… were gods. Yet men lived lives of meaning still… despite their small stature… in the scheme of things. So do not despair… Humanity has found zest and verve… before… in the shadows of vastness… in a place called Greece.

  Killeen nodded. So even this was not new. Humanity’s most heartfelt joys and crushing defeats had been mere sideshows, small dramas acted out at the feet of greater entities.

  It did not matter whether one termed these forces gods or the products of further evolution. Enormity defied definitions. Skysower was a living thing, but Killeen could not tell whether it even thought. Perhaps the distinction itself did not make sense at that level of grandeur.

  He looked up into the colossal sky. Fingers of knotted fire worked in molecular clouds. Storms frayed against the stars. Tides of light ebbed and flowed with ponderous majesty. Amid it all, Argo sailed on, a mote.

  “Shibo,” he whispered. “I love you.”

  It seemed as though the words were new, and that he said them for the first time.

  Chronology of Human Species

  (Dreaming Vertebrates)

  at Galactic Center

  This summary was prepared at your request, in order to make intelligible the human point of view. I must confess that this is fundamentally impossible even to anthology-class minds such as myself, and probably to any entity which does not arise from an initial organic base. However, as much as is possible I shall take the cramped human version of their own history, however distorted or inadequate this may be.

  These matters were of no concern to us until the strange events at the collapse of Citadel Bishop (see appendix 1). Some effort to understand that engagement led to my involvement with the humans who escaped our extermination.

  I have made use of these survivors. They recently departed on an aged vessel of earlier human construction. They will arrive at World #1936B. The destructive intercity competition there may be muted by their efforts. I have arranged that they be met by our representatives, assuming the situation there has not deteriorated further by the time of their arrival.

  However, as discussed in appendix 2, other purposes are served by their leaving Snowglade and going to World #1936B at this time. While these humans know nothing of the larger context, they may have methods of yielding further information of use to us. In light of our ignorance of these beings, higher entities have decided to allow their continued survival so long as they pose no serious irritant.

  [Note: This entry is abstracted from larger files. Times refer to flat space-time measurements, though some important events have occurred in the curved geometries of pulsar magneto-spheres and the black hole vicinity. Notes on one particular human refuge, planet Snowglade, are included.]

  Existing manuscripts and datalogs allow some preliminary description of events leading up to the current epoch. The historical scheme of humanity falls into periods which reflect stages in the steady decline of humans at Galactic Center. Human terms are used throughout, even where they are misleading or inadequate.

  THE GREAT TIMES

  This is a dimly remembered age spanning several thousand years. Humans moved freely between the close-packed stars of the Center. Even then they had to stay out of the way of mech civilization.

  Human legend holds that they arrived at Galactic Center in several waves.

  First was a small band which had captured a mech near-light starship. Apparently they went undetected for a while because of their conventional craft. This allowed stealthy investigation of mech ways and purposes. By observing mech civilization and learning from it, humans attained a level of ability rare among organic forms. They apparently also formed alliances with other organic forms nearby, though nothing is known of these.

  The development of large pulsar configurations had begun shortly before this time and occupied much mech energy. Creation of large electron-positron clouds contributed to the already considerable gamma-ray background near pulsars. These gamma rays heated molecular clouds and prevented human incursions into several regions. The few remaining records suggest that the first human expedition set about several pursuits involving organic civilizations which lived near the Center. However, these humans then vanished.

  The second wave of exploration came directly from Earth. An entire fleet of ramscoop vessels was launched within a century after the mech-sponsored warfare, which had introduced alien sea life into Earth’s oceans.

  Third came a larger expedition which sought the fabled Galactic Library which beacons had promised. Earth lies 8.63 kiloparsecs from Galactic Center (see appendix 3 for Universal Standard comparisons). This implies that the ramscoop vessels had begun their voyage in an age when the Library was still announcing itself. Well before their arrival the Library had disappeared, spirited away by unknown parties. Efforts to find it failed. The Library apparently contained the records of many extinct organic races. Searches for it tapered off when mechs finally took notice of these intruders and set about opposing them.

  THE CHANDELIER AGE

  Here humans gathered into large cities in space for protection. Surviving logs from starfaring vessels show that mechs had begun to make interstellar travel dangerous. Also, radiation increased in the zone around the black hole at Absolute Center (sometimes “True Center”). This made conditions harder for organi
c forms everywhere nearby.

  Scholars of this time studied the earliest humans known at Galactic Center and much of our knowledge of earlier ages descends from the detailed searches made then. Much art and literature survives from the centuries marking the transition into the Chandeliers, though most of this is abstract and useless for historical purposes.

  HIGH ARCOLOGY ERA

  This came after the “Hunker Down” (slang)—the exodus from the Chandeliers to planetary surfaces. Mech competition drove this desperate retreat. On most worlds, in the need for security humankind was forced into huge Arcologies, single-building cities which were still technically advanced and retained many facets of Chandelier life.

  Planet Snowglade was a particularly fertile site and received extensive colonizing. Assignment of territories was made by Family structure, as elsewhere. The trauma of the “Hunker Down” drove religious fervor. This is best considered as a form of human art (appendix 4), though much must be interpolated here to render this mode of expression into rational terms.

  LATE ARCOLOGY ERA

  The last small Chandeliers and freighting ships were abandoned at the opening of this time. All starflight ceased. Even interplanetary travel and harvesting of resources became difficult because of the mechs. Moist, plant-bearing planets were previously thought to be uninteresting to the mechs. Even these now came under threat. Since such worlds were where the Arcologies flourished best, humanity was further circumscribed.

  HIGH CITADEL AGE

  The Arcologies became untenable under further mech pressure. Breakup of the mountain-sized Arcologies followed, primarily because of difficulties in maintaining the high techcraft. Many retreated into the less conspicuous Citadels.

  Mech depredations were steady, but most damage was done by side effects of the expanding mech cities, which consumed resources and altered the biosphere. Many Arcologies were mined for materials and ores. Citadels the size of small towns survived. Mechs began to spread over most of Snowglade at this time, spurring climate-changing processes.

  Many human-carried Aspects date from this time, apparently because the breakdown of the human infrastructure threatened the human database held in fixed computing sites. New skills arose as humanity began to supplement its dwindling agriculture with hunter-gatherer techniques and especially raids on mech storehouses. Humans began to lose their own technology and concentrated on reworking mechtech. No longer potential rivals, they became pests scratching at the edges.

  THE CALAMITY(ON SNOWGLADE)

  This opened the final chapter in the conquest of Snowglade. Though Family Citadels had been tolerated for some time, and humans had been used occasionally as pawns in mech intercity rivalry, their usefulness was marginal. Each Citadel was attacked in turn as mech resources allowed. Each Citadel of the human Families fell separately, banishing their survivors to the raw countryside.

  It had become apparent by this time that Snowglade’s star, Denix, was following an orbit designed to bring it close to the black hole region. Mech activities had brought this about through electrodynamic coupling to molecular clouds, using a magnetic grappling effect to convey momentum. This means that Snowglade will inevitably become uninhabitable by organic lifeforms. This orbit change appears to be unknown to humans. Generally their scholarly speculation concentrates upon the large scale activity at True Center.

  Some humans still survive on Snowglade. The complex events surrounding the Calamity at Citadel Bishop suggest that some humans should be kept intact in case they are somehow important to the events of that day. It is apparent that none of the principals, mech or human, understands more than a fraction of the continuing puzzle.

  This report is most respectfully submitted. Appendices to follow.

  Please enjoy Gregory Benford’s classic novella set in the Galactic Center Universe

  A HUNGER FORTHE INFINITE

  Death came in on sixteen legs.

  If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat—then Ahmihi was composed.

  He had been the Exec of the Noachin ’Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rock the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him.

  He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of the world around him:

  I wish to “talk”—to convey linear meaning.

  “Yeasay, and you be—?” He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.

  I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs.

  “Damn nice of you.”

  The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle—now quite over, he saw—had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.

  I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you.

  “How many of my people… are left?”

  I count 453—no, 452; one died two xens ago.

  “If you’ll let them go—”

  That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.

  He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.

  This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier’s kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other ’Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.

  Rock was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier’s induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.

  In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.

  Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.

  I wish you to view my work. Here:

  Something seized Ahmihi’s sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed—and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood… things.

  They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a bloodred liquid did a trembling dance.

  At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound
muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being… which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly—

  “No!” He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. “What is this place?”

  The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.

  “Using… us?”

  For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human worldsum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.

  Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his ’Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into… what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.

  He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?

  You share with others (who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws. Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software. An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.

  “If your kind would just leave us alone—”

  Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be… significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.