Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

“If you’d showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you’d be lying in pieces by now.”

  I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed. My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.

  “Where?” He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away—

  Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.

  “As suredead?”

  I find you primates an entrancing medium.

  “Why don’t you just keep us alive and talk to us?”

  He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry.

  You are a fragile medium—pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method. Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer—

  She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.

  “I find this… overly hard-wired… medium is… constrained sufficiently… to yield… fresh insights.”

  “My God, kill her.” He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.

  “I am… dead as… a human… But I remain… a medium.”

  He looked away from Leona. “Don’t you have any sense of what she’s going through?”

  My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.

  “Wow, that must be tough.”

  Working her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through legs caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.

  “Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!”

  My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.

  “Sorry I can’t seem to appreciate it. Leona… she’s sure-dead?”

  “Yes… This one… has been… fully recorded…” Leona wheezed, “I have… harvested her… joyously.” “This way… she’s hideous.”

  As this revived form, I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones. She has thematic possibilities.

  Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. “She doesn’t deserve this.”

  Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?

  He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. “Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?”

  Leona gasped. “I sense… I have… missed essentials… The beauty… is seeping… from my… works.”

  “Beauty’s not the sort of thing that gets used up.”

  “Even through… the tiny… grimed window… of your sensorium… you sense… a world-set… I do not. Apparently… there is… something gained… by such… blunt… limitations.”

  Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. “What’s the problem?”

  “I sense… far more… yet do not… share your… filters.”

  “You know too much?” He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was suredead, “harvested” by the mechs—though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.

  “I have… invaded nervous… systems… driven them to… insanity, suicide.” Leona twitched, stumbled, sprawled. Her eyes goggled at the vault above, drifted to peer into Ahmihi’s. “Not the… whole canvas… something… missing.”

  He tried to reach a beam tube and failed. The Chandelier’s phosphor lights were dimming, shadowing Leona.

  With obvious pain she struggled to her feet. “I tried Ephemerals… so difficult… to grasp.”

  Ahmihi thought desperately. “Look, you have to be us.”

  For the first time in this eerie discussion the Mantis paused. It let Leona crumple on the floor below, a rag doll tossed aside.

  That is a useful suggestion. To truncate my selves into one narrow compass, unable to escape. Yes.

  Ahmihi felt a sudden pressure, like a wall of flinty resolve, course through his sensorium. He had no hope that he would live more than a few moments longer, but still, the hard dry coldness of it filled him with despair.

  THE HARVESTED

  >I had come around the corner and there it was, more like a piece of furniture than a mech, and it poked something at me.

  >The last thing I saw was a ’bot we used for ore hauling, tumbling over and over like something had blown it, and I thought, I’m okay because I’m behind this stressed glass.

  >I still got the memory of something hard and blue in my line of sight, a color I’d never seen before.

  >She fell down and I stooped to help her up and saw she had no head and the thing that was holding her head on the floor jumped up at me, too.

  >lt had a kind of ceramic tread that came around on me when I thought it was dead, booby-trapped some way, I guess, and it caught me in the side like a conveyor belt.

  The Noachian ’Sembly fled the mech plunder of their Chandelier. Their Exec, Ahmihi, had emerged from his capture by the Mantis with a sensorium that howled with discord. Each neurological node of his body vibrated in a different pattern. His voice rang like a stone in a bucket. It was as if the symphony of his body had a deranged conductor.

  But within hours he recovered. He would never speak of the experience with the Mantis. He led his ’Sembly into craft damaged but serviceable. The mechs did not attack as over three hundred escaped the drifting hulk their once glorious spin-city had become.

  This was one of the last routs of the Chandelier Age. After these defeats, humanity fled deep space for the nostalgic refuge of planets. This was in the end foolish, for the Galactic Center is unkind to the making and tending of worlds. There, within a single cubic light-year, a million suns glow. Glancing near-collisions between stars can strip the planets from a star within a few million years. Only worlds carefully stabilized can persist. Even then, they suffer weathering unknown in the calm outer precincts of the great spiral galaxy.

  The Noachian ’Sembly used a gravitational whip around the black hole to escape pursuit. This cost lives and baked their ships until they could barely limp on to a marginally habitable world, named Isis by some other ’Sembly, which a millennium before had departed for greener planets, farther out from True Center. Isis was dry and windswept, but apparently of little interest to mechs. This was enough; the Noachians spiraled in and began to live again. But much had happened on the way.

  Mech weaponry can be insidious, particularly their biological tricks. A ’Sembly platitude was all too true. You may get better after getting hit, but you do not get well.

  A year into their voyage, Ahmihi lay dying. As he gasped hideously, lungs slowly eaten by the nano-seekers the mechs had carried, his wife came near to say goodbye. The ’Sembly folk were afraid to record Ahmihi’s personality into an Aspect, since he was plainly mech-damaged, perhaps mentally. In his fever he spoke of some bargain he had struck with the near-mythical Mantis, and no one could fathom the terms. He had been tampered with in some profound way, perhaps so that the story he told could give away nothing vit
al.

  But they did have his archived recording from the year before; not everything would be lost. In a desperate era, skills and knowledge had to be preserved into the chips which rode at the nape of the neck of each ’Sembly member. These carried the legacy of many ancient personalities, rendered into Aspects or the lesser Faces or Profiles. Ahmihi would survive in fractional form, his expertise available to his descendants.

  No one noticed when a small insectlike entity crawled from the dying Ahmihi’s mouth. It whirred softly toward his wife, Jalia, and stung her. She slapped it away, thinking it no different from the other vermin released from the hydro sections.

  The flier implanted in Jalia a packet of nanodevices that quickly recoded one of her ova. Then it dissolved to avoid detection. The Noachian ’Sembly burned Ahmihi’s body to prevent any possible desecration by mechs, especially if nanos were alive in the ship.

  Their prayers were answered; apparently the small band of fleeing humans were not worth mech time or effort to pursue.

  Jalia gave birth to a son, a treasure in an era when human numbers were falling. Gene scanners found nothing out of the ordinary. She called the boy Paris, in the tradition of the Noachian ’Sembly, to use city names from Earth—Akron, Kiev, Fairhope—though Earth itself was now a mere legend, doubted by many.

  When he was five his intensive education began. He had been an ordinary boy until then, playing happily in the dry fields from which skimpy crops came. He was wiry, athletic, and seldom spoke.

  When Paris began learning, he made a discovery. Others did not sense the world as he did.

  Every second, many millions of bits of information flooded through his senses. But he could consciously discern only about forty bits per second of this cataract. He could read documents faster than he could write, or than people could speak, but the stream was still torpid.

  Whether the information was going in or out, his body was designed for roughly the same torpid flow speed. All serial ways of taking in information were painfully sluggish. His awareness was like a spotlight gliding across a darkened stage, lighting an actor’s face dramatically, leaving all else in the blackness. Consciousness stood on a mountain of discarded information.

  Even thinking about this fact was slow. It took him much longer to explain to himself what he was thinking than it did to think it. His brain channeled ten billion bits per second, far more than he took in from his surroundings.

  There were as many incoming signals from his sensorium as there were outgoing commands to his body. But nearly none of this could he tell anyone about. His sensibility, his speech—all were hopelessly serial logjams. Everybody else was the same; humans were not alone in their serial solitude.

  He had already learned how important story was to them—and to him. Plots, heroes and villains, for and against, minor roles and major ones, action and wisdom, tension and release—as fundamental as the human linear mouth-gut-anus tube, for story was the key to mental digestion.

  And without knowing it, each of them told their own stories, in every moment. Their bodies gave them away with myriad expressions, grunts, shrugs, unconscious gestures. Big chunks of their personalities came through outside their conscious control, as the unconscious spoke for itself through the body, a speech unheard by the discerning driver, hidden from it.

  For a young boy this was a shock. Others knew more about him than he knew about himself. By sensing the megabits that leaked through the body, they could read him.

  This was enormously embarrassing. Such a silent language must have come early in human evolution, Paris guessed, when it was more vital to know what strangers meant than what they said, using some crude proto-language.

  And laughter—the wine of speech, he learned—was the consciousness’s admission of its own paucity. He laughed often, after realizing that.

  Soon, even while scampering in madcap joy over the hard-packed dirt of the playground, he felt a part of him stand apart. What he experienced—all those billions of bits per second—was a simulation of what he sensed. This he felt as a gut level truth.

  Worse, the simulation lagged half a second behind the world outside. He tested this by seeing how fast his body reacted to pain or pleasure. Sure enough, he jerked away from a needle before he consciously knew it was poking him in the calf.

  His sensorium was ripe with tricks. His vision had a blind spot, which he deduced must emerge from the site where nerves entered the back of the eye. An abandoned, ruined Chandelier seemed larger when it hung in its forlorn orbit just above the Isis horizon than when it arched high in the sky. When he ran across the crinkled plains and stopped to admire filmy clouds overhead, his eyes told him for a while that the clouds were rushing by—a kinesthetic memory of running, translated by his mind into an observed fact.

  All because evolution shaped the eye-brain system to regard things high up as farther away, more unattainable, and so made people perceive them as smaller. And retained the sensation of running, unable to discard the mind’s pattern-frame right away.

  He sat in class and regarded his giggling classmates. How odd they seemed. Understanding himself had helped in dealing with them. He was popular, with a natural manner that some mistook for leadership. It was something decidedly different, something never seen in human society before. He felt this but could not name it. Indeed, there was no word.

  Gradually Paris saw that their—and his—world was meaning-filled, before they became aware of it. Scents, rubs, flavors—all carried the freight of origins many millennia and countless light-years away.

  So he came to make his next discovery: the unconscious ruled. He learned this when he noticed that he was happiest when he was not in control—when consciousness did not command. Ecstasy, joy, even simple gladness—these were the fruit of acting without thinking.

  “I am more than my I,” he said wonderingly. “I am my Me.”

  When his work went well—and everyone worked, even children—his Me was engaged. When things went well, they just went, zinging along. He ran ’factoring ’bots, tilled fields, prepared spicy meals—all in the flow, immersed.

  Even when he used his Faces or Profiles for craft labors, he could manifest their outlined selves without conscious management. These ancient sliced segments of real people used some of his perception-processing space, so that when working he lost Isis’s crisp savannah scent, wind-whispers, and prickly rubs. The Faces particularly needed to siphon off these sensory stimuli, to prevent them from becoming husklike embodiments, mere arid digital textbooks. He could feel them sitting behind his eyes, eagerly supping snippets of the world, relishing in scattershot cries. As he slept, he enabled them to raise his eyelids and catch glimpses that fed them gratifying slivers. Listening through his eardrums, they could keep watch—a safety precaution. Of such thin gruel they made their experience. This also isolated him, ensuring deep sleep.

  But there was something more, as well.

  Something shadowy sat within him, a Me beyond sensing except as specter. It seemed to watch while eluding his inner gaze. Yet he could feel this brooding blankness informing his own sense of self.

  This frightened him. He cast about for reassurance. There were sport and sex and spectacle, all unsatisfying. He probed deeper.

  The ’Sembly’s religion—its teachings so varied as to be contradictory—somehow summoned forth that state of free going, while the conscious mind was deflected by prayers, liturgy, hymns, rituals, numbing repetition. One day in Chapel, bored to distraction, Paris tried engaging the skimpy bandwidth of language with a chant, cycling it endlessly in his mind. He found his Me set free; thus he invented meditation.

  In adolescence he found a genuine talent for art. But his work was strange, transitory: ice carvings that melted, sand-sculptures held together by decaying electrostatic fields. He would write poetry with a stylus on pounded plant material, using vegetable pigments… and then rapturously watch them burn in a fire.

  “Poignancy, immediacy,” he replied, when aske
d about his work. “That is the essence I seek.”

  Few understood, but many flocked to see his strange works pass through the moments he allowed them to have.

  Art seemed utterly natural to him. After all, he reasoned, far back in human history, on mythical Earth, there must have been some primate ancestor who saw in the stone’s flight a simple and graceful parabola, and so had a better chance of predicting where it would fall. That cousin would eat more often and presumably reproduce more as well. Neural wiring could reinforce this behavior by instilling a sense of genuine pleasure at the sight of an artful parabola.

  He descended from that appreciative cousin. Though living 28,000 light-years from the dusty plains where art had emerged in genes, he was building on mental processing machinery finely tuned to that ancient place. While he shared a sense for the beauty of simplicity, though, something in him felt the poignancy of each passing moment. That was human, too, but something else in him felt this sense of the sliding moment as a contrast. He did not know why, but he did know that this set him apart.

  This was his first fame, but not his last.

  Quickly he saw that while the Me acted, society held the I accountable. The human social vow was I agree to take responsibility for my Me. On this he brooded.

  He found love, as a young man, and felt it as an agreement: Lover, my Me accepts you. So as well did spirituality come from I know my Me, just as true courage came from I trust my Me.

  Consciousness—bit-starved, ill-informed—was the brain’s model of itself, a simulation of a much more ornate under-Self.

  To experience the world directly, with no editing—what a grail! He attained that state only now and then, and when in it, felt the shocking fullness of the true world. Language evaporated like a drop of water beneath the sun’s full glare. All he could do was point a finger and mutter, “That.”

  Still riding behind his eyes was that phantom, the watcher who could not be watched. Yet it did not control. He felt it riding in him, and learned to ignore it.

  Or rather, his I agreed abstractly to accept the watcher. His Me never did. But there was no way it could control a shadowy vacancy.