Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  In dreams, his I could not control. In everyday life, he learned that his body could not lie; its bandwidth was too high, sending out data from his Me in an unconscious torrent. Conversely, with its small bit rate, the I could lie easily—in fact, could hardly avoid lying, at least by omission. But not his Me.

  This made him into the leader he had no real desire to become. He was too busy learning more than anyone had ever known about what it meant to be human.

  One evening, as he stood guard in a distant precinct at the outer edge of their holdings, he caught a mouse and tried to talk to it. Since they were both of flesh and had sprung from similar origins—this was an Earth rodent, imported by the original expeditions for reasons best known to themselves—he thought he should be able to commune with it. The mouse studied his face across an abyss of processing ability, and Paris could get nothing whatever from the creature on his sensorium.

  Yet somehow he knew that within that tiny head lay deep similarities. Why could a communion not come from a mech? He wondered.

  Amid such puzzles, life pressed upon him. The mechs had returned to Isis.

  * * *

  He met a Rattler while playing with some young men. They were chasing each other, carrying a ball, a game that called forth the hunting joys buried in the primordial past. So immersed they were that the Rattler got within a few hundred meters.

  They were playing near the ruins of a huge Kubla left by the people who had claimed Isis millennia before, then left. Its pleasure dome still offered vibrant illusions if stimulated, and Paris thought the Rattler must be one of these when he first saw it—moving slinky-quick, armatures pivoting to focus upon the men.

  The Rattler cut down six of them before Paris could reach his weapon, a long-bore kinetic rifle. It was hopelessly antique, but that was all they had to give the young men in training. He fired at the Rattler and even hit it but then a friend fell nearby and that distracted him. He had seen death, but not this way. He hesitated and by pure luck the Rattler did not kill him. A bolt from two others stilled the coiled thing. Paris knew he was of no use then and resolved to do better. The emotions that wrenched him as he helped carry the bodies away were like a fever, an illness that did not soon abate.

  That was the beginning. You start out thinking that other people get killed, but not you, of course. The first time you are badly wounded the worst shock of it is not the physical one, but the sudden realization that death can come so easily, and to you.

  It had taken a long time after that to know that nothing could happen to him that had not already happened to every generation before. They had done it and so could he. In a way, dying was the easiest of the hard things.

  There was an inscription above the archway of a broad public plaza, one crowned with a transparent dome through which the whole mad swirl of the Galactic Center constantly churned, and he had written it down to keep it, for the strange joy it brought when he understood it:

  By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death… and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.

  After a while he came to know that nothing happens until it actually comes to you, and you live your life up until then to get the most out of it. To live well, you had to live in each gliding moment. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future, was the vital secret. With it you could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.

  The Me learned this and the I accepted it.

  THE HARVESTED

  >They threw me in this pit of mech-waste, stuff like greasy packing fluff and I figured, sure as hell I can climb out of this.

  >All around these mechs were gathered like it was a ritual and they hanged me upside down first, shooting me through the belly and watching the blood run out and down over my breasts and into my face so I could taste it, warm in the cold air.

  >A whistling sharp by me and then a smack.

  >Must of been some nanos in the bread I ate before this hot sour taste rose up in my throat and I started choking real bad.

  >It stabbed me with an antenna, a big surprise because I thought it was one of those mechs that only used microwave pulsers.

  >It was at the very end of the campaign and I was tired out and lay down to catch a few snores and this slow thing came by, I didn’t pay it any mind.

  >We were going real fast to get away.

  >She went first and made the jump clean as you like and I did too but my leggings busted out and I lost my Goddamn balance.

  Riding in his upper spine he carried an advisor Aspect of great antiquity named Arthur.

  By then Paris was listened to in ’Sembly gatherings, though he was still fairly young. Arthur always urged moderation in diplomacy with the mechs and gave examples from ancient human history. When Paris questioned the hardships Arthur related from the Olden Times when humans had first come to Galactic Center, Arthur huffily replied,

  Let us say it was not precisely tea with the Queen.

  Every now and then Arthur would use these archaic expressions from the Old Time and nobody knew what they meant, but Arthur never seemed to notice. He had others, such as

  Warts and all—some big enough to hang a hat on.

  When plasma discharges sent burnt-gold lattices across the entire sector of the night sky, Arthur observed

  Any sufficiently advanced technology at the Center will appear to be a natural phenomenon.

  He was right, of course. Mech constructions swam in gossamer profusion within a few light-years. No one knew what the mechs were doing at Galactic Center, beyond the obvious point that here the raw energies and particle fluxes favored their kind. Not only were they less vulnerable to the cutting climate, they seemed to have a larger purpose.

  Arthur regaled Paris with tales of how grand the earlier human eras had been, one of his more irritating habits. Still, his Aspect-stilted advice was useful in dealing with the roving mechs who now pestered the ’Sembly’s days.

  Mechs were moving in and they made arrogant displays of their contempt for mere mongrel humans. Dried-up carcasses of animals and humans alike—for to mechs they were alike—dangled on rubbery ties from some mechs’ legs, so that they bounced and swayed with walking or just in the wind. Some thought this was just another way to terrorize humans, but Paris sensed in it the mech sense of humor, or something like it, for none of it of course was funny to humans.

  So the mechs came: Snouts, Lancers, Scrabblers, Stalkers, Rattlers, Baba Yagas, Zappers, Dusters, Luggos. Humanity had paid a high price for each name, each word calling up in a sensorium an instant, resonant, precise catalog of traits and vulnerabilities the mech had, facets won by many deaths.

  Beneath a smoldering sky where there was never truly a night—for dozens of nearby stars brimmed with furious glows, giving a simmering, nebula-lit sense of spreading immensity—mech ships descended like locusts.

  Paris fought in the sprawling, terrible, year-long battle that destroyed the principal mech units on Isis. In that year he wore a wolfish grin, all sharp edges and strung wire. He distinguished himself beneath the Walmsley statue, an ancient shaped mountain. There was a small village and some shacks built into the foot of the memorial monument; that’s how big it was. There Paris deduced the mech maneuverings before they could execute them, and so won the day.

  Not that the men serving under him found him warm. By then his increasing distance had become legendary. “Tight bastard, couldn’t fart without a shoehorn,” he overheard, and took it as a term of respect.

  By then he saw that a machine was a man turned inside out. It could describe all the details but in its flood of data it missed the sum of it all, the experience plucked from the endless stream. A vital secret of humans lay in their filters, what they chose to ignore.

  He did not feel degrees Kelvin or liters
per second or kilograms; he felt heat or cold, flows, heaviness. He knew love and hate, fear and hunger all beyond measure. Beyond the realm of digits.

  Their defeat of the mechs on Isis was surely only temporary. Everyone knew it.

  So the ’Sembly—grown to many millions now by immigration and fast-breeding—convened to celebrate the continuity they honored. It might be the last chance they had to do so.

  In a communal linkage the entire ’Sembly resurrected the Ole Bros—Personae so complete that some interpreted their very twilight existence as evidence for an afterlife. The Ole Bros advised that the ’Sembly strike back at the mechs in deep space, where they dwelled. Only by taking the fight to them could humans hope to survive.

  Paris believed this. Plan on being surprised, the Ole Bros said, and then unaccountably laughed. Paris took up their cause. He had many followers by this time, and women came to him easily, but he was not distracted. Something in the dire situation of his time called to him. He used the ’Sembly’s reverence for the Ole Bros to sway them, while not for a moment believing the theology surrounding the ’Sembly’s reverence for digital resurrections, for the implied afterlife in some remote analytical heaven.

  This turned Paris to a question many had asked in adversity. Of what use to humanity was religion?

  He knew this was not how the others of ’Sembly Noachian saw the world. But part of him insisted: Bare a benefit, explain the behavior. Why he thought automatically in terms of this rule he did not know, but he felt the shadow-self move in himself.

  For the ’Sembly, religion was a social cement. In its extreme form it could even get the believer to go off on crusades. Was it all based on a theory and solution to the greatest human problem, death? The power of theology among people around him then seemed to come from that shared, looming menace. He could see how this notion would spread readily, since in himself he, too, felt the hunger to resolve the anxiety brought on by the fear of death.

  But religion had no apparent feedback from the world; God did not answer his mail. Miracles are few and not reproducible. So why does religion persist, even grow?

  His mechanistic explanations, cutting and skeptical as a young man’s can be, did not seem to capture the essence of religion. There were big questions about the origins of the universe and of natural law. These science gripped only tentatively, converging on the grand riddle: why was there something, with all its order, rather than nothing? Chaos seemed as likely an outcome as the scrupulous, singing harmonies revealed by science.

  If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself to do its own homework—then religion manifested this underlying purpose, this evolution. But then, why did the mechs have no religion?

  To Paris, such abstract ways of envisioning the deep, devout impulse in humanity did not quite capture the heart-thumping urgency of faith. Something was missing.

  This, more than rituals and the ’Sembly’s celebrations of human triumphs over mechs, formed for Paris the convoluted condition of being human.

  THE COLLECTED

  >First thing I knew was, I was here and been turned into some kind of flowerpot.

  >I was in pieces all over but still able to think in little short pieces like this.

  >The pain that was it, and then they made less of it and I could stand it for longer but my arm was still on backwards.

  >It had written my name on my face which I thought was for identification until I saw the hologram of me standing right next door with my dick in the middle of the back of my head and hard all the time even though I couldn’t feel it at all when this thing like a woman climbed onto my neck.

  >The suet wasn’t so bad but drowning in mucus was and when I coughed and it came out through my mouth tasting like something that rotted down there in me.

  >After my skin blistered up black and brown and peeled back the chill set in on the skin below it and ran like scorching oil all over me.

  >I screamed but this thing with lots of legs would not stop.

  He met the Mantis while on patrol, alone.

  It was a glimmering thing, a play upon the planes of rock against a distant hillside. To see it meant looking past the illusions it projected. He could taste and smell it better than see it. Since he was on a routine transport job, alone with some simple ’bots, he was not well armed.

  Paris stood absolutely still and felt it glide closer. No point in running.

  Clan legend told of such a seldom-seen mech class, striding down through a corridor of ruin, broken lives and widespread suredeath, with tales of phantoms glimpsed as many-legged silhouettes scrambling across shadowy horizons, a tradition bequeathed to all the human Families and ’Semblies of horror, ghostly and undeniable, millennia of desiccated Aspect memories and encounters which few survived.

  I ask entrance. You echo of some essence I fathom from a far past. Do you recognize me?

  “No.” Though something buzzed and stirred at the back of his mind, his fear froze it. Then his training asserted itself and he felt rising in his chest a cold anger. He estimated how easily he might damage this thing. It refracted his sensorium’s interrogations, sending back to him hard claps and images of refracted icy layers.

  You have a quick and savory life, here in the wild. Your primate form is sculpted from a longer logic than I customarily encounter.

  Paris caught a fragment of a many-legged image moving rapidly at the base of distant hills. Carefully he calibrated the distance.

  Your phylum of laughing, dreaming vertebrates is capable of manifold surprises. You are an especially complex example of this; you have harvested many of these facets. I look forward to reaping and reviewing them.

  “From me?”

  Of course. You… do not know?

  “Know what?” The Mantis had paused, which in an entity of such vast computing power implied much.

  I see. We, who propagate forward forever, though in mixed forms, do not share your concern for artifacts. Though they seem permanent to you, I have already outlasted mountain ranges. Artifacts are passing tools, soon to be rubbish.

  “Just like me?”

  In your way, yes. So you do intuit…?

  Paris felt in the Mantis’s slow question some hint, but abruptly a part of him swerved from that line of thought. No, he would not go that way.

  Instead he locked his sole weapon on the last vector-signature of the Mantis and fired off a swift burst. The Mantis flickered and was gone.

  We shall merge in time, vessel.

  Seconds ticked by. Not a sign wrinkled his sensorium. No retaliation.

  The rattle of the salvo had soaked through him, enormously gratifying. His heart pounded. Something in him loved the release of action, while another seethed with unease. He felt an exhilaration at having veered away from a confusion his Me did not wish to confront. And what had the Mantis meant by that last transmission?

  He moved away quickly, fear and pride somehow eclipsing the moment, and he seldom thought of it ever again.

  Other Families and ’Semblies had come to Isis, strengthening this planetary redoubt. But in the fast pace of events at Galactic Center, great changes came even over the comparativeiy tiny life span of three centuries enjoyed by humans. Mechs lasted millennia and planned accordingly. Nanomechs still harried the people of Isis. Their Citadels were hard-hammered by the drawing dry climate of prickly dust storms, laden with nanos borne on the restless winds.

  Against the salting of the Isis atmosphere they mounted considerable space-based defenses. No mech could drop an asteroid on Isis, no ship could easily penetrate its magnetosphere. Paris volunteered for training in these military arts. He loved weightless glee, the play of hard dynamics, of Newtonian glides in a friction-free void.

  Isis beckoned with its dry beauties. At the dawn line, arid valleys lay sunk in darkness while snowy mountains gleamed above, crowned by clouds that glowed red-orange like live coals. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a sh
ip. Brooding thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.

  The glories of humanity were just as striking. The shining constellations of Citadels at night lay enmeshed in a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments—beaten down, perhaps, but still casting spacious designs upon whole planets. So much done, in the mere century of his life! He had helped shape artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great squared plains of cultivated fields, immaculate order hard-won from dry valleys.

  By then he had found a wife who loved him despite his strangeness, his need for solitude and silence. He had children of his own, but they showed no interest in art. Their children had children, and Paris sensed their continuity with him. Yet something rode in him he could not name, for it seethed on the billion-bit flow beneath the well-lit theatre of his conscious mind.

  He helped the burgeoning space fleet secure a wormhole for their sun-system. This one had been discovered in a murky molecular cloud that came coasting by the Isis star many centuries before. Hauling it closer consumed two decades of Paris’s life, but he gave them freely. A worm-hole mouth opened to humanity a fresh grasp. Until then, only mechs had employed them.

  His labors were well timed.

  After many decades of the full experience of the ’Sembly, after creating an amazing body of his strange short-lived artwork, the skies blazed once more with constructs the size of moons.

  More vast mechs arrived, ready to break down all seven planets in this solar system, all for raw materials to aid their great Constructions. A faction urged diplomacy. Some other ’Sembly members struggled to complete a vessel to take them away, before the mechs got around to disassembling their planet out from under them.

  Paris opposed this. Instead, he urged the ’Sembly to strike back. “Destroy something they value!” he shouted. “Only then will they respect us enough to listen.”