The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  A yellow-green sun greeted them. And soon enough, an Imperial picket craft. The Admiral had been right behind them and he had called ahead somehow.

  So they ducked and ran. A quick swerve, and they angled into the traffic-train headed for a large wormhole mouth. The commercial charge-computers accepted his Imperial override without a murmur. Zeb had learned well. Fyrna corrected him if he got mixed up.

  Their second hyperspace jump took a mere three minutes. They popped out far from a dim red dwarf.

  By the fourth jump they knew the drill. Having the code-status of the Imperial court banished objections.

  But being on the run meant that they had to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get. Kafalan’s people could not be too far behind.

  A wormhole could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the wormhole throats, which could vary from a finger’s length to a star’s diameter.

  Zeb had known the numbers, of course. There were a few billion wormholes in the galactic disk, spread among several hundred billion stars. The average Imperial Sector was about fifty light years in radius. A jump could bring you out still many years from a far-flung world.

  This influenced planetary development. Some verdant planets were green fortresses against an isolation quite profound. For them the Empire was a remote dream, the source of exotic products and odd ideas.

  The worm web had many openings near inhabitable worlds, but also many near mysteriously useless solar systems. By brute force interstellar hauling the Empire had positioned the smaller wormmouths—those massing perhaps as much as a mountain range—near rich planets. But some wormmouths of gargantuan mass orbited near solar systems as barren and pointless as any surveyed.

  Was this random, or a network left by some earlier civilization? Archaeologists thought so. Certainly the wormholes themselves were leftovers from the Great Emergence, when space and time alike began. They linked distant realms which had once been nearby, when the galaxy was young and smaller. The differential churn of the disk had redistributed the wormholes. But someone—or rather, something—had made sure they at least orbited reasonably near a star.

  They developed a rhythm. Pop through a wormmouth, make comm contact, get in line for the next departure. Imperial watchdogs would not pull anyone of high class from a queue. So their most dangerous moments came as they negotiated clearance.

  At this Fyrna became adept. She sent the WormMaster computers blurts of data and—whisk—they were edging into orbital vectors, bound for their next jump.

  They caught a glimpse of Admiral Kafalan’s baroque ship winking forth from a wormhole mouth they had left only minutes before. In the scurry-scurry of commerce they lost themselves, while they waited their turn. Then they ducked through their next hole, a minor mouth, hoping Kafalan had not noticed.

  For once, the snaky, shiny innards of the worm were almost relaxing to Zeb. This one was small of mouth but long of throat; their journey took dragging, heart-thumping moments.

  Matter could flow only one way at a time in a wormhole. The few experiments with simultaneous two-day transport ended in disaster. No matter how ingenious engineers tried to steer ships around each other, the sheer flexibility of worm-tunnels spelled doom. Each wormmouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as a wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself—a ripple in the “stress tensor,” as physicists termed it.

  Flying ships through both mouths sent stress waves propagating toward each other, at speeds which depended on the location and velocity of the ships. The stress constricted the throat, so that when the waves met, a clenching squeezed down the walls.

  The essential point was that the two waves moved differently after they met. They interacted, one slowing and the other speeding up, in highly nonlinear fashion.

  One wave could grow, the other shrink. The big one made the throat clench down into sausages. When a sausage neck met a ship, the craft might slip through—but calculating that was a prodigious job. If the sausage neck happened to meet the two ships when they passed—crunch.

  This was no mere technical problem. It was a real limitation, imposed by the laws of quantum gravity. From that firm fact arose an elaborate system of safeguards, taxes, regulators, and hangers-on—all the apparatus of a bureaucracy which does indeed have a purpose, and makes the most of it.

  Zeb learned to dispel his apprehension by watching the views. Suns and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the blackness.

  Behind the resplendence, he knew, lurked necessity.

  From the wormhole calculus arose blunt economic facts. Between worlds A and B there might be half a dozen wormhole jumps—the Nest was not simply connected, a mere astrophysical subway system. Each wormmouth imposed added fees and charges on each shipment.

  Control of an entire trade route yielded the maximum profit. The struggle for control was unending, often violent. From the viewpoint of economics, politics, and “historical momentum”—which meant a sort of imposed inertia on events—a local empire which controlled a whole constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.

  Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up. As Governor, he had been forced to bail some of them out. That amounted to local politics, where he had proved reasonably adept. Alas, Kafalan pursued them for global, galactic reasons.

  Many worlds that feasted on the largesse of a wormhole mouth perished, or at least suffered repeated boom-and-bust cycles, because they were elaborately controlled. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm to optimize traffic. But that degree of control made people restive.

  The system could not deliver the best benefits. Over-control failed.

  On their seventeenth jump, they met a case in point.

  “Vector aside for search,” came an automatic command from an Imperial vessel.

  They had no choice. The big-bellied Imperial sentry craft scooped them up within seconds after their emergence from a medium-sized wormhole mouth.

  “Transgression tax,” a computerized system announced. “Planet Alacaran demands that special carriers pay—” A blur of computer language.

  “Let’s pay it,” Zeb said.

  “I wonder if it will provide a tracer for Kafalan’s use,” Fyrna said over comm.

  “What is our option?”

  “I shall use my own personal indices.”

  “For a wormhole transit? That will bankrupt you!”

  “It is safer.”

  Zeb fumed while they floated in magnetic grapplers beneath the Imperial picket ship. The wormhole orbited a heavily industrialized world. Gray cities sprawled over the continents and webbed across the seas in huge hexagonals.

  The Empire had two planetary modes: rural and urban. Farm worlds were socially stable because of its time-honored lineages and stable economic modes. They, and the similar Femo-rustics, lasted.

  This planet Alacaran, on the other hand, seemed to cater to the other basic human impulse: clumping, seeking the rub of one’s fellows, a pinnacle of city-clustering.

  Zeb had always thought it odd that humanity broke so easily into two modes. Now, though, his political experience clarified these proclivities. Most people were truly primates, seeking a leader. Countless planets congealed into the same basic Feudalist attractor groups—Macho, Socialist, Paternal. Even the odd Thanatocracies fit the pattern. They had Pharaoh-figures promising admission to an afterlife, and detailed rankings descending from his exalted peak in the rigid social pyramid.

  “They’re paid off,” Fyrna sent over comm. “Such corruption!”

  “Ummm, yes, shocking.” Was he getting cynical? He wanted to turn and speak with her, but their pencil ship allowed scant socializing.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “To…” He realized that he had no idea.

  “We have probably eluded pursuit.” Fyrna’s voice came throug
h stiff and tight. He had learned to recognize these signs of her own tension.

  “We could work a route back to our Sector.”

  “They would expect that and block it.”

  He felt a stab of disappointment. But she was the professional bodyguard and she was undoubtedly right. “Where, then?”

  “I took advantage of this pause to alert a friend, by wormlink,” she said. “We may be able to return, though through a devious route.”

  “The Speculists—”

  “May not expect such audacity.”

  “Which recommends the idea.”

  Dizzying indeed—leaping about the entire galaxy, trapped in a casket-sized container.

  They jumped and dodged and jumped again. At several more wormhole yards Fyrna made “deals.” Payoffs, actually. She deftly dealt combinations of his cygnets, the Imperial passage indices, and her private numbers.

  “Costly,” Zeb fretted. “How will I ever pay—”

  “The dead do not worry about debts,” she said.

  “You have such an engaging way of putting matters.”

  “Subtlety is wasted here.”

  They emerged from one jump in close orbit about a sublimely tortured star. Streamers lush with light raced by them.

  “How long can this worm last here?” he wondered.

  “It will be rescued, I’m sure. Imagine the chaos in the system if a wormmouth begins to gush hot plasma.”

  Zeb knew the wormhole system, though discovered in pre-Empire ages, had not always been used. After the underlying physics of the wormhole calculus came to be known, ships could ply the galaxy by invoking wormhole states around themselves. This afforded exploration of reaches devoid of wormholes, but at high energy costs and some danger. Further, such ship-local hyperdrives were far slower than simply slipping through a worm.

  And if the Empire eroded? Lost the worm network? Would the slim attack fighters and snakelike weapons fleets give way to lumbering hypership dreadnoughts?

  The next destination swam amid an eerie black void, far out in the halo of red dwarfs above the galactic plane. The disk stretched in luminous splendor. Zeb remembered holding a coin and thinking of how a mere speck on it stood for a vast volume, like a large Zone. Here such human terms seemed pointless. The galaxy was one serene entity, grander than any human perspective.

  “Ravishing,” Fyrna said.

  “See Andromeda? It looks nearly as close.”

  The spiral, twin to their own galaxy, hung above them. Its lanes of clotted dust framed stars azure and crimson and emerald. A slow symphony of mass and time.

  “Here comes our connection,” Zeb warned.

  This wormhole intersection afforded five branches. Three black spheres orbited closely together like circling leopards, blaring bright by their quantum rim radiation. Two cubic wormholes circled further out. Zeb knew that one of the rare variant forms was cubical, but he had never seen any. Two together suggested that they were born at the edge of galaxies, but such matters were beyond his shaky understanding.

  “We go—there,” Fyrna pointed a laser beam at one of the cubes, guiding the pencil ship.

  They thrust toward the smaller cube, gingerly inching up. The wormyard here was automatic and no one hailed them.

  “Tight fit,” Zeb said nervously.

  “Five fingers to spare.”

  He thought she was joking, then realized that if anything, she was underestimating the fit. At this less-used wormhole intersection slow speeds were essential. Good physics, unfortunate economics. The slowdown cut the net flux of mass, making them backwater intersections.

  He gazed at Andromeda to take his mind off the piloting. No wormholes emerged in other galaxies, for arcane reasons of quantum gravity. Or perhaps by some ancient alien design?

  They flew directly into the flat face of a cubic worm. The negative-energy-density struts which held the wormhole open were in the edges, so the faces were free of tidal forces.

  A smooth ride took them quickly to several wormyards in close orbit about planets. One Zeb recognized as a rare type with an old but rained biosphere. There are plenty of ways to kill a world. Or a man, he reflected.

  Another jump—into the working zone of a true, natural black hole. He watched the enormous energy-harvesting disks glow with fermenting scarlets and virulent purples. The Empire had stationed great conduits of magnetic field around the hole. These sucked and drew interstellar dust clouds. The dark cyclones narrowed toward the brilliant accretion disk around the hole. Radiation from the friction and infalling of that great disk was in turn captured by vast grids and reflectors.

  The crop of raw photon energy itself became trapped and flushed into the waiting maws of wormholes. These carried the flux to distant worlds in need of cutting lances of light, for the business of planet-shaping, world-raking, moon-carving.

  “Time to run,” she said.

  “We can’t get back to our home Sector?”

  “I have eavesdropped on the signals sent between worm sites. We are wanted at all domains adjacent to our Sector.”

  “Damn!”

  “I suspect they have many allies.”

  “They must, to get this quick cooperation. They’ve staged a fine little manhunt.”

  “Perhaps the nova trigger issue is but a pretext?”

  “How so?”

  “Many like the present system of wormhole use,” she said delicately. She never let her own views of politics seep into their relationship. Even this oblique reference plainly made her uncomfortable. Her concern was for him as a breathing man, not as a bundle of political abstractions.

  She had a point, too. Zeb wanted free wormholes, governed only by market forces. The Speculists wanted tariffs and favors, preferences and paybacks. And guess who would control all that bureaucracy?

  He floated and thought. She waited for the decision.

  “Precious little running room left.”

  “I do not urge compromise. I merely advise.”

  “Ladoro…”

  “They would not have bothered to kill him unless they wanted to deal.”

  “I don’t like dealing with a knife at my throat.”

  “We need to decide,” she said edgily.

  Time ran against them. He bit his lip. Give up? He couldn’t, even if it seemed smart. “Our Sector is pretty far out. What if we run inward?”

  “To what end?”

  “I’ll be working on that. Let’s go.”

  Pellucid, a mere dozen light-years from Galactic Center, had seventeen wormhole mouths orbiting within its solar system—the highest hole density in the galaxy. The system had originally held only two, but a gargantuan technology of brute interstellar flight had tugged the rest there, to make the nexus.

  Each of the seventeen spawned occasional wild worms. One of these was Fyrna’s target.

  But to reach it, they had to venture where few did.

  “The galactic center is dangerous,” Fyrna said as they coasted toward the decisive wormhole mouth. They curved above a barren mining planet. “But necessary.”

  “The Admiral pursuing us worries me more—” Their jump cut him off.

  —and the spectacle silenced him.

  The filaments were so large the eye could not take them in. They stretched fore and aft, shot through with immense luminous corridors and dusky lanes. These arches yawned over tens of light-years. Immense curves descended toward the white-hot True Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.

  “The black hole,” he said simply.

  The small black hole they had seen only an hour before had trapped a few stellar masses. At True Center, three million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet.

  The orderly arrays of radiance were thin, only a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years as they churned with change. Zeb switched the polarized walls to see in different frequency ranges. Though the curves were hot and roiling in the visible, human spectrum, the
radio revealed hidden intricacy. Threads laced among convoluted spindles. He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order ascending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.

  “Particle flux is high,” Fyrna said tensely. “And rising.”

  “Where’s our junction?”

  “I’m having trouble vector-fixing—ah! There.”

  Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flow-couch. Fyrna took them diving down into a mottled pyramid-shaped wormhole.

  This was an even rarer geometry. Zeb had time to marvel at how accidents of the universal birth-pang had shaped these serene geometries, like exhibits in some god’s Euclidean museum of the mind.

  The wild worm they had used fizzled and glowed behind them. Something emerged on their tail.

  Fyrna sped them toward a ramshackle, temporary wormyard. He said nothing, but felt her tense calculations.

  The sky filled with light.

  “They have detonated the worm!” Fyrna cried.

  Breaking hard, veering left—

  —into a debris cloud. Thumps, crashes.

  Zeb said, “How could the Admiral blow a worm?”

  “He carries considerable weaponry. Evidently the Empire knows how to trigger the negative-energy-density struts inside a wormmouth.”

  “Can they see us?”

  “Not inside this cloud—I hope.”

  “Head for that bigger cloud—there.”

  A huge blot beckoned, coal-sack sullen. They were close in here, near the hole’s accretion disk. Around them churned the deaths of stars, all orchestrated by the magnetic filaments.

  Here stars were ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.

  Amid all that moved the strangest stars of all. Each was half-covered by a hanging hemispherical mask. The mask gave off infrared from this strange screen, which hung at a fixed distance from the star. It hovered on light, gravity just balancing the outward light pressure. The mask reflected half the star’s flux back on it, turning up the heat on the cooker, sending virulent arcs jetting from the corona.