Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “You’re just being cynical,”

  “Um. ‘Cynical’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Um. Usually.”

  A month passed without his particularly noticing it. One evening when Carlotta came by he muttered a greeting and went back to watching a three-dimensional color-factored Fourier picture of the EMs signals. They still remained damned nearly opaque to him. He was getting a hint of some earlier history, of their brief flirtation with spaceships and astronomy. There was something like poetry here, a suggestion of a fractured time, glimmers of the beings who had mustered the strength to remake themselves.

  “How do you think we should vote on this case coming up?” Nikka asked.

  —fragmented sprockets in the signal there— “Uh, what?”

  “This woman who stole all those shipcredits.”

  “How?”

  “False indexing, of course.”

  “What do you say, Carlotta?”

  “She’s guilty as sin.”

  “Um. Always wondered what that meant. What’s sin supposed to be guilty of?”

  —made one wonder if the pre-EM culture had ever gotten out of its own solar system, these images here, could mean outward-stretching limbs or tracers to other stars or a whacking great blowoff of dandelion seed for that matter—

  “Take it from me, she did it.”

  “Um. So the tribunal said.”

  “The whole crew has to decide what to do about her, though,” Nikka said.

  —crew’s rattled more than they know with this continual stream of bad news from Earth, Swarmers everywhere, even the chemicals don’t seem to work on them, and meanwhile the work goes on in orbit above the blighted oceans, building the starships, using self-programmed machines to do the scutwork, mankind getting ready to burst out like dandelion seeds among the stars, a runaway effect—

  Carlotta said, “I think she should be stored away in the Slots.”

  “That’s no punishment,” Nikka said.

  “Course it is,” Nigel mumbled. “She’ll wake up Earth-side, discredited, having accomplished nothing.”

  —an unstoppable exodus now, at just the right moment—

  “I think she should be ostracized,” Carlotta put in.

  “A collective solution?” Nikka pursed her lips. “I wonder …”

  —which might just be what leaving the ancient Mare Marginis wreck was meant to accomplish, a vault of the ages lying there in lunar pumice, and the Snark had “accidentally” activated it, ol’ boojum renegade Snark, too long gone from its masters, traitor to the lathe that bore it, knew there were only decades left to us once it had relayed what it found, knew something was up the sleeve of its Lords of Antiquity and gave us a slim chance of getting round it, if we could only understand—

  They were having a fight.

  Nigel realized this slowly. It began with Carlotta saying, “You know, it’s been weeks since I’ve been over here,” just casually in the flow of conversation. But Nikka took something in it wrong and sat up stiffly in the couch and replied, “What do you mean?”

  “Well, only that I haven’t seen very much of you two, that’s all.”

  “We’ve been busy.”

  Carlotta was not going to be put off with a bland generality. “You two don’t have me over the way we once did.”

  “Well, you don’t have us over at all.”

  “My apartment is crowded and, you know, yours is so much better.”

  Nigel spoke up. “True enough.”

  “One of my roomos has rotated, Doris, and this Lydia, the new one, isn’t cooperative at all. I think that’s why she was put in with us by the Block Council. She needs some socializing after her blowup with some lover, I don’t know who, but—”

  “Carlotta, that’s not what you wanted to talk about,” Nikka said with an edge in her voice.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “You’ve been coming up to me at work, leaving messages—plucking at my sleeve, nagging me for attention.”

  “Well, I need it.”

  Nigel said, “Don’t we all.”

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  Nikka observed, “The one who doesn’t understand is over there.”

  Nigel raised his head. He had just finished the damned dishes and felt he deserved a moment’s break. Apparently it was not to be. “What?”

  “Well, at least he’s said something germane,” Nikka said.

  Nigel murmured, “Sorry, fresh out of gossip.”

  “Gossip? Not gossip! I want you to say something, not sit there and pore over those goddamn transcripts.”

  “Not transcripts. Logs. Of—”

  “Yes, yes, Alex dutifully points our deployed antennas backward each day, so you can get your ration of EM gabble-gabble. But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore me.”

  Stiffly:“I didn’t realize I was.”

  Carlotta:“Look, of course you are.”

  Defensively:“I work hard. My concentration isn’t that good anymore. Things slip by me. I—”

  Carlotta:“You’re not responding.”

  Nigel:“What is this, groupthink?”

  Nikka:“If this is a threesome we have to talk.”

  Nigel:“Of course. But I’m explaining—”

  Carlotta:“How you’ve been neglecting the relationship.”

  Nigel:“That’s how you see it?”

  Nikka:“Unfortunately, yes.”

  Nigel:“It’s harder to keep three balls in the air than two.”

  Carlotta:“That’s a cliché. What’s that mean?”

  Nigel:“I’m dead pushed and fagged, that’s what.”

  Nikka:“No, it’s deeper than that.”

  Nigel:“To borrow a phrase, what’s that bloody mean?”

  Nikka:“It means I don’t like being treated like an old shoe.”

  Carlotta:“You’re aren’t tuned in here.”

  Nikka:“Three-way relationships are hard, but each member must give as much of themselves as—”

  Nigel:“Sounds like a flamin’ sociology textbook.”

  Carlotta:“Empathize.”

  Nigel:“I am. I really am.”

  Nikka:“You sit around, reading the astrophysical updates, but I never hear you as an ordinary man anymore.”

  Nigel:“There’s the possibility that I’m not.”

  Carlotta:“Don’t go all stiff on us again.”

  Nigel:“Am I imagining this, or have we gone from Carlotta to me?”

  Carlotta:“Maybe it’s the same problem.”

  Nikka:“No, it’s not. We all help each other. But Nigel has been burrowing into these neuro-anthropological matrix studies of his and, and shutting the world out.”

  Nigel:“Admittedly.”

  Carlotta:“Not so fast. My feeling is that you two are revolving around each other so much that I can’t get in edgewise.”

  Nikka:“I admit that I’ve been concerned with him. Perhaps less easy to, to reach, for you. But he is getting more distant from me. And from you.”

  Carlotta:“Sometimes I think it’s just a tactic.”

  Nigel:“Winning through withdrawal?”

  Carlotta:“Not exactly, but—”

  Nigel:“Then what? I’m a renegade, I’ve admitted that. And I sop up great gouts of time plugging away at my obsessions. But they’re my obsessions. Haven’t I buggering well earned the right to—”

  Nikka:“Not in this relationship, you haven’t. You’ve got to participate.”

  Carlotta:“Look, I think you ought to consider what you’re doing with, or doing to Nikka. She isn’t the same person now that she was when we left Earthside. She doesn’t respond to people, to me, the way she did then and I think it’s—”

  Nikka turned to Carlotta. “Why don’t you just do what you want? What you really feel, instead of echoing and reacting to us, to me, to—”

  Nigel said slowly, “Y
es, I should think—”

  “And you—!” Nikka cried. “We’re supposed to tiptoe softly around you while you’re muttering deep thoughts about who knows what!”

  Carlotta began, “Look—”

  Nikka whirled to her. “We each have to have our own lives. Don’t you see that? Three-sided things are harder. They only work if one pair is no more important than the other.”

  Carlotta said, “But you and Nigel are more important than you and me, or Nigel and me.”

  Nigel:“Give it time.” Though he didn’t really feel that way.

  Nikka sighed. She said quietly to Carlotta, “Do what you really want. That’s the answer. It’s the only way you’ll be happy.”

  Nigel nodded, a bit dazed. The storm of the two women had washed over him suddenly and he was not sure what it meant. “And I, in turn, shall try not to withdraw so much,” he said formally. He was damned if he could see how, though.

  He was doing therapy when Bob came by, sweating from running.

  “Still gettin’ inna box, uh?” Bob asked. He thumped the gray metal. “This’s the neurotiming one?”

  “Right.” Nigel grimaced. “Not my favorite. Sends prickly feelings up your nerves, like chilled mice running toward your heart.”

  Bob shuddered. “Me, I stay away from this stuff.”

  “Do, yes.”

  “Ever’ time I have to come in for some med work I feel like I’m puttin’ my balls in a grinder. Somethin’ goes wrong—poof.”

  “No choices left for me. Afraid I won’t be working for you again. In fact, I was surprised when you let me onto the throat-scraping team.”

  Bob leaned against the massive cabinet and mopped sweat from his face, grimacing. “Wasn’t me. Ted overrode my judgment. Wish I haddna let him.”

  “Not your fault. My medical was good, after all.”

  “Marginal. Just marginal.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thing was, I rejected you right off. Ted came and leaned on me—really leaned. Called in some obligations, had Sanchez over in Medical sweet-talk me. The works. I finally caved in.”

  “Ah.”

  “Wish I haddna.”

  It was, of course, the sort of thing you could never be sure of. Still, from Ted’s point of view; the calculation was simple enough: How could Ted lose? If Nigel did well in the job, things would have gone on as before. When he failed, instead, his long recovery reduced his political effectiveness.

  Or was this paranoia? Hard to tell. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself. After all, there was always the possibility that this was merely an opening move.

  Carlotta said, “I still don’t buy it,” and sipped at her drink. It was another fizzing orange thing, filling the air with a tingling sweetness.

  Nigel persisted. “Machines can evolve, just as animals do.”

  “Look—those things we’ve found, orbiting god-awful messed-up worlds. Sure, they’re automated artifacts. But intelligent? Self-reproducing, okay. The time needed to make a really smart entity is—”

  “Enormous. Granted. We haven’t dated most of those worlds—can’t, with just one flyby. They could be billions of years older than Earth.”

  There was the rub. It was difficult to think of what the galaxy might be like if organically derived intelligence was a mere passing glimmer, if machine evolution dominated in the long run. The ruins Lancer and the probes were finding seemed to say that even societies which had colonized other worlds could still be vulnerable to species suicide. Complex systems in orbit would have the best chance to live. A war would be a powerful selection pressure for survival among machines which had, in whatever weak form, a desire for survival. Given time …

  That was the point. Events on a galactic scale were slow, majestic. That fact had been written into the structure of the universe, from the beginning. In order for galaxies to form at all, the expansion energy of the Big Bang had to be just the right amount. To make stars coalesce from dust clouds, certain physical constants had to be the correct size. Otherwise, ordinary hydrogen would not be so widespread, and stellar evolution would be quite different. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker than they are, no complex chemical elements would be possible. Planets would be dull places, without a variety of elements to cook into life.

  The size of stars, and their distances from each other, were not arbitrary. If they were not thinly spread, collisions between them would have soon disrupted the planetary systems orbiting them. The size of the galaxy was set, among other things, by the strength of gravity. The fact that gravity was relatively weak, compared to electromagnetism and other forces, allowed the galaxy to have a hundred billion stars in it. This same weakness let living entities evolve which were bigger than microbes, without being crushed by their planet’s gravity. That meant they could be big enough, and complex enough, to dream of voyaging to the distant dots of light in a black sky.

  Those organic dreamers were doomed to a poignant end. Evolution worked remorselessly in a cycle of birth, begetting, and death. Each life-form had to make room for its children, or else the weight of the past would bear down on any mutation, smothering change. So death was written into the genetic code. Evolution’s judicial indifference selected for death as well as life.

  The coming of intelligent entities meant the birth of tragedy, the dawning realization of personal finiteness. Given the distance of habitable planets from a star, deducing the surface temperature, factoring in the physical constants that predicated chemistry—it was not hard to work out the approximate lifetime that evolution would ordain for human-sized intelligent life: a century or so. Which meant there was barely time to look around, understand, and work for a few frantic decades, before the darkness closed in. At best, an intelligent organism could make its mark in one or two areas of thought. It came and vanished in a flicker. Through its lifetime the night sky would not appear to move at all. The galaxy seemed frozen, unchanging.

  Unmoving stars, distant targets. The organic beings, knowing of their own coming deaths, could still dream of going there. Yet on their voyages they were subject to the speed limit set by light. If light’s velocity had been higher, allowing rapid flight between stars, there would have been a huge price to pay. Nuclear forces would be different; the stars’ slow percolating of the heavy elements would not work. The long march upward that led to human-sized creatures would never have gotten started.

  So it all knitted together: To arise naturally out of this universe meant a sure knowledge of impending death. That foreshortened all perspectives, forcing a creature to think on short time scales—times so truncated that a journey between stars was a life-devouring odyssey.

  “—doesn’t explain the Swarmers, doesn’t account for the EMs adequately,” Carlotta was saving. “Your explanation has too many holes. Too many unjustified assumptions.”

  “He hasn’t had help with a detailed analysis, remember that,” Nikka put in.

  “No,” Nigel said, “Carlotta’s right. It needs work. Conceptual work.”

  He sat back while the women discussed the latest gravlens images, his mind still wandering. He watched Carlotta’s quick, deft movements. She spent a lot of time on her dress, making artful concoctions from the skimpy supplies available. He was losing touch with her. She saw more of Nikka than of him, and knew a lot of the crewmen who were multisocketed now. Those people spent not only their working hours but their recreation as well, plugged in, taking part in—what was the phrase?—“computer-assisted socialization.” Meanwhile, Theory Section was producing no new hypotheses, nothing beyond a bland compiling of data. As the light-years piled up, the crew was turning inward, away from the awful emptiness that lay beyond Lancer’s stone buffers. Few went outside anymore, to gaze upon the relativistically Dopplered rainbow unaided. Weeks went by without his hearing even a mention of Earthside in casual conversation. In the face of immensity, something ingrained in humans made them reduce matters to the local, the present, the specific.

  Admittedly, L
ancer was packed with ambitious, intelligent folk. Given the years in flight, social diversions had undoubtedly been on from the start. But this … No, something rang wrong. Something beyond his curmudgeon’s distrust. Ted Landon and the rest could tune down this sort of thing if they desired. But a crew distracted was a crew easily misled, easily manipulated. And from such a muddle, a strong leader often eventually emerged when a crisis finally came.

  He watched Carlotta stirring the orange ice shards in her noisy drink. He thought of Magellan, voyaging with thin hopes and not enough oranges to stave off scurvy. And of the Titantic, which sailed with absolute certainty and oranges galore.

  “—wouldn’t they?” Carlotta was asking him a question.

  “I don’t catch the drift,” he said to cover his day-dreaming.

  “I mean, what’s going to force them to evolve higher intelligence?”

  “Self-replicating machines can forage for raw materials anywhere. Lord knows they work better in space than we do—we’re hopeless, messy sods. But resources always run out. That will ensure competition.”

  “It takes so long to exhaust a whole solar system,” Nikka said.

  “Um. Yes. Hard for us to think on that time scale, isn’t it? Perhaps a reasonably bright machine needn’t wait around for evolution to do its work, though. It can augment its intelligence by adding on units, remember. Manufacturing, then delegating tasks to its new subsystems. Boosts the thinking speed, which is at least a step in the right direction. Simpler than willing yourself to have more brain cells, which is what we’d have to do.”

  “Look, I’m the computer hack here,” Carlotta said. “I say artificial intelligence isn’t that easy. Earthside’s huge machines are sharp, sure, but it’s not just a question of adding more capacity.”

  “Granted. But we’re talking about millions of years of evolution here—perhaps billions.”

  “That’s a big, glossy generalization you’re making,” Carlotta said.

  “So it is. I suppose I ought to think matters through better.”

  “Listen,” Carlotta pressed him, “this is science. You’ve got to make a prediction if you want people to listen.”

  “Right. Here it is. A Watcher will appear around every world where technology is possible. Or where it once was and might come again. They’re cops, you see. But they only police spots where technology might come from a naturally arising species. An organic one.”