Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  Warren slowly put down the rifle, panting. He had not thought at all about killing Gijan but had just done it, not stopping for the instant of balancing the equation and seeing if it had to be that way, and that was what had saved him. If Gijan had gotten off another few rounds it would have been enough.

  He peered shoreward again. Voices, near. There was some sea still running against the ebb but now the tide was taking hold and carrying him out. The pass was a dark patch in the snarling white of the combers.

  He had to get away fast now because the men to the north would be coming toward the gunfire. Hoisting the sail would just give them a target. He had to wait for the slow steady draw to take him through.

  Something thumped against the bottom of the raft. It came again. Warren stood and cradled the rifle. The boards worked against each other as they came into the chop near the pass. A big dark thing broke water and rolled hugely. Eyes looked at him and legs that had grown from fins kicked against the current. The Swarmer turned and wallowed in the wash from the passage and then sank, the great head turning toward shore. The lagoon swallowed it.

  Warren used the oar to turn the raft free of the rocks. The surf broke to each side and the deep bands of current sucked the raft through with a sudden rush. Behind him Warren heard a cry, lonely and harsh and full of surprise. The warring rumbled beyond the ridge and was lost in the crashing of the waves running hard before an east wind, and he went out into the dark ocean, the raft rising fast and plunging as it came into the full sea swell.

  A sharp crack. A motorboat was coming fast behind. Warren lay flat on the raft and groped for his rifle. Another shot whispered overhead.

  They would get him out here for sure. He aimed at the place where the pilot would be but in the fast chop he knew he would miss. There came a short, stuttering bark of automatic weapons fire. He heard the shots go by, not close. They did not have to be accurate though if they had enough ammunition.

  The raft slewed port and the boat turned to follow. Warren crawled to the edge of the raft, ready to slip overboard when they got too close. It would be better than getting cut down, even with the Swarmers in the water.

  The boat whined and bounced on the swell, bearing down. He lifted the rifle to take aim and knew the odds were damn long against him. He saw a muzzle flash and the deck spat splinters at him where the shots hit.

  Warren squeezed carefully and narrowed his eyes to frame the target and saw something leap suddenly across the bow of the boat. It was big and another followed, landing in front of the pilot and wriggling back over the windshield in one motion. It crashed into the men there. Shouts. A blue-white shape flicked a man overboard and knocked another sprawling. The boat veered to starboard. From this angle Warren could see the pilot, holding to the wheel and crouched to avoid the flicking tail of the Skimmer. The boat bucked and slewed in the chop and its engine roared.

  A hammering of the automatic weapon. The Skimmer jumped and slashed at the man with its tail. Warren leaped up and rocked against the swell to improve his aim. He got off two quick shots at the man. The figure staggered and the Skimmer struck him solidly and he pitched over the side. The pilot glanced back and saw he was alone. The Skimmer stopped thrashing and went still. Warren did not give the man time to think. He fired at the dark splotch at the wheel until it was gone. The boat throttled into silence. Nothing moved.

  Distant shouts came from shore but no sounds of another boat. The boat drifted away. Warren thought of the Skimmer who lay dead in it. He tried to reach the boat, but the currents separated them farther. In moments it was gone in the darkness and the island itself faded into a mere looming shadow on the sea.

  TWO

  At noon the next day three big fighter-bombers split the sky with their roaring and passed over to the south. After that craft streaked across the sky for hours, high and soundless.

  He had rounded the island in the dark and put up his worn sail and then run before the wind to get distance. He had the map from Tseng. The fishing lines were still on the raft with their hooks. The rifle had no rounds left in its clip but with the bayonet it made a good gaff.

  He had a strike at dawn from a small tuna. It got away as he hauled it in. He hoped there would be more now that the Swarmers were going to land and not taking them.

  He got a small fish at noon and another near sunset. He slept most of the day, beneath a pale and heatless wafer disk of a sun. Welts and broken blisters made it hard to lie on his back.

  In the night there was a sudden distant glare of orange reflected off clouds near the horizon. It eased into a glow as the color seeped out of it and then it was gone. Afterward a rolling hammer blow of sound came. There were more bursts of light, fainter.

  High up, silvery specks coasted smoothly across the dark. One by one they vanished in bright firefly sparks—yellow, hard blue. Satellite warfare. Soon they were gone.

  At dawn he woke and searched the sky to find the thin silver thread that reached up into the dark bowl overhead.

  Now it curled about itself. Warren looked down the sky toward the dawn, shielding his eyes, and found another pale streak far below, where nothing should be.

  The Skyhook was broken. Part of it was turning upward while the other fell. Somebody had blown it in two.

  For long moments he watched the faint band come down. Finally he lost it in the glare as the sun rose. There had been men and women working on the lower tip of the Skyhook, engineers, and he tried to imagine what it was to fall hopeless that far and that long and then burn quick and high in the air like a shooting star.

  His knee had swollen up and be could not stand so he lay in the sail’s shadow. The wound in his neck throbbed and had a crusted blue scab. He didn’t touch it.

  A fever came and he sweated, delirious. He saw his wife walking toward him across the sloping waves, called out to her with a caked tongue. Then he was in the lagoon, floating lazily, staring up at the cascading sunbeams that played on him while a motor’s rrrrrrr purred in his ear.

  There was nothing to fear, he saw. A little time swimming like this in the bright water and then some rest and a cool drink, with ice cubes in it, and food, hot crisp toast, butter running on it, and steak well marbled with fat and then corned beef hash with the potatoes well browned, and iced tea, plenty of tea, pitchers of it, drinking it in the shade.

  Then the sweating passed and he rested. A school of fish passed and he got one, gutted and skinned it and ate it whole inside a minute. A little while later he got another and could start to think.

  He would ask the Skimmers about the larvae, he thought, but probably it would be no use. He was sure they were not natural to the Swarmers.

  He remembered the sheets he had written on long ago, the tangled thoughts. The Skimmers hated the machines that had intruded into their home waters. They had learned about them in the long years of voyaging, moved and fed and poked at by things that hummed and jerked and yet had no true life. Not like life that arose from nothing at all, flowering wherever chemicals met and sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.

  Their hate had brought them through a long journey. So when they saw the simple, noisy ships of men they hated those, too.

  The machines would have known that. Planned that. Easy. So easy.

  He fished more but caught nothing.

  That night there were more orange flashes to the west.

  Then, in the hours before dawn, things moved in the sky. Shapes glided through the black, catching the sunlight as they came out of Earth’s shadow.

  They were close in, moving fast, their orbits repeating in less than an hour. Huge, irregular, their surfaces grainy and blotched. For Warren to be able to see the features on them they had to be far bigger than the ships that had brought the Swarmers and Skimmers. Asteroid-sized.

  No defenses rose to meet the shapes. There were no military satellites left. No high-energy lasers. No particle-beam weapons. None of the apparatus that had kept the nuclear peace between humans for half a cen
tury.

  The ships absorbed the sunlight and gave back a strange glowing gray. As Warren watched they began to split. Chunks broke away and fell, separating again and again as they streaked across the sky.

  With dawn the light came back into the sky. The ocean was discolored around the raft. Nearby the water was pale, with a border, more than a hundred meters away, where the water got dark blue again.

  There was something under him. It didn’t move.

  Warren stayed silent, peering down.

  A machine? From the gray ships?

  But it did nothing.

  He probed down with a stick. No resistance. The chop was low and after a while he could tell the raft was not moving any, not following the steady pressure of waves.

  The thing below was holding him in place.

  He had to risk it. He leaned quickly over the side and put his head under. A line ran from the middle of the raft, down to something white. Something solid. Amber phosphorescence rippled through it.

  He watched it for an hour and it did not move, did not rise closer or drift off.

  No fish ventured near. If he stayed here like this he would starve.

  The rifle was useless but he took the knife. He dove in and swam down rapidly. He felt less vulnerable below the surface.

  Refraction misled the eye. It was deeper than he thought, bigger, and he nearly failed to reach it.

  His lungs already burned. Patterns raced across the faces of pearly walls. Twisting, he looked through them and saw floors and levels beyond. Nothing moved inside.

  There was a hole lower down and he swam toward it, throat constricting. He had to get a look at the underside, some glimpse of the engine or driving screw or whatever moved it. As he turned under the sharp edge of the hole he flexed upward, peering toward a refracting edge of light, and his face broke through into air.

  He gasped. It was a stale pocket, trapped between levels. He floated for a moment, trying to make structure out of the fuzzy images around him, confused by the liquid interplay of water and light. Translucent walls blended silvery wads of air with rippling shafts of green sunlight.

  There was nothing mechanical. He swam past quilted; blurred boundaries, the surfaces were smooth, with a resisting softness when he pressed. Some were curved, others flat. He found a ledge and crawled up onto it.

  He rested, surrounded by a play of filtered jade light. The white stuff that made the walls was, he saw, assembled nearly seamlessly from the kind of blocks that had washed up on the island, that Tseng had showed him. The ledge was narrow and bumpy. Crawling along it took him to a low wall he could climb. Beyond lay a flat floor, pitted by random holes nearly a meter wide. Beyond that, more.

  He explored the labyrinth for a long time, cautiously, slipping in the slick, narrow corridors. There seemed no scheme to it, only twisting passageways and small rooms. About a third of the whole structure held trapped air. Water-filled tubes intersected irregular rooms in a kind of curvilinear logic.

  He worked his way up, following the shafts of shadow that descended through milky walls, There—equipment, carelessly dumped into piles, soaked. Wreckage from ships—twisted superstructure, jumbles of electronics, valves and pipes and cables. An entire combustion assembly. There was a whole radio rig, compact, sealed against water, intact with emergency battery. A good ship’s set, with high-frequency bands.

  The debris was unsorted, scattered around a long room which had more of the round openings in the floor. No sign of how it got here.

  He worked on the radio for a while. Some hookup wire was missing but he scavenged some from nearby and got it up and running, it would be heavy, but maybe he could take it up to the raft. He peered at the thick cable lancing up to the raft.

  Green fingers of sunlight came down obliquely now; dusk. He found a hole in the floor that weaved for ten meters and then gave onto the outer wall of the structure. He panted for two minutes, filling his blood with oxygen, and then slipped through, working his way down a wide tube and then out, into open water. Once he was free the tightness in his chest vanished and he opened his mouth and let the air rush out. As he rose, the ocean’s pressure eased and more air filled him, a seeming unending fountain of it, fat bubbles wobbling upward toward the raft.

  The swell lapped at creaking boards. Fish jumped and the horizon was a clean line. The sea was gathering itself again after the long time of the Swarmers, blossoming, the schools returning. He could live here now.

  He got his fishing lines and the rifle and then dove in, carrying them down, entering the structure again. As the light ebbed, schools of fish gathered in the sheltered openings and tube. He trailed his lines down to them and got three.

  Darkness came swiftly. He lay on the floor. There was enough air in the labyrinth to last for the night, and plenty of time to think tomorrow. He dozed fitfully, and in the night his thoughts were ragged.

  There had been no more flashes over the horizon. So one part of it was finished, he thought. To set one kind of life against another. To upset the precarious balance and give humans what they thought at first was a simple fight with something from the sea.

  The men had done what they always did in groups and somehow the thing had gotten away from them. And they had killed the Skyhook, too.

  All without knowing that somewhere something wanted life to cancel other life and for each form to pull the other down. Clearing the way for the gray ships that now hurled themselves into the sea, far from the futile battles raging on the continents.

  Something was moving beyond the walls.

  He woke instantly, muscles stiff, and searched the pearly shafts of light nearby. Air and water bled into each other, catching the cool gleam of dawn, fooling the eye—

  There. Quick, darting movements. Skimmers.

  They entered through the tubes of water, swimming close to his room. And somehow these Skimmers knew about the time before, knew the difficult slow progress, knew the patience it demanded.

  It took hours to understand and more still to get the words right. They had brought something they probably thought would serve as writing implements. The crude pen barely made scratches on the oily, crinkled pages they gave him. He wrote and they replied and he tried to see through the packed strings of words.

  THE GRAY THINGS FLOAT FAR DOWN. THEY MINE THE SEA THEIR FACTORIES CLANK WE CAN HEAR THEM. THEIR SOUNDS TRAPPED IN THE PLANES OF WATER COME LONG DISTANCES. THEY MAKE MORE COPIES OF THEMSELVES. THE SWARMERS ARE GONE TO LAND THE GRAY THINGS THINK THEY ARE SAFE.

  Warren knew he was a hard man, uninterested in talk, never easy with fellow crew members, comfortable only with his wife, and that for a mere few years, before the gray shield had descended between them. There was an emptiness inside him he knew that too without feeling shame or loss, not a lack but a blank space—a vacancy that made him hear the wind whisper and the slosh of waves and, because of the vacancy, to truly listen, not thinking of them as background to man’s incessant mad talk, but as a separate song, the breathing of the planet. So he had an ear for the Skimmers and things meant and shown but not said. He made it into words because he was irreducibly human and the writing of it was a way of fixing it, a mere human impulse against the rub of time, to pin things with words. And the vacancy had saved him, years of interior silence had made a quietness that was solid now, stonelike.

  THEY THINK THEY ARE SAFE. THEY THINK THERE IS ONLY US, TRAPPED IN THIS NEW WORLD. WE BRING YOU TOOLS. WE KNOW THE WATERS. GRAY MACHINES MOVE NOW DO NOT SENSE CANNOT KNOW. CANNOT TASTE THE WATERS.

  That afternoon the Skimmers carried more shipwreck debris in, hauling it awkwardly in rope cradles they had made, whole teams sharing the weight. He picked among it, sorting and thinking. Later they brought him a skipjack to eat.

  He was tinkering with an antenna, making one from cables, when the light abruptly faded. As he peered upward a long shadow drifted against his raft. The underside was a jumble of planking and timbers.

  It held to his raft and Warren wondered wildly
if it could be from the gray ships, something made to float and find survivors. He crouched down among the motors and parts, staring upward, unable to see any Swarmers.

  Something struck the water and fanned into a cascade of bubbles. It twisted and flailed and suddenly Warren saw it was a woman, swimming around the big shape, inspecting it from below. She tugged at something, found it firm, and went on. She glanced down, stopped stroking and hung there, staring. He had the sense that she was looking through the milky blocks of light and could see him. Just before she fan out of air she made a gesture, a brief, choppy signal—and darted upward, air rushing from her.

  People. Other men and women who had learned to live on the sea. Remnants.

  Now a Skimmer came lazily into view, then more, and Warren saw they had led these people on their large raft, led them here. Bringing together a ragtag bunch of survivors and aliens without hands, adrift in an ocean already infested by the gray machines.

  They would have little to work with. Wrecks. Salvage. Maybe some ships fleeing from the mainland, where the death was still spreading. But they could fashion things.

  He was pretty sure that if he spread an antenna across the raft the radio could reach the deep orbit space stations, get word to them, if anyone still lived.

  He would have to build a parabolic antenna, to broadcast in a narrow cone, with no side-lobes. If he kept the transmissions short the only chance of being detected was if one of their orbital craft passed through the cone.

  Even if not, there must be more humans on the sea. They would have to be careful to avoid detection.

  The gray things would wait until the fighting was over on land. Then they would move. They would have to come up, ready to take the solid ground. But they would have to cross the remaining ocean first, and now it was a sea with Skimmers in it and men upon it, life that had fought and lost and endured and fought again and went on silently, peering forward and by instinct seeking other life, still waiting when the gray things began to move again—life still powerful and still asking as life always does, and still dangerous and still coming.