Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  So to me it was as if I had gone through several comfy afternoon snoozes, waking just for medical checkups and the odd message to send. My turn to patrol the ship, fix things. Lonely experience. My friends frozen stiff. I, clumping about in a stolen, alien machine. Hurtling down a corridor of relativistic refractions like a tunnel lined by rainbows. Quite striking. Frightening, too, no matter how well you fathomed the physics.

  I had rigged—well, Nikka rigged; she was a wonder—an infrared transmitter. Messages for Earth, squirted them off every thousand light-years or so. Keeping them up to date on what we’d found—data, reams of it. Plus a bit of rah-rah from me. I was hoping they were still there, really. It seemed like a small gesture at the time, only found out much later how important it was.

  Then, presto physico—there was the Center, glowing like a crass advert out the window. Convenient, these mech devices. Makes one wonder if their designers appreciate them. Pity, if they’re wasted on creatures who don’t relish the delights they can bring.

  The Center? Well, today you can’t see it the way I did. The Old Ones were already there, and more evident than they are now.

  We came in along an instreaming flow, to pick up even more speed. The Center was a perpetual firework. Arcing above it like a vast triumphal arch was a braided fire river. Bristling with gold and orange and sulphurous yellows, it was. Ferocious stuff. The gravitational potential of the black hole, expressed as ruby-hot gas, plasma filaments, incandescences light-years long.

  I’d expected those. From Earth, the Very Large Array had mapped the long, curving arcs that sliced straight up through the galactic plane. They hung a hundred light-years out from the True Center. There were others, too, filmy laces—all lit by gigantic currents.

  Galactic neon lights, they were, the specialists decided. But why so thin and long?—several hundred light-years long, some, and barely half a light-year wide.

  As we got closer, we could make out those filaments—not in the radio waves, but the optical. Dazzling. So clean, so obligingly orderly. Could they be some colossal power source? A transportation corridor, an unimaginable kind of freeway? What—or who—would need that much room to get around?

  They hung there like great ruddy announcements in the sky. But for what? A religious monument? An alien equivalent of the crucifix, beaming its eternal promise across the entire galaxy?

  We all thought of these possibilities as our ship—a great kluggy old thing, with streets of room compared with Lancer—plunged on through murky dust clouds, hot star-forming regions, the lot—hammering inward hard and swift, like an old dog heading home at last. Its navigational gear was simple, direct—and had a setting built in for the True Center.

  Think about that. This was one of its standard destinations.

  Easy to see why, in retrospect. Energy density. A blaze of light. Proton sleet. Huge plasma currents. Just the place for a hungry mech. The feeding trough.

  Mostly I had thought of True Center as a sort of jewel box, with stars packed in and glowing like emeralds, rubies, hot sapphires—all circling neatly around the black hole. Which had quite properly eaten up the nasty dust long ago, of course, leaving this pleasing array of finery.

  Or so the astronomers thought. Never trust in theories, m’lad, if they’re thought up by types who work in offices.

  What? Oh, offices are boxes where people work—no, not actual labor, heavy lifting or anything, more like—let’s pass over that, eh?

  Y’see, I’d forgotten that with several million stars jammed into a few light-years, there are collisions, abrasions. And plenty of shrapnel.

  As we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel.

  You could see others about to go at it—circling each other, loops of gas flung between them like insults. Even worse cases, too, as we got to see the outer edge of the accretion disk. Stars 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 were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. The mask gave off infrared and it took me a while to fathom what was going on.

  See, the hemispherical mask 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. That made the poor star send pretty arcs and jets of mass out, too. Which probably helped the purpose of it all.

  Light escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. But the mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted, kept the right distance. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.

  Somebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.

  Somebody was helping along the black hole’s appetite.

  Who could do such engineering? No time to find out, just then.

  We were getting closer. Heating up. Bloody awful hot, it was.

  And now, after all those years, communications traffic was coursing through the ship’s receivers. Chirps, beeps, dense thickets of blindingly fast code.

  Clearly, signals intended for the mechs who had run the ship. How should we respond?

  We were still dithering when a rather basic truth got pointed out to us. The ship didn’t just ferry mechs about. It was a mech.

  It had carried higher levels of mechs, sure. But it was still a member of the tribe, of sorts.

  As we approached, the course selection we had made ran out. We decelerated, hard. The magnetic throat, which dwarfed the actual ship, compressed. Then it tilted, so that incoming plasma hit us at an angle. That turned the whole ship—and such a groaning, popping, shrieking maneuver I’ve never heard. Clearly, the mechs weren’t sensitive to acoustics.

  We nearly went deaf. It lasted a week.

  But it worked. Turned the ship clean around, swapping ends so the fusion jet played out front of us now. That backflow protected us from the solid junk in the way—burnt it to a crisp, cooked it into ions for the drive itself.

  The throat was now aft of us, but the magnetic field lines fetched a fraction of the debris around, and stuffed it into the maw of the great, fat craft. Fusion burners rattled the plates, heated the air—but our life support labored through.

  A miracle, considering. There was plenty of power, so we rigged better air conditioners. Bit of hard work, that, in the stifling heat. Trouble was, where to dump the excess heat? Refrigerators don’t abolish heat, they just move it.

  We finally resorted to using some of the mech weapons. Lasers, they were, but they looked more like monstrous sewer pipes. Immense, corpulent gadgets.

  Trick about lasers is, they radiate better than anything natural. Higher brightness temperature, in the jargon. To lose energy to your surroundings, you must have something hotter than they are. Lasers could do that. So we dumped the excess heat of deceleration into convertors. And then into the drivers of the lasers themselves. The ship started projecting beams of cutting power, shedding our energy.

  Which made us even more conspicuous. And terrified. Was our ship reporting to its superiors that it had vermin aboard? We adventurers felt pretty damned small.

  We slowed hard—one and a half Earth gravities. Dicey. It was very much like being permanently obese, without any of the pleasure of having gotten that way. We arranged supply vats and made pools of water. Floated there for days, just to escape the weight.

  Finally the view cleared. The fusion drive worked up to higher energies as we slowed. It became transparent in the optical, so we could see through the plume. First in the reds—odd visio
n, that.

  We could clearly make out death, a whole great wall of it. Making haste toward us.

  As for what it was like . . .

  THREE

  Church Mice

  Like trying to take a drink out of a bloody fire hose,” Nigel said.

  “What is?” Nikka was still thin and pale but her black eyes glinted like living marbles, with amused intelligence.

  “Processing this damned data.” Nigel craned his neck to take in the full wall. Its glittering mica surfaces were canted at angles just out of true, in mysterious mech fashion.

  On these faces played different views around their ship. Gaudy sprays of ionized gas. Molecular clouds, inky-black at the core while fires played at their ravaged skins. Stars brimming full, scorching the billows of angry gas that muffled them.

  And directly ahead, a wall of furious mass boiling out from the True Center of the galaxy. Headed toward them.

  “Like a supernova remnant,” Nikka said from her console. She insisted on working. Her Japanese heritage, she said, constant addiction to the harness. When you love a woman, Nigel realized, you take the obsessions along with the rest. Much as she had with him. And in his opinion, she had gotten the worst of the deal. He was not getting easier to live with.

  Nigel frowned. “Looks like the hand of God about to swat a fly.”

  “Now there’s a theory that hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Seems likely. Going pretty fast, that stuff is.”

  “The Dopplers show plenty of hydrogen moving at around four hundred twenty kilometers per second,” she read off crisply.

  “Hard to see why God would bother to swat us.” Shock waves played like burnt-gold filigrees all across the face of the outrushing wall.

  Nikka chuckled. “You take even astrophysics personally.”

  “And why not? Makes it easier to remember the jargon.”

  “Egomania, perhaps?”

  “Probably. Still, there’s plenty else for God to go after around here. We’re pretty dull in comparison.”

  “Elephant rolling over in its sleep, then,” Nikka said.

  Her laconic logic had always amused him. How could he not love a woman who could be more clipped and wry than he? “Ummm?”

  “In old Kyoto days, my father told us a story about a man who thought he would be safe from the storm if he slept next to an elephant. For shelter.”

  “I see. Just because the big survive—”

  “Wait, here are the parallax readings.” She was all business again.

  Nigel studied the strange, tilted facets of the wall display. He had never seen the purpose of angling them so. Fresnel mirrors, he recalled. An old lab experiment, one he had done on a cold winter morning in lab at Cambridge. Creaky equipment, ancient clamps and lenses from mid-nineteenth century. He had done it in jig time, then packed it in for some tea and billiards.

  But he could still recall how it worked. Canting planes slightly askew, so that light reflected back and forth. That formed interference wedges. Retained the phase information in the light waves. Clever. Somehow the mechs had started up this classic effect into a dazzling many-visioned optical smorgasbord.

  And in one of the oblong panels he now saw a rapidly swelling nodule, coal-black and lumpy. Furnace-red brilliance danced behind it.

  “That front is closer than I thought,” Nikka said. “Only a few hours away.”

  “It’ll crack us for sure,” Nigel said.

  She nodded. “We can’t boost to that speed. We’ve barely slowed to local zero.”

  In the steepening potentials near True Center, masses following gravity’s gavotte swung at enormous speeds. “Local zero” just meant the orbital speed of this region. It was safer, they figured, to keep close to that speed while they tried to understand the fireworks further in. Church mice venture under the dinner table at their own peril, especially if the diners are wearing hobnail boots.

  “We can’t run,” Nigel said, eyeing the panels. “So we hide.”

  She followed his scrutiny. “Among this debris?”

  “Had my eye on that blob over there.” An asteroid-sized rock.

  “Why that one?”

  “I got a strange echo-answer from it when I did an immediate area survey.”

  She glanced at him. “This another hunch?”

  “That’s all I ever have.”

  “A solid mass, good shielding. But there are closer ones.”

  “Something about it. A memory.” He did not himself know what made him choose the tumbling stone. Its answer had made him think of the Snark, that old shambling representative of the mechs, long ago. But why should that be a good sign?

  She studied the bewildering array of information on the mech-made panel. He admired how she had puzzled out the mech diagnostics, jimmied them into yielding up the quantities humans liked to use. Brilliant, she was, and could flit among them as if they were perfectly natural, when at base they were skewed, alien. The underlying point, he supposed, was that the laws of mechanics and fields have an internal logic of their own. Any intelligence shapes itself to that blunt fact. In the end, the universe molded its children. Mind, as crusty old Wittgenstein would no doubt have remarked, was cut like a suit of clothes, into contours not born in the cloth itself.

  The thought brought fretful memories. Why, then, did life, in its myriad mortal forms, spend so much of itself in clashes with its fellows?

  “You’re sure?” Nikka’s face was a study in skepticism.

  He laughed. “Bloody hell, of course not.”

  FOUR

  Alexandria

  The others—younger, a shade more foolish—went in first. The slowly revolving chunk was oddly black for the center of the galaxy, where fire and fury prevailed, garish and showy. A cinder from some earlier catastrophe, perhaps. The black hole further in—still unseeable, behind the outrushing violence about to smash into them all—had left many hulks orbiting, burnished and stripped by scouring bursts of intense radiation.

  Dry astrophysics, rendered forth as casual violences.

  In his skinsuit, Nigel edged into the deep crevasse they had found. The crew had elected to moor their ship over the crevasse mouth. Then they wormed further in, to escape the shock waves that were now mere minutes away. The ship had balked, trying to restart its engines, resume its programmed course. Nikka had defeated its executive functions, perhaps even silenced its alarms. But she could not be sure . . .

  Suited up and in zero gravities again, Nigel felt his old self returning. He had once been an astronaut, after all—a word now ancient beyond comprehension. Was Earth still there?

  A certain springy youth returned. He bristled with energy.

  It was difficult to feel the impact of desiccated physics, he reflected. The combination of the coldsleep slots and the stretched time of special relativity, all catapulting him into a far future of distant, glowing vistas. He had arrived at this far time and place armed with only the training and culture of a society now gone to dust. Yet he still sent quick bursts of data homeward, the latest just an hour ago. Message in a cosmic bottle.

  He flitted, giddy and light, down a long tube of chipped rock. Away from the rest.

  He took a sample, just like the old NASA days. Dear, dead acronym. At least that was one American habit he would not miss, the compression of jawbreaker agency names into nonsense words that one nonetheless could at least remember. Across thirty thousand years.

  He studied the rock. Volcanic origin? He tried to remember his geology. Something strange about its grainy flecks.

  Further in, a vault. Gray walls.

  Coasting. Space infused even a stiff old carcass with birdlike grace.

  Stretched lines . . . up . . . through . . . rock eagerly shaping into swells. Should he go farther, or regain the crew, back there? Shadows swung with each motion of his hand torch, like an audience following every movement.

  Patterns in the walls.

  Should he? Caution, old fart. Behind each smile,
sharp teeth wait.

  Down. In. Gliding. Legs dangling

  soft, soft

  into cotton clouds

  shadows melting

  telescoping him into fresh cubes of space, geometries aslant. A spherical room now, glowing an answering red where his torch touched. A trick of the eyes?

  No, messages—racing across the walls, a blur of symbols. Mind trying to wrap the universe around itself?

  He had trouble focusing somehow, probably just loss of local vertical his old NASA training spoke to him, just a turn of the head could perhaps fix it—

  Worn stone steps leading impossibly up, spiraling away. Into a cupped ceiling now spattered with orange drops . . . eyes winking back at him.

  An old film, memories. The Tutankhamen tomb. The jackal god Anubis rampant above defeated foes.

  Opening the tomb.

  Stepping inside.

  One small step for a man, across endless churning millennia.

  Oozing up from the Valley of old dead Kings, the first to rise triumphant here, from Karnak and Luxor, winding downstream slow and snaky, to Alexandria, the library dry with scrolls, Alexandria a woman, ancient now, wrists rouged and legs numb—

  He shook his head.

  Local vertical.

  Insistent mental alarm bells. Get local vertical.

  Old truths, surely no use now?

  The humming. Insistent. No air here but he could not get away from it. Insect-faint but there.

  A sphere ahead. Adhesive patches on the backs of his gloves gave him purchase on it. He swung around, his creaky body bird-quick.

  Beyond the metallic sphere yawned a space so vast his torch fetched back no reflections, no answers. He turned to go back, mind still recalling another place and time—

  The humming lurched, rose. Shrieked, wailed. A violin string stretched to yield an octave too high, cutting, a dull saw meeting hard steel—

  Silence. He blinked, startled.

  It had been like this back so long ago. On his mission to Icarus, a supposed asteroid that had bloomed fitfully, outgassing a momentary cometary tail. That had been caused by the final loss of an internal atmosphere, as it worked out, from a ship. A vessel built inside an asteroid, a starship. Its rock was extrasolar, and lay beyond the dating protocols, the ratios of isotopes awry. For perhaps a hundred million years it had been left orbiting in the inner solar system.