Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  But the Old Ones weren’t mech-based. Not derived from the clanking iron and silicon, no.

  They weren’t cumbersome chemical concoctions like us, either—rickety packets of salty water and sundry impurities held together by calcium rods and an easily punctured skin, all run by dead slow electrical wiring. They weren’t beings that had to be retrofitted over ever worse workmanship from earlier times. Nothing messy. Nothing slapped together by chance.

  The Old Ones were those long strands. Each strand could speak with a single, well, voice. Approximately. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to have one, well, simply invade you. Not like a conversation, no. Rather more like being sodomized by God, I’d say.

  You saw them on your way in? Good. Like pearly lightning, as I remember. You could see them slowly twisting, fragile-seeming.

  They looped and arced around our ship. By this time there were plenty of mech blips on the screens. These the Old Ones deflected—using their magnetic pressures, I expect.

  Us, they swept along. They took precious little note of our limits. Gave us several gravities of acceleration at times. I’d once been an “astronaut”—a term from the days when doing this sort of thing wasn’t as ordinary as walking—and knew to balloon my lungs, then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Others didn’t weather so well. Nikka came through, despite being still weak.

  The Old Ones had made the explosion. That shock wave was simple cleaning up after the real job, sort of a janitor with his broom making a tidy Galactic Center for all. The Old Ones had released an immense burst of energy, mating two black holes together. Making this—the Lair.

  The mechs made a profit off it all. Someone always does. They sucked in the fast protons, harvested the photon flux. They have a whole system set up to gather in the energy fluxes, currents and all. You might say they’re farming the Galactic Center, but there’s another game afoot, a bigger one.

  The Lair. That the mechs tried to destroy. Almost did, I gather. It’s not easy to maintain, still harder to build.

  That explosion shaped the Lair, made it larger. Folded up space-time, manufactured room where there was no room. The Old Ones had made it in the far past, apparently to store things or beings or God knows what. And they kept adding to it, perhaps deepening its complexity.

  In our ship we got picked up, hurled at the accretion disk, then up and over it. Down the axis. Toward the pole of the black hole.

  You followed a similar path, correct? Good—I sent it to you.

  What? Of course, all that about Abraham sending messages. Well, I had to say something to get your attention.

  Deceptive? Of course. Immoral? Don’t be ridiculous.

  I had to claim it was from your grandfather, dead right. I had met him, after all. And speaking through the Magnetic Mind was the only route open to you. Mechs would’ve intercepted anything else.

  Where was I? Ah—

  All the bloody time with mechs coming straight at us. Inflicted some damage, too. Killed some of us. Have you ever seen steel blister?

  Mechs got through. Even the magnetic pressures couldn’t halt everything. Neutron beams, for one. Nothing stopped those.

  The Old Ones were powerful, certainly, but not like God the Sodomizer. Sorry if you find my sense of humor a bit demented. I’ve been here in this mountain largely without company, except of the most lofty sort. A bit wearing. Makes me long for the animal, I suppose. The root and rut of life.

  The Lair? Call it that because we’re hiding in it. As well as countless other organic species.

  The Old Ones stuffed us in here, with our ship. Down the steepest gravitational gradient in the galaxy, into a time-locked storage vault. General relativity, writ large.

  What they never taught me at Cambridge, not even that Hawking fellow, was that space-time could be a construction material. Mass is equivalent to the curvature of space-time, that I’d learned. We build things from matter. Why not build them from curved space-time?

  Simple enough, but the stress-energy tensors involved—you don’t want to see the mathematics, believe me. Ugly stuff. Frightful.

  You see, the most important point in understanding the universe is that God doesn’t have to make any approximations. He’s not doing as I dutifully learned at Cambridge, expanding in some small parameter, iterating solutions, solving differential equations by cut-and-try. God plays the game straight.

  The Old Ones aren’t Gods—in fact, they’re decidedly irritating—but they can solve general relativity in full. No short cuts. In the “strong field limit,” as it’s termed.

  How? I don’t know. I wasn’t here to see it done. Somehow the Old Ones squeezed together two black holes—the giant at True Center, and a lesser one they’d acquired somehow—and blew off a hell-storm of energy.

  When the dust cleared, here was the Lair. Furiously orbiting the remaining black hole, which has total mass a few million times the sun’s. The Lair Labyrinth. Stable. Twisted esty. An abiding refraction.

  They simply inserted us into it. You Bishops flew in, skimmed the ergosphere, correct? That’s the only way in now, apparently. That works only when there’s a significant chunk of mass coming through, rippling the skin of the black hole at its equator. Then someone can fly through.

  Unfortunately, the mechs learned this, too. The Old Ones couldn’t prevent that. We’ve done our best against them, even with the Earthers—I’ll get to them, different subject—to help. But it has been a losing battle. The mechs are good.

  In fact, the Old Ones have stooped to cooperating with us biologicals, the so-called Naturals, because the mechs are too good. They may exterminate all Naturals. The Old Ones don’t want that, for reasons of their own.

  What reason? I have guesses, plenty of them. But nobody knows for sure.

  Part of the confusion, for an ordinary TwenCen mind like mine, is the sheer complexity. Never mind the higher-order mechs, the Old Ones, and the like—they’re beyond view, for me. For you, too, I expect.

  It takes a while to get used to even the physics, y’see. The Lair—what? Oh, right, you can call it Wedge if you like, there must be a thousand names. Some quite obscene; you should hear sometime how “black hole” translates into Russian. The Lair is like a wasp’s nest perched on a cliff. The Eater’s tidal forces warp it, stretch both space and time.

  The lower parts live differently. Time runs slower here—straight Einsteinian effect, that. So outside, while centuries are sweeping by, I’m having lunch. Gives a body perspective. Of course, I do take long lunches.

  And it gets a bit lonely, too.

  TEN

  Vermin

  Toby had listened and watched and finally it was too damned much.

  The walls flashed with pictures, scenes of astonishing depth and range. Colossal twisted ships, frothing turbulence in the accretion disk, vistas with skewed perspectives, geometries so odd the eye could not keep them in order. Walmsley’s voice alone called up the images, summoned by some program in the utterly bare room.

  To Toby, technology meant details, controls, complex systems. Here nothing met the eye but plain walls. Yet the room responded to everything Walmsley seemed to need, even when he did not speak. Food and drink appeared through the floor. Music sounded in the distance, and Walmsley cocked an ear to it.

  “Look,” Toby said, “I’m trying to piece this together with the history of Family Bishop.”

  “That I know. Your Family came out of the Hunker Down. That’s when the folk outside, the Earthers, decided they couldn’t hold the mechs anymore. They left their cities.”

  “The Chandeliers?”

  “Right, that’s one tribal name for them. Wonderful places. I watched them disintegrate, alas.”

  “And we Bishops went to Snowglade?”

  “Is that—” Walmsley appeared to listen to some distant voice, then nodded. “Your name for it, yes. J-three-six-four, the index says. The index isn’t very romantic about these things, I’m afraid.”

&
nbsp; “And we lived there for . . . ?”

  “Many centuries. The mechs weren’t bothering with planets just then, y’see. They harvested plasma flows in those eras. When they got around to mining and chewing up planets, they ran into another organic species that came surging in. Big bugs, they were.”

  “Quath!—the Myriapodia.”

  “Right. Impressive creatures. They’re tech-bio anthologies, half-artificial, as the Earthers became. The Old Ones say they’re still missing something we humans’ve got, but I can’t fancy what that could be.”

  Toby felt elation at finding something in this history that he knew about. Quath . . . and where was she?

  Walmsley said, “The Myriapodia have been giving the mechs trouble. Not enough to stop their grand works, though.”

  “We hooked up with the Myriapodia, after some skirmishing. One is—was—with me.”

  Walmsley nodded. “Standard mech tactic. Used you to take some of the fight out of the bugs.”

  “What? We ran into them by accident. Our Family had escaped from Snowglade and—”

  “The mechs let you get away.”

  “The hell they did! We fought—”

  “We’re vermin to them,” Walmsley said gently.

  “And together, we and Quath’s kind, we tore the hell out of the mechs around that planet, near Abraham’s Star. I was there, I know—”

  “Certainly. The big bugs had cosmic strings, correct?”

  “Uh, yeasay.”

  “Fearsome as tools or weaponry alike. But the mechs are managing all this, for reasons I don’t quite follow. A faction wanted you Bishops here, at the Lair. They want something from you, but precisely what, I don’t know. Another faction would much prefer you all dead. Some strange game’s afoot.”

  Toby shot him an irked look. “You’ve had all this time here. Why haven’t you figured it out?”

  “Data’s hard to get, and subtle when you do. Most of the cards aren’t on the table—if there even is a table. And . . . well, point is, my family and I—”

  “Family Brit?”

  “No, no, in my time we thought of the nearest relatives as family. Family Brit was, shall we say, a manner of speaking.”

  “You kept Family so small? Why?”

  Walmsley’s eyes rolled up theatrically. “Comes to that, I’d sooner explain science than culture. Nikka and I, well, we were attempting a bit of an experiment, really. Wanted to get three generations together, for genetic reasons. Turned out wrong, since most of humanity had already genetically drifted away from—”

  “Genetic? I don’t—”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself. See, my family and I—just a few of us, not the bloody United Kingdom, see?—had discovered some odd scientific matters. Let me show you how it was.”

  “And those Earthers—”

  “Let me tell it my way.”

  ELEVEN

  The Earthers

  They were not what he expected.

  “Hope you weren’t hurt,” the tall woman said. English, slightly accented with flat a’s and odd, hollow e’s. She was the first Earther he had seen.

  “Jostled a bit, is all,” Nigel tried to say lightly.

  He had barely survived a brush with some mechs who had appeared to ooze straight out of the walls, like an elaborate magic trick. Then the Earthers had appeared and made short work of the strangely liquid mechs.

  Earthers. Nigel had seen their fleet approaching the Lair, knew they were here, but in its Labyrinth was unsure of how to find them. They found him, instead.

  “Why are you still speaking English?” he asked slowly.

  “Oh, we have this archaic dialect as an inboard. We heard you speaking it.”

  “Um. Very thoughtful.”

  “Your transmissions used it.”

  They moved with swift, sure movements, these people two heads taller than Nigel, caring for the wounded. He had taken a knock in the ribs, a pulse that broke the skin by frying it to a crisp, like a Thanksgiving turkey. He lay back and let the woman put a patch on it. The wound felt cold, then hot, then numb, and then he did not notice it at all.

  So these were the people who had built starships—better by far than the mech ship Nigel and Nikka had come here in—and made it their duty to reach Galactic Center. He tried to view them objectively, though by their earlier messages he knew they were from several thousand years after his time on Earth. He tried to imagine what time’s juggernaut could bring after the dear dead TwenCen and the sobering TwenOne.

  He lay back and watched them with slitted gaze. They spoke softly, used minimal sentences.

  Be objective, now, old fellow. See them as just another organic race. Just another large mammal.

  Hominids, yet different. He was somewhat gladdened to note that they still resembled the common chimps and pygmy chimps, just bigger and with less hair, walking upright. The visible differences between humans and chimps were far less than, say, between Great Danes and Chihuahuas. Yet dogs interbred and the chimps did not; the genome kept its secrets well hidden from the eye. Humans differed from chimps by a single percent in DNA. These folk were still of the species.

  These Earthers had killed mechs with obvious relish, too. Very human. Not strictly a hominid trait; genocide occurred in wolves and chimps alike. Animal murder was widespread. Ducks and orangutans raped. Ants had organized warfare and slave raids. Chimps in the wild, he recalled, had at least as good a chance of being murdered as did humans in cities.

  Nigel lay back, head woozy. Of all the hallowed human hallmarks—speech, art, technology, and the rest—the one that came most obviously from animal ancestors was genocide. Human tribes may well have evolved as a group defense. That no doubt helped, in those millennia separating him from these big, bright hominids.

  “Clubbiness against clubs,” he said aloud. A dry crack of a voice. Yes, he was skimming, mind light as shining dust.

  These Earthers had oddly shaped ears, more muscular frames, curious large eyes. Their uniforms were anything but uniform—technicolor wraparounds that shifted to different scenes in apparently random fashion. As the woman came over to check him again her loose garment abruptly showed him a sunlit seashore, waves crashing. To soothe him?

  Art adorned other Earthers’ close-fitting clothes—collages, abstracts, grainy expressionist vistas. Woozy, he puzzled over that. Art was certainly not useful in the narrow senses employed by the animal behaviorists or evolutionary biologists. Why did Cro-Magnon develop it? Bird songs were a different matter; they helped woo a mate, defend an area. Why did humans, the Earthers, still have their fragile arts? Bower birds built airy confections of leaves, lace, and fungi, all in the pursuit of love, or genes. He scarcely thought abstract expressionism could make such a claim. Could all the heights of human artistry be a display strategy, like a peacock’s plumage?

  He laughed at that and sat up. His fried side did not even ache. His head was clearer. Nikka stood a short distance away, talking to a huge fellow. Nigel waved.

  Nikka and the man came over. “I’m Akran,” the man said, staring down, blinking rapidly. “Are you . . . Walmsley?”

  “I believe so.”

  “My Lord! To find you!”

  “Just in time, too. Thanks.”

  “But you—you are—still alive!”

  “Somewhat.”

  Other Earthers came running, formed a knot around Nikka and Nigel.

  “It’s him!”

  “And her! She’s the one mentioned in Message Fifty-seven.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Sure it is. Look at him.”

  “After all this time?”

  “He’s been inside this twisted space-time.”

  “Don’t forget the Long Sleep.”

  “Still, it’s incredible that—”

  “It’s Walmsley.”

  Nigel gazed up into their faces and felt woozy. They all started speaking and Nikka beamed down at him—she seemed to understand what was going on—and th
ey talked so fast he could barely get the idea.

  One of them played a recording then and Nigel heard his own voice, reedy and precise.

  “Hello? Data follows on the molecular cloud we’re passing through. Still on course, apparently.”

  A blur of data, then: “This is humanity’s expedition. On high boost, flying inward.”

  Static. A sizzling hiss, like fat frying. “Hello? We’re still here. Are you?”

  The Earthers stood silently, long after the recording finished.

  “We got your messages every few centuries,” Akran said. “You know about the first assault, mechs dumping alien life into your seas? We received your first transmission just as we were getting the upper hand over those.”

  Nigel frowned. “So you really didn’t need help from us—”

  “Oh no! That was just the first. The second time, they tried to pound us with asteroids. Lots of them. Nearly got us, that time.”

  Nigel shook his head to clear it. “We sent you some mech gear, data—”

  “We got them. Helped a lot. That was at the worst of the third assault, the Ferret Time. That lasted five centuries.”

  “My God,” Nikka said. “The mechs had that strong a force?”

  “Of course,” Akran said. “Then the smart ones arrived. Tried to fool us. We lost a big piece of Earth to them. That took a thousand years.”

  Nigel said, “And you kept getting my messages?”

  Akron nodded eagerly. “We put up big antennas. First in orbit, then all around the solar system. Mechs kept finding them, smashing them.”

  Nigel thought of the centuries of struggle and sighed. The world revolved with a serene grace, people and dirt starting to spin left to right—

  “Is he tired?” Akran said with alarm. “We can talk later, let him sleep—”

  “Go on,” Nikka said. Nigel could only nod.

  “We did miss some of the messages, when the mechs came at us with positron weapons. But we got antennas back up on the moon after about four hundred years. That was after the poles melted and we lost most of the continents.”