Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “To ordinaries like us?” Nikka asked with a wise smile.

  The woman sniffed. “I do not use such mundane slang. Though surely there is a difference between us. I have touched the Old Ones directly. At the mental level.”

  “I’m sure it’s wonderful,” Nikka said.

  There was not a shade of malice in her tone but Nigel had a hard time not chuckling at the stiletto of meaning he could read in the words. He and Nikka were far older than this woman, but if he ever got as stiff and dead as her, he would blow his head off. So much for Interfacing with the Old Ones. He had decided to not undergo it when it was first offered, when the Earthers had devised the intricate method. Now he was reminded why.

  “I expect you to tend to the defenses we will set up here,” the woman said, still eyeing Nikka for a hint of spleen. Interfacers were notorious for taking offense.

  “Defenses?” Ito was surprised.

  “Against mechanicals. They may try to cut off this esty Vor.”

  Ito scowled skeptically. “Haven’t seen a mech around here in a long time.”

  “They have attacked other Vors and sealed them up.”

  Nigel nodded, old angers rising in him.

  The Interfacer held out a viewboard. “There were further views in the data you extracted from the dead woman.”

  In its surface images flickered. A vision of black holes—sharp dots against a wash of pearly light. The esty had formed from their collision. The viewboard was an advanced model. Into Nigel’s sensorium sounded quick, darting visions.

  FOUR

  Agonies of Gravity

  Locked in a madly whirling embrace, the two black holes spiral inward to a final marriage. As the partners draw closer, they swing around each other faster and faster. Each tugs out the other, stretching the envelope of each hole into a tortured egg shape.

  In its last moments, the smaller black hole stretches and contorts its own space-time, emitting a cry of gravitational agony: waves. These curl and lap about the smaller hole, then reflect and refract from the larger one. Eddies form. Standing waves reverberate between the two. These deepen as the moment of death approaches for the smaller hole. Energy foams from the doomed hole, in the form of the deepening trough of gravitational waves that eddy and play in the narrowing gap.

  With a final scream of torsion and torque, the smaller hole plunges into its giant master. But the wave energy is not lost. An intense packet of waves remains, lapping in the wash of fatality.

  This packet would disperse, bleeding away into space . . . if more matter did not intervene. At this precise moment an exactly directed stream of dense mass comes snaking in along a swift trajectory. In the full form of the General Field Equations—as envisioned long ago by Einstein, and of course by many other of the highest minds elsewhere in the galaxy, for Nature opens its secrets to many styles of thinking—space-time can curve itself. A gravitational wave is an oscillation in the curvature of space-time, like a ripple on the sea. But the equations are not linear. This means that the undulation, too, produces further curvature. Gravity itself has weight.

  The incoming blue-white stream of compact mass loops, drawn by the wave packet. Tidal tugs hook the now-incandescent matter into a beautiful spiral. From a distance, the silvery luminosity follows a path recalling the chambered nautilus, a creature born in Earth’s ancient oceans, shaped by evolution into a classic geometry.

  Now the true violence begins. Soundless, swift and sure.

  The mass reflects the gravitational wave troughs, forcing them to build to even higher amplitudes. This draws the mass farther in. The spiral tightens. Wave builds upon wave. The stretch and warp of space-time deepens. In a single microsecond comes a new kind of creation: a permanent, self-confined warpage of space-time. Within a second it spreads, an intact structure. Extra energy bleeds away into fleeting waves, radiating out toward unreachable infinity.

  Later, men who ventured into it would call it the Wedge. The name was inelegant but partly true. It had been formed by waves wedged between two black holes. It now orbited the single spherical hole, a tombstone of so much lost matter.

  But the final drop of mass which applied the crucial touch—that was not lost. It resides inside the Wedge. It was the first contribution of ordinary matter to the exotic, transparent walls of the Wedge.

  The first damp earth, in a ceramic flower pot.

  FIVE

  Three Billion Years

  Impressive,” Nigel said guardedly. His family murmured, surprised at the intensity of the vision broadcast into their sensoria.

  Nikka said, “I’ve never seen before how it was done. But this is from the past, many thousands of years—”

  “There is a date on it,” the woman said. “It says that this image is from three billion years in the past.”

  “But I know—”

  “Of course.” The woman lifted her lip in a regal sneer. “Three billion years in the past of that dead woman. Which gives us the first fix on the origin of these bodies. They come from a genuinely distant future. I am surprised that humans will still exist, then.”

  Ito said, “Hell, billions—what can matter over that much time?”

  Nikka said soberly, “The mechs think something does.”

  “They certainly do,” the Interfacer said. “They sent the Grey Mech to seal those other Vors.”

  The family blinked and glanced at each other silently. The Grey Mech was the one form that not even the Old Ones could master. It had extraordinary powers and could penetrate the esty seemingly at will. The mechanical civilizations that dominated the space around the esty—restrained by its tightrope walk near the Galactic Center’s black hole—did not dare venture in often. But the Grey Mech could. And did, following patterns no one had ever been able to predict.

  The Interfacer said quietly, “Why would mechanicals care so much about our origin—except to figure out how to undo it?”

  SIX

  Deep Down Superficial

  Nigel did not like it, but Family Walmsley had to bow to the Interface. Other craft fluttered down the curved air and deposited defensive gear—intricate assemblies of ceramo-metal tubes, tapered carbon-web cylinders, power modules like huge brown bricks.

  Nigel glanced at the shiny, white steel surface of the control console, then away. One reaches the age when mirrors are of no interest. As well, he had long given up hope of keeping track of technology’s relentless march and to him these did not even look like weapons. Nor did the attendants who crisply set up the defensive web, nodding curtly to him, look like soldiers. He was glad to finally see them ride their craft back down the Lane.

  The family eyed the defenses skeptically. Supposedly they would keep the worm open by offsetting whatever the Grey Mech could do to it. “Think it’ll work, Mom?” Benjamin wondered.

  Nikka shook her head. “People have tried such before. But it’s like a whip—easy to flip around, until the tail bites you.”

  “Should we, well, move?”

  Nikka was startled. “Our fruit is nearly ripe!”

  That seemed to settle matters. The Interfacer had mentioned in passing that the Grey Mech sometimes struck at wormholes only long after they had erupted. No one knew why. Still, it removed any sense of urgency.

  So did the very nature of the esty. As a self-curved space-time, it was in the ordinary universe of the galaxy, yet had other connections—to other spaces, other times. The Old Ones used the esty, had made and confined it, but nothing truly controlled it, any more than a man who cages a lion can necessarily make it perform tricks.

  They had a quiet evening, sobered by the presence of automatic weaponry on hair-trigger alert, just over the rise behind the rambling house. War had so outsped human reflexes that battles lasted mere milliseconds. This had a curiously liberating effect, for it meant that no warning or action was possible. So the family went about life as usual, but talked little.

  Getting ready for bed that evening, Nigel worked his fingertips along his sca
lp line where his gray, thinning hair began. He could have changed the gray readily to blond or one of the more fashionable hues—scarlet, say, or electric blue—but he liked the effect.

  Carefully he ran his left hand down and to the side, opening his face along a barely visible scar that ran along his chin, around the neck and down his back. Electrostatic bonds ripped free with a sound like corn popping in the next room. He peeled his skin back in a straight line down the spine and drew the flap over his left shoulder and biceps, until he could painstakingly roll it up against his wrist with a moisty, sucking sound. The skin stripped back down to his buttocks, revealing moist redness.

  He turned with exaggerated grace in a ballet pose. “The real me. Like it?”

  Lounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. “Can’t you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.”

  “I’ll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.”

  “I wasn’t planning on paying money, and I didn’t have running in mind.”

  He groaned as he turned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. “A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.”

  “You expect silky passions after you show me that?”

  “Fair enough. But trust me to summon up your passion, madam. My specialty.”

  She smiled. “Hurry up, then.”

  He gave her a fond grin as he worked on himself: tuning, refilling small vials, scanning outputs. She was still sinewy and muscular, her skin smooth everywhere but at elbows and knees. Somehow, Nigel noted as he inspected his own, those spots and the backs of hands were not corrected by the elaborate chemical cocktails medical science provided. A minor complaint. Without his in-body systems, which he had to tune in this rather unsettling fashion, he and Nikka would have been dead for centuries.

  “How is it?” she said suddenly—some mute inner pressure had finally found voice.

  “Um. Not much change.” He turned slightly toward the shadows, so she could not read the indices. On a tiny digital display he used to communicate with his in-body systems a small light winked red. He silenced it with an adjustment, fingers working swiftly with long practice.

  “How much change?”

  At times like this he was decidedly rankled that he had, from all the flower of womanhood, chosen one with a bulldog tenacity for detail. “A bit. A small bit.”

  “Which way?”

  “Ummmm.” He shrugged and started packing himself up.

  She let the evasion pass. He concentrated on his Earther tech, engineered to be maximally convenient. Like an employee in a candy factory, the key was knowing when to stop taking things for free. He and Nikka had adopted the truly useful and avoided the rest. There were other techno-delights open to them, but they used the minimum.

  He had to shuck his right hand free a bit to get at a pesky lace of veins that had clogged. He pulled the epidermis loose as if he had on a tight glove, pinching each finger free separately. The veins needed a soothing application of some noxious stuff. When the smell was gone he pulled the supple skin back into place, feeling the tabs self-seal with a warm purr.

  “It’s lower, isn’t it?”

  He knew that ignoring her would not work; it never had. “It’s a hundred seventy-two point eight.”

  “A full point down.”

  He turned back and her face was quite suddenly older, mournful. “Nothing for it, luv.”

  “If we go in to those specialists again—”

  “They’ll nod and probe and do me no good. Remember?”

  “It will kill you,” she said with abrupt energy.

  “Something has to.”

  “Don’t be so goddamned glib!”

  “That’s me. Deep down, I’m superficial.”

  “But you just, you just—” and she did the absolute worst thing, burst into tears. The one measure he could never confront with a wry smile and his lofty disdain for the nagging intrusions of life.

  So it ended as it had so many times before. He took her in his arms. Simple sympathy and body warmth made up for words. They comforted each other with a knowingness born of time and troubles past. It was a long while before they slept.

  SEVEN

  A Few Microseconds

  The Walmsleys visited the worm seldom because there was plenty of work to be done in the long, stretching groves, amid the sweet scent of crops coming.

  Seasons of a sort came and went in the esty and one had to pick fruit when the fitful warming of the timestone brought it to peak. They were in the fields when a hard yellow-white streak raced through the air high above and slammed into the esty where the woman had appeared.

  The weapons of the Old Ones answered. Hard radiation spiked at the edge of Nigel’s sensorium. He seldom used this Earther tech, but for the moment it was on full range. He turned his head—

  —a swift sensation of something massive and gray, high up in the air but closing fast—

  —A silence swelling like a bubble toward the family.

  They were loading up a produce carrier. The impulse hit before they could even pivot to flee.

  Brilliant glare enveloped them. The air seemed to clot—a thick, massive deadening. A flicker wrapped around them like neon rain, illuminated by green sheet lightning—

  —curling tendrils—

  —sheets glowing like ghost fire—

  And when it had passed, the far terrain around them was bare, hostile, steaming with sulphurous vapors.

  Machines worked in slivers of seconds that humans could not perceive. Huge energies slice time as they shatter it. The battle between the Grey Mech and the Interfacers’ weapons was over—had been decided, transmitted, antiseptically digested by distant minds, its effects calibrated and assessed.

  The mechanicals’ attack had distorted the esty. Mere bystanders in the spreading gulp of the reflexing esty, the Walmsleys had been swept through the wormhole portal, a swerve in space-time accomplished between two thuds of the human heart.

  EIGHT

  Antiques Dealer

  It took them days to figure out, first, what had happened and, second, what they could do about it.

  The first answer was buried in the fast diagnostics of the Interfacer defenses. Nikka retrieved those. The mech attack had dimpled them through to another place in the esty. Not merely to the other end of the wormhole, which presumably connected to a far future. Instead, the intensity of the flux of gravitational radiation emitted in the battle had whipped the wormhole to some other location in the esty.

  It had sheared off most of their groves. With them went a lot of equipment and their pet raccoon. A sliced fraction of their original farm sat uneasily in a new place.

  Another space, another time. Another space-time.

  The second answer was harder to accept: nothing.

  “We can’t, well, reverse this grav gear?” Exasperated, Ito slapped one of the modular cylinders. It seemed undamaged.

  Nikka shook her head, tired. She had kept up her technical ability better than Nigel. She could read the interlaced matrices of the artificial intelligence that maintained the Interface apparatus. “It is a defensive net, not a transport device.”

  Ito had always been impatient with recalcitrant equipment. He busted a knuckle trying to get a seal off one of the smooth, enigmatic cylinders. “How can they leave us stranded like this?” He twisted his mouth in exasperation while Nigel watched with something like amusement. Nigel had never expected organizations to get him out of scrapes and was quite sure that he was too old to start.

  “You have to understand that the esty isn’t just a convenient mass to live on, a source of local gravity,” Nigel said. “Such as a planet, for example.”

  Blank looks. None of the three children had ever lived on a planet.

  Despite an extensive education, he reminded himself, they could not truly visualize the most elementary aspects of it—an empty blue sky overhead, g
iving way to stars at night that swung around the black bowl in serene circles; raucous weather churning out of vagrant winds, driven by complex vector forces; horizons that always curved away, so that ships showed their masts first as they approached; the very oceans such ships could sail on, implying a colossal lavishness of water; the wholly different sensation of living at the bottom of a gravity well, while above yawned a vast abyss, visible to a glance upward.

  “It’s rubbery,” Nigel said. “And unpredictable.”

  The fact that they lived in a portion of the esty noted for its solidity did not lessen this fact, but Nigel saw that in bringing up the children so far from the spongy zones, he and Nikka had perhaps erred on the side of safety.

  Angelina objected, “But the Interfacer said—”

  “Nobody really controls the esty,” Nikka said. “Not even the Old Ones. It evolves and we live in it.”

  Angelina gestured upward, where a lightly forested land hung far away, curving behind cottony clouds. It looked as though they were in a spectacular spinning cylinder, pinned to its outer walls by centrifugal force.

  But spin did not do the job. The esty held itself together by folding space-time—by curving itself in unimaginable thin sheets, stacking time and space like pages of a vast book, the events and substance of whole lives and eras encased in walls that felt as solid as granite.

  Einstein had seen that mass curved space-time. The esty reversed the equality, making curved esty itself feel like mass, planet-solid. A building material. The esty was far more lively than mere boring matter, for indeed in a profound way it was alive, the compacted stuff of existence that could spawn more of itself. It even had parasites, the worms.

  “How can we get back to home?” Angelina asked plaintively.

  “We can’t,” Nikka said flatly. “No gear for it.”

  “We can’t use this, then?” Ito slapped the inert cylinder. He was a fine worker and loved his mother but fire flashed in his eyes when confronted with balky machinery.