Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “It’s defensive, period,” Nikka said mildly. “To even attempt a return we need to open the worm in a controlled way.”

  “How hard is that?” Nigel asked.

  She shook her head. “Even experts shy away from that, if they’re smart. It’s dangerous work.”

  “What’s it take?” Benjamin asked. He had his mother’s upturned chin and her quiet assurance that given time and tinkering, miracles were routine.

  “Some integrative graviton sensors, a field generator which can deliver a terrawatt at ten kilohertz acoustic . . . and a Causality Engine.” Nikka sat gingerly on a boulder. She had twisted her back in the flickering microsecond of transition through the Vor.

  Benjamin’s mouth sagged. No miracles were going to happen right away.

  Nigel asked skeptically, “Causality Engine? I thought we could take causality for granted.”

  Nikka shook her head, the sheen of her long, braided black hair catching the light. “It’s keeping causality in proper order that takes control.”

  Nigel had left the ever more complex physics of the esty to others in favor of his orchards, as a proper reward of age. Nikka still relished technical detail, and it took her quite a while to convey to them the realms of chaotic logic. Daunting stuff.

  A Vor was a “chaotic attractor” that linked portions of the esty in random fashion. But the links had a cyclic logic, so that any given connection would recur . . . in time. Generally, a long time. Making it happen again demanded deft mathematical control of the lip of the Vor. The process resembled stirring a pot, using bursts of gravitational radiation.

  She was explaining this when a pale pink craft sliced across their clouded sky and banked over them. Its backwash slammed down a fist of heated air, making them duck. It settled a short distance away on oddly angled struts of purple metal that ended in disk footpads.

  A woman came rapidly toward them, shanks hiking her forward as though in a race. She wore jet-black, porous ceramic eyes that wrapped around her head like a combination of hat and spectacles, yet left the crown of her honey hair uncovered.

  “I’ll go set rate,” she announced in a preemptory voice, heavily accented in broad a’s and eh’s.

  “For what?” Ito asked. He was nearer her and she seemed to assume he was delegated to speak.

  “Don’t stall.”

  “We’re not—”

  “Look, I be first in. So I get the bid.”

  Ito looked irked. “First in what?”

  “You know not? You’ve beed inside a suspension bubble. I waited days for it to pop.”

  Ito frowned. “A . . . time bubble?”

  “Checko.” She raked them all with an assessing gaze. “You be stable, though. I looked over your chunk from the air. It snapped off a section of ordinary rock. Settled in well, I sayed.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Sawazaki Lane. Your equipment—early era, right? I be good with antiques.”

  “We tunneled through to a human Lane, though, right?” Ito persisted.

  Nigel watched his son’s expression as the realization dawned that they could just as easily have popped out in some hellhole Lane of methane gas or bitter cold. Nigel and Nikka had known that but, as Nikka had said to him in private, what could they have done? The mechs had sent their sliver of esty caroming out into the larger esty, and it had lodged where laws of nonlinear dynamics took it.

  “Sure, did you not plan to?” Distracted, the woman glanced at her sleeve. “Ummm. As I calc, I could offer you a single pointo price for all of it.”

  She looked at them, an entirely phony smile splitting her face, showing bright yellow teeth. “Sight unseen. I willn’t bother. Not my style to poke around too much with people standing right there. Don’t much need the money. I just take what luck brings me.”

  Ito gaped. “What? Buy everything?”

  “Flat fee basis. Leave or take.”

  Nikka let her jaw jut out in a way Nigel knew well. “We aren’t interested.”

  The woman frowned. “Look, I know how it is. You must’ve saved most of your nut to get this big a spread slipstreamed in, right? I’ll allow for that, believe me.” She rolled her eyes theatrically. “Even though I usually get my budget busted when I do.”

  Nikka did not smile back. “No deal.”

  “Huh? You’re trans-importers, right?”

  “No,” Nikka said. “We’re refugees.”

  “Well then, you’ll be needing cash, won’t you? I can see my way clear to offer—”

  “We won’t sell,” Nigel said mildly.

  Her ceramic eyes prowled them. Facets winked as she turned her head, diagnostics probing. She wore a scarf, barely visible above an ivory jacket cut to show one obvious weapon, an antique-looking pistol on its own pop-out handle, and to conceal several others that made mere ripples in her sleek contours.

  “You people know not Sawazaki law, do you?” Again the eye-roll. “Lord, protect me from amateurs.”

  Nigel said, “We were blown here by mechs. Certainly we would appreciate assistance in getting back home.”

  She brightened. “Well then—”

  “With our property intact.”

  Her friendly bluster vanished. The transformation was so sudden it seemed to Nigel that he saw a wholly new face. Heavy brows tinted auburn, split by a deep frown line. Sunken, brilliant yellow eyes below—visible when the artificial eyes went suddenly transparent. Her hands were ribbed and knobbed like enlarged gloves—which, Nigel realized belatedly, they were—which angled forth fat fingers of obvious strength. He wondered why she needed them.

  “Snarfs, eh?” she said in a menacing whisper.

  Her gloved hands unsheathed into thin, servo’d fingers that jutted from the sausage-thick ones. Sharp, businesslike. “Then you be coming with.”

  Ito stepped forward, scowling This was just the kind of problem a young man would rise to, Nigel saw, and in the set of Ito’s jaw trouble was coming. Nigel was a half step behind him as Ito began, “I don’t think I like the way you—”

  —and Ito was on the ground. Nigel had not even seen her move. She had punched him and returned to exactly the same position in an eye-blink.

  NINE

  The Tilted City

  The city was on edge. Not meaning in a foul mood, Nigel thought to himself as they coasted over, through, and around the steepled constructions, but quite literally.

  The spired sprawl canted up into the filmy air as though it had been formed in a bowl until it hardened, and then shucked free—so that the curved base tipped nearly all the way over, a crescent moon about to crash down.

  But it was at least a hundred kilometers across. It rested on a rocky plain, a colossal ornament on the inside of a spherical bulge in Sawazaki Lane. In the far foggy distance he could see the annular geometry they had emerged from. Tricks of sliding perspective and the sharp dry air made everything here seem miniature.

  They banked in and the illusion vanished. The city became a forest of slender spires, jewels jutting up from the curved base. They swelled into thick, serpentine buildings studded with tiny lights: windows.

  In the city gravity pointed at “local down” as naturally as ever. Only by walking some distance through the curiously cushioned streets could one tell that the direction veered steadily, accommodating the bowl’s curvature. The effect struck Nigel as miraculous.

  “How do they do this?” he wondered. “Gravity like hands cupping a baby’s butt?”

  Nikka frowned but it was unlike her to admit being stumped. “They’ve figured a way to make the esty exert gravitational forces and torques at a distance . . . I think.”

  The woman escorting them, whose name proved to be Tonogan, said sardonically, “We tilt our city for religious reasons. You would not understand.”

  Nigel could not tell whether she was joking but it seemed an unlikely extravagance. He could see the air shimmer with compressed forces at the city’s rim. It occurred to him that if the effect was real,
and not some bizarre optical illusion, then it demanded that gravitational waves be radiated from the visible plain below up to the esty that cupped the city. But gravitational waves of such intensity were incredible. Or so he thought.

  He remembered the pictures of the two black holes merging, marrying, and giving birth to something wholly different between them. Maybe the way to think here was with biological metaphors, not the old physics ones he had learned at Cambridge so long ago.

  They passed through crowds whose size, mass, attire (where there was any), and facial gestures ran a gamut Nigel had never seen before. Some were antic, reacting to everything. Others seemed sublimely indifferent to the rabble of the oddly shaped who ambled, meandered, drifted, strolled, and marched without apparently acknowledging each other or, indeed, the ordinary laws of physics. Some seemed lighter, making great bounds. Others skated on unseen platforms. (Nigel tried to trip one, but the fellow slid past without a glance and for half an hour later his foot, which had felt no contact, was bitingly cold.) Some flew with outspread arms. Others scarcely seemed to walk at all, but moved forward swiftly on unseen carriers.

  A passing man lit a cigarette of some sweet-smelling stuff by scraping the knob end against his belt. Nigel wondered what happened if you dropped a whole pack of them knob-down.

  Some wore sandpaper-rough clothing to keep people at a respectful distance; a useful urban attire Nigel had not seen before. Despite the noise and confusion, an old game played out: locals were doing their best to accommodate the visitors and relieve them of any excess cash.

  A kid slapped a button on Angelina’s shoulder and it began to speak. “Dooed the upshift till you be down? Want to go/get level? Think pointo and—” Angelina pried off this portable advertisement and tossed it away, where it stuck to a wall and began its pitch again.

  Tonogan swerved suddenly into a broad opening in a pyramidal building. The family, gawking, hastened to keep up. She never looked back, apparently certain that they would follow. Inside, the floor propelled them through intersecting streams of men and women with fluorescent neck and ear tattoos, who came and went with bewildering speed, legs scissoring. At a large, ornate, copper-sheen doorway stood two well-muscled men wearing wraparound gray that accentuated their chest and shoulders. They stood rigidly, Nigel noted, and looked quite intrepid.

  They were apparently protecting an obese woman in a violently purple bag-dress. She wore skin to match, a near perfect shade. Yawning, she languidly glanced up as they came through the vertically pivoting door.

  “Good waxing.” Her voice rippled with polished undertones, as though she truly felt that it was a good rising of the esty’s fitful light and hoped that you did, too.

  She went back to looking at a scroll held in one hand. It unrolled on its own and she seemed fascinated with it, not even looking up as Tonogan rattled off a rapid-fire summary. They were standing in a gallery that gave onto an odd courtyard. As Tonogan spoke something like a six-legged dog trotted about courtyard center. It seemed to glide more than walk among the plants that festooned the area—big speckled yellow-green effusions, geysers of leafy abundance.

  The large woman interrupted Tonogan with, “I see the scans. A family, um. Quite a large area to transslip, eh?”

  She looked at Nikka, who answered. “We want help in getting back to our Lane, at our esty cords.”

  Nigel felt a quiet pride; ever Nikka, ever direct. Nigel was a doddering language purist, and disliked shortening “coordinates” to “cords” since that obscured a perfectly good word for rope, but he also knew that to crunch the lingo was crucial. The trimmed English here—all verbs and plurals regular, simple constructions—was efficient, where travelers from other eras and territories crossed.

  “Impossible.”

  Nikka said patiently, “Technically it must be—”

  “No no! It’s expensive.”

  Nikka frowned, always uncomfortable with financial matters. Nigel said, “We could perhaps trade off a bit of our holdings.”

  The purple woman looked distracted—back to her scroll. Nobody asked them to sit down and indeed there was no place to do so in this long, slick-floored vestibule. She occupied all of a spacious divan, with a bit more of her left over.

  Finally she yawned, perhaps not for show. “You haven’t nearly enough. Interesting historical artifacts, but—”

  “Historical?” Ito took affront.

  “Well, you do come from”—a string of digits and words, meaningless to Nigel—“and that’s a wayfer.”

  “Wafer?” Ito asked, his jaw working with irritation.

  “Way far gone, as we say here. I speak your approximate regional language, be I not? I had to chipload for it, that be how much trouble I went to.” She waved a hand with sausage fingers in airy disdain and went back to her scroll. Apparently the rest of the world was supposed to freeze in place until her attention returned.

  The strangely snakelike dog spotted a covey of dappled birds who had waddled out from beneath one of the leafy explosions. It went into a low stalk. The closer it got the slower and lower it went, until finally the birds burst into the sky and the dog dashed to where they had been. Trotting around, it wagged its eel-like tail.

  Nigel felt amused and comforted by the display. Genes tell, and this echo of Earth was welcome. He remembered pigeons in Trafalgar Square, chased by hounds out on a leash, and the momentary picture brought a dizzy sense of the immense perspectives in this life of his, so long and wearing.

  “Ummm. You know anything about holies?” the purple woman asked, one finger held to her cheek, staring at her scroll as though it were a mirror.

  Nikka said cautiously, “I know that esty Vortices are naturally occurring wormholes. No matter what size, they have fixed matter-throughput. But the bandwidth of information—

  matter, data, anything—that can go through scales up with its radius. The Grey Mech hit us with something—”

  “A Causality Polarizer,” the purple woman said, licking her lips with something like relish. “If I could only get one!”

  “—and blew us into here. And now.”

  “Our ‘now’ be quite a bit downstream of you,” the woman said. “You be several million year-kilometers distant.”

  Nigel blinked. “That much?”

  She shrugged. “A moderate traverse.”

  “Can’t you break that up into distance and time?”

  She laughed, lips stretched far back, but without real joy. “How old be you? The idea—splitting the esty!” A dry cackle.

  Nigel felt both awkward and vexed. “Fair enough. We know in principle that space-time can’t be just sectioned out, leastwise not here.”

  “Clocks and feet separate them out pretty well, but the esty knows what we can’t see.” There was a kind note in her voice as she asked, “You be old, yes?”

  Nikka said plainly, “From Earth.”

  The purple woman’s eyes flared with surprise, then anger. “I try be friendly with you, give you an honest deal. And you think you can play games!”

  It was Nikka’s turn to laugh. “I’m telling the truth. What do you want, passports?”

  The woman’s chip did not know the word—indeed, passports made no sense in a multiply connected esty with no true boundaries—and she waved them away, mouth askew with displeasure.

  “You people shouldn’t be traders at all!”

  Ito blurted, “We aren’t—can’t you get that straight?”

  Her eyes blazed again. “You get this straight. You take the rate I offer you for your property—buildings, historicals, mech widgets and sensies, the lot—or you’ll be punished.”

  Nigel bridled. “Punished for what?”

  “For taking up space, air, time—anything I want!”

  She stood with effort, waddling forward on huge feet—a purple wall unaccustomed to collisions. Nigel held his ground. She jutted a large palm out and shoved him. She was massive and surprisingly strong. He staggered back and made a mistake. Witho
ut thinking he punched her swiftly in the stomach.

  In what seemed the same instant someone struck him from behind. A sharp jolt of electrical violence coursed up through him. Then he was lying on the floor, without any perceptible interval in between. Arms and legs numb. Sounds hollow, distant. Staring up at a cloudy bowl. In a city tipped on end, he recalled distantly.

  The purple wall had gone back to her couch. Hissing in his inner ear, the mists around him fried away. He looked around and everything was as before.

  Tonogan had shocked him with the rod she held easily in one hand. He let a long breath out and stood, wheezing and rickety at the knees. How to begin?

  “And who the hell—” Nigel had an instant of caution, obviously far too late, still trying to size up this sizable lady—“are you?”

  “The Chairwoman,” Tonogan said. All this time she had been standing at rigid attention, like the two stuffed men outside.

  “Chairwoman of what?” Nikka demanded.

  “Everything. Just about everything.”

  “Oh.”

  The Chairwoman wrapped up her calculator-scroll and glowered darkly. “Pleased to meet you.”

  TEN

  Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

  Ito did his work, hooking up some multisocketed pipes, and all the while looked off into the distance without saying anything.

  When he could wait no more Nigel asked, “All right, what’s wrong?”

  “You got to ask that?”

  “I’m not swift on the subtleties.”

  “Subtleties? Best way to get your attention is with a stick.”

  They had been working for weeks in menial labor, hauling this, cleaning that. Putting in penance time for the Chairwoman, Tonogan had called it. It was clear that in this Lane the purple woman ran everything with a hard hand, for reasons that remained to Nigel quite mysterious. And he had been forced to concede that she had solidly behind her the brunt of what passed for law here.

  Nigel sighed and worked two pipes together, applying sealant. No matter how advanced technology got, there was always grunt labor needed to jimmy stubborn matter into place. No legions of robots or smartened animals ever replaced the general handyman-cum-janitor.