Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “Looks to be,” Nikka said. Physics here seemed to Nigel to be largely a matter of opinion.

  The sliding, coiling timestone was churning as before when a waning came, and the next waxing there were valleys, soil, plant life. The land here was cut and worked by unknowable forces and yet the weather also had ordinary touches: sudden showers, the drifting smell of sage, meat curing somewhere in a distant smokehouse.

  The runoff storm water sorted itself out into streams and then slow-moving rivers lined with tuft-topped trees. The soil beside them sometimes shot up into a mottled sky. Jagged crests shaped as they watched, spikes raking cottony clouds.

  Cautiously they hiked out into the new land. Oddly shaped creatures scampered among the rocks, dancing on webbed feet as though the ground were too hot to bear. The family went down a long grade and could see what looked like log houses at the feet of steep hills, windows glowing orange, dusky smoke blown so hard from their stone chimneys that it flattened along the roofs and trailed like flags down the valley. Through a cut in these hills they came into a dark bowl and a city spilled out like a shower of cinders stirred from an unseen fire, pinpoints going on as the light from the esty ebbed. But no people. Nigel realized that it was moving, the entire construction somehow crawling toward them. A city-thing, alive.

  He wondered what it could contain. Was there anything more to surprise a burnt-out wreck like him? A place that could startle him and yet let him sleep peacefully?

  Though of course, he thought, nodding ruefully, he would still wake in the morning with the odd familiar gargoyle of fears sitting on his chest, peering into his face, grinning toothless and triumphant.

  Abruptly timestone jutted through the topsoil. It split and burned, jagged teeth raking the land. They ran back to their own area, barely making it.

  The Grey Mech appeared shortly afterward.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Far Futures

  Lying sorely in a crevice of timestone, much later, Nigel recalled a time long ago when contact had been possible between humanity and the bewildering zoo of mech constructs. He had bound up his broken left arm and waited for sleep to take him. He fixed upon the past because thoughts of where his family might be would do him no good. When he could walk again he would go look. That was all.

  Some mechs back then had convinced members of Nigel’s own crew that existence as a mechanical creature was both better and longer lasting than the fragile life of “organic” creatures. So quite willingly some lower forms of the Grey Mech had “incorporated”—their term—several friends of his. “Uplifting,” they termed it.

  The process was painless. As mechs his friends became contrived boxes mounted on skeletal frames. They moved about the landscape seldom and when Nigel had tried to talk to them about their lives they seemed distracted—as if carrying on a telephone conversation while watching something more interesting on television, he thought. What they did say was bland, empty, and yet somehow chilling.

  He had waited some years until he was again in the particular Lane where this had happened. He settled in behind some rocks at a goodly distance from where he knew the Grey Mech’s lower forms sometimes came. The ones who had uplifted his friends.

  Their sensors were good and he could not get too close. One of the under-forms appeared and he was sure of its identity by its electromagnetics, its spectral hiss and clang. He shot out its undercarriage. With a weapon whose physics he did not quite understand he put three holes through the main frame of it. The mech went silent, its electromagnetic buzzings winking off. Something small climbed out of it and tried to get away and Nigel shot it eight times with great satisfaction. He later learned that the other under-forms had been incorporated back into the Grey Mech so he had to be content with the one.

  Of this he dreamed, as his arm ached and his heart burned leaden in his chest.

  It rained hard in the sullen dark. Vegetation beat at itself in the lashing winds. Lightning leapt across the sky. He could see the forks of yellow and green snaking high above where the esty folded over onto itself in a blithely twisted geometry.

  No sign of the Grey Mech.

  No, Grey Mechs, he corrected himself. That had been a rather large error.

  Two Grey Mechs had appeared in the Lane. Ashen, blocky, each headed for the buildings. He remembered the frozen tableau: Benjamin and Nikka and himself, scrambling for the segments of the Transit device. Ito and Angelina, turned to flee.

  Time was hopelessly warped here, he had conceded that long ago, but the same old question remained. Could he have done anything different?

  TWENTY-THREE

  Verge of Extinction

  In the few seconds before the dusky shapes reached them he had shouted, “Transducers!”—meaning the big pyramid-shaped wedges that transferred stored electrical energy into gravitational pulses.

  “At which?” Nikka yelled into a roaring, rising wind raised by the Grey Mechs.

  His eyes jerked from one Grey Mech to the other. Nikka slapped her wrist to the console, popped the interface.

  Which one? Both? Two ashen chunks with no visible means of flight. Pivoting on an unseen axis, in a sky they ripped with their passage.

  Not acting together. Each responding to the other’s darting swerves.

  One was closer, larger, coming fast, and in desperation he chose it. “There!”

  Nikka aimed and fired the transducers in one quick swivel of her interface hand. The ground buckled with the release of acoustic power and they all three sprawled. The leading Grey Mech shuddered but came on.

  Ito and Angelina never reached the house. The leading Grey Mech loosed a bolt that seemed to wrap itself like a scintillating blue-white cloak around them. They twisted and fell.

  Fringes of the bolt killed Nigel’s in-body electronics instantly. He had struggled halfway to his feet when the queasy jolt of his systems going dead knocked him down again.

  Strumming, nearly overpowered, his defenses teetered on the verge of extinction.

  He looked up at what he expected to be his last vision. Numbly he watched the spectacle of two Grey Mechs battling each other across the sapphire sky. Spasms refracted down the streaming air. A shock wave slammed into him and he felt his body bounce from its power.

  He tried to hang on to consciousness, but the chilly blackness had clasped him to itself—

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Alexandria

  —To awaken here, on a timestone slope.

  Arm broken, shooting pains in the legs.

  No, he probably could not have done anything differently. Alas.

  It was always comforting to think that but in dealing with mechs it was in fact true. They acted far more swiftly than beings based on muscle and nerves. But thinking this did him no good because it still sounded like an excuse.

  He groaned and opened his eyes, the lids sticky. Lightning licked overhead, seeking a place to rest, on a quest of its own. He knew it was merely a horde of electrons seeking a path to discharge an electrostatic potential, but that did not quell the eerie sensation of watching strange spirits seek and probe and lash the air with their desire. He was watching the luminous lemony fingers play across the high roof of the esty when she came to him again.

  You’ve changed.

  “You haven’t.”

  My kind never does.

  He blinked but it made no difference. Alexandria, his first wife, stood a little to one side, looking out at the same slippery lightning that he was. In the sulphurous flashes he could see her classic high forehead and delicate cheekbones. They had been that way up until a few weeks before the disease had weathered her down, stealing flesh from her, sending her into a grave on a hillside in Pasadena, California.

  “Alexandria, I . . .”

  I do like it when you use my name.

  “I always loved the sound of it.”

  What did you used to say about it?

  “That your name was perfect. That it was like you. Alexandria, Egypt, where the library burn
ed. Lost knowledge. The unknowable.”

  Oh yes. Most people mispronounced it. They thought it should be that ordinary name without the i.

  “Where classical civilization hit the reef and sank, losing most of its cargo.”

  Bad history, lover. The Greeks were long gone when that library burned.

  “But not the civilization. That remains as long as it is remembered.”

  And ours?

  Nigel shrugged. “As long as we’re here, I suppose.”

  As long as you are here. I don’t count. I am a ghost.

  “Not to me. You’re the woman I loved.”

  She turned slightly toward him, just enough to let him see the lilting curve of her eternal smile. It was always that way. He could never see her face, never know it entirely. Or be free of it, he saw now. She could visit him across the yawning centuries.

  Past tense?

  “Sorry. Love.”

  Lost knowledge.

  “Not really.”

  Her lips curled in a soundless laugh. You’re so sure?

  “I recall every hollow and delight.”

  After so many years?

  “Remember relativity. It’s been, oh, perhaps twenty-eight thousand years on Earth. But in here”—he tapped his skull—“there’s been very little going on. Dull, really. Time dilation, it’s called by the physicists.”

  I never understood that sort of thing.

  “I doubt anyone understands it fundamentally. It’s a flat fact of the universe.”

  And you?

  Nigel could not read her expression. “Me?”

  Are you a fact of the universe, too?

  “Ummm. An unimportant one, yes.”

  You were important then and you are now.

  “I’m a cockroach on the stage at Stratford. You might say, rather a serious case of undercasting.”

  By who?

  “By whom,” he said distantly.

  Ah! Always the language purist. Okay then, by whom?

  “The Director, I suppose.”

  Who is . . . ?

  “I’ve wondered about that. If there’s something working itself out here. Somehow.”

  God?

  “Too short a name for such a large idea. Anyway, I’d have thought you could ask Him directly, eh?”

  Because I’m in heaven?

  “Aren’t you? Or someplace at least different?”

  She laughed. I’m in your head. Not really heaven, no.

  Yet as she turned slightly more and smiled at him, Nigel could see her with crystalline clarity. This was too good to be a hallucination. Too solid, crisp, real. He must be worse off than he thought.

  “Alexandria . . . ?”

  Yes?

  “I want to—I—”

  Not that time yet.

  He snapped, “I’m like a child, told when to go to bed?”

  This isn’t bed. Not nearly as much fun, for one thing.

  “I’m . . . tired.”

  Not physically though.

  “Perhaps I’ve seen too much.”

  It’s not your moment yet.

  With sharp anger he barked, “It wasn’t your moment either.”

  You’re still getting hard at night, just thinking of me, aren’t you?

  “Um. I can hardly deny it, can I? You seem to live inside my head.”

  Exactly, lover! And as long as I do—well, maybe it wasn’t my moment, back there. Maybe I’m still here.

  “Copies aren’t originals.”

  A lady appreciates what compliments come her way. Especially since I know you have Nikka.

  “I hope this isn’t disloyal to her.”

  It can’t be. We are all the loves we have known—that’s my own attempt at self-definition.

  “I like that. A definition free of the worn-out carcass, the body.”

  Don’t ignore the body. Or bodies.

  He paused, swollen tongue running over bitter teeth. “Bodies . . .”

  The bodies got you into this.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Think of them as calling cards.

  “How hilarious. From the Grey Mechs, no doubt. Come to the dance, please, and die.”

  Who would read a suredead body, lover? Think.

  “I’m starting to hate riddles.” His head was woozy, the world circling him in a slow waltz.

  I’m a part of the riddle, too. We all are. See you around, lover.

  “Not yet!”

  ’Bye.

  He weathered out the long, murky waning. His in-body indices had come back somewhat. They were erratic and the index he watched most carefully was down three more points. He sighed, momentarily glad Nikka was not here to worry about that, and then the weight of it all came in upon him. He lay in fever and bitter regrets, thinking thoughts that went down so deep, the lizards there had no eyes.

  Something had blown him a long way down the Lane they had been in. This he discovered by climbing an unstable peak of teetering timestone and peering above a deck of olive-colored clouds. He recognized the territory where their farm had been and determined to walk back to it. This took longer than he thought it should with the broken arm and he hurried at the end. The farm seemed deserted at first. Inside the house he sat at the long dining room table and the room seemed filled with ghosts as substantial as Alexandria had been and that was when the thing moved into view.

  He sat completely still. It was two-legged and two-armed and that was where the resemblance ended.

  Human? No, he knew instantly.

  Eerie, silent, radiating strangeness like a chill wave.

  He noticed that his in-body electronics were working again. They helped a little with the splintered arm. The thing moved slightly. His in-bodies fluoresced in a disturbing response, sending dazzling fireworks across his retinas, and then he got it all in one long burst.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mortal Galaxies

  He stood beneath a dull black sky framed by a jagged horizon.

  Abruptly, he knew in a way he never had. In his weary bones he felt a worldview—kinesthetic, perceptions as momenta and geometry, not words. He fumbled to put the sensations into terms that he could get his mind around.

  The sky. Black, then unfolding into streamers of feathery light.

  How different, he thought, from the physics he had learned as a boy. In the Newtonian views of Boltzmann and Clausius, the universe extended forever but was always threatened by collapse. Nothing countered the drawing-in of gravity.

  Given enough time, matter would seek its own kind, smacking into greater and greater stars. But the stars would die, guttering out as blunt thermodynamics commanded, always seeking maximum disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ruled.

  He folded his arms, tried to make sense of the buzzing images. So. Then.

  That old, firm universe was doomed. In time, even hell would freeze over. Stars would burn into shadowy cinders. Planets, their atmospheres frozen out into waveless lakes of oxygen, would glide in meaningless orbits, warmed by no ruby star glow. The universal clock would run down to the last tick of time.

  Only after he had left Earth, and had time to study subjects that he had neglected in school, did he see what the twentieth century—the oft-disparaged “TwenCen” of later slang—had done to that dark, earlier vision.

  The universe was no static lattice of stars. It grew. The Big Bang was better termed the Enormous Emergence, space-time snapping into existence intact and whole, of a piece. With space-time came its warping by matter, each wedded to the other until time eternal.

  For its first hundred billion years, the universe would brim with light. Gas and dust still folded into fresh suns. For an equal span the stars would linger. Beside reddening suns, planetary life warming itself by the waning fires of stellar death.

  When a body meets a body, coming through the sky . . . he mused to himself. Stars inevitably collided, met, merged. All the wisdom and order of planets and suns finally compressed into the marriage of many stars,
plunging down the pit of gravity to become black holes. For the final fate of nearly all matter was the dark pyre of collapse.

  Now he felt, like a leaden soup in his gut, the implications of what he saw above him: a gaudy swirl of leaching light.

  Galaxies were as mortal as stars. In the sluggish slide of time, the spirals that had once gleamed with fresh brilliance would deaden. Black holes would blot out whole spiral arms of dim red. The holes would gnaw through the galaxies themselves.

  Life based on solid matter had no choice. To gain energy it had to merge black holes themselves. Only such fusions could yield fresh energy in a slumbering universe.

  High civilizations came, mounted on the carcass of matter itself, the ever-spreading legions of black holes. Only by moving such masses, extracting power through magnetic forces and the slow gyre of dissipating orbits, could life rule the dwindling resources of the ever-enlarging universe.

  Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt . . . He was startled to find that phrases learned by an irksome schoolboy in a cobwebbed past still leapt readily to mind. Old, and true.

  About this vision of a swelling universe, its life force spent, hung a great melancholy.

  For matter itself was doomed. Its basic building block, the proton, decayed. This took unimaginably long, but was inevitable, the executioner’s sword descending with languid grace.

  But something survived. Not all matter dies, as did the proton. After the grand operas of mass and energy have played out their plots, the universal stage cleared to reveal . . . the very smallest.

  The tiniest of particles—the electron and its antiparticle, the positron—lived on. No process of decay could find purchase on their infinitesimal scales, lever them apart. The electron danced with its antitwin in swarms: the lightest of all possible plasmas.

  By the time these were the sole players, the stage had grown enormously. Each particle found its nearest neighbor to be a full light-year away. Communication took years . . . but in the slow thumping of the universal heart, that was nothing.

  Could this actually happen? Perhaps, he thought, the best possible universe was one of constant challenge. One that made survival possible but not easy.