Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  With an electric shock he felt the full force of it:

  If life born to brute matter could find a way to incorporate itself into the electron-positron plasma, then it could last forever.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A Far One

  The thing was still standing at the far end of the dining room table. Cold ivory light played upon it.

  Nigel looked at it and felt a mixture of joys and sorrows he could not name. He panted shallowly, breath rasping as if he had run a long distance.

  The thing reminded him of a funhouse mirror distortion of a woman. Bulging here, slimmed there, suggesting deep changes that left the mottled skin the same.

  Intelligence glowed in large, unreadable violet eyes. It moved with easy grace, the awkward compromise curve of the human spine replaced by a complex double-spined split in the lumbar region. Broader hips held more weight. Four arms tapered to hands, every one with differently shaped fingers.

  This was what humanity had become in the billions of years since his own time. And he understood that this was not some mere adaptation to the esty itself. It was how humanity had evolved to meet its destiny everywhere, amid the hundreds of billions of stars across the churn of the galactic disk itself.

  Genetic lessons from a far place.

  He got up without knowing why, and walked outside. Now the jagged horizon was there—the same frame he had seen in his mind.

  Somehow this Lane had opened, unfolding itself like a blossoming flower. At the command of the thing in his dining room.

  And above sung the technicolor gallery he had seen in the mind-memories of the dead bodies. Electron-positron plasmas, immense and intricate, hanging where the stars had once been. He was seeing into the very end of the universe, the Omega Point, hanging in a sky where logic said it could not be. But was.

  He stood there trying to fathom how he could see an open sky from inside the self-folded esty. This simple but colossal change meant that someone—something—had mastered the esty itself, could unwrap it like a Christmas package to find fresh delights.

  He walked down into the torn and seared yard.

  Without a sign or word, he knew that the Far One was gone.

  Across a wrecked landscape came his family. Nikka limped. Benjamin and Angelina carried Ito’s body.

  “He’s gone,” Nikka said simply.

  One Grey Mech’s bolt had killed his son. In the same instant Angelina had suffered an in-body electronic blowout and the skin along her left side had ruptured, a thick purple bruise gone stiff and already yellowing.

  On his oldest son’s face was an expression of surprise and pain. Nigel reached out to the cradled body and ruffled the hair tenderly, bent and caught the familiar smell. Then he made himself stop.

  “I . . . we’ve got to . . .” He could not make his throat work.

  “The readers,” Nikka said, limping past him toward the house.

  The thing he had seen was not there now. The rooms felt cold.

  They got Ito into the readers and did what they could to pull forth from his brain cells the essence of him. Fluids, sutures, digital artifice. The labor was long and the family scarcely spoke, concentrating fully and leached of all else but their yearning.

  They sat at last on their porch and watched the feathery swaths of brilliance in the sky. He told them what he could and Nikka spoke for the first time since they had lowered Ito into the preserving solutions. “So the bodies . . .”

  “Were addressed to us.” Nigel nodded grimly. “Or someone like us.”

  Angelina supplied in a wan, empty voice, “Someone who would come.”

  “And we may not be the first.” Nikka watched the slow churn in the sky impassively. “The Grey Mech who killed Ito would have killed others, too.”

  “But it did not get all of us,” Nigel added. “The other Grey Mech prevented that.”

  Benjamin’s face had been containing anger for a long time as they worked and now it came out, first in a string of oaths and then a final forlorn wail. At last, gasping, he said, “Why? Bodies sent back like invitations—Grey Mechs—Ito—

  for what?”

  Nigel knew that there was no real answer to the despair under Benjamin’s words and that the best anyone could do was to talk about the surface. So he said gravely, hands knotted before him, “The bodies attracted the attention of humans. They were like bottles with scraps of paper rolled inside, tossed out into an ocean. Only the curious, only someone who understood the human need to communicate across the impossible stretch of time, would pay any attention.”

  Nikka’s drawn mouth moved but the rest of her face did not, eyes staring into an emptiness. “Most mechs have never respected us enough to learn how to read our brains directly. To them we’re messy, archaic. So they wouldn’t know how to decipher the bodies, even if they cared.”

  “Except the Grey Mech,” Angelina added.

  “Grey Mechs,” Nigel insisted. “One Grey Mech opposed the other. Saved us, I expect.”

  They sat in silence as chill winds blew across the fitful landscape. Nigel knew they were all digesting the strange fact that there was more than one Grey Mech, acting out of concert.

  “So one faction of mechs wants us to survive?” Nikka asked with sudden bitterness.

  Nigel got up and walked behind her chair, began kneading her neck and shoulders. His broken arm somehow did not hurt now though he knew that he would inevitably pay for this later.

  She resisted him for a moment and then relaxed into his hands. He felt the release in her. “I suppose there are Grey Mechs from different times, eras,” she said. “The Grey of our time wanted to stop any humans from learning about that sky.”

  Above, prickly streamers wreathed hard orange knots, bristling with ferment.

  Angelina said wonderingly, looking up, “That’s what the mechs want to do. Make themselves into those plasmas.”

  Nigel nodded. “So they can outlive solid matter itself.”

  Nikka said with caustic scorn, “Our son died because he had seen that?”

  “In a way,” Nigel said gently, his hands digging into her tense muscles. “To stop us from spreading the information. And that’s why the somebody”—he thought of the strange yet human figure he had seen—“sent the bodies. To bring us here.”

  Angelina said, “I hate the way we have been jerked around.”

  Nigel nodded, his expression distant. “We aren’t the superior species here. We get used, that’s the order of things. I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we’re feeling now.”

  Nikka was inconsolable. “And all for what?”

  Suddenly he recalled Alexandria saying, Who would read a suredead body, lover?

  Nigel ventured a guess, the only one left. “So we would go back. We understand this in a way that images or memories in a body could not. Somebody wants us to take back what we’ve learned.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody? Or something.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Radiant

  The second, smaller Grey Mech swelled above them in the darkness. A dusky presence.

  They knew there was no use in going inside so they watched its approach. It hung in the sky, a dark blotch coasting among coalescing rivulets of light.

  No bolts, no shock wave.

  Their apprehension ebbed as moments slid by and it made no aggressive move. “I suppose that is the one who helped us,” Nikka mused.

  Nigel had the eerie impression that it was watching them just as they watched it. They all noticed a small humming, not in their ears but throughout their bodies, as if long acoustic waves were resonating in them, deep notes below hearing.

  It glided up and dwindled. Smoothly it veered toward the largest of the luminous constructions and into Nigel’s mind came a single word: Radiant. Somehow he knew that this was a name, the way the Grey Mech thought of the electron-positron life that swarmed in this far future night.

  Abruptly, the Grey Mech vanished into the brilliance. A flash
, as if it had met the antimatter and been consumed. Seconds later, the humming stopped.

  They looked at each other without speaking. Had it died, task completed? Merged with its own form and fate?

  The Grey Mech had shown them something, but they were not certain just what.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tiny Farmers

  Their next Transit came soon. The stutter was over at last.

  They were dazed and tired and simply slept through Transits as they followed the long arc of the wormhole in space-time.

  They did not speak of Ito. Their preserving solutions would hold the body for a long while, but the central question was how much of Ito’s self had been lost before they could record it, to save the structure in his dying brain.

  Nigel sat and watched the landscapes outside while the others slept. Parents fear more than anything the loss of their children and now that he had lost at least some of Ito—for no process, he knew, could completely restore the son he had loved, as was—he could not stop remembering the moments with Ito as a little boy, the passing incidents transfigured by time into golden memories. There is no perfection in the world, but one of the functions of memory is to make the past perfect at least in its small ways. He clung to that and knew that this phase would pass, too, but he relished it nevertheless.

  Days of relative time passed. They were all in a hurry to return to their era and the random pauses during Transits irritated everyone. They became short-tempered and edgy about small details. Nigel withdrew, growing silent.

  Then, during a longer pause, he went for a walk with Angelina into fields beyond their sheared-off farm. It looked like maize and he hungered for something reassuring as he hiked across rumpled fields beneath a warm yellow glow of timestone overhead.

  It was indeed a field of maize but at its edge was a black swarm in orderly, marching columns. He squatted in the dust to inspect. Ants. So many they called up sudden apprehension. But they ignored him and Angelina.

  Here a line carried a kernel of corn each. Others carried bits of husk and there an entire team coagulated around a chunk of a cob. He followed and found that the streams split. The kernel-carriers went to a ceramic tower, climbed a ramp, and let their burdens rattle down into a sunken vault. They returned dutifully to the field. The other, thicker stream spread into rivulets that left their burdens of scrap at a series of neatly spaced anthills, dun-colored domes with regularly spaced portals.

  “Wonderful,” he said.

  Angelina caught his meaning, nodded. “So . . . intricate.”

  He marveled. These had once been leaf-cutter ants, content to slice up fodder for their own tribe. They still did, pulping the unneeded cobs and stalks and husks, growing fungus on the pulp deep in their warrens. Tiny farmers in their own right. But in the long voyage through humanity’s care, they had been genetically engineered to harvest and sort first.

  Faithfully they paid their human masters the tribute of the rich kernels, delivered to storage, no doubt following chemical cues. He thought of robots, clanky things. More subtly, insects were tiny robots engineered by evolution. Why not just co-opt their ingrained programming, then, at the genetic level, and harvest the mechanics from a compliant Nature?

  Slowly, as they wandered in nearby fields, he came to see that here the entire biosphere of the esty was shaped with similar craft. Like old Earth, the esty was a machine that kindled life and tuned it to the needs of . . . who? What? Intelligence?

  Certainly masterful hands lay behind the esty, something immense and unfathomable. But then, Earth had for nearly all of human evolution been just as mysterious to the growing, still-sluggish minds that lived among its marvelously tuned valleys, thick forests, and salty seas. The esty was a step up in that chain. A place beyond the comprehension of the smart apes who had blundered into this vastness, long on awe and short on table manners.

  Somehow this discovery about the esty of the future buoyed him. Angelina felt it, too, a strangeness that was somehow familiar, part of being human in an order beyond their knowing. A silent agreement passed between father and daughter and they held hands crossing the last field.

  They trotted back for the next Transit. Later, he found himself paying more attention to the panorama unfolding before them as they slipped and glided along the twisted geometry of the meandering worm.

  He saw again and again recurring themes. Sailboats cutting the green waters of great, curved lakes. They dappled cupped bowls of water as they harvested the winds that blew through the Lanes, blunt pressures adjusting thermodynamic truths. Spherical houses that clung to impossible cliffs, imitating hornets’ nests with Euclidean grace. Hot air balloons, inverted teardrops hanging yellow and gold and sunset red amid the cottony chaos of clouds. Only later did he notice that the coasting teardrop shapes were not managed by men at all. They were alive. Great heads swung where gondolas would. Immense eyes surveyed the land below for foraging. His surprise turned to pleasure. One teardrop plunged abruptly, snagged something on the ground, and buoyed

  aloft again.

  In all these, form fitted so perfectly to function that the marriage recurred in many different societies, cultural worlds divided by immeasurable difference, but united by a deep aesthetic that shaped tools to an obliging hand.

  All this he learned during their forays out for provisions, during the pauses which now seemed unbearably long. The esty had all kinds of people, he learned by bargaining with them. Maybe it had to, to work. There were ample numbers of the smoky-minded, the everyday deluded, the types who had to use emotional suction cups to hold on to this place at all. Nothing in nature said life should be easy.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Cauchy Horizon

  You all realize,” Nikka said to them over the lustrous dining room table, “that we can’t truly get back to where we were?”

  She had called a formal little family gathering after supper, no small talk or leftover coffee cups to clutter the mind. Everyone sat upright, properly chastened.

  Angelina blinked, shocked. “We can’t?”

  Nikka seemed to think this should be obvious. “A wormhole head can’t eat its tail.”

  “Ummm?” Nigel didn’t follow.

  “If one end of our wormhole gets too close to the other, there is a quantum-mechanical effect. Particles fry up out of the quantum foam, acting like a pressure. This forces the ends apart, so the loop can’t close.”

  Benjamin was puzzled. “Particles? Why?”

  Nikka thumbed in diagrams, which floated just below the polished tabletop. Airy confections: yellow light-cones intersecting scarlet, slanted planes.

  “The wormhole head can’t get close to its tail, can’t get beyond what’s called the Cauchy Horizon. If it does—”

  Frying radiance pulsed from the blue wormhole head. An answering hot shower pulsed from its tail. A storm of colliding radiation pushed the two apart.

  Nigel would once have untangled these Euclidean graces, but he was content now to let Nikka ferret out the truth—

  or theory, rather, he corrected himself. There was a big difference. Nikka said, “If they get too close, you could go back to where you started and stop yourself from beginning.”

  Benjamin shook his head. “Why would I want to do that?”

  Nikka laughed, eyes crinkling with myriad lines. “Physics doesn’t care about what you want. It’s about what you could do. Try to create paradoxes in causality and the universe will straighten you out—pronto.”

  Nigel ventured, “Uh . . . how?”

  Nikka gestured at intricate traceries of world-lines, slanting surfaces chopping through event-space. Nigel nodded as though he were following all this, and in fact some of it did come through. But he was struck by how the obliging simplicities embedded in the minds of primates who learned to throw rocks and joust with sticks on the flat dry plains of Africa could so deftly eye the warp and woof of the esty labyrinths. Presumption masquerading as physics . . . probably.

  Nikka’s pal
e logics were almost persuading. Almost.

  Their world peeled back to its essentials.

  Beyond their compound the esty flickered. Events, eras, whole blighted histories shimmered and winked away.

  Backward, sliding backward.

  The worm was writhing now, curling through its convoluted course on its great ranging return. There was no clear concept of speed in this, Nikka pointed out, because the rate of progress through time could not be measured versus time. The human perspective did not encompass this, and Nigel’s rather classically stiff-lipped education resounded in memory: That you cannot measure you cannot know.

  What they all did know was that the supplies for preserving Ito’s body and brain cells were running low. To keep him cooled to the critical range—below thermal damage, yet above the point around minus 110 degrees Centigrade, where shear stresses set in—took energy and circulating fluids.

  “He can’t hold much longer,” Angelina said, circles under her eyes.

  “Damn it!” Nigel slammed a fist onto the dining room table, where situation reports on Ito gleamed. “We’ll have to cobble something together.”

  Angelina had sat in vigil beside Ito’s tank and was worn down, but she knew those systems better than anyone, and her slow, sad shaking head struck a heavy weight into Nigel’s heart. “No use. We need to get back to our own era. Then I could find supplies.”

  “If we hit a longer pause,” Nikka said hopefully, “we could go out, forage—”

  “No time, our pauses are getting short. And out there it’s strange.” Angelina dismissed the idea with a tired wave of her hand. “I wouldn’t trust anything I got.”

  “That damned flickering is faster and faster anyway,” Benjamin said.

  “I hope it means we are—” Nikka hesitated with the instinctive rectitude of a scientist, “in some sense, accelerating toward the wormhole mouth.”

  “I hope, too,” Angelina whispered, “I do, I do.”