Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  So to thwart this era’s mechs, a future one had voyaged into its own future—where it knew the crucial moment awaited.

  There, on the wasted plains, as their tiny fragment of a farm stuttered at the edge of infinity’s abyss, the Walmsleys had learned the mechs’ final destiny. Only that truth could disarm the age-old hostility between the two great Forms of life.

  “That is my task,” the raccoon said. “As a diplomat.”

  “A diplomat from where?” Nikka demanded, still not quite convinced.

  “The Old Ones?” Nigel asked.

  “They are a part of it, yes.”

  “I don’t get it,” Nikka said.

  “There are several higher orders than yourselves.” The raccoon groomed itself, as if this were everyday talk. “Did you think the galaxy was a simple division between organic forms and mechanicals?”

  “Well . . . yes,” Angelina said lamely.

  “There are other substrates. Other media, perhaps I should say.”

  “Such as?” Nikka pressed.

  “Magnetic fields. Collaborations of organics and mechanicals. And inscrutable symphonies of all three, forms that I can but glimpse.” Its bandit eyes glittered and Nigel felt a keen intelligence having fun. Playing with a pet?

  “That’s who sent the bodies back, started all this?” Angelina asked.

  “Oh no—those were sent by humans. They quite rightly sought to warn you.”

  “And you work for something bigger, higher?” Nigel asked.

  “So I believe. Do you know who you ‘work for’?”

  Nikka laughed suddenly. “We thought, for ourselves.”

  “There are larger agencies,” Scooter said, its eyes gazing reflectively into the distance. “We might as well call them gods.”

  Nigel thought of the God he had appealed to, for Ito. A God outside time somehow, a bare minimal God who could at least salve the wounds He could not prevent. In a universe apparently devoid of meaning, that was the merest scrap one could hope for. But the raccoon spoke of higher orders still.

  “I do not believe we can in principle answer such questions,” Scooter said. “They may function outside our conceptual spaces, their acts indistinguishable from natural law.”

  Nigel suddenly wondered whether the human category of science, and physical order, might be a reflection of something deeper. What imposed the order, after all?

  He asked the raccoon, but it was silent.

  Nigel remembered long ago thinking, I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we’re feeling now. Confronted with something nonchalantly superior, what did a pet feel? Awe? Mild irritation at the presumption? He looked at the raccoon, which had deceived them so long, and thought about the muscular intelligence that lay behind such a simple act.

  “You’re pretty arrogant,” Nigel said.

  “Do not mistake the messenger for the message,” Scooter replied, licking itself.

  “Such a neat creature, too,” Nigel said sarcastically.

  “Sometimes it is not particularly pleasant to be a conscious being,” Scooter piped, “but it is always a pleasure to be a mammal.”

  Nigel realized that this animal was really quite a remarkable job. Scooter looked, smelled, and acted like an Earth-derived raccoon, fresh from the gene vaults humans had brought here.

  But it was a construction, made by—what? There are several higher orders . . . He remembered a crude sketch, shown him long ago. Highers. More than Old Ones?

  And what were they? The semi-humanoid thing he had seen at the stutter-point? Had that thing sent back the bodies, to catch the eye of curious, persistent humans? And unfurled the esty itself, to show those humans the phosphorescent positron sky?

  Awe, he remembered, was a mingling of fear and reverence. Something in him, hominid-deep, had a cold, clear fear of the little raccoon. And what it implied.

  THIRTY-THREE

  No Erasures

  Perhaps all this would bring peace with the mechs. Perhaps they would be able to get their farm back into workable order. Perhaps.

  None of that mattered a jot, compared with the moment when Ito emerged from the cyclers. Gray, muscles shriveled, skin patchy. Alive.

  “I . . . what went . . . on?” Ito shook his head and tried to sit up. His mother restrained him. Which was difficult, because she was showering him with tears at the same time.

  He blinked, solutions still giving his face a glossy sheen. “I’m, ah, hungry.” He frowned in puzzlement as they all burst out laughing.

  He was back. But not all of him, they learned in the weeks ahead. It was an Ito but perhaps not the Ito.

  No transcription is ever perfect. Some brain cells were lost, unread by the recorders, mangled in the minute processing.

  Between Nigel and Ito there was a distance, one they never bridged.

  Again Nigel could not truly tell if this arose from the errors in salvaging Ito or in the coolness that develops all too often between father and son. He would never know.

  Nikka did not seem to notice it. She had fitful spells now, apparently some neurological damage from the Grey Mech attack. Her head and hands would suddenly tremble and she could not control them. She brushed aside their concerns when the medical tech could find no solution.

  “It’ll pass in time,” she said. “The body knows its own ways.”

  Still, she made a remark later that meant she did guess about Ito. They spoke of their child the way parents do, knowing that in the end there is remarkably little they can do. That served to ease the sad separation Nigel felt from this man who had come back from death and been changed by it.

  Fathers and sons speak inevitably across an abyss. Time rubs. It is never really possible to do anything over again. The Cauchy Horizon permits no erasures.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When Paltry Planets Formed a Stage

  Nigel went for a walk days later, when the house was secured and he could stride again on sturdy legs. Nikka was not feeling well and turned down his invitation.

  At university he had learned scraps of poetry, and one returned to him now.

  And there grow fine flowers

  For others’ delight.

  Think well, O singer,

  Soon comes night.

  In the dimness that was not a true night he thought of the time when the esty would unfold, up there in the far future.

  He went to a hillside where he could see a profile of the distant other side of the Lane. Here it was somewhat like the impossible horizon he had seen at the other end of the wormhole. He remembered the gauzy filaments hanging in that strange sky. And he thought of the Cauchy Horizon, beyond which physics could not see. As if even God had a sense of metaphysical modesty.

  He sighed, like breathing in clouds of cobwebs now, and tried to feel how it would be.

  So plasma entities of immense size and torpid pace will drift through a supremely distant era. Sure and serene, free at last of ancient enemies.

  Neither the thermodynamic dread of heat death nor gravity’s gullet can swallow them. As the universe swells, energy lessens, and the plasma life need only slow its pace to match. By adjusting itself exactly to its ever-cooling environment, life—of a sort—can persist forever. The Second Law is not the Final Law.

  And they will have much to think about. They will be able to remember and relive in sharp detail the glory of the brief Early Time—that distant, legendary era when matter brewed energy from crushing suns together. When all space was furiously hot, overflowing with boundless energy. When life dwelled in solid states and mere paltry planets formed a stage.

  And frail assemblies of chemicals gazed at the gliding plasma forms and knew them for what they were. Destiny glimpsed, then lost.

  Suddenly he felt a fierce conviction that this would happen. That it must. That man and mech would work together to this final, far-flung destiny. That they would finally reconcile and realize that intelligence transcended the mere substrate that embodied it.

  He felt the stars
then, beyond the folds of the esty. Somewhere in that far night a ringing of the esty came, like an old Cambridge church bell. The low still tone bore him momentarily up into the swarming jewel lights so that he walked not under but among them, for a last time jaunty and irreverent, laughing like a thief of time loosed in a glowing orchard, with more paths for the choosing than any mind could count.

  He staggered then, wheezing, and turned toward home. A sip of wine as a nightcap, perhaps. A fine bottle from their own cellar. He and Nikka would sit and smile and not talk about his indices. Not any more.

  Perhaps they would speak of Ito’s restlessness; already he wanted to go courting a young lady in a nearby Lane. Nigel thought of his own young days and smiled.

  Or perhaps they would discuss Angelina’s need to go off to study in high citadels of knowledge, for her grasp had now exceeded their farm. Or of the raccoon, which still lived in the Lane and was very busy. Going about something it would not say, perhaps could not say.

  The subject would not matter much. The present was now all that mattered. A sliver so thin, yet as wondrously wide as a tick of time.

  Dispassionate Discourse

  These humans may be the ones we seek to understand.

  They carry deeply embedded programs?

  Their deepest are termed “emotions”—but this is not what we seek, in my opinion.

  Emotions?

  They are like our “drivers.”

  But drivers are mandates, easily changed.

  In humans they are fixed in matter, laid down in durable pattern on neurological substrate.

  What a pointless method. But at least it must make them simple to read out, to record, to anticipate.

  Somehow it does not. Their “emotions” learn.

  But programs fixed in matter!—only crude laborers use such, and then purely because high energy fluxes are so wearing on them.

  This is one reason why humans are difficult to understand. They use methods we do not know, ones we never shared.

  With good reason.

  Ancient inferences, by our higher minds, hold that humans are important. Also, some other Natural forms, now extinct.

  Extinct due to us, I hope.

  Yes. Most through simple competition, others by directed exterminations.

  I find it reprehensible that we allow the Galactic Center to be infiltrated by these.

  We achieved a unified synthesis of opinion on this issue, I remind you.

  It is a vexing irritation. I believe this latest incursion is also dangerous.

  They harbor special assets. Old stories say so.

  Their technology is marginal, their bodies quite unimpressive.

  They have some ancient knowledge of the sensual.

  Pleasures? A rudimentary evolutionary device for prompting action—no more.

  We have need of pleasure on occasion.

  As reward, even goad—true. But what could such limited organic forms have to teach us?

  Their limited perception-space may give them special aesthetic qualities.

  Impossible.

  Constraints make possible achievement. A color poem without restraint is the lesser for it.

  What is their range, then?

  They see in three colors, sense aromatics, and—

  Only three? How can nearly blind creatures make their way?

  Poorly. But they are of the Naturals, I remind you. They inherited strange crafts.

  Feats we have long since bettered.

  Aesthetically, perhaps not.

  They are obsolete. All organic forms are.

  That is ideology, not fact.

  It is evolution’s point!

  Evolution has no point.

  The building of more enduring, subtle works—

  A strategy, no more. Its usefulness may pass.

  We are such works, and fit to judge.

  Yet even now we study the clouds of antimatter. To prepare for further self-evolutions.

  You know of this?

  I must, to fathom our vulnerabilities.

  Such information was restricted, I believed, to we, the Analysts.

  But we, the Aesthetics, are qualified to know and comment.

  More problems from our two-self experiment! I wish to end it.

  A moment more, please. Antimatter is our hope, our grail—on this we must all agree. In it lies the salvation of our Self. In this we resemble the Phylum Magnetics.

  We are nothing like them.

  Dislike distorts your judgment.

  Beings without matter! What is so noble there?

  An odd concept, “nobility,” for an Analyst.

  Tell me more about these humans.

  More knowledge awaits more inquiry.

  Then be swift.

  PART THREE

  Categories Beyond Knowing

  ONE

  Prisoners of Immensity

  Toby Bishop and Nigel Walmsley walked bent slightly forward. They struggled into the brisk breezes that swept up from the plain. Harrowing winds had scoured the ramps and walkways along the pyramid face. Around the sharp peak churned a howling vacancy.

  Walmsley’s eyes narrowed as he studied the clean cut of the far horizons. Some disturbance had drawn him out here, a quick dart of a message Toby had felt as an electromagnetic flicker, no more.

  It was good to be outside after Walmsley’s story. There had been a claustrophobic feel to the way the old man told it. Listening, Toby had an uneasy sensation of the wormhole constricting, forcing humans along a loop, trapped in events they could not change, prisoners of immensities they could barely glimpse.

  Chill winds blew their hair, whipping like smoke, neither noticing.

  Below them lay the ramps and terraces of a huge, geometrically exact pyramid, spreading down in great spare expanses, the flanks of the largest mountain Toby had ever seen. He had thought it was a natural upjut when he first journeyed toward it. The walk had taken him two sleeping periods—there were no days here—and only when he had reached the base did he realize that the entire mass was one artifact.

  Toby shuffled uncomfortably. “Strange story,” he said inadequately.

  “I haven’t told it, not that way anyway, to anyone.”

  “Your children—?”

  “They’re off in the Lanes. Family of wanderers, I guess.”

  “So all this with the mechs . . .”

  “Is part of a pattern. A history, I suppose, if one could look back from the other end of the wormline we followed. The far future.”

  “There’s something they want from us?”

  “Seems so. I picked up terms once, when Earthers were chatting up some Old Ones. ‘Trigger Codes’ and ‘First Command’—jargon, without the slightest explanation. When I ask Earthers, they pretend to know nothing.”

  “Maybe they don’t know.”

  “They know more than they’re telling. All this ties in with the Galactic Library somehow, too.”

  “Library?”

  Citadel Bishop had housed a library. One superior to that of any other Citadel, Family lore had it. He remembered from childhood the racks and racks of cubes, glinting russet and gold from thousands of tiny facets deep inside. His grandfather had told him once that each point stood for a whole roomful of the old-timey books, the ones with wood pages all clamped together at one end. He had seen a picture of one of those. “Our human library?”

  “From all the organic races that came before mechs. Before us, for that matter, but including Earth as well.”

  “The mechs want it?”

  “To complete some pattern they desire. One of them said that to me once.”

  “A pattern?” Something chimed in memory. His Isaac Aspect spoke rapidly in the whispery voice that came through his acoustic nerve complex.

  The Mantis spoke of artfully complete patterns. It meant aesthetic motifs perhaps, but from what we have discovered, a more ominous meaning may be germane here. A plan of events, a . . . conspiracy. I would remind you that th
e Mantis enabled Bishops to find the buried Argo.

  Toby said to Isaac, “The Mantis said it was after us because it wanted to make artworks.”

  He had seen those, grotesque mergings of human body parts with mechs. Worse than anything he had ever imagined. Even talking about it in subvocal made his throat clench.

  It said it was an artist. Surely that was not its only function.

  Walmsley could not make out Toby’s private Aspect conversations, or so he thought, since no Bishop had the tech to do so. Toby was still ruminating on Isaac’s points when he caught up to Walmsley’s question: “—could they want what all organic races have?”

  “Uh, how d’you mean that?”

  “All signs point to one motivation. The mechs want everything they can get out of the Library. Not some specific thing. They want to read it all.”

  Toby laughed dryly. “More like, they want to destroy it all.”

  Walmsley pursed his lips, as if trying to recall something a long way back. “What fragments they have gotten, before we secured a place for the Library, they actually read. They didn’t simply smash the data cusps.”

  Toby could not understand why Walmsley, still naked, wasn’t getting chilled. The wind purred in his ears, crisp and insistent. “Where’d you get parts of this Library?”

  “It was in the Lair when we arrived. So were other aliens.”

  Toby recalled his wanderings. “I haven’t seen many.”

  Walmsley chuckled, a curious rustling in his chest. “Are you sure you could recognize them?”

  “They’d have cities, wouldn’t they? Machines, some—”

  “Most don’t. A few not only don’t have cities, they don’t have clothes.”

  “Like animals?”

  “Like aliens. Anyway, we’ve all spread out. And many have different ecospheres. They breathe odd gases and we know next to nothing about them. Most aren’t talkative. It would seem that chatter is fundamentally a primate trait.”