Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  Toby gazed around at the distant crumpled mountain range. Timestone simmered and flared with light. Shadows played across angled perspectives. Here the land misled the eye. Brilliant blades of rusty light lanced up through the timestone in the valley below, illuminating the cottony clouds. Denser masses embedded deep in the timestone cast shadows up, into the air and finally on the underbellies of clouds. The pyramid was pure stone, not timestone, and so squatted as a dark mass lit by smoldering glows beneath. Far above, the esty curved over, bounding the Lane. A high arch of timestone answered with its own beams and shimmers of reddish light. The esty seemed to smolder. “So this whole thing is a kind of . . . museum?”

  “Museum?” Walmsley looked surprised, then covered it with a shrug. “I hope it isn’t merely that.”

  “Sounds like it is. The Old Ones made it, didn’t they?”

  “I believe so. They were close to the scene, the explosion.”

  “Maybe they’re the museum keepers.”

  Walmsley laughed in his clipped, reserved way. “And we’re the exhibits?”

  “Could be.” Toby watched clouds come skimming down from the vault above. Descending blades of incandescent light were so strong they dissolved clouds that drifted under them. A high blue haze suggested an atmosphere as deep as a planet’s. “Do these Old Ones ever come around to visit the displays?”

  “In a way.” Walmsley stiffened slightly, and it wasn’t the chill getting to him.

  “What do they look at?”

  “If it’s a museum, I suppose I’m the librarian.”

  Well, Toby thought, if Walmsley had his reasons for sidestepping a question, it was his right. The geezer was fabulously old, though now Toby didn’t believe his story about being from Earth for a squeezed second. Best to play along with him. “Oh? How?”

  He waved casually at the pyramid mountain. “This is it. The Galactic Library.”

  Toby gaped. “You need this much room?”

  “Ten billion years, the galaxy’s been whirling around.”

  “But this is a whole mountain—”

  “Four hundred billion stars, give or take a hundred billion. And don’t forget the smaller stars in the halo above and below the disk. They may have started spawning lukewarm planets first of all. There has been plenty of time and room for life to blossom.” Something bitter flickered in Walmsley’s face. “And to die.”

  Rising winds moaned in Toby’s ears. “Did mechs kill ’em?”

  “Not usually, I gather. The mechanicals obey biological logic, just as we do. They were first made by Naturals, just like our computers on Earth. Later they replaced their parent species, often on worlds made damn near unlivable by some stupidity of their parents. Fatal stupidity.”

  “So you’ve got the Naturals’ . . .”

  “Science. Literature. Recordings of art. Lore. And things I cannot fathom as belonging to any category.”

  “The Old Ones come here to read?”

  Walmsley nodded. “I can’t often tell when they’ve been, until they’re gone. Crafty buggers, they are.”

  “And the mechs, they can’t find this place?”

  “They know. So far they’ve been turned back.”

  “By what?” The pyramid was impressive, but apparently undefended.

  “Ingenuity, mostly. In the early days, just plain people. The mechs would break through the esty in some new fashion. Sometimes they would get onto that plain out there and after it was over we found bodies soaked with oil and lubricants from damaged mechs who had run people over before they could be killed. The people looked like brown cigars. Suredead as well. The mechs would pack in all they could of people’s running minds, straight out of the cerebral cortex.”

  Toby nodded. “And when somebody finally killed the mech . . .”

  “Right. You ended the people, too.”

  “Damn.”

  “That made you think twice about doing it. No choice, though, in the end.”

  “My grandfather? He passed this way?”

  “The Old Ones brought him. I spoke to him and then they took him away. Fine fellow. We got drunk once.”

  Toby nodded, smiling. Abraham had been fond of anything that loosened the tongue without emptying the mind.

  A hard gust whipped Walmsley’s hair about his intense face. “Your father said something about that in his self-representation, remember? About Abraham being afoot, wasn’t it?”

  “A warning. I didn’t understand. Did you?” Walmsley shook his head, as if listening to the wind. Toby had last seen Abraham in Citadel Bishop, just before the mechs breached their defenses and the Calamity began. Would he still know the man? After years of hard pursuit, in his mind Abraham was nearly as legendary as Earth, a symbol of an earlier, better time.

  Walmsley said quietly, “You might ask a higher authority. That’s why I took us outside. A presence is descending.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Here—” Walmsley popped open his wrist and made some adjustment on a small panel. “I can pipe my sensorium into yours, within a few meters’ range.”

  At once Toby saw in the yawning spaces around the pyramid-mountain not empty air but fine blue lines. They converged from above like an unseen pipeline of—what?

  “Magnetic fields. Pressure’s building.”

  Toby sensed some movement down the field lines, though when he looked directly at any group of lines they seemed static. Gazing up into the bowl of sky he saw a constant interplay, field lines rustling and jostling, like wheat blown by autumn breezes.

  “That’s your guard?” It made sense. Mechs used circuits. Magnetic fields acted on all electrical currents. Field lines were like stretched rubber bands that could never break, but they could knot off, make smaller loops. They could slam into mech circuitry, scramble and fuse and scorch.

  Walmsley nodded. “They were an early form the Old Ones devised. An intermediate step. Now they do . . . chores, I suppose you’d say.”

  Striations worked high up. Bright blue-white snarls plunged down, shaping up into something massive.

  A heavy voice came into his mind.

  We perceive a threat. It has invaded my foot points in the accretion disk. I cannot repel it, as it propagates solely along my field lines. No transverse pressure can block it.

  “The Magnetic Mind.” Toby had heard it before, addressing his father.

  “Mind?” Walmsley sniffed. “More like a committee.”

  We encompass more than a single, authoritarian intelligence such as you can know. I/we swim in copper-tinged brilliances, harvesting the wealth beside the mouth that knows no end. I slide, wrapped rubbery about the accreting disk. Not a mere garment for plasma winds to wear. My feet plow scalding trenches, my head scrapes against stars.

  “Ummm,” Nigel said wryly. “And your ego? How big is that?”

  The voice strummed up in Toby’s ears like sheets of wires plucked together.

  Do not trifle with me.

  Walmsley grinned. “Pardon, squire. I get that way with the upper classes.”

  Before, his father had always been present to address the Mind. Toby remembered the strange phrases of the Mind, describing Abraham as “whirling somewhere in time-wracked eddies.” When his father had asked more the Mind had said, “The small mind that I can interrogate sends wails of remorse—” and would speak no further.

  Toby gathered his resolve and shouted at the shimmering blue forest, “Where is Abraham? And Killeen?”

  I do not carry such knowledge.

  “Then what the hell are you good for?”

  Walmsley said gently, “This.” He adjusted his sensorium and a darting signal sprayed out into the valley on electromagnetic wings. To Toby it looked like a spherical flower blooming for a rosy instant, then withering. In reply came,

  Nigel! I so long to press against you. We are shuffling to realign—busy! I am so happy you felt me out here.

  It was another presence altogether. Lighter, with a slippery gra
ce.

  “This is my wife, Nikka.”

  Toby blinked. The resonant voice seemed to come from behind him, close and warmly intimate. Utterly unlike the Magnetic Mind.

  “Hullo, luv,” Walmsley said happily.

  This is the boy, Toby? He is huge.

  “A refugee from the Hunker Down worlds. A Bishop.”

  I have heard of them. There were some in a ship a long time ago, yes? I overheard spiral waves propagating down the field gradient, carrying frequency-floating messages for them.

  “That was about my grandfather. You’re a, well, friend of the Magnetic Mind?”

  I stream-team with the Mind. You could say that I am a subsectioned part of it. The Mind itself is the theme. I am a variation within it.

  Walmsley said stonily, “That’s the best anyone can do.”

  Toby searched the hovering strands of blue but he could see no pattern. “Where is she?”

  I am dispersed. I express as tangled knots of flux spread over volumes. It makes for a slow life.

  “But a happy one,” Walmsley said. Toby caught a sad, sour note floating beneath the dry irony. Walmsley’s leathery face gave little away but he had a sense of how this man had limited his pain with a cutting humor.

  “What . . . happened?”

  “She picked up something from the wormhole. Like a virus. Perhaps mech-made. It slowly took apart neural networks.”

  “So she . . .”

  “Aged, in a way. Lost her self, so slowly it was like an excruciating exercise in remembering who she was, just to look at her. She—”

  Walmsley abruptly clamped his jaw tight, staring straight ahead. “It was subtle, I’ll give them that.”

  Toby thought of Shibo, a woman now long dead and surviving only in some chips he carried. Slivers of her still flitted like darting small birds through him, but he could control those. “No way to . . .”

  “Save her? No tech for it.”

  Do not mind him. I owe this to the Old Ones. They made it possible, imposing my patterns on a form of maglife.

  “They recorded you?” Toby remembered the Killeen he had seen on this same parapet. A sharp, clear representation, but after a while it repeated patterns.

  Recordings have limits, recursions.

  “So do people,” Walmsley said archly.

  “She doesn’t seem like a, well—”

  A narrow pattern? I am not. I am—as far as I can tell—the person I started out as. Evolved, of course, by experience.

  “Experience I haven’t had the privilege to share,” Walmsley said crisply.

  Don’t listen to him. He complains because I can’t sleep with him anymore.

  “Not a small issue, I should think.”

  No, lover, it isn’t. You know what I mean, though.

  Uncomfortably Toby said, “But you survived. Lived.”

  Nothing we knew could fix the horrible thing that was creeping through me. I . . . lost respect for my body in the end. It became foul and corrupted. This was the only escape we knew.

  He had never met this woman before but he could feel in the whispery voice a reservoir of strong emotion. He thought of his own mother, long suredead. “You were right to do it,” Toby said uselessly. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable talking to newly met adults, but this . . .

  “So she comes to tarry now and then,” Walmsley said. “Like having a cloud to tea.”

  Sing for me, Nigel. It always improves your mood.

  Toby was surprised to see Walmsley flush with embarrassment. He had not imagined the flinty old character could.

  Come on. You know it makes you feel better.

  Walmsley twisted his mouth and muttered, “Mind, this is a favor,” and then launched into:

  “Aw-ee laaast mah-ee hawrt een ahn Angleesh gawr-daan,

  Whaar tah rawzaz ahv Anglahand graw . . .”

  Bravo! More.

  Walmsley made a face. “That’s the Welsh accent. Next time, Cockney.” He glanced at Toby. “Always do something in bad taste occasionally. Keeps the muscles oiled.”

  “Bad taste?”

  “Old Earther concept. Having good taste was like being smart—only better, because once proved, you were done. Me, rather than good taste, I’d rather have things that taste good.”

  I so wish I could do more about that. I so want—

  “Isn’t there some way,” Toby began, “with all this tech—”

  We have come here because there is some apparent incursion.

  The Magnetic Mind had returned like a weight. Toby saw it as a glossy sheen between the field lines. His Isaac Aspect said, dry and stiff,

  Magnetic waves formed into packets. Beautiful! Much like the basic memory which carries me. Except here the information is analog, not digital.

  Walmsley asked sharply, “What kind of incursion?”

  Plasma modes I do not know. They descend into this volume. Their pace is quickening. Their dispersion relation has strange roots, in both real and imaginary spaces: v(w)=w(k)/k(w). I have traced back the field lines to their origin. Though derived from the accretion disk, where mine own feet are firmly planted, these undergo some change. They are contorted. Given fresh energies. Written upon.

  Walmsley watched the great space above the pyramid. Toby saw quickening field lines gather like smooth blue reeds blown by currents he could not sense. They tangled, snarled—

  Silently, the sky split into shadow and radiance.

  Half peeled back into eye-stinging brilliance. Along an exact hairline strip bisecting the bowl above, the other half turned dead black.

  “Fractured,” Walmsley said.

  Nigel! There are bipolar drafts. I cannot find my footpoints. If this is what the mechanicals have been doing in their works near the accretion disk, then I—

  “They’ve found a way to populate the Magnetic Mind’s own field lines,” Walmsley said with unnerving calm. “Pried open the magnetic canopy over us.”

  Toby felt a rising pressure all around him but he could still see nothing out of the ordinary. Magnetic presences were beyond his diagnostic ability but the sheer pent-up energy hovering above them set off his alarms. Tiny dismayed voices called for his attention in his sensorium. His internal defenses did not know what to do but they smelled something bad.

  “Shouldn’t we get inside?” he asked.

  “And miss the show?” Walmsley seemed unafraid.

  Knots plunged down the field lines. Toby suddenly saw that the lines now all converged on the pyramid and the knots were thickening as they fell. They turned an oily brown and slowed but kept coming.

  “The Galactic Library!” he shouted against a crackling wind.

  “The Magnetic Mind is defending it,” Walmsley answered as he walked back along the parapet.

  “But it looks like—”

  “You’re right. Let’s get inside.”

  Apparently this was all the notice Walmsley would take of the danger. He still did not hurry, and instead spoke rapidly to Nikka in a whisper Toby could not make out.

  I cannot apply pressures to them, Nigel! They butt against me. Hurt! I hear voices from them. Digital. Stuttering. They are mechs of a kind I have not seen. Vicious, sharp, like rats! I—

  The sky fell.

  The distant ceiling of the esty collapsed inward. An instant later Toby sensed that the magnetic fields were refracting his vision. The fields were plunging. Fighting, snarling, dying in dazzling explosions of scorched red.

  “Inside!” Walmsley called.

  Ah! It is, is shredding me. Shear waves—I—

  Something shrieked like metal ripping apart high up in the air. Toby ran for the open doorway. It started closing. He heard Nikka’s name called in a voice that boomed down around him. His senses contracted. Too much was battering at him. Walmsley was slightly ahead and then he was down, arms flailing, as though his legs had gone dead.

  Toby had been trained by Family Bishop to help vital Family members wounded on the field. He stopped to grab Walmsley
but the man slapped away his hands. “Go!”

  He had also been trained to follow orders. He went.

  TWO

  Flight

  Something like a defeated army was retreating. It was easier for Toby to tell that it was defeated than that it had been an army.

  Things were moving through the thick woods that he had never seen before and had no desire to see again. There were limits to his curiosity.

  He kept low and in shadows. Angular forms were retreating along with him but he did not trust any of them. Aliens, mostly. Quite alien.

  He had gotten out of the pyramid by luck. The walls knew he was coming and guided him through the massive underpinning of the mountain. They kept up with his dead run. He had taken no time to look at the columns that rose out of sight, glittering mica-sharp.

  Data banks, one wall told him. They looked more like huge shimmering trees.

  He reached a blank stone wall that did not answer. In one corner of it was a tiny booth, apparently made for dwarves like Walmsley. He grabbed his ankles and waddled in. A voice that sounded offended told him to make the second person get out. He banged on the wall to improve its understanding. Just when his hand got numb from it the door wheezed “Vandal!” and shut.

  The booth accelerated for a long time, slammed to a stop. He got out, went up a ramp—and was in this forest.

  Outside was a shambles. Mechs prowled high up in the esty spaces. He could not see the pyramid at all but the rumpled horizon looked a lot like the distant perspective from the pyramid top, only seen from the other side. A man came loping by Toby and in response to a shouted question answered only, “Magnetic Mind’s dead! Dead!” and ran on.