Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  Nikka too, he supposed. And maybe Walmsley as well.

  He had grown up on the move and retreats were his specialty. The Galactic Library had seemed the most solid and reliable thing he had ever seen, and Walmsley had stayed alive a long time, but if it was all gone it was just gone and he would not think about it any further. He settled in.

  His boots adjusted themselves without his thinking. For broken ground they grew high insteps and sturdy heels. As he picked up the pace the heels shaped in response to being slammed down at a particular angle and pivot. They threw him forward of his normal stance, making Toby feel as if he were being helped ahead.

  Boots could even be made into serviceable weapons. They sharpened along the outer edge if lifted well free of the ground and the leg cocked into kicking position. They could slam-cut certain mech parts in a way that was not pretty.

  A slim shiny thing like a snake came zipping through the air and veered toward him. He had no time for a microwave burst or any of the other weaponry so he sprang at it, boot first. He caught it in its middle and the boot did the rest. The edge could sense material and slice it, his internal systems having already given the command when they sensed his alarm. They were better than the human nervous system, and quicker.

  This was called “giving ’em the leather” in Family lore, though of course nothing had been made of animal parts within living memory and the idea would have horrified any of the Families. His Isaac Aspect refused to confirm that any Bishops of ancient times had been animal-eaters. Toby suspected that Isaac was concealing his own habits but did not pry. He had other things on his mind.

  The retreat did not make sense to him. Each Lane was a kind of space-time pocket. Apparently the mechs had breached this one with magnetic pressures. In the long run they would work their way through and kill whatever they found. There must be defenses here but none seemed to work this time.

  That was the trouble with seeking shelter down here in the deep esty, he realized, so close to the black hole itself. Time ran slowly here, which was fine for storing things. Walmsley had mentioned that holding the Galactic Library in close to time-stasis meant that it decayed slower.

  That also meant that the mechs could sit outside, in comparatively flat space-time, and patiently develop their techtricks. People in the esty could not keep up. It was not a matter of intelligence, but of the ticking of time.

  Which meant that this particular Lane was probably doomed. It was huge, certainly. But now he could see mech shapes flitting high in the vault above. When he had to cross a stretch of flat land he glimpsed a colossal battle up there, all flash and dazzle. For a moment he felt as if he were back on Snowglade, and it brought a pang. Flat land gave the sky such a chance to be anything it would. Here, distant lands curved across. Far away, yes, but he still knew he was enclosed. Trapped.

  He had fashioned ways to cut through the esty stuff before. If he could squeeze through a momentary hole, he might pass into another Lane. Somewhere in here there were Bishops. He would not find them in this Lane, he was pretty sure.

  He tried his tricks, lasers and thumbers and the rest. They did not work. The esty-mass was impacted, sometimes spongy, other times rock-hard. His Isaac Aspect popped up in his mind.

  It is worth noting that stone, which you believe to be so firm, is like all matter a soufflé of empty space and furious probabilities.

  “Shut up,” Toby muttered, and thrust the micro-Personality back in its cubbyhole. “You’re nothing more than a chip half the size of my bittiest fingernail.”

  I do concur that you should find a way through, however.

  When the Aspect gave him irritating advice it often rushed to apologize. Who wouldn’t, when getting out of its cell depended entirely on Toby’s good will?

  He fled into hilly country. The fighting kept on in the high vault. He could see the magnetic field lines now; his inboard systems had picked up the trick at the pyramid. The lines were splayed, jumbled, not the orderly shapes of the Magnetic Mind.

  Sometimes there came a sound like tearing the arms off a shirt. Timestone would flower forth. Clouds of it rose like volcanic plumes lit from within by pale fires. They slowly sank back. The air rippled around them and puckered so that Toby could glimpse for an instant different landscapes beyond: scooped valleys, craggy mountains, murky chasms. Sometimes people moved across these passing scenes and he once yelled to a woman who looked to be close. Then the smoky exploded timestone drifted back down as if rejoining its natural flowing place and she evaporated with a small cry.

  He met a band that was burying its dead. Humans, they looked to be. He could not understand a word they said. His inboards couldn’t recognize the lingo either.

  The timestone here was scorching to the touch and glowed with a hellish light. The heat brought lassitude, but the dead bodies nearby gathered strength of a different sort, flavoring the air. Toby moved off.

  The people did too, stopped and camped and cooked without fire somehow. He stayed with them because it seemed safer, considering the aliens he had seen. At least he knew something about people.

  These feasted on the animals they could catch or kill. In the retreat there had been plenty to snare or stab. They ate slabs of meat and crammed it in with cups of stinging alcohol. Toby watched carefully, fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.

  He tried to remain neutral. Other tribes, other Families, other customs. He had learned that much. He saw that the meat-eaters grew tired as they finished. Flesh, he knew, took longer to digest. The drinkers got loaded, addled, a touch crazy. They were clumsier and stumbled easily.

  A woman came to him in the dark, after the timestone finally dimmed. He had been sleeping soundly. When he smelled her musk, a scent he knew well despite being in his own mind still a boy, he felt what she wanted. They spoke no words and he did as well as he could. He fell asleep feeling tired but contented. In the morning she was gone and the rest of her people with her. So much for humans sticking together here.

  From long hours of watching the crashing cliffs, waiting his chance to pick a way through, he grasped the strange hard fact that much of what passed in his life was forever beyond his understanding. He alone imposed meaning on his life and often he failed. Certainly he had failed at the pyramid.

  To live with that, the fact of incompleteness, was to finally comprehend the place of humanity in a universe that, far worse than being your enemy, was indifferent and unknowable.

  THREE

  The Impressed Man

  He woke up at the next “waxing.” Nobody here used “morning” or “sunset” or any of the other words that seemed automatic but didn’t apply anymore. The next time the light came was a “waxing” and they came remarkably regularly between the “wanings,” as if arranged.

  Toby got up and was about to start eating when he saw a man lying face down in a big clearing below. He went down to see. Up the slope came a woman, rosy-haired and face contorted. Her belly was sticky red and pushed over to one side. Two other women wearing identical gray coveralls were helping her up.

  Toby offered to help. The wounded woman crossed her hands under her big bosom and he saw between her fingers blood seeping. She shook her head and the gray overalled women did too, as if the wounded one was giving orders. They went on without a word.

  In the clearing the man was face down in the middle of broken stubs of rock. A pale yellow gas billowed out of a perfectly round hole a few steps from the man. As Toby approached he saw that the man had not been very big but was now. He was smooth and intact and only a hand’s width deep, flattened uniformly.

  Only a trickle of blood worked away from his shoulder and there was no other sign of damage to the body. Toby touched the creamy skin. It was pebbled, as if small bubbles had formed beneath and could not break through.

  He ate breakfast with a passing group of thin-faced men and women who looked exactly alike. When they had first caught sight of the man some had started to run away. Then they came back for some re
ason and sat down and started chewing.

  “Did you see him hit?” one of the women asked Toby. She spoke a kind of slanted talk that his inboards could translate.

  “Naysay. What does that?”

  “A skimmer, we call it.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Kind of burnt-brown lookin’. Comes along about head-high off the ground.”

  “You see it?”

  “Felt it. Like somebody ticklin’ the balls of your feet.”

  Toby saw from their faces and the eager way they ate that there was an unspoken celebration. It wasn’t me. See? It wasn’t me again.

  Once he recognized the look in their faces he had to admit that he understood the feeling because he had it too. The dead could not be recovered here. The technology wasn’t available and by the time you got to somebody who had been mashed flat by some force you couldn’t even understand it was too late anyway.

  The dead he had seen were already receding into dim images. They weren’t him, and neither was this squashed figure he had never known. It would be different if any were Bishops.

  That was the way he got through this place. Pushing it back. Making it not-him. Not-me.

  The little breakfast group grinned nervously as they talked. One fellow who had not run at the first sight of the squashed man had a superior smirk, holding forth about how he had seen bodies like that plenty of times before in a way that made Toby pretty sure that he had not.

  The woman said with assurance that if you didn’t smell a skimmer you were safe. How she could know this Toby did not bring up. She went rattling on about never smelling the one that would get you because by the time your sensorium caught a whiff you were slam-dead anyway. It was the kind of guff he had heard a thousand times but he listened because sometimes people gave away information you could use, unintentionally of course.

  Later he caught a quick, cutting fragrance and saw a hillside above him simply vanish. It happened fast and he registered no noise. The hill vaporized, clouding the air with cottony filigree.

  He thought it was very pretty and a piece of it passing caught him in the leg. A clean slice. The piece did not even stop.

  The woman that morning had grinned and given him a “quick-lick,” which turned out to be a vial of brown, smart-smelling stuff. He could not drink it, even though he suspected it was intended to be quick liquor. He did not much like what liquor did to people but it worked well on the cut. He watched more hillsides boil off to take his mind off the sting.

  Twice before the next waning he got hit. Just nicks, but they hurt and his inboard systems had to adjust to keep his sensorium tuned.

  The quick-lick helped. He had learned not to worry much about the technology here so he just used it. That fitted in fine with his new policy of not thinking. He used the quick-lick that way until by accident he spilled some and found that it ate away the sleeve of his shirt.

  FOUR

  Carrion

  Carefully Toby looked out over the plain where heat made the air dance. He had learned a lot and had paid with only a small wound in his side and some cuts. A bargain, considering.

  He knew now that when hit in the butt or the fleshy thick of the thigh or the long taper of the calf, people could speak nobly and clearly. They could even reach outside themselves and show real concern for nearby wounded, or even for the worried faces of those gathered over them.

  But if hit solidly, they withdrew. A solid shot to the belly, a snapped bone, lost control over arms or neck and head—all common glancing wounds from mech disablers—and the wounded clutched themselves, eyes boring into spaces others could not see.

  The mech flying predators were the worst. For a while Toby could not understand what the flitting small forms were doing in the distance.

  He saw first a thin triangular wedge of black and white that skimmed near the ground. It settled on a fallen man’s leg and waddled up to his face. Two tilted triangles working from a shared axis. Black light-gathering panels hinged with white scanners, corded by wiry linkages.

  Toby guessed that it was just curious but then it tilted its head down and pressed against the man’s forehead and he knew what it was doing. For a few hours before the man went to rot his self could be extracted by using a fast-flash.

  The wiry bird jockeyed over the dead face. Panels skated over his brow, seeking, reading. The man’s body jerked once when the flash-reading hit a motor-active center. Then it lay still and the flood of what the man had been passed into the thing that sat on his face.

  Toby shot it with a curling lick of infrared. The bolt fried the unprotected solars. The black triangle winked to brown. Still the scavenger took two teetering steps and flopped over on its side.

  Toby approached warily. He kicked it off the man and stepped on the white scanner panel. The thing was a glinting intricacy, a marvel of compressed purpose, now smeared and crumpled. It snapped satisfyingly as he dug his heel into its spine.

  Whatever it had sucked out of this man and others was gone now. Gone for humans and mechs alike. But at least this man, still cooling in the mud, would not be resurrected as a grotesque toy.

  Within an hour he saw a rectangular silhouette planing high up. It swung down the sky on a slow glide. He followed it. There had been a series of deep whooms reverberating from a distant ridge. He had been skirting around it, keeping in the twisted trees, but his hatred of the scavengers burned and would not let him go.

  This one was bigger, with a scrawny neck of cables that gyroed a seeking-panel head. It swooped safely above, not committing itself. Toby got near and another whoom came. The shifting sheets above wheeled and then fell like a whistling projectile.

  This time it was a woman and she was not dead. Both her legs lay loose, control cut. She saw the thing land off balance. It looked around with darting crystal eyes and waddled toward her.

  It was on her before Toby could get set. He watched from the trees and wanted to shoot it but could not be sure that using the necessary power he would not hurt the woman or even kill her.

  It teetered over her head. She must have also had something wrong with her neck because she did not turn to look at it. Instead he could feel her sensorium shift to bunch against the thing but that did no good. Her eyes rolled—panic or fear or derangement, Toby could not tell. She found some way then to move and twisted, rolling over, away from the shuffling sheets.

  She could have been trying to save her face somehow. Toby would never know because as she did it, flopping awkwardly face down, arms sprawling uselessly, the mech fired a pulse.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen on full-scope sensorium before, a jagged jab of red. It overloaded his sensors so that they clicked shut. A sizzling, frying-fat throb—and the woman went limp.

  The mech lifted itself onto her chest and turned an inspecting head this way and that, as if checking its work. Job all done.

  He had to wait for his sensorium to recover before he could use his weapons again. Seconds ticked by on his lower-left eyeball clock.

  It began to lift off with a soft whish of acceleration and Toby hit it then, sorry that he was so slow. This time he caught the power panel, gray from the drain. The mech flapped and clattered to the ground.

  He walked carefully to the woman’s body. She looked peaceful, which he knew was an illusion but took comfort from anyway. Blood ran out of both of her ears and matted her wavy brown hair. After a while to dry it looked pretty much like ordinary reddish, crusted mud.

  FIVE

  Cards and Dodgers

  The worst was the woman with the baby. He saw it all because he had gone to a makeshift field station to resupply some of his inbody fluids. His wounds had used up the reservoir.

  The field station was set up by a Family named Yankee. There were plenty of wounded people there, Families named Cardinal and Dodger and people speaking in such a broken-jawed way Toby could not make out a tenth of what they said. But a thin woman found him by using some kind of sensorium seeker.<
br />
  “Bishop?”

  “Yeasay. You from—?”

  “There’s another Bishop over here. Asking after kin.”

  Toby followed her into a section sheltered by a tent roof. The flaps rattled in the wind. Therm beds were crowded together here and all filled. He passed a woman lying under a quilt who was grunting and shoving hard.

  Next to her lay a man rolled over on his side with the covers drawn up around his head. “Here,” the thin woman said and left him.

  Toby touched the man and saw that it was his grandfather. Abraham’s head stirred and he blinked up at Toby. “I . . . too late.”

  “What’s wrong? How—” Toby tore the covers back and Abraham’s body was shrunken, pale, with purple blotches all down both sides. He could see no wounds but the skin was diseased somehow.

  “What did this to you?”

  “I . . . running down.”

  “How’d you get here? Are the others . . .”

  Toby’s voice trailed off as he saw the vacant despair in the face he had so often seen as flinty and confident. He looked away.

  “I . . . no help for me. I . . . not real . . . Abraham . . .”

  “What? Where are the others?”

  “Not . . . with . . .”

  Toby shouted to a nurse, “This man needs treatment!”

  The nurse came over and took a small reading device out of his smock pocket and said nothing. He turned Abraham’s head and unlocked a small square patch right above the spinal column. With the reader pressed against the open fleshmetal portal he thumbed in an inquiry and apparently took the reply through his sensorium. “Progressive. Can’t stop deterioration like this even if I had the gear.”

  Toby said hotly, “What’s ‘progressive’ mean and why—”

  “This’s a copy. They have a big error rate, most of ’em. Run down fast.”