Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  But the time-storm afflicted both types of craft.

  Murmuring dark fell as they cut across river before the whorl of time that awaited. It rose syphonlike at midriver, whereas reports as recent as yesterday back in town had said it clung to the shore opposite where the Natchez now picked its way.

  “Moving quick, it is,” Mr. Preston said sternly at the wheel.

  The whirling foam-white column dimpled and reddened the images of forest and plain above it. Toby stood to the corner of the pilot’s nest and soon exhausted everything he could remember about seeing the storm days before, which proved of no use, for the tempest had grown and shaped itself into a twisted figure-eight knot that spewed black water and gray-metal fountains.

  Rain pelted the pilot’s nest windows. The cyclone air sucked light from around them. Blue-black traceries made a fretwork above. Toward shore Toby saw the trees dim into spider web outlines. Winds whipped and blasted at the Natchez, bending trees and turning up the pale underside of their leaves so that waves of color washed over the canopy. Trees tossed their arms as if in panic. With a shriek one of the Natchez’s chimneys wrenched and split and the top half flopped down on the foredeck. Crew ran out to cut it free and toss it overboard. Toby saw Stan with them, sawing frantically as the wind blasted them nearly off their feet. Peals of profanity blossomed on lips, so close Toby could read them, but a gust whipped the words away.

  This was no ordinary wind. It ripped and cut the air, warping images so that men laboring seemed to go in agonizing slow motion, then frantic speed, all the while stretched and yanked and pounded out of shape by invisible forces.

  Then—sssssttt!—a vacuum hiss jerked a brilliant glory-filled radiance into the sky. An ethereal glow flooded the deck. Yet ashore lay in gloom. Treetops plunged and wrestled with imaginary antagonists. At mid-river foam spouted.

  Another ssssstttt! and a crash and the ship fell a full man’s height, splashing itself into a bath of hot effervescence. In a fragment of a second the air got dark as sin and thunder rumbled across the sky like empty barrels rolling down stone stairs.

  And then they were out. The gale became a scenic protuberance on a mild river again and the pilot said, “Temporal turbulence was mild this go.”

  It did not seem so to Toby as he sat on a stool and got his breathing in order again.

  When he saw Stan later the young man said, surprised, “Twist? Stretched legs? I never felt any such.”—and Toby understood that the shiftings and unsteadiness of both time and space were the province of each particular observer. No one felt the same effects. But the truncated chimney, now being hastily restored by Stan and others in a full sweat, spoke of how real the waverings of time could be.

  They cut across once more, skirting a big bar of aluminum that gleamed dully, and could snatch the hull from an induction ship in a passing instant. This took the Natchez near the shore where Toby had left his skiff. With Mr. Preston’s binoculars he searched the blue-green brush but could find no trace of it.

  “Somebody stole it,” he said, outraged.

  “Or else ate it,” the pilot said, smiling.

  “I didn’t grow that skiff, it’s not alive. I sawed and hammered it and slapped on scrap metal.”

  “Maybe time ate it,” was all the pilot would say.

  The shore seemed watery and indeterminate, a blue-green emulsion. As they beat their way upstream his respect for the pilot grew. No prominence would stick to its shape long enough for Toby to make up his mind what form it truly was. Hills dissolved as if they were butter mountains left on a dining room table during a warm Sunday afternoon.

  Yet Mr. Preston somehow knew to make the Natchez waltz to starboard at some precise spot, else—he explained—the ship would have a grave misunderstanding with a snag that would rip them stem to stern in the time it took a man to yawn. The murky waste of water and slumbering metal laid traps for timeboaters of all keel depths.

  Mr. Preston made her shave the head of an island where a small temporal vortex had just broken from the misty skin of the river, trimming it so close that trees banged and brushed the stern, nearly taking off a curious passenger—who hurriedly disembarked at their first stop, leaving his bag. He babbled something about haunted visions of headless women he had seen in the air. The crew guffawed and made faces. Toby joined them.

  EIGHT

  The Eating Ice

  The vagaries of induction ships were of terrifying legend. Most folk who lived near the river—and many, indeed most, chose not to—reported seeing ships that winked into existence at a wharf, offloaded people and bags in a spilling hurry, and slipped away with motors whining, to vanish moments later by first narrowing, then becoming a door-thin wedge that sometimes rose up into the air before thinning into nothingness.

  People who tried to keep pace with a ship felt a pressure like a massive unseen hand upon them. They tired, especially going upstream. Thus most lived within less than a day’s walk of where they had been born. By straining effort a strong man or woman could take foot or horse into a distant town to find a price for a fresh crop, say, or purchase goods. Most preferred to let the induction ships ply their trade up and down, hauling bales of finespun, say, and returning with store-bought wonders ordered from a gaudy catalog.

  Some, though, booked passage on the ships, as much for the ride as for the destination. The Natchez’s main rooms were well appointed with opulent armchairs and stuffed davenports, the doorways garnished with bone-white wooden filigree of fanciful patterns and famous scenes of time-distortion. There was a technicolor symbolical mural of great pilots in the main lounge, and in first-class cabins, a porcelain doorknob and a genuine full-wall image sheet that gave an artistic view when caressed. The public rooms featured curving ceilings touched up with elegant gilt, and rainshower-style chandeliers of glittering glass-drops. Toby gazed at these jeweled confections and remembered seeing a true Chandelier, the great cities in space his distant ancestors had made. He enjoyed this place, but it was a humbled though ripe life these people led.

  Day passengers could get down to shirtsleeves and use a long row of bowls in the barber shop, which also boasted public towels, stiff public combs, and fragrant public soap. All this impressed Toby mightily. He had never, not even in the pilot’s own house, seen such opulence and finery. The Argo had been clean, crisp, beautiful in its way—but not splendid and grand, like this.

  Passengers boarding from the small, straggling, shabby hamlets along shore echoed his wide-eyed reverence. Three days of cruising brought a certain bemused certitude to him, though, so that he gazed at these scruffy travelers in their baggy clothes with the same elevated scorn as the older crew.

  Not that he inhabited the same celestial sphere as the pilot himself. Mr. Preston’s face wore lines earned by watching the immemorial clashes of differing temporal potentials. His speech veered from elegant, educated downriver cadences, to slurred, folk-wise vernacular. Pilots boated in eternity, and they knew it.

  Toby was along for his passingly useful knowledge, not his skill. So when the induction coils froze up he hustled below on sharply barked command of the Cap’n, just as did Stan and the rest. Mr. Preston stayed aloft, of course.

  The vast engine room was a frenzy of shouted orders and shoving bodies. The power that drove them uptime came separately from the huge copper armature that spun, when working properly, between mammoth black iron magnets.

  Normally, running into the river’s past would suck great bouts of energy from the whirling metal. But in crosscutting the river, snaking through reefs and bromium upwellings, the pilot would sometimes end up running at crosscurrent to the normal, and they would move for a while upstream, as far as the normal water current was concerned, but downstream and thus downtime, as the temporal contortions saw it.

  There was no general sign of this, though Toby thought he glimpsed far out in the river a huge, ghostly ship that flickered into being for a mere shaved second. It had great fat towers belching grimy smoke, portholes
brimming with violet light, and a craft hovering in the air like a gargantuan insect, vanes churning the mist above, as if it were a swollen predator mosquito about to attack a metal whale.

  Then—ssstttpp!—wind had whistled where the vision had floated, and a cry from below announced an all-hands.

  Stan showed him the coated pipes and cables, already crusted hand-deep in hard, milk-white ice. Boilers nearby radiated intense heat into the room, but the time-coursing inside the pipes and cables sucked energy from them so quickly that the ice did not melt.

  Toby and all the other men fell to chipping and prying and hammering at the ice. It was solid stuff. A chunk fell off into Toby’s hand and he momentarily saw the surface of a pipe that led directly into the interior of the induction motors. Though normally shiny copper, now the pipe was eerily black.

  He stuck his nose in close to see and heard the crack of air itself freezing to the metal.

  “Hey, get back!” a crewwoman shouted, yanking him away just as the entire gap he had opened snapped shut abruptly—air whooshing into the vacuum created, then freezing instantly itself, in turn sucking in more air.

  Another man was not so fortunate, and froze three fingers rock-solid in a momentary crevice in the pipe ice. His cries scarcely turned a head as they all labored to break off and heat away the fast-growing white burden.

  A cable sagged under its accumulating weight and snapped free. The high whine of electrical power waned when it did, and Toby felt real fear.

  He had heard the tales of induction ships frozen full up this way, the infinite cold of inverse time sucking heat, life, air, and self from them. The victim ships were found, temporally displaced years and miles from their presumed location, perpetual ivory icebergs adrift on the seemingly placid river.

  Toby hacked and pried and at last sledgehammered the ice. The frost groaned and shrugged and creaked as it swelled, like some living thing moaning with growing pains.

  Across the engine room he heard another cry as a woman got her ankle caught by the snatching ice. Gales shrieked in to replace the condensing air. Voices of the crew rose in panic.

  And the Cap’n’s bellow rang above it all, giving orders—“Belay that! Lever it out, man, heave on that crowbar! Thomson, run there quick! Smash it, son!”

  —and abruptly the howling winds faded, the ice ceased surging.

  “Ah,” the Cap’n sighed, “at last the pilot has deigned to direct us properly.”

  Toby took some offense at this, for no pilot ever could read the true vector of the time-current flux. Mr. Preston had brought them out of it, which should be fair enough.

  There were awful tales of ships truly mispiloted. Of induction craft hurtling uptime out of control—solid iceberg ships, with deep-frozen crew screaming upstream toward the beginning of time. Of downriver runaways, white-hot streaks that exploded, long before they could reach the legendary waterfall at the end of eternity.

  But the Cap’n reflected on none of that. Toby learned then that the high station of a pilot implies that a pilot take harsh criticism at the slightest hint of imperfection.

  NINE

  Cairo

  Casks and barrels and hogsheads blocked the quay but could not conceal from the pilot’s nest the sprawling green beauty of the city.

  Even the blocks of commercial warehousing sprouted verdant and spring-fresh from the soil. Cairo had perfected the fast-spreading art of growing itself from its own rich loam. This art was much easier than planting and raising trees, only to chop them down, slice them with band saws, plane them out, and fashion them elaborately into planks, beams, joists, braces, girders, struts, and dowels, all to make shelter.

  Such easeful grace demanded a deep sort of knowing. The folk of Cairo fathomed the double-twisted heart of living things.

  The Natchez rang three bells as it docked. Uprivermen often had a woman in every port and the bells announced which Cap’n this was, so that the correct lady could come to welcome him—sometimes for only an hour or two, in his cabin, before departure for the next port uptime. The vagaries and moods of the time currents led to many a hasty assignation. But the Cap’n of a swift ship might enjoy another such succulent dalliance quite soon—if he were physically able.

  A red-faced lady brushed by Toby on the gangplank as he went ashore. He gave her no notice as he contemplated staying here in the river’s biggest city.

  His head was crammed with lore he had learned in the pilot’s nest. At once he went to Cairo city hall and consulted the log of citizens. There was no notation concerning his father, but then it had been a forlorn hope anyway. His father was never one to let a piece of paper tag along behind like a dog, only to bite him later. Toby swallowed the disappointment and let his long-simmering anger supply him with fresh energy.

  Stan caught up to him and together they patrolled the streets, Stan doing the talking and Toby striding with hands jammed in pockets, bewitched by the sights. He had left his banged-up battle gear on the ship and stepped lightly.

  The self-grown houses rose seamlessly from fruitful soil. Seed-crafters advertised with gaudy signs, some the new neon-piping sort that spelled out whole words in garish, jumpy brilliance—Skillgrower, Houseraiser, even Custom Homeblossoms.

  They wandered through raucous bars, high-arched malls, viny factory-circles, and found them smoothly, effortlessly elegant, their atmospheres moist with fragrances that issued from their satiny woods. Women worked looms that grew directly from the damp earth. Stan asked one of these laboring ladies why she could not simply grow her clothes straight on the bush, and she laughed, replying, “Fashion changes much too quick for that, sir!” and then smothered a giggle at Stan’s misshapen trousers and sagging jacket.

  This put Stan of a mind to carouse, and soon Toby found himself strolling through a dimly lit street that reeked of, as Stan put it, “used beer.”

  The women who lounged in the doorways here were slatternly in their scarlet bodices and jet-black, ribbed corsets. Far different from the blocky, muscular women prized so in Family Bishop.

  Toby felt his face flush and recalled a time long ago, in the Citadel Bishop school. Family Bishop was strict in matters of lineage, which translated into a tight sexual code until the mating age.

  The boys’ coach had given them all a sheet of special paper and a pen that wrote invisibly, with orders to draw a circle for each time they masturbated—“shaking hands with your best friend,” he called it. The invisibility was to preclude discovery and embarrassment.

  At the end of a month they had all brought the sheets in. The coach had hung them up in rows and darkened the classroom, then turned on a special lamp. Its violet glow revealed the circles, ranks upon ranks of them, to the suddenly silent boys. “This,” the coach had said, “is the way God sees you. Your inner life.”

  The aim of all this displayed sin was to get the boys to cut down on their frequency, for lonely Onan’s dissipation sapped the intellectual skills—or so the theory went. His Isaac Aspect had supplied data on Onan, calling it a “folk tale” and sniffing with disdain at such primitive sexual mores.

  Instead, the exercise led to endless boasting, after they had returned to daylight and each knew his own circle-count, and yet could claim the highest number present, which was one hundred and seven.

  Toby had attained a mere eighty-six, somewhat cowed by the exercise itself. Later he felt that if he had known the end in mind, he could have pushed himself over a hundred, easy.

  In Cairo, sophisticated women were easily available. He felt a vague loyalty to Besen, troubled by his memory of her image trapped in the cube in Mr. Preston’s house. Was she still alive? Would she mind his indulging himself?

  Lust banished such fine distinctions, leaving him with a fidgety tautness. But the women beckoning with lacquered leers and painted fingers and arched blue eyebrows somehow did not appeal. He remembered Besen’s lopsided smile and missed it terribly.

  Stan made some fun of him for this. Toby reacted with surly sw
earwords, most fresh-learned from Mr. Preston.

  Anger irked his stomach. He left Stan bargaining with a milk-skinned woman who advertised with red hair and hips that seemed as wide as the river, and made his way through the darkling city. If his father had come this way there would be a sign. He had only to find it.

  TEN

  Zom Master

  Labyrinths of inky geometry enclosed him. Passing conversations came to him muffled and softly discordant as he worked his way among the large commercial buildings near the docks. Here the jobbing trade waxed strong, together with foundries, machine shops, oil presses, flax mills, and towering elevators for diverse crops, all springing from the intricately tailored lifecrafts known best in Cairo.

  Not that such arts grew no blemishes. Slick yellow fungus coated the cobbled streets, slippery malignancies that sucked at Toby’s heels, yearning to digest him. Trough-like gutters were awash in fetid fluids, some stagnant and brown-scummed, others running fast and as high as the thick curbstones.

  Each building had a mighty cask, several stories high, grown out from the building itself and shooting stilt-roots down to support the great weight of rainwater it held. Never near the river was there enough topsoil to support wells. The passing veils of rain were all Cairo had, and as if to make this point, droplets began to form in the mist overhead and spatter Toby as he searched.

  He descended into a lowland zone of the city, where the streets lay silent, with an empty Sunday aspect. But the wrought-iron symbology on the ramshackle buildings here told the reason. They made heavy, rugged ciphers and monograms, filled in with delicate cobwebs of baffling, intricate weave. Toby could make out in the gathering gloom the signs of Zom businesses, bearing the skulls and ribbed ornamentation. This solidity offset other fragilities. Cairo dwelled so near the great time-storm arcs that its folk always spoke conditionally, ending their statements about events with “so far” and “seems to be” and “in the sweet sometimey.”