Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  His bad luck, of course, that the timestone glow would ebb at just this time. The rain dribbled away, leaving a dank cold. He looked upward and saw that far overhead was a broad island of sandy waste, interrupting the timestone, and so leaving this part of the city permanently darker. So they had decided to put the Zom industry here, in constant gloom.

  He peed against a building, reasoning that it would help it to grow just like any plant—though he did modestly slip down a side alley to do it. So Toby was off the street when a squad of Zom women came by.

  They shambled, chill-racked and yellow-faced, eyes playing about as if in addled wonder, and one saw Toby. She grinned, an awful rictus, and licked her lips and hoisted her skirt with one hand, gesturing with the other index finger, eyebrows raised. Toby was so transfixed he stopped urinating and stood there shock-still until finally the Zom shrugged and went on with the other miserables. His heart restarted again some time after and he put himself back in his pants.

  Zoms were accepted as a necessity for their brute labor, he told himself. Still his breath came short, his chest grew tight and fluttery. He chided himself.

  Following the Zoms was easy. In a street of wavering oil lamps was the Zom Raiser.

  The man was tall, in a stovepipe-thin charcoal suit. He sat in a spacious room, working at an ancient stone desk, scribbling on a flat computer face. Along the walls were deep alcoves sunk into shadow.

  “I’m looking for a, my father. I thought maybe—”

  “Yes yes,” the man said. “An old story. Go ahead, look.”

  This abruptness startled Toby so that it was some moments before he fully realized what he saw.

  Grimy oil lamps cast dim yellow radiance across long rows of slanted boards, all bearing adult corpses. They were not shrouded, but wore work clothes, some mud-caked. Toby walked down the rows and peered into bloodless, rigid faces. In the alcoves were babes laid out in white shrouds.

  All had the necessary ribbed ironwork cage about them. Pale revitalizing fluids coursed through tubes into their nostrils, pumped by separate hearts—bulbous, scarlet muscles attached at the ribs, pulsing. The fluids did their sluggish work down through the body, sending torpid waves washing from the sighing chest through the thick guts and into the trembling legs. Their charge expended, the fluids emerged a deep green from the rumps, and spilled into narrow troughs cut into the hardwood floor.

  Amid echoing drips and splashes he returned to the stone desk, an island of luminosity in the cool, clammy silence. “He’s not here.”

  “Not surprising. We move them on fast.” The man’s deep-sunken eyes gave nothing away.

  “You raised anybody looks like me?”

  “Got a name for him?”

  Toby gave it. The man studied a leather-bound ledger and said, “No, not in the records. Say, though, I recall something . . .”

  Toby seized the Zom Raiser by the shoulders. “What?”

  “Leggo. Leggo, I say.” He shied back and when Toby’s hands left him he straightened himself the way a chicken shakes its feathers into order. “You damn fools come barging in here, you’re always—”

  “Tell me.”

  Something in Toby’s voice made the man cease and study him for a long moment. “I was trying to recollect. I’ve seen must be a dozen look sorta like you, if I ’member right.”

  Toby felt his throat tighten. They knew he was here and were copying Killeens to hunt him down.

  “Dealer comes in here with one every week or so.”

  “From where?”

  “Gets them in the countryside, he says. Brings them here for kindling up to strength. Got a storage place for them.”

  “Where?”

  “Last I heard, ’bout seven blocks over.”

  “Which way?”

  “Annunciation and Poydras. Big long shed, tin roof.”

  Toby made his way through the rain-slicked streets, getting lost twice in his hurried confusion and slipping on something slimy he did not want to look at. He got to the low building as a figure came out the other end of it and something made him step back into the street and watch the man hurry away. He went inside and there was nobody there except five Zoms who lay on ready-racks, chilled down and with brass amulets covering their faces. A gathering sense of betrayal caught in his mouth and Toby trotted down the empty aisles where Zoms would labor in the day, the slanting gray light making every object ghostly and threatening.

  He knew before he reached the end of it that the Zom Raiser had played him for a fool all along. While Toby was finding his way here the man had somehow sent word.

  He had hoped that the true Killeen would be here somehow, that perhaps his father was making the copies himself to aid his search. But it was far more likely that mechs had humans working for them. Toby should flee. He did not want to give up but the logic of it was clear and he had halfway turned when something fell out of the dark roof above.

  He dove sideways over a Zom without thinking. The thing was like a pale plate of meat spreading in the air like a flightless bird. It struck him smartly in the leg. An electric-blue blaze rose in his eyes. His sensorium crumpled and flashed with sparking pain. The Zom’s flesh was hard and cool as he fell across the body. Agony was climbing up his spine, coming for him. The frying intensity told him this was a high-order mech offensive weapon. He twisted on the slimy cool Zom and his legs cramped up with the shooting sting. That made it hard to roll but he grabbed the Zom’s head. It was a woman and he had to jam his hand into her open mouth to get the leverage. He slithered out from under the weight. The thing held on but he reached back and jabbed it with his gloved hand. Stiff fingers dug into a resistance like molasses. It shied away and he hit the floor. The mech device spread an oozing stain over the Zom.

  Maybe it had mistaken the Zom for him. Toby did not wait to find out.

  ELEVEN

  The Past Is Labyrinth

  Three deep, mellow bell notes floated off across the sublime skin of the river and some moments later came wafting back, steepened into treble and shortened in duration.

  “Means we’re getting close to the arc,” Mr. Preston said.

  Toby narrowed his eyes, searching the gloom before them. “Can’t see a thing.”

  “The bell notes get scrunched up by the time-wind, then bounce back to us. Better guide than seeing the arcs, sometimes. They twist the light, give you spaghetti pictures.”

  Toby would have preferred to watch the treacherous standing curves of frothy water, for he had seen one smash a flatboat to splinters on his trip down.

  A deep hush brooded upon the river. He felt a haunting sense of isolation, remoteness from the bustle of Cairo, though they were only hours upstream from it. He had felt bad about what would happen if mechs pursued him to the ship and so had hid out in a bar until the last moment. With his sensorium damped to zero he sat and brooded and decided never to activate the sensorium again. It was not the risk to himself so much, but the danger to the people he worked with.

  They sheltered here in a way he supposed was typical of humanity everywhere, given half the chance. They clung to a past and he passed among them in dangerous disguise. He could not bring mechs down upon his friends.

  He crept down to the river. To the ship. When he came aboard there was nothing remarkable, or at least nothing remarked. It had taken a while to get his calm back, to begin thinking again.

  To starboard he could make out solid walls of dusky forest softening into somber gray. Mr. Preston sounded the bells again and the steepened echoes came, quicker and sharper this time.

  Then the river seemed to open itself, revealing first the foamy feet and then the marvelous high swoop of the arcs. Silently they churned at their thick feet, sending waves to announce their power. Yet as the Natchez came up, holding tight to the opposite shore, the water was glass-smooth, with mercury breaking at mid-river and sending spectral flags of glittering mist into an eerily still air.

  This tranquility fractured. A wall of thunder
shook the glass windows of the pilot’s nest.

  “Whoa!” Mr. Preston called and slammed on the power. The induction motors sent a shock through the decking.

  “It look the way you seen it last?” Mr. Preston never took his eyes from the arcs. They were shimmering pink and blue now.

  “Yessir, only the tall one, it had a bigger foot.”

  “You shoot down through here?”

  “Nossir, stayed out by that sand bar.”

  “Damn right you were, too.”

  Toby had, in the chop and splash of it, been given no choice whatever. But he said nothing, just held on. The deck bucked, popped, complained.

  “Eddy running here up the bank to well beyond the point,” Mr. Preston said, betraying some excitement despite himself. “Might get us through without we have to comb our hair afterward.”

  They went flying up the shore so close that twigs snapped off on the chimneys. Mist churned the air fever-pink. Drumroll bass notes came up through Toby’s boots. “Hold on for the surge!” Mr. Preston called, as if anyone wasn’t already, and it hit.

  The Natchez struck the vortex whorl plunging by near the point. The suck of it stretched clear across the river this time, an enormous mouth of mercury and bromium seething brown and silver together in smeared curves. The ship whirled around, Toby thought as his stomach lurched, like a favorite top his mother had given him, possessing the mysterious ability to stand so long as it spun.

  This abstract memory lasted one breath and then water crashed over the pilot’s nest and smashed in the aft window. The ship careened to port. Time-torques whipsawed the groaning timbers. An eddy seized her and crunched one of her chimneys into pathetic torn tin. Concussion clapped Toby’s ears and left his head ringing. Lightning-quick flashes of ruby radiance forked from the river and ran caressing over the upper decks.

  Shouts. Screams.

  Athwart the current, then with it, the Natchez shot free of the howling whorl. Within a mere moment they brought up hard in the woods at the next bend. Ordinarily this would have been an embarrassment for a pilot, but as it came from passing uptime against the arcs, it was a deliverance, a penalty, as trivial as a stingy tip left after a banquet.

  In the lapsed quiet afterward they drummed upstream and Toby watched the shoreline for signs he remembered. Coming back to this place meant he could partly reverse the esty gradient. He figured that would get him back onto a time axis closer to the period shared with the portal cities. Maybe—just maybe, because people here didn’t want to talk about the esty at all—he could get closer to the source of Killeens.

  He had not told anyone that, but Mr. Preston gave him sidewise glances now and then. Stan, after the obligatory ragging of Toby for having shied away from the women of easy virtue, kept pestering him about finding hydrogen hats. So Toby spent long hours pretending, watching beady-eyed the dense, uncut forest roll by.

  To him the richness here was vaster than downriver, thicker and mysterious beyond ready expression. He had not the wit nor especially the years to savor it fully; taste comes with age and is perhaps its only reward, though he knew some called the same thing wisdom.

  He saw the great slow-working chains of cause and effect on the river—forces which, though elusive in the redolent natural wealth, in hard fact underpinned all the sweeping vistas, the realms of aery compass, the infinitesimal machineries of wood and leaf. The young must make their way in a world that is an enormous puzzle, so he watched the shifting hues quick-eyed, a student of the forever fluid, knowing that the silver river might foam suddenly to suck him under or contrariwise spew him aloft in a frothy geyser—all beautiful events, he supposed, but they would leave him no less dead.

  Toby kept lively advising Mr. Preston on reefs and bars. He inspected the passing acres of lumber rafts, great pale platforms behind which the launch could conceal itself. Likewise each bulky barge and the trading scows that peddled from farm to farm, the peddler’s family hanging out wash on deck and kids calling hullos. So when Stan shouted up from the passenger deck, “See that! Must be! Must be!” Toby felt a spur of irritation at being distracted from his work.

  Stan scampered aft and poled aboard some floating debris, then had the temerity to carry it forward to the pilot’s nest.

  Mr. Preston scowled and looked to bite his mustache at the sight of a mere deckhand intruding, but before Toby could shoo Stan out he saw the flowerlike gray thing Stan carried.

  “It’s a hat! A positive hat,” Stan burbled. “Pure hydrogen—worth plenty on its own, wager me—and lookee here.”

  Stan proudly displayed broaches and pins mounted into the gunmetal-gray thing, which to Toby’s immense surprise surely did resemble a hat. It was nearly weightless yet hard and the jewels gleamed with inner radiance.

  “And you led me straight on it, too, Toby, I’ll not forget,” Stan said. “I’ll share out the proceeds, yessir.”

  “Uh, sure thing.”

  Mr. Preston’s stormy face had turned mild as he studied the hat. “Never seen anything like this. How far upriver you say you come from?” He peered at Toby.

  “Good bit further,” was all Toby could say, for indeed that was so, but the shore already looked odd and contorted to him, as though his memory was warping.

  That was nothing compared to the consternation he felt but could not give a hint of, for the hat story was total yarning—yet here was an actual, in-fact, bejeweled hydrogen hat, worth many a month’s pay.

  His befuddlement got swept away soon enough by the twisty demands of the river. Under Mr. Preston he was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a dead language to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. No page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time Vortex about to break through from the undercrust of timestone.

  Passengers went oooh and aahhh at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was. A lone log floating across the prow could be in truth a jack-jawed beast bent on dining upon the tasty wooden hull. A set of boiling, standing rings spoke of a whorl that could eat an entire induction disk.

  Mr. Preston would sometimes muse out loud as they rounded a point and beheld a fresh vista, “That slanting brown mark—what you make of that? I’d say a bar of ground-up metal, dissolving now in the bromine current. See that slick place? Shoaling up now, be worse when we head back down. River’s fishing for induction ships right there, you mark.”

  Bust mostly Mr. Preston asked Toby the questions, for the river perpetually tore itself down, danced over its own banks, made merry of memory. They saw a farmer had shoved down pilings to hold his ground, even set a crazy-rail fence atop it, only to have the blithe momentum strip and pry and overrun his fetters, break his handcuffs, and laugh as the lawless currents—seemingly enraged by this confinement—stripped his worldly dominion.

  In all of it Toby looked for his father. There was precious little sign of anything from outside this enormous long riverland. But he felt himself drawing backward in time as the ship pressed them against the esty grade.

  Mr. Preston brought aboard a local “memory man” to help them through a set of neck-twisting oscillations, and the fellow displayed the affliction Toby had heard of but never witnessed. To remember everything meant that all events were of the same size.

  The short, swarthy man sat in the pilot’s nest and guided them well enough through the first two swaybacks, with reefs and snags galore, but on the third he began to tell the history of the snaggle-toothed tree that had fallen in at the lee shore and so stopped them from using the close-pass there, and from that tree went on to the famous boiling timestone eruption that had scorched the tree, and from that to a minute rendition of the efforts of Farmer Finn, who had saved his crops by building a sluice-diverter of the river, to Finn�
��s wife who ran off with a preacher, only people then found out he was no preacher at all but in fact a felon escaped from some jail uptime, which suggested to the memory man the way laws had to be deformed here to accord with the passage back and forth in eras of relatives and wives and husbands, which brought forth the scandal of the lady in a red dress who had taken on all the men at a dance once, hiking her skirts for each in turn plain as day, outside against the wall, and from there was but a step to the intricate discussion of dance steps the memory man had learned (since he learned anything merely by seeing it once), complete with toe-tapping demonstrations on the deck—so that Mr. Preston had to yank the man’s attention back to the veering river before it gutted them on an aluminum reef.

  Within minutes, though, the memory man would drift into more tedious jaw about whatever strayed into view of his panoramic mind. Mr. Preston bore this for the swings and sways of those bends, and then put the memory man ashore with full pay. The man didn’t seem to mind, and left still maundering on about great accidents of the past and where their survivors lived now and how they were doing.

  Toby silently envied the man, though, for at least he did know exactly that one short portion of the river, whereas Toby’s own memory betrayed him at each new rounding. Islands and bars arose from the water where none had been before, his mind told him. The river ran in new side-channels and had seemingly cut across headlands to forge fresh entries, thrusting aside monumental hillsides and carving away whatever misunderstandings had arisen with the spongy, pliant forest.

  “This sure looks to be a horseshoe curve here. Remember it?” Mr. Preston would ask, and Toby would peer through the misty wreaths that often wrapped the river, and shake his head.