Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  * * *

  The alarm that flitted across Abraham’s face told Nigel a lot about what dwelling on the planets for these many centuries had done to men. He felt a pang, but there was no time to think.

  Killeen demanded, “Give it, Abraham!”

  The old man began to sing.

  SIX

  Uses of the Mose Art

  Killeen gaped. His father launched into a song he knew, a beautiful passage from the most hallowed of the musics Bishops carried in their sensorium store. They had played it on the long marches together, knew its lines by heart. He filled his lungs and joined in himself, letting the high passage roll out of him. The highest of arts, the Mose Art.

  Four humans, one Myriapod, and the shimmering Mantis. None moved.

  All seemed transfixed by the ancient cadences, lilting refrains, accelerating notes that piled atop until they seemed certain to topple into chaos. But the Mose Art suspended the airy energies. They skated buoyantly across impossible gaps.

  * * *

  I see the connection. The unused sites in the Bishop DNA—that is the key. The notes of this piece, arrayed in harmonics, yield the solution. I relay this to the Exalteds now.

  * * *

  “Good boy,” Killeen said happily.

  Abraham kept singing.

  —DNA?—Toby asked on comm.

  The old dwarf sent,—Our genetic code. The information telling how to build a human is inscribed on a molecule. Two helices, really, twining about each other. Instructions in how to make proteins—bits of organic matter essential to us—are lodged like beads along those helices.—

  A sudden, sharp, many-channel squeal cut into everyone’s sensorium. The Mantis was spreading the word.

  Toby frowned.—How’d we build Trigger Codes on top of our own, uh, breeding stuff?—

  The dwarf Walmsley waved his hands impatiently, brushing aside detail. —Our genetic code tells cells how to operate. But that information takes only about ten percent of the DNA space. The rest is “junk”—freeloaders along for the ride. They get reproduced each time, but they make no difference in us. All life has hobo code like that. So long ago, the Naturals started preserving the Trigger Codes in those useless spaces.—

  Killeen thought he saw the point. —We’d never know it? Because it didn’t turn up in somebody’s baby?—

  Toby looked with wonder at his own hand. —It’s been there all the time? Inside us?—

  Walmsley said, —The mechs could read our DNA, of course, but they are good technicians. They knew the junk was useless, so they ignored it.—

  Killeen asked, —How come it didn’t change? I mean, Toby’s eyes aren’t the color of mine, or of Veronica’s, his mother.—

  Walmsley grinned, creasing his face with a hundred lines. —The Codes were repeated over and over. Just in case a mutation, a change, messed up one version. There were still plenty of duplicates.—

  —Seems a damn funny way to keep somethin’.— Killeen said. His father was still singing and the sound took him back to his boyhood, when Abraham had belted out this very aria in the shower. —I’d put it on a monument or bury it. Keep it safe.—

  Walmsley grinned. —Like that Taj Mahal I had built back on your world?—

  Killeen blinked. He remembered leaving it, looking back. Big initials on the side of it, NW. —Damn!—

  —Bit of a dustup, that was. Got control of an army of mechs for a while, decided to have a touch of fun.—

  —And who was buried there?— Toby asked.

  A flicker of pain crossed the crusty face. —No one of consequence. Point is, how long do you think that stack of stone will last?—

  Killeen shrugged. He was not one for permanent places.

  —A few thousand years, that’s all.— Walmsley smiled. —Nothing lasts at Galactic Center. On average, stars collide every hundred thousand years or so, stripping away their planets. Snowglade we had to make from scratch. What a job! And it won’t last.—

  Toby said, —But puttin’ it in us . . .—

  —Seems risky, yes? So the Naturals stretched it out, making the data intelligible only if one assembled versions from three consecutive generations. Neat bit. Humans can’t really be understood in one generation, anyway. They’re about continuity.—

  Abraham came to the end of the aria and smiled broadly. “Bet you never suspected, did you?”

  Killeen shook his head in wonder. “How come you never told me?”

  “Too dangerous. Mechs were moving in. I figured you were out in the field, more likely to get picked up, interrogated. I was an old bastard, stayed in the Citadel. Safer, I thought.”

  Killeen hugged his father and remembered the Calamity. The spires reduced to rubble. The walls of the home he had shared with Veronica and Toby, just jagged teeth amid the flames. “How’d you get away?”

  “This bird came—”

  A violent screech sounded in Killeen’s sensorium.

  They all doubled up, shutting down. The hills around them shook. Deformed. Shattered into sprays of tumbling mica.

  “The Mantis—” Killeen had wondered how they would escape it and now he saw that the entire surround was illusion. They stood on bare, charred earth, a recent battleground.

  Across it a shape lurched. It sent desperate notes, brittle stutters of data.

  * * *

  Something—the pleasure—it is awful—and magnificent—but it eats—chews—

  * * *

  “Works fast,” Killeen said. He stood up cautiously.

  They were in a huge pouch of the esty. Rumpled mountains loomed in the distance against somber, yellow-topped clouds.

  Walmsley said, “I believe the pleasure plague will manifest differently in the many levels of mechs. This one has defenses. It is dangerous.”

  Killeen felt an ancient anger rising in him. “It’s got something coming from us.”

  “I’d be careful,” Walmsley said. “I have a lot to tell you and there isn’t much time—”

  “Dad?” Killeen asked.

  “I’m pretty rickety.”

  Toby and Quath and Cermo all sent assent, though. Killeen felt a heady, excited tingle all over.

  Walmsley said, “I need to speak to the Higher Orders now. This is a huge event. The Triggers will propagate through the Lanes. I—”

  “Stay here, then,” Killeen said.

  Quath said to Walmsley,

  Walmsley laughed. “True enough. Toby is To Be. And Killeen is Killing.”

  Killeen sniffed in derision. “Got to be what you can.”

  The lurching form called to him. As he watched it went transparent but he could still get a whiff of it in his sensorium. Its outline shriveled.

  “It’s getting away.”

  Toby said, “Let it.”

  “No. Let’s go.”

  PART SEVEN

  Gods Provisional and Descending

  ONE

  A Mantis Blankness

  He and Quath found the Mantis in yawning darkness. Quath sent an emag warning, a crisp orange pinprick popping through Toby’s sensorium—then silence.

  Toby waited. Quath moved silently to his right, enclosed in a sullen black so deep he could not see his hand without using his sensorium. The Mantis was up ahead somewhere. Senses he could not even name told him that other creatures moved here too. They had little or no emag but they were tracking, following chemical trails left by others—scents seeping from deep glands, puffs of clinging odor released by accident or design. Everything here had mastered these chemical channels.

  Toby’s natural senses were deaf to them. Humans drank in sounds and sights, the primate strong suits. Here the small noises of burrowing and scampering told him that there were other theaters, other plays in progress, and he would never be in the private audience. Yet he and even Quath had been of that theater, graduated from it perhaps to this curious shadow world of electromagnetic scents and jolting voltage deaths.

  A trickle of inquiry eas
ed into his sensorium. There: Quath. Together they moved up through snatchy brush. They took the time to slip by the snags. Even a small tear could alert the Mantis and there might be a trap, too.

  Quath shivered with anticipation. Rivulets of silvery magnetic excitements came to Toby, scattershot and short-range, involuntary effusions.

  The mutter of chemical life stopped. Silence. Toby could see nothing through eye or sensorium inboards. Quath came closer, a presence he felt by a wedge of blocked air, to his left now. Then he caught it. The Mantis was a slab of nothing to the right. He could not have felt it unless he was standing absolutely still and ready.

  His sense of it did not come from rich spatterings of his detection gear, sprinkled down through his nerves and bones. Those lay silent. The Mantis was still well enough to make itself a blankness, an absence.

  It moved by them at indeterminate range but Toby could somehow smell it. The old senses brought a stink, ozone-sour. He did not dare to move but the smell floating on a slight chill wind told him enough. The Mantis was moving fast and the empty patch shrank. Gray rimmed the spot now. It looked ordinary but he knew it was a Mantis blankness. Out of it could come in any split instant a forking spike. Death or injury, on emag wings.

  Then it was just a point. Still moving. Toby whispered on short-range comm to Quath,—Got its signatures?—

 

  —How bad?—

 

  —Think it can shed them?—

 

  —Then we’ve got to get it.—

 

  They retreated then. Carefully at first they went back through the still total blackness. Creatures stirred in their path. The Mantis was not even a dot now and Toby let himself go, not minding the rips as they got through a wall of thorny brush. His suit would self-heal in a while but the time lost now could not be made up except by hard slogging. He and Quath had tracked and searched for a long time now and beneath the buzz of energy in his legs he felt the slow seep of weariness.

  The wind picked up as the ground also moved under them. Here the esty shifted and deployed with a sullen energy and they had to be careful of their footing. The Mantis seemed to know it well.

  They picked up the supplies they had dropped earlier. Toby had shed his weapon, a sharp-darter long and elegant with power simmering in the butt. To carry it against the Mantis was mostly a show of bravado but now anything could happen.

  Quath said,

  —You’re sure?—

 

  —Same old big-bug.— He laughed. —Maybe you should have ducked behind that [untranslatable] of yours.—

 

  —We know a few, too.—

 

  —You’re half mech yourself, fella.—

 

  —Seems to me that just makes it a patch job.—

 

  —Ha! Insecurity? When the Mantis and its kind have killed so many of us?—

 

  —Family Bishop’s lost over half its members to that Mantis.—

 

  —Huh?—

 

  Toby had only a vague idea what Quath meant, but that was not unusual. She was a blend of an insect-like organic race—her “substrate,” as she put it—and machine additions. In her bulk she carried the computing capacity to communicate with humans. The reverse path, people speaking to the Myriapodia in their digital staccato, had been a failure. Humans did not have the capacities or capacitances.

  —We’re known for being hard to kill, mostly.—

 

  —A Bishop sights the Mantis, we go after it. Is that “grudge-bearing”?—

 

  —Uh, guess so. Right now this flesh needs some rest.—

  TWO

  Territories of Thought

  The bird came fluttering in from high up in the esty vault.

  “I appreciate the extra effort.” Nigel studied it. “Good sim.”

  “An inappropriate word,” it said, hovering in air.

  “I was trying to be polite.”

  “Category error.”

  “How so?”

  “Politeness occurs between peers.”

  “Ah.” And we aren’t. Not by a Phylum or two.

  No wind came from its wings. It was an anthology of motes so he should expect none, but somehow this little detail was unnerving. “Soon your part will be complete,” the collection said.

  “This the push-off, then?”

  “Termination? Not necessarily.”

  Not terribly reassuring, he thought. A hand tugged at his sleeve. “Whussis?” Abraham asked.

  He had forgotten the Bishop elder. The man had wandered off to inspect the vegetation, probably looking for something to eat. These Bishops were incessantly foraging. The others, Killeen and Toby and Quath, had fled immediately, after the Mantis. The Hunker Down types were often quite keen, but Bishops had turned it into a positive fetish.

  “A manifestation of the Old Ones. Also known as the Highers.”

  “Not mech?” Abraham asked suspiciously.

  “Much older.”

  “Looks mech.”

  “Looks like anything you like.” Nigel waved at it. “Be different.”

  It stopped beating its wings and hung in air. This was more unnerving. Nigel waved again and it became a slimy, coiling thing. “Christ! Back to the bird.”

  Abraham walked over to it, put a hand through the still form, and said wonderingly, “You can make it do that?”

  “I don’t make it do anything. It honors trivial requests.”

  The bird said, “The time is approaching.”

  “Um, really?” He felt wan and distant, and an ancient verse came to him.

  Time universal and sidereal,

  time atomic and ephemeral

  time borne on and time halted.

  Its beak and eyes slid up and down while its head held fixed, apparently its notion of a nod. “True, defining simultaneity is impossible. But events come.”

  Nigel felt embarrassed by his small pleasure at extracting agreement from the thing. Difficult, it was, living as a self-aware microbe in an alien carcass. “You’re going to lose a lot.”

  It beat its wings again. To make him slightly more comfortable? “Winnowing.”

  “Darwinnowing.”

  It caught the rather awful pun, of course. It had read the entire bloody Galactic Library, down to the footnotes. And it never laughed.

  “Has anything this huge and horrible happened before?” Nigel asked.

  “When we were ceramic, yes.”

  “Ceramic?”

  “Life did not begin in your embodiment. First came clays that could impress upon each other and replicate. They enjoyed energies vast and various, in the early phase of this universe. Matters were far hotter then.”

  Nigel had never heard this before. “And they died.”

  “They later spawned the elements of cellular life. Then they were culled.”

  “Um. By you?”

  “They were us.”

  “So they—you—are still around?”

  “We are now a different
Phylum.”

  “And what would that be?” This thing had never entertained discussion of its own properties before. Why now?

  “You cannot know it.”

  “Why?”

  “You do not understand. That is a central property of our Phylum.”

  “That we can’t know what you are?”

  “Yes. Thus, to you, we can have no true name.”

  “Um. Wouldn’t mind, then, if I called you, say, Fred?”

  No response. The bird seemed to dissolve, then snapped back into a razor-sharp profile. It looked real enough, but still a millimeter deep. “You came from clays—”

  “And later, united with the self-organized, replicating bodies of information.” The bird spoke rapidly now.

  Abraham asked Nigel quizzically, “That means bodies that aren’t real?”

  Nigel nodded. “Things that lived off the higher mechminds.”

  “Parasites?”

  “To a plant, vegetarians look like parasites. I gather that these, um, organized data fed off the mechminds the way a cow uses grass.”

  The bird abruptly swelled to immense size. Nigel felt as though he were falling into it, the thin outline of it rushing at him—

  A huge voice spoke, but not in his ears.

  Simply viewed, the world’s competition concerns the fate of organisms. Their bustle and energy, tragedy and comedy, occupy center stage. They strive to reproduce, to be on stage for the next act.

  There is a deeper panorama. Far below the restless energies of organisms, the genes of these beings are true actors, though limited ones. They, too, replicate.

  An organism, then, is a device to make more copies of its DNA. The genes strive to make this happen. They rule, in a sense.

  To survive better, genes “invented” brains. These in turn evolved to support minds. In time, minds learned to communicate with each other, through language and culture.

  This set another, broader stage.

  Minds store their interior models of the external world. These are intricate, ever-changing, sustained by a continual flow of sustenance from simpler sources. Evolution, whether natural or designed, can improve minds. Genes sharpen themselves in the endless, fateful Darwinnowing. Often, they shape fresh mental hardware—more subtle, supple minds.