Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “You’re holding up. Feet fine.”

  “Just need some sleep,” Toby said.

  “You and Quath were up finding it while we were sleeping. No reason you shouldn’t be a little behind.”

  “I’ll do the sweep-searching tomorrow.”

  “Don’t take on too much. Have some more of those beans.”

  “Not all that hungry.”

  He was asleep before his father had turned off the burner and he heard nothing as the darkness waxed on. He thought of the Mantis or maybe he just dreamed that he did.

  The next day he remembered the sleeping fondly before many hours of loping were done. It was bad by then. He had started fresh but it faded and he sweated more than he ever had. Quath spoke to him with some concern but Toby talked little. He carried as big a pack as the others but they also had the burner and some extra food so he was behind in that as well.

  Cermo did not smile or waste energy on talk and Toby remembered again the intensity of the man on the plains of his boyhood, on the baked beauty of Snowglade. Cermo pointed to each sign of the Mantis and interpreted it with assurance. Cermo was pointing to a fresh print when the confusion squall hit them.

  Purple bees. It felt as if they were biting him as they swarmed inboard. Toby got down fast but the fan beam caught him and he could not see any more. He rolled downhill and fetched up against a rock. That jabbed him in the side and he rolled around it and further downhill. That was the surest way to get away from the swarm of emag turmoil. Above him hummed a tangle of magnetic fields and orange plasma discharges. Forking energies. His inboards covering up made sharp clangs in his sensorium.

  He slammed into a gnarled tree and could then see again. He lay there looking up at the others. They shared the stupefaction.

  Two heartbeats, three. The squall passed without any follow-on bolts.

  The Mantis used these to soften targets. Not attacking made no sense. He walked back up the hill and Quath greeted him with,

  “Good, ’cause otherwise we’d be dead.”

  A malicious grin split Cermo’s face. “Means it’s desperate.”

  “Wounded,” Killeen said and picked up his pack where he had dropped it at the first sign of trouble.

  They moved faster then and it got worse for Toby. The confusion squall had robbed him of his zest and the dry air sucked sweat from him.

  As he loped on Toby thought about but could not truly conceive of the expanses of time and therefore of injury and anguish, of remorse and rage and sullen gray sadness, which the Mantis and its kind had washed over the ruby stars themselves. It had cloaked the galaxy in a wracking conflict that could never be fully over. From this primordial pain there lumbered forward into his own time a heritage of melancholy unceasing conflict that had shaped all his life.

  “It’s sick, that’s suresay,” Killeen called as they moved.

  “We’re getting closer,” Cermo answered.

  Quath said.

  “How you know?” Cermo asked, head swiveling in surprise.

 

  “That spool?” Toby asked. “And the hexagon?”

  “It hoped we would miss them,” Killeen said. “Dropped that other gear to make us think it was just shedding mass. Yeasay, Quath.”

 

  Toby croaked, “Hope it’s getting tired,” but what he had intended to be a lighthearted remark came out desperate.

  His father dropped back and studied his face. “Just last out a few more hours,” was all he said.

  “I’ll take fore point,” Toby said suddenly.

  Killeen looked at Cermo, who nodded. “Keep a sharp,” Killeen said. He went back to sweeping the right, tracking.

  The navvy hit them as they came down a narrow draw. It was a fine place for an ambush and if the Mantis had done the job itself several of them would have died or at least gotten scrambled pretty badly. The navvy was a lesser mech that apparently the Mantis had assembled in flight. It looked like that.

  Toby saw it just before it fired at them. Its big disks were extruded and the emag burst fried Toby’s left side. His servos froze and his legs locked, chunk and chunk, and then no feeling. He went down hard.

  The beam swept across Cermo too but he had been faster and blew a hole in the navvy. That saved them from a real frying.

  Killeen was in the clear and took his time and got the navvy square so that the emag reservoirs in it spilled out in one long shriek. Then it was dead.

  They rested while Toby got his servos back up and running. Nobody said much but his father helped him with the crisped sockets and remarked casually, “Those navvies aren’t as slow as people think.”

  Toby knew what that meant and in recollection knew that the navvy had been pretty slow. He had been loping through his own personal fog and had missed the profile when it popped up on his sensorium. Ignoring signs while on point was stupid.

  “Sorry,” was all he could say.

  Toby kicked the navvy in exasperation and then bent over the cowling. He popped some seals and rummaged and brought out two smooth ceramic things shaped like lopsided eggs.

  “Mag traps,” Cermo said.

  “Fine.” Killeen handled one carefully. It had the usual mech slots and looked all right to Toby. “Can we use them?”

  “Lemme try,” Killeen said.

  “Sorry,” Toby said again.

  Killeen slapped one of the eggs into a hip servo. It clicked on. “Good find.” That was Killeen’s way of answering. “Let’s eat.”

  SIX

  Conceptual Spaces

  Nigel felt himself snatched up. Yanked. Hard, head-snapping, neck-wrenching—

  —then he was somewhere else.

  Shadows on stones. He was walking through a courtyard. The floor was not flagstones but flattened white skulls, skeletal cages of ribs, crushed arms. They snapped as he stepped.

  Whispers bubbled from the street of bones. Sharp and bitter words, ripped from throats that had once longed and yearned.

  His footing turned soft. He plunged forward helplessly, each step taking him up to the knee in the musty, blood-soaked past.

  The stinking street of the lost. The swamp of dead desire.

  Darkness streamed from the narrowing walls.

  All this, cooking under the thin veneer of the conscious mind.

  Luminous impulses fought and scurried across the open stage of the human intellect. Factions shouted and clashed. An inner world of endless combat. Instinct, reason, all shades between.

  And below that tiny conscious stage worked sinewy chords. The true deep mind worked there. Creation, desire, the sense of the exalted—all wove and lurked and had no conscious voice. They broke onto the conscious stage only with force, sudden actors in a play that no one faction wrote.

  That was the human lot, he saw.

  He was looking at his own mind.

  A human could not do that. Could not step outside and watch itself have an idea, trace the origins of desire, of dislike . . .

  So . . . what did that make him, now?

  Then the enormous voice was there again and he saw that he had been taken to another place, another small cage in a labyrinth mind.

  To continue his little lesson. Of course.

  All life extracts energy, uses it, and discards the dregs, energy in a degraded form. The history of life is a long saga of unconscious ingenuity, finding new pathways in the fields of brimming energy. The universe is yet young, and squanders its energies in flowers of excess-bright stars, whirling singularities, gaudy finery. Life profits from this.

  Organisms—natural, mechanical/electronic, or magnetic- feed upon their ecosystems. These systems are in turn driven by simple energy sources from below. Mild sunlight and chemicals, for the Naturals. Mass and raw photons
and electrical discharges, for others. But those organisms with minds themselves are the energy sources for higher orders: self-replicating patterns of information. These can thrive only in brains, or in the extensions of brains—books, computers, data banks. Mental musics, supported by brute matter.

  In organic cells, enzymes and raw materials form a soup for making DNA. Viruses hijack these to reproduce themselves. Minds, too, can bring into being parasites. On the stage of minds, dramas unfold. Ideas can hijack anxieties, unmet needs, even the diffuse mental hunger called curiosity.

  Minds are the substrate for memes.

  The simplest of these memes are like diseases. Some contagions are helpful, some destructive, some merely crippling—but all draw their sustenance from the organisms themselves. For they feed upon the thought processes of their hosts.

  Cultural evolution can be seen as the advancement of these patterns: memes are self-propagating cultures. In many life-forms, religious ideas were the earliest examples.

  Even simple mental systems can ask questions which they cannot answer—indeed, that have no answer.

  Planning for the future confers a powerful survival advantage; realizing that one should not venture back into a dangerous place means one may live to see tomorrow’s sunrise. Dependence on the seasons, especially in farming, sharpens this selection.

  But considering the future raises powerful questions. Unanswerable riddles: Where will I go after death? Where was I before birth?

  The mental tensions set up by such natural problems create a niche. Into this slot in the mental landscape, ideas can migrate. They arrive there by mutation from earlier, related ideas. Providing plausible answers to unanswerable questions, they occupy the niche. The host welcomes this aid, profits from it. Then they can spread. Those ideas which induce copies of themselves in other brains have greater chance of surviving. Religions are parasitic memes. Some lead to wholesale abandonment of the ordinary world, producing faiths susceptible to mass suicide, or celibacy, or irrational attempts to propagate the faith with violence. These can quickly kill the host, and so self-limit the meme growth. Successful parasitic memes evolve into mutual symbionts. Stable, long-lived religions are examples. Their adherents hand down doctrines and formalisms for millennia. They can even enclose and absorb other ideas, carrying them forward in time, protected by the bulk and momentum of belief.

  They can make the host resist other parasitic ideas. Every concept needs some protection.

  Logic is one of these. It tests memes for consistency. Such meta-memes check other, smaller ideas before allowing them into the mental theater. They function as do the simple alarm systems which tell a cell that a virus has invaded. The scientific method, which is essentially an orderly common sense, is a similar meme defense. It is more discriminating, more interactive with the invading meme itself, than the most primitive defense: to simply reject any new idea, uninspected.

  All memes can be seen as living, struggling entities which compete for space and energy. An idea can leap from mind to mind, encased in a single sentence. Intelligent beings convey far more information through memes than they do through genes.

  Nigel awoke lying on a mud flat. Cold, wet, sticky.

  He got up slowly. The voice had been soft and sensible and still had shaken him thoroughly.

  It was not of course a voice but a . . . lesson. His body ached and he had trouble breathing. Interference with the lower levels of the brain?

  He looked around but there was nothing but the mottled dark. He missed human contact, an ache he had learned long ago in places like this.

  He started walking. It was slow, hard work; his knees trembled, but he kept going.

  SEVEN

  The Suredead

  His gear used the mech positron traps that were new and light and carried a lot of energy in a small magnetic pocket. The clouds of positrons gyred in their magnetic pit and when his inboards or servos needed power positrons would snake out of their snare, find electrons, and die. Somehow that made potentials stream through him though Toby never thought of how it worked. The navvy’s mag traps they discharged into their own, harvesting most of the store. Energy stripped from mechs always had a special jolt to it.

  Killeen clapped him on the back. “Just shows how desperate the Mantis is,” Killeen snorted with derision. “Threw that navvy together. Put no defense in the mag traps.”

  Toby felt better until he woke up that night. The timestone was smoldering a dull ruby red half-light and they had all rolled their pads out to take advantage of the momentary night. Toby had been bone tired and grateful for it, a break not given as a favor by his father but simply by the weather.

  But he woke up with an itchy nervousness and could not sleep, thinking it had something to do with the positron power. He got up to pee though it was not pressing and that was when he saw it.

  The latticework did not move against the far ruddy hills, but it was not a building. It cast a shadow in his sensorium that was not a blankness now. He looked for the webs of loci and motivators and subminds. They were faintly luminous, tracing out the array of rods and struts. It moved then and he felt it as a positive thing finally. Not a vacancy but a presence.

  He knew by legend the impossible way it moved. As he stood absolutely still and watched, the matrix shambled away from him. No hurrying, no sign it knew he was there. It was two klicks away, easy. In range, but he did not think of that. He followed to keep in view the shifting phosphorescent mainmind exposed in the tilting work of rods and the great disks swiveling.

  It came at him then without a single flicker of sensorium warning. The burst was in him, before his inboards could counter. He staggered and fell. Hit hard, arms loose. The pulse skated through him and burned hot and was gone.

  He lay without moving, Bishop tactics. Numbly through his sensorium he watched it go. Angular energies, vectoring into a dwindling shape. Then nothing.

  He let his inboards run diagnostics and they came up with trivial overloads, easily corrected with a reset. He got up carefully. Creaky and legs shaking at the knees but all right.

  He could not explain what had happened. He knew he had to think about it but not right now. There was too much in him. A pressure seethed in his systems. Fear and a hollow longing too. Some quality of it reminded him of the way women drew him out, but it was not that either. On the way back to his pad he decided not to wake the others.

  Quath stirred electromagnetically as he passed. <?> she sent and he answered with —.^.—, which told her submind that it was just him. He envied the way she could delegate to her partial minds and fall instantly asleep if she wanted. It was a little surprising that such an intelligence needed the down time to process memories and arrange itself, which humans did by letting the subconscious levels work during sleep.

  It was the dreams that told him. He saw the long procession of Bishops in their Citadel, then on the plains, in battle and at peace. Many of the momentary shimmers of saved experience were of their last moments. That must mean that these were salvaged slivers from the lives of doomed Bishops. Eyes wide with surprise, or slitted by pain. Mouths gasping or else hardened against what they saw coming. But there was more to it than such externals. He felt the moments, lived through them in a way impossible to get from a mere image.

  These were the records of the suredead. Bishop minds, ransacked by mechs—by the Mantis—in age-old conflicts. Like volumes to be kept on a shelf and taken down and browsed. Or read intently if you cared.

  The Mantis had sent these shards of the suredead into him. Discarding them? Radiating away data as it executed its own subminds?

  He rolled sweaty in his sleep and woke sandy-eyed and ragged. At breakfast Killeen said, “I got some diagnostics on my morning screen. Said there was mech near us last night.”

  “Me too,” Cermo said.

  Toby said nothing and did not know why. The Mantis was dying anyway. The two men looked at him and still he said nothing.

  “I can pick up righ
t now some pretty weak echoes that way”—Cermo gave a thumb-jut uphill—“but not moving.”

  Toby could see nothing in his sensorium. When they started off he took rear point. They lost the Mantis trail in a place where overlapping mech signatures reeked in Toby’s sensorium, coded as stinks. He caught rotting leaves, a sharp pungency, something damp and musty. “Smells funny,” was all Cermo said.

  They followed the smells, all really just electronic prompts but no less exciting for the fact of their knowing it. They found the cause in a rugged narrow gulch.

  The mechs had died in convulsions. Disease programs had gotten into them and they had ended in an agony of pleasure, capacitors flashing over, mag traps sparking and searing their gray matte finish. That was what made the Trigger Codes so good. They brought intense ecstasy and the desire to share that with others, and so the mechs sent it on electromagnetic wings to each other, all in a delighted delirium. Toby knew it was supposed to be a pleasant way to die but the convulsed limbs and ripped matte-carbon skins were ugly, terrible.

  “Mantis was through here,” Cermo said.

  “I pick it up,” Killeen said and then Toby did too, a faint tangy odor that wound between the mech bodies. These were far lower order mechs than the Mantis of course and they crammed the little gorge. The Mantis had passed by the fallen and gone on.

  “Paying its respects, maybe,” Toby said. The men laughed although he had not meant it to be funny.

  Toby touched one of the wrecked carcasses. “You suppose mechs have, well, families?”

  Cermo shook his head vigorously. Killeen said, “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  Quath had been nearly silent since the navvy attack and now she said,

  “If not family,” Killeen said, “what?”

 

  Killeen frowned. “Models?”

 

  “Seems to me you either ken things or you don’t.” Killeen grinned at Cermo as if this were a private joke. Toby didn’t get it.