Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

Toby’s voice was a croak. “What . . . pattern?”

 

  “It wanted to see us do that?” Killeen was quiet now, kneeling with his hands uselessly rubbing Cermo’s shoulder.

 

  Toby thought about the stored memories it had shed into the air, its treasure evaporating. But memory was not yourself, he saw. It could not drive forward, act. Memories just sat and waited.

  TEN

  Paths of Glory

  The timestone tossed and broke and they spent a long time then just clinging to whatever stable places they could find. They did what they could for Cermo but that wasn’t much.

  Killeen opened Cermo’s spine and swore. “They’re burned.”

  “How?” Toby asked.

  “Mantis must’ve worked down through all his inboards.”

  “I thought our chips were protected.”

  “So did I. But our tech is old and mechs never stop learning.”

  Killeen said this heavily and with the respect a combatant had for another. Cermo’s cylinder spinal chips had carried the older Aspects and Faces from Bishop history. A suredeath reduced the present, subtracting one life. Chip charring carried that loss far back into a dim past, plundering the origins of the Family itself.

  It was hard finding enough real ground to bury Cermo. They stripped away his gear and divided the mass out for taking back. Most of it was useless but to leave it would draw mech scavengers.

  Utter darkness came for a while and they slept. It did not do much good for Toby and when he woke a gang of scavenger navvys had found the Mantis. He heard them cutting and clattering around and went up the slope to where they worked in the sprawling shambles. He remembered how the parabolic antenna had spun around like an eye searching madly and how the majesty had gone then. The flanks of it were gone too now, dragged off by scavengers. The mechs had their own ecology of a sort, recycling machined parts and whole intact auxiliaries. There was no more Mantis, just intricate assemblies slewed out of their mounts, and gear he could not understand fried by vagrant pulses. The navvys picked over the carcass where crystalline lattices had carried the Mantis intelligence. There were navvys of all sizes, scooters and jakos mostly, and they worked remorselessly in teams. When they were done they would leave nothing.

  He shot three and that scattered them for a while. The anger in him had boiled out and he felt stupid when Quath and Killeen came running, their sensoria projected out in a defensive screen. He just shrugged. His father nodded. Killeen looked at the Mantis for a while with nothing in his face and then pulled a few of the arc struts free.

  When Toby walked past the inner cells of the Mantis he saw a mag storage kernel hung partly disconnected from the frame. He took it. He told Quath he wanted the energy store but he carried it with him on the long march away from there without discharging it.

  Quath said as they headed downslope.

  “The memories it sent?”

 

  “How’d you know I did?”

 

  For a searing moment he wished that he had never seen the Mantis. “I don’t want that.”

 

  He walked on in silence.

  His father carried some of the beautiful arc struts strapped to his back despite the weight. Killeen was smiling and tired and said, “Plenty Bishops will want a piece. It killed a lot of us.”

  “How many?”

  “It’s cut through generations of us. Nobody can do the count. None of us has lived through the full time of it.”

  “We were trying to kill it, too.”

  “Yeasay. Had to.”

  “Murder on both sides.”

  “Now there is, yeasay.” His father squinted at him and looked away.

  Toby kept pace with Killeen behind Quath. They loped across timestone that had settled down. A golden glow seeped up through it and cast shadows up his father’s face from the chin. The silence between them simmered until Killeen said, “It made artworks of us. Hunted us. Sucked us up as suredead.”

  “Cermo made a mistake.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Coming on close to it at the end like that.”

  “Have it as you like.”

  They walked a while with the excitement going out of them and the only sound was their servos.

  “It cared about Bishops, y’know.”

  “Cared plenty. Cared enough to hound us.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “I know, son.”

  The Bishops had lost something too when the Mantis went out of their world but Toby could not say to his father what that was. He would be a full man before he came to understand it or to know that he had brought away from the Mantis not only the magnetic kernel—which he kept for years and never got around to discharging—but also a discord of loneliness that would go with him even when he was surrounded by Bishops.

  After some hard marching they found a Bishop camp. The news spread quickly and more Bishops came hurrying across the stretches of timestone. They saw the curved Mantis struts that Killeen had carried out on his back and insisted on standing them up in an arch for display. Together like that they looked fine in the smoldering ruby glow of the timestone.

  People crowded around the struts and touched them carefully. Killeen had a liquor toast from some of them and then another and talked freely. Toby stood back and watched as his father and himself and Quath were transformed into heroes by the excited chatter of the crowd who had not been there.

  They had lifted a burden and legend from the Bishops and he knew with one part of himself how he would feel if someone else had done that. But it was different to have done it yourself and nothing in the talk could change that or even explain it. Especially not explain it.

  Killeen said to him a little later, “Wish Cermo could be here.”

  “He is,” Toby said and in that moment felt what the Mantis had sent into him in its last moments. Cermo. Truncated, flattened, seeping in spongy interstices of him, slivers and rivulets flowing in his sensorium and flavoring the liquid light, forever, Cermo.

  He sent a whisper to Quath, —Why?—

 

  —Yeasay, and been plenty happier.—

 

  —Funny, how primates can get along with mechanical maggots.—

 

  —Quick-witted bug you are, ol’ Brave Crawler with Dreams. You just look like a giant maggot, is all, only beefed-up with metal.—

 

  —Yeasay, we play fast and loose with language.— He felt a sudden rush of affection for the lumbering assembly of legs and carapace beside him. —To avoid saying what we really mean, right?—

 

  —Lots of things, words don’t get at.—

 

  Toby sighed, not from fatigue. —Still wish I knew why the Mantis did that with Cermo.—

 

  —Something like this . . .—

 

  —Or neither one.—

 

  —Not always.—

  Toby said again to his father, his voice raspy, “He is.”

  �
��I s’pose,” Killeen said. He squinted at his son and looked puzzled and took a drink.

  They sat on little camp stools near the arch of fine struts and Toby had a drink then too, not wanting it but knowing that the moment needed it. He and Killeen drank from trail cups brought by a woman and her husband who had lost two children to the Mantis a long time ago. They wanted to talk to the brave ones and maybe to the heroic Quath, only Quath was not around anywhere. Toby drank carefully to hold on to the moments that were softening in him already, dropping away down the funnel of time and memory. He hoped he would not remember any of this last part of it and thought of the parabolic antenna instead and the silly way it had spun so fast and to his surprise saw it now with new deep eyes.

  PART EIGHT

  The Syntony

  In Silico

  Memes can propagate between computers as easily as between Natural, organic brains. The computer virus was the first, primitive form of this. Higher manifestations followed.

  Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.

  The organized constellations of information in computers were kenes—from ken, to know.

  Computers are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.

  Kenes evolved faster than memes. Soon, they learned to leave even the substrate of silicon. Ordered, replicating data propagated beyond its in silico origins. Rather than matter, it sought out fields—electric, magnetic, even gravitational. There vast challenges arose, were met, bested. Whole styles of thought found expression, bloomed, died. Free of the grinding embrace of matter, filigrees of thought played into intricate dances, with ideas as the mere substrate for abstractions of ever higher order. Even heaven can pall. In time, a fraction of the kenes became concerned with the raw rub of the worlds they had left behind. They decided to play there, as well.

  This intervention into the storm of mass and motion precipitated the further uniting of magnetic intelligences, mechanical forms, and Naturals. These now constitute the Highers.

  ONE

  Unintentional Jokes

  And Melancholy mark’d him for her own . . . Nigel Walmsley tried to recall people he had known from the Chandelier days, Earthers of consummate skill and obliging manners. They were elsewhere in the esty, he supposed, or else dead. Probably dead. They had gotten into struggles with mechanicals on higher levels, and that had proved fatal.

  Still, he often liked to bask in his memories. There were so many of them. And he had been augmented so many different times and ways, into the bargain. His memories had a sharpness and resonance he was sure the old, utterly Natural Walmsley could not imagine.

  Living in your memories . . . it could be seductive.

  But the Highers kept interrupting him.

  The bird said, “If you could meet a mechanical intelligence, encased in a body like your own, what would you do?”

  Nigel said, “I imagine I’d give him a smile that’s all gums.”

  “I see. Antagonism.”

  “Something to do with linking memory close to our hormone control, no doubt.”

  “In part. You would not make love to it? Him? Her?”

  “Matter of taste, really.”

  Nigel wondered what it was driving at. The tension, yes—to win sway over that world he had backed away from it, and felt forever that chasm. Yet having two hands did not mean you had to subscribe to every passing dichotomy. He reentered that world and felt how much he had longed for it—

  —bleak and flat, this Lane was now scoured by mech deaths and their last longing rampages of self-slaughter. So for a sheared instant he merged with it, glad of the smack and trudge of movement. Little registered, only the esty, single and woven and triumphant—

  As strange a place as any being had ever lived. Humans did not understand it, of course. But then, for all but a tiny sliver of their species’ time, they had not understood their own planet.

  Then the Mantis was there. Solemn, heavy.

  * * *

  The retina of the vertebrate eye appears to be “installed” backward. At the back of the retina lie the light-sensitive cells, so that light must pass through intervening circuitry, getting weakened. A long series of mutations could eventually switch the light-receiving cells to the front, and this would be of some small help. But the cost in rearranging would be paid by the intermediate stages, which would function more poorly than the original design. So these halfway steps would be selected out by evolutionary pressure. The rival, patched-up job works fairly well, and nature stops there. So these dreaming vertebrates are makeshift constructions, built by random time without foresight. There is a strange beauty in that.

  * * *

  “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

  * * *

  I am a part of something but I do not know what it is.

  * * *

  “I wonder if that’s something like being human?”

  * * *

  Being so small?

  * * *

  “I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

  * * *

  I . . . somehow know . . . that I am all that remains.

  * * *

  “Thank God I can’t say that for me.”

  * * *

  We . . . you/I . . . once spoke together.

  * * *

  “Back when I’d just arrived here.” Nigel surprised himself with his sudden anger. “You killed my friend, Carlos.”

  * * *

  Harvested him.

  * * *

  “We Naturals have a bit of a different opinion about that. We know that a copy of us still isn’t us.”

  * * *

  When I was mechanical, I knew the opposite. We had not evolved the selfness as a reflex, for it did not affect our survival. For you Naturals, saving the self was essential. For mechanicals, replicating our self achieved evolutionary success. I see now—immersed in a larger compass—that both are . . . partial visions.

  * * *

  “Part and parcel of a higher Phylum, eh? You’re still just bloody murderers to me.”

  * * *

  A partial vision again.

  * * *

  “I suppose I’ll just stay anchored right here, in my primate point of view. You Highers nearly exterminated us. Then you beset us in our Chandeliers and then the Citadels. All the time occasionally sidling up to us and trying to talk.”

  * * *

  The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

  * * *

  Even in his anger, Nigel laughed. “Unintentional jokes are the best.”

  TWO

  Besen

  * * *

  I have another of your kind. She can show you something of the mechanical world.

  * * *

  “Another partial vision?” Nigel sardonically studied the wavering Mantis image.

  * * *

  A great virtue of our mechanical, digital form was the ability to completely receive another’s experience.

  * * *

  “Ummm. Sometimes I think I’ve seen too much already. Go ahead.”

  The compressed wall of perception came out of nowhere. He had time to recall that it was remarkably like the impact that had transformed him long ago, back in an alien wreck on Earth’s moon, a jarring shift blindsiding him—

  The strange thing was how silent the mechs were through most of it. Immersed in the dirty Natural joys, she guessed. So awash in it they could not feel the mouths eating them.

  For some reason they jammed into some Lanes. Of course they had swarmed everywhere before that and killed a lot of Naturals. Everything they could find, in fact. Then when the Proselyte Pleasures—that was the term she heard applied to it—blew through them, they reacted very strangely.

  Some mechs tore themselves apart in a frenzy. The debris was loathsome and the others ate it. There were plenty of pieces floating through the Lanes by then. She supposed that the higher orders could defend
themselves longer, but that brought on something like a fever. She knew this analogy was false because mechs weren’t biological, but that was the only way she could make sense of it.

  The fever made them eat the others. Maybe it was to get more energy or fresh computing space or something that humans could not understand. Anyway, they ran out of dead members of the lower orders, navvys and rimouts and that sort.

  So they started eating mechs that were still alive. The higher ones would break the locomos to keep them still and then stab into their quarry and take something out of them. Eating was the best word for it because she knew no other.

  Not all of them. In one Lane larger mech forms had smaller mechs with them. They carried the small ones for a long time. She studied them carefully but they did not seem to be searching. They weren’t doing much more than moving, moving. The smaller ones had lesser defenses and after a while were plainly gone, dead, ruined. The big mechs still carried them. It was eerily like mothers carrying dead babies.

  Besen watched it all from hiding and with her sensorium off. She was hungry but to move meant death here. There had been plenty of examples of that.

  All those mechs. Screaming now in sharp frequencies. Broken and used and not being gathered into the higher orders at all. Not what they had been promised. The whole point of being a mech, it seemed to her, was that at least you got picked up at the end somehow. Added into some other and maybe higher mind.

  It was obviously like a religion for them but it had worked. They knew it as a hard, technical fact. Now it did not happen. No point in being lifted into something that was dying, too.