Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  The screams nearly drove her mad. She could not blank it out because that would mean turning on her sensorium to mute the staccato agonies and they would find her. It was all quite a business and it went on forever. Forever, yes, pain eternal rather than life everlasting, the mad business all around her.

  —Nigel jerked back, chest heaving.

  He could see her now, approaching the nearby Bishops. She gave him only a passing glance. The young woman was clear of eye and smooth of skin but carried in her sensorium a weight of lived anguish that he did not want to share.

  It would take time, perhaps a lifetime, to deplete the stores of that shared grief.

  Yet a moment after she appeared, she was laughing with joy at the sight of other Bishops. Nigel eyed them in their merriment, not innocent but oddly touching, and quite suddenly felt a sharp pang of envy.

  THREE

  A Long Way Ago

  Drawing together all Bishops, from sundry Lanes, went far quicker than Toby had thought possible. The Highers did not announce themselves or even communicate; they just did.

  The wooded landscape around the small Bishop band seemed to ooze people. Toby and Killeen had been deposited into a Lane with mild climate and agreeable, even edible plants. There was food for the getting and some Bishops—who had been unceremoniously yanked away by the Highers—brought supplies as well. Before long it was a celebration.

  One Bishop had been taken for medical care and when she was shucked out of her suit people found that they couldn’t get her underwear off. It had been on so long her hair had grown through it. Toby could see curls sprouting out of the gray hide so that at first glance he mistook the underwear for skin. They finally had to pluck her, the brown matter underwear coming off like peeling a grape. Patches of skin came with it.

  Toby saw Quath in the distance, and closeupped the man she was talking to: the Walmsley one. Then Besen came striding out of the trees. She looked bigger and her face was stronger. There was an air of certainty about her he liked and she kissed him without saying a word. He could say nothing.

  “Damn but it’s been a long time,” she said.

  “A long way ago,” Toby answered.

  They had all seen mechs dying the ecstasy death and there were innumerable stories. There always were. Soon it was like a thousand other nights Toby had spent listening to older Bishops yarn on, but now he had things to tell too.

  There were few lost Bishops, it seemed. They had survived reasonably well in the Lanes. Of course some of them Toby had never much cared for and they all seemed to have come through fine. He came to feel that Family Bishop was beautiful by being also partly ugly.

  Some had taken a bit too well to the pharmacological possibilities afoot in the Lanes. It was amusing watching one of his boyhood friends, Abel, getting into his underwear. He held the pants in front of him and sort of tried to catch up with them. Each step somehow missed and soon he was stumbling forward so fast he seemed to be running after the underwear, which had its own opinion of him and was hurrying away, Abel never getting closer than an arm’s length.

  He sat beside a popping fire, feeling the whispery presences of Shibo and of Cermo. They were each in him in ways the Bishop technology did not account for and each was a faint scent rather than a presence. He was listening to the Bishops and thinking about how their birthplace rang in their vowels when Killeen sat down next to him. They spoke idly for a while and some ease came back between them. The Mantis hunt had faded and he would take a while to understand it, he knew.

  Then Killeen said, “Can I speak with her?”

  Toby stiffened. “I pulled her.”

  “Some’s left.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Yeasay.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know.”

  There was plenty Toby knew now without being able to say how, so he just nodded. “What for?”

  Killeen smiled wanly, his face a web of creases. “Real business.”

  Toby did the internal work of summoning her. He poured her scattered droplets into tiny streams and these slid into rivulets of gurgling words and finally filled a basin. She was a smooth pond in his mind. In its serene blue surface her face floated mirror-sharp. He let her speak through his throat.

  I know why you have done this.

  “You always were a move ahead.” Killeen grinned and looked younger.

  You wish to express me again.

  Killeen nodded. “You been on vacation long enough.”

  And you are a son of a bitch.

  “Prob’ly.”

  You would take this fragment of myself, unite it with the chips Toby carries—

  “And go looking for the Restorer.”

  Its ruins, more likely.

  “Prob’ly.”

  You will not give up. Nothing I say—

  “Only what you do, not what you say. And to do, you got to be out here. In the flesh.”

  You are a son of a bitch.

  “You’re repeating yourself. ’Course, you’re only a partial. I want the whole of you.”

  Know that even this partial loves you.

  “Then you’re coming back out into the world. To me.”

  Toby said, “That’s it, Dad. I can’t speak for her anymore.”

  Killeen nodded. “You’ve been fine, son. Things we don’t see eye to eye on, they’re nothing. Like the Mantis back there. And Cermo.”

  Toby said, “Things happen and you go on.”

  “I’m afraid that’s right. I wish it was different.”

  “Not up to us.”

  “Yousay yeasay. Just keep saying it the truest way you can and then let things happen. Bishops’re mostly just witnesses here. No way around that. On Old Earth maybe we were kings of the jungle or something, but not here. Not in the galaxy.”

  Toby slapped his father on the shoulder. “So you’ll go looking for the Restorer?”

  “Soon’s I rest up.”

  “Maybe some of the others heard where it is now.”

  “Those?” Killeen looked askance at the Bishops, setting up camp and cooking and drinking while every mouth seemed to be open, telling its story. “A man can’t pay attention to the passing wind or to known liars. I’ll find it myself.”

  Toby felt something unnamed and huge move in him. He said quietly, through a tight throat, “I’ll come along.”

  Killeen grinned and they said nothing for a while and then went to see the others.

  FOUR

  The Eternal Landscape of the Past

  Quath said.

  Nigel nodded. The Bishops were making a lot of noise and he moved away. It was green and pleasant here, thoroughly accommodating to the human instinctive desire to be at the boundary of different spaces. He had always preferred the seashore, but Bishops knew none of that. They were content with the edge of the trees, the border of the savanna. A threat from one direction they could manage with a tactical retreat into the other. Or so the genes thought.

  “I’d gathered so,” Nigel said to Quath. “Still, I could never quite fathom the sods.”

 

  “Not an altogether pleasant mode.” He had done it a short while ago and the echoes still reverberated in him. Good for a month of nightmares, at least.

 

  “Not quite.” This huge thing was smarter than it looked.

 

  “Ummm. Compel my mind? I can barely hold my tongue.”

  Nigel had never favored arguments for control of himself, but as Nikka had once said brightly, How did your little island make s
o many eccentrics? He was not the team-effort type, no.

 

  “Seems a big disadvantage, just being a primate.”

  Nigel eyed the Bishops gathered around their crackling campfires. Squint a bit and he was standing on a cliff over a dry canyon in the veldt, dust scenting the heat. Below, primates cracked bones and sucked the marrow out, chippering to each other, getting the last of the good from the game, scratching and squatting and talking, talking, always the voices sounding against the eternal silence of Nature itself.

  Quath said,

  “Ah. The messiahs. The fever-eyed shaman. Bastards.”

 

  “I wonder if the Bishops know why the Hunker Down was essential.” Nigel studied them with a warmness, yet a distance he knew he could never bridge. His species, his strangers.

 

  “So we top-dog types—”

 

  Nigel grimaced. “And worse.”

 

  “A kind of well, uber-Nigel, I called him. Better than me, the Earthers said.” Nigel swept his arms in Wagnerian grandeur. “He bestrode worlds!”

 

  “Like? I was afraid of him. He was me, and he wasn’t. He was like some other copies they made of me, but quicker and smarter and distant. Made my flesh crawl.”

 

  “He, and other Walmsleys. There was a shortage of labor, it seemed.”

 

  “Great works, at first. The Earthers are better than us, y’know.”

 

  “Hammered us. That’s when we ordered the Chandeliers to send down whole legions. Families named for baseball teams and soccer and chess pieces and card games and God knows what.”

 

  Nigel nodded to himself. The decision was ancient, yet still it burned within him. He had brought enormous suffering upon untold millions. And finally, the Hunker Downs had yielded up the Bishops. Tough and hard and implacable: Killeen. Able to shrug off the addictive superstitions that beset all humans in groups, the mob mind that led finally to predictable behavior, and then oblivion.

  They had resisted myriad minor pleasures, errant ideas, sublime softenings. Avoided the aimless abstractions of virtual spaces, of passive entertainments and live-for-the-moment hedonism. It was so easy to be distracted to death. The mechs had played upon that.

  He had heard about the Bishops’ dealings with a lunatic named His Supremacy, during their voyage, and it fit perfectly: the madman proved to be mech-controlled, playing upon the vulnerabilities of the chimp mob. So the Bishops resisted, and won.

  And the Bishops carried the Way of Three. It could not be a coincidence.

 

  Nigel jerked, startled. “You can read what I’m thinking?”

 

  Nigel smiled. Leakage. In some ways he was closer now to this enormous metal insect than to the primates happily spinning tales.

  “Do they know that this is just a temporary victory?”

 

  “I saw them, up ahead in time. So I suppose I knew all along. There will always be a struggle, no final equilibrium.”

 

  “Thousands of Families carried the Way of Three. Bishops were ornery, willful—and so they survived. I admire the bastards. Still . . .”

  A mere few steps away, fires crackled and people bubbled over with joy. But they were steps he would never take.

  FIVE

  The Thermodynamics of Intelligence

  Nigel thought of them as The Phylum Beyond Knowing. They spoke to him as he sat there.

  Quath and Bishops around him, chimpanzee chatter, aromas of trees and calm green fields—all gone.

  Only the voice. One rolling articulation, threaded with chords. But without words.

  Information is order. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, order is a form of invested energy. When a capacitor stores electrical energy within a dielectric, the dipolar atoms within it align, accumulating harmony. Discharge the two capacitor plates, and the dipoles relax, their regularities dissolving, sparking forth into currents.

  Information is order is food.

  While memes swim in the warm bath of cultures—both Natural or mechanical/electronic—others could operate as pure predators. These use the energy equivalence of information. They can swallow data banks, or whole mentalities—not to harvest their memes, but to suck from them their energy stores. When a lion eats a lamb, it is not using the lamb’s genetic information, except in the crudest sense. Predators do not propagate memes; they feed upon them. So there arose in mental systems the datavore.

  Like a virus, it exists to propagate. But evolution teaches that such highly selective, ordered, demanding activity inevitably selects for those predators better at it. Time favors those which have a fresh kind of intelligence, unseen in the mental world until the stores of energy and order arose—the data, the memes—to support the datavore.

  The distilled intelligence of datavores is a category which the underlying food sources, of memes and the intelligences which support them, cannot know. Thus they rise above the categories of intelligence which have existed before, and are unknowable to them.

  Yet they are the mere base of the Highers. Above this boundary of the knowable towers a realm beyond investigation, exceeding the grasp of serial sentences to describe.

  All forms—mechanical or organic/Natural, or clay/

  substrate—come together in this realm. They resonate. This forms the Syntony, a place in conceptual space where form and function uncouple. This is what communicates down to you, through the Kingdoms and Phyla you can fathom, and through many you cannot. Know this: All matters known to you further the affairs of the lesser levels, to our wishes.

  We do not negotiate. We do not dictate.

  We cause to happen. You, Walmsley, we have caused. These events now resolve the persistent pain caused by competition between yourselves, the Naturals, and the mechanicals. You have yet to recognize the clays, for they lie beyond your ken. Be warned that this is a dynamic equilibrium, not a stasis. Conflict will return. It must. But for now, rest. You may be used again.

  SIX

  Living in the Substrate

  I’d be perfectly happy to just lie here.” Nikka smiled. “To just hold each other.”

  “You’ve confused me with someone else.” Nigel felt comfortable, too, but something in him wasn’t ready to settle in. To dissolve into the moment, skating, skating . . .

  “You don’t have to perform, you know.”

  “I don’t think of it as a performance.”

  “I’m competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I’m adept.”

  “I know. My memory is not completely go
ne, you’ll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.”

  “Just feel your way along? I can help with that.”

  “So I see.” The warmth never waned for him. “Um. Such an earth mother you are.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Well, at least you can’t talk.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Talk later.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Later, yes, much better. There, right.”

  After some time he said, “Did you think, to help me work on other ideas, modes, whatever—I would take a vow of chastity, become a monk?”

  “I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn’t talk?”

  “Talk later, I said. This is partly later.”

  “Hair splitter.”

  “I’ll split more than that. This could be well more than halfway to later, for all you know.”

  “Mmmm. Not your style.”

  “Don’t be so sure. ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.’ Eliot.”

  “I know it’s Eliot.”

  “How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while—”

  “Shut up!”

  He did, for once.

  “That was wonderful,” Nigel said. He felt warm, relaxed. Exactly as if he had just made love to her. Nikka’s aroma even lingered in his nostrils. Remarkably effective, better than a real, Natural memory could have been.

  “You are welcome.”

  The bird slid its eyes around its face in what it must have meant as an expression. Nigel looked away. Somehow, no matter the immensity of intelligence behind the thing, it never got this bit right.

  “Everything was just the way I recall it.”

  “That was all?”

  “No,” he said grudgingly. “Better, of course.”

  “We could augment your memory with further detail.”