Essays

by Gregory Benford

  Those magisterial forms need the energies from this furnace, yet do not venture here. The wise and valuable run no risks.

  At times the herds fail. Vast shimmering sheets peel away. Many are east into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolves their lattices. They burst open and flare with fatal energies.

  Now a greater threat spirals lazily down. It descends from the shelter of thick, turbulent dust. It lets itself fall toward the governing mass, the black hole itself. Then it arrests its descent with out-stretched wings of mirrors. They bank gracefully on the photon breeze.

  Its lenses swivel to select prey. There a pack of photovores has clumped, disregarding ageless programming, or perhaps caught in a magnetic flux tube. The cause does not matter. The predator eases down along the axis of the galaxy itself.

  Here, navigation is simple. Far below, the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things is a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.

  The clustered photovores sense a descending presence. Their vast sailing herds cleave, peeling back to reveal deeper planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They all live to ingest light and excrete microwave beams. Their internal world revolves around ingestion, considered digestion, and orderly excretion.

  These placid conduits now flee. But those clumped near the axis have little angular momentum, and cannot pivot on a magnetic fulcrum. Dimly they sense their destiny. Their hissing microwaves waver.

  Some plunge downward, hoping that the predator will not follow so close to the Eater. Others cluster ever more, as if numbers give safety. The opposite is true.

  The metallovore folds its mirror wings. Now angular and swift, accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It scoops them in with flux lines. Metal harvesters rip the photovores. Shreds rush down burnt-black tunnels. Electrostatic fields separate elements and alloys.

  Fusion fires await the ruined carcasses. There the separation can be exquisitely tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last analysis, the ultimate resources here are mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and now they end as mass.

  The sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of multitudes peeling back, their gigshertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.

  Yet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state, one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater's vagaries. Less energy would be harnessed, less mass recovered.

  The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.

  Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.

  Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore's polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements -- wreckage and dust which can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

  All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere which stretches for hundreds of cubic light years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.

  All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.

  Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.

  It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.

  Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.

  Intelligent machines would build atop this ferment a society we could scarcely fathom -- but we would try. Much of the next novel I wrote, Furious Gulf was about that -- the gulf around a Mack hole, and the gulf between intelligences born of different realms.

  For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences which never had to pass through our Darwin-nowing filter.

  If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us -- we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?

  A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the "substrate," the basic building blocks. Machines could embody intelligence, but their styles would be different.

  Angular antennas reflect the bristling ultraviolet of the disk below. Shapes revolve. They live among clouds of infalling mass -- swarthy, shredding under a hail of radiation: infrared spikes, cutting gamma rays.

  Among the dissolving clouds move silvery figures whose form alters to suit function. Liquid metal flows, firms. A new tool extrudes: matted titanium. It works at a deposit of rich indium. Chewing digesting,

  The harvesters swoop in long ellipses, high above the hard brilliance of the disk. As they swarm they strike elaborate arrays, geometric matrices. Their volume-scavenging strategy is self-evolved, purely practical, a simple algorithm. Yet it generates intricate patterns which unfurl and perform and then cuff up again in artful, languorous beauty.

  They have another, more profound function. Linked, they form a macro-antenna. In a single-voiced chorus they relay complex trains of digital thought. Never do they participate in the cross-lacing streams of careful deliberation, any more than molecules of air care for the sounds they transmit.

  Across light-minutes the conversation billows and clashes and rings. A civilization blooms on the brink of the deepest abyss in Creation.

  By the time I reached the last volume, in 1992, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center, am working on a further model for the Snake, and still eagerly read each issue of Astrophysical Journal for further clues.

  Much remains to be found there. My nephew, now a doctoral student at Caltech, will make a thorough map of the center in 1995, using a detector he built to view light wavelengths shorter than a millimeter -he's caught the bug.

  I finished the last novel, Sailing Bright Eternity, in summer 1994. It had been twenty-four years since I started on the series and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.

  I had taken many imaginative leaps in putting together a working "ecology" for the center, including truly outre ideas, such as constructions made by forcing space-time itself into compressed forms, which in turn act like mass itself: reversing Einstein's intuition, that matter curved space-time. All this was great fun, requiring a lot of time to think. I let my subconscious do most of the work, if possible. It's an easier way to write; but it stretches out projects, too. Occasionally I wanted to say to long-suffering readers, who wrote in asking when the next volume would appear, "Sorry; I'm writing as fast as I

  Doubtless t
here are many more surprises ahead. We're extending our gaze into ever more distant frequencies, gaining better resolution, seeing liner detail. In peeling back the onion skins, we get closer to. how galaxies work, how the vast outbursts of their centers affect life, and how the truly bright galactic cores, quasars, work.

  My own model is quite possibly completely wrong. It seems to explain some features (the filaments, the Snake) but has trouble with the jets. Eventually, comparing radio maps over time, we might see flareups and changes in the threads. Mine is strictly done in what I call the "cartoon approximation"--good enough for a first cut, maybe, but doomed to fail somewhere.

  In any case, models are like matters of taste. Nobody expects a French impressionist painting to look much like a real cow; it suggests ways of looking at cows.

  Is there life at the center? Nobody knows, but nobody can rule it out. Only by thinking about possibilities can we test them. My first intuition, seeing the radio map of the Arch, was, This looks artificial. Maybe it is -- you had probably thought of that explanation halfway through this piece. Astronomy reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. Someday, that may prove wrong.

  One of the ways science fiction looks at the world is by pushing it to extremes, asking the questions that go beyond the bounds of what we can observe and check now. Imagination is no mere foot soldier; it wants to fly. That's why science fiction and science are forever linked.

  GREGORY BENFORD and DAVID BRIN

  PARIS CONQUERS ALL

  * The second of our War of the Worlds stories is the third story in the issue by a columnist. Gregory Benford collaborated with award-winner David Brin in this tale of yet another writer, Jules Verne, and his encounter with the Martians.

  I commence this account with a prosaic stroll at eventide -- a saunter down the avenues of la Ville Lumiere, during which the ordinary swiftly gave way to the extraordinary. I was in Paris to consult with my publisher, as well as to visit old companions and partake of the exquisite cuisine, which my provincial home in Amiens cannot boast. Though I am now a gentleman of advanced age, nearing my 70th year, I am still quite able to favor the savories, and it remains a treat to survey the lovely demoiselles as they exhibit the latest fashions on the boulevards, enticing smitten young men and breaking their hearts at the same time.

  I had come to town that day believing -- as did most others -- that there still remained weeks, or days at least, before the alien terror ravaging southern France finally reached the valley of the Seine. Ile de France would be defended at all costs, we were assured. So it came to pass that, tricked by this false complaisance, I was in the capital the very afternoon that the crisis struck.

  Paris! It still shone as the most splendid exemplar of our progressive age -- all the more so in that troubled hour, as tense anxiety seemed only to add to the city's loveliness -- shimmering at night with both gas and electric lights, and humming by day with new electric trams, whose marvelous wires crisscrossed above the avenues like gossamer heralds of a new era.

  I had begun here long ago as a young attorney, having followed into my father's profession. Yet that same head of our family had also accepted my urge to strike out on a literary road, in the theater and later down expansive voyages of prose. "Drink your fill of Paris, my son!" the good man said, seeing me off from the Nantes railway station. "Devour these wondrous times. Your senses are keen. Share your insights. The world will change because of it."

  Without such help and support, would I ever have found within myself the will, the daring, to explore the many pathways of the future, with all their wonders and perils? Ever since the Martian invasion began, I had found myself reflecting on an extraordinary life filled with such good fortune, especially now that all human luck seemed about to be revoked. Now, with terror looming from the south and west, would it all soon come to nought? All that I had achieved? Everything humanity had accomplished, after so many centuries climbing upward from ignorance?

  It was in such an uncharacteristically dour mood that I strolled in the company of M. Beauchamp, a gentleman scientist, that pale afternoon less than an hour before I had my first contact with the horrible Martian machines. Naturally, I had been following the eye-witness accounts which first told of plunging fireballs, striking the Earth with violence that sent gouts of soil and rock spitting upward, like miniature versions of the outburst at Krakatau. These impacts had soon proved to be far more than mere meteoritic phenomena, since there soon emerged, like insects from a subterranean lair, three-legged beings bearing incredible malevolence toward the life of this planet. Riding gigantic tripod mechanisms, these unwelcome guests soon set forth with one sole purpose in mind -- destructive conquest!

  The ensuing carnage, the raking fire, the sweeping flames -- none of these horrors had yet reached the fair country above the river Loire . . . not yet. But reports all too vividly told of villages trampled, farmlands seared black, and hordes of refugees cut down as they fled.

  Invasion. The word came to mind all too easily remembered. We of northern France knew the pain just twenty-eight years back, when Sedan fell and this sweet land trembled under an attacker's boot. Several Paris quarters still bear scars where Prussian firing squads tore moonlike craters out of plaster walls, mingling there the ochre life blood of communards, royalists and bourgeois alike.

  Now Paris trembled before advancing powers so malign that, in contrast, those Prussians of 1870 were like beloved cousins, welcome to town for a picnic!

  All of this I pondered while taking leave, with Beauchamp, of the Ecole Militaire, the national military academy, where a briefing had just been given to assembled dignitaries, such as ourselves. From the stone portico we gazed toward the Seine, past the encampment of the Seventeenth Corps of Volunteers, their tents arrayed across trampled grass and smashed flower beds of the ironically named Champ-de-Mars. The meadow of the god of war.

  Towering over this scene of intense (and ultimately futile) martial activity stood the tower of M. Eiffel, built for the recent exhibition, that marvelously fashioned testimonial to metal and ingenuity . . . and also target of so much vitriol.

  "The public's regard for it may improve with time," I ventured, observing that Beauchamp's gaze lay fixed on the same magnificent spire.

  My companion snorted with derision at the curving steel flanks. "An eyesore, of no enduring value," he countered, and for some time we distracted ourselves from more somber thoughts by arguing the relative merits of Eiffel's work, while turning east to walk toward the Sorbonne. Of late, experiments in the transmission of radio-tension waves had wrought unexpected pragmatic benefits, using the great tower as an antenna. I wagered Beauchamp there would be other advantages, in time.

  Alas, even this topic proved no lasting diversion from thoughts of danger to the south. Fresh in our minds were reports from the wine districts. The latest outrage -- that the home of Vouvray was now smashed, trampled and burning. This was my favorite of all the crisp, light vintages--better, even, than a fresh Sancerre. Somehow, that loss seemed to strike home more vividly than dry casualty counts, already climbing to the millions.

  "There must be a method!" I proclaimed, as we approached the domed brilliance of Les Invalides. "There has to be a scientific approach to destroying the invaders."

  "The military is surely doing its best," Beauchamp said.

  "Buffoons!"

  "But you heard of their losses. The regimants and divisions decimated --" Beauchamp stuttered. "The army dies for France! For humanity -- of which France is surely the best example."

  I turned to face him, aware of an acute paradox -- that the greatest martial mind of all time lay entombed in the domed citadel nearby. Yet even he would have been helpless before a power that was not of this world.

  "I do not condemn the army's courage," I assured.

  "Then how can you speak --"

  "No no! I condemn their lack of imagination!"

  "To defeat the incredible takes --"

  "Vision!"


  Timidly, for he knew my views, he advanced, "I saw in the Match that the British have consulted with the fantasist, Mr. Wells."

  To this I could only cock an eye. "He will give them no aid, only imaginings."

  "But you just said --"

  "Vision is not the same as dreaming."

  At that moment the cutting smell of sulfuric acid waited on a breeze from the reducing works near the river. (Even in the most beautiful of cities, rode work has its place.) Beauchamp mistook my expression of disgust for commentary upon the Englishman, Wells.

  "He is quite successful. Many compare him to you."

  "An unhappy analogy. His stories do not repose on a scientific basis. I make use of physics. He invents."

  "In this crisis --"

  "I go to the moon in a cannon ball. He goes in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ca c'est tres joli! -- but show me this metal. Let him produce it!"

  Beauchamp blinked. "I quite agree -- but, then, is not our present science woefully inadequate to the task at hand -- defending ourselves against monstrous invaders?"

  We resumed our walk. Leaving behind the crowds paying homage at Napoleon's Tomb, we made good progress along rue de Varenne, with the Petite Palais now visible across the river, just ahead.

  "We lag technologically behind these foul beings, that I grant. But only by perhaps a century or two."

  "Oh surely, more than that! To fly between the worlds --"

  "Can be accomplished several ways, all within our comprehension, if not our grasp."

  "What of the reports by astronomers of great explosions, seen earlier this year on the surface of the distant roddy planet? They now think these were signs of the Martian invasion fleet being launched. Surely we could not expend such forces!"