Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  Not a single mind… and not multiple, interlocking intelligences, such as Quath.

  She should inform the Tukar’ramin, she knew. This discovery came as a complete surprise, with implications Quath could not fathom. But for now she was unable to think clearly. Her smaller minds urged different courses, yelping and squirming. She silenced them and imposed a stony resolve: keep far enough away from the Noughts to escape detection. She had to learn more of what they were.

  Cobwebs of the Nought mind still clung to Quath. They brushed across her field of vision, shimmering traceries of doubt. The very air clamored with skeptic winds.

  In rattled confusion Quath stumbled on.

  SEVEN

  Killeen was sleeping deeply when the first hard jolt rolled through the mountain. He came awake at once and rolled out of the tent, coming to his feet as Shibo followed him out. A second shock knocked him down.

  Jarred, his opticals took a moment to adjust. His eyes automatically cycled through to their most sensitive mode, because he had left them set for night vision. But this made the landscape glare as if under a noonday sun.

  Brilliance cascaded down, bleaching out colors and shadows. The entire bowl of the sky glowed with rich gold.

  The Syphon. The cosmic string was again revolving, sucking the rich ore from the planet’s center. Imploding rock far below sent immense waves. He felt through his feet the slow, rippling surge of colossal movements thousands of kilometers below.

  “Out!” he called on comm. “Leave the ravines. Get into the open!”

  He and Shibo had slept in their full boot rigs. They swept up their packs and were headed out of the arroyo when he saw that Toby and Besen were sitting, pulling on their boots.

  “Belay that!” he called. The ground wavered beneath him, making it hard to stand. “Run barefoot.”

  Toby looked up at his father vaguely, still half-asleep. They had given him what pitifully few medical measures the Family still had against the pain and infection of his wound.

  Killeen scooped up Toby’s pack and Shibo got Besen’s. “Come on!” she yelled.

  A rock as big as a man came thundering down the ravine. It rolled straight through two tents above them. It thumped hollowly and rushed by. Edges smashed off, showering them with shards as it lumbered past. It took their tents with it.

  They ran up the slope until they reached the scree. Killeen helped Toby stumble along the parts where recently settled dust made slippery going. The boy was still groggy and cradled his left hand. Killeen kept an eye out for the stones clattering down and steered Toby away from them.

  The sky’s steady glow made it easy to dodge the debris and boulders that rumbled past them. Not everyone was as quick or as lucky; surprised cries of pain came from the ravine below.

  They stopped when they got onto a flat, open slab of rock. The tall granite buttress and angular crest above seemed already scoured of loose stone. “Rally here!” Killeen called on comm.

  —Shut up!—Jocelyn shouted furiously.—Bishops! Home on my point!—

  “Jocelyn, it’s clear over this way,” Killeen said.

  —Bear on me! Don’t rally to Killeen!—

  The ground shook and rolled and trembled endlessly. Bishops crawled and ran up the flanks of the saddleback, fleeing the ravines which funneled rockslides. Killeen said no more on comm.

  Jocelyn was clinging to a chimney slope nearby. It looked safe as long as the shoulder range above didn’t slide. Few Bishops joined her. Most made their way to the ground below Killeen. The quakes eased slowly. Jocelyn’s area held. After a while she inched down the slope and led her small party across the saddleback. She came onto the open slab where by now over a hundred Bishops had spread out so they could easily dodge the tumbling rocks.

  “You’re undermining my Cap’ncy,” Jocelyn said, panting, as she approached.

  Killeen shook his head, not trusting himself to say any- thing. From downslope came crashes and shouts. A deep, slow rumbling swept up the mountain, as though the whole were breathing in painful gasps.

  —Assemble! Assemble!—came the harsh call of His Supremacy.

  “Let’s go!” Jocelyn cried to the Bishops.

  “Safer stay here,” Killeen said.

  “You’ll do as His Supremacy orders!” Jocelyn snapped.

  Toby and Besen had gotten their boots and packs in shape. The four of them set off across a granite plain scarred by rockslides. The tremors muted somewhat, as though the gnawing at the center of this world had ceased. Killeen studied the shimmering curtain of gold overhead but could see no sign of the extruded core metal. Something dark moved high up, a mere scratch against the glow, but nothing more.

  When they arrived at the next broad rock shoulder His Supremacy was already speaking to the Families that were raggedly assembling before him. “This is yet another attempt by the demons and devils released upon us, a failed attempt to make us disperse, to miss our conjunction with our sole remaining thread of hope. The Skysower shall arrive soon, my Aspects calculate. Prepare!”

  The other Families began to gather gnarled branches and bushes for a large fire. They stumbled and fell as the ground shook, but they kept on. Killeen and the others stared in disbelief.

  Then His Supremacy cried, “Behold! The moment is upon us!”

  Killeen looked up. A thin band hung above the mountain, visible only as a black segment against the glow. It moved. The nearly straight line slowly shortened and grew wider.

  Killeen had the sense that he was looking along the length of something far larger than it appeared. The band curved slightly with an almost languid grace. The gossamer glow behind it added to the perception that the band was moving rapidly, sweeping across the sky like a black finger that turned adroitly, serenely. Killeen thought that it looked absurdly like a stick thrown so high that, twirl as it might, it would never come down.

  Then the sound of it came. At first Killeen thought he was hearing a deep bass note that came up through the soles of his boots, but then he realized that the slow, gravid sound came pressing down from the sky. It boomed, a single note that frayed into a chorus of shifting overtones, plunging deeper and deeper into frequencies that he felt rather than heard, wavelengths resonant with the entire length of him, so that he listened with his whole body. It was like the beating of great waves from space itself, driven by tides of light to hammer against the small pebbles of planets and stars, washing over them in rivulets.

  Something came climbing down the sky.

  The slow, rolling notes brought long-reverberating fears. The rock below them had betrayed its ageold promise of solidity and now the strange dark ribbon above opened its own chasm of doubt. Killeen wondered if the thing could be some Cyber device, like the cosmic string. If so, there was no escape. Clearly it was headed down toward them here on the bald, exposed crown of the mountain. He sensed the immensity of the thing without being able to see any detail in it.

  Then he began to hear strumming notes that hung in the air. They rose like the sound of wind streaming through tall trees, as though a gale swept the huge thing above, as though it were made of wood and leaf.

  His Supremacy was shouting something, religious phrases that ran together and made little sense to Killeen.

  “Behold, a sower went forth to sow. And to those chosen it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, brought by the sower. And to all things mechanical it was not given!”

  He saw suddenly that the ribbon above, expanding gradually, was slowly curving down to point its long, tapered end directly at the ground. At them.

  Now that it drew closer, Killeen could make out details lit by the skyglow. Great sinews like cables stretched down, interrupted by knobby bulges, like the vertebrae of an immense spine. It groaned. The thing rushed down the sky at them, emitting vast twangings. Taut strands split the air with great hard cracks. A symphony of snappings and protracted pops sounded, building to a torrent of noise—

  —and something smacked int
o the rock near them. It smashed open, showering Killeen with aromatic juice that caught in his beard. He jerked back, but the smell was pleasant, sweet, cloying.

  Another slammed into the mountain, then another. They pelted the whole mountainside. Families shouted with glee, not terror, as more of the big, oblong shapes rained down on them.

  Killeen dimly realized that he had not felt fear as the band rushed toward them. Somehow he had quickly sensed that this was not a Cyber machine, not a threat.

  Pops and cracks still rained down, but ebbing now, as he saw the long thin line, slightly curved, drawing away again. It had seemed to come nearly straight down, spearing through the sky as though to point a finger of accusation—or beckoning?—at the huddled humanity upon the mountaintop.

  Wonderingly, he walked over to the nearest fallen object. The egg shape had split, spattering moisture everywhere. Small gray spheres were mixed in with the juice. Killeen scooped some up and smelled a light sweetness. Without thinking, his normal caution swept away, he bit into one. A pleasant, oily taste flooded his mouth.

  “No! No!” A Trey rushed up to him. “Save—for the cooking.”

  Killeen watched as the man gathered up the split pod and staggered off with it, scarcely able to carry the weight. Everywhere on the mountainside people ran to collect them. Others stoked the growing fires. Some already spitted the pods on sticks and began roasting them over dancing flames.

  Killeen let himself be caught up in the jubilation. The Tribe, worn down by its long retreat and short of food, needed a celebration. Without questioning why, he knew that this manna brought literally from heaven was good, healthy. The thick, heady aroma of the roasting promised delights to the nose and mouth. Even the continuing shocks that surged through the mountain did not bother him.

  He watched the dark blade that had cut the sky recede farther, making the sky shudder, curving slightly as it rose. It had spent only a long moment at its farthest stretch, hovering over the mountain summit as though to deliver a benediction—which it had.

  EIGHT

  Through the cold mountain night Quath felt a massive presence descending.

  She had taken shelter in a fissure beyond where the Noughts lurked. From this vantage she could pick up their effusions and leakage radiation. They plainly thought their small bubbles of electric perception, damped to the minimum, could elude the podia. Quath penetrated the tiny, wan spheres with ease, inspecting the fitful firefly radiances that simmered there.

  But she could extract little of use to her this way. Certainly she learned nothing that went beyond her scorching revelations while actually encased in the Nought. Rivulets of Nought thought slipped through the chilly air and snagged in Quath’s electro-aura, flapping like tiny flags in the perception-breeze. And the telltale she had planted on her Nought was silent.

  Still she was reluctant to approach the mountaintop. Another incident might alert them fully, scattering them and making Quath’s quest harder.

  Then she had felt the first high, tenuous note sounding down from far to the west. The high treble skated on the air, pursued by booming bass notes. They rolled like steady thunder. The source came down and forward at a speed that Quath thought at first must be an illusion. Stuttered Doppler images came too fast for her. Old fears welled up.

  The podia had come from ground-grubbing origins. Heights brought acute, squeezing panic to them. That was why they did not hunt for enemies from the air, no matter how efficient such searching could be. It had taken millennia for the podia to be able to tolerate the keening sense of falling that came in orbit. Only genetic alterations had made space travel possible for them… though it did not erase the persistent terror that flight over the nearby landscape brought, with its gripping images of precipitous possible falls. Quath and the others managed to loft for short distances only by turning control over to a submind, reducing the task to distant mechanical motions.

  But this thing!—it plunged as though oblivious to the ram pressure of air. A ship?

  No—the dark line spanned a quadrant of the sky. A falling chunk of the podia’s construction? Impossible—its browns and greens were unlike the enormous gray labyrinths they built.

  Down it came. Quath broke her aura-silence and called to the Tukar’ramin.

  The swelling intelligence came at once, flickering in the crisp air.

  *I understand your panic. Had I not been concerned with more grave and pressing matters, I would have warned you.*

  Quath asked, trying to seem composed.

  *No. It will not touch the ground at all.*

 

  *Attempt no such foolishness. Here.*

  In Quath’s aura burst a flowering electrical kernel of knowledge, fat and sputtering. Data impacted, data rampant.

  She swallowed it, converting the spinning ball of inductive currents into readable hormones. Scents and aromas bloomed, packed with stunning detail.

 

  *It comes unfiltered from the Illuminates.*

  The honor of receiving such a holy kernel stunned Quath. She tentatively tasted. An astonishing central fact swept over her like an icy stream: The thing above was alive.

  Its history had been buried in a musty vault of supposedly minor knowledge, Quath was shocked to find. Certainly none of the podia had spoken much of this thing. Yet, as she unpeeled the layers of hormonal implications, the crux became ever more impressive.

  Quath cried, as the history of the thing poured through her, her subminds dissecting the myriad nuances.

  *We did not consider it vital,* the Tukar’ramin replied. *It is a curious object, granted. It may be of use to us in the future.*

  Quath felt dismayed shock at the Tukar’ramin’s bland unconcern. Then her characterological submind took hold and reminded her that she was, after all, only a recently augmented member of the Hive. Her great advancement, the revelations about her Philosoph components—these still did not mean she could blithely question the Tukar’ramin’s judgment. She savored the strangely cool presence—the very voice of the Illuminates.

  Above, the thing came down through thunderclaps and vortex night.

  It had started as a seedbeast, far out at the rim of this solar system.

  It was then a thin bar of slow life struggling in bitter cold. Threads trailed from it, holding a gossamer mirror far larger than the bar. Wan sunlight reflected from the mica mirror, focusing on the living nucleus, warming it enough to keep a tepid, persistent flow of fluids.

  In hovering dark far beyond the target star the bar waited and watched. Passing molecular clouds brushed it with dust, and this grimy meal was enough—barely—to help repair the occasional damage from cosmic rays.

  Filigrees of muscle fiber kept its mirror aligned and formed the rigging for later growth. Even so far from the star, sunlight’s pressure inflated the large but flimsy structure. A slight spin supplied aligning tension, through crisscrossing spars.

  The wan but focused starlight fell upon photoreceptors, which converted the energy into chemical forms. The seed-beast did not need to move quickly, so this feeble flow of power was enough to send it on its hunt.

  No mind sailed in this bitterly cold, black chunk. None was needed… yet.

  The filmy mirror played another role. As the bed of photoreceptors grew through the decades, the image formed by the mirror broadened. Occasionally contractile fibers twitched. Weightless, the mirror canted to the side and curved into an artfully skewed paraboloid. Slow oscillations marched across the field of sewn mica. Leisurely, undulating images of the star rippled away to the edges, sending long waves through the rigging. The shimmering surfaces cupped dim radiance, compressed it. Momentarily this gave the receptors a sweeping image of the space near the approaching sun.

  For a very long time there was little of note in the expanded image—only the background mottling and lazy luminescent splashes in the molec
ular clouds. Against this wash of light the prey of the seedbeast would be pale indeed.

  But at least the beast found a suspect pinprick of light. Was it a ball of ice? Ancient instincts came sluggishly into play.

  Specialized photoreceptors grew, able to analyze narrow slivers of the spectrum that came from the far, dim dot. One sensed the ionized fragments of hydrogen and oxygen. Another patrolled the thicket of spectral spikes, searching for carbon dioxide, ammonia, traces of even more complex though fragile forms.

  Success would not come on the first try, nor even on the tenth. Not only did the seedbeast demand of the distant prey a filmy, evaporating hint of ices; the precometary head had to move in an orbit which the seedbeast could reach.

  At last one target daub of light fulfilled all the ancient genetically programmed demands, and the seedbeast set forth. A long stern chase began. Celestial mechanics, ballistics, decision-making—all these complex interactions occurred at the gravid pace allowed by sunlight’s constant pressure. Great sails grew and unfurled from the beast. Snagging the photon wind, the thing tacked and warped.

  Centuries passed. The tiny image of the prey waxed and waned as the elliptical pursuit followed the smooth demands of gravity. The prey swelled ahead, became a tumbling, irregular chunk of dust and ice.

  Now came a critical juncture: contact. Data accumulated in cells and fibers designed for just this one special task. Angular momentum, torques, vectors—all abstractions reduced finally to molecular templates, groupings of ions and membranes. Achingly slow, the beast made calculations that are second nature to any being which negotiates movement. But it could expend its limitless time to minimize even the most tiny of risks.

  Slender fibers extended. They found purchase on the slowly revolving ice mountain, each grappler seizing its chosen point at the same moment. The beast swung into a gravid gavotte, spooling out stays and guy threads. The slight centripetal acceleration activated long-dormant chemical and biological processes.