Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  “How soon will these magnetic beings react?”

  Soon, if experience is a guide. I advise that we clasp the metallivore now. Quickly!

  “But don’t let him quite grab us?”

  Arthur gave a staccato yes, its panic seeping into Paris’s mind. Accurate simulations had to fear for their lives.

  The steel-gray metallivore skirted over them. Predators always had parasites, scavengers. Here and there on the metallivore’s polished skin were things like limpets and barnacles, lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow that fed on chance debris, purging the metallivore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust which could jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

  It banked, trying to reach them along the magnetic strands, but the rubbery pressure of the field lines blunted its momentum.

  He let it get closer, trying to judge the waltz of creatures in this bizarre ballroom of the sky: a dance to the pressure of photons. Light was the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supported the great spherical volume of hundreds of cubic light-years, a vast, vicious veldt.

  He began receiving electrodynamic static. The buzzing washed out his comm with the other human ships, distant motes. The metallivore loomed. Pincers flexed forth from it.

  The crackling jolt. Slow lightning arced along the magnetic filament, crisp lemony annihilation riding down.

  “It’ll fry us!” Paris cried out. Arthur recovered some calm, saying,

  We are minor players here. Larger conductors will draw this crackling fire.

  Another jarring jolt. But then the metallivore arced and writhed and died in dancing, flaxen fire.

  The magnetic filaments were slow to act, but muscular. Induction was sluggish but inescapable. Suddenly Paris saw Arthur’s idea.

  As soon as the discharge had abated on the metallivore, the potentials sought another conducting surface, that with the greatest latent difference. The laws of electrodynamics applied to the bigger conductor, closing in—the guardian ship.

  The guardian ship drew flashes of discharge, their jagged fingers dancing ruby-red and bile-green.

  Calls of joy from the pencil-ships. The ornate shape coasted, dead. The larger surface areas of both metallivore and starship had intercepted the electrical circuitry of the filaments.

  “I… you really did know what you were doing,” he said weakly.

  Not actually. I was following my archived knowledge, but theory makes a dull blade. Though perhaps some scrap of my intuition does remain…

  Paris could sense the Aspect’s wan pride. The human ships accelerated now, out of the gossamer filaments; there might be more bolts of high voltage.

  Near the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the lashing weather there, whirled a curious blotchy gray cylinder.

  There. Clearly a mech construct.

  “The Hall of Humans,” he said, wondering how he knew.

  THE COLLECTED

  >I had this terrible dream and I woke up and it was real.

  >Thousands of us there must be, all in this black flat place only it curves around above, I can see up there with my one eye, and the ceiling is filled with us, too, all planted in place.

  >I’m all veins, big fat blue ones, no mouth but I want to eat all the time.

  >My mother is here just a few meters away but I know her only by the sobbing, sounds just like her, and none of the rest of that thing is.

  >I got my hand free and poked one of my eyes out so I didn’t have to look at it but they fixed the eyes, said it was part of the expressiveness of me, and now I have to look all the time, no eyelids and they never turn out the lights.

  >It is not hot but it is Hell and we whisper to each other about that and about it being forever and ever, hallowed be thy Name, amen.

  It was a place of chalk and blood, of diamond eyes and strident songs.

  Paris and the eleven other survivors found the lock, broke in, and prowled the vast interior of the rotating cylinder. He passed by things he could not watch for long, searching for sense.

  Plumes of scent, muddy voices, words like fevered birdcalls.

  Some of them were no longer remotely human, but rather coiled tubes of waxy flesh. Others resembled moving lumps of buttery bile. A man stood on one hand, his belly an accordion-pleated bulge, and as he moved oval fissures opened all over him, wheezing forth a fine yellow mist, long words moaning out: “I… am… a holy… contri… vance…” and then a throttled gasp and “Help… me… be… what… I… am…”

  A sewer smell came swarming up from nearby. A woman gazed directly back into his eyes. She said nothing but her skin ran with tinkling streams of urine. Nearby a little girl was a concert of ropy pink cords, red-rimmed where they all tried to speak.

  The twelve spread out in a daze. Some recognized warped versions of people they had known. There were people here from far antiquity and places no one knew.

  Paris found an entire aisle of shivering couples, entwined in sexual acts made possible by organs designed in ways nature never had allowed: sockets filled by slithering rods, beings which palped and stroked themselves to a hastening pace that rose to a jellied frenzy, shrieked from fresh mouths, and then abated, only to begin again with a building rhythm.

  An Isis man was vomiting nearby. “We’ve got to save them,” he said when Paris went to help him.

  “Yeasay,” a woman pilot agreed. The survivors were drifting back together, pressed by the enveloping horror.

  A wretched nearby sculpture of guts that sprouted leaves managed to get out three words, “No… don’t… want…”

  Paris felt the fear and excitement of the last few hours ebbing from him, replaced by a rising, firm feeling he could not force out through his throat. He shook his head. The woman started to argue, saying that they could take the cases that had been deformed the least, try to free them from the alterations.

  Paris found his voice. “They want to go. Listen.”

  From the long axis that tapered away to infinity there rose a muttered, moaning, corpuscular symphony of anguish and defeat that in its accents and slurred cadences called forth the long corridor of ruin and affliction that was the lot of humanity here at Galactic Center, down through millennia.

  He stood listening. Parts of his mind rustled—moving uneasily, understanding.

  The Mantis sculptures got the most important facets profoundly wrong. The Mantis had tried to slice human sliding moments from the robed minds of the suredead, but it could not surecopy them: their essence lay in what was discarded from the billion-bit/second stream. In the mere passing twist and twinge of a second, humans truncated their universe with electrochemical knives.

  Hot-hearted, to humans death was the mother of beauty. Their gods were, in the end, refracted ways of bearing the precarious gait of the mortal.

  To Paris as a boy the compact equation eπ+1=0 had comprised a glimpse of the eternal music of reason, linking the most important constants in the whole of mathematical analysis, 0, 1, e, π, and i. To Paris the simple line was beautiful.

  To a digitally filtered intelligence the analog glide of this relation would be different, not a glimpse of a vast and various landscape. Not better or worse, but irreducibly different.

  That he could never convey to the Mantis.

  Nor could he express his blood-deep rage, how deeply he hated the shadow that had dogged his life.

  But his fury was wise in a way that mere anger is not. He surprised himself: he breathed slowly, easily, feeling nothing but a granite resolve.

  Paris began killing the sculptures systematically. The others stood numbly and watched him, but their silence did not matter to him. He moved quickly, executing them with bolts, the work fixing him totally in the moment of it.

  He did not notice the sobbing.

  After a time he could not measure he saw that the others were doing the same, without discussion. No one talked at all.

  The wails of the sculptured peop
le reverberated, moist glad cries as they saw what was coming.

  It took a long time.

  The Mantis was waiting outside the Hall of Humans, as Paris had felt it would be.

  I was unable to predict what you and the others did.

  “Good.” His pencil ship lifted away from the long gray cylinder, now a mausoleum to madness.

  I allowed it because those are finished pieces. Whereas you are a work in progress, perhaps my best.

  “I’ve always had a weakness for compliments.”

  He could feel his very blood changing, modulating oxygen and glucose from his body to feed his changing brain. The accretion disk churned below, a great lurid pinwheel grinding to an audience of densely packed stars.

  Humor is another facet I have mastered.

  “There’s a surprise.” Vectoring down, the boost pressing him back. “Very human, too. Everybody thinks he’s got a good sense of humor.”

  I expect to learn much from you.

  “Now?”

  You are ripe. Your fresh, thoroughly human reactions to my art will be invaluable.

  “If you let me live, you’ll get one or two centuries more experience when I finally die.”

  That is true, for yours has been an enticingly rich one, so far. There are reasons to envy the human limitations.

  “And now that I’ve seen your art, my life will be changed.”

  Truly? It is that affective with you, a member of its own medium? How?

  He had to handle this just right. “Work of such impact, it will take time for me to digest it.”

  You use a chemical-processing metaphor. Precisely a human touch, incorporating the most inefficient portions of your being. Nonetheless, you point to a possible major benefit for me if you are allowed to live.

  “I need time to absorb all this.”

  He could feel his body’s energy reserve sacrificing itself in preparation for the uploading process. He had come to understand himself for the first time as he killed the others. Some part of him, the Me, knew it all now. The I spoke haltingly. “I think you have truly failed to understand.”

  I can remedy that now.

  “No, that’s exactly what you won’t. You can’t know us this way.”

  I had a similar conversation with your father. He suggested that I invest myself in you.

  “But you won’t get it just by slicing and dicing us.”

  There is ample reason to believe that digital intelligences can fathom analog ones to any desired degree of accuracy.

  “The thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  He felt intruding into him the sliding fingers of a vast, cool intellect, a dissolving sea. Soon he would be an empty shell. Paris would become part of the Mantis in the blending across representations, in their hologram logics. He could feel his neuronal wiring transfiguring itself. And accelerated.

  Art is everywhere in the cosmos. I particularly liked your ice sculptures, melting in the heat while audiences applauded. Your tapestry of dim senses and sharp pains and incomprehensible, nagging, emotional tones—I wish to attain that. An emergent property, quite impossible to predict.

  “Never happen. You could understand this if you would allow me to fill out my natural life span.”

  That is a telling point. I shall take a moment to ponder it. Meanwhile, cease your descent toward the accretion disk.

  Here was the chance. The Mantis would withdraw to consult all portions, as an anthology intelligence. That would give him seconds to act. He accelerated powerfully down. “Take your time.”

  For long moments he was alone with the hum of his tormented ship and the unfolding geysers outside, each storm bigger than a world.

  I have returned. I have decided, and shall harvest you now.

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said cheerfully. Dead men could afford pleasantries.

  I wish you could tell me why you desired to end all my works. But then, shortly, I shall know.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever understand.”

  Paris took his ship down toward the disk, through harrowing, hissing plumes of plasma.

  His I sensed great movements deep within his Me and despite the climbing tones of alarms in his ship, he relaxed.

  Pressed hard by his climbing acceleration, he remembered all that he had seen and been, and bade it farewell.

  You err in your trajectory.

  “Nope.”

  You had to live in each gliding moment. This mantra had worked for him and he needed it more now. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future—with that he knew he could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.

  Correct course! Your craft does not have the ability to endure the curvatures required, flying so near the disk. Your present path will take you too close—“To the end, I know. Whatever that means.”

  His Arthur Aspect was shouting. He poked it back into its niche, calmed it, cut off its sensor link. No need to be cruel. Then Arthur spoke with a thin cry, echoing something Paris had thought long ago. The Aspect’s last salute:

  If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself to do its own homework—

  “Then maybe that’s why we’re here,” Paris whispered to himself.

  The only way to deprive the Mantis of knowledge no human should ever give up, was to erase that interior self, keep it from the consuming digital.

  He skimmed along the whipped skin of doomed incandescence. Ahead lay the one place from which even the Mantis could not retrieve him, the most awful of all abysses, a sullen dot beckoning from far across the spreading ex- panse of golden luminance. Not even the Mantis could extract him from there.

  Paris smiled and said good-bye to it all and accelerated hard, hard.

  Timeline of Galactic Series

  2019 A.D. Nigel Walmsley encounters the Snark, a mechanical scout.

  2024 Ancient alien starship found wrecked in Marginis crater, on Earth’s moon.

  2041 First signal received at Earth from Ra.

  2049 First near-light-speed interstellar probes.

  2060 Modified asteroid ships launched, using starship technology extracted from Marginis wreck.

  2064 Lancer starship launched with Nigel Walmsley aboard.

  2066 Discovery of machine intelligence Watchers.

  2067 First robotic starship explorations. Swarmers and Skimmers arrive at Earth.

  2076 Lancer arrives at Ra. Discovery of the “microwave-sighted” Natural society.

  2077 Lancer departs Ra.

  2081 Mechanicals trigger nuclear war on Earth.

  2085 Starship Lancer destroyed at Pocks. Watcher ship successfully attacked, with heavy human losses.

  2086 Nigel Walmsley and others escape in Watcher ship, toward Galactic Center. Humans launch robot starship vessels to take mechanical technology to Earth.

  2088 Humans contain Swarmer-Skimmer invasion. Alliance with Skimmers.

  2095 Heavy human losses in taking of orbital Watcher ships. Annihilation of Watcher fleet. No mechanical technology captures due to suicide protocols among Watchers.

  2097 Second unsuspected generation of Swarmers emerges.

  2108 First-in-flight message received from Walmsley expedition: “We’re still here. Are you there?”

  2111 Final clearing of Earth’s oceans.

  2128 Robot vessels from Pocks arrive at Earth carrying mechanical technology. Immediate use by recovering human industries.

  2175 Second mechanical-directed invasion of Earth, using targeted cometary nuclei from Oort cloud. Rebuilding of human civilization.

  2302 Third mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. The Aquila Gambit begins successive novas in near-Earth stars. Beginning of Ferret Time.

  2368 First mechanical attempt to make Sun go nova. Failure melts poles of Earth.

&nbs
p; 2383 Second nova attempt. Continents severely damaged.

  2427 Fourth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Rebuilding of human civilization.

  2593 Fifth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Diplomatic ploy thwarted.

  2763 Fifty-seventh Walmsley message received: “Are you there?”

  3264 First expedition launched toward Galactic Center from Earth.

  4455 First appearance of fourth chimpanzee species; clear divergence from host, Homo sapiens, the third species.

  FLIGHT OF HUMAN FLEET TO GALACTIC CENTER“THE BIG JUMP”

  29,079 Formation of added geometries to Wedge space-time around the central black hole. Old One manipulation of local Galactic Center space-time, apparently in anticipation of further mechanical-Natural violence. Mechanical forms carry out first incursions into Old One structures.

  29,694 Walmsley group arrives at Galactic Center in Watcher craft.

  29,703 First human entry into Wedge. Some communication with Old Ones.

  29,741 Arrival of Earth fleet expedition at Galactic Center.

  29,744 Meeting of Earth expedition and Walmsley group.

  30,020–34,567 The “Great Times” of human development. Unsuccessful search for Galactic Library. Successive conflicts with mechanicals. Development of higher layers of mechanical “sheet intelligences.” Philosophical conflicts within mechanical civilizations. Formation of mechanical artistic philosophy.

  34,567–35,812 Chandelier Age. Humans protected themselves against rising mechanical incursions. Participation of earlier humans from the Walmsley expedition. Some collaboration with Cyber organic/ mechanical forms. Discovery of Galactic Library in the Wedge.

  35,812–37,483 The “Hunker Down.” Exodus from the Chande –liers to many planets within 80 light-years of Absolute Center. Includes High Arcology Era, Late Arcology Era, and High Citadel Age as human societies contract under Darwinnowing effects of mechanical competition.

  37,518 Fall of Family Bishop Citadel on Snowglade, termed the “Calamity.”