Light escaped freely on one side while the mask bottled it up on the other. This pushed the star toward the mask, but the mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted and kept the right distance. The forlorn star was able to eject light in only one direction, so it recoiled oppositely.
The filaments were herding these stars: sluggish, but effective. Herded toward the accretion disk, stoking the black hole’s appetite.
“The Admiral is after us.”
Zeb could see nothing, but she had the instruments to peer through the dust cloaking them. “Can he shoot?”
“Not if we damp engines.”
“Do it.”
Drifting…into a narrow gulf, overlooking the splendor below.
Blackness dwelled at the core, but friction heated the infalling gas and dust. These brimmed with forced radiation. Storms worried the great banks; white-hot tornadoes whirled. A virulent glow hammered outward, shoving incessantly at the crowded masses jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forced the streams into a disk, churning ever inward.
Amid this deadly torrent, life persisted. Of a sort.
Zeb peered through the gaudy view, seeking the machine-beasts who ate and dwelled and died here.
Suffering the press of hot photons, the grazer waited. To these photovores, the great grinding disk was a source of food. Above the searing accretion disk, in hovering clouds, gossamer herds fed.
“Vector that way,” Zeb said. “I remember seeing these on my visit…”
“We run a risk, using our drive.”
“So be it.”
Sheets of the photovores billowed in the electromagnetic winds, basking in the sting. Some were tuned to soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, each species with a characteristic polish and shape, deploying great flat receptor planes to maintain orbit and angle in the eternal brimming day.
Their ship slipped among great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread. The photovore herds skated on winds and magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. They were machines, of course, descended from robot craft which had explored this center billions of years before. More complex machines, evolved in this richness, prowled the darker lanes further out.
“Let’s hide here.”
“We’re overheating already,” she said.
“Duck into the shade of that big-winged one.”
She called, “Our own ship magnetic fields are barely able to hold back the proton hail.”
“Where’s the nearest worm?”
“Not far, but—”
“The Admiral will be covering it.”
“Of course.” A chess game with obvious moves.
A bolt seared across the dust ball behind them and struck some photovores. They burst open and flared with fatal energies.
“He’s shooting on spec,” Zeb said.
“Perhaps as he does not like the weather here.”
They hugged the shadow and waited. Moments tiptoed by.
The Admiral’s ship emerged from a dust bank, baroquely elegant and foppishly ornate, glowing with purpose, spiraling lazily down.
Zeb saw a spindly radiance below the photovore sheets. “A magnetic filament.”
“Looks dangerous,” she said.
“Let’s head for it.”
“What?”
“We’re doomed if we stay here. If you’re losing at a game, change the game.”
They slipped below vast sheets of photovores with outstretched wings, banking gracefully on the photon breeze. Lenses swiveled to follow the human ship: prey? Here a pack of photovores had clumped, caught in a magnetic flux tube that eased down along the axis of the galaxy itself.
Among them glided steel-blue gammavores, feeders on the harder gamma-ray emission from the accretion disk. They sometimes came this far up, he knew, perhaps to hunt the silicate-creatures who dwelled in the darker dust clouds. Much of the ecology here was still unknown.
He stopped musing. Nature red in tooth and claw, after all. Time to move. Where?
“Slip into the magnetic tube.”
She said sharply, “But the electrodynamic potentials there—”
“Let’s draw a little cover.”
She swooped them forward toward the filament. This also took them angling toward a huge sailcraft photovore. It sighted them, pursued.
Here navigation was simple. Far below them, the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things, the black hole of three million stellar masses, was a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving incandescent disk.
The photovore descended after them, through thin planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They all lived to ingest light and excrete microwave beams, placid conduits, but some—like the one gliding after the tiny human ship—had developed a taste for metals: a metallovore. It folded its mirror wings, now angular and swift, accelerating.
“The Admiral has noticed us,” she announced in flat tones.
“Good. Into the flux tube. Quick!”
“That big alien machine is going to reach us first.”
“Even better.”
He had heard the lecture, while on his “tour” here. Fusion fires inside the photovores could digest the ruined carcasses of other machines. Exquisitely tuned, their innards yielded pure ingots of any alloy desired.
The ultimate resources here were mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and the sleek metallovore lived to eat them, or even better, the human ship, an exotic variant. It now gave gigahertz cries of joy as it followed them into the magnetic fields of the filament.
“These magnetic entities are intelligent?” she asked.
“Yes, though not in the sense we short-term thinkers recognize. They are more like fitfully sleeping libraries.” A glimmer of an idea. “But it’s their thinking processes that might save us.”
“How?”
“They trigger their thinking with electrodynamic potentials. We’re irritating them, I’m sure, by flying in hellbent like this.”
“How wonderful.”
“Watch that metallovore. Let it get close, then evade it.”
Banks, swoops, all amid radiance. Magnetic strands glowed like ivory.
It would ingest them with relish, but the metal-seeker could not maneuver as swiftly as their sleek ship. Deftly they zoomed through magnetic entrails—and the Admiral followed.
“How soon will these magnetic beings react?”
Zeb shrugged. “Soon, if experience is a guide.”
“And we—”
“Hug the metallovore now. Quick!”
“But don’t let him grab us?”
“That’s the idea.”
The metallovore, too, was part of an intricate balance. Without it, the ancient 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 skirted over them. Zeb gazed out at it. Predators always had parasites, scavengers. Here and there on the metallovore’s polished skin were limpets and barnacles, lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow that fed on chance debris, purging the metallovore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust which can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
It banked, trying to reach them. The Admiral’s glossy ship came angling in, too, along the magnetic strands.
“Let it get closer,” Zeb ordered.
“It’ll grab us!”
“True, unless the Admiral kills it first.”
“Some choice,” she said sardonically.
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 sphere which stretched for hundreds of cubic light-years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.
Why had he gone into politics, Zeb asked himself—he was always rather abstract when in a crisis—when all this beckoned?
All t
his, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.
“I’m getting a lot of electrodynamic static,” she called.
“Ah, good.”
“Good? My instruments are sluggish—”
The metallovore loomed. Pincers flexed forth from it.
The jolt came first as a small refraction in the howling virulence. Slow tightening arced along the magnetic filament, annihilation riding down.
“It’ll fry us!”
“Not us,” he said. “We’re a minor mote here. Much bigger conductors will draw this fire.”
Another jarring jolt. The metallovore arced and writhed and died in a dancing fire.
No differently could the laws of electrodynamics treat an ever bigger conductor, closing in. The Admiral’s fine glowing ship drew flashes of discharge, dancing ruby-red and bile-green.
It coasted, dead. The larger surface areas of both metallovore and starship had intercepted the electrical circuitry of the filaments.
“I… You really did know what you were doing,” she said weakly.
“Not actually. I was just following my intuition.”
“The one that got you the Governorship?”
“No, something more primitive.”
Coasting now, out of the gossamer filaments. There might be more bolts of high voltage.
“Is everyone on that ship dead?” she asked.
“Oh no. You have forgotten your elementary physics. A charge deposits only on the outside of a conductor. Electrons will not enter it.”
“But why are they drifting then?”
“Any antenna will draw the charge in, if the line is active; that’s its job. Like having your hand on the knob of a radio in a lightning storm, a chancy act.”
“So they’re inert?”
“A few may have been standing too close to the instruments.”
“They would be…?”
He shrugged. “Fried. Luck of the game.”
“The Admiral—”
“Let us hope he was unlucky. Even if not, I suspect the Speculists will not look kindly upon one who has raised such a rowdy chase and then caught nothing.”
She laughed. They coasted in the gorgeous splendor.
Then he yawned, stretched, and said, “Getting cramped in here. Shall we find that wormhole you mentioned?”
He really didn’t like travel all that much, indeed.
Think of the galaxy as a swarm of gaudy bees, bright colors hovering in a ball. Stomp them somehow in midair, so they bank and turn in a furious, compressed disk. Yet their courses and destinies are now guided by small entities of great pretension: humans, at times no better than bees. Across the span of a hundred billion worlds, rich and ancient blood sings in pounding vessels. Even on so great a scale, the hunt is always on.
AFTERWORD
I so loved Roger Zelazny’s liquid grace, his fervent sense of narrative momentum, that I have tried in this piece to emulate some of his moments and moves.
Like many, my first Zelazny story was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” Who can forget reading that opening voice? It evoked a romantic, daring world seen through a poet’s eyes. I followed his career eagerly, through novels and novellas of great power. He was the brightest light in a burning decade, the sixties.
When I met Roger in the 1970s he proved to be an affable, witty, wiry man. We became friends and I visited him and family, often having dinner in Santa Fe when I was consulting at Los Alamos. Restless of mind, he always probed for the latest from the grand canvas of science.
I saw him twice in the last year and a half of his life, when we were both guests of honor at two cons. The last time, in Idaho, I found him as quick and funny, eyes glittery, as ever, though gaunt and at times sobered. His spirit was so firm I did not seriously suppose that he would falter and vanish from us so quickly.
Deaths diminish us all. Among the science fiction community, I missed terribly Robert Heinlein and Terry Carr and had persistent dreams about them for over a year after they departed. For Roger it was the same: dreams of flying somewhere with him, always in air sunny and resplendent with long, high perspectives.
So when asked to write a story in tribute to him, I took from my stock of ideas at hand, using pieces of ideas I was working on, and tried to see what Roger would like to fashion from them. He loved the bare and the swanky alike, so I thought of a rather Roger-like character, comfortable in his opulent world, who gets to flee and fight across the sort of wondrous galaxy Roger would have enjoyed. It’s been fun to go along with him this one last time.
A Dance to Strange Musics
(1998)
1.
The first crewed starship, the Adventurer, hung like a gleaming metallic moon among the gyre of strange worlds. Alpha Centauri was a triple-star system. A tiny flare star dogged the two big suns. At this moment in its eternal dance, the brilliant mote swung slightly toward Sol. Even though it was far from the two bright stars it was the nearest star to Earth: Proxima.
The two rich, yellow stars defined the Centauri system. Still prosaically termed A and B, they swam about each other, ignoring far Proxima.
The Adventurer’s astronomer, John, dopplered in on both stars, refreshing memories that were lodged deep. The climax of his career loomed before him. He felt apprehension, excitement, and a thin note of something like fear.
Sun B had an orbital eccentricity of 0.52 about its near-twin, with the extended axis of its ellipse 23.2 astronomical units long. This meant that the closest approach between A and B was a bit farther than the distance of Saturn from Sol.
A was a hard yellow-white glare, a G star with 1.08 the Sun’s mass. Its companion, B, was a K-class star that glowed a reddish yellow, since it had 0.88 times the Sun’s mass. B orbited with a period of 80 years around A. These two were about 4.8 billion years of age, slightly older than Sol. Promising.
Sun A’s planetary children had stirred Adventurer’s expedition forth from Earth. From Luna, the system’s single Earth-class planet was a mere mote, first detected by an oxygen absorption line in its spectrum. Only a wobbly image could be resolved by Earth’s kilometer-sized interferometric telescope, a long bar with mirror-eyes peering in the spaces between A and B. Just enough of an image to entice.
A new Earth? John peered at its shrouded majesty, feeling the slight hum and surge of their ship beneath him. They were steadily moving inward, exploring the Newtonian gavotte of worlds in this two-sunned ballroom of the skies. Proxima was so far away, it was not even a wall-flower.
The Captain had named the fresh planet Shiva. It hung close to A, wreathed in water cirrus, a cloudball dazzling beneath A’s simmering yellow-white glare. Shimmering with promise, it had beckoned to John for years during their approach.
Like Venus, but the gases don’t match, he thought. The complex tides of the star system massaged Shiva’s depths, releasing gases and rippling the crust. John’s many-frequency probings had told him a lot, but how to stitch data into a weave of a world? He was the first astronomer to try out centuries of speculative thinking on a real planet.
Shiva was drier than Earth, oceans taking only forty percent of the surface. Its air was heavy in nitrogen, with giveaway tags of eighteen percent oxygen and traces of carbon dioxide; remarkably Earth-like. Shiva was too warm for comfort, in human terms, but not fatally so; no Venusian runaway greenhouse had developed here. How had Shiva escaped that fate?
Long before, the lunar telescopes had made one great fact clear: the atmosphere here was far, far out of chemical equilibrium. Biological theory held that this was inevitably the signature of life. And indeed, the expedition’s first mapping had shown that green, abundant life clung to two well-separated habitable belts, each beginning about thirty degrees from the equator.
Apparently the weird tidal effects of the Centauri system had stolen Shiva’s initial polar tilt. Such steady workings had now made its spin align to within a single degree with its orbital angular momentum, so that conditions were steady
and calm. The equatorial belt was a pale, arid waste of perpetual tornadoes and blistering gales.
John close-upped in all available bands, peering at the planet’s crescent. Large blue-green seas, but no great oceans. Particularly, no water links between the two milder zones, so no marine life could migrate between them. Land migrations, calculations showed, were effectively blocked by the great equatorial desert. Birds might make the long flight, John considered, but what evolutionary factor would condition them for such hardship? And what would be the reward? Why fight the jagged mountain chains? Better to lounge about in the many placid lakes.
A strange world, well worth the decades of grinding, slow, starship flight, John thought. He asked for the full display and the observing bowl opened like a flower around him. He swam above the entire disk of the Centauri system now, the images sharp and rich.
To be here at last! Adventurer was only a mote among many—yet here, in the lap of strangeness. Far Centauri.
It did not occur to him that humanity had anything truly vital to lose here. The doctrine of expansion and greater knowledge had begun seven centuries before, making European cultures the inheritors of Earth. Although science had found unsettling truths, even those revelations had not blunted the agenda of ever-greater knowledge. After all, what harm could come from merely looking?
The truth about Shiva’s elevated ocean only slowly emerged. Its very existence was plainly impossible, and therefore was not at first believed.
Odis was the first to notice the clues. Long days of sensory immersion in the data-streams repaid her. She was rather proud of having plucked such exotica from the bath of measurements their expedition got from their probes—the tiny speeding, smart spindle-eyes that now cruised all over the double-stars’ realm.
The Centauri system was odd, but even its strong tides could not explain this anomaly. Planets should be spherical, or nearly so; Earth bulged but a fraction of a percent at its equator; due to its spin. Not Shiva, though.
Odis found aberrations in this world’s shape. The anomalies were far away from the equator; principally at the 1,694-kilometer-wide deep blue sea, immediately dubbed the Circular Ocean. It sat in the southern hemisphere, its nearly perfect ring hinting at an origin as a vast crater. Odis could not take her gaze from it, a blue eye peeking coyly at them through the clouds: a planet looking back.
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 44