Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  Simple as that

  I understand your concern and if you’ll merely let me think

  I’m calling the question Mr. Chairman

  No wait let me ask—Bob?

  Uh, yes, Ted?

  Are we cleared?

  All revved

  All right then I’m ordering Propulsion to bring the ramscoop up to ignition

  That’s great!

  I take it I have the approval of you all? And does anybody have anything further to add?

  All primed Ted

  Team here is ready

  Nigel shook himself. Ted has used the consensus for so long, and now it was using him.

  “Don’t you think we should get inside?” Nikka asked.

  “That air bubble won’t be any protection. Quite the reverse, if you shed your helmet.”

  Carlos called, “Look! They’re turning Lancer.” Then plaintively, “They’re not going to evacuate first.”

  “The Watcher is active. It might skrag our shuttle,” Nigel said, looking at Carlos.

  The man was making an effort to be more authoritative now, speaking more deeply and using more abrupt phrases. Still, it was unconvincing. Inappropriate response. Yes, that was the nub of it, the wrong answer to one of the inherent troubles of organic life. The machines had no need of sex; they could reproduce through a template. And they could alter themselves at will, a form of voluntary evolution.

  Organic beings were forever split into the efficient yet isolating bonds of two sexes, two views of the world, two dynamics that only partially overlapped, two beings who desired the other but could never wholly be the other, no matter how surgery or simulations promised a fleeting false liberation from the problem of forever being who you truly were, separate and unlike and yearning in the darkness you made for yourself.

  Overhead in the hard night, Lancer moved.

  It turned on its axis and brought the exhaust of the ramscoop to bear on the Watcher. Men and women stood on the barren plain and watched the silvery dot that was their home. Lancer pulsed with fresh energy. The magnetic fields gathered, driven by the awakened fluxlife.

  “Hope they burn the damn thing to a cinder,” Carlos said fiercely.

  “Nigel, I don’t like this,” Nikka whispered.

  Nigel said laconically, “Listen. They’re calling it an ‘exploratory attack.’”

  “It’s revenge,” Nikka said.

  “Don’t be such a coward,” Carlos said roughly. “It’s about time somebody did something.”

  Nigel’s eyebrows arched like iron-gray caterpillars. “Indeed. But not this.”

  Crusted orange lights moved on the Watcher. Blue bands crisscrossed it. A halo of darting burnt-yellow specks appeared around Lancer as the drive engaged. The ramscoop required a mix of deuterium and other isotopes to begin the fire.

  Carlos began, “I bet it’s never seen a fusion drive before, or it’d be more—” and the sky exploded.

  A gout of flame curled out of Lancer’s exhaust. The fusion start-up belched ionized plasma in a roaring streak that slammed into the Watcher.

  “Jesus!” Carlos cried. “That’ll fry it for sure.”

  Soundless, the stream poured forth, spattering streamers of blue and gold and crimson on the Watcher’s gray stone and tarnished metal.

  “This is mere show,” Nigel said. Arcing plasma lit the plain around them, throwing grotesque shadows. “The high-energy gamma rays are doing the real damage.”

  “How long can it …?” Nikka said.

  “Lancer can keep this up for hours, but—ah, see, it’s altering orbit from the reaction already.”

  “Damn thing’ll be fried good by—”

  Movement from the Watcher.

  A thin spout of crisp orange flame shot forward, spanning the distance to Lancer so quickly it appeared instantly as a bar of light between the two. It wrapped around the flux lines of the magnetic throat and exhaust, licking and eating at the ship, curling down the long magnetic tunnels, spewing into the drive tubes, burning everywhere, gnawing at the delicate electronics and fluxlife and humans inside.

  Lancer’s drive sputtered. Died. The Watcher’s orange flame went on and on in a deepening, deadening silence, cutting and searing and boiling.

  A low moan came over the group comm line. Nigel stood rigid, his chest locked, seeking a purchase on this.

  We should have called it Pox, he thought. He looked around at the blind craters: blinkless sockets.

  Above, a spot on the Watcher exploded in a shower of crimson and violet. Silent smoke and debris spread a gray fog. “Something in the gamma-ray beam touched off a delayed reaction,” Nigel murmured.

  —and he felt himself again, after so many years, living in a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water pouring through, the quality that the Marginis aliens had tried to bring to humans and that Nigel had gotten a fragment of—they had come bearing enlightenment, the one wedding to the world that the machines lacked, sought, and knew only as a sucking vacancy.

  Nigel saw in an instant, as the flame from the Watcher cooled, that he had lost it years ago—become tied to events by ropes of care which sank him, tugging him below the waves—and now had found it again, falling down there in that great perpetual night beneath his feet, found it by finally letting go. He stood empty now, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of age and death and having to be Walmsley’s Fool, free again to measure each moment by what it was, let’s all slide out of here one of these nights

  Casualties! God so many of them look at those indicators

  What happened what went wrong

  endless clashing cross talk, human or Skimmer or EM, all welling up from the depths, the rattling chatter of minds forever cut off from integrating with each other but seeking, talking, yammering hammering on

  Total electrical failure onboard looks like

  Where’re the Life Support Indices I get damn little

  He sucked in a gulp of air, and realized he had been holding his breath.

  He thought of the beasts below. There was a natural alliance possible, they knew the piercing of mortality, felt the immemorial sweep carrying forward and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns.

  amid the rush and ruination

  over in the territory but they were all out in the territory now, the country of the strange—but linked to Earth and Skimmer and the mute, huge, blood-rich things below by cycles of talk and sign and inevitable death

  Watcher’s damaged sir but still active I’m getting counts from it

  damn we didn’t get it

  Weak signal from Lancer, nothing on shipcomm at all

  Lots of casualties, it got most of ’em in the hall

  Ted? What about Ted

  Nothing

  Ted had never been a captain and had never had a ship.

  The drive’s out! Blew it out! We got no way home—

  The voices rang on, thin with panic.

  He had been here before, in the land of the seemingly defeated. But they had not.

  He remembered the radio clamor that carried the EMs through their blasted red world; remembered the booming songs he had heard in the ocean below his feet; remembered the cramped message received from Earth only hours ago about one man, Warren, and his scribbled words from the Skimmers; remembered how humanity seemed to him one unending sea of talk—unthinking, automatic, like breathing.

  All the myriad voices, and I says all right, that suits me. He could hear them all—EM, Skimmer, human—from Pocks, no need to voyage back to Earth, and the incessant mad organic talk would go on.

  Nikka whispered, “So many … gone …”

  “Yes.”

  “Now we’re … we’re like the Skimmers. Far from home and no way back.”

  Carlos began to sob. He collapsed onto the gritty purple ice. He pounded at it with a fist. “We’re alone!” he cried out. “We’ll die here.”

  There was a long silence on the stark bare
plain. Then:

  “Probably,” Nigel said. And for some reason, he smiled.

  EIGHT

  He waited for the Watcher to emerge.

  Nigel’s heart still tripped with skittering excitement. Something in him recalled days long ago, when he had boosted up above Earth’s filmy air in transatmospheric craft. There had been the same steady tug of acceleration as the sluggish plane skated up into the thin reaches of atmosphere. Then the rocket part of the hybrid would thunder into life, ramming him at the hard blue-black sky. He had gone up that way on his first deep space mission, to the gas-cloaked asteroid Icarus. But that small world had turned out to be a ruined spaceship, and so had launched him on a long career of flinty risk, of unastronautlike disobedience.

  Now his heart recalled those days. It thumped agreeable, happy to be riding a torch up into weightlessness. He felt the pressure of acceleration dwindle. He floated with the sudden buoyancy that for an aging man spelled returning youth. His idiot heart wanted conflict, exploration, zest, the fierce emptiness and the black velocities.

  He glided above Pocks, bound with parabolic grace toward the Watcher.

  You all right? Nikka called on comm. He turned and waved at her. They rode on makeshift braces, twelve people crammed into the shuttle space meant for five. Carlos was wedged into a cranny halfway between them, his eyes studying the viewscreen anxiously.

  Now was the moment. They had boosted off from Pocks and now would come within view of the Watcher within seconds. If it saw them, they were dead.

  Nigel peered ahead. Using override command, he called for a closeup of the Watcher as soon as its outline nudged above the tightly curved horizon of Pocks. Then he searched for the missile they had launched against the Watcher. It was their only hope.

  There. A dim blob of gray hung against the unyielding black of space.

  If they had sent anything metallic against the Watcher it would have quickly sensed it. Metals were the language and substrate of machines. Their textures and electromagnetic glints were as natural to the Watcher as skin and smell were to humans.

  And there lay a vulnerability. Or so Nigel guessed. And bet his life upon.

  They had spent days gathering the odd, pale gray algae that lived in utter vacuum. Evolution’s persistence had somehow forced waterborne life up, out of the fissures in the ice. There it had adapted to a cold, airless world. It had learned to suck sustenance from ice. The top surface of the lichen was a hard, silicon-rich armor against the piercing ultraviolet of Pocks’s star, Ross. Its underside transferred Ross’s heat, minutely melting the ice and brewing a slow-kindled photosynthesis. The slimy stuff took a tenacious grip on whatever it found.

  It could survive for a while in vacuum without clinging to ice. It could withstand the boost into orbit.

  Better, it had no metal innards, was transparent to radar.

  So the small band of isolated humans had cobbled together some thrusters and made a kind of balloon filled with algae. They had to do this while the Watcher was on the other side of Pocks, so that their activity did not catch the Watcher’s interest.

  Nigel had spent long hours scooping up the muck. It clung to its forlorn ice and rock. He had grunted with effort, yanking it free. And been reminded of gardening in far off Pasadena, of the whole warm brush of life that perfumed Earth’s air. The work had put him right again. His limp went away. His pulse steadied. He felt ten years younger—no, twenty.

  Then they launched.

  Slimeball’s coming up on the Watcher, someone sent.

  Nigel braced himself, then relaxed and felt foolish.

  On the screen the gray dab coasted toward the curved horizon, a few minutes ahead of them in orbit. And in a moment, as if in answer to the life-filled balloon, the silhouette of the Watcher would poke above the smooth roundness of Pocks.

  Seconds were crucial. The Watcher would see them soon. They were defenseless against it. But first …

  Tock. Their charge detonated on the leading edge of the balloon. The sound of the balloon splitting came to Nigel over the comm. A faint, still sound.

  Go, slimeball!

  Ahead of them the gray mass spread outward. An organic shotgun blast into—

  The roughened hull of the Watcher loomed above Pocks. Gray groping fingers reached out toward it … touched … and swarmed over the leading surface, smothering the Watcher in a sucking, hungry tide.

  Made it!

  Dead on!

  Eat it, slimeball!

  Nigel smiled. He felt strength flooding into him from some buried resource.

  It is pleasant enough to be abstractly right. He had had quite enough of that during the years on Lancer, thank you. It was far finer to act and win. He had advanced the algae idea to the others, half expecting them to shrug it off. He was sure that despite all, they would still rather have had Ted leading them. Good old savvy Ted. But they were desperate. The notion had stuck.

  Just as the algae itself now stuck and crawled and slithered over the eyes and ears of the Watcher. Eating at the delicate sensors. Blinding them.

  So that as the humans in their frail craft glided close, no bolt answered them.

  Nikka sent, I’d hate to have some of that ice-eating fuzz on me.

  “All life’s an ally,” Nigel murmured. Not all life’s responses were inappropriate.

  He was already readying himself for the battle.

  The Watcher was a labyrinth. It wasn’t easy to get in, even with the external sensors covered by the thirsty algae. They had to burn it away from the hull to find a way in.

  After they had forced an entrance at a bulky lock, the party of twelve found themselves floating through winding spaghetti corridors. Some necked down to scarcely a hand’s width. Others swelled until an elephant could have wallowed through.

  A strange humming fled through the lacquered walls Skittering tones shot through the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel followed Carlos down a tube that seemed to drop away into infinity. Red panels spattered random glows on bulk-heads and complex equipment. Nigel tried to see a pattern to the illumination, but most of it seemed to be wasted on bare, plain metal and stone.

  The Watcher was half an asteroid, just as the ancient Icarus craft had been. Into the carbon and raw metal of a minor planet something had fitted elaborate technology. And whatever ran the Watcher lurked somewhere here. Nigel drew Nikka close and followed Carlos. The silence of the place hung like a warning.

  They did not have to wait long.

  Things long and snakelike scuttled from holes. Bigger machines, tubular and awkward, jetted down side corridors.

  There were impossibly many of them. The humans fired at the approaching machines with a grim desperation. Laser bolts and e-beam cutters lanced forth.

  They were almost surprised to see their shots fall sure and hard on the machines. Parts blew away. Electrical arcs flared blue-white, then died. The machines tumbled forward, out of control, and smashed into walls.

  There are so many! Carlos called. He had a laser projector in each hand and two power packs strapped to him.

  Turn sideways, so you’ll be a smaller target, Nikka answered.

  Down this way, Nigel called.

  They fled the hordes. Nigel rebounded from three walls in quick succession and darted down a narrow tube. Weightlessness gave him back the deft reflexes he had too long missed. As soon as Carlos and Nikka had caught up to him he turned down a side passage. Two slender machines, glossy with glazed ceramic, came at him. He punctured each with a bolt of tightly bound electrons.

  Carlos began, What are—

  Nigel sent a signal back into the passage they had left. Crimson light burst upon them. A crackling of electromagnetic death ricocheted through their comm lines.

  “Implosion devices I cooked up,” Nigel said. “Spits out electromagnetic noise. I’ve been dropping them every hundred meters.”

  Nikka said, I see. It will burn out these creatures?

  “Hope so.”

  It did. T
he swarms who staffed the Watcher had once been made to defend it against intrusion. But time works its way even with stolid machines. Those which wore out were replaced, but each time the basic instructions were engraved into fresh silicon or ferrite memory, a small probability existed of a mistake. The weight of these errors accumulated, like autumn leaves blown into a chance pocket of a backyard, making improbably dense piles.

  So the minions of the Watcher had devolved. They were slow, sluggish, and dumb in just the deadly crafts of battle that life could never afford to neglect. Humanity’s penchant for warfare now paid off.

  It took hours to work their way through the Watcher. Small machines launched themselves at any moving figure. Some exploded suicidally. Others jumped from ambush. Mines detonated, ripping at legs and lungs.

  Nigel played cat and mouse down the dark corridors. He used stealth and tricks and, to his own vast surprise, stayed alive.

  More men and women launched from the base on Pocks. They slipped aboard like pirates and joined battle.

  In the end the machines retreated. Running, they were even less able. They were blown apart or fried with microwave bursts. Every machine fought to the very end. It was obvious that whatever had designed the Watcher had not thought deeply about the chance that it would be boarded. After all, the vast ship was intended to bombard planets, perhaps even kindle suns to a quickening fire. Hand-to-hand fighting was not its style.

  Still, over half of the humanity that entered the Watcher left as corpses. Many more groaned and sweated with deep wounds. Others bit their lips at the pain and swore with ragged, angry pride. The last machines they found, cowering now in dim hiding holes, they smashed with great relish into small, twisted fragments.

  Much of the Watcher labyrinth they would never understand. It was a forest of glazed surfaces, nested cables, inexplicable tangles of technology alien to all humanity’s avenues of thought.

  But they did understand the small ship they found.

  It was buried near the center of the vast complex. It had a curious blue-white sheen, as if the metal were fired in some unimaginably hot furnace. Yet it opened easily at a touch of a control panel.

  Carlos said, “It’s not the same design as the rest of this Watcher. Looks finer, I’d say. The Watcher is solid but crude. This thing …”