Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  That much energy delivered so precisely would have done the job even if it hit the hip or gut. Delivered so exactly, it burst the big axis, plowing massive pressures through the spinal fluid—a sudden breeze blowing out a candle, the brain going black in a millisecond.

  Carlos had gone down boneless, erased. A soft, liquid thump, then eternal silence.

  Nigel held up his hand and watched it tremble for a while. Enough waiting.

  He worked his way along the ridgeline. The pulse had come from behind Carlos and he kept plenty of rock between him and that direction. He got to Carlos and studied the face from behind a boulder nearby. The head was cocked to one side. Eyes still open, mouth seeping moisture into the dry dirt. The eyes were the worst, staring into an infinity nobody glimpses more than once.

  Good-bye, friend. We had our arguments, but we came thirty thousand light-years together. And now I can’t do a damn thing for you.

  Something moved to his right. He pulled out a pulse gun and fired at it but the target was a gossamer ball of motes. A Higher, or rather, a local manifestation of one.

  It flickered, spun, and said in a low, bass voice, “We regret.”

  “You did this?”

  “No. A mechanical form, termed the Mantis.”

  “And who’re you?”

  “That would be impossible to say.”

  “Is this Mantis after me, too?”

  “I will protect you.”

  “You didn’t do a great job for Carlos.”

  “I arrived here slightly late.”

  “Slightly?”

  “You must forgive errors. We are finite, all.”

  “Damn finite.”

  “The Mantis was harvesting Carlos. He is saved.”

  “You mean stored?”

  “To mechanicals it is the same thing.”

  “Not to us. I thought we’d be safe in this place, this Lair.”

  “No place is safe. This is safer.”

  “What’ll kill a Mantis?”

  “There was nothing you could do.”

  Nigel Walmsley cursed the mote cloud, his fury going into fruitless words.

  “Nothing you could do,” he muttered to himself.

  Do not belabor the past so.

  Nikka’s frail voice resounded in his sensorium.

  “There’s so much of it.”

  Pay attention to the young man before you. He is a key to saving us.

  Nigel sighed. “I grow old, I grow old—”

  I shall wear my trousers rolled—yes, I know the poem. Get on with it, Nigel!

  He nodded and dropped out of the interior space of smooth blankness. It was pleasant to retire to that cool, interior vault. Perhaps the old solidly good point to the augmentations he had gained through centuries; the quietness of a good, old-fashioned library. Where most of the people were books.

  Very well, then. Back into the grainy. The real. The deliciously dangerous.

  PART ONE

  Wondrous Ruins

  ONE

  Half Vast

  An old man sat and told a young man a story. As stories go it was long and angular, with its own momentary graces and clumsy logic, much the way life is.

  “What is this place?” Toby asked. “This mountain?”

  Nigel Walmsley leaned back in a webbing that shaped itself to him. He was nude, leathery. The lattice of his ribs made him look as though he had a barrel chest, but that was because he was gaunt with age.

  He had reached the phase when life reduces a man to the essentials. For packaging, skin like brown butcher’s paper. Muscles like motors, lodged in lumps along the bone-girders. Knobby elbows and knees, so round they seemed to encase oiled ball bearings. Sockets at the shoulder and hip, bulging beneath the dry parchment skin. Eyes blue and quick, glittering like mica in the bare face. A jaw chiseled above a scrawny neck. Cheekbones high and jutting like blades above the thin, pale lips. An oddly tilted smile, playing mischievously.

  “It’s popularly termed the Magnetic Mountain, though I have rather a more personal name for it.”

  “You’re from a planet near True Center?”

  “No no, I’m from Earth.”

  “What? You said before that you were Family Brit. I—”

  “A jest. In my time there weren’t Families in the way you mean. The Brits were a nation—much bigger.”

  “How much bigger?” Toby had heard Earth invoked, of course, but it was a name from far antiquity. Meaningless. Probably just a legend, like Eden and Rome.

  “I doubt that all the Families surviving at Galactic Center number a tenth what the Brits did.”

  “That many?”

  “Hard to estimate, of course. There are layers and folds and hideaways aplenty in the esty.”

  “Brits must be powerful.”

  Walmsley pursed his lips, bemused. “Um. Alas, through the power of the word, mostly.”

  Toby had no idea how many people still lived, after all the death he had seen. He had come here on a long journey, fleeing the mechs. Through it all, to all sides and in his wake, mechs had cut swaths through all the humans they could find. The slaughter reminded him of the retreat from the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop: a landscape of constant dying.

  But the butchery was now far greater. Devoting so much energy to hunting vermin humans was unusual for mechs. Mostly they didn’t care; humans were pests, no more. This time they clearly were after Toby in particular. So the deaths behind him weighed on him all the more. He was only slowly coming to feel the meaning of that. It was a thing beyond words or consolations.

  “Ummm.” Walmsley seemed pensive, eyes crinkling. “Usually I felt there were too few Brits, too many of everybody else.”

  “Family Brit must’ve been huge.”

  “We reproduced quickly enough. Didn’t have the radiation you suffer through here.”

  “We’re protected from that, my father said.”

  “There’s a limit to what genetic tinkering can do. Organic cells fall apart easily. Part of their beauty, really. Makes them evolve quicker.”

  “Most of our Citadel was underground, to help—”

  “Somewhat useful, of course. But the stillbirths, the deformities . . .” Walmsley’s bony face creased with painful memories.

  “Well, sure, that’s life.”

  “Life next door to this hell hole, true.”

  “The Eater?” Toby had grown up with the Eater, a glowering eye rimmed in angry reds and sullen burnt browns. It had been as bright as Snowglade’s own sun. “Living near it was pretty ordinary.”

  Walmsley laughed heartily, not the aged cackle Toby would have expected. “Trust me, there are better neighborhoods.”

  “Snowglade was good enough for me,” Toby said defensively.

  “Ah yes. We gave the chess families a good world, I recall.”

  “Gave? You?”

  “I am rather older than you may suppose.”

  “But you couldn’t be—”

  “Could and am. I’ve stretched matters out, of course. Had to. I fetched up at the very bottom of this steep gravitational gradient, along the elastic timeline—”

  “The, uh . . . ?”

  “Sorry, that’s an old way of talking. I mean, this is a stable point, this esty. We’re in a descended Lane, one where time runs very slowly. I—”

  “Slow?” Maybe this was why Toby had been having trouble with his internal clock. When he had been near their ship Argo his systems lagged the ship’s, if he went too far into the city beyond. He could never trace the cause. He checked it reflexively, ticking along steadily if he looked far down into the corner of his left eye and blinked. There: 14:27:33. “Measured by what?”

  “Good point. Measured with respect to the flat space-time outside, far from the black hole.”

  “So this is a kind of time storage place?”

  “Indeed. I’ve stored myself here, one might say. And there are other things, many others, this far deep in the esty.”

  “
When did you do it?”

  Toby was trying to place this dried-up old man in the pantheon of Family Bishop legend, but the very idea seemed a laugh. The men and women who had started the Families, at the very beginning of the Hunker Down, had been wise and farsighted. The founding fathers and mothers. Better than anybody alive today, that was pretty clear. And for sure they wore clothes.

  “Before the ‘Hunker Down.’ Well before. I spent a great while in Lanes squirreled away, deep, letting time pass outside.”

  “So you weren’t actually doing anything?”

  “If you mean, did I get out occasionally, yes. To the early Chandeliers, in fact. On my last excursion, to several worlds.”

  Toby snorted scornfully. “You expect me to swallow that?” His Aspects were trying to pipe in with some backup information, but he was confused enough already.

  Walmsley yawned, not the reaction of wounded innocence Toby had expected of a practiced liar. “Matters little if you don’t.”

  A sudden suspicion struck him. “You were around in the Great Times?”

  “As they’re called, yes. Not all that great, really.”

  “We ruled here then, right?” That was the drift of countless stories from Citadel Bishop days. Humanity triumphant. Then the fall, the Hunker Down, and worse after.

  “Nonsense. Rats in the wall, even then. Just a higher class of rat.”

  “My grandfather said—”

  “Legends are works of fiction, remember.”

  “But we must’ve been great, really great, to even build the Chandeliers.”

  “We’re smart rats, I’ll give you that.”

  Not trying to hide his disbelief, Toby asked, “You helped build those? I mean, I visited one—was booby-trapped. Derelict, sure, but beautiful, big and—”

  “The grunt labor was done by others, really, from Earth.”

  Toby snorted in disbelief. Walmsley cocked an eye. “Think I’m pulling your leg?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That I’m having you on.” A crinkled grin.

  Toby frowned doubtfully, glancing at his leg.

  “That is, I’m joking.”

  “Oh. But—Earth’s a legend.”

  “True enough, but some legends still walk and talk. These legends were of the second wave, actually, us being the first. Whole bloody fleet of ramscoops, better than the mech ship we’d hauled in on. Smart rats.”

  Toby nodded slowly. Why would this dried-up runt lie?

  So Earthers had built the Chandeliers? Maybe Earthers weren’t mythical folk, after all. They probably really ran things during the Great Times, then, too. But for sure nobody like this wrinkled dwarf could have. “Uh huh. So it’s Earther tech in the Chandeliers.”

  “Polyglot tech, really—mech, Earthborn, plenty of things slapped together.”

  “By who?” Toby still wasn’t impressed with this dwarf.

  “By us. Humanity. The Earthers who came in the second wave were still, I suppose, the same species as us. But . . .” A strange melancholy flickered in his face. “Different. Much . . . better.”

  “Better at tech?”

  “More than that. Dead on, they were beyond merely impressive. Made miracles, just tinkering with the huge range of gear they—we—captured down through centuries. Others did it, I mean—I tired of tech quite some time ago.”

  Toby sniffed. “Knowing techtricks is same as breathing, to Bishops.”

  “True enough, down on the planets. The second-wave ‘Earthers,’ as you call them, they were important, mind. My wife, Nikka, used to say our problems were vast—and Earthers brought us plenty of half-vast solutions.”

  Toby wasn’t used to this man’s deadpan way of making jokes. Bishops were more the thigh-slapper type. “Brit breed, you are,” he said reluctantly. No geezer was going to put one over on him, but something finally made him believe Walmsley was from Earth. Maybe it was the fact that Walmsley didn’t seem to care very much whether he did or not.

  “The second wave boosted our numbers—which the mechs were always trimming, shall we say.”

  “Even then?”

  “Always and forever. A few interludes of cooperation, but we were tolerated at best. For a while, we could move fairly freely near True Center. They swatted us when they noticed us. We had plenty of help from the Old Ones, time to time. Capricious, but crucial.”

  “Old Ones?”

  “They were a form of intelligence descended from clay.”

  “Clay? From dirt?”

  “Electrostatic energy storage, in clay beds with saline solutions—on old seashores, I gather.”

  Now Toby was annoyed. “You being from Earth, I can maybe believe that, but living dirt? You must think—”

  “They came first of all. Have a squint.”

  A three-dimensional plot shimmered in Toby’s sensorium. He sectioned it to read in 2D, which collapsed the nuances into a simple diagram. “Complexity?”

  “The specialists term it ‘structure complexity.’ Clays built up complicated lattices that could replicate themselves. Harvested piezoelectrical currents, driven by pressures in crystals. Later on, they allowed algae to capture sunlight. They drew off the energy, rather like farmers.”

  Toby had not the slightest idea how to take all this in. “So . . . dirt life, that’s the Old Ones?”

  “Combined with magnetic structures, yes. Bit hard to describe, that ancient wedding. All long ago, of course.”

  Toby gazed at the immense eras represented by simple lines, biological beings coming after the clays, intersecting the “magnetics kingdom,” and then mystifying lines labeled “Earth biologicals.” Of “memes” and “kenes” he knew nothing. From the time axis he guessed that all this had started over twelve billion years ago, when—what? the whole universe?—began.

  Shaken by the implications of the simple diagram, he did not venture into the other dimensions, which expanded this simple 2D along axes of “fitness” and “pattern depth” and “netplex” and other terms he could not even read. Better get back to something simple.

  “Then . . . how’d you get here in the first place?”

  “Stole a ship, actually. Mech, fast cruiser.”

  Toby had never heard of anyone doing something so audacious. It had been hard enough for the Bishops to use an old human craft, Argo. “Stole it? And just walked into True Center, easy as you please?”

  “Umm, not quite.” Walmsley’s eyes were far away. “See, this is how it was.”

  TWO

  The Place of Angry Gods

  You’ve got to remember, first, that we were limping along in an outdated mech ship. Dead slow, compared to what’s zipping around here now. A ramscoop, big blue-white tail dead straight, scratched across space.

  Far better than our Earth ship had been, the knocked-together old Lancer. Bravely named, it was, but venturing out into the nearby stars that way was like Indians trying to explore Europe using birch bark canoes. The wrong way round, historically and technically.

  Y’see, the mechs had explored us pretty well. They’d been in the solar system a long time ago, millions of years back. Some earlier, carbon-based life had fought a battle near Earth, against mechs. Presumably defending Earth when the primates were still sharpening their wits, edging up on being Homo sap.

  They left a crashed starship on the moon. That’s how we knew this conflict had been going long before us. My wife, Nikka, was in on that. I came along later. Ancient history.

  We went out together in the first human starship, Lancer. Got hammered by mechs. Barely survived.

  Then we got lucky, stole a mech ship.

  —Ah! Blithe understatement, quite Brit. In truth, there were two cowed alien species huddling beneath the ice of that world. Beings who could see electromagnetically in the microwave region. Turned out they’d been the cause of a wreck we’d found on our own moon, one I’d picked through, been changed by. I wanted so much to know what they were, how they thought.

  But there w
ere others, too. Whalelike things that glided serenely through murky depths, warmed by a radioactive core they had assembled in the moon’s core.

  All immensely strange, yet all allies against the mech Watcher that loomed above. Together, two alien kind plus the constantly chattering chimpanzees, they attacked the Watcher and captured it. Sounds so easy now . . .

  Um? Oh, sorry, must’ve let the mind wander. The mech ship?

  Outfitted it with our gear, the life support equipment—anything that survived after the mechs tore into Lancer. Hard work.

  Bravo. What next?

  There we sat, a scrawny distance out from our home star. Lots of the crew—the surviving crew, rather—wanted to head home.

  I saw no point. I was old enough by then to have very little left to lose. And little invested in grand old Earth, either—no children, or even close relatives.

  But we knew Earth had already been attacked by mechs. Used a clever weapon, fishlike aliens dumped into our seas. Should we go back to help?

  —and augh! The arguments that caused. I had to admit the other side had a point, save the home world and all that. So we compromised. Built a robot starship, using mech bits. Tricky, that. Then we packed it full of mechtech. Let Earth make use of its tricks, we figured.

  Some wanted to go along, no less. Classic Wagnerian gesture—all emotion, no reason. Too risky.

  So we dispatched it to Earth, crawling along at a twentieth of light speed. Best we could manage, I’m afraid.

  In truth, I wanted to stay there, commune with the two species still living beneath the moon’s ice. But there was the other faction . . .

  Nikka and I had allies in the crew. We hated the mechs, wanted to do something. Follow this riddle to the end. So we set sail—if that quaint term includes boosting up to within a hair’s width of light speed.

  Straight inward. To the Center.

  Took nearly thirty thousand years to get here—but that’s measured in the rest frame of the galaxy. What some call “real” time. But all inertial frames are really equivalent, y’know. We proved that. Only diff is the clocks ran slow on our craft. Plus, we had coldsleep.