Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “Why? You cannot afford to return to your Lane.”

  Ito said flatly, “We want the buildings. That’s final.” The family had decided on that and Nigel was pleased to see Ito showing that they could not be split, as Tonogan had tried.

  Nikka said, more pointedly, “If we can’t buy a short transit, how about a long one?”

  The Chairwoman’s face, which was usually animated despite looking for most purposes like a wad of dough with raisins stuck in for eyes, became blank. “How did you . . . ?”

  “Old folks aren’t entirely useless,” Nikka said brightly. “I nosed around.”

  “Carnivorous curiosity,” Nigel added. “She turned up the fact that the energy density in a wormhole is higher if it’s tightly curved.”

  Nikka nodded. “And the cost of making a transit goes up with the energy density.”

  “Umm.” The Chairwoman’s mouth turned crabby. “I did not think you would work that out.”

  “Offer us terms. We want—” Nikka rattled off a long list, headed by the use of a Causality Engine—polarized, of course.

  “You realize that you’ll have to make several jumps, further and further into esty-cords? And then several back?” The Chairwoman seemed genuinely interested, not merely angling for advantage.

  “We’ll need pressure skins, too,” Nikka confirmed.

  A curt nod. “You truly wish to risk that?”

  “We must,” Angelina said. “We want to go home.”

  Nigel nodded, not daring to speak. This was the crucial moment, he could feel it. Home. Back to a world he could understand, off the grand stage. For at least a while. Something told him that he would be forced back into the operatics of Earthers and mechanicals and Old Ones, eventually. But not now. Not while they still had family and blissfully finite horizons.

  The Chairwoman eyed them. “You are more courageous than you look, you Walmsleys.”

  She agreed to the financial details with a suddenness and phony casualness that masked a disagreeable defeat. Not that the Walmsleys had made any appreciable dent in her bureaucrat’s world, he was sure. They would not have survived that. Sometimes, Nigel thought, it was of more use to be an irritant—so long as you didn’t get slapped like a pesky insect.

  Deal done, the Chairwoman was cordial. In a mannered fashion, apparently part of a set ritual marking successful negotiations, she arranged herself in a helical hammock—

  apparently a sign of informality here—and remarked, “No one ever choosed this before.”

  Nigel asked, “Why? We aren’t particularly brilliant. It’s obvious.”

  “Obvious, yes. But untried. Dangerous.”

  Nikka looked wary. “Going further in cords is how much more dangerous?”

  “We of this city and Lane know more than you.” She sniffed. “We have seen the bodies.”

  THIRTEEN

  Only Barbarians

  Of course they asked what the bodies were. Officials grimaced but did as the Chairwoman said, and within a day they were ushered into a cool, starkly lit vault.

  The family had looked at each other with dismay when they realized that here, corpses from the esty were held as volumes in a kind of library. Many times the family had debated and regretted their handling of the woman’s corpse, which had precipitated their exile. Here the rare emergence of a carcass from the esty was greeted with anticipation and also a sort of dread, for invariably the cadavers proved to come from the future of the esty.

  Nigel’s elation at their negotiation trickled away as he looked at the pale, emaciated corpse of a middle-aged man, kept suspended somehow. A mass of tiny magnetic readers crowned the head. They could “read him” quite well, a technician told them. “Isotope analysis shows he’s from one point three million years uptime.”

  “What did he die of?” asked Nikka, ever the tech type.

  “Radiation burns.”

  “Any memories?”

  The young man blinked owlishly. “Some. Missing the short-term recall, of course.”

  Memories, indeed. Fractured pictures. The same hazy sky, mapped in the 0.511 million electron Volt line. Only far more developed, with ornate structures corkscrewing across a mottled ruby sky.

  More: a bleak landscape marked off by boxy monuments. Among these crawled three-wheeled things that appeared to be not vehicles but living creatures.

  “Or mechs,” Nigel said crisply.

  “Who was he?” Nikka asked pensively.

  “We cannot really understand that. He does not have the personality signatures we know. All I can unscramble be images. What these pictures mean, we can say not.”

  “Why not?”

  “He haved different cerebral organization. Internal organs be altered, too. He be another species.”

  Angelina was shocked. “He looks like us!”

  The pale young man shrugged. “Tinker with the insides all you want, but keep the outside looking the same. Otherwise, people beed nervous.”

  “That’s why you can’t get much from their minds?” Angelina pressed him.

  “That, and cultural differences. This fellow did not look at the world the way we do. It shows up in how he stored memories.”

  Nigel found all this depressing. More bodies, but still no one, not even pale pedants, understood why.

  When they went to sign off on the arrangements, the Chairwoman herself appeared. “You’re going into mech-dominated territory, you know,” she said severely.

  Nigel guessed that she was having second thoughts about the deal. Or maybe her ego was getting in the way again. Not uncommon, he thought wanly. “You’re sure?”

  “We receive no dead mechs coming back through the esty Vors. Only humans.”

  “You’re sure?” Nikka asked pointedly.

  “We pay close attention. The Old Ones make sure of that.” She snorted with frustration.

  “Why?” Nigel persisted.

  “The old questions. You have them even in your time, um?” A speculative look, then she recited as if from memory. “First, they want to know what the mechs want up there in the far future. Plenty of mechs goed into the future one-way, using Vors.”

  “To carry information forward?” Nikka asked.

  “Possibly. The Old Ones want to find out why.”

  “And stop it?” Nigel asked.

  “I suppose. Or at least understand.”

  Nikka nodded. “So do we.”

  The Chairwoman plainly could see no percentage in such foolhardiness. “Why? The esty’s trouble enough if you just sit still in it.”

  “Carnivorous curiosity,” Nigel said.

  She snorted. “A child’s reasoning. If you could see the things I do just to keep us tipped up—”

  “Yes?” Angelina asked. Nigel was happy to see her speak up, for she had been cowed by this place. “Why do you tilt your city?”

  The Chairwoman said scornfully, “Why, it be beautiful. Only barbarians would even think of asking.”

  FOURTEEN

  Grey Mech

  The mecurial Chairwoman invited them to sleep on her personal estate as they arranged details for their esty transit. This proved to be the same ornate, almost satirically baroque villa where they had met her. They had entered by the back door, amid thronged streets; the true entrance gave onto a cantilevered view of the cupped city, from the uppermost rim of it.

  Large birds, some with shiny teeth and even lips, hung on the winds off the Chairwoman’s balcony. One swooped near and eyed them, as if sizing up a meal. It was half the size of a man. Here gravity eased, lending everything an airy lightness that reminded Nigel of getting drunk but suffering no consequences. Still, the toothy birds smiled at them with unnerving assurance. They went back inside.

  The next waning lasted quite long. Somehow the city could influence the pulses of brilliant glow emitted by the timestone, shaping them to a roughly regular schedule: dark about a third of the time, enough to sleep if you were not too tired.

  Nobody here seemed to get
tired. Noisy, chaotically colorful, they rushed about a lot. Nikka wondered aloud if this was just their Old Fart bewilderment at the pointless energy of the young. Nigel shook his head. He had harbored that notion for so long that he had passed through to another state, in which he ceased grasping for the fullness of life and let it come to him instead. It had taken him centuries to realize that joy and pain were equally biting and rewarded close inspection equally little. They were just there, like flowers. Better to take them for their flavors than their metaphors.

  They stood again on the balcony with the Chairwoman, idle talk before bed, and across the distant porcelain sky shot something large and swift and somber. The Chairwoman’s eyes widened. “Grey Mech!” she cried, and crashed to the marble floor.

  Thin cries of panic from all across the cupped city below. Nigel studied the dusky, hovering presence with abstract interest, hands on a gleaming brass railing.

  “Get down!” Nikka called to him from her knees, hidden from view.

  The Grey Mech rushed toward them, accelerating from high up. A chorus of despairing shouts came up to him from the expanse of streets and glassy buildings below. Casually he turned and walked inside.

  “Probably wasn’t after us,” he said to Nikka as they stood in an elaborate ballroom. People rushed through, panicked, calling hoarsely to each other.

  “We can’t be sure,” she said nervously.

  “Come now. We aren’t remotely important to—”

  The crash blew in the far wall. Hammer-hard impact, then an eerie silence.

  It buried them under heavy furniture. They learned later, as a medical type patched them up, that a section of the Grey Mech had detached and gone prowling over the city. Fire lanced up from weapons below. It deflected these with dismissive ease. It had sent interrogating bursts of electromagnetic energy into every possible device, quickly sectioning the city’s grid, narrowing its search. The scrutiny sharpened upon this district but no further. Apparently it could not resolve whatever it sought. So the angular thing had fired pulses into the area, killing several hundred people and caving in the lower walls of the Chairwoman’s villa.

  Nigel nodded. “You were right,” he said mildly to Nikka. “But why?”

  The Chairwoman had suffered some bruises but that did not explain her jittery anxiety, hands clenching and unclenching, face bluish white. “Never did one attack us before. They be of the highest mech class, always ahead of our technology.”

  “I see not much has changed,” Nikka said. “It was the same in our era.”

  “They could slaughter us all.” The Chairwoman eyed them warily. “And they be after you?”

  “A mere hypothesis,” Nigel said, yawning.

  Nikka caught his glance and said, “I’m still not happy with the provisions you’ve supplied.”

  “What?” The Chairwoman scowled, then said automatically, “We made a deal.”

  “We won’t leave without—” and Nikka rattled off a further list.

  The large woman opened her mouth and slowly closed it. “You must leave.”

  “No we don’t,” Nigel said.

  She glowered. He could see her step through the logic. If these Walmsleys were of interest to a Grey Mech, best be rid of them and count yourself lucky. “All right, the provisions—but you go at first light.”

  Nikka nodded. Anything that drew the Grey Mech was bad for business.

  “Still,” Nigel said distantly, later, “why should we be important?”

  “Maybe because of where we’re headed?” Nikka asked.

  That night he lay on a sort of pliant water pillow with Nikka and they watched the snake-like dog come into their room and investigate them. It was apparently fairly intelligent and in fact head of security there. To questions it gave a nod of the head and abrupt, slurred yhas or noah.

  He ignored it after a while and realized, staring out at the encased night of this Lane, that he had become married to a flat, unremarked fatality. Yet this did not carry with it any of the usual gloom of earlier times. Maybe this was new wisdom or maybe fatigue but in any case he did not want to piss his life away on nonsense. Much of what he had once believed and felt he now saw as foolishness or at least useless. On the other hand, some moments shone like jewels.

  He shook off this mood by immersing himself in Nikka, the love between them now so distant from labored technical strenuosities that he found it yielding up what seemed most impossible of all, moments of pleasurable surprise. He slept soundly. In the musty morning half-light they awoke lingeringly together.

  “That dog was in the room when we were going at it.”

  “I didn’t mind. Perhaps by now they’ve evolved to the point where at the crucial moment they politely look away.”

  “Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?”

  “Well, let’s say it was timeless.”

  “That’s better. I do seem to recall the dog barking at an important point.”

  “Oh? I thought that was you.”

  FIFTEEN

  Transit

  The Causality Polarizer was mammoth, its compressive antennas perpetually yawning like vast bored mouths. They gaped in all six faces of an enormous, burnished ceramic cube. They reminded Nikka of speakers from a giant’s stereo set, she remarked. These were the ten-kilohertz oscillators, delivering a terrawatt in short-wavelength gravitational waves.

  Still, Nigel liked the speaker analogy—because that was how it felt. The family sheltered in a metallic capsule set beside their house, back among the familiar setting that had been wrenched away from their home Lane. It felt good to simply be there, but from the moment he got into the capsule he fidgeted uneasily. The countdown did not help.

  “The point of making a wormhole sprout out of a Lane is that you really can’t do it by yourself,” Nikka told him. “Takes astronomically too much energy, or more accurately, density of energy. The best we can do is ripple the esty surface, find a weak spot—a place where the Casimir force is substantial.”

  “Who was Casimir?” Angelina asked.

  “Who cares? He saw that in a true vacuum, there would be a force, one you could harness.”

  “As we are about to?” Angelina looked skeptical.

  “Of course.” Nikka had on her See?—obvious! expression.

  “So when we have to travel in a big loop to get home, that means we have to go into the future?” Nigel liked scientific ideas but he did not like having to think like a pretzel.

  “There is a lot more future than past. The universe is only fifteen billion years old. The future’s almost infinite.”

  Nikka seemed to think that finished off the idea. Nigel ventured, “Approximately infinite. Interesting concept. So there’s a much greater chance that any leg of our trip will go into the future?” and she rewarded him again with her daintily amused See?—obvious! smile.

  Ito scowled in the last moments before Transit and asked warily, “How dangerous is this?”

  She shrugged. She was no stranger to trauma and death and did not think much about it. “Not very, unless we hit a stutter.”

  “What’s that me—” was all Ito had time for before the pulverizing wall of sound struck their capsule.

  Pain stretches time.

  The vibrations confirmed his fears. They seemed to go on for a sluggish, pounding eternity, though Nikka later told them offhandedly that it had been only forty-four seconds. Of agony.

  SIXTEEN

  Time Is a Horizon

  Shaken, they popped open the capsule lock. They found themselves among their home and outbuildings, with the same slice of orchard as before—all resting atop a sliding mass of luminous timestone. To all sides a box canyon rose, shrouded in lemon-hot vapor.

  They got out and breathed cold, thin air but kept their pressure skins on anyway. Nikka calculated from the capsule’s instruments and decided that they had squeezed through the momentarily pulsating wormhole, traversing an esty-displacement of several million kilometer-years.

&nb
sp; “Could be millions of klicks away and at exactly the same time we left,” she said calmly, “or the same Lane, millions of years in the future.” Wormholes tunneled between eras not at all like elevators linking floors of a building, but that was how Nigel persisted on thinking of them.

  The ground shook. The plate of their property shifted uneasily on the timestone beneath.

  “There’s no way to tell which?” Benjamin asked apprehensively.

  “The Causality Engine had chaos built into it,” Nikka answered, holding on to a capsule strut for support. “We can’t measure any better than this.”

  Nigel watched the distant sky, where more lava-like walls fumed and roiled. “How long do we stay here?”

  “That’s chaotic, too,” Nikka said. “But short. Looks to be maybe an hour or two. We’ll have some warning of when the next Transit is coming.”

  Angelina laughed, which startled the others. “Until then we’re free to enjoy the scenery?” Despite their gathering unease, the family chuckled with her.

  As if in answer, nearby cliffs oozed sulphurous light, complaining with slow groans. A sheet peeled off—crack!—and a sharp snap in the air knocked them flat. Here the esty was like skin, sloughing away layers so that more could grow. Compressed events evolved, brimmed, died.

  Nigel knew from undergraduate days that mass curved space-time, but the inverse was still a surprise: compacted esty behaved like matter. Rendered as mass, events themselves were squeezed into slabs. Their endings brought forth explosive energies: literally, the end of history, for in these detonations data burst into phosphorescent energy, its true equivalent. The esty confirmed the final triumvirate of physics, one side of which Einstein had got right: mass was like energy was like information.

  They went into their house, which had been fully provisioned by the Chairwoman’s minions, and tried to act as though this was a kind of homecoming. They were hungry and ate something like steaks of beef to celebrate but the coming Transit made their talk edgy. Nigel went outside. Ostensibly it was to smoke one of his cigars, carefully kept chilled in the kitchen but scorned if lit inside. He did not like delivering his family into the hands of Causality Engines or “intrinsic chaos” or any other collection of jawbreaker words that in the end meant the world’s casual indifference to human life and values. But he had no choice.