Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  THIRTY

  Comfy Doubt

  Nigel had grown up in a properly skeptical English home. He doubted the polite glacial veneer that the Church of England had become, coating a flat disbelief in all things supernatural or superhuman, squashing all morality into a pale, thin social ethic. No God need apply in the C of E, the only faith known by its link to a country of the mind, Church of England, hallelujah. The comfy doubt of frayed religiosity, he thought.

  The esty had taught him that space and time were malleable, folded forms of each other. Now they had transcended time as easily as one moved in space—a property ascribed in ancient texts only to God, and an omnipotent one at that.

  If there was a God, then He or She or—more probably, he thought—It, acting in strict accord with physical laws (which presumably It had made—but there was an interesting argument there, too), could reach back in time. Could influence the past, even though to Nigel the events had already happened. This idea he had worked over in his mind until he began in a quiet and regular way to pray. Nothing could have surprised his younger self more, he was sure.

  He had known and loved people who had died hard deaths. He asked God to manifest Itself in a previous time—not to change the course of events, but to enter into the minds of the dying. To drain from them the unbearable torments, the sharp pains, the cutting remorse, the freezing fears that forked into them in their last agonies.

  Maybe it was possible and maybe the big It would do it. And maybe not. But having thought of it, he knew that he had to try. Alexandria, wife. Ichino, friend. Names now, people then. Agonies spent.

  Then, quite illogically, he prayed for Ito. Whether his son’s fate lay in past or future was a riddle to him now. When he closed his eyes he saw Ito as he had been, returning from foraging while the family lay ill. His wind-burned face was dark, curly hair black and looking oily. A lopsided grin split the tired face and on an impulse Nigel had embraced the man his boy had become.

  Now that was how he saw Ito. Not as the body floating in suspension here in their house, a thin hope.

  The flickering sped up.

  Blaring brilliance cascaded down upon them from wrenched timestone above—followed immediately, in a single breath, by utter sullen dark.

  Nigel and Nikka were standing on their porch, he smoking a cigar out of sheer distraction, when the scene outside jumped again. Sparkled. Settled somehow into place.

  “We’re back!” Nikka cried.

  “It’s . . . the same,” Nigel said. “But look.”

  Glassy patches marred the familiar topography. Spikes of erupted timestone thrust up through the groves of fruit trees, vomiting yellow-hot liquids. Events peeled off the upthrust peaks, unloosing booms and cracks.

  Benjamin and Angelina ran outside onto the lawn, shouting. A swirling sphere of darkness like a pulsing bruise came gliding through the air in the distance. “It’s our home, but—it’s changed,” Angelina shouted against a rush of hot wind.

  Their raccoon ran out of nearby bushes and scampered onto the porch. It said very clearly, “Welcome back.”

  Nigel picked up the ball of fur and found it weighed more than he remembered. He had missed its bandit eyes and pesky personality. With sheathed claws Scooter climbed onto his shoulder without hesitation. When he looked back at the purpling sphere it looked closer. Behind it now loomed a mottled, dusky shape. Nigel stopped breathing.

  “Grey Mech!” Benjamin yelled.

  “They have been waiting here,” Scooter piped precisely.

  “They?”

  “Others arrived, fought. One remains.”

  Nigel was startled. This simple pet had somehow acquired remarkable speech. “How long have we been gone?”

  “A few moments.”

  “A few—”

  “Forces have contended here, destroying much of this Lane.”

  With a black paw Scooter gestured toward smoky recesses in the far distance. The timestone bristled, skinned of its former abundant greenery. Dirty gray fumes spread like foul fog everywhere.

  “Why?” Nikka asked the beast, wonderingly.

  “The one above waits for you, I believe.”

  Nigel eyed the slowly approaching bulk. Planes of slate-gray mass, an air of threat. “The patience of watchdogs. Umm, most admirable. But it’s sniffing up the wrong leg.”

  “It knows why you were sent,” the raccoon said.

  “Sent?” Nikka asked.

  “We could only orchestrate the Grey Mech to begin the process, by deceiving it about the importance of this particular wormhole,” Scooter said.

  “You sent?” Nikka shot back. Scooter licked its paws as if searching for scraps of food it might have forgotten, a familiar gesture that contrasted with its suddenly fluent diction.

  “Unfortunately, we do not have the means to destroy it,” the raccoon said calmly.

  Nikka’s face darkened. “What the hell do you—”

  “Still, it is cautious. The wormhole mouth orbits this spot. Such dynamics are a vestigial remnant of the stress tensor which formed with your passage. The Grey Mech fears the worm mouth. It will not kill us without taking care.”

  “How comforting,” Nikka said.

  Hot winds rising. The bruised-purple sphere jittered in the high air. The family shrank back, looking at Nigel, but he had not the slightest idea what to do. He regretted not listening better when Nikka was explaining all this. He opened his mouth without knowing what he could say.

  From the far side of the Lane, mountains split open. It was as though some unseen force had unzipped the entire range of peaks, cutting a crack that widened—and another blue-black sphere burst from it. Yellow energies played around it. Gales rose, stirring dust in the yard.

  “The other mouth of the wormhole,” Nikka whispered. “It’s trying to tie itself off.”

  Nigel shouted against the gale’s howl, “But you said they can’t—the couch something, how—”

  “The Cauchy Horizon. It prevents their linking up—but the elasticity along the worm can whip them toward each other.”

  “Why in hell—”

  “The energies! Nobody’s ever gone as far as we did. The stored capacitive stress—”

  A gust snatched her words away. In the purpling vault above them the two spheres grew, swerving erratically across a wracked sky. Storms yowled. Jagged teeth of timestone wrenched up, sucked by tidal forces.

  Nigel felt himself lighten, as though falling. Nearby tree limbs stretched upward, as if beseeching the tumbling horror above. Tides, stretching and drawing.

  Screeching winds, tumbling debris. A lump smacked him in the leg. “Inside!” Nikka called.

  “No!” he shouted. Something told him that to burrow in now was death.

  The raccoon said calmly, “We had planned well, but this eventuality goes beyond our ability to control events. I apologize.”

  Wailing winds ripped up the roof of their house. Tiles shattered to the ground and the Walmsleys ducked. Benjamin and Angelina ran inside. The two worm mouths accelerated, veered. Crashed into hillsides and smashed them to spraying stones. Concussions shook the ground. A shock wave slammed Nigel and Nikka to the flooring of the porch and the railing split off. Nigel tasted blood in his mouth and his arm, nearly healed, sent him a spike of livid pain.

  “Inside!” Nikka called, yanking him up to his knees.

  The purple virulence above crackled and crashed. Twin monstrosities, swerving across a fevered sky. On his knees, he saw the Grey Mech approaching, keeping away from the ripping, darting worm mouths. Still after them.

  “It wishes to erase the information you have brought back,” the raccoon said serenely. Though its claws dug into his shoulder, he noticed.

  “Damned determined,” Nigel said.

  “It knows what is at stake.”

  “Well, I don’t, and—” At that moment he saw a possibility.

  “Nikka! Let’s go! To your goddamned Causality Engine.”

  She looked at him in
stark disbelief. He yanked on her arm. She stumbled after him, across the yard.

  Snapped limbs from the orchard covered the white steel console. He tossed them aside with furious energy. “Got power stored?” he shouted against the roar.

  She nodded, lips compressed. She pressed her wrist to the command slot, began sequencing. “Why?”

  “Cauchy Horizon!” He pointed to the nearest wormhole mouth. It bristled with sparks, discharges sprouting like electric-blue hair.

  “What? That’s a theoretical—”

  “Does that look theoretical to you?” When the rapidly dodging wormhole apertures zoomed near each other, the air fried with orange energies.

  Nigel pointed at the nearest wormhole opening, a foggy sphere that shot across the sky. “Push that one!”

  She aimed the device. Sheets of numbers and graphics slid across the console face. “Where?”

  “Toward the other—but no, wait!”

  The mouths yawned, pulsed. The Grey Mech was below them but with the erratic paths they followed—it should be possible—

  “There! Aim it up—and to the left.” He pointed wildly. The right geometry would occur only for a second.

  A wormhole mouth screeched down the sky, shredding clouds and debris, tossing off spurts of orange.

  Its twin followed, the other end of the unimaginably long corridor seeking to find itself. To close, to marry, to then contract into a singularity of event-space, intact to itself for a time beyond duration—

  “Now—there. Quick.”

  She fired the gravitational transducers. The pulse knocked them flat. Popped their eardrums, brought blood from nose and ears.

  Nigel rolled, caught up against one of the ceramic cylinders. He looked up to see the nearest worm mouth rushing toward its other end. The air between them fractured, sparked, broke down. The net momentum took both wormhole apertures downward—toward the Grey Mech.

  A sandpaper rasp, rising. Tendrils of shooting energy frayed between the two mouths.

  And splitting the space between them, where the quantum foam began to erupt with spontaneous particles, the Grey Mech tried to flee.

  Too slow. Far too slow.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A Wherewhen String

  I attribute it to your hunting strategy,” the raccoon said.

  They were sitting on the ruined front porch. A wrecked landscape smoked as far as the eye could see, cracking as it cooled.

  “As I understand it, all evidence suggests that you hunted in groups, and were unafraid to take on quite sizable game, such as mastodons.” The raccoon smacked its lips appreciatively at the fish Angelina had given it, freshly defrosted. “Your method, though, was not to rely upon brave displays of courage.”

  “Sounds insulting to me,” Benjamin put in.

  “Not at all.” The raccoon looked startled, the first time Nigel had seen that expression. He was learning to read the supple meanings the creature could impart to the merest curl of its full black lips. “That was inventive.”

  “How do you know?” Nigel asked. He was all soreness and fatigue, but did not want to so much as lie down until he understood what had happened here. Then he was going to sleep for the rest of his life, if not longer.

  “I am of your phylum. I know the courses of evolution.” Scooter licked itself scrupulously. “Long ago, your species shouted and waved sticks and ran after your prey. Typical grazing animals spook easily, run well, then tire. They soon stop and go back to cropping grass.”

  “Yech!” Angelina grimaced. “Nobody eats meat.”

  The raccoon gave her a baleful glance. She hastily added, “Well, I don’t include fish.”

  The raccoon went on. “Most carnivores who fail to make a catch on their first lunge also lose interest. They rest up a bit, and wait for another target to amble by. Your species did not. That promised the qualities we wished to harness. Alas, they were present in only a fraction of you, so we had to select just the right circumstances.” It regarded them all as though they were museum exhibits. “And individuals.”

  “To do your dirty work?” Nikka said with a glint in her eye.

  They were waiting. Inside, Ito’s body was cycling through the diagnostics that would see if he could be fully restored. They had gotten the needed tech from ruins beyond the next line of hills, a small fraction of the town still standing. Now there was time to sit and think.

  Nikka’s mind was restless, awaiting news of whether her son would come back to her. And this confident raccoon irritated her quite a bit.

  “Instead, your species would pursue the same prey to its next stop. Surprise it again. Run it until it outdistanced you. How those grazers must have hated you!” It cackled suddenly.

  “You weren’t particularly fast, but eventually you could run down the tired grazer. A guaranteed result, if you persisted. In this tenacity lies your major difference from other omnivores, and certainly from carnivores.” It cackled again. “You boast of your brains, your opposable thumbs, your two-footed grace—but stubborn perseverance is rare, very rare—and we needed that. So we had to use primates . . . alas.”

  “Why ‘alas’?” Nigel asked.

  “You are cantankerous and difficult to manage. Sorry, but that is true.”

  “Well, you weren’t the best pet we ever had, either,” Angelina said.

  “I was a poor actor. Actually, I am a diplomat.”

  “You don’t seem all that diplomatic,” Benjamin said.

  “I negotiate. In the Lanes there are many kinds, but your strategy is shared by no other species here. Some Lanes hold octopus-like creatures who manipulate objects and snare others, but cannot pursue game. Many bright herbivores, too—charming, but in the wrong business to begin with, hemmed in by short attention spans. We needed something which would, for the most abstract reasons, sustain effort over times significant to your own well being.”

  “Uh-huh.” Nikka’s mouth was thin, skeptical. “And our ‘abstract reason’?”

  “Curiosity, basically.”

  “You based your strategy on our getting interested?” Nikka snorted with derision.

  “We chose carefully. After all, how did this family come to be settled here?”

  Nigel laughed. “We came this far, why not farther? Touché!”

  “The Grey Mech didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  The raccoon lowered its head, concentrating on grooming itself. Nigel guessed that it was embarrassed—to the extent that any human category could apply to this strange thing. “Well, we did have to begin matters.”

  “By slamming us forward in the wormhole.” Nikka’s eyes were narrow slits. “So we couldn’t get back.”

  “Such are the vagaries of any wherewhen string,” Scooter said.

  Nigel said, “By ‘wherewhen string’ I suppose you mean a wormhole path through the esty?”

  “Yes, we term it differently—”

  “Cut the techtalk!” Nikka fumed. “This, this pet got us blown—”

  “Let it go on,” Nigel said, hoping he could calm her.

  Scooter had dashed down the porch. It turned back and said hesitantly, “We calculated that if the Grey Mech knew of this particular vortex, and guessed our plans, it would attempt to seal it—which would boost you along in the wherewhen string, I mean, the wormhole . . . perhaps.”

  “Rodent!” Nikka sprang up and kicked at the raccoon. It squealed and scampered out of the way. Nikka followed.

  It cried, “I assure you, there was no—” another kick, closer this time, “no other way!”

  “You risked my family for, for—” Nikka sputtered angrily.

  It reached safety, hanging on a splintered beam beneath the overhang of the wrecked roof. “For greater causes than you can know,” the raccoon said, regaining its dignity.

  “You little rat!” Nikka swiped, but it swung farther away.

  It said earnestly, “The knowledge and data you bring—and do not forget that the recording devices in your Causality
Engine will give us precise measurements—can reconcile the long struggle between us, the organic living Phyla, and the mechs.”

  “You risked our lives—my son!—on a plan—”

  Angelina threw a chunk of roofing at Scooter, narrowly missing. Nigel stood, blocking her from another shot. They were not truly angry with this raccoon, he saw. Ito, lying inside, body worked and threaded, battling, his fate hinging on mechanical help—that was the root of their rage. And until their wait was over, they would know no rest.

  Nigel sighed, held up a hand. “Belay that! Let this thing speak.”

  “Thank you.” It smoothed its fur and began again.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Larger Agencies

  There was only one Grey Mech of their era. It had just perished above their home, fried by the torrents of particles sputtering into the space between the two wormhole mouths.

  Causality was indeed insured, by the frying foam of the quantum. The wormhole could not connect, could not break through the Cauchy Horizon. In the end, Nature kept its causal books balanced with a furious storm of emission, dissipating the wriggling elastic energy of the wormholes.

  And all energy can be used as a weapon.

  The Grey Mech was a censor. It had wanted to stop the information about long-term mech purposes from reaching the organic life-forms of this era. The mechs feared that their organic enemies would disrupt their gossamer-thin experiments in electron-positron plasma. Simply flying a starship’s roiling plasma exhaust through a delicate whorl of magnetic fields and lacy filaments could devastate the work of centuries.

  “Wouldn’t mind doing just that,” Benjamin said when he heard the idea. Antagonism to mechs ran deep in the blood of many organic races, not just humans.

  But up ahead along the curve of grand time, other Grey Mechs arose.

  The mech vs. Naturals war stretched like a stain across millennia in the esty. Nothing could truly stop the inherent competition, growing out of a Darwinnowing commanded in all Phyla and Kingdoms of life—not even this strange voyage along the “wherewhen string” and back.

  But its effects could be changed, with adroit care. Up ahead, solving the puzzle of how to make an electron-positron plasma would require cooperation of both mechs and organics. But that alliance could never come about if the past could spread its venom to the future.