Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  Toby sipped his strong beer and said, “I don’t know as I want to go back up there, sir.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while.” The pilot squinted at him, as though trying to see something in Toby’s face that he wasn’t giving away. “I was hoping you might have business back up there.”

  Might have business. At once the Zom’s face lurched into Toby’s mind’s-eye and he felt the barroom close about him, its suffocating air clotted with cigar smoke. The banks of blue fumes swirled amid the seeping yellow glow of filament bulbs that sprouted from the walls, each the size of a man’s head with his hat on. Toby had kept his mind away from the memory until now but the weight of uncertainty again descended. He could not know if the Zom was his father unless he found it again, questioned it.

  “Sir, I’m going to have to give you my reply tomorrow. I have to see to a certain matter right now.”

  The surprise in Stan’s and Mr. Preston’s faces was almost amusing. It increased when Toby stood, bootheels smacking the floorboards loudly from the drink he had put down. He nodded solemnly and without a word plunged into the darkness outside.

  FIVE

  The Frozen Girl

  Inky shapes still shifted in his mind as he knocked on the door of Mr. Preston’s house. Toby still felt himself encased in tangled memories, the hate he felt toward the Zom because he did not want it to be the Killeen he had known.

  It was a fitful morning, with gray light piercing a fog and sending traceries across the rooftops along the slumbering river. Mechs and their virulence seemed infinitely far away. People here did not even talk about them. They were cloaked in this cozy, snug corner of the esty and would hear not a word of events beyond. Toby wondered if such people were typical of humanity. If so, what were the Bishops?

  He could barely see the white picket fence framing Mr. Preston’s yard. The pearly wisps blotted out detail beyond the brick walk that led to the house. This was a grand place, he had to admit, even in such diffuse light. It was porticoed in pale pine, the massive columns topped with flowery capitals. He rapped the iron door knocker again and instantly the brass doorknob turned, as if attached to the knocker. A dwarf answered, a mute servant, and led Toby along a carpeted hall.

  He was unprepared for the grandiosity of a pilot’s lodging, taking in with awe the mahogany furniture, a new electric lamp with yellow-paper shade, and an entire shelf of sound-sculptures. The dwarf retreated, gesturing at a yawning, tongueless mouth and showing the red servant tattoo on his shoulder to explain his silence.

  A bounty of travel visions speckled the walls—Above the Falls of Abraham, Volcanic Quest, Heart of Lightness, Struggle Against Destiny—and many of literature, including the fanciful. Toby yearned to take the sheets and stroke them into luminosity, but as he reached for Time Stream and World-Wrack he heard heavy thumping footsteps and turned to find the pilot in full blue and gold uniform.

  “I hope you have settled your other matter,” Mr. Preston said severely.

  Only now did Toby recall clearly his abrupt departure from the table. The town beyond that raucous room had swallowed memory. He had made his way through narrow streets lined by rude buildings that seemed to lean out over the street, eclipsing the wan sky glow. The moist lanes near the river had been tangled and impossible to navigate without stumbling and stepping on sprawled forms, like bundles of clothing left for trash collection.

  The masters of the Zoms left them where they lay, sure that they could not move without further feeding. Toby took hours to find the slack-jawed face he had seen on the quay, and then another long time peering at it before he was sure that the Zom was not merely in its lapsed state of rest. The thing had proved dead, limbs akimbo, stiffening into a hardened parody of a dance.

  At morning the burly owner had come by, shrugged at the corpse, and thrown it into his wagon for disposal. Toby’s questions about the Zom the big man brushed aside—he didn’t know the names, no, nor where they came from, nor from what part of the great river they hailed. Resurrection City? Only a rumor.

  And the last glimpse Toby had of that face had unsettled him further, as if in final death the Zom gave its last secret. There was a clear resemblance to his father. But was this a copy?

  So with fatigue in his bones but a fresh, iron resolve in his spine Toby made himself stand erect beside the oak mantelpiece and say to Mr. Preston, “I’ll come, sir.”

  “Damn good! Want to see the backtime, do you?”

  “Yeasay.”

  “Whuzzat?”

  “Uh, yes.” The word still felt odd. See the backtime, yeasay—and go opposite to the mechs.

  “Here, you had breakfast?”

  Cornmeal flapjacks and fritters, brought by the mistress of the house, quickly dominated Toby’s attention while the pilot regaled him with lore and stories. Toby managed to keep the details of his long voyage downriver well-muddied, and was distracted from this task by Mr. Preston’s collection of oddments, arrayed along the walls. There were crystals, odd-colored stones betraying volcanic abuse, a circlet of ancestral hair, five flint arrowheads from the fabled days, and some works of handicraft like dozens Toby had seen before. Beside these were bronze-framed, stiff 3D’s of addled-looking children, aged uncles and the like, all arranged awkwardly and in Sunday-suited best for their bout with immortality.

  But these oddments were nothing compared with the large transparent cube that dominated the dining room table. It shed cold air and Toby took it to be ice, but as he ate he saw that no drops ran off the sleek flat sides. Within its blue-white glow small objects of art were suspended—a golden filigree, a jagged bit of quartz, two large insects with bristly feelers, and a miniature statue of a lovely young girl with red hair and a flowing white robe.

  He had nearly finished inhaling the molasses-fattened flapjacks and slurping down a pot of coffee when he chanced to notice that one of the insect wings had lowered. Keeping an attentive ear to the pilot, who had launched into what appeared to be a four-volume oral autobiography in first draft, he watched carefully and saw the girl spinning slowly about her right toe. Her robe fetched up against her left leg and then gracefully played out into a spinning disk of velvety delicacy.

  By this time the insects had both flapped their transparent gossamer wings nearly through a quarter-stroke. They were both heading toward the girl. Their multifaceted eyes strobed and fidgeted with what to them must be an excited vigor, and to Toby was a torpid, ominous arabesque.

  “Ah, the hunt,” the pilot interrupted his soliloquy. “Beautiful, eh? I’ve been watching it for long enough to grow three beards.”

  “The girl, she’s alive.”

  “Appears so. Though why she’s so small, I cannot say.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Far downstream.”

  “I never saw such.”

  “Nor I. Indeed, I suspect, from the quality of the workmanship, that the girl is real.”

  “Real? But she’s no bigger than my thumbnail.”

  “Some trick of the light makes her seem so to us, I reckon.”

  “And these bugs—”

  “They’re nearly her size, true. Maybe they’re enlarged, the opposite of the trick with the girl.”

  “And if they aren’t?”

  “Then when they reach the girl they will have a merry time.” The pilot grinned. “A week’s pay packet, I just handed it over flat, to purchase this. That li’l golden trinket, it’s revolving, too—see?”

  She spun farther and he saw that it was Besen. His Besen.

  Somewhere she had been trapped. Copied? Or could this somehow be the true Besen?

  He tapped on the side but she showed no reaction.

  He remembered once aboard Argo when they had cleaned out a filthy shower together, doing ship’s maintenance. Besen had unscrewed the drain and pulled out a hair ball the size of a well-fed rat. It was lustrous and gummy and so amazing when she held it up, a hairy moon beside her beaming, incredulous planet of a face, that he had
laughed.

  He felt a fresh wave of bitterly cold air waft from the cube of silent, slow time. “Somethin’ wrong, boy?”

  He had an urge to smash the blue-white wedge of molasses-slow tempo, to release its wrenched epochs and imprisoning, collapsed perspectives. But this was the pilot’s object, and such men understood the twists of time better than anyone. Perhaps it was right that these things belonged to them.

  Best to put it aside. He would not know what to do with the trapped Besen if he did get it. Still, he felt relief when he escaped from the dining room and emerged into the cloaking fog outdoors.

  SIX

  Going Upback

  They were to boom out of the dock that very day. Toby had never known such awe as that instilled by his first moment, when he marched up the gangplank and set foot upon the already thrumming deck.

  Never before had he done more than gaze in reverence and abject self-abasement at one of the induction ships as it parted the river with its razor-sharp prow. Now Mr. Preston greeted him with a curt nod, quite circumspect compared to the sprawl of the man’s conversation at breakfast. With minor ceremony he received his employment papers. Other crew shook Toby’s hand with something better than the cool indifference he knew they gave any and all passengers. The customers who paid the costs were of course held in the lowest regard of all those aboard, including the wipe-boys below. Toby could tell from the somewhat distant, glassy gazes of the men and women of the crew that he was at least considered in the human family, pending.

  “You been by that li’l flurry up ahead?” Mr. Preston asked him as they made their way up the three flights of external stairs to the pilot’s nest.

  “Nossir. I came ashore, stowed my skiff, and walked round it.”

  “Ummm. Too bad. Think I’ll nudge out across stream, keep some distance on it.”

  “Yessir.”

  To Toby this exotic Lane was a continual wonder. He began to see how people could want it this way, a pocket set aside from the mechs and all that weight of history. That they were re-creating some ancient manner long past did not matter; here, now, it was real.

  The loading was finishing up, the ship’s barely restrained thirst for the river sending a strong strumming into the air. Freight spun off the wagons and flew aboard at the hands of jostling work gangs, mostly Zoms. Late passengers came dodging and scampering among the boxes and hogsheads awaiting loading. Wives carrying hat boxes and grocery knapsacks urged on sweaty husbands, who lugged carpet bags and yowling babies. Drays and baggage three-wheelers clattered over cobblestones and intersected each others’ trajectories more often than seemed possible from the supposed laws of probability, sending cases and jars smashing. Profanity blued the air. Windlasses snapped into hatches, fore and aft.

  Toby loved the turmoil and racket, the whiz and whir of earnest purpose. The bursar called, “All not goin’, please to get themselfs ashore!” and last bells rang, and the thronged decks of the Natchez gushed their yammering burden onto the gangplanks—a running tide that a few last, late passengers fought. The stage-plank slid in and a tall man came running and tried to jump the distance. He got a purchase on the gunmetal side and a crewwoman hauled him up, but his back pocket opened and his wallet thunked into the river. The crowd ashore laughed and a woman had to stop the man from jumping in after it.

  All this Toby watched from the elevated sanctity of the pilot’s nest. It was an elegant place, glass in so many directions he had to count to be sure there were only four of the transparent walls. The Cap’n stood beside the pilot, both arrayed in their dark blue-gold uniforms, and an eerie whistle sounded. The orange flag ran up the jack staff and the ship ceased its drift. Momentum surged through the deck and oily smoke belched from the three tall chimneys at the ship’s midships.

  The crowd along the quay called last-minute messages and cheered and the ship shot away from them, seeming to accelerate as it caught with induction fields the deep surge of metal beneath the waters. The town dwindled with bewildering speed, people on the quay turning into animated dolls that turned pinkish and mottled as Toby watched.

  “The time flux,” Mr. Preston answered Toby’s frown. “I locked us on to her right off. We’re seeing their images squeezed and warped.”

  Already the shore was dappled with reds and blues as time shifted and streamed about the ship, the slap and heave of currents resounding in deep bass notes that Toby felt through his big-heeled boots.

  To fly across duration itself, to wrench away from the certainty of patient, single-minded time—Toby felt sour nausea grip his throat. Confusion swamped him, gut-deep accelerations—a quickening not in mere velocity but in the quantity that he knew governed the esty but which no man could sense, the force of tangled space and time together. The firm deck went snake-slithery, thick air hummed, sparks forked about him. His body fought for long, aching moments the urgent tows and tugs, his chest tight, bowels watery, knees feather-light—and then somehow his sinews found their equilibrium, without his conscious effort. He gulped in air and found it moist and savory.

  “Steady.” Mr. Preston had been eyeing him, he now saw. “I reckoned you’d come through, but can’t be sure till it’s done.”

  “What if I hadn’t?”

  The pilot shrugged. “Put you ashore next stop, nothing else for it.”

  “What about passengers?”

  “It’s easier down below. Up here, the tides are worse.”

  “Tides?” He studied the river’s table-flat expanse.

  “Not river tides—time tides. Passengers with addled heads and stomachs can just lie down till we reach their getoff point. Most, anyway.”

  Toby had always figured that the job of a pilot was to keep his ship on the river, which was not a considerable feat, since it was so wide. Silently watching Mr. Preston trim and slip among the upwellings of rich brown mud, and then slide with liquid grace along a burnt-golden reef of bromium metal, he saw the dancer’s nimbleness and ease that came from the whirling oak-spoked master wheel, the orchestrated animal mutter of the induction motors, the geometric craft of rudder and prow. To have this elegant gavotte interrupted was not merely an inconvenience, and dangerous, but an aesthetic atrocity.

  This Toby learned when a trading scow came rushing down the washboard-rough main current and into the Natchez’s path. Rather than perturb his elegant course, Mr. Preston ran across the scow’s two aft steering oars. Scarcely had the snapping and crunching ceased than a volley of gnarled profanity wafted up from the clutch of red faces shooting by to starboard. Mr. Preston’s face lit up with a positive joy, for here were fit targets who could, unlike the Natchez’s crew, talk back.

  Joy of joys! He snatched open the roller window and stuck his head out and erupted back at the scow. And as the two ships separated and the scowmen’s maledictions grew fainter, Mr. Preston poured on both volume and ferocity, calling upon gods and acts Toby had never heard of. When Mr. Preston rolled the window shut on its spool the pilot was emptied of malice, all tensions of the departure now well fled.

  “My, sir, that was a good one,” a voice said at Toby’s elbow. It was Stan, beaming with appreciation of the pungent profanity.

  Not an opportune appearance. Mr. Preston skewered him with a glare. “Deckhands with opinions? Nose to the planking, you!”

  So it was hours before Toby learned why Stan was on the Natchez at all, for Stan spent his time manicuring the already immaculate-looking pilot’s nest and then the iron stairs and pine gangways nearby. When Toby found him slurping a steaming cup of blackbean in the rear galley, Stan waxed eloquent.

  “Treasure, that’s why I signed on. Deckhand pays next to nothin’ and the time-current made me sick a sec or two, but I’m going to stick it out.”

  “Uh, treasure?”

  “I’m already looking for those hydrogen hats. Nobody never spied any this far downstream, so I figure you overshot, Toby, coming as far down as us. They got to be above us, for sure.”

  Toby nodded and listene
d to Stan gush about the star sapphires and fat rubies awaiting them and barely avoided laughing and giving it all away. On the other hand, it had brought him a friend in a place he found daunting.

  “Too bad you had to give up your quest, though,” Stan said slyly.

  “What?” Toby was using a bowl of bluebeans to keep his mouth busy and was brought up short by this odd remark.

  “You overshot another way. That Zom was who you wanted to find. Only you wanted the man in his first life, and that lies upstream.”

  How Stan could swallow whole the hydrogen hat story and yet put together the truth about Toby’s father from little slivers was a confoundment. Toby acknowledged this with a grunt and a begrudging nod, but cut off further talk. There was on the river a curious assumption that the river was infinitely long and that the rest of the esty a mere shadow wreathed about the telescoping downslope that sucked the river ever forward. So everything outside, esty-business and mechs and all, was a distraction.

  He had learned early in his downstreaming not to allow others to indulge in yet another sentimental tale of a poor boy without a mother’s cozy love or a father’s strong arm, heaved all unfriended upon the cold charity of a censorious world. That was not the truth of it and if he did not tell them true they drew back in white-eyed horror.

  You are handling them just right.

  The sudden spiking up of the Shibo fragment startled him. He stifled her, feeling oddly guilty.

  SEVEN

  Temporal Turbulence

  The river’s easy water lay close ashore. There the deep streams of bromium and mercury allowed the induction coils a firm grip, while the water current sped best in midstream. No hull-searing bromium streams broke surface here, so the watch was comparatively at ease.

  Mr. Preston explained that the Natchez had to hug the bank, thus separating it from the downstreaming craft that lazed in the middle, harvesting the stiff current. Toby learned a few of the deft tricks for negotiating the points, bends, bars, islands, and reaches that encumbered the route. He resolved early that if he ever became a pilot he would stick to downtiming and leave the uptiming to those dead to caution.