Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  On this particular one they hauled ashore, because a passenger thought he lived near here, though could not spot any landmark either, but wanted to try his own luck. Toby went ashore and slogged through brambles and sandy loam across the neck of the horseshoe, arriving well before the Natchez got there, coming hard-chuffing around the curve.

  These branches and inlets lay in his past, yet despite their here-and-now solidity they had wriggled into new shapes, oddities of growth, even whole fresh porticoed master-houses. Slowly it dawned on Toby that none of this surprised Mr. Preston.

  “Every time we go upriver, things lay different,” Mr. Preston said, twirling a toothpick in his mouth as his only sign of agitation.

  “Damnfire,” Toby said, a new curse he had picked up and was proud to sport. “What use is a memory man, then?”

  “Better than nothing, is all.”

  They were near to drawing all the water there was in the channel, a curious tide having sucked streamers up and into the clouds above. The hull caught and broke free and then snagged again, so Mr. Preston had to order the induction motors up to full, wrenching them off the bed of the river by sheer magnetic ferocity.

  “Sure seems that way,” Toby said. “Why’d you hire me as guide, then?”

  “Your knowledge is for certain fresher than any I could find. And you’re young enough, you don’t think you know everydamnthing.”

  They were going slow, deck humming, riding on magnetic cushions that Toby thought of as bunched steel coils. Mr. Preston said that wasn’t far wrong, only you couldn’t feel or see the wires. They were more like wrestling magnetic ghosts.

  “Sometimes a time-tide will come and cut a little gutter across a neck of land,” Mr. Preston went on. “I saw one once while I was shipping downstream, no bigger than a garden path it was. Shimmered and snaked and snapped yellow fire. Now, there were handsome properties along that shore. But inland from there was a worthless old farm. When I came back uptime on the old Reuben, that li’l time-twist had cut a big course through. Diverted the whole damn river, it did. Shooting off crimson sparklers, still. That old farm was now smack on the river, prime land, worth ten times more. The big places that had been on the river stood inland. No ship could reach them.”

  “Lucky,” Toby said.

  Mr. Preston grinned. “Was it? Lot of people got mad, accused the family that owned the old farm of starting that time-wrinkle.”

  “How could they?”

  “Who’s to say? Is there a way to figure it? The past is labyrinth, truly. Give time a shove here, a tuck there? Anybody who knows how, sure don’t talk about it.”

  TWELVE

  Whorl

  Toby felt himself lost in a dense, impenetrable maze of riverways. Coming upstream against the time-pressure now refracted the very air.

  Smooth and serene the majestic mud-streaked expanse had seemed as he drifted down obliviously in his skiff. Now the shore was morasses and canebrakes and even whole big plantations, the grand main houses beautiful with their ivory columns. He often gazed up at the world hanging overhead, too, lands of hazy mystery. A ripple passed, flexing the entire tubular esty, and Toby felt suddenly that they all lived in the entrails of a great beast, an unknowable thing that visited the most awful of calamities upon mere humans by merely easing its bowels.

  The whorl came upon them without warning. It burst through a channel of bromium, coiling like a blue-green serpent up into the shimmering air. A thunderclap banged into the pilot’s nest and blew in two windows.

  Toby saw it from the mid-deck where he was helping Stan and two men with some baling. The glass scroll window shattered but did not catch Mr. Preston in the face, so when Toby raced in the pilot was already bringing the Natchez about, clawing away from the swelling cloud-wrack.

  The whorl soared, streamers breaking from it to split the congealing air with yellow forked lightning. Toby saw it hesitate at its high point, as if deciding whether to plunge on across and bury itself in the forest-wall hanging far overhead. Then it shook itself, vigorous with the strength of the newborn, and shot riverward.

  The silver river seemed to yearn for this consummation, for it buoyed in up-sucking ardor and kissed the descending column. Instantly a foam of muddy water and a mist of metal soared through the time-whorl, writing a great inverted U that bubbled and frothed and steam-hissed amid more sharp thunder-cracks.

  “Damn!” Mr. Preston cried. “That’ll block us for sure.”

  Toby held tight to a stanchion. “Can’t we shoot by—”

  “It’ll riptide us to pieces, we try that.”

  A blistering gale broke over the Natchez. “You figure it’ll last long?”

  “This big a one, you bet.”

  The Natchez beat steadily away from the whorl, which twisted and shuffled its water-feet around on the skin of the river. Mud and logs sucked up into it tumbled and seemed to break apart and come together again. In the midst of what looked like a water-wave Toby saw a log burst into orange flame. It turned slow-motion, streaming black smoke, and smacked full into the river.

  Then he saw the mechs. They had been hiding among some weeping willows. Silvery and quick, they fled as the whorl lashed sidewise.

  Suddenly it made sense to him. The whorl was a way into this esty tube and thus a gateway to be policed. It was also the obvious place to wait for anyone, if you knew their ways.

  Mechs didn’t know him. But Killeen did.

  Toby called, “Wait! Let’s stay a while, see if it—”

  “Shut up, boy. We’re running downtime.”

  Even the Cap’n could not overrule a pilot reversing course for safety. Toby stood frozen as the mechs lifted off the shoreline. They were angular and reminded him of the Rattler that had nearly killed him long ago. These were more advanced.

  They were coming. They would kill his friends.

  Tentatively he resurrected his sensorium. Nothing. Then—

  A faint echo, a note he had not heard sounded for so long—

  Then he did not think anymore but simply ran, down the iron stairs and pine gangway and over—into the water. He flailed about for a desperate moment—he had forgotten his battle gear—then struck for shore.

  Stan shouted behind him but he did not look around. He estimated the mechs could see him clearly by now. Good.

  But then he heard a whooshing boom, like a giant drawing its breath. The mechs glided beside the funnel mouth of the whorl. A ribbed light pulsed from them. It pushed the whorl . . . slowly . . . faster . . . but not toward Toby. Toward the ship.

  The sucking came skating on the choppy silver waters. It swooped with train-wreck malevolence down upon the Natchez and drew it up, elongating the decks like rubber stretched to its limit and then cracking. A deckhand jumped overboard and his body stretched to translucent thinness.

  The Natchez squeezed and contorted and obeyed the call of warping forces. It shot up the whorl-mouth. Tide-tides wrenched and wracked it and then it was gone in a brilliant last pearly flash. The glare burned Toby’s face.

  Toby had no time to think or mourn. The mouth reeled, crackled and snaked and swept down upon him. He had time to gulp air. Burning orange foam broke over him.

  Legs, arms—both stretched involuntarily, as though some God were playing with his strings—yet he was weightless. He knew he must be rising up on the whorl but he felt a sickened, belly-opening vacancy of infinite falling. He struggled not to fill his lungs as the foam thronged at his skin, infested his nose, pried at his eyelids. Don’t breathe! was all he could think as he prepared for the time-crushed impact his instincts told him was coming at the end of such a protracted fall.

  He smacked hard. In the river again.

  Bobbed to the surface. Paddled, gasping. Ignored the wave-wracked waters. Made the shore and flopped upon it.

  THIRTEEN

  Pursuit

  The mechs were shattered on the shore. Something had blown big chunks of their ivory skins away.

  In each hole a midm
ind lay splintered. Something about the unerring way each shot had found the operating intelligence made him smile without humor.

  A sweet dust of time blew high above the river and there was no sign of the whorl. Or of the Natchez.

  Toby followed the boot tracks he found over the next rise. The long strides led inland, so there was no time-pressure to fight. He was wet and dazed but he hurried.

  Inland the lush forest dribbled away into scrub desert. He realized whoever it was might back around on him so he retraced his steps and erased signs of his passage from the water and onto safe stone. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. He could not let his excitement get him killed here. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. He mussed up a scraped bush and tree so that it looked to be from an animal, from biting or itch-easing. Stealth spelled safety.

  His head pounded with a headache that worked its way into his eyes. So much had happened but he put it aside, not thinking about Mr. Preston or Stan, just keeping on. It got dryer and a big-winged thing with teeth flapped overhead, eyeing him for possibilities. He flung a rock at it.

  He wished for a blunderbuss tree, recalling the man who had threatened him with one of the awkward weapons. But a big fallen branch served to make a club after he stripped the bark away.

  The boot tracks showed heels dug in from haste. He let his senses float out ahead of him. His sensorium was faulty, flickering.

  Everything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Four-winged quail hovered in shadow, hoping you’d take them for stones, but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Snakes evaporated, doves squeaked skyward, rabbits crazy-legged away in a dead heat. Fox, midget mountain horn, coyote—they melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the desert was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness and bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their circles of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. Vacancy was life.

  He caught a smell fetid and pestiferous and knew instantly what it was. In the slaying fields of several Lanes he had smelled it.

  He worked his way around it by nose alone. Slow, slow. When he finally looked down into the bowl-like field he could see only sprawled dead. Men lay putrefying, faces puffed and lips bruised. Most were gutted, appearing to give birth to their own entrails.

  The time-whorls sometimes did this, disgorging people or matter from times and places no one knew. What the induction ships did by laboring upstream, a flick of space-time could accomplish in an instant. Sometimes carrion like this could still be saved for the Zom business.

  But these men all wore the same face.

  Toby turned to merge again with the brush and there he was.

  The same features—angular, hollow-eyed with fatigue, a familiar cut to the jawline and the downcurved mouth. Toby compared it with his memories, carried now for what seemed like years, taken out and studied every day.

  “Who are you?” Toby asked.

  The voice was low and edged. “What do you want?”

  “Are you real? I mean—”

  The eyes gave nothing away. But that was how they had always been. “You know me, son.”

  “In this place? Don’t know what I know anymore.”

  The face constricted as though wolfdark memories pressed against it from deep inside. “The mechs sent out copies of me. I tried to warn you. Before the mechs hit the portal city, Andro helped me make a general release kind of message—”

  “I saw it. A Walmsley character had it at a big library thing, a pyramid—”

  “You’ve been there?” He was startled.

  “Yeasay. Mechs got it. I had to run.”

  “I’ve heard about this Walmsley. The portal people—Andro, remember?—say he comes from ’way far back. Warned me about him.”

  “He seemed like a shrunk-up dwarf, that’s all.”

  “Sure can’t judge much around here by appearances.”

  Toby moved carefully away from the bodies. This Killeen looked pretty nearly right, but then so did the ones with their guts vomiting out.

  “What’re they?” Toby gestured at the corpses.

  “Copies. The mechs I just shot were making them.”

  “Sending them downriver?”

  “Must’ve been. They were gatekeepers, I guess.”

  “That whorl out there on the river?”

  “Yeasay. They know how to open and close it.” The man who looked like Killeen jerked a thumb at the river where the mechs lay. “They figured out how to get in and out of Lanes.”

  “I can do it too.”

  The man again blinked with surprise. “Where’d you learn?”

  “Worked it out.”

  “Let’s get out of here then.”

  Toby didn’t want to look as though he were stalling and make this man cautious but he was still not sure. “Where’s Besen?”

  “I don’t know. I lost track of the whole Family when the mechs busted up the portal city.”

  It sounded all too convenient. He could kill this one if he could get it off guard. It was in field gear but without helmet.

  The man said, “Look, more mechs for sure will come to replace those.”

  Toby didn’t like how this man kept pushing him. And this Killeen was so haggard and washed out. That could come from the copying process, whatever that was. “I’m not so—”

  Let me speak to him. Please.

  It was Shibo. A fragment rising in him.

  Please. In the name of all we have been to each other.

  It had an authority he had not felt before. As if it had been waiting for this moment, saving its resources.

  He hesitated and she reached up through him somehow. In a crisp instant he felt how it had been for her. She had somehow rewritten herself into his neurological circuitry, lodged fragments in his Aspects, hidden. All before he had decided to strip her chip from his spine.

  If he let her get any control this Killeen could take him easily. He began tracing through his own recesses, searching for her. She fled. Then her voice chimed in him, clearly, unafraid:

  Ask him if he remembers whether Family Knights take their boots off first.

  “Huh?” Toby said. The man gave him a puzzled look.

  If Knights keep their boots on when they’re on top.

  Without knowing why he was doing it, Toby repeated the sentence.

  The man’s mouth opened and closed and then said, “What? Who’s talking?”

  “Shibo.”

  The man said slowly, “I thought you said once you didn’t know.”

  The sliver of Shibo said thinly,

  Knights keep run-ready.

  Toby repeated it and the man said, “So the one on top has to keep his boots on.”

  She answered,

  What makes you say “his”?

  Killeen answered, “You said you never got on top.”

  Toby was getting uncomfortable with this but he repeated Shibo again, who said,

  I wanted to be on top, be fast, wear boots.

  “You learned how.”

  Good teacher.

  The man grinned. “Seemed like you learned somewhere before me.”

  Never learned your moves, naysay.

  “Compliments, even. You always know how to get what you want.”

  Toby struggled to say something. All the knotted energy surrounding Shibo, of his carrying her as an Aspect, of his ripping her out with crude tools when she went awry—all of it collided and tightened his throat until he could not speak.

  Anything, anything to get it again.

  The tiny voice was so desperate it ope
ned a flood of sadness in Toby. He croaked out the words for her. The man’s eyes widened and Shibo cried to Toby alone,

  It’s him! Him!

  “Maybe there’s a way for even that.” Killeen peered into his son’s eyes but without seeing him.

  That’s the point.

  When Toby repeated it he was surprised to find tears had run down and over his lips.

  “You always liked to joke about it.”

  Not really jokes.

  “No, they weren’t.”

  Toby clasped the man and knew he was Killeen. Shibo laughed when they both did, not a joke but joy.

  A long moment passed between them. “Dad, Dad . . .” No words.

  Toby grinned and the two of them pounded each other on the back, the laughter just bubbling up and out, and so he took a moment to register stresses arcing in the air, a pressing sharp presence—

  The sky ripped open.

  Above them a blackness spread like oily ooze across the Lane.

  “Down!” Killeen called.

  Pointless, Toby thought. He crouched. Whatever was up there was sweeping fast. It ate the Lane. Edges turned up like a fire curling the pages of a book. But this thing was consuming the esty itself.

  * * *

  I could not stop the Highers from allowing this.

  * * *

  He knew instantly that this was the Mantis. Its manifestation was different, tinged with currents of emotion and echoing knowledge which he could not catch.

  He looked around them and felt the Mantis now as a seethe in the air. Killeen was down in firing position but their weapons plainly could do no good here.

  A jab of pain. He turned as a small winged thing lifted off his right arm. A metallic buzz, anxious with its single-minded task. It shot away.

  * * *