Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 1994 by Abbenford Associates

  Excerpt from The Sunborn copyright © 2004 by Abbenford Associates

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55904-1

  First eBook Edition: February 2005

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE: True Center

  PARTICLE STORM

  PART ONE: Far Antiquity

  ONE: Techno-Nomads

  TWO: The Sail-Snake

  THREE: The Rule of Number

  FOUR: Pale Immensities

  FIVE: Ancient Flavors

  SIX: The Song of Electrons

  PART II: The Eater of All Things

  ONE: Hard Pursuit

  TWO: The Shredded Star

  THREE: Besik Bay

  FOUR: Motes Such As You

  FIVE: Tiny Minds

  SIX: Lightning Life

  SEVEN: A Taste of the Void

  EIGHT: The Aperture Moment

  NINE: The Cyaneans

  Photovores

  PART THREE: The Time Pit

  ONE: Deep Reality

  TWO: Honeycomb Home

  THREE: The Far Black

  FOUR: A Day in Court

  FIVE: Trans-History

  SIX: The Charm of Commerce

  SEVEN: Animal Spirits

  PART FOUR: Gravity’s Gullet

  ONE: The Esty Wind

  TWO: Time’s Grip

  THREE: The Rock of Chaos

  FOUR: Unsettled Movement

  FIVE: Hard Spark

  SIX: Mind Surgery

  PART FIVE: Malign Attentions

  ONE: The Pain of Eternity

  TWO: Rational Laughter

  THREE: Casualties

  FOUR: Salvage

  FIVE: The Sea of Sand

  SIX: Eating the Storm

  SEVEN: Passing Currents

  Timeline of Galactic Series

  About the Author

  A preview of “The Sunborn”

  The Galactic Center Series by Gregory Benford

  TIME’S GRIP

  He lifted his right hand—

  —and it wouldn’t budge. It lay palm-up on smooth, cool timestone. The flesh near his knuckles felt cold, stiff. He pulled harder. A little give, not much. “Quath, I’m stuck. It’s got me.”

  He yanked harder. The right hand came free with an awful ripping sound—and a flash of white-hot pain.

 

  “What ‘event’? That stuff tried to eat me.”

 

  “You mean everything here can sop us up, like sponges?”

  ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER

  TIDES OF LIGHT

  “Benford’s most adventurous, most philosophical, and most scientifically creative novel.”

  —Houston Press

  “Mr. Benford is a rarity: a scientist who writes with verve and insight not only about black holes and cosmic strings but about human desires and fears.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  SAILING BRIGHT ETERNITY

  “As at the end of any great symphony, one can only stand and applaud.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “A worthy conclusion to what now should be acknowledged as the most important and involving hard SF series yet written.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD

  Fiction

  Beyond Infinity

  The Sunborn

  The Martian Race

  Eater

  The Stars in Shroud

  Jupiter Project

  Shiva Descending (with William Rostler)

  Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)

  A Darker Geometry (with Mark O. Martin)

  Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Against Infinity

  Cosm

  Foundation’s Fear

  Artifact

  Timescape

  The Galactic Center Series

  In the Ocean of Night

  Across the Sea of Suns

  Great Sky River

  Tides of Light

  Furious Gulf

  Sailing Bright Eternity

  Non-fiction

  Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia

  For Joan, forever

  PROLOGUE

  True Center

  Toby watched his father walk the hull.

  Killeen was a silvery figure, his suit tuned to reflect as much radiation as possible. A mirror man. Slick light slid over him as he moved, shimmering with the phosphorescence of stars and gas. Toby could follow Killeen’s smooth, slow lope as a rippling warp against the fiery background.

  —Dad!—Toby called over his skinsuit comm band.

  —What? Oh . . . —Killeen’s surprise came through the fizz of comm static.—How come you’re outside?—

  —Crew’s wondering how come you’re out here so long.—

  As Cap’n of the Argo, Killeen could do whatever he liked, of course. But Toby had felt the growing uncertainty among the officers inside. Somebody had to act, to say something, so he had pulled on his skin-tight suit and come clumping out here. Lately Cap’n Killeen had kept himself isolated. He came out here to hike over the fat curves of the ship’s hull, often not even leaving his suit comm line open.

  Killeen said distantly,—I’m navigating. Watching.—

  The big man’s watery image flowed, liquid with light, as Killeen came toward Toby across Argo’s blunt prow. His suit momentarily mirrored the black depths of a nearby molecular cloud, and Toby saw him as an eerie shadow-man against the distant burnt-orange wash of star-speckled gas.

  —You can do that from the bridge,—Toby said.

  —Get a better feel for it out here.—Killeen came close enough for Toby to make out his father’s stern expression through the suit’s small vision slit.

  Toby knew his father’s pinched-face, hedgehog mood, and decided to cut through it directly.—There’s near a dozen more crew on sick report.—

  Killeen’s lips thinned but he said nothing. Toby hesitated, then summoned up his courage.—Dad, we’re starving! Those gardens we lost, they’re not gonna grow again. Face it!—

  Abruptly Killeen whirled, adroitly sliding his magnetic boots in zero gravity.—I am facing it! We just don’t know any more techtricks. Even the specialists, the green-thumbers, they can’t get those ship gardens sprouting again. No help there. So I’m thinking, got that?—

  Toby stepped back involuntarily; Killeen’s flinty anger was quick and daunting. He took a breath and said hesitantly,—Shouldn’t . . . can’t we . . . do something different?—

  Killeen scowled.—Like what?—

  —Approach some of those?—Toby pointed tenta
tively.

  Far ahead of Argo floated faint metallic dabs of light. Not clouds or luminous dust. Artificial.

  —We don’t know what they are. Could be mechwork. Probably is. Mechs have built plenty near True Center.—Killeen shrugged.

  —Maybe they’re human, Dad.—

  —Doubtful. It’s been a fearsome long time since humans lived in space.—

  —That’s just what history says. We won’t know till we look for ourselves. We’re raiders by heritage, Dad! The Family’s itching to get out of the ship, stretch their legs.—

  Killeen gazed thoughtfully toward the blaze of Galactic Center.—One thing you learn as Cap’n is not to stick your nose into a beehive just to smell the honey. Those things’ll probably be hostile, even if they aren’t mech. Ever’thing else here seems to be.—

  Toby let the remark ride. It had been over a year, but still Killeen had not recovered from the death of his woman, Shibo. He kept up his duties as Cap’n but was often withdrawn, pensive, moody. That might have been acceptable for a crewman, but not for a Cap’n. The price in morale was getting too high.

  Still, Toby thought, Killeen was probably right. They were cruising directly into the center of the galaxy, where vast, indifferent energies worked. Huge, glowering suns. Incandescent clouds of dust and gas. Powers far beyond anything mere humans could manage. And somewhere here, intelligences to match the mad swirl of stars.

  He had studied enough history to know that humans had evolved near a star two-thirds of the way out in the galactic spiral. The galaxy was a spinning disk, like a toy—only bigger than the human mind could encompass. Out there at Old Earth, far from the cataclysms of True Center, living had been easy, quiet.

  One of his instructional drills had tried to get him to visualize a box that was a light-year on a side, the distance light itself could travel in a whole year. Out there, near the legendary Earth, that box would hold maybe one single star, on average.

  Here, at Galactic Center, such a box held a million stars.

  Suns crowded the sky like glowing marbles. Stormy streamers of red gas shrouded them. Stars swarmed like angry bees around the central axis—the blue-white brilliance of the exact center.

  Toby said quietly,—We could come alongside one of ’em, just for a look.—

  Killeen shook his head.—Solve one problem, maybe, but make another. A worse one.—

  —We’re starving, Dad. We have to do something.—

  Killeen turned and strode angrily away along the worn and pitted hull. His magnetos snapped down to the metal with a hard clank that Toby felt through his own boots. He trotted after his father. Walking here took a strangely gaited stride, coasting between steps, letting his boot clamp just long enough to get more momentum. Then he jerked the boot free, pushing forward, and was off on another glide. Toby was good at it but he couldn’t keep pace with his father.

  Argo had brought them here at near-light speeds, gulping down plasma with her magnetic scoops. There was fuel aplenty, thicker and thicker as they neared the center. Still, random chunks of rock had pocked and blistered her shiny hull. Now they were coasting slower, and Killeen used the chance to hull-walk with some safety. Argo had joined the gyre of matter here, which swung about True Center at one-thousandth light speed.

  Killeen reached a smooth ridge in the Argo’s complex bulges and stopped, as if on the brow of a real mountain, back on the planet of their birth. Their ship was a last grand construction of their ancestors, a vessel as big as a hill. Beyond him loomed a vast dark cloud, like a smudge of ink against the flaming stars.

  Killeen turned and looked back at his son. As Toby approached he saw Killeen’s expression shift to a plaintive longing.

  —If only there were planets here . . . —

  —Can’t be, I heard,—Toby said flatly, hoping to jar their talk back to realities.

  —Why?—Killeen asked sharply.

  —Look at these stars! They’re flying past each other so close, they strip planets clean free of their parent sun.—

  —Well, that sets planets drifting free, sure. So?—Killeen said stubbornly.

  —Sure, free. And frozen. Too far from any sun. No plant life. No food.—

  Killeen peered wistfully outward.—So in all this magnificence, there’s no place for life?—

  —Yeasay. Prob’ly none for us, either.—Toby ventured this opinion mostly to snap his father out of his illusions. Maybe even get him to rethink this foolhardy venture to True Center.

  Killeen gave him a sober, almost plaintive look.—We have to go on.—

  —Why? The radiation levels are so high, Argo can barely hold it off. Just coming outside here, you’re risking heavy exposure.—

  —It’s our duty, I tell you.—

  —Dad, your first duty is to Argo, to your crew.—

  —There’s something near the Galactic Center. We have to find out what.—

  Toby snorted in frustration. Killeen’s eyes narrowed at this, but Toby told himself he was speaking for a majority of the crew. That was his duty, too. He said bitterly,—Moldy old records hint—hint!—at something. That’s all. For that we’re supposed to . . . —

  He broke off as Killeen abruptly turned his back. The Cap’n of the Argo kept his shoulders square despite a sudden sag of his head. Toby saw that his father was fighting with himself, wrestling with dark demons his son would never fully know.

  Toby could only glimpse them through the clotted phrases of their conversations, through half-made gestures, through the veiled language of shrugs and scowls and sudden, blunt looks that revealed momentary, naked emotion. The Cap’n was never able to unburden himself, not even to his son. Not even, perhaps, to Shibo . . . when she had lived.

  Things were weighing on Killeen. Shibo’s loss. Killeen’s oblique relation now with his own son. The approaching whirlpool of True Center. All these churned within his father’s mind, Toby knew. An unhealthy soup.

  Killeen gazed out at the blue-black mass that loomed like an absolute wall beside the Argo. It was a snarled, inky cloud of dust and simple molecules, their ship’s instruments said. But Killeen always distrusted the crisp certainties of Argo’s Bridge diagnostics. Years before he had formed the habit of surveying from the hull itself, free of the reassuring, softening, artificial clasp of the ship. Or at least that was what he said. Toby suspected that he just liked to get clear of Argo’s confines. Like father, like son.

  Gloomy clouds like this dotted the pressing radiance of the Galactic Center, black punctuation marks in a riot of stellar fire. Killeen had chosen Argo’s course to take advantage of this cloud as a shield against lethal radiation levels. As Argo slipped slowly by veiled, murky filaments, Toby watched his father’s face tighten, wrinkle with a grimace—and suddenly open in astonishment.

  —There!—Killeen pointed.—Moving.—

  Toby thumbed a control on his neck collar. The helmet computer telescoped his vision and shifted to infrared. His field of view rushed into the recesses of the cloud.

  Something snaked at the edge of the mottled mist.

  —Go to high mags,—Killeen said tersely, his surprise gone, all business.

  Toby sent his vision zooming to max magnification. RANGE: 23 KM, his visor told him.

  The snaky thing wriggled—slowly, slowly. Its gleaming jade skin reflected the starglow. Sluggishly it spread gossamer-thin sheets along its body.

  —It’s alive!—Toby called.

  The green serpent was using sails. Natural sails, grown out of its body on fibrous spars. They caught amber starlight. In zero gravity, Toby knew, even the faint pressure of light was enough to give a measurable push. With nothing to slow it down, the twisty creature would pick up speed.

  —Look.—Killeen whispered.—There’s something more in that cloud.—

  The gently wriggling beast had no head, only a long black slit at one end. Toby thought this must be a mouth, because the push from its broad, shiny sails was taking it forward with the slit end ahead. And it was
sailing in pursuit of a blue ball.

  Silently they watched it draw nearer, nearer—and the slit-mouth widened. Something orange shot out and stuck to the blue ball. Drew it in. The slit-mouth yawned. With two gulps the ball disappeared.

  —Predators.—Killeen said.—And prey.—

  Toby said wonderingly,—Pred . . . ? How can anything live in a cloud? In free space?—

  A grin split Killeen’s star-tanned face.—In free space? Nothing’s free, son. Molecular clouds have organic molecules, right? So the astro types say.—

  —Those names, yeasay.—Toby recalled the voice of his teacher Aspect, Isaac, who gave him complicated lessons.—Oxygen. Carbon. Nitrogen.—

  Killeen gestured expansively.—Add all this starlight, cook for a few billion years. Presto!—

  Toby blinked.—Life’s hiding all through this cloud?—

  —I’ll bet the hunting is good at the edge of the cloud. Some things prob’ly live deeper in, where they can hide. Every now and then they’ll come out. To bask in the starlight. Get warm.—

  Toby nodded, convinced.—That snaky thing, it knows that. Comes around, looking for supper.—

  —The sail-snake eats the blue balls. But what’s the blue ball eat?—

  —Something smaller. Something we can’t see from here.—

  —Right.—Killen squinted.—There’s got to be some critter that lives off the starlight and drifting molecules alone.—

  Toby said wonderingly,—Plants? Space plants. I’ll bet we can eat some of them.—

  Killeen pounded his son on the back.—Be a wonder if we couldn’t. We know these clouds have the same basic chemistry that nature generates everywhere. Argo’s science programs told us that, ’member? So we’ll be able to digest some of whatever’s hiding in there, for sure.—

  Toby blinked, watching the jade snake unfurl its sails further. Was it green for the same reason plants were, to sop up sunlight in all colors except green? It began an achingly slow turn, showing curved black stripes. Had it seen their ship? Maybe they should run it down, see what it tasted like. His stomach rumbled at the idea.