But the creature had a majesty about it, too. A beauty in its glistening hide, its graceful movement. Like an immense swimmer in a black pool. Maybe they’d leave it be.
—We’d never have seen them from the bridge. Those instruments would’ve filtered out what they didn’t think was important.—Killeen was all business again, his wonderment suppressed. That was part of the price of being Cap’n.
Toby gaped, still fascinated by the sail-snake. He knew what his father said was right. Nobody could have guessed what they’d see out here. But Killeen had come out, again and again. Hammering away at a Cap’n’s problems, thinking, worrying, pacing the hull, looking without knowing what he was looking for. And some of the crew had thought he was crazy.
Toby listened as Killeen called the Bridge and ordered Argo toward the shadowy cloud. Understanding came slowly amid the crew. He could hear on comm as the ship stirred with excited voices, with hope, with joy.
—Dad?—he finally asked.
Killeen was giving a flurry of orders. Crew had to prepare to hunt, to forage, to pursue strange game in inky vacuum depths. To do things they had never tried before. Had never even imagined.
Killeen paused and said curtly,—Yeasay?—
—We can hole up inside the cloud for a while. Rest up. Get our bearings.—
Killeen shook his head furiously.—Naysay. Resupply, that’s all. There’s True Center. Look at it! We’re so close now.—
Toby peered ahead, through dusty clumps already wreathing the hull of Argo as the great ship headed into the recesses of the giant cloud. At max mag he could make out the exact center of the galaxy. White-hot. Beautiful. Dangerous.
And his father, he now saw, could never be deflected from that goal. Not by starvation. Not by deadly risks. Not by the weight of past sorrow.
They would fly straight into the gnawing center of all this gaudy, swirling chaos. On an impossible voyage. Looking for something, with no clear idea of what it might be.
Killeen grinned broadly.—C’mon, son, this is what we were born to do. We’ll go onward. Inward. There’s all our Family’s past here, somewhere. We’ll find out what happened, who we are.—
—Crew doesn’t like that kind of talk, Dad.—
He frowned.—How come?—
—This is a scary place.—
—So? They haven’t seen the glory of it, haven’t really thought it through. When the time comes, they’ll follow me.—
—We’re running for our lives, Dad.—
—So?—Killeen grinned, a jaunty human gesture amid the wash of galactic light.—We always have been.—
PARTICLE STORM
The carapace glides like a hunting hornet.
Its thorax is of high-impact matte ceramic. Bone-white lattices mimic ribs. Storage balloons inflate like lungs as it exchanges plasma charge. Slow rises, fluttering exhales.
This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight, remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent of the substrate, whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings now encased in habit. Function converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible tension, struts like statements.
Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.
It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.
It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.
Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless as the rain of protons.
Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.
Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.
Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing luminescent ideas.
From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.
Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic needles through prey light-minutes away.
For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to think long. Within them, data dances.
The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here) and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.
Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.
It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.
Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.
They must. They are an unresolved issue.
You term them “primates”?
Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.
I/You consider them irrelevant.
The underlying issues still vex.
They are nothing! Debris, motes.
They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.
We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in history, demand completion of this ancient task.
This policy is e>/~*~< old. We/You should reinspect it.
They are nearly extinct. Press on.
Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests weyou reconsider ourmy assumptions.
They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!
Some would say that evolution works as equally upon youus as upon them.
Nonsense. WeYou direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.
They were once able to alter their own imprintings. To write changes in their carbon kind.
They lost it as weyou diminished them. Now they are the same as the unthinking forms, the animals—shaped by random forces.
They were once important players here. WeYou should understand their threat to us before expunging them.
Possibly they harbor information harmful to usyou—so say our most stable records.
Those are sheltered against the Mass Eater’s radiant storm and so should be well preserved.
By its nature weyou cannot know what this hidden information is.
Why “by its nature”?
There are many theories.
Precisely. Does it not seem curious that something in ouryour makeup makes it somehow impossible for usyou to know what these humans carry? That such knowledge is blocked for us? A curious aspect of our deep programming.
May carry. Such ancient records are suspect.
WeYou cannot risk disbelieving them.
Long ago the philosopher [|~] resolved such questions. WeYou are imprisoned within our perception-space. There will always remain matters youwe cannot know.
But if these matters affect ourselves? Disquieting.
Living with ambiguity is the nature of high intelligence. Still, to lessen uncertainty weyou should exterminate the remaining bands.
And lose their information?
Very well—archive them first. I now point to this latest incursion— already it nears True Center.
There may be risks in erasing them.
Nonsense. YouWe have destroyed many such expeditions before.
First, let scouts find them accurately. The usual primate-hunter units will track them, perhaps inflict minor damage—one must give such lower forms some reward structure, remember.
You/We advocate delay?
No—cautious action. Remember that higher forms than us will judge ouryour actions. Prudence demands care. Earlier events involving these primates, on two separate planets, have pointed toward some significant yet poorly defined role they play. They may carry information—and what are they, but information? Indeed, what are we?—which can bring the attentions of minds above ours.
Very well, caution. But how?
A trap.
PART ONE
Far Antiquity
ONE
Techno-Nomads
Toby had barely gotten back inside the air lock and was shedding his suit when Cermo showed up. Toby wore nothing but shorts under his vacuum suit, and the ship felt colder than outside. He rummaged in his locker for his overalls, shivering, and Cermo said, “Where you been?”
“Where’s it look?”
The big man towered over Toby. Cermo had been called Cermo-the-Slow in years past, but now was leaner and quicker. A broad grin seemed to divide his face in half with delighted anticipation. “Heard all the ruckus. Cap’n found us somethin’ to eat, right?”
“We’ll see.”
“Doesn’t change anything for you, though,” Cermo said with a sly chuckle. He was a big man with a soft-eyed, mirthful face, so the chuckle carried no malice.
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re on maintenance detail today.”
“So? Okay, I’ll check the biotanks, the usual.”
“Today’s not usual.” Again the sly grin.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sewage seals broke.”
“Again? No fair! They went out last time I was on maintenance, too.”
“Well then, you’re an expert.” Cermo handed Toby a mop. “Apply your know-how.”
The seals were always popping, because the pressure regulators had to be tuned just exactly right. Human waste was a vital ingredient in the biotanks. It had to be pressurized, filtered, and the final product flattened into squishy mats—which the farm teams spread around among the big bowl-shaped crop zones. The Argo was a long-voyage ship, designed to keep every drop of water, every sigh of air sealed tight inside its skin.
Easy to understand, hard to do. Most of the Argo crew were relatives, all that remained of Family Bishop. They came from Snowglade, a bleak world Toby remembered rather fondly. Toby was of the youngest generation of Family Bishop. That gave him the flexibility of being fresh and green, but the sour fact of the matter was that Bishops had few skills to help them run the Argo.
All Families had been techno-nomads, learning just enough to survive while they were on the move. Always running, dodging, staying ahead of mechs. Not that most mechs paid them any special attention. Humans at Galactic Center were more like rats in the walls, not major players in anything.
Argo was as friendly to its passengers as a ship could be, a fine artifact from the High Arcology Era. Trouble was, its systems assumed the passengers had educations that Family Bishop could only guess at.
Example: the sewage. Neither Cap’n Killeen nor Cermo nor anybody else had been able to make head or tail of the instructions for the pressure system.
It assumed something called the Perfect Gas Law, the instructions said. The foul stuff that actually flowed through the smooth, clear pipes was certainly not perfect, and it obeyed no law anybody ever heard of. It spewed out without provocation and often with what seemed to be insulting timing. Last week, a howling brown leak sprayed the Family when it was assembled for a wedding. That took a certain fine edge off the celebration.
Toby joined the other poor souls who had drawn maintenance this week. He breathed through his mouth but that helped only a while, until the smell got up into his head. His teacher Aspect, Isaac, spoke to him in his mind while he bent over, pushing the foul stuff with a sponge brush.
I have conferred with the most ancient records you carry in your chip-library. Interestingly, the term you use is actually derived from the name of the man on Old Earth who invented the flush toilet. An Englishman, legend has it, he made a fortune and benefited all humankind. His name, Thomas Crapper, has come to be—
“Hey, give me a break.”
I thought perhaps some distraction would make your task easier.
“Look, I want distraction, I’ll play one of the old Mose Art musics.”
You mistake the name, I fear. That should be Wolfgang Ama—
Toby mentally pushed the sputtering Aspect back into its storage hole. Aspects were recorded personalities out of Family Bishop’s past, some quite old, like Isaac. They were really interactive information bases written on small chips, which Toby carried in his neck slots. Isaac was only a shrunken slice of a real, long-dead human personality, of course, mostly just old lore that might come in handy. Isaac had tried and tried to explain that Perfect Gas Law, but Toby never really got it.
Knowing about Thomas Crapper wasn’t going to be any use to Toby, but he got a smile out of it; so maybe that was some purpose, after all. The Family used Aspects to help them get through troubles, carrying the masses of knowledge they needed to survive while living amid technology that was far beyond them.
“Hey, you sleepwalking?”
Toby came alert. Besen was standing beside him, neat and trim, her part of the cleanup done. Toby still had half a hallway to sponge up. “Uh, I was thinking deep thoughts.”
Besen rolled her eyes. “Oh sure.”
He gestured with his mop at the brown-stained deck. “Bet you don’t know who this stuff is named for.”
Besen looked skeptical when he told her. “Honest truth,” he said.
Besen gave him a grin and he marveled at how wonderful she looked lately. Fitted out in overalls, auburn hair tied back, spattered and grimy, to his eyes she still had a radiance. Girls bloomed just once, like flowers, before turning into women—but that was enough. Besen seemed impossibly fresh, alive, fun.
“I was just remembering some of those plays we had to listen to,” he said. “They apply here.”
“Oh?” she said skeptically.
“Sure, you recall. ‘Good night, good night! Farting is such sweet sorrow.’ Great romantic stuff.”
“That’s ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’ Some romantic you are!”
One of their private games came from a truly ancient chip that Besen carried. It had actual texts from Old Earth, including a gray geezer named Shake-Spear. A great poet from some kind of primitive hunter-gatherer society, Besen thought. This Shake-Spear was one of the scraps humans had retained across the Great Gulf that separated them from the Old Earth cultures, and Besen liked to quote frags of such stuff, just to show off.
“Well, I got it nearly right.” He grinned. “Wait’ll I finish here, we’ll go have some fun in the weightless gym.”
Toby liked the zones of Argo at zero-g. Most of the ship’s sections spun, creating an artificial centrifugal “gravity.” In the weightless gym, they could bounce off trampoline-walls, make carom shots, cannonball into shimmering spheres of water.
Besen shook her head. “That’s what I came to get you for. There’s another seal break.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes. And we’re elected to help tidy up.”
“Where?” He hoped it wasn’t in a weightless zone. What made them fun also made them horrible to clean up. Gunk stuck to every c
onceivable surface, and some inconceivable ones.
“The Bridge. Come on, hustle!”
When they got to the ample, softly lighted Bridge, Toby was appalled at the sewage leak. Thick scum ran down one whole wall—luckily, one bare of electronics or display screens. It stank. He knew all the uniformed officers by first name, of course, as Family members—but they carefully ignored him, Besen, and the fragrant brown stain. They stood with hands firmly clasped behind their backs, frowning sternly, concentrating on tasks that did not offend their lofty officers’ dignity.
The Bridge was a hallowed part of Argo, where momentous decisions about the whole future of Family Bishop were made, often in split seconds. To have it invaded by smelly waste seemed a deliberate affront of the mocking Sewage God.
The Bridge data screens flickered and swam with views, sliding slabs of information, estimates and four-color projections made automatically by the Argo’s ever-vigilant computers. Without this level of control, Family Bishop would be reduced to what it was—a gang of barely literate nomads who had lucked into a comfortable ship.
Still, even here the years they had occupied Argo showed their toll. The carpet had a big yellow stain and scuff marks. Here somebody had gouged the wall, and over there a repair team must have thought they could help by cutting a sawtooth gap and then abandoning it. Random chunks of servos and electronics gear cluttered the working surfaces. As nomads, their lifelong habits made them carve up and strip away, haul off and make do. Clearing up didn’t come naturally.
Toby and Besen tried to eavesdrop on the cross-talk conversations of the Bridge as they worked. The ship was indeed diving deeply into the molecular cloud. A low tone was gathering, a long bass note sounded by the dust of the cloud rubbing against the ship’s balloonlike lifezones. It was as though the interstellar gas outside was playing Argo like an instrument, sending through her a mournful call.
“Kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Besen asked.
“Like a funeral dirge,” Toby whispered.
“The rub of reality,” Besen said theatrically. “A symphony of space.”
Furious Gulf Page 2