Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  But frozen? It lives in fire.

  Only its image in space-time is frozen. To you/us, the swallowed mass takes forever to make its final descent into the throat of oblivion.

  Very well; such technicalities bore more than they illuminate.

  True, for some portions of you/us.

  Yet the primates are still drawn to this nexus. What was that language you/we cited earlier, to illustrate how they think?

  The image was like moths to the flame.

  Bio logics are so simple. So linear. How can we/you be sure of their processings? Know their minds?

  You/We cannot.

  But with resources—

  As you/I must face, there are matters which you/we cannot know even in principle.

  Memory returns—yes. Some truths can never be proven within any logic system.

  I/We did not refer to so obvious a theorem. Blind spots lurk in our very way of comprehending the universe. For these no one can compensate.

  Surely you/I do not suggest that our/your kind share blindnesses with such as these primates!

  All sentient forms have ways of filtering the world. In this all are alike.

  Surely this does not mean that you/we cannot understand lesser forms and their primitive worldviews in their entirety?

  Perhaps it does.

  Lack of comprehension in such a grave matter is troubling.

  Enough musing. As a practical matter alone, you/I oppose destroying this latest primate incursion. It would cost greatly.

  This refers to the quasi-mechanicals.

  They follow the primate craft and protect it.

  We/You have dealt with their kind before.

  They have greater craft than the humans. You/We have suffered from their skills.

  They are tools! We/You use the quasi-mechanicals to track the humans.

  They carry a hoop of sheared discontinuity. This makes tracking simple. But it would make a most disagreeable weapon, if turned against us/you.

  I might remind us/you/them that we/you possessed several such discontinuities—once. Admittedly they were lost in the assault upon the Wedge in the era e {+[~ | ]}.

  A grave mistake, one many of us/you opposed.

  You/I need not relive that error.

  Well spoken, as the one/many who made it.

  Such distinctions are meaningless. The experience has been absorbed into all our selves.

  Lessons unlearned still bring pain.

  No one could have anticipated that the Wedge would swallow, digest, and then use the discontinuities, to build itself further. To make itself even more difficult to penetrate.

  Caution would have saved us/you this instructive lesson of ours/yours.

  You/We now understand that no one/many can even in principle know the stochastic geometry of the Wedge interior.

  Excuses are useless now. The price will be great if we attack the quasi-mechanicals and their discontinuity.

  You/I agreed, long ago, to use humans against the quasi-mechanicals. Yet we/you now find that they seem to have formed an alliance. This we/you could not anticipate. Carbon-based life has protocols we/you do not know. Need not know.

  I/You wish it were so. But they were here before our kind and—

  Many of us/you reject that thesis.

  How can you/I? Organic forms arose first.

  There are philosophies which hold that metal and ceramic were the original materials, shaped in electrolytic discharges, organized by accretion of clay and ion. The carbon-based forms devolved from that.

  Historical records rebuke such theories.

  Even so, your/our precious records still cannot tell us why we should fear the humans. Why especially humans? There were other carbon forms.

  Which you/we eradicated.

  With no remorse.

  Conceded. But your/our ingrained drivers say that our kind must fathom the humans.

  I/You urge that we/you at least damage them a bit. To reduce their powers.

  Stay away from the discontinuity.

  The human ship is moderately protected but we/you can productively damage it. There is no need to let them pass unharmed.

  Detecting their craft among the galactic disk debris works only intermittently. Further, the quasi-mechanicals and their discontinuity warp the entire region, making precise location difficult.

  Action is crucial! You/We know that they have conversed with one member of the magnetic kingdom.

  That is an unfortunate turn. It confirms the information conveyed by a submind.

  Which was this/us?

  We/You delegated study of the remaining primates to |>A<|. It wrapped itself around the planet of these primates’ origin.

  And reported little of use.

  True. But |>A<| arranged for the primates to believe that they had their own ship, and freedom of movement. This made it far simpler—given the primates’ psychology-sets—to use them. They formed an alliance with the quasi-mechanicals, which brought them here.

  Why involve the quasi-mechanicals at all? All this history obscures more than it illuminates.

  They may know what the primates do not.

  That is an infinite amount.

  I refer to what you/we do not know. What we seek.

  Without knowing quite what that mysterious stuff might be. I tire of such obscurations. Fetch this |>A<|, that I/we might dip into it.

  Done. Light-travel time will delay |>A<| In the interval, we should do more.

  Then you/we concede that humans should be pruned, reduced.

  I/You suggest that we lay another trap for them? Something to draw them in, give us a known vector for them.

  That might clarify the basic issue.

  Which is?

  What do they seek here? Carbon-based forms wilt under the sling of hard radiation.

  True, this is not their province.

  The deeper concern is, why do we/you wonder about them so? When we/you should simply kill them.

  In other words, why do I/we exist? Is a critical voice necessary? Is our divided intelligence here simply to irk you/we?

  Enough rumination. Act!

  PART II

  The Eater of All Things

  ONE

  Hard Pursuit

  Toby eyed Besen warily. Why couldn’t she leave him alone?

  Like most women, she assumed that talking about things that bothered you, getting it all out, made them better. Obviously. Automatically.

  Toby’s experience was that pretty often that just made them worse. Bringing vague, smoky feelings into the glaring open daylight, sharpening them up bright and shiny with words, making them more concrete—well, then the problems looked even harder. At least to him.

  He sighed. They were eating in the clattering, chattering, communal cafeteria. All around them people were murmuring earnestly, the big room alive with excited speculations about their mission.

  It had been a week since Killeen’s dramatic speech at the Gathering. A week spent hammering their way in toward the blazing, star-swarming True Center. A week when Argo throbbed and lurched and rumbled in the buffeting plasma winds. A week that people seemed to be enjoying.

  Pulse-pounding adventure was better than sitting on your haunches, mulling over matters. Family Bishop was tired of the soft life in Argo. A wonderful ship, a grand inheritance from their distant, time-dimmed ancestors, sure—but in the end just a smart can. In Toby’s judgment, Bishops weren’t at their best when they were cooped up with nothing better to do than talk. Like right now.

  “I appreciate your asking and all,” Toby said at last, struggling to be diplomatic. After all, Besen had been trying to cajole him out of his moody silence. “Don’t get me started, though.”

  Besen smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes you close up tight as a vacuum seal.”

  “There’s a lot of adrenaline pumping lately, that’s all.”

  “Why, sure.” She looked startled, her lips canted in puzzlement. “We’re leaving those mechs way behind.”
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  “Huh!” He snorted. “A rat in a cage can dash back and forth all it wants.”

  “We’re not caught!”

  “I don’t see any way out—do you?”

  “Plenty. We haven’t even sighted the disk around the black hole yet. There may be room to hide, then—”

  “The mechs know this place. They’ve got telltales planted around here, for sure. Smart snoopers.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “It’s a good bet. Something at True Center has been a fixation of mechs for a long time—Quath says so.”

  “You believe everything that big collection of pants says?”

  “Sure do.” Toby shot back. “At least Quath doesn’t try to cheer me up.”

  Besen frowned prettily. “Ummm. You are down in the mouth.”

  “I’m not celebrating, is all.” Toby sipped his lotus juice and picked up a grain cube. He rapped it against the table and a small white weevil came squirming out. “Only way to get these bugs out, far as anybody knows,” he said with disgust, sweeping it away.

  “It was that Erica, she let them get free.”

  “Easy mistake to make when you can’t read the directions.”

  “She could’ve asked her Aspects!”

  Erica had mistakenly let the self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders escape years ago, but their daily irritations reminded everybody and brought her name up like a curse.

  Toby was sympathetic. Who could have known that the ugly squirmers would pop out of their container, all ready to start eating?—which was, after all, their job. They startled poor Erica into dropping the vial. Who could guess that then they’d get into all the grain crops? The worms belonged among the vegetables and apple trees, just as the inscription said, in some dead language. Just Erica’s bad luck—and theirs—that she was in the grain dome when she opened the cylinder. He shrugged. “She’d been working hard seeding.”

  “I think the Cap’n should’ve whipped her for it.”

  “He doesn’t like whipping.”

  “What a Cap’n likes and doesn’t like, that doesn’t matter,” Besen said stiffly. “What’s good for the Family, that comes first.”

  “Sure. And a smart Cap’n gets his crew all fired up about what he wants.”

  Besen blinked. “Oh, so you’re saying Cap’n’s got us dancing his dance, only we’re hearing different music?”

  “Could be.”

  “And you don’t want to say anything in public? Out of loyalty?”

  “I don’t like to go against him.”

  “Well, you’d sure be unpopular.”

  “Yeasay—and I got to admit, everybody’s spirits are running pretty high.” He gestured around at the cafeteria, jammed with animated faces. There was an electric smell of skittering excitement. People so long on the run greeted a hard pursuit with elation; the thrill of familiar danger.

  Besen’s lips pursed with concern. “You really don’t think this is just a way of getting away from the mechs, do you?”

  “I don’t know what it’s really about.” Toby rapped his grain cube angrily. Another weevil fell out onto the table. With relish he squashed it with his thumb. “Pays to be careful, is all.”

  Besen smiled. “Look twice for weevils?”

  “Weevils can be anywhere.”

  Besen gathered herself visibly and tried to shift their mood. “Let’s go up to observation, see if we can spot any.”

  “Great.” He tossed aside the grain cube, then thought again, rapped it a third time—no more weevils—and bit in. “Umm, not bad—when you’re starving.”

  “You’re always starving. And since the sail-snake and the rest, we have plenty to eat.”

  “Let’s go.” Toby was grateful to her for giving him an exit from an uncomfortable conversation. He didn’t like his brooding to color the mood of the ship, not when his father had pulled everybody together so well, had them putting in long hours of grunt labor and smiling about it.

  They made their way up the broad helical ramp at Argo’s core. All crew were working harder now, dealing with the agro domes. The level of radiation from outside was climbing by the hour. Smoldering infrareds, sharp ultraviolets, unseen spectra biting at the crops. They had polarized the domes to the max, but stinging energies still got through. So it was a relief to forget all that, to slump into the netting of an observation chamber and watch the stunning brilliance outside.

  In the cool, dim core of the ship the observation room was crowded and Toby could not get a good clear view. The field of glowing stars was confusing, crisscrossed by eerie splashes of radiating gas. Then the Bridge switched to a Doppler-shifted frequency, and details leaped out. Going to blue-rich frequencies picked out things moving toward Argo and dimmed everything else.

  And there they were: brilliant pinpoints of blue, eight of them evenly spaced around a circle.

  “Impossible to miss,” Toby murmured.

  “The mechs must not care whether we notice,” Besen said.

  “Or else they really want us to.”

  “Why would they? More effective to sneak up, I’d think.”

  “Maybe they want to spook us.”

  “Into doing what?”

  “Maybe just what we’re doing,” Toby said grimly.

  “Hey, we’re gettin’ away from them!” a big, hawk-nosed woman protested on Toby’s left, gouging him with a sharp elbow. She was an Ace, from the wastelands of Trump. Trained to follow her Family leader.

  “Yeasay, throwin’ dust in their faces,” a man joined in. A Fiver.

  “We can outrun any damn mech,” another woman announced proudly. Her accent was of Family Deuce, so thick Toby could barely understand her.

  Toby gritted his teeth. “Yeasay, yeasay. I was just wondering—”

  “Not right, Cap’n’s son goin’ on like that.” The hawk-nosed woman’s elbow poked him again.

  “Sorry, brothers and sisters,” Toby said, though he was getting irritated. “Uh, ’scuse me.”

  He got up and worked his way out of the press of bodies. Everybody seemed to be looking at him, sour-faced. Or else avoiding his eyes. Besen followed, whispering, “That old bag, she’s a flap-mouthed gossip. All those Trump Families are.”

  Toby was already feeling bad about the incident, and he stopped before leaving the room to catch another glimpse of the screen. Family Bishop members were murmuring, speculating, even laughing—and not just among the Snowglade folk, either. They argued and elbowed and laughed with the Trump Families, too. An electric smell came from the crowd, a fidgety excitement.

  It struck Toby that the room was jammed not so much because they wanted to see the gaudy pictures, but to provide a place to gather, gossip, and grumble. All to sharpen their sense of themselves as a fragile human Family in the face of the abyss outside.

  That was essential—holding together. Argo held mostly Bishops, from Snowglade, but also Families of the planet they had just left, which its natives called Trump. Those Families had names Toby didn’t understand—Aces and Deuces, Jacks and Fivers. There were Queens, though, which by logic should have had the same customs and history as the Family Queen of Snowglade. But they didn’t.

  Killeen called these Trump Families the Cards. They were fiercely loyal and prone to follow hot-eyed leaders. Back on Trump some had obeyed the crazy man who called himself His Supremacy, a fierce-faced type the Bishops had finally had to kill. Somehow this had meant that the Cards then transferred their loyalty to Killeen.

  It made no sense, but then, not much about Trump did. Toby flatly disbelieved the idea that the Cards had gotten their names from some ancient game. Maybe a game had been made up using those names, sure. But Families were ancient and hallowed and not the stuff of trivial matters.

  Still, the Trumps were a bit hard to take, butt-headed and ignorant. But the Snowgladers were no prize, either, when you looked close.

  Rooks liked to blow their noses by pinching the bridge of the nose and letting fly into the air. They laugh
ed if anybody was in the way. The hawk-nosed woman was a Rook, true to form.

  On the other hand, Pawns saw nothing wrong with taking a crap in full view of anybody who happened by. A perfectly natural function, they said. What’s to be embarrassed about?

  Knights burped and farted at the most formal occasions—they didn’t even seem to notice doing it.

  Bishops spit whenever they felt like it, which was pretty often.

  Rooks preferred to pee on plants, maintaining that since this was part of the Great Cycle of Life, it must be good for them.

  And Kings would cough smack in your face, smiling after they did it. Some said that in the old Citadel days the lost Family of Queens had even made love in public, feet pointed at the ceiling, rumps thrusting in the air free as you please. They had some sort of theory about doing it as a show of demented social solidarity. Toby didn’t really believe that, it was utterly fantastic—but who could truly say what people of the deep past had believed and done?

  Still, the Snowglade Families overlooked these differences, acts that seemed to others like gross social blunders, and held together. And aside from minor incidents, they extended the same hand to the Trumps, even if they were butt-stubborn and ate with their mouths open. The Family of Families.

  Toby knew he had an obligation to keep the social glue in place. Not that he had to like it. He smacked a fist into his palm as he walked away from the jammed room.

  Concerned, Besen asked, “She really got to you?”

  “Naysay. Forget it.” But he knew he wouldn’t.

  TWO

  The Shredded Star

  Toby missed having Quath live outside. Anything that big should be free beneath the stars, not closed in.

  He was sure of this despite knowing that Quath’s kind had evolved out of a burrowing species that liked to dig in snug and tight beneath the ground. How such a race developed intelligence was a riddle. It seemed unlikely that something that wormed into dark, smelly crannies and ventured out to hunt for game would need much in the way of smarts. On the other hand, he reflected, humans had holed up in caves a lot, or so Isaac said. What made a creature develop intelligence was a deep question. After all, mechs came to have quick minds and nobody remembered when or how. Not even Isaac.