Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  But the real reason Toby thought Quath should be outside was that Toby now had no excuse to go hull-walking himself. He felt an itchy, restless energy that he couldn’t erase with workouts in zero-grav. At least when he did visit Quath, it was in spaces so big that Toby could practice his low-grav skills.

  At the moment Quath was in the abandoned agro dome. The high arch reflected back Toby’s huffing and puffing as he did rebounds off the walls. He would coast across the dome, maybe try to bank a little in the ventilator winds. Zooming toward the opposite wall, he pinwheeled his arms in mid-flight to bring his legs around, so that they could absorb momentum and rebound like coiled springs. A lot more fun than lifting dead weights, like some kind of demented machine.

  Quath stood at the dome floor’s center, eyes swiveling to follow Toby’s ricocheting. She sent a hissing note of derision:

 

  “I wouldn’t expect a giant cockroach to understand.”

 

  “You eat stuff that would gag any self-respecting pest.”

 

  This startled Toby. He grabbed a steel strut and clung to it, panting. “Really?”

 

  “Were they, well, like us?”

 

  “Ugh. I’m trying hard to think of you as a buddy, big-bug, but if you go on like this—”

 

  Toby could sense the capitals in Quath’s hissing mind-voice and decided to not pursue the matter. Quath was serious. Maybe it was common for intelligent beings anywhere to think of themselves as the crown of creation—The People—and everybody else as a smart animal at best. Savvy smarts and egomania went hand in hand. Or pincer in pincer.

  After all, suppose Quath had been a thousand times smaller. It wouldn’t matter that she was supersmart—if Toby shook her out of his bedroll, he would step on her without a thought. He certainly wouldn’t inquire into what she thought about the nature of life.

  “I think I could pass up honors like that. Anyway, many-eyes, you seem to have settled in here okay.”

 

  “So generous of you. Look, I was sent here to see if you can figure what your own folks are doing in their ships.”

 

  “They’re still hauling that huge ring. Only it’s glowing more, a kind of ivory.”

 

  “It sure seems to keep them away, all right. But why are your people gaining on us?”

 

  “Uh, what’s a cusp?”

 

  “More geometry. Between Isaac and his numbers and you with your always using math talk, I don’t know—”

 

  “Oh yeah? Look, I bite into an apple, it tastes real good. Where’s the geometry in that?”

 

  Toby hated it when Quath said something and then the programs in his head, and in Quath’s too, couldn’t make enough sense between them to get the job done. All that came through was a fizzy blurt and a bland, flat [untranslatable]. “Okay, then where’s the geometry in a kiss, huh?”

 

  “Oh, glad it’s so obvious. How silly of me.”

 

  “Yeasay, we call it ‘sarcasm.’”

 

  “Let’s just call it [untranslatable], bug-boy.”

 

  “Aaahhh!”

  This was driving Toby up the wall—literally. He was glad he could work out his frustration by climbing through the struts of the dome, leaping across wide spans, burning calories to clear his mind. It was getting hot in here—hot all through Argo, in fact. The domes were absorbing radiation from the astronomical fireworks outside.

  Stinging sweat dripped into Toby’s eyes. He clambered over struts and beams, swung in the nearly zero-grav, and let go. He spread his arms and beat against the air, flapping like an awkward bird, and slowly fell toward Quath. The alien caught him at the very last moment before he would have smacked painfully on the deck. “Oooof! Thanks.”

 

  “That’s part of being human, you ol’ giant grub.”

 

  “In search of what?”

 

  “Oh no, not again!”

 

  Toby scuffed up some dead soil with his boot, sending a shower of gray dust spurting up into the low-gray dome. He still had some irritations to work out, some thinking to do about his father. He leaped and swung up on one of Quath’s extended telescoping arms. “Maybe I—”

  —Toby! Bring Quath to the Bridge, right away.—

  Killeen’s sharp voice cut into his concentration so abruptly that Toby let go of the arm, coasted, and thumped back into the dirt. “Okay. But Quath won’t fit in—”

  —Get moving!—

  It turned out that Quath could scrunch down in the corridor outside the Bridge, bend two eye-stalks around the entrance, and see most of the wall screens. Quath looked uncomfortable, her steel-jacketed legs cocked at odd angles and wedged against bulkheads, though she said nothing. Killeen wanted Quath to try more communication channels with his own kind, the Myriapodia. “After all, I spent days trapped in her belly, once,” Killeen said casually.

  Toby blinked. His misgivings aside, he had to remember that his father had been through horrendous adventures with Quath. Maybe they communicated with each other in ways he didn’t fully appreciate.

  Killeen assigned several Bridge Lieutenants to help the alien with technical problems, using Argo’s long-range antennas.

  The Bridge buzzed, but Killeen kept good ship’s discipline, and the excitement remained controlled, visible mostly in pinched faces and narrowed eyes. The great wall screens showed scenes that shifted with dizzying speed. The ivory hoop hung suspended between three strange, angular ships. Somehow their shape—geometry again, Toby thought—would have told him that they were of Quath’s kind, if he had not known.

  The hoop itself flickered and strobed with eerie plays of the spectrum. Flashes of gold and crimson ran along it, then faded into the milky light, like runny stains sinking in a deep chalky sea.

  Killeen paced the Command Deck of the Bridge, his boots ringing on steel, hands carefully clasped behind him. Toby knew he did that so nobody could read through fidgeting fingers his own anxieties and tensions; it was the kind of thing that a Cap’n had to do.

  Toby felt an upwelling of concern and love for the controlled disguise this big man struggled to maintain. What was the
cost? Would anyone ever know?

  And there was much to be agitated about, Toby saw. The wall screens flickered. Now they showed a scene so strange it took a long moment to even sort out what he was witnessing. An orange ball hung shimmering against the backdrop of thousands of gemlike stars, not pinpoints crowding the sky. The ball swirled with mottled storms.

  Toby had decided it was an oddly colored star, nothing exceptional—until it began to bulge on one side. Blue-hot flares rose all along its fiery edge. The bulge extended, grew banana yellow. It was as though the star was turning itself into a giant egg. But to give birth to what?

  Killeen turned and saw his son. Waving him over, the Cap’n said, “Even stars are prey for it.”

  “Huh? What’s happening?”

  “Sorry—I forget, watching this for so long, that the lives of stars are not so gripping to everyone.”

  “I repeat—huh?” Toby was used to his father going off into distracted ramblings.

  “This star is about to be gobbled up. See?”

  Killeen’s fingers danced on a command plate. The view backed away from the star, whose side kept swelling like a fat man’s belly at a feast. Then, entering the frame came an angry red smear, spreading like a stain across the wall. “The great disk,” Killeen said. “There are Family legends of it. Some call it the Eye of the Eater.”

  “Disk?” The viewpoint kept backing away.

  Toby saw that the orange star was just at the edge of an immense plane of festering, smoldering fire. The plane was moving. Streams of blood red and hot, phosphorescent orange curved away into the distance, slowly circling about some axis far out of view. “Oh—the star’s getting sucked in?”

  Killeen crossed his arms and watched the doomed sun stretch itself, now rippling with vagrant yellow plumes and dark purple veins. “Yes—but not sucked in by the disk itself. The Eye of the Eater is matter that was sucked in before.”

  Toby’s Isaac Aspect rasped disdainfully,

  He is copying ancient lore. Not for a moment do I believe that he understands—

  “Hey, who do you think you are?” Toby shot back in a subvocal whisper. “We all repeat what you Aspects and Faces tell us—we sure don’t have time to learn all this tech-stuff!”

  Still, if he would credit the classical sources who developed the theories, who made the dangerous measurements—

  “Gimmie a break! We’d be nothing but dry bones if we waited for you Aspects to yammer on till you’re happy.” He stifled Isaac.

  Killeen went on, “That mass, it’s stuff flowing inward, getting a bit closer every time it circles. So the disk is a highway, that’s all. The villain in all this, him you can’t see.”

  Toby got it now. “The black hole? It’s pulling this star apart?”

  Killeen nodded. “A rare event, and we’re just in time for it. The hole swallows stars—but first it likes to chew ’em up.”

  The panorama grew, retreating from the star, bringing more of the huge, churning disk into view. The Eye of the Eater was a furious red at its rim, working with gales of burnt orange and fierce yellow. Each flaring pinprick was like a momentary bonfire—but Toby reminded himself that these bonfires were bigger than whole planets.

  As the vista broadened, he saw that the disk got brighter toward its center. Reds shifted into roiling greens and wrathful purples. Even further in, a hard blue glare seethed. He could barely make himself look as the view swung inward toward eyehurting brilliance. The disk revolved about a white-hot ball sizzling with blistering energy.

  “Where’s . . . where’s the hole?”

  Killeen pointed at the white ball. “In there—but we can’t see it, because everything’s so hot at the inner edge of that disk.”

  Isaac put in,

  I have conferred with High Chandelier Aspects—they are getting even harder to understand!—and translated their complaints. I must say, I agree with them. Correct attribution is important!—otherwise we lose our past. Now, all this was discovered in 3065 by Antonella Frazier, who even wrote an epic poem about it. A cosmic irony—“that the blackest of places wears a white cloak.” I can dimly recall hearing of this great work, and . . .

  He let the Aspect run a little, not really paying attention. Isaac and Killeen’s tech-Aspect were probably using the two living humans to subtly compete. Did such chip-beings have jealousy, envy, spite? Of course, he and his father were slinging the techtalk around pretty heavy, maybe trying to impress each other, too. The ancient Aspects were nested inside the newer ones, to ease translation. Their ideas and feelings came through as well, an emotion/data stew.

  Small human motives, all dwarfed by the huge scale of events. All this was beautiful, in a weird way, but hard to understand.

  Toby jerked himself out of his reverie. “Why’s everything so hot?”

  “Friction. All that stuff, orbiting tighter and tighter around the hole, it rubs up against other stuff—gas and dust and whatnot. Heats up.”

  Toby tried to take it all in. The disk glowered, like a red eye with a white bulb smack at the center. A monster’s glare. The Eye of the Eater—only you couldn’t see the Eater, the blackest thing in the universe. As near as he could understand it, a hole in space. Things drained into it. “So the hole eats stars, I get that, and likes to chew its food first. The disk is all the stuff it’s ripped apart lately.”

  “And it’s been eating ever since the galaxy was born.”

  “You mean—that plate of gas—it was once stars?”

  Killeen nodded distantly, staring at a particularly spectacular eruption. A blue-green geyser curled up from the disk like a maddened snake, flicking yellow tongues.

  “What better way to serve up food for the Eater, than on a plate?” A grim chuckle.

  Toby looked around at the strained faces of the Bridge crew. Lieutenant Jocelyn had been waiting to speak, standing off to the side as if she didn’t want to interrupt a conversation between father and son, even on the Bridge. She stepped smartly forward, long hair wafting in the warm ship’s air, and said, “Cap’n, we’re getting more hull heating.”

  Killeen instantly snapped out of his musing. “Near the danger line?”

  “Not yet, but—”

  “Coolant circulating to the max?”

  “Yessir.”

  Killeen scowled. “How’s our spin?”

  “We’ve got all the independently moving sections of the ship at their top rotation.” Jocelyn’s full, muscular frame stayed at strict attention, but Toby could see from her twitching fingers that she was worried.

  They were spinning parts of Argo to smooth out the heat load. The ferocious rage of that brawling gas could singe their hull, and crisp up the human cargo nicely. Toby recalled Quath’s gourmet comments about cracking open carefully cooked primate bones, savoring the marrow. He shuddered.

  Killeen smacked a fist into his palm, a momentary release. “I don’t see what more we—”

  came the fizzy speech of Quath, beamed over general head-comm.

  The Bridge crew turned as if one. They stared at the half-seen alien who stood absolutely still in the corridor outside.

  Killeen was the first to speak, with sardonic humor. “I wondered when you would begin to spill your lore.”

  Quath’s two eye-stalks rattled against the hatchway.

  Killeen laughed. “Glad to know you care so much. Those antennas we erected—I suppose your new link with your ships works better?”

 

  “Well, we’re learning.” Killeen grinned. Toby could see his father relish the conversation, his face losing its lined tension.

  Partially.

 

  “We don’t need all that extra mass you lug around
.”

 

  “You look like you’ve grown some more eyes, since I saw you last time.”

 

  Toby knew the word “Myriapodia” simply meant “many-legged,” but the funny trilling way Quath sounded the word carried an air of awe and pride, too. Killeen had told Toby to get here in a hurry, then had ignored Quath completely. Toby was beginning to see that Killeen had different ways of dealing with the alien, maybe better ones.

  “This Besik Bay. You want to hide there, many-eyed?”

  The crew murmured. Toby knew they all suspected that they were being used by the Podia for some murky purpose, and this brought that question close to the surface again. But what choice did they have now?

  Quath rattled her eye-stalks again.

  “Ummm—diplomatic of you. But I asked what you think.”

 

  Toby put in, “Besik? No Family of that name.”

 

  Somehow Quath made the wall screens jump and swivel. They whirled around as the ship’s sensors sought a different target—and locked on an inky blob, high above the glowering red disk.

 

  Killeen gestured to Lieutenant Jocelyn. “Take us up that way.” He had always been one for quick decisions, and the Bridge jumped to comply. Killeen turned back to Quath, his expression veiled. “What were your ancestors looking for here?”

 

  “What kind of weapon?”