Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

 

  “Can’t say more than that?”

 

  “Hell! Look, for Family Bishop True Center is a legend. Almost a holy place—only we don’t know why.”

 

  “Yeasay?” Killeen frowned. “Whatever we did, way back then, it’s lost.”

 

  Killeen stated moodily at the expanses. “For us, coming here—well, it’s like climbing the tallest mountain anybody ever saw.”

 

  Killeen shrugged, as if sensing when he would learn no more. “Okay, we’ll cool our heels a little behind that cloud.”

  Though ordinary crew seldom spoke on the Bridge without the Cap’n’s bidding, Toby decided to use his position as Cap’n’s son. He could not resist probing further. “Quath, what made your ancestors leave?”

 

  “Why? It’s a hellhole.”

 

  “But there aren’t any mechs here now.”

 

  “There are plenty on our tail,” Killeen observed mildly.

 

  “So we hide?” Killeen asked, frowning.

  Toby knew his father did not like to sneak by a challenge unless he absolutely had to. On the other hand, the Families had been running for a long time, learning the elusive crafts, and knew the virtues of being missing.

 

  Killeen shrugged again, as if he knew when he wasn’t going to get any more out of Quath. He tapped the control board. The screens veered again, coming around to the strange, warped star—which wasn’t a star at all any more.

  While they had been talking, the inflating fat-man’s belly had broken open. Now it spewed out white-hot streamers, the tortured sun finally shredding. Erupting gas swirled away from the split star, twisting. It rushed to join the smoldering rim of the great disk. As the view backed away, Toby saw the star as if it were a helpless animal, caught, struggling pointlessly, its life being sucked out. Lumps of it streamed into the disk, setting off fresh orange explosions there.

  Toby felt a chilling wonder mixed with fear. “How come the hole can rip up a whole star, this far out, and it’s so small we can’t even see it?”

  Killeen reached down and patted his son’s shoulder, and in his face Toby saw the same mix of emotions. “The way I understand it, that hole is small, sure—but it’s got plenty of mass in it. That much, all compressed together, it makes strong tides. The inner face of that star’s trying to orbit along one curve, see? Its back face, it’s a smidgen further out from the hole, so it wants to orbit along a little-bit different orbit.”

  “I guess. So?”

  “Well, they can’t both go their separate ways and still hold together and be a star, right?” From Killeen’s half-distracted gaze Toby knew he was getting coached by his tech Aspect. “But they can go their own way, if the star tears itself apart. So when the tides get strong enough, that’s what it does. The tides just plain shred it, like a rag doll.”

  Toby looked around. The whole Bridge crew was silent, watching their Cap’n. In their upturned faces Toby read hope and need, sobered by the spectacle. Killeen’s wary smile reflected the glare of the agonized, dying sun.

  In the quiet Quath spoke, her words carrying a faint hiss.

  Killeen’s face wrinkled with worry. “So it’ll get hotter?”

 

  Toby grinned. “I thought your kind looked but didn’t run.”

 

  “Ummm. Sounds like an excuse to me, big-bug.”

  <[Untranslatable].>

  THREE

  Besik Bay

  Toby didn’t like to take advantage of his being son of the Cap’n, but there were times when he couldn’t resist.

  This was one. They were running for their lives now.

  Every wall screen in Argo showed how close pursuit was. The mech ships were gaining on them. A narrow gap, getting slimmer. Their boxy, jumbled construction betrayed no concern for line or craft. Indeed, as Jocelyn explained, mech ships weren’t like bottles carrying passengers. They were multiple, interlocking machines, without even a single, intact skin of metal. The basic unit of organic forms was the individual. For mechs, single operating systems the size of cities were perfectly ordinary. And these ships were huge, misshapen bundles.

  Behind them came the Myriapodia craft with their immense ivory hoop suspended between them. The mechs did not turn to attack the Myriapodia. And Argo now fled into the shadowy tendrils of the immense Besik cloud.

  Bravado and loud talk dwindled away. Family spoke quietly in small, worried knots around the cafeteria. Toby didn’t want to sit idly and wait for news, so whenever he could fake an excuse, he slipped up to the Bridge. If he stood at the back, the Bridge officers didn’t notice him, or else they gave him a wink and passed on. Cap’n’s son, who needs trouble?

  Naturally, Besen wanted to come, too. Toby had yet to master the skills of dealing with women, as opposed to girls—and Besen was most definitely a woman. In the Family, a woman was one who displayed ability at a wide range of practical matters, not just in the kitchen or in bed—though they were no slouches there, either. Girls and boys were just that—but women and men were crew. With appropriate rituals to mark the change. So he found it impossible to not take her along.

  They stopped for a moment in the small Legacy chamber. It was really just a cranny tucked into the flowing corridor walls, and Toby came there often. Besen had hardly ever been, and said so. He was shocked.

  “But these are the Legacies!”

  “Well, sure,” she said half-apologetically—and then her eyes flashed defiantly. “But they’re just some slabs with writing on them. Not even writing anybody can read, right?”

  “Of course not. That’s why we’re keeping them, mounted here, so someday, when we meet someone who can read them—”

  “Yeasay, yeasay—but till then, they’re just puzzles, right?”

  Toby shook off the skeptical twist of her mouth and stood for a long moment just staring at the tall, gray slabs and their strange curly writing. Cool, solemn. Lines like wriggling snakes. Why did they fill him with longing?

  Besen was getting restless, so they went on to the Bridge. Slipping in was easy—a nod and a wink. Together they stood in the shadows, watching the screens for long hours.

  Besik Bay. Mysterious, murky, like the slag from a monstrous furnace.

  Somehow this cinder-black place orbited safely around the black hole. At times its orbit swung through the disk below, where it sucked in matter. A thicket of magnetic fields, coarse-woven like cloth, protected it. Then it broke free of the disk and soared above, slowly circling high above the fury. How it persisted, a dust ball in a skillet of slow-stirred liquid iron, no one knew.

  Argo now prowled the inky recesses of the immense Besik cloud, awaiting the arrival of the mech ships. Their hull cooled. The ship’s lean metal sinews relaxed, shortening, sending loud strums and pops through the corridors. The air lost its prickly ozone smell. But the banks of grainy dust and gas could not protect against sophisticated sensors forever.

  “How long you figure we got?” Besen whispered.

  Toby shrugged, wanting to appear more casual than he was. One thing he had lear
ned early as a boy—no point in loading up tension in your muscles. And no point in showing it even if you did. He casually rolled his shoulders, trying to let go of the tightness there. “Depends on what the mechs can see in here. We’ve got lots of tech designed to dodge and blind—but who knows what the mechs’ve got?”

  “How come this cloud has been here so long?” Besen waved at the huge, dense ridges of murk. “How come the black hole doesn’t grab it?”

  “Quath said something about it being artificial. A place to shelter ships, left here from ancient days.”

  “But who’d take the trouble to build some dustball like this?”

  As if in answer, silvery lightning arced from the dust bank ahead. Besen persisted, “And why?”

  Toby shrugged again. She insisted, “We ought to find out.”

  “Look, we’re rats living in the walls of this place. Ignorant vermin, to the mechs.”

  “That’s no reason to stop learning.”

  “Sure—but a smart rat pays attention to staying alive.”

  Killeen stood at the center of the Bridge. Activity revolved around him with officers coming and going, dealing with the many strains on Argo’s systems. Toby knew his father’s skills were being tested to the limit, but what troubled him more was Killeen’s stiff, almost glazed look. He wished he could guess what was going on behind those flinty eyes.

  And then such matters seemed soft and small and trivial, as the first mech ship burst into view. Boxy. Ribbed struts. Machined gray angles. It jetted straight out of a towering, gloomy mass—and began to turn toward Argo.

  The Bridge stirred uneasily. The mech ship was under high magnification and Toby could not tell if it was even armed—until it launched a stubby missile at them.

  Argo went on full alert. Wall screens displayed collision time estimates, defense options, maneuver possibilities. And then the missile was gone, evaporated by a defensive bolt from Argo. The Bridge crew cheered, but Killeen did not even smile. Toby found he was holding Besen’s hand tightly.

  Other mech ships burst into view. They approached Argo on complex paths, designed to make it hard to shoot at more than one at a time. Even though Killeen ordered the ship to maximum acceleration, they drew nearer.

  Long moments ticked by. The mechs did not fire. Officers on the Bridge speculated that the mech ships did not want to waste fire power on Argo’s defenses until they got overpoweringly close. But that made little sense, Toby thought, since the humans were so outnumbered.

  Ships darted and swooped. They seemed eager to force Argo out of the cloud, down a long lane of cindery dust. Toby could feel Argo’s straining engines as a steady trembling in the bulkhead behind him. Killeen gave orders quietly, stone-faced.

  Then something quick and glowing swept past Argo, coming into view as a brilliant white line, like a vibrant, moving scratch on the wall screens. The Bridge crew gasped. It was the Cosmic Circle, as the Myriapodia called it—and now Toby saw its true scale.

  This close, the segment seemed straight. Toby called up his Isaac Aspect as the luminous line slowly drew away toward the mech ships. He had seen this hoop before, at the last world they visited, but he had never understood it. “What is that thing?”

  I would have been happy to instruct you at any time, if you had only inquired—

  “Come on, spill—and make it quick and simple.”

  Very well, though you will miss much very interesting materiel. These were called “cosmic strings” by the ancients, though as you see they are really loops. My older, nested Faces do not resolve this oddity.

  “What’re they for?”

  They are not for anything—they are natural. They formed early in the universe, as compact folds in space-time. Like the wrinkles that form in the ice of a frozen pond. They are only a few atoms wide, but very long. Think of them as a natural resource, born of the Big Bang.

  “A few atoms wide? Come on! This one blazes away like a star.”

  That is because it passes through the strong magnetic fields here, which drives electric current through the string, lighting it up.

  “I don’t get it,” Toby mind-whispered to his Aspect. “Must be hard to carry, even if it’s thin. Why haul it around?”

  In many ways, the most useful of all tools is the knife. This is a blade the size of a world. Imagine what you can cut with it.

  Toby did not have to imagine. He had seen it core a whole planet. Now the hoop sped toward the mech ships, escorted by the spiky-shaped ships of the Myriapodia. The hoop ebbed and flowed with latent energies.

  Suddenly the Myriapodia released it and the great scythe shot forward. It wriggled and looped, so fast the eye could hardly follow. Quick knots formed, raced around the rim, and dispersed in flashes of amber and blue. The mechs tried to flee, to dodge.

  Too slow. The vibrating hoop passed through them, snaking and looping to catch each ship as it sped by. After its passage, the mech ships looked the same, even under high mags. But then as Toby watched a mech ship began growing, getting longer. It had been cut in half. It was trying to hold itself together, using the supple, shiny metals mechs preferred.

  They could not hold. The ship split in two, scattering fragments and exhaling a plume of orange gas. Shards spun away.

  Toby thought of the strangeness of nature which left thin, glowing hoops, like a signature of whatever had made the whole universe. And how life taught itself to use the signatures, to its own ends.

  Then he realized that everyone around him was shouting and laughing with glee. Besen was hugging him. He ignored his Isaac Aspect, who was still trying to lecture him, and joined in the celebration.

  Their joy did not last long.

  Before they had even quieted down, more mech ships appeared. These kept their distance, as if afraid. But the cosmic string was gone. It had plunged into a vast shadowy dust plume and the ships of the Myriapodia had followed, to rein it in again—Isaac said, with magnetic grapplers.

  The mechs edged closer. Again Argo had to flee. Soon they were forced back, back, back—and out of Besik Bay entirely, by the gliding, steady mechs. Again virulent radiation from the churning disk far below began to cook Argo’s skin. Looking at the seethe and flare of the disk, Toby remembered that it was digesting its new meal, the doomed orange star. He could almost feel its baking heat.

  Something caught his eye, a thin column of cool blue. It rose out of the very hottest center of the disk, the great white ball of blinding light. As he watched, small bright whorls raced around inside the column. He realized the whole thing was moving, pencil-straight. Fleeing the central hell.

  Eerie, beautiful, a shimmering blue. Like a flowing river, cool and welcoming, he thought.

  One of the galactic jets. There is another on the other side of the disk, pointing in the opposite direction. Both are ejected by the black hole.

  Resplendent, graceful, its ever-changing elegance seemed violated by the Aspect’s ho-hum description. Toby was about to thrust Isaac back into its digital hole, then paused. “How come a black hole lets out anything?”

  The hole spins, because it acquires the rotation of all that has ever fallen into it, in all its billions of years. Matter comes falling in from the inner edge of the disk. But the hole’s strong magnetic fields seize that mass. They fling it around, faster and faster. The spin makes hot matter corkscrew up around the poles and then out. As it cools it emits the soft blue radiance.

  To Toby it seemed that a hole was a hole, and things fell in, period. But he pulled his attention away from the immense spectacle on the wall screens, whose vivid colors lit the haggard faces of the Bridge officers.

  Especially his father. Killeen watched the mech ships behind them, more all the time—small, quick, drawing into a complex pattern. His eyes flitted with caged energy over the views, and a leaden pallor came over his brooding features.

  They were trapped. Argo had fled the Besik cloud in the direction toward the inner edge of the disk. Killeen had turned up, to escape—and
more mechs had come speeding in to block that way.

  “These small craft—they’re probably suicide mechs,” Killeen muttered. He glanced at Toby. A fleeting smile. “Smart ones. Same principle as that bomb back in the Chandelier.”

  “Can’t we get by them?” Toby asked earnestly. His father was a genius at slipping out of tight spots.

  Killeen shook his head soberly. “Too many. Too many.”

  Lieutenant Jocelyn had been working at the control panels and now she stepped back, looking at the trajectory options their computer presented. Webs of three-dimensional curves, swoops and dodges and artful evasions. Her intense eyes searched the screen, at first hopefully, and finally, slowly, coming to rest on one curve. “A single option, Cap’n. We have to go inward. The mechs don’t have that covered.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Killeen said. “It’s death that way.”

  “There’s no other path. In all this, not a single—”

  Killeen nodded. “So that’s where we head.”

  Jocelyn stared at Killeen in disbelief. The entire Bridge became very quiet, the only sound a faint buzz of an open comm line. “We can’t. The heat—”

  Killeen turned slowly, moving with a deceptive quiet. Yet the air around him seemed to steam and seethe with energy, purpose, granite resolve, as he looked each officer in the eye. With a slight, tilted smile he nodded to Besen, who shouldn’t have been there—letting the silence build, his gaze sweeping every corner of the Bridge, and finally coming to Toby.

  “We must. That Besik cloud was there for some reason. A place to cool off, maybe, a way station. But not the final destination, no—it’s just a mass of drifting dark gas. The ancient writing from the Chandelier—it spoke of someplace here, at the True Center. There’s nothing out here but mechs and death. That place must be somewhere further in.”

  “No!” Jocelyn cried. “We can’t last a day at these—”

  “Quiet!” Killeen barked.

  Again silence fell. The Cap’n pointed to the glimmering, ghostlike blue of the galactic jet. “I take that as a sign. A pointer. And we will follow it.”