Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  Jocelyn had managed to get the Argo’s antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk—and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.

  “What’s that?” Jocelyn called. “It sounds terrible.”

  Killeen’s mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note, and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. “Maybe the Magnetic Mind’s not the only thing that knows how to live on electricity.”

  Toby said, “Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?”

  Jocelyn nodded. “It’s the ones that are connected to those bright lumps.”

  Toby’s Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:

  These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy. Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence. They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field.

  “Doesn’t look like they’re enjoying dinner much,” Toby said sardonically.

  The sudden intrusion of the star’s mass has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die.

  “How come the Magnetic Mind doesn’t die, then?”

  It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers—or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of it, and were singed for their trouble.

  Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting starmass—and dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star’s shredded mass was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among the slender, lacy beings.

  Toby watched their distant deaths, and despite the gulf separating him from those reedy cries, he felt a strange connection. Such truly alien forms could never be brethren. They were separate nations, but still caught with humans in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of splendor and travail. Beyond matter itself, gifted with extensions of the senses no human could ever comprehend, they none the less shared the veiled dignity of being forever incomplete, of always emerging, a common heritage of being finite and forever wondering.

  But the rest of the Bridge was staring beyond the splashes of color from the disk. Now visible, coming toward them, was the hexagonal of ships flown by the Myriapodia. Once more they held between them the shimmering pearly hoop, a weapon bigger than worlds.

  “What’s going on?” Killeen wondered out loud. “Where’s Quath?”

  Jocelyn added, “Even that cosmic string seems small here.”

  The Myriapodia ships bore down upon the Argo relentlessly. They accelerated along the magnetic field lines, invisible slopes that steepened by the minute, pitching down toward the inner edge of the blazing accretion disk.

  Into the pit of hell. The air brimmed with hard, dry heat. Toby gulped and wondered if he would live out the next day.

  SEVEN

  A Taste of the Void

  As Toby heard them recounted later, the next hours on the Bridge were electrifying. He wasn’t there to see them, though. On a ship, chores have to be done on time—no excuses. Not even battle releases all of a crew to gape and thrill.

  His assignment was seeding one of the seared agro domes. A team of five sweated beneath the blue-white violence in the dome’s sky, glowing from near the Eater of All Things. They had to keep the complex biodiversity here limping along, so plants that had perished under the sting of radiation had to be replaced, and new ones watered, nurtured, sheltered. Hard, ground-grubbing work.

  It was a relief, in a way, after the tension of the Bridge. Using your muscles was sometimes easier than using your overstretched mind. He felt the ship moving under him as he toted and dug and fetched, knew that something was happening.

  More mechs, he later learned. On the Bridge screens they appeared as flickering images, barely detectable by Argo’s systems. The earlier mech craft had been simple compared with these. It stood to reason. Some higher-order mech-tech had driven humanity from space. These were probably the type—surprisingly small, quick, elusive. They plunged down the jet after Argo and dispersed. Argo’s detectors lost them entirely.

  They attacked from several angles, using strategies Killeen and the others could not even understand. Toby heard only a brief rattle of strange static in his sensorium, and then a whoosh as the dome above him vanished.

  The hit took the dome’s air in a howling, hollow rush. Toby gasped for air and got nothing. He went spinning up, away from the soil, which rose after him in a dirty storm.

  The wailing gale ebbed as he windmilled his arms, rotating to face upward. A huge hole in the dome swelled before him. He snatched at a broken strut, got it, hung on.

  I’m dead, he thought quite clearly. Already his lungs heaved, wanting to breathe.

  A painful jab in his leg. A sharp sliver stuck from it, flung by the whistling air. He swung by one arm from the strut, smacked into another.

  Angry shouts in his ear—on comm, but no time to listen.

  Ears throbbed with pain. Then no more sounds. Air all gone.

  He launched himself downward. There was a self-sealing airlock there, already closed. That kept the whole ship from vac’ing out from a single breech.

  But it was a long way down and purple flecks danced at the corners of his eyes. They made crazy, enticing patterns and he spent some time trying to figure out what they were trying to say. The dirt below looked no closer and his arms in front of him flapped fruitlessly, like clothes drying in a warm breeze.

  In his mouth a metallic, flat bite. The taste of the void.

  Purple flies filled his vision. Then a sharp spark of yellow.

  Lightning. Playing in the bowl. Licking at bodies as if tasting them.

  He dodged away from the slender fire. It missed him and seared the bulkhead beyond.

  Ears drumming, fighting to keep his throat closed, chest searing. The soil was closer, in fact very close, and then it hit him in the face. His lungs convulsed but he refused to open his mouth, let his last ball of breath escape into the emptiness.

  Scrambling, tumbling, off balance but going on anyway. Across the powdery dirt. Streamers of vapor bursting from the ground, a gray fog.

  Ears pounding, hammering his head. In his sinuses, spikes of agony.

  The square lock, wobbling. Hard to keep it in focus, stand it upright by tilting his head. While his legs plunged and worked, pounding him forward.

  Hands out in front. They hit the lock door and punched a big red plate. The emergency entry dilated. He dived through it.

  The first sound he heard was a whisper, then a high-pressure roaring. His ears popped. Only then did he wonder about the others in the dome.

  By the time he got his bearings back, it was too late. The other four in the dome never made it to the lock.

  Two went through the big hole in the dome and were forever lost. The lightning had fried two more.

  Nobody knew whether the lightning was a mech weapon or just natural. Despite the damage to their internal electrocoupling, Argo’s tech recorded the two selves in enough detail to provide Aspects in future chip-life.

  Small consolation, Toby thought. He felt guilty for not thinking of the other four, for not helping them.

  Not much time for guilt. Cermo pressed him into a gang to repair the dome, to slap on pressure
patches, to secure ship’s atmosphere for the next attack.

  But there wasn’t any attack. The mechs had taken severe losses from Argo’s automatic defenses. She was an old ship but still pretty agile.

  People celebrated like it was a victory. Toby wondered if maybe the mechs had just decided to let Argo go on, into more dangerous territory. Let the Eater do their job for them.

  The thought gave him a sinking sensation, like stepping off into a metallic-tasting chasm. Into the void.

  EIGHT

  The Aperture Moment

  “What’s your favorite dish?” Besen asked.

  “Huh? Oh—the nearest.” Toby noticed that he was shoveling in cauliflower with yellow cheese melted over it. Not his favorite dish, but then he hadn’t been tasting it anyway.

  “Some gourmet you are.” She wrinkled her nose at him.

  “Look, I don’t want to have good taste, I just want things that taste good.”

  He finished the cauliflower and looked for anything that might be left. The best thing about communal eating was that at the end of the meal extras got passed around. A quick eater got more, and Toby was always hungry. Even when they were zooming down toward a huge disk of white-hot fire, he responded to the rumble in his stomach.

  “You don’t look concerned,” Besen said.

  Toby studied her face. The deaths only hours before had been acknowledged in a ship-wide ceremony. Now, by necessity, they got back to business, teams repairing the damage, a bustle of purpose. Besen was not one to give a lot away, but he could read the tightening around the edges of her mouth, the slight high-strung cant of her head.

  “No point in worrying.” He took her hand across the table and squeezed. “Bigger heads than ours are working on this thing.”

  Besen bit nervously at her lip. He leaned across the table and gave her a light kiss on the brow. “Ummmm,” she said, but didn’t stop chewing.

  “We’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.” He could do no such thing, but he had to cheer her up.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Sure. Uh, could you reach me those potatoes?”

  “What an animal! Facing death, and he wants to eat.”

  “Only smart thing to do, seems to me.”

  “My stomach feels tight. I can’t get anything down.” She lifted a pea pod with her chopsticks, bit off a fraction, and put it back.

  “Well, maybe some other recreation will take your mind off things.” He gave her a blank face.

  “Some other—oh. You beast!”

  “I hear it’s good for the circulation.”

  “First food, then—no, I will not jump into the sack with you while we are flying into the teeth of, of—”

  “No need to throw a duck fit.”

  “Well—I mean—it’s so totally inappropriate.”

  He pretended to consider the question deeply, complete with a profound scowl. “Ummm. What’s a better way to vote in favor of there being a future? That’s what the whole thing points toward, after all.”

  She snorted. “I thought it was about love.”

  “That, too. But when we’re all candidates for the bone orchard—only who’s going to bury us here, when there’s no dirt for a cemetery anyway?—the oldest human ritual is a, well, a gesture of faith. Faith in the future.”

  “So sex is faith now?” She was starting to grin, which had been his aim. “You have an odd religion.”

  “I worship at the altar of my choosing,” he said with a staged haughty air.

  “And what’s that about the oldest ritual? I can think of some more uplifting ones.”

  Toby consulted with Isaac, who was a gold mine of ancient terms, in the space of a heartbeat. “They used to call it ‘the beast with two backs’—so maybe you have a point.”

  Besen gave him a grin that began wickedly and slid into a tentative shyness. “You were really just joshing me out of my mood, weren’t you?”

  “Um.”

  “You don’t like to admit it, but you are very kind, in your own way, behind that fake toughness.”

  “You have unmasked me, madam.”

  “Ummm.” She eyed him speculatively. “How much time is it, until we get really close to the disk?”

  “I can’t tell. The Bridge is too busy to give out details, and we’re swooping in along a complicated kind of spiral, so—say, why do you want to know?”

  “Well, if there really is enough time . . .”

  “You hussy! Here I was just trying to cheer you up—”

  “Oh, forget it. You can’t take a little ribbing yourself.” She poked him in the chest with a finger. “Come on, Romeo, let’s see what the wall screens tell us. I guess you’ve used up your supply of romance for the week.”

  “Then I’ll have to stop off and pick up my next allotment. Where do I go?”

  “Don’t think I can’t tell you where to go—get moving.”

  He had managed to kid her out of her jittery depression, but the raging cauldron visible on the big Assembly Hall screen was enough to bring it all back. He put his arm around her as they stood with a large crowd of the Family, watching the harsh glare of the disk seem to spread and wriggle as they drew nearer.

  “Where are we going in all this?” Besen asked, wonder and fear mingling in her tone.

  “I don’t know. I can’t even guess.”

  “The disk, it’s like a huge world or something.”

  “A world is nothing here, a fly speck.”

  “But I can see clouds down there. And that twisty thing, it almost looks like a river.”

  “Almost ain’t the same as is. Those clouds are really plasma that would boil away your hand in an eye-blink. That river, my faithful Aspect tells me, is some kind of magnetic knot that’s gotten caught up in the disk as it churns around.”

  “But it looks so familiar, somehow.”

  Toby’s mouth twisted, eyes distant. “We need to see familiar things here. Otherwise it’s too strange to deal with.”

  Besen paused, then nodded soberly. “My teacher Aspect just said that ‘river’ is bigger than a whole planet. Lots bigger. And that the disk is the size of a solar system.”

  “Sometimes I wish our Aspects wouldn’t tell us so much.” She nodded, her hair tumbling in the low gravity. “I felt better when I thought that little squiggle was a river. Still, with the Aspects we can get all branches of learning.”

  Toby chuckled dryly. “Branches, yeasay. But none of the roots.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They can’t tell us what all this means.”

  “They know lots of facts and numbers, though.”

  “Maybe that’s all we can trust them with. Anyway, this place, it’s big-time stuff.” He had to keep up a casual face, but the approaching disk, swelling, throbbing with seething light, was starting to inspire in him less awe and more plain old fear.

  “And it eats stars. We don’t belong here.”

  “Yeasay to that, too. Only somebody thinks we do.”

  “And your father believes it, too. He decides.”

  A note of bitterness had crept into her voice. Around them jaws clenched, eyes whitened as a giant white flare burst across the disk, and a low growl rose. Slowly it dawned on Toby that the entire Assembly Hall murmured with discontent, with dread, with tight-stretched anxiety. The deaths had sobered them, loosened Killeen’s hold. A bitter wind stirred them all.

  A band of men and women at the far side of the Hall began shouting. Before Toby could understand what was happening, the crowd began to move. They knocked over tables and squeezed through the outer doorways, pressing on with gathering energy, like a tide sucked forward by an irresistible moon. Sour words flew, boots thumped on the deck, the air rang with harsh accusation.

  Toby got up and followed, hardly noticing the twinge in his leg where a metal spike had gouged him in the agro dome. That seemed like an age ago. He didn’t limp; his body had already fixed up most of the gouge.

  He
and Besen were at the back when the swarming pack reached the Bridge. To Toby there was a ghostlike quality to the rapid swerve of events. Again the officers stopped them. Again Killeen appeared on the balcony. Again he held them back with a stern speech.

  This time Toby sensed the deep foreboding in the shuffling, muttering crowd, and now that he knew what to look for, he saw how his father used their fear to bind them to him. They needed to believe in him now, and he played upon that. If he hadn’t, they might easily have worked themselves into a frenzy, have boiled over into mutiny.

  Killeen held them in part by sheer physical presence. He was a full chest-length taller than Toby, testament to his greater years. He used that, and the added perspective of the balcony, to cow the louder protestors.

  Long ago, in response to the rapacious mechs, humanity had lengthened its life span by tinkering with its own growth pattern. The body given forth by natural evolution, far back on ancient Earth, had matured at about twenty of the Old Earth years. Then even the best body hit a plateau. Gradually it weakened with the years, the erosion of muscle and bone offset by the slow gathering of wisdom and experience.

  To counter this, long ago the Family of Families had sculpted humanity. Now, people simply never reached that plateau where decline set in. People died of injury and mech attack, not age. They never stopped growing. Their rate slowed, of course—otherwise, elders would shoot up into sluggish giants. A woman a century old might not gain an extra finger’s width of height in a decade. But she grew. And she would have all the savvy and grit years brought.

  This perpetual late youth held in check the inner magics that governed aging. The eldest Bishops were nearly twice as tall as Toby. This meant higher door sills and bigger meals. More important, elders towered over others, their experience given the force of bulk. Toby stood lanky for his eighteen Old Earth years, but he felt small and insignificant compared to Cermo or Killeen. In them, the weight of Family authority had firm physical presence.

  This Killeen used with unconscious, telling effect. Still, voices called out protests. Oaths cut the air, strident and ragged with fear.