Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  She knew damn well that any biosphere held innumerable tragedies, slaughters vast and vicious. She had been aboard a research vessel on an Earthside ocean, could not recall which now, amid a krill bunch-up, like a soup of tiny silvery crunchy crustaceans. She had watched the swarm of them fed on by whales, seals, penguins, squids, and fish, a mass murder of the bottom of the sea’s food chain. So swarming schools of animals fed larger ones and none cared, because they had no culture to make that an evil thing. Sometimes it was a blessing not to think.

  Along the way here, they had already met odd forms. Twisty called one plant the trappersnapper, a horny caselike affair, just a trunk with a pair of square jaws. Plants had developed ways to trap animals. The leapycreeper had roots and stems that were also tongues and lashes. In one stand of fat trees, a section of the bark gaped wide, revealing a pale deadly mouth. An oystermaw, Twisty had said, for unwary small animals. The trees could digest flesh.

  Yet she had seen herds and groups of animals with horns, claws, stabbing tails, armor shields, needles, bony sabers—armaments like Earthside ones, for ambush predators, for dominance, for display, and not just for dinner.

  She glanced up at the sky to follow a flock of soft blue, angular-winged birds. Abruptly, as though they knew she was watching, they formed into a series of lines:

  ! ! !

  “Huh?” She turned to Twisty, who was having some more late breakfast, breaking a shell creature in half with three hands.

  “They mean it as a greeting, I believe,” it said.

  “Maybe not,” Cliff said with a worried look at the sky. The birds now formed into a clear series of signs:

  ? ? ?

  “Fear masks itself as procrastination,” Twisty said smoothly. “Let us land, disperse, and explore. You will learn much.”

  * * *

  They came down the spongy tongue ramp of the great skyfish gingerly, the team’s eyes watching the surroundings carefully. The air was cool and thin, compared to that of the womblike skyfish interior.

  Cliff looked back at the big bulk and saw their host carrier bulged even larger now, its somber skin stretched shiny-tight. They were at the broad mountain peak in a mild breeze that carried scents of greenery and moist soil. Beneath their feet lay long stretches of gray rock leading uphill. A chittering swarm of agitated wings and improbably big mouths massed broadly across the sky, ignoring the humans below. No punctuation marks now.

  The skyfish Captain bade them good progress. “Brave adventurers of your slender species, learn much!” The fish would feed on local sources and await them.

  With the team, Cliff walked to the edge of a steep drop. Beth deployed the team in a wing and tail formation. They had a vibrant view of the sloping lands below, spread like a rumpled quilt set with dark gems. Close-up showed the black structures to be many-walled and with stone towers of glinting obsidian, like ominous medieval castles. Some big creatures moved around them, apparently working the fields like enormous horses.

  Nearer, he close-upped slanted green houses rearing on stilts, balloon creatures nuzzling beside them, apparently feeding on elevated platforms. Huge, hollowed-out cacti served as homes. Gossamer-winged silvery torpedoes cavorting in looping aerials, like mating dances. Downslope but nearer, slender things like trees waved their branches though there was little wind. Maybe they were stretching up, yearning for a visit from their skyfish? Hard to fathom the ecology here. It had been odd and yet satisfying at breakfast, to guzzle the fruity drink, suck meaty larvae from a shell like an ear. Bemor had swallowed whole a catlike thing that might not have been dead, hard to tell.

  “Keen eyes!” Twisty called as it approached. “Let us scale the very heights! The view is even more splendiferous.”

  “Why didn’t our host skyfish take us to the top?” Beth asked.

  “It labors hard to reach this height. The air here is forty percent less dense. The great beast desires you carry on yourselves.”

  “Good to get back into the field,” Beth said crisply. Cliff saw she wanted to move on, explore.

  The view was stunning. They walked alongside the warble of a frothing river that sported bubbling blurts as it tumbled down the steep slope. They worked up the sheets of stone, into the bug-flecked heat of Honor’s long, festering days, even at this altitude. Insect air squadrons let off a whispery humming hymn, like musical smoke in the ear.

  He sucked in the moist air and recalled that on Earth, desert plants defended against losing moisture by keeping their stamens closed in the day. They opened at night to take in carbon dioxide without evaporating too much water away. Here in Honor’s long days, the air had to hold enough moisture to let plants respire, venting oxygen. That meant a lot of water. It explained the heavy rainstorms and thick, flavored air, the sprawling rivers they had to work around or fly over, the ivory mists rising from bare ground that shrouded even small depressions in the land.

  He wondered if the moisture at high altitude somehow shaped the liquid warbles of the lofting birds. On the stony slope, the team stepped on what looked like limbs or lichen that turned out to be small animals that knew the arts of disguise. Closer inspection showed they were not animals but plants that could jerk away from inspecting hands, as if startled by such rude invasion. This fascinated Beth, who crouched over them while the team moved uphill.

  They were near the top of a great gray slab when a slithering weave of feeling swept over Cliff. He staggered. Shimmering seams of stone seemed to fluoresce, oranges and reds and blues bright enough to see in daylight. A pull of whispery magnetic texture washed up into him, prickling the soles of his boots, like spiky small stings.

  In a strained voice, Beth said, “What’s happening?”

  “Just a dab of the dizzies,” he answered.

  But the feeling did not go away.

  “Uh. Me … too.”

  The team buzzed with talk. They all felt it. Even Bemor had spread his insectoid legs to grip the rock. Ashley Trust had drawn his weapon and looked around warily.

  They tightened their formation and kept on. The team muttered and breathed deeper, sucking in the thin dry air with long sighs. Their patient plodding brought rock slabs moving beneath their feet. The team was getting worn down by the deaths, the troubles of moving Bemor around, being on the move. He could see it in their faces. Viviane held down their left edge, eyes veiled. Cliff jutted his chin out, eyes slitted. The strain of the strange.

  Canyons slashed across seams like knives carving wounds in the gray masses. Head down, head buzzing, he studied the stone under his boots. As Cliff worked upward, succulent, soft dreams eased into his mind. Mute passages roosted in his head and took blithe flight. A soft, slippery whisper came coasting through on wings of shimmer and splash. Meanings beat just below the gray grainy surfaces. Sand danced its stories in windy pillars of air. Crystal juts marked a continental seamed mass that churned somewhere deep below. Sparkling rain slid in on breezes and joined the casement beneath his feet. An evil rainbow arch made its bridge to rugged jags of stone. He blinked.

  “What’s … happening…?” Beth said vaguely.

  He turned toward her with grinding effort. The whole team was stretched across the stony upslope. Some seemed as far away as a hundred meters. They all were moving as if underwater. He was, too. A glance in the other direction showed the green valley below, moving in a blur. Two different timescales?

  He felt a rustle below him. The stone shimmered, shook. Below, a shadow companion moved with him, lurking not on the grainy stone surface, but moving deeper. Within it, like an enormous manta ray with arms, sliding by beneath dark swarming waters. He bent and struck at the apparent sea, and a sound came back, tink-tink, a tinny echo. Then a low gravelly growl came, as if from afar, a second hollow answer to his tap. A slumbering, slow darkness rose toward him as if from a depth, swirling like ink in milk. Clouds within rock? Life? With a soft thunk sound, the dark fog seemed to be reaching up, out, somehow desperately seeking.

  Beth said, �
��This place is … alive.” Her voice droned out, Dopplered away.

  He tried to jump up, see if the noir persona below moved, too. It looked now more like himself, a shadowy mirror image peering up at him. He grunted and surged up—

  His feet would not leave the stone. He gave it all the muscle he could. Nothing. He was pinned.

  The rock layer bristled and flared with suppressed energy. The shadow-self below looked to be reaching, grasping, wanting. Yet it had no legs, just arms. The cant of head, shrouded eyes, all seemed to implore. Cliff wondered how he knew this and saw it was something about reading body postures. Maybe that was a universal, across species? Or else the whole primate suite of abilities converged—driven by the urgent need to communicate, no matter what world your abilities came from—on myriad subtle signs that told stories from a mere glance.

  “What are you?” he called in frustration at the swimming shadow figure.

  The thing below arched back its head—now with visible nose, eyes, mouth—and a low bass note sounded out from near his feet, “What are you? Architect of minds? Geozoologist?”

  “Explorer. Human. Just arrived.”

  “Give … time … to learn.” The words stretched longer, vowels deeper.

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “We learn … both.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You. The layers … of you.”

  “Layers?”

  The low bass voice came from the whole surface, like a vibrating amplifier. In the seething stone, the figure was still vague, so he could not see lips move. “We live … slow life … in rigorous lumenstone. You are … other. You … of fragile molecular bonds … immersed in the immediate. Water shapes you.”

  Cliff recalled there were stone intelligences back on the Bowl, too. But those were inert, slow. This was quick. Then there lurked the Ice Minds wrapped around the exterior of the Bowl, who carried the ageless memories of the whole passage of the Bowl’s voyages. But both those solid forms had evolved in the far past, the stones on hot worlds, the Ice Minds in the outer precincts of solar systems. What was this fluorescent rock that held him fixed?

  “Team, tighten up,” Beth sent on comm. Viviane took a look around and ushered in the outliers. Menace seemed to darken the air.

  The pressing power he felt hammered the air around them with a deep bass note. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance. His body arched and flexed and stretched in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them. Boonnnug wrappppennnu faaaaliiiooong …

  Nearby, Twisty gave him an eye-goggle he could not read.

  Cliff called, “This is a smartstone life?”

  Twisty tossed its hands around in a rippling shrug, as if it found all this unremarkable. “Some of our antique minds choose to reside in this lumenstone. Their ancient experiences can evaluate recent … guests.”

  Beth sent on comm, “Guests? We’re immigrants. This is some kind of entrance exam?”

  “More an inspection,” Twisty said.

  “We’re stuck to this damn rock like insects pinned under a microscope!” Cliff shouted.

  “The larger, full-boulder form of rocklife you encountered—or so I infer, from your reactions—was on the Bowl, true?”

  “So?” Cliff asked skeptically.

  “An earlier species, ancient embodied—or entombed—from which we here learned much. That simpler form evolved from geological progresses, beginning on planets born shortly after our grand galaxy began to spin and clump.”

  Beth shot back, “What the hell has that got to do with sticking us here?”

  As if in reply, Twisty coiled forward and then sprang into the air, leaping high, and at the top of its arc turned—catlike, twisting spine and aligning legs—to smack back down on the stone. “I am free because to the Increate, I am known. You are not.”

  “What the hell—” Beth started, but Twisty spoke rapidly now—

  “These seeming stones harbor the vast resources of the previous. Our system is far older than yours. The layers you term the Cobweb took more years to build than your entire civilized era. Far more expanses stretch back beyond that age. To house the minds—I suppose some of you would say, souls—of so innumerable an army, marching down toward us in time—requires…”

  Beth said, “Go on.” There was something vexed about how the alien held itself.

  Twisty paused, staring distantly. “Your tongue has only dull words for the glories beneath our feet. I then say, housing the many reduced yet intact minds requires storage”—a dismissive sniff at the word—“compact and enduring. Think of it as a rugged version of your computer chips—robust computation. The data stores are partially the minds of those who went before, and linger with us still, embodying our stores of knowledge. Thus, rock that knows.”

  “And wants to know us?” Cliff asked.

  “Just so. Let it inspect you all.” With this, Twisty simply walked away, leaving them to their pinned-down prisons.

  Cliff looked down, puffing in frustration. Smartstone that could sense them—did that make sense?

  Now the figure below rose higher, a black velvet curtain swirling up as if to envelop him. Cliff could not fathom how this apparition could suck every glint of light from the rock. The speckled stone was shot through now with crystal planes, and the air was warmer.

  He looked around at their team, set now in a landscape that seemed to storm upward, stresses racking stones. Pillars of ivory glow played along the entire expanse of the mountain, seething as if to fry the sky. Some had crumpled to the ground. “Stay up!” he called. Beth was trying to step toward those farther down the slope, the tail following the wing formation. She managed to lift a leg and plant it. Then stopped.

  Looking down farther, he could see torsos, smaller and heaving as if suffocating. A sound came out, a grinding like molars. They paraded past, like efforts to copy human shapes.

  “Do you think this is communicating?” he demanded of the rock.

  Twisty said, “Lumenstone is the Increate, as we term them. They sense you, and then advise us upon you.”

  Cliff could feel frazzled thoughts frying up in his mind. This stony intelligence was interrogating him in ways he could barely perceive, and certainly disliked. Time stretched on. There was plenty of it.

  Into his view of the landscape came invading images. Stars radiating with flares in nighttime. Flickering halos hovering as motes fought across that sky. Pulses of shimmering waves in the upper atmosphere, with rolling howls of bass notes: a war he could not fathom. Rainfalls in shades of black and gray amid occasional fat, golden droplets. War.

  Twisty’s voice, hollow: “Take a sip, a swill, a swag of swigs. The Increate speak of their past.”

  “Pretty savage,” Cliff managed to say.

  As he looked back at the team, spread over a hundred meters now, it seemed, he saw hexagonal flagstones emerge as a pattern in the rock. They snapped into place, exactly. Each framed a single human, a hexagon about a meter across. Nobody was moving. It was as if something was marking out intricate angular designs along the mountain’s flanks, hexagons stretching into elongated marching perspectives. Using humans as reference points.

  “Everybody, steady!” Beth called. “We wait this out. Have some water. Use inboard snacks if you need it. Might be in this fix for a while.”

  They paused to drink and Cliff stood looking at the now shifting rockwork. He gazed at a big stonework rising from about forty meters upslope. A tower in onyx. Black sheaths jutted up to a point. Something stirred about halfway along the tower that was still extruding from the lumenstone.

  Slowly, about fifty meters up, an eye opened.

  He knew it was an eye, for he had seen its like before. “We saw those stonelife back on the Bowl, remember?” he called to the others.

  Some assents from the team. Weak voices, though.

  The big glaring eye had a green center like an iris. Slowly the ent
ire oval, several meters across, turned downward to look at them. One eye.

  “What…” Cliff could not take his eyes off the single enormous pupil at the thing’s center. It seemed to be looking straight at him. A pupil in rock? An eye with lens and retinas? He had seen this on the Bowl, but here it seemed more ominous.

  The air was now hot. No breeze. He could not see the valley below, shrouded now in a roiling gray fog.

  “Stone mind,” a team member said. “Reminding us of its origins?”

  But the lumenstone was not finished. It rose higher with groans and pops. In the dream-easy lighter grav here, the structure could soar. Looking up, he watched immense columns rise with quick, sharp thunderclaps he felt through his feet. That led his eye up to the arches. The corbeled roof supported effortlessly the enormous weight of the nave, its crest shrouded in gauzy gray light. Stone pillows rounded with age led his eye to turrets, gargoyles, statues, and ornaments against the otherwise clean lines of architectural grace.

  Beth sent, “It’s the west front of Chartres Cathedral. La Belle France! Redwing sent the reference as soon as it started growing.”

  “A visual pun,” some team member sent. “Showing it knows our culture now.”

  “Smaller than the original. But not by much.”

  To the side of the great rose window, icons perched on a shelf. One even moved. It stretched out a claw and … beckoned.

  Cliff wondered at all this and without thinking started walking toward it. His feet moved. He was free! No hindrance, no sticky stone tying him down. His boots stepped gingerly on some steps of the south bay. A great sculpture of the Virgin Mary gazed severely out over an alien mountain.

  Beth sent, “My data feed is flooded with details. Looks pretty damn authentic. Cliff, you’re right below—see them?—four figures of the arts. Grammar, Rhetoric, Music, and Dialectic.”

  “That old guy next to them?” Cliff said. “Human.”

  “That’s Aristotle, data feed says. See, he’s frowning while he dips his pen into a stone inkwell.”