Sailing Bright Eternity
Gregory Benford
Copyright © 1995 by Abbenford Associates
Excerpt from The Sunborn copyright © 2004 by Abbenford Associates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by Don Puckey
Cover illustration by Don Dixon
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group USA
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First eBook Edition: March 2005
ISBN: 978-0-446-51128-5
Contents
Also by Gregory Benford
Dedication
Prologue: Metallovore
An Abyss of Time
Part One: Wondrous Ruins
Chapter One: Half Vast
Chapter Two: The Place of Angry Gods
Chapter Three: Church Mice
Chapter Four: Alexandria
Chapter Five: Huck
Chapter Six: Something Fatal
Chapter Seven: Old Ones
Chapter Eight: Grandfather
Chapter Nine: The Strong Field Limit
Chapter Ten: Vermin
Chapter Eleven: The Earthers
Chapter Twelve: Sobering Perspectives
Chapter Thirteen: The Physical Representation
Part Two: Soon Comes Night
Chapter One: Worm
Chapter Two: Annihilation Line
Chapter Three: Interfacer
Chapter Four: Agonies of Gravity
Chapter Five: Three Billion Years
Chapter Six: Deep Down Superficial
Chapter Seven: A Few Microseconds
Chapter Eight: Antiques Dealer
Chapter Nine: The Tilted City
Chapter Ten: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Chapter Eleven: Sphincter Frequency
Chapter Twelve: Grudging Respect
Chapter Thirteen: Only Barbarians
Chapter Fourteen: Grey Mech
Chapter Fifteen: Transit
Chapter Sixteen: Time Is a Horizon
Chapter Seventeen: Transit; Wait
Chapter Eighteen: Marching
Chapter Nineteen: Storytelling
Chapter Twenty: Generations
Chapter Twenty-One: Inflection Point
Chapter Twenty-Two: Far Futures
Chapter Twenty-Three: Verge of Extinction
Chapter Twenty-Four: Alexandria
Chapter Twenty-Five: Mortal Galaxies
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Far One
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Radiant
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tiny Farmers
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Cauchy Horizon
Chapter Thirty: Comfy Doubt
Chapter Thirty-One: A Wherewhen String
Chapter Thirty-Two: Larger Agencies
Chapter Thirty-Three: No Erasures
Chapter Thirty-Four: When Paltry Planets Formed a Stage
Dispassionate Discourse
Part Three: Categories Beyond Knowing
Chapter One: Prisoners of Immensity
Chapter Two: Flight
Chapter Three: The Impressed Man
Chapter Four: Carrion
Chapter Five: Cards and Dodgers
Chapter Six: The Incredible in Concrete
A Tapestry of Thought
Part Four: Sense of Self
Chapter One: Melted Portals
Chapter Two: A Fog of Flies
Chapter Three: The Pleasure Plague
Chapter Four: The Way of Three
Decision Tree
Part Five: The Silver River Road
Chapter One: Molten Time
Chapter Two: Confusion Winds
Chapter Three: The Zom
Chapter Four: Mr. Preston
Chapter Five: The Frozen Girl
Chapter Six: Going Upback
Chapter Seven: Temporal Turbulence
Chapter Eight: The Eating Ice
Chapter Nine: Cairo
Chapter Ten: Zom Master
Chapter Eleven: The Past Is Labyrinth
Chapter Twelve: Whorl
Chapter Thirteen: Pursuit
Part Six: Wedded to the Substrate
Chapter One: Partial to Primates
Chapter Two: The Gathering Up
Chapter Three: Some Terrible Wonder
Chapter Four: Finitudes
Chapter Five: An Abyss of Squashed Duration
Chapter Six: Uses of the Mose Art
Part Seven: Gods Provisional and Descending
Chapter One: A Mantis Blankness
Chapter Two: Territories of Thought
Chapter Three: Hard Pursuit
Chapter Four: Abraham
Chapter Five: Confusion Squall
Chapter Six: Conceptual Spaces
Chapter Seven: The Suredead
Chapter Eight: Phylum Myriapodia
Chapter Nine: Stalking
Chapter Ten: Paths of Glory
Part Eight: The Syntony
In Silico
Chapter One: Unintentional Jokes
Chapter Two: Besen
Chapter Three: A Long Way Ago
Chapter Four: The Eternal Landscape of the Past
Chapter Five: The Thermodynamics of Intelligence
Chapter Six: Living in the Substrate
Chapter Seven: Hard Copy
Chapter Eight: The Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise
Chapter Nine: The Pain of Eternity
Coda
Afterword to the Galactic Center Series
Timeline of Galactic Series
About the Author
BATTLE STARS
As we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel. Stars ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.
Amid all that were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. Light escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.
Somebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.
Somebody was helping along the black hole’s appetite.
ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER
IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT
“A major novel . . . evokes truly majestic feeling for the vast distances and time scales upon which the universe operates.”
—Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“A brilliant book, a weather vane for the changing winds of science fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
FURIOUS GULF
“A heady mixture of science . . . and no-holds-barred adventure.”
—New York Times Book Review
“When it comes to conjuring the marvels of space and the bizarre possibilities of high-energy physics, Benford is second to none.”
—Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD
Fiction
Beyond Infinity
The Sunborn
The Martian Race
Eater
The Stars in Shroud
Jupiter Project
Shiva Descending (with William Rostler)
Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)
A Darker Geometry(with Mark O. Martin)
Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Against Infinity
Cosm
Foundation’s Fear
Artifact
Timescape
The Galactic Center Series
In the Ocean of Night
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
Non-fiction
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates
Across Millennia
To Mark and Alyson and Joan
who grew and changed far more
in the decades it took to write this series of novels
than novels can possibly portray.
PROLOGUE
Metallovore
Black holes have weather, of a sort.
Light streams from them. Blackness dwells at their cores, but friction heats the infalling gas and dust. These streams brim with forced radiation. Storms worry them. White-hot tornadoes whirl and suck.
From the immense hole at the exact center of the galaxy, a virulent glow hammers outward. It pushes incessantly at the crowded masses that circle it, jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forces the streams into a disk, churning ever inward. Suffering in the weather.
The press of hot photons is a wind, driving all before it. Except for the grazers. To these photovores, the great grinding disk is a source of food.
Fire-flowers blossom in the disk, sending up lashes of fierce ultraviolet. Storms of light.
Both above and below the accretion disk, in hovering clouds, these photons smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge, whip particles into sleet. The clouds are debris, dust, grains. They are already doomed by gravity’s rub, like nearly everything here.
Nearly. To the gossamer, floating herds this is a fountain. Their life source.
Sheets of them hang, billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Basking in the sting. Holding steady.
The photovores are patiently grazing. Some are Infras, others Ultras—tuned to soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Each species has a characteristic polish and shape. Each works within evolutionary necessity, deploying great flat receptor planes. Each has a song, used to maintain orbit and angle.
Against the wrathful weather here, information is at least a partial defense. Position-keeping telemetry flits between the herd sheets. They sing luminously to each other in the eternal brimming day.
Hovering on the pressure of light, great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread. Vectoring, skating on winds, magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Ruling forces govern their perpetual, gliding dance. This is decreed by intelligences they scarcely sense, machines that prowl the darker lanes farther out.
Those magisterial forms need the energies from this furnace, yet do not venture here. The wise and valuable run no risks.
At times the herds fail. Vast shimmering sheets peel away. Many are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolves their lattices. They burst open and flare with fatal energies.
Now a greater threat spirals lazily down. It descends from the shelter of thick, turbulent dust. It lets itself fall toward the governing mass, the black hole itself. Then it arrests its descent with outstretched wings of mirrors. They bank gracefully on the photon breeze.
Its lenses swivel to select prey. There a pack of photovores has clumped, disregarding ageless programming, or perhaps caught in a magnetic flux tube. The cause does not matter. The predator eases down along the axis of the galaxy itself.
Here, navigation is simple. Far below, the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things is a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.
The clustered photovores sense a descending presence. Their vast sailing herds cleave, peeling back to reveal deeper planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They all live to ingest light and excrete microwave beams. Their internal world revolves around ingestion, considered digestion, and orderly excretion.
These placid conduits now flee. But those clumped near the axis have little angular momentum, and cannot pivot on a magnetic fulcrum. Dimly they sense their destiny. Their hissing microwaves waver.
Some plunge downward, hoping that the predator will not follow so close to the Eater. Others cluster ever more, as if numbers give safety. The opposite is true.
The metallovore folds its mirror wings. Now angular and swift, accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It scoops them in with flux lines. Metal harvesters rip the photovores. Shreds rush down burnt-black tunnels. Electrostatic fields separate elements and alloys.
Fusion fires await the ruined carcasses. There the separation can be exquisitely tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last analysis, the ultimate resources here are mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and now they end as mass.
The sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.
Yet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state, one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater’s vagaries. Less energy would be harnessed, less mass recovered.
The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.
Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.
Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore’s polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust that can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere that stretches for hundreds of cubic light-years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.
All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.
Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.
It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.
Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.
An Abyss of Time
Interior state: a place cloudless and smooth, without definition:
The mechanicals are converging, Nigel.
“You feel them?”
Clearly. They can now manifest themselves in magnetic vortices.
“Bloody dexterous, they are.”
I can feel them. Something bad is coming.
“Thanks for the warning, m’love. But I’ve got to bring the lad Toby up to speed, and it’ll take a while.”
There is nothing you could do for me anyway.
He smiled without mirth. “All too t
rue.”
I will alert you if the energy densities change for the worse.
He nodded and the space without definition vanished.
He was back in a bare room, sitting opposite a young man, trying to frame the immense story that had led him to this moment.
—nothing you could do—
He remembered another time, long ago.
He and Carlos stood on a dry ridge of bare rock and looked out over a plain. This was not a world at all but a convoluted wraparound of space-time itself. Its sky curved overhead, a bowl of scrub desert.
Still, it felt like a place to live. A remarkable, alien-made refuge. Dirt, air, odd but acceptable plants.
They talked about finding a way to live here, in a hard, dry place twisted and alive in a way that rock was not.
Carlos had just made a good joke and Nigel laughed, relaxed and easy, and then Carlos plunged forward, his shoulder striking Nigel’s arm. Carlos went down with his head tilted back, as if he were looking up at the sky, a quizzical expression flickering as the head brushed by Nigel and down and hit face first on the baked dirt. Carlos had not lifted his hands to break the fall. He slid a foot as he struck.
The noise that had started it all was ugly. It seemed to condense out of the air, a soft thump like an ax sinking into a rotten stump.
As Carlos pitched forward something rose from his back, a geyser of skin and frothy blood. It spattered over the back of the tunic as the body smacked into the dirt. The thump, Nigel realized later, was the compact explosion of electromagnetic energy, targeted a few centimeters below the skin.
As Nigel dropped to lower his profile he got a good look at Carlos. One was enough. Then he ran, bent over, hearing the harsh following buzz of the electromagnetic pulse tapering away as he zigzagged behind some jagged boulders.
Too much open space and too little shelter. He squatted and could not see what had fired the shot. Carlos lay flat without a twitch.
Nothing happened. No following pulses.
Nigel replayed the images as he waited. A spout of rosy blood from a circle punched high in the spine. Absolutely dead center, four centimeters below the neck. Kilojoules of energy focused to a spot the size of a fingernail.
