The Galactic Center Companion Read online

  The Galactic Center Companion

  By

  Gregory Benford

  A Lucky Bat Book

  The Galactic Center Companion, Second Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Gregory Benford

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Cover design by Brandon Swann

  Published by Lucky Bat Books

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com for your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  A Hunger For The Infinite

  Mandikini

  At The Double Solstice

  Galactic Center Astronomy, 2013

  Life At Galactic Center

  Writing The Galactic Center Series

  Astrophysical Journal, 1988: An Electrodynamic Model Of The Galactic Center

  Perspectives

  About Gregory Benford

  Introduction

  Welcome to a companion volume to the Galactic Center series of novels I wrote between 1970 and 1995—a quarter century to produce about 750,000 words, or an average of 30,000 words a year. (I was also doing others things—mostly having a family and being a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.)

  Many readers have written asking for parts of this book, so I decided to assemble all I’ve written about the series, plus some perspectives by others. As I write later stories, I’ll include them in later editions of this Companion—one of the advantages of keeping it only in ebook form, and so easily amended. (For example, “At the Double Solstice” and “Mandikini” are in this second edition. I had simply forgotten these stories when I did the first edition in 2013.)

  A bit more on the contents:

  A Hunger for the Infinite

  A novella written after I finished the six book series.

  Mandikini

  I wrote this commissioned work for The Universe (1987), which combined scientific essays with fiction. The editor, Byron Preiss, asked me to write both aspects for the Galaxy theme, but I stuck to fiction. It helped me flesh out the elements I would later use in novels.

  “At the Double Solstice”

  I wrote this for a chapbook by Cheap Street Press, and then for a tribute volume to my old friend, Terry Carr (with whom I edited a fanzine when I was a teenager). It, too, helped me get ideas for later novels.

  Galactic Center Astronomy, 2013

  A quick summary, with observations of the galactic center in several spectral regions—plus an anticipation of what may happen in the 2013-2014 flyby of a large cloud, swooping around the black hole there.

  Life At Galactic Center

  The biology I envisioned there.

  Writing The Galactic Center Series

  Thoughts on writing a series, almost without meaning to.

  Astrophysical Journal, 1988: An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center

  My first published paper on the physics of the galactic center. This model seems to describe pretty well the strange long filaments observed there, and still is referenced.

  Perspectives

  My selection of reviews and commentaries on the series. Not always favorable, but with point of view differing from my own. (Few writers are good critics, and none is reliable when commenting on their own works.)

  If you want to comment on this book, or anything else, please go to gregorybenford.com and leave a post.

  A bit of history

  I began the series without thought of doing more than a few stories: In the Ocean of Night (1972) [as by Greg Benford], Icarus Descending (1973), Threads of Time (1974), A Snark in the Night (1977).

  By then I saw that these threads knitted together, and so set about writing just one novel to stitch them firmer, In the Ocean of Night (1977). By this time my research was well funded at UC Irvine and I traveled extensively, taking sabbaticals in Cambridge, England, in 1976 and Italy in 1979 and 1982. I worked on jets of matter from energetic galactic centers, black holes, and pulsars, as well as assembling a laboratory group at UCI to study relativistic plasma dynamics in highly energetic experiments. I liked doing theory and experiment together.

  I returned to the series because my unconscious wouldn’t let me alone. To quote from another part of this book, “All this while scenes, ideas, and characters popped into my head as I worked on other books. By this time I had learned to follow my unconscious. If I didn’t, I stalled on other projects. Slowly I realized that a larger series of novels yawned before me.”

  So I wrote them:

  Across the Sea of Suns (1984)

  Great Sky River (1987)

  Tides of Light (1989)

  Then a gap, brought on by my wife’s illness and a lot of research work. I was by then running a considerable laboratory program and writing a dozen or two scientific papers a year. After I got some tasks finished, I returned and finished the series:

  Furious Gulf (1994)

  Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

  Years later, Robert Silverberg asked me to contribute “A Hunger for the Infinite“ (1999) to his Far Horizons anthology. I note now Goodreads.com describes it so: “(They reach) True Center in order to destroy something, anything, important to the Mechs, but Paris had something else on his mind. A story of the Mantis, and the decline of humans beginning in 3600 AD.” A reader noted the series’ “vertigo-inducing time spans” which is certainly true. The events stretch from the early 2000s to A.D. 37518, an immense scope imposed because its central focus, our galactic center, is 28,000 light-years away. Characters had to get there to take part in the galaxy’s larger games, and a core assumption I nearly always use in fiction is there can be no faster-than-light travel. Indeed, getting above 0.1c is very hard.

  I welcome further comments on the series. I may return to it for other stories, too, if there’s interest. It’s certainly a big landscape!

  Thanks—

  To all those who helped me with this Companion and the series itself: Editors Lou Aronica, James Frenkel and Betsy Mitchell.

  Innumerable scientists, especially James Benford, Mark Morris, Virginia Trimble, Martin Rees, Roger Blandford and Jean Eilek.

  The Lucky Bat team, especially Judith Harlan, Cindie Geddes and Jeff Posey. Dave Truesdale was especially helpful.

  Lastly, to the many critics (some included in this Companion) who let me know how the books were coming over. Critics, like alcohol, are useful—you just have to know how much to take.

  A Hunger For The Infinite

  Death came in on sixteen legs.

  If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat—then Ahmihi was composed.

  He had been the Exec of the Noachian ’Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rook the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him.

  He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of th
e world around him:

  I wish to “talk”—to convey linear meaning.

  “Yeasay, and you be—?” He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.

  I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs.

  “Damn nice of you.”

  The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle—now quite over, he saw—had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.

  I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you.

  “How many of my people…are left?”

  I count 453—no, 452; one died two xens ago.

  “If you’ll let them go—”

  That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.

  He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.

  This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier’s kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other ’Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.

  Rook was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier’s induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.

  In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.

  Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.

  I wish you to view my work. Here…

  Something seized Ahmihi’s sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed—and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood…things.

  They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a blood-red liquid did a trembling dance.

  At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being…which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly—

  “No!” He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. “What is this place?”

  The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.

  “Using…us?”

  For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human world-sum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.

  Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his ’Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into…what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.

  He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?

  You share with others (those who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws.

  Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software.

  An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.

  “If your kind would just leave us alone—”

  Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be…significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.

  “If you’d showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you’d be lying in pieces by now.”

  I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed.

  My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.

  “Where?” He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away—

  Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.

  “As suredead?”

  I find you primates an entrancing medium.

  “Why don’t you just keep us alive and talk to us?” He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry. Hollow eyes yearned upward.

  You are a fragile medium-pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method.

  Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer—

  She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.

  “I find this…overly hard-wired…medium is…constrained sufficiently…to yield…fresh insights.”

  “My God, kill her.” He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.

  “I am…dead as…a human…But I remain…a medium.”

  He looked away from Leona. “Don’t you have any sense of what she’s going through?”

  My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.

  “Wow, that must be tough.”

  The Mantis could not sense sarcasm, either.

  Working her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through legs caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.

  “Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!”

  My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.

  “Sorry I can’t seem to appreciate it. Leona…she’s suredead?”

  “Yes…This one…has been…fully recorded…” Leona wheezed, “I have…harvested her…joyously.”

  “This way…she’s hideous.”

  As in this revived form,
I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones.

  She has thematic possibilities.

  Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. “She doesn’t deserve this.”

  Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?

  He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. “Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?”

  Leona gasped, “I sense…I have…missed essentials…The beauty…is seeping…from my…works.”

  “Beauty’s not the sort of thing that gets used up.”

  “Even through…the tiny…grimed window…of your sensorium…you sense…a world-set…I do not. Apparently…there is…something gained…by such…blunt…limitations.”

  Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. “What’s the problem?”

  “I sense…far more…yet do not…share your…filters.”

  “You know too much?” He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, kill her quickly, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was suredead, “harvested” by the mechs—though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.

  “I have…invaded nervous…systems…driven them to…insanity, suicide.” Leona twitched, stumbled, sprawled. Her eyes goggled at the vault above, drifted to peer into Ahmihi’s. “Not the…whole canvas…something…missing.”

  He tried to reach a beam tube and failed. The Chandelier’s phosphor lights were dimming, shadowing Leona.

  With obvious pain she struggled to her feet. “I tried…Ephemerals…so difficult…to grasp.”

  Ahmihi thought desperately. “Look, you have to be us.”

  For the first time in this eerie discussion the Mantis paused. It let Leona crumple on the floor below, a rag doll tossed aside.