Sailing Bright Eternity Read online

  And Nigel had found this same configuration there. Strangely shaped spaces. A sphere. The humming. A quick electromagnetic cry.

  His suit had recorded it all. He spun slowly in a pocket of darkness, the sphere now seeming smaller, spent, exhausted.

  Message received. He jetted back toward the others.

  FIVE

  Huck

  Ping, their capsule spoke.

  Nikka’s face was drawn and furrowed in the reflected light. A searing blue glow seeped down the crevasse. To be this bright down here meant that brilliant furies worked along the asteroid face outside. They were tucked into this makeshift canister, flimsy protection.

  A solid bang slapped them against their restraints.

  “That’s it,” Nikka said. “The shock wave.”

  Tongues of thin fire licked by the observation port.

  A few hundred meters away, ionized frenzy worked to get at them—or so went the human-centered view, Nigel reflected.

  The awful truth was worse: that the unleashed searing energies booming out from the black hole sought no one, meant nothing, cared not a fig for the human predicament. It would grind up intelligence and spit it out, toward the sleepy stars beyond. Here, mind shaped itself to nature, not the reverse.

  They waited out the onslaught for a day, then two. A giant drummed on the walls. Sensors on the ship sent data, painting a picture of huge mass flows past the hull. The ship itself breached, repaired itself, breached again, zapped a few bits of debris. They had come to respect these self-fixing aspects in the long voyage from the suburbs of the galaxy. They were parasites, after all. If they drew too much attention to themselves, some cleanup squad might well get activated.

  He had brought with him a few personal bits, hauled all the way from Earth. In dim suit light he read again the small yellow hardback, spine cracked, pages stiff and yellowing and stained from the accidents of adolescence. Near the end there was a passage he had long ago involuntarily memorized:

  And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two, and I says, all right, that suits me . . .

  Nigel had never felt himself remotely American, despite having lived and labored there for decades, but this passage somehow always made his voice catch in his throat when he read it aloud.

  The capsule ticked and pinged and he realized that he and the others had lived so long now in alien metal corridors that they were used to the feel of quiet, implacable strangeness all about. Once you’d left home, all places were remote and foreign and so you might as well keep going. On to the finality, the omega point of some alphabet you could not read but by tramping along the full length of it.

  When they finally straggled out, the crevasse was blocked with debris. Lumps and chunks of rock jammed into every crevice. Nigel worked on it for a while and then had to rest. He was old, in stringy good health, but knew his limits. He wondered if there might be another way out of this place, which was clearly a wreck of a starship of asteroid size.

  “It’s like the old crash site on the moon,” he said to Nikka over comm. “In Mare Marginis.”

  “Ummm. I’d noticed some resemblance.”

  “And the original derelict ship I found, Icarus.”

  “Which implies that—what? Whoever built them was spread all over the galaxy?”

  “They got this far. Must’ve been.”

  “And this hulk, as dead as the others?”

  Nigel nodded. “Means the mechs got them, I suppose.”

  “There must have been millions of them, to run into another, thirty thousand light-years away.”

  “Um. There’s a big game afoot.”

  They coasted together down one of the side corridors, looking at yawning vaults and smashed metallic enclosures. “Looks like someone stripped it,” Nikka said, shining a torch into a dark warren. “Not much left for us to scavenge—”

  —out of the corner of Nigel’s eye, skimming fast, came the snaky thing.

  Helical, with bulky masses appended, a sharp glinting prow. No bigger than a man but faster, coming at Nikka and him as though it had waited for this.

  Time collapsed for him. He felt a muscular sliding energy in his shoulders as he spun, lofting away his pack and snatching forth his tool kit.

  The thing was plainly mech, crackling on the electromagnetic spectrum in Nigel’s ears, a sound like bacon frying on a chilly morning in England long ago—

  —as Nigel’s hand went for his laser cutter and Nikka had just caught sight of it, her mouth agape, surprise in the inky shadows—

  He launched himself on a leap lap to intersect the thing, as it rappelled somehow off a shiny steel bulkhead—

  —He felt the mathematics of it in him, geometry as limpid as the fresh continent of Euclidean joy he had entered as a boy, sitting with fingers tucked under his legs as he studied at dawn in his chilly bedroom, keeping hands warm by turning the pages with his tongue—

  —static buzz from it—

  The snake-mech flexed itself and turned away from him. Headed for Nikka.

  —distilling order from life’s rough jumble, that was what he had always hungered for, hyperbolic grace, to merge cleanly with life, not split the world into subject and object, no observer/observed, his arm bringing the laser cutter around smoothly, circular arc,

  . . . so

  slow . . .

  atoms in concert, the old dim dualities of mind and matter lapping against the fragile yet inexorable momentum of this instant—

  She was faster than he. She shot at it.

  The pulse shimmered an instant in the mottled blue surface of the thing, like an argument conducted on its skin. Then the pulse skittered off, reflected. Nigel shot at it too and the thing forked away, split, was somehow two slippery helices now.

  —so was it some odd visual pun?—this vision into helices, mimicking the key to organic life, DNA pairs spiraling off, the flag of life unfurling in a vacuum wind that rushed from a shadowed passage. A sliver of meaning, he felt it, seven blind men and a melting elephant, all describing, none understanding. His lungs whooshed dry air—

  —enameled, spraying glow from the uncoiling thing—

  It flexed again. Lashed out with a spiky electromagnetic lance. The shot hovered in vacuum, a discharge of reluctant electrons, spitting angry red radiation. Then it split.

  One shaft struck Nikka. It burst across her in worms of acrid yellow. She went limp.

  Go to ground. Nigel touched the steel bulkhead an instant before the lance reached him. He felt a jolt of megavolts.

  —corroding through him, kiloamps rising. His shell clicked home and then he was inside the suddenly conducting surface of his skinsuit, the rub and stretch of potentials racing along a millimeter away from prickly hairs on his shivering flesh, breathing and being breathed, surges passing by, electromagnetic kiss, inductances fighting the ramping current, forcing jabbing current slivers through his shoulders and licking into his arm, the light touch of his hand enough to draw uncountable speedy electrons to seek another prey, all at frequencies he could not glimpse but the information sliding into him through portals he could never know, below perception a shaved second of intuition—

  Before the rattling voltages had spoken their piece he fetched forth the punch gun with his left hand. Muscles clenched and he had to force his fingers to—

  It snaked toward him. Nikka floated inert.

  Nigel kicked away from the bulkhead, though that meant losing his electrical grounding. There might be a few seconds before the mech recharged.

  —springing with the kickoff came feelings and desires forking like summer lightning across the inner unmoving vault of him, part of himself eating them as they flared across his mind, seeing them for what they were, messages from a fraction of himself finding a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, tim
e like water washing away the eruptions, scattershot angers and cutting fears far down in him—

  He drove the punch gun ahead. Fired with great relish into the mech.

  It was quick, a thing of bunched electrical energies, but the crude and rude sometimes worked.

  —zig when they zag, leaving no opening he fires the laser cutter too, his right hand tracking the other aspect of the split mech, yin and yang, supple but not crude enough to deal with the sweaty urgencies of organic life-forms, the Darwinnowing of mech evolution selecting it for special tasks, narrowing it like a knife by perpetually sharpening, but to get an edge on a blade you had to subtract from it, and the loss was framed in the space of a single heartbeat as the dutiful stubby laser snapped out its jabbing pattern—

  The divided mech died. Mere mechanical damage was undoubtedly beneath its program-function range. But potentials cannot build in sheaths mutilated and gouged, and its charge ejected itself down wrong pathways, into the innards, dissolving crystalline structures of intricate artistry. A jewel crushed by a muddy boot.

  —he whipped the punch gun around and riddled the other for good measure, the buzzing trailing away, and he slammed into the other spindly riddled carcass, legs collecting recoil, breath whistling in his dry throat in a scatter of perishing light from the gutted mech—

  —and he was off, pushing it to gain momentum toward Nikka—

  —still drifting, Nikka—

  SIX

  Something Fatal

  Nikka did not awaken for three days. Even then she was sluggish and vague, eyes watering, words like discordant lumps trying to make their way out of her throat.

  Before she could sit up they had started to move inward again. They got the ship to resume its programmed course. Their handbuilt, tightbeam antenna for signaling Earth was a twisted wire mesh. No more infobursts for the home front. Now they had no mission, except the basic one: survive and learn.

  By then they understood from a careful metallicity dating that the helical mech was quite old. It had probably lain in wait in the derelict for ages, in case something organic ventured aboard. A snare.

  “Not the sort of thing the Snark would’ve done,” Nigel muttered to himself in the long vigils beside her. Though the Snark had been a mech, of sorts.

  The brain repairs itself, with the right help, and her recovery was long.

  In his time the very word “machinelike” had two meanings. One was “unfeeling, unconcerned,” while the other was “implacable, utterly committed.” No wonder that each suggested inhumanity and some rigid stupidity as well.

  But here there was a third meaning, revealed in the immense, cool arabesques that filled the sky within a light-year of the black hole. Constructions vast and imponderable. Geometries unnatural and subtly alien.

  Energies churned here, sleeting radiation and turbulence. Mechwork patterns floated obliviously through the storming masses. Implacable, unconcerned.

  Their ship still gave some cover, apparently. Interrogating messages came beeping into it. Automatic programs aboard answered. Since the scavenger stowaway humans had long since corrupted the information base of the ship, what it told its superiors was undoubtedly nowhere near the truth. But the nature of the alien is that no one can adequately fake a true, intricate language.

  So it was inevitable that scarlet traceries condensed around the ship. Potentials arced and played along its hull. A warning, perhaps.

  “Or maybe just a bath and a scrub,” Nigel joked to Nikka. She could be moved about the ship in a makeshift wheelchair by then. When she saw the wall view outside she gasped.

  Once the shock front of the explosion had passed, the True Center loomed like an impossibly detailed tapestry, each uncoiling plume and shimmering sun a jewel woven into the whisking churn of gravity.

  “Trick is,” Nigel said, “we couldn’t see that something had forced mass into the center. A mouthful, sent straight down the gullet, apparently. But you can never stuff all of it down a black hole. Matter heats up, flares out like an angry objection, drives away the outer portion.”

  She was still taking it in. “What made that happen?”

  “Those, I’ll wager.”

  It was the first time he had framed aloud the idea that most of the crew already held. Seemingly insubstantial filaments hung before them like mere filmy curtains. But above and below the galactic plane, they connected to the immense long strands of brilliant radiation, hundreds of light-years long and a light-year wide, which bracketed the entire True Center for vast volumes of space. Nigel had seen the radio maps on Earth, showing the arching filaments. Even through the dark clouds that shielded Earth from the fireworks of the Center, their steady gigahertz glow shone.

  “They’re so thin.”

  “To our eyes, true enough.”

  “What do the ship’s diagnostics say?”

  “Dead on, m’love. They show strong magnetic fields.”

  “Enough to hold off all that mass that’s trying to slip through them?”

  “Right again.” Just because she had nearly been killed, cast into a coma and thoroughly lacerated mentally, was no reason to forget that indeed, he had the old Nikka back. Always one step ahead of the argument. Circling round it, sometimes.

  “I can see how that gas—lovely purple glow, isn’t it?—veers up and around. Some pressure is doing that.”

  “Magnetic pressure. Never seen anything like it. Even in the outer strands, which nobody understood when we were back on Earth, the field isn’t a hundredth as strong.”

  “And it’s coming at us, whatever it is.”

  He was surprised again. “How can you tell?”

  “I can see the stuff in front of it. It’s getting squashed, see?” Indeed, now that he screwed up his eyes and studied it, he could. Until now he had relied on ship’s instruments to check that the gossamer strands were rushing toward their ship from several directions.

  “What are they?” Nikka asked, some fatigue still lacing her voice.

  “Something fatal, I’d say.”

  SEVEN

  Old Ones

  One virtue of the shock wave, my boy—it cleared the view. Finally we saw the Old Ones.

  The long, curved filaments were not freeways or power sources or religious icons—they were intelligences. A life-form bigger than stars or giant molecular clouds or anything else in the galaxy’s astrophysical zoo.

  I later learned that these were the, well, the body of the Old Ones—though that term means quite little. In the filaments, currents carried both information—thoughts—and food, that is, charge accumulations, inductances, and potentials. All flowing together. As if, in our bodies, sugars and synapses were the same thing, somehow. The long, sinewy structures glowed and flared, but that was a minor side effect.

  After all, we eat and think and love—and the net result, viewed in the infrared, is a diffuse, ruddy glow, no more.

  The real point of us you’d find only by peering at our industriously firing synapses. Or, backing off about six orders of magnitude, in our sluggish talk.

  And of course, we are sluggish, compared to a lot that’s going on round here. In the local jargon, we talk at about fifty bits per second. We need small bandwidths for long times, just to get out a single idea.

  The Old Ones are broad bandwidth, fast times. We talk slowly, but see well—big chunks of our brains are devoted to shaping up images. Punching up the data, before we ever “see” them at all.

  The Old Ones have that, as well. I doubt there’s anything they can’t do.

  I watched those strange strands, weaving like slow seaweed in a vacuum ocean, and automatically thought of telling Earth about them. That’s what I’d been doing for so long—beaming reports back down the tunnel of our wake.

  Our flight time to Galactic Center was several centuries, ship’s time. I had transmitted a burst every few years. Earth would get those coded blips, I knew, widely spread out by relativistic effects. But was anyone listening?

 
; Staring at the Old Ones, I realized that we were mayflies. The ebb and flow of our civilizations were like gusts of passing, feather-light winds.

  I doubt there’s anything the Old Ones can’t do.

  Point is, what do they want to do?

  EIGHT

  Grandfather

  Toby was getting irked. “You sure got a funny way of telling me what the hell’s going on here.”

  The naked man, though he was a mass of wrinkles, was able to get into his face an expression of canny humor. “Do you poke at your grandfather when he’s setting you straight?”

  “What do you know about my grandfather?”

  “Met him, actually.”

  “When? Where is he?”

  “I’ve learned not to use ‘when’ too much down here. Where is easier. He’s here.”

  Toby stood up, knocking over the little chair with a clatter. “I want to see him!”

  “That you can’t do.”

  “I want to now.”

  “He’s not available. If—”

  “I’ve had about enough of you and your—”

  The old man’s face was suddenly stern and imposing, bringing a flicker of memory to Toby: very much like his grandfather. Maybe all old people got that, something years brought. He sighed and sat down. “All right. Can you tell him I’m here?”

  “He knows.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I’m attempting to tell you.”

  “Uh, sorry.”

  NINE

  The Strong Field Limit

  The Old Ones—not a very inventive name, but then, Jehovah isn’t that catchy, either.

  The Old Ones had been here when the mech civilizations arrived. Mechanicals arose when advanced, organic societies somehow committed suicide—from war, degeneration, unimaginable things—or retreated, from plain simple lack of interest in the tensions of the technological life. That left machines, who evolved into separate societies.