Sailing Bright Eternity Read online

  “Good grief,” Nigel managed to wheeze out.

  “But we got all the rest. Nobody wanted the next one to find an empty Earth. So we pulled ourselves up. Searched the whole damn solar system for the last mech outposts. They were pretty well hidden, some down in Jupiter’s clouds. And we got every one.”

  Nigel blinked. The world had stopped revolving and he was beginning to understand. “And came . . .”

  “Here. To find out what had happened to you. And what’s this whole thing all about.”

  Hello? We’re still here. Are you?

  He saw in the faces something like awe. To them he and Nikka and the others were antique historical pieces, incredibly ancient.

  Immensely capable, these Earthers were. The mechs would fear them.

  Nigel blinked, smiled. “We’re still here. Still here.” It seemed very amusing and he could not talk anymore for the lump in his throat.

  TWELVE

  Sobering Perspectives

  That was the high point. Of course it was fine and wonderful to meet his own kind again, humans from dear beloved Earth.

  But in time, his first fuzzy perceptions as he lay there wounded, of the Earthers as bright chimps, made more and more ironic sense. They were human, true. Smart chimps. But far more. Changed.

  The mech onslaughts against Earth had forced human evolution—both through biotech enhancements and natural selection. The Earthers had implants that gave them sensoria—complex electromagnetic shells, useful for both war and work. Their spines rode better, on thick lumbar disks. They carried no pesky appendix to fester and erupt. Their bodies had intricate neurological meshes, better metabolism, rugged cartilage, sturdier bones.

  Those were rather obvious. The unconscious differences were more telling. He and Nikka and the others from the TwenOne century—called the “Elders,” soon enough—could not keep up with these Earthers, mentally or physically. The big, almost lazily competent newcomers were very polite about it, of course. They tried to include their Elders as they explored the esty, hammered the mechs, and even made contact with the ghostly Old Ones.

  These brave new Earthers retained a certain chimpyness. Hominids, still. Quite courteous to their Elders, but learning quickly from mechs and Old Ones alike. Climbing an evolutionary ladder, trailing clouds of glory, into a fog.

  At that point, their thought processes simply escaped comprehension.

  The rheumy old-fart Elders could not follow conversations involving the Old Ones. Nigel and Nikka and the others who had come in the hijacked mech starship—a small band, now, called Ancestrals by the Earthers—were adrift. They could not master the blindingly fast tech the Earthers had brought, or later devised in response to the mechs.

  Nigel got a glimmering of the Old Ones, when he helped explore portions of the esty Lanes. Those convoluted geometries, sealed away, made excellent petri dishes. In the Lanes, different cultures—alien and human alike—could evolve the diversity needed to counter the mechanicals. All sorts emerged—high-tech, low-tech, even no-tech.

  For the Elders, the new perspectives were sobering. The Earthers, though, worked easily with the Old Ones. They countered the mechs, killed many, sometimes even cooperated with them.

  The Old Ones dispersed Earthers, out of the Lair. Nigel and the other Elders more or less looked on and did scut work. The news was distant, hard to follow.

  A big offensive against mech control of the entire Center. Earthers spread among the planets orbiting stars a bit farther out from True Center.

  They learned from mechtech, scavenged mech properties. They built huge constructions in space, the Chandeliers.

  For many millennia the Earthers did well. Nigel watched them from the time-slowed pit of the esty. Then came trouble.

  Mechs found a way to short-circuit some of the power by which the Old Ones sustained their strange magnetic strands. Tapping that source for their own ends made them enormously more powerful. That’s when they started to grow, to pillage the great orbiting Earther cities.

  Nigel had visited their crystal cities, and the even greater structures that he could witness but not fathom. When the mechs began getting the upper hand again, he helped as he could. The very terms of the struggle were difficult to comprehend.

  Like listening to a conversation carried out through a drain pipe during a rainstorm, he had said. A very long drain pipe.

  As the mechanicals destroyed more and more of the human enterprise at Galactic Center, he found more to do. The conflict was coming down to his level again.

  The final, desperate strategy of the Hunker Down—

  dividing humanity into separate cultural petri dishes, down on the planets—gave him plenty of grunt work to do. In that era he had spent a time outside the esty.

  He could not follow in any detail the ramifications of the Earthermech struggle. He knew it involved alien organic races, other Originals, as well. And the conflict’s main stage was at a level involving the Old Ones and the elusive Highers. Of these he and the other Ancestrals knew nothing.

  Except . . . The mechanicals had some grail they sought. They kept utterly secretive about it, but they pursued bands of humans as if searching for something. Nigel once caught the phrases “Trigger Codes” and “First Command” but they went by on the fly, soon lost. And the Earthers gave him a stony-faced nothing in answer. As if there were some secret so subtle that knowledge that there was a secret was a secret.

  Also, it had taken him a long time to see how he was being used.

  Politely, with the most consideration possible, of course. But used. By Earthers and Highers alike.

  He had retired, then, from a struggle beyond his ken. Or thought he had.

  THIRTEEN

  The Physical Representation

  Nigel Walmsley squinted at Toby. “There’s so much to tell—”

  “I don’t need to know much! Just enough to keep alive,” Toby said.

  “That turns out to be quite a bit. You’re pretty complicated yourself, boy.” Nigel could not resist giving an interior command. Points were often better made by example.

  Beside Toby, glimmering points condensed into Shibo. She was a handsome, mature woman, lean and translucent and her legs missing. Her upper body twisted as if stretching from a long confinement. A thin smile. “Hello, my carrier.”

  Toby jumped, startled. “You! You’re still buried down in my reserve banks?”

  “I insinuated . . . myself.”

  “Damn! I wanted you out.”

  “I have . . . no place . . . to go.”

  The room’s sensorium readers were tuned to excruciating precision and could pick up even diffused Aspects and Personalities and Faces lodged in an individual’s fringing fields. Shibo shimmered, ghostly remnant hiding in Toby’s electro-aura.

  Shibo’s face said more than her faltering words. “I am here . . . to help.”

  “I’ve got you in chipstore,” Toby said bitterly. “That’s enough.”

  “I cannot help . . . being.”

  Nigel felt a strange, silky current pass between Toby and the Shibo representation. Toby said, “Killeen, he wants to bring you back. Chips’re enough for that?”

  “I prefer . . . to reside . . . here.”

  “If Killeen gets your chips, he’ll try to bring you back.”

  “I prefer . . . here.”

  “I want you out.”

  “I stay.” She lifted a hand in silent salute—and vanished.

  “Ah! Damn!” Toby spat out in frustration.

  “Sorry, but I had a point to make,” Nigel said. “You will find that the notion of self is a bit complex here.”

  “I’ve got to get her out of me.”

  Nigel said with compassion, “In time you’ll realize that what mechs call the ‘physical representation’ is only one phase.”

  “Shibo really could be brought back, then?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Reality—a delightfully abs
tract term—is analog. Humans live and think there.”

  Toby shrugged. “Yeasay, it’s real.”

  “The mech world is essentially digital. You’ll never understand mechs until you realize how differently they view matters. And not only them. The Old Ones, the Highers—they do not share our sense of the self.”

  “Highers?”

  Walmsley knew the boy would understand it all best if it unfurled in a story. The classic primate manner of learning. Linear, relentlessly serial. Quite old-fashioned, yet it stuck.

  Very well, best to go back a long way, to the time after he had backed away from the High Phyla entirely, sought the refuge of simplicity.

  He sighed. “There’s so much to tell—”

  PART TWO

  Soon Comes Night

  The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

  —EDEN PHILLPOTTS,

  A Shadow Passes, 1934

  ONE

  Worm

  The body lay dying for some time before Angelina found it.

  She had noticed a small cyclone of birds standing in the air above a churned-up span of smoldering rock and went to look. The small, four-winged birds were predators only in a flock, never alone. They banked on the warm updraft from the oozing soup of sun-orange rock below, peering down with hungry intensity.

  The broken body stirred every now and then and the birds would rise a bit, a reflex born of long evolution, for if the prey revived it might be dangerous. Their courage was purely collective. Each would have fled in confusion were it not for the familiar, gene-deep helical churn of their updrafted gyre that calmed them all.

  Angelina found the body folded up, as though broken in the legs and chest. It was a woman in a dark-red single-sheathed garment. The pliant weave was ripped and caked with blood already gone brown. As Angelina knelt to help she caught the coppery scent of fresh blood and saw an eyelid quiver. A patch seeped red at the temple.

  That made Angelina send a quick comm alert to her brothers, Benjamin and Ito, who came from the house an hour’s walk away. They ran it in much less, bringing a sling and medical supplies.

  Angelina had stopped most of the bleeding with a tourniquet, but the woman was in a bad way from the heat and dehydration on top of the catalog of injuries: chest a massive purple bruise, chin crushed in, right arm twisted at an impossible angle and showing white bone.

  They got her in the sling and worked on the arm before carrying her back over the broken landscape. Only then did the slowly cycling tower of birds, hundreds-strong and chorusing a disappointed chip-chip-chip song, disperse into its timid, individual parts. Some still tracked the humans, for scouts were part of the collective genetic lessons as well.

  The three had trouble getting back to safer ground and that was when they guessed the origin of the dying woman. Footing was unsteady. From long habit they thought of the solid stuff their boots struck as rock, but knew that the glowing, slippery sheen was the “esty”—S-T, a compacted form of space-time. The esty could be firm and dense at one moment and the next, blur and fuzz into a foglike film. Vital and durable yet flexing, following laws of its own nature, rules unknowable. Or at least unknown by humans of this era.

  As they took turns carrying the listless body each of them was troubled by a sense of foreboding. In their circumscribed world this woman had come as a signal flare, an announcement. She opened again the doors of speculation, for they knew the tales of bodies belched forth by the esty from places and eras of danger and promise. They did not share these first tingling thoughts, but the air hung heavy among them.

  Humans had lived here a long time, shaped by the esty and knowing it as the frame of their world. Yet it was also an enemy of capricious, almost vindictive spirit. It slipped beneath their boots as they carried the woman, who still oozed blood and pus at her many wounds. Blue-white flashes wracked the air. Vagrant electrical energies plucked at their sleeves like fugitive winds.

  They reached their sprawling, ramshackle house. Their father, Nigel, had returned from the orchard. He frowned when he saw the damage. Already their mother, Nikka, had their auto-medical equipment rigged up and running, shiny and smooth despite its age, but there was by that time little hope.

  The woman gasped and choked, her hot breath whistling past a broken tooth. For a moment she smacked her lips and seemed to savor the flavor of the home: sweet cloves and garlic, aging flowers, damp rags, thick soup simmering in an all-day pot, a woody tang tamed by a sheen of oil.

  Her concussion spoke for her then, forcing clogged murmurs and hoarse cries from her raw throat.

  “Sky . . . burning . . . ohkan . . . ohkan . . . get away!”

  The family Walmsley glanced at each other. “The others we heard about,” Nikka whispered, “they never could talk.”

  “This one won’t for long, I’ll wager,” Nigel said.

  Something in him took an instant dislike to anything that disturbed his tranquil world, this rustic refuge he and Nikka had shaped. Earthers, mechs, Old Ones—their operatic clashes lay far away, in other Lanes, or out among the fevered stars. This woman brought all that to mind again.

  Yet he had chosen this place for their farm. He had known that the eruption spots in the esty were important. Something in him did not want to quite let go of the larger stage.

  The woman subsided for a while. They moved around her, following the instructions of the artificial intelligence, which spoke with a hushed, calming voice. The program had a false note of sympathy that always irritated Nigel, but the family found it reassuring.

  Nikka saw the bulge of the woman’s optic disk—papilledema, the soothing computer voice supplied, speaking of severe damage to the woman’s outsized cranium. Fractures ran through the body, as if it had been systematically stepped upon. Cracked ribs and hips and calves, ending in toes snapped off clean. Blood vessels had been raked and cauterized by a tunneling fire. No one knew how to fix these things readily and the computer would not hazard a guess as to their cause. As they inventoried the damage and patched where they could, the woman gave a harsh bark. Her eyes flew open in a kind of discharging overload, and she sat up.

  “Grey Mech . . . knows . . . got to . . . sky . . . fire, fire . . .”

  She yawned, startled jaws agape with bright fresh pain—and went completely limp. By the time her head slapped back on the pad her life functions had gone flatline.

  Nothing Angelina or Benjamin or Ito could do could bring a spark back into the body. Her mind was blown to shards. They started the small measures that would snatch back some fragment of the woman: circulating her blood with a pump inserted into the bloodstream, reading her cortical map.

  “From the esty,” Nigel said as they worked.

  “And she mentioned the Grey Mech,” Benjamin said. They glanced at each other soberly.

  Nigel ran the diagnostics program but otherwise kept his distance. He had seen a lot of damaged people in his time and did not share his children’s fascination. “She came up from the wormhole spot, correct?—same as long ago.”

  Benjamin, the younger son, cocked his mouth doubtfully. “That body was dead too?”

  “A man near here named Ortega found it hanging half-exposed out of a kind of fog-ball, he said.” Nigel was quite old now, nearly four hundred of the old Earth years by his reckoning, but he remembered fairly well. This territory he tread softly, for it brought up doubts about himself, of who he had been long ago, of what the abyss of centuries had swallowed—

  He stopped himself from thinking that way and went on. “That’s the only case I ever heard of around here, but esty history has a few more.”

  “From that shaky spot in the Lane?” Benjamin shook his head. “But worms, they’re like balls, spheres, not like holes in a wall.”

  “True,” Nikka said. “But worms can open up best in compacted esty. There is more free energy available there, or so the theory goes.”

  Benjamin stopped working, his hands resting on the
blood-spattered table. “So this woman passed through a worm? I thought the pressures inside were incredible.”

  “They are. The body Ortega found was stretched, pulped. From far upstream time,” Nigel said.

  “Suredead?” Benjamin asked, eyes rapt.

  Nigel said, “A few memories, but nobody could assemble a Personality from them.”

  Nigel thought then of the distant space and time from which this cooling woman had probably come. A one-way passage to a past or future unknown, a journey fraught with murderous forces.

  Yet she had come. Or been sent? “Bringing something,” he mused.

  Benjamin frowned. “Bringing what?” With long, bony fingers he searched among the tatters they had cut from the body. “Nothing here but cloth.”

  Ito was swaddling up the cutting stink where the woman’s bowels had loosened in her final, clenching agony. “D’you think the Old Ones’ll want to look at her?”

  “I hope not,” Nikka said. “They’ll take forty forevers to send somebody out here.”

  Nigel said crabbily, “I hope she’s not going to rot quickly, like the one Ortega found.”

  Nikka rebuked him sharply, eyes irked in her leathery face. “Don’t be calloused.”

  “Respect for the dead doesn’t mean you take risks.” Nigel looked a little sheepish over his remark and felt called to defend it.

  “Full protocols?” Angelina asked. She was muscular and compact from work in the groves and smiled prettily despite the circumstances.

  Benjamin said eagerly, “I’ll get the readers.” As the youngest, just entering adolescence, he sprang to take on any task, to show he wasn’t much behind his sister, the middle child. Ito had been that way but lately had left his teenage years and did not have his bearing straight, Nigel judged, on where to go from there.

  All but Benjamin knew about the man Ortega found, who had gone bad in ways—fungus growing while you watched, spores blown off, eyes popping vapor—that had inspired in them childhood nightmares. Even now, nearly fully grown, none of them liked to recall Nigel’s warnings and pictures: boils that had sprouted like small glassy domes from the man’s flesh, festering purple and angry red. They had burst with wet pops and ejected spongy drops that stuck and had to be scraped off with a knife. And scraped fast—they sought food, boring into flesh.