Authors: Gregory Benford
“No!” Jocelyn cried. “We can’t last a day at these—”
“Quiet!” Killeen barked.
Again silence fell. The Cap’n pointed to the glimmering, ghostlike blue of the galactic jet. “I take that as a sign. A pointer.
And we will follow it.”
Toby realized he had been holding his breath. He finally gasped for air. The crew stirred restlessly, murmuring, stunned.
Jocelyn asked Toby’s question before he could get up the courage.
Her eyes seemed to drill through the intense air of the Bridge. “The jet goes outward. We follow it?”
Killeen stiffened. “The mechs will block us.”
“Where, then?”
“Into the jet. Maybe there’s a way.”
T
oby was passing by a minor side corridor when he caught the tang of smoke. He blinked, sniffed—and followed the acrid stink
at a trot.
The corridor was unlit, the phosphors deliberately off. Ahead he saw dancing flames. There was nothing worse on a starship
than fire—burning the very air they needed, while threatening to breech the hull and let in swallowing vacuum. He hurried—and
stumbled over a man squatting near the fire.
When he picked himself up he saw by the orange flames that people were huddled around a big pile of smoky corn husks and popping
dried branches. But the blaze was young, under control. Bright eyes danced with reflected firelight and they all laughed at
his surprise. “Siddown! Take a load off,” someone called.
He knew the fire would leave sooty stains on the ceiling, as others had in innumerable nooks of the ship, but he saw the need.
The Families were vagabonds. A communal fire took them back to the one shelter they trusted, even when surrounded by a threatening
night.
He let himself slide into it, too. It was restful, remembering the long treks of his boyhood, the biting cold nights beneath
a brilliant sky. Smoke licked at his eyes. The crackling yellow spirits danced. Shadows played on faces staring moodily into
the unending mystery of flame.
“You look tired, Toby-lad,” Cermo said from nearby.
Toby was surprised to see Cermo here, and even closer, Jocelyn. Usually the highest ship’s officers kept a certain distance
from the others. But here Cermo was settled onto his beefy haunches, the age-old posture. It left you always ready to jump
and move, if surprised. Useless here, of course, but a warming reminder of their shared past, their wary vulnerability.
“Been working the fields,” Toby answered.
“Good crop?”
“Asparagus. Lost most of it.”
Jocelyn said mildly, “Time was, we just picked the food and moved on.”
Cermo nodded sadly. “We hunted, we gathered, hit the mech centers for whatever extra we wanted.”
Answering murmurs came from around the shadowy circle. Toby grinned. “Come on—I was there. It was living by our wits, the
mechs on our backs every minute. It could be worth your life to take a breather.”
Cermo shook his head, thick muscles working in his neck, catching the gleam of the snapping flames. “At least we didn’t just
dig in the dirt. Sure, some gardening in Citadel Bishop—but we weren’t hardscrabble clod-busters. We were free. Nature was
the only farmer, and we just picked.”
Toby knew where this was coming from. People were forever getting nostalgic for a rosy past they made better than it ever
was. And they did it when the present was tough and tight. “Jocelyn, you remember—always looking over our shoulder for mechs,
eating scraps, on the run morning to night—”
“How’s it different now?” she shot back.
Another woman’s voice called from the murk, “Mechs got us trapped.” A Fiver accent.
Toby nodded. “But we’re in a human ship, fighting our way through them.”
“We’re running,” Jocelyn said. “Those big bugs, they did the fighting. But now they’re way behind us, holding off some of
the mech ships—and we’re running.”
Toby snapped, “Hey now, that’s what the Myriapodia want. Quath’s in touch with them, and she says they’re fighting a rearguard.
So we can figure out what’s so important in here. Just give us a little time and—”
“Time’s what we don’t have,” Cermo said solemnly, his eyes tortured. “We’re heatin’ up already, and we haven’t even reached
that galactic jet.”
“Give the Cap’n a break, huh?” Toby said. “Maybe the jet’s what we want.”
Jocelyn laughed dryly. “That? It’s just a column of cooling gas. Refugee junk that got away from the black hole.”
Toby didn’t like to argue his father’s case, but something made him speak out against this aimless, hang-mouth talk. “Hey,
give him time. We’re moving, we’re in good shape, and—”
“He brought us here with no more idea of what we were getting into than a camp rat.”
An older man snickered. “I’d say he don’t know enough to pour piss outta a boot with a hole in the toe and directions writ
on the heel.”
This got a good hearty laugh.
“Look, we all like to air our lungs,” a Trump-accented voice said. “But where I come from, we had to stick with the Cap’n.”
Toby nodded vigorously. “I won’t honeyfuggle you about how tight things are. But yeasay—we got to keep true.”
Voices came pelting in from all directions now, some objecting, others backing him up. Trump Families for Killeen, firm as
steel. Bishops dog-mouthing the Cap’n, even though he was one of their own.
The sooty flavor of the air and the brooding dark made it easy for people to speak out, let fly with a few hard-edged words,
sharpen the air. The corncobs gave forth their sweeter smoke, cracking and fizzing. Slowly their talk turned more meditative,
lost its harshness as people got their inner fears out, saw them for what they were, and stuffed them back into the mental
pouches where everyone had to keep the dark moments. So the fire did its work, and its spreading blue fog made the nook a
warmer, more human place.
When a call came on comm for Toby, he was reluctant to leave. But it was the Bridge, and he hurried.
He passed by a wall screen on his way. The soft blue jet hung before them now, its shimmer working upward, away and against
the iron reds and burnt golds of the virulent disk, far below. Dry heat stirred the air. An odd humming sounded through the
ship, like a bass note sounded far away. It made Toby jittery. By the time he reached the Bridge he was not surprised to see
his father looking weary and gray, his uniform wrinkled from long hours.
“Toby! You’re needed.”
“Uh, why?” Everybody seemed worked up, but there was nothing new on the wall screens.
“That.” Killeen gestured at long filaments of rosy gas that trailed alongside the jet. The
Argo
was cruising hard through the immense, glowing filigrees. They had passed through such “weather” before, though these luminous
strands twisted with restless energy.
“So? More fireworks.”
“Not quite. I’ve spoken with these before.”
“Spoken?” His father had been on duty too long.
“Not for years, and maybe you don’t remember. The voice from the sky.”
“Huh?” Toby shook his head. So much had happened, and they understood so little of it.
“The Magnetic Mind. This is it.”
Now Toby remembered.
—Years before, standing in a rocky valley while skittering veins of green and yellow played through the sky like searching
fingers. Striations that worked the furious air and finally had found them. Hot filaments had vibrated like angry breezes,
speaking through the sensorium input each person carried in the back of the skull.
An intelligence that lived, somehow, in silvery radiances. It had spoken to Killeen—though the entire Family could overhear,
witnesses as a colossal intellect delivered a message in the sky. Toby recalled that childhood memory in an instant, the way
a warm kitchen smell can bring a vibrant mother’s voice to life long after . . .
He shook himself. The memories of far childhood, back in the happy closeness of the Citadel, could come flooding through him
at any time.
But this was not the right moment. Those were a boy’s recollections, and he had to stop thinking like a boy.
He refocused on the huge, stringy luminescence that grew steadily before the
Argo
, and made himself ask, “How do you know? I mean, this could be just some kind of lightning or something.”
Killeen smiled without humor. “I guess it is, in a way. Vital lightning, the same as you and I are really walking heaps of
controlled burning. That’s what keeps us going, thinking, doing. Oxygen burns our food, one of my Aspects says. This thing
uses electricity, generated by that disk down below.”
“How?”
“I dunno. But energy is energy, and the way I figure it, this thing has learned how to stack magnetic fields, build them up
into something like a body.”
Toby liked to appear capable and savvy in front of ship’s officers, but the striations before
Argo
didn’t look like anything he remembered. “Huh?”
Killeen shrugged. “I’ve been getting prickly feelings, like something probing at me.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain,
but it’s like before. The Magnetic Mind glues itself together with magnetic fields. Or maybe it just
is
magnetic fields, period. And it lives somewhere here, so . . .”
A deep strumming came up through Toby’s heels. At first he thought it was the ship’s acceleration as it fought against the
lurking gravitational pulls here in this riot of mass and light. Then he noticed that the quivering came and went with a slow
rhythm. He felt it through his ears and hands, too. Pulses. Then the odd vibration climbed into the massive walls and filled
the air of the Bridge with a heavy presence.
Give sign if you perceive.
The voice was gritty, granite-hard, immense.
“Not like before,” Killeen whispered. “Then it used our sensoria. Now—look, the whole room is shivering.”
I am charged with a task of discernment. If you be of the tribe of Bishop, give voice.
The Bridge was acting as a giant amplifier for the hollow, lordly voice, the walls ringing and shaking like a loudspeaker.
Toby wondered how a thing that was just magnetic fields, with no weight or substance, could do that.
Killeen looked cornered, surrounded by the voice. Then he barked out, “Bishops we are. I’m Killeen. Remember?”
So you are. I forget nothing, and store tidings of times ancient beyond your imaginings in the curls and knots of my being.
I recall your particular flat odor and squashed, slanted self. Good—I have been enjoined to inspect you.
“By who?” Killeen called. The Bridge crew stood transfixed, and the voice ignored him.
I seek another as well. It is termed “Toby” and must be with you if you are to receive further attentions from the inner realm.
“I’m here,” Toby shouted.
Are you? Let me taste . . . Each of you tiny things has a different aroma, an angularity. Such pointless profusion!
“We’re different people!” Toby protested.
Skittering spokes shot through him, electric-quick and bristling with points of pain. Probing. Then they were gone.
You are the flavor termed “Toby”—your animal signatures match the genetic inventory, crude though it is. Creation is so trivially
diverse, endowing each of you with oblique gene-scents and dusky shadings. Such a waste of natural craft! Detail and artful
turns, needlessly multiplied, throwing reason to ruination.
“We like ourselves pretty well,” Toby said, tight-lipped.
So you do. All is illusion. Still, I must report that you are here. Then I hope to be quit of this obligation and irritant.
“Wait!” Toby cried. “What’s this about? Who wants to know?”
A power which sits further inward.
“Well, what is it?”
It is not of the cold, dead flecks of matter such as you inhabit. The power which presses me to this task speaks to me through
my feet, which rest in the warm hearth of the plasma disk.
“Yeasay,” Toby persisted, “so it’s a, a plasma cloud?” Whatever that was.
It dwells somewhere below me, in storm-cut majesty, but is unknowable to as large an entity as I.
Killeen called, “You said last time, years ago, that my father had something to do with this.”
Years? I do not know such terms . . .
Killeen said, “A major part of our present lifetimes. I—”
But which “present” do you reside in? Duration, distance—these are primitive terms.
Killeen was visibly puzzled. “Look, was my father—”
Tiny forms such as yourselves are impossible to resolve in the warp of energies at my feet. But such terms and names come
rippling up to me, along the cables of myself. When such information was loaded onto my eternal tangle of knowledge-knots,
and thus the age of this clotted cognizance, I cannot know. Forms such as yourself were once there, yes—squalid primitives.
Their persistence in the realm of immense clashes-imponderable is quite unlikely.
“You’re saying he’s dead?” Killeen asked sharply.
Tiny lives wink like flames beneath my footpoints. My whole motivation to assume this field-form is to rise above mortality
and its minute matters. I cannot register small endings, any more than animals like you sense grains of sand as you trod them.
“Is he—”
I go. If the power below desires more, I shall touch you further.
“Wait! We need to know what to do here, how to escape—”
The vibration of the Bridge walls cut off, leaving a hush.
Killeen threw up his hands, swearing, and then drove a fist into the wall. A painful smack.
This shocked Toby more than the abrupt departure of the Magnetic Mind. He realized how much his father had bottled up, how
desperate he was beneath his flinty exterior.
“Dad—what did it mean? What—”
“Damned if I know. That thing treats us like bugs.”
“Well, we don’t much like to talk to bugs, either,” Toby pointed out reasonably, hoping to josh Killeen out of his scowling,
nasty mood. Then he thought a moment and added to himself,
Except Quath.