Authors: Gregory Benford
He broke off as Killeen abruptly turned his back. The Cap’n of the
Argo
kept his shoulders square despite a sudden sag of his head. Toby saw that his father was fighting with himself, wrestling
with dark demons his son would never fully know.
Toby could only glimpse them through the clotted phrases of their conversations, through half-made gestures, through the veiled
language of shrugs and scowls and sudden, blunt looks that revealed momentary, naked emotion. The Cap’n was never able to
unburden himself, not even to his son. Not even, perhaps, to Shibo . . . when she had lived.
Things were weighing on Killeen. Shibo’s loss. Killeen’s oblique relation now with his own son. The approaching whirlpool
of True Center. All these churned within his father’s mind, Toby knew. An unhealthy soup.
Killeen gazed out at the blue-black mass that loomed like an absolute wall beside the
Argo
. It was a snarled, inky cloud of dust and simple molecules, their ship’s instruments said. But Killeen always distrusted
the crisp certainties of
Argo
’s Bridge diagnostics. Years before he had formed the habit of surveying from the hull itself, free of the reassuring, softening,
artificial clasp of the ship. Or at least that was what he said. Toby suspected that he just liked to get clear of
Argo
’s confines. Like father, like son.
Gloomy clouds like this dotted the pressing radiance of the Galactic Center, black punctuation marks in a riot of stellar
fire. Killeen had chosen
Argo
’s course to take advantage of this cloud as a shield against lethal radiation levels. As
Argo
slipped slowly by veiled, murky filaments, Toby watched his father’s face tighten, wrinkle with a grimace—and suddenly open
in astonishment.
—There!—Killeen pointed.—Moving.—
Toby thumbed a control on his neck collar. The helmet computer telescoped his vision and shifted to infrared. His field of
view rushed into the recesses of the cloud.
Something snaked at the edge of the mottled mist.
—Go to high mags,—Killeen said tersely, his surprise gone, all business.
Toby sent his vision zooming to max magnification.
RANGE:
23
KM
, his visor told him.
The snaky thing wriggled—slowly, slowly. Its gleaming jade skin reflected the starglow. Sluggishly it spread gossamer-thin
sheets along its body.
—It’s alive!—Toby called.
The green serpent was using sails. Natural sails, grown out of its body on fibrous spars. They caught amber starlight. In
zero gravity, Toby knew, even the faint pressure of light was enough to give a measurable push. With nothing to slow it down,
the twisty creature would pick up speed.
—Look.—Killeen whispered.—There’s something more in that cloud.—
The gently wriggling beast had no head, only a long black slit at one end. Toby thought this must be a mouth, because the
push from its broad, shiny sails was taking it forward with the slit end ahead. And it was sailing in pursuit of a blue ball.
Silently they watched it draw nearer, nearer—and the slit-mouth widened. Something orange shot out and stuck to the blue ball.
Drew it in. The slit-mouth yawned. With two gulps the ball disappeared.
—Predators.—Killeen said.—And prey.—
Toby said wonderingly,—Pred . . . ? How can anything live in a cloud? In free space?—
A grin split Killeen’s star-tanned face.—In free space? Nothing’s free, son. Molecular clouds have organic molecules, right?
So the astro types say.—
—Those names, yeasay.—Toby recalled the voice of his teacher Aspect, Isaac, who gave him complicated lessons.—Oxygen. Carbon.
Nitrogen.—
Killeen gestured expansively.—Add all this starlight, cook for a few billion years. Presto!—
Toby blinked.—Life’s hiding all through this cloud?—
—I’ll bet the hunting is good at the edge of the cloud. Some things prob’ly live deeper in, where they can hide. Every now
and then they’ll come out. To bask in the starlight. Get warm.—
Toby nodded, convinced.—That snaky thing, it knows that. Comes around, looking for supper.—
—The sail-snake eats the blue balls. But what’s the blue ball eat?—
—Something smaller. Something we can’t see from here.—
—Right.—Killen squinted.—There’s got to be some critter that lives off the starlight and drifting molecules alone.—
Toby said wonderingly,—Plants? Space plants. I’ll bet we can eat some of them.—
Killeen pounded his son on the back.—Be a wonder if we couldn’t. We know these clouds have the same basic chemistry that nature
generates everywhere.
Argo
’s science programs told us that, ’member? So we’ll be able to digest some of whatever’s hiding in there, for sure.—
Toby blinked, watching the jade snake unfurl its sails further. Was it green for the same reason plants were, to sop up sunlight
in all colors except green? It began an achingly slow turn, showing curved black stripes. Had it seen their ship? Maybe they
should run it down, see what it tasted like. His stomach rumbled at the idea.
But the creature had a majesty about it, too. A beauty in its glistening hide, its graceful movement. Like an immense swimmer
in a black pool. Maybe they’d leave it be.
—We’d never have seen them from the bridge. Those instruments would’ve filtered out what they didn’t think was important.—Killeen
was all business again, his wonderment suppressed. That was part of the price of being Cap’n.
Toby gaped, still fascinated by the sail-snake. He knew what his father said was right. Nobody could have guessed what they’d
see out here. But Killeen had come out, again and again. Hammering away at a Cap’n’s problems, thinking, worrying, pacing
the hull, looking without knowing what he was looking for. And some of the crew had thought he was crazy.
Toby listened as Killeen called the Bridge and ordered
Argo
toward the shadowy cloud. Understanding came slowly amid the crew. He could hear on comm as the ship stirred with excited
voices, with hope, with joy.
—Dad?—he finally asked.
Killeen was giving a flurry of orders. Crew had to prepare to hunt, to forage, to pursue strange game in inky vacuum depths.
To do things they had never tried before. Had never even imagined.
Killeen paused and said curtly,—Yeasay?—
—We can hole up inside the cloud for a while. Rest up. Get our bearings.—
Killeen shook his head furiously.—Naysay. Resupply, that’s all. There’s True Center. Look at it! We’re so close now.—
Toby peered ahead, through dusty clumps already wreathing the hull of
Argo
as the great ship headed into the recesses of the giant cloud. At max mag he could make out the exact center of the galaxy.
White-hot. Beautiful. Dangerous.
And his father, he now saw, could never be deflected from that goal. Not by starvation. Not by deadly risks. Not by the weight
of past sorrow.
They would fly straight into the gnawing center of all this gaudy, swirling chaos. On an impossible voyage. Looking for something,
with no clear idea of what it might be.
Killeen grinned broadly.—C’mon, son, this is what we were born to do. We’ll go onward. Inward. There’s all our Family’s past
here, somewhere. We’ll find out what happened, who we are.—
—Crew doesn’t like that kind of talk, Dad.—
He frowned.—How come?—
—This is a scary place.—
—So? They haven’t seen the glory of it, haven’t really thought it through. When the time comes, they’ll follow me.—
—We’re running for our lives, Dad.—
—So?—Killeen grinned, a jaunty human gesture amid the wash of galactic light.—We always have been.—
T
he carapace glides like a hunting hornet.
Its thorax is of high-impact matte ceramic. Bone-white lattices mimic ribs. Storage balloons inflate like lungs as it exchanges
plasma charge. Slow rises, fluttering exhales.
This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight, remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent
of the substrate, whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings now encased in habit. Function
converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible tension, struts like statements.
Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines
blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.
It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.
It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are
racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.
Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless
as the rain of protons.
Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that
flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.
Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding
mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.
Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient
supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing
luminescent ideas.
From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly
revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and
scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.
Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic
needles through prey light-minutes away.
For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to
think long. Within them, data dances.
The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here)
and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.
Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but
they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.
It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.
Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.
They must. They are an unresolved issue.
You term them “primates”?
Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.
I/You consider them irrelevant.
The underlying issues still vex.
They are nothing! Debris, motes.
They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.
We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in
history, demand completion of this ancient task.
This policy is e>/~*~\< old. We/You should reinspect it.
They are nearly extinct. Press on.
Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests we\you reconsider our\my assumptions.
They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!
Some would say that evolution works as equally upon you\us as upon them.
Nonsense. We\You direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.
They were once able to alter their own imprintings. To write changes in their carbon kind.
They lost it as we\you diminished them. Now they are the same as the unthinking forms, the animals—shaped by random forces.
They were once important players here. We\You should understand their threat to us before expunging them.
Possibly they harbor information harmful to us\you—so say our most stable records.
Those are sheltered against the Mass Eater’s radiant storm and so should be well preserved.
By its nature we\you cannot know what this hidden information is.
Why “by its nature”?
There are many theories.
Precisely. Does it not seem curious that something in our\your makeup makes it somehow impossible for us\you to know what
these humans carry? That such knowledge is blocked for us? A curious aspect of our deep programming.
May
carry. Such ancient records are suspect.
We\You cannot risk disbelieving them.
Long ago the philosopher [
|
~] resolved such questions. We\You are imprisoned within our perception-space. There will always remain matters you\we cannot
know.
But if these matters affect ourselves? Disquieting.
Living with ambiguity is the nature of high intelligence. Still, to lessen uncertainty we\you should exterminate the remaining
bands.
And lose their information?
Very well—archive them first. I now point to this latest incursion— already it nears True Center.
There may be risks in erasing them.
Nonsense. You\We have destroyed many such expeditions before.
First, let scouts find them accurately. The usual primate-hunter units will track them, perhaps inflict minor damage—one must
give such lower forms some reward structure, remember.
You/We advocate delay?
No—cautious action. Remember that higher forms than us will judge our\your actions. Prudence demands care. Earlier events
involving these primates, on two separate planets, have pointed toward some significant yet poorly defined role they play.
They may carry information—and what are they, but information? Indeed, what are we?—which can bring the attentions of minds
above ours.