Authors: Gregory Benford
No sign of Killeen or Cermo. No shouts or unusual hurry. He leaned against a building, eyeing the park a block away.
This was only a temporary victory. The Family would comb this city and pluck him out.
He felt a familiar cool signal in his comm. Quath, apparently, had played the same kind of games as a child—or hatchling,
or whatever the Myriapodia were when young. But Toby couldn’t see her anywhere.
The bulky form was above him, clinging somehow to the side of a building, concealed in shadow. Nobody nearby had noticed.
“With Dad acting that way, it had to happen.”
“Freedom starts between the ears, sticky-paws. I had to follow what I know. So did you. Thanks.”
“Really? Do you think I should give Shibo back to him?”
“Come on!”
Toby leaned against a wall, watching Quath clamber down the gray ceramic building—which shuddered and popped with the strain—and
said, “I don’t hear much music these days, buggo. Just noise.”
“How would you know?”
“You don’t have unconscious thoughts? I mean, impulses, things that just turn up when you’re not thinking about them?”
“Maybe we like ourselves the way we are.”
“Ummm.” He recalled the sensuous moments, his deep, troubling sweats. “Not really.”
“So I can’t really think about Shibo? That’s why I’m so messed up?” He felt exhausted, and not from his running. He let himself
slide down, back to the wall, legs splaying out until he was sitting in the alley.
“That’s . . . why we feel so much . . .”
“And we can’t.”
Toby wondered if he would ever know what stormy emotions tossed him about on the surface of a deep, troubled inner sea. He
shrugged. “In that case, maybe I’ll feel a smidge better if I do something more than sit on my fat ass, waitin’ for Cermo
to fall over me here.”
in this grave matter.>
“Hey, without you I’d be having my spinal chips picked clean.” Toby got to his feet, feeling lighter, easier in himself.
“Like my grandfather used to say, bug-brain—Cheer up! We’ll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.” It seemed odd to be
giving Quath a pep talk.
“Part of the line. We got plenty more like him.” It felt good to say it, even if he didn’t really know if it was true. Maybe
no son ever did know.
Quath rustled her legs, then restlessly played her boosters, hovering in air. People in the street nearby looked up, startled,
and moved away. They were pretty savvy, but Quath was a bit much.
“Neither do I. We can’t stay here, though. You’re kinda conspicuous and I’m a wanted man.”
“I dunno. We flew
Argo
in through the grand entrance and they were ready for us. Is there a back door to this place?”
A
bove the disk nothing made of metal or ceramic can survive.
Perpetually the great turning disk grinds down the stuff of stars. Tides suck inward, shredding.
The Eater itself holds eternally captive the gathered masses of a million dead suns. The ancient matter itself vanished in
seconds of stretched agony, drawn down the steepening slide of space-time. But the memory of these transient masses lingers
in curvature.
To the outside, a ghost warp testifies to the dead. Ten billion years of sacrificed matter—stars and dust, planets and cities,
lost civilizations and their records, their hopes—have their single tombstone in the mute remaining distortion. A galaxy’s
ancient pain persists as silent gravitation.
Blobs of already incandescent matter spiral in, skating on the curvature at speeds higher than found anywhere else in the
galaxy. Incessant pull whirls doomed matter in a final frenzied gyre.
The blobs collide, smash, reform, rub. Magnetic fields mediate the friction. Snarls of plasma stream and whirl. Currents churn.
Magnetic vortices grow. The fields twine and loop through the condemned kernels. In tight collisions, fields themselves annihilate
against each other. More energy flares forth.
Above such brutal furnaces skim the phase creatures. They had once been of the mechanicals. Now they exist not in hard circuits
or ceramic lattice-intelligences. They have evolved out of self-directed necessity. To drink more energy they have learned
to dissolve.
As torrents of hard radiation lance through them, they are plasmas. This gathers in fluxes and stores them in long-range correlations.
When the flood ebbs, the phase creatures change. In the cooler spots above the disk they can condense. Lacy filaments become
gaseous discharges. The power so generated they broadcast outward, to lesser ranks who can store it.
The phase creatures themselves use these fluxes to organize themselves into free-floating networks. Circuits without wires.
Electrons flowing only in their own self-consistently generated magnetic fields. Pinched currents that snake and flare. Voltages
and switches. Light-quick, gossamer-thin.
Lively intelligences dance there. Inductive, silent, invisible.
They enter the discussion that has been teeming above them, in the cooler realms. With silky elegance their thoughts merge
with the hard beings who are the cruder, earlier forms of mechanicals.
But the phase creatures still know their origins. They share the thought patterns of the metallic forms. They converse.
I/We do not understand why these odd, primitive primates should be studied at all. And what is this arrival?
You/I summoned |>A<|, who was concluding the elimination of remaining organic life on the planet of these primates’ origin.
This
|
>A<
|
is a strange mixture of intelligences.
I/We know. Tolerate it. Here:
Greetings. I employ the single-consciousness approximation. This you may find uncomfortable.
Regard: How narrow.
We/You tried it before and found it stifling.
We should accommodate |>A<|.
Very well. But what a demented limitation!
Bear with |>A<| for a moment.
To plumb the recesses of primate thinking such strictures are necessary.
Why study them, then?
Their sense of beauty is like no other. Variant organics are unique, as well, but these have long duration here at True Center.
Beauty? We are arbiters of that.
I seek to find wholly fresh reaches of grace and flavor. These are species-specific, lavish in lore.
A needless luxury. We face sterner issues now.
Beauty is as vital to our being as any of your raw pursuits.
Is that an insult?
Never—but a fact.
Careful, then.
I intend no offense. I am a specialist intelligence, with my own drivers. Let me point out to you gathered minds what a richness
these primates have! These are the creatures who developed the Five-Digit Motif. It grips the perceptual centers as can no
other! And then there are their inner, colorful emotion-curtains. Wondrous! Their Subverted-Maximal Abstractions. All wonderful
creations!
I/We are more concerned with their possible danger to us. All because of some semi-mythical knowledge they carry.
But without knowing they carry it. That is important. They must not learn what they possess!
I believe they sense some special destiny which they carry. But they do not know its nature, that is clear. Such beings carry
deeper knowledge as narratives. To primates, a myth is a deep story which answers the difficult questions of their lives.
I/You thought that myths were simply someone else’s religion.
Of course, but I speak of primates. I have studied them well.
Then you are the one who must enter the Wedge and act for us there.
Why? I have other matters—
You know them best.
But I have never been to the Wedge.
I do not wonder, with your time spent on the beauties of underlife.
The Wedge is treacherous.
Indeed. But we/you have breached it with minor forms. Even now the tiny informants have filtered into their portal city. They
are keeping close watch on the primates of the ship—those we allowed to enter.
A move you/I opposed.
It gained us valuable information. This Legacy of theirs—it hints at much we do not know.
We/I would not need to know it if we had expunged the primates.
No! You should not think this way. The primates are a valuable form, approaching extinction. Protect such beings for their
last moments.
That is a luxury.
We command you to follow close upon the important primate members which their own Legacy has identified.
The Wedge is perilous. I cannot even be sure, entering it, where I shall be. Or when.
We/I shall give you/I resources.
I could become lost in the chaotics.
A risk we/you must take.
I have heard that there are agencies in the Wedge which can harm even higher systems such as ourselves.
True. We do not know what they are.
But I am in single-consciousness mode! If I perish, the “I-form” shall vanish!
I\We cannot help that.
You/We elected this state.
Though of course we will archive your present state. A copy of you will carry on.
To venture into such turmoil—I am not qualified.
You/We seem reluctant. Yet you\we have trained in the most important skill—you have dealt with primates. You moved them to
their intersection with the quasi-mechanicals. Very adroit.
And we/you have other motivations.
What motivations? To risk so much—
Think of beauty. Of art.
Gravity’s Gullet
T
he city of the dwarves slipped away behind them.
Toby and Quath moved quickly, using scattered buildings for cover and then a dense grove of curious spindly trees. These rose
to greater and greater heights as they fled into a gorge of arched and tangled rock. Toby’s attention fled as well, veering
away from the confrontation with his father, taking refuge in the pure bliss of flight. He ran hard.
“More dangerous to stay back there.”
Dangerous? Toby asked himself. To whom? The word was wrong but he was not going to inspect his inner feelings now. Time to
act
.
“Great help, those [untranslatable]s.”
“Hey, leave me alone, yeasay?”
“Humans aren’t so easy to figure, you said once.”
“Me either. Some way he needs it, more than the Legacy . . . or me.” He swallowed hard but the lump in his throat would not
go away.
Into his mind sprang scattershot images, ripples of sensation, rushing fragments of ideas briefly glimpsed and then tumbling
away. Shibo lurked just behind his nervous eyes.
You cannot understand what is going on here and neither can Killeen. I urge you to relax into it, not strive so hard.
Toby felt a hot flare of indignation. “Look, it’s
your
ass I’m saving.”
From the erosions of real life, yes. Do not think I cannot feel appreciation for that. And it would be best for us to be together
for at least a while longer.
His hurt irritation swerved to grateful warmth. “You want it, I want it. My father, he can’t see that.”
Do not suppose this relieves you from your Family obligations.
Shibo’s whispery words carried a flinty edge. “What obligations?”
To find Abraham. To carry forward the Family ways.