Authors: Gregory Benford
Staring outward for long moments, he could sense the slow churn of the entire disk of the galaxy. Everything here whirled
about a single point that no one could see: the black hole at True Center.
The Eater. As a boy on Snowglade he had seen it, a smoldering presence behind churning molecular clouds. Some legends called
it the Eye, from an age when it had glared down on Families like an avenging angel, or devil, or both.
Toby could only glance at the eye-stinging brilliance there—the disk of captured matter that spiraled about the hole. Then
he had to look away, or his body’s own systems would close down his optical vision, to avoid getting burned out. Still, it
was eerie, staring at clouds of dust as they slid into the death grip of that tiny, vicious maw. A mouth that was always hungry,
always impatient.
He turned his back on the glare and hiked down into the little valley formed by two bulges in
Argo
’s hull. He was daydreaming, taking in the view—and then stopped short. Quath’s honeycomb warren lay in shambles.
And Quath stalked among the ruins. Her double-jointed legs worked in their steel sockets as Quath seized a wall of gray bricks.
Alarmed, Toby trotted forward, boots clanging heavily.
—What happened? Did a piece of the Chandelier hit it?—
—But this much, something big—hey!—
Quath jerked powerfully and the entire wall came apart. Bricks of waste and garbage flew everywhere. Then Toby noticed that
despite their tumbling and spinning, the bricks all drifted into neat stacks on the hull, following long, curved paths in
zero-gravs. They settled nicely into order with impossible, liquid grace.
—How’d you do that?—
—Okay, but how do you get them to fly apart like that, and go into the right stacks?—
Toby squinted up at the huge form as she broke up another part of her own dwelling. He knew enough about Quath to see that
he would get no more explanation of how, so he turned to why. Quath answered, trajectory.>
—What trajectory? We haven’t decided where to go yet.—
And then Quath would say no more. She worked quickly and, for her size, with an unlikely deft touch. Toby called to her and
got no answer.
He shrugged and walked away, reminding himself not to take this personally. Quath was not a woman in an insect suit. Nor was
she an untamed and uncontrollable force of nature. She was just plain alien, and human metaphors didn’t apply. That was the
hardest thing to remember, when you’d just been snubbed. Toby turned and called back,—So much for your crap-castle, bug-face!—
Quath stopped and waved two feelers at him but said nothing but <[untranslatable]>. Maybe that was an obscene gesture, for
Quath’s race—but Toby would never know.
He stalked away and took out his irritation by working harder, faster. He was pleasantly tired by the time the job was done,
and when he cycled back inside he treated himself to a full shower.
This was three days early, but he felt sorely used by life. He thumbed the nozzle on full bore and selected options of suds
and an alcohol spray. By pure luck it was the first day in a cycle and the water was fresh. It didn’t smell of other Bishops
or of the refilter that never really took away all the odors. He let the wonderful warmth gush over him, tuned the nozzle
to pound his muscles and massage his scalp. Back in Citadel Bishop they had lots more water, so much he had even played in
a bath of it once. Usually baths were reserved for couples, as part of the wedding ceremony.
He was sorry when his charge was used up and the last dribbles gurgled away. He wouldn’t have another such treat for weeks.
He sighed, dropped into his bunk—and his caller chimed. Cermo’s voice rang in his left ear. “Report to Command, Toby.”
Toby groaned. He and Besen had planned on “resting up” together, which was Family slang for a little mutual bunk time in the
free-for-all quarters. Unmarried Family enjoyed a period of complete sexual freedom, before the necessity of childbearing
closed in, and Toby had been making the most of it. This feature of shipboard life he liked best—time to indulge the animal
within. Well, it would have to wait.
He called Besen and explained. She groaned. “Hey, and I got us time in a zero-grav section, too!”
“Duty calls, my Juliet.”
“So you did check that play. See, it’s
parting
that’s such sweet sorrow.”
“In this case, it’s staying apart.”
“Hurry it up, Romeo. Maybe we can still use the time I booked.”
To his surprise, only his father and Cermo were in the Command Center. The two figures seemed dwarfed by the enormous ceramic-faced
banks of computers, the arrays of sliding phosphorescent data. Cermo said rather stiffly, “We have need of your Shibo Aspect.”
Toby studied his father’s face in the shimmer of blue-white data displays, remembering the last time they had talked about
Shibo, but Killeen was wearing his firm Cap’n persona. His dark eyes gave nothing away. “Uh, okay. What’s up?”
“Two things, really.” Killeen was brisk, efficient. “That engraving from the Chandelier, remember? We’re trying to decipher
it. Give a squint.”
“Ummm.” Toby was mystified. He summoned up his Shibo Personality. Her cool presence paused a long moment and then said,
This “she” must’ve been quite a woman.
Killeen said, “We can’t make sense of some parts of this.”
Toby frowned. “What’s it mean, that every other line is written backwards?”
Cermo shrugged. “Some kinda code?”
He felt Shibo meshing with his oldest Aspects, calling up shreds of memory. She summed these and reported:
This is an ancient skill. I saw such when I was a girl with Family Knight. This was written to be read digitally. Instead
of returning to the left to scan each line, a digital mind simply reads the characters in backwards order as its field of
view returns, right to left.
Toby relayed this. Cermo said, “Seems screwy.”
It saves time. Our practice of reading only after returning to the left each time is for simple minds.
Killeen said doubtfully, “Chandelier folk could do such?”
Family Knight did, once. Their ancient scrolls were writ so. I saw some as a girl.
Toby repeated this. He could see by the compression of Killeen’s face that it had great weight for him. It was the burden
of all the Families to live out lives of flight and desperation, knowing that once their kind had strode proud and tall at
Galactic Center. Chandelier-makers, explorers, hunters of vacuum beasts, riders of great storms. But that was so long ago
now that even legends only whispered about the heights of such far antiquity.
“There was none such at the Citadel of Family Bishop,” Killeen said begrudgingly.
Toby recalled seeing a wall in the mined Blaine Arcology that held some such message on it. He started to say so but Cermo
cut him off with a wave. “Look, however they slung their alphabet. I can see this plain. It’s a story about a woman who led
humanity. They won. But what’s all this stuff about pearl palaces?”
“I figure that’s the Chandelier,” Killeen said distantly.
“Makes sense,” Toby said, quickly referring to his Isaac Aspect. “That word ‘pearl’ means a jewel—a kind of foggy one, like
thin cat beer.”
This time Shibo was puzzled.
What is “cat beer”?
“Milk. Sorry, it’s a kid’s joke.” Toby whispered to her.
He had said it without thinking. He wanted to be taken seriously here, not as just a funnel for Shibo’s expertise. He had
not let Cermo or Killeen have direct access to Shibo through comm interface, which would have been an easy techno-trick. Then
they would have just bypassed him completely, a kid left out of adult business.
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about this engraving,” Killeen said. “First, can you get it writ right for us?”
For Shibo it was easy. In a few moments she relayed to one of the big wall screens.
“So I was right.” Killeen slammed a fist on his desk. “They had a long era when they beat the mechs—see, the ‘five kinds of
living dead.’ I saw that written on a monument, a tomb, years ago—remember? You were both there.”
Cermo frowned. “Ummm, I recall something . . .”
Toby said, “I remember. The inscription was about a powerful ‘He,’ though, and—”
“It was about mechs, for sure,” Killeen went on. “And this ‘she,’ a great leader—they took her away somewhere.”
Cermo’s brow wrinkled doubtfully. “How’s that?”
“Plain as starshine,” Killeen said, getting up with muscular energy and pacing before the screen. “See? This ‘she’ ‘voyaged
on to place immutable’ after her ‘bodily form evaped’—evaporated? She’ll ‘rise as shall we all who plunge inward to the lair
and library.’ They left the Chandelier, at least some of them. And went somewhere else, this ‘lair’ where they’d be safe.”
Cermo nodded reluctantly. “Yeasay, I remember a tomb. As for the rest . . .”
“It’s obvious!” Killeen paced quickly. “Look, I recorded it using one of my Aspects. Here—”
On a screen flashed:
He,
on whose arm fame was inscribed, when, in battle in the vasty countries, he kneaded and turned back the first attack. With
his breast he parted the tide of enemies—those hideous ones, mad-mechanical and unmerciful to the fallen.
There was more, and Killeen rattled on, reciting passages and comparing them with the inscription they had seen near a tomb,
and none of it made any particular sense to Toby. Some, like
He: Who led Humankind from the steel palaces aloft,
probably referred to the Chandelier Era. Others, such as
He: by the breezes of whose prowess the southern ocean is still perfumed,
must have come from a time when there were oceans on Snowglade, not just the lakes he knew, that shrank every year. But there
were plenty, like
He: Who set forth Humanity in the names of the Pieces,
that made no sense at all. And his Isaac Aspect told him that even the folk of the Arcologies were mystified by such wordy
relics.
Killeen paced and talked, paced and talked. When his famous ardor came on him like this, he had a hypnotic energy. But Toby
could see a quiet frenzy building in his father and did not like the signs.
Cermo intervened, voice smooth and soothing. “Could be, lotsa big fat maybes in there—but that’s not the point, Cap’n, ’member?”
Killeen blinked and took a deep breath. “I . . . suppose not. I had hoped that the engraving would give us some way to deal
with this tight spot we’re in.”
Toby tried to keep his voice light and businesslike. “What spot?”
Cermo said to his Cap’n, “We should hold a Gathering.”
“Yeasay. I can present our choices to the Family—”
“
What
spot?”
Cermo said, “The explosion in the Chandelier, it was the energy source for a pulse of radiation. We thought it was meant to
catch us, but could be the emission was the true intent.”
Toby kept his face blank to cover his surprise, the way his father sometimes did. “I didn’t pick up anything, on any comm
band.”
Killeen thumbed up a spectrum plot on a wall screen. “No wonder. It was far up in frequency, way above anything we can see.
Gamma rays. And beamed—
Argo
picked it up, just barely.”
“Beamed which way?” Toby persisted.
“Outward. Toward some of those places Quath told us to avoid.” Killeen gazed somberly at his son.
Toby felt a burst of sympathy for his father. Killeen had taken so much on faith, and now that would all be tested. They had
followed Quath’s advice ever since their long flight began from Trump. They had gone to that world hoping to make it be New
Bishop, thinking they would settle there. But they had been driven out.
And the Family had not even protested when members of Quath’s species had followed them—though at a distance, propelling forward
a huge glowing instrument of their own gigantic craft. It was somewhere behind them, acting as a kind of rear guard that nobody
quite understood. They had swooped and dodged to get this close to True Galactic Center, avoiding obstacles Quath found in
the confusing star maps. All on faith, flying nearly blind. Without knowing what strange strategies would work here.
“Burglar alarm,” Toby blurted.
Cermo asked, “Huh? The emission?”
“Beamed at somebody who wanted to know when humans returned here,” Toby said with more certainty than he felt—a skill he thought
of as adult, manly.
Killeen nodded. “Mechs.”
“Why not just leave a bigger bomb?” Cermo said. “Kill us total.”
Toby spread his hands. “Maybe they thought they’d catch us.”
Killeen shook his head. “They master enormous energies. If they wanted to kill, they’d have done the job.”
“So why’d they want to catch us?” Cermo asked.
Toby said quickly, “And the explosion, maybe it was just to make us think we had gotten away, that we were okay.”
Killeen pursed his lips, still pacing tensely. “Mechs think we’re pretty dumb. Could be.”
“Something else, too,” Toby said, listening to Shibo. “That bomb spoke our kind of talk. Not this ancient lingo.”
Killeen stopped pacing and regarded his son with interest. “Yeasay—it didn’t rummage around among dialects. Something told
it how we talk.”
“So . . . they’re coming to scoop us up?” Real fear edged Cermo’s words.
“Depends on what level mech we’re dealing with. The stupid rat-catcher type they used against us on Snowglade—”
“They’re not subtle enough,” Toby said. “But the Mantis . . .”
Killeen and Cermo exchanged a glance. The Mantis had already loomed into legend for Family Bishop, the most intelligent mech
they had ever met. It had hounded them, using its elaborate electronic illusions. They had thought it was just a better killer,
but the Mantis itself showed them, in a horrifying moment, how it used humans in its “works of art.”