Authors: Gregory Benford
By then he had found a wife who loved him despite his strangeness, his need for solitude and silence. He had children of his
own, but they showed no interest in art. Their children had children, and Paris sensed their continuity with him. Yet something
rode in him he could not name, for it seethed on the billion-bit flow beneath the well-lit theatre of his conscious mind.
He helped the burgeoning space fleet secure a wormhole for their sun-system. This one had been discovered in a murky molecular
cloud that came coasting by the Isis star many centuries before. Hauling it closer consumed two decades of Paris’s life, but
he gave them freely. A worm-hole
mouth opened to humanity a fresh grasp. Until then, only mechs had employed them.
His labors were well timed.
After many decades of the full experience of the ’Sembly, after creating an amazing body of his strange short-lived artwork,
the skies blazed once more with constructs the size of moons.
More vast mechs arrived, ready to break down all seven planets in this solar system, all for raw materials to aid their great
Constructions. A faction urged diplomacy. Some other ’Sembly members struggled to complete a vessel to take them away, before
the mechs got around to disassembling their planet out from under them.
Paris opposed this. Instead, he urged the ’Sembly to strike back. “Destroy something
they
value!” he shouted. “Only then will they respect us enough to listen.”
But even as he said it, he knew that something different brewed in him.
The shadowy presence that had sat beyond view of his inner self now moved with sluggish purpose. Into his mind flashed the
coordinates and routes necessary to take a desperate band of pilots within reach of the great accretion disk at True Center.
The data-flow was a torrent, thick and fast and coming from a source he could not clearly sense. Perhaps a deep-carried Aspect?
But no, another portion of himself denied it. What, then?
He chuckled ruefully to release the tension such thoughts brought, and for a darting moment saw himself down a long telescoping
tunnel of immense perspective, glimpsing himself as a member of a phylum—that of the laughing, dreaming vertebrates.
>The thing with plenty legs, it said I was a monument to my kind.
>There was a team of five of the little ones and a big one with funny legs and they cut me up slowly to see.
>My mother was there with parts of animals growing out of her and when I tried to get to her they did that to me, too.
>I was kept in my fighting suit like being laid to rest only there were these maggots that kept bursting out from puckers
in my skin and crawling all over me.
>They said I would not feel the things that went in through my eyes but they lied.
>I think they forgot all about me and let me lie there on the floor while they worked on the others and finally decided to
just use me for parts.
>I could see pretty well but looked down and there was no body, just my head on a pike they carried around with them, I figure
to scare other members of my ’Sembly in battle, with me pleading and screaming most of the time but without lungs.
The Galactic Center was a collection of debris swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole. Its howling, riotous inner
precincts were by this time well guarded by mech fleets.
But worms made it traversable. The first human expeditions through the wormhole mouth had been successful. It opened upon
a site nearer to True Center. Paris himself had flown through it, darting in and back like a mouse dashing anxiously from
its hole. And so they were—pests in the walls.
They flew through in order, then met on convergent asymptotes.
Paris demanded and got a role in the assault. He was an accomplished pilot, easily able to angle in on the wormhole at high
speeds, with a nudge here and a twist there.
Wormholes were fossils of the first split second of the universe. They were held open by onionskin layers of negative energy,
sheets of anti-pressure made in that primordial convulsion. As natural resources, they had been gathered—by whom?—billions
of years before and brought here, to serve as a transport nexus.
Quantum froth fizzed at the worm-mouth rim, a gaudy spray of burnt hues. These “struts” were of unimaginable density, but
danger lurked only at the rim, where stresses would tear ordinary matter into virulent plasma. To hit the walls of the constantly
shifting, oblong target, would be fatal, as several pilots had inadvertently proved.
The mouth was now an ellipsoid rimmed in quantum fire. He flew a pencil-thin ship, its insulation slight, safety buffers minimal.
Yet he somehow felt no fear, only a serene certainty. Tidal stresses wrenched squeals from his ship as lightning curled in
snakes of violet and gold—
—and he was tumbling out the other end, in a worm complex over a hundred light-years away.
A blue-green star majestically greeted the human fleet with a coronal plume. Nearby orbited a mech complex; picket craft policed
it. With quick swerves the tiny human ships angled into a traffic-train headed for a large wormhole mouth. Fifty men and eighty-six
women had died learning the route they would follow, gaining the override codes to pass through the mech complexes. But their
disguises would withstand only a moment’s inspection; daily and they were dead.
Their second transit was through a spacious wormhole that left them racing in low orbit over a smoldering red
dwarf. They could use their hard-won code-status perhaps a few more times before the mech complexes would catch on. They had
to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get.
Wormholes could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the wormhole throats, which could vary
from a finger’s length to a planet’s diameter. A jump through could leave one near mysteriously useless solar systems, or
in virulent places that would fry a human in seconds.
Long before, presumably by brute-force interstellar hauling, someone—perhaps those who had made the earliest mechs?—had built
an elaborate system at Galactic Center. Smaller worm mouths, massing perhaps as much as a mountain range, allowed only thin-ships
to pass. These Paris and the other eighteen volunteers chose when they popped out in a mech complex. They never slowed; each
network site was well policed, and speed was their only defense.
Shoot through a worm mouth, aim for a small worm mouth nearby,
go
. The snaky, shiny worm-walls zoomed by as Paris lay watching his displays and trying not to think of what was coming.
The tapering gray sheen of the throat flexed. Each worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten, the information
flowing as a surge in the tension of the wormhole itself. Stress waves sent clenching oscillations, making the throat ripple
like sausage links. If a sausage neck met him, tightened too fast, he would emerge as a rosy plume of ionized gas at the exit
mouth.
From an elaborate wormhole calculus human theorists had worked out the route to follow. Between Isis and the space near True
Center were a dozen wormhole jumps. Worse, some wormholes had multiple mouths, so the sleek throat split into choices—selections
they had to make at immense speed.
Suns and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the distant blackness when they emerged. Behind the resplendent nebulae
loomed the radiant promise of True Center. It seemed a strange contrast, to leap about the vast distances while boxed into
a casket-size container.
Blink-quick, they jumped and dodged and jumped again.
Subtlety was wasted here; when a mech craft approached on a routine check, they destroyed it with kinetic energy bolts. Mechs
never used such crude methods, so they were leaving behind clear signs that “vermin” had passed that way.
They emerged amid an eerie halo of white-dwarf stars, arranged in a hexagonal. Paris wondered why mechs would arrange such
a pattern, which from simple orbital mechanics could not last. But like so many mech traits, this had no explanation, even
in Arthur’s huge memory stores, nor any likelihood of one.
Ahead, the galactic disk stretched in luminous splendor. Lanes of clotted dust framed stars azure and crimson and emerald.
This wormhole intersection afforded five branches: three black spheres orbited like circling lethal leopards, while two cubes
blared bright with quantum rim radiation.
Their pencil ships thrust directly into a flat face of a cubic worm. The negative-energy-density struts that held the wormhole
open were in the edges, so the faces were free of tidal forces. A flicker, a stomach-twisting wrench—and they were near True
Center.
The inner disk glowed with fermenting scarlets and mean purples. Great funnels of magnetic field sucked and drew in interstellar
dust clouds. Sullen cyclones narrowed toward the brilliant accretion disk.
Mech contrivance orbited everywhere here, filling a bowl of sky alive with activity. Vast gleaming grids and reflectors caught
radiation from the friction and infalling of the great
disk. This crop of raw photon energy was flushed into the waiting maws of wormholes, apparently moving the flux to distant
worlds in need of cutting lances of light. For what—mech planet-shaping, world-raking, moon-carving?
They flitted into yet another wormhole mouth—
—and the spectacle made him hold his breath.
Magnetic filaments towered, so large the eye could not take them in. Through them shot immense luminous corridors alive with
wriggling energies. These arches yawned over tens of light-years, their immense curves descending toward the white-hot True
Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.
At True Center, three million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet. The arches were plainly artificial, orderly arrays of
radiance a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years, as gauzy as a young girl’s hair
as they churned with airy intricacy.
Could intelligence dwell here? There had been ancient stories, never confirmed. Emerald threads laced among tangled ruby spindles.
He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order ascending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.
Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flow-couch. From behind, a torrent of malignant light.
They have detonated the worm!
came a cry over comm.
Braking hard, veering left into a debris cloud—
Evidently mechs knew how to trigger the negative-energy-density struts inside a worm mouth—and would do so to catch vermin.
Now their line of retreat was gone.
They fled to a huge blot that beckoned with the promise of sullen shelter. They were close to the edge of the black hole’s
accretion disk. Around them churned the deaths of stars, all orchestrated by the magnetic filaments. Which in turn, Paris
was quite sure, worked to the command of something
he did not care to contemplate. Did mechs govern here, or had he ventured into a realm where even they were vermin?
Here stars were ripped open by processes he could not fathom—spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark,
orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal-sack.
Amid this swam the strangest stars of all. Each was half-covered by a hanging hemispherical mask. This shroud gave off infrared,
a strange screen hanging at a fixed distance from each star. It hovered on light, gravity just balancing the outward light
pressure. The mask reflected half the star’s flux back on it, turning up the heat on the cooker, sending virulent arcs jetting
from the corona.
Light escaped freely on one side while the mask bottled it up on the other. This pushed the star toward the mask, but the
mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted and kept the right distance. The forlorn star was able to eject light
in only one direction, so it recoiled oppositely.
The filaments were herding these stars: sluggish, but effective. Herded toward the accretion disk, stoking the black hole’s
appetite.
Paris and the others hung in a narrow gulf overlooking the splendor below. Blackness dwelled at the core, but friction heated
the infalling gas and dust. Storms worried these great banks; white-hot tornadoes whirled. A virulent glow hammered outward,
shoving incessantly at the crowded masses jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forced the streams into a disk,
churning ever inward.
Amid this deadly torrent, life persisted. Of a sort.
He peered through the gaudy view, seeking the machine-beasts who ate and dwelled and died here. Records millennia old told
of these.
There
.
Suffering the press of hot photons, a grazer basked. To
these photovores, the great grinding disk was a source of food. Above the searing accretion disk, in hovering clouds, gossamer
herds fed.
Vector that way
, came the command. This way led to their target, but already mechs were moving toward the spindly human ships.
Sheets of the photovores billowed in the electromagnetic winds, luxuriating in the acrid sting. Some seemed tuned to soak
up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, each species with a characteristic polish and shape. They deployed great
flat receptor planes to maintain orbit and angle in the eternal brimming day.
The human ships slipped among great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet. The photovore herds skated on winds and magnetic torques
in a complex dynamical sum. They were machines, of course, presumably descended from robot craft which had explored this center
billions of years before. More complex machines, evolved in this richness, prowled the darker lanes farther out.
A bolt seared through the dust and struck a human ship. Another lanced through some photovores, which burst open in flares.
They hugged the shadow and waited. Moments tiptoed by.
A contorted shape emerged from a filmy dust bank, baroquely elegant in a shape no human mind could have conceived, ornate
and glowing with purpose, spiraling lazily down the gravitational gradients. Paris saw a spindly radiance below the photovore
sheets. A magnetic filament, he guessed. His Arthur Aspect broke in,