But Stan was shaking his head. “We won’t have time,” he announced.
Estrella stopped short, peering at him from under her dragging eyelid. “Why won’t we?” she asked, suddenly shot down from her enthusiasm.
“Because we’ve got to be on that ship when it goes back, Estrella. We have to get there while we’re still news, the first people to come back from the Core. Can you imagine what that will be worth? Not just the bonus—I bet that’ll be huge—but we’ll be famous! And rich, Full Medical and all!” He ran out of steam then, peering at Estrella’s face, trying to read her expression. “Don’t you see what we’re missing, Estrella?”
She said contemplatively, “Full Medical. Long, rich lives.”
He nodded with vigor. “Exactly! And time is passing us by. We have to go back!”
Estrella took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. She asked simply, “Why?”
He blinked at her. “What do you mean, why?”
“Well, Stan,” she said reasonably, “there’s no real hurry, is there? What have we got to go back to that we won’t have right here?”
“Our friends—” he began, but she shook her head. She kissed his hand before she released it, and spoke.
“Have you looked at the time, dear? Our friends are getting old, may even have died by now. You wanted to live a long, long time. Now we’re doing it.” She took pity on the look on his face and hugged him tightly. “Besides,” she said persuasively, “we’ve come all this way. As long as we’re here, we might as well see what the place looks like.”
Stan found words at last. “How long?”
“Not long, if that’s what you want. A week or two—”
“Estrella! That’ll be—what? A thousand years or more!”
She nodded. “And by then maybe it’ll be worth going back to.”
THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES
Gregory Benford
In the Ocean of Night (1977)
Across the Sea of Suns (1984)
Great Sky River (1987)
Tides of Light (1989)
Furious Gulf (1994)
Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)
The series comprises six novels, composed over a twenty-five-year span. The events stretch from the early 2000s to A.D. 37518, an immense scope imposed because its central focus, our galactic center, is 28,000 light-years away, and characters had to get there to take part in the galaxy’s larger games.
But as well, I wanted to convey the huge scales of both time and distance that a galaxy implies. We are mayflies on the stage lit by the stars, and science fiction should remember that.
In the Ocean of Night, published in 1977, explored our discovery that computer-based life seemed dominant throughout the galaxy. A British astronaut in NASA’s space program, Nigel Walmsley, had uncovered the implication that “evolved adding machines,” as he put it, had inherited the ruins of earlier, naturally derived alien societies. We realized this by finding wrecked craft on the moon, and because a roving machine from an ancient interstellar society enters the solar system to study it.
Across the Sea of Suns follows Walmsley on the first manned interstellar expedition. Drawn by curiosity, humans want to know more about nearby stars, where there are aliens of very strange properties. There Walmsley finds that Naturals—organic beings like us—have been annihilated or at least greatly hampered by the galaxy’s pervasive machine societies.
During this flight Earth is invaded by an ocean-living species, as a method the machine-based civilizations use to disrupt any advanced Natural society. As soon as others know of our presence, they seek to wipe us out, as feared Natural rivals. The novel concludes with a few remaining people, including Walmsley, capturing a sophisticated interstellar ship. They head for the galactic center, to find out what’s going on.
In our galactic core, within a few light-years of the exact center, there are a million stars within a single light-year. Imagine having several stars so close they outshine the moon!
Worse, the galactic center was the obvious place for machines to seek. Virulent gamma rays, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes dominate the crackling activity.
Great Sky River opens on this landscape; the title refers to the ancient American Indian name for the Milky Way. Its central figure is a man named Kileen, who flees with his Family Bishop across a ruined landscape. Its sky is dominated by the black hole at True Center, which his people call the Eater of All Things—though they don’t quite know why.
In this ravaged panorama humans have fallen from grace. Though the Walmsley-led expedition reached the Center and did well there, building a considerable civilization, they could not evade the superiority of machines. Pursuing them is an enigmatic mech, or machine, the Mantis, who views humans as an endangered species, their extinction inevitable. It wishes to record what it finds worthy in the few remaining societies. Not since humans lived in immense space stations called Chandeliers have they been on even terms with the mechs.
The Bishops flee their home world, Snowglade, in hopes of finding refuge and a solution to their many riddles about the true nature of mechs closer to the black hole. In the fourth novel, Tides of Light, they reach another planet and form an alliance with another organic species, one also endangered by the relentless mechs. We meet other kinds of mechs, too. Machines which can reproduce themselves would inevitably fall under the laws of natural selection, and would specialize to use local resources. The entire panoply of biology would recapitulate: parasites, predators, prey.
The Bishops deal with this while trying to fathom enigmatic messages from an intelligence lodged in the magnetic strands that loom throughout the Center. It tells of a place, the Wedge, where humans might find refuge and perhaps discover the legendary Galactic Library, which comprises a history of the entire galaxy.
In the fifth novel, Furious Gulf, we enter the gulf around the powerful black hole, and see another kind of gulf, that between intelligences born of different realms. Our human concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures is unnecessary among intelligences that never had to pass through our Darwinnowing filter.
If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us—us Naturals, still hobbled by our biological destiny?
A slowly emerging theme in these novels, then, is how intelligence depends on the “substrate,” whether in evolved humans or adaptive machines—both embodying intelligence, but with wildly different styles.
Since the second novel we had not seen Nigel Walmsley, though there are hints that he was active near True Center much earlier. Much history echoes in ruins and enigmatic messages. Finding and entering the Wedge finally brings signs of humans who have sustained themselves against the mechs, though in a bewildering folded space-time (the s-t, or esty).
Sailing Bright Eternity, book six, finished in 1995, pulls all the series’ major characters together. In the Wedge they find that humans themselves have been carrying information they did not know they had, data crucial to stopping the mechs from erasing all Natural life.
It had been twenty-five years since I started on In the Ocean of Night, and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.
The themes of the series resolve in favor of humanity as unique and worth saving, even in as hostile a galaxy as I envisioned. But I suspect that if natural life is as foolish and vulnerable as we seem to be, quite possibly machines may inherit the galaxy, and thus sit bemused, watching us with cool indifference from afar.
This added story deals with an essential question asked of humans at the beginning of their decline, about A.D. 36000. It also reveals several aspects of the dreaded Mantis I never found room for in the novels.
—Gregory Benford
A HUNGER FOR THE INFINITE
by Gregory Benfo
rd
Death came in on sixteen legs.
If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat—then Ahmihi was composed.
He had been the Exec of the Noachian ’Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rook the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him.
He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of the world around him:
I wish to “talk”—to convey linear meaning.
“Yeasay, and you be—?” He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.
I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs.
“Damn nice of you.”
The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle—now quite over, he saw—had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.
I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you.
“How many of my people…are left?”
I count 453—no, 452; one died two xens ago.
“If you’ll let them go—”
That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.
He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.
This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier’s kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other ’Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.
Rook was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier’s induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.
In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.
Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.
I wish you to view my work. Here:
Something seized Ahmihi’s sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed—and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood…things.
They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a blood-red liquid did a trembling dance.
At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being…which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly—
“No!” He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. “What is this place?”
The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.
“Using…us?”
For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human world-sum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.
Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his ’Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into…what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.
He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?
You share with others (who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws. Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software. An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.
“If your kind would just leave us alone—”
Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be…significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.
“If you’d showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you’d be lying in pieces by now.”
I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed. My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.
“Where?” He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away—
Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.
“As suredead?”
I find you primates an entrancing medium.
“Why don’t you just keep us alive and talk to us?”
He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry.
You are a fragile medium—pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method. Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer—
She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.
“I find this…overly hard-wired…medium is…constrained sufficiently…to yield…fresh insights.”
“My God, kill her.” He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.
“I am…dead as…a human…But I remain…a medium.”
He looked away from Leona. “Don’t you have any sense of what she’s going through?”
My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.
“Wow, that must be tough.”
Working her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through leg
s caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.
“Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!”
My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.
“Sorry I can’t seem to appreciate it. Leona…she’s suredead?”
“Yes…This one…has been…fully recorded…” Leona wheezed, “I have…harvested her…joyously.”
“This way…she’s hideous.”
As this revived form, I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones. She has thematic possibilities.
Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?
He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. “Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?”
Leona gasped, “I sense…I have…missed essentials…The beauty…is seeping…from my…works.”
“Beauty’s not the sort of thing that gets used up.”
“Even through…the tiny…grimed window…of your sensorium…you sense…a world-set…I do not. Apparently…there is…something gained…by such…blunt…limitations.”
Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. “What’s the problem?”
“I sense…far more…yet do not…share your…filters.”
“You know too much?” He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was suredead, “harvested” by the mechs—though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.