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-sized 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 shap
e 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,
I was here once, in my Aspect manifestation, during the glorious era when we were allowed this close. I advise that you shelter there, for the guardian ship approaching is lethal beyond even my comprehension.
“Your memory is that good?”
This was merely 3,437 years ago. I have suffered some copying errors, true, but fear is still the most potent stabilizer of recall. I was quite terrified during my carrier’s incursion here. She was one of three who survived that, out of over a thousand.
“I don’t know…”
His intuition failed him. The other human pencil ships zoomed all around, sending panicked transmissions that he could scarcely filter. The ornate mech craft lumbered down toward them, many hundreds of kilometers away but still close, close, in the scales of space battle.
We are surely doomed if we stay here. If you are losing at a game, change the game.
Paris nodded and sent a compressed signal to the others. At full power he slipped below the shiny sheets of photovores, their outstretched wings banking gracefully on the photon breeze. Storms worried the flocks. White-hot tornadoes whirled and sucked, spun off from the disk below. When fire-flowers blossomed in the disk, a chorus arose from the feeding layers. Against the wrathful weather, position-keeping telemetry flitted between the herd sheets. They sang luminously to each other in the timeless glare.
Paris watched one herd fail. Vast shimmering sheets peeled away. Many were cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which were themselves soon to boil away. Others followed a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolved their lattices. They flared with fatal energies.
He felt, in the ship’s bubble-sensorium, fresh attention focused on him. Lenses swiveled to follow: prey?
Here a pack of photovores had clumped, caught in a magnetic flux tube that eased down along the axis of the galaxy itself. Among them glided steel-blue gammavores, feeders on the harder gamma-ray emission from the accretion disk. Arthur said,
These sometimes fly this far above the disk, as I recall, to hunt the silicate-creatures who dwell in the darker dust clouds. Much of the ecology here was unknown in my time, and humans were banished from such territories before we could well explore. We sought the Wedge, the place where the earliest humans had taken shelter, including the legendary Walmsley. We wished to find there the rumored Galactic Library, a wealth which could have aided—
“Fine, stick to business.”
He stopped the Aspect’s idle musing with an internal block. Time to move. Where? Into the magnetic tube. But could they draw down some concealing cover?
He swooped with the others toward the filament. This also angled them toward a huge sailcraft photovore. It sighted them, pursued.
Here navigation was simple. Far below them, funneling away to an infinite well, lay the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things, the black hole of three million stellar masses: a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.
The metallivore descended after them, through thin planes of burnt-gold light seekers. The pencil ships scattered, firing ineffectually at it. They had speed, it had durability.
“How the hell do we deal with that?”
The metallivore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallivore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue. Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.
“We need something to zap it!”
I shall ponder. Meanwhile, be fleet of foot.
He veered and sheered, letting his feel for the craft take over. Others were not so swift; he heard the dying cries of three people nearby.
These placid conduits all lived to ingest light and excrete microwave beams, but some—like the one gliding after the tiny human ships—had developed a taste for metals: a metallivore. It folded its mirror wings, became angular and swift, accelerating.
The higher phyla are noticing us.
“Coming damned fast, too.”
Plants harness only one percent of the energy falling upon them. Here photovoltaics capture ten percent, and evolution acting upon the mechs has improved even that. Admirable, in a way, I suppose—
“Give it to me compressed, not true-voice.” An Aspect always tried to expand his airing time.
Arthur sent a squirt of compacted ancient lore—Fusion fires, he said, inside the photovores digested the ruined carcasses of other machines. Exquisitely tuned, their innards yielded pure ingots of any alloy desired.
The ultimate resources here were mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and the sleek metallivore lived to eat them—or even better, the human ships, an exotic variant. It now gave gigahertz cries of joy as it plunged after them into the magnetic fields of the filament.
“These magnetic entities are intelligent?” he asked.
Yes, though not in the sense we short-term thinkers recognize. They are more like fitfully sleeping libraries. I have an idea. Their thinking processes are vulnerable.
“How?”
They trigger their thinking with electrodynamic potentials. We are irritating them, I am sure.
He saw the metallivore closing fast. Beyond it came the convoluted mech guardian ship, closing remorselessly.
The remaining human ships executed evasions—banks, swoops, all amid the pressing radiance from the disk-glare. Around them magnetic strands glowed like smoldering ivory.
The metal-seeker would ingest them with relish, but with its light-wings spread to bank it could not maneuver as swiftly as their sleek ships. Deftly they zoomed through magnetic entrails. The mech ship followed.
“How soon will these magnetic beings react?”
Soon, if experience is a guide. I advise that we clasp the metallivore now. Quickly!
“But don’t let him quite grab us?”
Arthur gave a staccato yes, its panic seeping into Paris’s mind. Accurate simulations had to fear for their lives.
The steel-gray metallivore skirted over them. Predators always had parasites, scavengers. Here and there on the metallivore’s polished skin were things like limpets and barnacles, lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow that fed on chance debris, purging the metallivore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust which could jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
It banked, trying to reach them along the magnetic strands, but the rubbery pressure of the field lines blunted its momentum.
He let it get closer, trying to judge the waltz of creatures in this bizarre ballroom of the sky: a dance to the pressure of photons. Light was the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supported the great spherical volume of hundreds of cubic light-years, a vast, vicious veldt.
He began receiving electrodynamic static. The buzzing washed out his comm with the other human ships, distant motes. The metallivore loomed. Pincers flexed forth from it.
The crackling jolt. Slow lightning arced along the magnetic filament, crisp lemony annihilation riding down.
“It’ll fry us!” Paris cried out. Arthur recovered some calm, saying,
We are minor players here. Larger conductors will draw this crackling fire.
Another jarring jolt. But then the metallivore arced and writhed and died in dancing, flaxen fire.
The magnetic filaments were slow to act, but muscular. Induction was sluggish but inescapable. Suddenly Paris saw Arthur’s idea.
As soon as the discharge had abated on the metalli
vore, the potentials sought another conducting surface, that with the greatest latent difference. The laws of electrodynamics applied to the bigger conductor, closing in—the guardian ship.
The guardian ship drew flashes of discharge, their jagged fingers dancing ruby-red and bile-green.
Calls of joy from the pencil-ships. The ornate shape coasted, dead. The larger surface areas of both metallivore and starship had intercepted the electrical circuitry of the filaments.
“I…you really did know what you were doing,” he said weakly.
Not actually. I was following my archived knowledge, but theory makes a dull blade. Though perhaps some scrap of my intuition does remain…
Paris could sense the Aspect’s wan pride. The human ships accelerated now, out of the gossamer filaments; there might be more bolts of high voltage.
Near the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the lashing weather there, whirled a curious blotchy gray cylinder.
There. Clearly a mech construct.
“The Hall of Humans,” he said, wondering how he knew.
THE COLLECTED
>I had this terrible dream and I woke up and it was real.
>Thousands of us there must be, all in this black flat place only it curves around above, I can see up there with my one eye, and the ceiling is filled with us, too, all planted in place.
>I’m all veins, big fat blue ones, no mouth but I want to eat all the time.
>My mother is here just a few meters away but I know her only by the sobbing, sounds just like her, and none of the rest of that thing is.
>I got my hand free and poked one of my eyes out so I didn’t have to look at it but they fixed the eyes, said it was part of the expressiveness of me, and now I have to look all the time, no eyelids and they never turn out the lights.
>It is not hot but it is Hell and we whisper to each other about that and about it being forever and ever, hallowed be thy Name, amen.
It was a place of chalk and blood, of diamond eyes and strident songs.
Paris and the eleven other survivors found the lock, broke in, and prowled the vast interior of the rotating cylinder. He passed by things he could not watch for long, searching for sense.