Tides of Light (56 page)

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 metallivore, 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.

>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.

Plumes of scent, muddy voices, words like fevered birdcalls.

Some of them were no longer remotely human, but rather coiled tubes of waxy flesh. Others resembled moving lumps of buttery
bile. A man stood on one hand, his belly an accordion-pleated bulge, and as he moved oval fissures opened all over him, wheezing
forth a fine yellow mist, long words moaning out: “I… am… a holy… contri… vance…” and then a throttled gasp and “Help… me…
be… what… I… am…”

A sewer smell came swarming up from nearby. A woman gazed directly back into his eyes. She said nothing but her skin ran with
tinkling streams of urine. Nearby a little girl was a concert of ropy pink cords, red-rimmed where they all tried to speak.

The twelve spread out in a daze. Some recognized warped versions of people they had known. There were people here from far
antiquity and places no one knew.

Paris found an entire aisle of shivering couples, entwined in sexual acts made possible by organs designed in ways nature
never had allowed: sockets filled by slithering rods, beings which palped and stroked themselves to a hastening pace that
rose to a jellied frenzy, shrieked from fresh mouths, and then abated, only to begin again with a building rhythm.

An Isis man was vomiting nearby. “We’ve got to save them,” he said when Paris went to help him.

“Yeasay,” a woman pilot agreed. The survivors were drifting back together, pressed by the enveloping horror.

A wretched nearby sculpture of guts that sprouted leaves managed to get out three words, “No… don’t… want…”

Paris felt the fear and excitement of the last few hours ebbing from him, replaced by a rising, firm feeling he could not
force out through his throat. He shook his head. The woman started to argue, saying that they could take the cases that had
been deformed the least, try to free them from the alterations.

Paris found his voice. “They want to
go
. Listen.”

From the long axis that tapered away to infinity there rose a muttered, moaning, corpuscular symphony of anguish and defeat
that in its accents and slurred cadences called forth the long corridor of ruin and affliction that was the lot of humanity
here at Galactic Center, down through millennia.

He stood listening. Parts of his mind rustled—moving uneasily, understanding.

The Mantis sculptures got the most important facets profoundly wrong. The Mantis had tried to slice human sliding moments
from the robed minds of the suredead, but it could not surecopy them: their essence lay in what was discarded from the billion-bit/second
stream. In the mere passing twist and twinge of a second, humans truncated their universe with electrochemical knives.

Hot-hearted, to humans death was the mother of beauty. Their gods were, in the end, refracted ways of bearing the precarious
gait of the mortal.

To Paris as a boy the compact equation e
^π
+1=0 had comprised a glimpse of the eternal music of reason, linking the most important constants in the whole of mathematical
analysis,
0, 1, e
, π, and
i
. To Paris the simple line was beautiful.

To a digitally filtered intelligence the analog glide of this relation would be different, not a glimpse of a vast and various
landscape. Not better or worse, but irreducibly different.

That he could never convey to the Mantis.

Nor could he express his blood-deep rage, how deeply he hated the shadow that had dogged his life.

But his fury was wise in a way that mere anger is not. He surprised himself: he breathed slowly, easily, feeling nothing but
a granite resolve.

Paris began killing the sculptures systematically. The others stood numbly and watched him, but their silence did not matter
to him. He moved quickly, executing them with bolts, the work fixing him totally in the moment of it.