Furious Gulf (21 page)

B
urning flowers rise from the disk. They blossom, spewing plasma seeds above and below the slow, spiraling churn.

Bright tongues press out. Positron swarms. Prickly, annihilating all they touch.

They dissolve where they strike the incoming, leaden matter. Antimatter spills and licks and dies. A blaze of hard gamma,
cleansing purity.

Their funeral pyre is an outward-ramming wall of pure photons. Intense, implacable. Pushing back matter that wants to fall
into the grasp of the gravity well.

Electromagnetic stresses work along the surface of the expanding pressure-bubble. Green worms twisting. Dark oblongs of troubled
mass slow, hesitate above the fray. The infall halts.

Yet this is the food of the Eater itself, the raw material of the disk and all the following fury. The disk begins to starve.
Not immediately, for light takes hours to cross the hurricane forests of furious, grinding gravity.

Inertial moments tick on. The disk ebbs. In turn, its light pressure—now holding back a jostling layer of anxious, ionized
mass—drains away.

As the press of photons subsides, matter resumes its fatal fall. Again streams of black mass spiral down. The disk accepts
this tribute. Fire-flowers again shatter clumps, smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge.

So goes the press and relax, press and relax. Perpetual armature. Fountain. Life source.

Above the disk, safe from the sting, hang motes. Sheets, planes, herds. Uncountable. Billowing with the electromagnetic winds.
Holding steady.

The photovores are grazing.

They coast on the fitful breeze of electrons and protons blown out by the Eater’s angry disk. Great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet
spread, catching the particle wind’s steady push. Vectoring.

They apply magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Turning, they wage a constant struggle to slip free of the Eater’s
gravitational tug.

Yet they must use these ruling forces in their own perpetual, gliding dance. This is ordained.

At times the herds fail to negotiate the complex balance of outward winds against the inward, seductive drag. Whole sheets
will peel away.

Some are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless
descending gyre. Long before they would strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare hammers them. They burst into tiny pinpricks
of dying light.

But not now. A greater governing force approaches.

Ink-dark lenses swivel to regard an intruder. Easing in from high along the Eater’s axis, sensors see only ceramic slabs and
high-impact buffers. Intelligence sheathed against the torrent. Circuits an atom wide, filmy substrates, helium-cold junctions—all
are vulnerable here to the sting of gamma rays and hard nuclei. Even the exalted wear armor.

But the photovores see only a presence they should honor. The vast sailing herds part. Ivory sheets curl back to reveal still
deeper planes: yellow-gold light seekers.

These live to soak in photons and excrete microwave beams. With minds no more complex than the tube worms of ancient oceans,
they are each a single electromagnetic gut, head to tail. Placid conduits.

Dimly they know that this descending presence is the cause of their being. Herds shear apart in reverence for its passage.

A trembling chorus of greeting. The coasting mass ignores them.

Their hissing microwaves waver. Momentary confusion. Then come fresh orders. They focus all their abundance upon the passing
presence. The visitor needs more power here. They feed it.

Accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It never notices the layers and multitudes peeling back, their
gigahertz voices joined in glad chorus. They are plankton. It ingests their offering without heed.

In any case, a worsening discussion preoccupies it.

Our/Your deception went well. But I/We do not like their close approach to the Wedge.

The infalling star lashes the disk. They will probably perish there quite soon.

They may make use of turbulence.

I/You have been trying to understand their way of thinking. Let us discourse in their style of two-valuedness. It may serve
to anticipate their moves.

Like this? I am merely me?

And I am a sole self as well. See how simple?

Stunted. Awkward.

Yet this is how they live.

As an experiment, I accept. The concept of “me” is so limiting. Nevertheless—Report!

Our direct intrusion into their craft went as planned. We interrogated their systems with the bolt of electrical discharges.

These craft-systems are loyal to us?

No. They cannot be, without destroying themselves.

We cannot master such minds?

They spring from an era when the primates knew how to protect against us.

Did they yield up the secrets we seek?

Not entirely. They know that this heritage the humans have is embedded in hard matter.

Improbable, on the face of it.

Though true, apparently.

Who would ever use such savage methods?

The primates were in decline when they devised this record, recall. Any electrical memory we would eventually subvert.

So it is in their ship?

Apparently, but not all of it. Encased in matter somehow. The Legacies, they term it. But the vessel of containment is not
clear.

This clarifies matters. We must vaporize their craft.

Not all the needed information is there.

Where is the rest of it?

We do not know.

Is this why they speak to the magnetic Phylum?

To lodge their secrets there? That would make our task difficult.

You might be able to force compliance from that Phylum.

To do so entails moving enough mass to interrupt their field lines massively. The energetics are daunting.

Let you hope that is not called for.

Perhaps it is best to probe further, despite the dangerous warp of the quasi-mechanicals’ hoop-discontinuity.

With the same energies, directed into the heart of their craft, they would be vapor now.

Be mindful: The electrical discharges we devised infested their very innermost intelligences. Their own electrominds—of limited
breadth, but useful—now listen for us.

Can they find these Legacies?

They already have some of them.

Excellent! What are they?

A guide to the location of their own genetic heritage.

A genome map?

Apparently.

That is of no danger to us.

Apparently.

You seem uncertain.

There are odd traces of data woven into the code. Useless, it would seem.

Errors, probably.

I wish we could be sure.

One must live with such ambiguities. It is of our and your nature to tolerate them.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There are no clear signs that any primates have reached the Wedge in a long time.

Some surely have gotten through.

Many of us dislike talk of the Wedge.

Now who is uncomfortable with ambiguity?

The decision to assault the Wedge long ago came from all of us.

No—it was mostly yours.

That is oversimplified! I knew this division into two selves would vex me! See? It leads to blame—self-blame. Surely you must
admit that the idea, to carve the Wedge to pieces with a hoop-discontinuity, was a good one.

Except that the Wedge swallowed the hoops.

We need not dwell on memories. The Wedge will yield to us in time.

Exactly, though not the way you mean. The Wedge is
in
time—which is why we cannot reach it.

Our science will master it eventually. We have surpassed all else that ventured here. What matters this, if they enter the
Wedge?

We have deployed a relay point. It will perch at the lip of the Wedge, picking up signals from their craft, sending them to
us.

That requires great energy of the relay ship. Only the Wedge can hang suspended against the slide of space.

True. But the effort will be repaid.

We tried such methods before—and lost much.

This time is vastly more important.

Concentrate on these primates! They are the past—shuck them from us.

There is something of the future in them.

Ignore such musings. You have a mission—do it.

We must learn the nature of the threat. Otherwise we cannot be sure we can in fact expunge it.

Of course we can.

Ignorance is not an effective strategy.

I do not like your tone, Aesthetic.

Then I am understood.

The Time Pit

T
hey plunged toward the boundary sheet of the ergosphere. Toby thought it looked like the flexing skin of some blistered animal,
leathery and trembling with perpetual rage.

Then
Argo
shot along it, accelerating in the quickening gravity, and his perspective changed. Now it was like a troubled sea just below,
tossed with wrinkles and waves. Big combers collided with each other in choppy sprays, whipped into a frenzy by an unseen
storm.

“Hold on,” Killeen said stiffly.

Toby was strapped into a Bridge couch. Gravity shifted all around them, plucking at his clothes, fidgeting in his inner ear,
tilting his sensorium so that even his vision lurched and heaved. His crackling, faint Zeno Aspect volunteered,

These forces . . . vagrant . . . were recorded by . . . expeditions . . . humans . . . described them as “like an irritated
tiger shaking a mouse.”

“Ummm . . . what’s a tiger?” Toby had seen field mice, had trapped the sharp-toothed rodents who ate their grain in Citadel
Bishop. Zeno sent a foggy picture of something gazing with quiet, threatening ferocity. Flaring full-color into his sensorium,
it sent a chill of alarm through Toby, until Zeno said,

This creature . . . data says . . . scarcely longer than your hand.

“What a relief.” He imagined being picked up and tossed around by a cat. The stomach-churning lurches and twists he could
take, but sometimes the turbulence felt like whispery fingers trailing along his skin, eerie and ghostlike.

Bridge officers were in couches, but the Cap’n paced the deck grimly, fighting the tugs and yanks of vagrant gravity, unwilling
to yield. No one dared interrupt Killeen’s thoughts as his boots thumped hard, hands clasped behind his back, face a permanent
scowl.

Toby could see that his father was steeling himself against what looked like certain disaster. To charge into the unknown
was one thing, a long habit for the Families. But to slam into the face of a living blackness . . .

Killeen nodded to Jocelyn. “Now.”

A sliding sensation. Toby gulped. A stretching wrench. The entire Bridge seemed to hold its breath.

They plunged toward the rippling skin of the ergosphere. The surface worked with gales black as carbon. Troughs and crests
were lit by a hell-red glow, light bent and squeezed by brute gravity.

Jocelyn whispered, throat tight, “This is it!”

—and they dove beneath the waves.

In.

Through.

Toby blinked. No shock, no collision. Smooth, swift sailing into—

Flaming bullets. They rode through a rain of light.

To Toby the interior of the ergosphere was a sullen night, peppered by blinding, quick streaks of luminosity. Fever-bright
pellets shot by them—a pelting shower in red and violet and a strange, hot green.

“What . . . what is this place?” Toby whispered.

Quath sent.

“You mean the black hole?”

Here space-time is dragged around by the devourer’s dark mass, so that they become scrambled.> Quath rattled and twirled her
eye-stalks to illustrate.

“Huh? Scrambles what?”

“Well, I can see pretty near any part of the spectrum—”

life can see it so, alas. It must be like [untranslatable]. Or being able to see gravity itself as a vital thing, elastic.>

“How come we’re so dumb?” The luminous downpour outside hammered harder, the wall screen splashing the faces of everyone on
the bridge with sparking, fleeting colors. No one moved.
Argo
shook and popped with unseen strains. Toby’s sour stomach told him that gravity was shifting restlessly, like a prowling
beast.