Tides of Light (57 page)

He did not notice the sobbing.

After a time he could not measure he saw that the others were doing the same, without discussion. No one talked at all.

The wails of the sculptured people reverberated, moist glad cries as they saw what was coming.

It took a long time.

The Mantis was waiting outside the Hall of Humans, as Paris had felt it would be.

I was unable to predict what you and the others did.

“Good.” His pencil ship lifted away from the long gray cylinder, now a mausoleum to madness.

I allowed it because those are finished pieces. Whereas you are a work in progress, perhaps my best.

“I’ve always had a weakness for compliments.”

He could feel his very blood changing, modulating oxygen and glucose from his body to feed his changing brain. The accretion
disk churned below, a great lurid pinwheel grinding to an audience of densely packed stars.

Humor is another facet I have mastered.

“There’s a surprise.” Vectoring down, the boost pressing him back. “Very human, too. Everybody thinks he’s got a good sense
of humor.”

I expect to learn much from you
.

“Now?”

You are ripe. Your fresh, thoroughly human reactions to my art will be invaluable
.

“If you let me live, you’ll get one or two centuries more experience when I finally die.”

That is true, for yours has been an enticingly rich one, so far. There are reasons to envy the human limitations
.

“And now that I’ve seen your art, my life will be changed.”

Truly? It is that affective with you, a member of its own medium? How?

He had to handle this just right. “Work of such impact, it will take time for me to digest it.”

You use a chemical-processing metaphor. Precisely a human touch, incorporating the most inefficient portions of your being.
Nonetheless, you point to a possible major benefit for me if you are allowed to live
.

“I need time to absorb all this.”

He could feel his body’s energy reserve sacrificing itself in preparation for the uploading process. He had come to understand
himself for the first time as he killed the others. Some part of him, the Me, knew it all now. The I spoke haltingly. “I think
you have truly failed to understand.”

I can remedy that now
.

“No, that’s exactly what you won’t. You can’t know us this way.”

I had a similar conversation with your father. He suggested that I invest myself in you
.

“But you won’t get it just by slicing and dicing us.”

There is ample reason to believe that digital intelligences can fathom analog ones to any desired degree of accuracy
.

“The thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

He felt intruding into him the sliding fingers of a vast, cool intellect, a dissolving sea. Soon he would be an empty shell.
Paris would become part of the Mantis in the blending across representations, in their hologram logics. He could feel his
neuronal wiring transfiguring itself. And accelerated.

Art is everywhere in the cosmos. I particularly liked your ice sculptures, melting in the heat while audiences applauded.
Your tapestry of dim senses and sharp pains and incomprehensible, nagging, emotional tones—I wish to attain that. An emergent
property, quite impossible to predict.

“Never happen. You could understand this if you would allow me to fill out my natural life span.”

That is a telling point. I shall take a moment to ponder it. Meanwhile, cease your descent toward the accretion disk.

Here was the chance. The Mantis would withdraw to consult all portions, as an anthology intelligence. That would give him
seconds to act. He accelerated powerfully down. “Take your time.”

For long moments he was alone with the hum of his tormented ship and the unfolding geysers outside, each storm bigger than
a world.

I have returned. I have decided, and shall harvest you now.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said cheerfully. Dead men could afford pleasantries.

I wish you could tell me why you desired to end all my works. But then, shortly, I shall know.

“I don’t think you’ll ever understand.”

Paris took his ship down toward the disk, through harrowing, hissing plumes of plasma.

His I sensed great movements deep within his Me and despite the climbing tones of alarms in his ship, he relaxed.

Pressed hard by his climbing acceleration, he remembered all that he had seen and been, and bade it farewell.

You err in your trajectory.

“Nope.”

You had to live in each gliding moment. This mantra had worked for him and he needed it more now. Cowardice—the real thing,
not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your
imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future—with that he knew he could get through each second
and on to the next without needless pain.

Correct course! Your craft does not have the ability to endure the curvatures required, flying so near the disk. Your present
path will take you too close—“To the end, I know. Whatever that means.”

His Arthur Aspect was shouting. He poked it back into its niche, calmed it, cut off its sensor link. No need to be cruel.
Then Arthur spoke with a thin cry, echoing something Paris had thought long ago. The Aspect’s last salute:

If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself to do its own homework—

“Then maybe that’s why we’re here,” Paris whispered to himself.

The only way to deprive the Mantis of knowledge no human should ever give up, was to erase that interior self, keep it from
the consuming digital.

He skimmed along the whipped skin of doomed incandescence. Ahead lay the one place from which even the Mantis could not retrieve
him, the most awful of all abysses, a sullen dot beckoning from far across the spreading ex-
panse of golden luminance. Not even the Mantis could extract him from there.

Paris smiled and said good-bye to it all and accelerated hard, hard.

G
REGORY
B
ENFORD
is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at
Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. His research encompasses both theory
and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including two Nebula Awards,
one John W. Campbell Award, and one British SF Award. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.

Gregory Benford is an eminent physicist, multiple award-winning author, and recipient of the United Nations Prize for Literature.
Now in a new, revised edition, here is the continuing story of his classic Galactic Center series, a triumph of breathtaking
imagination and tense human drama set against an immeasurable tapestry of space, time, and evolution.

Onboard an ancient starship, Killeen and the Bishop tribe escape the mech-ruled world of Snowglade. Seeking refuge on a faraway
planet, they discover vast wonders—an organic life-form as large as a world, a planet-coring cosmic string, a community of
humans ruled by a brutal tyrant, and ultimately an alien race more awesome than any they have encountered. As they battle
for survival against these myriad dangers, Killeen and his crew will gain an unforeseen ally —one that may determine humanity’s
true destiny…