Gregory Benford: Across the Sea of Suns

The pre-EMs? The race that remade itself at Isis?

The thought came suddenly. Perhaps. So much was lost in time …

Whoever had come to that ancient earth had left fluxlife, a sure sign that the Marginis wreck carried organic beings, for only they would use a thing that reproduced itself with a molecular genetic code. And fluxlife was the sign and the gift: an opening to the stars.

The pulsing in him was becoming a song and the harmonics of it called up the long weary wail of the EMs, in a timeless weave that blended this huge blind creature into the same slow, ponderous hymn of life in the galaxy, weighed and hammered down yet still with an abiding hope, a need, a calling.

He felt his mind clearing.

He checked his medcomp. It was good, no trace of the runaway reactions. He gingerly detached from the silent solid mass. Pulled out the sharpened pipe.

The tendrils holding the frame jerked away in a spasm of rejection. The frame shuddered and came free.

The medmon tumbled out of the pipe brace. Nigel twisted around and snatched, gasping. Caught it.

He grabbed for the frame, too, and pain shot through his arm. He held.

Stretched between two charging horses, he thought wildly. The frame wrenched sideways. His joints popped. Can’t take much of this. By the dim suit lamp he saw the slowly turning struts. Limp bags trailed it. Most of the floaters were crushed.

Falling. Above, the vast bulk faded in the dimming amber light and yet it was so large that it did not seem to grow smaller as the distance increased. He could not see the sides of it.

Nigel fought for a hold with his boots. The frame tumbled. Currents plucked at him, trying to snatch away the medfilter, to loosen his hand on the pipe.

He fought—and then realized he did not need the frame any longer. It was falling too, floaters useless. He simply let go. Darkness swallowed the skeletal shape.

His final security was gone. He was falling in absolute hard black, clutching his faintly ludicrous filter, invisible currents swirling and gurgling.

He came back from the blurred pain in his arms, to hear the ragged lines of argument from Lancer’s consensus meeting.

Swarmers had something to do with it everything to do with it of course don’t be a fool

But there’s no evidence not clear evidence anyway

Plain as the nose on your face they were the advance party

Yeah these ships in orbit now they look like the ones the Swarmers came in just look at the

All mixed in together

Nikka’s voice broke in, Nigel! Nigel! Time is “Yes, I hear.”

You had your reasons I’m sure but too much is happening, I’m frightened, I don’t want you out there when—

“Of course. I … I’m sorry. I was shagged out, dead bushed, and this seemed the only way to finally … I haven’t been on a planetary surface, I’ve had no chance to ever really, to … I …” His voice trailed away as he felt the old block, the inability to communicate deep recesses that lay beyond language.

Turn on your tracer. It works, doesn’t it?

“Done, I’m falling,” he added mildly.

How did —

“A boring long tale.”

We’re coming. You’re picking up the Lancer comm? I piped it through on open circuit.

“Yes. Dead awful.” He could think of nothing more to say. The full weight of it would come on him later, he knew. The mind did what it must to survive.

I’ve got you fixed a few klicks away but you’re moving fast nothing nearby

Jesus we’ll have to catch him how can we

Nigel relaxed, spread-eagling himself to offer the most flow resistance. His ears popped. Suit adjustment.

It’s impossible, we don’t have that kind of maneuvering ability

Shut up, he’ll hear you, Carlos

But it—look, we can get there but Madre Dios it’ll take ten minutes minimum and we’ll be moving too fast .

Knobbed joints grumbling with pain, muscles whining, heart thumping dumbly in the converging dark.

“Get—get under me. Then … deploy … a sac.”

Gliding in the soft night. Coasting. What was coming depended on relaxation, reaching out with the senses. He could not tighten up or the frail ol’ muscles would tire before they were needed. He had to let go.

Decades ago, after Alexandria’s death, Mr. Ichino had said to him, I wish you the strength to let go .

He needed that now. Until he saw the submersible and knew which direction to bank toward, there was nothing productive he could do. Either they would snag him in time, or else he would fall farther in this cold murk, into higher pressures, and his suit would fail. He would squash like a grape.

From the Lancer meeting came

Obviously those goddamn Swarmers started it Yeah the Trojan horse

Dunno how the nukes got going but when those Swarmers started coming ashore what was China supposed to do. Matter of survival if what they say about the Americans is true

Was true you mean—North America’s gone, incinerated

Those high-burst bombs, just one’ll ignite a continent

Asian mainland took less nukes looks like Swarmers are getting pasted good there thank God

Merde je ne

Those flying things—ugly, you see’em, horrible—an’ that on-site report says the Swarmers don’ reproduce usin’ the flyin’ thing at all they’re some kind of add-on

Damn Swarmers musta planned it from ’way back an’ bioengineered themselves

Point is it’s all linked—the Watchers an’ those gray ships an’ the Swarmers—all in it together

He felt the waters rushing by, gurgling and whispering to him. He was without weight and form and felt himself spreading ever wider, as if his legs and arms were detached, a flag filling. Words and sentences and garbled bits came from Lancer and the submersible, but they seemed hollow and distant and finally irrelevant.

He wondered if the huge creatures perceived him, a falling mote, and puzzled over the brilliant bubble that swam to meet him.

Damfino how it all works but it’s plain as the nose on your face

Goddamn Ted we got to do somethin’

Latest says the deepspace net is sending in fragmentation loads, blow them up ten thousand klicks out and try to knock out some of their ships in orbit

Might get some of the small stuff but those big ones

He saw a faint luminous thread of orange to the left, turning and twisting and darting away, and felt at the same moment a long booming note that tolled through the water like a distant bell. It reminded him of the EMs and their song, and as he lazily plunged toward the heart of this ocean world he saw suddenly how this tied together with the Swarmers, all forms of life victimized and beaten down because in the end the machines could not stop life, could not smother it, could not eliminate forever the endlessly burgeoning forms which competed with the machines for resources and space, and so in the end they enlisted some forms of life to stop their worst competitors, the budding technologies.

The machines had known of Earth for a long time, they had fought some titanic battle there millions of years ago and lost—the Marginis wreck was the only mute remaining testament of that—and in the losing had become fearful of simply blasting it with asteroids or doing anything else which could perhaps be blocked by the Marginis wreck or by humans themselves. If they tried bombardment, as they did with Isis, and the humans captured some of their vessels, deciphered where their centers of power were, then the same crushing warfare might reach across the stars and find them in their lairs, unleash the terrible marriage of mind and instinct—which the machines did not have—and destroy all that the patient and implacable cybernetic beings had built up.