Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Nebula Award-winning author's fifth installment of his classic Galactic Center series is reissued in this special edition that contains a teaser chapter from The Sunborn.

Release date: February 1, 2005

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 448

Sample

 

 

Toby watched his father walk the hull.


Killeen was a silvery figure, his suit tuned to reflect as much radiation as possible. A mirror man. Slick light slid over
him as he moved, shimmering with the phosphorescence of stars and gas. Toby could follow Killeen’s smooth, slow lope as a
rippling warp against the fiery background.


—Dad!—Toby called over his skinsuit comm band.

—What? Oh . . . —Killeen’s surprise came through the fizz of comm static.—How come you’re outside?—

—Crew’s wondering how come you’re out here so long.—

As Cap’n of the Argo, Killeen could do whatever he liked, of course. But Toby had felt the growing uncertainty among the officers inside. Somebody
had to act, to say something, so he had pulled on his skin-tight suit and come clumping out here. Lately Cap’n Killeen had
kept himself isolated. He came out here to hike over the fat curves of the ship’s hull, often not even leaving his suit comm
line open.


Killeen said distantly,—I’m navigating. Watching.—

The big man’s watery image flowed, liquid with light, as Killeen came toward Toby across Argo’s blunt prow. His suit momentarily mirrored the black depths of a nearby molecular cloud, and Toby saw him as an eerie shadow-man
against the distant burnt-orange wash of star-speckled gas.


—You can do that from the bridge,—Toby said.

—Get a better feel for it out here.—Killeen came close enough for Toby to make out his father’s stern expression through the
suit’s small vision slit.


Toby knew his father’s pinched-face, hedgehog mood, and decided to cut through it directly.—There’s near a dozen more crew
on sick report.—


Killeen’s lips thinned but he said nothing. Toby hesitated, then summoned up his courage.—Dad, we’re starving! Those gardens
we lost, they’re not gonna grow again. Face it!—


Abruptly Killeen whirled, adroitly sliding his magnetic boots in zero gravity.—I am facing it! We just don’t know any more techtricks. Even the specialists, the green-thumbers, they can’t get those ship gardens
sprouting again. No help there. So I’m thinking, got that?—


Toby stepped back involuntarily; Killeen’s flinty anger was quick and daunting. He took a breath and said hesitantly,—Shouldn’t
. . . can’t we . . . do something different?—


Killeen scowled.—Like what?—

—Approach some of those?—Toby pointed tentatively.

Far ahead of Argo floated faint metallic dabs of light. Not clouds or luminous dust. Artificial.


—We don’t know what they are. Could be mechwork. Probably is. Mechs have built plenty near True Center.—Killeen shrugged.

—Maybe they’re human, Dad.—

—Doubtful. It’s been a fearsome long time since humans lived in space.—

—That’s just what history says. We won’t know till we look for ourselves. We’re raiders by heritage, Dad! The Family’s itching
to get out of the ship, stretch their legs.—


Killeen gazed thoughtfully toward the blaze of Galactic Center.—One thing you learn as Cap’n is not to stick your nose into
a beehive just to smell the honey. Those things’ll probably be hostile, even if they aren’t mech. Ever’thing else here seems
to be.—


Toby let the remark ride. It had been over a year, but still Killeen had not recovered from the death of his woman, Shibo.
He kept up his duties as Cap’n but was often withdrawn, pensive, moody. That might have been acceptable for a crewman, but
not for a Cap’n. The price in morale was getting too high.


Still, Toby thought, Killeen was probably right. They were cruising directly into the center of the galaxy, where vast, indifferent
energies worked. Huge, glowering suns. Incandescent clouds of dust and gas. Powers far beyond anything mere humans could manage.
And somewhere here, intelligences to match the mad swirl of stars.


He had studied enough history to know that humans had evolved near a star two-thirds of the way out in the galactic spiral.
The galaxy was a spinning disk, like a toy—only bigger than the human mind could encompass. Out there at Old Earth, far from
the cataclysms of True Center, living had been easy, quiet.


One of his instructional drills had tried to get him to visualize a box that was a light-year on a side, the distance light
itself could travel in a whole year. Out there, near the legendary Earth, that box would hold maybe one single star, on average.


Here, at Galactic Center, such a box held a million stars.

Suns crowded the sky like glowing marbles. Stormy streamers of red gas shrouded them. Stars swarmed like angry bees around
the central axis—the blue-white brilliance of the exact center.


Toby said quietly,—We could come alongside one of ’em, just for a look.—

Killeen shook his head.—Solve one problem, maybe, but make another. A worse one.—

—We’re starving, Dad. We have to do something.—


Killeen turned and strode angrily away along the worn and pitted hull. His magnetos snapped down to the metal with a hard
clank that Toby felt through his own boots. He trotted after his father. Walking here took a strangely gaited stride, coasting
between steps, letting his boot clamp just long enough to get more momentum. Then he jerked the boot free, pushing forward,
and was off on another glide. Toby was good at it but he couldn’t keep pace with his father.


Argo had brought them here at near-light speeds, gulping down plasma with her magnetic scoops. There was fuel aplenty, thicker
and thicker as they neared the center. Still, random chunks of rock had pocked and blistered her shiny hull. Now they were
coasting slower, and Killeen used the chance to hull-walk with some safety. Argo had joined the gyre of matter here, which swung about True Center at one-thousandth light speed.


Killeen reached a smooth ridge in the Argo’s complex bulges and stopped, as if on the brow of a real mountain, back on the planet of their birth. Their ship was a last
grand construction of their ancestors, a vessel as big as a hill. Beyond him loomed a vast dark cloud, like a smudge of ink
against the flaming stars.


Killeen turned and looked back at his son. As Toby approached he saw Killeen’s expression shift to a plaintive longing.

—If only there were planets here . . . —

—Can’t be, I heard,—Toby said flatly, hoping to jar their talk back to realities.

—Why?—Killeen asked sharply.

—Look at these stars! They’re flying past each other so close, they strip planets clean free of their parent sun.—

—Well, that sets planets drifting free, sure. So?—Killeen said stubbornly.

—Sure, free. And frozen. Too far from any sun. No plant life. No food.—

Killeen peered wistfully outward.—So in all this magnificence, there’s no place for life?—

—Yeasay. Prob’ly none for us, either.—Toby ventured this opinion mostly to snap his father out of his illusions. Maybe even
get him to rethink this foolhardy venture to True Center.


Killeen gave him a sober, almost plaintive look.—We have to go on.—

—Why? The radiation levels are so high, Argo can barely hold it off. Just coming outside here, you’re risking heavy exposure.—


—It’s our duty, I tell you.—

—Dad, your first duty is to Argo, to your crew.—


—There’s something near the Galactic Center. We have to find out what.—

Toby snorted in frustration. Killeen’s eyes narrowed at this, but Toby told himself he was speaking for a majority of the
crew. That was his duty, too. He said bitterly,—Moldy old records hint—hint!—at something. That’s all. For that we’re supposed to . . . —


He broke off as Killeen abruptly turned his back. The Cap’n of the Argo kept his shoulders square despite a sudden sag of his head. Toby saw that his father was fighting with himself, wrestling
with dark demons his son would never fully know.


Toby could only glimpse them through the clotted phrases of their conversations, through half-made gestures, through the veiled
language of shrugs and scowls and sudden, blunt looks that revealed momentary, naked emotion. The Cap’n was never able to
unburden himself, not even to his son. Not even, perhaps, to Shibo . . . when she had lived.


Things were weighing on Killeen. Shibo’s loss. Killeen’s oblique relation now with his own son. The approaching whirlpool
of True Center. All these churned within his father’s mind, Toby knew. An unhealthy soup.


Killeen gazed out at the blue-black mass that loomed like an absolute wall beside the Argo. It was a snarled, inky cloud of dust and simple molecules, their ship’s instruments said. But Killeen always distrusted
the crisp certainties of Argo’s Bridge diagnostics. Years before he had formed the habit of surveying from the hull itself, free of the reassuring, softening,
artificial clasp of the ship. Or at least that was what he said. Toby suspected that he just liked to get clear of Argo’s confines. Like father, like son.


Gloomy clouds like this dotted the pressing radiance of the Galactic Center, black punctuation marks in a riot of stellar
fire. Killeen had chosen Argo’s course to take advantage of this cloud as a shield against lethal radiation levels. As Argo slipped slowly by veiled, murky filaments, Toby watched his father’s face tighten, wrinkle with a grimace—and suddenly open
in astonishment.


—There!—Killeen pointed.—Moving.—

Toby thumbed a control on his neck collar. The helmet computer telescoped his vision and shifted to infrared. His field of
view rushed into the recesses of the cloud.


Something snaked at the edge of the mottled mist.

—Go to high mags,—Killeen said tersely, his surprise gone, all business.

Toby sent his vision zooming to max magnification. RANGE: 23 KM, his visor told him.


The snaky thing wriggled—slowly, slowly. Its gleaming jade skin reflected the starglow. Sluggishly it spread gossamer-thin
sheets along its body.


—It’s alive!—Toby called.

The green serpent was using sails. Natural sails, grown out of its body on fibrous spars. They caught amber starlight. In
zero gravity, Toby knew, even the faint pressure of light was enough to give a measurable push. With nothing to slow it down,
the twisty creature would pick up speed.


—Look.—Killeen whispered.—There’s something more in that cloud.—

The gently wriggling beast had no head, only a long black slit at one end. Toby thought this must be a mouth, because the
push from its broad, shiny sails was taking it forward with the slit end ahead. And it was sailing in pursuit of a blue ball.


Silently they watched it draw nearer, nearer—and the slit-mouth widened. Something orange shot out and stuck to the blue ball.
Drew it in. The slit-mouth yawned. With two gulps the ball disappeared.


—Predators.—Killeen said.—And prey.—

Toby said wonderingly,—Pred . . . ? How can anything live in a cloud? In free space?—

A grin split Killeen’s star-tanned face.—In free space? Nothing’s free, son. Molecular clouds have organic molecules, right?
So the astro types say.—


—Those names, yeasay.—Toby recalled the voice of his teacher Aspect, Isaac, who gave him complicated lessons.—Oxygen. Carbon.
Nitrogen.—


Killeen gestured expansively.—Add all this starlight, cook for a few billion years. Presto!—

Toby blinked.—Life’s hiding all through this cloud?—

—I’ll bet the hunting is good at the edge of the cloud. Some things prob’ly live deeper in, where they can hide. Every now
and then they’ll come out. To bask in the starlight. Get warm.—


Toby nodded, convinced.—That snaky thing, it knows that. Comes around, looking for supper.—

—The sail-snake eats the blue balls. But what’s the blue ball eat?—

—Something smaller. Something we can’t see from here.—

—Right.—Killen squinted.—There’s got to be some critter that lives off the starlight and drifting molecules alone.—

Toby said wonderingly,—Plants? Space plants. I’ll bet we can eat some of them.—

Killeen pounded his son on the back.—Be a wonder if we couldn’t. We know these clouds have the same basic chemistry that nature
generates everywhere. Argo’s science programs told us that, ’member? So we’ll be able to digest some of whatever’s hiding in there, for sure.—


Toby blinked, watching the jade snake unfurl its sails further. Was it green for the same reason plants were, to sop up sunlight
in all colors except green? It began an achingly slow turn, showing curved black stripes. Had it seen their ship? Maybe they
should run it down, see what it tasted like. His stomach rumbled at the idea.


But the creature had a majesty about it, too. A beauty in its glistening hide, its graceful movement. Like an immense swimmer
in a black pool. Maybe they’d leave it be.


—We’d never have seen them from the bridge. Those instruments would’ve filtered out what they didn’t think was important.—Killeen
was all business again, his wonderment suppressed. That was part of the price of being Cap’n.


Toby gaped, still fascinated by the sail-snake. He knew what his father said was right. Nobody could have guessed what they’d
see out here. But Killeen had come out, again and again. Hammering away at a Cap’n’s problems, thinking, worrying, pacing
the hull, looking without knowing what he was looking for. And some of the crew had thought he was crazy.


Toby listened as Killeen called the Bridge and ordered Argo toward the shadowy cloud. Understanding came slowly amid the crew. He could hear on comm as the ship stirred with excited
voices, with hope, with joy.


—Dad?—he finally asked.

Killeen was giving a flurry of orders. Crew had to prepare to hunt, to forage, to pursue strange game in inky vacuum depths.
To do things they had never tried before. Had never even imagined.


Killeen paused and said curtly,—Yeasay?—

—We can hole up inside the cloud for a while. Rest up. Get our bearings.—

Killeen shook his head furiously.—Naysay. Resupply, that’s all. There’s True Center. Look at it! We’re so close now.—

Toby peered ahead, through dusty clumps already wreathing the hull of Argo as the great ship headed into the recesses of the giant cloud. At max mag he could make out the exact center of the galaxy.
White-hot. Beautiful. Dangerous.


And his father, he now saw, could never be deflected from that goal. Not by starvation. Not by deadly risks. Not by the weight
of past sorrow.


They would fly straight into the gnawing center of all this gaudy, swirling chaos. On an impossible voyage. Looking for something,
with no clear idea of what it might be.


Killeen grinned broadly.—C’mon, son, this is what we were born to do. We’ll go onward. Inward. There’s all our Family’s past
here, somewhere. We’ll find out what happened, who we are.—


—Crew doesn’t like that kind of talk, Dad.—

He frowned.—How come?—

—This is a scary place.—

—So? They haven’t seen the glory of it, haven’t really thought it through. When the time comes, they’ll follow me.—

—We’re running for our lives, Dad.—

—So?—Killeen grinned, a jaunty human gesture amid the wash of galactic light.—We always have been.—

The carapace glides like a hunting hornet.


Its thorax is of high-impact matte ceramic. Bone-white lattices mimic ribs. Storage balloons inflate like lungs as it exchanges
plasma charge. Slow rises, fluttering exhales.


This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight, remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent
of the substrate, whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings now encased in habit. Function
converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible tension, struts like statements.


Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines
blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.


It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.

It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are
racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.


Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless
as the rain of protons.


Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that
flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.


Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding
mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.


Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient
supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing
luminescent ideas.


From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly
revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and
scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.


Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic
needles through prey light-minutes away.


For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to
think long. Within them, data dances.


The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here)
and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.


Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but
they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.


It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.

Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.

They must. They are an unresolved issue.

You term them “primates”?

Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.

I/You consider them irrelevant.

The underlying issues still vex.

They are nothing! Debris, motes.

They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.

We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in
history, demand completion of this ancient task.

This policy is e>/~*~\< old. We/You should reinspect it.

They are nearly extinct. Press on.

Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests we\you reconsider our\my assumptions.

They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!

Some would say that evolution works as equally upon you\us as upon them.

Nonsense. We\You direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.

They were once able to alter their own imprintings. To write changes in their carbon kind.

They lost it as we\you diminished them. Now they are the same as the unthinking forms, the animals—shaped by random forces.

They were once important players here. We\You should understand their threat to us before expunging them.

Possibly they harbor information harmful to us\you—so say our most stable records.

Those are sheltered against the Mass Eater’s radiant storm and so should be well preserved.

By its nature we\you cannot know what this hidden information is.

Why “by its nature”?

There are many theories.

Precisely. Does it not seem curious that something in our\your makeup makes it somehow impossible for us\you to know what
these humans carry? That such knowledge is blocked for us? A curious aspect of our deep programming.


May carry. Such ancient records are suspect.

We\You cannot risk disbelieving them.

Long ago the philosopher [|~] resolved such questions. We\You are imprisoned within our perception-space. There will always remain matters you\we cannot
know.

But if these matters affect ourselves? Disquieting.

Living with ambiguity is the nature of high intelligence. Still, to lessen uncertainty we\you should exterminate the remaining
bands.

And lose their information?

Very well—archive them first. I now point to this latest incursion— already it nears True Center.

There may be risks in erasing them.

Nonsense. You\We have destroyed many such expeditions before.

First, let scouts find them accurately. The usual primate-hunter units will track them, perhaps inflict minor damage—one must
give such lower forms some reward structure, remember.


You/We advocate delay?

No—cautious action. Remember that higher forms than us will judge our\your actions. Prudence demands care. Earlier events
involving these primates, on two separate planets, have pointed toward some significant yet poorly defined role they play.
They may carry information—and what are they, but information? Indeed, what are we?—which can bring the attentions of minds
above ours.


Very well, caution. But how?

A trap.

Toby had barely gotten back inside the air lock and was shedding his suit when Cermo showed up. Toby wore nothing but shorts
under his vacuum suit, and the ship felt colder than outside. He rummaged in his locker for his overalls, shivering, and Cermo
said, “Where you been?”


“Where’s it look?”

The big man towered over Toby. Cermo had been called Cermo-the-Slow in years past, but now was leaner and quicker. A broad
grin seemed to divide his face in half with delighted anticipation. “Heard all the ruckus. Cap’n found us somethin’ to eat,
right?”


“We’ll see.”

“Doesn’t change anything for you, though,” Cermo said with a sly chuckle. He was a big man with a soft-eyed, mirthful face,
so the chuckle carried no malice.


“What’s that mean?”

“You’re on maintenance detail today.”

“So? Okay, I’ll check the biotanks, the usual.”

“Today’s not usual.” Again the sly grin.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sewage seals broke.”

“Again? No fair! They went out last time I was on maintenance, too.”


“Well then, you’re an expert.” Cermo handed Toby a mop. “Apply your know-how.”

The seals were always popping, because the pressure regulators had to be tuned just exactly right. Human waste was a vital
ingredient in the biotanks. It had to be pressurized, filtered, and the final product flattened into squishy mats—which the
farm teams spread around among the big bowl-shaped crop zones. The Argo was a long-voyage ship, designed to keep every drop of water, every sigh of air sealed tight inside its skin.


Easy to understand, hard to do. Most of the Argo crew were relatives, all that remained of Family Bishop. They came from Snowglade, a bleak world Toby remembered rather fondly.
Toby was of the youngest generation of Family Bishop. That gave him the flexibility of being fresh and green, but the sour
fact of the matter was that Bishops had few skills to help them run the Argo.


All Families had been techno-nomads, learning just enough to survive while they were on the move. Always running, dodging,
staying ahead of mechs. Not that most mechs paid them any special attention. Humans at Galactic Center were more like rats
in the walls, not major players in anything.


Argo was as friendly to its passengers as a ship could be, a fine artifact from the High Arcology Era. Trouble was, its systems
assumed the passengers had educations that Family Bishop could only guess at.


Example: the sewage. Neither Cap’n Killeen nor Cermo nor anybody else had been able to make head or tail of the instructions
for the pressure system.


It assumed something called the Perfect Gas Law, the instructions said. The foul stuff that actually flowed through the smooth,
clear pipes was certainly not perfect, and it obeyed no law anybody ever heard of. It spewed out without provocation and often
with what seemed to be insulting timing. Last week, a howling brown leak sprayed the Family when it was assembled for a wedding.
That took a certain fine edge off the celebration.


Toby joined the other poor souls who had drawn maintenance this week. He breathed through his mouth but that helped only a
while, until the smell got up into his head. His teacher Aspect, Isaac, spoke to him in his mind while he bent over, pushing
the foul stuff with a sponge brush.


I have conferred with the most ancient records you carry in your chip-library. Interestingly, the term you use is actually
derived from the name of the man on Old Earth who invented the flush toilet. An Englishman, legend has it, he made a fortune
and benefited all humankind. His name, Thomas Crapper, has come to be—

“Hey, give me a break.”

I thought perhaps some distraction would make your task easier.

“Look, I want distraction, I’ll play one of the old Mose Art musics.”

You mistake the name, I fear. That should be Wolfgang Ama—

Toby mentally pushed the sputtering Aspect back into its storage hole. Aspects were recorded personalities out of Family Bishop’s
past, some quite old, like Isaac. They were really interactive information bases written on small chips, which Toby carried
in his neck slots. Isaac was only a shrunken slice of a real, long-dead human personality, of course, mostly just old lore
that might come in handy. Isaac had tried and tried to explain that Perfect Gas Law, but Toby never really got it.


Knowing about Thomas Crapper wasn’t going to be any use to Toby, but he got a smile out of it; so maybe that was some purpose,
after all. The Family used Aspects to help them get through troubles, carrying the masses of knowledge they needed to survive
while living amid technology that was far beyond them.


“Hey, you sleepwalking?”

Toby came alert. Besen was standing beside him, neat and trim, her part of the cleanup done. Toby still had half a hallway
to sponge up. “Uh, I was thinking deep thoughts.”


Besen rolled her eyes. “Oh sure.”

He gestured with his mop at the brown-stained deck. “Bet you don’t know who this stuff is named for.”

Besen looked skeptical when he told her. “Honest truth,” he said.

Besen gave him a grin and he marveled at how wonderful she looked lately. Fitted out in overalls, auburn hair tied back, spattered
and grimy, to his eyes she still had a radiance. Girls bloomed just once, like flowers, before turning into women—but that
was enough. Besen seemed impossibly fresh, alive, fun.


“I was just remembering some of those plays we had to listen to,” he said. “They apply here.”

“Oh?” she said skeptically.

“Sure, you recall. ‘Good night, good night! Farting is such sweet sorrow.’ Great romantic stuff.”

“That’s ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’ Some romantic you are!”


One of their private games came from a truly ancient chip that Besen carried. It had actual texts from Old Earth, including
a gray geezer named Shake-Spear. A great poet from some kind of primitive hunter-gatherer society, Besen thought. This Shake-Spear
was one of the scraps humans had retained across the Great Gulf that separated them from the Old Earth cultures, and Besen
liked to quote frags of such stuff, just to show off.


“Well, I got it nearly right.” He grinned. “Wait’ll I finish here, we’ll go have some fun in the weightless gym.”

Toby liked the zones of Argo at zero-g. Most of the ship’s sections spun, creating an artificial ce