In the Ocean of Night

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

A classic novel of man's future and fate, written by the eminent American physicist and award-winning author of Timescape. 2034. An indistinguishable sound is heard from the depths of space and one member of the search and survey team, Nigel, believes he knows its origins. 15 years earlier, he was the astronaut sent to implode a firey comet as it hurtled toward the Asian subcontinent. Once inside the fissure he made an unlikely discovery: an abandoned alien ship. Against his better judgment, Nigel carried out his mission, destroying the vessel-but not before clandestinely removing alien data and technology from on board. Now, as the team sets forth on a new adventure of discovery, Nigel's past will collide with the present, introducing him to wonders beyond human comprehension.

Release date: July 31, 2007

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 452

Sample

At Home in the Galaxy

I did not set out to write a series of interconnected novels over a span of twenty-five years. I’m sure that if I’d known it would grow to a million words, I’d not have started. The project grew on me, and I made plenty of mistakes bringing it to fruition. And now here it is, in a uniform edition at last.

I could describe here my inner struggles alone, the endless interior workings one performs before the blank page—but external events proved just as important. I suspect this happens more often for hard science fiction, and more often than most of us would like.

In 1977 I published my fourth novel, In the Ocean of Night, concerning an irritable astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, who discovers evidence of a galaxy-spanning network of intelligent machines. Walmsley was named for a friend of mine in graduate school, an astrophysicist who years later politely asked why I’d done it. It seemed a perfect English name, I said. The novel was nominated for awards and I went about my normal tasks as a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.

But my subconscious would not let me alone. I kept thinking of what such ideas implied, and by 1982 wrote Across the Sea of Suns, with the same character exploring nearby stars.
In the Ocean of Night explored the discovery that computer-based life was dominant throughout the galaxy. The British astronaut, Walmsley, uncovered the implication that “evolved adding machines,” as he put it, inherited the ruins of earlier, naturally derived alien societies.

Working with Walmsley set tough problems. I had picked a British point of view character because he was an outsider in a space program usually run by Americans. I had a feeling for the Brits from a sabbatical there in 1976, though I’d been writing stories that I incorporated into the first novel as early as 1972. Still, one novel can trace the core events of a character over years, perhaps a life—but I did not expect how Walmsley would change over the considerable span of Book #2. He ages, gets even crankier. Could he possibly be the central figure in a longer series? Could the readers stand him? Could I?

I finished the book in a mental muddle. Uninvited, my subconscious had begun to present me with events beyond the end of the book. In the first version of Across the Sea of Suns, a Simon & Schuster hardcover, I ended on a note of difficulty and defiance. A cliff-hanger, more a promise that I’d be back than anything else.

Then publishing intervened. Pocket Books had negotiated with me to name their imprint Timescape Books (named for a novel of mine), and they contracted for Across the Sea of Suns. Months after publishing #2 they collapsed. I don’t think it was wholly due to my novel.

The demise of my home imprint took the wind from my sails. Years passed. Scenes, ideas, and characters popped into my head as I worked on other books. By this time I had learned to follow my subconscious. If I didn’t, I stalled on other projects. Only slowly I realized that a larger series of novels yawned before me.

Bad news, I knew immediately. Series novels must each have a sense of an ending, while foreshadowing more. I hadn’t done this in the first two books.

Or had I? Book #1 closed with an expansive embracing, and #2 hadn’t reached most of its audience yet.

A new editor, Lou Aronica at Bantam, offered to publish the whole series, perhaps five books. Sweating, I took the plunge. After I added more to the ending of Across the Sea of Suns, Lou Aronica remarked at the voice of the new material, which he said echoed the rest of the novel well. I blinked; I hadn’t even thought of rereading Across the Sea of Suns. It had simply been sitting there, still fresh. Reassured, I set about writing Great Sky River.

And hit a snag straightaway. A series treats the arc of a figure’s life, but a galaxy-spanning novel covers so much space and time, I couldn’t get Walmsley around to see and live enough.

Worse, the galactic center was the obvious place for machines to seek. Plenty of energy is there, in forms machines can use but we can’t. By the early 1980s we knew that there is a virulent gamma ray flux there, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes. Most of this we gathered from the radio emissions, which penetrate dust clouds and revealed the crackling activity at the center for the first time. Infrared astronomy soon caught up, unmasking the hot, tangled regions. Not a great place to put frail human characters. Yet I yearned to set a long story in such a vibrant scene.

By the time I finished Across the Sea of Suns in 1983, I realized that I could do some research myself on the galactic center. I had by that time written papers on pulsars and galactic jets, and had both expertise and curiosity.

Here the physicist collided with the writer. I had been doing research in astrophysics since 1974, and noticed that our own galactic center was abrim with intriguing new phenomena, teased out by observations with new instruments, principally the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico.

In the core, just a few light-years from the exact center of our galaxy, a million stars crowd into a single cubic light-year. On average, the nearer stars are only a hundredth of a light-year away, ten thousand times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Imagine having several stars so close they outshone the moon.

As one might expect, this is bad news for solar systems around such stars. Close collisions between all these stars occur every few hundred thousand years, scrambling up planetary orbits, raining down comets upon them as well.

The galactic center is the conspicuous Times Square of the galaxy—and far more deadly than comfortable suburbs like ours, the Orion Arm of the spiral. Joel Davis’s Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy details how horrific the central volume is, pointing out that the survival time for an unshielded human within even a hundred light-years of the core is probably a few hours.

Strikingly, mysterious features appeared in the radio maps. In 1984 I was giving a talk on galactic jets at UC Los Angeles, and my host was Mark Morris, a radio astronomer.
“Explain this,” he challenged, slapping down a radio map he had just made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

My first reaction was, “Is this a joke?”

It showed a feature I called the Claw, but which Mark more learnedly termed the Arch: a bright, curved prominence made up of slender fibers. The Arch is over a hundred light-years long, yet these filaments are only about a light-year wide, curving upward from the galactic plane. They resemble arcs of great circles, with their centers near the galactic core, several hundred light-years away. A vast, strong magnetic field shapes them. These intricate filaments shine by energetic (in fact, relativistic) electrons, radiating in strong magnetic fields, which are aligned along the filaments.

My first intuition, seeing the glossy radio map of the Arch was, This looks artificial. Astronomy reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. The sf writer in me immediately explored the opposite. I decided to extend the Walmsley books by at least one more, set at galactic center.

But first, physics. I worked on a theory for those thin filaments that glow by electron luminosity, tubes a hundred times longer than they were wide. I thought of neon lights, which are glow discharges sustained by electric currents in slender tubes. Could these fibers be a sort of slow-motion lightning, taking perhaps hundreds of thousands of years to discharge?

I worked out a model of the situation, supposing that the giant molecular clouds orbiting at high velocities there provided the energy for the electrical discharges. They would provoke huge, multicolored arcs playing across the night sky, like permanent twisted neon lights. The ancient Asian Indian name for the Milky Way, Great Sky River, would be spectacularly true at the center. In my mind’s eye I saw these pyrotechnics as backdrop for my puny humans…

Those hunches became the kernel of several papers on the center, the first published in The Astrophysical Journal in 1988. They work out an electrodynamic model that has become generally accepted—for now, pending more data. About half a dozen competing views surfaced and sank in the storm of incoming observations. More filaments turned up. Arguments waxed over how big a black hole at the center of it all might be.

While I was mulling over maps and jotting equations, I kept on writing. Over years, the writing fed the physics, and vice versa.

Intriguing setting is essential in a series of novels, or else a sense of sameness creeps in. I used all the gaudy color and striking effects I could muster in #3 of what came to be called The Galactic Series, Great Sky River.

I focused on the innermost few light-years, for dramatic effects, even though I knew the sheer energy flux there made humans quite vulnerable. To protect them I made them huge and armored. The central figure was a man named Killeen, who flees across a ruined landscape dominated by the black hole, which his people call the Eater of All Things—though they don’t quite know why.

This ravaged panorama seemed an ample stage to act out my main theme, the superiority of machines in much of the galaxy. We need a moist envelope of air and mild temperatures. They can take just about anything, including vacuum. I also got to spring their size as a twist at the very end of the series, when they meet Walmsley, whom they take to be a dwarf.

By then, measures of the very high orbital velocities of stars very close to the true galactic center, called Sagittarius A, suggested that some enormous mass was tugging at them. The data implied a compact mass of several million stellar masses lurks there, and—big clue—giving off very little light. A black hole.

I opted for a million-mass black hole, because then a ship could fly through the ergosphere, the very rim of the black hole, and not be crushed by the tidal forces. Contrary to intuition, the bigger the hole mass, the larger the comfy zone at its “edge” where the stresses can be small. Big enough, and a ship could skim through. This fact would be crucial to the last volume, Furious Gulf. I thought I would have a band of fleeing humans dodge into this warped region of space-time, only to discover a surprise… which I won’t reveal here.

The huge energetics of the center would draw machines, I felt. There they could live heartily, while their vermin enemies (us) struggled. The black hole would intrigue any inquisitive life-form, their struggles surging across a virulent territory. Humans would be part of it all, but certainly not the major players.

So I began envisioning what it might be like at stage center, where the diet of particles and photons is rich and varied. Only hard, tough machines could survive for long there—and evolve into forms I could imagine.

In the fourth novel, Tides of Light, I drew out these contrasts. Hard work, but fun. I devised “photovores” and “metallovores” as adaptations to special evolutionary niches. After all, machines that can reproduce themselves would, inevitably, fall under the laws of natural selection and specialize to use local resources. The entire panoply of biology would recapitulate: parasites, predators, prey.

How to envision this? I prepare for novels by writing descriptive passages of places and characters. In spare moments I began working up snapshots of possible life-forms and their survival styles.

Years before I had found a technique to deal with “obstructions”—a better word than the fearsome “block.” To me it meant something rather more subtle. At times I simply couldn’t get my subconscious to flower forth with free material along the lines of the novel. So I pretended that I was working on another story entirely and wrote that. At times I found that I was right—it really didn’t connect with the novel. Most times, with some tuning, it did. I made a policy of following through, publishing the work independently if possible, out of an almost superstitious belief that my subconscious would catch on. So far it hasn’t.

That’s why occasionally pieces of my novels appear first as short stories. I often don’t know whether they fit the novel, sometimes until years later. This trick I had to use again and again, because my subconscious proved lazy and headstrong. I’d planned to rap out three novels and be done by 1989, but #3 appeared in 1987, #4 in 1989. Then I got interested in another novel, wrote it in three tough years… and ground to a halt.

The pesky subconscious just wouldn’t cooperate with my game plans. This cost me considerably, for the series’ momentum broke, and undoubtedly some readers lost the thread.

In 1992 I had to start from scratch again, thinking through the overarching logic of the series. Slowly it dawned that some part of me had shied away from doing the “last” novel because I couldn’t reconcile the many forces within the narrative. I realized with a sinking feeling that one more book wouldn’t be enough.

Intelligent machines would build atop the galactic center ferment a society we could scarcely fathom—but we would try. Much of #5, Furious Gulf was about that—the gulf around a black hole, and the gulf between intelligences born of different realms.

For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences that never had to pass through our Darwinnowing filter.

If we could copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us— we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?

Through Books #3, #4, and #5, I had used the viewpoint of humans hammered down by superior machines. This got around the Walmsley lifetime problem, but demanded that I portray people enormously different from us. They had to seem strange, yet understandable—a classic sf quandary.

A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the “substrate,” whether in evolved humans or adaptive machines—both embodying intelligence, but with wildly different styles.

By the time I reached the last volume, in 1993, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center and eagerly read each issue of The Astrophysical Journal for further clues.

I finished the last novel, #6, Sailing Bright Eternity, in the summer of 1994. It had been twenty-five years since I started on In the Ocean of Night, and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.

When the series was finished, I was happy with the response. All along readers had nominated the books for awards, written in with ideas (and urgings to hurry up), asked for references to the scientific background. I realized that my readership was sophisticated and liked a challenge. The books sold well and got listed regularly in best-of-year summaries. Quite enough to keep me going, but part-time writers do not have the momentum of the full-time pros.

In all, I’m glad I wrote these novels. The Walmsley character was fun to engage. I’ve always liked crusty people, being somewhat crusty myself—and I think they are more engaging in fiction, where niceness is doom.

The series is ultimately about a question Walmsley asks toward the end, rather plaintively: What is the meaning of human action? In other words, can what we do really matter very much?

I felt intuitively that to measure a man, or mankind, one must have a comparison. How we measure up against the very largest scale, the galactic, drew me to make the attempt. We’ll never know, of course, how well we fare, but it is very human to ask.

July 2003

ONE

He found the flying mountain by its shadow.

Ahead the sun was dimmed by a swirling film of dust, and Nigel first saw Icarus at the tip of a lancing finger of shadow in the clouds.

“The core is here,” he said over the radio. “It’s solid.” “You’re sure?” Len replied. His voice, filtered by sputtering radio noise, was thin and distant, though the Dragon module waited only a thousand kilometers away.

“Yes. Something bloody big is casting a shadow through the dust and coma.”

“Let me talk to Houston. Back in a sec, boy-o.” A humming blunted the silence. Nigel’s mouth felt soft, full of cotton: the thick-tongued sensation of mingled fear and excitement. He nudged his module toward the cone of shadow that pointed directly ahead, sunward, and adjusted attitude control. A pebble rattled against the aftersection.

He entered the cone of shadow. The sun paled and then flickered as, ahead, a growing dot passed across its face. Nigel drifted, awash in yellow. Corona streamed and shimmered around a hard nugget of black: Icarus. He was the first man to see the asteroid in over two years. To observers on Earth its newborn cloak of thick dust and gas hid this solid center.

“Nigel,” Len said quickly, “how fast are you closing?” “Hard to say.” The nugget had grown to the size of a nickel held at arm’s length. “I’m moving to the side, out of the shadow, just in case it comes up too fast.” Two stones rapped hollowly on the hull; the dust seemed thicker here, random fragments bled from Icarus to make the Flare Tail.

“Yeah, Houston just suggested that. Any magnetic field reading?”

“Not—wait, I’ve just picked up some. Maybe, oh, a tenth of a gauss.”

“Uh oh. I’d better tell them.”

“Right.” His stomach clenched slightly. Here we go, he thought.

The black coin grew; he slipped the module further away from the edge of the disk, for safety margin. A quick burst of the steering jets slowed him. He studied the irregular rim of Icarus through the small telescope, but the blazing white sun washed out any detail. He felt his heart thumping sluggishly in the closeness of his suit.

A click, some static. “This is Dave Fowles at Houston, Nigel, patching through Dragon. Congratulations on your visual acquisition. We want to verify this magnetic field strength—can you transmit the automatic log?”

“Roger,” Nigel said. Conversations with Houston lagged; the time delay was several seconds, even at the light-speed of radio waves. He flipped switches; there was a sharp beep. “Done.”

The edge of the disk rushed at him. “I’m going around it, Len. Might lose you for a while.”

“Okay.”

He swept over the sharp twilight line and into full sunlight. Below was a burnt cinder of a world. Small bumps and shallow valleys threw low shadows and everywhere the rock was a brownish black. Its highly elliptical orbit had grilled Icarus as though on a spit, taking it yearly twice as close to the sun as Mercury.

Nigel matched velocities with the tumbling rock and activated a series of automatic experiments. Panel lights winked and a low rhythm of activity sounded through the cramped cabin. Icarus turned slowly in the arc light-white sun, looking bleak and rough… and not at all like the bearer of death to millions of people.

“Can you hear me, Nigel?” Len said.

“Right.”

“I’m out of your radio shadow now. What’s she look like?”

“Stony, maybe some nickel-iron. No signs of snow or conglomerate structures.”

“No wonder, it’s been baked for billions of years.” “Then where did the cometary tail come from? Why the Flare?”

“An outcropping of ice got exposed, or maybe a vent opened to the surface—you know what they told us. Whatever the stuff was, maybe it’s all been evaporated by now. Been two years, that should be enough.”

“Looks like it’s rotating—ummm, let me check— about every two hours.”

“Uh huh,” Len said. “That cinches it.”

“Anything less than solid rock couldn’t support that much centrifugal force, right?”

“That’s what they say. Maybe Icarus is the nucleus of a used-up comet and maybe not—it’s rock, and that’s all we care about right now.”

Nigel’s mouth tasted bitter; he drank some water, sloshing it between his teeth.

“It’s knocking on one kilometer across, roughly spherical, not much surface detail,” he said slowly. “No clear cratering, but there are some shallow circular depressions. I don’t know, it could be that the cycle of heating and cooling as it passes near the sun is an effective erosion mechanism.”

He said all this automatically, trying to ignore the slight depression he felt. Nigel had hoped Icarus would turn out to be an icy conglomerate instead of a rock, even though he knew the indirect evidence was heavily against it. Along with a few of the astrophysicists, he hoped the Flare Tail of 2017—a bright orange coma twenty million miles long that twisted and danced and lit the night sky of Earth for three months—had signaled the end of Icarus. No telescope, including the orbiting Skylab X tube, had been able to penetrate the cloud of dust and gas that billowed out and obscured the spot where the asteroid Icarus had been. One school of thought held that a rocky shell had been eroded by the eternal fine spray of particles from the sun—the solar wind—and a remaining core of ice had suddenly boiled away, making the Flare Tail. Thus, no core remained. But a majority of astronomers felt it unlikely that ice should be at the center of Icarus; probably, most of the rocky asteroid was left somewhere in the dust cloud.

NASA hoped the controversy would stimulate funding for an Icarus flyby. The Agency, ever press-conscious, needed support. It had come a long way from the dark days of 1986, when the explosion of the Challenger had begun a fundamental shift in Agency thinking. NASA went on to develop the transats—trans-atmospheric rocket-airplane combinations that flew a good piece of the way to the upper atmosphere, then boosted into orbit on rocket thrust—but it had been badly mauled. As soon as it could, it edged away from the milk-run, commercial and military business of carrying tonnage into orbit. NASA was trying to become a primarily scientific agency now.

Icarus seemed a pleasantly distant spectacle. Its sudden, bright, fan-shaped coma was larger and prettier than Halley’s Comet’s rather disappointing apparition in 1985. The Los Angeles Times dubbed it “the instant comet.” People could see it, even through suburban smog. It made news.

But in the winter of 2017, the question of Icarus’s composition became more than a passing, academic point. The jet of gas spurting from the head of what was now Comet Icarus seemed to have deflected it. The dust cloud was moving sidewise slightly as it followed Icarus’s old orbit, and it was natural to assume that if a core remained, it was somewhere near the center of the drifting cloud. The deflection was slight. Precise measurements were difficult and some uncertainty remained. But it was clear that by mid-2019 the center of the cloud and whatever remained of Icarus would collide with the Earth.

“Len, how’s it look from your end?” Nigel said. “Pretty dull. Can’t see much for the dust. The sun’s a kind of watery color looking through the cloud. I’m off to the side pretty far, to separate your radio and radar image from the sun’s.”

“Where am I?”

“Right on the money, in the center of the dust. On your way to Bengal.”

“Hope not.”

“Yeah. Hey—getting a relay from Houston for you.” A moment’s humming silence as the black pitted world turned beneath him. Nigel wondered whether it was made of the original ancient material that formed the solar system, as the astrophysicists said, or the center of a shattered planet, as the popular media trumpeted. He had hoped it would be a snowball of methane and water ice that would break up when it hit Earth’s atmosphere—perhaps filling the sky with blue and orange jets of light and spreading an aurora around the globe, but doing no damage. He stared down at the cinder world that had betrayed his hopes by being so substantial, so deadly. The automatic cameras clicked methodically, mapping its random bumps and depressions; the cabin smelled of hot metal and the sour tang of sweat. No leisurely strolling and hole-boring expeditions with Len, now; no measurements; no samples to chip away; no time.

“Dave again, Nigel. Those magnetic field strengths sew it up, boy—it’s nickel-iron, probably eighty percent pure or better. From the dimensions we calculate the rock masses around four billion kilograms.”

“Right.”

“Len’s radar fixes have helped us narrow down the orbit, too. That ball of rock you’re looking at is coming down in the middle of India, just like we thought. I—”

“You want us to go into the retail poultry business,” Nigel said.

“Yeah. Deliver the Egg.”

Nigel lit a panel of systems monitors. “Bringing the Egg out of powered-down operation,” he said mechanically, watching the lights sequence.

“Good luck, boy,” Len broke in. “Better look for a place to plant it. We’ve got plenty of time. Holler if you need help,” he said, even though they both knew full well he could not bring the Dragon module into the cloud without temporarily losing most communications with Houston.

Nigel passed an hour in the time-filling tasks of awakening the fifty-megaton fusion device that rode a few yards behind his cabin. He repeated the jargon—redundancy checks, safe-arm mode, profile verification—without taking his attention fully from the charred expanse below. Toward the end of the time he caught sight of what he had anticipated: a jagged cleft at the dawn edge of Icarus.

“I think I’ve found the vent,” he called. “About as long as a soccer field, perhaps ten meters wide in places.”

“A fracture?” Len said. “Maybe the thing’s coming apart.”

“Could be. It will be interesting to see if there are more, and whether they form a pattern.”

“How deep is it?”

“I can’t tell yet; the bottom is in shadow now.”

“If you have the time—wait, Houston wants to patch through to you again.”

A pause, then: “We’ve been very happy with the relayed telemetry from you, Nigel. Looks to us here in Control as though the Egg is ready to fly.”

“Has to be hatched before it can fly.”

“Right, boy, got me on that one,” Dave said with sudden exuberant levity.

A pause, then Dave’s tones became rounded, modulated. “You know, I wish you could see the Three-D coverage of the crowds around the installation here, Nigel. Traffic is blocked for a twenty-kilometer radius. There are people everywhere. I think this has caught the imagination of all humanity, Nigel, a noble attempt—”

He wondered if Dave knew how all this sounded. Well, the man probably did; every astronaut a member of Actor’s Equity.

He grimaced when, a moment later, the smooth voice described the sweaty press of bodies around NASA Houston, the heat strokes suffered and babies delivered in the waiting crowds, the roiling prayer chains of New Sons, their nighttime vigils around bonfires of licking, oily flames. The man was good, no possible qualm over that; the millions of eavesdroppers thought they were listening to the straight stuff, an open line between Houston and Icarus meant for serious business, when in fact the conversation at Dave’s end was elaborately staged and mannered.

“Anybody you’d like to talk to back here on Earth, Nigel, while you’re taking your break?”

He replied that no, there was no one, he wanted to watch Icarus as it turned, study the vent. While, simultaneously, he saw in his mind’s eye his parents in their cluttered apartment, wanted to speak to them, felt the halting, ineffectual way he had tried to explain to them why he was doing this thing.

They still lived in that dear dead world where space equaled research equaled dispassionate truth. They knew he had trained for programs that never materialized. He’d put in time in orbit as a glorified mechanic, and that had seemed quite all right.

But this. They couldn’t understand how he’d come to take a mission which promised nothing but the chance to plant a bomb if he succeeded, and death if he failed. A scrambled, jury-rigged, balls-up of a mission with sixty percent chance of failure; so the systems analysts said.

They had emigrated from England, following their son when he was selected for the US-European program, hard on his final year at Cambridge. As an all-purpose scientist he’d seemed trainable, in good condition (squash, soccer, amateur pilot) agreeable, docile (after all, he was British, happy to have any sort of career at all) and presentable. When he showed superior reflexes, did well in flight training and was accepted into the aborted Mars program, his parents felt vindicated, their sacrifices redeemed.

He would lead in the new era of moon exploration, they thought. Justify their flight from a sleepy, comfy England into this technicolor technocrat’s circus.

So when the Icarus thing came, they’d asked: Why risk his Cambridge years, his astronautics, in the high vacuum between Venus and Earth?

And he’d said—?

Nothing, really. He had sat in their Boston rocker, pumping impatiently, and spoken of work, plans, relatives, the Second Depression, politics. Of t