Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

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

Synopsis

This new, special edition of the classic concluding volume of this defining series by the eminent physicist and Nebula Award-winning author contains a teaser chapter from Benford's, The Sunborn.

The final chapter of humanity's future has begun, and three men hold the key to survival. As the fierce, artificially intelligent mechs pursue their savage and unstoppable destruction of the human race, it soon becomes apparent that three men-three generations in a family of voyagers-are their targets. Toby Bishop, his father Kileen, and his longdead grandfather each carry a piece of the lethal secret that can destroy their relentless pursuers. There is only one problem: They have no idea they possess the only weapon that can save humanity.

Release date: March 1, 2005

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 528

Sample

Prologue

 

Black holes have weather, of a sort.

Light streams from them. Blackness dwells at their cores, but friction heats the infalling gas and dust. These streams brim with forced radiation. Storms worry them. White-hot tornadoes whirl and suck.

From the immense hole at the exact center of the galaxy, a virulent glow hammers outward. It pushes incessantly at the crowded masses that circle it, jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forces the streams into a disk, churning ever inward. Suffering in the weather.

The press of hot photons is a wind, driving all before it. Except for the grazers. To these photovores, the great grinding disk is a source of food.

Fire-flowers blossom in the disk, sending up lashes of fierce ultraviolet. Storms of light.

Both above and below the accretion disk, in hovering clouds, these photons smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge, whip particles into sleet. The clouds are debris, dust, grains. They are already doomed by gravity’s rub, like nearly everything here.

Nearly. To the gossamer, floating herds this is a fountain. Their life source.

Sheets of them hang, billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Basking in the sting. Holding steady.

The photovores are patiently grazing. Some are Infras, others Ultras—tuned to soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Each species has a characteristic polish and shape. Each works within evolutionary necessity, deploying great flat receptor planes. Each has a song, used to maintain orbit and angle.

Against the wrathful weather here, information is at least a partial defense. Position-keeping telemetry flits between the herd sheets. They sing luminously to each other in the eternal brimming day.

Hovering on the pressure of light, great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread. Vectoring, skating on winds, magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Ruling forces govern their perpetual, gliding dance. This is decreed by intelligences they scarcely sense, machines that prowl the darker lanes farther out.

Those magisterial forms need the energies from this furnace, yet do not venture here. The wise and valuable run no risks.

At times the herds fail. Vast shimmering sheets peel away. Many 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 could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolves their lattices. They burst open and flare with fatal energies.

Now a greater threat spirals lazily down. It descends from the shelter of thick, turbulent dust. It lets itself fall toward the governing mass, the black hole itself. Then it arrests its descent with outstretched wings of mirrors. They bank gracefully on the photon breeze.

Its lenses swivel to select prey. There a pack of photovores has clumped, disregarding ageless programming, or perhaps caught in a magnetic flux tube. The cause does not matter. The predator eases down along the axis of the galaxy itself.

Here, navigation is simple. Far below, the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things is a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.

The clustered photovores sense a descending presence. Their vast sailing herds cleave, peeling back to reveal deeper planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They all live to ingest light and excrete microwave beams. Their internal world revolves around ingestion, considered digestion, and orderly excretion.

These placid conduits now flee. But those clumped near the axis have little angular momentum, and cannot pivot on a magnetic fulcrum. Dimly they sense their destiny. Their hissing microwaves waver.

Some plunge downward, hoping that the predator will not follow so close to the Eater. Others cluster ever more, as if numbers give safety. The opposite is true.

The metallovore folds its mirror wings. Now angular and swift, accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It scoops them in with flux lines. Metal harvesters rip the photovores. Shreds rush down burnt-black tunnels. Electrostatic fields separate elements and alloys.

Fusion fires await the ruined carcasses. There the separation can be exquisitely tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last analysis, the ultimate resources here are mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and now they end as mass.

The sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.

Yet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state, one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater’s vagaries. Less energy would be harnessed, less mass recovered.

The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.

Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.

Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore’s polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust that can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere that stretches for hundreds of cubic light-years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.

All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.

Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.

It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.

Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.

 

An Abyss of Time

Interior state: a place cloudless and smooth, without definition:

The mechanicals are converging, Nigel.
 
“You feel them?”

Clearly. They can now manifest themselves in magnetic vortices.

“Bloody dexterous, they are.”

I can feel them. Something bad is coming.

“Thanks for the warning, m’love. But I’ve got to bring the lad Toby up to speed, and it’ll take a while.”

There is nothing you could do for me anyway.

He smiled without mirth. “All too true.”

I will alert you if the energy densities change for the worse.

He nodded and the space without definition vanished.

He was back in a bare room, sitting opposite a young man, trying to frame the immense story that had led him to this moment.

—nothing you could do—

He remembered another time, long ago.

He and Carlos stood on a dry ridge of bare rock and looked out over a plain. This was not a world at all but a convoluted wraparound of space-time itself. Its sky curved overhead, a bowl of scrub desert.

Still, it felt like a place to live. A remarkable, alien-made refuge. Dirt, air, odd but acceptable plants.

They talked about finding a way to live here, in a hard, dry place twisted and alive in a way that rock was not.

Carlos had just made a good joke and Nigel laughed, relaxed and easy, and then Carlos plunged forward, his shoulder striking Nigel’s arm. Carlos went down with his head tilted back, as if he were looking up at the sky, a quizzical expression flickering as the head brushed by Nigel and down and hit face first on the baked dirt. Carlos had not lifted his hands to break the fall. He slid a foot as he struck.

The noise that had started it all was ugly. It seemed to condense out of the air, a soft thump like an ax sinking into a rotten stump.

As Carlos pitched forward something rose from his back, a geyser of skin and frothy blood. It spattered over the back of the tunic as the body smacked into the dirt. The thump, Nigel realized later, was the compact explosion of electromagnetic energy, targeted a few centimeters below the skin.

As Nigel dropped to lower his profile he got a good look at Carlos. One was enough. Then he ran, bent over, hearing the harsh following buzz of the electromagnetic pulse tapering away as he zigzagged behind some jagged boulders.

Too much open space and too little shelter. He squatted and could not see what had fired the shot. Carlos lay flat without a twitch.

Nothing happened. No following pulses.

Nigel replayed the images as he waited. A spout of rosy blood from a circle punched high in the spine. Absolutely dead center, four centimeters below the neck. Kilojoules of energy focused to a spot the size of a fingernail.

That much energy delivered so precisely would have done the job even if it hit the hip or gut. Delivered so exactly, it burst the big axis, plowing massive pressures through the spinal fluid—a sudden breeze blowing out a candle, the brain going black in a millisecond.

Carlos had gone down boneless, erased. A soft, liquid thump, then eternal silence.

Nigel held up his hand and watched it tremble for a while. Enough waiting.

He worked his way along the ridgeline. The pulse had come from behind Carlos and he kept plenty of rock between him and that direction. He got to Carlos and studied the face from behind a boulder nearby. The head was cocked to one side. Eyes still open, mouth seeping moisture into the dry dirt. The eyes were the worst, staring into an infinity nobody glimpses more than once.

Goodbye, friend. We had our arguments, but we came thirty thousand light-years together. And now I can’t do a damn thing for you.

Something moved to his right. He pulled out a pulse gun and fired at it but the target was a gossamer ball of motes. A Higher, or rather, a local manifestation of one.

It flickered, spun, and said in a low, bass voice, “We regret.”

“You did this?”

“No. A mechanical form, termed the Mantis.”

“And who’re you?”

“That would be impossible to say.”

“Is this Mantis after me, too?”

“I will protect you.”

“You didn’t do a great job for Carlos.”

“I arrived here slightly late.”

“Slightly?”

“You must forgive errors. We are finite, all.”

“Damn finite.”

“The Mantis was harvesting Carlos. He is saved.”

“You mean stored?”

“To mechanicals it is the same thing.”

“Not to us. I thought we’d be safe in this place, this Lair.”

“No place is safe. This is safer.”

“What’ll kill a Mantis?”

“There was nothing you could do.”

Nigel Walmsley cursed the mote cloud, his fury going into fruitless words.

“Nothing you could do,” he muttered to himself.

Do not belabor the past so.

Nikka’s frail voice resounded in his sensorium.

“There’s so much of it.”

Pay attention to the young man before you. He is a key to saving us.

Nigel sighed. “I grow old, I grow old—”

I shall wear my trousers rolled—yes, I know the poem. Get on with it, Nigel!

He nodded and dropped out of the interior space of smooth blankness. It was pleasant to retire to that cool, interior vault. Perhaps the old solidly good point to the augmentations he had gained through centuries; the quietness of a good, old-fashioned library. Where most of the people were books.

Very well, then. Back into the grainy. The real. The deliciously dangerous.

 

 

CHAPTER  ONE

 

Half Vast

An old man sat and told a young man a story. As stories go it was long and angular, with its own momentary graces and clumsy logic, much the way life is.

“What is this place?” Toby asked. “This mountain?”

Nigel Walmsley leaned back in a webbing that shaped itself to him. He was nude, leathery. The lattice of his ribs made him look as though he had a barrel chest, but that was because he was gaunt with age.

He had reached the phase when life reduces a man to the essentials. For packaging, skin like brown butcher’s paper. Muscles like motors, lodged in lumps along the bone-girders. Knobby elbows and knees, so round they seemed to encase oiled ball bearings. Sockets at the shoulder and hip, bulging beneath the dry parchment skin. Eyes blue and quick, glittering like mica in the bare face. A jaw chiseled above a scrawny neck. Cheekbones high and jutting like blades above the thin, pale lips. An oddly tilted smile, playing mischievously.

“It’s popularly termed the Magnetic Mountain, though I have rather a more personal name for it.”

“You’re from a planet near True Center?”

“No no, I’m from Earth.”

“What? You said before that you were Family Brit. I—”

“A jest. In my time there weren’t Families in the way you mean. The Brits were a nation—much bigger.”

“How much bigger?” Toby had heard Earth invoked, of course, but it was a name from far antiquity. Meaningless. Probably just a legend, like Eden and Rome.

“I doubt that all the Families surviving at Galactic Center number a tenth what the Brits did.”

“That many?”

“Hard to estimate, of course. There are layers and folds and hideaways aplenty in the esty.”

“Brits must be powerful.”

Walmsley pursed his lips, bemused. “Um. Alas, through the power of the word, mostly.”

Toby had no idea how many people still lived, after all the death he had seen. He had come here on a long journey, fleeing the mechs. Through it all, to all sides and in his wake, mechs had cut swaths through all the humans they could find. The slaughter reminded him of the retreat from the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop: a landscape of constant dying.

But the butchery was now far greater. Devoting so much energy to hunting vermin humans was unusual for mechs. Mostly they didn’t care; humans were pests, no more. This time they clearly were after Toby in particular. So the deaths behind him weighed on him all the more. He was only slowly coming to feel the meaning of that. It was a thing beyond words or consolations.

“Ummm.” Walmsley seemed pensive, eyes crinkling. “Usually I felt there were too few Brits, too many of everybody else.”

“Family Brit must’ve been huge.”

“We reproduced quickly enough. Didn’t have the radiation you suffer through here.”

“We’re protected from that, my father said.”

“There’s a limit to what genetic tinkering can do. Organic cells fall apart easily. Part of their beauty, really. Makes them evolve quicker.”

“Most of our Citadel was underground, to help—”

“Somewhat useful, of course. But the stillbirths, the deformities . . .” Walmsley’s bony face creased with painful memories.

“Well, sure, that’s life.”

“Life next door to this hell hole, true.”

“The Eater?” Toby had grown up with the Eater, a glowering eye rimmed in angry reds and sullen burnt browns. It had been as bright as Snowglade’s own sun. “Living near it was pretty ordinary.”

Walmsley laughed heartily, not the aged cackle Toby would have expected. “Trust me, there are better neighborhoods.”

“Snowglade was good enough for me,” Toby said defensively.

“Ah yes. We gave the chess families a good world, I recall.”

“Gave? You?”

“I am rather older than you may suppose.”

“But you couldn’t be—”

“Could and am. I’ve stretched matters out, of course. Had to. I fetched up at the very bottom of this steep gravitational gradient, along the elastic timeline—”

“The, uh . . . ?”

“Sorry, that’s an old way of talking. I mean, this is a stable point, this esty. We’re in a descended Lane, one where time runs very slowly. I—”

“Slow?” Maybe this was why Toby had been having trouble with his internal clock. When he had been near their ship Argo his systems lagged the ship’s, if he went too far into the city beyond. He could never trace the cause. He checked it reflexively, ticking along steadily if he looked far down into the corner of his left eye and blinked. There: 14:27:33. “Measured by what?”

“Good point. Measured with respect to the flat space-time outside, far from the black hole.”

“So this is a kind of time storage place?”

“Indeed. I’ve stored myself here, one might say. And there are other things, many others, this far deep in the esty.”

“When did you do it?”

Toby was trying to place this dried-up old man in the pantheon of Family Bishop legend, but the very idea seemed a laugh. The men and women who had started the Families, at the very beginning of the Hunker Down, had been wise and farsighted. The founding fathers and mothers. Better than anybody alive today, that was pretty clear. And for sure they wore clothes.

“Before the ‘Hunker Down.’ Well before. I spent a great while in Lanes squirreled away, deep, letting time pass outside.”

“So you weren’t actually doing anything?”

“If you mean, did I get out occasionally, yes. To the early Chandeliers, in fact. On my last excursion, to several worlds.”

Toby snorted scornfully. “You expect me to swallow that?” His Aspects were trying to pipe in with some backup information, but he was confused enough already.

Walmsley yawned, not the reaction of wounded innocence Toby had expected of a practiced liar. “Matters little if you don’t.”

A sudden suspicion struck him. “You were around in the Great Times?”

“As they’re called, yes. Not all that great, really.”

“We ruled here then, right?” That was the drift of countless stories from Citadel Bishop days. Humanity triumphant. Then the fall, the Hunker Down, and worse after.

“Nonsense. Rats in the wall, even then. Just a higher class of rat.”

“My grandfather said—”

“Legends are works of fiction, remember.”

“But we must’ve been great, really great, to even build the Chandeliers.”

“We’re smart rats, I’ll give you that.”

Not trying to hide his disbelief, Toby asked, “You helped build those? I mean, I visited one—was booby-trapped. Derelict, sure, but beautiful, big and—”

“The grunt labor was done by others, really, from Earth.”

Toby snorted in disbelief. Walmsley cocked an eye. “Think I’m pulling your leg?”

“What’s that mean?”

“That I’m having you on.” A crinkled grin.

Toby frowned doubtfully, glancing at his leg.

“That is, I’m joking.”

“Oh. But—Earth’s a legend.”

“True enough, but some legends still walk and talk. These legends were of the second wave, actually, us being the first. Whole bloody fleet of ramscoops, better than the mech ship we’d hauled in on. Smart rats.”

Toby nodded slowly. Why would this dried-up runt lie?

So Earthers had built the Chandeliers? Maybe Earthers weren’t mythical folk, after all. They probably really ran things during the Great Times, then, too. But for sure nobody like this wrinkled dwarf could have. “Uh huh. So it’s Earther tech in the Chandeliers.”

“Polyglot tech, really—mech, Earthborn, plenty of things slapped together.”

“By who?” Toby still wasn’t impressed with this dwarf.

“By us. Humanity. The Earthers who came in the second wave were still, I suppose, the same species as us. But . . .” A strange melancholy flickered in his face. “Different. Much . . . better.”

“Better at tech?”

“More than that. Dead on, they were beyond merely impressive. Made miracles, just tinkering with the huge range of gear they—we—captured down through centuries. Others did it, I mean—I tired of tech quite some time ago.”

Toby sniffed. “Knowing techtricks is same as breathing, to Bishops.”

“True enough, down on the planets. The second-wave ‘Earthers,’ as you call them, they were important, mind. My wife, Nikka, used to say our problems were vast—and Earthers brought us plenty of half-vast solutions.”

Toby wasn’t used to this man’s deadpan way of making jokes. Bishops were more the thigh-slapper type. “Brit breed, you are,” he said reluctantly. No geezer was going to put one over on him, but something finally made him believe Walmsley was from Earth. Maybe it was the fact that Walmsley didn’t seem to care very much whether he did or not.

“The second wave boosted our numbers—which the mechs were always trimming, shall we say.”

“Even then?”

“Always and forever. A few interludes of cooperation, but we were tolerated at best. For a while, we could move fairly freely near True Center. They swatted us when they noticed us. We had plenty of help from the Old Ones, time to time. Capricious, but crucial.”

“Old Ones?”

“They were a form of intelligence descended from clay.”

“Clay? From dirt?”

“Electrostatic energy storage, in clay beds with saline solutions—on old seashores, I gather.”

Now Toby was annoyed. “You being from Earth, I can maybe believe that, but living dirt? You must think—”

“They came first of all. Have a squint.”

A three-dimensional plot shimmered in Toby’s sensorium. He sectioned it to read in 2D, which collapsed the nuances into a simple diagram. “Complexity?”

“The specialists term it ‘structure complexity.’ Clays built up complicated lattices that could replicate themselves. Harvested piezoelectrical currents, driven by pressures in crystals. Later on, they allowed algae to capture sunlight. They drew off the energy, rather like farmers.”

Toby had not the slightest idea how to take all this in. “So . . . dirt life, that’s the Old Ones?”

“Combined with magnetic structures, yes. Bit hard to describe, that ancient wedding. All long ago, of course.”

Toby gazed at the immense eras represented by simple lines, biological beings coming after the clays, intersecting the “magnetics kingdom,” and then mystifying lines labeled “Earth biologicals.” Of “memes” and “kenes” he knew nothing. From the time axis he guessed that all this had started over twelve billion years ago, when—what? the whole universe?—began.

Shaken by the implications of the simple diagram, he did not venture into the other dimensions, which expanded this simple 2D along axes of “fitness” and “pattern depth” and “netplex” and other terms he could not even read. Better get back to something simple.

“Then . . . how’d you get here in the first place?”

“Stole a ship, actually. Mech, fast cruiser.”

Toby had never heard of anyone doing something so audacious. It had been hard enough for the Bishops to use an old human craft, Argo. “Stole it? And just walked into True Center, easy as you please?”

“Umm, not quite.” Walmsley’s eyes were far away. “See, this is how it was.”

CHAPTER  TWO

The Place of Angry Gods

You’ve got to remember, first, that we were limping along in an outdated mech ship. Dead slow, compared to what’s zipping around here now. A ramscoop, big blue-white tail dead straight, scratched across space.

Far better than our Earth ship had been, the knocked-together old Lancer. Bravely named, it was, but venturing out into the nearby stars that way was like Indians trying to explore Europe using birch bark canoes. The wrong way round, historically and technically.

Y’see, the mechs had explored us pretty well. They’d been in the solar system a long time ago, millions of years back. Some earlier, carbon-based life had fought a battle near Earth, against mechs. Presumably defending Earth when the primates were still sharpening their wits, edging up on being Homo sap.

They left a crashed starship on the moon. That’s how we knew this conflict had been going long before us. My wife, Nikka, was in on that. I came along later. Ancient history.

We went out together in the first human starship, Lancer. Got hammered by mechs. Barely survived.

Then we got lucky, stole a mech ship.

—Ah! Blithe understatement, quite Brit. In truth, there were two cowed alien species huddling beneath the ice of that world. Beings who could see electromagnetically in the microwave region. Turned out they’d been the cause of a wreck we’d found on our own moon, one I’d picked through, been changed by. I wanted so much to know what they were, how they thought.

But there were others, too. Whalelike things that glided serenely through murky depths, warmed by a radioactive core they had assembled in the moon’s core.

All immensely strange, yet all allies against the mech Watcher that loomed above. Together, two alien kind plus the constantly chattering chimpanzees, they attacked the Watcher and captured it. Sounds so easy now . . .

Um? Oh, sorry, must’ve let the mind wander. The mech ship?

Outfitted it with our gear, the life support equipment—anything that survived after the mechs tore into Lancer. Hard work.

Bravo. What next?

There we sat, a scrawny distance out from our home star. Lots of the crew—the surviving crew, rather—wanted to head home.

I saw no point. I was old enough by then to have very little left to lose. And little invested in grand old Earth, either—no children, or even close relatives.

But we knew Earth had already been attacked by mechs. Used a clever weapon, fishlike aliens dumped into our seas. Should we go back to help?

—and augh! The arguments that caused. I had to admit the other side had a point, save the home world and all that. So we compromised. Built a robot starship, using mech bits. Tricky, that. Then we packed it full of mechtech. Let Earth make use of its tricks, we figured.

Some wanted to go along, no less. Classic Wagnerian gesture—all emotion, no reason. Too risky.

So we dispatched it to Earth, crawling along at a twentieth of light speed. Best we could manage, I’m afraid.

In truth, I wanted to stay there, commune with the two species still living beneath the moon’s ice. But there was the other faction . . .

Nikka and I had allies in the crew. We hated the mechs, wanted to do something. Follow this riddle to the end. So we set sail—if that quaint term includes boosting up to within a hair’s width of light speed.

Straight inward. To the Center.

Took nearly thirty thousand years to get here—but that’s measured in the rest frame of the galaxy. What some call “real” time. But all inertial frames are really equivalent, y’know. We proved that. Only diff is the clocks ran slow on our craft. Plus, we had coldsleep.

So to me it was as if I had gone through several comfy afternoon snoozes, waking just for medical checkups and the odd message to send. My turn to patrol the ship, fix things. Lonely experience. My friends frozen stiff. I, clumping about in a stolen, alien machine. Hurtling down a corridor of relativistic refractions like a tunnel lined by rainbows. Quite striking. Frightening, too, no matter how well you fathomed the physics.

I had rigged—well, Nikka rigged; she was a wonder—an infrared transmitter. Messages for Earth, squirted them off every thousand light-years or so. Keeping them up to date on what we’d found—data, reams of it. Plus a bit of rah-rah from me. I was hoping they were still there, really. It seemed like a small gesture at the time, only found out much later how important it was.

Then, presto physico—there was the Center, glowing like a crass advert out the window. Convenient, these mech devices. Makes one wonder if their designers appreciate them. Pity, if they’re wasted on creatures who don’t relish the delights they can bring.

The Center? Well, today you can’t see it the way I did. The Old Ones were already there, and more evident than they are now.

We came in along an instreaming flow, to pick up even more speed. The Center was a perpetual firework. Arcing above it like a vast triumphal arch was a braided fire river. Bristling with gold and orange and sulphurous yellows, it was. Ferocious stuff. The gravitational potential of the black hole, expressed as ruby-hot gas, plasma filaments, incandescences light-years long.

I’d expected those. From Earth, the Very Large Array had mapped the long, curving arcs that sliced straight up through the galactic plane. They hung a hundred light-years out from the True Center. There were others, too, filmy laces—all lit by gigantic currents.

Galactic neon lights, they were, the specialists decided. But why so thin and long?—several hundred light-years long, some, and barely half a light-year wide.

As we got closer, we could make out those filaments—not in the radio waves, but the optical. Dazzling. So clean, so obligingly orderly. Could they be some colossal power source? A transportation corridor, an unimaginable kind of freeway? What—or who—would need that much room to get around?

They hung there like great ruddy announcements in the sky. But for what? A religious monument? An alien equivalent of the crucifix, beaming its eternal promise across the entire galaxy?

We all thought of these possibilities as our ship—a great kluggy old thing, with streets of room compared with Lancer—plunged on through murky dust clouds, hot star-forming regions.