Beyond the Farthest Suns

  Tall spiral chimneys, like Baroque columns in a church, release water heated in the upper mantle, creating plumes that can extend for many kilometers. These plumes spread out at the upper ice layer, eroding smooth domes almost a hundred kilometers in diameter and usually less than a millimeter deep. These domes collect oxygen freed from the actions of photosynthetic organisms. Typically, within seconds the oxygen is forced back under extreme pressure into the water and the ice, but during this brief time, miniature forests of opportunistic organisms grow in the domes, extracting all the benefits from a more efficient oxygen metabolism.

  The upper limit of organization in MDIO ecosystems is not known. Typical distributed-intelligence ecosystems are found here, and interact to form complex neuronal networks that govern MDIO life-cycles (as on Earth). However, no condensed nodal intelligences such as large animals have yet been found. Instead, intelligence seems frozen at a very early and distributed stage.

  This may reflect the unlikelihood of any intelligences within the MDIO ever being challenged by major environmental change, much less being given a chance to observe the outside universe.

  MDIOs seem to be remarkably stable over hundreds of millions of years.

  The impossibility of emergence through the deep ice and escape into space limits the potential growth of concentrated hypothesis engines as defined by the Turing-Watteau diagram of novel information vs. expansion opportunity.

  Some researchers suggest that the seeding of provocative artifacts (“Clarkeing”) below the deep ice may encourage condensation of concentrated intelligences, or at the very least, induce some interesting emergent properties. The design of these artifacts is currently spurring intense debate.

  As one chief communications researcher has asked, “How do you uplift slime?”

  Harnessing of bacterial communities on Earth in the last century could provide a template for working with MDIO ecosystems, adding to the list of beings we can actually talk to.

  Hardfought

  I can’t recall the list of magazines that rejected “Hardfought.” At some 24,000 words, my novella was too long for most at the time; too weird and difficult for some. When I sent it to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, an interim editor caught the story and didn’t know what to do with it. (Isaac Asimov did not buy stories for the magazine. He wrote editorials and answered letters, and visited the offices to spread good cheer.)

  Asimov’s future editor-in-chief, Shawna McCarthy, was enthusiastic, but she was not yet in control. Asimov’s had become known for publishing fairly traditional stories, generally light and doggedly unpretentious. “Hardfought” is long and heavy and very pretentious.

  I made a phone call and tried to persuade the interim editor to buy it. Certainly it was not your usual SF story, I said. I invoked the hallowed name of Joseph Conrad. I was desperate. I needed the money. “What if I cut it—a little?” I suggested. Pretty please… ?

  The editor, still undecided, soon left to take another editorial position. Shawna McCarthy moved up, bought the story, made some cuts, slotted it for publication, and…

  But let’s go back a bit.

  Jim Turner at Arkham House was waiting for me to write a masterpiece to cap off a proposed story collection. Jim is dead now, but I remember his voice very clearly, and cherish his contrarian sense of humor. I sent him “Hardfought.” He phoned to tell me the bad news. It was a tough read, he confessed. He was not enthusiastic.

  He read it four more times and called again.

  Had he seen Babe, he might have said, “That’ll do, Bear.” What he actually said was, “All right, Bear. It’s a masterpiece.”

  Asimov’s published the story first. Shawna warned the magazine’s readers that it was not the magazine’s usual fare. She needn’t have worried.

  “Hardfought” and “Blood Music” picked up Nebula awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, on the same evening. The Nebula Banquet that year (1984) was held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor. Seated at our table were my mother and father, my favorite college professor, Elizabeth Chater, her daughter Patty, and my wife Astrid. The ceremony was emceed by my good friend Gregory Benford, and the award was presented by my father-in-law, Poul Anderson. Karen Anderson, my mother-in-law, was present as well. A full house!

  Need I say it was a great evening?

  My first story collection, The Wind from a Burning Woman, was published in the spring of 1983 by Arkham House. It sold out its first print run in ninety days, and became the fastest selling book in Arkham House history.

  A few years later, in 1986, I spoke briefly with Isaac Asimov at a SFWA Publisher’s Reception in Manhattan. I had my infant son Erik strapped to my chest. Isaac was being ferried from interview to interview when he spotted my name tag, paused, lifted his eyebrows, and said, “So you’re Greg Bear! I’m glad you weren’t around when I was getting started!”

  I beamed.

  This may be the best story I’ve ever written.

  In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by royal edict to write the history of Imperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their trust.

  At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents, Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history.

  The thread survives by whim.

  Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Watery black flecked a central core of ghoulish green. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula’s magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of stars—and disputed territory.

  Whenever Prufrax looked at the nebula in displays or through the ship’s ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the fibs.

  At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangee’s mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of in­doctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. “Zap, Zap,” she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn’t think her thoughts were straying.

  The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all fo­cusing somewhere around the tellman’s spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. “How many branch individ­uals in the Senexi brood mind?” he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. “Pru?”

  “Five,” she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.

  “What will you find in the brood mind?” the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoul­ders. Some of the fems thought tellmen were attractive. Not many, and Pru was not one of them.

  “Yoke,” she said.

  “What is in the brood-mind yoke?”

  “Fibs.”

  “More specifically? And it really isn’t all fib, you know.”

  “Info. Senexi data.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Zap,” she said, smiling.

  “Why, Pru?”

  “Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team’s five branc
h inds.”

  “Zap the brood, Pru?”

  “No,” she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class’s inception. “Hold the brood for the supreme overs.” The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.

  “Fine,” said the tellman. “You tell well, for someone who’s always half-journeying.”

  Brainwalk, Prufrax thought to herself. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.

  “Zap, Zap,” she said softly.

  Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Me­dusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety-three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature.

  The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just be­cause of their material handicaps. In those times elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical com­binations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars.

  Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz’s perspective was expanding with each day of his new assign­ment.

  In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Popu­lation I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had re­treated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, con­serving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts.

  As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy’s first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mu­tability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi.

  Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though his team hadn’t existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from the total store of nearly twelve billion years’ experience; an awesome amount of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods.

  Through the brood mind Aryz could share the memories of a hun­dred thousand past generations, yet the brood mind itself was younger than its branch individuals. For a time in their youth, in their liquid-dwelling larval form, the branch inds carried their own sacs of data, each a fragment of the total necessary for complete memory. The branch inds swam through ammonia seas and wafted through thick warm gaseous zones, protoplasmic blobs three to four meters in diameter, developing their personalities under the weight of the past—and not even a complete past. No wonder they were inflexible, Aryz thought. Most branch inds were aware enough to see that—es­pecially when they were allowed to compare histories with the Pop­ulation I species, as he was doing—but there was nothing to be done. They were content the way they were. To change would be un­speakably repugnant. Extinction was preferable … almost.

  But now they were pressed hard. The brood mind had begun a number of experiments. Aryz’s team had been selected from the seedship’s contingent to oversee the experiments, and Aryz had been chosen as the chief investigator. Two orbits past, they had cap­tured six human embryos in a breeding device, as well as a highly coveted memory storage center. Most Senexi engagements had been with humans for the past three or four generations. Just as the Senexi dominated Population II species, humans were ascendant among their kind.

  Experiments with the human embryos had already been con­ducted. Some had been allowed to develop normally; others had been tampered with, for reasons Aryz was not aware of. The tamperings had not been very successful.

  The newer experiments, Aryz suspected, were going to take a dif­ferent direction, and the seedship’s actions now focused on him; he believed he would be given complete authority over the human shapes. Most branch inds would have dissipated under such a burden, but not Aryz. He found the human shapes rather interesting, in their own horrible way. They might, after all, be the key to Senexi survival.

  The moans were toughening her elfstate. She lay in pain for a wake, not daring to close her eyes; her mind was changing and she feared sleep would be the end of her. Her nightmares were not easily separated from life; some, in fact, were sharper.

  Too often in sleep she found herself in a Senexi trap, struggling uselessly, being pulled in deeper, her hatred wasted against such power…

  When she came out of the rigor, Prufrax was given leave by the subordinate tellman. She took to the Mellangee’s greenroads, walk­ing stiffly in the shallow gravity. Her hands itched. Her mind seemed almost empty after the turmoil of the past few wakes. She had never felt so calm and clear. She hated the Senexi doubly now; once for their innate evil, twice for what they had made her overs put her through to be able to fight them. Logic did not matter. She was calm, assured. She was growing more mature wake by wake. Combat-bud­ding, the tellman called it, hate emerging like flowers, synthesizing the sunlight of his teaching into pure fight.

  The greenroads rose temporarily beyond the labyrinth shields and armor of the ship. Simple transparent plastic and steel geodesic sur­faces formed a lacework over the gardens, admitting radiation neces­sary to the vegetation growing along the paths. No machines scooted one forth and inboard here. It was necessary to walk. Walking was luxury and privilege.

  Prufrax looked down on the greens to each side of the paths with­out much comprehension. They were beautiful. Yes, one should say that, think that, but what did it mean? Pleasing? She wasn’t sure what being pleased meant, outside of thinking Zap. She sniffed a flower that, the signs explained, bloomed only in the light of young stars not yet fusing. They were near such a star now, and the greenroads were shiny black and electric green with the blossoms. Lamps had been set out for other plants unsuited to such darkened conditions. Some technic allowed suns to appear in selected plastic panels when viewed from certain angles. Clever, the technicals.

  She much preferred the looks of a technical to a tellman, but she was common in that. Technicals required brainflex, tellmen cargo capacity. Technicals were strong and ran strong machines, like in the adventure fibs, where technicals were often the protags. She wished a technical were on the greenroads with her. The moans had the ef­
fect of making her receptive—what she saw, looking in mirrors, was a certain shine in her eyes—but there was no chance of a breeding liaison. She was quite unreproductive in this moment of elfstate. Other kinds of meetings were not unusual.

  She looked up and saw a figure at least a hundred meters away, sitting on an allowed patch near the path. She walked casually, grace­fully as possible with the stiffness. Not a technical, she saw soon, but she was not disappointed. Too calm.

  “Over,” he said as she approached.

  “Under,” she replied. But not by much—he was probably six or seven ship years old and not easily classifiable.

  “Such a fine elfstate,” he commented. His hair was black. He was shorter, but something in his build reminded her of the glovers. She accepted his compliment with a nod and pointed to a spot near him. He motioned for her to sit, and she did so with a whuff, massaging her knees.

  “Moans?” he asked.

  “Bad stretch,” she said.

  “You’re a glover.” He looked at the fading scars on her hands.

  “Can’t tell what you are,” she said.

  “Noncombat,” he said. “Tuner of the mandates.”

  She knew very little about the mandates, except that law decreed every ship carry one, and few of the crew were ever allowed to peep. “Noncombat, hm?” she mused. She didn’t despise him for that; one never felt strong negatives for a crew member. She didn’t feel much of anything.

  “Been working on ours this wake,” he said. “Too hard, I guess. Told to walk.” Overzealousness in work was considered an erotic trait aboard the Mellangee. Still, she didn’t feel receptive toward him.

  “Glovers walk after a rough grow,” she said.

  He nodded. “My name’s Clevo.”

  “Prufrax.”

  “Combat soon?”

  “Hoping. Waiting forever.”

  “I know. Just been allowed access to the mandate for a half-dozen wakes. All new to me. Very happy.”