In the Ocean of Night (47 page)

loved the lifting sweep as a misty dust of snow sprang up beneath the machine like chiming crystals attempting to fly anew—
farewell
—this unflagging energy of the mind he loved the most as each sense in turn made a fresh grab at the greased pig which was the world even as he waves upward at the veiled white faces receding, his gesture a line scratched across the space between them, Ichino beginning to speak but Nigel cutting him off saying no, he has work to finish, seeing though that later they would chew over this moment by a crisp fireside, crunching popcorn, drinking heated cider, for this instant it would be like a stomach irked by spent whiskey, no, later was soon enough and all in good solvent time smoothing the edges of events he leans back into the bracing air and takes the rifle by its long and ignorant snout flings it up butt cleaving the jeweled nitrogen into the trees where
thunk
it strikes an encrusted trunk deadening the sound, this motion releasing a merry oil that spreads across the faces of Nikka Ichino rising in concert to watch the stupid tube on its parabola its crash punctuating an end to their worry, Ichino turning to watch the dwindling copter as it thrashes through the brightening air Nigel murmuring the world sinking away as he listens to the fading chop with half an ear and a muzzy connection forms, a dawning realization humming, he feels the sentence leave him and in the saying knows it for the first time “Graves made his future before he came here” for indeed yes the man was free had been free the sum was his

“—before he came here,” made Mr. Ichino turn, in the midst of framing his thanks, turn and find the stirring dot as it skated over the tree tops toward the ridge. The puffy clouds had lifted and sunlight streamed fitfully through them. As the copter neared the ridge it entered a blade of sunlight. Tilting, a facet of its slick skin caught the light and there was an odd optical effect, a brilliant yellow twinkling. Mr. Ichino saw a burning spark leap up from the trees and envelop the copter in a sputtering orange globe. He blinked and the vision went away, leaving only a fuzzed afterimage on his retina. The copter was gone. He listened for its dull clatter. Nothing was audible above the sighing of wind in tree tops. Had the copter slipped over the ridgeline that quickly? He could not tell. He turned to ask Nigel but the other man had already.

above all Graves’s monomaniac insistence, the whole laughable business with the rifle, Graves’s last meeting with Bigfoot an eternal instant ago, recalled the poor dear desk calculator civilizations cowering up there amid the stars, afraid to use radio for fear the young organic races will seek them out and rip them up for scrap iron, yet even a desk calculator can turn vicious when cornered, destroy the suckling animal cultures before they develop, ah what an old sod of a galaxy this was pissing away its energy a kilobuck per nanosecond like poor gone Graves, right action in part but wrong sense of the warp of things, no feel for the joyful lofting song all this meant, so much like the old dimly remembered Nigel, so tied to events by ropes of care each sank him tugging him below the waves, Alexandria Snark dear dead Dad, yes Nigel sees how he felt that way but now he slaps his pockets in mock surprise, brings up his hands spread wide to the world, empty, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of what he was, it melts he laughs free and awash in this universe of essences and ready for Aquila yes he laughs—

As the two came back into the warm cabin, their boots making loud thumps in the room as they stamped away the snow, Nikka said, “I doubt you’ll be seeing more of that one.”

“No. Everyone learns from experience,” Mr. Ichino replied, thinking of Bigfoot. He went over to the window and saw Nigel through the square Western window. The crosshair of the four panes centered on him for a moment. Beyond Nigel was the opening bowl of the sky and the sun still hiding behind patches of haze. Nigel, hefting his ax, moved at the center of a round universe.

lungs panting with the effort he pauses and looks back toward the crosshair window and sees it as blowing him out, the inverse of the young lad’s leaden shot, out into a billowing
swack
the blade bites into a rotten seam, wood frags showering up around him tumbling faceted a crash of crystal orbiting asteroids carving the cold, muscles clenching melting, heels biting the compacted snow as earth holds him in its fierce ageless grip of which he himself is a part, he has his own gravitational field, and thoughts flit like summer lightning through the streaming wash of feelings that float him through each moment, melting. Above was the galaxy, a swarm of white bees, each an infinite structure of its own, a spinning discus slicing space with its own definition. Nigel unable to see who threw the discus and uncaring, for there was enough here at the fragile axis of earth, each new truth melting into the old as their fraction of the world flowed through him,
le’s slide out of here one of these nights
as continents butted against each other
an’ get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns
chopping wood, trisecting Andromeda
over the territory
Oregon to Aquila
for a couple of weeks or two
all moments going, as he touched them, to smash and scatteration
and I says, all right, that suits me
—

And it melts “Nigel!” Nikka’s voice comes. “Have some more coffee.”

the cabin steaming melting with renewal

“Of course,” Nigel calls. “I’ll be there.”

Eternally, it melts yes he turns and yes it melts and he falls through it melting and turning yes and yes eternally, it melts

Timeline of Galactic Series

FLIGHT OF HUMAN FLEET TO GALACTIC CENTER “THE BIG JUMP”

OF PREAMBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.

If you enjoyed
IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT

Read the rest of Gregory Benford’s

Galactic Center Series

Across the Sea of Suns

Great Sky River
^*

Tides of Light
^*

Furious Gulf
^*

Sailing Bright Eternity
^*

*coming soon from Warner Aspect

FREE PREVIEW

Please turn this page for an excerpt from Gregory Benford’s newest science fiction novel

BEYOND INFINITY

Available wherever books are sold

T
he attack had come in a savage, fire-bright moment.

It began with strange droplets coasting on the air, shimmering, murmuring. Floodlights had ringed a gray, chipped slab, where she worked with Kurani. Recently opened passages far into the Library labyrinth had yielded complicated new puzzles in data-slabs. They were reading out a curious string of phrases in a long-dead language, from a society that had reached the peak of mathematical wisdom, or so the historians said.

The floating, humming motes distracted her. Unlike the familiar microtech that pervaded the Library performing tasks, these shifted and scintillated in the hard spotlight glare.

Kurani ignored them. His powers of concentration were vast and pointed. He had just discovered that these ancient people had used numbers not as nouns or adjectives, but to modify verbs, words of action. Instead of “see those three trees,” they would say something like, “the living things manifesting treeness here act visibly as a collection divided to the extent of three.”

She remembered Kurani’s furrowed brow, his quizzical interrogation of distant resource libraries as he struggled with this conceptual gulf. These ancients had used number systems that recognized three bases—ten, twelve, and five—and were rooted in the body, with its five toes and six fingers. So grounded in the flesh, what insights did the ancients reach in far more rarefied pursuits? Scholars had already found a deep fathoming of the extra dimensions known to exist in the universe. The slab before Cley and Kurani spoke of experiments in dimensional transport, all rendered in a strangely canted manner.