HIGH CITADEL AGE

The Arcologies became untenable under further mech pressure. Breakup of the mountain-sized Arcologies followed, primarily because of difficulties in maintaining the high techcraft. Many retreated into the less conspicuous Citadels.

Mech depredations were steady, but most damage was done by side effects of the expanding mech cities, which consumed resources and altered the biosphere. Many Arcologies were mined for materials and ores. Citadels the size of small towns survived. Mechs began to spread over most of Snowglade at this time, spurring climate-changing processes.

Many human-carried Aspects date from this time, apparently because the breakdown of the human infrastructure threatened the human database held in fixed computing sites. New skills arose as humanity began to supplement its dwindling agriculture with hunter-gatherer techniques and especially raids on mech storehouses. Humans began to lose their own technology and concentrated on reworking mechtech. No longer potential rivals, they became pests scratching at the edges.

THE CALAMITY(ON SNOWGLADE)

This opened the final chapter in the conquest of Snowglade. Though Family Citadels had been tolerated for some time, and humans had been used occasionally as pawns in mech intercity rivalry, their usefulness was marginal. Each Citadel was attacked in turn as mech resources allowed. Each Citadel of the human Families fell separately, banishing their survivors to the raw countryside.

It had become apparent by this time that Snowglade’s star, Denix, was following an orbit designed to bring it close to the black hole region. Mech activities had brought this about through electrodynamic coupling to molecular clouds, using a magnetic grappling effect to convey momentum. This means that Snowglade will inevitably become uninhabitable by organic lifeforms. This orbit change appears to be unknown to humans. Generally their scholarly speculation concentrates upon the large scale activity at True Center.

Some humans still survive on Snowglade. The complex events surrounding the Calamity at Citadel Bishop suggest that some humans should be kept intact in case they are somehow important to the events of that day. It is apparent that none of the principals, mech or human, understands more than a fraction of the continuing puzzle.

This report is most respectfully submitted. Appendices to follow.

Please enjoy Gregory Benford’s classic novella set in the Galactic Center Universe

A HUNGER FORTHE INFINITE

Death came in on sixteen legs.

If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat—then Ahmihi was composed.

He had been the Exec of the Noachin ’Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rock the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him.

He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of the world around him:

I wish to “talk”—to convey linear meaning.

“Yeasay, and you be—?” He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.

I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs.

“Damn nice of you.”

The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle—now quite over, he saw—had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.

I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you.

“How many of my people… are left?”

I count 453—no, 452; one died two xens ago.

“If you’ll let them go—”

That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.

He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.

This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier’s kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other ’Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.

Rock was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier’s induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.

In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.

Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.

I wish you to view my work. Here:

Something seized Ahmihi’s sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed—and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood… things.

They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a bloodred liquid did a trembling dance.

At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being… which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly—

“No!” He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. “What is this place?”

The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.

“Using… us?”

For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human worldsum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.