They fled to a huge blot that beckoned with the promise of sullen shelter. They were close to the edge of the black hole’s accretion disk. Around them churned the deaths of stars, all orchestrated by the magnetic filaments. Which in turn, Paris was quite sure, worked to the command of something he did not care to contemplate. Did mechs govern here, or had he ventured into a realm where even they were vermin?
Here stars were ripped open by processes he could not fathom—spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal-sack.
Amid this swam the strangest stars of all. Each was half-covered by a hanging hemispherical mask. This shroud gave off infrared, a strange screen hanging at a fixed distance from each star. It hovered on light, gravity just balancing the outward light pressure. The mask reflected half the star’s flux back on it, turning up the heat on the cooker, sending virulent arcs jetting from the corona.
Light escaped freely on one side while the mask bottled it up on the other. This pushed the star toward the mask, but the mask was bound to the star by gravitation. It adjusted and kept the right distance. The forlorn star was able to eject light in only one direction, so it recoiled oppositely.
The filaments were herding these stars: sluggish, but effective. Herded toward the accretion disk, stoking the black hole’s appetite.
Paris and the others hung in a narrow gulf overlooking the splendor below. Blackness dwelled at the core, but friction heated the infalling gas and dust. Storms worried these great banks; white-hot tornadoes whirled. A virulent glow hammered outward, shoving incessantly at the crowded masses jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forced the streams into a disk, churning ever inward.
Amid this deadly torrent, life persisted. Of a sort.
He peered through the gaudy view, seeking the machine-beasts who ate and dwelled and died here. Records millennia old told of these. There.
Suffering the press of hot photons, a grazer basked. To these photovores, the great grinding disk was a source of food. Above the searing accretion disk, in hovering clouds, gossamer herds fed.
Vector that way, came the command. This way led to their target, but already mechs were moving toward the spindly human ships.
Sheets of the photovores billowed in the electromagnetic winds, luxuriating in the acrid sting. Some seemed tuned to soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, each species with a characteristic polish and shape. They deployed great flat receptor planes to maintain orbit and angle in the eternal brimming day.
The human ships slipped among great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet. The photovore herds skated on winds and magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. They were machines, of course, presumably descended from robot craft which had explored this center billions of years before. More complex machines, evolved in this richness, prowled the darker lanes farther out.
A bolt seared through the dust and struck a human ship. Another lanced through some photovores, which burst open in flares.
They hugged the shadow and waited. Moments tiptoed by.
A contorted shape emerged from a filmy dust bank, baroquely elegant in a shape no human mind could have conceived, ornate and glowing with purpose, spiraling lazily down the gravitational gradients. Paris saw a spindly radiance below the photovore sheets. A magnetic filament, he guessed. His Arthur Aspect broke in,
I was here once, in my Aspect manifestation, during the glorious era when we were allowed this close. I advise that you shelter there, for the guardian ship approaching is lethal beyond even my comprehension.
“Your memory is that good?”
This was merely 3,437 years ago. I have suffered some copying errors, true, but fear is still the most potent stabilizer of recall. I was quite terrified during my carrier’s incursion here. She was one of three who survived that, out of over a thousand.
“I don’t know…”
His intuition failed him. The other human pencil ships zoomed all around, sending panicked transmissions that he could scarcely filter. The ornate mech craft lumbered down toward them, many hundreds of kilometers away but still close, close, in the scales of space battle.
We are surely doomed if we stay here. If you are losing at a game, change the game.
Paris nodded and sent a compressed signal to the others. At full power he slipped below the shiny sheets of photovores, their outstretched wings banking gracefully on the photon breeze. Storms worried the flocks. White-hot tornadoes whirled and sucked, spun off from the disk below. When fire-flowers blossomed in the disk, a chorus arose from the feeding layers. Against the wrathful weather, position-keeping telemetry flitted between the herd sheets. They sang luminously to each other in the timeless glare.
Paris watched one herd fail. Vast shimmering sheets peeled away. Many were cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which were themselves soon to boil away. Others followed a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolved their lattices. They flared with fatal energies.
He felt, in the ship’s bubble-sensorium, fresh attention focused on him. Lenses swiveled to follow: prey?
Here a pack of photovores had clumped, caught in a magnetic flux tube that eased down along the axis of the galaxy itself. Among them glided steel-blue gammavores, feeders on the harder gamma-ray emission from the accretion disk. Arthur said,
These sometimes fly this far above the disk, as I recall, to hunt the silicate-creatures who dwell in the darker dust clouds. Much of the ecology here was unknown in my time, and humans were banished from such territories before we could well explore. We sought the Wedge, the place where the earliest humans had taken shelter, including the legendary Walmsley. We wished to find there the rumored Galactic Library, a wealth which could have aided—
“Fine, stick to business.”
He stopped the Aspect’s idle musing with an internal block. Time to move. Where? Into the magnetic tube. But could they draw down some concealing cover?
He swooped with the others toward the filament. This also angled them toward a huge sailcraft photovore. It sighted them, pursued.
Here navigation was simple. Far below them, funneling away to an infinite well, lay the rotational pole of the Eater of All Things, the black hole of three million stellar masses: a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving, incandescent disk.
The metallivore descended after them, through thin planes of burnt-gold light seekers. The pencil ships scattered, firing ineffectually at it. They had speed, it had durability.
“How the hell do we deal with that?”
The metallivore 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 bythe hot accretion disk below. The metallivore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue. Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere. “We need something to zap it!”
I shall ponder. Meanwhile, be fleet of foot.
He veered and sheered, letting his feel for the craft take over. Others were not so swift; he heard the dying cries of three people nearby.
These placid conduits all lived to ingest light and excrete microwave beams, but some—like the one gliding after the tiny human ships—had developed a taste for metals: a metallivore. It folded its mirror wings, became angular and swift, accelerating.