The Galactic Center Companion, page 11
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 further 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 out-stretched 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 which 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 which 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.
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Intelligent machines would build atop this ferment a society we could scarcely fathom—but we would try. Much of the next novel I wrote, Furious Gulf, was about that—the gulf around a black hole, and the gulf between intelligences born of different realms.
For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences which never had to pass through our Darwinnowing filter.
If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us—we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?
A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the “substrate,” the basic building blocks. Machines could embody intelligence, but their styles would be different.
#
Angular antennas reflect the bristling ultraviolet of the disk below. Shapes revolve. They live among clouds of infalling mass—swarthy, shredding under a hail of radiation: infrared spikes, cutting gamma rays.
Among the dissolving clouds move silvery figures whose form alters to suit function. Liquid metal flows, firms. A new tool extrudes: matted titanium. It works at a deposit of rich indium. Chewing, digesting.
The harvesters swoop in long ellipses, high above the hard brilliance of the disk. As they swarm they strike elaborate arrays, geometric matrices. Their volume-scavenging strategy is self-evolved, purely practical, a simple algorithm. Yet it generates intricate patterns which unfurl and perform and then curl up again in artful, languorous beauty.
They have another, more profound function. Linked, they form a macro-antenna. In a single-voiced chorus they relay complex trains of digital thought. Never do they participate in the cross-lacing streams of careful deliberation, any more than molecules of air care for the sounds they transmit.
Across light-minutes the conversation billows and clashes and rings. A civilization blooms on the brink of the deepest abyss in Creation.
#
By the time I reached the last volume, in 1992, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center, am working on a further model for the Snake, and still eagerly read each issue of Astrophysical Journal for further clues.
Much remains to be found there. My nephew, now a doctoral student at Caltech, will make a thorough map of the center in 1995, using a detector he built to view light wavelengths shorter than a millimeter—he’s caught the bug.
I finished the last novel, Sailing Bright Eternity, in summer 1994. It had been 24 years since I started on the series and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.
I had taken many imaginative leaps in putting together a working “ecology” for the center, including truly outré ideas, such as constructions made by forcing space-time itself into compressed forms, which in turn act like mass itself: reversing Einstein’s intuition, that matter curved space-time. All this was great fun, requiring a lot of time to think. I let my subconscious do most of the work, if possible. It’s an easier way to write; but it stretches out projects, too. Occasionally I wanted to say to long-suffering readers, who wrote in asking when the next volume would appear, “Sorry; I’m writing as fast as I can.”
Doubtless there are many more surprises ahead. We’re extending our gaze into ever more distant frequencies, gaining better resolution, seeing finer detail. In peeling back the onion skins, we get closer to how galaxies work, how the vast outbursts of their centers affect life, and how the truly bright galactic cores, quasars, work.
My own model is quite possibly completely wrong. It seems to explain some features (the filaments, the Snake) but has trouble with the jets. Eventually, comparing radio maps over time, we might see flareups and changes in the threads. Mine is strictly done in what I call the “cartoon approximation”—good enough for a first cut, maybe, but doomed to fail somewhere.
In any case, models are like art, matters of taste. Nobody expects a French impressionist painting to look much like a real cow; it suggests ways of looking at cows.
Is there life at the center? Nobody knows, but nobody can rule it out. Only by thinking about possibilities can we test them. My first intuition, seeing the radio map of the Arch, was, This looks artificial. Maybe it is—you had probably thought of that explanation halfway through this piece. Astronomy reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. Someday, that may prove wrong.
One of the ways science fiction looks at the world is by pushing it to extremes, asking the questions that go beyond the bounds of what we can observe and check now. Imagination is no mere foot soldier; it wants to fly. That’s why science fiction and science are forever linked, dancing in the great gyre that is the genre.
Writing The Galactic Center Series
I did not set out to write a series of interconnected novels over a span of twenty-five years. The project grew on me, and I made plenty of mistakes bringing it to fruition.
I could describe here my inner struggles alone, the endless interior workings one performs before the blank page—but external events proved just as important. I suspect this happens more often than most of us would like.
In 1977 I published my fourth novel, In the Ocean of Night, concerning an irritable astronaut who discovers evidence of a galaxy-spanning network of intelligent machines. It was nominated for a Nebula and I went about my normal profession as a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. But my subconscious would not let me alone. I kept thinking of what such ideas implied, and by 1982 wrote Across the Sea of Suns, with the same character exploring nearby stars. Here the physicist collided with the writer. I had been doing research in astrophysics since 1974, and noticed that our own galactic center was abrim with intriguing new observations. In the core, within a few light years of the exact center, there are a million stars within a single light year. On average, the nearer stars are only a hundredth of a light year away, ten thousand times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Imagine having several stars so close they outshone the moon.
As one might expect, this is bad news for solar systems around such stars. Close collisions between all these stars occur in about a hundred thousand years, scrambling up planetary orbits, raining down comets upon them as well.
The galactic center is the conspicuous Times Square of the galaxy—and far more deadly than the comfortable suburbs like ours. Joel Davis’s Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy details how horrific it is, pointing out that the survival time for an unshielded human within even a hundred light years of the core is probably only hours.
In the Ocean of Night explored the discovery that computer-based life seemed dominant throughout the galaxy. The British astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, had uncovered the implication that “evolved adding machines,” as he put it, had inherited the ruins of earlier, naturally derived alien societies. (I picked the name from my friendship with astrophysicist fellow student at UCSD in the early 1960s. Nigel Walmsley is now a retired astronomer living in Italy. None of my character Nigel Walmsley’s personality resides in astronomer Nigel Walmsley’s self; he’s mild mannered and unassuming, the opposite of my character.)
Working with irksome Walmsley set tough problems. I had picked a British point-of-view character because he was an outsider in a space program usually run by Americans. I had a feeling for the Brits from my sabbatical there in 1976, though I’d been writing stories which I incorporated into the first novel as early as 1972. Further, while one novel can trace the core events of a character over years, perhaps a life, still I did not know how Walmsley would change over the considerable span of Book #2.
I finished that book in a mental muddle. My subconscious had begun to present me, quite uninvited, with events beyond the end of the book. In the first version of #2, a Simon & Schuster hardcover, I ended on a note of difficulty and defiance.
Then publishing intervened. Timescape Books collapsed and Pocket Books held hostage several books, seeking to extract their investment. Pocket’s publisher-in-chief told my agent (none of them would speak to a mere author) they would not publish the paperback of Across the Sea of Suns and wanted $80,000—yes, $10,000 more than they had paid me—for the rights. I refused and the book went into stasis for several years. I eventually escaped by paying $10,000, as I remember.
All this while scenes, ideas, and characters popped into my head as I worked on other books. By this time I had learned to follow my subconscious. If I didn’t, I stalled on other projects. Slowly I realized that a larger series of novels yawned before me.
Bad news, I knew immediately. Series novels must each have a sense of an ending, while foreshadowing more. I hadn’t done this in the first two books. Or had l? Book #1 closed with an expansive embracing, and #2 hadn’t reached most of its audience yet.
When Lou Aronica at Bantam offered to publish the whole series, I took the plunge. I added more to the ending of #2 and Lou remarked at the voice of the new material, which he said echoed the rest of the novel well. I blinked; I hadn’t even thought of rereading Across the Sea of Suns. The ambience had simply been sitting there, still fresh. Reassured, I set out writing #3—and hit a snag straightaway.
A series treats the arc of a figure’s life, but the galaxy-spanning novel covers so much space and time, I couldn’t get Walmsley around to see and live enough.
Worse, the galactic center was the obvious place for machines to seek. By the early I980s we knew that there is a virulent gamma ray flux there, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes. Most of this we gathered from the radio emissions, which penetrate dust clouds and revealed the crackling activity at the center for the first time. Infrared astronomy soon caught up, unmasking the hot, tangled regions.
By the time I finished Across the Sea of Suns in 1983, I realized that I could do some research myself on the galactic center. I had by that time written papers on pulsars and galactic jets, accumulating both expertise and curiosity. Strikingly, mysterious features appeared in the galactic center radio maps. In 1984 I was giving a talk on galactic jets at UC Los Angeles, and my host was Mark Morris, a radio astronomer.
“Explain this,” he challenged, slapping down a radio map he had just made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.
My first reaction was “Is this a joke?” The glossy print showed a feature I immediately called the Claw, but which Mark more learnedly termed the Arch: a bright, curved prominence made up of slender fibers. Though the Arch is over a hundred light years long, these filaments are only about a light year wide, curving upward from the galactic plane, like arcs of great circles which center near the galactic core, which lies several hundred light years away. These intricate filaments shine by energetic (in fact, relativistic) electrons, radiating in strong magnetic fields, which arc aligned along the filaments.
My first intuition, seeing the radio map of the Arch was “This looks artificial.” Astronomy reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. The sf writer in me immediately explored the opposite. I decided to extend the Walmsley books by at least one more, set at galactic center.
I worked on a theory for those thin filaments which glow by electron luminosity, a hundred times longer than they were wide. I thought of neon lights, which are glow discharges sustained by electric currents in slender tubes. Could these fibers be a sort of slow-motion lightning, taking perhaps hundreds of thousands of years to discharge?
Those hunches became the kernel of several papers on the center, a model which has become generally accepted—for now, pending more data. While I was mulling over maps and jotting equations, I kept on writing fiction. Over years, the writing fed the physics, and vice versa.
Intriguing setting is essential in a series of novels, or else a sense of sameness creeps in. I used all the gaudy color and striking effects I could muster in #3 of what came to be called the “Galactic Series” (by my publisher, Bantam), Great Sky River—a reference to the ancient Indian name for the Milky Way.
