Gregory Benford - Around the Curves of a Cosmos

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2024-11-29 0 0 125.71KB 26 页 5.9玖币
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Around the Curve of a Cosmos
by Gregory Benford
Cley sensed them first by their stench.
A tangy reek like old bile curled into her nostrils. Quickly came a flat, metallic smell. She had
time to sniff, look around—and there was the first of them, gaudy in its slick mix of blues and
reds. Mats of it spun in the air, humming.
Then it was gone—pop. Intrusions from higher dimensions were like the weather—occasionally
spectacular, mostly a side effect of larger action elsewhere. They usually meant trouble.
"That wasn't just tech leaking through," Cley said. "It was alive—Morphs."
"I agree. More than passing strange," Seeker said in its curious accent, as though the long, black-
ribbed mouth were lingering over each word.
The technology for spanning dimensions had only been rediscovered recently, left over from the
Third Tech Age. The process relied on a virulent state of manner termed "quagma"—quark
plasma that seared like magma.
Once such quagma-driven geometric bridges had been a source of great adventures and even
commerce, the history slabs said. That lay many centuries behind humanity now, and the
technology was difficult and dangerous. Cley had not studied it—the past was a vast labyrinth of
decayed wonders—though Seeker had.
She set about her labors again, clicking micro-excavation tools to her hand neurals. Her
companion stood frozen, though.
Cley was used to the occasional encroachments of other dimensions, both subtle and rude. Since
humans had again begun experiments into higher dimensional physics, momentary overlaps
would drift away from the experiment sites. Since a 4D perspective could move rapidly in 3D,
these could appear very nearly in two distant places at once.
But they were mere flashes, lasting seconds. Cley took no note, once the oddness wore off.
Seeker, though, never lost its unending wonder at the twisted shapes that came across the gulf of
dimensionality. They had worked together for years, but Cley got used to whatever came along.
The world was odd, yes? Next question …
Not so the quick-witted pseudo-animal, which stood sniffing the air with an expression Cley took
for wonderment. "C'mon, let's get this stuff catalogued."
They both set about their labors again. They were working in the Library of Life, an ancient city
of genetic and tissue information that was older than records could show. Certainly it came after
the Era of Ur-Humans, when technology had first shed its enveloping light over all humanity.
Cley's genome dated from that distant eon. She was a recreation of some distant ancestor of the
Supras who now governed the Earth.
Now something made Cley uneasy, though. The 4D Morphs had smelled wrong. She wondered if
this was her ancient hunter-gatherer instincts coming to the fore again. Automatic fear of the
strange. Such responses had been ironed out of later human sub-species. She shook her head and
concentrated on her work.
Some of the microscopic slabcasts they studied went as far back as the early centuries of the
Space Age, well over a thousand years ago. They found it exciting to recover genomes and
sometimes even whole glassified organisms from Earth's distant past. Especially if they came
from before the Age of Appetite and the following Era of Excess.
Theirs was a privileged task. It required both careful attention and a certain skewed way of
looking at what they found among the ancient canisters and recording devices. This was where
Seeker excelled; nonhuman intelligences were essential in plumbing the currents of the ancient
ecospheres. The mind riding in that raccoon-like body was as aslant from human minds as
anyone had yet created.
Seeker took joy in carefully rooting in the ruins of this, the fifteenth subsurface level of the
Library, in the southwestern quadrant. It enjoyed using its finely articulated, yet rugged hands to
pry up slab-entries and discern their contents. Cley listened to Seeker's mutters and smiled. A
cool breeze wafted over them, ruffling Seeker's fur, provoking from it an uneasy purr.
Cley had long ago gotten used to the raccoon-creature's oblique intelligence. She could see that
forebodings stirred in that mind now; its black lips twisted and the broad face wrinkled with
complex, unreadable, expressions. It allowed itself a low growl as it worked.
Very little of humanity's history had survived the rub of the last millennium. Over the yawning
chasm of eons, meanings altered beyond recognition. The two of them had once labored at a site
rich in radioactives, gingerly harvesting the lode to great benefit … only to discover that the
ancient technociv had thought this richness was a pollutant to be buried, with stern, immense
markers to warn off their presumably primitive, ignorant descendants. This had been a source of
much comedy.
The present Library of Life told of the vast experiments that had yielded such strange fruit as
Seeker, but not how those had been achieved. In a way, working here was an expedition of self-
discovery, for Cley herself was not a true lineal descendant of the ancient genomes; and certainly
not an Original. Scarcely anyone was, in all of present humanity.
"Something's … coming." Seeker's ears pricked up. "That earlier incident—the sea shell,
remember? Several days ago?"
"I wasn't here," Cley said, looking up. Was that a cool, dry breeze stirring her hair again? In the
heat of the day? "Some sort of vandalism, I heard."
"I wish it had been something so innocuous. Look—" Seeker pointed.
Blobs and rods floated nearby. Slick, red and white, shimmering.
The cutting stench again—
The micro-slab Cley was working on vanished.
She looked up into a hovering mass of sickly green, shot through with glowing crimson dots. It
emitted a low moan. "Morph!" she cried, tumbling backwards.
Several more shelves of slabs disappeared. "Damn!"
Seeker was there immediately, springing at the Morph. In its lean paws it held a gray equipment
tarp. It wrapped the tarp around the churning Morph and scampered around the shape, pulling.
"Grab the end!" Seeker called.
Cley caught the tail of the tarp and Seeker grabbed both ends, jerking them together. It made a
bag around the Morph. "Hold—it!—"
Seeker grappled with the tarp. It was poking and jerking. Cley got a bear hug around the violently
struggling package. The Morph punched her in the nose and she punched back. "What—"
Something yanked on them—the world dwindled dizzily—and they were flying.
· · · · ·
It was as if immense objects swept through a high, vaulted space that they could see only in
quilted shadows. An immense cathedral of perceptions sped by. Passages yawned, beckoned, fell
away. No gravity tugged at them—and then a huge force knocked the breath from their lungs,
plunged them down and then jerked them aside, then—was gone.
Floating. Shadows sliding by in their obsidian mystery. Ground rushing up, branches of trees—
they snapped off pieces as they went, tumbling—and hit hard.
They were buried in shredded fronds, branches and pancakes of fungi. Seeker snarled and
snapped and thrashed.
Cley looked around. Purpling growths in a tangled, gray-green forest shimmered in the vanilla
glow. Light seeped from the ground, not from above. They had fallen through the spotty,
lavender canopy that hovered above on snaky vines. Debris like helical fronds, fruit of their
plunge, lay around them.
They got to their feet, checked, found no broken bones. It had been over an hour, by Cley's
inboard time meter, yet they had seemed to fall only for frightened moments.
They got themselves in order. She had tears in her unisuit. Seeker, of course, never wore clothes;
its fur was an elaborate signaling medium for its species, using codes no human was privileged to
know.
They stood among tangled vegetation, light gleaming up from the hard ground. A persistent
breeze sighed.
"What … happened?" Cley asked.
"Maybe we got sucked along when the Morph escaped from our space."
"So where are we?"
"Ummm.…This place has a curious curve to it," Seeker said.
Cley looked at the forest rising to right and left, disappearing into a white mist overhead. A drop
spattered in her eye from a frond overhead. "We're in a bowl, I guess. Never mind the
sightseeing—what happened?"
Seeker chuckled, showing pointed teeth. "I do not know. My 'sightseeing' is the only plausible
way we shall answer your question. I do not see anyone who is likely to tell us what this place
is."
Seeker was the puzzle-lover, Cley more practical; most archeo teams had such a balance. Cley
decided to stick to the practical.
She studied the luminous ground. The light here seemed eternal, seeping through the odd, stony
soil beneath them. The soil itself seemed like ground glass held together with translucent webs.
The twisted trees grew in the stuff.
A steady breeze stirred the canopy of limbs, fronds, leaves and pads. The trees seemed of many
sorts, some rough, others smooth. Small animals made rustling excursions nearby. The air was
thick, moist and almost milky as Cley drew in breaths. Carefully they explored back and forth
along the "axis" of the forest, but found no large clearings. They both wearied, and finally found
some comfort in a bed made of the tree leaves.
"We knew something strange was afoot," Seeker said, lounging back. It was always good at
taking its ease when there was no point in not. "Recall, one of the big symbols at the Library of
Life site entrance was a huge seashell, beautifully shaped into a detailed spiral, of precious luster-
metal. Then that one day it disappeared. Sheared off from its mount, somehow. A few hours later,
it reappeared. You were off exploring the Library's labyrinths days later, I recall, when it popped
back into existence. I heard the sound, went running. No ordinary person returned it—the spiral
just came back, its connection at the shear point flawless."
Cley frowned, not getting it. "I heard there was something funny, yes."
"More than that. It had been lifted, I believe, out of our 3D space. When it returned, it was not
quite the same."
"A Morph took it—"
"The way you could pluck an ant off a sheet of glass." Seeker gazed at Cley significantly. "That
same ant you could see from above, or below, just by lifting the glass over your head. From such
a superior perspective, it will appear differently, yes?"
Cley's frown deepened. Another Seeker puzzle, one of their games with each other. She had long
since stopped trying to find her way through the miasma of advanced physics. Still, she did know
a little mathematics, so: "Ah—the spiral was backwards, that's it."
"Indeed. None of us noticed it at first."
Cley brightened. "I see! Same as the ant on glass, if you look at a spiral from below, it goes from
right-handed to left-handed. "
"I suppose the 4D Morphs took our spiral, passed it through our 3D universe, then pivoted it
about their dimension. That left it reversed when they so kindly returned it to us."
"As a warning?"
"The calling card of the Morphs. A signal, had we read it right—"
"Which we didn't."
"They showed us who they were, free of the constraints of language or symbols."
"Polite—a calling card. But why did they attack us, steal the slabs?"
Seeker shrugged. "They are like us? They also study human origins? A mere guess; I apologize."
"Um. That would explain a lot … It's easy to think others aren't like us, just because they're
mysterious. They'll give our slabs back?"
"Why don't they give us back? I suspect our being dropped here was an incidental."
"Sure didn't feel incidental."
"This is some sort of place between our 3D universe and their 4D one. We may have gotten
sheared off into it, while the Morphs were passing through."
"This place is between 3D and 4D?"
Seeker shrugged. "I reason by analogy—a classic human trick, which I borrow frequently."
"You're welcome."
"Thieves do not offer thanks. Nor did our Morphs."
"What's between dimensions?"
"A space contrived for passage? I do not know. If they have built a roadway between dimensions,
perhaps this is the ditch beside that roadway. Forgive the analogy."
"So we're ditched?"
Seeker waved its hands broadly. Leathery and black, they were in their fully deployed posture,
and its long hands tapered to thin fingers of great delicacy. "And perhaps our slabs are, too."
"The Morph was pretty agitated."
"In a hurry to get back, it dropped us. And the slabs."
"But where?"
"You humans made your reputation by pushing beyond the horizon. I suggest such a strategy
here."
"Huh? There is no horizon."
"Somewhere in this tube world, there must be a place where the connection to our 3D universe
gets manufactured. Not necessarily nearby, I suppose. We were inducted here by some curious
property of the quagma, so I suppose."
"Or by something that lives here."
"Life seems unlikely in such a narrow place," Seeker said distantly.
"Why? The Morphs have all our three dimensions, plus extra to play with."
"We are fond of carbon, thinking it the root of life. True enough—here. But in 4D, there are more
choices for molecules to make, ways to hook to each other. Carbon might take longer to form
life-helping compounds."
"Sure, but there might be more available, too."
"With that I cannot argue. Then there is the problem of what an intelligent organism might look
like in 4D. In 3D the design is obvious—"
"Human?"
Seeker laughed. "You tool-users are all alike. No, you and I are both mere tubes. Body-bags filled
with modified sea water. That is the basic design blessed by three dimensions."
"Ugh! I'd like to think we're more than that."
"I am speaking of basic body design—nothing personal." But Seeker grinned the mock-fiendish
grimace that meant it was enjoying this—as usual, for mysterious reasons.
"What's a 4D tube look like, then?"
"They will have a greater surface area for a given volume … " Seeker screwed up its long mouth,
obviously trying to visualize. "That ratio rises as dimension increases, I gather. Brain and heart—
if they have one—could be kept deep inside, for safety, and digestion done on the outside."
"A gut as outside skin? Ugh!"
"Ours are 'outside' our bodies, too, geometrically … just lying along a tube, tucked nicely in the
middle, where we can't see them work."
"That's how I like it."
"I doubt the design was made to satisfy our sensibilities."
"What use would digestion on the outside be?"
"Easier flow of air and fluids," Seeker said. "One could treat 'the runs,' as you term them, directly,
inspecting the issues by eye."
Cley tried to imagine this and failed. She sniffed, sampled—and finally, out of hunger, nibbled at
some seeds they had found. No bad effects. Pretty soon, she wished there were a lot more of
them.
"I think we should determine the geometric properties of this place," Seeker said decisively.
"How? Measurement?"
"Geometry is a global property. We must travel."
"Me, I'm more interested in finding some fresh water, getting a splash in the face, a drink."
"I smell water upslope—there." Seeker led her a surprisingly short way to a dense clump,
shadowed, moist. It quickly fetched a fat fish from the shallows and began eating. Fastidious, it
carefully washed each piece of flesh before popping the morsel into its ample, black-rimmed
mouth. Cley stripped and plunged in. When she came out, feeling far brisker, Seeker was gone.
"Damn!" She never quite got used to the ways of her companion. You kept thinking of it as
human like, but its greatest asset lay in its difference. Seeker needed time alone, and wanted to
explore—so it just vanished, and might be gone for a moment or a month.
Cley would not have watched Seeker scamper away into the forest of purple-speckled, knotted
trunks, and not followed. Seeker knew that, and knowing the human propensity to argue, simply
evaporated.
Seeker had other ways of … well, of feeling. Cley studied the snarled growths all around her.
They seemed to writhe like sluggish vines, stirred by a breeze she could not feel … or else they
moved on their own. She kept checking nervously behind her.
On the way to the pool she had watched Seeker disappear into the snaky mat, moving with
surprising speed. The trunks warped behind it into a puckering pattern … almost, she thought, as
though the things were enclosing and digesting Seeker …
Silence. She shivered. Seeker never showed true fear, and she wished she could share that talent.
She suspected that the creature had accepted death in a way the fretful human mind could not.
Animals lived without such foreknowledge, or so the conventional wisdom went. Shaped from
raccoon genetics, amplified and tuned in countless fashions, these hybrids carried a quality
humans could not readily attain. Death was only one element in their thinking, not an ever-
present background tone. Seeker seemed at times oblivious of danger, even in this frightening
place, after nearly breaking its neck in a fall …
She stood gazing fruitlessly at the forest where Seeker had vanished. What now? The gauzy,
alabaster light seeped up from the glassy soil, casting vertical shadows … Though the forest
seethed and fretted, it made none of the sounds she associated with vegetation—no sighing,
creaking, swish … except, she now heard, a deep rolling bass note, at the limit of hearing, like a
great slow breath of some immense beast. The Morphs? Looking for them?
The thought made her wary and she wished Seeker would reappear, where the slow swaying
pucker in front of her was smoothing out—
She jumped. Something had touched her shoulder—
"Interesting geometry," Seeker said. It stood nonchalantly at the end of a track that led back into
the forest behind her.
"What!?"
"I suspected that this was an odd place—"
"How'd you do that?"
Seeker grinned, stretching its black gums. "I walked in what I thought was a straight line. But this
is a cylinder we're in, my friend. I walked around the entire geometry and came back behind
you."
Cley looked up. "Then above that fog … "
"There's more forest, yes. We could see it, if the air were ever clear here."
"So it's a cylinder … how long?"
"Infinite, is my guess. Or maybe it curves around and connects back, eats its tail."
"If this is just an extra dimension, how come my hand is 3D?" Cley waved her hand at the forest.
"And these odd trees?"
"My suspicion—and remember, I am only going from zaps and the like—is that this is what's
called a 'brane' wrapped around a one-dimensional space."
Zaps were whole concept-nuggets, electronically induced—constellations of ideas that could be
imported into a mind much as a book could be picked up. Understanding the zap meant
ruminating upon it, letting it get integrated with your own thinking. That took time, but much less
than old-fashioned learning through the serial input of reading, or even the parallel processors of
eyes and ears through images. Still, if you didn't "read your zaps" you knew effectively nothing.
Enough to get by at a dinner party, maybe, but no more.
"So we appear here as 3D things … "
"Because we can move in the 'brane' that folds our 3D bodies into this added dimension."
"We're sort of wedged into this 4D place?"
"In a curious fashion. The Morphs must have known we could fit in this kind of halfway house of
dimensionality."
"But for what?"
"Because we could comprehend this way? I do not know. Given the difficulties of broaching even
simple ideas to the Morphs, I suggest we try to discover that ourselves."
"Um … So we've only got one way to go, right?"
"Down the 1D axis of this wrapped-around, 3D space, yes." Seeker started that way.
· · · · ·
It was a hard trudge. Rough ground, thick air. They foraged for berries and Cley's stomach
rumbled. Forest crowded in on them; at least there wasn't much underbrush. This seemed odd,
since the light that apparently sustained these plants came from below. Cley wondered aloud
about that, but for once Seeker—who always seemed to have an answer, even if a bit wrong—
just shrugged.
"We could be anywhere in this Tubeworld, right? I don't like the sound of that."
"This is as roomy a 1D world as we could expect," Seeker said. "Remember, we experience it
through a sort of transform."
"That 'brane'?"
"I suspect it allows us to perceive a more complex realm as this tube. Even so, it could be as long
along the axis as our space is across, the radius of the universe entire."
"You mean it's infinite going that way?" She pointed fore and aft of the axis, the two flat
directions.
Seeker tut-tutted. "Infinity is a term promiscuously tossed about."
"Okay, okay—large."
"And note that the breeze always blows the same direction."
"Right. I wonder if it wraps around the whole cylinder."
"Possibly. But what drives it?"
"A break somewhere?"
"A disturbance in the geometry. Ummm … the quagma could provide that."
"But would it drive the air toward itself, or away?"
"I do not know. This is a 3D manifold, wrapped around an extra dimension, a complex 'brane,' I
do believe. I christen it Tubeworld."
"Look, before we go founding new worlds or anything, worry about this. If it's really light years
long along the axis, then we'd never find the quagma that brought us here, that's doing all this."
"Well, yes."
"Y'know, that spiral back at the Library … if we could use that ability, pop things in and out of
the extra dimension … "
Seeker's eyes opened in agreeable surprise. "Ah, interesting."
"We could reverse the sense of rotation in molecules, make them act differently."
"Excellent. There might be biological advantages. Some diseases are left-handed because that
matches some of our molecules. If we could switch that sense in our blood streams, we would
become immune."
"Great—only we have to be sure the Morphs that live here don't kill us first."
"I doubt they live here. This is a portal, no more."
"Yeah, a ditch. The bastards who dumped us here—"
"May not have even noticed that we had been sucked along in their wake."
"Even worse!
"To be unnoticed? I would think it a blessing, ordinarily."
"Well, you don't think like a human!"
"That does seem to be a problem," Seeker said lightly, and went to sleep.
· · · · ·
Cley kept waking up in the diffuse pearly glow that oozed from the ground. It made her uneasy,
and she wondered what made the light. What drove biological processes here? Were there stars,
planets? If the Morphs made this, they had command of physics in an extra dimension,
transcending everything she knew. Not gods, no—she had wrestled with one in the tarp bag, felt
its smooth strength jerk and struggle. But vastly strange, yes …
She lay awake and turned these questions over, and then heard odd sounds … growing louder …
something coming.
Cley shook Seeker awake. Long reverberations came, sounding louder. They both stood up. Cley
found a stick of satisfying heft.
The sounds seemed to come from all around. Cley discovered that if they turned perpendicular to
the 1D axis, their bodies amplified the vibrations. In their ears sounded a tortured strooooonnng
that repeated like the beats of a slow, thick heart. The pulses refracted and stretched.
摘要：

AroundtheCurveofaCosmosbyGregoryBenfordCleysensedthemfirstbytheirstench.Atangyreeklikeoldbilecurledintohernostrils.Quicklycameaflat,metallicsmell.Shehadtimetosniff,lookaround—andtherewasthefirstofthem,gaudyinitsslickmixofbluesandreds.Matsofitspunintheair,humming.Thenitwasgone—pop.Intrusionsfromhighe...

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