[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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
Page 16
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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
Page 17
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]