The Galactic Center Series
In the Ocean of Night
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
Non-fiction
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates
Across Millennia
To Mark and Alyson and Joan
who grew and changed far more
in the decades it took to write this series of novels
than novels can possibly portray.
PROLOGUE
Metallovore
Black holes have weather, of a sort.
Light streams from them. Blackness dwells at their cores, but friction heats the infalling gas and dust. These streams brim with forced radiation. Storms worry them. White-hot tornadoes whirl and suck.
From the immense hole at the exact center of the galaxy, a virulent glow hammers outward. It pushes incessantly at the crowded masses that circle it, jostling in their doomed orbits. Gravity’s gullet forces the streams into a disk, churning ever inward. Suffering in the weather.
The press of hot photons is a wind, driving all before it. Except for the grazers. To these photovores, the great grinding disk is a source of food.
Fire-flowers blossom in the disk, sending up lashes of fierce ultraviolet. Storms of light.
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 farther 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 outstretched 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.
