37,483
deliers to many planets within 80 light-years of Absolute Center. Includes High Arcology Era, Late Arcology Era, and High Citadel Age as human societies contract under Darwinnowing effects of mechanical competition.
37,518
Fall of Family Bishop Citadel on Snowglade, termed the “Calamity.”
37,524
Escape of Family Bishop from Snowglade in ancient human vessel. Clandestine oversight of this band by Mantis level mechanicals.
37,529
Surviving bishops reach nearest star, encounter Cybers. Defeat local mechanicals. Adopt some human refugees.
37,530
Bishops leave, escorted by Cybers and cosmic string.
37,536
Bishops reach Absolute Center, enter Wedge.
37,538
Temporal sequences become stochastically ordered. Release of Trigger codes into mechanical minds. Death of most mechanical forms, Intervention of Highers to rectify damage done by excessive mechanical expansion.
Preservation of several human varieties. Archiving of early forms in several deeply embedded representations.
Beginning of cooperation between Higher mechanically-based forms and organic (“Natural”) forms. Decision to address the larger problems of all lifeforms by Syntony, in collaboration with aspects of lower forms.
Beginning of mature phase of self-organized forms.
OF PREAMBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.
If you enjoyed IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT
Read the rest of Gregory Benford’s
Galactic Center Series
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River*
Tides of Light*
Furious Gulf*
Sailing Bright Eternity*
*coming soon from Warner Aspect
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BEYOND INFINITY
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The attack had come in a savage, fire-bright moment.
It began with strange droplets coasting on the air, shimmering, murmuring. Floodlights had ringed a gray, chipped slab, where she worked with Kurani. Recently opened passages far into the Library labyrinth had yielded complicated new puzzles in data-slabs. They were reading out a curious string of phrases in a long-dead language, from a society that had reached the peak of mathematical wisdom, or so the historians said.
The floating, humming motes distracted her. Unlike the familiar microtech that pervaded the Library performing tasks, these shifted and scintillated in the hard spotlight glare.
Kurani ignored them. His powers of concentration were vast and pointed. He had just discovered that these ancient people had used numbers not as nouns or adjectives, but to modify verbs, words of action. Instead of “see those three trees,” they would say something like, “the living things manifesting treeness here act visibly as a collection divided to the extent of three.”
She remembered Kurani’s furrowed brow, his quizzical interrogation of distant resource libraries as he struggled with this conceptual gulf. These ancients had used number systems that recognized three bases—ten, twelve, and five—and were rooted in the body, with its five toes and six fingers. So grounded in the flesh, what insights did the ancients reach in far more rarefied pursuits? Scholars had already found a deep fathoming of the extra dimensions known to exist in the universe. The slab before Cley and Kurani spoke of experiments in dimensional transport, all rendered in a strangely canted manner.
Cley had kept her focus as tightly wrapped around this problem as she could. She found such abstractions engulfing.
But the motes… and suddenly she looked up at a new source of light. The motes were tumbling in a field of amber glitter. Sharp blue shards of brilliance lanced into her eyes. The motes were not microtech but windows into another place, where hard radiance rumbled and fought.
She had turned to Kurani to warn him—
—and the world was sliced. Cut into thin parallel sheets, each showing a different part of Kurani, sectioned neatly by a mad geometer.
