I shall ponder. Meanwhile, be fleet of foot.
He veered and sheered, letting his feel for the craft take over. Others were not so swift; he heard the dying cries of three people nearby.
These placid conduits all lived to ingest light and excrete microwave beams, but some—like the one gliding after the tiny human ships—had developed a taste for metals: a metallivore. It folded its mirror wings, became angular and swift, accelerating.
The higher phyla are noticing us.
“Coming damned fast, too.”
Plants harness only one percent of the energy falling upon them. Here photovoltaics capture ten percent, and evolution acting upon the mechs has improved even that. Admirable, in a way, I suppose—
“Give it to me compressed, not true-voice.” An Aspect always tried to expand his airing time.
Arthur sent a squirt of compacted ancient lore—Fusion fires, he said, inside the photovores digested the ruined carcasses of other machines. Exquisitely tuned, their innards yielded pure ingots of any alloy desired.
The ultimate resources here were mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and the sleek metallivore lived to eat them—or even better, the human ships, an exotic variant. It now gave gigahertz cries of joy as it plunged after them into the magnetic fields of the filament.
“These magnetic entities are intelligent?” he asked.
Yes, though not in the sense we short-term thinkers recognize. They are more like fitfully sleeping libraries. I have an idea. Their thinking processes are vulnerable.
“How?”
They trigger their thinking with electrodynamic potentials. We are irritating them, I am sure.
He saw the metallivore closing fast. Beyond it came the convoluted mech guardian ship, closing remorselessly.
The remaining human ships executed evasions—banks, swoops, all amid the pressing radiance from the disk-glare. Around them magnetic strands glowed like smoldering ivory.
The metal-seeker would ingest them with relish, but with its light-wings spread to bank it could not maneuver as swiftly as their sleek ships. Deftly they zoomed through magnetic entrails. The mech ship followed.
“How soon will these magnetic beings react?”
Soon, if experience is a guide. I advise that we clasp the metallivore now. Quickly!
“But don’t let him quite grab us?”
Arthur gave a staccato yes, its panic seeping into Paris’s mind. Accurate simulations had to fear for their lives.
The steel-gray metallivore skirted over them. Predators always had parasites, scavengers. Here and there on the metallivore’s polished skin were things like limpets and barnacles, lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow that fed on chance debris, purging the metallivore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust which could jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
It banked, trying to reach them along the magnetic strands, but the rubbery pressure of the field lines blunted its momentum.
He let it get closer, trying to judge the waltz of creatures in this bizarre ballroom of the sky: a dance to the pressure of photons. Light was the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supported the great spherical volume of hundreds of cubic light-years, a vast, vicious veldt.
He began receiving electrodynamic static. The buzzing washed out his comm with the other human ships, distant motes. The metallivore loomed. Pincers flexed forth from it.
The crackling jolt. Slow lightning arced along the magnetic filament, crisp lemony annihilation riding down.
“It’ll fry us!” Paris cried out. Arthur recovered some calm, saying,
We are minor players here. Larger conductors will draw this crackling fire.
Another jarring jolt. But then the metallivore arced and writhed and died in dancing, flaxen fire.
The magnetic filaments were slow to act, but muscular. Induction was sluggish but inescapable. Suddenly Paris saw Arthur’s idea.
As soon as the discharge had abated on the metallivore, the potentials sought another conducting surface, that with the greatest latent difference. The laws of electrodynamics applied to the bigger conductor, closing in—the guardian ship.
The guardian ship drew flashes of discharge, their jagged fingers dancing ruby-red and bile-green.
Calls of joy from the pencil-ships. The ornate shape coasted, dead. The larger surface areas of both metallivore and starship had intercepted the electrical circuitry of the filaments.
“I… you really did know what you were doing,” he said weakly.
Not actually. I was following my archived knowledge, but theory makes a dull blade. Though perhaps some scrap of my intuition does remain…
Paris could sense the Aspect’s wan pride. The human ships accelerated now, out of the gossamer filaments; there might be more bolts of high voltage.
Near the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the lashing weather there, whirled a curious blotchy gray cylinder.
There. Clearly a mech construct.
“The Hall of Humans,” he said, wondering how he knew.
THE COLLECTED
>I had this terrible dream and I woke up and it was real.
