Gregory Benford

Chapter 5: Galactic Center Two

Chapter5 GALACTIC CENTER TWO Nigel Walmsley’s Space Odyssey The first two novels in the Galactic Center series are set in Earth’s near future . The dates are from 1999 (twenty-two years after the novel’s publication) to 2061, a time when mankind has conquered space in the sense that it can reach nearby stars and thus stands on the edge of “the ocean of night,” deep space. By the end of the first novel, In the Ocean of Night, protagonist Nigel Walmsley has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines, which plays out in the second novel, a genuine sequel to the first: Across the Sea of Suns. In this novel, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. As he does so, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. But still, in this 88 Chapter 5 second novel, the machine enemy seems little more than a descendant of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers. The invading “Mechs” trick far-distant Earth into a thermonuclear war. Only a few human enclaves are left on Earth to do future battle with the machines. The bureaucrats Nigel has fought throughout his career as a NASA astronaut are now destroyed. He now stands alone on the threshold of outer space. Like his proclaimed ancestor Huck Finn, he launches himself and his small band of survivors into unknown territories. Their destination, apparently programmed into the starship Argo he commandeers , is the Galactic Center. The stamp of Clarke’s Space Odyssey is clearly on these two novels. Protagonist Nigel seems the Clarkean hero. Like Bowman, or like the astronauts who enter the spaceship Rama, he is a man of our very near future who, through contact with alien beings (the Ramans) and/or artifacts (the moon sentinel) finds his “door” into deep space, following the lure of eternity. Nigel however, is a composite character. His origins may be British, but he has immigrated to the United States and adopted America’s sense of the space frontier as an open path toward the new and unknown. Nigel’s presence will dominate these two novels. And unlike figures such as Bowman and Poole, Nigel undergoes no transhuman enhancements. Cosmic landscapes change around him, the obstacles become increasingly difficult to overcome, yet as with Huck Finn and the eternal youths of Heinlein’s juveniles, his spirit of adventure never ages. His body, however, does age in the course of the two initial novels. Despite rejuvenating drugs and medical devices, he, like Heinlein’s Lazarus, eventually does grow older and is fully aware of the toll time takes on his mortal body. Nigel Walmsley is a fascinating combination of all these elements—Bowman’s mystical journey, Huck Finn’s eternal youth, Lazarus Long’s struggle with his expanding, ever-aging physical existence. A very different “Nigel” will reappear in the final novel Sailing Bright Eternity, many thousands of years later in terms of Earth time. Here he exists in a strange dimension of “solid time” where he is free to recreate——as did Lazarus Long in Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love—a replica of a long-lost original Earth homestead. Nigel, whose early career was marked by very 1960s group families and partnership experiments, now finds—in this fantastic timescape—family, wife, children, and pets, all in a rural Earthlike setting. GalaCtIC Center two 89 Close examination of these two novels is necessary for understanding how Benford launched his space epic. In terms of narrative complexity, In the Ocean of Night is the more interesting novel. A close reading is needed to lay bare the process—almost organic in nature—by which the author modulates from a scientific novel of manners to a space epic in the “Doc” Smith manner, complete with cosmic battlefield and contending super-presences locked in seemingly endless struggles. The gradual and subtle interplay between the contemporary and the cosmic is carefully worked out here. In this sense, Clarke’s fiction was clearly a major influence on this novel. IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT...