Gregory Benford

Chapter 6: To the Galactic Center

Chapter6 TO THE GALACTIC CENTER From Earth to Eternity The next four Galactic Center novels span vast expanses of spacetime and nine years of the author’s career, from 1987 (Great Sky River) to 1996 (Sailing Bright Eternity). The reader of this human saga wants to know how it will end at a place of such unthinkable magnitudes as Galactic Center. What will humanity encounter there? What kind of “humanity” will it be, and can anything vaguely human survive this encounter? Do the Nigel novels promise some special destiny reserved for humanity at this terminus? Benford delays answers to these questions for the first three novels, as he chronicles mankind ’s 30,000-year struggle to survive and to advance. These are all fine novels. They offer what the hard SF reader demands—mind-bending environments, plausibly extrapolated aliens, and high adventure. I will discuss these novels as space permits. My focus, however, will be on the final novel Sailing Bright Eternity. Here, space opera becomes fiction of a very different order. Nigel, in the first novel, by solving the mystery of alien involvement in our origins, 114 Chapter 6 launched mankind on a quest, physical and spiritual, to discover its role in the cosmic order of things. Action yields to dialogue in Sailing Bright Eternity, and Benford has the task of giving fictional voice to alien beings of the strangest sort. Doing so leads to dazzling experiments in narrative structure and tone. A good deal of this novel is discussion between “them” and “us.” As these various life forms seek to explain and justify their ways to Man, Benford offers his reader philosophical discourse in the grand manner. Improbably, Nigel Walmsley returns here. But now his role is less that of Huck Finn than that of Socrates—the great ironist who turns feigned ignorance into a powerful weapon for “humble” humanity. The first two novels of Benford’s saga follow Clarke’s slow advance into Earth’s near future, to the year 2061, following Nigel Walmsley through his normal human lifespan. Great Sky River takes place some estimated 30,000 years after Nigel’s “big jump” (telling time will itself become a part of the scientific adventure as Benford’s novels advance toward the mind-bending spacetime of the Galactic Center). The action takes place on a planet named Snowglade. Unlike the planets in Across the Sea of Suns, this planet has no known location on mankind’s celestial map. We learn simply that it orbits around a black hole, referred to as the Eater. Great Sky River is the story of Killeen Bishop, the leader of a band of cyborg-humans who are on the run and engaged in constant struggle with the Mechs. The reader here takes a sudden leap into the world of Doc Smith. Much of the novel deals with fighting , hiding, raiding—with human survivors ever on the run, heroically pitted against the dominant force of mechanical life. It is a world of tactics, weapons, battles. But there is much more. Despite the leap into vast spacetime, Killeen remains a figure cut from the same cloth as Nigel Walmsley. His quest to save his ever-dwindling band leads him to more and more alien encounters. Using the same combination of reason and intuition as Nigel, Killeen finds himself in communication with a new, more complex form of mech entity—the Mantis. Their meeting provokes the manifestation of an emissary of “the one from the Eater,” a magnetic entity whose source of vital energy seems to lie in the black hole itself, and to whom the Mantis suggestively refers as “the minister of magnitudes.” Killeen senses, as he engages the Mantis, that the Mantis is leading him somewhere. This encounter ends as the voice from the black hole singles out Killeen and his band. It “talks down” to them, designating to the GalaCtIC Center 115 them as lowly life forms. Yet, mysteriously, it urges them to “find the Argo.” In what is by now the familiar ending for these novels, Killeen, his son Toby, and his band discover the super-starship Argo, commandeer it, and light out for new territory closer to the Galactic Center. There are some very interesting things in this novel. First, there is a detailed presentation of Killeen’s “enhanced” humans. Their ancestors on Snowglade, the original settlers, appeared to have had a highly developed technology. They seem initially...