In the Ocean of Night (2 page)
In the core, just a few light-years from the exact center of our galaxy, a
million
stars crowd into a single cubic light-year. On average, the nearer stars are only a hundredth of a light-year away, ten thousand times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Imagine having several stars so close they outshone the moon.
As one might expect, this is bad news for solar systems around such stars. Close collisions between all these stars occur every few hundred thousand years, scrambling up planetary orbits, raining down comets upon them as well.
The galactic center is the conspicuous Times Square of the galaxy—and far more deadly than comfortable suburbs like ours, the Orion Arm of the spiral. Joel Davis’s
Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy
details how horrific the central volume is, pointing out that the survival time for an unshielded human within even a hundred light-years of the core is probably a few hours.
Strikingly, mysterious features appeared in the radio maps. In 1984 I was giving a talk on galactic jets at UC Los Angeles, and my host was Mark Morris, a radio astronomer. “Explain this,” he challenged, slapping down a radio map he had just made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.
My first reaction was, “Is this a joke?”
It showed a feature I called the Claw, but which Mark more learnedly termed the Arch: a bright, curved prominence made up of slender fibers. The Arch is over a hundred light-years long, yet these filaments are only about a light-year wide, curving upward from the galactic plane. They resemble arcs of great circles, with their centers near the galactic core, several hundred light-years away. A vast, strong magnetic field shapes them. These intricate filaments shine by energetic (in fact, relativistic) electrons, radiating in strong magnetic fields, which are aligned along the filaments.
My first intuition, seeing the glossy radio map of the Arch was,
This looks artificial.
Astronomy reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. The sf writer in me immediately explored the opposite. I decided to extend the Walmsley books by at least one more, set at galactic center.
But first, physics. I worked on a theory for those thin filaments that glow by electron luminosity, tubes a hundred times longer than they were wide. I thought of neon lights, which are glow discharges sustained by electric currents in slender tubes. Could these fibers be a sort of slow-motion lightning, taking perhaps hundreds of thousands of years to discharge?
I worked out a model of the situation, supposing that the giant molecular clouds orbiting at high velocities there provided the energy for the electrical discharges. They would provoke huge, multicolored arcs playing across the night sky, like permanent twisted neon lights. The ancient Asian Indian name for the Milky Way, Great Sky River, would be spectacularly true at the center. In my mind’s eye I saw these pyrotechnics as backdrop for my puny humans…
Those hunches became the kernel of several papers on the center, the first published in
The Astrophysical Journal
in 1988. They work out an electrodynamic model that has become generally accepted—for now, pending more data. About half a dozen competing views surfaced and sank in the storm of incoming observations. More filaments turned up. Arguments waxed over how big a black hole at the center of it all might be.
While I was mulling over maps and jotting equations, I kept on writing. Over years, the writing fed the physics, and vice versa.
Intriguing setting is essential in a series of novels, or else a sense of sameness creeps in. I used all the gaudy color and striking effects I could muster in #3 of what came to be called The Galactic Series,
Great Sky River.
I focused on the innermost few light-years, for dramatic effects, even though I knew the sheer energy flux there made humans quite vulnerable. To protect them I made them huge and armored. The central figure was a man named Killeen, who flees across a ruined landscape dominated by the black hole, which his people call the Eater of All Things—though they don’t quite know why.
This ravaged panorama seemed an ample stage to act out my main theme, the superiority of machines in much of the galaxy. We need a moist envelope of air and mild temperatures. They can take just about anything, including vacuum. I also got to spring their size as a twist at the very end of the series, when they meet Walmsley, whom they take to be a dwarf.
By then, measures of the very high orbital velocities of stars very close to the true galactic center, called Sagittarius A, suggested that some enormous mass was tugging at them. The data implied a compact mass of several million stellar masses lurks there, and—big clue—giving off very little light. A black hole.
I opted for a million-mass black hole, because then a ship could fly through the ergosphere, the very rim of the black hole, and not be crushed by the tidal forces. Contrary to intuition, the bigger the hole mass, the larger the comfy zone at its “edge” where the stresses can be small. Big enough, and a ship could skim through. This fact would be crucial to the last volume,
Furious Gulf.
I thought I would have a band of fleeing humans dodge into this warped region of space-time, only to discover a surprise… which I won’t reveal here.
The huge energetics of the center would draw machines, I felt. There they could live heartily, while their vermin enemies (us) struggled. The black hole would intrigue any inquisitive life-form, their struggles surging across a virulent territory. Humans would be part of it all, but certainly not the major players.
So I began envisioning what it might be like at stage center, where the diet of particles and photons is rich and varied. Only hard, tough machines could survive for long there—and evolve into forms I could imagine.
In the fourth novel,
Tides of Light,
I drew out these contrasts. Hard work, but fun. I devised “photovores” and “metallovores” as adaptations to special evolutionary niches. After all, machines that can reproduce themselves would, inevitably, fall under the laws of natural selection and specialize to use local resources. The entire panoply of biology would recapitulate: parasites, predators, prey.
How to envision this? I prepare for novels by writing descriptive passages of places and characters. In spare moments I began working up snapshots of possible life-forms and their survival styles.
Years before I had found a technique to deal with “obstructions”—a better word than the fearsome “block.” To me it meant something rather more subtle. At times I simply couldn’t get my subconscious to flower forth with free material along the lines of the novel. So I pretended that I was working on another story entirely and wrote that. At times I found that I was right—it really didn’t connect with the novel. Most times, with some tuning, it did. I made a policy of following through, publishing the work independently if possible, out of an almost superstitious belief that my subconscious would catch on. So far it hasn’t.
That’s why occasionally pieces of my novels appear first as short stories. I often don’t know whether they fit the novel, sometimes until years later. This trick I had to use again and again, because my subconscious proved lazy and headstrong. I’d planned to rap out three novels and be done by 1989, but #3 appeared in 1987, #4 in 1989. Then I got interested in another novel, wrote it in three tough years… and ground to a halt.
The pesky subconscious just wouldn’t cooperate with my game plans. This cost me considerably, for the series’ momentum broke, and undoubtedly some readers lost the thread.
In 1992 I had to start from scratch again, thinking through the overarching logic of the series. Slowly it dawned that some part of me had shied away from doing the “last” novel because I couldn’t reconcile the many forces within the narrative. I realized with a sinking feeling that one more book wouldn’t be enough.
Intelligent machines would build atop the galactic center ferment a society we could scarcely fathom—but we would try. Much of #5,
Furious Gulf
was about that—the gulf around a black hole, and the gulf between intelligences born of different realms.
For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences that never had to pass through our Darwinnowing filter.
If we could copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us— we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?
Through Books #3, #4, and #5, I had used the viewpoint of humans hammered down by superior machines. This got around the Walmsley lifetime problem, but demanded that I portray people enormously different from us. They had to seem strange, yet understandable—a classic sf quandary.
A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the “substrate,” whether in evolved humans or adaptive machines—both embodying intelligence, but with wildly different styles.
By the time I reached the last volume, in 1993, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center and eagerly read each issue of
The Astrophysical Journal
for further clues.
I finished the last novel, #6,
Sailing Bright Eternity,
in the summer of 1994. It had been twenty-five years since I started on
In the Ocean of Night,
and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.
When the series was finished, I was happy with the response. All along readers had nominated the books for awards, written in with ideas (and urgings to hurry up), asked for references to the scientific background. I realized that my readership was sophisticated and liked a challenge. The books sold well and got listed regularly in best-of-year summaries. Quite enough to keep me going, but part-time writers do not have the momentum of the full-time pros.
In all, I’m glad I wrote these novels. The Walmsley character was fun to engage. I’ve always liked crusty people, being somewhat crusty myself—and I think they are more engaging in fiction, where niceness is doom.
The series is ultimately about a question Walmsley asks toward the end, rather plaintively: What is the meaning of human action? In other words, can what we do really matter very much?
I felt intuitively that to measure a man, or mankind, one must have a comparison. How we measure up against the very largest scale, the galactic, drew me to make the attempt. We’ll never know, of course, how well we fare, but it is very human to ask.
July 2003
2019
From the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
17th Edition, 2093:
Icarus
(
)
Minor planet 1566. Had the most eccentric elliptic orbit of all the known asteroids (e = 0.83), the smallest semimajor axis (a = 1.08) and passed closest to the sun (28,000,000 kilometers). It was discovered by Walter Baade of Mt. Palomar Observatory in 1949. Its orbit extended from beyond Mars’s to within Mercury’s; it could approach to within 6,400,000 kilometers of the Earth. Radar observations showed it to have a diameter of about 0.8 kilometer and a rotation period of about 2.5 hours. The unusual orbit attracted only minor interest until June 2017, when Icarus suddenly began emitting a plume of gas and dust. Since it was presumably a typical rocky Apollo asteroid, this evolution into a cometary object excited the astronomical world. The oddity became of intense concern when calculations in October 2017 showed that the momentum transferred to the escaping cometary tail was altering the orbit of Icarus. This orbital perturbation could, within a few years, cause a portion of the comet to collide with the Earth. Impact of the tenuous gas would be harmless. But the head of the comet Icarus was by then obscured, and some conjectured that a solid core could remain, in which case …
Icarus
In Greek legend, the son of Daedalus. After Daedalus, an architect and sculptor, built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete, he fell out of favor with the king. He fashioned wings of wax and feathers for himself and Icarus, and escaped to Sicily. Icarus, however, flew too near the sun and his wings melted; he fell into the sea and drowned. The island on which his body was washed ashore was later named Icaria. The legend is often invoked as a symbol of man’s quest for knowledge and fresh horizons, whatever the cost. Icarus was invoked in van Hoven’s masterwork, Icarus Descending (2017), as an emblem for the decline of Western cultural eminence …
