COSM

by Gregory Benford

  “You think it’ll be like us?” the President asked.

  “Support life? We can’t tell and probably won’t be able to.”

  “But you can study the stars, can’t you?”

  “Yes, we can,” she could not resist adding, “sir.” She showed him the fast-photography pictures of cherry-red nebulae illuminated by the hot spikes of young stars.

  “It certainly is a wonderful thing.”

  “We want to see how far it develops. I’m afraid our connection to it may be slipping away.”

  He looked at her in the Cosm’s pink radiance. “We can’t let that happen.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much we can do about it.”

  He gestured briskly at the U-magnet. “Hold on to it.”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t that simple—”

  “I have every respect for your abilities, Professor Butterfield, but this is a national asset now, not just a research object. My advisors tell me we have stolen a march on all the rest of the world with this.”

  “So we have, sir. We simply know so little—”

  “I’m sure I speak for all Americans when I say that we want to see more, Professor.” He grinned broadly. “Thanks for finding it for us.”

  This last sentence rang oddly in her mind as the President left, shaking hands with Zak and Max and a half dozen UCI suits. She had to admire the way he gave each person an intense ten seconds, then smoothly passed on. Within minutes, even with the ritual handshaking in the crowd, they were all back in the parking lot and she was standing beside the President on a raised platform and the media moment was at hand: a quick, punchy speech with three lines honed to get on TV. The networks had an hour’s clear window left to get it onto the East Coast nightly news. Then the entourage began its melancholy withdrawing roar.

  She waved goodbye with all the rest, grinned at Max, shook hands with the knots of local officialdom, and greeted Zak’s parents, who beamed at everyone, speechless at the splendor. Wow.

  UCI’s publicists could not resist a big clambake press conference after the President’s departure. Alicia let Max do most of the talking, and when the crowd seemed to want data—“Let’s see this thing,” a voice called from the crowd sitting on fold-out chairs, and others swiftly echoed it—she gave them Zak. Far from selflessness, she distrusted her own ability to withstand their probing. Zak did well, a dispassionate rendering of “Just the facts, ma’am.”

  But finally she had to go forward and face the blinding lights, then the popping of flashes. She stuck to what Max termed the High Church strategy: a brief statement that the Cosm was developing with ever-increasing rapidity, that theory suggested the connection might not persist for long, and therefore, with the greatest respect, they would decline further interviews or press “opportunities” until they were through with “the crucial phases of the study.” Then, thanks to several evenings’ ferreting, she ended with a grand historical perspective note.

  “Around the turn of the century, the French scientist Henri Poincaré worried about the conflict between his Catholic faith and the hard laws of my field: physics. Miracles bothered him. He argued that we scientists can’t treat phenomena that occur only once, since science could not test itself by reproducing the event. And Creation itself was a one-time-only event. There were plenty of aftereffects, like galaxies and girls, all worthy of study, but the essential moment came but once.”

  She liked the alliteration of galaxies and girls, and was enough of a feminist to no longer bridle at the term when it was useful. She gazed out over the heads of the crowd and was thrilled to see her father there. Into her voice, rehearsed and modulated so far, came a wobbly, proud note she could not control.

  “But now we know that Poincaré was wrong. We can reproduce even our universe’s origins. The implications of this I leave to others. The reality of it we shall continue to explore, with care and humility.”

  To her genuine surprise, a storm of applause followed her from the rostrum. But as it died, she saw people at the back carrying signs with Biblical quotations on them, plus some from the Koran, and heard shouts of derision and genuine anger hammering in the hall.

  8

  “I don’t feel like going out.”

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “To capitalize on your fame,” Jill explained.

  “Ugh.”

  “Also, you’ve got cobwebs in your brain, silly.”

  “Ummm.” Alicia stretched out on her sofa, trying to hear the comforting crunch of the waves through her open window. Maybe a long walk on the beach…

  “Not to mention cobwebs elsewhere.”

  “Oooof, a low blow.”

  “I can hear your ovaries shrinking from here.”

  “Hey, girl, I feel like vegging out. Catch one of those sitcoms, y’know, middlebrow wisecracks by bone-thin women with big firm knockers, living in an apartment in some fab city?”

  “Sure, and eat popcorn and chocolate while we do it.” Jill made a gargoyle face. She had been waiting when Alicia got home, having performed her usual trick of picking the lock.

  “Listen, I was at that reception over at the chancellor’s last night, right on top of the President’s visit, and today I worked in the lab straight through—”

  “I signed you up three weeks ago.”

  “Against my will.”

  “I have twenty bucks invested in your having grandchildren.”

  Alicia smiled, feeling helpless. “All so I can meet guys who use seductive tongue gestures?”

  “Hey, that was one guy, and he was in a leisure suit.”

  “He said they were coming back in.”

  “All the better.” Jill bustled her into the bedroom, threw open her closet. “We’ll know how to spot the species now. My God, you haven’t been shopping in ages, have you?”

  “Who has time?”

  “You seem to have forgotten about those other pesky little necessities, like eating and sleeping.”

  “Listen, lately my philosophy has been ‘I endure, therefore I am.’”

  “True, but sad. Me, it’s more like ‘I flirt, therefore I am.’”

  She couldn’t hear the waves breaking on the shoreline beyond Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe that was a sign; her world was shrunken, self-involved. With a sinking feeling, she realized that she wanted to go out socializing in an entirely theoretical way, without the zest she used to feel. How come? Max had stayed behind at UCI, working on some insight he wouldn’t discuss, not just yet.

  “You game?” Jill persisted.

  “I have a choice?”

  The social Jill hauled her to was inland, at the outer reaches of the town that called itself Lake Forest and had no lake and no forest. They voyaged past strip malls and “condo communities” perched smack up against a bleak prairie of prefab electronics assembly plants and industrial park bland tilt-ups, metallic and windowless and crouched down, as if ashamed. Like insect colonies, lines of stucco houses squatted beigely in their land of “sunburst” linoleum.

  Alicia was getting by with a rental car, still dithering over replacing her Miata, which the kidnappers had totaled. Jill curled a lip at the rental, so they took her “more spiffy wheels.” Jill drove them under a flapping NOW RENTING banner caked with dust, past already cracking aggregate-concrete steps with flimsy railings, into a basement parking garage guarded by grinning steel street teeth. Inside the “suite” apartment complex the reception ran in rooms that echoed with a cultural emptiness, the walls without pictures or books, the marble-veneer fireplaces with antiseptic gas instead of logs. Furniture attempted to fill these spaces, but even the mandatory oversized sectional couch seemed dwarfed by the austere, automatic geometry of sameness. Dress was “casual elegant,” which apparently included rumpled wide-legged, button-fly, stone-washed pale jeans, looking like a phony effect when worn with a black leather jacket. In the first half hour of trawling the crowd, which had spread throughout the ground floor and probably ran o
ver three hundred of what Jill termed the Tribe of Assessing Gazes, they saw tackiness galore: mixed florals and stripes, plastic piercings, avocado green with pink, a sheer blouse over plaid pants, even a parka vest with bare midriff and a diamond in the navel.

  By adroit word of mouth this singles’ arena had drawn more blacks, and she circulated among them without anybody, thank God, recognizing her from the news. She saw a tall, loose-jointed man drifting among the chattering crowds. Named Jerome, Jill soon ferreted out, mid-level executive, marketing. He had that certain homecoming-float quality, like the President, of latent grandeur. Good-looking black men had a strike against them, to be sure, just by being black, but in the sexual sweepstakes they had two strikes for them, too: an ebony prince elegance and the sheer scarcity of suitable black men.

  She sipped her drink, waited him out, circulated, had another drink while pretending to be interested in local politics. Late-night lectures to herself asserted themselves: Don’t just sit at home in your head, she reprimanded herself. Don’t live for the moment. Live into the moment, on your toes, eyes bright.

  The dancing started. Jill prompted, “You go first.”

  “Ask him to dance?” Pure terror.

  “Listen, there are plenty worse out there. A guy just told me a joke: ‘Why are mononucleosis and herpes opposites? Because you get mono when you snatch a kiss.’ And he thought I’d be charmed.”

  “You talked me into it.” So she went over to more-ebony-than-thou Jerome and croaked out a weak hello. He smiled, was kind, they danced, and everything worked, the room going around a little but her smile staying in place.

  “You hear about the new black restaurant?” Jerome said.

  “Uh, no—”

  “It’s called Chez What.”

  She rewarded this sally with a muffled guffaw. Jill gave her a thumbs-up and Alicia wondered what she was doing here, really, her classic avoidance symptom. Jerome talked about the usual things, leading off with the obligatory career history, not asking about hers. After the first hour, things were going more than well and the room was indeed going around unless she sat down. When he finally asked what she did anyhow, girl, she said she worked for the state, which was technically true.

  A little later in the proceedings, dancing again after some reconstruction work in the ladies’ room, he whispered, “Honey, it’s good ol’ love makes the world go round.”

  “Actually, it’s inertia.”

  Back to the table where Jill was entertaining five others with a description of a recent night at Rubber Gotham, a new club, quasi-hip, with B-list celebs on opening night, Chardonnay and warmed-over chicken wings (exactly what she skipped as a girl, now heading for deserved oblivion as an appetizer), women lurching around on heels they couldn’t manage (“sexy evening columns” as Frederick’s termed them)—further proof yet again that money can’t buy a clue. Jill was good at it, just the right details in the story, all haute-style. Alicia tried to think of an amusing way to bring up how Jill had been that first year at Berkeley when she was their dorm’s Queen of Gross, giving darkened-room demos of fart-lighting, using big kitchen matches to ignite astonishing blue and orange plumes a foot long, “a scientific feat extraordinaire.” On the other hand, she was far too gone to bring anything off very lightly. She had a fresh drink and Jill said with her trademark uneasy delicacy, “You’re doing a lot of that tonight.”

  “You’re the one wanted me to come on out.”

  “True, but not all the way out.”

  “Y’know, when I was a tomboy I asked my dad what it was like to be drunk. He said, ‘See those two men sitting over there? When you see four men, you’re drunk.’ So I said, ‘But, Dad, there’s only one man there.’ My father’s expression was worth it. And”—a slow, pointed look at Jill—“he never bugged me about it again.”

  “Just checking,” Jill said. “Time to go home, I think.”

  “C’mon, girl, not yet.”

  She got Jill to do her best set piece, a takeoff on a woman from the ‘60s on an acid trip, trying to eat dinner with friends: “Have I already chewed this food in my mouth three hundred times? Are they on to me? Wow, how wet this water feels. Is this the same lump of burger I was just wondering about? Or was that half an hour ago? And what is food anyway, really?”

  It was all funny now and she was only vaguely conscious of Jerome taking her home, with Jill supervising. As Jerome went around to get in the driver’s seat, Jill whispered, “Careful with this one,” and they were off.

  As lights streaked by on the windshield, she told herself very solemnly that she was not taking a guy home with her from a singles’ meat market, not at all, he was taking her home was all. Misgivings she brushed away like a pesky insect.

  Into Laguna, out of the car, the world going very fast now. Time jumped forward, accelerating like the Cosm, she said, but Jerome didn’t understand. Into her apartment, stomach lurching, hall light on, Jerome against her, the smell of him warm and rosy, his hands starting up and going down. His tongue in her mouth cut off her breathing and her head cleared as his hands started hurting suddenly, his body wedged hard into hers against the closet door, the apartment too hot and his face too close, “No, I’m not… No, I don’t… Please, not that—”

  And Jerome was chuckling, sweet-talking low and threatening, forcing her stumbling into the living room, somehow her blouse off now, her arms coming up protectively as she lurched away from him in the sudden blaring light coming through the archway and there was Max.

  “Hey, back off!” Max said.

  “Who the hell’re you?” Jerome said.

  “Get away from her.”

  “You some kind of peeper or somethin’, man—”

  “Beat it, fella.”

  “—sneakin’ in here—”

  “I can handle this,” Alicia said firmly, then tripped and fell on the couch, face in a pillow.

  She watched dimly as Max came forward and Jerome swore at him and pushed Max back. Then it was very fast and she felt very sick. Max and Jerome tangled together and then there was just Max in the air over her and she closed her eyes just to straighten things out a little, a rest, then it would all be clear.

  PART VI

  FLAWED GODS

  LATE FALL 2005

  It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

  —Blaise Pascal

  1

  Dimly she realized hangovers were like the Japanese language: no articles, no “the” or “a.” Head hurt, hurt, hurt. Waves crunching in distance, traffic swishing. In bedroom articles strewn everywhere. How got there? She remembered nothing. Up, groaning. Out, teetering on wooden feet, living room painted in tiger stripes by Venetian blinds. Clock told time. Most morning gone, where? Scratched head; that hurt, too. Ice, yes. No, too much work; she lay down. Room settled into place. Ceiling was vast plain. Moving? Unfolding geometry of swelling universe or else swelling head.

  After a while, she got all her head to operate together and though the pain was there, it did not pound on the front door and demand attention. Basic question: Do I need to hurl? No. Do I want to? Yes. A little later both answers switched and then at least she was through that and feeling a bit better.

  Smell of coffee? Sounds? Front door opening. Alarm, panic, something about last night—

  Max appeared in the doorway. “I went out for pastry.”

  Then she remembered the awful all of it. “Oh God.”

  “I threw him out.”

  “You were…?”

  “You gave me your key, remember? In case I wanted to work late at UCI, then crash here.”

  “Ah. Jerome…”

  “A hard man to convince.”

  “He was… okay at the party.”

  “Lacked a little technique, seemed to me.”

  “I’m so… embarrassed.”r />
  “None of it your fault. Guy went too far. You’re just hung over, that’s all.”

  She nursed the coffee he brought and then showered and dressed and repaired some of the damage to her face, bags under the eyes: the raccoon look. He had some eggs scrambled and the pastry crisp and she spoke little. He didn’t ask why she had gotten so drunk and she didn’t ask why he had come to her rescue, which didn’t make them nearly even, but helped. Max did not seem puffed up about the incident and he didn’t show those little signs of disapproval anyone else would have—Jill or Dad, say. Their talk drifted around and then a little pool of quiet formed between them and spread and filled up whole minutes, a void of silence she felt no need to fill with talk, like a warm bath of untroubled stillness. Neither moved. Insulated time ticked on. An invisible sphere enveloped them and he leaned over absolutely casually and kissed her.

  Everything seemed to lead up to this first kiss, with all else leading away. Deep-sea kiss, cramming for the final kiss. She thought, I’m going to remember this, then didn’t think any more for a blessedly long time.

  Fingers through tangled hair, smells swarming up the air, his hardness insisting on her softness.

  A long time later he said, looking at the ceiling, “First time I ever had a breakfast that worked like an aphrodisiac.”

  “Anglodisiac, in my case.”

  “Okay, A-F-R-O-disiac, for me.”

  “Boy, do I hate that term, African-American.”

  “I’ll never use it.”

  “I wonder if we’re different enough, though. Two physicists…”

  “What, there should be miscegenation laws?”

  “I always thought I should look for somebody more, uh, normal. Not a scientist. I’m a bit yang, maybe some yin—”

  “Two yangs don’t make a right?”