COSM

by Gregory Benford

  She came down the long slope of the finger hills into Laguna. The city slept, cuddled against the black sweep of the ocean. She could see fifty miles down the coast as she at last padded onto Pinecrest Street. The big steel gate was formidable, with big locks, but an easy place to squeeze through the barbed wire. Asphalt felt easy beneath tired feet.

  In the hush the usual deckologies and angular, slabby ensembles clung to the steep hillsides here and afforded her places to slip by in shadow, around the lawn lights of the wealthy. She avoided the streets where she could, cutting across yards heavy with acacias, eucalyptus, and bottle brush. Even through the dry summer, Lagunatics kept lush surroundings.

  A helicopter rattled far to the north as she angled along a hedge and saw her Pathfinder on the street ahead. There didn’t seem to be anyone watching it. She slipped alongside it and got the key in and with a long sigh slid into the driver’s seat.

  A quick check: the Cosm was there, glowing serenely in its iron magnet’s jaws. She threw the tarp back over it and the gear all around it. Her jury-rigged diagnostics were recording it all. She gunned the engine and got out of there.

  Now what? First, Jill.

  She eased the Pathfinder toward her own apartment. The only landmark she could think to give Jill over the presumably tapped phone was a statue half a block from her apartment, a statue from the 1920s of a boy giving his dog a drink. Two blocks inland from there she parked the Pathfinder and slipped down an alley. Jill’s car was parked in a driveway up the street. She could see Jill in it, so she came up on the car from the front and waved. Jill waved back; clear. Jill got out of her car and followed Alicia among the shadows. They got into the Pathfinder and Alicia finally let Jill speak.

  “Thought you’d need these.” Jill opened her backpack and service station food spilled out: moon pies, breakfast bars, chewy delights, and Dr Pepper (her fave).

  “You’re a genius.” Alicia stuffed her mouth full without shame.

  “Finally you notice. Now explain.”

  It seemed to take a long time. When she got to the lawyering part and her plans, Jill said, “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish.”

  By the time she was through, Jill was already nodding. “We have to plan. You’re hoping this Pathfinder won’t come to their attention right away, since you bought it in a private deal, used, right?”

  “Yes. I’d hoped they’d be busy looking for the compact instead, at least to buy me—us—some distance and time. But they got the compact back at UCI.” She smacked the steering wheel with her palm. “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

  “So they know to look for something big enough to carry the Cosm. It has to be within walking distance of UCI or you wouldn’t have tried to escape on foot. Not good.” Jill munched a breakfast bar in the gloom. “They’ll probably watch the roads out of Laguna.”

  “With only three, and plenty of choke points, that won’t be hard.”

  “They’ll count on your being worn-out, too.”

  “Not far wrong there,” Alicia conceded, letting her head loll back against the headrest. Maybe if she just got an hour’s nap…

  “Hey!” Jill was punching her in the shoulder. “You nodded off.”

  She shook her head. “Doing my meditation. Got another Dr Pepper?”

  “Ol’ girl, I don’t see a way out of this box.”

  “I don’t either.” Was it me who said, “An elephant stampede, Don’t be in its way?” “I guess I thought once I got back here, something would come up. Funny, I get through miles of wilderness okay, but get trapped once I reach civilization.”

  Jill’s head jerked up. “Hey, that’s it.”

  “Civilization?”

  “Sure. You got this Pathfinder because you wanted to hightail it out into the boonies, right? So let’s just go.”

  Alicia gazed at Jill’s indistinct profile, not following at all. Jill grinned and said, “We just go back out on that trail you followed.”

  “But there’s a gate, locks—”

  “This is Jill the lock genius, remember? And I brought my secret tools.”

  6

  Through her fog of fatigue the next hour was ghostlike, filmy. Alicia drove back to the top of Pinecrest. Jill got through the gate locks in less than a minute. The Pathfinder found its way up the dirt path with ease, Jill driving. No headlights, of course; a helicopter patrolled to the north over Irvine but didn’t head their way. “Anyway, they’re prob’ly still looking for you heading away from Irvine, not back.”

  Lurching, creaking, they made their way along the ridgelines. The Pathfinder earned its keep. Beyond the tollway there were several ways down to Laguna Canyon Road. Alicia got down in the back and Jill threw a plastic sacking over her. She lay next to the iron magnet, secured by bungee cords, and peered at the glow of the Cosm. Her optical gear was working fine, clicking away, the whole array drawing power for its batteries now from the Pathfinder. As a hasty kludge, she had to admit, it was amazing; Zak had done a lot of the tricky bits. The only creative part lay in realizing that the Cosm, now weighing less than five kilograms, could be transferred to a small portable magnetic trap.

  They negotiated the ridge road, a bit hairy with no lights, just poking along. Eventually they came down onto Laguna Canyon, looking intently for any cars that might be surveying the road. Nothing; just the silence of predawn canyon. They barreled out toward the freeways and Jill said, “Where to now?”

  “You’ve saved my ass. I’ll drop you somewhere, then—”

  “The hell you will.”

  “Look, this is going to involve multiple felonies—”

  “Think you can hog all the infamy? C’mon, girl, this is fun.”

  “Look, I have some suspicions that this might get dangerous.”

  “Even better.”

  “I can’t get you involved—”

  “I am involved. Think I’ll walk out on you now? Where to?”

  Pasadena came like a sudden movie jump shot; she had gone to sleep as they hit the 57 freeway. Easing through streets pale with dawn, she wondered if she should stop for Max at all. That had always been her plan, involve him only if she successfully got away with the Cosm. Now the enormity of what she had done sank in.

  But so did the necessity of handling this properly. Whatever happened, she at least would finish knowing she had done what she truly thought was right. Max had a right to be in on the end of it.

  He lived in a morose pile built on an aging Douglas fur frame. Jill got them into the foyer of the apartment house with her “secret tools,” which had turned out to be a strip of industrial plastic and a little metal pick.

  “Doesn’t look hard to do,” Alicia said as the foyer lock clicked over.

  “All in the wrist.”

  Alicia had never been here before, so she had to check the mailboxes to find Max’s apartment. A sullen redbrick façade outside had tried to make the apartment house look like New England, but the cramped lobby had big-leafed plants in tubs, a dingy carpet, and air scented with Essence de Spray Can. Alicia pondered this and Jill saw her expression as they went up the stairs to the third floor. “Penny for…”

  “I’m thinking, ‘I’m in love—might as well admit it—with a guy who lives in a place like this.’”

  “Style isn’t everything.”

  “Here, style isn’t anything.”

  “Isn’t it a little early to start with the second thoughts?”

  “Ummmm.” Somehow the stairs were taking a lot out of her and then she remembered that she hadn’t slept in several years. “I never thought I’d fall for a guy who blindsided me, coming up on my professional perimeter.”

  Jill said, “You mean he actually built a relationship first.”

  “Oh, maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize it. First time.”

  “You’re riding a whirlwind, girl. Don’t start second-guessing Max.”

  “Right, I’ll need somebody to visit
me in jail.”

  “Hey, you’re famous. I’m an accomplice. You’ll walk and I’ll be in handcuffs.”

  “Well, you always said you’d get around to trying bondage.”

  Jill laughed. “And I’ll be thinking of you as they roll me into a grave marked ‘Nobody Special.’”

  They knocked five times before Max opened the door, managing to yawn and look surprised at the same time. His living room seemed to be deliberately retro by three decades. The doorknobs were just enough off-round to be sure you noticed them and the thin drapes were trying to be lighthearted by letting you get some of the view of an even worse place across the street. At least the furniture was clean and dusted, but the air was telling her that he had take-out food for dinner, probably Mexican, but with fried stuff it was hard to tell.

  “Funny, I had a call about you,” he said, voice foggy.

  “From?”

  “Said he was some lawyer. About an hour ago. Asked if you were here.”

  Jill went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets. “Uh,” Max said uncertainly, “can I get you something?”

  “You can get dressed,” Alicia said. “Pronto. You have a sleeping bag?”

  “Sure. When do I hear what’s going on?”

  “About fifty miles from here, which better be inside half an hour.”

  Death Valley did not have the thin, stingy light of autumn, but rather a perpetual slanted glare. The highway wound through the rugged grandeur of the slopes, skirted by the usual bright strip of cheesy fast-food mills. They ordered in one of them, Alicia now feeling much the better for several hours’ sleep.

  “Burgers. Six. And throw in fries and onion rings,” Alicia added in a devil-may-care, arteries-be-damned voice.

  Zak grinned. “What are the rest of us going to eat?”

  They had been headed for Badwater (ELE. –280 FT.) on Highway 178 when they spotted Zak pulled back on a side road but visible, just as he and Alicia had planned. Not that his U-Haul van was hard to spot; there was not too much distraction among the rutted hills and baking rock. She had gotten a truck from UCI yesterday and then hidden it on a street in Costa Mesa, hoping the Feds would then be looking for it still, but that dodge was probably quite dead by now.

  Alicia gave him the first onion rings to arrive. He had been driving the slow van all night and looked worse than she did. “The Cosm riding okay?” he asked.

  “Rock-solid,” Alicia said. It was midafternoon, with few patrons in the fast-food joint. The burgers were tasty, or was she just pumped on adrenaline?

  “I’d like to get set up soon, have a look,” Max said. “I’ve been thinking about ways to check the evolution of the Cosm as it ages.”

  “Let’s head for the Furnace Creek RV and tent camp,” Jill said, tracing the map and consulting the AAA camping book with sticky fingers. “Toilets, but no showers. Oooh. Why can’t we stay in the hotel there?”

  Zak said, “We’d have to register.”

  “Camps register you, too,” Max said.

  “Our idea was that nobody will think we’d come here,” Alicia said. “None of us has ever been here.”

  “How wide a net they cast depends on how important this is,” Max said reasonably. “I doubt that even the Department of Energy can muster an all-out effort.”

  Jill said, “I’m just an ordinary citizen, but this doesn’t sound like an agency wrangle.”

  “Why not?” Zak asked.

  “The President. He’s going to be embarrassed by this if we just skip off with a national treasure.”

  “Good point,” Zak conceded. “He can even get on top of the issue, say it’s a matter of safety.”

  “You’ve gotten politically savvy pretty fast,” Max said.

  “Part of his education,” Alicia said lightly. Indeed, this canny Zak was a great change from the quiet prototypical good-immigrant persona he had projected not long ago. She had underestimated this one.

  They all felt better leaving the place, fully fed if not well. As Alicia walked toward the Pathfinder, a cotton-top couple in caps and jeans and sneakers stopped in their tracks. For an instant she wondered if this was the shocked-to-see-a-nigga-here reaction she occasionally got, then saw something else in their open-mouthed wonder.

  “You’re the one!” the man said.

  “On the TV,” the woman said.

  Everybody froze. The parking lot lay in bleached light for one long heartbeat in Alicia’s ears.

  “That’s right,” Alicia said, stepping forward with a smile. “Veronica of the Virginals, glad ta meecha, caught us on ‘What’s Hot’ last night, didja?”

  “Virginals?” the man said.

  “How’d you like that new song of ours, huh? Wild or what?”

  “Uh, I thought I saw you… the news…” the woman said.

  “Great coverage, huh?”

  The man hesitated, peering at Max and Jill and Zak in turn, then held out the road map in his hand. “It is her, Irma. Uh, can I get your autograph?”

  7

  The Los Angeles Times they bought from a vending machine had nothing about them. “Not enough time,” Max said. “But you’re on TV. That lets out the RV place.”

  “What’s left?” Jill asked. They had driven quickly away from there and pulled into a rest stop ten miles farther along.

  “Camping out. Run our gear from the generator Zak’s got in the van,” Alicia said.

  “If that couple figures out that they’ve been bamboozled, they’ll blow the whistle,” Jill said.

  Max said soberly, “And spot us from the air, no matter where we are out here.”

  “We’d be safer in the forests, up toward Lone Pine,” Jill said.

  “I need to go to fugitive school, gang,” Alicia said. “But I thought out here there would be less at risk if something… happens.”

  Jill said, “We all chose to be here.”

  “I mean the Cosm.”

  “What could happen?” Jill asked. “I mean, as I understand you guys, the Cosm will just get older and older.”

  “Let’s hope that’s all,” Max said. “The neck connecting us is, well, thinning out. If it snaps off in some way, I don’t know what will happen at this end. There’s a lot of potential energy stored in the exotic matter that keeps it open.”

  Jill’s face wrinkled, puzzled. “So it was safety that made you do this?”

  Alicia’s face flickered with conflicting emotions. She realized that she was still tired, though adrenaline-driven; anyway, she should be straight with these three, who had given her so much. “Some, sure. But mostly, I want to see what comes next in there.” She hooked a thumb toward the Pathfinder, where the Cosm rested under plastic sheeting. “Let’s roll.”

  They went another fifteen miles and pulled off on a dirt road. Even in late autumn the temperature was in the high seventies. A few miles in, they found a box canyon and parked the two vehicles close together on a level area. Max found a news show at 5 P.M. that was full of excited talk about the “woman-hunt” on for Alicia.

  “How come they don’t mention any of us?” Jill asked.

  “Disappointed?” Alicia ribbed her with an elbow. “We’ve covered ourselves pretty well, so they can’t be sure you’re with me.”

  Zak shook his head as he unloaded gear from the back of the van. “They know. They’re just not saying.”

  At 6 P.M. one of the L.A. talk shows dedicated two hours to the “woman-hunt” and various loudmouths who called in to denounce her. Talk rapidly deteriorated to the playing-goddess clichés and they all laughed at some of the more outrageous callers as they grouped detection gear around the Cosm.

  It sat at the center of a circle ten feet across. Deep in its ebony sheen were gauzy veils of gas roiling with fitful light. Setting up was actually easier than at the observatory because there was enough room.

  Jill had stopped by the observatory weeks before to see the Cosm and now she was shocked to see how much it had changed. “It’s… marvelous.” After
a long moment, she said, “So my goddess girlfriend here is just like most people’s idea of God, huh?”

  Puzzled, Alicia looked up from her work. “How so?”

  “You made this, courtesy of taxpayer dollars, of course, but now you can’t intervene in it. Nobody can. You don’t even know if anything’s alive in there.”

  Alicia said soberly, “I wouldn’t know how to intervene. Or on what side.”

  “Most people I know figure God doesn’t actually dip His finger into our lives.”

  “Maybe that’s a good idea,” Max said.

  As darkness came, they sat and watched it, Zak’s radio barking out its frothing-at-the-mouth voices in the background.

  The Cosm now looked out on a reddening galaxy. In the cool desert dark Max said, “While we’ve been getting here, the universe on the other side has aged over fifty billion years.”

  Murmurs of astonishment. “That’s how exponentials work. It’s maturing at a rate that is taking off toward infinity.”

  He punched on his laptop and displayed the graph, using his hand-writer to scratch in labels.

  The curve of Cosm time was very nearly vertical. NOW lay beyond 25 WEEKS, so the Cosm age was around 4 x 1010 YEARS; forty billion was well past the age of our universe. Max nodded, taking the vast implications in stride; in a sense, these were just more points on the curve. “The elliptical galaxy is past its prime, reddening. See, no big bright blue ones left? Smaller stars will live longer, and they’re dim and red and numerous. But even they’re only good for a hundred billion years or so.”

  Alicia thought of abodes for life-forms near stars that were guttering out. Such planets would orbit close enough to their stars to stay warm and so would also be tide-locked, one side baked and the other freezing. Still, such worlds might prove temporary abodes.

  Did the sphere seem smaller now? Alicia could not tell.

  Max said slowly, watching the churn of rosy radiance across the Cosm’s face, “But eventually, even with superengineering, nearly all the stellar hydrogen gets burned. New stars can form, but not many. See those faint red stars glowing? The great big dust banks we saw just a few weeks ago, they’re trapped into stellar corpses now.”