The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

Joe was okay, but even a guy like me who’s never been married could tell he wasn’t thinking up this stuff himself. His woman was pushing him. Not satisfied with what she had.

  Now, that was wrong. Guy like Joe doesn’t have anywhere to go. Doesn’t know computers, automation. Can’t get a career rating in the army. So the pressure was backing up on him.

  Supers like me are supposed to check out their people and leave it at that, and I go by the book like everybody else. But Joe wasn’t the problem.

  I made a mental note to have a psycher look at his wife.

  “Okay,” he said, taking off his helmet. “I got to go set up the AnCops for the next one.”

  I watched him walk off down the alley. He was a good man. Hate to lose him.

  I started back toward our permanent operations center to check in. After a minute I decided maybe I’d better put Joe’s name in, too, just in case. Didn’t want anybody blowing up on me.

  He’d be happier, work better. I’ve sure felt a lot better since I had it. It’s a good job I got, working in public affairs like this, keeping people straight with themselves.

  I went around the corner at the end of the street, thinking about getting something to drink, and noticed the mailbox. I check on it every time because it sure looks like a mistake.

  Everything’s supposed to be pretty realistic on Burton Street, but putting in a mailbox seems like a goofy idea.

  Who’s going to try to burn up a box like that, made out of cast iron and bolted down? A guy couldn’t take out any aggressions on it.

  And it sure can’t be for real use. Not on Burton Street.

  Nobody lives around there.

  Doing Lennon

  (1975)

  Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

  —John Russell

  As the hideous cold seeps from him he feels everything becoming sharp and clear again. He decides he can do it, he can make it work. He opens his eyes.

  “Hello.” His voice rasps. “Bet you aren’t expecting me. I’m John Lennon.”

  “What?” the face above him says.

  “You know. John Lennon. The Beatles.”

  Professor Hermann—the name attached to the face which loomed over him as he drifted up, up from the Long Sleep—is vague about the precise date. It is either 2108 or 2180. Hermann makes a little joke about inversion of positional notation; it has something to do with nondenumerable set theory, which is all the rage. The ceiling glows with a smooth green phosphorescence and Fielding lies there letting them prick him with needles, unwrap his organiform nutrient webbing, poke and adjust and massage as he listens to a hollow pock-pocketa. He knows this is the crucial moment, he must hit them with it now.

  “I’m glad it worked,” Fielding says with a Liverpool accent. He has got it just right, the rising pitch at the end and the nasal tones.

  “No doubt there is an error in our log,” Hermann says pedantically. “You are listed as Henry Fielding.”

  Fielding smiles. “Ah, that’s the ruse, you see.”

  Hermann blinks owlishly. “Deceiving Immortality Incorporated is—”

  “I was fleeing political persecution, y’dig. Coming out for the workers and all. Writing songs about persecution and pollution and the working-class hero. Snarky stuff. So when the jackboot skinheads came in I decided to check out.”

  Fielding slips easily into the story he has memorized, all plotted and placed with major characters and minor characters and bits of incident, all of it sounding very real. He wrote it himself, he has it down. He continues talking while Hermann and some white-smocked assistants help him sit up, flex his legs, test his reflexes. Around them are vats and baths and tanks. A fog billows from a hole in the floor; a liquid nitrogen immersion bath.

  Hermann listens intently to the story, nodding now and then, and summons other officials. Fielding tells his story again while the attendants work on him. He is careful to give the events in different order, with different details each time. His accent is standing up though there is mucus in his sinuses that makes the high singsong bits hard to get out. They give him something to eat; it tastes like chicken-flavored ice cream. After a while he sees he has them convinced. After all, the late twentieth was a turbulent time, crammed with gaudy events, lurid people. Fielding makes it seem reasonable that an aging rock star, seeing his public slip away and the government closing in, would corpsicle himself.

  The officials nod and gesture and Fielding is wheeled out on a carry table. Immortality Incorporated is more like a church than a business. There is a ghostly hush in the hallways, the attendants are distant and reserved. Scientific servants in the temple of life.

  They take him to an elaborate display, punch a button. A voice begins to drone a welcome to the year 2108 (or 2180). The voice tells him he is one of the few from his benighted age who saw the slender hope science held out to the diseased and dying. His vision has been rewarded. He has survived the unfreezing. There is some nondenominational talk about God and death and the eternal rhythm and balance of life, ending with a retouched holographic photograph of the Founding Fathers. They are a small knot of biotechnicians and engineers clustered around an immersion tank. Close-cropped hair, white shirts with ball-point pens clipped in the pockets. They wear glasses and smile weakly at the camera, as though they have just been shaken awake.

  “I’m hungry,” Fielding says.

  News that Lennon is revived spreads quickly. The Society for Dissipative Anachronisms holds a press conference for him. As he strides into the room Fielding clenches his fists so no one can see his hands shaking. This is the start. He has to make it here.

  “How do you find the future, Mr. Lennon?”

  “Turn right at Greenland.” Maybe they will recognize it from A Hard Day’s Night. This is before his name impacts fully, before many remember who John Lennon was. A fat man asks Fielding why he elected for the Long Sleep before he really needed it and Fielding says enigmatically, “The role of boredom in human history is underrated.” This makes the evening news and the weekly topical roundup a few days later.

  A fan of the twentieth asks him about the breakup with Paul, whether Ringo’s death was a suicide, what about Allan Klein, how about the missing lines from Abbey Road? Did he like Dylan? What does he think of the Aarons theory that the Beatles could have stopped Vietnam?

  Fielding parries a few questions, answers others. He does not tell them, of course, that in the early sixties he worked in a bank and wore granny glasses. Then he became a broker with Harcum, Brandels and Son and his take in 1969 was 57,803 dollars, not counting the money siphoned off into the two concealed accounts in Switzerland. But he read Rolling Stone religiously, collected Beatles memorabilia, had all the albums and books and could quote any verse from any song. He saw Paul once at a distance, coming out of a recording session. And he had a friend into Buddhism, who met Harrison one weekend in Surrey. Fielding did not mention his vacation spent wandering around Liverpool, picking up the accent and visiting all the old places, the cellars where they played and the narrow dark little houses their families owned in the early days. And as the years dribbled on and Fielding’s money piled up, he lived increasingly in those golden days of the sixties, imagined himself playing side man along with Paul or George or John and crooning those same notes into the microphones, practically kissing the metal. And Fielding did not speak of his dreams.

  It is the antiseptic Stanley Kubrick future. They are very adept at hardware. Population is stabilized at half a billion. Everywhere there are white hard decorator chairs in vaguely Danish modern. There seems no shortage of electrical power or oil or copper or zinc. Everyone has a hobby. Entertainment is a huge enterprise, with stress on ritual violence. Fielding watches a few games of Combat Golf, takes in a public execution or two. He goes to witness an electrical man short-circuit himself. The flash is visible over the curve of the Earth.

  Genetic manipulants—manips, Hermann explains—are thin, stringy people, all lines and knobby joints
where they connect directly into machine linkages. They are designed for some indecipherable purpose. Hermann, his guide, launches into an explanation but Fielding interrupts him to say, “Do you know where I can get a guitar?”

  Fielding views the era 1950–1980:

  “Astrology wasn’t rational, nobody really believed it, you’ve got to realize that. It was boogie woogie. On the other hand, science and rationalism were progressive jazz.”

  He smiles as he says it. The 3D snout closes in. Fielding has purchased well and his plastic surgery, to lengthen the nose and give him that wry Lennonesque smirk, holds up well. Even the technicians at Immortality Incorporated missed it.

  Fielding suffers odd moments of blackout. He loses the rub of rough cloth at a cuff on his shirt, the chill of air-conditioned breeze along his neck. The world dwindles away and sinks into inky black, but in a moment it is all back and he hears the distant murmur of traffic, and convulsively, by reflex, he squeezes the bulb in his hand and the orange vapor rises around him. He breathes deeply, sighs. Visions float into his mind and the sour tang of the mist reassures him.

  Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting. The twenty-first developed weightlessness, which worked out well except for the re-entry problems if one overindulged. In the twenty-second there were aquaform and something Fielding could not pronounce or understand.

  He thumbs away the readout and calls Hermann for advice.

  Translational difficulties:

  They give him a sort of pasty suet when he goes to the counter to get his food. He shoves it back at them.

  “Gah! Don’t you have a hamburger someplace?” The stunted man behind the counter flexes his arms, makes a rude sign with his four fingers and goes away. The wiry woman next to Fielding rubs her thumbnail along the hideous scar at her side and peers at him. She wears only orange shorts and boots, but he can see the concealed dagger in her armpit.

  “Hamburger?” she says severely. “That is the name of a citizen of the German city of Hamburg. Were you a cannibal then?”

  Fielding does not know the proper response, which could be dangerous. When he pauses she massages her brown scar with new energy and makes a sign of sexual invitation. Fielding backs away. He is glad he did not mention French fries.

  On 3D he makes a mistake about the recording date of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A ferret-eyed history student lunges in for the point but Fielding leans back casually, getting the accent just right, and says, “I zonk my brow with heel of hand, consterned!” and the audience laughs and he is away, free.

  Hermann has become his friend. The library readout says this is a common phenomenon among Immortality Incorporated employees who are fascinated by the past to begin with (or otherwise would not be in the business), and anyway Hermann and Fielding are about the same age, forty-seven. Hermann is not surprised that Fielding is practicing his chords and touching up his act.

  “You want to get out on the road again, is that it?” Hermann says. “You want to be getting popular.”

  “It’s my business.”

  “But your songs, they are old.”

  “Oldies but goldies,” Fielding says solemnly.

  “Perhaps you are right,” Hermann sighs. “We are starved for variety. The people, no matter how educated—anything tickles their nose they think is champagne.”

  Fielding flicks on the tape input and launches into the hard-driving opening of “Eight Days a Week.” He goes through all the chords, getting them right the first time. His fingers dance among the humming copper wires.

  Hermann frowns but Fielding feels elated. He decides to celebrate. Precious reserves of cash are dwindling, even considering how much he made in the international bond market of ’83; there is not much left. He decides to splurge. He orders an alcoholic vapor and a baked pigeon. Hermann is still worried but he eats the mottled pigeon with relish, licking his fingers. The spiced crust snaps crisply. Hermann asks to take the bones home to his family.

  “You have drawn the rank-scented many,” Hermann says heavily as the announcer begins his introduction. The air sparkles with anticipation.

  “Ah, but they’re my many,” Fielding says. The applause begins, the background music comes up, and Fielding trots out onto the stage, puffing slightly.

  “One, two, three—” and he is into it, catching the chords just right, belting out a number from Magical Mystery Tour. He is right, he is on, he is John Lennon just as he always wanted to be. The music picks him up and carries him along. When he finishes, a river of applause bursts over the stage from the vast amphitheater and Fielding grins crazily to himself. It feels exactly the way he always thought it would. His heart pounds.

  He goes directly into a slow ballad from the Imagine album to calm them down. He is swimming in the lights and the 3D snouts zoom in and out, bracketing his image from every conceivable direction. At the end of the number somebody yells from the audience, “You’re radiating on all your eigenfrequencies!” And Fielding nods, grins, feels the warmth of it all wash over him.

  “Thrilled to the gills,” he says into the microphone.

  The crowd chuckles and stirs.

  When he does one of the last Lennon numbers, “The Ego-Bird Flies,” the augmented sound sweeps out from the stage and explodes over the audience. Fielding is euphoric. He dances as though someone is firing pistols at his feet.

  He does cuts from Beatles ’65, Help!, Rubber Soul, Let It Be—all with technical backing spliced in from the original tracks, Fielding providing only Lennon’s vocals and instrumentals. Classical scholars have pored over the original material, deciding who did which guitar riff, which tenor line was McCartney’s, dissecting the works as though they were salamanders under a knife. But Fielding doesn’t care, as long as they let him play and sing. He does another number, then another, and finally they must carry him from the stage. It is the happiest moment he has ever known.

  “But I don’t understand what Boss 30 radio means,” Hermann says.

  “Thirty most popular songs.”

  “But why today?”

  “Me.”

  “They call you a ‘sonic boom sensation’—that is another phrase from your time?”

  “Dead on. Fellow is following me around now, picking my brains for details. Part of his thesis, he says.”

  “But it is such noise—”

  “Why, that’s a crock, Hermann. Look, you chaps have such a small population, so bloody few creative people. What do you expect? Anybody with energy and drive can make it in this world. And I come from a time that was dynamic, that really got off.”

  “Barbarians at the gates,” Hermann says.

  “That’s what Reader’s Digest said, too,” Fielding murmurs.

  After one of his concerts in Australia Fielding finds a girl waiting for him outside. He goes home with her—it seems the thing to do, considering—and finds there have been few technical advances, if any, in this field either. It is the standard, ten-toes-up, ten-toes-down position she prefers, nothing unusual, nothing à la carte. But he likes her legs, he relishes her beehive hair and heavy mouth. He takes her along; she has nothing else to do.

  On an off day, in what is left of India, she takes him to a museum. She shows him the first airplane (a Piper Cub), the original manuscript of the great collaboration between Buckminster Fuller and Hemingway, a delicate print of The Fifty-Three Stations of The Takaido Road from Japan.

  “Oh yes,” Fielding says. “We won that war, you know.”

  (He should not seem to be more than he is.)

  Fielding hopes they don’t discover, with all this burrowing in the old records, that he had the original Lennon killed. He argues with himself that it really was necessary. He couldn’t possibly cover his story in the future if Lennon kept on living. The historical facts would not jibe. It was hard enou
gh to convince Immortality Incorporated that even someone as rich as Lennon would be able to forge records and change fingerprints—they had checked that to escape the authorities. Well, Fielding thinks. Lennon was no loss by 1988 anyway. It was pure accident that Fielding and Lennon had been born in the same year, but that didn’t mean that Fielding couldn’t take advantage of the circumstances. He wasn’t worth over ten million fixed 1985 dollars for nothing.

  At one of his concerts he says to the audience between numbers, “Don’t look back—you’ll just see your mistakes.” It sounds like something Lennon would have said. The audience seems to like it.

  Press Conference.

  “And why did you take a second wife, Mr. Lennon, and then a third?” In 2180 (or 2108) divorce is frowned upon. Yoko Ono is still the Beatle nemesis.

  Fielding pauses and then says, “Adultery is the application of democracy to love.” He does not tell them the line is from H. L. Mencken.

  He has gotten used to the women now. “Just cast them aside like sucked oranges,” Fielding mutters to himself. It is a delicious moment. He had never been very successful with women before, even with all his money.

  He strides through the yellow curved streets, walking lightly on the earth. A young girl passes, winks.

  Fielding calls after her, “Sic transit, Gloria!”

  It is his own line, not a copy from Lennon. He feels a heady rush of joy. He is into it, the ideas flash through his mind spontaneously. He is doing Lennon.

  Thus, when Hermann comes to tell him that Paul McCartney has been revived by the Society for Dissipative Anachronisms, the body discovered in a private vault in England, at first it does not register with Fielding. Lines of postcoital depression flicker across his otherwise untroubled brow. He rolls out of bed and stands watching a wave turn to white foam on the beach at La Jolla. He is in Nanking. It is midnight.