The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Some years later, seeking something, he visited the Krishna temple. There was a large room packed with saffron-robed figures being lectured on doctrine. Merrick could not quite tell them what he wanted. They nodded reassuringly and tried to draw him out but the words would not come. Finally they led him through a beaded curtain to the outside. They entered a small garden through a bamboo gate, noisily slipping the wooden latch. A small man sat in lotus position on a broad swath of green. As Merrick stood before him, the walnut-brown man studied him with quick, assessing yellow eyes. He gestured for Merrick to sit. They exchanged pleasantries. Merrick explained his feelings, his rational skepticism about religion in any form. He was a scientist. But perhaps there was more to these matters than met the eye, he said hopefully. The teacher picked up a leaf, smiling, and asked why anyone should spend his life studying the makeup of this leaf. What could be gained from it? Any form of knowledge has a chance of resonating with other kinds, Merrick replied. So? the man countered. Suppose the universe is a parable, Merrick said haltingly. By studying part of it, or finding other intelligences in it and discovering their viewpoints, perhaps we could learn something of the design that was intended. Surely the laws of science, the origin of life, were no accident. The teacher pondered for a moment. No, he said, they are not accidents. There may be other creatures in this universe, too. But these laws, these beings, they are not important. The physical laws are the bars of a cage. The central point is not to study the bars, but to get out of the cage. Merrick could not follow this. It seemed to him that the act of discovering things, of reaching out, was everything. There was something immortal about it. The small man blinked and said, it is nothing. This world is an insane asylum for souls. Only the flawed remain here. Merrick began to talk about his work with NASA and Erika. The small man waved away these points and shook his head. No, he said. It is nothing.

  On the way to the hospital he met a woman in the street. He glanced at her vaguely and then a chill shock ran through him, banishing all thoughts of the cancer within. She was Erika. No, she only looked like Erika. She could not be Erika, that was impossible. She was bundled up in a blue coat and she hurried through the crisp San Francisco afternoon. A half block away he could see she did not have the same facial lines, the same walk, the bearing of Erika. He felt an excitement nonetheless. The turbulence was totally intellectual, he realized. The familiar vague tension in him was gone, had faded without his noticing the loss. He felt no welling pressure. As she approached he thought perhaps she would look at him speculatively but her glance passed through him without seeing. He knew that it had been some time now since the random skitting images of women had crossed his mind involuntarily. No fleshy feast of thighs, hips, curving waists, no electric flicker of eyelashes that ignited broiling warmth in his loins. He had not had a woman in years.

  The hospital was only two blocks farther but he could not wait. Merrick found a public restroom and went in. He stood at the urinal feeling the faint tickling release and noticed that the word BOOK was gouged in square capitals in the wall before him. He leaned over and studied it. After a moment he noticed that this word had been laid over another. The F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed to O’s, the K left as it was. He absorbed the fact, totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a BOOK. Who had done the carving? Was the whole transition a metaphysical joust? The entire episode, now fossilized, seemed fraught with interpretation. Distracted, he felt a warm trickle of urine running down his fingers. He fumbled at his pants and shuffled over to the wash basin. There was no soap but he ran water over his wrinkled fingers and shook them dry in the chill air. There was a faint sour tang of urine trapped in the room, mingling with the ammonia odor of disinfectant. Ammonia. Methane. Titan. His attention drifted away for a moment and suddenly he remembered Erika. That was her in the street, he was sure of it. He looked around, found the exit and slowly made his way up the steps to the sidewalk. He looked down the street but there was no sign of her. A car passed; she was not in it. He turned one way, then the other. He could not make up his mind. He had been going that way, toward the hospital. Carrying the dark heavy thing inside him, going to the hospital. That way. But this—he looked in the other direction. Erika had walked this way and was moving rather quickly. She could easily be out of sight by now. He turned again and his foot caught on something. He felt himself falling. There was a slow gliding feel to it as though the falling took forever and he gave himself over to the sensation without thought of correcting it. He was falling. It felt so good.

  The aliens are upon him. They crowd around, gibbering. Blurred gestures in the liquid light. They crowd closer; he raises his arm to ward them off and in the act his vision clears. The damp air parts and he sees. His arm is a spindly thread of bone, the forearm showing strings of muscle under the skin. He does not understand. He moves his head. The upper arm is a sagging bag of fat, and white. The sliding marbled slabs of flesh tremble as he strains to hold up his arm. Small black hairs sprout from the gray skin. He tries to scream. Cords stand out on his neck but he can make no sound. The white creatures are drifting ghosts of white in the distance. Something has happened to him. He blinks and watches an alien seize his arm. The image ripples and he sees it is a woman, a nurse. He moves his arm weakly. O Be A Fine Girl, Help Me. The blur falls away and he sees the white creatures are men. They are men. Words slide by him; he cannot understand. His tongue is thick and heavy and damp. He twists his head. A latticework of glass tubes stands next to his bed. He sees his reflection in a stainless-steel instrument case: hollow pits of his eyes, slack jaw, wrinkled skin shiny with sweat. They speak to him. They want him to do something. They are running clean and cool. They want him to do something, to write something, to sign a form. He opens his mouth to ask why and his tongue runs over the smooth blunted edge of his gums. They have taken away his teeth, his bridge. He listens to their slurred words. Sign something. A release form, he was found in the street on his way to check in. The operation is tomorrow—a search, merely a search, exploratory…he wrenches away from them. He does not believe them. They are white creatures. Aliens from the great drifting silences between the stars. Cyclops. Titan. He has spent his life on the aliens and they are not here. They have come to nothing. They are speaking again but he does not want to listen. If it were possible to close his ears—

  But why do they say I am old? I am still here. I am thinking, feeling. It cannot be like this. I am, I am… Why do they say I am old?

  In Alien Flesh

  (1978)

  I.

  —green surf lapping, chilling—

  Reginri’s hand jerked convulsively on the sheets. His eyes were closed.

  —silver coins gliding and turning in the speckled sky, eclipsing the sun—

  The sheets were a clinging swamp. He twisted in their grip.

  —a chiming song, tinkling cool rivulets washing his skin—

  He opened his eyes.

  A yellow blade of afternoon sunlight hung in the room, dust motes swimming through it. He panted in shallow gasps. Belej was standing beside the bed.

  “They came again, didn’t they?” she said, almost whispering.

  “Ye…yes.” His throat was tight and dry.

  “This can’t go on, darling. We thought you could sleep better in the daytime, with everyone out in the fields, but—”

  “Got to get out of here,” he mumbled. He rolled out of bed and pulled on his black work suit. Belej stood silent, blinking rapidly, chewing at her lower lip. Reginri fastened his boots and slammed out of the room. His steps thumped hollowly on the planking. She listened to them hurrying down the hallway. They paused; the airless silence returned. Then the outer door creaked, banged shut.

  She hurried after him.

  She caught up near the rim of the canyon, a hundred meters from the log buildings. He looked at her. He scratched at his matted hair and hunched his shoulders forward.

  “That one was pretty bad,”
he said woodenly.

  “If they keep on getting worse…”

  “They won’t.”

  “We hope. But we don’t know that. If I understood what they’re about…”

  “I can’t quite describe it. They’re different each time. The feeling seems the same, even though…” Some warmth had returned to his voice. “It’s hard.”

  Belej sat down near the canyon edge. She looked up at him. Her eyebrows knitted together above large dark eyes. “All right,” she said, her mood shifting suddenly, an edge coming into her voice. “One, I don’t know what these nightmares are about. Two, I don’t know where they come from. That horrible expedition you went on, I suppose, but you’re not even clear about that. Three, I don’t know why you insisted on joining their dirty expedition in the—”

  “I told you, dammit. I had to go.”

  “You wanted the extra money,” Belej said flatly. She cupped her chin in a tiny hand.

  “It wasn’t extra money, it was any money.” He glowered at the jagged canyon below them. Her calm, accusing manner irritated him.

  “You’re a pod cutter. You could have found work.”

  “The season was bad. This was last year, remember. Rates weren’t good.”

  “But you had heard about this Sasuke and Leo, what people said about them—”

  “Vanleo, that’s the name. Not Leo.”

  “Well, whatever. You didn’t have to work for them.”

  “No, of course not,” he said savagely. “I could’ve busted my ass on a field-hopper in planting season, twelve hours a day for thirty units pay, max. And when I got tired of that, or broke a leg, maybe I could’ve signed on to mold circuitry like a drone.” He picked up a stone and flung it far over the canyon edge. “A great life.”

  Belej paused a long moment. At the far angular end of the canyon a pink mist seeped between the highest peaks and began spilling downward, gathering speed. Zeta Reticuli still rode high in the mottled blue sky, but a chill was sweeping up from the canyon. The wind carried an acrid tang.

  He wrinkled his nose. Within an hour they would have to move inside. The faint reddish haze would thicken. It was good for the plant life of northern Persenuae, but to human lungs the fog was an itching irritant.

  Belej sighed. “Still,” she said softly, “you weren’t forced to go. If you had known it would be so—”

  “Yes,” he said, and something turned in his stomach. “If anybody had known.”

  II.

  At first it was not the Drongheda that he found disquieting. It was the beach itself and, most of all, the waves.

  They lapped at his feet with a slow, sucking energy, undermining the coarse sand beneath his boots. They began as little ripples that marched in from the gray horizon and slowly hissed up the black beach. Reginri watched one curl into greenish foam farther out; the tide was falling.

  “Why are they so slow?” he said.

  Sasuke looked up from the carry-pouches. “What?”

  “Why do the waves take so long?”

  Sasuke stopped for a moment and studied the ponderous swell, flecked with yellow waterweed. An occasional large wave broke and splashed on the sharp lava rocks farther out. “I never thought about it,” Sasuke said. “Guess it’s the lower gravity.”

  “Uh-hum.” Reginri shrugged.

  A skimmer fish broke water and snapped at something in the air. Somehow, the small matter of the waves unnerved him. He stretched restlessly in his skinsuit.

  “I guess the low-gee sim doesn’t prepare you for everything,” he said. Sasuke didn’t hear; he was folding out the tappers, coils and other gear.

  Reginri could put it off no longer. He fished out his binocs and looked at the Drongheda.

  At first it seemed like a smooth brown rock, water-worn and timeless. And the reports were correct: it moved landward. It rose like an immense blister on the rippled sea. He squinted, trying to see the dark circle of the pithole. There, yes, a shadowed blur ringed with dappled red. At the center, darker, lay his entranceway. It looked impossibly small.

  He lowered the binocs, blinking. Zeta Reticuli burned low on the flat horizon, a fierce orange point that sliced through this planet’s thin air.

  “God, I could do with a burn,” Reginri said.

  “None of that, you’ll need your wits in there,” Sasuke said stiffly. “Anyway, there’s no smoking blowby in these suits.”

  “Right.” Reginri wondered if the goddamned money was worth all this. Back on Persenuae—he glanced up into the purpling sky and found it, a pearly glimmer nestling in closer to Zeta—it had seemed a good bet, a fast and easy bit of money, a kind of scientific outing with a tang of adventure. Better than agriwork, anyway. A far better payoff than anything else he could get with his limited training, a smattering of electronics and fabrication techniques. He even knew some math, though not enough to matter. And it didn’t make any difference in this job, Sasuke had told him, even if math was the whole point of this thing.

  He smiled to himself. An odd thought, that squiggles on the page were a commercial item, something people on Earth would send a ramscoop full of microelectronics and bioengineered cells in exchange for—

  “Some help here, eh?” Sasuke said roughly.

  “Sorry.”

  Reginri knelt and helped the man spool out the tapper lines, checking the connectors. Safely up the beach, beyond the first pale line of sand dunes, lay the packaged electronics gear and the crew, already in place, who would monitor while he and Vanleo were inside.

  As the two men unwound the cables, unsnarling the lines and checking the backup attachments, Reginri glanced occasionally at the Drongheda. It was immense, far larger than he had imagined. The 3Ds simply didn’t convey the massive feel of the thing. It wallowed in the shallows, now no more than two hundred meters away.

  “It’s stopped moving,” he said.

  “Sure. It’ll be there for days, by all odds.” Sasuke spoke without looking up. He inserted his diagnostic probe at each socket, watching the meters intently. He was methodical, sure of himself—quite the right sort of man to handle the technical end, Reginri thought.

  “That’s the point, isn’t it? I mean, the thing is going to stay put.”

  “Sure.”

  “So you say. It isn’t going to roll over while we’re in there, because it never has.”

  Sasuke stopped working and scowled. Through his helmet bubble, Reginri could see the man’s lips pressed tight together. “You fellows always get the shakes on the beach. It never fails. Last crew I had out here, they were crapping in their pants from the minute we sighted a Drongheda.”

  “Easy enough for you to say. You’re not going in.”

  “I’ve been in, mister. You haven’t. Do what we say, what Vanleo and I tell you, and you’ll be all right.”

  “Is that what you told the last guy who worked with you?”

  Sasuke looked up sharply. “Kaufmann? You talked to him?”

  “No. A friend of mine knows him.”

  “Your friend keeps bad company.”

  “Sure, me included.”

  “I meant—”

  “Kaufmann didn’t quit for no reason, you know.”

  “He was a coward,” Sasuke said precisely.

  “The way he put it, he just wasn’t fool enough to keep working this thing the way you want. With this equipment.”

  “There isn’t any other way.”

  Reginri motioned seaward. “You could put something automated inside. Plant a sensor.”

  “That will transmit out through thirty meters of animal fat? Through all that meat? Reliably? With a high bit rate? Ha!”

  Reginri paused. He knew it wasn’t smart to push Sasuke this way, but the rumors he had heard from Kaufmann made him uneasy. He glanced back toward the lifeless land. Down the beach, Vanleo had stopped to inspect something, kneeling on the hard-packed sand. Studying a rock, probably—nothing alive scuttled or crawled on this beach.

  Reginri shrugged. “I
can see that, but why do we have to stay in so long? Why not just go in, plant the tappers and get out?”

  “They won’t stay in place. If the Drongheda moves even a little, they’ll pop out.”

  “Don’t make ’em so damned delicate.”

  “Mister, you can’t patch in with spiked nails. That’s a neural terminus point you’re going after, not a statphone connection.”

  “So I have to mother it through? Sit there up in that huge gut and sweat it out?”

  “You’re getting paid for it,” Sasuke said in clipped tones.

  “Maybe not enough.”

  “Look, if you’re going to bellyache—”

  Reginri shrugged. “Okay, I’m not a pro at this. I came mostly to see the Drongheda anyway. But once you look at it, that electronics rig of yours seems pretty inadequate. And if that thing out there decides to give me a squeeze—”

  “It won’t. Never has.”

  A short, clipped bark came over the earphones. It was Vanleo’s laugh, ringing hollow in their helmets. Vanleo approached, striding smoothly along the water line. “It hasn’t happened, so it won’t? Bad logic. Simply because a series has many terms does not mean it is infinite. Nor that it converges.”

  Reginri smiled warmly, glad that the other man was back. There was a remorseless quality about Sasuke that set his teeth on edge.

  “Friend Sasuke, don’t conceal what we both know from this boy.” Vanleo clapped Sasuke on the back jovially. “The Drongheda are a cipher. Brilliant, mysterious, vast intellects—and it is presumptuous to pretend we understand anything about them. All we are able to follow is their mathematics—perhaps that is all they wish us to see.” A brilliant smile creased his face.

  Vanleo turned and silently studied the cables that played out from the dunes and into the surf.

  “Looks okay,” he said. “Tide’s going out.”

  He turned abruptly and stared into Reginri’s eyes. “Got your nerve back now, boy? I was listening on suit audio.”