The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  I had misheard the earlier gossip; perhaps I had mused over some problem while she related the story to me over breakfast. It was not the teacher’s mother who had cancer, but the teacher herself. I felt an instant, settling guilt. I could scarcely remember the woman’s face, though it was a mere hour later. I asked why she was still working.

  Because, my wife explained with her straightforward New England accent, it was better than staring at a wall. The chemotherapy took only a small slice of her hours. Anyway, she probably needed the money. The night beyond our windows seemed solid, flinty, harder than the soft things inside. In the glass I watched my wife take off her print dress and stretch backward, breasts thinning into crescents, her knobbed spine describing a serene curve that anticipated bed. She blessed me with a sensual smile.

  I went over to my chest of drawers and looked down at the polished walnut surface, scrupulously rectangular and arranged, across which I had tossed the residue of an hour’s dutiful parenting: a scrawled essay on marmosets, my son’s anthology of drawings, his reading list, and on top, the teacher’s bland paragraph of assessment. It felt odd to have called these things into being, these signs of a forward tilt in a small life, by an act of love or at least lust, now years past. The angles appropriate to cradling my children still lived in my hands. I could feel clearly the tentative clutch of my son as he attempted some upright steps. Now my eye strayed to his essay. I could see him struggling with the notion of clauses, with ideas piled on each other to build a point, and with the caged linear prison of the sentence. On the page above, in the loops of the teacher’s generous flow pen, I saw a hollow rotundity, a denial of any constriction of her life. She had to go on, this schoolgirl penmanship said, to forcefully forget a gnawing illness among a roomful of bustling children. Despite all else, she had to keep on doing.

  What could be energetic enough to push black holes out of the galactic center, up the slopes of the deep gravitational potential well? Only another black hole. The dynamics had been worked out years before—as so often happens, in another context—by William Saslaw. Let a bee-swarm of black holes orbit about each other, all caught in a gravitational depression. Occasionally, they veer close together, deforming the space-time nearby, caroming off each other like billiard balls. If several undergo these near-miss collisions at once, a black hole can be ejected from the gravitational trap altogether. More complex collisions can throw pairs of black holes in opposite directions, thriftily conserving angular momentum: jets and counter-jets. But why did NGC 1097 display two blue jets and two red? Perhaps the blue ones glowed with the phosphorescent waste left by the largest, most energetic black holes; their counter-jets must be, by some detail of the dynamics, always smaller, weaker, redder.

  I went to the jutting, angled, modernist library and read Saslaw’s papers again. Given a buzzing hive of black holes in a gravitational well—a bowl partly of their own making—many things could happen. There were compact configurations, tightly orbiting and self-obsessed, which could be ejected as a body. These close-wound families could in turn be unstable, once they were isolated beyond the galaxy’s tug, just as the group at the center had been. Caroming off each other, they could eject unwanted siblings. I frowned. This could explain the astonishing right-angle turn the long blue jet made. One black hole thrust sidewise and several smaller, less energetic black holes pushed the opposite way. We saw only the bully of the gang.

  As the galactic center lost its warped children, the ejections would become less probable. Things would die down. But how long did that take? NGC 1097 was no younger than our own Galaxy; on the cosmic scale, a sixty-million-year difference was nothing.

  In the waning of afternoon—it was only a bit more than twenty-four hours since I first laid out the plates of NGC 1097—the Operations report came in. There was no explanation for the Sagittarius A data. It had been received from the station in orbit and duly processed. But no command had made the scope swivel to that axis. Odd, Operations said, that it pointed in an interesting direction, but no more.

  But there were two added plates, fresh from processing.

  I did not mention to Redman in Operations that the resolution of these plates was astonishing, that details in the bloated, spilling clouds was unprecedented. Nor did I point out that the angle of view had tilted further, giving a better perspective on the outward-jutting inferno. With their polynomial percussion, the computers had given what was in the stream of downward-flowing data, numbers that spoke of something being banished from the pivot of our Galaxy. Software does not ask questions; it delivers the mail, cleansed and neat.

  Caltech is a compact campus. I went to the Athenaeum for coffee, ambling slowly beneath the palms and scented eucalyptus, and circumnavigated the campus on my return. In the varnished perspectives of these tiled hallways, the hammer of time was a set of Dopplered numbers, blue-shifted because the thing rushed toward us, a bulge in the sky. Silent numbers.

  There were details to think about, calculations to do, long strings of hypothesis to unfurl like thin, flapping flags. I did not know the effect of a penetrating, ionizing flux on Earth. Perhaps it could affect the upper atmosphere and alter the ozone cap that drifts above our heedless heads. A long trail of disturbed, high-energy plasma could fan out through our benign spiral arm—odd, to think of bands of dust and rivers of stars as a neighborhood where you have grown up—churning, working, heating. After all, the jets of NGC 1097 had snuffed out the beaded H II regions as cleanly as an eraser passing across a blackboard, ending all the problems that life knows.

  The NGC 1097 data was clean and firm. It would make a good paper, perhaps a letter to Astrophysical Journal Letters.

  But the rest, the strange plates—there was no crisp professional path. These plates had come from much nearer the Galactic center. I had struggled with this flat impossibility, and now submitted to it. There was no other explanation. The information had come outward at light speed, far faster than the pressing bulge, showing views tilted at a slight angle away from the radial vector that led to Earth.

  I had checked the newest Palomar plates from Sagittarius A this afternoon. There were no signs of anything unusual. No Doppler bulge, no exiled mass. This flatly contradicted the satellite plates.

  That was the key: old reliable Palomar, our biggest ground-based ’scope, showed nothing. Which meant that someone in high orbit had fed data into our satellite ’scope—exposures which had to be made nearer the Galactic center and then brought here and deftly slipped into our ordinary astronomical research. Exposures speaking of something stirring far inward, where we could not yet see it, beyond the obscuring lanes of dust. The plumes of fiery gas would take a while longer to work through the dark cloak.

  These plain facts had appeared on a screen, mute and undeniable, keyed to the data on NGC 1097. Keyed to a connection that another eye than mine could miss. Some astronomer laboring over plates of eclipsing binaries or globular clusters might well have impatiently erased the offending, multicolored spattering, not bothered to uncode the Dopplers, to note the persistent mottled red of the Galactic dust arm at the lower right, and so not known what the place must be. Only someone like me, a galactic structure specialist, would plausibly have made the connection to NGC 1097, and guessed what an onrushing black hole could do to a fragile planet: burn away the ozone layer, hammer the land with high-energy particles, mask the sun in gas and dust.

  But to convey this information in this way was so strange, so—yes, that was the word—so alien. Perhaps this was the way they had to do it; quiet, subtle, indirect. Using an oblique analogy that only suggested, yet somehow disturbed more than a direct statement. This very strangeness made it more plausible.

  And of course, this might be only a phrase in a longer message. Moving out from the Galactic center, they would not know we were here until they grazed the expanding bubble of radio noise that gave us away. So their data would use what they had, views at a different slant. The data itself, raw and silent, would not nece
ssarily call attention to itself. It had to be placed in context, beside NGC 1097. How had they managed to do that? Had they tried before? What odd logic dictated this approach? How…

  Take it in pieces. Some of the data I could use, some not. Perhaps a further check, a fresh look through the dusty Sagittarius arm in many wavelengths, would show the beginnings of a ruddy swelling, could give a verification. I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove.

  The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way.

  There is a small Episcopal church, not far up Hill Street, which offers a Friday communion in early evening. Driving home through the surrounding neon gumbo, musing, I saw the sign, and stopped. I had the NGC 1097 plates with me in a carrying case, ripe beneath my arm with their fractional visions, like thin sections of an exotic cell. I went in. The big oak door thumped solemnly shut behind me. In the nave two elderly men were passing woven baskets, taking up the offertory.

  I took a seat near the back. Idly I surveyed the worshipers, distributed randomly like a field of unthinking stars, in the pews before me. A man came nearby and a pool of brassy light passed the basket before me and I put something in, the debris at the bottom clinking and rustling as I stirred it. I watched the backs of heads as the familiar litany droned on, as devoid of meaning as before.

  I do not believe, but there is a communion. Something tugged at my attention; one head turned a fraction. By a kind of triangulation I deduced the features of the other, closer to the ruddy light of the altar, and saw it was my son’s teacher. She was listening raptly. I listened too, watching her, but could only think of the gnawing at the center of a bustling, swirling galaxy. And of her.

  The lights seemed to dim. The organ fell silent. Take, eat. This is the body and blood of and so it had begun. I waited my turn. I do not believe, but there is a communion. People went forward in their turns. The woman rose; yes, it was she, the kind of woman whose hand would give forth loops and spirals and who would dot her i’s with a small circle. A fresh, faint timbre from the organ seeped into the layered air. When it was time I was still thinking of NGC 1097, of how I would write the paper—fragments skittered across my mind, the pyramid of the argument was taking shape—and I very nearly missed the gesture of the elderly man at the end of my pew. Halfway to the altar rail I realized that I still carried the case of NGC 1097 exposures, crooked into my elbow, where the pressure caused a slight ache to spread: the spot where they had made the transfusion in the clinic, a fraction of life, blood given.

  I put it beside me as I knelt. The robes of the approaching figure were cobalt blue and red, a change from the decades since I had been an acolyte. There were no fidgeting boy acolytes at such a small service, of course. The blood would follow; first came the offered plate of wafers. Take, eat. Life calling out to life.

  I could feel the pressing weight of what lay ahead for me, the long roll of years carrying forward one hypothesis, a strange campaign. With no idea how long we had before catastrophe fell from a fevered sky.

  Then, swallowing, knowing that I would never believe this ceremony of blood and flesh, and yet that I would want it, I remembered my son, remembered that these events were only pieces, that the puzzle was not yet over, that I would never truly see it done, that as an astronomer I had to live with knowledge forever partial and provisional, that science was not final results, but instead a continuing meditation, carried on in the face of enormous facts—take it in phrases—let the sentences of our lives pile up.

  Relativistic Effects

  (1982)

  They came into the locker room with a babble of random talk, laughter, and shouts. There was a rolling bass undertone, gruff and raw. Over it the higher feminine notes ran lightly, warbling, darting.

  The women had a solid, businesslike grace to them, doing hard work in the company of men. There were a dozen of them and they shed their clothes quickly and efficiently, all modesty forgotten long ago, their minds already focused on the job to come.

  “You up for this, Nick?” Jake asked, yanking off his shorts and clipping the input sockets to his knees and elbows. His skin was red and callused from his years of linked servo work.

  “Think I can handle it,” Nick replied. “We’re hitting pretty dense plasma already. There’ll be plenty of it pouring through the throat.” He was big but he gave the impression of lightness and speed, trim like a boxer, with broad shoulders and thick wrists.

  “Lots of flux,” Jake said. “Easy to screw up.”

  “I didn’t get my rating by screwing up ’cause some extra ions came down the tube.”

  “Yeah. You’re pretty far up the roster, as I remember,” Jake said, eyeing the big man.

  “Uh huh. Number one, last time I looked,” Faye put in from the next locker. She laughed, a loud braying that rolled through the locker room and made people look up. “Bet ’at’s what’s botherin’ you, uh, Jake?”

  Jake casually made an obscene gesture in her general direction and went on. “You feelin’ OK, Nick?”

  “What you think I got, clenchrot?” Nick spat out with sudden ferocity. “Just had a cold, is all.”

  Faye said slyly, “Be a shame to prang when you’re so close to winnin’, movin’ on up.” She tugged on her halter and arranged her large breasts in it.

  Nick glanced at her. Trouble was, you work with a woman long enough and after a while, she looked like just one more competitor. Once he’d thought of making a play for Faye—she really did look fairly good sometimes—but now she was one more sapper who’d elbow him into a vortex if she got half a chance. Point was, he never gave her—or anybody else—a chance to come up on him from some funny angle, throw him some unexpected momentum. He studied her casual, deft movements, pulling on the harness for the connectors. Still, there was something about her…

  “You get one more good run,” Faye said slyly, “you gonna get the promotion. ’At’s what I’d say.”

  “What matters is what they say upstairs, on A deck.”

  “Touchy, touchy, tsk tsk,” Jake said. He couldn’t resist getting in a little dig.

  Nick knew. Not when Jake knew it might get Nick stirred up a little. But the larger man stayed silent, stolidly pulling on his neural hookups.

  Snick, the relays slide into place and Nick feels each one come home with a percussive impact in his body, he never gets used to that no matter that it’s been years he’s been in the Main Drive crew. When he really sat down and thought about it he didn’t like this job at all, was always shaky before coming down here for his shift. He’d figured that out at the start, so the trick was, he didn’t think about it, not unless he’d had too much of that ’ponics-processed liquor, the stuff that was packed with vitamin B and C and wasn’t supposed to do you any damage, not even leave the muggy dregs and ache of a hangover, only of course it never worked quite right because nothing on the ship did anymore. If he let himself stoke up on that stuff he’d gradually drop out of the conversation at whatever party he was, and go off into a corner somewhere and somebody’d find him an hour or two later staring at a wall or into his drink, reliving the hours in the tube and thinking about his dad and the grandfather he could only vaguely remember. They’d both died of the ol’ black creeping cancer, same as eighty percent of the crew, and it was no secret the Main Drive was the worst place in the ship for it, despite all the design specs of fifty-meter rock walls and carbon-steel bulkheads and lead-lined hatches. A man’d be a goddamn fool if he didn’t think about that, sure, but somebody had to do it or they’d all die. The job came down to Nick from his father because the family just did it, that was all, all the way back to the first crew, the original bridge officers had decided that long before Nick was born,
it was the only kind of social organization that the sociometricians thought could possibly work on a ship that had to fly between stars, they all knew that and nobody questioned it any more than they’d want to change a pressure spec on a seal. You just didn’t, was all there was to it. He’d learned that since he could first understand the church services, or the yearly anniversary of the Blowout up on the bridge, or the things that his father told him, even when the old man was dying with the black crawling stuff eating him from inside, Nick had learned that good—

  “God, this dump is gettin’ worse every—lookit ’at.” Faye pointed.

  A spider was crawling up a bulkhead, inching along on the ceramic smoothness.

  “Musta got outta Agro,” somebody put in.

  “Yeah, don’t kill it. Might upset the whole damn bio-sphere, an’ they’d have our fuckin’ heads for it.”

  A murmur of grudging agreement.

  “Lookit ’at dumb thing,” Jake said. “Made it alla way up here, musta come through air ducts an’ line feeds an’ who knows what.” He leaned over the spider, eyeing it. It was a good three centimeters across and dull gray. “Pretty as sin, huh?”

  Nick tapped in sockets at his joints and tried to ignore Jake. “Yeah.”

  “Poor thing. Don’t know where in hell it is, does it? No appreciation for how important a place this is. We’re ’bout to see a whole new age start in this locker room, soon’s Nick here gets his full score. He’ll be the new super an’ we’ll be—well, hell, we’ll be like this li’l spider here. Just small and havin’ our own tiny place in the big design of Nick’s career, just you think how it’s gonna—”

  “Can the shit,” Nick said harshly.

  Jake laughed.

  There was a tight feeling in the air. Nick felt it and figured it was something about his trying to get the promotion, something like that, but not worth bothering about. Plenty of time to think about it, once he had finished this job and gotten on up the ladder. Plenty of time then.