The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Let’s stop in this’n,” Jake called, interrupting Nick’s muzzy thoughts, and he followed them into a small inn. Without his noticing it they had left the big observation dome. They angled through a tight, rocky corridor cut from the original asteroid that was the basic body of the whole starship.

  Among the seven thousand souls in the ten-kilometer-wide starship, there were communities and neighborhoods and bars to suit everyone. In this one there were thick veils of smoky euphorics, harmless unless you drank an activating potion. Shifts came and went, there were al-ways crowds in the bar, a rich assortment of faces and ages and tongues. Techs, metalworkers, computer jockeys, manuals, steamfitters, muscled grunt laborers. Cadaverous and silent alesoakers, steadily pouring down a potent brown liquid. Several women danced in a corner, oblivious, singing, rhyming as they went.

  Faye ordered drinks and they all three joined in the warm feel of the place. The euphorics helped. It took only moments to become completely convinced that this was a noble and notable set of folk. Someone shouted a joke. Laughter pealed in the close-packed room.

  Nick saw in this quick moment an instant of abiding grace: how lovely it was when Faye forgot herself and laughed fully, opening her mouth so wide you could see the whole oval cavern with its ribbed pink roof and the arching tongue alive with tension. The heart-stopping blackness at the back led down to depths worth a lifetime to explore, all revealed in a passing moment like a casual gift: a momentary and incidental beauty that eclipsed the studied, long-learned devices of women and made them infinitely more mysterious.

  She gave him a wry, tossed-off smile. He frowned, puzzled. Maybe he had never paid adequate attention to her, never sensed her dimensions. He strained forward to say something and Jake interrupted his thoughts with, “Hey there, look. Two bridgies.”

  And there were. Two bridge types, not mere officers but scientists; they wore the sedate blue patches on their sleeves. Such people seldom came to these parts of the ship; their quarters, ordained by time, nestled deep in the rock-lined bowels of the inner asteroid.

  “See if you can hear what they’re sayin’,” Faye whispered.

  Jake shrugged. “Why should I care?”

  Faye frowned. “Wanna be a scuzzo dope forever?”

  “Aw, stow it,” Jake said, and went to get more beer.

  Nick watched the scientist nearest him, the man, lift the heavy champagne bottle and empty it. Have to hand it to bioponics, he thought. They keep the liquor coming. The crisp golden foil at the head would be carefully collected, reused; the beautiful heavy hollow butts of the bottles had doubtless been fondled by his own grandfather. Of celebration there was no end.

  Nick strained to hear.

  “Yes, but the latest data shows definitely there’s enough mass, no question.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” said the other. “Must say I never thought there’d be enough between the clusters to add up so much—’’

  “But there is. No doubt of it. Look at Fenetti’s data, clear as the nose on your face. Enough mass density between the clusters to close off the universe’s geometry, to reverse the expansion.”

  Goddamn, Nick thought. They’re talking about the critical mass problem. Right out in public.

  “Yes. My earlier work seems to have been wrong.”

  “Look, this opens possibilities.”

  “How?”

  “The expansion has to stop, right? So after it does, and things start to implode back, the density of gas the ship passes through will get steadily greater—right?”

  Jesus, Nick thought, the eventual slowing down of the universal expansion, billions of years—

  “Okay.”

  “So we’ll accelerate more, the relativistic rate will get bigger—the whole process outside will speed up, as we see it.”

  “Right.”

  “Then we can sit around and watch the whole thing play out. I mean, shipboard time from now to the implosion of the whole universe, I make it maybe only three hundred years.”

  “That short?”

  “Do the calculation.”

  “Ummm. Maybe so, if we pick up enough mass in the scoop fields. This flyby we’re going through, it helps, too.”

  “Sure it does. We’ll do more like it in the next few weeks. Look, we’re getting up to speeds that mean we’ll be zooming by a galaxy every day.”

  “Uh-huh. If we can live a couple more centuries, ship-board time, we can get to see the whole shebang collapse back in on itself.”

  “Well, look, that’s just a preliminary number, but I think we might make it. In this generation.”

  Faye said, “Jeez, I can’t make out what they’re talkin’ about.”

  “I can,” Nick said. It helped to know the jargon. He had studied this as part of his program to bootstrap himself up to a better life. You take officers, they could integrate the gravitational field equations straight off, or tell how a galaxy was evolving just by looking at it, or figure out the gas density ahead of the ship just by squinting at one of the X-ray bands from the detectors. They knew. He would have to know all of that too, and more. So he studied while the rest of the squad slurped up the malt.

  He frowned. He was still stunned, trying to think it through. If the total mass between the clusters of galaxies was big enough, that extra matter would provide enough gravitational energy to make the whole universe reverse its expansion and fall backward, inward, given enough time…

  Jake was back. “Too noisy in ’ere,” he called. “Fergit the beers, bar’s mobbed. Let’s lift ’em.”

  Nick glanced over at the scientists. One was earnestly leaning forward, her face puffy and purplish, congested with the force of the words she was urging into the other’s ear. He couldn’t make out any more of what they were saying; they had descended into quoting mathematical formulas to each other.

  “Okay,” Nick said.

  They left the random clamor of the bar and retraced their steps, back under the observation dome. Nick felt a curious elation.

  Nick knows how to run the squad, knows how to keep the equipment going even if the voltage flickers, he can strip down most suits in under an hour using just plain rack tools, been doing it for forty years, all those power tools around the bay, most of the squad can’t even turn a nut on a manifold without it has to be pneumatic rrrrrtt quick as you please nevermind the wear on the lubricants lost for-ever that nobody aboard can synthesize, tools seize up easy now, jam your fingers when they do, give you a hand all swole up for a week, and all the time the squad griping ’cause they have to birddog their own stuff, breadboard new ones if some piece of gear goes bad, complaining ’cause they got to form and fabricate their own microchips, no easy replacement parts to just clip in the way you read about the way it was in the first generation, and God help you if a man or woman on the crew gets a fatal injury working in the throat crew, ’cause then your budget is docked for the cost of keeping ’em frozen down, waiting on cures that’ll never come just like Earth will never come, the whole planet’s been dead now a million years prob’ly, and the frozen corpses on board running two percent of the energy budget he read somewhere, getting to be more all the time, but then he thinks about that talk back in the bar and what it might mean, plunging on until you could see the whole goddamn end of the universe—

  “Gotta admit we got you that time, Nick,” Jake says as they approach the dome, “smooth as glass I come up on you, you’re so hard workin’ you don’t see nothin’, I give you a shot of extra spin, man your legs fly out you go wheelin’ away—”

  Jake starts to laugh.

  —and livin’ in each other’s hip pockets like this the hell of it was you start to begrudge ever’ little thing, even the young ones, the kids cost too, not that he’s against them, hell, you got to keep the families okay or else they’ll be slitting each other’s throats inside a year, got to remember your grandfather who was in the Third Try on the decelerators, they came near to getting some new magnets in place before the plasma turbulen
ce blew the whole framework away and they lost it, every family’s got some ancestor who got flung down the throat and out into nothing, the kids got to be brought up rememberin’ that, even though the little bastards do get into the bioponic tubes and play pranks, they got not a lot to do ’cept study and work, same as he and the others have done for all their lives, average crewman lasts two hundred years or so now, all got the best biomed (goddamn lucky they were shippin’ so much to Centauri), bridge officers maybe even longer, get lots of senso augmentation to help you through the tough parts, and all to keep going, or even maybe get ahead a little like this squad boss thing, he was that close an’ they took it away from him, small-minded bastards scared to shit he might make, what was it, fifty more units of rec credit than they did, not like being an officer or anything, just a job-jockey getting ahead a little, wanting just a scrap, and they gigged him for it and now this big mouth next to his ear is goin’ on, puffing himself up in front of Faye, Faye who might be worth a second look if he could get her out of the shadow of this loudmouthed secondrate—

  Jake was in the middle of a sentence, drawling on. Nick grabbed his arm and whirled him around.

  “Keep laughin’, you slimy bastard, just keep—”

  Nick got a throat hold on him and leaned forward. He lifted, pressing Jake against the railing of the walkway. Jake struggled but his feet left the floor until he was balanced on the railing, halfway over the twenty-meter drop. He struck out with a fist but Nick held on.

  “Hey, hey, vap off a li’l,” Faye cried.

  “Yeah—look—you got to take it—as it comes,” Jake wheezed between clenched teeth.

  “You two done me an’ then you laugh an’ don’t think I don’t know you’re, you’re—” He stopped, searching for words and not finding any.

  Globular star clusters hung in the halo beyond the spirals. They flashed by the ship like immense chandeliers of stars. Odd clumps of torn and twisted gas rushed across the sweep of the dome overhead. Tortured gouts of sputtering matter were swept into the magnetic mouth of the ship. As it arched inward toward the craft it gave off flashes of incandescent light. These were stars being born in the ship-driven turbulence, the compressed gases, collapsing into firefly lives before the ship’s throat swallowed them. In the flicker of an eyelid on board, a thousand years of stellar evolution transpired on the churning dome above.

  The ship had by now carved a swooping path through the narrow strait between the disks. It had consumed banks of gas and dust, burning some for power, scattering the rest with fresh ejected energy into its path. The gas would gush out, away from the galaxies, unable to cause the ongoing friction that drew the two together. This in turn would slow their collision, giving the glittering worlds below another million years to plan, to discover, to struggle upward against the coming catastrophe. The ship itself, grown vast by relativistic effects, shone in the night skies of a billion worlds as a fiercely burning dot, emitting at impossible frequencies, slicing through kiloparsecs of space with its gluttonous magnetic throat, consuming.

  “Be easy on him, Nick,” Faye said softly.

  Nick shook his head. “Naw. Trouble with a guy like this is, he got nothin’ to do but piss on people. Hasn’t got per…perspective.”

  “Stack it, Nick,” Faye said.

  Above them, the dome showed briefly the view behind the ship, where the reaction engines poured forth the raw refuse of the fusion drives. Far back, along their trajectory, lay dim filaments, wisps of ivory light. It was the Local Group, the cluster of galaxies that contained the Milky Way, their home. A human could look up, extend a hand, and a mere thumb-nail would easily cover the faint smudge that was in fact a clump of spirals, ellipticals, dwarfs and irregular galaxies. It was a small part of the much larger association of galaxies, called the Local Supercluster. The ship was passing now beyond the fringes of the Local Supercluster, forging outward through the dim halo of random glimmering-galaxies which faded off into the black abyss beyond. It would be a long voyage across that span, until the next supercluster was reached: a pale blue haze that ebbed and flowed before the nose of the ship, liquid light distorted by relativity. For the moment the glow of their next destination was lost in the harsh glare of the two galaxies. The disks yawned and turned around the ship, slabs of hot gold and burnt orange, refracted, moving according to the twisted optical effects of special relativity. Compression of wavelengths and the squeezing of time itself made the disks seem to open wide, immense glowing doors swinging in the vacuum, parting to let pass this artifact that sped on, riding a tail of forking, sputtering, violet light.

  Nick tilted the man back farther on the railing. Jake’s arms fanned the air and his eyes widened.

  “Okay, okay, you win,” Jake grunted.

  “You going upstairs, tell ’em you scragged me.”

  “Ah…okay.”

  “Good. Or else somethin’ might, well, happen.” Nick let Jake’s legs down, back onto the walkway.

  Faye said, “You didn’t have to risk his neck. We would’ve cleared it for you if you’d—”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nick said sourly.

  “You bastard, I oughta—”

  “Yeah?”

  Jake was breathing hard, his eyes danced around, but Nick knew he wouldn’t try anything. He could judge a thing like that. Anyway, he thought, he’d been right, and they knew it. Jake grimaced, shook his head. Nick waved a hand and they walked on.

  “Y’know what your trouble is, Nick?” Jake said after a moment. “Yer like this spider here.”

  Jake took the spider out of his jumpsuit pocket and held up the gray creature. It stirred, but was trapped.

  “Wha’cha mean?” Nick asked.

  “You got no perspective on the squad. Don’t know what’s really happenin’. An’ this spider, he dunno either. He was down in the locker room, he didn’t appreciate what he was in. I mean, that’s the center of the whole damn ship right there, the squad.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “This spider, he don’t appreciate how far he’d come from Agro. You either, Nick. You don’t appreciate how the squad helps you out, how you oughta be grateful to them, how mebbe you shouldn’t keep pushin’ alla time.”

  “Spider’s got little eyes, no lens to it,” Nick said. “Can’t see farther than your hand. Can’t see those stars up there. I can, though.”

  Jake sputtered, “Crap, relative to the spider you’re—”

  “Aw, can it,” Nick said.

  Faye said, “Look, Jake, maybe you stop raggin’ him alla time, he—”

  “No, he’s got a point there,” Nick said, his voice suddenly mild. “We’re all tryin’ to be reg’lar folks in the ship, right? We should keep t’gether.”

  “Yeah. You push too hard.”

  Sure, Nick thought. Sure I do. And the next thing I’m gonna push for is Faye, take her clean away from you.

  —the way her neck arcs back when she laughs, graceful in a casual way he never noticed before, a lilting note that caught him, and the broad smile she had, but she was solid too, did a good job in the blowback zone last week when nobody else could handle it, red gases flaring all around her, good woman to have with you, and maybe he’d need a lot of support like that, because he knows now what he really wants: to be an officer someday, it wasn’t impossible, just hard, and the only way is by pushing. All this scratching around for a little more rec credits, maybe some better food, that wasn’t the point, no, there was something more, the officers keep up the promotion game ’cause we’ve got to have something to keep people fretting and working, some-thing to take our minds off what’s outside, what’ll happen if—no, when—the drive fails, where we’re going, only what these two don’t know is that we’re not bound for oblivion in a universe that runs down into blackness, we’re going on to see the reversal, we get to hear the recessional, galaxies, peeling into the primordial soup as they compress back together and the ship flies faster, always faster as it sucks up the dust of time and hurls itself f
urther on, back to the crunch that made everything and will some day—hell, if he can stretch out the years, right in his own lifetime!—press every-thing back into a drumming hail of light and mass, now that’s something to live for—

  Faye said pleasantly, “Just think how much good we did back there. Saved who knows how many civilizations, billions of living creatures, gave them a reprieve.”

  “Right,” Jake said, his voice distracted, still smarting over his defeat.

  Faye nodded and the three of them made their way up an undulating walkway, heading for the bar where the rest of the squad would be. The ship thrust forward as the spiral galaxies dropped behind now, Doppler reddened into dying embers.