The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  One crashed. The others landed, although damaged.

  The authorities are keeping it quiet. They’re not just keep-ing us tourists in the dark—they’re playing mum with everybody.

  I hope the engineer is right. Joanna is fretting and we hardly ate anything for dinner, just picked at the cold lamb. Maybe tomorrow will settle things.

  December 20

  It did. When we woke, the Earth was rising.

  It was coming up from the western mountains, blue-white clouds and patches of green and brown, but mostly tawny desert. We’re looking west, across the Sahara. I’m writing this while everybody else is running around like a chicken with his head chopped off. I’m sitting on deck, listening to shouts and wild traffic and even some gunshots coming from ashore.

  I can see farther east now—either we’re turning, or we’re rising fast and can see with a better perspective.

  Where central Egypt was, there’s a big, raw, dark hole.

  The black must be the limestone underlying the desert. They’ve scraped off a rim of sandy margin enclosing the Nile valley, including us—and left the rest. And somehow, they’re lifting it free of Earth.

  No Quarthex flying around now. Nothing visible except that metallic blue smear of light high up in the air.

  And beyond it—Earth, rising.

  December 22

  I skipped a day.

  There was no time even to think yesterday. After I wrote the last entry, a crowd of Egyptians came down the quay, shuffling silently along, like the ones we saw back at Abu Simbel. Only there were thousands.

  And leading them was a Quarthex. It carried a big disclike thing that made a humming sound. When the Quarthex lifted it, the pitch changed.

  It made my eyes water, my skull ache. Like a hand squeezing my head, blurring the air.

  Around me, everybody was writhing on the deck, moan-ing. Joanna, too.

  By the time the Quarthex reached our ship I was the only one standing. Those yellow-shot, jittery eyes peered at me, giving nothing away. Then the angular head turned and went on. Pied piper, leading long trains of Egyptians.

  Some of our friends from the ship joined at the end of the lines. Rigid, glassy-eyed faces. I shouted but nobody, not a single person in that procession, even looked up.

  Joanna struggled to go with them. I threw her down and held her until the damned eerie parade was long past.

  Now the ship’s deserted. We’ve stayed aboard, out of pure fear.

  Whatever the Quarthex did affects all but a few percent of those within range. A few crew stayed aboard, dazed but ok. Scared, hard to talk to.

  Fewer at dinner.

  The next morning, nobody.

  We had to scavenge for food. The crew must’ve taken what was left aboard. I ventured into the market street nearby, but everything was closed up. Deserted. Only a few days ago we were buying caftans and alabaster sphinxes and beaten-bronze trinkets in the gaudy shops, and now it was stone cold dead. Not a sound, not a stray cat.

  I went around to the back of what I remembered was a filthy comer cafe. I’d turned up my nose at it while we were shopping, certain there was a sure case of dysentery waiting inside…but now I was glad to find some days-old fruits and vegetables in a cabinet.

  Coming back, I nearly ran into a bunch of Egyptian men who were marching through the streets. Spooks.

  They had the look of police, but were dressed up like Mardi Gras—loincloths, big leather belts, bangles and beads, hair stiffened with wax. They carried sharp spears.

  Good thing I was jumpy, or they’d have run right into me. I heard them coming and ducked into a grubby alley. They were systematically combing the area, searching the miserable apartments above the market. The honcho barked orders in a language I didn’t understand—harsh, guttural, not like Egyptian.

  I slipped away. Barely.

  We kept out of sight after that. Stayed below deck and waited for nightfall.

  Not that the darkness made us feel any better. There were fires ashore. Not in Aswan itself—the town was utterly black. Instead, orange dots sprinkled the distant hillsides. They were all over the scrub desert, just before the ramparts of the real desert that stretches—or did stretch—to east and west.

  Now, I guess, there’s only a few dozen miles of desert, before you reach—what?

  I can’t discuss this with Joanna. She has that haunted expression, from the time before her breakdown. She is drawn and silent. Stays in the room.

  We ate our goddamn vegetables. Now we go to bed.

  December 23

  There were more of those patrols of Mardi Gras spooks today. They came along the quay, looking at the tour ships moored there, but for some reason they didn’t come aboard.

  We’re alone on the ship. All the crew, the other tourists—all gone.

  Around noon, when we were getting really hungry and I was mustering my courage to go back to the market street, I heard a roaring.

  Understand, I hadn’t heard an airplane in days. And those were jets. This buzzing, I suddenly realized, is a rocket or something, and it’s in trouble.

  I go out on the deck, checking first to see if the patrols are lurking around, and the roaring is louder. It’s a plane with stubby little wings, coming along low over the water, burping and hacking and finally going dead quiet.

  It nosed over and came in for a big splash. I thought the pilot was a goner, but the thing rode steady in the water for a while and the cockpit folded back and out jumps a man.

  I yelled at him and he waved and swam for the ship. The plane sank.

  He caught a line below and climbed up. An American, no less. But what he had to say was even more surprising.

  He wasn’t just some sky jockey from Cairo. He was an astronaut.

  He was part of a rescue mission, sent up to try to stop the Quarthex. The others he’d lost contact with, although it looked like they’d all been drawn down toward the floating island that Egypt has become.

  We’re suspended about two Earth radii out, in a slowly widening orbit. There’s a shield over us, keeping the air in and everything—cosmic rays, communications, spaceships—out.

  The Quarthex somehow ripped off a layer of Egypt and are lifting it free of Earth, escaping with it. Nobody had ever guessed they had such power. Nobody Earthside knows what to do about it. The Quarthex who were outside Egypt at the time just lifted off in their ships and rendezvoused with this floating platform.

  Ralph Blanchard is his name, and his mission was to fly under the slab of Egypt, in a fast orbital craft. He was supposed to see how they’d ripped the land free. A lot of it had fallen away.

  There is an array of silvery pods under the soil, he says, and they must be enormous anti-grav units. The same kind that make the Quarthex ships fly, that we’ve been trying to get the secret of.

  The pods are about a mile apart, making a grid. But between them, there are lots of Quarthex. They’re building stuff, tilling soil, and so on—upside down! The gravity works opposite on the underside. That must be the way the whole thing is kept together—compressing it with artificial gravity from both sides. God knows what makes the shield above.

  But the really strange thing is the Nile. There’s one on the underside, too.

  It starts at the underside of Alexandria, where our Nile meets—met—the Mediterranean. It then flows back, all the way along the underside, running through a Nile valley of its own. Then it turns up and around the edge of the slab, and comes over the lip of it a few hundred miles upstream of here.

  The Quarthex have drained the region beyond the Aswan dam. Now the Nile flows in its old course. The big temples of Rameses II are perched on a hill high above the river, and Ralph was sure he saw Quarthex working on the site, taking it apart.

  He thinks they’re going to put it back where it was, before the dam was built in the 1960s.

  Ralph was supposed to return to Orbital City with his data. He came in close for a final pass and hit the shield they have, the one th
at keeps the air in. His ship was damaged.

  He’d been issued a suborbital craft, able to do reentries, in case he could penetrate the airspace. That saved him. There were other guys who hit the shield and cracked through, guys with conventional deepspace shuttle tugs and the like, and they fell like bricks.

  We’ve talked all this over but no one has a good theory of what is going on. The best we can do is stay away from the patrols.

  Meanwhile, Joanna scavenged through obscure bins of the ship, and turned up an entire case of Skivva, a cheap Egyptian beer. So after I finish this ritual entry—who knows, this might be in a history book someday, and as a good academic I should keep it up—I’ll go share it out in one grand bust with Ralph and Joanna. It’ll do her good. It’ll do us both good. She’s been rocky. As well,

  Malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s ways to man.

  December 24

  This little diary was all I managed to take with us when the spooks came. I had it in my pocket.

  I keep going over what happened. There was nothing I could do, I’m sure of that, and yet…

  We stayed below decks, getting damned hungry again but afraid to go out. There was chanting from the distance. Getting louder. Then footsteps aboard. We retreated to the small cabins aft, third class.

  The sounds got nearer. Ralph thought we should stand and fight but I’d seen those spears and hell, I’m a middle-aged man, no match for those maniacs.

  Joanna got scared. It was like her breakdown. No, worse. The jitters built until her whole body seemed to vibrate, fingers digging into her hair like claws, eyes squeezed tight, face compressed as if to shut out the world.

  There was nothing I could do with her, she wouldn’t keep quiet. She ran out of the cabin we were hiding in, just rushed down the corridor screaming at them.

  Ralph said we should use her diversion to get away and I said I’d stay, help her, but then I saw them grab her and hold her, not rough. It didn’t seem as if they were going to do anything, just take her away.

  My fear got the better of me then. It’s hard to write this. Part of me says I should’ve stayed, defended her—but it was hopeless. You can’t live up to your ideal self. The world of literature shows people summoning up courage, but there’s a thin line between that and stupidity. Or so I tell myself.

  The spooks hadn’t seen us yet, so we slipped overboard, keeping quiet.

  We went off the loading ramp on the river side, away from shore. Ralph paddled around to see the quay and came back looking worried. There were spooks swarming all over.

  We had to move. The only way to go was across the river.

  This shaky handwriting is from sheer, flat-out fatigue. I swam what seemed like forever. The water wasn’t bad, pretty warm, but the current kept pushing us off course. Lucky thing the Nile is pretty narrow there, and there are rocky little stubs sticking out. I grabbed onto those and rested.

  Nobody saw us, or at least they didn’t do anything about it.

  We got ashore looking like drowned rats. There’s a big hill there, covered with ancient rock-cut tombs. I thought of taking shelter in one of them and started up the hill, legs wobbly under me, and then we saw a mob up top.

  And a Quarthex, a big one with a shiny shell. It wore something over its head. Supposedly Quarthex don’t wear clothes, but this one had a funny rig on. A big bird head, with a long narrow beak and flinty black eyes.

  There was madness all around us. Long lines of people carrying burdens, chanting. Quarthex riding on those lifter units of theirs. All beneath the piercing, biting sun.

  We hid for a while. I found that this diary, in its zippered leather case, made it through the river without a leak. I started writing this entry. Joanna said once that I’d retreated into books as a defense, in adolescence—she was full of psychoanalytical explanations, it was a hobby. She kept think-ing that if she could figure herself out, then things would be all right. Well, maybe I did use words and books and a quiet, orderly life as a place to hide. So what? It was better than this “real” world around me right now.

  I thought of Joanna and what might be happening to her. The Quarthex can—

  (New Entry)

  I was writing when the Quarthex came closer. I thought we were finished, but they didn’t see us. Those huge heads turned all the time, the glittering black eyes scanning. Then they moved away. The chanting was a relentless, singsong drone that gradually faded.

  We got away from there, fast.

  I’m writing this during a short break. Then we’ll move on. No place to go but the goddamn desert.

  December 25

  Christmas.

  I keep thinking about fat turkey stuffed with spicy dress-ing, crisp cranberries, a dry white wine, thick gravy—

  No point in that. We found some food today in an abandoned construction site, bread at least a week old and some dried-up fruit. That was all.

  Ralph kept pushing me on west. He wants to see over the edge, how they hold this thing together.

  I’m not that damn interested, but I don’t know where else to go. Just running on blind fear. My professorial instincts—like keeping this journal. It helps keep me sane. Assuming I still am.

  Ralph says putting this down might have scientific value. If I can ever get it to anybody outside. So I keep on. Words, words, words. Much cleaner than this gritty, surreal world.

  We saw people marching in the distance, dressed in loin-cloths again. It suddenly struck me that I’d seen that clothing before—in those marvelous wall paintings, in the tombs of the Valley of Kings. It’s ancient dress.

  Ralph thinks he understands what’s happening. There was an all-frequencies broadcast from the Quarthex when they tore off this wedge we’re on. Nobody understood much—it was in that odd semi-speech of theirs, all the words blurred and placed wrong, scrambled up. Something about their mission or destiny or whatever being to enhance the best in each world. About how they’d made a deal with the Egyptians to bring forth the unrealized promise of their majestic past and so on. And that meant isolation, so the fruit of ages could flower.

  Ha. The world’s great age begins anew, maybe—but Percy Bysshe Shelley never meant it like this.

  Not that I care a lot about motivations right now. I spent the day thinking of Joanna, still feeling guilty. And hiking west in the heat and dust, hiding from gangs of glassy-eyed workers when we had to.

  We reached the edge at sunset. It hadn’t occurred to me, but it’s obvious—for there to be days and nights at all means they’re spinning the slab we’re on.

  Compressing it, holding in the air, adding just the right rotation. Masters—of space/time and the river, yes.

  The ground started to slope away. Not like going downhill, because there was nothing pulling you down the face of it. I mean, we felt like we were walking on level ground. But overhead the sky moved as we walked.

  We caught up with the sunset. The sun dropped for a while in late afternoon, then started rising again. Pretty soon it was right overhead, high noon.

  And we could see Earth, too, farther away than yesterday. Looking cool and blue.

  We came to a wall of glistening metal tubes, silvery and rippling with a frosty blue glow. I started to get woozy as we approached. Something happened to gravity—it pulled your stomach as if you were spinning around. Finally we couldn’t get any closer. I stopped, nauseated. Ralph kept on. I watched him try to walk toward the metal barrier, which by then looked like luminous icebergs suspended above barren desert.

  He tried to walk a straight line, he said later. I could see him veer, his legs rubbery, and it looked as though he rippled and distended, stretching horizontally while some force compressed him vertically, an egg man, a plastic body swaying in tides of gravity.

  Then he starting stumbling, falling. He cried out—a horrible, warped sound, like paper tearing for a long, long time. He fled. The sand clawed at him as he ran, strands grasping at his feet, trailing long streamers of gl
ittering, luminous sand—but it couldn’t hold him. Ralph staggered away, gasping, his eyes huge and white and terrified.

  We turned back.

  But coming away, I saw a band of men and women marching woodenly along toward the wall. They were old, most of them, and diseased. Some had been hurt—you could see the wounds.

  They were heading straight for the lip. Silent, inexorable.

  Ralph and I followed them for a while. As they approached the wall, they started walking up off the sand—right into the air.

  And over the tubes.

  Just flying.

  We decided to head south. Maybe the lip is different there. Ralph says the plan he’d heard, after the generals had studied the survey-mission results, was to try to open the shield at the ground, where the Nile spills over. Then they’d get people out by boating them along the river.

  Could they be doing that, now? We hear roaring sounds in the sky sometimes. Explosions. Ralph is ironic about it all, says he wonders when the Quarthex will get tired of intruders and go back to the source—all the way back.

  I don’t know. I’m tired and worn down.

  Could there be a way out? Sounds impossible, but it’s all we’ve got.

  Head south, to the Nile’s edge.

  We’re hiding in a cave tonight. It’s bitterly cold out here in the desert, and a sunburn is no help.

  I’m hungry as hell. Some Christmas. We were supposed to be back in Laguna Beach by now.

  God knows where Joanna is.

  December 26

  I got away. Barely.

  The Quarthex work in teams now. They’ve gridded off the desert and work across it systematically in those floating platforms. There are big tubes like cannon mounted on each end and a Quarthex scans it over the sands.

  Ralph and I crept up to the mouth of the cave we were in and watched them comb the area. They worked out from the Nile. When a muzzle turned toward us I felt an impact like a warm, moist wave smacking into my face, like being in the ocean. It drove me to my knees. I reeled away. Threw myself farther back into the cramped cave.