The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  It all dropped away then, as if the wave had pinned me to the ocean floor and filled my lungs with a sluggish liquid.

  And in an instant was gone. I rolled over, gasping, and saw Ralph staggering into the sunlight, heading for the Quarthex platform. The projector was leveled at him so that it no longer struck the cave mouth. So I’d been released from its grip.

  I watched them lower a rope ladder. Ralph dutifully climbed up. I wanted to shout to him, try to break the hold that thing had over him, but once again the better part of valor—I just watched. They carried him away.

  I waited until twilight to move. Not having anybody to talk to makes it harder to control my fear.

  God I’m hungry. Couldn’t find a scrap to eat.

  When I took out this diary I looked at the leather case and remembered stories of people getting so starved they’d eat their shoes. Suitably boiled and salted, of course, with a tangy sauce.

  Another day or two and the idea might not seem so funny.

  I’ve got to keep moving.

  December 27

  Hard to write.

  They got me this morning.

  It grabs your mind. Like before. Squeezing in your head.

  But after a while it is better. Feels good. But a buzzing all the time, you can’t think.

  Picked me up while I was crossing an arroyo. Didn’t have any idea they were around. A platform.

  Took me to some others. All Egyptians. Caught like me.

  Marched us to the Nile.

  Plenty to eat.

  Rested at noon.

  Brought Joanna to me. She is all right. Lovely in the long draping dress the Quarthex gave her.

  All around are the bird-headed ones. Ibis, I remember, the bird of the Nile. And dog-headed ones. Lion-headed ones.

  Gods of the old times. The Quarthex are the gods of the old time. Of the greater empire.

  We are the people.

  Sometimes I can think, like now. They sent me away from the work gang on an errand. I am old, not strong. They are kind—give me easy jobs.

  So I came to here. Where I hid this diary. Before they took my old uncomfortable clothes I put this little book into a crevice in the rock. Pen too.

  Now writing helps. Mind clears some.

  I saw Ralph, then lost track of him. I worked hard after the noontime. Sun felt good. I lifted pots, carried them where the foreman said.

  The Quarthex-god with ibis head is building a fresh temple. Made from the stones of Aswan. It will be cool and deep, many pillars.

  They took my dirty clothes. Gave me fresh loincloth, headband, sandals. Good ones. Better than my old clothes.

  It is hard to remember how things were before I came here. Before I knew the river. Its flow. How it divides the world.

  I will rest before I try to read what I have written in here before. The words are hard.

  Days Later

  I come back but can read only a little.

  Joanna says you should not. The ibis will not like it if I do.

  I remember I liked these words on paper, in my days before. I earned my food with them. Now they are empty. Must not have been true.

  Do not need them any more.

  Ralph, science. All words too.

  Later

  Days since I find this again. I do the good work, I eat, Joanna is there in the night. Many things. I do not want to do this reading.

  But today another thing howled overhead. It passed over the desert like a screaming black bird, the falcon, and then fell, flames, big roar.

  I remembered Ralph.

  This book I remembered, came for it.

  The ibis-god speaks to us each sunset. Of how the glory of our lives is here again. We are one people once more again yes after a long long time of being lost.

  What the red sunset means. The place where the dead are buried in the western desert. To be taken in death close to the edge, so the dead will walk their last steps in this world, to the lip and over, to the netherworld.

  There the lion-god will preserve them. Make them live again.

  The Quarthex-gods have discovered how to revive the dead of any beings. They spread this among the stars.

  But only to those who understand. Who deserve. Who bow to the great symmetry of life.

  One face light, one face dark.

  The sun lights the netherworld when for us it is night. There the dead feast and mate and laugh and live forever.

  Ralph saw that. The happy land below. It shares the sun.

  I saw Ralph today. He came to the river to see the falcon thing cry from the clouds. We all did.

  It fell into the river and was swallowed and will be taken to the netherworld where it flows over the edge of the world.

  Ralph was sorry when the falcon fell. He said it was a mistake to send it to bother us. That someone from the old dead time had sent it.

  Ralph works in the quarry. Carving the limestone. He looks good, the sun has lain on him and made him strong and brown.

  I started to talk of the time we met but he frowned. That was before we understood, he says. Shook his head. So I should not speak of it. The gods know of time and the river. They know. I tire now.

  Again

  Joanna sick. I try help but no way to stop the bleeding from her.

  In old time I would try to stop the stuff of life from leaving her. I would feel sorrow. I do not now. I am calm.

  Ibis-god prepares her. Works hard and good over her.

  She will journey tonight. Walk the last trek. Over the edge of the sky and to the netherland.

  It is what the temple carving says. She will live again forever.

  Forever waits.

  I come here to find this book to enter this. I remember sometimes how it was.

  I did not know joy then. Joanna did not.

  We lived but to no point. Just come-go-come-again.

  Now I know what comes. The western death. The rising life.

  The Quarthex-gods are right. I should forget that life. To hold on is to die. To flow forward is to live.

  Today I saw the pharaoh. He came in radiant chariot, black horses before, bronze sword in hand. The sun was high above him. No shadow he cast.

  Big and with red skin the pharaoh rode down the avenue of the kings. We the one people cheered.

  His great head was mighty in the sun and his many arms waved in salute to his one people. He is so great the horses groan and sweat to pull him. His hard gleaming body is all armor for he will always be on guard against our enemies.

  Like those who fall from the sky. Every day now more come down, dying fireballs to smash in the desert. All fools. Black rotting bodies. None will rise to walk west. They are only burned prey of the pharaoh.

  The pharaoh rode three times on the avenue. We threw ourselves down to attract a glance. His huge glaring eyes regarded us and we cried out, our faces wet with joy.

  He will speak for us in the netherworld. Sing to the undergods.

  Make our westward walking path smooth.

  I fall before him.

  I bury this now. No more write in it.

  This kind of writing is not for the world now. It comes from the old dead time when I knew nothing and thought everything.

  I go to my eternity on the river.

  Time’s Rub

  (1985)

  1.

  At Earth’s winter ebb, two crabbed figures slouched across a dry, cracked plain.

  Running before a victor who was himself slow-dying, the dead-stench of certain destiny cloyed to them. They knew it. Yet kept on, grinding over plum-colored shales.

  They shambled into a pitwallow for shelter, groaning, carapaces grimed and discolored. The smaller of them, Xen, turned toward the minimal speck of burnt-yellow sun, but gained little aid through its battered external panels. It grasped Faz’s extended pincer—useless now, mauled in battle—and murmured of fatigue.

  “We can’t go on.”

  Faz, grimly: “We must.”

  Xen w
as a functionary, an analytical sort. It had chanced to flee the battle down the same gully as Faz, the massive, lumbering leader. Xen yearned to see again its mate, Pymr, but knew this for the forlorn dream it was.

  They crouched down. Their enemies rumbled in nearby ruined hills. A brown murk rose from those distant move­ments. The sun’s pale eye stretched long shadows across the plain, inky hiding places for the encroaching others.

  Thus when the shimmering curtains of ivory luminescence began to fog the hollow, Xen thought the end was here—that energy drain blurred its brain, and now brought swift, cutting death.

  Fresh in from the darkling plain? the voice said. Not acoustically—this was a Vac Zone, airless for millennia.

  “What? Who’s that?” Faz answered.

  Your ignorant armies clashed last night?

  “Yes,” Xen acknowledged ruefully, “and were defeated. Both sides lost.”

  Often the case.

  “Are the Laggenmorphs far behind us?” Faz asked, faint tracers of hope skating crimson in its spiky voice.

  No. They approach. They have tracked your confused alarms of struggle and flight.

  “We had hoped to steal silent.”

  Your rear guard made a melancholy, long, withdraw­ing roar.

  Xen: “They escaped?”

  Into the next world, yes.

  “Oh.”

  “Who is that?” Faz insisted, clattering its treads.

  A wraith. Glittering skeins danced around them. A patchy acrid tang laced the curling vacuum. In this place having neither brass, nor earth, nor boundless sea.

  “Come out!” Faz called at three gigaHertz. “We can’t see you.”

  Need you?

  “Are you Laggenmorphs?” Panic laded Faz’s carrier wave a bright, fervid orange. “We’ll fight, I warn you!”

  “Quiet,” Xen said, suspecting.

  The descending dazzle thickened, struck a bass note. Laggenmorphs? I do not even know your terms.

  “Your name, then,” Xen said.

  Sam.

  “What’s that? That’s no name!” Faz declared, its voice a shifting brew of fear and anger.

  Sam it was and Sam it is. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive it.

  Xen murmured at a hundred kiloHertz, “Traditional ar­chaic name. I dimly remember something of the sort. I doubt it’s a trap.”

  The words not yet free of its antenna, Xen ducked—for a relativistic beam passed not a kilometer away, snapping with random rage. It forked to a ruined scree of limestone and erupted into a self-satisfied yellow geyser. Stones pelted the two hunkering forms, clanging.

  A mere stochastic volley. Your sort do expend energies wildly. That is what first attracted me.

  Surly, Faz snapped. “You’ll get no surge from us.”

  I did not come to sup. I came to proffer.

  A saffron umbra surrounded the still-gathering whorls of crackling, clotted iridescence.

  “Where’re you hiding?” Faz demanded. It brandished blades, snouts, cutters, spikes, double-bore nostrils that could spit lurid beams.

  In the cupped air.

  “There is no air,” Xen said. “This channel is open to the planetary currents.”

  Xen gestured upward with half-shattered claw. There, stand­ing in space, the playing tides of blue-white, gauzy light showed that they were at the base of a great translucent cylinder. Its geometric perfection held back the moist air of Earth, now an ocean tamed by skewered forces. On the horizon, at the glimmering boundary, purpling clouds nudged futilely at their constraint like hungry cattle. This cylinder led the eye up to a vastness, the stars a stilled snowfall. Here the thin but persistent wind from the sun could have free run, gliding along the orange-slice sections of the Earth’s dipolar magnetic fields. The winds crashed down, sputtering, deliv­ering kiloVolt glories where the cylinder cut them. Crackling yellow sparks grew there, a forest with all trunks ablaze and branches of lightning, beckoning far aloft like a brilliantly lit casino in a gray dark desert.

  How well I know. I stem from fossiled days.

  “Then why—”

  This is my destiny and my sentence.

  “To live here?” Faz was beginning to suspect as well.

  For a wink or two of eternity.

  “Can you…” Faz poked the sky with a horned, fused launcher. “…reach up there? Get us a jec?”

  I do not know the term.

  Xen said, “An injection. A megaVolt, say, at a hundred kiloAmps. A mere microsecond would boost me again. I could get my crawlers working.”

  I would have to extend my field lines.

  “So it is true,” Xen said triumphantly. “There still dwell Ims on the Earth. And you’re one.”

  Again, the term—

  “An Immortal. You have the fieldcraft.”

  Yes.

  Xen knew of this, but had thought it mere legend. All material things were mortal. Cells were subject to intruding impurities, cancerous insults, a thousand coarse alleyways of accident. Machines, too, knew rust and wear, could suffer the ruthless scrubbing of their memories by a random bolt of electromagnetic violence. Hybrids, such as Xen and Faz, shared both half-worlds of erosion.

  But there was a Principle which evaded time’s rub. Order could be imposed on electrical currents—much as words rode on radio waves—and then the currents could curve into self-involved equilibria. If spun just so, the mouth of a given stream eating its own tail, then a spinning ring generated its own magnetic fields. Such work was simple. Little children made these loops, juggled them into humming fireworks.

  Only genius could knit these current whorls into a fully contorted globe. The fundamental physics sprang from an­cient Man’s bottling of thermonuclear fusion in magnetic strands. That was a simple craft, using brute magnets and artful metallic vessels. Far harder, to apply such learning to wisps of plasma alone.

  The Principle stated that if, from the calm center of such a weave, the magnetic field always increased, in all directions, then it was stable to all manner of magnetohydrodynamic pinches and shoves.

  The Principle was clear, but stitching the loops—history had swallowed that secret. A few had made the leap, been translated into surges of magnetic field. They dwelled in the Vac Zones, where the rude bump of air molecules could not stir their calm currents. Such were the Ims.

  “You…live forever?” Xen asked wonderingly.

  Aye, a holy spinning toroid—when I rest. Otherwise, distorted, as you see me now. Phantom shoots of burnt yellow. What once was Man, is now aurora—where winds don’t sing, the sun’s a tarnished nickel, the sky’s a blank rebuke.

  Abruptly, a dun-colored javelin shot from nearby ruined hills, vectoring on them.

  “Laggenmorphs!” Faz sent. “I have no defense.”

  Halfway to them, the lance burst into scarlet plumes. The flames guttered out.

  A cacophony of eruptions spat from their left. Gray forms leapt forward, sending scarlet beams and bursts. Sharp metal cut the smoking stones.

  “Pymr, sleek and soft, I loved you,” Xen murmured, thinking this was the end.

  But from the space around the Laggenmorphs condensed a chalky stuff—smothering, consuming. The forms fell dead.

  I saved you.

  Xen bowed, not knowing how to thank a wisp. But the blur of nearing oblivion weighed like stone.

  “Help us!” Faz’s despair lanced like pain through the dead vacuum. “We need energy.”

  You would have me tick over the tilt of Earth, run through solstice, bring ringing summer in an hour?

  Xen caught in the phosphorescent stipple a green underlay of irony.

  “No, no!” Faz spurted. “Just a jec. We’ll go on then.”

  I can make you go on forever.

  The flatness of it, accompanied by phantom shoots of scorched orange, gave Xen pause. “You mean…the fieldcraft? Even I know such lore is not lightly passed on. Too many Ims, and the Earth’s magnetic zones will be congested.”<
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  I grow bored, encased in this glassy electromagnetic shaft. I have not conferred the fieldcraft in a long while. Seeing you come crawling from your mad white chaos, I desired company. I propose a Game.

  “Game?” Faz was instantly suspicious. “Just a jec, Im, that’s all we want.”

  You may have that as well.

  “What’re you spilling about?” Faz asked.

  Xen said warily, “It’s offering the secret.”

  “What?” Faz laughed dryly, a flat cynical burst that rat­tled down the frequencies.

  Faz churned an extruded leg against the grainy soil, wast­ing energy in its own consuming bitterness. It had sought fame, dominion, a sliver of history. Its divisions had been chewed and spat out again by the Laggenmorphs, its feints ignored, bold strokes adroitly turned aside. Now it had to fly vanquished beside the lesser Xen, dignity gathered like tat­tered dress about its fleeing ankles.

  “Ims never share that. A dollop, a jec, sure—but not the turns of fieldcraft.” To show it would not be fooled, Faz spat chalky ejecta at a nearby streamer of zinc-laden light.

  I offer you my Game.

  The sour despair in Faz spoke first. “Even if we believe that, how do we know you don’t cheat?”

  No answer. But from the high hard vault there came descending a huge ribbon of ruby light—snaking, flexing, writing in strange tongues on the emptiness as it approached, fleeting messages of times gone—auguries of innocence lost, missions forgot, dim songs of the wide world and all its fading sweets. The ruby snake split, rumbled, turned eggshell blue, split and spread and forked down, blooming into a hemisphere around them. It struck and ripped the rock, spit­ting fragments over their swiveling heads, booming. Then prickly silence.

  “I see,” Xen said.

  Thunder impresses, but it’s lightning does the work.

  “Why should the Im cheat, when it could short us to ground, fry us to slag?” Xen sent to Faz on tightband.