The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  All this time, devotees streamed past them in the gloom. None took the slightest notice of Clay. Some spoke to themselves.

  “Western science doesn’t seem to bother ’em much now,” Clay whispered wryly.

  Mrs. Buli nodded. The last figure to pass was a woman who limped, sporting an arm that ended not in a hand but in a spoon, nailed to a stub of cork.

  He followed Mrs. Buli into enveloping darkness. “Who were they?”

  “I do not know. They spoke seldom and repeated the same words. Dharma and samsara, terms of destiny.”

  “They don’t care about us?”

  “They appear to sense a turning, a resolution.” In the fitful moonglow her eyes were liquid puzzles.

  “But they destroyed the experiment.”

  “I gather that knowledge of your Western presence was like the wasp-things. Irritating, but only a catalyst, not the cause.”

  “What did make them—”

  “No time. Come.”

  They hurriedly entered a thin copse of spindly trees that lined a streambed. Dust stifled his nose and he breathed through his mouth. The clouds raced toward the horizon with unnatural speed, seeming to flee from the west. Trees swayed before an unfelt wind, twisting and reaching for the shifting sky.

  “Weather,” Mrs. Buli answered his questions. “Bad weather.”

  They came upon a small crackling fire. Figures crouched around it, and Clay made to go around, but Mrs. Buli walked straight toward it. Women squatted, poking sticks into flames. Clay saw that something moved on the sticks. A momentary shaft of moonlight showed the oily skin of snakes, tiny eyes crisp as crystals, the shafts poking from yawning white mouths that still moved. The women’s faces of stretched yellow skin anxiously watched the blackening, sizzling snakes, turning them. The fire hissed as though raindrops fell upon it, but Clay felt nothing wet, just the dry rub of a fresh abrading wind. Smoke wrapped the women in gray wreaths, and Mrs. Buli hurried on.

  So much, so fast. Clay felt rising in him a leaden conviction born of all he had seen in this land. So many people, so much pain—how could it matter? The West assumed that the individual was important, the bedrock of all. That was why the obliterating events of the West’s own history, like the Nazi Holocaust, by erasing humans in such numbing numbers, cast grave doubt on the significance of any one. India did something like that for him. Could a universe which produced so many bodies, so many minds in shadowed torment, care a whir about humanity? Endless, meaningless duplication of grinding pain…

  A low mutter came on the wind, like a bass theme sounding up from the depths of a dusty well.

  Mrs. Buli called out something he could not understand. She began running, and Clay hastened to follow. If he lost her in these shadows, he could lose all connection.

  Quickly they left the trees and crossed a grassy field rutted by ancient agriculture and prickly with weeds. On this flat plain he could see that the whole sky worked with twisted light, a colossal electrical discharge leathering into more branches than a gnarled tree. The anxious clouds caught blue and burnt-yellow pulses and seemed to relay them, like the countless transformers and capacitors and voltage drops that made a worldwide communications net, carrying staccato messages laced with crackling punctuations.

  “The vans,” she panted.

  Three brown vans crouched beneath a canopy of thin trees, further concealed beneath khaki tents that blended in with the dusty fields. Mrs. Buli yanked open the door of the first one. Her fingers fumbled at the ignition. “The key must be concealed,” she said quickly.

  “Why?” he gasped, throat raw.

  “They are to be always with the vans.”

  “Uh-huh. Check the others.”

  She hurried away. Clay got down on his knees, feeling the lip of the van’s undercarriage. The ground seemed to heave with inner heat, dry and rasping, the pulse of the planet. He finished one side of the van and crawled under, feeling along the rear axle. He heard a distant plaintive cry, as eerie and forlorn as the call of a bird lost in fog. “Clay? None in the others.”

  His hand touched a small slick box high up on the axle. He plucked it from its magnetic grip and rolled out from under.

  “If we drive toward the mine,” she said, “we can perhaps find others.”

  “Others, hell. Most likely we’ll run into devotees.”

  Figures in the trees. Flitting, silent, quick.

  “But—”

  He pushed her in and tried to start the van. Running shapes in the field. He got the engine started on the third try and gunned it. They growled away. Something hard shattered the back window into a spiderweb, but then Clay swerved several times and nothing more hit them.

  After a few minutes his heart-thumps slowed, and he turned on the headlights to make out the road. The curves were sandy and he did not want to get stuck. He stamped on the gas.

  Suddenly great washes of amber light streamed across the sky, pale lances cutting the clouds. “My God, what’s happening?”

  “It is more than weather.”

  Her calm, abstracted voice made him glance across the seat. “No kidding.”

  “No earthquake could have collateral effects of this order.”

  He saw by the dashboard lights that she wore a lapis lazuli necklace. He had felt it when she came to him, and now its deep blues seemed like the only note of color in the deepening folds of night. “It must be something far more profound.”

  “What?”

  The road now arrowed straight through a tangled terrain of warped trees and oddly shaped boulders. Something rattled against the windshield like hail, but Clay could see nothing.

  “We have always argued, some of us, that the central dictate of quantum mechanics is the interconnected nature of the observer and the observed.”

  The precise, detached lecturer style again drew his eyes to her. Shadowed, her face gave away no secrets.

  “We always filter the world,” she said with dreamy momentum, “and yet are linked to it. How much of what we see is in fact taught us, by our bodies, or by the consensus reality that society trains us to see, even before we can speak for ourselves?”

  “Look, that sky isn’t some problem with my eyes. It’s real. Hear that?” Something big and soft had struck the door of the van, rocking it.

  “And we here have finished the program of materialistic science, have we not? We flattered the West by taking it seriously. As did the devotees.”

  Clay grinned despite himself. It was hard to feel flattered when you were fleeing for your life.

  Mrs. Buli stretched lazily, as though relaxing into the clasp of the moist night. “So we have proven the passing nature of matter. What fresh forces does that bring into play?”

  “Huh!” Clay spat back angrily. “Look here, we just sent word out, reported the result. How—”

  “So that by now millions, perhaps billions of people know that the very stones that support them must pass.”

  “So what? Just some theoretical point about subnuclear physics, how’s that going to—”

  “Who is to say? What avatar? The point is that we were believed. Certain knowledge, universally correlated, surely has some impact—”

  The van lurched. Suddenly they jounced and slammed along the smooth roadway. A bright plume of sparks shot up behind them, brimming firefly yellow in the night. “Axle’s busted!” Clay cried. He got the van stopped. In the sudden silence, it registered that the motor had gone dead.

  They climbed out. Insects buzzed and hummed in the hazy gloom. The roadway was still straight and sure, but on all sides great blobs of iridescent water swelled up from the ground, making colossal drops. The trembling half-spheres wobbled in the frayed moonlight. Silently, softly, the bulbs began to detach from the foggy ground and gently loft upward. Feathery luminescent clouds above gathered on swift winds that sheared their edges. These billowing, luxuriant banks snagged the huge teardrop shapes as they plunged skyward.

  “I…I don’t…”

&
nbsp; Mrs. Buli turned and embraced him. Her moist mouth opened a redolent interior continent to him, teeming and blackly bountiful, and he had to resist falling inward, a tumbling silvery bubble in a dark chasm.

  “The category of perfect roundness is fading,” she said calmly.

  Clay looked at the van. The wheels had become ellipses. At each revolution they had slammed the axles into the roadway, leaving behind long scratches of rough tar. He took a step.

  She said, “Since we can walk, the principle of pivot and lever, of muscles pulling bones, survives.”

  “How…this doesn’t…”

  “But do our bodies depend on roundness? I wonder.” She carefully lay down on the blacktop.

  The road straightened precisely, like joints in an aged spine popping as they realigned.

  Angles cut their spaces razor-sharp, like axioms from Euclid. Clouds merged, forming copious tinkling hexagons.

  “It is good to see that some features remain. Perhaps these are indeed the underlying Platonic beauties.”

  “What?” Clay cried.

  “The undying forms,” Mrs. Buli said abstractly. “Perhaps that one Western idea was correct after all.”

  Clay desperately grasped the van. He jerked his arm back when the metal skin began flexing and reshaping itself.

  Smooth glistening forms began to emerge from the rough, coarse earth. Above the riotous, heaving land the moon was now a brassy cube. Across its face played enormous black cracks like mad lightning.

  Somewhere far away his wife and daughter were in this, too. G’bye, Daddy. It’s been real.

  Quietly the land began to rain upward. Globs dripped toward the pewter, filmy continent swarming freshly above. Eons measured out the evaporation of ancient sluggish seas.

  His throat struggled against torpid air. “Is…Brahma…?”

  “Awakening?” came her hollow voice, like an echo from a distant gorge.

  “What happens…to…us?”

  His words diffracted away from him. He could now see acoustic waves, wedges of compressed, mute atoms crowding in the exuberant air. Luxuriant, inexhaustible riches burst from beneath the ceramic certainties he had known.

  “Come.” Her voice seeped through the churning ruby air.

  Centuries melted between them as he turned. A being he recognized without conscious thought spun in liquid air.

  Femina, she was now, and she drifted on the new wafting currents. He and she were made of shifting geometric elements, molecular units of shape and firm thrust. A wan joy spread through him.

  Time that was no time did not pass, and he and she and the impacted forces between them were pinned to the forever moment that cascaded through them, all of them, the billions of atomized elements that made them, all, forever.

  Mozart on Morphine

  (1989)

  As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

  —Freeman Dyson, 1988

  All theory, dear friend, is grey,

  But the golden tree of life springs ever green.

  —Goethe, Faust

  1.

  I read a fragment of God’s mind, during that summer when He seemed to be trying to stop me.

  I realize this is not the usual way such proceedings go, with their pomp and gravity. But please bear with me. I shall try to talk of matters that scientists usually avoid, even though these are crucial to the unspoken rhythms of our trade.

  I live in a small community spread before the Pacific like a welcoming grin, thin but glistening in the golden shafts of sunlight. That unrelenting brilliance mocked my dark internal chaos as I struggled with mathematical physics. I worked through the day on my patio, the broad blue of the ocean lying with Euclidean grace beyond, perspective taking it away into measureless infinity. Endless descending glare on my gnarled equations, their confusion the only stain on nature.

  My habit was to conclude a frustrating day of particle theory by running on the broad sands of Laguna Beach, a kilometer downhill from my home. The salt air cleared my mind.

  In August of 1985 I went running barefoot on the beach at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. The sun hung low and red, and I pounded along crisply warm sand, vacantly watching the crumbling, thumping waves. I paid no attention to the small crowd forming up ahead and so when the first shot came it took me completely by surprise.

  I saw the teenagers scattering and the man in his twenties poking the small silvery gun at them, yelling something I couldn’t make out. I wondered if the gun was loaded with blanks because it wasn’t very loud.

  The man started swearing at a kid near me, who was moving to my right. I was still doggedly running the same way so when the second shot came, I was just behind the kid. The round went tssiiip! by my head.

  Not blanks, no. I did the next hundred meters in ten seconds, digging hard into the suddenly cloying sand. I turned to look back only once. A third thin splat sound followed me up the beach, but no screams. I heard more swearing from the skinny shooter, who was backing up the gray concrete stairs and trying to keep the pack of kids from following him.

  I stood and watched him fire one last time, not trying to hit anyone now but just keep them at bay. Then he turned and ran up the remaining stairs and onto the street beyond.

  I ran back and asked the kids what had happened and got a lot of conflicting stories. I ran back down the beach and in a few minutes saw a cop. I started to tell him what had happened. He said he had been sent down there to block this route, since the police were trying to track the man down in the streets. It was evidently a drug deal gone bust and the kids had started jazzing him around and he got mad.

  2.

  Walking home, I thought about Churchill’s saying, that there was nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed. I felt a touch of that, and remembered a similar time-compressing moment in June.

  I had been visiting my parents on their 50th wedding anniversary. My father was driving me to the reception after that Sunday morning’s church service. It was a mild sunny day in Fairhope, Alabama, and I was lazily breathing in the pine scent as my father stopped at a stop sign. He started off and from the corner of my vision I saw a sudden movement. It was a car that a nearby telephone junction box had hidden from view, coming from the right at 40 miles per hour.

  “Dad stop!” He hit the brake and the other car smashed into our front end. Our seat belts restrained us but somehow coming forward I smacked my head into the roof of the car. The world slipped around, wobbled, straightened. The hood was smashed sideways. The other car had hit and veered away. I got out, thinking dimly that if my father had not stomped down on the brake they would have come in on my side of the car and probably through the door. It was that close. The other car’s people were more shaken up than we were. The woman was driving without shoes, the car was borrowed, and she had broken her hand when their car went off the road and into a shallow ditch. My father took it all quite mildly and it seemed to me I could smell the pine trees even stronger now. The surge of mixed fear and elation came as I paced around, looking at the bashed cars.

  3.

  In late September I was making my final plans to go to India when I developed pains in my stomach, high up. My children had the same symptoms, apparently a standard flu that was going around, so I stayed in bed a few days and expected it to go away. I had to fly to northern California for a conference on Friday.

  On Thursday I was doing pretty well, running a little fever, though the pain had moved down some. I was getting used to it and it didn’t seem so bad. No other symptoms, I thought, just a pesky flu. My plane tickets were ready and I picked them up on the way into the university. I was sitting in my office trying to do a calculation at noon when the pain got a lot worse. I couldn’t stand up.

  It was pretty bad for half an hour. I called a doctor near the university and made an appointment for two o’clock a
nd waited out the pain. It subsided by one o’clock and I began to think things were going to be okay, that I could still travel. But I did go to the doctor. In her office I showed an elevated white count and a fever and some dehydration. When she poked my right side it hurt more. She thought it might be appendicitis and that I should go to an emergency room nearby. I thought she was making too much of it and wanted some mild pain suppressors so I could fly the next day.

  On the other hand, it might be good to check into matters. I wanted to go to the hospital in Laguna, where I knew a few doctors. She started to call an ambulance but I was pumped up by then and went out and got into my car and drove very fast into Laguna, skating my sports car fast down the canyon road. I stopped at home to tell my wife, Joan, and she drove me into the emergency room.

  It was the real thing of course and soon enough I was watching the fluorescent lights glide by as the anesthetist pushed me into the operating room. He said I must have a high tolerance for pain because the appendix was obviously swollen and sensitive. I asked him how quickly the drugs took effect, he said, “Well…” and then I was staring at the ceiling of my hospital room and it was several hours later.

  My wife came to kiss me good night. I asked her to bring my calculations to me the next day.

  I had a good night, slept well. In the morning my doctor told me his suspicions had been right, that when the pain got bad in my office it had been my appendix bursting. By the time they opened me up the stuff had spread. I asked to see the appendix and they brought it up to me later, a red lumpy thing with white speckles all over the top of it. I asked what the white spots were and the aide said casually, “Oh, that’s gangrene. It’s riddled with the stuff.”

  The doctor said there was a 60% chance the antibiotics would not take out the gangrene that had spread throughout my lower abdomen, so of course I figured I would be in the lucky 40%. By the early hours of the next morning, Saturday, I knew I was wrong. I became more and more feverish. I could not sleep but a bone-deep fatigue seeped through me.