The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  I had stood up and walked around in the afternoon but when the night nurse tried it with me again I couldn’t get to my feet. I was throwing up vile sour stuff and the orderly was talking to me about inserting some tubes and then the tube was going in my nose and down my throat and a bottle nearby was filling with brown bile, lots of it, a steady flow.

  I couldn’t sleep, even with the drugs. There was talk about not giving me too many drugs for fear of suppressing my central nervous system too much, which didn’t make much sense to me, but then, little did. Things began to run together—the ceiling lights, words, images of frowning faces. The doctor appeared around 6:30 a.m. and said the antibiotics weren’t working, my white count was soaring. There was talk about this I could not follow.

  A man came by and reminded me to use the plastic tube with a ball in it that the nurse had given me the day before. You blew into it and kept a ball in the air and that was to exercise your general respiration. It seemed dumb to me, I could breathe fine, but I did it anyway and asked for some breakfast. I wasn’t getting any, they were feeding me from the array of bottles going into my IV, and wouldn’t give me more than ice chips to suck on. I was hungry. Logic didn’t seem to work on the nurses.

  There were more people around by that time and I realized blearily that this was very much like the descriptions in a short story of mine written more than a decade before, “White Creatures.” What these quickly moving white-smocked beings were doing was just as incomprehensible to me as it had been to the character in that story. My fever was climbing a degree every two hours and Joan was patting my brow with a cool cloth and I wanted some food.

  I didn’t see how they could expect a man to get better if they didn’t feed him. All they did was talk about stuff I couldn’t follow very well, they spoke too fast, and added more bottles to the antibiotic array. They started oxygen but it didn’t clear my head any. My IV closed off from vascular shock, Joan told me. A man kept punching my arms, trying to find a better way in and it hurt so I told him to knock it off if he couldn’t do better.

  Then they were tilting me back so the doctor could put a subclavial tube in close to my heart. It would monitor the flow there and provide a big easy access for the IV. Then I was wheeling beneath the soft cool fluorescents again and was in a big quiet room that was in the Intensive Care Unit, Joan said. I laid for a time absolutely calm and restful and realized I was in trouble. The guy with the breathing tube and the ball was gone but the nurses made me do it anyway, which still struck me as dumb because I wasn’t going to stop breathing, was I? If they would just give me some food I would get better.

  But after the gusts of irritation passed I saw in a clear moment that I was enormously tired. I hadn’t slept in the night and the tubes in my nose tugged at me when I moved. They had slipped a catheter into me, surprisingly painless, and I felt wired to the machines around me, no longer an independent entity but rather a collaboration. If I lay still with my hands curled on my chest I could maybe rest and if I could do that I could get through this and so I concentrated on that, on how blissful it felt after the nurse gave me another injection of morphine, how I could just forget about the world and let the world worry about me instead.

  I woke in the evening and then the next morning the doctor startled me awake by saying that I was better. They had called in more exotic antibiotics and those had stopped the fever’s rise, leveling it off at 105 degrees, where it held steady for a day and then slowly eased off. The room was still prickly with light but Joan came and I found her presence calming. I listened to tapes on my Sony set of all Mozart’s symphonies and every hour or so called for an injection and lifted off the sheets and spun through airy reaches, Mozart on morphine, skimming along the ceilings of rooms where well dressed people looked up at me with pleased expressions, interrupted as they dined on opulent plates of veal and cauliflower and rich pungent sauces, rooms where I would be again sometime, among people whom I knew but had no time for now, since I kept flying sedately along the softly lit yellow ceilings, above crimson couches and sparkling white tablecloths and smiles and mirth. Mozart had understood all of this and saw in this endless gavotte a way to loft and sweep and glide, going, to have ample ripe substance without weight.

  When the doctor took the stitches out a week later he said casually, “Y’know, you were the closest call I’ve had in a year. Another twelve hours and you would’ve been gone.”

  4.

  In November I went to India anyway. I hadn’t fully recovered, but it seemed important to not let the calm acceptance of mortality I had now deflect me from life itself. My fear of death was largely gone. It wasn’t any more a fabled place, but rather a dull zone beyond a gossamer-thin partition. Crossing that filmy divider would come in time but for me it no longer carried a gaudy, supercharged meaning. And for reasons I could not express a lot of things seemed less important now, little busynesses. People I knew were more vital to me and everything else seemed lesser, peripheral—including writing. Maybe even physics.

  In Agra I arose at dawn to see the Taj Mahal by the rosy first glow. It shimmered above the gardens, deceptively toylike until you realized how far away and so how huge the pure curved white marble thing was. The ruler who built it to hold his dead wife’s body had intended to build a black Taj also, across the river which lies behind. He would lie buried there, a long arcing bridge linking the two of them. But his son, seeing how much the first Taj cost, confined his father to a red sandstone fort a mile away for the last seven years of his life. There the old man lay on a bed and watched the Taj in a mirror in his last days.

  On the broad deck behind the Taj the river ran shallow since it was two months after the monsoon. On the right was a bathing spot for devotees. Some were splashing themselves with river water, others doing their meditation. To the left was a mortuary. The better off inhabitants of Agra had their bodies burned on pyres and then the lot was tossed into the river. If one could not afford the pyre, then after a simple ceremony the body was thrown off the sandstone quay and onto the mud flats or into the water if the river was high. This was usually done in early morning.

  By the glimmering dawn radiance I watched buzzards picking apart something on the flats. They made quick work of it, deftly tearing away the cloth, and in five minutes had picked matters clean. They lost interest and flapped away. The Taj coasted in serene eternity behind me, its color subtly changing as the sun rose above the trees, its cool perfect dome glowing, banishing the shadows below. Somehow in this worn alien place everything seemed to fit. Death just happened. From this simple fact came India’s inertia. I thought of Mozart and heard a faint light rhythm, felt myself skimming effortlessly over a rumpled brown dusty world of endless sharp detail and unending fevered ferment, and watched the buzzards and the bathers and felt the slow sad sway of worlds apart.

  Centigrade 233

  (1990)

  It was raining, of course. Incessantly, gray and gentle, smoothing the rectangular certainties of the city into moist matters of opinion. It seemed to Alex that every time he had to leave his snug midtown apartment, the heavens sent down their cold, emulsifying caresses.

  He hurried across the broad avenue, though there was scant traffic to intersect his trajectory. Cars were as rare as credible governments these days, for similar reasons. Oil wells were sucking bone dry, and the industrial conglomerates were sucking up to the latest technofix. That was as much as Alex knew of matters worldly and scientific.

  He took the weather as a personal affront, especially when abetted by the 3D ’casters who said things like, “As we all know, in the Greater Metropolitan Area latitudinal overpressures have precipitated (ha ha) a cyclonic bunching of moist offshore cumulus—” and on and on into the byzantine reaches of garish, graphically assisted meteorology. Weather porn.

  What they meant, Alex told himself as cold drops trickled under his collar, was the usual damp-sock dismality: weather permanently out of whack, thanks to emissions from the fabled taxis tha
t were never there when you needed them. Imagine what these streets were like only thirty years ago! Less than that! Imagine these wide avenues inundated to the point of gridlock, that lovely antique word. Cars parked along every curb, right out in the open, without guards to prevent joyriding.

  “Brella?” a beggar mumbled, menacing Alex with a small black club.

  “Get away!” Alex overreacted, patting the nonexistent shoulder holster beneath his trench coat. The beggar shrugged and limped away.

  Small triumph, but Alex felt a surge of pride. Onward!

  He found the decaying stucco apartment building on a back street, cowering beside a blocky factory. The mail slot to 2F was stuffed with junk mail. Alex went up creaky stairs, his nose wrinkling at the damp reek of old rugs and incontinent pets. He looked automatically for signs that the plywood frame door to 2F had been jimmied. The grain was as clear as the skin of a virgin spinster.

  Well, maybe his luck was improving. He fished the bulky key from his pocket. The lock stuck, rasped, and then turned with a reluctant thump; no electro-security here. He held his breath as the door swung open. Did he see looming forms in the musky murk beyond?

  This was the last and oldest of Uncle Herb’s apartments. Their addresses were all noted in that precise, narrow handwriting of the estate’s list of assets. The list had not mentioned that Uncle Herb had not visited his precious vaults for some years. The others had all been stripped, plundered, wasted, old beer cans and debris attesting to a history of casual abuse by neighborhood gangs.

  At the Montague Street apartment, Alex had lingered too long mourning the lost trove described in the list. Three slit-eyed Hispanics had kicked in the door as he was inspecting the few battered boxes remaining of his uncle’s bequest. They had treated him as an invader, cuffed him about and extorted “rent,” maintaining with evil grins that they were the rightful owners and had been storing the boxes for a fee.

  “The People owns this ‘parmen’ so you pays the People,” the shortest of the three had said.

  At last they went away, chuckling evilly. There had been scanty wealth in any of the three apartments, and now, one last hope opened to the click of a worn key.

  The door creaked. His fingers fumbled and found the wall switch. Vague forms leaped into solid, unending ranks—books! Great gray steel shelves crammed the room, anchored at floor and ceiling against the earth’s shrugs. He wondered how the sagging frame of this apartment building could support such woody weight. A miracle.

  Alex squeezed between the rows and discovered wanly lit rooms beyond, jammed alike. A four-bedroom apartment stripped of furniture, blinds drawn, the kitchen recognizable only by the stumps of disconnected gas fittings. But no, no—in the back room cowered a stuffed chair and storklike reading lamp. Here was Uncle Herb’s sanctuary, where his will said he had “idled away many a pleasant afternoon in the company of eras lost.” Uncle Herb had always tarted up his writing with antique archness, like the frilly ivory-white shade on the stork lamp.

  Alex sniffed. Dust lingered everywhere. The books were squeezed on their shelves so tightly that pulling one forth made Alex’s forearm muscles ache. He opened the seal of the fogged polymer jacket and nitrogen hissed out.

  Preserved! A signed and dated Martian Chronicles!

  Alex fondled the yellowed pages carefully. The odor of aging pulp, so poignant and undefinable, filled him. A first edition. Probably worth a good deal. He slipped the book back into its case, already regretting his indulgence at setting it free of its inert gas protection.

  He hummed to himself as he inched down the rows of shelves, titles flowing past his eyes at a range of inches. The Forever War with its crisp colors. A meter-long stretch of E. E. “Doc” Smith novels, all very fine in jackets. Last and First Men in the 1930 first edition.

  Alex had heard it described as the first ontological epic prose poem, the phrase sticking in his mind. He had not read it, of course. And the pulps! Ranks of them, gaudy spines shouting at customers now gone to dust. Alex sighed.

  Everything in the twencen had apparently been astounding, thrilling, startling, astonishing, even spicy. Heroines in distress, their skirts invariably hiked up high enough to reveal a fetching black garter belt and the rich expanse of sheer hose. Aliens of grotesque malignancy. Gleaming silver rockets, their prows no less pointed than their metaphor.

  The pulps took the largest bedroom. In the hallway began the slicks. Alex could not resist cracking open a Collier’s with Bonestell full-colors depicting (the text told him breathlessly) Wernher von Braun’s visionary space program. Glossy pages grinned at their first reader in a century. To the moon!

  Well, Alex had been there, and it wasn’t worth the steep prices. He had sprained an arm tumbling into a wall while swooping around in the big wind caverns. The light gravity had been great, the perfect answer for one afflicted with a perpetual diet, but upon return to Earth he had felt like a bowling ball for a month.

  Books scraped him fore and aft as he slid along the rows. His accountant’s grasp of numbers told him there were tens of thousands here, the biggest residue of Uncle Herb’s collection.

  “Lord knows what was in the other apartments,” he muttered as he extracted himself from the looming aisles. The will had been right about this apartment—it was all science fiction. Not a scrap of fantasy or horror polluted the collection. Uncle Herb had been a bug about distinctions that to Alex made no difference at all. No novels combining rockets and sword-wielding barbarians. No voluptuous vampires at all, to judge from the covers.

  Alex paused at the doorway and looked back, sighing. Bright lurid remnants of a lost past.

  He recalled what awe that Brit archeologist had reported feeling, upon cracking into Tut’s tomb. Only this time the explorer owned the contents.

  He made his way into the chilly drizzle, clucking contentedly to himself. He shared with Uncle Herb the defective gene of bibliophilia, but a less rampant case. He loved the crisp feel of books, the supple shine of aged leather, the snick snick snick of flipped pages. But to read? Not in hard copy, surely. No one did that anymore.

  And surely the value of a collectable did not depend on its mere use, not in this Tits ’n Glitz age.

  In less than an hour, Alex reclined on a glossy Korean lounger, safely home, speaking to Louise Keppler on his wall screen. Her face showed signs of a refurb job still smoothing out, but Alex did not allow even a raised eyebrow to acknowledge the fact; one never knew how people took such things. Louise was a crafty, careful dealer, but in his experience such people had hidden irrationalities, best avoided.

  “You got the index?” she wanted to know.

  He wanted to close this deal quickly. Debts awaited, compounding, and Uncle Herb had been a long time dying.

  Alex nodded eagerly. “Sure. I ran it through my assessing program just now.”

  She was swift, eyes darting over the inventory he had e-sent. He shivered and wished he had paid his heating bill this month. His digital thermometer read Centigrade 08. A glance at the window showed the corners filmed by ice. “I hope we can agree on a fair market price,” he said, hoping the timbre didn’t seem too hopeful.

  Louise smiled, eyes at last pinning him with their asessing blue. He thumbed a close-up and found that they were true color, without even a film to conceal bloodshot veins, the sullen residue of the City’s delights. “Alex, we’ve dealt before. You know me for no fool.”

  He blinked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Books, Alex? Early videos, yes. First generation CDs, sure—nobody realized they had only a seven-year lifetime, unless preserved. Those are rare.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “But books? These are even earlier, much—”

  “Sure, but who cares?” He had to break in.

  “Linear reading, Alex?” Sardonic now.

  “You should try it,” he said swiftly.

  “Have you?” she asked with an arched eyebrow. He wondered if she had close-upped him, seen his own red eyes.

  “Wel
l, sure…a little…”

  “Kids still do, certainly,” she said. “They’ll experiment. But not long enough to get attached to the classic twencen physical form.”

  “But this was, well, the literature of the future.”

  “Their future, our past—what of it?” Her high cheekbones lent her lofty authority. She tugged her furs about her. “That’s not our future.”

  His knowledge of science fiction came mostly from the myriad movids available. Now that the genre was dead, there was interest in resurrecting the early, naive, strangely grand works—but only in palatable form, of course—to repay the expense of translation into movids.

  “They do have a primitive charm,” he said uncertainly. “I find them—”

  “So torpid! So unaware of what can be done with dramatic line.” She shook her head.

  Alex said testily, “Look, I didn’t call for an exchange of critical views.”

  She made a show of a yawn. “Quite so. I believe you wanted a bid.”

  “Yes, but immediately payable. There are, ah, estate expenses.”

  “I can go as high as twelve hundred euros.”

  He blinked. “Twelve—” For the first time in his life Alex did not have to act out dismay at an opening price. He choked, sputtered, gasped.

  Louise added, “If you provide hauling out of that infested tawdry neighborhood and to a designated warehouse.”

  “Haul—” He coughed to clear his head. Twelve hundred was only two months’ rent, or three months of heating oil, with the new tax.

  “My offer is good for one day.”

  “Louise! You’re being ridiculous.”

  She shook her head.

  “You haven’t been keeping up. Items like this, they were big maybe a decade back. No more. Nostalgia market.”