The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Tatsuhiko’s blunt jaw shifted slightly sidewise, which she knew promised a slightly patronizing remark. He said, “Of course, you are on firmer ground.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “Planetary geology cannot falsify so easily, I take it.”

  “I don’t understand.” Or are we both sending mixed signals? Then, to shake him a little, she asked liltingly, “Would you like a drink?”

  “I wished to walk the city a bit, as you were.”

  “Oh, this is in the city. We don’t have to return to camp. Come.”

  She deliberately took him through galleries of stone that seemed feather-light, suspended from thick walls by small wedges of pale rock; the sight was still unsettling, to one born to greater gravity. She padded quickly along precarious walkways teetering above brackish ponds, and then, with no time for eyes to adjust, through murky tunnels. A grove of spindly trees surrounded a round building of burnt-orange rock, breezes stirring from them a sound like fat sizzling on a stove. She stopped among them, looking for damp but firm sand. Without saying a word in answer to his puzzled expression, she dug with her hands a hole a palm wide and elbow-deep.

  “Wet gravel,” she said, displaying a handful. He looked puzzled. Did he know that this made him boyish and vulnerable? She would not put that past him; he was an instinctive analyzer. Once he had tried with her all the positions made possible by the short period when the starship had glided under low deceleration—penetrating her in mechanical poses of cartoonish angles, making her laugh and then, in short order, come hard and swiftly against him. Where was that playful man now?

  On alien ground, she knew. Preoccupied by the central moment of his life. And she could not reach out to touch him here, any more than she had the last few years on board.

  The stand of pale yellow reeds she had noticed the day before nearly blocked the building’s ample arched doorway. She broke off two, one fat and the other thin. Using the smaller as a ramrod, she punched the pith from the larger. Except for some sticking at the joints it worked and she thanked her memory of this trick.

  “A siphon,” she said, plunging the larger reed into the sand hole and formally offering it to Tatsuhiko. A bit uncertainly Tatsuhiko sucked on this natural straw, his frown turning to surprised pleasure.

  “It works. Ground water—not salty.”

  “I tire of the processed taste in our water. I learned this on one of our desert classes.” Pre-expedition training had been a blizzard of facts, techniques, gadgets, lore—all predicated on the earliest data from the probes, most of it therefore only marginally relevant; planets proved to be even more complex systems than they had suspected.

  He watched her carefully draw the cool, smelly, oddly pleasant water up and drink long and steadily. The very air here robbed the skin of moisture, and their dry throats were feasting grounds for the head colds that circulated among the crew.

  “This unfiltered water should be harmless, I suppose,” he said hesitantly, his face turning wary too late.

  She laughed. “You’ve already got a bellyful of any microbe that can feast off us.”

  “I thought there weren’t any such.”

  “So it seems.”

  Indeed, this was the most convincing proof that panspermia, the seeding of the galaxy by spores from a single planet, had never happened. Chujo and Genji shared a basic reproducing chain, helical like DNA but differing in elemental details. Somehow the two worlds had shared biological information. The most likely explanation lay in debris thrown out by meteorite bombardment through geological timescales, which then peppered the other planet. She saw his familiar self-involved expression and added, “But of course, we’ve only covered a tiny fraction of Chujo yet.”

  His look of dismay made her suppress another laugh. Specialization was so intense among them! Tatsuhiko did not realize that biospheres were thoroughly mixed, and that the deep, underlying incompatibility of Chujoan microbes with Earthly biochemistry was a planet-wide feature. “I’m just fooling, Tatsuhiko-san,” she said, putting stress on the more friendly form of address.

  “Ah.” Abrupt nod of head, tight jaw, a few seconds to recover his sense of dignity. There had been a time when he reacted with amusement to her jibes. Or rolled her over and pinned her and made her confess to some imaginary slight, laughing.

  They walked on, unspoken elements keeping them at a polite distance. She fetched forth a knife and cut a few notches in the soft length of the reed. As they walked she slipped the tip of the reed under her mask and blew through this crude recorder, making notes oddly reminiscent of the stern, plaintive call of the ancient Japanese country flute, the shakuhachi. She had played on such hastily made instruments while a young girl, and these bleak, thin-textured sounds took her back to a life which now seemed inconceivably, achingly remote—and was, of course. Probably few of them would ever walk the soil of the Home Islands again. Perhaps none.

  They wandered among the tumbled-down lofts and deeply cut alcoves, Miyuki’s music echoing from ruined walls. Here they passed through “streets” which were in fact pathways divided by thin partitions of gray-green stone, smoothed by wind and yet still showing the serpentine elaboration of colors—maroon, rose, aqua—inlaid by hands over ten thousand years ago. The dating was very imprecise, of course. Weaker planetary magnetic shielding, a different sun, an unknown climate history—all made the standard tables of carbon dating irrelevant.

  Tatsuhiko raised his hand and they stopped before a worn granite wall. Deeply carved into it was one of the few artworks remaining in the city, perhaps because it could not be carried away. She estimated it was at least a full Chujoan’s height on each of its square sides.

  She followed the immense curves of the dune tiger. Only twice had any human glimpsed this beast in the flesh. The single photograph they had showed a muscular, canvas-colored, four-legged killing machine. Its head was squat, eyes enormous, mouth an efficient V design. Yet the beast had a long, sensuous tail thickly covered with gray-green scales. Intricate, barbed, its delicate scales almost seemed like feathers.

  The ancient artist had taken this striking feature and stretched it to provide the frame and the substance of his work. The dune tiger’s tail flowed out of the beast—which glowered at the viewer, showing teeth—into a wrap-around wreath that grew gnarled branches, sprouted ample flowers, and then twisted about itself to form the unmistakable profile of an alert Chujoan native.

  The strange face also looked at the viewer, eyes even larger than the reality Miyuki had seen, mouth agape, head cocked at an angle. Miyuki would never know if this was a comic effect, but it certainly looked that way. And the sinuous tail, having made this head, wriggled around the design—to be eaten by the tiger itself.

  “Writhing at the pain of biting itself?” she whispered.

  “That could be. But wouldn’t the whole tiger struggle, not just the tail?”

  “Unless the tiger has just this instant bitten itself.”

  “Ummm, I hadn’t thought of that. A snapshot, an instant frozen in time.”

  She fingered her reed. “But then why does its tail make that face?”

  “Why indeed? I feel so empty before this work. We can bring so little to it!” He gestured angrily.

  “The archaeologists, they must have some idea.”

  “Oh, they suppose much. But they know little.”

  She followed the tiger’s tail with her eyes, looking fruitlessly for some clue. “This city had so many things ours do.”

  “But were they used the same way? The digging team hasn’t found a single grave. Most of what we know about ancient Earth comes from burial of the dead.”

  She touched the stone, found its cool strength oddly reassuring. “This has outlasted the pyramids.”

  “Maybe it was cut very deep?”

  “No… How long it has been buried we cannot tell. And Chujo’s lighter gravity should lead to less erosion, generally. But I would have expected the winds to rub this out.”

  Ta
tsuhiko shrugged. “Our dating could be wrong, of course.”

  “Not this far wrong.” Miyuki frowned. “I wonder if this place was more like an arrested Athens.”

  He looked at her speculatively. “A city-state? Difficult to tell, from a ruin.”

  “But the Chujoans still camp here—you found their old embers yourself.”

  “Until we scared them away, I suppose.”

  Miyuki studied the great wall. “You suspect they linger here, to view the ruins of what they were?”

  “They may not be even the same species which built all this.” Tatsuhiko looked around, as if trying to imagine the streets populated, to envision what forms would have ambled here.

  She gestured at small circles which appeared above the carving. “What are these?”

  Tatsuhiko frowned. “Symbols?”

  “No, they look like a depiction of real objects. See, here’s one that’s a teardrop.”

  He stooped to examine the wall. “Yes, the lowest of them is. And higher up, see, another teardrop, only not so pronounced.”

  Miyuki tried to fathom some sense to the round gouges. If the piece had perspective, the circles could be of any true size. “Teardrop at the bottom…and as they rise, they round out?”

  Tatsuhiko shrugged. “Rain droplets form round in the air, I believe, then make teardrops as they fall.”

  “Something the tiger gives off?”

  “How?”

  His questions were insightful, but there was something more here, she was sure of it. Her mother had once told her that art could touch secret places. She had described it in terms of simple events of childhood. When the summer rain had passed and the air was cool, when your affairs were few and your mind was at ease, you listened to the lingering notes of some neighbor’s flute chasing after the clear clouds and the receding rain, and every note seemed to drop and sink into your soul. That was how it was now, this moment, without explanations.

  Miyuki let the moment pass. Tatsuhiko gave up in exasperation. “Come—let’s walk.”

  She wanted to move through the city as though she had once been a citizen of it, to catch some fleeting fragrance of lives once lived.

  They walked on. She blew into her crude recorder again.

  To her the atonal, clear, crude tones seemed to mirror the strangely solid feel of this place, not merely the veiled city of opaque purpose but as well the wind-carved desert wastes surrounding it. Motionless and emotionless, at one moment both agonized and deeply still.

  “Perhaps that would be better to send back,” Tatsuhiko said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Better than our precious reports. Instead, transmit to Earth such music. It conveys more than our data, our measurements, our…speculations.”

  She saw through his guarded expression—tight jawline, pensive lips, veiled eyes—how threatened Tatsuhiko felt. The long voyage out had not made every member of the 482 crew familiar to her, and she and Tatsuhiko had always worked in different chore details, but still she knew the character-indices of them all. Crew had to fit within the narrow avenue which had allowed them to withstand the grand, epic voyage, and not decay into the instabilities which the sociometricians had so tellingly predicted.

  Tatsuhiko had lost great face in that abortive first encounter, and three other attempts by his team to provoke even a flicker of recognition from the Chujoans had failed just as miserably.

  Yet it would not do to address Tatsuhiko directly on this issue, to probe in obvious fashion his deepest insecurities. “You have illuminated a principal feature of their character, after all. That is data.”

  He snorted derisively. “Feature? That they do not think us worth noticing?”

  “But to take no notice—that is a recognition which says much.”

  Suspiciously: “What?”

  “That they know our strangeness. Respect it.”

  “Or hold it in contempt.”

  “That is possible.”

  His face suddenly opened, the tight lines around his eyes lightening. “I fear I have been bound in my own discipline too much.”

  “Sociobiology?”

  “Yes. We attempt to explain social behavior as arising from a species’ genetic heritage. But here—the categories we ourselves bring are based on a narrowing of definitions, all accomplished by our own brains—wads of gray matter themselves naturally selected for. We cannot use words like respect or contempt. They are illusions here.”

  She frowned. “In principle, of course. But these natives, they are so like ourselves…”

  Tatsuhiko chuckled. “Oh? Come tomorrow, we’ll go into the field. I’ll show you the proud Chujoans.”

  3.

  So-So Biology

  They squatted in a blind, peering through a gauzy, dim dawn.

  Recently cut branches hid them from the roaming animals beyond. “I can’t see anything.” Miyuki shifted to get a better view of the plain. Scraggly gray trees dotted it and low, powder-blue brush clung to the gullies.

  Tatsuhiko gestured. “Look on the infra monitor.” He fiddled, sharpening the image.

  She saw a diffuse glow about half a kilometer away. It was near a snaky stream that had cut deeply into the broad, flat valley. “Something killed a kobold last night?”

  Tatsuhiko nodded. “Probably a ripper. Our sensors gave us an audio signature. Picked it up on omni and then focused automatically with a directional mike.”

  “Could it have been a dune tiger?”

  “Don’t know.” He studied her face. “You’re still thinking about the carving.”

  “It is beautiful,” she said quickly, embarrassed for reasons she could not fathom.

  “Indeed.” His quick eyes gave nothing away. “The kobold kill is scenting in the air, and this breeze will carry it. We now wait to see what the chupchups do.”

  “They call each other chupchups?”

  “We have analyzed their voice patterns. No clear syntax yet, of course. We aren’t even sure of many words. We noticed that they make name-like sounds—preess-chupchup, for example—they always end in that phrase.”

  “Perhaps it means ‘Mister.’ Or ‘Honorable.’”

  He shrugged. “Better than calling them ‘apes,’ as some crew have started to do.”

  She sat back, thighs already aching from squatting, and breathed in the dry aroma of the hunting ground. It was like Africa, she thought, with its U-shaped valleys cut by meandering rivers, the far ramparts of fault blocks being worn down by wind-blown sand. Only this world was far more bleak, cold, eerie in its shadows cast by the great sun now rising.

  This star always made her uneasy when it ponderously rose or set, for the air’s refraction flattened it. Filling four times as much of the sky as the sun she knew, it was nonetheless a midget, with a third the mass of Sol. Though the astronomers persisted in calling Murasaki a red dwarf, it was no dull crimson ember. In the exalted hierarchy of solar specialists, stars like this one, with surface temperature greater than a carbon-filament incandescent lamp, were nonetheless minor lukewarm bores. Had they been rare, astronomers might have studied them more before the discovery of life here. Though Murasaki sported sunspots and vibrant orange flares, its glow did not seem reddish to her, but rather yellow. The difference from Sol became apparent as she squinted at the carrion awaiting the dawn’s attentions. Detail faded in the distance, despite the thin air, because there was no more illumination than in an well-lit earthly living room after dark. Only as this swollen sun rose did it steal some of the attention from Genji, which perched always directly above, splitting the sky with its sardonic halfmoon grin.

  “Here come the first,” Tatsuhiko whispered tensely. His eyes danced with anticipation. When she saw him like this it was as if his formal skin had dissolved, giving her the man she had known.

  A fevered giggling came over the chilly plain. Distant forms scampered: small tricorns, running from a snakehound. Their excited cries seemed nearly human. As they outdistanced the snakehound,
which had sprung from concealment too soon, they sounded as though they laughed in derision. A hellbat flapped into view, drawn by the noise, and scooped up a burrowbunny which appeared to be just waking up as it stood at the entrance of its hole.

  Then she saw the band of low shapes gathering where the kobold carcass lay. They were hangmouths—ugly hyena-like beasts which drooled constantly, fought each other over their food, and never hunted. These scavengers dismembered the kobold as she watched, hunching forward with the rest of the survey team. Short, snarling squabbles came over the audios.

  “Vicious,” she whispered, despite her resolution to say nothing about others’ specialties.

  “Of course,” one of the team said analytically. “This is an ecology being slowly ground down by its biosphere. Hard times make hard species.”

  She shivered, not entirely from the dawn chill.

  As they watched, other teams reported that a party of Chujoans was headed this way. Tatsuhiko’s team had tracked these Chujoans, noted the kobold kill, and now awaited their collision with the squinting intensity of an author first watching his play performed.

  Miyuki could not see the chupchups at all. The gradual warming of the valley brought tangy suggestions of straw-flavored vegetation, pungent meat rotting, the reek of fresh feces.

  Tatsuhiko asked over comm, “Team C—have you counted them yet?”

  The reply came crisply, “Eight, three female adult, three male, two children.”

  “Any displays that show parental investment?”

  “Males carry the children.”

  Tatsuhiko nodded. “It’s that way in all groups smaller than a hundred. Interesting.”

  “What do those groups do?” Miyuki asked.

  “Food gathering.”

  One of the team, Hayaiko, said, “You should look at that data on incest avoidance. Very convincing. Female children are separated from the male in an elaborate ceremony, given special necklaces, the entire panoply of effects.”