The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Tatsuhiko pursed his lips. “Don’t deduce too much too soon. They might have been marrying them off, for all we know.”

  Hayaiko blinked. “At age four?”

  “Check our own history. We’ve done about the same not that long ago,” Tatsuhiko said with a grin. He seemed relaxed, affable, a natural leader, but undercurrents played in his face.

  She saw that he was no longer beset by doubt, as he had been in pensive moments in the ancient city. He would redouble his efforts, she saw, summon up more gaman, the famed dogged persistence which had made Japan the leader of the world. Or did he aspire higher, to gaman-zuyoi, heroic effort?

  “The chupchups are creeping up on the carrion,” came a comm message.

  “They’ll fight the hangmouths?” Miyuki asked.

  “We’ll see,” Tatsuhiko said.

  She caught sight of the aliens then, moving in a squat-walk as they left a gully and quickly crossed to another. Their zigzag progress over the next half hour was wary, tediously careful as they took advantage of every tuft of grass, every slope, for concealment. She began to look forward to a fight with the hangmouths as their continuing snarls and lip-smacking over the audio told of the slow devouring of the carcass. It was, of course, quite unprofessional to be revolted by the behavior of species they had come so far to study, but she could not help letting her own delicate personal habits bring a curl of disgust to her lips.

  “They’re leaving,” comm called.

  The hangmouths began to stray from the carcass. “Picked it clean,” Tatsuhiko said.

  The chupchups ventured closer. The two children darted in to the kill, dodged rebuffs from the larger hangmouths, and snatched away some carelessly dropped sliver—like pauper children at a land baron’s picnic, Miyuki thought, in the days of the Shogunate. This intrusion seemed to be allowed, but when the adults crept closer a hangmouth turned and rushed at the leading chupchup. It scampered back to safety, despite the fact that it carried a long pointed stick. It held the stick up as if to show the hangmouth, but the drooling beast still snarled and paced, kicking up curtains of dust, holding the band of chupchups at bay for long minutes.

  “Why don’t they attack it?” she asked.

  “I have no idea.” Tatsuhiko studied the scene with binoculars. “Could the stick be a religious implement, not a weapon at all?”

  “I do not think it is trying to convert the hangmouth,” Miyuki said severely.

  “Along with semantic language, religion is the one accomplishment of humans which has no analogy in the animal world,” Tatsuhiko said stiffly. “I wish to know whether it is a biological property here, as it is for us.”

  “You believe we genetically evolved religion?”

  “Plainly.”

  “Oh, come now.”

  A flicker of the other man: a quick smile and “Religion is the opiate of the mortal.”

  How could he still surprise her, after many years? “You believe we’ve had religion so long that it’s buried in our genes?”

  “It is not merely a cultural manifestation, or else it would not be universal among us. Incest avoidance is another such.”

  She blinked. “And morals?

  “Moral pronouncements are statements about genetic fitness strategies.”

  All she could say was, “A severe view.”

  “A necessary one. Look there!”

  Two hellbats had roosted in trees near the kill site. “Note how they roost halfway down the canopy, rather than in the top. They wish to be close to the game.”

  The hangmouth had turned and now, with aloof disdain, padded away from the chupchup and its raised stick. Trotting easily, the hangmouths departed. The chupchup band ventured forward to the kobold body and began to root among the remains.

  Miyuki said, “The hellbats—”

  “See what the chupchups are doing? Breaking open the big thigh bones.” Tatsuhiko pointed to the vision screen, where a full color picture showed chupchups greedily sucking at the cracked yellow bones.

  Miyuki was shocked. “But why, when there’s meat left?”

  “The marrow, I suspect. It is rich in calories among the larger species here.”

  “But still—”

  “The chupchups prefer the marrow. They have given up on finding fresh meat, for they have given up hunting.” Tatsuhiko said this dispassionately, but his face wore an expression of abstracted scorn.

  With screeches they could hear even at this range, two hellbats launched themselves upon the knot of stooping chupchups. The large, leathery birds dove together at a chupchup child which had wandered a few meters from the band. Miyuki watched their glittery, jewellike eyes and bony wings as they slid down the sky.

  The first hellbat sank claws into the child and flapped strongly. A male chupchup threw itself forward but the second hellbat deflected it. A female chupchup ran around the male and snatched at the child. The hellbat bit the female deeply as it tried to gain the air, but she clubbed it solidly twice with the flat of her hand. The hellbat dropped the child. It flapped awkwardly away, joined by its partner.

  “They nearly got that little one!” Miyuki cried.

  “They go for the weaker game.”

  “Weaker?” Miyuki felt irritated at Tatsuhiko’s cool analysis. “The chupchups are armed.”

  “But they do not use them to hunt the larger game. Or even, it seems, to defend themselves. The only use we have observed for those weapons is the pursuit of small game. Easy prey.”

  Miyuki shook her head. “That seems impossible. Why not use them?”

  Somehow this direct question shattered Tatsuhiko’s stony scientific distance. “Because they have adapted—downward.”

  “Maybe just sideways.”

  “A once proud race of creators, now driven down to this.”

  “We ourselves, early man, we hunted in places like this. We could be forced back to it if—”

  “No. We were hunters, like the lion. We did not scavenge.”

  Miyuki said quietly, “I thought lions scavenged.”

  Tatsuhiko glared at her but acknowledged this uncomfortable fact with a curt nod of his head. “Man the hunter did not. These chupchups—they have let themselves be driven down to this lowly state.”

  She saw his vexed position. Traits derived from genes had led humans upward in ability. It had been a grand, swift leap, from wily ape to sovereign of the Earth. That tended to salt the truths of sociobiology with the promise of progress. Here, though, the same logic led to devolution of the once-great city-builders.

  She said lightly, “We are merely talking wildly. Making guesses.” She switched to English. “Doing so-so biology.” Perhaps the pun would lift their discussion away from the remorselessly reductionist.

  He gave her a cold smile. “Thank you, Miyuki-san, for your humor.” He turned to regard the distant feeding, where the chupchups now nuzzled among the bones. “Those cannot be the breed which built the cities. We have come so very slightly late.”

  “Perhaps elsewhere on Chujo—”

  “We will look, certainly. Still…”

  She said evenly, hoping to snap him out of this mood, “For four billion years, Earth supported only microbes. Oxygen and land plants are only comparatively recent additions. If those proportions hold everywhere, we are very lucky to find two planets which have more than algae!”

  His angular features caught the dawn glow, giving him a sardonic look even in his pressure mask.

  “You are trying to deflect my dark temper.”

  “Of course.”

  Each crew member was responsible for maintaining cohesion. They kept intact the old ship disciplines. In solidarity meetings, one never scratched one’s head or even crossed legs or arms before a superior, and always concluded even the briefest encounter with a polite bow—15 degrees to peers, 45 degrees to superiors. Every week they repeated the old rituals, even the patient writing of Buddhist sutras with wooden pens. The officers polished the boots of the lower ranks, and soo
n after the ranks reciprocated. Each was bound to the others. And she felt bound to him, though they had not been lovers for years, and she had passed through many liaisons since. Her longing to know him now was not carnal, though that element would never be banished, and she did not want it to be. She felt a need to reach him, to bring out the best that she knew lay within him. It was a form of love, though not one that songwriters knew. Perhaps in some obscure way it knitted into the cohesion of the greater expedition, but it felt intensely personal and incommunicable. Especially to the object of it all, standing obliviously a meter away. She snorted with frustration.

  Not noticing her mood, Tatsuhiko smacked his fist into his palm. “But so close! If we had come fifty thousand years ago! Seen those great ancestors of these, these cowards.”

  Miyuki blinked, sniffed, chuckled. “Then we would have been Neanderthals.”

  4.

  The Library

  Their flyer came down smoothly beside the spreading forest. The waving fields of dark grain beckoned, but Miyuki knew already that the stuff was inedible.

  Nearly everything on Chujo was. Only the sugar groups were digestible. Their dextro-rotary sense was the same as that of Earthly ones, a simple fact that led to deep mystery. Genji’s sugars had that identical helical sense, though with myriad different patterns. And the intelligent, automated probes which now had scanned a dozen worlds around further stars reported back the same result: where life appeared at all, anything resembling a sugar chain had the same sense of rotation. Some said this proved a limited form of molecular panspermia, with a primordial cloud seeding the region with simple organic precursors.

  But there still were deeper similarities between Genji and Chujo: in protein structures, enzymes, details of energy processing. Had the two worlds once interacted? They were now 156,000 kilometers apart, less than two-thirds the Earth-moon separation, but tidal forces were driving them further away. Their locked rotation minimized the stress from each others’ tides. Even so, great surges swept even the small lakes as the mother-sun, Murasaki, raised its own tides on both her worlds. Miyuki stood beside a shallow, steel-gray lake and watched the waters rush across a pebbled beach. The rasp and rattle of stones came like the long, indrawn breath of the entire planet.

  “Regroup!” Koremasa ordered over comm.

  Miyuki had been idling, turning over in her mind the accumulating mysteries. She studied the orderly grain fields with their regimental rows and irrigation slits, as the expeditionary group met. Their reports were orderly, precise: discipline was even more crisp amid these great stretches of alien ground. Close observation showed that this great field was self-managing.

  She watched as one of the bio group displayed a cage of rodents, each with prehensile, clawed fingers. “They cultivate the stalks, keep off pests,” the woman said. “I believe this field can prune and perhaps even harvest itself.”

  Murmurs of dissent gradually ebbed as evidence accumulated. Remains of irrigation channels still cut the valley. Brick-brown ruins of large buildings stood beside the restless lake. Small stone cairns dotted the landscape. It was easy for Miyuki to believe the rough scenario that the anthropologists and archaeologists proposed: that the slow waning of Chujo had driven the ancient natives to perfect crops which needed little labor, an astounding feat of biotech. That this field was a fragment of a great grain belt that had fed the cities. That as life suited to cold and aridity moved south, the ancients retreated into a pastoral, nomadic life. That—

  “Chupchups!” someone called.

  And here they came, already spreading out from the treeline a kilometer away. Miyuki clicked her vision to remote and surveyed them as she moved to her encounter position. This tribe had a herd. Domesticated snakehounds adroitly kept the short, bulky red-haired beasts tightly bunched. A plume of dust pointed at the baggage train—pole arrangements drawn behind thin, flat-headed animals. An arrowfowl came flapping from over a distant hillside and settled onto the shoulder of the largest chupchup—bringing a message from another tribe, she now knew enough to guess. The races met again.

  The leading chupchup performed as before—a long, lingering looking straight at the first human it met, then ignoring the rest. Miyuki stood still as the smelly, puffing aliens marched obliviously through the human formation.

  Nomads had always been a fringe element in human civilization, she reflected. Even ancient Nippon had supported some. But here the nomads were the civilization. The latest survey from satellites had just finished counting the chupchups; there were around a million, covering a world with more land area than Earth. The head of Exo-Analysis thought that the number was in fact exactly 1,048,576—1024 tribes of 1024 individuals apiece. He even maintained that each tribe held 32 families of 32 members each. Even if he was right, she thought, and the musky bodies passing stolidly by her now were units in some grandly ordained arithmetic, had it always been that way? How did they maintain it?

  She caught an excited murmur on comm. To her left a crew member was pointing toward a few stacked stones where three chupchups had stopped.

  Slowly, gingerly, they pried up the biggest slab of blue-grey granite. One chupchup drew something forth, held it to the light—a small, square thing—and then put it in a pocket of its shabby brown waistcoat. Then the chupchups walked on, talking in that warbling way of theirs, still ignoring the humans who stood absolutely still, aching for contact, receiving none. She almost laughed at the forlorn expressions of the crew as the last of the chupchups marched off, leaving only a fragrant odor of musty sweat. They did not inspect the fields or even glance at the ruins.

  “It’s a library!” someone called.

  Miyuki turned back to see that a crew man, Akihiro, had lifted the granite slab. Inside rested a few cubes, each ornately decorated. “I think this is a library. They were picking up a book.”

  Koremasa appeared as if he had materialized from the air. “Put it back!” he ordered tersely.

  Akihiro said, “But I—look, it’s—”

  “Back!”

  But by then it was too late. From the trees came the trolls.

  Miyuki was not a first-line combat officer. She thus had a moment, as others ran to form a defensive line, to observe the seemingly accidental geometry which unfolded as the troll attack began. The chupchups had stopped, turned around—and watched impassively as the trolls burst from the thick treeline. Had the chupchups summoned the trolls, once they saw their library violated? She could not guess from their erect posture, blandly expressionless faces, unmoving mouths.

  The trolls resembled chupchups as chimps resembled humans—shorter, wider, long arms, small heads. But they ran with the fluid speed of a hunting animal, and caught the nearest crew member before she could fetch her weapon forth from her pack. A troll picked her up and threw her like something it wished to discard—hurling her twenty meters, where she struck and bounced and rolled and lay still. The other trolls took no notice.

  They hesitated. Had they gotten some signal from the chupchups? But no—she saw that the wind had shifted. The odorous extract which the biotechs had made everyone smear themselves with—yes, that was it. The cutting reek of it, carried on the breeze, had confused the trolls for a moment. But then their rage came again, their teeth flashed with mad hunting passion, and they fell upon the next crew members.

  She would remember the next few instants for all her life. The weapons carriers liked to fire from a single line, to minimize accidents. Trolls struck that still-forming line. When he saw that the smell defense had failed, Koremasa blinked, raised his hand with a sad, slow gravity—and the rifles barked, a thin sharp sound in the chilly air.

  The sudden hard slaps were inundated by the snarls and howls of trolls as they slammed aside their puny opponents. The aliens were swift, sure, moving with enormous power and sudden, almost ballet-like agility. In their single-footed swerves, their quick ducks to avoid a rifle shot, their flicked blows that struck with devastating power, Miyuki saw how a billion yea
rs of evolution had engineered reflexes intricately suited to the lesser gravity.

  But then the concerted splatting violence took them down. Their elegant, intelligent attack had not counted on a volley of automatic fire. The great, bright-eyed beasts fell even as they surged on, oblivious to danger.

  The last few reached Miyuki and she saw, in slow-motion surrealism, the flushed, heady expression on a troll which stumbled as it took a round in its massive right arm. It’s ecstatic, she thought.

  But it would not be stopped by one shot. It staggered, looking for another enemy to take, and saw her. Red eyes filled with purple pupils widened. It swung its left arm, claws arcing out—and she ducked.

  The swipe whistled over her ear, caught her with a thunk in the scalp. It was more a sound, a booming, than a felt blow. She flew through the air, turning, suddenly and abstractly registering the pale blue, cloud-quilted sky, and then she landed on her left shoulder and rolled. A quick rasping brrrrt cut through a strange hollow silence that had settled around her. She looked up into the sky and the troll eclipsed this view like a red-brown thundercloud. It was not looking at her, but instead seemed to be gazing off into a world it could not comprehend. Then it felt the tug of mortality and orbited down into the acrid clouds of dust stirred by the battle, landing solidly beside her, not rolling, its sour breath coughing out for the last time.

  5.

  I-Witnessing

  They devoted three days to studying the fields and burying the bodies. A pall spread among them, the radio crackled with questions, and mission command wrung from each fact a symphony of meaning, of blame, of outrage.

  Miyuki was doubly glad that she had not sought a higher post in this exploration party. Koremasa had to feed the appetite of his superiors, safely orbiting Genji, with data, photos, transcripts, explanations, analysis. Luckily, two cameras had recorded most of the battle. Watching these images again and again, Miyuki felt a chill at the speed and intelligence of the troll assault. Her own head wound was nothing compared to the bloody cuts and gougings many others had received.