The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  She studied the bare cliff faces that framed the valley. Volcanic ash layers like slices in an infinite sandwich, interspersed with more interesting lines of pink clay, of pebbled sand, of gray conglomerates. So they would have to do what they did at so many sites—sample quickly, thinking little, hoping that they had gotten the kernel of the place by dint of judgment and luck. So much! A whole world, vast and various—and another, hanging overhead like a taunt.

  The biologist reached the broad, flat field of green and knelt down to poke at it. He looked up in surprise. “It’s algae! Sort of.”

  Miyuki stepped on the stuff. It was so thin she could feel pebbles crunch beneath it. She bent to examine it, her suit gathering and bunching uncomfortably at her knees. The mat was finely textured, green threads weaving among brown splashes.

  The biologist dug his sample knife into it. “Tough,” he said. “Very tough.” With effort he punctured the mat and with visible exertion cut out a patch. His portable chemlab shot back an answer as soon as he inserted the patch. “Ummm. Distinct resemblance to…oh yes, that chupchup clothing. Same species, I’d say.”

  Tatsuhiko’s voice was tight and precise over comm. “This proves how long ago the original form was developed. Here it’s assumed a natural role in the environment. Unless the chupchups simply adapted it themselves from this original species. I—”

  “Funny biochem going on here,” the biologist said. “It’s excreting some kind of metabolic inhibitor. And—say, there’s a lot of hydrogen around it, too.”

  Tatsuhiko nodded. “That agrees with the tests on the chupchup living cloth. It interacts with the chupchup body, we believe.”

  “No, this is different.” The biologist moved on, tugging at the surface, taking readings. “This stuff is interconnected algae and fibers with a lot of energy stored in chemical bonds.”

  “Look at these,” Miyuki said. She lifted a flap of the thin but tough material. There was a pocket several meters long, open at one end.

  “Double-layered, I guess. Wonder why?” The biologist frowned. “This thing is a great photosynthetic processor. Guess that’s why it flourishes here only in summer. Now, I—”

  The ground rolled. Miyuki staggered. The biologist fell, throwing his knife aside to avoid a cut in his suit. Miyuki saw a dark mass fly up from the mountain’s peak. A sudden thunderclap hammered down on them. The valley floor shook. Dust rose in filmy curtains.

  “Sample taken?” Koremasa asked on comm. “Good. Let us—”

  “But the ruins!” Miyuki said. “They’ll want at least a few photos.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Koremasa looked unhappy but nodded.

  Miyuki could scarcely believe she had blurted out such a rash suggestion. Not only was it quite unlike her, she thought, but it contradicted her better judgment. She did want to have a look at the ruins, yes, but—

  A tremblor rocked her like an ocean wave. More smoke spat from the peak, unfurling across a troubled sky. The other five had already started running uphill across the mat.

  She followed, turning every hundred meters to glance behind, memorizing the way back in case they had to retreat in a hurry. She heard Tatsuhiko’s shout and saw him pointing just as another slow, deep ripple worked through the valley.

  “Chups!”

  They were in a single file, winding out of the ruins. They did not turn to look at the humans, simply proceeded downhill.

  Miyuki’s perspectives shifted and danced as she watched them, the world seemed to be tilting—and then she realized that again it was not her, but the valley floor which was moving. What she felt was not the wrenching of an earthquake.

  It was the mat itself. The entire floor of the valley wrinkled, stretched, slid.

  The chupchups seemed to glide across the wrestling surface of the mat, uphill from the humans. They were headed for a crevasse which billowed steam. Streamers of sulphurous yellow swirled across the mat. Yet the chupchups gave none of the gathering chaos any notice.

  “Back!” Koremasa called on comm. “Back into the flyer.”

  They had nearly reached the ruins. Miyuki took a moment to snap quick pictures of the crumbled structures. The slumped stoneworks did not look at all like housing. In fact they seemed to be immense vats, caved in and filled with rubble. Vats for what?

  She turned away and the ground slid out from under her. She rolled. The others were further downhill but the jerking of the tawny-green growth under them had sent them tumbling pellmell downward, rolling like dolls. They shouted, cried out, swore.

  Miyuki stopped herself by digging in her heels and grabbing at the tough, writhing mat. It was durable material and she could not rip it for a better hold. In a moment the convulsions stopped. She sat up. Pearly fog now rose from the mat all around her. She felt a trembling and then realized that she was moving—slowly, in irregular little jerks, but yes—the mat was tugging itself across the pebbles beneath it. She scrambled for footing—and fell. She got to her knees. Somewhere near here the chupchups—

  There. They were standing, looking toward the chasm a hundred meters away. Miyuki followed their intent, calm gaze.

  The mat was alive, powerful, muscular—and climbing up the sky.

  No, it merely reared, like the living flesh of a wounded thing. It buckled and writhed, a nightmare living carpet.

  It jerked itself higher than a human, forming a long sheet that flexed like an ocean wave—and leaped.

  The wave struck the far side of the crevasse. It met there another shelf of rising mat. The two waves stuck, clung. All along the chasm the two edges slapped together, melted into one another, formed a seamless whole.

  And rose. As though some chemical reaction were kindling under it, the living carpet bulged like a blister. Miyuki clung to the shifting, sliding mat—and then realized that if she let go, she could roll downhill, where she wanted to go.

  She watched the mat all along the vent as it billowed upward. The chupchups made waving motions, as if urging the mat to leave the ground. She thought suddenly, They came here for this. Not fleeing from us at all.

  Then she was slipping, rolling, the world whirling as she felt the mat accelerate. Her breath rasped and she curled up into a ball, tumbling and bouncing down the hillside. Knocks, jolts, a dull gathering roar—and then she slammed painfully against a boulder. A bare boulder, free of the mat.

  She got up, feeling a sharp pain in her left ankle. “Koremasa-san!”

  “Here! Help me with Tatsuhiko!”

  Tatsuhiko had broken his leg. His dark face contorted with agony. She peered down into his constricted eyes and he said, speaking very precisely between pants, “Matters are complex.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Clearly something more is going on here,” he said tightly, holding the pain back behind his thin smile.

  “Never mind that, you’re hurt. We’ll—”

  He waved the issue away. “A temporary intrusion. Concentrate on what is happening here.”

  “Look, we’ll get you safely—”

  “I have missed something.” Tatsuhiko grimaced, then gave a short, barking laugh. “Maybe everything.”

  She felt the need to comfort him, beyond placing compresses, and said, “You may have been right. This—”

  “No, the chupchups are…something different. Outside the paradigms.”

  “Quiet now. We’ll get you out of here.”

  Tatsuhiko lifted his eyebrows weakly. “Keep your lovely eyes open. Watch what the chupchups are doing. Record.”

  Something in his tone made her hesitate. “I…still love you.”

  His lips trembled. “I…also. Why can we not talk?”

  “Perhaps…perhaps it means too much.”

  He twisted his lips wryly. “Exactly. That hypothesis accounts for the difficulty.”

  “Too much…” She saw ruefully that she had thought him stiff and uncompromising, and perhaps he was—but that did not mean she did not share those elements. Perhaps they were part of the
personality constellations chosen long ago on Earth, the partitioning of traits which insured the expedition would get through at all.

  He said, “I am sorry. I will do better.”

  “But you…” She did not know what to say and her mouth was dry and then the others came.

  They lifted him and started toward the flyer. The others had rolled onto the rocky ground below as the mat moved. Miyuki stumbled, this time from a volcanic tremor. She got to the flyer and looked back. The entire party paused then, fear draining from them momentarily, and watched.

  The mat was lifting itself. Alive with purpose, rippling, its center axis bulged, pulling the rest of it along the ground with a hiss like a wave sliding up a beach. It shed pebbles, making itself lighter, letting go of its birthplace.

  “Some…some reaction is going on in the vent under it,” the biologist panted over comm. “Making gases—that hydrogen I detected, I’ll bet. That’s a byproduct of this mat. Maybe it’s been growing some culture in the volcanic vents around here. Maybe…” His voice trailed away in stunned disbelief.

  She remembered the strange vat-like openings among the chupchup buildings. Some ancient chemical works? A way to augment this process? After all the chupchups had clothing made of material much like this crawling carpet.

  They got Tatsuhiko into the bay of the flyer. Koremasa ordered the pilot to ready the flyer for liftoff. He turned back to the others and then pointed at the sky. Miyuki turned. From valleys beyond large, green teardrops drifted up the sky. They wobbled and flexed, as though shaping themselves into the proper form for a fresh inhabitant of the air.

  Organic balloons were launching themselves from all the valleys of the volcanic ridge. Dozens rose into the winds. In concert, somehow, Miyuki saw. Perhaps triggered by the spurt of vulcanism. Perhaps responding to some deeply imprinted command, some collision of chemicals.

  “Living balloons…” she said.

  The biologist said, “The vulcanism, maybe it triggers the process. After the mat has grown to a certain size. Methane, maybe anaerobic fermentation—”

  “The carving,” Miyuki said.

  Koremasa said quietly, “The chupchups.”

  The frail, distant figures clung to the side of the mat as the center of it rose, fattening. Some found the pockets which the humans had noticed, and slipped inside. Others simply grabbed a handful of the tough green hide and hung on.

  “They are going up with it,” Koremasa said.

  She recalled the carving in the ancient city, with its puzzling circles hanging in the backdrop of the tiger eating its tail, nature feeding on itself, with the Chujoan face arising from the writhing pain of the twisting tail. “The circles—they were balloons. Rising.”

  The last edge of the mat sped toward the ascending bulge with a sound like the rushing of rapids over pebbles. The accelerating clatter seemed to hasten the living, self-making balloon. Frayed lips of the mat slapped together below the fattening, uprushing dome. These edges sealed, tightened, made the lower tip of a green teardrop.

  On the grainy skin of the swelling dome the chupchup passengers now settled themselves in the pockets Miyuki had noted before. Most made it. Some dangled helplessly, lost their grip, fell with a strange silence to their deaths. Those already in pockets helped others to clamber aboard.

  And buoyantly, quietly, they soared into a blue-black sky. “Toward Genji,” Miyuki whispered. She felt a pressing sense of presence, as though a momentous event had occurred.

  “In hydrogen-filled bags?” Koremasa asked.

  “They can reach fairly far up in the atmosphere that way,” Tatsuhiko said weakly. He was lying on the cushioned deck of the flyer, pale and solemn. The injury had drained him but his eyes flashed with the same quick, assessing intelligence.

  Miyuki climbed into the flyer and put a cushion under his helmet. The crew began sealing the craft. “I don’t think they mean to just fly around,” she said.

  “Oh?” Tatsuhiko asked wanly. “You think they imagine they’re going to Genji?”

  “I don’t think we can understand this.” She hesitated. “It may even be suicide.”

  Tatsuhiko scowled. “A race devoted to a suicide ritual? They wouldn’t have lasted long.”

  She gestured at the upper end of the valley. “Most of them didn’t go. See? They’re standing in long lines up there, watching the balloon leave.”

  “More inheritance?” Tatsuhiko whispered. “Is this all they remember of the technology the earlier race had mastered?”

  Miyuki thought. “I wonder.”

  Tatsuhiko said wanly, taking her hand, “Perhaps they have held onto the biomats, used them. Maybe they don’t understand what they were for, really. A piece of biotech like that—a beautiful solution to the problem of transport, in an energy-scarce environment. And the chupchups are just, just joyriding.”

  Miyuki smiled. “Perhaps…”

  They lifted off vertically just as another rolling jolt came. The flyer veered in the gathering winds, and Miyuki watched the teardrop shapes scudding across the purpling sky. Soon enough they would be the object of scrutiny, measurement, with the full armament of scientific dispassion marshalled to fathom them. She would probably even do some of the job herself, she thought wryly.

  But for this single crystalline moment she wished to simply enjoy them. Not analyze, but feel the odd, hushed quality their ascent brought.

  They were probably neither Tatsuhiko’s vestigial technology nor some arcane tribal ceremony. Perhaps this entire drama was purely a way for the chupchups to tell humans something. She bit her lip in concentration. Tell what? Indeed, satellite observations, dating back to the first robot probe, had never shown any sign of a chupchup migration here. It might be unique—a response to humans themselves.

  She sighed. Cabin pressure hissed on again as the flyer leveled off for its long flight back. She popped her helmet and wrestled Tatsuhiko’s off. He smiled, thanked her—and all the while behind his tired eyes she saw the glitter, the unquelled pursuit of his own singular vision, which Tatsuhiko would never abandon. As he should not.

  The biologist was saying something about the balloons, details—that they seemed to be photosynthetic processors, making more hydrogen to keep themselves aloft, to offset losses through their own skin. He even had a term for them, bioloons…

  So the unpeeling of the onion skins was already beginning. And what fun it would be.

  But what did it mean? The first stage of science atomizes, dissects, fragments. Only much later do the Bohrs, the Darwins, the Einsteins knit it all together again—and nobody knew what the final weave would be, silk or sackcloth.

  So both Tatsuhiko and herself and all the others—they were all needed. There would be no end of explanations. Did the chupchups think humans were in fact from that great promise in the sky, Genji? Or were they trying to signal something with the mat-balloons—while still holding to their silence? An arcane ceremony? Some joke?

  The chupchups would never fit the narrow rules of sociobiology, she guessed, but just as clearly they would not be merely Zen aliens, or curators of some ashram in the sky. They were themselves, and the fathoming of that would be a larger task than Miyuki, or Tatsuhiko, or Koremasa could comprehend.

  The flyer purred steadily. The still-rising emerald teardrops dwindled behind. Their humming technology was taking them back to base, its pilot already fretting about fuel.

  Miyuki felt a sudden, unaccountable burst of joy. Hard mystery remained here, shadowed mystery would call them back, and mystery was far better that the cool ceramic surfaces of certainty.

  In the Dark Backward

  (1993)

  The fearful wrenching snap, a sickening swerve—and she was there.

  Vitrovna found herself in a dense copse of trees, branches swishing overhead in a fitful breeze. Shottery Wood, she hoped. But was the time and place truly right? She had to get her bearings.

  Not easy, in the wake of the Transition. She was still groggy from
stretched moments in the slim, cushioned cylinder. All that aching time her stomach had knotted and roiled, fearing that intercession awaited the Transition’s end. A squad of grim Corpsmen, an injunction. A bleak prospect of standing at the docket for meddling in the sanctified past, a capital crime.

  But when the wringing pop echoed away, there was no one awaiting to erase her from time’s troubled web. Only this scented night, musky with leaves and a wind promising fair.

  She worked her way through prickly bushes and boggy glades, using her small flashlight as little as she could. No need to draw attention—and a white beam cutting the darkness of an April night in 1616 would surely cause alarm.

  She stumbled into a rough country lane wide enough to see the sky. A sliver of bleached moon, familiar star--sprinklings—and there, Polaris. Knowing north, she reckoned from her topo map which way the southward-jutting wedge of Stratford might be. This lane led obliquely that way, so she took it, wind whipping her locks in encouragement.

  Much still lay to be learned, she could be far off in space and time, but so far the portents were good. If the combined ferretings and guesses of generations of scholars proved true, this was the last night the aging playwright would be afoot. A cusp moment in a waning life.

  Up ahead, hollow calls. A thin blade of yellow as a door opened. A looming shamble-shadow of a drunken man, weaving his ragged course away from the inky bulk of an inn. Might this be the one she sought? Not the man, no, for they were fairly sure that graying Will had spent the night’s meaty hours with several friends.

  But the inn might be the place where he had drunk his last. The vicar of Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, John Ward, had written years after this night that the bard had “been on an outing” with two lesser literary lights. There were probably only a few inns in so small a town, and this might be the nearest to Shakespeare’s home.