The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Should. Might. Probably. Thin netting indeed, to snare hard facts.

  She left the lane and worked through brush that caught at her cloak of simple country burlap. A crude weave covering a cotton dress, nothing lacy to call attention, yet presentably ladylike—she hoped. Considering the sexual fascinations of the ancients, she might easily be mistaken for a common harlot, or a village slut about for a bit of fun.

  Any contact with others here would endanger her, to say nothing of definitely breaking the Codes. Of course, she was already flagrantly violating the precepts regulating time travel, but years of preparation had hardened her to that flat fact, insulated her from any lingering moral confusions.

  She slipped among trees, trying to get a glimpse through the tiny windows of the inn. Her heart thudded, breath coming quick. The swarming smells of this place! In her antiseptic life, a third-rank Literary Historian in the University Corps, she had never before felt herself so immersed in history, in the thick air of a world innocent of steel and ceramic, of concrete and stale air.

  She fished her senso-binoculars from her concealed pack and studied the windows. It was difficult to make out much through the small, warped panes and heavy leading, behind which men lifted tankards and flapped their mouths, illuminated by dim, uncertain candles. A fat man waved his arms, slopping drink. Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic. Swill thou then among them, scrike thine ale’s laughter. Not Will’s words, but some contemporary. Marlowe? Whoever, they certainly applied here. A ragged patch of song swept by on the stirring wind, carried from an opening door.

  Someone coming out. She turned up the amps on the binoculars and saw three men, each catching the swath of lantern light as they helped each other down stubby stairs to the footpath.

  Three! One large, balding, a big chest starting to slide into an equatorial belly. Yet still powerful, commanding, perhaps the manner of a successful playwright. Ben Jonson?

  The second younger, short, in wide-brimmed hat—a Warwickshire style of the time, she recalled. It gave him a rakish cast, befitting a poet. Michael Drayton?

  And coming last, tripping on the stair and grasping at his friends for purchase, a mid-sized man in worn cloak and close-fitting cap. Life brief and naught done, she remembered, a line attributed—perhaps—to this wavering apparition. But not so, not so.

  The shadowy figure murmured something and Vitrovna cursed herself for her slowness. She telescoped out the directional microphone above the double barrels of the binoculars. It clicked, popped, and she heard—

  “I was then bare a man, nay, a boy still,” the big man said. “Big in what fills, sure speak.” The wide-hatted man smirked.

  “Swelled in blood-fed lustihead, Ben’s bigger than stallions, or so rumor slings it,” the cloaked figure rapped back, voice starting gravelly and then swinging tenor-high at the sentence’s end.

  The tall man chuckled with meaty relish. “What fills the rod’s same as fills the pen, as you’d know better.”

  So this was the man who within a few years would say that his companion, the half-seen figure standing just outside the blade of light cast by the inner inn, was “Not of an age, but for all time.” Ben Jonson, in breeches, a tuft of white shirt sticking from an unbuttoned fly. A boisterous night for all.

  “Aye, even for the miowing of kitticat poetry on spunk-stained parchment, truest?” the cloaked man said, words quick but tone wan and fading.

  “Better than a mewling or a yawper,” the short man said. All three moved a bit unsteadily round a hitching post and across the yard. Jonson muttered, laughed. She caught the earthy reek of ale. The man who must be Drayton—though he looked little like the one engraving of his profile she had seen—snickered liquidly, and the breeze snatched away a quick comment from the man who—she was sure now—must be Shakespeare. She amped up the infrared and pressed a small button at the bridge of the binoculars. A buzz told her digital image recording was on, all three face-forward in the shimmering silver moonlight, a fine shot. Only then did she realize that they were walking straight at her.

  Could they make her out, here in a thicket? Her throat tightened and she missed their next words, though the recorder at her hip would suck it all in. They advanced, staring straight into her eyes—across the short and weedy lawn, right up to the very bushes that hid her. Shakespeare grunted, coughed, and fished at his drawers. To her relief, they all three produced themselves, sighed with pleasure, and spewed rank piss into the bushes.

  “The one joy untaxed by King or wife,” Jonson meditated.

  The others nodded, each man embedded in his own moment of release, each tilting his head back to gaze at the sharp stars. Then they were done, tucked back in. They turned and walked off to Vitrovna’s left, onto the lane.

  She followed as silently as she could, keeping to the woods. Thorns snagged her cloak and soon they had walked out of earshot of even her directional microphone. She was losing invaluable data!

  She stumbled onto the path, ran to catch up, and then followed, aided by shadows. To walk and keep the acoustics trained on the three weaving figures was all she could manage, especially in the awkward, raw-leather shoes she had to wear. She remembered being shocked that this age did not even know to make shoes differently curved for left and right feet, and felt the effect of so simple a difference within half a kilometer. A blister irked her left heel before she saw a glow ahead. She had given up trying to follow their darting talk. Most was ordinary byplay laced with coarse humor, scarcely memorable, but scholars could determine that later.

  They stopped outside a rambling house with a three-windowed front from which spilled warm lantern light. As the night deepened a touch of winter returned. An ice-tinged wind whipped in a swaying oak and whistled at the house’s steep-gabled peak. Vitrovna drew as near as she dared, behind a churning elm.

  “Country matters need yawing mouths,” Shakespeare said, evidently referring to earlier talk.

  “Would that I knew keenly what they learn from scrape and toil,” Drayton said, voice lurching as the wind tried to rip it away from her pickups.

  “A Johannes Factotum of your skinny skin?” Shakespeare said, sniffing.

  Vitrovna translated to herself, A Jack-Do-All of the senses?—though the whole conversation would have to be endlessly filtered and atomized by computer intelligences before she could say anything definitive. If she got away with this, that is.

  “Upstart crow, cockatrice!” Jonson exclaimed, clapping Shakespeare on the shoulder. All three laughed warmly.

  A whinny sped upon the breeze. From around the house a boy led two horses. “Cloddy chariot awaits,” Drayton said blearily.

  Shakespeare gestured toward his own front door, which at that moment creaked open, sending fresh light into the hummocky yard where they stood. “Would you not—”

  “My arse needs an hour of saddle, or sure will be hard-sore on the ride to London tomorrow,” Jonson said.

  Drayton nodded. “I go belike, to see to writ’s business.”

  “My best bed be yours, if—”

  “No, no, friend.” Jonson swung up onto a roan horse with surprising agility for one so large. “You look chilled. Get inside to your good wife.”

  Ben waved good night, calling to the woman who had appeared in the doorway. She was broad and sturdy, graying beneath a frilly white cap, and stood with arms crossed, her stance full of judgment. “Farewell, Anne!”

  Good-byes sounding through the frosty air, the two men clopped away. Vitrovna watched Shakespeare wave to them, cloak billowing, then turn to his wife. This was the Anne Hathaway whom his will left with his “second-best” bed, who had saddled him with children since his marriage at eighteen—and who may have forced him into the more profitable enterprise of playwriting to keep their household in something resembling the style of a country gentleman. Vitrovna got Anne’s image as she croaked irritably at Shakespeare to come inside.

  Vitrovna prayed that she would get the fragment of time she needed. Just
a moment, to make a fleeting, last contact—

  He hesitated. Then he waved his wife away and walked toward the woods. She barked something at him and slammed the door.

  Vitrovna slipped from behind the elm and followed him. He coughed, stopped, and began to pee again into a bush.

  An ailment? To have to go again so soon? Stratford’s vicar had written that on this night Will “drank too hard,” took ill, and died of a fever. This evidence suggested, though, that he knew something was awry when he wrote his will in March, a few weeks before this evening. Or maybe he had felt an ominous pressure from his approaching fifty-second birthday, two days away—when the fever would claim him.

  All this flitted through her mind as she approached the wavering figure in the wood-smoke-flavored, whipping wind. He tucked himself back in, turned—and saw her.

  Here the danger made her heart pound. If she did something to tweak the timeline a bit too much—

  “Ah! Pardons, madam—the ale within would without.”

  “Sir, I’ve come to tell you of greatness exceeding anything you can dream.” She had rehearsed this, striving for an accent that would not put him off, but now that she had heard his twangy Elizabethan lilt, she knew that was hopeless. She plowed ahead. “I wanted you to know that your name will be sung down the ages as the greatest of writers.”

  Will’s tired, grizzled face wrinkled. “Who might you be?”

  —and the solidity of the past struck her true, his breath sour with pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. The reeking intensity of the man nearly staggered her. Her isolated, word-clogged life had not prepared her for this vigorous, full-bodied age. She gulped and forced out her set speech.

  “You may feel neglected now, but centuries hence you’ll be read and performed endlessly—”

  “What are you?” He scowled.

  “I am from the future. I’ve come backward in time to tell you, so that such a wonderful man need not, well, need not think he was just a minor poet. Your plays, they’re the thing. They—”

  “You copy my lines? ‘The play’s the thing.’ Think you that japing pranks—”

  “No, no! I truly am from the future, many centuries away.”

  “And spring upon me in drafty night? I—”

  Desperately she brought up her flashlight. “Look.” It clicked on, a cutting blue-white beam that made the ground and leaves leap from inky presences into hard realities. “See? This is a kind of light you don’t have. I can show you—”

  He leaped back, eyes white, mouth sagging. “Uh!”

  “Don’t be afraid. I wondered if you could tell me something about the dark lady in your sonnets, just a moment’s—”

  “Magic!”

  “No, really, it’s just a different kind of lantern. And your plays, did you have any help writing them?”

  He recovered, mouth curving shrewdly. “You be scholar or rumormonger?”

  “Neither, sir.”

  His face hardened as he raised his palm to shield his eyes from the brilliance. “Think me gut-gullible?”

  “You deserve to know that we in the future will appreciate you, love you, revere you. It’s only justice that you know your works will live forever, be honored—”

  “Promising me life forever, then? That’s your cheese?”

  “No, you don’t—”

  “This future you claim—know you something of my self, then? My appointed final hour?” His eyes were angry slits, his mouth a flat, bloodless line.

  Was he so quick to guess the truth? That she had come at the one possible moment to speak to him, when his work or friends would not be perturbed? “I’ve come because, yes, this is my only chance to speak with you. There’s nothing I can do about that, but I thought—”

  “You tempt me with wisps, foul visions.” Did he suspect that once he walked into that house, lay upon his second-best bed, he would never arise again? With leaden certainty she saw him begin to gather this, his mouth working, chin bobbing uncertainly.

  “Sir, no, please, I’m just here to, to—”

  “Flat-voiced demon, leave me!”

  “No, I—”

  He reached into his loose-fitting shirt and drew out a small iron cross. Holding it up, he said, “Blest be he who spares my stones, curst be he who moves my bones!”

  The lines chiseled above his grave. So he had them in mind already, called them up like an incantation. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Go! Christ immaculate, drive such phantoms from me! Give me a sword of spirit, Lord!”

  Vitrovna backed away. “I, I—”

  —and then she was running, panicked and mortified, into the woods. In her ears rang a fragment from The Tempest,

  What seest thou else

  In the dark backward and abysm of time?

  In the shimmering cylinder she panted with anxiety and mortification, her skin a sheen of cold sweat. She had failed terribly, despite decades of research. All her trial runs with ordinary folk of these times who were about to meet their end, carried out in similar circumstances—those had gone well. The subjects had welcomed her. Death was natural and common here, an easeful event. They had accepted her salute with stoic calm, a quality she had come to envy in these dim eras. Certainly they had not turned their angers on her.

  But she had faltered before Shakespeare. He had been larger than life, awesome.

  Her recordings were valuable, yes, but she might never be able to release them for scholarly purposes now. She had wrenched the past terribly, exciting the poor man just before death’s black hand claimed him. She could never forget the look of wild surmise and gathering panic that worked across that wise face. And now—

  She had stolen into the University Corps Facility, slipped into the machine with the aid of friends, all in the service of true, deep history. But if she had changed the past enough to send a ripple of causation forward, into her own era, then the Corps would find her, exact the penalty.

  No time to think of that. She felt the sickening wrench, a shudder, and then she thumped down into a stony field.

  Still night air, a sky of cutting stars. A liquid murmuring led her to the bank of the Big Wood River and she worked her way along it, looking for the house lights. This route she knew well, had paced it off in her own era. She could tell from the set of the stars that she had time, no need to rush this.

  Minutes here took literally no time at all in the stilled future world where machines as large as the cities of this age worked to suspend her here. The essence of stealing time from the Corps was that you took infinitesimal time-wedges of that future world, undetectable, elusive—if she was lucky. The Corps would find her uses self-indulgent, sentimental, arrogant. To meddle so could snuff out their future, or merely Vitrovna her-self—and all so a few writers could know for a passing moment of their eventual high destiny? Absurd, of course.

  July’s dawn heat made her shed her cloak and she paused to get her breath. The river wrinkled and pulsed and swelled smooth against the resistance of a big log, and she looked down through it to an unreadable depth. Trout hung in the glassy fast water like ornaments, holding into the current. Deeper still a fog of sand ran above the gravel, stirred by currents around the pale round rocks.

  The brimming majesty of this silent moment caught at her heart. Such simple beauty had no protection here, needed none.

  After a long moment she made herself go on and found the house as faint streamers traced the dawn. Blocky, gray poured concrete, hunkered down like a bunker. A curious, closed place for a man who had yearned to be of the land and sky. In 1926 he had said, “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.” Yet in this spare, beautiful place of rushing water and jutting stone he would finally yield to the abyss that had tempted him all his wracked life.

  She worked her way up the stony slope, her Elizabethan shoes making the climb hard. As she reached the small outer door into the basement, she fished fo
rth the flex-key. Its yellow metal shaped itself to whatever opening the lock needed, and in a moment she was inside the storage room, beside the heavy mahogany rack. She had not seen such things except for photo-graphs. Elegant machines of blue sheen and polished, pointful shapes. Death solidified and lustrous. They enchanted her as she waited.

  A rustling upstairs. Steps going into the kitchen, where she knew he would pick up the keys on the ledge above the sink. He came down the stairs, haggard in the slack pajamas and robe, the handsome face from photographs now lined and worn, wreathed by a white beard and tangled hair. He padded toward the rack, eyes distant, and then stopped, blinking, as he saw her.

  “What the hell?” A rough voice, but recognizable.

  “Mr. Hemingway, I ask only a moment of your time, here at the end. I—”

  “You’re from the IRS aren’t you? Snooping into my—”

  Alarm spiked in her throat. “No sir, I am from the future. I’ve come backward in time to tell you, so that so wonderful a man need not—”

  “FBI?” The jowly face clouded, eyes narrow and bright. “I know you’ve been following me, bribing my friends.”

  The drinking, hypertension, hepatitis, and creeping manic depression had driven him further even than her research suggested.

  She spread her hands. “No, no. You deserve to know that we in the future will appreciate you, love you, revere you. It’s only justice that you know your works will live forever, be honored—”

  “You’re a goddamn federal agent and a liar on top of that.” His yellowed teeth set at an angry angle. “Get out!”

  “Remember when you said that you wanted to get into the ring with Mr. Tolstoy? Well, you have, you did. You’re in his class. Centuries from now—”

  A cornered look came into the jumping eyes. “Sure, I’ve got six books I declare to win with. I stand on that.”

  “You have! I come from—”

  “You a critic? Got no use for sneaky bastards come right into your house, beady-eyed nobodies, ask you how you write like it was how you shit—”

  He leaned abruptly against the pinewood wall and she caught a sour scent of defeat from him. Color drained from his wracked face and his head wobbled. “Future, huh?” He nodded as if somehow accepting this. “God, I don’t know…”