The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  She stepped back, fear tight in her throat. Earlier in this year he had written, A long life deprives a man of his optimism. Better to die in all the happy period of unillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered. She saw it now in the loose cant of mouth and jaw, the flickering anxiety and hollow dread. The power of it was unbearable.

  “I…I wanted you to know that those novels, the short stories, they will—”

  The sagging head stopped swaying. It jerked up. “Which have you read?”

  “All of them. I’m a literary historian.”

  “Damn, I’m just read by history professors?” Disdain soured the words.

  There were no such professions in her time, just the departments of the Corps, but she could not make this ravaged man understand that. “No, your dramas are enjoyed by millions, by billions—”

  “Dramas?” He lurched against the wall. “I wrote no dramas.”

  How to tell him that the media of her time were not the simple staged amusements of this era? That they were experienced directly through the nervous system, sensory banquets of immense emotional power, lived events that diminished the linear medium of words alone to a curious relic?

  “You mean those bum movies made from the novels? Tracy in The Old Man?”

  “No, I mean—we have different ways of reading the same work, that is all. But for so long I’ve felt the despair of artists who did not know how much they would mean, poor Shakespeare going to his grave never suspecting—”

  “So you know what I’m down here for?” A canny glint in the eyes.

  “Yes, of course, that’s why I came.”

  He pulled himself erect with visible effort. “If you’re not just another shit artist come here to get a rise out of me—”

  “I’m not, I’m a scholar who feels so much for you lonely Primitivists who—”

  “That’s what you call us? Real writers? Primitives?” Jutting jaw. “I’m going to kick your goddamn ass out of here!”

  His sudden clotted rage drove her back like a blow. “I meant—”

  “Go!” He shoved her. “Hell will freeze over before I’ll give in to a lard-ass—”

  She bolted away, out the basement door, into the spreading dawn glow. Down the rocky slope, panic gurgling acid in her mouth. She knew that years before this, when asked his opinion of death, he had answered, “Just another whore.” Yet there was something new and alive in his face just now, fresh fuel from his sudden, hugely powerful anger, some sea change that sent into her mind a wrenching possibility.

  She looked back at the house. He was standing there thin and erect, shaking a knotted fist down at her. She reached the dawn-etched river and punched the summons into her controls and then came the wringing snap and she was in the cylinder again.

  Vitrovna let a ragged sigh escape into the cool, calming air. This one was as unsettling as the last. The old man had seemed animated as she left, focused outside himself by her visit. He had kept her off balance the entire time. Now she saw her error. The earlier tests with ordinary people, whose deaths did not matter in the flow of history, had misled her. In person Shakespeare and Hemingway loomed immensely larger than anyone she had ever known. Compared with the wan, reasonable people of her time, they were bristly giants. Their reactions could not be predicted and they unsettled even her, a historian who thought she knew what to expect.

  Vitrovna leaned back, shaken and exhausted. She had programmed a long rest after this engagement, time to get her thoughts in order before the next. That one, the great poet Diana Azar, lay as far ahead in centuries as the gap between the last two, yet her simple dress should still pass there and—

  A slim man materialized at the snub end of the cylinder. He wore a curious blue envelope which revealed only head and hands, his skin a smooth green.

  “Ah,” he said in a heavily accented tenor, “I have intersected you in time.”

  She gasped. “You—how? To catch me while transporting—”

  “In your age, impossible, of course.” He arched his oyster-colored forehead, which had no eyebrows. “But when you are in Transition we of your far future may snag you.”

  She had thought for decades about what she would do if caught, and now said cannily, “You follow the Code standards for self-incrimination?”

  She blinked with shock when he laughed. “Code? Ancient history—though it’s all the same here, of course. I am not one of your Corps police.”

  “Then you’re not going to prosecute—”

  “That was an illusion of your time, Vitrovna. You don’t mind me using your first name? In our era, we have only one name, though many prefer none.”

  “But how can you…”

  He languidly folded his arms, which articulated as if his elbows were double-jointed. “I must first say that generations far beyond yours are eternally grateful to you for opening this possibility and giving us these historical records.” He gestured at her senso-binoculars.

  “Records? They survived? I mean, I do make it back to my—

  “Not precisely. But the detailed space-time calculations necessary to explain, these you would not understand. You braved the Codes and the Corps quite foolishly, as you have just discovered—but that is of no import to us.”

  She felt a rush of hope, her lips opening in expectation. “Then you’ve come to rescue me from them?”

  He frowned, a gesture which included his ears. “No, no. You feared the Corps’ authority, but that was mere human power. They vaguely understood the laws of acausality, quite rightly feared them, and so instituted their Code. But they were like children playing with shells at the shore, never glimpsing the beasts which swam in the deeps beyond.”

  Her seat jolted and she felt queasy. He nodded, as if expecting this, and touched his left wrist, which was transparent.

  “The Code was a crude rule of thumb, but your violations of it transgressed far beyond mere human edicts. How arrogant, your age! To think that your laws could rule a continuum. Space-time itself has a flex and force. Your talk with Hemingway—quite valuable historically, by the way, considering that he was not going to ever release his memoir, A Moveable Feast, when he went down into that basement. But even more important was what he wrote next.”

  “Next? But he—”

  “Quite. Even so, rather less spectacular than your ‘apparition’ before Shakespeare. As his shaky hand testified, you cause him to gather his notes and scraps of plays. They kept quite well in even a tin box, wedged in with the corpse. A bounty for the critics, though it upset many cherished theories.”

  “But he still died of pneumonia?”

  “You do not have miraculous healing powers. You simply scared him into leaving something more of a record.”

  “Still, with so much attention paid to the few records we do have, or did have, I—”

  “Quite.” A judicious nod. “I’m afraid that despite our vastly deeper understanding of these matters, there is nothing we can do about that. Causality will have its way.”

  The cylinder lurched. A raw bass note. “Then how—”

  “Not much time left, I’m afraid. Sorry.” He leaned forward eagerly. “But I did want to visit you, to thank you for, well, liberating this method of probing the past, at great personal sacrifice. You deserve to know that our epoch will revere you.”

  He spoke rapidly, admiration beaming in his odd face, the words piling up in an awful leaden weight that sent bile-dark fear rushing hotly through her, a massive premonition.

  “So Vitrovna, I saw the possibility, of making this intersection. It’s only right that you know just how famous you will be—”

  The sensation of stepping off a step into a dark, unending fall.

  Her speech. He was giving her own speech, and for the same reason.

  A Desperate Calculus

  (1995)

  Amy inched shut the frail wooden door of her hotel room and switched on the light. Cockroaches—
or at least she hoped they were mere cockroaches—scuttled for dark corners. They were so big she could hear them bumping into the tin plating along one wall.

  She shucked off her dusty field jacket, threw it at the lone pine chair and sprawled on the bed. Under the dangling, naked light bulb she slit open her husband’s letter eagerly, using a dirty fingernail. Frying fat flavors seeped through the planking but she forgot the smells and noises of the African village. Her eyes raced along the lurching penmanship.

  God, I do really need you. What’s more, I know it’s my ‘juice’ speaking—only been two weeks, but just at what point do I have to be reasonable? Hey, two scientists who work next to disasterville can afford a little loopy irrationality, right? Thinking about your alabaster breasts a lot. Our eagerly awaited rendezvous will be deep in the sultry jungle, in my tent. I recall your beautiful eyes that evening at Boccifani’s and am counting the days…

  This “superflu” thing is knocking our crew people down pretty fierce now. With our schedule already packed solid, now comes two-week Earth Summit V in São Paulo. Speeches, press, more talk, more dumb delay. Hoist a few with buddies, sure, but pointless, I think. Maybe I can scare up some more funding. Takes plenty juice!—just to keep this operation going! Wish me luck and I’ll not even glance at the Latin beauties, promise. Really.

  She rolled over onto her side to ease the ache in her back, keeping the letter in the yellow glow that seemed to be dimming. The crackly pages were wrinkled as if they had gotten wet in transit.

  A distant generator coughed, stuttered, stopped. The light went out. She lay in the sultry dark, thinking about him and decoding all that the letter said and implied. In the distance a dog yapped and she smelled the sour lick of charcoal on the air. It did not cover the vile sickly-sweet odor of bodies left out in the street. Already they were swelling. Autumn was fairly warm in this brush-country slice of Tanzania and the village lay quiet with the still of the fallen. In a few minutes the generator huffed sluggishly back into its coughing rhythm and the bulb glowed. Watery light seeped into the room. Cockroaches scuttled again.

  She finished the letter, which went on in rather impressively salacious detail about portions of her anatomy and did the job she knew Todd had intended. If any Tanzanian snoops got into her mail, they probably would not have the courage to admit it. And it did make her moist, yes.

  The day’s heavy heat now ebbed. A whispering breeze dispersed the moist, infesting warmth.

  Todd got the new site coordinates from their uplink, through their microwave dish. He squatted beside the compact, black matte-finish module and its metallic ear, cupped to hear a satellite far out in chilly vacuum. That such a remote, desiccated and silvery craft in the empty sky could be locked in electromagnetic embrace with this place of leafy heaviness, transfixed by sweet rot and the stink of distant fires, was to Todd a mute miracle.

  Manuel yelled at him in Spanish from below. “Miz Cabrina says to come! Right away!”

  “I’m nearly through.”

  “Right away! She says it is the cops!”

  The kid had seen too much American TV. Cop spun like a bright coin in the syrup of thickly accented Spanish. Cops. Authorities. The weight of what he had to do. A fretwork of irksome memories. He stared off into infinity, missing Amy.

  He was high up on the slope of thick forest. Toward him flew a rainbird. It came in languid slow motion, flapping in the mild breeze off the far Atlantic, a murmuring wind that lifted the warm weight from the stinging day. The bird’s translucent shape flickered against big-bellied clouds and Todd thought of the bird as a gliding bag of genes, biological memories ancient and wrinkled and yet still coming forth. Distant time, floating toward him now across the layered air.

  He waved to Manuel. “Tell her to stall them.”

  He finished getting the data and messages, letting the cool and precise part of him do the job. Every time some rural bigshot showed up his stomach lurched and he forced down jumpy confusions. He struggled to insulate the calm, unsettled center of himself so that he could work. He had thought this whole thing would get easier, but it never did.

  The solar panels atop their van caught more power if he parked it in the day’s full glare, but then he couldn’t get into it without letting the interior cool off. He had driven up here to get clear of the rest of the team. He left the van and headed toward where the salvaging team was working.

  Coming back down through kilometers of jungle took him through terrain that reflected his inner turmoil. Rotting logs shone with a vile, vivid emerald. Swirls of iridescent lichen engulfed thick-barked trees. He left the cross-country van on the clay road and continued, boots sinking into the thick mat.

  Nothing held sway here for long. Hand-sized spiders scuttled like black motes across the intricate green radiance. Exotic vitality, myriad threats. A conservation biologist, he had learned to spot the jungle’s traps and viper seductions. He sidestepped a blood vine’s barbs, wisely gave a column of lime ants their way. Rustlings escorted him through dappled shadows which held a million minute violences. Carrion moths fluttered by on charcoal wings in search of the fallen. Tall grass blades cut the shifting sunlight. Birds cooed and warbled and stabbed insects from the air. Casually brutal beauty.

  He vectored in on the salvaging site. As he worked downslope the insecticidal fog bombs popped off in the high canopy. Species pattered down through the branches, thumped on logs, a dying rain. The gray haze descended, touched the jungle floor, settled into nooks. Then a vagrant breeze blew it away. His team moved across the hundred-meter perimeter, sweeping uphill.

  Smash and grab, Todd thought, watching the workers in floppy jeans and blue work shirts get down on hands and knees. They inched forward, digging out soil samples, picking up fallen insects, fronds, stems, small mammals. Everything, anything. Some snipped samples from the larger plants. Others shinnied up the slick-barked trees and rummaged for the resident ants and spiders and myriad creatures who had not fallen out when the fog hit them. A special team took leaves and branches—too much trouble to haul away whole trees. And even if they’d wanted to, the politicos would scream; timbering rights here had already been auctioned off.

  Todd angled along behind the sweeping line of workers, all from Argentina. He caught a few grubs and leaves that had escaped and dropped them into a woman’s bag. She smiled and nodded respectfully. Most of them were embarrassingly thankful to have a job. The key idea in the BioSalvage Program was to use local labor. That created a native constituency wherever they went. It also kept costs manageable. The urban North was funding this last-ditch effort. Only the depressed wages of the rural South made it affordable.

  And here came the freezers. A thinner line of men carrying styrofoam dry ice boxes, like heavy-duty picnic coolers. Into these went each filled sack. Stapled to the neck of each bag was a yellow bar-code strip giving location, date, terrain description. He had run them off in the van this morning. Three more batches were waiting in his pack for the day’s work further up the valley.

  His pack straps cut into his roll of shoulder muscle, reminding him of how much more remained to do. To save. He could see in the valley below the press of population on the lush land. A crude work camp sprawled like a tan fungus. Among the jungle’s riot of emerald invention a dirt road wound like a dirty snake.

  He left the team and headed toward the trouble, angling by faded stucco buildings. Puddles from a rain shower mirrored an iron cross over the entrance gate of a Catholic mission. The Pope’s presence. Be fruitful, ye innocent, and multiply. Spread like locusts across God’s green works.

  Ramshackle sheds lay toward the work camp, soiling the air with greasy wood smoke. In the jungle beyond, chain saws snarled in their labors. Beside the clay ruts of the road lay crushed aluminum beer cans and a lurid tabloid about movie stars.

  He reached the knot of men as Cabrina started shouting.

  “Yes we do! Signed by your own lieutenant governor especial!”

  She waved pape
rs at three uniformed types, who wore swarthy scowls and revolvers in hip holsters.

  “No, no.” An officer jerked a finger at the crowd. “These, they say it interferes with their toil.”

  Here at the edge of the work camp they had already attracted at least fifty. Worn men slouched against a stained yellow wall, scrawny and rawboned and faces slack with fatigue. They were sour twists of men, maraneros from the jungle, a machete their single tool, their worn skins sporting once-jaunty tattoos of wide-winged eagles and rampant bulls and grinning skulls.

  “The hell it does.” Cabrina crossed her arms over her red jumper and her lips whitened.

  “The chemicals, they make coughing and—”

  “We went through all that with the foreman. And I have documents—”

  “These say nothing about—”

  Todd tuned out the details and watched lines deepen in the officer’s face. Trouble coming, and fast. He was supposed to let Cabrina, as a native, run the interference. Trouble was, these were macho backcountry types. He nodded respectfully to the head officer and said, “Our schedule bothering them?”

  The officer looked relieved to deal with a man. “They do not like the fumes or having to stay away from the area.”

  “Let’s see if we can do something about that. Suppose they work upwind?”

  So then it got into a back-and-forth negotiation. He hated cutting in on Cabrina but the officer had been near the breaking point. Todd gradually eased Cabrina back in and the officer saw how things were going to go. He accepted that with some face-saving talk and pretty soon it was settled.

  Todd walked Cabrina a bit back toward the jungle. “Don’t let them rile you. Just stick to the documents.”

  “But they are so stupid!” Flashing anger, a wrenched mouth.