The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “And there are still the dishes to do from last night.”

  “Ugh. I’ll race you to the beach first.”

  The Voice

  (1997)

  I don’t believe it,” Qent said sternly.

  Klair tugged him down the musty old corridor. “Come on, turn off your Voice.”

  “Mine is—I showed you.”

  “Stuff on walls, whoever heard of—”

  “There’s another one further along.”

  Down the narrow, dimly lit hallway they went, to a recessed portion of the permwall. “See—another sign.”

  “This? Some old mark. What’s a ‘sign’ anyway?”

  “This one says—” she shaped the letters to herself carefully—“passage denied.”

  Qent thumbed on his Voice impatiently. He blinked. “That’s…what the Voice says.”

  “See?”

  “You’ve been here before and the Voice told you.”

  “I let you pick the corridor, remember? A fair trial.”

  “You cheated.”

  “No! I can read it.” Read. The very sound of the word made her pulse thump.

  Qent paused a second and she knew he was consulting the Voice again. “And ‘read’ means to untangle things, I see. This ‘sign’ tells you passage denied? How?”

  “See those?—they’re letters. I know each one—there are twenty-six, it takes a lot of work—and together they shape words.”

  “Nonsense,” Qent said primly. “Your mouth shapes words.”

  “I have another way. My way.”

  He shook his head and she had to take him on to another sign and repeat the performance. He grimaced when the Voice told him that indeed, the markings meant aldenten sector. “A trick. Your Voice is on. You just rigged your touchpad—”

  “Here, take my insert!” She thrust it into his hand and made him walk to the next emblem. “manufac dist, that way.”

  “I know an arrow when I see it,” he said sarcastically. “But the rest of it—what’s dist mean?”

  She had hoped he wouldn’t ask that. “Maybe it means a place.”

  “Like a neighborhood?”

  “Could be—in fact, yes, ‘district.’ If there wasn’t room to write it all out, they’d shorten a word.”

  “And who were ‘they’? Some magicians?”

  “The ancients, I guess.”

  He was working his way around to being convinced, she could see. “They left wall marks? What for, when the Voice—”

  “Maybe they came before the Voice.”

  “But what possible use—”

  “I learned all this from those old papers I uncovered in the Historical Section. They were called ‘Bills of Lading’ but there were enough words—”

  “How do you know you can ‘read’ something? I mean, without checking with the Voice?”

  “I know. The letters group together, you see—manufac is just ‘man’ and this upturned letter is the sound ‘you,’ and—”

  “You’re going too fast.” He grimaced, obviously not liking this at all. He was a biology specialist and tolerated her interest in antiquity, but finally he said, “Okay, show me again. Not that I really believe this, but…”

  They spent the next few days in the oldest, shadowy precinct of the Historical Sector, searching out corridors that the Imperium had not gotten around to Voicing. Klair read him signs and he started picking up the method. Progress was slow; reading was hard. Letters, words, then working up to grasping how sentences and then paragraphs had their logic and rhythms, their clues about how to extract meaning.

  The words were hard but more interesting were the simple sketches, some just whorls or jagged faces or lines of different colors that didn’t seem to mean anything more than your eye could grasp in a second. Art, Qent supposed. Mingled among the words like gaudy confetti at a solemn parade.

  Still, it wasn’t as though he were some Deedee, after all. After a while she recalled from her Educational Specialty training that Deedees were actually officially called the Developmentally Delayed. So if someone had once taken just the first letters of both words, that was how they had gotten their name.

  Everything went well between them and they got to like having their Voices off while they strolled through the antiquated hallways, making sense of the signs.

  The Voice was always available if they needed it. Linkchips embedded near both ears could pick up the pervasive waves of CompCentral. They only had basic link, no frills but constant access. Like everybody, they had used the Voice more as time went on; it was so easy.

  But reading gave them a touch of the past and some silence. It was a relief, really.

  They had kept their Voices nearly always on. It was easy to get used to the Voice’s silky advertisements that floated just within hearing. You could pay the subscriber service for the Voice and have no ads, but none of their friends did: it was far too expensive. And anyway, the ads told you a lot about people. There was a really interesting one for sperm and egg donors to the gay/les bank, a Meritocracy program to help preserve the Gay gene. It had zoomer sonics and life histories and everything. You could amp it and hear a whole half-hour show if you wanted. For free, too. But most weren’t anywhere near that good, so they were glad to be rid of them.

  Reading, though, grew on them. There were advantages to reading old signs that the Voice didn’t bother to translate. They showed off to a few friends but nobody believed they could really read the curious markings. It had to be some trick, for sure. Klair and Qent just smiled knowingly and dropped the subject.

  Not that it was all good. At an old intersection Qent honored the go signal by reading it, rather than listening to his Voice. The signal was off synch and he nearly got flattened by a roller car.

  They debated whether to tell anyone in authority. After all, maybe nobody knew this.

  “Ummm, no,” Qent said. “Look at it this way—carrion eaters rule the world, in their way. Because nobody cares. Nobody wants what they like.”

  “So we’d be fools to make other people like reading?”

  “Demand rises, supplies fall. Suppose everybody wanted those old books you found?”

  She had to admit it was a sobering possibility. The carrion-eater analogy came out of his biology training, and he couldn’t resist adding, “It’s a smart strategy. When times are tough on everybody, the buzzards just get more to eat.”

  The thought was so disgusting she decided to forget about the whole question.

  They came to like strolling the byways of the Megapolis, ferreting out the antiquated secrets of the signs. Lovers often find their own rituals, and this was a particularly delectable one.

  Outside one vaultway there were clearly marked instructions on how to spin a dial and get in. They had to work on it for quite a while but finally they made it work. The door swung open on primitive hinges and they walked into a musty set of rooms. Exploring them proved boring; just stacks of locked compartments, all without signs. Until a guard came in with a drawn zapper.

  “How’d you kids get in here?”

  “It was open, sir,” Qent said. He had always been quick and Klair supposed his answer was technically correct. She had opened the door.

  “How the hell—? Well, get out. Out!”

  The guard was confused and worried and hardly gave them more than a brief search, muttering. Qent asked to see the zapper, imitating a dumbo kid, and the guard brushed them off, still puzzled.

  Until the vault she had not realized that her hard-won trick was anything more than a delicious secret. Klair was a scholarly type and enjoyed her hours of scanning over the decaying sheets she found in the Historical Sector’s archives.

  The fat ones she learned were called “books” and there was even an entry in the Compendium about them. The Voice recited the entry to her in its soft tones, the ones she had chosen for her daily work. She used a more ornate voice for social matters and a crisp, precise one for directions. In normal life that was all anyone
needed, a set of pleasing Voice agents.

  There was hardly any delay when she requested the book entry and the Voice told a marvelous tale. There were many kinds of books, including one called “novel.” This meant new the Voice said. But the one novel Klair found in the dank, dark Antiquities Vault was obviously old, not new at all. Such confusions were inevitable in research, she realized.

  Books were known also as buchs in some ancient sources, it said, in the confusing era when there were competing Voices. Not really even Voices, either, but whole different speech-methods, before Standard was discovered.

  All that happened in the Narrow Age, as antiquarians termed it. A time of constrained modes, hopelessly linear and slow. People then were divided by their access to information. Thank goodness such divisive forces were now banished.

  They now lived in the Emergent Age, of course. The Voice had emerged from the evolution of old style Intelligent Agents, on computers. Those would perform fetch-’em tasks. Gradually, people let their Agents do more and more. Agent merging led to more creativity, coming from the overlap of many voices, many threads in a society where all was open and clear to all, available through the Voice.

  “What sop!” Qent said to this, and she sort of agreed. The Narrow Age sounded fascinating, with its books and reading. The tingling thrill of being able to hold a year’s worth of Voice talk in your hand, opening it to anywhere you chose, picking out lore at will—it captivated her.

  Of course, she knew the Voice was superior. Instantly it could skip to any subject or even word you liked in any record. It would explain in private, sounding just like an enormously smart person speaking to you alone, in your head. Everybody had one and could access it with an internal signal. There were jokes about women falling in love with the husky Voice tone they chose.

  She looked up the Voice itself in one of the old books. The words were hard to follow and she began to wish for some way to find out what they meant. Sounding them out was hard because, even when she knew the word, the mapping from letters to sounds followed irregular rules.”What’s the point of that?” Qent asked often, but he kept at it with her.

  The books said that the Voice had started as an aid to people called “illiterates”—and Klair was startled to find, consulting the Voice, that everybody was one. Except her and Qent, now.

  Once, lots and lots of people could read. But as the Voice got easier to use, a certain cachet attached to using only the Voice. Independence from linear “print-slavery” became fashionable, then universal. After all, the Voice could pipe the data you needed on fast-flow, a kind of compressed speech that was as fast (or in fact, by that time, faster) as people could read.

  Most people got their information by eye, anyway. In a restaurant, they ordered chicken by touching the drumstick icon, or fish by the fishstick icon. And of course most of their time they spent at entertainments, which had to be visual, tactile, smell-rich—sports, 3Ds, senses, a-morphs, realos.

  She found it quite delicious to have an obscure, secret talent that none of her friends even guessed. She was going to have a party and show them all, but then she saw the big letters in the Boulevard of Aspiration, and things got complicated.

  Qent said, “I make it to be—

  SAVVY THIS? MEAT 13:20 @ Y.”

  Skeptically he eyed the poorly printed letters written in livid red on a blue wall. Next to it was a sketch he supposed was a map, but he couldn’t figure it out because there were no names on the corridors.

  “Somebody did that by hand,” Klair marveled.

  “Writing by yourself? How?”

  “I hadn’t thought anybody could. I mean, machines make letters, don’t they?”

  “You’re the one who read all those historical books. Printing machines gave way to Voice machines, you said.”

  Klair traced a hand over the misshapen letters. “It’s like making a drawing, only you try to imitate a machine, see? Think of letters as little art objects.”

  “This isn’t an art exhibit.”

  “No, it’s a message. But maybe I can…”

  By luck she had in her side-sack her latest cherished discovery, a fat book called “Dictionary.” It had many more words in it than the Voice, approximating and vernacular. Big words that nobody used any more, hadn’t used for so long even the Voice didn’t know them. It even told her that “@” meant “at,” but not why.

  “Here,” she pointed forcefully at the tiny little entry. “Meat is the flesh of an animal.”

  “Animals eat flesh. I heard that people used to.”

  “Primitivo!” she said scornfully. “It may mean that in there, but it sounds like ‘meet.’”

  “Somebody made an error? Confusing the sound with another word?”

  “Somebody wants people who can read the sign to meet them.”

  “Other readers.”

  “Where?” He frowned.

  “It says ‘Y.’ That’s not a word.”

  “Maybe it’s an abbreviation, like that “MANUFAC DIST?”

  “No, too short.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Remember where the Avenue of Aspiration branches? You can look down on it from the balcony of the Renew building. From above, it looks like that letter.”

  “Let’s be there, then.”

  They showed up, but nobody else did. Instead, at the Y another crude hand-lettered sign said

  MEAT CORRIDOR 63,

  13:30 TOMORROW, BLOCK 129

  They went home and turned off their Voices and talked. Most couples silenced the Voice only during sex. This was merely polite, even though of course no other person could be sure it was off nowadays, what with the new neuroactivated models. Kids joked about the Voice giving them advice when they first tried sex, “walking you through it” as the phrase went. Though of course no one could walk and do sex.

  They went home and sped-read some ancient texts. There was a thick book titled The Lust of the Mohicans that Qent had seen on senso. She read it—her speed was a lot higher than his—but it wasn’t anything like the senso he had seen. There was no sex in it at all. Just stares of infinite longing and heavy breathing and pounding pulses and stuff like that. Still, she found it oddly stirring. Reading was funny that way.

  They could not get their minds off the sign. Qent was out of sorts, irked that others had mastered their discovery. He groused about it vaguely and found excuses to change the subject.

  Klair didn’t see it possessively. After all, the higher moral good was to share. Reading was wickedly single-ist. Was that why she liked it so much? A reader was isolated, listening to a voice no one else could take part in. That led to differences and divisions, friction and clashes.

  Still, the rapture of reading—of listening in her mind to silent sounds from ages past—was too, well, perhaps the right word was titillating.

  She was excited by the prospect of other readers. Inevitably, they went to the site.

  The man who slouched beside a rampway was not impressive. Medium height, his crimson codpiece was three years out of date. His hair was stringy and festooned with comically tattered microbirds. He said nothing, simply handed them a sheet. Miserably printed sentences covered both sides. The first paragraph was enough for Klair.

  THE SECRET ASSEMBLY OF READERS MUST UNITE! WE HAVE A TALENT THE MASSES CANNOT UNDERSTAND. THEY WILL FEAR US IF THEY KNOW. A BROTHERHOOD AND SISTERHOOD OF READERS IS THE ONLY SOLUTION TO OUR ISOLATION. ARISE!

  “What cliché sop!” She thrust the sheet back at him.

  “True, though.”

  Qent said sharply, “Just tell us what you—”

  “You never know when the Voice is on,” the man said mysteriously.

  Klair said, “And your printing is awful.”

  “Better than yours,” he said shrewdly.

  “That’s not the point,” Qent said. “We demand to know—”

  “Come on. And shut up, huh?”

  They were in a leafy, green wildness preserve before the man spoke. His face wa
s broad, Asian, with glittering black eyes. “I’m Marq. No Voice pickups here, at least according to the flow charts.”

  “You’re an engineer?” Klair asked, admiring the oaks.

  “I’m a philosopher. I make my money engineering.”

  “How long have you been reading?”

  “Years. Started with some old manuals I found. Figured it out from scratch.”

  “So did we,” Qent said. “It’s hard, not being able to ask for help from the Voice.”

  Marq nodded with a sheepish smile. “I did. Dumb, huh?”

  “What happened?”

  “Some Spectors came by. Just casual talk, y’know, but I knew what they were after.”

  “Evidence?” she asked uneasily.

  “When I asked the Voice there was a pause, just a little one. A priority shift, I know how to spot them. So I broke off and took the books I had to a hiding place. When I got back there were the Spectors, cool as you like, just kind of looking around my room.”

  “You didn’t tell them…?” she asked.

  “You got to give them something. I had a copy of this thing about books that I couldn’t understand, Centigrade 233. Kept it buried under a pseud-bush bed. They were getting funny on me—you know, getting in my face, routine intimidation—so I took it out and gave it to them.”

  She blinked, startled. “What did they do? Arrest you?”

  Marq gave her a crooked grin. “Reading’s not illegal, y’know. Just anti, that’s all. So they let me off with six weeks of grouping.”

  “Wow, do I hate those,” Qent said.

  Marq shrugged. “I did the time. They poked at me and I had to pretend to see the light and all. They kept the book.”

  “You’re brave,” Klair said.

  “Just stupid. I should never have asked the Voice.”

  Qent said earnestly, “You’d think the Voice would encourage us to learn. I mean, it’d be useful in emergencies. Say the Voice goes down, we could read the info we’d need.”