Marq nodded. “I figure the Voice reads. It just doesn’t want competition.”
She said, “The Voice is a machine.”
“So?” Marq shrugged again. “Who knows how smart it is?”
“It’s a service,” Qent said. “That’s all.”
“Notice how it won’t store what we say?” Marq smiled shrewdly.
Qent nodded. “It says it’s trying to improve our memories.”
“Reading was invented to replace memory,” Klair said. “I read it in a history book.”
“So it must be true?” Marq shrugged derisively, a gesture that was beginning to irk Klair a lot.
She hated politics and this was starting to sound like that. “How many books have you got?”
“Lots. I found a tunnel into a vault. I can go there anytime.”
Qent and Klair gasped at his audacity as he described how, for years, he had burrowed into sealed-off chambers. Many of the musty rooms were rich in decaying documents and bound volumes. He spoke of exotica they had never seen, tomes which were nothing but names in the Dictionary: Encyclopedias, Thesauruses, Atlases, Alamancs. He had read whole volumes of the fabled Britannica!
Would he trade? Lend? “Of course,” Marq said warmly.
Their friendship began that way, a bit edgy and cautious at the margins, but dominated by the skill and secret lore they shared. Three years of clandestine reading followed before Marq disappeared.
He wasn’t at any of their usual meeting places. After all this time, they still did not know where he lived, or where his hoard of books might be. Marq was secretive. They searched the sprawling corridors of the complexes, but were afraid to ask the Voice for any info on him.
The Majority Games were on then so the streets were more crowded than usual. Most people were out all the time, excited and eager and happy to be in the great mobs that thronged the squares. The Games took up everybody’s time—except, of course, the three hours of work everyone had to put in, no exceptions, every laborday. Klair and Qent broke up to cover more ground and spent a full week on the search. Many times Klair blamed herself for not pressing Marq about where he lived, but the man was obsessively secretive. “Suppose they grab you, make you tell about me?” he had always countered.
Now she wondered what the Specters would do if they uncovered a lode of books like Marq’s. Send him to Advanced Treatment? Or was there something even worse?
She came home after a day of dogged searching and Qent was not there. He did not appear that evening. When she awoke the next morning she burst into tears. He was gone that day and the one after.
On her way back from work, a routine counseling job, she resolved to go to the Spector. She halfheartedly watched the crowds, hoping to see Marq or Qent. She ambled along, wandering really, and that was how she noticed that three men and a woman were moving parallel to her as she crossed the Plaza of Promise. They were all looking some other way but they formed four points of the compass around her with practiced precision.
She walked faster and they did too. They looked stern and remorseless and she could not lose them in the warrens of streets and corridors near the two-room apartment she shared with Qent. They had waited five years to get one with a tiny balcony. Even then it was just two levels up from the muddy floor of the air shaft. But if you hooked your head over to the side you could see some sky that way. When they got it she had been thrilled.
Klair kept moving in an aimless pattern and they followed. Of course she did not want to go to the apartment, where she would be trapped. She sat in bars and if one of her shadowers entered, she left. But she was tired and she could not think of anything else to do. Finally she went home.
They knocked a few minutes after she collapsed on the bed. She had hoped they might hold off for a while. She was resigned. When she spun the door open looming in the doorway was not one of the shadower team but—Marq.
“You won’t believe what’s going on,” he said, brushing past her.
“What? Where have you—”
“The Meritocrats want us.”
“For what?”
“Reading!”
“But the Voice—”
“Keeps people out of touch and happy. Great idea—but it turns out you can’t run everything with just the Voice.” He blinked, the merest hesitation. “Somebody’s got to be able to access info at a higher level. That was our gut feeling, remember—that reading was different.”
“Well, yes, but the Spectors—”
“They keep people damped down, is all.” A slight pause. “Anybody who’s got the savvy to see the signs, the words, the grit to learn to piece together words on their own, to process it all—those are the people the Merits want.” Another pause. “Us!”
Klair blinked. This was too much to encompass. “But why did they take you away, and Qent—”
“Had to be sure.” He gave his old familiar shrug. “Wanted to test our skills, make sure we weren’t just posing.” His eyes roved the room. “People might catch on, only pretend to read, y’know?”
“I…see.” There was something about Marq that wasn’t right. He had never had these pauses before…because he wasn’t listening to the Voice then?
She backed away from him. “That’s marvelous news. When will Qent be back?”
“Oh, soon, soon.” He advanced. She opened the thin door and backed out onto the balcony.
“So what job will you do? I mean, with reading in it?”
They were outside in chilly air. She backed into the railing. The usual distant clatter and chat of the air shaft gave her a momentary sense of security. Nothing could happen here, could it?
“Oh, plenty. Looking up old stuff, comparing, y’know.” He waved his hands vaguely.
It wasn’t much of a drop from here. Over the railing, legs set right…
“It’s good work, really.”
Could she could get away if she jumped? Marq wasn’t the athletic type and she knew that if she landed right on the mud below she wouldn’t twist an ankle or anything. She had on sensible shoes. She could elude him. If she landed right.
She gave him a quick, searching look. Had he come here alone? No, probably there were Spectors outside her door, just waiting for him to talk her into surrendering. Stall for time, yes.
“How bad is it?”
He grinned. “You won’t mind. They just access that part of your mind for three hours a day. Then they install a shutdown on that cerebral sector.”
“Shutdown? I—”
“So you don’t need to read any more. Just during work, is all. You get all you need that way, plenty of reading. Then you’re free!”
She thought it through. Jump, get away? Couldn’t use the Voice for help because they could undoubtedly track her if she had her receiver on. Could she get by, just reading the old signs?
Suppose she could. Then what? Find some friends she could trust. Stay underground? How? Living off what?
“Sounds like it’s much better. Qent will be back soon and—”
Marq held up a hand and stepped closer. “Hold it. Don’t move.”
She looked down the air shaft. Was the jump worth it?
You spool out of the illusion and snap—back into the tight cocoon. The automatic sensory leads retract, giving your skin momentary pinprick goodbye kisses. Once more you feel the cool clasping surfaces of the cocoon. Now you turn and ask, “Hey, where’s the rest?”
Myrph shrugs her shoulders, still busy undoing her leads. “That’s all there was, I told you.”
“Maybe it’s just damaged?”
“No, that’s the end of the cube. There must be another cube to finish the story, but this was the only one I found back in that closet.”
“But how does it end? What’s she do?” You lean toward her, hoping maybe she’s just teasing.
“I dunno. What would you do? Jump?”
You blink, not ready for the question. “Uh, this reading thing. What is it, really?”
Myrph frowns.
“It felt like a kind of your own silent voice inside your head.”
“Is it real? I mean, does reading exist?”
“Never heard of it.”
“So this isn’t an historical at all, right? It’s a fantasy.”
“Must be. I’ve never seen those things on walls.”
“Signs, she called them.” You think back. “They would have worn away a long time ago, anyway.”
“I guess. Felt kinda strange, didn’t it, being able to find out things without the Voice?”
You bite your lip, thinking. Already the illusion of being that woman is slipping away, hard to fix in memory. She did have a kind of power all on her own with that reading thing. You liked that. “I wonder what she did?”
“Hey, it’s just a story.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t have to decide. It’s just a story.”
“But why tell it then?”
Myrph says irritably, “It’s just an old illusion, missing a cube.”
“Maybe there was only one.”
“Look, I want illusions to take me away, not stress me out.”
You remember the power of it. “Can I have it, then?”
“The cube? Sure.”
Myrph tosses it over. It is curiously heavy, translucent and chipped with rounded corners. You cup it in your hand and like the weight of it. Gravitas.
That is how it starts. You know already that you will go and look for the signs in the corridors and that for good or ill something new has come into your world and will now never leave it.
Slow Symphonies of Mass and Time
(1998)
The chase across an entire galaxy started at a swanky private party.
Think of the galaxy as a swarm of gaudy bees, bright colors hovering in a ball. Then stomp them somehow in midair, so they bank and turn in a compressed disk. Dark bees fly with them too, so that somber lanes churn in the swiftly-rotating cloud. Angry bees, buzzing, stingers out. Churning endlessly in their search.
That is the galaxy, seen whole and quick. Stars have no will, but their courses and destinies were now guided by small entities of great pretension: humans, now lording it over the All.
Or such is the viewpoint of the lords and ladies of a galactic empire that stretches across that bee swarm disk: they loom above it all, oblivious. Stars do their bidding. The bees swarm at the lift of an Imperial eyebrow.
Until one lord turns upon another. Then they are as their origins made them: savvy omnivores, primates reared up and grimacing, teeth bared at each other. Across the span of a hundred billion worlds, ancient blood sings in pounding vessels.
Despite appearances, some of these primordial creatures were present at the party, yet seeming mild and splendid in their finery.
Of course, it all began innocently enough.
An ample, powerful woman named Vissian grasped his sleeve and tugged him back to the ornate reception. “Sir Zeb, you are the point of this affair! Sir Zeb, my guests have so much to tell you.”
And to think that he had wanted to come here! To get the scent of change. But already he was tiring of this world, Syrna. Sir Zeb, indeed. He truly did not enjoy travel all that much, a fact he often forgot.
Even here, in a distant Sector, the heavy hand of the Imperium lay upon style and art. The Imperium’s essence lay in its solidity; its taste ran to the monumental. Rigorous straight lines in ascending slabs, the exact parabolas of arching purple water fountains, heavy masonry—all entirely proper and devoid of embarrassing challenge. He sniffed at the hyperbolic draperies and moved toward the crowd, their faces terminally bland.
Vissian nattered on. “—and our most brilliant minds are waiting to meet you! Do come!”
He suppressed a groan and looked beseechingly at Fyrna, his consort now of a full decade; something of a record in Imperial circles. She smiled and shook her head. From this hazard she could not save him.
“Sir Zeb, what of the mysteries at galactic center?”
“I savor them.”
“But are those magnetic entities a threat? They are huge!”
“And wise. Think of them as great slumbering libraries.”
“But they command such energies!”
“Then think of them as natural wonders, like waterfalls.”
This provoked a chorus of laughter in the polite half-moon crowd around him. “Some on the Council believe we should take action against them!” a narrow woman in flocked velvet called from the crowd’s edge.
“I would sooner joust with the wind,” Zeb said, taking a stim from a passing dwarf servant.
“Sir Zeb, surely you cannot take lightly—”
“I am on holiday, sir, and can take things as they are.”
“But you, Sir Zeb, have seen these magnetic structures?”
“Filaments, hundreds of light-years long—yes. Lovely, they are.”
Wide-eyed: ”Was it dangerous?”
“Of course. Nobody goes to the galactic center. Hard protons sleet through it, virulent X-rays light its pathways.”
“Why did you risk it?”
“I am a fool, madam, who works for you, the people.”
And so on.
If Vissian had begun as a grain of sand in his shoe, she became a boulder. An hour later, Fyrna whisked him into an alcove and said curtly, “I am concerned about someone tracking us here. We’re just one worm-jump away from fleet’s quadrant assembly point.”
Zeb had allowed himself to forget about politics: the only vacation a statesman had. “My protection should be good here. I can get a quick message out, using a wormlink to—”
“No, you can’t work using a link. The Speculists could trace that easily.”
Factions, factions. The situation had shifted while he was idling away here. As Governor of another Sector, he was a guest here, given nominal protection. He had his own bodyguards, too, salted among the crowd here. But the Speculists had strong support in this region of the galaxy and were quite blithely ruthless. Zeb stared out at the view, which he had to admit was spectacular. Great, stretching vistas. Riotous growth.
But more fires boiled up on the horizon. There was gaiety in the streets here—and angst. Their laboratories seethed with fresh energies, innovation bristled everywhere, the air seemed to sing with change and chaos.
The extremes of wealth and destitution were appalling. Change brought that, he knew.
As a boy he had seen poverty—and lived it, too. His grandmother had insisted on buying him a raincoat several sizes too large, “to get more use out of it.” His mother didn’t like him playing kickball because he wore out his shoes too quickly.
Here, too, the truly poor were off in the hinterlands. Sometimes they couldn’t even afford fossil fuels. Men and women peered over a mule’s ass all day as it plodded down a furrow, while overhead starships screamed through velvet skies.
And here… Among these fast-track circles, body language was taught. There were carefully designed poses for Confidence, Impatience, Submission (four shadings), Threat, Esteem, Coyness, and dozens more. Codified and understood unconsciously, each induced a specific desired neurological state in both self and others. The rudiments lay in dance, politics, and the martial arts, but by being systematic, much more could be conveyed. As with language, a dictionary helped.
Zeb felt an unease in the reception party. Reading some veiled threat-postures? Or was he projecting?
Quickly he adjusted his own stance—radiating confidence, he hoped. But still, he had picked up a subconscious alarm. And he knew enough from decades of politics to trust his instincts.
“Governor!” Vissian’s penetrating voice snatched away his thoughts.
“Uh, that tour of the precincts. I, I really don’t feel—”
“Oh, that is not possible, I fear. A domestic disturbance, most unfortunate.”
Zeb felt relief but Vissian went right on, bubbling over new ventures, balls, and tours to come tomorrow. Then her eyebrows lifted and she said b
rightly, “Oh yes—I do have even more welcome news. An Imperial squadron has just come to call.”
“Oh?” Fyrna shot back. “Under whose command?”
“An Admiral Kafalan. I just spoke to him—”
“Damn!” Fyrna said. “He’s a Speculist henchman.”
“You’re sure?” Zeb asked. He knew her slight pause had been to consult her internal files.
Fyrna nodded. Vissian said gaily, “Well, I am sure he will be honored to return you to your sector when you are finished with your visit here. Which we hope will not be soon, of—”
“He mentioned us?” Fyrna asked.
“He asked if you were enjoying—”
“Damn!” Zeb said.
“An Admiral commands all the wormlinks, if he wishes—yes?” Fyrna asked.
“Well, I suppose so.” Vissian looked puzzled.
“We’re trapped,” Zeb said.
Vissian’s eyes widened in shock. “But surely you, Governor, need fear no—”
“Quiet.” Fyrna silenced the woman with a stern glance. “At best this Kafalan will bottle us up here.”
Fyrna pushed them both into a side gallery. Vissian seemed startled by this, though Fyrna was both consort and bodyguard. Indeed, she and Zeb might as well have been married, but for the social impossibilities.
This side gallery featured storm-tossed jungles of an unnamed world lashed by sleeting rain, lit by jagged purple lightning. Strange howls called through the lashing winds.
“Note that if Imperial artists do show you an exterior, it is alarming,” Fyrna said clinically as she checked her detectors, set into her spine and arms.
“They’re still nearby?” Zeb asked, shushing Vissian.
“Yes, but of course they are beards.”
To his puzzled look she said, “Meaning, the disguise we are meant to see.”
“Ah.” They strolled into the next gallery, trying to look casual. This sensor was milder, a grandiose streetscape and hanging gardens. “Ummm, still poorly attended. And the real shadows?”
“I have spotted one. There must be more.”
Vissian said, “But surely no one would dare kidnap you from my reception—”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 41
