The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Disposable realities,” some sneered—but the fascination of such lives was clear.

  Shiva’s implication was extreme: an entire world could give itself over to life-as-computation.

  Could the intelligent species of Shiva have executed a huge fraction of their fellow inhabitants? And then themselves gone extinct? For what? Could they have fled—perhaps from the enormity of their own deeds?

  Or had those original predators become the tile-polygons?

  The Adventurer crew decided to return to Shiva’s surface in force, to crack the puzzles. They notified Earth and descended.

  Shortly after, the Shiva teams ceased reporting back to Earth. Through the hiss of interstellar static there came no signal.

  After years of anxious waiting, Earth launched the second expedition. They too survived the passage. Cautiously they approached Shiva.

  Adventurer still orbited the planet, but was vacant.

  This time they were wary. Further years of hard thinking and careful study passed before the truth began to come.

  4.

  {— John/Odis/Lissa/Tagore/Cap’n —} —all assembled/congealed/thickened — —into a composite veneer persona— —on the central deck of their old starship, —to greet the second expedition.

  Or so they seemed to intend.

  They came up from the Shiva surface in a craft not of human construction. The sleek, webbed thing seemed to ride upon electromagnetic winds.

  They entered through the main lock, after using proper hailing protocols.

  But what came through the lock was an ordered array of people no one could recognize as being from the Adventurer crew.

  They seemed younger, unworn. Smooth, bland features looked out at the bewildered second expedition. The party moved together, maintaining a hexagonal array with a constant spacing of four centimeters. Fifty-six pairs of eyes surveyed the new Earth ship, each momentarily gazing at a different portion of the field of view as if to memorize only a portion, for later integration.

  To convey a sentence, each person spoke a separate word. The effect was jarring, with no clue to how an individual knew what to say, or when, for the lines were not rehearsed. The group reacted to questions in a blur of scattershot talk, words like volleys.

  Sentences ricocheted and bounced around the assembly deck where the survivors of the first expedition all stood, erect and clothed in a shapeless gray garment. Their phrases made sense when isolated, but the experience of hearing them was unsettling. Long minutes stretched out before the second expedition realized that these hexagonally spaced humans were trying to greet them, to induct them into something they termed the Being Suite.

  This offer made, the faces within the hexagonal array began to show separate expressions. Tapes of this encounter show regular facial alterations with a fixed periodicity of 1.27 seconds. Each separate face ratcheted, jerking among a menu of finely graduated countenances—anger, sympathy, laughter, rage, curiosity, shock, puzzlement, ecstasy—flickering, flickering, endlessly flickering.

  A witness later said that it were as if the hexagonals (as they came to be called) knew that human expressiveness centered on the face, and so had slipped into a kind of language of facial aspects. This seemed natural to them, and yet the 1.27 second pace quickly gave the witnesses a sense of creeping horror.

  High-speed tapes of the event showed more. Beneath the 1.27 frequency there was a higher harmonic, barely perceptible to the human eye, in which other expressions shot across the hexagonals’ faces. These were like waves, muscular twitches that washed over the skin like tidal pulls.

  This periodicity was the same as the tile-polygons had displayed. The subliminal aspects were faster than the conscious human optical processor can manage, yet research showed that they were decipherable in the target audience.

  Researchers later concluded that this rapid display was the origin of the growing unease felt by the second expedition. The hexagonals said nothing throughout all this.

  The second expedition crew described the experience as uncanny, racking, unbearable. Their distinct impression was that the first expedition now manifested as like the tile-things. Such testimony was often followed by an involuntary twitch.

  Tapes do not yield such an impression upon similar audiences: they have become the classic example of having to be in a place and time to sense the meaning of an event. Still, the tapes are disturbing, and access is controlled. Some Earth audiences experienced breakdowns after viewing them.

  But the second expedition agreed even more strongly upon a second conclusion. Plainly, the Adventurer expedition had joined the computational labyrinth that was Shiva. How they were seduced was never clear; the second expedition feared finding out.

  Indeed, their sole, momentary brush with {— John/Odis/Lissa/ Tagore/Cap’n… —} convinced the second expedition that there was no point in pursuing the maze of Shiva.

  The hostility radiating from the second expedition soon drove the hexagonals back into their ship and away. The fresh humans from Earth felt something gut-level and instinctive, a reaction beyond words. The hexagonals retreated without showing a coherent reaction. They simply turned and walked away, holding to the four-centimeter spacing. The 1.27 second flicker stopped and they returned to a bland expression, alert but giving nothing away.

  The vision these hexagonals conveyed was austere, jarring…and yet, plainly intended to be inviting.

  The magnitude of their failure was a measure of the abyss that separated the two parties. The hexagonals were now both more and less than human.

  The hexagonals left recurrent patterns that told much, though only in retrospect. Behind the second expedition’s revulsion lay a revelation: of a galaxy spanned by intelligences formal and remote, far developed beyond the organic stage. Such intelligences had been born variously, of early organic forms, or of later machine civilizations which had arisen upon the ashes of extinct organic societies. The gleam of the stars was in fact a metallic glitter.

  This vision was daunting enough: of minds so distant and strange, hosted in bodies free of sinew and skin. But there was something more, an inexpressible repulsion in the manifestation of {— John/Odis/Lissa/Tagore/Cap’n… —}.

  A nineteenth-century philosopher, Nietzsche, had once remarked that if one stared into the abyss long enough, it stared back. This proved true. A mere moment’s lingering look, quiet and almost casual, was enough. The second expedition panicked. It is not good to stare into a pit that has no bottom.

  They had sensed the final implication of Shiva’s evolution. To alight upon such interior worlds of deep, terrible exotica exacted a high cost: the body itself. Yet all those diverse people had joined the syntony of Shiva—an electrical harmony that danced to unheard musics. Whether they had been seduced, or even raped, would forever be unclear.

  Out of the raw data-stream the second expedition could sample transmissions from the tile-things, as well. The second expedition caught a link-locked sense of repulsive grandeur. Still organic in their basic organization, still tied to the eternal wheel of birth and death, the tiles had once been lords of their own world, holding dominion over all they knew.

  Now they were patient, willing drones in a hive they could not comprehend. But—and here human terms undoubtedly fail—they loved their immersion.

  Where was their consciousness housed? Partially in each, or in some displaced, additive sense? There was no clear way to test either idea.

  The tile-things were like durable, patient machines that could best carry forward the first stages of a grand computation. Some biologists compared them with insects, but no evolutionary mechanism seemed capable of yielding a reason why a species would give itself over to computation. The insect analogy died, unable to predict the response of the polygons to stimulus, or even why they existed.

  Or was their unending jostling only in the service of calculation? The tile-polygons would not say. They never responded to overtures.

  The Circular Ocean’s enormou
s atmospheric laser pulsed regularly, as the planet’s orbit and rotation carried the laser’s field of targeting onto a fresh partner-star system. Only then did the system send its rich messages out into the galaxy. The pulses carried mind-packets of unimaginable data, bound on expeditions of the intellect.

  The second expedition reported, studied. Slowly at first, and then accelerating, the terror overcame them.

  They could not fathom Shiva, and steadily they lost crew members to its clasp. Confronting the truly, irreducibly exotic, there is no end of ways to perish.

  In the end they studied Shiva from a distance, no more. Try as they could, they always met a barrier in their understanding. Theories came and went, fruitlessly. Finally, they fled.

  It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy. Worse, the lack was clearly in oneself, and was irredeemable.

  This was the first contact humanity had with the true nature of the galaxy. It would not be the last. But the sense of utter and complete diminishment never left the species, in all the strange millennia that rolled on thereafter.

  Anomalies

  (2001)

  It was not lost upon the Astronomer Royal that the greatest scientific discovery of all time was made by a carpenter and amateur astronomer from the neighboring cathedral town of Ely. Not by a Cambridge man.

  Geoffrey Carlisle had a plain directness that apparently came from his profession, a custom cabinet maker. It had enabled him to get past the practiced deflection skills of the receptionist at the Institute for Astronomy, through the Assistant Director’s patented brush-off, and into the Astronomer Royal’s corner office.

  Running this gauntlet took until early afternoon, as the sun broke through a shroud of soft rain. Geoffrey wasted no time. He dropped a celestial coordinate map on the Astronomer Royal’s mahogany desk, hand amended, and said, “The moon’s off by better’n a degree.”

  “You measured carefully, I am sure.”

  The Astronomer Royal had found that the occasional crank did make it through the Institute’s screen, and in confronting them it was best to go straight to the data. Treat them like fellow members of the profession and they softened. Indeed, astronomy was the only remaining science which profited from the work of amateurs. They discovered the new comets, found wandering asteroids, noticed new novae and generally patrolled what the professionals referred to as local astronomy—anything that could be seen in the night sky with a telescope smaller than a building.

  That Geoffrey had gotten past the scrutiny of the others meant this might conceivably be real. “Very well, let us have a look.” The Astronomer Royal had lunched at his desk and so could not use a date in his college as a dodge. Besides, this was crazy enough to perhaps generate an amusing story.

  An hour later he had abandoned the story-generating idea. A conference with the librarian, who knew the heavens like his own palm, made it clear that Geoffrey had done all the basic work correctly. He had photos and careful, carpenter-sure data, all showing that, indeed, last night after around eleven o’clock the moon was well ahead of its orbital position.

  “No possibility of systematic error here?” the librarian politely asked the tall, sinewy Geoffrey.

  “Check ’em yerself. I was kinda hopin’ you fellows would have an explanation, is all.”

  The moon was not up, so the Astronomer Royal sent a quick email to Hawaii. They thought he was joking, but then took a quick look and came back, rattled. A team there got right on it and confirmed. Once alerted, other observatories in Japan and Australia chimed in.

  “It’s out of position by several of its own diameters,” the Astronomer Royal mused. “Ahead of its orbit, exactly on track.”

  The librarian commented precisely, “The tides are off prediction as well, exactly as required by this new position. They shifted suddenly, reports say.”

  “I don’t see how this can happen,” Geoffrey said quietly.

  “Nor I,” the Astronomer Royal said. He was known for his understatement, which could masquerade as modesty, but here he could think of no way to underplay such a result.

  “Somebody else’s bound to notice, I’d say,” Geoffrey said, folding his cap in his hands.

  “Indeed,” the Astronomer Royal suspected some subtlety had slipped by him.

  “Point is, sir, I want to be sure I get the credit for the discovery.”

  “Oh, of course you shall.” All amateurs ever got for their labors was their name attached to a comet or asteroid, but this was quite different. “Best we get on to the IAU, ah, the International Astronomical Union,” the Astronomer Royal said, his mind whirling. “There’s a procedure for alerting all interested observers. Establish credit, as well.”

  Geoffrey waved this away. “Me, I’m just a five-inch ’scope man. Don’t care about much beyond the priority, sir. I mean, it’s over to you fellows. What I want to know is, what’s it mean?”

  Soon enough, as the evening news blared and the moon lifted above the European horizons again, that plaintive question sounded all about. One did not have to be a specialist to see that something major was afoot.

  “It all checks,” the Astronomer Royal said before a forest of cameras and microphones. “The tides being off true has been noted by the naval authorities round the world, as well. Somehow, in the early hours of last evening, Greenwich time, our moon accelerated in its orbit. Now it is proceeding at its normal speed, however.”

  “Any danger to us?” one of the incisive, investigative types asked.

  “None I can see,” the Astronomer Royal deflected this mildly. “No panic headlines needed.”

  “What caused it?” a woman’s voice called from the media thicket.

  “We can see no object nearby, no apparent agency,” the Astronomer Royal admitted.

  “Using what?”

  “We are scanning the region in all wavelengths, from radio to gamma rays.” An extravagant waste, very probably, but the Astronomer Royal knew the price of not appearing properly concerned. Hand-wringing was called for at all stages.

  “Has this happened before?” a voice sharply asked. “Maybe we just weren’t told?”

  “There are no records of any such event,” the Astronomer Royal said. “Of course, a thousand years ago, who would have noticed? The supernova that left us the Crab nebula went unreported in Europe, though not in China, though it was plainly visible here.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Carlisle?” a reporter probed. “As a non-specialist?”

  Geoffrey had hung back at the press conference, which the crowds had forced the Institute to hold on the lush green lawn outside the old Observatory Building. “I was just the first to notice it,” he said. “That far off, pretty damned hard not to.”

  The media mavens liked this and coaxed him further. “Well, I dunno about any new force needed to explain it. Seems to me, might as well say its supernatural, when you don’t know anything.”

  This the crowd loved. SUPER AMATEUR SAYS MOON IS SUPERNATURAL soon appeared on a tabloid. They made a hero of Geoffrey. ‘AS OBVIOUS AS YOUR FACE’ SAYS GEOFF. The London Times ran a full page reproduction of his log book, from which he and the Astronomer Royal had worked out that the acceleration had to have happened in a narrow window around ten p.m., since no observer to the east had noticed any oddity before that.

  Most of Europe had been clouded over that night anyway, so Geoffrey was among the first who could have gotten a clear view after what the newspapers promptly termed The Anomaly, as in ANOMALY MAN STUNS ASTROS.

  Of the several thousand working astronomers in the world, few concerned themselves with “local” events, especially not with anything the eye could make out. But now hundreds threw themselves upon The Anomaly and, coordinated out of Cambridge by the Astronomer Royal, swiftly outlined its aspects. So c
ame the second discovery.

  In a circle around where the moon had been, about two degrees wide, the stars were wrong. Their positions had jiggled randomly, as though irregularly refracted by some vast, unseen lens.

  Modern astronomy is a hot competition between the quick and the dead—who soon become the untenured.

  Five of the particularly quick discovered this Second Anomaly. They had only to search all ongoing observing campaigns and find any that chanced to be looking at that portion of the sky the night before. The media, now in full bay, headlined their comparison photos. Utterly obscure dots of light became famous when blink-comparisons showed them jumping a finger’s width in the night sky, within an hour of the ten p.m. Anomaly Moment.

  “Does this check with your observations?” a firm-jawed commentator had demanded of Geoffrey at a hastily called meeting one day later, in the auditorium at the Institute for Astronomy. They called upon him first, always—he served as an anchor amid the swift currents of astronomical detail.

  Hooting from the traffic jam on Madingley Road nearby nearly drowned out Geoffrey’s plaintive, “I dunno. I’m a planetary man, myself.”

  By this time even the nightly news broadcasts had caught onto the fact that having a patch of sky behave badly implied something of a wrenching mystery. And no astronomer, however bold, stepped forward with an explanation. An old joke with not a little truth in it—that a theorist could explain the outcome of any experiment, as long as he knew it in advance—rang true, and got repeated. The chattering class ran rife with speculation.

  But there was still nothing unusual visible there. Days of intense observation in all frequencies yielded nothing.

  Meanwhile the moon glided on in its ethereal ellipse, following precisely the equations first written down by Newton, only a mile from where the Astronomer Royal now sat, vexed, with Geoffrey. “A don at Jesus College called, fellow I know,” the Astronomer Royal said. “He wants to see us both.”