The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  The woman gives her a glance and there’s a little something going on right away. Goldman has been trying to go straight for a while to see what it’s like, no Father Knows Best or anything, but to get the flavor back in her mouth, was the way she thought of it.

  The woman sits at the next table and they do some eye stuff. That gets Goldman’s pulse up, just like always, but then Trotsky comes lumbering through the door and looks around with his jerky head movements and darting eyes, like an eagle on the hunt. They get to her even more, something predatory.

  He comes over to her table and plunks his bony body down. Right off he starts talking about some news stuff, not even saying hello. The owner stands glowering by the cash register, a black guy who makes a point about every customer having to order something. Trotsky catches the look and makes a show of ignoring it, keeps right on talking. The black guy puts on his apron, some kind of territorial signal maybe. Trotsky gets up and orders an herbal tea.

  While he’s over at the counter Goldman catches a sidelong from the woman still in her roller blades. Her soft green eyes mingle sympathy and an eyebrow-arching whassup? Goldman feels herself getting wet.

  Trotsky comes back with his tea. He’s angry that they don’t have brown sugar and says that if the owner wasn’t black Trotsky would write a letter to the chain management about it. Goldman has always liked how he sticks to the straight and narrow, even on little things. And he was good in bed those three times, she reminds herself. Wolfish, intense, talked all the way through it, even the oral part. None of the talk was dirty, either. Kinda weird.

  Then he has to go to the john and the woman at the next table gives her the look again. She has a lot of options here. The rollerblader would be pretty squishy, play to her short-term self. Trotsky was a ferret-faced irk sometimes, but he thought ahead, saw horizons. Which should she go for this time?

  Jefferson walks into the board meeting the next morning with a solid, confident stride. The satellite company he consults for has sent him to push the new networking scenarios to these biz types. No sweat, he’s done it all. Which is the problem.

  Halfway through his Powerpoint presentation he feels the carpet seem to slide away. He keeps talking, practically knows the lines by heart now. But his Self, as he likes to think of it, is elsewhere. Out there.

  He speaks on about a big real estate deal along the Mexican border, water rights and pollution guarantees and the rest of it, but the zest is gone. Instead he’s thinking about virgin lands and wind-swept forests and big skies.

  A raised hand in the audience. “Mr. Jefferson, what’s the ten-year rollout on convertible trust deeds here?”

  —and the room swims away into deep moist green, towering trunks, rippling waters, dizzy desires all around him.

  Lenin wears a big floppy hat to the demonstration. He tells himself it’s to keep down his sun exposure, a man with a premature bald spot at age 34 has got to watch that. But a woman in his affinity group smirks at the hat, guessing that it’s to make it a little harder to identify his face. There’s plenty of TV around and there will be footage on tonight’s news. That’s the point, after all. But he doesn’t want it to get him in trouble at work, either.

  There’s some shoving and chanting and yelling and he gets into it, shoving back. A cop trips him and laughs. All the power of private capital comes rushing up into Lenin’s face and slams him in the nose. He rolls over and gets some blood on his black suit, the standard uniform with vest he always wears to these things. A woman runs over and hands him a towelette for the blood and the cop kicks him in the ass. Lenin backs away but catches the cop’s eye.

  “You can kiss my ass,” he mouths clearly enough for the cop to see but nobody could hear. The cop’s face is a quick study in surprise-irritation-rage, coming just that fast.

  The kids around him are all in jeans or sweats and he feels out of place in his suit. They use tactics borrowed from punk rock, warmed over Spanish anarchism, rave culture. Amazon folk songs blend with obscenities, both long ago robbed of their impact on him by overexposure. A call had gone out before this demo, all about defining principles and goals, skimpy on theory and long on rhetoric.

  He had spent his time with affinity groups fighting for microscopically narrow causes, using consensus-based decision making that took forever. He had thought a lot about their “ways of being” that range from the strictly legal through the iffy quasi-pacifist, which meant tripping cops or throwing paint. He disliked all the phony-talk euphemism “diversity of tactics” that meant old fashioned street fighting. That wasn’t the way to go now, somehow.

  He walks away from the scramble, suddenly confused. His nose hurts and he wonders if the hat looks silly with the suit. Maybe that’s why the woman laughed.

  Goldman gets up early and finds some coffee in a tin. She gets some hot water going but it’s a battle in this strange kitchen. The woman with dirty-blonde hair, what’s her name, is a messy housekeeper.

  Cobwebs are just clearing as she fetches the L.A. Times from the driveway. A Santa Ana is blowing, curling her hair and making her skin jump. There’s the usual mercantile news on the front page so she takes refuge in the comics. After she’s sucked the juice out of those there’s the ritual skimming of the bookshelves, only there aren’t many. She picks A Primer of Soto Zen and reads. The first entry is from Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253). It’s about a monk who carried around Buddhist relics in a box until Dogen told him to give them up. The monk refused and next time he opened the box there was “a poisonous snake coiled within.” A pretty good joke, she thinks, symbol of the folly of worshiping mere signs instead of the essence. Just then the dirty-blonde woman comes shuffling in, naked and yawning. The breasts that so fascinated Goldman last night, after she ditched the Trotsky guy, show some sensual sag and big brown nipples.

  The woman slurps up some of the Columbian coffee without saying a word and hooks a hand around Goldman’s shoulder at the table and feels her breast. A warmth climbs up into Goldman’s mind, a mingling of sweaty musks from last night and the savory zest of the coffee scent in this cluttered, moist apartment. Without a word they get at it again. Hands sliding over soft skin, sniffs and savors, murmurs, her mouth somehow salty on a nipple. It stops her thinking, which she supposes is a good thing. Live in the moment, that’s what it will be like when the Revolution comes.

  Washington gets out of his Mercedes to see what the crowd is all about. Turns out it’s a demonstration against free trade. “Against free traffic, too,” he mutters.

  A guy passing in an old black suit gives him a sharp, pinched-eye look. “We’re against exploitation, man,” the guy says and Washington recognizes him.

  “Say, did you go to Cal?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Washington recalls. They were in the same year and argued with each other in economics classes. There’s blood on the black suit and a kind of desperate glaze in the guy’s eyes. Val, that’s the name. Washington always remembered names, had drilled himself to, it was essential in networking.

  Val’s nose starts trickling blood again. Washington sees that his Mercedes is going nowhere because people are streaming in both directions. Rag-tag types running from the cops a block away, and media hounds closing in on the scene, hungry for it. He takes Val into a bar to use the john and orders them both Irish coffees. It’s uncharacteristic for him, no booze before 5 p.m. has been his rule, but he’s not feeling like hitting the office today anyway. The same old same old won’t cut it for him any more. Time to move on.

  Val comes back and is embarrassingly grateful for the Irish coffee waiting. Suddenly Washington is telling Val about how pointless it seems to him, all the deals and perks. “No scale to it, you know?” he concludes. Even though he’s birthed two Fortune 500 companies in fifteen years.

  “Been there, done that,” Val says heavily. The phrase has called up some private demons for him, too, Washington can see that.

  They have three more rounds of Irish coffees and then a sa
ndwich lunch with arugula salad. It’s almost like the old Cal days, disagreeing on nearly everything but enjoying it. Washington asks what line of work Val is in and gets a story he’s heard before. Professor at some state school, then some startups to learn about real economics. “But not at the center, you know?” Val says with an almost tearful tone.

  They watch a basketball game for a while on the TV. Neither had noticed this is a sports bar. Guys are starting to trickle in, it’s early afternoon. Some are in jeans and others in three-pieces. They’re all there for the game, getting away from whatever reality they’re living in.

  He and Val talk over the basketball game, not really interested. They get excited about something and then guys nearby are shushing them, Hey you don’t wanna hear the game why you here? so soon enough they’re out on the street. The demo is over and Washington should get on to his office. His cell phone’s been ringing all the time. He turns it off and goes for a walk with Val.

  Franklin uses his new tunnel phone to make the call. It’s a beautifully made gizmo he just had to take apart as soon as it came in from shipping. He tries it out by walking around his office and having his secretary listen to how the mike tracks him and adjusts its acoustic feed. Her voice comes back good and clear on the five-speaker input, too. He walks over to his view, straight down the barrel of the Sunset Strip. His company’s media-mogul logo dominates the big studio signs in view. He ordered it positioned there, so he could glance out and see their latest big deal show looming over the tourist crowds.

  The pleasure fades, the way it does a lot lately. His second call on the new phone is to an old girlfriend from back in business school. One night they had a hot-’n-heavy after a big group report was done. Just one, but he found himself thinking about her lately. Her voice shifts from office-official to warm and soft when she recognizes him. “Wow, all these years! Great… Dinner? Tonight? I’d love to, but…” Long pause while he finds himself holding his breath. “I’ve been on the road a lot, and I’d planned to just stay in tonight. Why don’t you come over? 7:30?”

  He brings a bottle of Aussie Shiraz and a couple pictures of one of his inventions. He thinks it’s good to be up front about his sideline interests, so women don’t think he’s just another media pirate, though he is that, too.

  She’s more lovely than he remembers, a little too thin for his taste now. Instead of the severe black business suits she always wore then she’s in a soft blue blouse and willowy skirt with flowers on it. Her mouth is as tough looking as ever but she has on one of those cable music channels, wispy atmospheric stuff. One of the new scent gizmos has flavored the air like a pine forest and her auburn hair shimmers in the recessed lighting. He goes on about his work while she draws him out, standing in her sandals and stirring vegetables and ostrich meat in a wok. He gets an erection just talking and finds it hard to think. He pours the wine and does the usual number about the Australians being overrated. That leads to some conventional talk about the troubles in Malaysia. She sips the wine and tells him she really tries to use only American products. The World Trade Organization is trying to flatten out the whole planet, she says, and he decides to just nod and move on to something else.

  They talk until it’s late. She’s devoted to a variant of the usual twelve-step program and has a picture on the wall of herself standing next to a guy in a white suit, beaming self confidence. He can’t follow what it’s all about.

  His usual game plan, directing the soulful talk after dinner to more intimate areas, keeps sliding away. Maybe his heart isn’t in it. The erection doesn’t come back. That’s a first and he doesn’t understand what it means.

  Contrary to his absolute solid pattern, he starts making his goodbyes. She seems reluctant to let him go. At the door she tells him that she always wanted to get back in touch again, that she has thought about him for years. There is a note of desperation in this that Franklin recognizes, he hears it a lot these days. It probably isn’t about him and her at all but something else, something they both sense. But he doesn’t think climbing into the sack with her is going to help either of them this time.

  He leaves, gunning his sports car on the freeway, and gets a ticket. This really ticks him off and to cool down he stops at a frond bar he remembers from years before. This late it’s nearly deserted and he sits at the bar and orders from the wine menu. A woman two stools away looks at him and turns a certain way so he can see the outline of her breasts, which are ample, in her silky blouse. He gives her the full 100-Amp smile and in a few minutes they’re in a booth ordering some of the new Jaipur appetizers. Her name is Emma Goldman and he gets an erection right away.

  Trotsky decided to move to California because he was just too tight-wound in Manhattan.

  So he tries the Venice scene, making himself sit in those coffee shops. He even goes roller-blading and throws a frisbee on the beach, getting a tan in cutoffs. He works as an accountant, some of it under the table for some tech companies to keep the taxes down. Maybe not completely ethical but what is, these days?

  He thinks he’s mellowed out some since New York but there’s the old dissatisfaction simmering behind his eyes, nothing will make it go away. He runs into Kropotkin from the old gang on the East Side. Kropotkin is wearing a baseball cap on backwards, real out of date, and says he’s trying to break into screenwriting. Working as a waiter right now, but you just wait.

  The thing with Emma Goldman didn’t work out and he can’t figure why. He thought he was coming over pretty well, first the coffee shop meeting and then dinner at a fish taco joint. Maybe he wasn’t upscale enough. Or maybe, he thinks, he still talks about his ideas too much. About Siberia and all.

  He tries getting high, an area he had scorned all along. Dope was ok but made him go to sleep. Ecstasy just made him hear stuff in the music of those mixer clubs, themes and resonances that he knew the next day could not possibly have been there. Everybody was wearing that retro look, 1940s sleek or the Latino peacock look.

  So he goes out to a seminar on The Human Prospect. A pretentious title, sure, but he has always been tempted by the big perspectives, things beyond the present. The meeting is full of the usual futurology elements. Here comes overpopulation, greenhouse climate change, bioengineering, cloning, the whole menu. Everybody nods and an old leftie gets up and somehow ties this to the execution of the Rosenbergs. There’s a verbal slugfest over anti-semitism and racism and Israel.

  He gets up and leaves. On the way out he exchanges sour disappointed looks with a guy wearing all black, the usual business signature. The guy makes a sardonic wisecrack and Trotsky comes back with one that makes them both laugh in a wry, sad way.

  They stop at a bar to trash the “seminar” they’ve just been in. Right away they hit it off. Trotsky has his ideas about a genuine Revolution from below, based on people getting as part of their pay some shares in their company. “Self-ownership, that’s it,” the guy says, name of Jefferson. “Every man a capital owner.”

  “And woman,” Trotsky adds automatically. Jefferson nods and they have another round of some dark African beer. Trotsky unloads his idea then, a plan so odd that Jefferson at first can’t see it. “Take Siberia? How? Why?”

  “It’s the biggest virgin territory on Earth.”

  “Virgin? But—”

  “Okay, call it California virgin. By the time they’re in junior high school they know plenty, have done some. But still essentially intact.”

  Jefferson smiles. “You should have been a lawyer.” He is a big guy with an easy smile. The kind people warm to right away. Not like himself, Trotsky realizes ruefully. Jefferson is the sort of figure the Revolution needs.

  So he reels off the numbers. Siberia is a tenth of the total land area of the planet. It has big reserves of timber, metals, oil. Two crappy railroads, a few airports. The Russians abused it for four centuries and now the Chinese are infiltrating it, grabbing at the water supplies already.

  “The communists never knew how to open a frontier, r
ight,” Jefferson says thoughtfully.

  Trotsky pounces. “Magic word—frontier. Who owns the imagery? Us! Westerns!”

  “You want there to be…Easterns?”

  Trotsky laughs, liking this guy even more. “In time, sure. Rough and ready. There are thirty million people living there, tough people.”

  “Let’s not treat them the way we did the Indians,” Jefferson said archly.

  “Exactly! This will be a frontier with social justice.”

  Jefferson frowns. “That phrase usually means income transfers.”

  Trotsky sees he has to be careful here. Trotsky’s not some warmed-over socialist, he’s ahead of that, sure. But Jefferson in his black take-me-serious suit and that every-man-a-capitalist idea is going to want economic freedoms. “Okay, got you. We give everybody in Siberia, native or immigrant, shares in the profits.”

  “Immigrants?”

  Trotsky is getting wild-eyed, he knows that, but he can’t stop. “Gals who work in factories, guys who thought they’d never do more than pump gas. From everywhere.”

  “What America used to be,” Jefferson says with a distant look in his eyes.

  “So these corporate fascist regimes—China, nearly all of southeast Asia—they’ll have to deal with a solid, worked-out example of another way to uplift people, due north of them. On the mainland, not some idea from way over the horizon.” Trotsky stops, realizing that he may have gone over the top. But what the hell, this is the Revolution.

  Jefferson looks both dreamy and shrewd, an expression Trotsky has never seen before. “So…how do we get Siberia?”

  “That’s the free market glory of the thing. We buy it.”