The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Franklin brings along Emma Goldman to the dinner with Washington. She’s rubbing against him at discreet moments, giving him the eyes, but it’s all in good taste. Washington has no woman with him, just this funny guy in a black suit. Emma mistakes his name for Lennon.

  Washington is at his best, holding forth about this guy Lenin’s ideas. The main one seems to be “horizons.” Lenin thinks they should be expanding human horizons and uplifting the bulk of humanity—all at the same time. “You can’t do one without the other,” Washington says.

  “Not by bread alone, and all that,” Lenin says. “But you’ve got to have bread to say that in the first place. Otherwise, you’re too busy.”

  Franklin is hungry and the bread here is very good. It’s a retro-TwenCen restaurant and show business people don’t come here.

  Washington nods. “A way to unite humanity, that’s what we need.”

  Franklin decides to bring up his agenda, since everybody else is. “Do something big, then. Go to Mars.”

  They all blink over their appetizers. Emma Goldman is the first to speak. “How’s that help people?”

  “By giving them a focus.” Franklin waves his hands. “A huge drama, running three years. Life or death, every day, on prime time.”

  It takes them a while to get it. Of course it will cost money. Plenty. “Maybe as much as another carrier group for the U.S. Navy,” Lenin says sardonically.

  But Franklin thinks going to Mars with a manned expedition— Emma says, “Womanned, too,” and they all laugh—would pull the whole planet together.

  “Why?” Lenin probes.

  “Because they’ll go to settle a real, important scientific point,” Franklin says. “Did life ever arise there? Does it still hold out, under the dried out surface? We all gain a little stature by answering that.”

  There are looks around the table. Somebody mentions social justice and somebody else says why does it have to be either/or? and Emma smiles at him.

  There’s plenty of talk, endless talk, and some joking. But unlike all the gossip and tit-for-tat talk he’s heard for decades now, this dinner party discussion is about something. He can see that Washington is waiting until the people around the restaurant table have ridden their individual hobby horses as far as they will go. When the momentum is spent, Washington says, “Y’know, for years now I’ve had a restless feeling. I thought I was living in the long plateau of an empire. That there was no place to go. But now…you feel it too, don’t you?”

  They did. A woman came in selling flowers, one of the high-priced mannerisms that made Lenin curl his lip. But tonight Franklin buys roses for Emma and somehow it’s just fine. She beams. And reminds them all that if they’re going to promote big ideas, they should remember that people had to stay grounded in their own selves, their bodies. If they didn’t, it would get all abstract and theoretical. Like the TwenCen. “That’s how big dreams turn into nightmares,” she said.

  Just then the waiter arrived for dessert orders. And Washington beckons and there, coming in for the ending, is an old buddy, Jefferson. He’s got in tow a skinny fellow, under-dressed for this restaurant and with hot, darting eyes. They have an idea they want to discuss, they say.

  Franklin gets up to go to the john and Emma goes, too. The restaurant has those new unisex johns and they go in together. A matron outside looks scandalized. There was a time when they’d have taken advantage of the moment, maybe just to irk the matron, and actually had sex in the john.

  Not now. There is something about this night. They don’t want to disturb it, because in the air there seems to hand a certain crystalline note, like a bell that has rung in a distant steeple, the tone lingering on, clear and long.

  Franklin notices on his way back to the table that he has an erection. Ahead, the gang is making a lot of noise, arguing and joking, disagreeing and planning. Behind is Emma, a smoldering center of his world. Somehow it all comes together in mind and body for him, surges of the heart. He looks out the window at the view. Diamonds sprawl across the San Fernando Valley. Somewhere out there somebody is bleeding to death and somebody else is giving birth. He leans against the cool window pane and feels the whole vast moment seep through him and knows it is the Revolution.

  Twenty-Two Centimeters

  (2004)

  The Counter Universe was dim in its strange ebbing glow.

  The Counter-Earth below them had a gray grandeur—lightly banded in pale pewter and salmon red, save where the shrunken Moon cast its huge gloomy shadow. Here the Moon clung close to the Counter-Earth, in a universe chilling toward absolute zero.

  Julie peered out at a universe cooling into extinction. Below their orbit hung the curve of Counter-Earth, its night side lit by the pale Counter-Moon. Both these were lesser echoes of the “real” Earth-Moon system, a universe away—or twenty-two centimeters, whichever came first.

  Massive ice sheets spread like pearly blankets from both poles. Ridges ribbed the frozen methane ranges. The equatorial land was a flinty, scarred ribbon of ribbed black rock, hemmed in by the oppressive ice. The planet turned almost imperceptibly, a major ridgeline just coming into view at the dawn line.

  Julie sighed and brought their craft lower. Al sat silent beside her. Yet they both knew that all of Earthside—the real Earth, she still thought—listened and watched through their minicams.

  “The focal point is coming into sunlight ’bout now,” Al reported.

  “Let’s go get it,” she whispered. This gloomy universe felt somber, awesome.

  They curved toward the dawn line. Data hummed in their board displays, spatters of light reporting on the gravitational pulses that twisted space here.

  They had already found the four orbiting gravitational wave radiators, just as predicted by the science guys. Now for the nexus of those four, down on the surface. The focal point, the coordinator of the grav wave transmissions that had summoned them here.

  And just maybe, to find whatever made the focal point. Somewhere near the dawn line.

  They came arcing over the Counter night. A hard darkness deeper than she had ever seen crept across Counter. Night here, without the shrunken Moon’s glow, had no planets dotting the sky, only the distant sharp stars. At the terminator shadows stretched, jagged black profiles of the ridgelines torn by pressure from the ice. The warming had somehow shoved fresh peaks into the gathering atmosphere, ragged and sharp. Since there was atmosphere thicker and denser than anybody had expected the stars were not unwinking points; they flickered and glittered as on crisp nights at high altitudes on Earth. Near the magnetic poles, she watched swirling blue auroral glows cloak the plains where fogs rose even at night.

  A cold dark world a universe away from sunny Earth, through a higher dimension…

  She did not really follow the theory; she was an astronaut. It was hard enough to comprehend the mathematical guys when they spoke English. For them, the whole universe was a sheet of space-time, called “brane” for membrane. And there were other branes, spaced out along an unseen dimension. Only gravity penetrated between these sheets. All other fields, which meant all mass and light, was stuck to the branes.

  Okay, but what of it? had been her first response.

  Just mathematics, until the physics guys—it was nearly always guys—found that another brane was only twenty-two centimeters away. Not in any direction you could see, but along a new dimension. The other brane had been there all along, with its own mass and light, but in a dimension nobody could see. Okay, maybe the mystics, but that was it.

  And between the two branes only gravity acted. So the Counter-Earth followed Earth exactly, and the Counter-Moon likewise. They clumped together, hugging each other with gravity in their unending waltz. Only the Counter brane had less matter in it, so gravity was weaker there.

  Julie had only a cartoon-level understanding of how another universe could live on a brane only twenty-two centimeters away from the universe humans knew. The trick was that those twenty-two centimeters lay a
long a dimension termed the Q-coordinate. Ordinary forces couldn’t leave the brane humans called the universe, or this brane. But gravity could. So when the first big gravitational wave detectors picked up coherent signals from “nearby”—twenty-two centimeters away!—it was just too tempting to the physics guys.

  And once they opened the portal into the looking-glass-like Counter system—she had no idea how, except that it involved lots of magnets—somebody had to go and look. Julie and Al.

  It had been a split-second trip, just a few hours ago. In quick flash-images she had seen: purple-green limbs and folds, oozing into glassy struts—elongating, then splitting into red smoke. Leathery oblongs and polyhedrons folded over each other. Twinkling, jarring slices of hard actinic light poked through them. And it all moved as though blurred by slices of time into a jostling hurry—

  Enough. Concentrate on your descent trajectory.

  “Stuff moving down there,” Al said.

  “Right where the focal point is?” At the dawn’s ruby glow.

  “Looks like.” He close-upped the scene.

  Below, a long ice ridge rose out of the sea like a great gray reef. Following its Earthly analogy, it teemed with life. Quilted patches of vivid blue green and carrot orange spattered its natural pallor. Out of those patches spindly trunks stretched toward the midmorning sun. At their tips crackled bright blue St. Elmo’s fire. Violet-tinged flying wings swooped lazily in and out among them to feed, Some, already filled, alighted at the shoreline and folded themselves, waiting with their flat heads cocked at angles.

  The sky, even at Counter’s midmorning, remained a dark backdrop for gauzy auroral curtains that bristled with energy. This world had an atmospheric blanket not dense enough to scatter the wan sunlight. For on this brane, the sun itself had less mass, too.

  She peered down. She was pilot, but a biologist as well. And they knew there was something waiting…

  “Going in,” she said.

  Into this slow world they came with a high roar. Wings flapped away from the noise. A giant filled the sky.

  Julie dropped the lander closer. Her legs were cramped from the small pilot chair and she bounced with the rattling boom of atmospheric braking.

  She blinked, suddenly alarmed. Beside her in his acceleration couch Al peered forward at the swiftly looming landscape. “How’s that spot?” He jabbed a finger tensely at the approaching horizon.

  “Near the sea? Sure. Plenty of life forms there. Kind of like an African watering hole.” Analogies were all she had to go on here but there was a resemblance. Their reconn scans had showed a ferment all along the shoreline.

  Al brought them down steady above a rocky plateau. Their drive ran red-hot.

  Now here was a problem nobody on the mission team, for all their contingency planning, had foreseen. Their deceleration plume was bound to incinerate many of the life forms in this utterly cold ecosystem. Even after hours, the lander might be too hot for any life to approach, not to mention scalding them when nearby ices suddenly boiled away.

  Well, nothing to do about it now.

  “Fifty meters and holding.” Al glanced at her. “Ok?”

  “Touchdown,” she said, and they settled onto the rock.

  To land on ice would have sunk them hip-deep in fluid, only to then be re-frozen rigidly into place. They eagerly watched the plain. Something hurried away at the horizon, which did not look more than a kilometer away.

  “Look at those lichen,” she said eagerly. “In so skimpy an energy environment, how can there be so many of them?”

  “We’re going to be hot for an hour, easy,” Al said, his calm, careful gaze sweeping the view systematically. The ship’s computers were taking digital photographs automatically, getting a good map. “I say we take a walk.”

  She tapped a key, giving herself a voice channel, reciting her ID opening without thinking. “Okay, now the good stuff. As we agreed, I am adding my own verbal comments to the data I just sent you.”

  They had not agreed, not at all. Many of the Counter Mission Control engineers, wedded to their mathematical slang and NASA’s jawbone acronyms, felt that commentary was subjective and useless. Let the expert teams back home interpret the data. But the PR people liked anything they could use.

  “Counter is a much livelier place than we ever imagined. There’s weather, for one thing—a product of the planet’s six-day rotation and the mysterious heating. Turns out the melting and freezing point of methane is crucial. With the heating-up, the mean temperature is well high enough that nitrogen and argon stay gaseous, giving Counter its thin atmosphere. Of course, the ammonia and carbon dioxide are solid as rock—Counter’s warmer, but still incredibly cold, by our standards. Methane, though, can go either way. It thaws, every morning. Even better, the methane doesn’t just sublime—nope, it melts. Then it freezes at night.”

  Now the dawn line was creeping at its achingly slow pace over a ridgeline, casting long shadows that pointed like arrows across a great rock plain. There was something there she could scarcely believe, hard to make out even from their thousand-kilometer high orbit under the best magnification. Something they weren’t going to believe back Earthside. So keep up the patter and lead them to it. Just do it.

  “Meanwhile on the dark side there’s a great ‘heat sink,’ like the one over Antarctica on Earth. It moves slowly across the planet as it turns, radiating heat into space and pressing down a column of cold air—I mean, of even colder air. From its lowest, coldest point, winds flow out toward the day side. At the sunset line they meet sun-warmed air—and it snows. Snow! Maybe I should take up skiing, huh?”

  At least Al laughed. It was hard, talking into a mute audience. And she was getting jittery. She took a hit of the thick, jolting Columbian coffee in her mug. Onward—

  “On the sunrise side they meet sunlight and melting methane ice, and it rains. Gloomy dawn. Permanent, moving around the planet like a veil.”

  She close-upped the dawn line and there it was, a great gray curtain descending, marching ever-westward at about the speed of a fast car.

  “So we’ve got a perpetual storm front moving at the edge of the night side, and another that travels with the sunrise.”

  As she warmed to her subject, all pretense at impersonal scientific discourse faded from Julie’s voice; she could not filter out her excitement that verged on a kind of love. She paused, watching the swirling alabaster blizzards at twilight’s sharp edge and, on the dawn side, the great solemn racks of cloud. Although admittedly no Jupiter, this planet—her planet, for the moment—could put on quite a show.

  “The result is a shallow sea of methane that moves slowly around the world, following the sun. Who’d a thought, eh, you astro guys? Since methane doesn’t expand as it freezes, the way water does”—okay, the astro guys know that, she thought, but the public needs reminders, and this damn well was going out to the whole wide bloomin’ world, right?—“I’m sure it’s all slush a short way below the surface, and solid ice from there down. But so what? The sea isn’t stagnant, because of what the smaller Counter-Moon is doing. It’s close to the planet so it makes a permanent tidal bulge directly underneath it. And the two worlds are trapped, like two dancers forever in each others’ arms. So that bulge travels around from daylight to darkness, too. So sea currents form, and flow, and freeze. On the night side, the tidal pull puts stress on the various ices, and they hump up and buckle into pressure ridges. Like the ones in Antarctica, but much bigger.”

  Miles high, in fact, in Counter’s weak gravity. Massive peaks, worthy of the best climbers…

  But her enthusiasm drained away and she bit her lip. Now for the hard part.

  She’d rehearsed this a dozen times, and still the words stuck in her throat. After all, she hadn’t come here to do close-up planetology. An unmanned orbital mission could have done that nicely. Julie had come in search of life—of the beings who had sent the gravitational wave signals. And now she and Al were about to walk the walk.

&nbs
p; The cold here was unimaginable, hundreds of degrees below human experience. The suit heaters could cope—the atmosphere was too thin to steal heat quickly—but only if their boots alone actually touched the frigid ground. Sophisticated insulation could only do so much.

  Julie did not like to think about this part. Her feet could freeze in her boots, then the rest of her. Even for the lander’s heavily insulated shock-absorber legs, they had told her, it would be touch-and-go beyond a stay of a few hours. Their onboard nuclear thermal generator was already laboring hard to counter the cold she could see creeping in, from their external thermometers. Their craft already creaked and popped from thermal stresses.

  And the thermal armor, from the viewpoint of any natives, must seem a hot, untouchable furnace. Yet already they could see things scurrying on the plain. Some seemed to be coming closer. Maybe curiosity was indeed a universal trait of living things.

  Al pointed silently. She picked out a patch of dark blue-gray down by the shore of the methane sea. On their console she brought up the visual magnification. In detail it looked like rough beach shingle. Tidal currents during the twenty-two hours since dawn had dropped some kind of gritty detritus—not just ices, apparently—at the sea’s edge. Nothing seemed to grow on the flat and—swiveling point of view—up on the ridge’s knife-edge also seemed bare, relatively free of life. “It’ll have to do,” she said.

  “Maybe a walk down to the beach?” Al said. “Turn over a few rocks?”

  They were both tip-toeing around the coming moment. With minimal talk they got into their suits.

  Skillfully, gingerly—and by prior coin-flip—Julie clumped down the ladder. She almost envied those pioneer astronauts who had first touched the ground on Luna, backed up by a constant stream of advice, or at least comment, from Houston. The Mars landing crew had taken a mutual, four-person single step. Taking a breath, she let go the ladder and thumped down on Counter. Startlingly, sparks spat between her feet and the ground, jolting her.