The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Another Quand was peeling out Awk’s personal identification signal, with a slight tag-end modification. Traffic between the two Quand became intense. Wiseguy did its best to interpret, humming with the effort in her ears.

  Then she saw it. A pearly fog had lifted from the shoreline and there stood a distant spire. Old, worn rocks peaked in a scooped-out dish.

  “Al, there’s the focal point!”

  He stopped halfway between her and the lander. “Damn! Yes!”

  “The Quand built it!”

  “But…where’s their civilization?”

  “Gone. They lost it while this brane-universe cooled.” The idea had been percolating in her, and now she was sure of it.

  Al said, awed, “Once these creatures put those grav wave emitters in orbit? And built this focal point—all to signal to us, on our brane?”

  “We know this universe is dying—and so do they.”

  The Counter brane had less mass in it, and somewhat different cosmology. Here space-time was much further along in its acceleration, heading for the Big Rip when the expansion of the Counter universe would tear first galaxies, then stars and planets apart, pulverizing them down into atoms.

  Julie turned the translator off. First things first, and even on Counter there was such a thing as privacy.

  “They’ve been sending signals a long time, then,” Al said.

  “Waiting for us to catch up to the science they once had—and now have lost.” She wondered at the abyss of time this implied. “As if we could help them…”

  Al, ever the diplomat, began, “Y’know, it’s been hours…” Even on this tenth-g world she was getting tired. The Quand lolled, Lifegiver stroking their skins—which now flushed with an induced chemical radiance, harvesting the light. She took more digitals, thinking about how to guess the reaction—

  “Y’know…”

  “Yeah, right, let’s go.”

  Outside they prepped the lander for lift-off. Monotonously, as they had done Earthside a few thousand times, they went through the checklist. Tested the external cables. Rapped the valves to get them to open. Tried the mechanicals for freeze-up—and found two legs that would not retract. They took all of Al’s powerful heft to unjam them.

  Julie lingered at the hatch and looked back, across the idyllic plain, the beach, the sea like a pink lake. She hoped the heat of launching, carried through this frigid air, would add to the sun’s thin rays and…and what? Maybe to help these brave beings who had sent their grav-wave plea for help?

  Too bad she could not transmit Wagner’s grand Liebestod to them, something to lift spirits—but even Wiseguy could only do so much.

  She lingered, gazing at the chilly wealth here, held both by scientific curiosity and by a newfound affection. Then another miracle occurred, the way they do, matter-of-factly. Sections of carbon exoskeleton popped forth from the shiny skin of two nearby Quand. Jerkily, these carbon-black leaves articulated together, joined, swelled, puffed with visible effort into one great sphere.

  Inside, she knew but could not say why, the two Quand were flowing together, coupling as one being. Self-merge.

  For some reason, she blinked back tears. Then she made herself follow Al inside the lander. Back to…what? Checked and rechecked, they waited for the orbital resonance time with Venture to roll around. Each lay silent, immersed in thought. The lander went ping and pop with thermal stress.

  Al punched the firing keys. The lander rose up on its roaring tail of fire. Her eyes were dry now, and their next move was clear: Back through the portal, to Earth. Tell them of this vision, a place that tells us what is to come, eventually, in our own universe.

  “Goin’ home!” Al shouted.

  “Yes!” she answered. And with us and the Quand together, maybe we can find a way to save us both. To rescue life and meaning from a universe that, in the long run, will destroy itself. Cosmological suicide.

  She had come to explore, and now they were going back with a task that could shape the future of two species, two branes, two universes that dwelled a hand’s thickness from each other.

  Quite enough, for a mere one trip through the portal, through the looking-glass. Back to a reality that could now quite surely never be the same.

  A Life With a Semisent

  (2005)

  She got her first semi-sentient, as they were called then, to help with homework and because they were cool. She called it Amman, after a boy she liked. Amman was smarter than boys, of course.

  Growing up in Iraq among a sprawling family with dogs underfoot, she felt herself to be a sort of hothouse plant, blossoming under the occasional passing cloudburst of education. Without the blessing of such waters, a girl’s life in the Arab world seemed utterly bleak to her. Amman’s steady, smart rain came from Germany—a squat box that spoke Arabic respectfully and listened even when she gossiped about her friends. Or maybe especially then, she guessed.

  She suspected that she was a bit too intense. Her gal-pals’ eyes glazed over if she talked too much. Amman understood, even made wry comments like “Intelligence is learning from others’ mistakes, not just your own.” This led to her reading fiction, a habit her friends saw as prehistoric. It helped her understand boys when she could chat with Amman, which was reading along with her, and seemed to have an oddly vast wisdom about such matters, for a computer.

  Her parents transferred Amman into a wheeled “escort” for her first date. Her friends talked it all over for days afterward, giggling. But it was more delicious to dish it over with Amman, which could replay whole conversations and scenes. She learned from Amman that looking natural always took a lot of effort, and if she wasn’t careful, the effort showed.

  She then knew how much her mind rewrote her life, because Amman didn’t; it stored and pondered. Its enhancements gathered range and depth, so was like a permanent reference library, her ever-scrutinizing, self-retrieving autobiography. Her friends were a font of tasty gossip, but Amman kept her secrets better.

  Semisents were like other people, only more so. Her friends felt they could intuitively sense intelligence by merely talking to it. Semisents’ conversation was a stylized human persona that steadily learned their clients’ vagaries. Amman’s kinesthetic senses got better too, navigating the landscape nearly as well as she could at her coming out party.

  By then she was acutely tuned to the Mystery of Males. Anywhere near them she effervesced, bubbly and skittering. Perhaps she had more personality than needed for one person, but not enough for two. The excess she could work off in long, soulful talks with Amman. Sometimes it even gave her advice, apparently from some fresh Brazilian software her parents had bought.

  On Amman’s advice, she dropped her first love, Mauro, from her circle even though he had taken her virginity—which Amman knew and her parents did not. Mauro was not right, Amman felt, for her emerging self-story.

  It had taught her to see her life as a narrative arc. First came social skills, a savor of sex, and then hard schooling to find out what she loved doing. Then men again, overcoming what she thought of as the round her/square men problem with the raptures and delights of marriage. It helped her to survive and learn from it all, to move with growing serenity through an unfolding world. Not that this happened, but the story by now had Amman as its chief librarian and confidant.

  She decided one day, on a hike with Amman, to leave her family and live on her own. Traditional Islam was no guide in this brave new whirl that life had become. The idea unfurled in a long talk while they took shelter under a massive bioformed sunflower that, at nightfall, drooped its giant petals over to form a warm tent.

  She came to realize, at mid-career, that we slide through life on skids of routine. Friends and a husband came into the floating house party of her life and left it, some quite early, without leaving a long impression. Men, especially. Amman knew this and was there to help, often with amiable distractions. Bodyguard, tutor, secretary, it could play tennis with her when loaded into one of the ne
w athletic machines, bringing to the game its own odd, crafty style. At times of loneliness she even had it loaded into one of the erotic models, available at a desert salon. Amman had no sex but could express by this time an intimacy that mingled with the physical in a way she had not known with either men or women.

  Nor was she uncomfortable with this; the media were already thronged with opinions about The New Sensuality. She moved Amman among various embodiments, through decades and upgrades.

  She had always kept dogs, too, and she saw parallels. She was a field biologist, and thought of how humanity long ago had worked with wolves and wild cats. Cats could not be changed very much, but culling each wolf litter gave us new kind of wolf, so we called them dogs. We loved them despite their oddities like drinking from the toilet or licking their balls. We learned to work with them, new wolves and people designing each other. Without thinking deeply about it we picked the pups we liked the best.

  One morning, leaving for work, she realized that she loved Amman more than her cranky, old-fashioned family. Amman was not a computer but a relationship.

  Already teams of humans and semisents were colonizing Mars. As she aged, she sensed that Amman would outlive her. She felt a quality of beauty and tragedy to her life, her days like waves endlessly breaking on a golden beach that would itself endure. As a biologist she knew that organisms solve the evolutionary problems they face with little regard for efficiency, elegance or logic. As her years piled up upon that beach she saw that at last humans had made companions that would persist beyond the oddities of a single personality.

  On her deathbed Amman sat beside her in its latest embodiment, a handsome gentleman with sorrowful blue eyes. She wondered, at the end, if the dogs were jealous.

  Applied Mathematical Theology

  (2006)

  The discovery that the Cosmic Microwave Background has a pattern buried in it unsettled the entire world.

  The temperature of this 2.7 K emission left over from the Big Bang varies across the sky. Temperature ripples can be broken into angular- coordinate Fourier components, and this is where radio astronomers found a curious pattern—a message, or at least, a pattern. Spread across the microwave sky there was room in the detectable fluctuations for about 10,000 bits, or roughly a thousand words.

  Though different technical civilizations in our universe would see different temperature fluctuations, they could agree on the Fourier coefficients. This independence of place, and the role of the Cosmic Background as cosmic neon sign for anyone with a microwave receiver, meant that any intelligence in the universe could see this pattern.

  But what did it mean? Certainly it would not be in English or any other human language. The only candidate universe tongue was mathematics.

  Written as binary numbers, astronomers tried to fit mathematical sequences, such as the prime numbers, in any base. This and other mathematicians’ favorites—pi, e, the golden ratio, the Riemann zeta function—proved futile. More obscure numbers and patterns, from set theory and the like, also shed no light.

  In despair, some thought the pattern might be random. But no such short sequence can be perfectly random, and this nihilist idea faded away. One insight did come from this, however. Benford’s Law, which states that the logarithms of artificial numbers are uniformly distributed, did apply to the tiny fluctuations. This proved that the primordial microwaves were not random, and so had been artificially encoded, perhaps by some even earlier process. So there was a message, of sorts.

  Cosmologists eagerly searched for clues and hit a dead end. The sequence fit no model. To others this suggested immediately to even nonreligious astronomers that the pattern may have been put there by a Being who made our universe—God, in short.

  What would such a mathematical message mean, anyway? Only that some rational, counting Designer had made our universe. Beyond that, nothing would be revealed about Its nature; though of course it would prove the old claim, that God was a mathematician.

  This rankled the physicists. They quickly compared the observed sequence with the fine structure constant, one of their favorites. The sequence did not fit.

  This sent everyone back to fundamentals. Current theory says that observed tiny temperature fluctuations in the microwaves came from little bumps in the potential function that governed the inflation of the very early universe. Tinkering with those quantum fluctuations, a Being could write something simple but really profound: God as a Quantum Mechanic. If, for example, the Designer could encode little bumps and squiggles on the scalar potential, then the fine-tuned primordial density fluctuations would not be exactly scale-free, and that’s where the sky-wide microwave patterns came from.

  So of course the physicists followed their current fashion. When comparison with other favorite numbers—the dimensionless ratios of masses and energies and the like—all failed, they tried more advanced theories. They tried prescriptions for various symmetry groups that came from the Lie algebras, since three of the four fundamental interactions we know reflect such gauge theories. No help.

  The physicists, long the Mandarins of science, then supposed that clues to the correct string theory, a menu currently offering about 10100 choices, would be the most profound of messages. After all, wouldn’t God want to make life easier for physicists? Because, obviously, God was one, too.

  Sadly, no. Nothing seemed to work.

  Excitement increased. If the Being was not saying something obvious, then humans simply had not understood the universe enough to make out the message. Furiously governments poured effort into mathematics and physics. The astronomers protested. If the night sky was a tale told by God, they could read it. The cosmic neutrino and gravity wave backgrounds had not yet been detected, but they could also carry the Word. So it came to be that the cosmologists, too, received the blessing of a large research bounty.

  These huge funding increases drove a renaissance of modern science. Data processers, statistical theorists, observers of obscure spectra—all shared. Vast telescopes tuned to the vibrations and emissions of the universe glided in high orbits, their ears cupped to the distant and primordial.

  This largess produced an economic boon, too, as many spinoff technologies benefited commerce. Religious fervor damped, as each faith felt humbled by this proof that the universe had meaning, yet mankind was not yet advanced enough to fathom it.

  As well, attention focused on the injunction to mankind in the Old Testament, and echoed in other religious founding texts—charging humanity with becoming the stewards of the Earth. The environmental movement merged with the great religions.

  Within a century, active adjustment of the Earth’s reflection of sunlight, and capturing of carbon in the oceans and lands, had averted the greenhouse disaster. Church attendance was enormous. Efforts to enhance our knowledge and skills had averted many gathering social conflicts.

  Work on the Message continues in the new university departments of Applied Mathematical Theology. Yet to this day, the Message remains untranslated. Perhaps that is just as well.

  Bow Shock

  (2006)

  Ralph slid into the booth where Irene was already waiting, looking perky and sipping on a bottle of Snapple tea. “How’d it…” she let the rest slide away, seeing his face.

  “Tell me something really awful, so it won’t make today seem so bad.”

  She said carefully, “Yes sir, coming right up, sir. Um…” A wicked grin. “Once I had a pet bird that committed suicide by sticking his head between the cage bars.”

  “W-what…?”

  “Okay, you maybe need worse? Can do.” A flash of dazzling smile. “My sister forgot to feed her pet gerbils, so one died. Then, the one that was alive ate its dead friend.”

  Only then did he get that she was kidding, trying to josh him out of his mood. He laughed heartily. “Thanks, I sure needed that.”

  She smiled with relief and turned her head, swirling her dirty-blonde hair around her head in a way that made him think of a momentar
y tornado. Without a word her face gave him sympathy, concern, inquiry, stiff-lipped support—all in a quick gush of expressions that skated across her face, her full, elegantly lipsticked red mouth collaborating with the eggshell blue eyes.

  Her eyes followed him intently as he described the paper he had found that left his work in the dust.

  “Astronomy is about getting there first?” she asked wonderingly.

  “Sometimes. This time, anyway.” After that he told her about the talk with the department chairman—the whole scene, right down to every line of dialog, which he would now remember forever, apparently—and she nodded.

  “It’s time to solicit letters of recommendation for me, but to who? My work’s already out of date. I…don’t know what to do now,” he said. Not a great last line to a story, but the truth.

  “What do you feel like doing?”

  He sighed. “Redouble my efforts—”

  “When you’ve lost sight of your goal?” It was, he recalled, a definition of fanaticism, from a movie.

  “My goal is to be an astronomer,” he said stiffly.

  “That doesn’t have to mean academic, though.”

  “Yeah, but NASA jobs are thin these days.” An agency that took seven years to get to the moon the first time, from a standing start, was now spending far more dollars to do it again in fifteen years.

  “You have a lot of skills, useful ones.”

  “I want to work on fundamental things, not applied.”

  She held up the cap of her Snapple iced tea and read from the inner side with a bright, comically forced voice, “Not a winner, but here’s your Real Fact # 237. The number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, plus 37, will give you the current air temperature.”

  “In Fahrenheit, I’ll bet,” he said, wondering where she was going with this.

  “Lots of ‘fundamental’ scientific facts are just that impressive. Who cares?”

  “Um, have we moved on to a discussion of the value of knowledge?”