The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Vanleo panted. His face was ashen.

  “When the tentacle went in, it filled the pithole exactly, Tight. There was no room left,” he said. “Sasuke…was there. Inside.”

  Reginri froze, stunned. A wave swirled around him and he slipped. The waters tumbled him backward. Dazed, he regained his footing on the slick rocks and began stumbling blindly toward the bleak shore, toward humanity. The ocean lapped around him, ceaseless and unending.

  IX.

  Belej sat motionless, unmindful of the chill. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “That was it,” he murmured. He stared off into the canyon. Zeta Reticuli sent slanting rays into the layered reddening mists. Air squirrels darted among the shifting shadows.

  “He’s crazy,” Belej said simply. “That Leo is crazy.”

  “Well…” Reginri began. Then he rocked forward stiffly and stood up. Swirls of reddish cloud were crawling up the canyon face toward them. He pointed. “That stuff is coming in faster than I thought.” He coughed. “We’d better get inside.”

  Belej nodded and came to her feet. She brushed the twisted brown grass from her legs and turned to him.

  “Now that you’ve told me,” she said softly, “I think you ought to put it from your mind.”

  “It’s hard. I…”

  “I know. I know. But you can push it far away from you, forget it happened. That’s the best way.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “Believe me. You’ve changed since this happened to you. I can feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “You. You’re different. I feel a barrier between us.”

  “I wonder,” he said slowly.

  She put her hand on his arm and stepped closer, an old, familiar gesture. He stood watching the reddening haze swallowing the precise lines of the rocks below.

  “I want that screen between us to dissolve. You made your contribution, earned your pay. Those damned people understand the Drongheda now—”

  He made a wry, rasping laugh. “We’ll never grasp the Drongheda. What we get in those neural circuits are mirrors of what we want. Of what we are. We can’t sense anything totally alien.”

  “But—”

  “Vanleo saw mathematics because he went after it. So did I, at first. Later…”

  He stopped. A sudden breeze made him shiver. He clenched his fists. Clenched. Clenched.

  How could he tell her? He woke in the night, sweating, tangled in the bedclothes, muttering incoherently…but they were not nightmares, not precisely.

  Something else. Something intermediate.

  “Forget those things,” Belej said soothingly. Reginri leaned closer to her and caught the sweet musk of her, the dry crackling scent of her hair. He had always loved that.

  She frowned up at him. Her eyes shifted intently from his mouth to his eyes and then back again, trying to read his expression. “It will only trouble you to recall it. I—I’m sorry I asked you to tell it. But remember”—she took both his hands in hers—“you’ll never go back there again. It can be…”

  Something made him look beyond her. At the gathering fog.

  And at once he sensed the shrouded abyss open below him. Sweeping him in. Gathering him up. Into—

  —a thick red foam lapping against weathered granite towers—

  —an ellipsoidal sun spinning soundlessly over a silvered, warping planet—

  —watery light—

  —cloying strands, sticky, a fine-spun coppery matrix that enfolded him, warming—

  —glossy sheen of polyhedra, wedged together, mass upon mass—

  —smooth bands of moisture playing lightly over his quilted skin—

  —a blistering light shines through him, sets his bones to humming resonance—

  —pressing—

  —coiling—

  Beckoning. Beckoning.

  When the moment had passed, Reginri blinked and felt a salty stinging in his eyes. Every day the tug was stronger, the incandescent images sharper. This must be what Vanleo felt, he was sure of it. They came to him now even during the day. Again and again, the grainy texture altering with time…

  He reached out and enfolded Belej in his arms.

  “But I must,” he said in a rasping whisper. “Vanleo called today. He…I’m going. I’m going back.”

  He heard her quick intake of breath, felt her stiffen in his arms.

  His attention was diverted by the reddening fog. It cloaked half the world and still it came on.

  There was something ominous about it and something inviting as well. He watched as it engulfed trees nearby. He studied it intently, judging the distance. The looming presence was quite close now. But he was sure it would be all right.

  Redeemer

  (1979)

  He had trouble finding it. The blue-white exhaust plume was a long trail of ionized hydrogen scratching a line across the black. It had been a lot harder to locate out here than Central said it would be.

  Nagara came up on the Redeemer from behind, their blind side. They wouldn’t have any sensors pointed aft. No point in it when you’re on a one-way trip, not expecting visitors and haven’t seen anybody for seventy-three years.

  He boosted in with the fusion plant, cutting off the translight to avoid overshoot. The translight rig was delicate and still experimental and it had already pushed him over seven light years out from Earth. When he got back to Earth there would be an accounting, and he would have to pay off from his profit anything he spent for over expenditure of the translight hardware.

  The ramscoop vessel ahead was running hot. It was a long steel-gray cylinder, fluted fore and aft. The blue-white fusion fire came boiling out of the aft throat, pushing Redeemer along at a little below a tenth of light velocity. Nagara’s board buzzed. He cut in the mill-mag system. The ship’s skin, visible outside through his small porthole, fluxed into its superconducting state, gleaming like chrome. The readout winked and Nagara could see on the situation board his ship slipping like a silver fish through the webbing of magnetic field lines that protected Redeemer.

  The field was mostly magnetic dipole. He cut through it and glided in parallel to the hot exhaust streamer. The stuff was spitting out a lot of UV and he had to change filters to see what he was doing. He eased up along the aft section of the ship and matched velocities. The magnetic throat yawning up ahead sucked in the interstellar hydrogen for the fusion motors. Redeemer’s forward mag fields pulsed to shock-ionize the hydrogen molecules ahead, then ate them eagerly. He stayed away from that. There was enough radiation up there to fry you for good.

  Redeemer’s midsection was rotating but the big clumsy-looking lock aft was stationary. Fine. No trouble clamping on.

  The couplers seized clang and he used a waldo to manually open the lock. He would have to be fast now, fast and careful.

  He pressed a code into the keyin plate on his chest to check it. It worked. The slick aura enveloped him, cutting out the ship’s hum. Nagara nodded to himself.

  He went quickly through the Redeemer’s lock. The pumps were still laboring when he spun the manual override to open the big inner hatch. He pulled himself through in the zero-g with one power motion, through the hatch and into a cramped suitup room. He cut in his magnetos and settled to the grid deck.

  As Nagara crossed the desk a young man came in from a side hatchway. Nagara stopped and thumped off his protective shield. The man didn’t see Nagara at first because he was looking the other way as he came through the hatchway, moving with easy agility. He was studying the subsystem monitoring panels on the far bulkhead. The status phosphors were red but they winked green as Nagara took three steps forward and grabbed the man’s shoulder and spun him around. Nagara was grounded and the man was not. Nagara hit him once in the stomach and then shoved him against a bulkhead. The man gasped for breath. Nagara stepped back and put his hand into his coverall pocket and when it came out there was a dart pistol in it. The man’s eyes didn’t register anything at first and when they d
id he just watched the pistol, getting his breath back, staring as though he couldn’t believe either Nagara or the pistol was there.

  “What’s your name?” Nagara demanded in a clipped, efficient voice.

  “What? I—”

  “Your name. Quick.”

  “I…Zak.”

  “All right, Zak, now listen to me. I’m inside now and I’m not staying long. I don’t care what you’ve been told. You do just what I say and nobody will blame you for it.”

  “…Nobody…?” Zak was still trying to unscramble his thoughts and he looked at the pistol again as though that would explain things.

  “Zak, how many of you are manning this ship?”

  “Manning? You mean crewing?” Confronted with a clear question, he forgot his confusion and frowned. “Three. We’re doing our five-year stint. The Revealer and Jacob and me.”

  “Fine. Now where’s Jacob?”

  “Asleep. This isn’t his shift.”

  “Good.” Nagara jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Personnel quarters that way?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Did an alarm go off through the whole ship, Zak?”

  “No, just on the bridge.”

  “So it didn’t wake up Jacob?”

  “I…I suppose not.”

  “Fine, good. Now, where’s the Revealer?”

  So far it was working well. The best way to handle people who might give you trouble right away was to keep them busy telling you things before they had time to decide what they should be doing. And Zak plainly was used to taking orders.

  “She’s in the forest.”

  “Good. I have to see her. You lead the way, Zak.”

  Zak automatically half turned to kick down the hatchway he’d come in through and then the questions came out. “What—who are you? How—”

  “I’m just visiting. We’ve got faster ways of moving now, Zak. I caught up with you.”

  “A faster ramscoop? But we—”

  “Let’s go, Zak.” Nagara waved the dart gun and Zak looked at it a moment and then, still visibly struggling with his confusion, he kicked off and glided down the drift tube.

  The forest was one half of a one hundred meter long cylinder, located near the middle of the ship and rotating to give one g. The forest was dense with pines and oak and tall bushes. A fine mist hung over the tree tops, obscuring the other half of the cylinder, a gardening zone that hung over their heads. Nagara hadn’t been in a small cylinder like this for decades. He was used to seeing a distant green carpet overhead, so far away you couldn’t make out individual trees, and shrouded by the cottonball clouds that accumulated at the zero-g along the cylinder axis. This whole place felt cramped to him.

  Zak led him along footpaths and into a bamboo-walled clearing. The Revealer was sitting in lotus position in the middle of it. She was wearing a Flatlander robe and cowl just like Zak. He recognized it from a historical fax readout.

  She was a plain-faced woman, wrinkled and wiry, her hands thick and calloused, the fingers stubby, the nails clipped off square. She didn’t go rigid with surprise when Nagara came into view and this bothered him a little. She didn’t look at the dart pistol more than once, to see what it was, and that surprised him, too.

  “What’s your name?” Nagara said as he walked into the bamboo-encased silence.

  “I am the Revealer.” A steady voice.

  “No, I meant your name.”

  “That is my name.”

  “I mean—”

  “I am the Revealer for this stage of our exodus.”

  Nagara watched as Zak stepped halfway between them and then stood uncertainly, looking back and forth.

  “All right. When they freeze you back down, what’ll they call you then?”

  She smiled at this. “Michele Astanza.”

  Nagara didn’t show anything in his face. He waved the pistol at her and said, “Get up.”

  “I prefer to sit.”

  “And I prefer you to stand.”

  “Oh.”

  He watched both of them carefully.

  “Zak, I’m going to have to ask you to do a favor for me.”

  Zak glanced at the Revealer and she moved her head a few millimeters in a nod. He said, “Sure.”

  “This way.” Nagara gestured with the pistol to the woman. “You lead.”

  The woman nodded to herself as if this confirmed something and got up and started down a footpath to her right, her steps so soft on the leafy path that Nagara could not hear them over the tinkling of a stream on the overhead side of the cylinder. Nagara followed her. The trees trapped the sound in here and made him jumpy.

  He knew he was taking a calculated risk by not taking Jacob, too. But the odds against Jacob waking up in time were good and the whole point of doing it this way was to get in and out fast, exploit surprise. And he wasn’t sure he could handle the three of them together. That was just it—he was doing this alone so he could collect the whole fee, and for that you had to take some extra risk. That was the way this thing worked.

  The forest gave onto some corn fields and then some wheat, all with UV phosphors netted above. The three of them skirted around the nets and through a hatchway in the big aft wall. Whenever Zak started to say anything Nagara cut him off with a wave of the pistol. Then Nagara saw that with some time to think Zak was adding some things up and the lines around his mouth were tightening, so Nagara asked him some questions about the ship’s design. That worked. Zak rattled on about quintuple-redundant failsafe subsystems he’d been repairing until they were at the entrance to the freezing compartment.

  It was bigger than Nagara had thought. He had done all the research he could, going through old faxes of Redeemer’s prelim designs, but plainly the Flatlanders had changed things in some later design phase.

  One whole axial section of Redeemer was given over to the freezedown vaults. It was at zero-g because otherwise the slow compression of tissues in the corpses would do permanent damage. They floated in their translucent compartments, like strange fish in endless rows of pale, blue-white aquariums.

  The vaults were stored in a huge array, each layer a cylinder slightly larger than the one it enclosed, all aligned along the ship’s axis. Each cylinder was two compartments thick, a corpse in every one, and the long cylinders extended into the distance until the chilly fog steaming off them blurred the perspective and the eye could not judge the size of the things. Despite himself Nagara was impressed. There were thousands and thousands of Flatlanders in here, all dead and waiting for the promised land ahead, circling Tau Ceti. And with seventy-three more years of data to judge by, Nagara knew something this Revealer couldn’t reveal: the failure rate when they thawed them out would be thirty percent.

  They had come out on the center face of the bulwark separating the vault section from the farming part. Nagara stopped them and studied the front face of the vault array, which spread away from them radially like an immense spider web. He reviewed the old plans in his head. The axis of the whole thing was a tube a meter wide, the same translucent organiform. Liquid nitrogen flowed in the hollow walls of the array and the phosphor light was pale and watery.

  “That’s the DNA storage,” Nagara said, pointing at the axial tube.

  “What?” Zak said. “Yes, it is.”

  “Take them out.”

  “What?”

  “They’re in failsafe self-refrigerated canisters, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s fine.” Nagara turned to the Revealer. “You’ve got the working combinations, don’t you?”

  She had been silent for some time. She looked at him steadily and said, “I do.”

  “Let’s have them.”

  “Why should I give them?”

  “I think you know what’s going on.”

  “Not really.”

  He knew she was playing some game but he couldn’t see why. “You’re carrying DNA material for over ten thousand people. Old genotypes, undamaged. It wasn�
��t so rare when you collected it seventy-three years ago but it is now. I want it.”

  “It is for our colony.”

  “You’ve got enough corpses here.”

  “We need genetic diversity.”

  “The System needs it more than you. There’s been a war. A lot of radiation damage.”

  “Who won?”

  “Us. The outskirters.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “We’re the environments in orbit around the sun, not sucking up to Earth. We knew what was going on. We’re mostly in Bernal spheres. We got the jump on—”

  “You’ve wrecked each other genetically, haven’t you? That was always the trouble with your damned cities. No place to dig a hole and hide.”

  Nagara shrugged. He was watching Zak. From the man’s face Nagara could tell he was getting to be more insulted than angry—outraged at somebody walking in and stealing their future. And from the way his leg muscles were tensing against a foothold Nagara guessed Zak was also getting more insulted than scared, which was trouble for sure. It was a lot better if you dealt with a man who cared more about the long odds against a dart gun at this range, than about the principle. Nagara knew he couldn’t count on Zak ignoring all the Flatlander nonsense the Revealer and others had pumped into him.

  They hung in zero-g, nobody moving in the wan light, the only sound a gurgling of liquid nitrogen. The Revealer was saying something and there was another thing bothering Nagara, some sound, but he ignored it.

  “How did the planetary enclaves hold out?” the woman was asking. “I had many friends—”

  “They’re gone.”

  Something came into the woman’s face. “You’ve lost man’s birthright?”

  “They sided with the—”

  “Abandoned the planets altogether? Made them unfit to live on? All for your awful cities—” and she made a funny jerky motion with her right hand.

  That was it. When she started moving that way Nagara saw it had to be a signal and he jumped to the left. He didn’t take time to place his boots right and so he picked up some spin but the important thing was to get away from that spot fast. He heard a chuung off to the right and a dart smacking into the bulkhead and when he turned his head to the right and up behind him a burly man with black hair and the same Flatlander robes and a dart gun was coming at him on a glide.