The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  The ship had swept clean the space between them, postponed the coming collision. The scientists had seen this chance, persuaded the captain to make the slight swerve that allowed them to study the galaxies, and in the act accelerate the ship still more. The ship was now still closer to the knife-edge of light speed. Its aim was not a specific destination, but rather to plunge on, learning more, studying the dabs of refracted lights beyond, struggling with the engines, forging on as the universe wound down, as entropy in-creased, and the last stars flared out. It carried the cargo meant for Centauri—the records and past lives of all humanity, a library for the colony there. If the drives held up, it would carry them forward until the last tick of time.

  Nick laughed. “Not that they’ll know it, or ever give a—” He stopped. He’d been going to say ever give a Goddamn about who did it, but he knew how Faye felt about using the Lord’s name in vain.

  “Why, sure they will,” Faye said brightly. “We were a big, hot source of all kinds of radiation. They’ll know it was a piece of technology.”

  “Big lights in the sky? Could be natural.”

  “With a good spectrometer—”

  “Yeah, but they’ll never be sure.”

  She frowned. “Well, a ramscoop exhaust looks funny, not like a star or anything.”

  “With the big relativistic effect factored in, our emission goes out like a searchlight. One narrow little cone of scrambled-up radiation, Dopplered forward. So they can’t make us out the whole time. Most of ’em’d see us for just a few years, tops,” Nick said.

  “So?”

  “Hard to make a scientific theory about somethin’ that happens once, lasts a little while, never repeats.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They could just as likely think it was something unnatural. Supernatural. A god or somethin’.”

  “Huh. Maybe.” Faye shrugged. “Come on. Let’s get ’nother drink before rest’n rec hours are over.”

  They walked on. Above them the great knives of light sliced down through the air, ceaselessly changing, and the humans kept on going, their small voices indomitable, reach-ing forward, undiminished.

  Of Space/Time and the River

  (1985)

  December 5

  Monday.

  We took a limo to Los Angeles for the 9 a.m. flight, LAX to Cairo.

  On the boost up we went over 1.4 G, contra-reg, and a lot of passengers complained, especially the poor things in their clank-shank rigs, the ones that keep you walking even after the hip replacements fail.

  Joanna slept through it all, seasoned traveler, and I occu-pied myself with musing about finally seeing the ancient Egypt I’d dreamed about as a kid, back at the turn of the century.

  If thou be’st born to strange sights,

  Things invisible go see,

  Ride ten thousand days and nights

  Till Age snow white hairs on thee.

  I’ve got the snow powdering at the temples and steadily expanding waistline, so I suppose John Donne applies. Good to see I can still summon up lines I first read as a teenager. There are some rewards to being a Prof. of Comp. Lit. at UC Irvine, even if you do have to scrimp to afford a trip like this.

  The tour agency said the Quarthex hadn’t interfered with tourism at all—in fact, you hardly noticed them, they deliberately blended in so well. How a seven-foot insectoid thing with gleaming russet skin can look like an Egyptian I don’t know, but what the hell, Joanna said, let’s go anyway.

  I hope she’s right. I mean, it’s been fourteen years since the Quarthex landed, opened the first diplomatic interstellar relations, and then chose Egypt as the only place on Earth where they cared to carry out what they called their “cultural studies.” I guess we’ll get a look at that, too. The Quarthex keep to themselves, veiling their multi-layered deals behind diplomatic dodges.

  As if 6 hours of travel weren’t numbing enough, including the orbital delay because of an unannounced Chinese launch, we both watched a holoD about one of those new biotech guys, called Straight from the Hearts. An unending string of single-entendres. In our stupefied state it was just about right.

  As we descended over Cairo it was clear and about 15°. We stumbled off the plane, sandy-eyed from riding ten thousand days and nights in a whistling aluminum box.

  The airport was scruffy, instant third world hubbub, confusion, and filth. One departure lounge was filled exclusively with turbaned men. Heavy security everywhere. No Quarthex around. Maybe they do blend in.

  Our bus across Cairo passed a decayed aqueduct, about which milled men in caftans, women in black, animals eating garbage. People, packed into the most unlikely living spots, carrying out peddler’s business in dusty spots between buildings, traffic alternately frenetic or frozen.

  We crawled across Cairo to Giza, the pyramids abruptly looming out of the twilight. The hotel, Mena House, was the hunting lodge-cum-palace of 19th century kings. Elegant.

  Buffet supper was good. Sleep came like a weight.

  December 6

  Joanna says this journal is good therapy for me, might even get me back into the habit of writing again. She says every Comp. Lit. type is a frustrated author and I should just spew my bile into this diary. So be it:

  Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me

  All strange wonders that befell thee.

  World, you have been warned.

  Set off south today—to Memphis, the ancient capital lost when its walls were breached in a war and subsequent floods claimed it.

  The famous fallen Rameses statue. It looks powerful still, even lying down. Makes you feel like a pygmy tip-toeing around a giant, à la Gulliver.

  Saqqara, principal necropolis of Memphis, survives 3 km away in the desert. First Dynasty tombs, including the first pyramid, made of steps, 5 levels high. New Kingdom graffiti inside are now history themselves, from our perspective.

  On to the Great Pyramid!—by camel! The drivers proved to be even more harassing than legend warned. We entered the pyramid Khefren, slightly shorter than that of his father, Cheops. All the 80 known pyramids were found stripped. These passages have a constricted vacancy to them, empty now for longer than they were filled. Their silent mass is unnerving.

  Professor Alvarez from UC Berkeley tried to find hidden rooms here by placing cosmic ray detectors in the lower known rooms, and looking for slight increases in flux at certain angles, but there seem to be none. There are seismic and even radio measurements of the dry sands in the Giza region, looking for echoes of buried tombs, but no big finds so far. Plenty of echoes from ruins of ordinary houses, etc., though.

  No serious jet lag today, but we nod off when we can. Handy, having the hotel a few hundred yards from the pyramids.

  I tried to get Joanna to leave her wrist comm at home. Since her breakdown she can’t take news of daily disasters very well. (Who can, really?) She’s pretty steady now, but this trip should be as calm as possible, her doctor told me.

  So of course she turns on the comm and it’s full of hysterical stuff about another border clash between the Empire of Israel and the Arab Muhammad Soviet. Smart rockets vs. smart defenses. A draw. Some things never change.

  I turned it off immediately. Her hands shook for hours afterward. I brushed it off.

  Still, it’s different when you’re a few hundred miles from the lines. Hope we’re safe here.

  December 7

  Into Cairo itself, the Egyptian museum. The Tut Ankh Amen exhibit—huge treasuries, opulent jewels, a sheer wondrous plenitude. There are endless cases of beautiful alabaster bowls, gold-laminate boxes, testifying to thousands of years of productivity.

  I wandered down a musty marble corridor and then, com-ing out of a gloomy side passage, there was the first Quarthex I’d ever seen. Big, clacking and clicking as it thrust forward in that six-legged gait. It ignored me, of course—they nearly always lurch by humans as though they can’t see us. Or else that distant, distracted gaze means they’re ruminating over strange, a
lien ideas. Who knows why they’re intensely studying ancient Egyptian ways, and ignoring the rest of us? This one was cradling a stone urn, a meter high at least. It carried the black granite in three akimbo arms, hardly seeming to notice the weight. I caught a whiff of acrid pungency, the fluid that lubricates their joints. Then it was gone.

  We left and visited the oldest Coptic church in Egypt, supposedly where Moses hid out when he was on the lam. Looks it. The old section of Cairo is crowded, decayed, people laboring in every nook with minimal tools, much standing around watching as others work. The only sign of really efficient labor was a gang of men and women hauling long, cigar-shaped yellow things on wagons. Some-thing the Quarthex wanted placed outside the city, our guide said.

  In the evening we went to the Sound & Light show at the Sphinx—excellent. There is even a version in the Quarthex language, those funny sputtering, barking sounds.

  Arabs say, “Man fears time; time fears the pyramids.” You get that feeling here.

  Afterward, we ate in the hotel’s Indian restaurant; quite fine.

  December 8

  Cairo is a city being trampled to death.

  It’s grown by a factor of 14 in population since the revolution in 1952, and shows it. The old Victorian homes which once lined stately streets of willowy trees are now crowded by modern slab concrete apartment houses. The aged buildings are kept going, not from a sense of history, but because no matter how rundown they get, somebody needs them.

  The desert’s grit invades everywhere. Plants in the court-yards have a weary, resigned look. Civilization hasn’t been very good for the old ways.

  Maybe that’s why the Quarthex seem to dislike anything built since the time of the Romans. I saw one running some kind of machine, a black contraption that floated two meters off the ground. It was laying some kind of cable in the ground, right along the bank of the Nile. Every time it met a building it just slammed through, smashing everything to frags. Guess the Quarthex have squared all this with the Egyptian gov’t, because there were police all around, making sure nobody got in the way. Odd.

  But not unpredictable, when you think about it. The Quarthex have those levitation devices which everybody would love to get the secret of. (Ending sentence with preposition! Horrors! But this is vacation, dammit.) They’ve been playing coy for years, letting out a trickle of technology, with the Egyptians holding the patents. That must be what’s holding the Egyptian economy together, in the face of their unrelenting population crunch. The Quarthex started out as guests here, studying the ruins and so on, but now it’s obvious that they have free run of the place. They own it.

  Still, the Quarthex haven’t given away the crucial devices which would enable us to find out how they do it—or so my colleagues in the physics department tell me. It vexes them that this alien race can master space/time so completely, manipulating gravity itself, and we can’t get the knack of it.

  We visited the famous alabaster mosque. It perches on a hill called The Citadel. Elegant, cool, aloofly dominating the city. The Old Bazaar nearby is a warren, so much like the movie sets one’s seen that it has an unreal, Arabian Nights quality. We bought spices. The calls to worship from the mosques reach you everywhere, even in the most secluded back rooms where Joanna was haggling over jewelry.

  It’s impossible to get anything really ancient, the swarthy little merchants said. The Quarthex have bought them up, trading gold for anything that might be from the time of the Pharaohs. There have been a lot of fakes over the last few centuries, some really good ones, so the Quarthex have just bought anything that might be real. No wonder the Egyptians like them, let them chew up their houses if they want. Gold speaks louder than the past.

  We boarded our cruise ship, the venerable Nile Concorde. Lunch was excellent, Italian. We explored Cairo in midafternoon, through markets of incredible dirt and disarray. Calf brains displayed without a hint of refrigeration or protection, flies swarming, etc. Fun, especially if you can keep from breathing for five minutes or more.

  We stopped in the Shepheard’s Hotel, the site of many Brit spy novels (Maugham especially). It has an excellent bar—Nubians, Saudis, etc., putting away decidedly non-Islamic gins and beers. A Quarthex was sitting in a special chair at the back, talking through a voicebox to a Saudi. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but the Saudi had a gleam in his eye. Driving a bargain, I’d say.

  Great atmosphere in the bar, though. A cloth banner over the bar proclaims,

  Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,

  why fret about them if today be sweet.

  Indeed, yes, ummm—bartender!

  December 9

  Friday, Moslem holy day.

  We left Cairo at 11 p.m. last night, the city gliding past our stateroom windows, lovelier in misty radiance than in dusty day. We cruised all day. Buffet breakfast & lunch, solid eastern and Mediterranean stuff, passable red wine.

  A hundred meters away, the past presses at us, going about its business as if the pharaohs were still calling the tune. Primitive pumping irrigation, donkeys doing the work, women cleaning gray clothes in the Nile. Desert ramparts to the east, at spots sending sand fingers—no longer swept away by the annual floods—across the fields to the shore itself. Moslem tombs of stone and mud brick coast by as we lounge on the top deck, peering at the madly waving children through our binoculars, across a chasm of time.

  There are about fifty aboard a ship with capacity of 100, so there is plenty of room and service as we sweep serenely on, music flooding the deck, cutting between slabs of antiquity; not quite decadent, just intelligently sybaritic. (Why so few tourists? Guide guessed people are afraid of the Quarthex. Joanna gets jittery around them, but I don’t know if it’s only her old fears surfacing again.)

  The spindly, ethereal minarets are often the only grace note in the mud brick villages, like a lovely idea trying to rise out of brown, mottled chaos. Animal power is used wherever possible. Still, the villages are quiet at night.

  The flip side of this peacefulness must be boredom. That explains a lot of history and its rabid faiths, unfortunately.

  December 10

  Civilization thins steadily as we steam upriver. The mud brick villages typically have no electricity; there is ample power from Aswan, but the power lines and stations are too expensive. One would think that, with the Quarthex gold, they could do better now.

  Our guide says the Quarthex have been very hard-nosed—no pun intended—about such improvements. They will not let the earnings from their patents be used to modernize Egypt. Feeding the poor, cleaning the Nile, rebuilding monuments—all fine (in fact, they pay handsomely for restoring projects). But better electricity—no. A flat no.

  We landed at a scruffy town and took a bus into the western desert. Only a kilometer from the flat floodplain, the Sahara is utterly barren and forbidding. We visited a Ptolemaic city of the dead. One tomb has a mummy of a girl who drowned trying to cross the Nile and see her lover, the hieroglyphs say. Nearby are catacombs of mummified baboons and ibises, symbols of wisdom.

  A tunnel begins here, pointing SE toward Akhenaton’s capital city. The German discoverers in the last century followed it for 40 kilometers—all cut through limestone, a gigantic task—before turning back because of bad air.

  What was it for? Nobody knows. Dry, spooky atmosphere. Urns of desiccated mummies, undisturbed. To duck down a side corridor is to step into mystery.

  I left the tour group and ambled over a low hill—to take a pee, actually. To the west was sand, sand, sand. I was standing there, doing my bit to hold off the dryness, when I saw one of those big black contraptions come slipping over the far horizon. Chuffing, chugging, and laying what looked like pipe—a funny kind of pipe, all silvery, with blue facets running through it. The glittering shifted, changing to yellows and reds while I watched.

  A Quarthex riding atop it, of course. It ran due south, roughly parallel to the Nile. When I got back and told Joanna about it she looked at the map and we couldn
’t figure what would be out there of interest to anybody, even a Quarthex. No ruins around, nothing. Funny.

  December 11

  Beni Hassan, a nearly deserted site near the Nile. A steep walk up the escarpment of the eastern desert, after crossing the rich flood plain by donkey. The rock tombs have fine drawings and some statues—still left because they were cut directly from the mountain, and have thick wedges securing them to it. Guess the ancients would steal anything not nailed down. One thing about the Quarthex, the guide says—they take nothing. They seem genuinely interested in restoring, not in carting artifacts back home to their neck of the galactic spiral arm.

  Upriver, we landfall beside a vast dust plain, which we crossed in a cart pulled by a tractor. The mud brick palaces of Akhenaton have vanished, except for a bit of Nefertiti’s palace, where the famous bust of her was found. The royal tombs in the mountain above are defaced—big chunks pulled out of the walls by the priests who undercut his monotheist revolution, after his death.

  The wall carvings are very realistic and warm; the women even have nipples. The tunnel from yesterday probably runs under here, perhaps connecting with the passageways we see deep in the king’s grave shafts. Again, nobody’s explored them thoroughly. There are narrow sections, possibly warrens for snakes or scorpions, maybe even traps.

  While Joanna and I are ambling around, taking a few snaps of the carvings, I hear a rustle. Joanna has the flashlight and we peer over a ledge, down a straight shaft. At the bottom something is moving, something big.

  It takes a minute to see that the reddish shell isn’t a sarcophagus at all, but the back of a Quarthex. It’s planting suckerlike things to the walls, threading cables through them. I can see more of the stuff farther back in the shadows.