The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  The Quarthex looks up, into our flashlight beam, and scuttles away. Exploring the tunnels? But why did it move away so fast? What’s to hide?

  December 12

  Cruise all day and watch the shore slide by.

  Joanna is right; I needed this vacation a great deal. I can see that, rereading this journal—it gets looser as I go along.

  As do I. When I consider how my life is spent, ere half my days, in this dark world and wide…

  The pell-mell of university life dulls my sense of wonder, of simple pleasures simply taken. The Nile has a flowing, infinite quality, free of time. I can feel what it was like to live here, part of a great celestial clock that brought the perpetually turning sun and moon, the perennial rhythm of the flood. Aswan has interrupted the ebb and flow of the waters, but the steady force of the Nile rolls on.

  Heaven smiles,

  and faiths and empires gleam,

  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

  The peacefulness permeates everything. Last night, making love to Joanna, was the best ever. Magnifique!

  (And I know you’re reading this, Joanna—I saw you sneak it out of the suitcase yesterday! Well, it was the best—quite a tribute, after all these years. And there’s tomorrow and to-morrow…)

  He who bends to himself a joy

  Does the winged life destroy;

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

  Perhaps next term I shall request the Romantic Poets course. Or even write some of my own…

  Three Quarthex flew overhead today, carrying what look like ancient rams-head statues. The guide says statues were moved around a lot by the Arabs, and of course the archaeologists. The Quarthex have negotiated permission to take many of them back to their rightful places, if known.

  December 13

  Landfall at Abydos—a limestone temple miraculously pre-served, its thick roof intact. Clusters of scruffy mud huts surround it, but do not diminish its obdurate rectangular severity.

  The famous list of pharaohs, chiseled in a side corridor, is impressive in its sweep of time. Each little entry was a lordly pharaoh, and there is a whole wall jammed full of them. Egypt lasted longer than any comparable society, and the mass of names on that wall is even more impressive, since the temple builders did not even give it the importance of a central location.

  The list omits Hatchepsut, a mere woman, and Akhenaton the scandalous monotheist. Rameses II had all carvings here cut deeply, particularly on the immense columns, to forestall defacement—a possibility he was much aware of, since he was busily doing it to his ancestor’s temples. He chiseled away earlier work, adding his own cartouches, apparently thinking he could fool the gods themselves into believing he had built them all himself. Ah, immortality.

  Had an earthquake today. Shades of California!

  We were on the ship, Joanna dutifully padding back and forth on the main deck to work off the opulent lunch. We saw the palms waving ashore, and damned if there wasn’t a small shock wave in the water, going east to west, and then a kind of low grumbling from the east. Guide says he’s never seen anything like it.

  And tonight, sheets of ruby light rising up from both east and west. Looked like an aurora, only the wrong directions. The rippling aura changed colors as it rose, then met over-head, burst into gold, and died. I’d swear I heard a high, keening note sound as the burnt-gold line flared and faded, flared and faded, spanning the sky.

  Not many people on deck, though, so it didn’t cause much comment. Joanna’s theory is, it was a rocket exhaust.

  An engineer says it looks like something to do with magnetic fields. I’m no scientist, but it seems to me whatever the Quarthex want to do, they can. Lords of space/time they called themselves in the diplomatic ceremonies. The United Nations representatives wrote that off as hyperbole, but the Quarthex may mean it.

  December 14

  Dendera. A vast temple, much less well known than Karnak, but quite as impressive. Quarthex there, digging at the foundations. Guide says they’re looking for some secret passageways, maybe. The Egyptian gov’t is letting them do what they damn well please.

  On the way back to the ship we pass a whole mass of people, hundreds, all dressed in costumes. I thought it was some sort of pageant or tourist foolery, but the guide frowned, saying he didn’t know what to make of it.

  The mob was chanting something even the guide couldn’t make out. He said the rough-cut cloth was typical of the old ways, made on crude spinning wheels. The procession was ragged, but seemed headed for the temple. They looked drunk to me.

  The guide tells me that the ancients had a theology based on the Nile. This country is essentially ten kilometers wide and seven hundred kilometers long, a narrow band of livable earth pressed between two deadly deserts. So they believed the gods must have intended it, and that the Nile was the center of the whole damned world.

  The sun came from the east, meaning that’s where things began. Ending—dying—happened in the west, where the sun went. Thus they buried their dead on the west side of the Nile, even 7,000 years ago. At night, the sun swung below and lit the underworld, where everybody went finally. Kind of comforting, thinking of the sun doing duty like that for the dead. Only the virtuous dead, though. If you didn’t follow the rules…

  Some are born to sweet delight.

  Some are born to endless night.

  Their world was neatly bisected by the great river, and they loved clean divisions. They invented the 24 hour day but, loving symmetry, split it in half. Each of the 12 daylight hours was longer in summer than in winter—and, for night, vice versa. They built an entire nation-state, an immortal hand or eye, framing such fearful symmetry.

  On to Karnak itself, mooring at Luxor. The middle and late pharaohs couldn’t afford the labor investment for pyramids, so they contented themselves with additions to the huge sprawl at Karnak.

  I wonder how long it will be before someone rich notices that for a few million or so he could build a tomb bigger than the Great Pyramid. It would only take a million or so lime-stone blocks—or, much better, granite—and could be better isolated and protected. If you can’t conquer a continent or scribble a symphony, pile up a great stack of stones.

  L’eterniti,

  ne fut jamais perdue.

  The light show this night at Karnak was spooky at times, and beautiful, with booming voices coming right out of the stones. Saw a Quarthex in the crowd. It stared straight ahead, not noticing anybody but not bumping into any humans, either.

  It looked enthralled. The beady eyes, all four, scanned the shifting blues and burnt-oranges that played along the rising columns, the tumbled great statues. Its lubricating fluids made shiny reflections as it articulated forward, clacking in the dry night air. Somehow it was almost reverential. Rearing above the crowd, unmoving for long moments, it seemed more like the giant frozen figures in stone than like the mere mortals who swarmed around it, keeping a respectful distance, muttering to themselves.

  Unnerving, somehow, to see

  …a subtler Sphinx renew

  Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

  December 15

  A big day. The Valleys of the Queens, the Nobles, and finally of the Kings. Whew! All are dry washes (wadis), obviously easy to guard and isolate. Nonetheless, all of the 62 known tombs except Tut’s were rifled, probably within a few centuries of burial. It must’ve been an inside job.

  There is speculation that the robbing became a needed part of the economy, recycling the wealth, and providing gaudy displays for the next pharaoh to show off at his funeral, all the better to keep impressing the peasants. Just another part of the socio-economic machine, folks.

  Later priests collected the pharaoh mummies and hid them in a cave nearby, realizing they couldn’t protect the tombs. Preservation of Tuthmosis III is excellent. His hook-nosed mummy has been returned to its tomb—a big, deep thing, larger than our apartment, several floors in all, connected by
ramps, with side treasuries, galleries, etc. The inscription above reads,

  You shall live again forever.

  All picked clean, of course, except for the sarcophagus, too heavy to carry away. The pyramids had portcullises, deadfalls, pitfalls, and rolling stones to crush the unwary robber, but there are few here. Still, it’s a little creepy to think of all those ancient engineers, planning to commit murder in the future, long after they themselves are gone, all to protect the past. Death, be not proud.

  An afternoon of shopping in the bazaar. The old Victorian hotel on the river is atmospheric, but has few guests. Food continues good. No dysentery, either. We both took the ezdi bacteria before we left, so it’s living down in our tracts, festering away, lying in wait for any ugly foreign bug. Comforting.

  December 16

  Cruise on. We stop at Kom Ombo, a temple to the crocodile god, Sebek, built to placate the crocs who swarmed in the river nearby. (The Nile is cleared of them now, unfortunately; they would’ve added some zest to the cruise…) A small room contains 98 mummified crocs, stacked like cordwood.

  Cruised some more. A few km south, there were gangs of Egyptians working beside the river. Hauling blocks of granite down to the water, rolling them on logs. I stood on the deck, trying to figure out why they were using ropes and simple pulleys, and no powered machinery.

  Then I saw a Quarthex near the top of the rise, where the blocks were being sawed out of the rock face. It reared up over the men, gesturing with those jerky arms, eyes glitter-ing. It called out something in a halfway human voice, only in a language I didn’t know. The guide came over, frowning, but he couldn’t understand it, either.

  The laborers were pulling ropes across ruts in the stone, feeding sand and water into the gap, cutting out blocks by sheer brute abrasion. It must take weeks to extract one at that rate! Farther along, others drove wooden planks down into the deep grooves, hammering them with crude wooden mallets. Then they poured water over the planks, and we could hear the stone pop open as the wood expanded, far down in the cut.

  That’s the way the ancients did it, the guide said kind of quietly. The Quarthex towered above the human teams, that jangling, harsh voice booming out over the water, each syllable lingering until the next joined it, blending in the dry air, hollow and ringing and remorseless.

  NOTE ADDED LATER

  Stopped at Edfu, a well preserved temple, buried 100 feet deep by Moslem garbage until the late 19th century. The best aspect of river cruising is pulling along a site, viewing it from the angles the river affords, and then stepping from your stateroom directly into antiquity, with nothing to intervene and break the mood.

  Trouble is, this time a man in front of us goes off a way to photograph the ship, and suddenly something is rushing at him out of the weeds and the crew is yelling—it’s a crocodile! The guy drops his camera and bolts.

  The croc looks at all of us, snorts, and waddles back into the Nile. The guide is upset, maybe even more than the fellow who almost got turned into a free lunch. Who would introduce crocs back into the Nile?

  December 17

  Aswan. A clean, delightful town. The big dam just south of town is impressive, with its monument to Soviet excellence, etc. A hollow joke, considering how poor the USSR is today. They could use a loan from Egypt!

  The unforeseen side effects, though—rising water table bringing more insects, rotting away the carvings in the temples, rapid silting up inside the dam itself, etc.—are getting important. They plan to dig a canal and drain a lot of the incoming new silt into the desert, make a huge farming valley with it, but I don’t see how they can drain enough water to carry the dirt, and still leave much behind in the original dam.

  The guide says they’re having trouble with it.

  We then fly south, to Abu Simbel. Lake Nasser, which claimed the original site of the huge monuments, is hundreds of miles long. They enlarged it again in 2008.

  In the times of the pharaohs, the land below these had villages, great quarries for the construction of monuments, trade routes south to the Nubian kingdoms. Now it’s all underwater.

  They did save the enormous temples to Rameses II—built to impress aggressive Nubians with his might and majesty—and to his queen, Nefertari. The colossal statues of Rameses II seem personifications of his egomania. Inside, carvings show him performing all the valiant tasks in the great battle with the Hittites—slaying, taking prisoners, then presenting them to himself, who is in turn advised by the gods—which include himself! All this, for a battle which was in fact an iffy draw. Both temples have been lifted about a hundred feet and set back inside a wholly artificial hill, supported inside by the largest concrete dome in the world. Amazing.

  Look upon my works, ye Mighty,

  and despair!

  Except that when Shelley wrote Ozymandias, he’d never seen Rameses II’s image so well preserved.

  Leaving the site, eating the sand blown into our faces by a sudden gust of wind, I caught sight of a Quarthex. It was burrowing into the sand, using a silvery tool that spat ruby-colored light. Beside it, floating on a platform, were some of those funny pipelike things I’d seen days before. Only this time men and women were helping it, lugging stuff around to put into the holes the Quarthex dug.

  The people looked dazed, like they were sleep-walking. I waved a greeting, but nobody even looked up. Except the Quarthex. They’re expressionless, of course. Still, those glittering popeyes peered at me for a long moment, with the little feelers near its mouth twitching with a kind of anxious energy.

  I looked away. I couldn’t help but feel a little spooked by it. It wasn’t looking at us in a friendly way. Maybe it didn’t want me yelling at its work gang.

  Then we flew back to Aswan, above the impossibly narrow ribbon of green that snakes through absolute bitter desolation.

  December 18

  I’m writing this at twilight, before the light gives out. We got up this morning and were walking into town when the whole damn ground started to rock. Mud huts slamming down, waves on the Nile, everything.

  Got back to the ship but nobody knew what was going on. Not much on the radio. Cairo came in clear, saying there’d been a quake all right, all along the Nile.

  Funny thing was, the captain couldn’t raise any other radio station. Just Cairo. Nothing else in the whole Middle East.

  Some other passengers think there’s a war on. Maybe so, but the Egyptian army doesn’t know about it. They’re stand-ing around, all along the quay, fondling their AK 47s, looking just as puzzled as we are.

  More rumblings and shakings in the afternoon. And now that the sun’s about gone, I can see big sheets of light in the sky. Only it seems to me the constellations aren’t right.

  Joanna took some of her pills. She’s trying to fend off the jitters and I do what I can. I hate the empty, hollow look that comes into her eyes.

  We’ve got to get the hell out of here.

  December 19

  I might as well write this down, there’s nothing else to do.

  When we got up this morning the sun was there all right, but the moon hadn’t gone down. And it didn’t, all day.

  Sure, they can both be in the sky at the same time. But all day? Joanna is worried, not because of the moon, but be-cause all the airline flights have been cancelled. We were supposed to go back to Cairo today.

  More earthquakes. Really bad this time.

  At noon, all of a sudden, there were Quarthex everywhere. In the air, swarming in from the east and west. Some splashed down in the Nile—and didn’t come up. Others zoomed over-head, heading south toward the dam.

  Nobody’s been brave enough to leave the ship—including me. Hell, I just want to go home. Joanna’s staying in the cabin.

  About an hour later, a swarthy man in a ragged gray suit comes running along the quay and says the dam’s gone. Just gone. The Quarthex formed little knots above it, and there was a lot of purple flashing light and big crackling noises, and then the dam just disappeared.r />
  But the water hasn’t come pouring down on us here. The man says it ran back the other way. South.

  I looked over the rail. The Nile was flowing north.

  Late this afternoon, five of the crew went into town. By this time there were fingers of orange and gold zapping across the sky all the time, making weird designs. The clouds would come rolling in from the north, and these radiant beams would hit them, and they’d split the clouds, just like that. With a spray of ivory light.

  And Quarthex, buzzing everywhere. There’s a kind of high sheen, up above the clouds, like a metal boundary or some-thing, but you can see through it.

  Quarthex keep zipping up to it, sometimes coming right up out of the Nile itself, just splashing out, then zooming up until they’re little dwindling dots. They spin around up there, as if they’re inspecting it, and then they drop like bricks, and splash down in the Nile again. Like frantic bees, Joanna said, and her voice trembled.

  A technical type on board, an engineer from Rockwell, says he thinks the Quarthex are putting on one hell of a light show. Just a weird alien stunt, he thinks.

  While I was writing this, the five crewmen returned from Aswan. They’d gone to the big hotels there, and then to police headquarters. They heard that TV from Cairo went out two days ago. All air flights have been grounded because of the Quarthex buzzing around and the odd lights and so on.

  Or at least, that’s the official line. The captain says his cousin told him that several flights did take off two days back, and they hit something up there. Maybe that blue metallic sheen?