The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Why anything?” Faz answered, but there was nodding in the tone.

  2.

  The Im twisted the local fields and caused to appear, hovering in fried light, two cubes—one red, one blue.

  You may choose to open either the Blue cube alone, or both.

  Though brightened by a borrowed kiloAmp jolt from Xen, Faz had expended many Joules in irritation and now flagged. “What’s…in…them?”

  Their contents are determined by what I have already predicted. I have already placed your rewards inside. You can choose Red and Blue both, if you want. In that case, following my prediction, I have placed in the Red cube the bottled-up injection you wanted.

  Faz unfurled a metallic tentacle for the Red cube.

  Wait. If you will open both boxes, then I have placed in the Blue nothing—nothing at all.

  Faz said, “Then I get the jec in the Red cube, and when I open the Blue—nothing.”

  Correct.

  Xen asked, “What if Faz doesn’t open both cubes?”

  The only other option is to open the Blue alone.

  “And I get nothing?” Faz asked.

  No. In that case, I have placed the, ah, “jec” in the Red cube. But in the Blue I have put the key to my own fieldcraft—the designs for immortality.

  “I don’t get it. I open Red, I get my jec—right?” Faz said, sudden interest giving it a spike of scarlet brilliance at three gigaHertz. “Then I open Blue, I get immortality. That’s what I want.”

  True. But in that case, I have predicted that you will pick both cubes. Therefore, I have left the Blue cube empty.

  Faz clattered its treads. “I get immortality if I choose the Blue cube alone? But you have to have predicted that. Other­wise I get nothing.”

  Yes.

  Xen added, “If you have predicted things perfectly.”

  But I always do.

  “Always?”

  Nearly always. I am immortal, ageless—but not God. Not…yet.

  “What if I pick Blue and you’re wrong?” Faz asked. “Then I get nothing.”

  True. But highly improbable.

  Xen saw it. “All this is done now? You’ve already made your prediction? Placed the jec or the secret—or both—in the cubes?”

  Yes. I made my predictions before I even offered the Game.

  Faz asked, “What’d you predict?”

  Merry pink laughter chimed across the slumbering megaHertz. I will not say. Except that I predicted correctly that you both would play, and that you particularly would ask that question. Witness.

  A sucking jolt lifted Faz from the stones and deposited it nearby. Etched in the rock beneath where Faz had crouched was What did you predict? in a rounded, careful hand.

  “It had to have been done during the overhead display, before the game began,” Xen said wonderingly.

  “The Im can predict,” Faz said respectfully.

  Xen said, “Then the smart move is to open both cubes.”

  Why?

  “Because you’ve already made your choice. If you pre­dicted that Faz would choose both, and he opens only the Blue, then he gets nothing.”

  True, and as I said before, very improbable.

  “So,” Xen went on, thinking quickly under its pocked sheen of titanium, “if you predicted that Faz would choose only the Blue, then Faz might as well open both. Faz will get both the jec and the secret.”

  Faz said, “Right. And that jec will be useful in getting away from here.”

  Except that there is every possibility that I already predicted his choice of both cubes. In that case I have left only the jec in the Red Cube, and nothing in Blue.

  “But you’ve already chosen!” Faz blurted. “There isn’t any probable-this or possible-that at all.”

  True.

  Xen said, “The only uncertainty is, how good a predictor are you.”

  Quite.

  Faz slowed, flexing a crane arm in agonized frustration. “I…dunno…I got…to think…”

  There’s world enough, and time.

  “Let me draw a diagram,” said Xen, who had always favored the orderly over the dramatic. This was what condemned it to a minor role in roiling battle, but perhaps that was a blessing. It drew upon the gritty soil some boxes: “There,” Xen wheezed. “This is the payoff matrix.”

  As solemn and formal as Job’s argument with God.

  Enraptured with his own creation, Xen said, “Clearly, taking only the Blue cube is the best choice. The chances that the Im are wrong are very small. So you have a great chance of gaining immortality.”

  “That’s crazy,” Faz mumbled. “If I take both cubes, I at least get a jec, even if the Im knew I’d choose that way. And with a jec, I can make a run for it from the Laggenmorphs.”

  “Yes. Yet it rests on faith,” Xen said. “Faith that the Im’s predicting is near-perfect.”

  “Ha!” Faz snorted. “Nothing’s perfect.”

  A black thing scorched over the rim of the pitwallow and exploded into fragments. Each bit dove for Xen and Faz, like shrieking, elongated eagles baring teeth.

  And each struck something invisible but solid. Each smacked like an insect striking the windshield of a speeding car. And was gone.

  “They’re all around us!” Faz cried.

  “Even with a jec, we might not make it out,” Xen said.

  True. But translated into currents, like me, with a subtle knowledge of conductivities and diffusion rates, you can live forever.

  “Translated…” Xen mused.

  Free of entropy’s swamp.

  “Look,” Faz said, “I may be tired, drained, but I know logic. You’ve already made your choice, Im—the cubes are filled with whatever you put in. What I choose to do now can’t change that. So I’ll take both cubes.”

  Very well.

  Faz sprang to the cubes. They burst open with a popping ivory radiance. From the red came a blinding bolt of a jec. It surrounded Faz’s antennae and cascaded into the creature.

  Drifting lightly from the blue cube came a tight-wound thing, a shifting ball of neon-lit string. Luminous, writhing rainbow worms. They described the complex web of magnetic field geometries that were immortality’s craft. Faz seized it.

  You won both. I predicted you would take only the blue. I was wrong.

  “Ha!” Faz whirled with renewed energy.

  Take the model of the fieldcraft. From it you can deduce the methods.

  “Come on, Xen!” Faz cried with sudden ferocity. It surged over the lip of the pitwallow, firing at the distant, moving shapes of the Laggenmorphs, full once more of spit and dash. Leaving Xen.

  “With that jec, Faz will make it.”

  I predict so, yes. You could follow Faz. Under cover of its armory, you would find escape—that way.

  The shimmer vectored quick a green arrow to westward, where clouds billowed white. There the elements still gov­erned and mortality walked.

  “My path lies homeward, to the south.”

  Bound for Pymr.

  “She is the one true rest I have.”

  You could rest forever.

  “Like you? Or Faz, when it masters the…translation?”

  Yes. Then I will have company here.

  “Aha! That is your motivation.”

  In part.

  “What else, then?”

  There are rules for immortals. Ones you cannot under­stand…yet.

  “If you can predict so well, with Godlike power, then I should choose only the Blue cube.”

  True. Or as true as true gets.

  “But if you predict so well, my ‘choice’ is mere illusion. It was fore-ordained.”

  That old saw? I can see you are…determined…to have free will.

  “Or free won’t.”

  Your turn.

  “There are issues here…” Xen transmitted only ruby ruminations, murmuring like surf on a distant shore.

  Distant boomings from Faz’s retreat. The Red and Blue cubes spun, sparkling, surfaces r
ippled by ion-acoustic modes. The game had been reset by the Im, whose curtains of gauzy green shimmered in anticipation.

  There must be a Game, you see.

  “Otherwise there is no free will?”

  That is indeed one of our rules. Observant, you are. I believe I will enjoy the company of you, Xen, more than that of Faz.

  “To be…an immortal…”

  A crystalline paradise, better than blind Milton’s scrib­bled vision.

  A cluster of dirty-brown explosions ripped the sky, rocked the land.

  I cannot expend my voltages much longer. Would that we had wit enough, and time, to continue this parrying.

  “All right.” Xen raised itself up and clawed away the phosphorescent layers of both cubes.

  The Red held a shimmering jec.

  The Blue held nothing.

  Xen said slowly, “So you predicted correctly.”

  Yes. Sadly, I knew you too well.

  Xen radiated a strange sensation of joy, unlaced by regret. It surged to the lip of the crumbling pitwallow.

  “Ah…” Xen sent a lofting note. “I am like a book, old Im. No doubt I would suffer in translation.”

  A last glance backward at the wraith of glow and darkness, a gesture of salute, then: “On! To sound and fury!” and it was gone forever.

  3.

  In the stretched silent years there was time for introspec­tion. Faz learned the lacy straits of Earth’s magnetic oceans, its tides and times. It sailed the magnetosphere and spoke to stars.

  The deep-etched memories of that encounter persisted. It never saw Xen again, though word did come vibrating through the field lines of Xen’s escape, of zestful adventures out in the raw territory of air and Man. There was even a report that Xen had itself and Pymr decanted into full Manform, to taste the pangs of cell and membrane. Clearly, Xen had lived fully after that solstice day. Fresh verve had driven that blithe new spirit.

  Faz was now grown full, could scarcely be distinguished from the Im who gave the fieldcraft. Solemn and wise, its induction, conductivity, and ruby glinting dielectrics a glory to be admired, it hung vast and cold in the sky. Faz spoke seldom and thought much.

  Yet the game still occupied Faz. It understood with the embedded viewpoint of an immortal now, saw that each side in the game paid a price. The Im could convey the fieldcraft to only a few, and had nearly exhausted itself; those moments cost millennia.

  The sacrifice of Faz was less clear.

  Faz felt itself the same as before. Its memories were stored in Alfven waves—stirrings of the field lines, standing waves between Earth’s magnetic poles. They would be safe until Earth itself wound down, and the dynamo at the nickel-iron core ceased to replenish the fields. Perhaps, by that time, there would be other field lines threading Earth’s, and the Ims could spread outward, blending into the galactic fields.

  There were signs that such an end had come to other worlds. The cosmic rays which sleeted down perpetually were random, isotropic, which meant they had to be scattered from magnetic waves between the stars. If such waves were ordered, wise—it meant a vast community of even greater Ims.

  But this far future did not concern Faz. For it, the past still sang, gritty and real.

  Faz asked the Im about that time, during one of their chance auroral meetings, beside a cascading crimson chum.

  The way we would put it in my day, the Im named Sam said, would be that the software never knows what the original hardware was.

  And that was it, Faz saw. During the translation, the original husk of Faz had been exactly memorized. This meant determining the exact locations of each atom, every darting electron. By the quantum laws, to locate perfectly implied that the measurement imparted an unknown, but high, mo­mentum to each speck. So to define a thing precisely then destroyed it.

  Yet there was no external way to prove this. Before and after translation there was an exact Faz.

  The copy did not know it was embedded in different…hardware…than the original.

  So immortality was a concept with legitimacy purely seen from the outside. From the inside…

  Somewhere, a Faz had died that this Faz might live.

  …And how did any sentience know it was not a copy of some long-gone original?

  One day, near the sheath that held back the atmosphere, Faz saw a man waving, it stood in green and vibrant wealth of life, clothed at the waist, bronzed. Faz attached a plasma transducer at the boundary and heard the figure say, “You’re Faz, right?”

  Yes, in a way. And you…?

  “Wondered how you liked it.”

  Xen? Is that you?

  “In a way.”

  You knew.

  “Yes. So I went in the opposite direction—into this form.”

  You’ll die soon.

  “You’ve died already.”

  Still, in your last moments, you’ll wish for this.

  “No, it’s not how long something lasts, it’s what that something means.” With that the human turned, waved gaily, and trotted into a nearby forest.

  This encounter bothered Faz.

  In its studies and learned colloquy, Faz saw and felt the tales of Men. They seemed curiously convoluted, revolving about Self. What mattered most to those who loved tales was how they concluded. Yet all Men knew how each ended. Their little dreams were rounded with a sleep.

  So the point of a tale was not how it ended, but what it meant. The great inspiring epic rage of Man was to find that lesson, buried in a grave.

  As each year waned, Faz reflected, and knew that Xen had seen this point. Immortality seen from without, by those who could not know the inner Self—Xen did not want that. So it misled the Im, and got the mere jec that it wanted.

  Xen chose life—not to be a monument of unaging intel­lect, gathered into the artifice of eternity.

  In the brittle night Faz wondered if it had chosen well itself. And knew. Nothing could be sure it was itself the original. So the only intelligent course lay in enjoying what­ever life a being felt—living like a mortal, in the moment. Faz had spent so long, only to reach that same conclusion which was forced on Man from the beginning.

  Faz emitted a sprinkling of electromagnetic tones, spatter­ing rueful red the field lines.

  And stirred itself to think again, each time the dim sun waned at the solstice. To remember and, still living, to rejoice.

  Freezeframe

  (1986)

  Well, Jason, it’ll take some explaining. Got a minute? Great.

  Here’s the invitation. It’s for the weekend, and it’s not just the kid’s birthday party, no. You and me, we’ve been out of touch the last couple years, so let me run through a little flashback, okay?

  Teri and me, we’re world-gobblers. You’ve known that since you and me were roomies, right? Remember the time I took a final, went skiing all afternoon, had a heavy date, was back next day for another final—and aced them both? Yeah, you got it fella, aced the date, too. Those were the days, huh?

  Anyway, my Teri’s the same—girl’s got real fire in her. No Type A or anything, just alive. And like sheet lightning in bed. We grab life with both hands. Always have. If you work in city government, like me, you got to keep ahead of the oppo. Otherwise you see yourself hung out to dry on the six o’clock news and next day nobody can remember your name.

  Goes double for Teri. She’s in liability and claims, a real shark reef. Pressureville. So many lawyers around these days, half of them bred in those barracuda farms, those upgraded speed-curricula things. So we’ve got to watch our ass.

  Right, good joke—watching Teri’s is no trouble, I’ll take all I can get. That woman really sends me. (Hey, lemme get you another drink.)

  We’re both in challenging careers, but she finds the time to make my day, every day, get it? Our relationship is stage center with us, even though we’re putting in ten-hour days. That’s what started us thinking, see?

  We need the time to work on our marriage, really firm it up when the old
schedule starts to fray us around the edges. We’ve been through those stress management retreats, the whole thing, and we use it. So we’re happy. But still, about a year ago we started to feel something was, well, missing.

  Yeah, you got it. The old cliché—a kid. Teri’s been hearing the old bio clock tick off the years. We got the condo, two sharp cars, timeshare in Maui, diversified portfolio thick as your wrist—but it’s not enough. Somehow.

  Teri brought it up carefully, not sure I’d like the idea of sharing all this wonderful bounty with a cranky little brat. I heard her through, real quality listening, and just between you and me, old buddy, I didn’t zoom in on the idea right away. Babies are more of a gal thing, right?

  I mean, we’re fast lane folks. Teri’s happy poring over legal programs, looking for a precedent-busting angle, zipping off to an amped workout at the gym, and then catching one of those black and white foreign films with the hard to read subtitles. Not much room in her schedule to pencil in a feeding or the mumps.

  I had real trouble conceptualizing how she—much less I—could cope. But she wanted this, I could tell from the soft watery look her eyes get. She’s a real woman, y’know?

  But the flip side was, no way she’d go for months of waddling around looking and feeling like a cow. Getting behind in her briefs because of morning sickness? Taking time off for the whole number? Not Teri’s kind of thing.

  What? Oh, sure, adoption. Well, we did the research on that. Let me put it this way. We both think the other’s pretty damn special. Unique. And our feeling was, why raise a kid that’s running on somebody else’s genetic program? We’re talented people, great bodies, not too hard on the eyes—why not give our kid those advantages?

  And think about the kid. You got to look at it from his point of view. He should have parents who provide the very best in everything—including genes. He had to be ours—all ours. So you can see our problem. Balancing the tradeoffs, and nothing looks like a winner. We’d hit a roadblock.

  That’s where my contacts came in handy. Guy at work told me about this company, GeneInc. The corporation was looking for a franchise backer and the city was getting involved because of all the legal hassles. Red tape had to be cut with the AMA, the local hospitals, the usual stuff. No big deal, though—just takes time.