The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Clay had been holding back even tentative approval. He had expected some show of jubilation. Patil and Singh simply sat and stared into the flickering coals of the stove’s half-open door.

  Slowly Patil said, “Word will spread quickly.”

  “Soon as you transmit it on that dish, sure.”

  Singh murmured, “Much shall change.”

  “Look, you might want to get out of here, go present a paper—”

  “Oh no, we shall remain,” Singh said quickly.

  “Those devotees could give you trouble if they find—”

  “We expect that this discovery, once understood, shall have great effects,” Patil said solemnly. “I much prefer to witness them from my home country.”

  The cadence and mood of this conversation struck Clay as odd, but he put it down to the working conditions. Certainly they had sacrificed a great deal to build and run this experiment amid crippling desolation.

  “This result will begin the final renunciation of the materialistic worldview,” Singh said matter-of-factly.

  “Huh?”

  “In peering at the individual lives of mere particles, we employ the reductionist hammer,” Patil explained. “But nature is not like a salamander, cut into fragments.”

  “Or if it were,” Singh added, “once the salamander is so sliced, try to make it do its salamander walk again.” A broad white grin split the gloom of nightfall. “The world is an implicate order, Dr. Clay. All parts are hinged to each other.”

  Clay frowned. He vaguely remembered a theory of quantum mechanics which used that term—“implicate order,” meaning that a deeper realm of physical theory lay beneath the uncertainties of wave mechanics. Waves that took it into their heads to behave like particles, and the reverse—these were supposed to be illusions arising from our ignorance of a more profound theory. But there was no observable consequence of such notions, and to Clay such mumbo jumbo from theorists who never got their hands dirty was empty rhapsodizing. Still, he was supposed to be the diplomat here.

  He gave a judicial nod. “Yeah, sure—but when the particles die, it’ll all be gone, right?”

  “Yes, in about 1034 years,” Patil said. “But the knowledge of matter’s mortality will spread as swiftly as light, on the wind of our transmitter. You are an experimentalist, Dr. Clay, and thus—if you will forgive my putting it so—addicted to cutting the salamander.” Patil made a steeple of his fingers, sending spindly shadows rippling across his face. “The world we study is conditioned by our perceptions of it. The implied order is partially from our own design.”

  “Sure, quantum measurement, uncertainty principle, all that.” Clay had sat through all the usual lectures about this stuff and didn’t feel like doing so again. Not in a dusty shed with his stomach growling from hunger. He sipped at his cup of weak Darjeeling and yawned.

  “Difficulties of measurement reflect underlying problems,” Patil said. “Even the Westerner Plato saw that we perceive only imperfect modes of the true, deeper world.”

  “What deeper world?” Clay sighed despite himself.

  “We do not know. We cannot know.”

  “Look, we make our measurements, we report. Period.”

  Amused, Singh said, “And that is where matters end?”

  Patil said, “Consensual reality, that is your ‘real’ world, Professor Clay. But our news may cause that bland, unthinking consensus to falter.”

  Clay shrugged. This sounded like late-night college bullshit sessions among boozed-up science nerds. Patty-cake pantheism, quantum razzle-dazzle, garbage philosophy. It was one thing to be open-minded and another to let your brains fall out. Was everybody on this wrecked continent a boogabooga type? He had to get out.

  “Look, I don’t see what difference—”

  “Until the curtain of seeming surety is swept away,” Singh put in.

  “Surety?”

  “This world—this universe—has labored long under the illusion of its own permanence.” Singh spread his hands, animated in the flickering yellow glow. “We might die, yes, the sun might even perish—but the universe went on. Now we prove otherwise. There cannot help but be profound reactions.”

  He thought he saw what they were driving at. “A Nobel Prize, even.”

  To his surprise, both men laughed merrily. “Oh no,” Patil said, arching his eyebrows. “No such trifles are expected!”

  The boxy meeting room beside the data bay was packed. From it came a subdued mutter, a fretwork of talk laced with anticipation.

  Outside, someone had placed a small chalky statue of a grinning elephant. Clay hesitated, stroked it. Despite the heat of the mine, the elephant was cool.

  “The workers just brought it down,” Mrs. Buli explained with a smile. “Our Hindu god of auspicious beginnings.”

  “Or endings,” Patil said behind her. “Equally.”

  Clay nodded and walked into the trapped, moist heat of the room. Everyone was jammed in, graduate students and laborers alike, their kurta already showing sweaty crescents. Clay saw the three students the devotees had beaten and exchanged respectful bows with them.

  Perceiving some need for ceremony, he opened with lengthy praise for the endless hours they had labored, exclaiming over how startled the world would be to learn of such a facility. Then he plunged into consideration of each candidate event, his checks and counter-checks, vertex corrections, digital array flaws, mean free paths, ionization rates, the artful programming that deflected the myriad possible sources of error. He could feel tension rising in the room as he cast the events on the inch-thick wall screen, calling them forth from the files in his cubes. Some he threw into 3-D, to show the full path through the cage of iron that had captured the death rattle of infinity.

  And at the end, all cases reviewed, he said quietly, “You have found it. The proton lifetime is very nearly 1034 years.”

  The room burst into applause, wide grins and wild shouts as everyone pressed forward to shake his hand.

  Singh handled the message to the NSF. Clay also constructed a terse though detailed summary and sent it to the International Astronomical Union for release to the worldwide system of observatories and universities. Clay knew this would give a vital assist to his career. With the Kolar team staying here, he would be their only spokesman. And this was very big, media-mesmerizing news indeed.

  The result was important to physicists and astronomers alike, for the destiny of all their searches ultimately would be sealed by the faint failures of particles no eye would ever see. In 1034 years, far in the depths of space, the great celestial cities, the galaxies, would be ebbing. The last red stars would flicker, belch, and gutter out. Perhaps life would have clung to them and found a way to persist against the growing cold. Cluttered with the memorabilia of the ages, the islands of mute matter would turn at last to their final conqueror—not entropy’s still hand, but this silent sputter of protons.

  Clay thought of the headlines: UNIVERSE TO END. What would that do to harried commuters on their way to work?

  He watched Singh send the stuttering messages via the big satellite dish, the corrugated tin roof of the shed pulled aside, allowing him to watch burnt gold twilight seep across the sky. Clay felt no elation, as blank as a drained capacitor. He had gone into physics because of the sense it gave of grasping deep mysteries. He could look at bridges and trace the vectored stability that ruled them. When his daughter asked why the sky was blue, he actually knew, and could sketch out a simple answer. It had never occurred to him to fear flying, because he knew the Bernoulli equation for the pressure that held up the plane. But this result…

  Even the celebratory party that evening left him unmoved. Graduate students turned out in their best khaki. Sitar music swarmed through the scented air, ragas thumping and weaving. He found his body swaying to the refractions of tone and scale.

  “It is a pity you cannot learn more of our country,” Mrs. Buli remarked, watching him closely.

  “Right now I’m mostly inte
rested in sleep.”

  “Sleep is not always kind.” She seemed wry and distant in the night’s smudged humidity. “One of our ancient gods, Brahma, is said to sleep and we are what he dreams.”

  “In that case, for you folks maybe he’s been having a nightmare lately.”

  “Ah yes, our troubles. But do not let them mislead you about India. They pass.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Clay replied, dutifully diplomatic.

  “You were surprised, were you not, at the outcome?” she said piercingly.

  “Uh, well, I had to be skeptical.”

  “Yes, for a scientist certainty is built on deep layers of doubt.”

  “Like my daddy said, in the retail business deal with everybody, but count your change.”

  She laughed. “We have given you a bargain, perhaps!”

  He was acutely aware that his initial doubts must have been obvious. And what unsettled him now was not just the hard-won success here, but their strange attitude toward it.

  The graduate students came then and tried to teach him a dance. He did a passable job and a student named Venkatraman slipped him a glass of beer, forbidden vice. It struck Clay as comic that the Indian government spent much energy to suppress alcohol but did little about the population explosion. The students all laughed when he made a complicated joke about booze, but he could not be sure whether they meant it. The music seemed to quicken, his heart thumping to keep up with it. They addressed him as Clay, a term of respect, and asked his opinion of what they might do next with the experiment. He shrugged, thinking ’Nother job, sahib? and suggested using it as a detector for neutrinos from supernovas. That had paid off when the earlier generation of neutrino detectors picked up the 1987 supernova. The atom bomb, the 1987 event, now this—particle physics, he realized uncomfortably, was steeped in death. The sitar slid and rang, and Mrs. Buli made arch jokes to go with the spicy salad. Still, he turned in early. To be awakened by a soft breeze. A brushing presence, sliding cloth… He sensed her sari as a luminous fog. Moonlight streaming through a lopsided window cast shimmering auras through the cloth as she loomed above him. Reached for him. Lightly flung away his sticky bedclothes.

  A soft hand covered his mouth, bringing a heady savor of ripe earth. His senses ran out of him and into the surrounding dark, coiling in air as he took her weight. She was surprisingly light, though thick-waisted, her breasts like teacups compared with the full curves of her hips. His hands slid and pressed, finding a delightful slithering moisture all over her, a sheen of vibrancy. Her sari evaporated. The high planes of her face caught vagrant blades of moonlight, and he saw a curious tentative, expectant expression there as she wrapped him in soft pressures. Her mouth did not so much kiss his as enclose it, formulating an argument of sweet rivulets that trickled into his porous self. She slipped into place atop him, a slick clasp that melted him up into her, a perfect fit, slick with dark insistence. He closed his eyes, but the glow diffused through his eyelids, and he could see her hair fanning through the air like motion underwater, her luxuriant weight bucking, trembling as her nails scratched his shoulders, musk rising smoky from them both. A silky muscle milked him at each heart-thump. Her velvet mass orbited above their fulcrum, bearing down with feathery demands, and he remembered brass icons, gaudy Indian posters, and felt above him Kali strumming in fevered darkness. She locked legs around him, squeezing him up into her surprisingly hard muscles, grinding, drawing forth, pushing back. She cried out with great heaves and lungfuls of the thickening air, mouth going slack beneath hooded eyes, and he shot sharply up into her, a convulsion that poured out all the knotted aches in him, delivering them into the tumbled steamy earth—and next, with no memories between, he was stumbling with her down a gully…beneath slanting silvery moonlight. “What—what’s—”

  “Quiet!” She shushed him like a schoolmarm.

  He recognized the rolling countryside near the mine. Vague forms flitted in the distance. Wracked cries cut the night.

  “The devotees,” Mrs. Buli whispered as they stumbled on. “They have assaulted the mine entrance.”

  “How’d we—”

  “You were difficult to rouse,” she said with a sidelong glance.

  Was she trying to be amusing? The sudden change from mysterious supercharged sensuality back to this clipped, formal professionalism disoriented him.

  “Apparently some of our laborers had a grand party. It alerted the devotees to our presence, some say. I spoke to a laborer while you slept, however, who said that the devotees knew of your presence. They asked for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Something about your luggage and a telephone call home.”

  Clay gritted his teeth and followed her along a path that led among the slumped hills, away from their lodgings. Soon the mine entrance was visible below. Running figures swarmed about it like black gnats. Ragged chants erupted from them. A waarrrk waarrrk sound came from the hangar, and it was some moments until Clay saw long chains of human bodies hanging from the rafters, swinging themselves in unison.

  “They’re pulling down the hangar,” he whispered.

  “I despair for what they have done inside.”

  He instinctively reached for her and felt the supple warmth he had embraced seemingly only moments before. She turned and gave him her mouth again.

  “We—back there—why’d you come to me?”

  “It was time. Even we feel the joy of release from order, Professor Clay.”

  “Well, sure…” Clay felt illogically embarrassed, embracing a woman who still had the musk of the bed about her, yet who used his title. “But… how’d I get here? Seems like—”

  “You were immersed. Taken out of yourself.”

  “Well, yeah, it was good, fine, but I can’t remember anything.”

  She smiled. “The best moments leave no trace. That is a signature of the implicate order.”

  Clay breathed in the waxy air to help clear his head. More mumbo jumbo, he thought, delivered by her with an open, expectant expression. In the darkness it took a moment to register that she had fled down another path. “Where’ll we go?” he gasped when he caught up.

  “We must get to the vans. They are parked some kilometers away.”

  He hesitated a moment, then followed her. There was nothing irreplaceable. It certainly wasn’t worth braving the mob below for the stuff.

  They wound down through bare hillsides dominated by boulders. The sky rippled with heat lightning. Puffy clouds scurried quickly in from the west, great ivory flashes working among them. The ground surged slightly. “Earthquake?” he asked.

  “There were some earlier, yes. Perhaps that has excited the devotees further tonight, put their feet to running.”

  There was no sign of the physics team. Pebbles squirted from beneath his boots—he wondered how he had managed to get them on without remembering it—and recalled again her hypnotic sensuality. Stones rattled away down into narrow dry washes on each side. Clouds blotted out the moonglow, and they had to pick their way along the trail.

  Clay’s mind spun with plans, speculations, jittery anxiety. Mrs. Buli was now his only link to the Western fragment of India, and he could scarcely see her her in the shadows. She moved with liquid grace, her sari trailing, sandals slapping. Suddenly she crouched down. “More.”

  Along the path came figures bearing lanterns. They moved silently in the fitful silvery moonlight. There was no place to hide, and the party had already seen them.

  “Stand still,” she said. Again the crisp Western diction, yet her ample hips swayed slightly, reminding him of her deeper self.

  Clay wished he had a club, a knife, anything. He made himself stand beside her, hands clenched. For once his blackness might be an advantage.

  The devotees passed, eyes rapt. Clay had expected them to be singing or chanting mantras or rubbing beads—but not shambling forward as if to their doom. The column barely glanced at him. In his baggy cotton trousers and formless shirt, he hoped h
e was unremarkable. A woman passed nearby, apparently carrying something across her back. Clay blinked. Her hands were nailed to the ends of a beam, and she carried it proudly, palms bloody, half crucified. Her face was serene, eyes focused on the roiling sky. Behind her was a man bearing a plate. Clay thought the shambling figure carried marbles on the dish until he peered closer and saw an iris, and realized the entire plate was packed with eyeballs. He gasped and faces turned toward him. Then the man was gone along the path, and Clay waited, holding his breath against a gamy stench he could not name. Some muttered to themselves, some carried religious artifacts, beads and statuettes and drapery, but none had the fervor of the devotees he had seen before. The ground trembled again.

  And out of the dark air came a humming. Something struck a man in the line and he clutched at his throat, crying hoarsely. Clay leaped forward without thinking. He pulled the man’s hands away. Lodged in the narrow of the throat was something like an enormous cockroach with fluttering wings. It had already embedded its head in the man. Spiky legs furiously scrabbled against the soiled skin to dig deeper. The man coughed and shouted weakly, as though the thing was already blocking his throat.

  Clay grabbed its hind legs and pulled. The insect wriggled with surprising strength. He saw the hind stinger too late. The sharp point struck a hot jolt of pain into his thumb. Anger boiled in him. He held on despite the pain and yanked the thing free. It made a sucking sound coming out. He hissed with revulsion and violently threw it down the hillside.

  The man stumbled, gasping, and then ran back down the path, never even looking at them.

  Mrs. Buli grabbed Clay, who was staggering around in a circle, shaking his hand. “I will cut it!” she cried.

  He held still while she made a precise cross cut and drained the blood. “What…what was that?”

  “A wasp-thing from the pouches that hang on our trees.”

  “Oh yeah. One of those bio tricks.”

  “They are still overhead.”

  Clay listened to the drone hanging over them. Another devotee shrieked and slapped the back of his neck. Clay numbly watched the man run away. His hand throbbed, but he could feel the effects ebbing. Mrs. Buli tore a strip from her sari and wrapped his thumb to quell the bleeding.