The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  The alien rotated its torso—a flickering of interest?—as it passed. Tatsuhiko raised a bare hand in a sign they had all agreed had the best chance of being read as a nonhostile greeting. Tatsuhiko smiled, careful to not reveal white teeth, in case that implied eating or anger among beings who shared a rich lore of lipped mouths.

  To this simple but elaborately rehearsed greeting the alien gave Tatsuhiko a second’s further gaze—and then strode on, head turning to scan the ground beyond.

  And so they all came on. No sounds, no trace of the talk the Japanese had recorded from directional mikes. The second alien drew abreast Captain Koremasa Tamura, the expedition leader. This one did not register Koremasa with even the slightest hesitation in the regular, smooth pivot of its head.

  So came the next. And the next.

  The Chujoans pressed forward, nomads in search of their next meal. Miyuki remembered the videos taken from orbit of just this remorseless sweeping hunt. Only the first of them had permitted its gaze to hesitate for even a moment.

  “I…I do not…” Tatsuhiko whispered over comm.

  The aliens swept by the humans, their eyes neither avoiding recognition nor acknowledging it.

  “Do not move,” Koremasa ordered.

  Even so, one woman named Akiko was standing nearly directly in front of an approaching Chujoan—and she lifted a palm in a gesture that might have meant greeting, but Miyuki saw as simple confusion. It brushed the passing alien. Akiko clutched suddenly at the Chujoan hand, seeking plaintively. The creature gave no notice, allowing its momentum to carry it forward, freeing its hand.

  Koremasa sharply reprimanded Akiko, but Miyuki took little notice of that, or of the buzzing talk on her comm. She hugged herself against the growing chill, turned away from the cutting winds, and watched the aliens continue on, unhurried. Hundreds of evenly spaced, oblivious hunters. Some carried heavy packs while others—thin, wiry, carrying both slings and lances—had little. But they all ignored the humans.

  “Anyone registering eye contact?” Tatsuhiko asked tersely.

  The replies trickled in reluctantly. No. No one.

  “How do they know?” Tatsuhiko asked savagely. “The first, it looked at me. Then the rest, they just—just—”

  Faintly someone said, “They won’t even piss on us.”

  Another whisper answered, “Yes, the ultimate insult.”

  Chuckles echoed, weak and indecisive against the strong, unending alien wind.

  The humans stood in place, automatically awaiting orders, as endless drill had fashioned them to do. Dust devils played among them. A crusty-skinned thing the first expedition had unaccountably named a snakehound on the basis of a few glimpses on their video records—though it showed no signs of liking the fat worms which resembled earthly snakes—came bounding by, eluding the hunters. Likewise, it took no apparent notice of the humans frozen in their carefully planned deployment of greeting, of contact, of the cusp moment.

  In their calm exit Miyuki saw her error, the mistake of the entire crew. These Chujoans had two hands, two feet, binocular eyes—primate-like, city-builders, weapon-users. Too close to human, far too close.

  For they were still alien. Not some pseudo-Navajos. Not more shambling near-apes who had meandered out of the forest, patching and adding to their cerebral architecture, climbing up the staircase of evolution toward a self-proclaimed, seemingly ordained success.

  These beings shared no genes, nor assumptions, nor desires, with the seemingly similar humans. Their easy sway, their craftily designed slingshots and arrows—all came from unseen anvils of necessity that humans might not share at all.

  She leaned back, smothering an impulse to laugh. The release of tension brought a mad hilarity to her thoughts, but she immediately suppressed the urge to shout, to gesture, to stamp her boots into the dusty certainties of this bleak plain. After all, Tatsuhiko had not given the order to disperse the pattern—he was stiff with shock.

  Perhaps this sky gave a clue. How different from Earth! Genji loomed, a great mottled ball fixed at the top of the sky.

  How well she knew the stories of the Genji Monogatari, by the great Murasaki. Yet the imposition of a millennium-old tale on these hard, huge places was perhaps another sign of their underlying arrogance.

  The whirl of worlds, she thought. Spheres stuck at the ends of an invisible shaft, balls twin-spinning about each other. Tidal stresses forced them to eternal mutual regard, rapt, like estranged lovers unable to entertain the warmer affections of the swollen, brooding sun which even now sought to come onstage, brimming above the horizon, casting slanting exaggerated shadows. The aliens headed into this ruddy dawnlight, leaving the humans without a backward glance.

  2.

  Arrested Athens

  They took refuge in the abandoned cities. Not for physical shelter, for that was provided by the transparent, millimeter-thin, yet rugged bubbles they inflated among the ruins. They came here to gain some psychological consolation, for reasons no one could quite express.

  Miyuki sat in one of the largest bubbles, sipping on aromatic Indian tea and cracking seeds between her teeth. So far these small, tough, oddly sweet kernels were the only bounty of this dry planet. Miyuki had been the first to master them, cracking them precisely and then separating the meat from the pungent shell with her tongue. Gathering them from the low, gnarled trees was simple. They hung in opulent, unpicked bunches; apparently the Chujoans did not like them. Still, it would be interesting to see if anyone without other food could eat the seeds quickly enough to avoid starvation.

  The subject never came up, she realized, because no one liked to jest about real possibilities. The entire expedition was still living off the growing tanks on the mother ship. Every kilogram of protein and carbohydrate had to be brought down with many more kilos of liquid hydrogen fuel. That in turn had to be separated from water on Genji, where their main base sprawled beside a rough sea.

  Such weighty practicalities suppressed humor. Not that this crew was necessarily a madcap bunch, of course. Miyuki spat her cheekful of shells into her hand, tossed them into the trash, and started listening to Tatsuhiko again. He had never been a mirthful man, and had not responded well to her suggestion that perhaps the Chujoans had played a sort of joke.

  “—so I remain astonished by even the suggestion that their behavior was rooted in anything so obvious,” Tatsuhiko concluded.

  “As obvious as a joke?” Captain Koremasa asked blandly. He sat while the others stood, a remnant of shipboard discipline. The posture was probably unnecessary, for the Captain was already the tallest and most physically commanding figure in the expedition. Standard primate hierarchy rules, Miyuki thought distantly. Koremasa had a broad forehead and strong features, a look of never being surprised. All quite useful in instilling confidence.

  “A joke requires context,” Tatsuhiko said, his mouth contracting into tight reserve. He was lean and angular, muscles bunching along his long jawline. She knew the energies which lurked there. She had had a brief, passionate affair with him and could still remember his flurries of anxious attention.

  Partly out of mischief, she said, “They may have had enough ‘context’ for their purposes.”

  Tatsuhiko’s severe mouth turned down in scorn. “That band knew nothing of prior contact—that was why we selected them!”

  “How do you know?” Miyuki asked mildly.

  Tatsuhiko crossed his arms, energies bundled in. “First contact was with a band over three thousand kilometers from here. We tracked them.”

  Miyuki said, “Stories fly fast.”

  “Across a mountain range?”

  “In months, yes.”

  “These are primitives, remember. No signs of writing, of metallurgy, of plowing. Thus, almost certainly no information technology. No semaphore stations, no roads, not even smoke signals.”

  “Gossip is speedy,” Miyuki said. The incredible, irrational and cowardly withdrawal of the first expedition had left Chujo for the Japa
nese, a slate virtually unblemished. But in the time since the Chujoans might have turned that first contact into legend.

  “We must go by what we know, not what we invent.” Tatsuhiko kept his tone civil but the words did his work for him.

  “And I am a geophysicist and you are the culture specialist.” Miyuki looked at him squarely, an unusual act among a crew trained for decades to suppress dissension.

  “I believe no one should proceed to theory without more experience,” Koremasa said evenly. His calm eyes seemed to look through them and out, into the reaches beyond. She caught a sense of what it was like to have more responsibility than others, but to be just as puzzled. Koremasa’s years of quiet, stolid leadership on the starship had not prepared him well for ambiguity.

  Still, his sign of remote displeasure made both Miyuki and Tatsuhiko hesitate, their faces going blank. After a moment Tatsuhiko nodded abruptly and said, “Very much so.”

  They automatically shifted to routine matters to defuse any tensions. Familiar worries about food, air, illness and fatigue surfaced, found at least partial solutions. Miyuki played her part as supplies officer, but she let her mind wander as Tatsuhiko and Koremasa got into a long discussion of problems with their pressure masks.

  They had retreated into studying artifacts; after all, that is what archaeologists were trained to do, and artifacts could not ignore you. Two women had trailed the Chujoans for several kilometers, and found what appeared to be a discarded or forgotten garment, a frayed legging. The biologists and Exo-Analysis people had fallen upon it with glad cries.

  Quite quickly they showed that the snug-rug, as some called it, was in fact a sophisticated lifeform which seemed bioengineered to parasitic perfection, for the sole purpose of helping the Chujoans fend off the elements. It lived on excrement and sweat—‘biological exudates,’ the specialists’ jargon said. The mat was in fact a sort of biological corduroy, mutually dependent species like small grasses, moss and algal filaments. They gave back to their host warmth and even a slow, steady massage. They even cleaned the skin they rode—‘dermal scavenging,’ the specialists termed it. Useful traits—and better than any Earthly gadget.

  The specialists in Low Genji Orbit had labored to duplicate the snug-rug in their laboratories. The expedition depended on powerful biotech resources, for everything from meals to machine repair. But the snug-rug proved a puzzle. The specialists were, of course, quite sure they could crack the secret…but it would require a bit of time. They seemed equally divided on the issue of whether the snug-rug was a remnant from an earlier biotech civilization, or another example of evolution’s incredible diplomacy among species.

  Appetites whetted by one artifact, the team turned to the province of archaeology. The abandoned cities which dotted Chujo were mostly rubble, but some like this—Miyuki glanced out through the transparent bubble wall—still soared, their creamy massive walls blurred by winds until they resembled partly melted ice cream sculptures. Little metal had gone into them, apparently not needed because of the milder gravity. Perhaps that was why later ages had not plundered these canyonlike streets for all the threads of decorative tin and copper. Sand, frost, storm, invading desert brush—all had conspired to rub away most of the stone sheaths on the grander buildings, so little art remained. Koremasa and Tatsuhiko went on discussing matters, but Miyuki had heard the same debates before; one of the mild irritations of the expedition was that Koremasa still sought consensus, as though they were still packed into a starship, mindful of every frown. No, here they needed daring, leadership, dash and verve.

  At the right moment she conspicuously bowed, exaggerating her leave-taking just enough for a slight ironic effect, and slipped through the pressure lock.

  She slipped her pressure mask on, checked seals, tasted the slightly oily compressed air. This was the one huge freedom they had missed so much on the long voyage out: to slam the door on exasperation. There had been many elaborate ways to defuse stresses, such as playing smashball; the object was to keep the ball aloft as long as possible, not to better your opponent. Long rallies, cooperation, learning to compensate for inability or momentary fault, deploring extravagant impulse and grandstanding—all good principles, when you are going lonely to the stars. They had similarly lasted through their predicted season of sexual cookbook athletics. The entire team was like an old married couple by now—wise and weathered.

  The chilly bite of even noonday never failed to take her by surprise. She set off quickly, still enjoying the spring that low gravity gave to her step, and within minutes was deep among the maze of purple-gray colonnades. Orbital radar had deepscanned the sandy wastes and found this buried city. Diggers and wind machines had revealed elegant, airy buildings preserved far better than the weathered hovels found on the exposed surface. Had the city been deliberately buried? The street-filling sands had been conspicuously uniform and free of pebbles, not the residue of eons of runoff from nearby hills. Buried for what?

  The moody, shadowed paths gave abruptly into hexagonal spaces of pink flagstones. Above, high-pitched roofs and soaring towers poked into a thin blue sky which sported small, quickly scudding clouds like strands of wool. To her eye the styles here, when they struck any human resonance at all, were deliberate blends, elements of artful slope and balanced mass that made the city seem like an anthology of ages. Could this be the last great gathering place of the ancient natives, erected to pay tribute to their passing greatness? Did they know that the ebbing currents of moisture and dusty icestorms were behind the ceaseless slow drying that was trimming their numbers, narrowing the pyramid of life upon which all large omnivores stood? They must have, she concluded.

  In this brooding place of arched stone and airy recesses there came to her a silky sense of melancholy, of stately recessional. They had built this elaborately carved and fretted stonework on the edge of what must have then been a large lake. Now the diminished waters were briny, hemmed in by marshes prickly with bamboo-like grasses. Satellites had found larger ruined cities among the slopes of the many mountain ranges, ones displaying large public areas, perhaps stadiums and theatres—but humans could not bear those altitudes without bulky pressure suits. She coughed, and remembered to turn up the burbling humidifier in her air feed. There was enough oxygen here, five hundred meters above what passed for sea level on a world where the largest sea was smaller than many of Earth’s lakes. But the thieving air stole moisture from sinuses and throat, making her skin prickly and raw.

  Miyuki peered up, past the steepled roofs and their caved-in promise, at the perpetual presence of Genji. Geometry told her that at noon the brother world should be dark, but the face of milky swirls and clumpy browns glowed, reflecting Chujo’s own radiance. Even the mottlings in the shadowed and strangely sinister face of Chujo’s brother seemed to have a shifting, elusive character as she watched. Genji loomed twelve times larger than the Moon she had known as a child in Kyoto, and at night it gave hundreds of times as much light, enough to read by, enough to pick out colors in the plains of Chujo. Now high cirrus of glittery powdered ice momentarily veiled it in the purpling sky, but that somber face would never budge from its hovering point at the top of the sky. A moist, warm, murky sphere. How had that richness overhead affected the Chujoans, through the long millennia when they felt the thieving dryness creeping into their forests, their fields, their lives?

  She turned down a rutted path beside a crumbled wall, picking her way, and before her a shadowy form moved. She froze. They all wore the smell-dispersers that supposedly drove off even large predators, but this shape—

  “We should not be alone here,” Tatsuhiko said, his eyes hooded behind his pressure mask.

  “You frightened me!”

  “Perhaps a little fear would be wise.”

  “Fear is disabling,” she said disdainfully.

  “Fear kindles caution. This world is too Earthlike—it lulls us.”

  “Lulls? I have to fight for oxygen when I trot, we all scratch from the ari
dity, the cold seeps in, I—”

  “It deceives us, still.”

  “You were the one maintaining that the natives couldn’t possibly be joking with us, or—”

  “I apologize for my seeming opposition.” Tatsuhiko bowed from the waist.

  She started to reply, but his gesture reminded her suddenly of moments long ago—times when the reserve between them had broken in a sudden flood, when everything important had not seemed to require words at all, when hands and mouths and the simple slide of skin on welcoming skin had seemed to convey more meaning than all the categories and grammars of their alert, managerial minds. Times long gone.

  She wondered whether Koremasa had delicately implied that Tatsuhiko should follow her, mend fences. Perhaps—but this perpetual wondering whether people truly spoke their minds, or merely what solidarity of effort required—it provoked her! Still…she took the space of a heartbeat to let the spurt of irritation evaporate into the chilly air.

  She sighed and allowed herself only a sardonic, “You merely seemed to differ?”

  “I merely expressed the point of view of my profession.” Tatsuhiko gave her a direct, professional smile.

  Despite herself Miyuki grinned. “You were an enthusiastic advocate of sociobiology, weren’t you?”

  “Still am.” His heavy-lidded eyes studied her. The age-old male gaze, straying casually away for a quite unconscious study of what the contours of her work suit implied, a subtle tang of the matters between men and women that would never be settled…not that anyone wished them to be.

  She nodded briskly, suddenly wanting to keep their discussion businesslike. “I suppose we are all at the forefront of our fields, simply by being here. Even though we haven’t kept up with Earthside literature.”

  Communicating with Earth had proved to be even more difficult than they had imagined. In flight the hot plasma exhaust tail had blurred and refracted transmissions. Further, the Doppler shift had reduced the bit rate from Earth by half. Few dry academic journals had made it through.