The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “There must be a lot of electricity running around out here,” she said, fervently thanking the designers for all that redundant insulation.

  Al followed. She watched big blue sparks zap up from the ground to his boots. He jumped and twitched.

  “Ow! That smarts,” Al said.

  Only then did she realize that she had already had her shot at historical pronouncements, and had squandered it in her surprise. “Wow—what a profound thought, huh?” she asked herself ruefully.

  Al said solemnly, “We stand at the ramparts of the solar system.”

  Well, she thought, fair enough. He had actually remembered his prepared line. He grinned at her and shrugged as well as he could in the bulky suit. Now on to business.

  Against the gray ice and rock their lander stood like an H. G. Wells Martian walking-machine, splay-footed and ominous.

  “Rocks, anyone?” They began gathering some, using long tweezers. Soil samples rattled into the storage bin.

  “Let’s take a stroll,” Al said.

  “Hey, closeup that.” She pointed out toward sea.

  Things were swimming toward them. Just barely visible above the smooth surface, they made steady progress toward shore. Each had a small wake behind it.

  “Looks like something’s up,” Al said.

  As they carefully walked down toward the beach she tried her link to the lander’s wide-band receiver. Happily, she found that the frequencies first logged by her lost, devoured probe were full of traffic. Confusing, though. Each of the beasts—for she was sure it was them—seemed to be broadcasting on all waves at once. Most of the signals were weak, swamped in background noise that sounded like an old AM radio picking up a nearby high-tension line. One, however, came roaring in like a pop music stailon. She made the lander’s inductance tuner scan carefully.

  That pattern—yes! It had to be. Quickly she compared it with the probe-log she’d had the wit to bring down with her. These were the odd cadences and sputters of the very beast whose breakfast snack had been her first evidence of life.

  “Listen to this,” she said. Al looked startled through his face plate.

  The signal boomed louder, and she turned back the gain. She decided to try the radio direction-finder. Al did, too, for cross-check. As they stepped apart, moving from some filmy ice onto a brooding brown rock, she felt sparks snapping at her feet. Little jolts managed to get through even the thermal vacuum-layer insulation, prickling her feet.

  The vector reading, combined with Al’s, startled her. “Why, the thing’s practically on top of us!”

  If Counter’s lords of creation were all swimming in toward this island ridge for lunch, this one might get here first. Fired up by all those vitamins from the lost probe? she wondered.

  Suddenly excited, Julie peered out to sea—and there it was. Only a roiling, frothing ripple, like a ship’s bow wave, but arrowing for shore. And others, farther out.

  Then it bucked up into view and she saw its great, segmented tube of a body, with a sheen somewhere between mother-of-pearl and burnished brass. Why, it was huge. For the first time it hit her that when they all converged on this spot, it was going to be like sitting smack in a middling-sized dinosaur convention.

  Too late to back out now. She powered up the small lander transmitter and tuned it to the signal she was receiving from seaward.

  With her equipment she could not duplicate the creature’s creative chaos of wavelengths. For its personal identification sign the beast seemed to use a simple continuous pulse pattern, like Morse code. Easy enough to simulate. After a couple of dry-run hand exercises to get with the rhythm of it, Julie sent the creature a roughly approximate duplicate of its own ID.

  She had expected a call-back, maybe a more complex message. The result was astonishing. Its internal rocket engine fired a bright orange plume against the sky’s black. It shot straight up in the air, paused, and plunged back. Its splash sent waves rolling up the beach. The farthest tongue of sluggish fluid broke against the lander’s most seaward leg. The beast thrashed toward shore, rode a wave in—and stopped. The living cylinder lay there, half in, half out, as if exhausted.

  Had she terrified it? Made it panic?

  Cautiously, Julie tried the signal again, thinking furiously. It would give you quite a turn, she realized, if you’d just gotten as far in your philosophizing as I think, therefore I am, and then heard a thin, toneless duplicate of your own voice give back an echo.

  She braced herself—and her second signal prompted a long, suspenseful silence. Then, hesitantly—shyly?—the being repeated the call after her.

  Julie let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.

  She hadn’t realized she was holding it. Then she instructed DIS, the primary computer aboard Venture, to run the one powerful program Counter Mission Control had never expected her to have to use: the translator, Wiseguy. The creation of that program climaxed an argument that had raged for a century, ever since Whitehead and Russell had scrapped the old syllogistic logic of Aristotle in favor of a far more powerful method—sufficient, they believed, to subsume the whole of science, perhaps the whole of human cognition. All to talk to Counter’s gravitational signals.

  She waited for the program to come up and kept her eyes on the creature. It washed gently in and out with the lapping waves but seemed to pay her no attention. Al was busily snapping digitals. He pointed offshore. “Looks like we put a stop to the rest of them.”

  Heads bobbed in the sea. Waiting? For what?

  In a few moments they might have an answer to questions that had been tossed around endlessly. Could all language be translated into logically rigorous sentences, relating to one another in a linear configuration, structures, a system? If so, one could easily program a computer loaded with one language to search for another language’s equivalent structures. Or, as many linguists and anthropologists insisted, does a truly unknown language forever resist such transformations?

  This was such a strange place, after all. Forbidding, weird chemistry. Alien tongues could be strange not merely in vocabulary and grammatical rules, but in their semantic swamps and mute cultural or even biological premises. What would life forms get out of this place? Could even the most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number-crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta Stone?

  With the Counter Project already far over budget, the decision to send along Wiseguy—which took many terabytes of computational space—had been hotly contested. The deciding vote was cast by an eccentric but politically astute old skeptic, who hoped to disprove the “bug-eyed monster Rosetta Stone theory,” should life unaccountably turn up on Counter. Julie had heard through the gossip tree that the geezer was gambling that his support would bring along the rest of the DIS package. That program he passionately believed in.

  Wiseguy had learned Japanese in five hours; Hopi in seven; what smatterings they knew of Dolphin in two days. It also mastered some of the fiendishly complex, multi-logic artificial grammars generated from an Earth-based mainframe.

  The unexpected outcome of six billion dollars and a generation of cyberfolk was simply put: a good translator had all the qualities of a true artificial intelligence. Wiseguy was a guy, of sorts. It—or she, or he; nobody had known quite how to ask—had to have cultural savvy and blinding mathematical skills. Julie had long since given up hope of beating Wiseguy at chess, even with one of its twin processors tied off.

  She signaled again and waved, hoping to get the creature’s attention. Al leaped high in the one-tenth of a g gravity and churned both arms and legs in the ten seconds it took him to fall back down. Excited, the flying wings swooped silently over them. The scene was eerie in its silence; shouldn’t birds make some sort of sound? The auroras danced, in Julie’s feed from Venture she heard Wiseguy stumblingly, muttering…and beginning to talk.

  She noted from the digital readout on her helmet interior display that Wiseguy had been eavesdropping on the radio crosstalk alread
y. Now it was galloping along. In contrast to the simple radio signals she had first heard, the spoken, acoustic language turned out to be far more sophisticated. Wiseguy, however, dealt not in grammars and vocabularies but in underlying concepts. And it was fast.

  Julie took a step toward the swarthy cylinder that heaved and rippled. Then another. Ropy muscles surged in it beneath layers of crusted fat. The cluster of knobs and holes at its front moved. It lifted its “head”—the snubbed-off, blunt forward section of the tube—and a bright, fast chatter of microwaves chimed through her ears. Followed immediately by Wiseguy’s whispery voice. Discourse.

  Another step. More chimes. Wiseguy kept this up at increasing speed. She was now clearly out of the loop. Data sped by in her ears, as Wiseguy had neatly inserted itself into the conversation, assuming Julie’s persona, using some electromagnetic dodge. The creature apparently still thought it was speaking to her; its head swiveled to follow her.

  The streaming conversation verged now from locked harmonies into brooding, meandering strings of chords. Julie had played classical guitar as a teenager, imagining herself performing before concert audiences instead of bawling into a mike and hitting two chords in a rock band. So she automatically thought in terms of the musical moves of the data flow. Major keys gave way to dusky harmonies in a minor triad. To her mind this had an effect like a cloud passing across the sun.

  Wiseguy reported to her and Al in its whisper. It had only briefly had to go through the me-Tarzan-you-Jane stage. For a life form that had no clearly definable brain she could detect, it proved a quick study.

  She got its proper name first, as distinguished from its identifying signal; its name, definitely, for the translator established early in the game that these organisms had no gender.

  The Quand they called themselves. And this one—call it Awk, because that was all Wiseguy could make of the noise that came before—Awk-Quand. Maybe, Wiseguy whispered for Julie and Al alone, Awk was just a place-note to show that this thing was the “presently here” of the Quand. It seemed that the name was generic, for all of them.

  “Like Earth tribes,” Al said, “who name themselves the People. Individual distinctions get tacked on when necessary?”

  Al was like that—surprising erudition popping out when useful, otherwise a straight supernerd techtype. His idea might be an alternative to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms, Julie thought; the political theorists back home would go wild.

  Julie took another step toward the dark beach where the creature lolled, its head following her progress. It was no-kidding cold, she realized. Her boots were melting the ground under her, just enough to make it squishy. And she could hear the sucking as she lifted her boot, too. So she wasn’t missing these creatures’ calls—they didn’t use the medium.

  One more step. Chimes in her ears, and Wiseguy sent them a puzzled, “It seems a lot smarter than it should be.”

  “Look, they need to talk to each other over distance, out of sight of each other,” Julie said. “Those waxy all-one-wing birds should flock and probably need calls for mating, right? So do we.” Not that she really thought that was a deep explanation.

  “How do we frame an expectation about intelligence?” Al put in.

  “Yeah, I’m reasoning from Earthly analogies,” Julie admitted. “Birds and walruses that use microwaves—who woulda thought?”

  “I see,” Wiseguy said, and went back to speaking to Awk in its ringing microwave tones.

  Julie listened to the ringing interchange speed up into a blur of blips and jots. Wiseguy could run very fast, of course, but this huge tubular thing seemed able to keep up with it. Microwaves’ higher frequencies had far greater carrying capacity than sound waves and this Awk seemed able to use that. Well, evolution would prefer such a fast-talk capability, she supposed—but why hadn’t it on Earth? Because sound was so easy to use, evolving out of breathing. Even here—Wiseguy told her in a sub-channel aside—individual notes didn’t mean anything. Their sequence did, along with rhythm and intonation, just like sound speech. Nearly all human languages used either subject-object-verb order or else subject-verb-object, and the Quand did, too. But to Wiseguy’s confusion, they used both, apparently not caring.

  Basic values became clear, in the quick scattershot conversation. Something called “rendezvous” kept coming up, modified by comments about territory. “Self-merge,” the ultimate, freely chosen—apparently with all the Quand working communally afterward to care for the young, should there luckily occur a birthing. Respect for age, because the elders had experienced so much more.

  Al stirred restlessly, watching the sea for signs that others might come ashore. “Hey, they’re moving in,” Al said apprehensively.

  Julie would scarcely have noticed the splashing and grinding on the beach as other Quand began to arrive—apparently for Rendezvous, their mating, and Wiseguy stressed that it deserved the capital letter—save that Awk stopped to count and greet the new arrivals. Her earlier worry about being crunched under a press of huge Quand bodies faded. They were social animals and this barren patch of rock was now Awk’s turf. Arrivals lumbering up onto the dark beach kept a respectful distance, spacing themselves. Like walruses, yes.

  Julie felt a sharp cold ache in her lower back. Standing motionless for so long, the chill crept in. She was astounded to realize that nearly four hours had passed. She made herself to pace, stretch, eat, and drink from suit supplies.

  Al did the same, saying, “We’re eighty percent depleted on air.”

  “Damn it, I don’t want to quit now! How ’bout you get extra from the lander?”

  Al grimaced. He didn’t want to leave either. They had all dedicated their lives to getting here, to this moment in this place. “Okay, Cap’n sir,” he said sardonically as he trudged away.

  She felt a kind of silent bliss here, just watching. Life, strange and wonderful, went on all around her. Her running digital coverage would be a huge hit Earthside. Unlike Axelrod’s empire, the Counter Project gave their footage away.

  As if answering a signal, the Quand hunched up the slope a short way to feed on some brown lichen-like growth that sprawled across the warming stones. She stepped aside. Awk came past her and another Quand slid up alongside. It rubbed against Awk, edged away, rubbed again. A courtship preliminary? Julie guessed.

  They stopped and slid flat tongues over the lichen stuff, vacuuming it up with a slurp she could hear through her suit. Tentatively, the newcomer laid its body next to Awk. Julie could hear the pace of microwave discourse Awk was broadcasting, and it took downward a lurch with the contact, slowing, slowing… And Awk abruptly—even curtly? it seemed to Julie—rolled away. The signal resumed its speed.

  She laughed aloud. How many people had she known who would pass up a chance at sex to get on with their language lessons?

  Or was Wiseguy into philosophy already? It seemed to be digging at how the Quand saw their place in this weird world.

  Julie walked carefully, feeling the crunch of hard ice as she melted what would have been gases on Earth—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen itself. She had to keep up and the low-g walking was an art. With so little weight, rocks and ices that looked rough were still slick enough to make her slip. She caught herself more than once from a full, face-down splat—but only because she had so much time to recover, in a slow fall. As the Quand worked their way across the stony field of lichen, they approached the lander. Al wormed his way around them, careful to not get too close.

  “Wiseguy! Interrupt.” Julie explained what she wanted. It quickly got the idea, and spoke in short bursts to Awk—who resent a chord-rich message to the Quand.

  They all stopped short. “I don’t want them burned on the lander,” Julie said to Al, who made the switch on her suit oxy bottles without a hitch.

  “Burnt? I don’t want them eating it,” Al said.

  Then the Quand began asking her questions, and the first one surprised her: Do you come from
Light-giver? As heralds?

  In the next few minutes Julie and Al realized from their questions alone that in addition to a society, the Quand had a rough-and-ready view of the world, an epic oral literature (though recited in microwaves), and something that resembled a religion. Even Wiseguy was shaken; it paused in its replies, something she had never heard it do before, not even in speed trials.

  Agnostic though she was, the discovery moved her profoundly. Light-giver. After all, she thought with a rush of compassion and nostalgia, we started out as sun-worshippers too.

  There were dark patches on the Quands’ upper sides, and as the sun rose these pulled back to reveal thick lenses. They looked like quartz—tough crystals for a rugged world. Their banquet of lichen done—she took a few samples for analysis, provoking a snort from a nearby Quand—they lolled lazily in their long day. She and Al walked gingerly through them, peering into the quartz “eyes.” Their retinas were a brilliant blue with red wire-like filaments curling through and under. Convergent evolution seemed to have found yet another solution to the eye problem.

  “So what’s our answer? Are we from Light-giver?”

  “Well…you’re the Cap’n, remember.” He grinned. “And the biologist.”

  She quickly sent No. We are from a world like this, from near, uh, Light-giver.

  Do not sad, it sent through Wiseguy. Light-giver gives and Light-giver takes; but it gives more than any; it is the source of all life, here and from the Dark; bless Light-giver.

  Quand did not use verb forms underlining existence itself—no words for are, is, be—so sad became a verb. She wondered what deeper philosophical chasm that linguistic detail revealed. Still, the phrasing was startlingly familiar the same damned, comfortless comfort she had heard preached at her grandmother’s rain-swept funeral.

  Remembering that moment of loss with a deep inward hurt, she forced it away. What could she say…?

  After an awkward silence, Awk said something renderable as, I need leave you for now.