She put the binocs away and headed north. The city’s seacoast was mostly rimmed by treacherous mudflats, even after the sea kept rising. Still, there were coves and sandbars of great beauty. Elinor drove off Glenn Highway to the west, onto progressively smaller, rougher roads, working their way backcountry by Bureau of Land Management roads to a sagging, long-unused access gate for loggers. Bolt cutters made quick work of the lock securing its rusty chain closure. After she pulled through, Gene carefully replaced the chain and linked it with an equally rusty padlock, brought for this purpose. Not even a thorough check would show it had been opened, till the next time BLM tried to unlock it. They were now on Elmendorf, miles north of the airfield, far from the main base’s bustle and security precautions. Thousands of acres of mudflats, woods, lakes, and inlet shoreline lay almost untouched, used for military exercises and not much else. Nobody came here except for infrequent hardy bands of off-duty soldiers or pilots, hiking with maps red-marked UXO for “Unexploded Ordnance.” Lost live explosives, remnant of past field maneuvers, tended to discourage casual sightseers and trespassers, and the Inuit villagers wouldn’t be berry-picking till July and August. She consulted her satellite map, then took them on a side road, running up the coast. They passed above a cove of dark blue waters.
Beauty. Pure and serene.
The sea level rise had inundated many of the mudflats and islands, but a small rocky platform lay near shore, thick with trees. Driving by, she spotted a bald eagle perched at the top of a towering spruce tree. She had started birdwatching as a Girl Scout and they had time; she stopped.
She left the men in the Ford and took out her long-range binocs. The eagle was grooming its feathers and eyeing the fish rippling the waters offshore. Gulls wheeled and squawked, and she could see sea lions knifing through fleeing shoals of herring, transient dark islands breaking the sheen of waves. Crows joined in onshore, hopping on the rocks and pecking at the predators’ leftovers.
She inhaled the vibrant scent of ripe wet salty air, alive with what she had always loved more than any mere human. This might be the last time she would see such abundant, glowing life, and she sucked it in, trying to lodge it in her heart for times to come.
She was something of an eagle herself, she saw now, as she stood looking at the elegant predator. She kept to herself, loved the vibrant natural world around her, and lived by making others pay the price of their own foolishness. An eagle caught hapless fish. She struck down those who would do evil to the real world, the natural one.
Beyond politics and ideals, this was her reality.
Then she remembered what else she had stopped for. She took out her cell phone and pinged the alert number.
A buzz, then a blurred woman’s voice. “Able Baker.”
“Confirmed. Get a GPS fix on us now. We’ll be here, same spot, for pickup in two to three hours. Assume two hours.”
Buzz buzz. “Got you fixed. Timing’s okay. Need a Zodiac?”
“Yes, definite, and we’ll be moving fast.”
“You bet. Out.”
Back in the cab, Bruckner said, “What was that for?”
“Making the pickup contact. It’s solid.”
“Good. But I meant, what took so long.”
She eyed him levelly. “A moment spent with what we’re fighting for.”
Bruckner snorted. “Let’s get on with it.”
Elinor looked at Bruckner and wondered if he wanted to turn this into a spitting contest just before the shoot.
“Great place,” Gene said diplomatically.
That broke the tension and she started the Ford.
They rose further up the hills northeast of Anchorage, and at a small clearing, she pulled off to look over the landscape. To the east, mountains towered in lofty gray majesty, flanks thick with snow. They all got out and surveyed the terrain and sight angles toward Anchorage. The lowlands were already thick with summer grasses, and the winds sighed southward through the tall evergreens.
Gene said, “Boy, the warming’s brought a lot of growth.”
Elinor glanced at her watch and pointed. “The KCs will come from that direction, into the wind. Let’s set up on that hillside.”
They worked around to a heavily wooded hillside with a commanding view toward Elmendorf Air Force Base. “This looks good,” Bruckner said, and Elinor agreed.
“Damn—a bear!” Gene cried.
They looked down into a narrow canyon with tall spruce. A large brown bear was wandering along a stream about a hundred meters away.
Elinor saw Bruckner haul out a .45 automatic. He cocked it.
When she glanced back the bear was looking toward them. It turned and started up the hill with lumbering energy.
“Back to the car,” she said.
The bear broke into a lope.
Bruckner said, “Hell, I could just shoot it. This is a good place to see the takeoff and—”
“No. We move to the next hill.”
Bruckner said, “I want—”
“Go!”
They ran.
One hill farther south, Elinor braced herself against a tree for stability and scanned the Elmendorf landing strips. The image wobbled as the air warmed across hills and marshes.
Lots of activity. Three KC-10 Extenders ready to go. One tanker was lined up on the center lane and the other two were moving into position.
“Hurry!” she called to Gene, who was checking the final setup menu and settings on the Dart launcher. Her pulse sped up and she made herself take a moment, checking the recoilless ejection motor that hurled the projectile out of the barrel and to a distance where they wouldn’t get hurt by the next stage’s back blast. On the training range in Ecuador she had been impressed with how the solid fuel sustainer rocket ignited at a safe distance, accelerating away like a mad hornet.
He carefully inserted the missile itself in the launcher. He checked, nodded and lifted it to Bruckner. They fitted the shoulder straps to Bruckner, secured it, and Gene turned on the full arming function. “Set!” he called.
Elinor saw a slight stirring of the center Extender. It began to accelerate. She checked: right on time, oh-nine-hundred hours. Hard-core military like Bruckner, who had been a Marine in the Middle East, called Air Force the “saluting Civil Service,” but they did hit their markers. The Extenders were not military now, just surplus, but flying giant tanks of sloshing liquid around the stratosphere demands tight standards.
“I make the range maybe twenty kilometers,” she said. “Let it pass over us, hit it close as it goes away.”
Bruckner grunted, hefted the launcher. Gene helped him hold it steady, taking some of the weight. Loaded, it weighed nearly fifty pounds. The Extender lifted off, with a hollow, distant roar that reached them a few seconds later, and Elinor could see media coverage was high. Two choppers paralleled the takeoff for footage, then got left behind.
The Extender was a full extension DC-10 airframe and it came nearly straight toward them, growling through the chilly air. She wondered if the chatty guy from the bar, Ted, was one of the pilots. Certainly, on a maiden flight the scientists who ran this experiment would be on board, monitoring performance. Very well.
“Let it get past us,” she called to Bruckner.
He took his head from the eyepiece to look at her. “Huh? Why—”
“Do it. I’ll call the shot.”
“But I’m—”
“Do it.”
The airplane was rising slowly and flew by them a few kilometers away.
“Hold, hold…” she called. “Fire.”
Bruckner squeezed the trigger and the missile popped out—whuff!—seemed to pause, then lit. It roared away, startling in its speed—straight for the exhausts of the engines, then correcting its vectors, turning, and rushing for the main body. Darting.
It hit with a flash and the blast came rolling over them. A plume erupted from the airplane, dirty black.
“Bruckner! Resight—the second plane is taking off.”
The first airplane was coming apart, rupturing. A dark cloud belched across the sky.
Elinor said clearly, calmly, “The Dart’s got a max range about right so…shoot.”
Bruckner let fly and the Dart rushed off into the sky, turned slightly as it sighted, accelerated like an angry hornet. They could hardly follow it. The sky was full of noise.
“Drop the launcher!” she cried.
“What?” Bruckner said, eyes on the sky.
She yanked it off him. He backed away and she opened the gas can as the men watched the Dart zooming toward the airplane. She did not watch the sky as she doused the launcher and splashed gas on the surrounding brush.
“Got that lighter?” she asked Bruckner.
He could not take his eyes off the sky. She reached into his right pocket and took out the lighter. Shooters had to watch, she knew.
She lit the gasoline and it went up with a whump.
“Hey! Let’s go!” She dragged the men toward the car.
They saw the second hit as they ran for the Ford. The sound got buried in the thunder that rolled over them as the first Extender hit the ground kilometers away, across the inlet. The hard clap shook the air, made Gene trip, then stagger forward.
She started the Ford and turned away from the thick column of smoke rising from the launcher. It might erase any fingerprints or DNA they’d left, but it had another purpose too.
She took the run back toward the coast at top speed. The men were excited, already reliving the experience, full of words. She said nothing, focused on the road that led them down to the shore. To the north, a spreading dark pall showed where the first plane went down.
One glance back at the hill told her the gasoline had served as a lure. A chopper was hammering toward the column of oily smoke, buying them some time.
The men were hooting with joy, telling each other how great it had been. She said nothing.
She was happy in a jangling way. Glad she’d gotten through without the friction with Bruckner coming to a point, too. Once she’d been dropped off, well up the inlet, she would hike around a bit, spend some time birdwatching, exchange horrified words with anyone she met about that awful plane crash—No, I didn’t actually see it, did you?—and work her way back to the freighter, slipping by Elmendorf in the chaos that would be at crescendo by then. Get some sleep, if she could.
They stopped above the inlet, leaving the Ford parked under the thickest cover they could find. She looked for the eagle, but didn’t see it. Frightened skyward by the bewildering explosions and noises, no doubt. They ran down the incline. She thumbed on her comm, got a crackle of talk, handed it to Bruckner. He barked their code phrase, got confirmation.
A Zodiac was cutting a V of white, homing in on the shore. The air rumbled with the distant beat of choppers and jets, the search still concentrated around the airfield. She sniffed the rotten egg smell, already here from the first Extender. It would kill everything near the crash, but this far off should be safe, she thought, unless the wind shifted. The second Extender had gone down closer to Anchorage, so it would be worse there. She put that out of her mind.
Elinor and the men hurried down toward the shore to meet the Zodiac. Bruckner and Gene emerged ahead of her as they pushed through a stand of evergreens, running hard. If they got out to the pickup craft, then suitably disguised among the fishing boats, they might well get away.
But on the path down, a stocky Inuit man stood. Elinor stopped, dodged behind a tree.
Ahead of her, Bruckner shouted, “Out of the way!”
The man stepped forward, raised a shotgun. She saw something compressed and dark in his face.
“You shot down the planes?” he demanded.
A tall Inuit racing in from the side shouted, “I saw their car comin’ from up there!”
Bruckner slammed to a stop, reached down for his .45 automatic—and froze. The double-barreled shotgun could not miss at that range.
It had happened so fast. She shook her head, stepped quietly away. Her pulse hammered as she started working her way back to the Ford, slipping among the trees. The soft loam kept her footsteps silent.
A third man came out of the trees ahead of her. She recognized him as the young Inuit father from the diner, and he cradled a black hunting rifle. “Stop!”
She stood still, lifted her binocs. “I’m bird watching, what—”
“I saw you drive up with them.”
A deep, brooding voice behind her said, “Those planes were going to stop the warming, save our land, save our people.”
She turned to see another man pointing a large caliber rifle. “I, I, the only true way to do that is by stopping the oil companies, the corporations, the burning of fossil—”
The shotgun man, eyes burning beneath heavy brows, barked, “What’ll we do with ’em?”
She talked fast, hands up, open palms toward him. “All that SkyShield nonsense won’t stop the oceans from turning acid. Only fossil—”
“Do what you can, when you can. We learn that up here.” This came from the tall man. The Inuit all had their guns trained on them now. The tall man gestured with his and they started herding the three of them into a bunch. The men’s faces twitched, fingers trembled.
The man with the shotgun and the man with the rifle exchanged nods, quick words in a complex, guttural language she could not understand. The rifleman seemed to dissolve into the brush, steps fast and flowing, as he headed at a crouching dead run down to the shoreline and the waiting Zodiac.
She sucked in the clean sea air and could not think at all. These men wanted to shoot all three of them and so she looked up into the sky to not see it coming. High up in a pine tree with a snapped top an eagle flapped down to perch. She wondered if this was the one she had seen before.
The oldest of the men said, “We can’t kill them. Let ’em rot in prison.”
The eagle settled in. Its sharp eyes gazed down at her and she knew this was the last time she would ever see one. No eagle would ever live in a gray box. But she would. And never see the sky.
The Sigma Structure Symphony
(2012)
Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
—Galileo (from The Assayer, 1623)
1.
Andante
Ruth felt that math was like sex—get all you can, but best not done in public. Lately, she’d been getting plenty of mathematics, and not much else.
She had spent the entire morning sequestered alone with the Andromeda Structure, a stacked SETI database of renowned difficulty. She had made some inroads by sifting its logic lattice, with algebraic filters based on set theory. The Andromeda messages had been collected by the SETI Network over decades, growing to immense data-size—and no one had ever successfully broken into the stack.
The Structure was a daunting, many-layered language conveyed through sensation in her neural pod. It did not present as a personality at all, and no previous Librarians had managed to get an intelligible response from it. Advanced encoded intelligences found humans more than a bit boring, and one seldom had an idea why. Today was no different.
It was already past lunch when she pried herself from the pod. She did some stretches, hand-walks and lifts against Luna’s weak grav and let the immersion fog burn away. Time for some real world, gal…
She passed through the Atrium of the SETI Library, head still buzzing with computations and her shoes ringing echoes from
the high, fluted columns. Earthlight framed the great Plaza in an eggshell blue glow, augmented by slanting rays from the sun that hugged the rocky horizon. She gazed out over the Locutus Plain, dotted with the cryo towers that reminded her of cenotaphs. So they were—sentinels guarding in cold storage the vast records of received SETI signals, many from civilizations long dead. Collected through centuries, and still mostly unread and unreadable. AIs browsed those dry corridors and reported back their occasional finds. Some even got entangled in the complex messages and had to be shut down, hopelessly mired.
She had just noticed the buzzing crowd to her left, pressed against the transparent dome that sheltered the Library, when her friend Catkejen tapped her on the shoulder. “Come on! I heard somebody’s up on the rec dome!”
Catkejen took off loping in the low grav and Ruth followed. When they reached the edge of the agitated crowd she saw the recreational dome about two klicks away—and a figure atop it.
“Who is it?” Catkejen asked and the crowd gave back, “Ajima Sato.”
“Ajima?” Catkejen looked at Ruth. “He’s five years behind us, pretty bright. Keeps to himself.”
“Pretty common pattern for candidate Hounds,” Ruth said. The correct staffing title was Miners, but Hounds had tradition on its side. She looked around; if a Prefect heard she would be fined for improper terminology.
“How’d he get there?” someone called.
“Bulletin said he flew inside, up to the dome top and used the vertical lock.”
“Looks like he’s in a skin suit,” Catkejen said, having closeupped her glasses. Sure enough, the figure was moving and his helmet caught the sunlight, winking at them. “He’s…dancing.”
Ruth had no zoom glasses but she could see the figure cavorting around the top of the dome. The Dome was several kilometers high and Ajima was barely within view of the elevated Plaza, framed against a rugged grey crater wall beyond. The crowd murmured with speculation and a Prefect appeared, tall and silent but scowling. Librarians edged away from him. “Order, order,” the Prefect called. “Authorities will deal with this.”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 63