What was simple and quick? “Here.” I touched buttons, summoning a first-generation map of the state. Fifty years from today, I explained. Assuming everything moved according to the timetable. The big trick was starting with all the facets in balance. Not in their final climax state, no, but at least something stable and workable. “The prairie forming around us now? The tall grasses? They were native a couple hundred years ago, but they’re not the true native community. Not in the strictest sense. The megafauna will require different vegetations—”
“Yeah?”
“For the past 5 million years, give or take, we’ve had rich and varied ecosystems. Particularly between the ice ages. Camels and mammoths and pronghorns, all sorts of species. Plus the predators. The lions and cheetahs and sabertooths and short-faced bears—”
“Bears?” he echoed. Nodding.
“We’ll need to build the species as we need them. From their close relatives, or from scratch. Each gene team projects a species, and they’re locked into computer memory.” I gestured. “I test them and try to make corrections, hopefully small ones, and the gene teams get angry and start building new versions.”
Johnny kept shaking his head.
“Once started,” I admitted, “the project could take centuries—”
“I love it!”
“A lot of it will be public land. For the tourists. They’ll come from the coasts and down from space. On holidays and whatnot.” I waited for a moment, then said, “Access will be controlled. Small electric planes will silently take the tourists to overlook points and campsites, and the rest of the country will be wilderness. An enormous, fresh-minted wilderness.” I didn’t mention the enclaves scattered here and there. There would be half a hundred enclaves for the wealthy; a substantial chunk of the start-up costs would come from luxury-minded people. People who would want to leave their descendants parcels of exotic lands and a remarkable solitude. “So,” I asked, “what do you think?”
“Where do we live?” asked Johnny.
What did he mean? We?
“The Lakota,” he told me.
I looked at him, feeling tired and vague and suddenly cranky. Then I glanced at the map, at the estimates of tourists and native residents, and I said nothing. I just stood there.
Johnny finished his beer and crushed the can, and he watched me. He said, “Aaron, you should think about the Lakota here. You know? We were part of the way it was. Back when. Just like those bears and whatever … we belong in this thing.”
“Do you?” I managed.
“Sure,” he said. He waved the second beer at me, opened it, and wondered, “You sure you don’t want it?”
I wasn’t thinking about the beer. I told him, “What we’re trying to do … we’re trying to re-create the substance of the past 5 million years. And Native Americans—transplanted Asians—didn’t arrive in credible numbers until twelve thousand years ago.”
He didn’t seem to hear me.
He said, “I’d like to live in that sort of country.”
I looked at my watch.
“Hunt and fish and live the good life,” he said. “No clocks. No bosses watching over you. No one expecting anything more than meat from you, and shelter. You know what I mean?”
“Listen,” I mentioned, “I need to get busy—”
“We’re too damned busy; that’s what I mean.” He giggled and tilted back the can, drinking and then giving a deep belch. “You ought to talk to your bosses. Get them to let me into the picture.”
I said, “No.” I was really awfully tired.
“No?”
I said, “I can’t. Won’t.”
“Not for me?” He seemed injured. “I come here and do this favor for you, Aaron, and you can’t just give me a sliver of all this? What was mine in the first place anyway?”
“No,” I told him. I used a hard voice that surprised even me. I said, “The reservations are going to have two choices. Either they stay as they are today and we’ll build fences around them, or the Natives can sell out and leave, returning whenever it’s possible. Like everyone else. As tourists, and with all the usual restrictions.”
Johnny was puzzled. Surprised.
“What’s your problem?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
I pointed at the screen, saying, “You don’t belong there. That’s what I’m explaining.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m having trouble just fitting the cats into the picture. The goddamn cats!”
“Aaron—?”
“Quit talking as if you know me!” I snapped.
He made a small sound, saying nothing.
“A few thousand Natives running around the place,” I said, “and you know what would happen? You sure as hell wouldn’t be hunting with bows and arrows, would you? You’d starve if you had to do that.”
“So I’d use my rifle. I’d just take what I needed—”
“You sure didn’t take what you needed twelve thousand years ago. You didn’t!” I said, “Your ancestors crossed over here at the end of the Ice Age, and you know what happened? The megafauna went extinct. In almost every case. Mammoths. Mastodons. The giant bison and whatever. And that includes the predators and the huge scavengers. They’re dead because they didn’t know how to cope with you. You slaughtered them, and the changing weather killed the rest, and don’t give me any of that red-man-in-tune-with-nature crap. All right?”
He was staring at me, his face blank and hard.
I pulled my hands through my hair. I was shaking in my hands and everywhere. The red pills had me shaking.
Then Johnny Whiteeagle said, “I wasn’t talking about being noble,” with the smallest, darkest voice possible. “What did I say?”
I sat down. I had to sit.
“Hey,” he told me, “I’m a poor guy with problems. O.K. My old lady says I drink too much and I’m lazy … but hey, you don’t want to hear my story. Do you?”
“I’ve got my own troubles,” I replied. That was the bottom line. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back to work. I’m going to have to ask you to take your tools and leave.”
“Yeah.” He walked out of the room without another sound. He went to get his mechanical spider, and came out into the living room with his eyes fixed on me, watching me, and there was something showing. I saw something. “You could have acted nice,” he told me. “It wouldn’t have cost you anything.”
“How do you want to be paid?” I started looking for my credit cards, and he said:
“I’ll bill you.”
So I turned my back to him, feeling his eyes. The apartment door opened and closed, and I listened to him on the stairs and got up and went to the window, watching him appear below me. A battered van was parked on the curb, a shabby white eagle painted on its side. I was still shaking, maybe worse than before. He got into the van and sat motionless, looking straight ahead, then he bent and brought a long-necked bottle out of somewhere. He drank and then drank some more, putting down a terrific amount of liquor. Then he started the van and drove out of the sudden cloud of blackish smoke. He didn’t look my way once. Not even a glance upward. It felt good to have him ignore me, and I started hoping he would get good and drunk and sleep it off, forgetting everything. Particularly me.
I got back to work after a few minutes.
It took me forever to get into the right mood again, but then things were fine. The trouble with the sabertooths, I learned, wasn’t too bad. I made the adjustments in an hour, dropping their intelligence and plugging the new parameters into the memory, then I put the new slow-learning cats into the imaginary landscape. “O.K,” I said. “Go.”
Everything was up and running. One generation, then two. I watched slivers and wisps of the whole, at triple speed. Everything had a certain simplicity. This was a model, after all. The cats and bears were rounded shapes, and the grasses were the same impossible green. Bright and lush. Each element was an elaborate estimate, and I found myself explaining the details to Johnn
y. For some reason I imagined him standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. “The gene teams will make adjustments according to my recommendations. Then I start over again. It isn’t that we want to get everything right. That’s not the point. But a good working model is what will impress our investors. The government agencies and the various billionaires.” I paused for a minute, then I told him, “If I just had more time, I could be more exotic. But this is pretty good. All things considered.”
Three generations. And no troubles yet.
I made a fresh pot of coffee and a sandwich, then I ran my kitchen faucet for a long, long while. As an experiment. I watched the water spin down the drain, and I sighed, going back to the linkup room—
—and finding nothing.
The screen was black. Utterly and profoundly black.
An outage somewhere, I thought. I sat and ate my sandwich, sipping coffee and waiting. Telling myself it was nothing. A power outage down at the campus, and it wasn’t the first time. Only, maybe I knew I was fooling myself. Thinking back now, I have to wonder. I just sat there and waited, never checking with the university or listening to the news. I kept telling myself someone had dug into a power cable, and I waited.
My phone sang out after a long while.
I stood and went to the living room. I can remember every step. I remember the project head shouting at me before the receiver was to my ear, telling me, “We’ve got some friend of yours here, and he says you’ll understand. He says you’ll know what this is about!” He said, “Aaron.” He said, “Do you know what your buddy did? He showed up here and said there was a problem with the building’s pipes, and he went up to the top floor and opened a pipe and lowered a fucking pipe bomb down level with the computers—”
“I see,” I managed.
“—and it’s a goddamn miracle nobody was blown to pieces.”
I said nothing.
“The son of a bitch is shitfaced. Do you hear me?”
I nodded.
“Do you hear me?” He said, “He wanted me to call you and give you a message. Are you there?”
“Sure.”
“‘We did it again.’ That’s the message. ‘The redskins did it again.’ Whatever in hell that means!”
“It’s bad?” I wondered.
“Oh no, not too bad.” He made a cutting sound, then said, “Just everything is lost. Data and the simulations and a fortune in hardware … and we’re finished, Aaron. I don’t know how you pissed him off, but I’ll have you know—!”
I hung up on him.
I sat back down in the linkup room, watching the black screen and listening to the phone sing. Then I stopped hearing it. All at once I was pretending that it was a thousand years from now, from here, and I was walking on a green savanna filed with huge herbivores and fierce predators and condors half the size of planes. It was really rather funny, I realized. Funny-strange. All the work I’d done on the project, all the hours invested—the caffeine and the pills and the runaway tensions, too—and this was the first time I’d imagined myself as being part of that landscape. It was so strange to realize that fact, and after a while the phone quit singing, and the room was quiet, and I could smell the faint stink of grass burning somewhere.
MATTER’S END
Gregory Benford
Here’s a taut and engrossing story that’s either about The End of Everything or The Start of It All, depending on the way you look at it.…
Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel Timescape won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, and Across the Sea of Suns. His most recent novels are the best-selling Great Sky River, and Tides of Light. His story “Alphas” appeared in our Seventh Annual Collection. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.
When Dr. Samuel Johnson felt himself getting tied up in an argument over Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal, he kicked a large stone and answered, “I refute it thus.” Just what that action assured him of is not very obvious, but apparently he found it comforting.
—Sir Arthur Eddington
India came to him first as a breeze like soured buttermilk, rich yet tainted. A door banged somewhere, sending gusts sweeping through the Bangalore airport, slicing through the 4 A.M. silences.
Since the Free State of Bombay had left India, Bangalore had become an international airport. Yet the damp caress seemed to erase the sterile signatures that made all big airports alike, even giving a stippled texture to the cool enamel glow of the fluorescents.
The moist air clasped Robert Clay like a stranger’s sweaty palm. The ripe, fleshy aroma of a continent enfolded him, swarming up his nostrils and soaking his lungs with sullen spice. He put down his carry-on bag and showed the immigration clerk his passport. The man gave him a piercing, ferocious stare—then mutely slammed a rubber stamp onto the pages and handed it back.
A hand snagged him as he headed toward baggage claim.
“Professor Clay?” The face was dark olive with intelligent eyes riding above sharp cheekbones. A sudden white grin flashed as Clay nodded. “Ah, good. I am Dr. Sudarshan Patil. Please come this way.”
Dr. Patil’s tone was polite, but his hands impatiently pulled Clay away from the sluggish lines, through a battered wooden side door. The heavy-lidded immigration guards were carefully looking in other directions, hands held behind their backs. Apparently they had been paid off and would ignore this odd exit. Clay was still groggy from trying to sleep on the flight from London. He shook his head as Patil led him into the gloom of a baggage storeroom.
“Your clothes,” Patil said abruptly.
“What?”
“They mark you as a Westerner. Quickly!”
Patil’s hands, light as birds in the quilted soft light, were already plucking at his coat, his shirt. Clay was taken aback at this abruptness. He hesitated, then struggled out of the dirty garments, pulling his loose slacks down over his shoes. He handed his bundled clothes to Patil, who snatched them away without a word.
“You’re welcome,” Clay said. Patil took no notice, just thrust a wad of tan cotton at him. The man’s eyes jumped at each distant sound in the storage room, darting, suspecting every pile of dusty bags.
Clay struggled into the pants and rough shirt. They looked dingy in the wan yellow glow of a single distant fluorescent tube.
“Not the reception I’d expected,” Clay said, straightening the baggy pants and pulling at the rough drawstring.
“These are not good times for scientists in my country, Dr. Clay,” Patil said bitingly. His voice carried that odd lilt that echoed both the Raj and Cambridge.
“Who’re you afraid of?”
“Those who hate Westerners and their science.”
“They said in Washington—”
“We are about great matters, Professor Clay. Please cooperate, please.”
Patil’s lean face showed its bones starkly, as though energies pressed outward. Promontories of bunched muscle stretched a mottled canvas skin. He started toward a far door without another word, carrying Clay’s overnight bag and jacket.
“Say, where’re we—”
Patil swung open a sheet-metal door and beckoned. Clay slipped through it and into the moist wealth of night. His feet scraped on a dirty sidewalk beside a black tar road. The door hinge squealed behind them, attracting the attention of a knot of men beneath a vibrant yellow streetlight nearby.
The bleached fluorescence of the airport terminal was now a continent away. Beneath a line of quarter-ton trucks huddled figures slept. In the astringent street-lamp glow he saw a decrepit green Korean Tochat van parked at the curb.
“In!” Patil
whispered.
The men under the streetlight started walking toward them, calling out hoarse questions.
Clay yanked open the van’s sliding door and crawled into the second row of seats. A fog of unknown pungent smells engulfed him. The driver, a short man, hunched over the wheel. Patil sprang into the front seat and the van ground away, its low gear whining.
Shouts. A stone thumped against the van roof. Pebbles rattled at the back.
They accelerated, the engine clattering. A figure loomed up from the shifting shadows and flung muck against the window near Clay’s face. He jerked back at the slap of it. “Damn!”
They plowed through a wide puddle of dirty rainwater. The engine sputtered and for a moment Clay was sure it would die. He looked out the rear window and saw vague forms running after them. Then the engine surged again and they shot away.
They went two blocks through hectic traffic. Clay tried to get a clear look at India outside, but all he could see in the starkly shadowed street were the crisscrossings of three-wheeled taxis and human-drawn rickshaws. He got an impression of incessant activity, even in this desolate hour. Vehicles leaped out of the murk as headlights swept across them and then vanished utterly into the moist shadows again.
They suddenly swerved around a corner beneath spreading, gloomy trees. The van jolted into deep potholes and jerked to a stop. “Out!” Patil called.
Clay could barely make out a second van at the curb ahead. It was blue and caked with mud, but even in the dim light would not be confused with their green one. A rotting fetid reek filled his nose as he got out the side door, as if masses of overripe vegetation loomed in the shadows. Patil tugged him into the second van. In a few seconds they went surging out through a narrow, brick-lined alley.
“Look, what—”
“Please, quiet,” Patil said primly. “I am watching carefully now to be certain that we are not being followed.”
They wound through a shantytown warren for several minutes. Their headlights picked up startled eyes that blinked from what Clay at first had taken to be bundles of rags lying against the shacks. They seemed impossibly small even to be children. Huddled against decaying tin lean-tos, the dim forms often did not stir even as the van splashed dirty water on them from potholes.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 41