The Best of Gregory Benford Read online

  The Best of Gregory Benford Copyright © 2015 by Gregory Benford. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2015 by John Harris. All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2015 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-687-8

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  To the editors who helped shape these stories:

  Ed Ferman, Ted White, Ben Bova, Robert Silverberg, Ellen Datlow, Henry Gee, Lou Aronica, Greg Bear, Stan Schmidt, Terry Carr, Marty Greenberg, David Hartwell, Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Gordon van Gelder, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, George Zebrowski.

  Also, to my unconscious, which never gets the credit it deserves.

  Table of Contents

  Nobody Lives on Burton Street (1970)

  Doing Lennon (1975)

  White Creatures (1975)

  In Alien Flesh (1978)

  Redeemer (1979)

  Dark Sanctuary (1979)

  Time Shards (1979)

  Exposures (1981)

  Relativistic Effects (1982)

  Of Space/Time and the River (1985)

  Time’s Rub (1985)

  Freezeframe (1986)

  Proselytes (1988)

  Matter’s End (1989)

  Mozart on Morphine (1989)

  Centigrade 233 (1990)

  World Vast, World Various (1992)

  In the Dark Backward (1993)

  A Desperate Calculus (1995)

  Zoomers (1996)

  The Voice (1997)

  Slow Symphonies of Mass and Time (1998)

  A Dance to Strange Musics (1998)

  Anomalies (2001)

  Comes the Evolution (2001)

  Twenty-Two Centimeters (2004)

  A Life with a Semisent (2005)

  Applied Mathematical Theology (2006)

  Bow Shock (2006)

  Reasons Not to Publish (2007)

  The Champagne Award (2008)

  Penumbra (2010)

  Gravity’s Whispers (2010)

  Mercies (2011)

  Grace Immaculate (2011)

  Eagle (2011)

  The Sigma Structure Symphony (2012)

  Backscatter (2013)

  Afterword

  Nobody Lives on Burton Street

  (1970)

  I was standing by one of our temporary command posts, picking my teeth after breakfast and talking to Joe Murphy when the first part of the Domestic Disturbance hit us.

  People said the summer of ’78 was the worst ever, what with all the pollution haze and everything was kicking up the temperatures, but here it was a year later and getting worse than ’78. Spring had lost its bloom a month back and it was hot, sticky—the kind of weather that leaves you with a half-moon of sweat around your armpits before you’ve had time to finish morning coffee. The summer heat makes for trouble, stirs up people.

  I was getting jumpy with the waiting. I walked back toward the duplex apartment set away from the street, trying to round up my men. The apartment was deserted, of course, so I wasn’t listening for anything special from the bedroom. I walked right in on them.

  Johnson, a kid from the other side of town, was sprawled across the bed with a skinny little black girl. He was really ramming it to her, grunting with each thrust. She had her legs wrapped around him like a snake in heat, sobbing each time he went in, eyes rolled up.

  Yeah, I knew that one; rolled with her a few times myself last year. She was a groupie, really, always following our squads around with that hungry look in the eyes. She just liked to hump the boys, I guess, like some girls go for Marines. She had her skirt bunched up around her waist while Johnson was working on her, hands wrapped around her ass so he could lift her up with each lunge. They were really going at it.

  “Okay, fun’s over,” I said, and gave Johnson a light kick in the butt. “Finish it off and form up.”

  “What th—” he said as he rolled over, still clutch-ing her to him and jerking. Then he saw me and shut up. The girl—Melody, I think her name was—looked at me with big round eyes and squirmed all over Johnson, getting him to hurry up. I made a mental note to get back to her one of these days; she was skinny, but she had a good way of twisting around that really got me off.

  I turned and walked back out onto the roof where we had our command post.

  We knew the mob was in the area, working to-ward us. Our communications link had been humming for the last half hour, getting fixes on their direction and asking the computers for advice on how to handle them when they got there.

  I looked down. At the end of the street were a lot of semipermanent shops and the mailbox. The mailbox bothers me—it shouldn’t be there.

  From the other end of Burton Street I could hear the random dull bass of the mob, sounding like animals.

  We started getting ready, locking up the equipment. I was already working up a sweat when Joe came over, moaning about the payments on the Snocar he’d been suckered into. I was listening with one ear to him and the other to the crowd noise.

  “And it’s not just that,” Joe said. “It’s the neighborhood and the school and everybody around me.”

  “Everybody’s wrong but Murphy, huh?” I said, and grinned.

  “Hell no, you know me better than that. It’s just that nobody’s going anyplace. Sure, we’ve all got jobs, but they’re most of them just make-work stuff the unions have gotten away with.”

  “To get a real job you gotta have training,” I said, but I wasn’t chuffing him up. I like my job, and it’s better than most, but we weren’t gonna kid each other that it was some big technical deal. Joe and I are just regular guys.

  “What’re you griping about this now for, any-way?” I said. “You didn’t used to be bothered by any-thing.”

  Joe shrugged. “I dunno. Wife’s been getting after me to move out of the place we’re in and make more money. Gets into fights with the neighbors.” He looked a little sheepish about it.

  “More money? Hell, y’got everything you need, we all do. Lot of people worse off than you. Look at all those lousy Africans, living on nothing.”

  I was going to say more, maybe rib him about how he’s married and I’m not, but then I stopped. Like I said, all this time I was half listening to the crowd. I can always tell when a bunch has changed its direction like a pack of wolves off on a chase, and when that funny quiet came and lasted about five seconds I knew they were heading our way.

  “Scott!” I yelled at our communications man. “Close it down. Get a final printout.”

  Murphy broke off telling me about his troubles and listened to the crowd for a minute, like he hadn’t heard them before, and then took off on a trot to the AnCops we had stashed in the truck below. They were all warmed up and ready to go, but Joe likes to make a final check and maybe have a chance to read in any new instructions Scott gets at the last minute.

  I threw away the toothpick and had a last look at my constant-volume joints, to be sure the bulletproof plastiform was matching properly and wouldn’t let anything through. Scott came double-timing over with the diagnostics from HQ. The computer compilation was neat and confusing, like it always is. I could make out the rough indices they’d picked up on the crowd heading our way. The best guess—and that’s all you ever get, friends, is a guess—was a lot of Psych Disorders and Race Prejudice. There was a fairly high number of Unemployeds, too. We’re getting more and more Unemployeds in the city now, and they’re hard for the Force to deal with. Usually mad enough to spit. Smash up everything.


  I penciled an OK in the margin and tossed it Scott’s way. I’d taken too long reading it; I could hear individual shouts now and the tinkling of glass. I flipped the visor down from my helmet and turned on my external audio. It was going to get hot as hell in there, but I’m not chump enough to drag around an air-conditioning unit on top of the rest of my stuff.

  I took a look at the street just as a gang of about a hundred people came around the corner two blocks down, spreading out like a dirty gray wave. I ducked over to the edge of the building and waved to Murphy to start off with three AnCops. I had to hold up three fingers for him to see because the noise was already getting high. I looked at my watch. Hell, it wasn’t nine a.m. yet.

  Scott went down the stairs we’d tracted up the side of the building. I was right behind him. It wasn’t a good location for observation now; you made too good a target up there. We picked up Murphy, who was carrying our control boards. All three of us angled down the alley and dropped down behind a short fence to have a look at the street.

  Most of them were still screaming at the top of their lungs like they’d never run out of air, waving whatever they had handy and gradually breaking up into smaller units. The faster ones had made it to the first few buildings.

  A tall Negro came trotting toward us, moving like he had all the time in the world. He stopped in front of a wooden barbershop, tossed something quickly through the front window, and whump! Flames licked out at the upper edges of the window, spreading fast.

  An older man picked up some rocks and began methodically pitching them through the smaller windows in the shops next door. A housewife clumped by awkwardly in high heels, looking like she was out on a shopping trip except for the hammer she swung like a pocketbook. She dodged into the barbershop for a second, didn’t find anything, and came out. The Negro grinned and pointed at the barber pole on the side-walk, still revolving, and she caught it in the side with a swipe that threw shattered glass for ten yards.

  I turned and looked at Murphy. “All ready?”

  He nodded. “Just give the word.”

  The travel agency next door to the barbershop was concrete-based, so they couldn’t burn that. Five men were lunging at the door and on the third try they knocked it in. A moment later a big travel poster sailed out the front window, followed by a chair leg. They were probably doing as much as they could, but with-out tools they couldn’t take much of the furniture apart.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s have the first AnCops.”

  The thick acrid smell from the smoke was drifting down Burton Street to us, but my air filters would take care of most of it. They don’t do much about human sweat, though, and I was going to be inside the rest of the day.

  Our first prowl car rounded the next corner, going too fast. I looked over at Murphy, who was controlling the car, but he was too busy trying to miss the people who were standing around in the street. Must have gotten a little overanxious on that one. Something was bothering his work.

  I thought for sure the car was going to take a tumble and mess us up, but the wheels caught and it rightened itself long enough for the driver to stop a skid. The screech turned the heads of almost everybody in the crowd and they’d started to move in on it almost be-fore the car stopped laying down rubber and came to a full stop. Murphy punched in another instruction and the AnCop next to the driver started firing at a guy on the sidewalk who was trying to light a Molotov cocktail. The AnCop was using something that sounded like a repeating shotgun. The guy with the cocktail just turned around and looked at him a second before scurrying off into a hardware store.

  By this time the car was getting everything—bricks, broken pieces of furniture, merchandise from the stores. Something heavy shattered the windshield and the driver ducked back too late to avoid getting his left hand smashed with a bottle. A figure appeared on the top of the hardware shop—it looked like the guy from the sidewalk—and took a long windup be-fore throwing something into the street.

  There was a tinkling of glass and a red circle of flame slid across the pavement where it hit just in front of the car, sending smoke curling up over the hood and obscuring the inside. Murphy was going to have to play it by feel now; you couldn’t see a thing in the car.

  A teenager with a stubby rifle stepped out of a doorway, crouched down low like in a western. He fired twice, very accurately and very fast, at the win-dow of the car. A patrolman was halfway out the door when it hit him full in the face, sprawling the body back over the roof and then pitching it forward into the street.

  A red blotch formed around his head, grew rap-idly, and ran into the gutter. There was ragged cheering and the teenager ran over to the body, tore off its badge, and backed away. “Souvenir!” he called out, and a few of the others laughed.

  I looked at Murphy again and he looked at me and I gave him the nod for the firemen, switching control over to my board. Scott was busy talking into his recorder, taking notes for the write-up later. When Murphy nudged him he stopped and punched in the link for radio control to the fire-fighting units.

  By this time most of Burton Street was on fire. Everything you saw had a kind of orange look to it. The crowd was moving toward us once they’d lost interest in the cops, but we’d planned it that way. The firemen came running out in that jerky way they have, just a little in front of us. They were carrying just a regular hose this time because it was a medium-sized group and we couldn’t use up a fire engine and all the extras. But they were wearing the usual red uniforms. From a distance you can’t tell them from the real thing.

  Their subroutine tapes were fouled up again. In-stead of heading for the barbershop or any of the other stuff that was burning, like I’d programmed, they turned the hose on a stationery store that nobody had touched yet. There were three of them, holding on to that hose and getting it set up. The crowd had backed off a minute to see what was going on.

  When the water came through it knocked in the front window of the store, making the firemen look like real chumps. I could hear the water running around inside, pushing over things, and flooding out the building. The crowd laughed, what there was of it—I noticed some of them had moved off in the other direction, over into somebody else’s area.

  In a minute or so the laughing stopped, though. One guy who looked like he had been born mad grabbed an ax from somewhere and took a swing at the hose. He didn’t get it the first time but people were sticking around to see what would happen and I guess he felt some kind of obligation to go through with it. Even under pressure, a thick hose isn’t easy to cut into. He kept at it and on the fourth try a seam split—looked like a bad repair job to me—and a stream of water gushed out and almost hit this guy in the face.

  The crowd laughed at that, too, because he backed off real quick then, scared for a little bit. A face full of high-velocity water is no joke, not at that pressure.

  The fireman who was holding the hose just a little down from there hadn’t paid any attention to this be-cause he wasn’t programmed to, so when this guy thought about it he just stepped over and chopped the fireman across the back with the ax.

  It was getting hot. I didn’t feel like overriding the stock program, so it wasn’t long before all the firemen were out of commission, just about the same way. A little old lady—probably with a welfare gripe—borrowed the ax for a minute to separate all of a fireman’s arms and legs from the trunk. Looking satisfied, she waddled away after the rest of the mob.

  I stood up, lifted my faceplate, and looked at them as they milled back down the street. I took out my grenade launcher and got off a tear gas cartridge on low charge, to hurry them along. The wind was going crosswise so the gas got carried off to the side and down the alleys. Good; wouldn’t have complaints from somebody who got caught in it too long.

  Scott was busy sending orders for the afternoon shift to get more replacement firemen and cops, but we wouldn’t have any trouble getting them in time. There hadn’t been much damage, when you think how much they could’ve done.


  “Okay for the reclaim crew?” Murphy said.

  “Sure. This bunch won’t be back. They look tired out already.” They were moving toward Horton’s area, three blocks over.

  A truck pulled out of the alley and two guys in coveralls jumped out and began picking up the an-droids, dousing fires as they went. In an hour they’d have everything back in place, even the prefab barber-shop.

  “Helluva note,” Murphy said.

  “Huh?”

  “All this stuff,” he waved a hand down Burton Street. “Seems like a waste to build all this just so these jerks can tear it up again.”

  “Waste?” I said. “It’s the best investment you ever saw. How many people were in the last bunch—two hundred? Every one of them is going to sit around for weeks bragging about how he got him a cop or burned a building.”

  “Okay, okay. If it does any good, I guess it’s cheap at the price.”

  “If, hell! You know it does. If it didn’t they wouldn’t be here. You got to be cleared by a psycher before you even get in. The computer works out just what you’ll need, just the kind of action that’ll work off the aggressions you’ve got. Then shoots it to us in the profile from HQ before we start. It’s foolproof.”

  “I dunno. You know what the Consies say—the psychers and the probes and drugs are an in—”

  “Invasion of privacy?”

  “Yeah,” Murphy said sullenly.

  “Privacy? Man, the psychers are public health! It’s part of the welfare! You don’t have to go around to some expensive guy who’ll have you lie on a couch and talk to him. You can get better stuff right from the government. It’s free!”

  Murphy looked at me kind of funny. “Sure. Have to go in for a checkup sometime soon. Maybe that’s what I need.”

  I frowned just the right amount. “Well, I dunno, Joe. Man lets his troubles get him down every once in a while, doesn’t mean he needs professional help. Don’t let it bother you. Forget it.”