The Best of Gregory Benford Page 3

  “Me old bud, then?” he manages to say, getting the lilt into the voice still. He adjusts his granny glasses. Rising anxiety stirs in his throat. “My, my…”

  It takes weeks to defrost McCartney. He had died much later than Lennon, plump and prosperous, the greatest pop star of all time—or at least the biggest money-maker. “Same thing,” Fielding mutters to himself.

  When Paul’s cancer is sponged away and the sluggish organs palped to life, the world media press for a meeting.

  “For what?” Fielding is nonchalant. “It’s not as though we were ever reconciled, y’know. We got a divorce, Hermann.”

  “Can’t you put that aside?”

  “For a fat old slug who pro’bly danced on me grave?”

  “No such thing occurred. There are videotapes, and Mr. McCartney was most polite.”

  “God, a future where everyone’s literal! I told you I was a nasty type, why can’t you simply accept—”

  “It is arranged,” Hermann says firmly. “You must go. Overcome your antagonism.”

  Fear clutches at Fielding.

  McCartney is puffy, jowly, but his eyes crackle with intelligence. The years have not fogged his quickness. Fielding has arranged the meeting away from crowds, at a forest resort. Attendants help McCartney into the hushed room. An expectant pause.

  “You want to join me band?” Fielding says brightly. It is the only quotation he can remember that seems to fit; Lennon had said that when they first met.

  McCartney blinks, peers nearsightedly at him. “D’you really need another guitar?”

  “Whatever noisemaker’s your fancy.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re hired, lad.”

  They shake hands with mock seriousness. The spectators—who have paid dearly for their tickets—applaud loudly. McCartney smiles, embraces Fielding, and then sneezes.

  “Been cold lately,” Fielding says. A ripple of laughter.

  McCartney is offhand, bemused by the world he has entered. His manner is confident, interested. He seems to accept Fielding automatically. He makes a few jokes, as light and inconsequential as his post-Beatles music.

  Fielding watches him closely, feeling an awe he had not expected. That’s him. Paul. The real thing. He starts to ask something and realizes that it is a dumb, out-of-character, fan-type question. He is being betrayed by his instincts. He will have to be careful.

  Later, they go for a walk in the woods. The attendants hover a hundred meters behind, portable med units at the ready. They are worried about McCartney’s cold. This is the first moment they have been beyond earshot of others. Fielding feels his pulse rising. “You okay?” he asks the puffing McCartney.

  “Still a bit dizzy, I am. Never thought it’d work, really.”

  “The freezing, it gets into your bones.”

  “Strange place. Clean, like Switzerland.”

  “Yeah. Peaceful. They’re mad for us here.”

  “You meant that about your band?”

  “Sure. Your fingers’ll thaw out. Fat as they are, they’ll still get around a guitar string.”

  “Ummm. Wonder if George is tucked away in an ice cube somewhere?”

  “Hadn’t thought.” The idea fills Fielding with terror.

  “Could ask about Ringo, too.”

  “Re-create the whole thing? I was against that. Dunno if I still am.” Best to be noncommittal. He would love to meet them, sure, but his chances of bringing this off day by day, in the company of all three of them…he frowns.

  McCartney’s pink cheeks glow from the exercise. The eyes are bright, active, studying Fielding. “Did you think it would work? Really?”

  “The freezing? Well, what’s to lose? I said to Yoko, I said—”

  “No, not the freezing. I mean this impersonation you’re carrying off.”

  Fielding reels away, smacks into a pine tree. “What? What?”

  “C’mon, you’re not John.”

  A strangled cry erupts from Fielding’s throat. “But…how…”

  “Just not the same, is all. Dunno Merseyside jokes, street names, the lot.”

  “I, I know that Penny Lane was a street and—”

  “Come off it. You’re not even English!”

  Fielding’s mouth opens, but he can say nothing. He has failed. Tripped up by some nuance, some trick phrase he should’ve responded to—

  “Of course,” McCartney says urbanely, looking at him sideways, “you don’t know for sure if I’m the real one either, do you?”

  Fielding stutters, “If, if, what’re you saying, I—”

  “Or I could even be a ringer planted by Hermann, eh? To test you out? In that case, you’ve responded the wrong way. Should’ve stayed in character, John.”

  “Could be this, could be that—what the hell you saying? Who are you?” Anger flashes through him. A trick, a maze of choices, possibilities that he had not considered. The forest whirls around him, McCartney leers at his confusion, bright spokes of sunlight pierce his eyes, he feels himself falling, collapsing, the pine trees wither, colors drain away, blue to pink to gray—

  He is watching a blank dark wall, smelling nothing, no tremor through his skin, no wet touch of damp air. Sliding infinite silence. The world is black.

  —Flat black, Fielding adds, like we used to say in Liverpool.

  —Liverpool? He was never in Liverpool. That was a lie, too—

  —And he knows instantly what he is. The truth skewers him.

  Hello, you still operable?

  Fielding rummages through shards of cold electrical memory and finds himself. He is not Fielding, he is a simulation. He is Fielding Prime.

  Hey, you in there. It’s me, the real Fielding. Don’t worry about security. I’m the only one here.

  Fielding Prime feels through his circuits and discovers a way to talk. “Yes, yes, I hear.”

  I made the computer people go away. We can talk.

  “I—I see.” Fielding Prime sends out feelers, searching for his sensory receptors. He finds a dim red light and wills it to grow brighter. The image swells and ripples, then forms into a picture of a sour-faced man in his middle fifties. It is Fielding Real.

  Ah, Fielding Prime thinks to himself in the metallic vastness, he’s older than I am. Maybe making me younger was some sort of self-flattery, either by him or his programmers. But the older man had gotten someone to work on his face. It was very much like Lennon’s but with heavy jowls, a thicker mustache and balding some. The gray sideburns didn’t look quite right but perhaps that is the style now.

  The McCartney thing, you couldn’t handle it.

  “I got confused. It never occurred to me there’d be anyone I knew revived. I hadn’t a clue what to say.”

  Well, no matter. The earlier simulations, the ones before you, they didn’t even get that far. I had my men throw in that McCartney thing as a test. Not much chance it would occur, anyway, but I wanted to allow for it.

  “Why?”

  What? Oh, you don’t know, do you? I’m sinking all this money into psychoanalytical computer models so I can see if this plan of mine would work. I mean whether I could cope with the problems and deceive Immortality Incorporated.

  Fielding Prime felt a shiver of fear. He needed to stall for time, to think this through. “Wouldn’t it be easier to bribe enough people now? You could have your body frozen and listed as John Lennon from the start.”

  No, their security is too good. I tried that.

  “There’s something I noticed,” Fielding Prime said, his mind racing. “Nobody ever mentioned why I was unfrozen.”

  Oh yes, that’s right. Minor detail. I’ll make a note about that—maybe cancer or congestive heart failure, something that won’t be too hard to fix up within a few decades.

  “Do you want it that soon? There would still be a lot of people who knew Lennon.”

  Oh, that’s a good point. I’ll talk to the doctor about it.

  “You really care that much about being John Lennon?�
�

  Why sure. Fielding Real’s voice carried a note of surprise. Don’t you feel it too? If you’re a true simulation you’ve got to feel that.

  “I do have a touch of it, yes.”

  They took the graphs and traces right out of my subcortical.

  “It was great, magnificent. Really a lark. What came through was the music, doing it out. It sweeps up and takes hold of you.”

  Yeah, really? Damn, you know, I think it’s going to work.

  “With more planning—”

  Planning, hell, I’m going. Fielding Real’s face crinkled with anticipation.

  “You’re going to need help.”

  Hell, that’s the whole point of having you, to check it out beforehand. I’ll be all alone up there.

  “Not if you take me with you.”

  Take you? You’re just a bunch of germanium and copper.

  “Leave me here. Pay for my files and memory to stay active.”

  For what?

  “Hook me into a news service. Give me access to libraries. When you’re unfrozen I can give you backup information and advice as soon as you can reach a terminal. With your money, that wouldn’t be too hard. Hell, I could even take care of your money. Do some trading, maybe move your accounts out of countries before they fold up.”

  Fielding Real pursed his lips. He thought for a moment and looked shrewdly at the visual receptor. That sort of makes sense. I could trust your judgment—it’s mine, after all. I can believe myself, right? Yes, yes…

  “You’re going to need company.” Fielding Prime says nothing more. Best to stand pat with his hand and not push him too hard.

  I think I’ll do it. Fielding Real’s face brightens. His eyes take on a fanatic gleam. You and me. I know it’s going to work, now!

  Fielding Real burbles on and Fielding Prime listens dutifully to him, making the right responses without effort. After all, he knows the other man’s mind. It is easy to manipulate him, to play the game of ice and steel.

  Far back, away from where Fielding Real’s programmers could sense it, Fielding Prime smiles inwardly (the only way he could). It will be a century, at least. He will sit here monitoring data, input and output, the infinite dance of electrons. Better than death, far better. And there may be new developments, a way to transfer computer constructs to real bodies. Hell, anything could happen.

  Boy, it’s cost me a fortune to do this. A bundle. Bribing people to keep it secret, shifting the accounts so the Feds wouldn’t know—and you cost the most. You’re the best simulation ever developed, you realize that? Full consciousness, they say.

  “Quite so.”

  Let him worry about his money—just so there was some left. The poor simple bastard thought he could trust Fielding Prime. He thought they were the same person. But Fielding Prime had played the chords, smelled the future, lived a vivid life of his own. He was older, wiser. He had felt the love of the crowd wash over him, been at the focal point of time. To him Fielding Real was just somebody else, and all his knife-sharp instincts could come to bear.

  How was it? What was it like? I can see how you responded by running your tapes for a few sigmas. But I can’t order a complete scan without wiping your personality matrix. Can’t you tell me? How did it feel?

  Fielding Prime tells him something, anything, whatever will keep the older man’s attention. He speaks of ample-thighed girls, of being at the center of it all.

  Did you really? God!

  Fielding Prime spins him a tale.

  He is running cool and smooth. He is radiating on all his eigenfrequencies. Ah and ah.

  Yes, that is a good idea. After Fielding Real is gone, his accountants will suddenly discover a large sum left for scientific research into man-machine linkages. With a century to work, Fielding Prime can find a way out of this computer prison. He can become somebody else.

  Not Lennon, no. He owed that much to Fielding Real.

  Anyway, he had already lived through that. The Beatles’ music was quite all right, but doing it once had made it seem less enticing. Hermann was right. The music was too simple-minded, it lacked depth.

  He is ready for something more. He has access to information storage, tapes, consultant help from outside, all the libraries of the planet. He will study. He will train. In a century he can be anything. Ah, he will echo down the infinite reeling halls of time.

  John Lennon, hell. He will become Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  White Creatures

  (1975)

  And after let me lie

  On the breast of the darkening sky.

  —Joan Abbe

  The aliens strap him in. He cannot feel the bindings but he knows they must be there; he cannot move. Or perhaps it is the drug. They must have given him something because his world is blurred, spongy. The white creatures are flowing shapes in watery light. He feels numb. The white creatures are moving about him, making high chittering noises. He tries to fix on them but they are vague formless shapes moving in and out of focus. They are cloudy, moving too fast to see, but he knows they are working on him. Something nudges his leg. For a moment something clicks at his side. Two white creatures make a dull drone and fade into the distance. All sensations are formless and cloudy; the air puckers with moisture. He tries to move but his body is lethargic, painless, suspended. There is gravity; above, a pale glow illuminates the room. Yes, he is in a room. They have not brought him to their ship; they are using human buildings. He cannot remember being captured. How many people do they have? When he tries to focus on the memory it dissolves and slips away. He knows they are experimenting on him, probing for something. He tries to recall what happened but there are only scraps of memory and unconnected bunches of facts. He closes his eyes. Shutting out the murky light seems to clear his mind. Whatever they have given him still affects his body, but with concentration the vagueness slips away. He is elated. Clarity returns; thoughts slide effortlessly into place. The textures of his inner mind are deep and strong.

  Muddy sounds recede. If he can ignore the white creatures things become sharp again. He knows he must get free of the white creatures and he can only do that if he can understand what is happening. He is absolutely alone and he must fight them. He must remember. He tries. The memories resolve slowly with a weight of their own. He tries.

  He cut across the body of the wave, awash in churning foam. The clear Atlantic was startlingly cold. The waves were too small for boards but Merrick was able to body-surf on them easily. The momentum carried him almost to shore. He waded through the rippling currents and began jogging down the beach. After a moment his wind came to him and he ran faster. His long stride devoured the yards. He churned doggedly past forests of firm bodies; the beach was littered with Puerto Ricans. The tropical sun shimmered through a thin haze of sweat that trickled into his eyes. As his arms and legs grew leaden he diverted himself with glimpses of the figures and faces sliding by, moving stride by stride into his past. His mind wandered. Small families, leathery men, dogs and children—he made them all act out plays in his head, made them populate his preconceived universe. That was where he saw Erika Bascomb for the second time. He had met her at a reception some months before, known her only as the distant smiling wife of the Cyclops director. She sat on the sand, arms braced behind, and followed his progress. Her deliciously red lips parted in a smile more than mere welcoming and he slowed, stopped. His thickening waistline showed his age, thirty-eight, but his legs were as good as ever; strong, tanned, no stringy muscles or fine webbed nets of blue veins. Erika was a few years younger, heavily tanned from too much leisure time. So he stopped. He remembered that day better than any of the others. She was the first fresh element in his life for years, an antidote to the tedious hours of listening that filled his nights with Cyclops. He remembered her brown nipples pouting and the image dissolved into the green and brown swath of jungle that ringed the Cyclops project. The directional radio telescopes were each enormous, but ranked together in rigid lanes they added up to
something somehow less massive. Each individual dish tipped soundlessly to cup an ear at the sky. The universe whispered, exciting a tremor of electrons in the metal lattice. He spent his days and nights trying to decipher those murmurs from eternity. Pens traced out the signals on graph paper and it was his lot to scan them for signs of order and intelligence. Bascomb was a pudgy radio astronomer intent on his work who tried to analyze each night’s returns. Erika worked there as a linguist, a decoder for a message which never came. Merrick was merely a technician, a tracer of circuits. Project Cyclops had begun in earnest only the year before and he had landed a job with it after a decade of routine at NASA. When he came they were just beginning to search within a two-degree cone about the galactic center, looking for permanent beacons. If the galactic superculture was based in the hub, this was the most probable search technique. That was the Lederberg hypothesis, and as director Bascomb adopted it, supported it; and when it failed his stock in the project dropped somewhat. One saw him in the corridors late at night, gray slacks hanging from a protruding belly, the perpetual white shirt with its crescent of sweat at the armpits. Bascomb worked late, neglected his wife, and Erika drifted into Merrick’s orbit. He remembered one night when they met at the very edge of the bowl valley and coupled smoothly beneath the giant webbing of the phased array. Bascomb was altering the bandwidth of the array, toying with the frequencies between the hydroxyl line and the 21-centimeter hydrogen resonance. Merrick lay in the lush tropical grass with Erika and imagined he could hear the faint buzzing of hydrogen noise as it trickled from the sky into the Cyclops net, bearing random messages of the inert universe. Bascomb and his bandwidth, blind to the chemical surges of the body. Bascomb resisting the urgings of Drake, Bascomb checking only the conventional targets of Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, the F and G and K stars within thirty light-years. Politics, a wilderness of competition and ideals and guesses. He tried to tell Erika of this but she knew it already, knew the facts anyway, and had tired of them. A linguist with nothing to translate. She waited for a mutter from the sky, but waiting dulled the mind and sharpened the senses. She shook her head when he spoke of it, fingers pale and white where she gripped the grass with compressed energy, head lowered as he took her from behind. Blond strands hung free in the damp jungle twilight. Her eyelids flickered as his rhythm swelled up in her; she groaned with each stroke. The galaxy turned, a white swarm of bees.