Gregory Benford - White Creatures.pdf - Gregory Benford - margozap

WHITE

CREATURES

Gregory Benford

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 a 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.

The aliens seize him. He struggles against the padded

ghostlike webbing. He moves his head a millimeter to see them but

he cannot focus, cannot bring things to a point. The white creatures

are patches of light. They make chittering shrieks to each other and

move about him. Their images ripple and splinter; light cannot

converge. They are performing experiments on humans. He tilts his

head and sees a plastic tube snaking in from infinity. There is a

fetid smell. The tube enters his nostril and penetrates his sinuses.

Something flows into him or out of him—there seems little

difference—and his perceptions shift and alter again. The white

creatures make a nugget of pain within him. He tries to twist away

but his body is full of strange weaknesses, limbs slack. His face

crinkles with pain. He feels delicate tremors, minute examinations

at points along his legs and belly. He is an animal on the dissecting

table and the white creatures are high above him, taller than men.

Their rapid, insect-like gestures melt into the murky liquid light.

They are cutting him open; he feels the sharp slitting in his calf. He

opens his mouth to scream but nothing comes out. They will break

him into parts; they will turn him inside out and spill his brains

into a cup. His fluids will trickle onto cracked linoleum, be

absorbed into the parched eternal earth. Do they know that he is

male? Is this what they want to find out? Siphon away hormones,

measure blood count, trace the twisted DNA helix, find the sense

of rotation in body sugar? What are they after? What could they

use? He shuts them out, disconnects from the dense flooded

universe outside his eyelids. He thinks.

Erika continued to meet him. There were sly deceptions,

shopping expeditions in the town, Erika in a Peter Pan collar and

cable-stitch cardigan; tan, arranged, intent, as much a monument to

an America now vanished as a statue of Lincoln. Neat, making

casual purchases, then into the back hotel room and coiled about

him in sweaty ecstasy. She whispered things to him. That Bascomb

was pale and soft underneath his clothes, a belly of suet, mind

Gregory Benford - White Creatures.pdf

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