Gregory Benford - Timescape

So he would not smudge the issue with a few tattered names, not for Shriffer’s spotlight. Perhaps he would tell Markham, just as he would inevitably publish the faint calls he had measured from Epsilon Eridani, eleven light years away. They were voices from an undated future, reporting shipboard maintenance details. No paradoxes there. Unless, of course, the information blunted the leap into rocketry now underway, aborted the upcoming space station by some contrary twist. That was always possible, he supposed. Then the universe would split again. The river would fork. But perhaps, when this was all understood and Tanninger’s squiggles cut deeper into the riddle, they would know whether paradoxes should be avoided at all. Paradoxes did no true damage, after all. It was like having a dusky twin beyond the looking glass, identical but for his lefthandedness. And the nature of the tachyons made accidental paradox unlikely, anyway. A starship reporting back to its Earth would use tight beams. No fringing fields would by chance catch the present Earth on its helical whirl through space, intersect its gavotte around the galaxy.

Ramsey moved across his field of vision and jerked him back into this illuminated moment. Ramsey stubbed out his smoke, the slim cigar twisting like a dying insect. The man was nervous. Suddenly, a blare of recorded music. Hail to the Chief . Everyone on the stage stood, belying the fact that the man who entered from the right, smiling and waving a casual hand, was a public servant. President Scranton shook the Secretary’s hand with media-sharpened warmth and took in the rest of the stage with a generalized smile. Despite himself, Gordon felt a certain zest. The President moved with a comfortable certainty, acknowledging the cheers and finally sitting beside the Secretary. Scranton had discredited Robert Kennedy, tripping the scowling younger brother in a tangle of Democratic wiretapping, and then the use of the intelligence community and the FBI against the Republicans. Gordon had found the charges difficult to believe at the time, particularly since Goldwater had uncovered the first hints. But in retrospect it was good to be rid of the Kennedy dynasty idea, and the Imperial Presidency along with it.

The Secretary was at the dais now, making the mechanical introductions and slipping in the obligatory puffing-up of the administration. Gordon leaned over to Marsha and whispered, “Christ, I didn’t make up a speech.”

She said merrily, “Tell them about the future, Gordelah.”

He growled, “That future’s only a dream now.”

She replied laconically, “It’s a poor sort of memory that works only backward.”

Gordon grinned back at her. She had fetched that up from her reading to the kids, a line from the lookingglass, time-reversed scene, the White Queen. Gordon shook his head and sat back.

The Secretary had finished his prepared speech and now introduced the President to a solid round of applause. Scranton read the citation for Ramsey and Hussinger. The two men came forward, awkwardly managing to get in each other’s way. The President handed over the two plaques amid applause. Ramsey glanced at his and then exchanged it with Hussinger’s, to laughter from the audience. Polite hand clapping as they sat down. The Secretary came forward, shuffling papers, and handed some to the President. The next award was for some achievement in genetics which Gordon had never heard about. The recipient was a chunky Germanic woman who spread some pages before her on the dais and turned to the audience, plainly prepared for an extended history of her work. Scranton gave the Secretary a sidelong look and then moved back and sat down. He had been through such things before.

Gordon tried to concentrate on what she said, but lost interest when she launched into a salute to other workers in the field who regrettably could not be honored here today in such august surroundings.

He toyed with the question of what to say. He would never see the President again, never again even have the ear of so influential a person as the Secretary. Perhaps if he tried to convey something of what this all meant… His eyes strayed over the audience.

He had a sudden sense that time was here , not a relation between events, but a thing . What a specifically human comfort it was to see time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this riverrun of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time’s flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light. If only—

He looked at Ramsey, reading his plaque, oblivious to the geneticist’s ramble, and remembered the foaming waves at La Jolla, cupping forward out of Asia to break on the bare new land. Gordon shook his head, not knowing why, and reached for Marsha’s hand. A warming press.

He thought of the names ahead, in that deflected future, who had tried to send a signal into the receding murk of history, and write it fresh again. It took courage to send firefly hopes through the dark, phosphorescent dartings across an infinite swallowing velvet. They would need courage; the calamity they spoke of could engulf the world.

Scattered, polite applause. The President gave the hefty woman her plaque—the check would come later, Gordon knew—and she sat. Then Scranton peered into his bifocals and began to read, in the squarish vowels of Pennsylvania, the citation to Gordon Bernstein.

“—for investigations in nuclear magnetic resonance which produced a startling new effect—”

Gordon reflected that Einstein won the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, which was considered reasonably safe by 1921, and not for the still controversial theory of relativity. Good company to be in.

“—which, in a series of definitive experiments in 1963 and 1964 he showed could only be explained by the existence of a new kind of particle. This strange particle, the tac—tac—”

The President stumbled over the pronunciation. Agreeing laughter rippled through the audience. Something pricked in Gordon’s memory and he searched the dark bowl of faces. That laugh. Someone he knew?

“—tachyon, is capable of moving faster than the speed of light. This fact implies—”

The tight bun of hair, the lifted, almost jaunty chin. His mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history.

“—that the particles can themselves travel backward in time. The implications of this are of fundamental importance in many areas of modern science, from cosmology to—”

Gordon half rose, hands clenched. The proud energy in thè way she beamed, head turned to the flow of words—

“—the structure of the subnuclear particles. This is truly an immense—”

But in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again.

“—scale, echoing the increasing connection—”

The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary, called forth to see the President Still, something in her alert gaze—The room wavered, light blurred into pools.

“—between the microscopic and the macroscopic, a theme—”

Moisture on his cheeks. Gordon peered through his fuzzed focus at the lanky outline of the President, seeing him as a darker blotch beneath the burning spotlights. Beyond him, no less real, were the names from Cambridge, each a figure, each knowing the others, but never wholly. The shadowy figures moved now beyond reach, bound for their own destinations just as he and Ramsey and Marsha and Lakin and Penny were. But they were all simply figures. A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.