Gregory Benford - Timescape

At last they had a beer before lunch and Jack switched to other subjects. Linus Pauling had just won the Nobel Peace Prize: what did Gordon think of that? Wasn’t this the first time anybody had won two Nobels? No, Gordon pointed out, Madame Curie had won one in physics and another in chemistry. Gordon was afraid this would launch them into politics. He was pretty sure Jack was a member of the disarmament-equals-Munich school, pushed locally by William Knowland of the Oakland Trib . But lack adroitly side-stepped the point and ushered them into a steaming lunch of soup and well-marbled minute steaks. Jacaranda trees cloaked a portion of the view from the dining room. The rest of the windows gave a sweeping vista of bay and city and hills. The steak was perfect.

“See?” Penny called. “Ajax knows what you’re going to do before you know yourself.”

Gordon watched. The big horse shivered, snorted, blinked. She took Ajax from a standing position directly into a canter. Ajax bounded forward, puffing, ears pricked. She could get the animal to turn from either foot instantly, and make him walk sideways using only the pressure of her leg. She moved Ajax subtly, coasting around the corral.

Gordon slumped against the railings. Come at it from a different angle . Okay, Ramsey had the biochem part wrapped up. But that was a piece, not the whole puzzle. The only other hard data they had was good old RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, a drum beat that led nowhere. It had to mean something—

“Gordon! I’m taking Ajax out on a trail ride. Want to come?”

“Uh, okay. No riding, though.”

“Come on.”

He shook his head, distracted. All he could remember now from the previous hour of her instruction was how to avoid getting kicked. When you walked behind him you had to keep close to the rump, so the horse knew there wasn’t room to get in a good healthy whack with his hoof. Brushing the tail apparently told the animal you were not a suitable target to relieve its minor irritations on, and it lost interest. This seemed doubtful to Gordon. It was an animal, after all, incapable of such foresight.

He hiked along the ridge line above her. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. They were just below the lip of the Oakland hills. The rumpled brown landscape of Contra Costa County lay in the distance. The redwoods and pines around him were musty with a dry, swarming odor he could not place. 263 KEV PEAK. POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM. A fine dust rose in puffs to greet his steps. It was late afternoon. Blue shadows lanced through the dusty clouds behind Ajax. Penny had come here every day when she was in high school, Jack told him. Gordon had considered making a wry joke about the Freudian implications of adolescent girls and horseback riding. He decided against it after a glance at Penny. CAN VERIFY WITH NMR. This horsy ambience was far away from the sandlot ball he remembered as his only sport. Clop clop of hooves, images of Gary Cooper or maybe Ida Lupino, a stately glide through aisles of looming redwoods: serene. Gordon felt heavy and conspicuous. He plodded through the woods in black street shoes his mother had bought in Macy’s, unsuited for this distant continent. He felt surrounded here by a naturalness he found foreign. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. Yea verily.

That night, when he made love to her back at the motel, Penny seemed changed. Her hips had got harder. Angular patterns of bone spoke to him through the thin cloak of flesh. She was tough, western, a horsewoman. She knew that artichokes grew on a sort of bush, not on trees. She could cook over an open fire. He found her breasts more pointed, with pronounced nipples, rosy and soft, that puckered swiftly as he sucked on them. The east was east and the west was west.

Jack took them out Sunday in late morning to watch some walnutting he had invested in. In the walnut groves near Alamo a mechanical tree-shaker chuffed and wheezed. Its hydraulic arm yanked at the tree trunks, bringing showers of nuts bursting from the sky. Men shepherded a contraption down the lanes between the trees, coaxing its engine. It flicked rubber flippers to the side, herding the nuts into ragged rows. A picker followed after. The walnuts were still in their dappled green husks and the picker scooped them up, leaving behind the twigs and dirt and snapped branches. Jack explained that this new method would pay off in no time. A trailer carried the nuts to a gauntlet of brushes and wire nets, where the hulls were rubbed off. A natural gas oven baked off any hulls that stuck. “Going to revolutionize the industry,” Jack pronounced. Gordon watched the huffing machines and the gangs of men tending them. They worked even on Sunday; it was harvest. The walnut groves were soothing after the bleak scrub desert of Southern California. The long shadowed ranks of green reminded him of upper New York State. The clanking arm that strangled trees for their nuts was disturbing, though: a new, robot west.

“Can I borrow some of those astronomy books of yours this afternoon?” he asked Jack abruptly.

Jack nodded, surprised, covering it with a baffled grin. Penny rolled her eyes and grimaced: Won’t you ever stop working, even for a weekend? Gordon shrugged, daunted for a moment by her silent condemnation. He saw that she wanted this weekend to work, in some sense. Perhaps he and just plain Jack were supposed to strike up some sudden comradeship. Well, maybe they would, given the right occasion. But this weekend wasn’t it. Gordon knew he had been drifting through it in a daze, distracted by the problem. Yet knowing the fact didn’t change it. And whenever he did join in, he found himself misreading Penny’s parents. He was acutely conscious of sleeping with their daughter. Sticking it to the shiksa, yeah . What was the agreed-upon California way to deal with that fact? Politely ignoring the sleeping arrangements? He supposed so, and yet he still felt uncomfortable.

The tree-shaker grunted and yanked, bringing him out of his ruminations. He had been standing with his hands behind his back, his usual lecturer pose, staring at a clod of earth. Gordon looked up at the others, who had moved off toward the car. Penny gave her father a wry, resigned look, gesturing at Gordon: family signals.

There was nothing in the indexes of Jack’s books about Hercules. Gordon paged through them, looking for something about the constellations. There were star charts, seasonal views of Ursa Major and Orion and the Southern Cross. Students who had been reared under city lights needed a simple guide to the stars. Gordon was no different. He studied the lines connecting the stellar dots, trying to understand why anybody thought these looked like hunters or swans or bulls. Then a passage caught his eye.

Our own sun is in motion, just as all stars are. We revolve about the center of our galaxy at a speed of about 150 miles per second. In addition, the sun is moving at about 12 miles per second toward a point near the star Vega, in the Hercules cluster. Many thousands of years from now, the constellations will appear different, because of such motions of stars relative to each other. In Figure 8 the constellation…

Penny drove him over to the Berkeley campus. She had liked the idea of going for a drive around the area again, even though it meant seeing a little less of her parents. Her attitude changed when she saw that he did not want to stroll around the campus at all, and instead headed directly for the Physics Department library. The library was in a building next to the campanile but Gordon refused to ride the elevator up and look at the view. He waved goodbye to her and went inside.