Progress? A reprieve against the long decline?
“There’s more, Susannah.”
The way he said it—his falling tone—it was a warning that set her tired heart pounding.
“You asked me to act as your agent,” he reminded her. “You asked me to screen all news, and I’ve done that.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he agreed, looking down, looking frightened by the knowledge he had decided to convey. “I should have told you sooner.”
“But you didn’t want to risk interrupting work on the obelisk?”
“You said you didn’t want to hear anything.” He shrugged. “I took you at your word.”
“Nate, will you just say it?”
“You have a granddaughter, Susannah.”
She replayed these words in her head, once, twice. They didn’t make sense.
“DNA tests make it certain,” he explained. “She was born six months after her father’s death.”
“No.” Susannah did not dare believe it. It was too dangerous to believe. “They both died. That was confirmed by the survivors. They posted the IDs of all the dead.”
“Your daughter-in-law lived long enough to give birth.”
Susannah’s chest squeezed tight. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the child is still alive?”
“Yes.”
Anger rose hot, up out of the past. “And how long have you known? How long have you kept this from me?”
“Two months. I’m sorry, but …”
But we had our priorities. The tombstone. The Martian folly.
She stared at the floor, too stunned to be happy, or maybe she’d forgotten how. “You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“And I … I shouldn’t have walled myself off from the world. I’m sorry.”
“There’s more,” he said cautiously, as if worried how much more she could take.
“What else?” she snapped, suddenly sure this was just another game played by the master torturer, to draw the pain out. “Are you going to tell me that my granddaughter is sickly? Dying? Or that she’s a mad woman, perhaps?”
“No,” he said meekly. “Nothing like that. She’s healthy, and she has a healthy two-year-old daughter.” He got up, put an age-marked hand on the door knob. “I’ve sent you her contact information. If you need an assistant to help you build the habitat, let me know.”
He was a friend, and she tried to comfort him. “Nate, I’m sorry. If there was a choice—”
“There isn’t. That’s the way it’s turned out. You will tear down the obelisk, and this woman, Tory Eastman, will live another year, maybe two. Then the equipment will break and she will die and we won’t be able to rebuild the tower. We’ll pass on, and the rest of the world will follow—”
“We can’t know that, Nate. Not for sure.”
He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”
He opened the door. For a few seconds, wind gusted in, until he closed it again. She heard his clogs crossing the porch and a minute later she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road.
You have a granddaughter. One who grew up without her parents, in a quarantine zone, with no real hope for the future and yet she was healthy, with a daughter already two years old.
And then there was Tory Eastman of Mars, who had left a dying colony and driven an impossible distance past doubt and despair, because she knew you have to do everything you can, until you can’t do anymore.
Susannah had forgotten that, somewhere in the dark years.
She sat for a time in the stillness, in a quiet so deep she could hear the beating of her heart.
This all looks like hope.
Indeed it did and she well knew that hope could be a duplicitous gift from the master torturer, one that opened the door to despair.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” she whispered to the empty room. “I’m not done. Not yet.”
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. He has published forty-two books, mostly novels.
SHADOWS OF ETERNITY
Gregory Benford
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would gaze an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity.
—Henry Vaughn, The Retreate, 1690
Falling in. She can feel somehow the gossamer sailcraft’s long nose-dive into the red star’s grav potential, as if her own body were there, plunging arrow-quick, dozens of light years away.
Her pod hummed, using her entire body to convey connections through its induced neural web. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin, bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from intricate flurries of her nervous system—the burr and tang of temperature, particle plasma flux, spectral flickers, kinesthetic glides and swivels, sharp images of the unending dark, lit by a smoldering dot of a sun.
These merged with her own in-board subsystems, coupled with highbit-rate feeds the Artilects had already processed and smoothed from the sailcraft’s decades of laser-beamed signals back to Earthside.
She went to fast-forward and the sailcraft plunged, its magnetic brakes on full. Down the potential well it flew in star-sprinkled dark. It heard no electromagnetics bearing patterns, from radio through to optical. Yet Earthside knew from a few pixels that one world here held an atmosphere out of equilibrium, clear signs of life that used oxygen and methane. So: life, perhaps minds, but no technology that spoke in waves. This L-dwarf star was of the commonplace majority, perhaps 75% or more of those stars in the disk, fully half of the total stellar mass in the Galaxy.
The craft chose its own path, looping intricately through repeated grav-wraps around three gas giants in the outer system, losing delta-Vs all the while. Now it had lost enough of
