Short-short stories are exceptionally difficult to write in science fiction. It’s necessary to evoke a new world in every story, and once the background is explained there isn’t much space left for plot, characterization, and the other requirements of fiction. But if background, plot, and character are so closely interconnected that writing about one tells us about the rest, a great deal can be said in few words.

Greg Benford has written impressively in all lengths—his most recent novel is In the Ocean of Night—but he says he’s intrigued by the challenges of short fiction. “Nooncoming” could serve as a textbook example of how to meet those challenges.

* * * *

NOONCOMING

Gregory Benford

Saturday night, and they straggled into the cramped bar on Eucalyptus Boulevard. They nudged through the crowd and found friends, these aging people, ordered drinks, watched the crystal clouds at the ceiling form lurid, fleshy stories. But the best tales were the ones they told each other: Janek’s got a newsy flapping needs a big cast, senso and all, the works, I—so I go back and there are people living in my goddamn office for Christ’s sakes hanging out washing and the desks gone, just gone, the file cases made into a bureau—programmers? who needs programmers? this guy says to the crowd and Jeff, he throws a—could still maneuver one of those three-piecer rigs, ten gears an’ all, if some bastards hadn’t broken ‘em all down into little skimpy ratass haulers with—asked why an’ I guess I just wanna stay close to the old centers, hopin’ some big Brazilian money will come in like in ‘72 an’ a good derrick man can get on—queen she was from hunger and not gonna bust her head for any factory that traded her off—

Only one woman in the bar was eating alone and she was tucked back in a shadowed corner, far from the oily light. She was big-boned and deeply tanned, her denim pants and shirt cut in a manner that meant she had deliberately chosen them that way; they seemed to bracket her body rather than enfolding it. She wore only eyeshadow and her widely spaced eyes seemed to make her face broader than it was, more open, just as the backward sweep of her hair bared her face more than necessary. The long strands of it were held back by a clip and had occasional flecks of blond, enough to hint that with a little treatment she could have been a striking beauty. She ate steadily, no becoming hesitations, winding up neat cylinders of artichoke spaghetti and rolling them through the red sauce before taking precise bites out of them. Somehow the strands of green didn’t break free and hang down as she did this. She ignored the buzz of talk around her and drank regularly from a tumbler of dark red wine. Every few moments she would look up, not at the swirling lattice above that featured tangled bodies, nor at the Saturday night crowd in their flossy clothing, but toward the doorway.

The man she was waiting for appeared there, shouldering his way by a giggling clump of aging heavy drinkers, just after 1800 hours, thirty minutes late. He wore a frayed synthetic jacket, antique, like several others she had seen in the bar.

“Joanna, frange it, sorry I’m late.”

“I started without you,” she said simply, still chewing.

“Yes. A good house wine, isn’t it? Petite Sirah.”

“Right.”

He sat down and hunched forward, elbows on the burnished pine table. “I’ve already had something.”

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. He seemed fidgety and pale to her, but maybe that was because she was so used to seeing tanned people; everybody in town today had looked rather sickly, now that she thought about it.

“Yes. I, ah, I was celebrating. With some friends.”

“Celebrating returning to High Hopes?” She smiled. “That doesn’t sound like the Brian I—”

“No. I’m going back.”

“What?”

“Back ... on vacation.”

“Getting vacated, you mean. Renting space.”

She grimaced and put down her fork.

“However you want to describe it,” he said precisely.

“You tappers have your little words,” she murmured scornfully. “Going on vacation. Sounds like a free ride somewhere.”

“It is.”

“Stealing your life is—”

“Joanna.” He paused. “We’ve had this discussion before.”

“Look. You know High Hopes doesn’t like you selling yourself off this way—”

“They agreed to let me do it.”

“On an occasional basis.”

“Okay, it’s just getting less occasional. Let’s put it that way.”

“Skrag that.”

“I don’t owe you—”

“The hell you don’t. High Hopes has put up with your renting your lobes for—what?—three years, off and on. We let you run off to San Francisco and tap in, and then take off and squander the bills on—”

“High living,” he said sarcastically. His face wrinkled up into a thin smile.

“Right. Your fatcat amusements.”

“Travel. Good food. Too rich for your tastes, I know, but good nonetheless. But the rest of it—Joanna, it’s the work. I’m doing some damned interesting physics these days.”

“Useless,” she said decisively.

“Probably. Nonlinear dynamics—not much use in digging potatoes.”

“You never did that. You were a pod cutter.”

“Grunt labor is all the same.”

Her eyes flashed. “Group work is never—”

“I know, I know.” Brian waved a hand listlessly and looked around. “Think I’ll have some of that red ink.”

He got up and squeezed through the packed room, toward the wine barrel and glasses. There were no waiters here, to keep costs down. Joanna watched him move and suddenly it struck her that Brian was getting older, at least forty-five now. He had a certain heavy way of moving she wasn’t used to seeing at High Hopes.

“Good stuff,” he said, sitting back down. He sipped at the glass and studied the layered air around them. There was a musty, sour scent.

“Did we have to meet here?” Joanna said, resuming eating.

“Why not?”

“All these old—well, some of them look pretty seamy.”

“They are seamy. We’re getting that way.”

“If they’d pitch in, get some exercise—”

“Ha! Look, my sturdy girl of the soil, these people are artists, engineers, scientists, administrators, men and women with education. They like living in town, even if it’s this little dimple of a burg, two hundred klicks down from the city they all want to live in, San Francisco.”

“A bunch of rattle-headed sophies,” she said, chewing.

“Sophies?”

“Sophisticates, isn’t that what you call yourselves?”

“Oh, you’ve got a name for us.”

“Why not? You’re the biggest trouble back at High Hopes. Always wanting what you can’t have any more.”

He licked his lips. “We want the old days. Good jobs. To own something worth a damn.”

“Possessions,” she said wryly. “Only they possess you—that’s what you people forgot.”

“We still remember the dignity of it.”

She snorted and took a long drink. “Ego feeding.”

“No!” he said earnestly. “There were people, ideas, things happening.”

“We’re making things happen, if that’s what you want,” she said. She finished the last green strand and dropped her fork into the plate with a rattle. The thick crockery was filmed with grease.

“Surviving, that’s all,” he murmured.

“There are good problems. We’re not just a bunch of simple-minded farmers, you know. You seem to’ve forgotten—”

“No, I haven’t. Tapping doesn’t blur the memory.”

“Well, it must. Otherwise you’d come back to the one group of people who care about you.”

“Really? Or do you want me to patch up the chem and bio systems?”

“There’s that,” she said grudgingly.

“And sit around evenings, pinned to the communal 3D, or bored to death.”

“We do more than that,” Joanna said mildly.

“I know. And you have wondrous thighs, Joanna, but they can’t encompass all my troubles.”

She smiled and brushed at her severely tied-back hair. “You’re still possessive about the sex thing, too, aren’t you?”

“Terribly old style of me, I know.”

“Ummm,” she said. Brian tipped his glass at her in mock salute and went to refill it. Joanna leaned back in her chair, reflecting moodily. She remembered the old English woman who had died last year, working with a kind of resigned energy right up until her last day. The woman had said to Joanna, as she went inside the dormitory to lie down for what proved to be the last time, “You know, my dear, you’re wrong that suffering ennobles people.” She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.” So was that it—Brian and the rest of the older ones looked on the honest labor in the pod rows as petty, degrading?

Joanna watched Brian standing patiently in line by the wine barrel. She remembered that Brian had talked to the English woman a lot, while most of High Hopes was watching the 3D in the evenings. They’d talked of what they’d once had, and Brian even spoke of it when he and Joanna lay together occasionally. The dry dead past, gaudy and stupid. She remembered Brian frowning in displeasure as the sounds of the next couple came through the thin walls. He had disapproved of them strongly, and it was all Joanna could do to stop him leaping out of bed and going next door to stop Dominic—it was usually Julie and Dominic—beating her. He had the idea that things people did together for sex were public somehow, that there were rules High Hopes should maintain. Standards, he called them. And even when they were at it themselves, pumping with a steady rhythm as though propelling each other over the same steepening slope of a familiar hill, when the sound came of Julie’s high, wavering cry—which then slid into something almost like a laugh, a chuckle at some recognizable delight that lay ahead and would come upon her—then Brian would freeze against her loins and seethe, his mood broken. And she, mystified at first, would try to rock him gently back into reality and out of his dusty obsessions. She would wrap herself around him and draw him back down; once, she misunderstood and offered to do those things for him, perform whatever he liked, and the look on his face told her more about Brian than all the conversations.

Odd, she thought, that she should remember that now. Her sexual interest in him was no greater than for any of the others at High Hopes. A recreation, a kind of warming exercise that bound them all together and eased the days of labor into sleep.

He returned, smiling in the wan lamplight. “Can you stay in town tonight?”

“Why?” she said.

“Not so I can hear more lectures on High Hopes, I assure you of that. No, I want to sleep with you again.”

“Oh,” she said, and realized she was saying it stiffly, formally, that something in her was drawing away from Brian and the memories of Brian.

“Come on.”

“It isn’t that way, Brian. You don’t own somebody—”

“I know, I’ve heard it. These flesh shows”—he gestured at the tangled bodies on the ceiling above—”are very much a cultural remnant. Like everybody in here.”

Joanna looked around, grimacing. “Unsatisfied people. They can’t stand being frogs in a small pond.”

“No, it’s not that,” Brian said wearily. “They remember when they could do more, be more. Make sound sculptures, explore new things, use their minds for once—”

“Loaf around in a university.”

He smiled wanly. “I’m surprised you remember the word. The regime has just ruled that only the Davis Agri-works is legal now—crop studies, that’s it. I don’t—”

“Look, Brian,” she said abruptly. “I came into town to get some supplies and pick you up. The bus doesn’t run into mid-Sur any more, so you’d have had to hike in. We’ve got a lot of new people drifting in, refugees from southern California, starving, most of them. Don’t know a damn thing about work. That’s why we need you—you’re our best, y’know. We have to—”

“I told you,” he said, stony-faced. “I’m going on vacation.”

“Those damned franging computers don’t need you! We do. They could get animals—”

“I’ve told you before. Animals don’t have enough holographic data-storing capability. They lose too much detail.”

“Then the hell with the whole skrag!”

“That’s right,” he said savagely, “tear it down. You don’t understand it so you want to sacrifice the whole biosystems inventory, the ecological index, everything that’s holding this poor battered world together—”

“Don’t come on noble with me. You like the pay, getting to live back in the rotten city again—”

Her voice rose to a shrill edge and several people turned their heads, frowning. She was suddenly aware of how old and strange and distant all these people were, with their broken dreams and memories. And she glanced at the only window in the room to see a yellowish fog pressing against the pane. Beaded moisture glinted in the wan light. She would have to get started soon, before it thickened.

“You’re right,” Brian said, and his voice was oddly quiet. “I like to be among my own kind. I don’t mind the price I pay. They hook me up during peak periods and the computers, which don’t have enough solid state electronics banks left to do the calculations, push into my lobes and use the space there. I know what you think of it and I don’t care. I know it looks grotesque to you, on the outside. I lie there still as a stone and the data flits through me, the machines using my neural capacity to do their work, and it’s like dreaming and drifting and dreaming again, only when you wake up you can’t remember what it was all about. You’re vacated—every memory you had in those spaces is wiped, gone. But it’s usually unimportant stuff and, Joanna, that doesn’t matter, that isn’t it. That’s merely the price—what I get is freedom, time to talk to other people who’re working in my field and still care about those things, some feeling of the old days.”

“So you’re going to stay there.”

“Right.”

“Instead of working for a better world, here—” “I’m going to clutch after the only way I can stay in the old one. And I’m needed there, too, Joanna. The cost of making new computer elements is enormous. How much better, to link into the best, most compact neural net ever made—our brains—and use the few educated people left to work with the computer systems, guide them, be both storage space and programmers—”

Her face barely repressed the rage she felt. “We need you. You’re a resource, trained people are scarce who’ll work in the communes, and—”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. With an abrupt gesture he tossed back the glass of wine. “I want the old way. I’m not going to bust my tail.”

They looked at each other and she suddenly felt alien and alone in this strange place, this room of people who had washed up like refuse in the towns, refusing to go out into the forgiving countryside any more, clinging to the dear dead past, and felt the abyss that opened between them and her. They were living in some place that the world had once been, and would never be again. So in an odd way she and her kind were parents to their elders now, and must shelter them against the world. It was at that moment that she realized that the revolution she had been a part of was over, the morning was finished, and the long day of the human race was beginning.

“Have some more wine, Brian,” she said softly after a while. “I’ve got to head on back pretty soon now.”