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Cover art by Jean-Pierre Normand
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: HELP THE MEDICINE GO DOWN by Stanley Schmidt
IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: ICARUS BEACH by C. W. JOHNSON
Science Fact: FINDING PLANEMOS by KEVIN WALSH
Novelette: KUKULKAN by SARAH K. CASTLE
Short Story: ANYTHING WOULD BE WORTH IT by LESLEY L. SMITH
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE AGAINST OBJECTIVE REALITY by JOHN G. CRAMER
Poetry: A CITY FORGED OF STEEL by GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
Short Story: SALVATION by JERRY OLTION
Short Story: “DOMO ARIGATO,” SAYS MR. ROBOTO by ROBERT R. CHASE
Novella: REUNION by DAVID W. GOLDMAN
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by TOM EASTON
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS
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Vol. CXXVII No. 12, December 2007
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
EDITORIAL: HELP THE MEDICINE GO DOWN by Stanley Schmidt
Every few years, at least since the first Earth Day in 1970, it becomes fashionable for people to Care About the Environment and Make Sacrifices to Save It. For a while lots of people try to drive less, raise or lower their thermostats (depending on the season), use local products, and recycle. Then the feeling of novelty wears off, they lose interest in self-righteousness, and move on to the next fad. None of which is surprising, given the popularity of living from fad to fad, but it does little good if there's really a long-term problem with pollution, resource depletion, or global warming. If these things are actually threats, ameliorative measures that work will require a long-term commitment from many people.
How might such a thing be made to happen?
I submit that most attempts have been doomed from the start because they fail to allow for the realities of human nature. Not just fickleness and shortsightedness, but really basic things like this: unless people personally see and feel a compelling reason to do otherwise, they will almost invariably choose easy and comfortable ways over difficult and unpleasant ones. Maybe that's a character flaw, but it's a reality, and any serious attempt to change behavior in a lasting way will have to take it into account, not just wish it were otherwise.
Let's consider a couple of examples: using public transportation instead of driving, and disposing of toxic wastes responsibly.
We're often exhorted to take bicycles, buses, or trains instead of driving, because when a large percentage of people do so, traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and the generation of greenhouse gases are all reduced. Most people understand this, in principle, but many still choose to drive when the option exists.
Let us grant first of all that the option doesn't always exist. Some people must drive to work because they live in and have to travel between places where public transportation is not available and distance, terrain, or the loads they must carry make bicycling impractical. Others never drive because they live in places (like New York City) where public transportation is readily available and they can't afford to own a car or find driving one under local conditions too unpleasant.
Those who can choose are people between those extremes, and that's a pretty broad range. Personally, I always use public transportation to get into and around Manhattan, because it's usually pretty decent and driving there is a pain. (Okay, I confess: I drove into Manhattan once because my wife and I had tickets for a ballet at Lincoln Center and she broke her foot a couple of days before the show. But that was the only time in the last 30 years or so.) There are people who live in Manhattan and routinely drive there because, for them, the annoyances of driving are less onerous than those of using subways or buses. (Of course, some of them don't really drive there, but hire chauffeurs to do it for them—which is a whole other kettle of worms.)
For some (but by no means all) of the places I go near home, in a rural area utterly different from Manhattan, I could take a bus, if I absolutely had to. But I would waste a great deal of time doing so because there are very few routes and they run so seldom that I would spend hours waiting for buses. If I drive, I can go directly to where I need to go, do what I need to do, and go directly home (or to my next errand). There are often so many things that I have to do, in scattered locations, that that advantage is important. Even if it were not a matter of strict necessity, I freely confess that, like many people in a similar situation, I would seldom pick the bus. Life is too short to spend any more of it than I have to waiting for buses.
And there's the rub. Using mass transit For the Good of All sounds very noble in the abstract; but if someone has become accustomed to the convenience and privacy of having his or her own vehicle to go exactly where they want to, door to door, on their own schedule, with no extra stops, it will be really hard to see standing on a hot, crowded, noisy, dirty subway platform, wondering when the train will come and hoping it will have a vacant seat, as an improvement. Those who would have everyone take mass transportation whenever possible will have to come to terms with that fact. Many people will choose the subway or bus if and only if it truly seems the better choice, not only in abstract philosophical terms, but at the gritty level of everyday personal reality. For me, it meets that test in Manhattan, because the trains run frequently and miles and miles of slow, incessantly horn-blowing traffic make driving too tedious. But I can understand part of the reason why that traffic is so tedious: some of those drivers are there because they find the aforementioned conditions in the subways as unpleasant as I find driving above them. It's a matter of personal preference, and ultimately that's what most people will use to decide.
The lesson is simple: if you want more people to use buses and subways, you have to make them more inviting. They have to take people where they want to go, when they want to go, with an acceptable level of comfort and perceived safety. New York subways do pretty well on convenience, but others, such as Montreal, show that they could do far better on comfort and esthetics. Yes, making subways more appealing would cost money, and most people claim to be (and are) already overtaxed. But if Concerned Citizens really want it to happen, they will have to find affordable, cost-effective ways to do it.
How about toxic waste disposal? Few of us would say that we want our fellow citizens dumping last year's snowblower fuel and pesticides into our drinking water sources, but what else can they do with it? To their credit, many municipalities and counties now hold periodic household waste disposal days on which residents can bring such things to be disposed of by workers trained in their safe handling. Less to their credit, these programs are often set up in such a way that they are at best inconvenient and difficult, and at worst impossible, to use.
I recently took several years’ accumulation of chemicals to one of these. It was several years’ worth because we had not been able to get a slot on several previous attempts. Even though the county says it's doing this to encourage all residents to do the right thing with their hazardous household chemicals, they only hold the day for doing so once a year, and limit it to the first 400 people who call to make an appoin
tment.
The population of the county is roughly 100,000. What are the rest of those people doing with their toxic wastes?
No doubt some, like us, collect them for several years and bring them all in at once when they get the chance. But others, no doubt, lose patience with that and simply find their own ways to get rid of them, some of which we'd probably rather not know about.
Furthermore, when we got to the collection site—twenty-plus miles away, at the other end of the county—we had to wait in a line of idling cars, in the rain, for more than half an hour. We'll do it again, if we must; but I wonder how many in that line will decide it wasn't worth the trouble, and resolve not to repeat the experience.
I'm not sure how it can be improved. Here's one thought: This same county has several town recycling centers open on a regular schedule year-round, and closer to most residents’ homes. Could their services be expanded to include collecting hazardous wastes? Yes, I know people doing the ultimate disposal need special training, and I realize that any extra service will cost—and that residents of this county are (again) already overburdened with taxes. But sometimes clever people can find ways to do things less expensively than they thought. E.g., might the local recycling centers just store the stuff, and then periodically take it to a central location for final disposition by specialists?
My purpose today is not to provide the answer (though I would if I could) so much as to get at least a few people thinking about it, in the hope that some of them will come up with answers. We need them; these questions are important.
And answers that ignore the way people actually make personal decisions are hardly answers at all. People will swallow bitter medicine if they absolutely have to, but by the time they're convinced of that, it may be too late. If you want them to take it sooner, you must make it as palatable as possible.
Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt
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[Back to Table of Contents]
IN TIMES TO COME
Our next (January/February) issue is one of our two annual doubles, and leads off with an oversized opening installment of Joe Haldeman's new serial, Marsbound. The title lends itself to at least two interpretations, both of which are at least partly applicable. And while the story does involve Martians, they are, as Joe puts it, “not your grandfather's Martians.” You'll see that as soon as you meet them, and likely find them among the most intriguing aliens you've ever encountered. But there's much more to them than meets the eye....
Back in 1998, Tom Ligon had a fact article here called “The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor,” which attracted plenty of attention both among our regular readers and “outside.” Next month he's back with “The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited,” an in-depth follow-up about bigger and better research along similar lines done by folks including, among others, Robert Bussard.
And, since it's a double issue, we'll have lots more fiction of all shapes and sizes, by such writers as Barry B. Longyear (yes, Jaggers and Shad are back!), Geoffrey A. Landis, Ron Goulart, Wil McCarthy, Jerry Oltion, and Carl Frederick.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Novelette: ICARUS BEACH by C. W. JOHNSON
How far can our culture's obsession with “extremes” go?
As Kazo plummeted toward the heart of the doomed star, she thought of what Apilak had told her:
Love, Apilak had said, is no more eternal than the stars. It may burn slow and steady for a long time and then gradually shrink away, or it may burn bright and hot for a brief period, only to end spectacularly.
Like a supernova? Kazo had said, her voice sharp with sarcasm.
Apilak laughed. Of course! And then Apilak added softly, But those are cynical words. We live in the light of ephemeral suns, Kazo. We all need that light.
Now, falling, Kazo felt only darkness.
* * * *
In the dark of her cabin, when Majnu had touched her, Kazo had felt the searing heat of desire; the dark swirled around their bodies, but inside, beneath her skin, in her lungs and her thighs and her head, heat and light roared and filled her.
They met shortly before the supernova, in preparation for the rare tarindhu celebration of rebirth. Once or twice a century, when a massive star ripens to death, a few hundred thousand of the galaxy's most devoted, superrich tarindhus gather to witness the explosion that destroys the star while simultaneously reseeding the starlanes with heavy elements. Of those devotees, maybe a thousand will descend into the heart of the star and ride the shockwave. A third perish, the most honored of deaths. And to survive—survival heralds the rise of a family's fortunes, both material and spiritual.
Although she had never been through a supernova, Nagaan Kazo had had many adventures in her young life. The Nagaan family—Kazo, her older sister Kumko, and their mother Haisho—worked as guides aboard the starcraft Umialik, hired by the superrich to tour extreme environments of the galaxy.
Apilak, the owner and captain of the Umialik, was a genius at spinning knotted anomalies into brane-shifted blisters, best in all the galaxy. She never lacked customers.
When word spread that the star Maishaitan was nearly ripe, Apilak put the services of her ship out to bid. She won a contract with old Samraatju Rajraan, to carry him and his third brood of children to the supernova. The Samraatju owned a flock of moons that manufactured knotted anomalies. Apilak's price: sufficient knotted anomalies to fling the Umialik across the galaxy and back a hundred times.
Nagaan Haisho, Kazo's mother, did not reveal her price.
* * * *
They were to collect the Samraatju brood on Kitna Two, at a seaside town at low latitude. The air was thick and hot, the sky tinged toward the color of a yellow fruit above a steely sea. Kazo begged to go swimming.
Haisho looked at her for a while, silent. Kazo thought of her mother as a bar of old iron, unbending, the surface scuffed but unreadable. At last Haisho nodded. “Come immediately when I signal.” And off Haisho went, followed by her other daughter. Walking away Kumko looked back over her shoulder, glanced right and left and made a sour face at Kazo. Kazo stuck her tongue out at Kumko, then ran down the lane to the beach. She kicked off her sandals as she crossed the hot sand. At the water's edge, where sea foam shivered in a slight wind, she pulled off her tunic and pants and splashed naked into the waves. Salt water filled her mouth. She spit it out and dove down deep.
Kazo loved swimming in the cool silent world beneath the surface. It was calm and peaceful, like the space between stars, but more comforting. Kumko was afraid of the water, afraid of drowning, although she regularly did far more dangerous things in space. Haisho had no use for the sea, for it could give neither advantage to the family nor enlightenment and release from the burdens of this plane. Kazo disagreed: swimming beneath the waves was the closest she felt to detachment, but Haisho said it was an illusion and dangerous for its feigned peace. “You cannot stay there forever. You must always come up for air. What kind of peace is that?
"
"I'll graft gills,” Kazo shot back, but she did not have them yet, so she swam up to the silver mirror of the surface. Salt water streamed down her face as she gasped air.
When she waded back ashore, squeezing water from her hair, she noticed a boy sitting beneath a lone tree on the beach. He was lean and dark, darker than Kazo even, wearing only short pants and sandals. In the meager shade of the tree he cradled a bookslate and did not seem to notice her.
Kazo bundled her tunic and pants under her arm and walked toward the boy. He was only a little younger than her, and beautiful, with long black hair that flowed over his narrow shoulders and down his chest. Around his neck he had a pendant, the wheel of stars of a tarindhu. She stopped before him, as the hot sun dried the last drops of water from her skin, but still he kept his head bowed. “Samraatju?” she asked.
Now he looked up, shielding his eyes with one hand, and nodded. “Samraatju Majnu.” He glanced at her bracelet, with the wheel of swords of the taruddhist. “You?"
"Nagaan Kazo. We're to guide you at the supernova."
"Have you been through a supernova?"
Kazo laughed in surprise. “The last supernova was seventy years ago. My mother went through it, in her youth. She'll teach you."
But now Majnu was looking down the beach, where three figures distorted by the heat walked toward them. “My brother and sisters,” he murmured. “Best get dressed or Gojraan will make a nasty remark. He probably will anyway."
As Kazo slipped on her clothes, the figures trudged across the sand, morphing from wavering black sticks into solid human forms. The man in a linen tunic and shorts was heavyset, with a pale, milky face, a black mustache, and a black scowl. Majnu's sisters were dark and slender like him, one tall and one petite. The shorter girl broke away from the others and slid into the sand next to Majnu. “Hi,” she said cheerfully. She looked about Kazo's age. “I'm Kushri."
The other two looked much older than Majnu. The tall sister studiously avoided looking at Kazo, while the brother, who also wore a tarindhu wheel-of-stars pendant, stared coldly at Kazo. Kazo turned and looked out at the water, wishing she were in the peace beneath the waves.
Analog SFF, December 2007 Page 1