Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  Had I known of such an effect? The Hong Kong police wanted to know. I related the SanJi incident. They knew it already because I had included it in my Net comments.

  The police went away finally. After all I had done nothing beyond publishing comments, as requested.

  There was no word about the foxy thing. I never saw another like it either.

  I thought about her a lot then. There were other rumors about her but the big fact was the death. It always will be the big fact, now. Experimenting at the edge of knowledge can be wondrous but also fatal. Knowing that is our unique human condition. We know we will die and evolution gives us countless ways that make it happen.

  Desires can kill you, too. When she came to my home and tried in her awkward way to seduce me I had not let desire rule me. So she had lost her edge that had come from the konn.

  Desire can kill the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure they can bring you down as well, but there will be no special hurry. So in our pursuit of knowledge we scamper after those desires, much like her fox.

  HABILIS

  Howard Hendrix

  * * *

  Is the universe left-handed? If so, why?

  Hold up your hands before you and take a good look at them. What you are staring at is the most wonderful piece of biological engineering on Earth.

  The human hand is the only one (on Earth) in which the thumb can touch the tips of each of the other four fingers. Only human hands can play the violin. Or throw a curveball.

  Our hands developed before our brains did, as far as paleoanthropologists can determine. Did our supple hands lead to the development of our complex brains? And intelligence?

  Howard Hendrix’s tale of right-handedness and left-handedness is a complex, subtle examination of these questions. But what are the answers? Read on.

  * * *

  Driving my used but newly purchased Montjoy LoCat onto the fish hatchery grounds, I can hear the spatter of gravel, despite The Pharaoh and Denile’s “Pi-Rat Love” blasting from the vehicle’s Airpush speakers. The dusting of new snow on the road doesn’t damp down the road noise much—just makes the gravel slicker, easier for me to fishtail sideways, a wannabe big fish in a small pond of Planet Dolores.

  Ahead, beside the hatchery’s ancient Sun Dog pickup, my boss Mark Kemper is standing, a wiry man with wiry hair. The space around his head is wreathed in the steam of his breath hitting cold air and the smoke of the skankweed stick he’s huffing. Chill morning notwithstanding, he’s wearing the same old two-pocket, lightweight ASGuard jacket he wore off world during the Knot War. He doesn’t like wearing heavy coats, even in cold weather. The pockets bother him. Mark says a man with too many pockets soon finds he has too few hands.

  The first time Mark told me the story of his lost and found hand, we were dressed in chest-high waders, sludging out Pond 7, removing the thick, foul-smelling organic muck we’d pressure-hosed from the bottom of the drained pond into the concrete-lined, boxlike depression—the “kettle”—at the pond’s deepest point. The stinking stuff—a mix of mud, fish dung, debris, and detritus Mark called “crap pudding”—was too thick for the pump to suction up, so we were shoveling the mucky dregs of it by hand from the kettle’s bottom.

  “I should have died when the Bots turned our own war AIs against us and drove us from Citadel Moon,” Mark said. “My left hand was blown away, but that was among the least of my worries. I lay there, bleeding out from half a dozen wounds, among the dead and dying bodies of my comrades, in a dying spaceship, with the Bots breaking through our last bulkhead.”

  I power the LoCat’s passenger window down. Hearing the courtship ballad of Pi-rat Susie and Pi-rat Sam blaring from my speakers, Mark shakes his head. From beneath a mustache smoke-stained the color of rusted barbed wire, he flashes me a lopsided smile.

  “A ground effector is not the kind of tuna boat I’d have chosen to drive,” he says, thumping the Montjoy, “but that song reminds me of something—beyond the fact that it’s ripped off from a two-hundred-year-old pop hit.”

  He elaborates no further, just opens the battered blue Sun Dog’s driver-side door and gets in. I kill the LoCat’s engine and the music and exit my vehicle.

  “I think that’s why I’m still alive,” Mark said, glancing down at his complex prosthetic hand, then gazing at the space above the message board in the office where we were taking our lunch break. “That there is why I’m still looking on the sunlight, instead of eternal night. Despite being captured by the Bots.”

  His gaze, I saw, had come to rest on the banner above the board. The banner was labeled with the digits 0 through 9. Next to them stood the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, capitals and smalls both, from Aa to Zz. The previous fish-hatchery manager had homeschooled her kids here, and the office retained something of the air of a classroom about it.

  “What? The numbers and letters?”

  “Not just in themselves. The handedness of them, the chirality. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, recapitulates chirogeny, recapitulates cosmogeny. Or maybe cosmogony. The Bots seem to think it’s the key to human difference, however you spell it.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Look at the ten numbers there, and hold out your right hand, palm facing away from you. Sixty percent of them—1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9—are right-handed, opening outward in the same direction your thumb and forefinger do from your right hand. Now hold out your left hand, palm away again. Twenty percent of the numbers—5, and 6—are left-handed. The remaining twenty percent—8 and 0—express mirror symmetry. You might call those numbers ambidextrous, since they face both directions and neither. See that?”

  “I think so.”

  Opening the creaking door on the truck’s passenger side and climbing in, I note the truck cab smells of beer and skankweed again this morning, as it has every morning since Mark and his wife split up, six Doloresian months back.

  The tale of the wreck of his marriage is Mark’s second most oft-repeated story, and he keeps telling it, though by now he knows I know it by heart: Jinny was the high school sweetheart he married before he caught a NAFAL troopship to the up and out. Quirks of near-light-speed travel and time dilation being what they are, he aged only the two years of his tour fighting the Bots, while Jinny, planetside, aged the twelve years he was gone in her reference frame. She stayed with him five years after he came home, too. She’d long since grown up and grown away from him, though even before she left, taking their little girl—the save-the-marriage baby that didn’t—with her.

  “Jinny treated every bump in the road as if it were a cliff,” Mark says, always coming to the same point in his sifting of the wreckage. “I treated every cliff as if it were a bump in the road. We just couldn’t make that work together, in the long run.”

  “I passed out from blood loss, certain I would die,” Mark said, standing knee-deep in kettle muck. He heaved a great shovelful of sludge into the wheelbarrow on the bank beside him. “Yet against all expectation I woke up again. Unsure how much time had passed, with no memory of my Bot captivity, I found myself dumped out into space, in an environment suit that couldn’t sustain me for much longer. I wouldn’t have bet on my chances just then, but against the odds I was spotted and picked up by a passing cruiser—one of ours as luck or fate would have it. To this day I don’t know whether the intent of my abandonment by the Bots was to be lost to my enemies, or to be found by my friends.”

  As we bump along toward the double sunrise, the Sun Dog’s solar-electric motor is inaudible over the squeaking of its bad shocks. We stop at the south end of the hatchery’s easternmost pond—the coldest, Pond 1. Both it and Pond 2 have spotted graithlings in them. The other twenty ponds grow a few goldengills, but mostly they’re full of slant-head minnows. All three species are sacrifice fish for the EnviroLab on the hill and its LC50 tests, which designate a heavy metal, a prionoid seed protein, or other water pollutant “toxic” when a given
concentration of the substance proves lethal (within four hours) to fifty percent or more of the fish in the test population. Such tests were long ago banned as inhumane on Old Earth, but they’re expedient on a frontier world like ours.

  “Now look at the letters,” Mark said, pointing at the banner at the back of the office. “Handedness is a bit more complicated for letters than for numbers. Hold out your left hand in front of you again, palm away, so you’re looking at the back of the hand. Thumb spread away from the rest of the hand at about a ninety degree angle. See what direction the thumb points? Capitals B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, P, R, S—11 out of 26, or 42.3 percent of the alphabet—are left-handed, while only capitals J and Z—2 out of 26, or 7.7 percent of the alphabet—are right-handed. A, H, I, M, N, O, Q, T, U, V, W, X, Y—13 out of 26, or 50 percent—are ambidextrous, although I suppose you could argue Q trends left, and N is some kind of mirror-inverted. Got it?”

  “OK…” I said, continuing to stare hard at the banner with its basic numbers and letters on the office wall, trying to puzzle through what he was saying.

  “Good. Now, of the small letters, b, c, e, f, h, k, p, r, s—9 out of 26, or 34.6 percent—are left-handed, while a, d, g, j, q, y, z—7 out of 26, or 27 percent—are right-handed. The remaining small letters—10 out of 26, or 38 percent—are best described as ambidextrous.”

  I shook my head and whistled softly.

  “You’ve obviously thought and calculated about this a lot, Mark—and those are interesting statistics—but, well, so what?”

  “See, the Bots have never figured out what allows the Raveleras to weave and unweave space-time around them,” Mark said, moving the wheelbarrow for me to shovel muck into it, “because it’s not something you can do by figuring. Not calculable. But that didn’t stop my captors from giving me this hand.”

  “Any idea why they did that?”

  “Many ideas—even if I don’t remember when this alien hand joined the rest of my body. Maybe I’ve kept learning so much about all this, beyond my debriefing, because—despite the memory wipe—some faint trace of my time in Bot custody still persists in my head unconsciously, still keeps prodding me to try to puzzle it out. I don’t know for certain, though. I can’t explain, for instance, why I absolutely will not allow my faceless ‘friends’ in our merc-corp government to remove this hand from my body—for their ‘research.’ It’s not just because it’s interwoven into me deep enough I might die in the process of that removal. I just refuse. That’s annoyed the powers-that-be enough that I’m lucky even to have this shit-shoveling fish hatchery job.”

  Mark shook his head and exhaled.

  “So they think me a spy, and spy on me. Maybe they’re not the only ones, either. Maybe Hivist turncoats are reporting on me back to their Bot masters, too. Who knows? Maybe you, too, without even knowing it, might be some kind of android designed by the Bots to be indistinguishable from a human being—and you’re recording all this for some unseen audience.”

  He gave me a sly, sideways look. We laughed, but even in my own ears the laughter sounded forced.

  At the northern end of each pond stands a spring box. We check the boxes all summer long for any cruncher turtles that, blundering onto the gapped planking atop the sunken concrete boxes and falling between the planks, might have gotten trapped down in the boxes themselves. This morning I doubt we’ll find any of those nasty-tempered little dinosaurs. They don’t move as much from pond to pond once the weather gets cool.

  “‘So what?’” Mark laughed and took a bite of his luncherito. “That’s what I thought when I was debriefed, too. It took me a while to see it. But try to think like a curious kid for a minute. Notice that the right-handed forms are the most common forms for numbers, but the least common form for letters—both capitals and smalls.”

  “I see that, Mark. So maybe the differences in spatial orientation of numbers and letters are statistically significant. But are they truly significant? I don’t see the context.”

  “Neither did I, at first. Maybe that’s because the context is so big.”

  “In what way?”

  He stared off into a space I couldn’t see into.

  “People have probably realized that the brain is in two major parts—that it’s in two chambers, or bicameral—for as long as they’ve been looking at the brains of their usually deceased fellow humans. A couple hundred years ago researchers started doing split-brain work with living epilepsy patients, who had the connections between the right and left hemispheres of their brains cut, in order to reduce their seizure symptoms. That research led to work on hemispheric dominance, cerebral lateralization—on the ‘handedness’ of human minds, if you like.”

  “And numbers and letters say something about that?” I asked, gesturing at the banner with my sandwich.

  We decide not to check the spring boxes for wayward turtles after all, and focus instead on looking for the bank pi-rats. It’s cold, but the ponds haven’t iced over yet. We walk toward the north end of the first pond, each of us pacing a shoreline. As we go along we check the long-spring leg hold traps we’ve staked into the bank and set for the ’rats, near their burrow entrances. We look for traps whose chains have been run out from the bank, to the deeper water, indicating that a foot-clamped ratty, big as a midsize dog, has most likely dragged the device and itself into that depth and drowned.

  Together Mark and I pushed the wheelbarrow up the bank, toward the lowered bed of the Sun Dog. It took everything we had to lever up the handles on the barrow and tilt its load of sludge into the truck.

  “This hand is a souvenir,” Mark said, as we took a breather. “A scar I can’t hide but don’t want to lose. A reminder of the Bots’ investigation into the interweaving of hands and minds—a crude experiment, for all the magnificent crafting that went into this. No prosthetic that humans have developed can match the nanomechanics of it. I think that’s one reason why the military brass still want this hand—so they can reverse-engineer it. I’ve let them examine its workings, again and again, but I draw the line at letting them try to sever it from my body. They’d love to disconnect it from me the same way the Bots connected it to me: without my permission.”

  “Right,” Mark said, ignoring my sandwich. “For some time now, researchers have wondered if the right-handedness of the majority of numbers might indicate that the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, dominates most in the production of numbers. At the same time, the left side of the brain also seems to be least powerful in influencing the production of letters. When you include the smalls, ‘ambidextrous’ edges left-handed out—just barely—as the most common letter-form of all, even if you include capital Q among the block of letters you might call left-handed and right-brained. Makes you wonder if hemispheric non-dominance—with a strong tilt to the left hand and right brain, admittedly—is in fact the most ‘dominant’ factor in letter production.”

  “That makes both sides of my brain hurt,” I said, laughing, “although I guess that makes some sense. What about spatial orientations in numbering systems other than the Arabic, though?”

  “In Mayan numerals, for instance? Or how spatial orientation of letters manifests in languages read not left to right, but right to left—in Hebrew, say? Or what about other systems in which the numbers are also letters and vice versa—not only Hebrew but the Roman system, too, whose numerals were not part of a separate numeric system but derived from the Latin alphabet?”

  “Let me guess: you’ve already thought about this.”

  Mark nodded and leaned toward me.

  “I learned in my debriefing that all of those questions had already been asked. Neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, linguistic anthropologists—all of them have been quietly involved in investigating whether or not the spatial orientations of letters and numbers might be evidence of patterns in the ‘cultural unconscious’ that mirror the evolutionary history of the human brain.”

  “And they found…?”

 
“The same patterns, with some minor variations, persist across all human cultures.”

  That made me pause.

  Mark claims his grandfather knew the First Expedition biologist who named these freshwater critters we trap “pi-rats.” Although better known for naming our world Dolores after his wife, Hector Quinones was not only the mission’s chief population ecologist but also a math geek of the first water—and tagged the bank-burrowers with their odd but appropriate name, given the critters’ packrat thievery, giant muskrat looks, and their disproportionately long (seemingly endless) tails.

  “As hatchery manager,” Mark says when we get to the north end of Pond 1, “I suppose I should reiterate that, officially, we’re thinning the pi-rat population because their burrows damage the levees between the ponds. It also just so happens that pi-rat fur is prime now, and bringing a good price.”

  “My hand is like those other exquisitely complex mechanisms, the prionoids the Bots have been bombing our worlds with,” he said, grabbing the wheelbarrow’s handles. “Those D-amino transmission particles meant to morph our brain chemistry, confuse our myriad complications and defeat that thing in human consciousness that the Bots can’t figure out. I guess they figure you don’t have to understand something to destroy it. But all the Bots’ efforts have resulted only in poisonings, and madness, and the necessity of running these LC tests on our air and water.”

  He lifted up on the handles.

  “The poop is in the pudding. Back to it.”