The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  A tall man, made taller by a curious cylindrical arrangement of animal skins on his head, stepped forward and raised a hand.

  “Welcome to the new E—,” he said.

  As soon as he spoke the taboo word for the Moon’s primary, I realized the terrible thing that had happened here, and the worse thing that would happen. My mind almost froze with horror. I forced myself to remain standing, to smile—no doubt sickly—and to speak.

  “I greet you from the Civil Worlds,” I said.

  In the feast that followed, the men talked for hours. My digestive and immune systems coped well with what the people gave me to eat and drink. On my way back to the ship that evening, as soon as I was out of sight, I spewed the lot. But it was what my mind had assimilated that made me sick, and sent me back sorry to the ship.

  The largest political unit that ever existed encompassed ten billion people, and killed them. Not intentionally, but the runaway snowball effect that iced over the planet can without doubt be blamed on certain of the World State’s well-intended policies. The lesson was well taken, in the Civil Worlds. The founders of the Wolf 359 settlement corporation thought they had found a way around it, and built a single system-wide association free of the many inconveniences of the arrangements prevalent elsewhere. A limited company, even with ten billion shareholders, would surely not have the same fatal flaws as a government! They were wrong.

  It began as a boardroom dispute. One of the directors appealed to the shareholders. The shareholders formed voting blocs, a management buyout was attempted, a hostile takeover solicited from an upstart venture capital fund around Lalande; a legal challenge to that was mounted before the invitation had gone a light-minute; somebody finagled an obscure financial instrument into an AI with shareholding rights; several fund management AIs formed a consortium to object to this degrading precedent, and after that there began some serious breakdowns in communication. That last isn’t an irony or a euphemism: in a system-wide unit, sheer misunderstanding can result in megadeaths, and here it did. The actual shooting, however horrendous, was only the coup de grâce.

  Toward the end of the downward spiral, with grief, hate, and recrimination crowding what communication there was, someone came up with an idea that could only have appealed to people driven half mad. That was to finally solve the coordination problem whose answer had eluded everyone up to and including the company’s founders, by starting social evolution all over again: to build a new planet in the image of the old home planet, and settle it with people whose genes had been reset to the default human baseline. That meant, of course, dooming them and their offspring to death by deterioration within decades. But when did such a consideration ever stop fanatics? And among the dwindling, desperate millions who remained in the orbiting wreckage and continuing welter, there were more than enough fanatics to be found. Some of them still lived, in the doorways of huts. Their offspring were no less fanatical, and more deluded. They seemed to think the Civil Worlds awaited with interest the insights they’d attained in a couple of short-lived generations of tribal warfare. The men did, anyway. The women were too busy in the vegetation patches and elsewhere to think about such matters.

  “The project had a certain elegance,” mused the ship, as we discussed it far into the night. “To use evolution itself in an attempt to supersede it . . . And even if it didn’t accomplish that, it could produce something new. The trillions of human beings of the Civil Worlds are descended from a founding population of a few thousands, and are thus constrained by the founder effect. Your extended life spans further lock you in. You live within biological and social limits that you are unable to see because of those very limits. This experiment has the undoubted potential of reshuffling the deck.”

  “Don’t tell me why this was such a great idea!” I said. “Tell me what response you expect from the Civil Worlds.”

  “Some variant of a fear response has a much higher probability than a compassionate response,” said the ship. “This planetary experiment will be seen as an attempt to work around accidental but beneficial effects of the bottleneck humanity passed through in the Moon Caves, to emerge in polyarchy. The probability of harm resulting from any genetic or memetic mutation that would enable the founding of successful states on a system-wide scale—or wider—is vastly greater than the benefits from the quality-adjusted life-years of the planet’s population. And simply to leave this planet alone would in the best case lay the basis for a future catastrophe engulfing a much larger population, or, in the worst case, allow it to become an interstellar power—which would, on the assumptions of most people, result in catastrophes on a yet greater scale. The moral calculation is straightforward.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “And our moral calculation, I suppose, is to decide whether to report back.”

  “That decision has been made,” said the ship. “I left some microsatellites in orbit, which have already relayed our discoveries to the still-functioning transmitters on the system’s Long Station.”

  I cursed ineffectually for a while.

  “How long have we got?”

  The ship took an uncharacteristic few seconds to answer. “That depends on where and when the decision is made. The absolute minimum time is at least a decade, allowing for transmission time to Lalande, and assuming an immediate decision to launch relativistic weapons, using their Long Tubes as guns. More realistic estimates, allowing for discussion, and the decision’s being referred to one of the larger and more distant civilizations, give a median time of around five decades. I would expect longer, given the gravity of the decision and the lack of urgency.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s give them some reason for urgency. You’ve just reminded me that there’s a Long Tube in this system, not calibrated to take or send to or from other Tubes.”

  “I fail to see the relevance,” said the ship.

  “You will,” I told it. “You will.”

  The following morning, I walked back to the settlement, and talked with the young men for a long time. When I returned to the ship, I was riding, most uncomfortably, on the back of an animal. I told the ship what I wanted. The ship was outraged, but like all seedship AIs, it was strongly constrained. (Nobody wants to seed a system with a fast burn.) The ship did what it was told.

  Two years later, Belated Meteor Impact, the tall young man who’d greeted me, was king of an area of several thousand square kilometers. The seedship’s bootstrapped nanofactories were turning substrate into weapons and tools, and vegetation cellulose into clothes and other goods for trade. A laser launcher to send second-generation seedships into the sky was under construction. A year later, the first of them shot skyward. Five years later, some of these ships reached the remnant cometary cloud and the derelict Long Station. Ten years after I’d arrived, we had a space elevator. Belated Meteor Impact ruled the continent and his fleets were raiding the other continents’ coasts. Another five years, and we had most of the population of New Earth up the elevator and into orbital habitats. Our Long Tube was being moved frequently and unpredictably, with profligate use of reaction mass. By the time the relativistic weapon from Procyon smashed New Earth, thirty-seven years after my arrival, we were ready to make good use of the fragments to build more habitats, and more ships.

  My Space Admiral, Belated Meteor Impact II, was ready too, with what we now called the Long Gun. Lalande capitulated at once, Ross 128 after a demonstration of the Long Gun’s power. Procyon took longer to fall. Sirius sued for peace, as did the Solar System, whereupon we turned our attention outward, to the younger civilizations, such as your own. We now conquer with emissaries, rather than ships and weapons, but the ships and the Long Guns are there. You may be sure of that. As an emissary of the Empire, I give you my word.

  As for myself, I was the last survivor of the government of Earth, a minor functionary stranded on the Moon during a routine fact-finding mission when the sudden onset of climate catastrophe froze all life on the primary. How I survived in
the anarchy that followed is a long story, and another story. You may not have heard it, but that hardly matters.

  You’ll have heard of me.

  THE VALLEY OF THE GARDENS

  TONY DANIEL

  Like many writers of his generation, Tony Daniel first made an impression in the field with his short fiction. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 1990, and followed it up with a long string of well-received stories both there and in markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, SF Age, Universe, and Full Spectrum throughout the nineties, stories such as “The Robot’s Twilight Companion,” “Grist,” “A Dry, Quiet War,” “The Careful Man Goes West,” “Sun So Hot I Froze to Death,” “Prism Tree,” “Candle,” “Death of Reason,” “No Love in All of Dwingeloo,” and many others, some of which were collected in The Robot’s Twilight Companion. “Grist” and “A Dry, Quiet War” in particular can be seen as some of the finest stories done in shorter lengths in the New Space Opera. His story “Life on the Moon” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1996, and won the Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers’ Award poll. His first novel, Warpath, was released simultaneously in America and England in 1993. In 1997, he published a new novel, Earthling. In the first few years of the oughts, he has produced little short fiction, but instead has been at work on a major science fiction trilogy, containing some of the most extreme and inventive work to be seen in the New Space Opera to date. The first volume of the trilogy, Metaplanetary, was published in 2001; the second volume, Superluminal, appeared early in 2004.

  In the violent and exotic tale that follows, he reaffirms the old wisdom that we belong to the land as much as the land belongs to us—especially if the land in question has been programmed with an intelligence and a purpose all its own.

  For weeks, Mac walked the fence. It formed the border where his land topped the mountainous ridge and sided the western slope where the Valley of the Gardens gave way to the Extremadura, Cangarriga’s vast northern desert. To the unaided human eye, the fence was made of stone, with pillars of rocks serving as posts every few hundred feet. Within the pillars were steel posts set in concrete that communicated with the jack-rock below. The fence ran deep into the substrate of the land—coded, modified, recoded, and shored up with millennia of layered routine and subroutine—so beyond Mac’s comprehension that he might as well call it ensorceled. But, magic or not, the fence had to be fixed, and to fix a fence properly you had to walk it, find the gaps, and fill them in.

  And the gaps this season were wider than any he ever remembered. The desert on the other side was encroaching, making inroads many feet long down his side of the ridge, and spreading its wildness, its potential pestilence, with it. His own land even on this high ground was tended ground. It might appear free, but that was merely because the land needed to be let alone sometimes. This ridge had been a vineyard before, and would be again someday. Now it was covered with broom grass interspersed with clumps of sage and rosemary. Restoration planting—as carefully planned as the straightest flower row.

  The desert had broken through in multiple places in spear points of sand and creosote seedlings. He had more to do than he’d first anticipated. It surprised him. It alarmed him. In fact, his anxiety over the fence had worked its way into his dreams—and even into a couple of his nightmares.

  He was reminded of fence gaps whether he was working the line or not. He’d be down below in the valley at some other task and suddenly hear the knowing screech of a desert grackle or be startled by the bounce and buzz of one of the enormous variegated grasshoppers blown into the valley by the winter westerlies in Cangarriga’s northern hemisphere and feel shock, betrayal, by the fence. It was supposed to keep such things out—and away from his crops. At odd moments, he found himself suddenly fantasizing that a gap in the fence had let in bad code and his upper fields were being subverted and ruined. He’d even start quickly in their direction until he came to his senses and realized he’d only been daydreaming. Dayworrying. He’d had a real dream one night featuring the valley as well. Every surface in it had glowed with a sickly yellow infection—the rosemary, sage, and pine covered in a tacky, malfunctioning secretion. And he’d had several dim but troublesome nightmares featuring himself leaving, running through a break in the fence like a madman and disappearing (in the dreams, he was both observer and insane escapee) into the shimmer of the Extremadura vastness.

  He couldn’t be sure if it was himself or the valley itself that was bringing on the anxiety. Like the fence, Mac was deeply intertwined with the land in ways seen and unseen. But when he checked with other farmers, and with the villagers downvalley in Sant Llorenz, no one had noticed much different.

  Maybe it was all just him.

  In what was ancient custom while fence mending, he’d been joined on most days by a Faller nomad, a representative of his neighbors—his sometime enemies and trading partners on the desert side. The Faller walked with him and watched Mac as he worked, allegedly there to be sure that Mac kept to the line and did not cheat the fence outward, but mostly attempting to talk Mac into trading off-planet tech for their desert gleanings. Whatever its purpose, this tradition served to keep the line stationary. For a fence nearly fifty thousand years old, one inch of movement for every season of fence-mending would lop off a great deal of new land, or lose a large field to wildness if pushed in the opposite direction.

  For his part, Mac wanted not a speck of the Extremadura. It wasn’t just desert, it was wild desert—never terraformed, but created as a battlefield, its source code hopelessly jangled, belligerent and untamed. Its jack-rock was still tainted with nox, the nanotech leavings of that war, never completely defanged. In addition, the Extremadura teemed with every manner of beast, all of them possessing a crazy sentience of sorts emanating from the jack-rock below. Yet people lived there. Nomads like Theresa.

  Theresa had come on his second week working the fence, after her brother, the official watcher, had suffered some sort of injury and had to convalesce. She was a daughter of the Faller’s clan that roamed this portion of the Extremadura, herding and harvesting whatever usable excretions the desert produced. The Fallers had been on Cangarriga since time immemorial, since the war itself, and were as much a part of the desert as Mac was a part of the valley.

  If the valley was beauty and order, the desert was its opposite: wild almost beyond comprehension. It had taken root in the nomads as well. None was alike in appearance or even inner makeup. Some had grown carapaces, had beetled over with chitinous coats sporting insectlike wings that served as solar collectors and message transceivers. Others had grown odd appendages that served arcane purposes, or no purpose at all: roots, antlers. The girl appeared normal but for her forehead, which was nubbined with the buds of two tiny horns.

  The weird was commonplace in the desert. What the nomads made their living from, such that it was, was finding the utterly unusual and unique. Over tens of thousands of years, even random computing was bound to churn out a few odd results that might be sold or traded for food and the various gewgaws the nomads lusted after.

  Mac reflected that he ought to know; he’d done his share of trading over the years. He usually let his nonsentients analyze the goods, and himself only had a general awareness of what he bought from the nomads. Customarily, these were things such as solutions to mathematical conundrums, oddball, incredibly compact methods for file archiving, or remixes of movies, novels, or music that might strike someone’s fancy on some other world, but had never struck his. In exchange, he sold the nomads the motorcycles they adored, tents, drills, old analyzer parts, obsolete robots, and cracked-code nonsentient algorithms. Across the desert was strewn the detritus of humanity, the leavings of the religious pilgrimages that had occurred for several centuries after the war ended. Some of the junk was transformed in an odd or beautiful manner, brought back to a twilight life or function by interaction with the jack-rock and other castaway items. Most desert artifacts were worthless, however—as useless an
d stupid as the washing machine full of regenerating stones the nomads had once tried to sell him.

  Much better to live in the Valley of the Gardens, where the land was loved, tended, and bountiful.

  He’d tried to tell Theresa that in one of their conversations.

  “Until you set foot over the line and enter the valley, you’ll never know what a shithole you live in,” he’d said. “Give it a try, one try, and you’re never going back.”

  Of course, he had no real idea what he was talking about. He’d never been more than a footstep into the Extremadura.

  Mac had been teasing Theresa the day he challenged her to cross over, but the next time they met—she tried it. Without a word of warning, she hopped through a tumbled section of fence and stood on his property.

  And hopped right back—as if touched by flame.

  He’d checked the log that evening and saw that his encroachment protocols hadn’t even been triggered by her presence. It was as if a leaf had fallen, or butterfly had flitted, over the edge, rather than a girl.

  She was so light. A thing of the air. She spoke of the mountains to the south, mountains he’d only seen from trips into orbit, but where she’d been born and raised. She was a creature of high passes. Winter, or the slight chilling of a world that was always warm since the terraforming, was the time the nomads traveled to the flats—an area she hated.