The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  It was a throwaway line—but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they all have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

  Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data backed up to all the farflung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the moment—or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget that they’d ever made the journey.

  Paolo recalled the honest puzzlement of a friend from Ashton-Laval, Why go looking for aliens? Our polis has a thousand ecologies, a trillion species of evolved life. What do you hope to find, out there, that you couldn’t have grown at home?

  What had he hoped to find? Just the answers to a few simple questions. Did human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence, in order to explain itself? Or had a neutral, preexisting universe given birth to a billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same delusions of grandeur—until they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology was used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the physical universe was created by human thought, it had no special status that placed it above virtual reality. It might have come first—and every virtual reality might need to run on a physical computing device, subject to physical laws—but it occupied no privileged position in terms of “truth” versus “illusion.” If the ACs were right, then it was no more honest to value the physical universe over more recent artificial realities than it was honest to remain flesh instead of software, or ape instead of human, or bacterium instead of ape.

  Elena said, “We can’t lie here forever; the gang’s all waiting to see you.”

  “Where?” Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn’t be the same.

  “I’ll show you.”

  Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again … night-side, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multicolored shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean’s smoothly tapered thermal glow spelt three hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as backlighting the atmosphere’s tell-tale infrared silhouette.

  He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir, aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line. Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange—and he recognized most of the old signposts by color. He had his bearings now. Twenty degrees away from Sirius—south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

  Elena was beside him—superficially unchanged, although they’d both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this environment mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free fall and vacuum, but it wasn’t set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren’t embedded in the physics at all, but were running directly on the processor web.

  Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition—and being human was largely self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged from the experience, he felt as if he’d broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate. The last flesh human had died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart from the communities of Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as conservative as a transhuman society could be. The balance seemed right to Paolo, though—acknowledging the flexibility of software, without abandoning interest in the physical world—and although the stubbornly corporeal Gleisners had been first to the stars, the C-Z diaspora would soon overtake them.

  Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

  “Do you like our humble new meeting place?” Hermann floated by Paolo’s shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. “We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It’s desolate up here, I know—but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface.”

  Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe’s close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, and expanse of fissured red rock. “More desolate down there, I think.” He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.

  “Ignore Hermann,” Liesl advised. “He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be.” Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized human face stippled in gold on each wing.

  Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken, he’d assumed that his friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobes—and only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. “What effects? The carpets—”

  “Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we don’t know what else is down there.” As Liesl’s wings fluttered, her mirror image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. “With neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time resolution in seconds. We don’t know anything about smaller life-forms.”

  “And we never will, if you have your way.” Karpal—an ex-Gleisner, human-shaped as ever—had been Liesl’s lover last time Paolo was awake.

  “We’ve only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There’s still a wealth of data we could gather nonintrusively, with a little patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life—”

  Elena said dryly, “Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would be fried by UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than we’re already seeing in the surface water.”

  “Not necessarily. The carpets seem to be vulnerable—but other species might be better protected, if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals.”

  Paolo smiled; he hadn’t thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting for.

  Liesl continued, “What is there to lose by waiting a few hundred Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate patterns—and we could watch for anomalies, storms and quakes, hoping for some revelatory glimpses.”

  A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo’s ambivalence waned. If he’d wanted to inhabit geological time, he would have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers watched Earth’s mountains erode in subjective seconds. Orpheus hung in the sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to be understo
od.

  He said, “But what if there are no ‘revelatory glimpses’? How long do we wait? We don’t know how rare life is—in time, or in space. If this planet is precious, so is the epoch it’s passing through. We don’t know how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets—and whatever else—could die out before we’d learned the first thing about them. What a waste that would be!”

  Liesl stood her ground.

  “And if we damage the Orphean ecology—or culture—by rushing in? That wouldn’t be a waste. It would be a tragedy.”

  Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his earth-self-almost three hundred years’ worth—before composing a reply. The early communications included detailed mind grafts—and it was good to share the excitement of the diaspora’s launch; to watch—very nearly firsthand—the thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of fusion fire from beyond the orbit of Mars. Then things settled down to the usual prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip, Carter-Zimmerman’s ongoing research projects, the buzz of interpolis cultural tensions, the not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the perceptual aesthetic overthrows the emotional, again … although Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have constructed a new synthesis of the two).

  After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to hold things back; by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clones’ demise, the messages had become pure audiovisual linear monologues. Paolo understood. It was only right; they’d diverged, and you didn’t send mind grafts to strangers.

  Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the ships, indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent a special message to the Vega-bound clone.

  “The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just picked up clear signs of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate oceans waiting for you, if the models are right. So … good luck.” Vision showed the instrument’s domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside; plots of the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. “Maybe it seems strange to you—all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

  “There’s been a revival of the old debate: Should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the light-speed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by nonconscious systems.” Essays, pro and con, were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. “I don’t think the idea will gain much support though—and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind … so we cling to the Earth—looking outward, but remaining firmly anchored.

  “I keep asking myself, though: Where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe … but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Flesh humans used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’ … as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do—knowing no better, having no choice.

  “Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find alien life—not just to break the spell of the anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens who’ve faced the same decisions—and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”

  Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral room. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong that had just fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colony—if that was what it was—might have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms. It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything that caught his interest; for the diaspora’s great discovery to remain nothing more than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.

  He glanced at a schematic of the scout probes’ neutrino detectors, but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to disrupt the balancing act. The carpets cast a shadow so faint, though, that even this near-perfect vision could barely resolve it.

  Orlando Venetti said, “You’re awake.”

  Paolo turned. His father stood an arm’s length away, presenting as an ornately clad human of indeterminate age. Definitely older than Paolo, though; Orlando never ceased to play up his seniority—even if the age difference was only twenty-five percent now, and falling.

  Paolo banished the carpets from the room to the space behind one pentagonal window, and took his father’s hand. The portions of Orlando’s mind that meshed with his own expressed pleasure at Paolo’s emergence from hibernation, fondly dwelt on past shared experiences, and entertained hopes of continued harmony between father and son. Paolo’s greeting was similar, a carefully contrived “revelation” of his own emotional state. It was more of a ritual than an act of communication—but then, even with Elena, he set up barriers. No one was totally honest with another person—unless the two of them intended to permanently fuse.

  Orlando nodded at the carpets. “I hope you appreciate how important they are.”

  “You know I do.” He hadn’t included that in his greeting, though. “First alien life.” C-Z humiliates the Gleisner robots, at last—that was probably how his father saw it. The robots had been first to Alpha Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planet—but first life was Apollo to their Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.

  Orlando said, “This is the book we need, to catch the citizens of the marginal polises. The ones who haven’t quite imploded into solipsism. This will shake them up—don’t you think?”

  Paolo shrugged. Earth’s transhumans were free to implode into anything they liked; it didn’t stop Carter-Zimmerman from exploring the physical universe. But thrashing the Gleisners wouldn’t be enough for Orlando; he lived for the day when C-Z would become the cultural mainstream. Any polis could multiply its population a billionfold in a microsecond, if it wanted the vacuous honor of outnumbering the rest. Luring other citizens to migrate was harder—and persuading them to rewrite their own local charters was harder still. Orlando had a missionary streak: he wanted every other polis to see the error of its ways and follow C-Z to the stars.

  Paolo said, “Ashton-Laval has intelligent aliens. I wouldn’t be so sure that news of giant seaweed is going to take Earth by storm.”

  Orlando was venomous. “Ashton-Laval intervened in its so-called ‘evolutionary’ simulations so many times that they might as well have built the end products in an act of creation lasting six days. They wanted talking reptiles, and—mirabile dictu!—they got talking reptiles. There are self-modified transhumans in this polis more alien than the aliens in Ashton-Laval.”

  Paolo smiled. “All right. Forget Ashton-Laval. But forget the marginal polises, too. We choose to value the physical world. That’s what de
fines us—but it’s as arbitrary as any other choice of values. Why can’t you accept that? It’s not the One True Path that the infidels have to be bludgeoned into following.” He knew he was arguing half for the sake of it—he desperately wanted to refute the anthrocosmologists himself—but Orlando always drove him into taking the opposite position. Out of fear of being nothing but his father’s clone. Despite the total absence of inherited episodic memories the stochastic input into his ontogenesis, the chaotically divergent nature of the iterative mind-building algorithms.

  Orlando made a beckoning gesture, dragging the image of the carpets halfway back into the room. “You’ll vote for the microprobes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Everything depends on that now. It’s good to start with a tantalizing glimpse—but if we don’t follow up with details soon, they’ll lose interest back on Earth very rapidly.”

  “Lose interest? It’ll be fifty-four years before we know if anyone paid the slightest attention in the first place.”

  Orlando eyed him with disappointment, and resignation. “If you don’t care about the other polises, think about C-Z. This helps us; it strengthens us. We have to make the most of that.”

  Paolo was bemused. “The charter is the charter. What needs to be strengthened? You make it sound like there’s something at risk.”

  “What do you think a thousand lifeless worlds would have done to us? Do you think the charter would have remained intact?”

  Paolo had never considered the scenario. “Maybe not. But in every C-Z where the charter was rewritten, there would have been citizens who’d have gone off and founded new polises on the old lines. You and I, for a start. We could have called it Venetti-Venetti.”

  “While half your friends turned their backs on the physical world? While Carter-Zimmerman, after two thousand years, went solipsist? You’d be happy with that?”