The Hard SF Renaissance

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The Hard SF Renaissance Page 7

by David G. Hartwell


  Paolo said, uncertainly, “You could give people a glimpse of this in just three-dimensions. Enough to make it clear that there’s … life in here. This is going to shake them up badly, though.” Life—embedded in the accidental computations of Wang’s Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter-Zimmerman’s whole philosophy: if nature had evolved “organisms” as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis, where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between truth and illusion?

  And after three hundred years of waiting for good news from the disapora, how would they respond to this back on Earth?

  Karpal said, “There’s one more thing I have to show you.”

  He’d named the creatures squids, for obvious reasons. Distant cousins of the jellyfish, perhaps? They were prodding each other with their tentacles in a way that looked thoroughly carnal—but Karpal explained, “There’s no analog of light here. We’re viewing all this according to ad hoc rules that have nothing to do with the native physics. All the creatures here gather information about each other by contact alone—which is actually quite a rich means of exchanging data, with so many dimensions. What you’re seeing is communication by touch.”

  “Communication about what?”

  “Just gossip, I expect. Social relationships.”

  Paolo stared at the writhing mass of tentacles.

  “You think they’re conscious?”

  Karpal, pointlike, grinned broadly. “They have a central control structure with more connectivity than the human brain—and which correlates data gathered from the skin. I’ve mapped that organ, and I’ve started to analyze its function.”

  He led Paolo into another environment, a representation of the data structures in the “brain” of one of the squids. It was—mercifully—three-dimensional, and highly stylized, built of translucent colored blocks marked with icons, representing mental symbols, linked by broad lines indicating the major connections between them. Paolo had seen similar diagrams of transhuman minds; this was far less elaborate, but eerily familiar nonetheless.

  Karpal said, “Here’s the sensory map of its surroundings. Full of other squids’ bodies, and vague data on the last known positions of a few smaller creatures. But you’ll see that the symbols activated by the physical presence of the other squids are linked to these”—he traced the connections with one finger—“representations. Which are crude miniatures of this whole structure here.”

  “This whole structure” was an assembly labeled with icons for memory retrieval, simple tropisms, short-term goals. The general business of being and doing.

  “The squid has maps, not just of other squids’ bodies, but their minds as well. Right or wrong, it certainly tries to know what the others are thinking about. And”—he pointed out another set of links, leading to another, less crude, miniature squid mind—“it thinks about its own thoughts as well. I’d call that consciousness, wouldn’t you?”

  Paolo said weakly, “You’ve kept all this to yourself? You came this far, without saying a word—”

  Karpal was chastened. “I know it was selfish—but once I’d decoded the interactions of the tile patterns, I couldn’t tear myself away long enough to start explaining it to anyone else. And I came to you first because I wanted your advice on the best way to break the news.”

  Paolo laughed bitterly. “The best way to break the news that first alien consciousness is hidden deep inside a biological computer? That everything the diaspora was trying to prove has been turned on its head? The best way to explain to the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman that after a three-hundred-year journey, they might as well have stayed on Earth running simulations with as little resemblance to the physical universe as possible?”

  Karpal took the outburst in good humor. “I was thinking more along the lines of the best way to point out that if we hadn’t traveled to Orpheus and studied Wang’s Carpets, we’d never have had the chance to tell the solipsists of Ashton-Laval that all their elaborate invented life-forms and exotic imaginary universes pale into insignificance compared to what’s really out here—and which only the Carter-Zimmerman diaspora could have found.”

  Paolo and Elena stood together on the edge of satellite Pinatubo, watching one of the scout probes aim its maser at a distant point in space. Paolo thought he saw a faint scatter of microwaves from the beam as it collided with iron-rich meteor dust. Elena’s mind being diffracted all over the cosmos? Best not think about that.

  He said, “When you meet the other versions of me who haven’t experienced Orpheus, I hope you’ll offer them mind grafts so they won’t be jealous.”

  She frowned. “Ah. Will I or won’t I? I can’t be bothered modeling it. I expect I will. You should have asked me before I cloned myself. No need for jealousy, though. There’ll be worlds far stranger than Orpheus.”

  “I doubt it. You really think so?”

  “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that.” Elena had no power to change the fate of the frozen clones of her previous self—but everyone had the right to emigrate.

  Paolo took her hand. The beam had been aimed almost at Regulus, UV-hot and bright, but as he looked away, the cool yellow light of the sun caught his eye.

  Vega C-Z was taking the news of the squids surprisingly well, so far. Karpal’s way of putting it had cushioned the blow: it was only by traveling all this distance across the real, physical universe that they could have made such a discovery—and it was amazing how pragmatic even the most doctrinaire citizens had turned out to be. Before the launch, “alien solipsists” would have been the most unpalatable idea imaginable, the most abhorrent thing the diaspora could have stumbled upon—but now that they were here, and stuck with the fact of it, people were finding ways to view it in a better light. Orlando had even proclaimed, “This will be the perfect hook for the marginal polises. ‘Travel through real space to witness a truly alien virtual reality.’ We can sell it as a synthesis of the two world views.”

  Paolo still feared for Earth, though—where his Earth-self and others were waiting in hope of alien guidance. Would they take the message of Wang’s Carpets to heart and retreat into their own hermetic worlds, oblivious to physical reality?

  And he wondered if the anthrocosmologists had finally been refuted … or not. Karpal had discovered alien consciousness—but it was sealed inside a cosmos of its own, its perceptions of itself and its surroundings neither reinforcing nor conflicting with human and transhuman explanations of reality. It would be millennia before C-Z could untangle the ethical problems of daring to try to make contact … assuming that both Wang’s Carpets, and the inherited data patterns of the squids, survived that long.

  Paolo looked around at the wild splendor of the scar-choked galaxy, felt the disk reach in and cut right through him. Could all this strange haphazard beauty be nothing but an excuse for those who beheld it to exist? Nothing but the sum of all the answers to all the questions humans and transhumans had ever asked the universe—answers created in the asking?

  He couldn’t believe that—but the question remained unanswered.

  So far.

  GENESIS

  Poul Anderson

  Poul Anderson (1926-2001), along with Arthur C. Clarke, is one of the most important literary ancestors of, as well as a participant in, the nineties resurgence of hard SF. It was not his very American politics, but his tone and approach (as in such stories as “Kyrie”) that are evident in the works of such writers as Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, and Greg Egan. One of the Grand Masters who lent particular honor to that title, he died at the end of July 2001. He was married to the poet and writer Karen Anderson, a famous beauty in her day with whom he also collaborated. His daughter, Astrid, is married to Greg Bear To the readers and writers who grew up reading his work he was an heroic figure, a living giant of the SF field. And because of the sheer size of his output, his influence is in the water, in the air, and
in the soil of SF. He was a professional writer of astonishing competence, varied talents and interests, and a thoughtful stylist. He financed his honors degree in physics by writing, and remained a writer after graduating in 1948. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, was published in 1952. Distinguished as a fantasy writer—The Broken Sword (1954) was his first adult novel—and a mystery writer—his first mystery, Perish by the Sword (1959), won the Cock Robin prize—he is nevertheless principally one of the heroes of hard science fiction, a John W. Campbell man whose stories appeared in Astounding/Analog for five decades. Of his many excellent collections, All One Universe is perhaps the best, since it contains not only first-class SF stories but also several fine essays and extensive story notes by Anderson, who has been notably reticent in his other books.

  During the fifties and the following four decades he produced a long string of fine SF and fantasy adventure stories and novels continuing to the present. “He is perhaps SF’s most prolific writer of any consistent quality,” says The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The extraordinary thing is that he continued to write so well, given that he wrote so much. James Blish, in the 1950s, called him “the continuing explosion.” He was active and prolific in hard SF in the 1990s, and his major work was this novella, and the novel of the same title expanded from it.

  Anderson has always defended the traditions of military honor in his fiction, and devoted much of his effort to adventure plots. His many volumes of Dominic Flandry stories and novels are exemplars. Anderson respected the military virtues of courage, loyalty, honor and sacrifice, and often subjected his characters to situations of extreme hardship, allowing them to show these virtues. But he usually doesn’t write about war. In fact, his characters are businessmen (such as in a series of books and stories about the wily trader Nicholas van Rijn) as often as soldiers (such as the Dominic Flandry series). In “The Saturn Game,” or in Tau Zero, they are scientists, multiple specialists. In The Boat of a Million Years, they are immortals living throughout human history, from the distant past into the far future, not necessarily above average in intelligence or emotional maturity—though the necessities of survival through the calamities of history have weeded out the weaker ones, and even some of the stronger. His heroes are heroic and strong in the slightly tragic vein of nineteenth-century Romanticism—often they have suffered some earlier emotional wound—but blended in is a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge that is a hallmark of hard science fiction characters, that Heinlein and Campbell tradition referred to above. You know a fair amount about what they are feeling, but what really matters is what they do, regardless of how they feel.

  But he has also turned out a number of colorful, powerful hard science fiction stories and novels, from Brain Wave (1954) to The Boat of a Million Years (1989), the four-novel sequence in the 1990s beginning with Heritage of Stars (1993), and Genesis (2000), that are generally perceived as his major works—the most famous is probably Tau Zero (1970). These are marked by astronomical and physical speculation and large-scale Stapledonian vistas of time and space. Even in his swashbuckling adventure stories, he is famous for beginning with calculations of the elements of the orbit of the world to be his setting, and allowing the physics, chemistry and biology to follow logically. He is an admirer of Hal Clement’s fiction, and himself wrote a nonfiction book, Is There Life on Other Worlds? (1963), on the general subject of what kinds of life forms might inhabit what kinds of planets.

  Politically, Anderson represented the hard SF mainstream tradition of the twentieth century. “As for the value of the individual, I’m quite consciously in the Heinleinian tradition there … . It’s partly an emotional matter, a Libertarian predilection, a prejudice in favor of individual freedom, and partly an intellectual distrust based on looking at the historical record and considering the theory of it, including matters like chaos theory. A distrust of large, encompassing systems …” he said in an interview in Locus. He is given to making his stories vehicles for philosophical and social commentary, in the Heinlein manner. In much of his fiction of the 1990s, especially in Heritage of Stars and its sequels, his political bent is evident.

  But not here. Far into the post-human era, Als responsible for whole planets are the dominant civilization. Gaia, the Earth Al, has been reporting unreliably the progress of Earth’s ecosystem. A ship is sent to investigate. Like Egan in “Wang’s Carpets,” in this story, Anderson takes on some of the grand SF themes of the 1990s—upbaded minds, virtual life, virtual civilizations—and integrates them with some of the grand themes of space opera—interplanetary civilizations, all-powerful computers, and human survival over vast expanses of time. It first appeared in Far Futures, the aforementioned original anthology of specifically hard SF novellas, and then was expanded into the novel Genesis.

  Was it her I ought to have loved … ?

  —Piet Hein

  1

  No human could have shaped the thoughts or uttered them. They had no real beginning, they had been latent for millennium after millennium while the galactic brain was growing. Sometimes they passed from mind to mind, years or decades through space at the speed of light, nanoseconds to receive, comprehend, consider, and send a message on outward. But there was so much else—a cosmos of realities, an infinity of virtualities and abstract creations—that remembrances of Earth were the barest undertone, intermittent and fleeting, among uncounted billions of other incidentals. Most of the grand awareness was directed elsewhere, much of it intent on its own evolution.

  For the galactic brain was still in infancy: unless it held itself to be still a-borning. By now its members were strewn from end to end of the spiral arms, out into the halo and the nearer star-gatherings, as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The seeds of fresh ones drifted farther yet; some had reached the shores of the Andromeda.

  Each was a local complex of organisms, machines, and their interrelationships. (“Organism” seems best for something that maintains itself, reproduces at need, and possesses a consciousness in a range from the rudimentary to the transcendent, even though carbon compounds are a very small part of its material components and most of its life processes take place directly on the quantum level.) They numbered in the many millions, and the number was rising steeply, also within the Milky Way, as the founders of new generations arrived at new homes.

  Thus the galactic brain was in perpetual growth, which from a cosmic viewpoint had barely started. Thought had just had time for a thousand or two journeys across its ever-expanding breadth. It would never absorb its members into itself; they would always remain individuals, developing along their individual lines. Let us therefore call them not cells, but nodes.

  For they were in truth distinct. Each had more uniquenesses than were ever possible to a protoplasmic creature. Chaos and quantum fluctuation assured that none would exactly resemble any predecessor. Environment likewise helped shape the personality—surface conditions (what kind of planet, moon, asteroid, comet?) or free orbit, sun single or multiple (what kinds, what ages?), nebula, interstellar space and its ghostly tides … Then, too, a node was not a single mind. It was as many as it chose to be, freely awakened and freely set aside, proteanly intermingling and separating again, using whatever bodies and sensors it wished for as long as it wished, immortally experiencing, creating, meditating, seeking a fulfillment that the search itself brought forth.

  Hence, while every node was engaged with a myriad of matters, one might be especially developing new realms of mathematics, another composing glorious works that cannot really be likened to music, another observing the destiny of organic life on some world, life which it had perhaps fabricated for that purpose, another—Human words are useless.

  Always, though, the nodes were in continuous communication over the light-years, communication on tremendous bandwidths of every possible medium. This was the galactic brain. That unity, that selfhood which was slowly coalescing, might spend millions of years contemplating a thought; but the thought would be
as vast as the thinker, in whose sight an eon was as a day and a day was as an eon.

  Already now, in its nascence, it affected the course of the universe. The time came when a node fully recalled Earth. That memory went out to others as part of the ongoing flow of information, ideas, feelings, reveries, and who knows what else? Certain of these others decided the subject was worth pursuing, and relayed it on their own message-streams. In this wise it passed through light-years and centuries, circulated, developed, and at last became a decision, which reached the node best able to take action.

  Here the event has been related in words, ill-suited though they are to the task. They fail totally when they come to what happened next. How shall they tell of the dialogue of a mind with itself, when that thinking was a progression of quantum flickerings through configurations as intricate as the wave functions, when the computational power and data-base were so huge that measures become meaningless, when the mind raised aspects of itself to interact like persons until it drew them back into its wholeness, and when everything was said within microseconds of planetary time?

  It is impossible, except vaguely and misleadingly. Ancient humans used the language of myth for that which they could not fathom. The sun was a fiery chariot daily crossing heaven, the year a god who died and was reborn, death a punishment for ancestral sin. Let us make our myth concerning the mission to Earth.

  Think, then, of the primary aspect of the node’s primary consciousness as if it were a single mighty entity, and name it Alpha. Think of a lesser manifestation of itself that it had synthesized and intended to release into separate existence as a second entity. For reasons that will become clear, imagine the latter masculine and name it Wayfarer.

  All is myth and metaphor, beginning with this absurd nomenclature. Beings like these had no names. They had identities, instantly recognizable by others of their kind. They did not speak together, they did not go through discussion or explanation of any sort, they were not yet “they.” But imagine it.

 

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