The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “That may well be. I’ll willingly hear you out, if you care to unfold your thoughts more fully than you have hitherto. But I do want to make my own survey and develop my own recommendations. No reflection on you; we both realize that no one mind can encompass every possibility, every interpretation. Nor can any one mind follow out every ongoing factor in what it observes; and what is overlooked can prove to be the agent of chaotic change. I may notice something that escaped you. Unlikely; granted. After your millions of years here, you very nearly are Earth and the life on it, are you not? But … we … would like an independent opinion.”

  Imagine her laughing. “At least you are polite, Wayfarer. Yes, do come down. I will steer you in.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Your physical centrum is in the arctic region, isn’t it? I can find my way.”

  He sensed steel beneath the mildness: “Best I guide you. You recognize the situation as inherently chaotic. Descending on an arbitrary path, you might seriously perturb certain things in which I am interested. Please.”

  “As you wish,” Wayfarer conceded.

  Robotics took over. The payload module of the spacecraft detached from the drive module, which stayed in orbit. Under its own power but controlled from below, asheen in the harsh spatial sunlight, the cylindroid braked and slanted downward.

  It pierced the cloud deck. Wayfarer scanned eagerly. However, this was no sightseeing tour. The descent path sacrificed efficiency and made almost straight for a high northern latitude. Sonic-boom thunder trailed.

  He did spy the fringe of a large continent oriented east and west, and saw that those parts were mainly green. Beyond lay a stretch of sea. He thought that he glimpsed something peculiar on it, but passed over too fast, with his attention directed too much ahead, to be sure.

  The circumpolar landmass hove in view. Wayfarer compared maps that Gaia had transmitted. They were like nothing that Christian Brannock remembered. Plate tectonics had slowed, as radioactivity and original heat in the core of Earth declined, but drift, subduction, upthrust still went on.

  He cared more about the life here. Epoch after epoch, Gaia had described its posthuman evolution as she watched. Following the mass extinction of the Paleotechnic, it had regained the abundance and diversity of a Cretaceous or a Tertiary. Everything was different, though, except for a few small survivals. To Wayfarer, as to Alpha and, ultimately, the galactic brain, those accounts seemed somehow, increasingly, incomplete. They did not quite make ecological sense—as of the past hundred thousand years or so. Nor did all of Gaia’s responses to questions.

  Perhaps she was failing to gather full data, perhaps she was misinterpreting, perhaps—It was another reason to send him to her.

  Arctica appeared below the flyer. Imagine her giving names to it and its features. As long as she had lived with them, they had their identities for her. The Coast Range of hills lifted close behind the littoral. Through it cut the Remnant River, which had been greater when rains were more frequent but continued impressive. With its tributaries it drained the intensely verdant Bountiful Valley. On the far side of that, foothills edged the steeply rising Boreal Mountains. Once the highest among them had been snowcapped; now their peaks were naked rock. Streams rushed down the flanks, most of them joining the Remnant somewhere as it flowed through its gorges toward the sea. In a lofty vale gleamed the Rainbowl, the big lake that was its headwaters. Overlooking from the north loomed the mountain Mindhome, its top, the physical centrum of Gaia, lost in cloud cover.

  In a way the scenes were familiar to him. She had sent plenty of full-sensory transmissions, as part of her contribution to universal knowledge and thought. Wayfarer could even recall the geological past, back beyond the epoch when Arctica broke free and drifted north, ramming into land already present and thrusting the Boreals heavenward. He could extrapolate the geological future in comparable detail, until a red giant filling half the sky glared down on an airless globe of stone and sand, which would at last melt. Nevertheless, the reality, the physical being here, smote him more strongly than he had expected. His sensors strained to draw in every datum while his vessel flew needlessly fast to the goal.

  He neared the mountain. Jutting south from the range, it was not the tallest. Brushy forest grew all the way up its sides, lush on the lower slopes, parched on the heights, where many trees were leafless skeletons. That was due to a recent climatic shift, lowering the mean level of clouds, so that a formerly well-watered zone had been suffering a decades-long drought. (Yes, Earth was moving faster toward its doomsday.) Fire must be a constant threat, he thought. But no, Gaia’s agents could quickly put any out, or she might simply ignore it. Though not large, the area she occupied on the summit was paved over and doubtless nothing was vulnerable to heat or smoke.

  He landed. For an instant of planetary time, lengthy for minds that worked at close to light speed, there was communication silence.

  He was again above the cloud deck. It eddied white, the peak rising from it like an island among others, into the level rays of sunset. Overhead arched a violet clarity. A thin wind whittered, cold at this altitude. On a level circle of blue-black surfacing, about a kilometer wide, stood the crowded structures and engines of the centrum.

  A human would have seen an opalescent dome surrounded by towers, some sheer as lances, some intricately lacy; and silver spiderwebs; and lesser things of varied but curiously simple shapes, mobile units waiting to be dispatched on their tasks. Here and there, flyers darted and hovered, most of them as small and exquisite as hummingbirds (if our human had known hummingbirds). To her the scene would have wavered slightly, as if she saw it through rippling water, or it throbbed with quiet energies, or it pulsed in and out of space-time. She would not have sensed the complex of force fields and quantum-mechanical waves, nor the microscopic and submicroscopic entities that were the major part of it.

  Wayfarer perceived otherwise.

  Then: “Again, welcome,” Gaia said.

  “And again, thank you,” Wayfarer replied. “I am glad to be here.”

  They regarded one another, not as bodies—which neither was wearing-but as minds, matrices of memory, individuality, and awareness. Separately he wondered what she thought of him. She was giving him no more of herself than had always gone over the communication lines between the stars. That was: a nodal organism, like Alpha and millions of others, which over the eons had increased its capabilities, while ceaselessly experiencing and thinking; the ages of interaction with Earth and the life on Earth, maybe shaping her soul more deeply than the existence she shared with her own kind; traces of ancient human uploads, but they were not like Christian Brannock, copies of them dispersed across the galaxy, no, these had chosen to stay with the mother world … .

  “I told you I am glad too,” said Gaia regretfully, “but I am not, quite. You question my stewardship.”

  “Not really,” Wayfarer protested. “I hope not ever. We simply wish to know better how you carry it out.”

  “Why, you do know. As with any of us who is established on a planet, high among my activities is to study its complexities, follow its evolution. On this planet that means, above all, the evolution of its life, everything from genetics to ecology. In what way have I failed to share information with my fellows?”

  In many ways, Wayfarer left unspoken. Overtly: “Once we”—here he referred to the galactic brain—“gave close consideration to the matter, we found countless unresolved puzzles. For example—”

  What he set forth was hundreds of examples, ranging over millennia. Let a single case serve. About ten thousand years ago, the big continent south of Arctica had supported a wealth of large grazing animals. Their herds darkened the plains and made loud the woods. Gaia had described them in loving detail, from the lyrecurved horns of one genus to the wind-rustled manes of another. Abruptly, in terms of historical time, she transmitted no more about them. When asked why, she said they had gone extinct. She never explained how.

  To Wayfarer she res
ponded in such haste that he got a distinct impression she realized she had made a mistake. (Remember, this is a myth.) “A variety of causes. Climates became severe as temperatures rose—”

  “I am sorry,” he demurred, “but when analyzed, the meteorological data you supplied show that warming and desiccation cannot yet have been that significant in those particular regions.”

  “How are you so sure?” she retorted. Imagine her angry. “Have any of you lived with Earth for megayears, to know it that well?” Her tone hardened. “I do not myself pretend to full knowledge. A living world is too complex—chaotic. Cannot you appreciate that? I am still seeking comprehension of too many phenomena. In this instance, consider just a small shift in ambient conditions, coupled with new diseases and scores of other factors, most of them subtle. I believe that, combined, they broke a balance of nature. But unless and until I learn more, I will not waste bandwidth in talk about it.”

  “I sympathize with that,” said Wayfarer mildly, hoping for conciliation. “Maybe I can discover or suggest something helpful.”

  “No. You are too ignorant, you are blind, you can only do harm.”

  He stiffened. “We shall see.” Anew he tried for peace. “I did not come in any hostility. I came because here is the fountainhead of us all, and we think of saving it.”

  Her manner calmed likewise. “How would you?”

  “That is one thing I have come to find out—what the best way is, should we proceed.”

  In the beginning, maybe, a screen of planetary dimensions, kept between Earth and sun by an interplay of gravity and electromagnetism, to ward off the fraction of energy that was not wanted. It would only be a temporary expedient, though, possibly not worthwhile. That depended on how long it would take to accomplish the real work. Engines in close orbit around the star, drawing their power from its radiation, might generate currents in its body that carried fresh hydrogen down to the core, thus restoring the nuclear furnace to its olden state. Or they might bleed gas off into space, reducing the mass of the sun, damping its fires but adding billions upon billions of years wherein it scarcely changed any more. That would cause the planets to move outward, a factor that must be taken into account but that would reduce the requirements.

  Whatever was done, the resources of several stars would be needed to accomplish it, for time had grown cosmically short.

  “An enormous work,” Gaia said. Wayfarer wondered if she had in mind the dramatics of it, apparitions in heaven, such as centuries during which fire-fountains rushed visibly out of the solar disc.

  “For an enormous glory,” he declared.

  “No,” she answered curtly. “For nothing, and worse than nothing. Destruction of everything I have lived for. Eternal loss to the heritage.”

  “Why, is not Earth the heritage?”

  “No. Knowledge is. I tried to make that clear to Alpha.” She paused. “To you I say again, the evolution of life, its adaptations, struggles, transformations, and how at last it meets death—those are unforeseeable, and nowhere else in the space-time universe can there be a world like this for them to play themselves out. They will enlighten us in ways the galactic brain itself cannot yet conceive. They may well open to us whole new phases of ultimate reality.”

  “Why would not a life that went on for gigayears do so, and more?”

  “Because here I, the observer of the ages, have gained some knowledge of this destiny, some oneness with it—” She sighed. “Oh, you do not understand. You refuse to.”

  “On the contrary,” Wayfarer said, as softly as might be, “I hope to. Among the reasons I came is that we can communicate being to being, perhaps more fully than across light-years and certainly more quickly.”

  She was silent awhile. When she spoke again, her tone had gone gentle. “More … intimately. Yes. Forgive my resentment. It was wrong of me. I will indeed do what I can to make you welcome and help you learn.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Wayfarer said happily. “And I will do what I can toward that end.”

  The sun went under the cloud deck. A crescent moon stood aloft. The wind blew a little stronger, a little chillier.

  “But if we decide against saving Earth,” Wayfarer asked, “if it is to go molten and formless, every trace of its history dissolved, will you not mourn?”

  “The record I have guarded will stay safe,” Gaia replied.

  He grasped her meaning: the database of everything known about this world. It was here in her. Much was also stored elsewhere, but she held the entirety. As the sun became a devouring monster, she would remove her physical plant to the outer reaches of the system.

  “But you have done more than passively preserve it, have you not?” he said.

  “Yes, of course.” How could an intelligence like hers have refrained? “I have considered the data, worked with them, evaluated them, tried to reconstruct the conditions that brought them about.”

  And in the past thousands of years she had become ever more tacitum about that, too, or downright evasive, he thought.

  “You had immense gaps to fill in,” he hinted.

  “Inevitably. The past, also, is quantum probabilistic. By what roads, what means, did history come to us?”

  “Therefore you create various emulations, to see what they lead to,” about which she had told scarcely anything.

  “You knew that. I admit, since you force me, that besides trying to find what happened, I make worlds to show what might have happened.”

  He was briefly startled. He had not been deliberately trying to bring out any such confession. Then he realized that she had foreseen he was bound to catch scent of it, once they joined their minds in earnest.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why else but for a more complete understanding?”

  In his inwardness, Wayfarer reflected: Yes, she had been here since the time of humanity. The embryo of her existed before Christian Brannock was born. Into the growing fullness of her had gone the mind-patterns of humans who chose not to go to the stars but to abide on old Earth. And the years went by in their tens of millions.

  Naturally she was fascinated by the past. She must do most of her living in it. Could that be why she was indifferent to the near future, or actually wanted catastrophe?

  Somehow that thought did not feel right to him. Gaia was a mystery he must solve.

  Cautiously, he ventured, “Then you act as a physicist might, tracing hypothetical configurations of the wave function through space-time-except that the subjects of your experiments are conscious.”

  “I do no wrong,” she said. “Come with me into any of those worlds and see.”

  “Gladly,” he agreed, unsure whether he lied. He mustered resolution. “Just the same, duty demands I conduct my own survey of the material environment.”

  “As you will. Let me help you prepare.” She was quiet for a span. In this thin air, a human would have seen the first stars blink into sight. “But I believe it will be by sharing the history of my stewardship that we truly come to know one another.”

  4

  Storm-battered until men must work the pumps without cease, Gray Courser limped eastward along the southern coast of an unknown land. Wind set that direction, for the huukin trailed after, so worn and starved that what remained of its strength must be reserved for sorest need. The shore rolled jewel-green, save where woods dappled it darker, toward a wall of gentle hills. All was thick with life, grazing herds, wings multitudinous overhead, but no voyager had set foot there. Surf dashed in such violence that Kalava was not certain a boat could live through it. Meanwhile they had caught but little rainwater, and what was in the butts had gotten low and foul.

  He stood in the bows, peering ahead, Ilyandi at his side. Wind boomed and shrilled, colder than they were used to. Wrack flew beneath an overcast gone heavy. Waves ran high, gray-green, white-maned, foam blown off them in streaks. The ship rolled, pitched, and groaned.

  Yet they had seen the sky uncommonly often. Ilyandi believed tha
t clouds—doubtless vapors sucked from the ground by heat, turning back to water as they rose, like steam from a kettle—formed less readily in this clime. Too eagerly at her instruments and reckonings to speak much, she had now at last given her news to the captain.

  “Then you think you know where we are?” he asked hoarsely.

  Her face, gaunt within the cowl of a sea-stained cloak, bore the least smile. “No. This country is as nameless to me as to you. But, yes, I do think I can say we are no more than fifty daymarches from Ulonai, and it may be as little as forty.”

  Kalava’s fist smote the rail. “By Ruvio’s ax! How I hoped for this!” The words tumbled from him. “It means the weather tossed us mainly back and forth between the two shorelines. We’ve not come unreturnably far. Every ship henceforward can have a better passage. See you, she can first go out to the Ending Islands and wait at ease for favoring winds. The skipper will know he’ll make landfall. We’ll have it worked out after a few more voyages, just what lodestone bearing will bring him to what place hereabouts.”

  “But anchorage?” she wondered.

  He laughed, which he had not done for many days and nights. “As for that—”

  A cry from the lookout at the masthead broke through. Down the length of the vessel men raised their eyes. Terror howled.

  Afterward no two tongues bore the same tale. One said that a firebolt had pierced the upper clouds, trailing thunder. Another told of a sword as long as the hull, and blood carried on the gale of its flight. To a third it was a beast with jaws agape and three tails aflame … . Kalava remembered a spear among whirling rainbows. To him Ilyandi said, when they were briefly alone, that she thought of a shuttle now seen, now unseen as it wove a web on which stood writing she could not read. All witnesses agreed that it came from over the sea, sped on inland through heaven, and vanished behind the hills.

  Men went mad. Some ran about screaming. Some wailed to their gods. Some cast themselves down on the deck and shivered, or drew into balls and squeezed their eyes shut. No hand at helm or pumps, the ship wallowed about, sails banging, adrift toward the surf, while water drained in through sprung seams and lapped higher in the bilge.