The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Thank you,” he said. “The idea is to furnish me a kind of baseline, right?”

  “Yes, because conditions here are the easiest for life. When you are ready, we will proceed south, across countries increasingly harsh. You will learn about the adaptations life has made. Many are extraordinarily interesting. The galactic brain itself cannot match the creativity of nature.”

  “Well, sure. Chaos, complexity … You’ve described quite a few of those adaptations to, uh, us, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but by no means all. I keep discovering new ones. Life keeps evolving.”

  As environments worsened, Brannock thought. And nonetheless, species after species went extinct. He got a sense of a rear-guard battle against the armies of hell.

  “I want you to experience this as fully as you are able,” Gaia said, “immerse yourself, feel the sublimity of it.”

  The tragedy, he thought. But tragedy was art, maybe the highest art that humankind ever achieved. And more of the human soul might well linger in Gaia than in any of her fellow intelligences.

  Had she kept a need for catharsis, for pity and terror? What really went on in her emulations?

  Well, Christian was supposed to find out something about that. If he could.

  Brannock was human enough himself to protest. He gestured at the land below, where the river flowed in its canyons through the coastal hills, to water a wealth of forest and meadow before emptying into a bay above which soared thousands of wings. “You want to watch the struggle till the end,” he said. “Life wants to live. What right have you to set your wish against that?”

  “The right of awareness,” she declared. “Only to a being that is conscious do justice, mercy, desire have any existence, any meaning. Did not humans always use the world as they saw fit? When nature finally got protection, that was because humans so chose. I speak for the knowledge and insight that we can gain.”

  The question flickered uneasily in him: What about her private emotional needs?

  Abruptly the aircraft veered. The turn pushed Brannock hard into the force field upholding him. He heard air crack and scream. The bay fell aft with mounting speed.

  The spaceman in him, who had lived through meteoroid strikes and radiation bursts because he was quick, had already acted. Through the optical magnification he immediately ordered up, he looked back to see what the trouble was. The glimpse he got, before the sight went under the horizon, made him cry, “Yonder!”

  “What?” Gaia replied as she hurtled onward.

  “That back there. Why are you running from it?”

  “What do you mean? There is nothing important.”

  “The devil there isn’t. I’ve a notion you saw it more clearly than I did.”

  Gaia slowed the headlong flight until she well-nigh hovered above the strand and wild surf. He felt a sharp suspicion that she did it in order to dissipate the impression of urgency, make him more receptive to whatever she intended to claim.

  “Very well,” she said after a moment. “I spied a certain object. What do you think you saw?”

  He decided not to answer straightforwardly—at least, not before she convinced him of her good faith. The more information she had, the more readily she could contrive a deception. Even this fragment of her intellect was superior to his. Yet he had his own measure of wits, and an ingrained stubbornness.

  “I’m not sure, except that it didn’t seem dangerous. Suppose you tell me what it is and why you turned tail from it.”

  Did she sigh? “At this stage of your knowledge, you would not understand. Rather, you would be bound to misunderstand. That is why I retreated.”

  A human would have tensed every muscle. Brannock’s systems went on full standby. “I’ll be the judge of my brain’s range, if you please. Kindly go back.”

  “No. I promise I will explain later, when you have seen enough more.”

  Seen enough illusions? She might well have many trickeries waiting for him. “As you like,” Brannock said. “Meanwhile, I’ll give Wayfarer a call and let him know,” Alpha’s emissary kept a minute part of his sensibility open to outside stimuli.

  “No, do not,” Gaia said. “It would distract him unnecessarily.”

  “He will decide that,” Brannock told her.

  Strife exploded.

  Almost, Gaia won. Had her entirety been focused on attack, she would have carried it off with such swiftness that Brannock would never have known he was bestormed. But a fraction of her was dealing, as always, with her observing units around the globe and their torrents of data. Possibly it also glanced from time to time—through the quantum shifts inside her—at the doings of Christian and Laurinda. By far the most of her was occupied in her interaction with Wayfarer. This she could not set aside without rousing instant suspicion. Rather, she must make a supremely clever effort to conceal from him that anything untoward was going on.

  Moreover, she had never encountered a being like Brannock, human male aggressiveness and human spacefarer’s reflexes blent with sophisticated technology and something of Alpha’s immortal purpose.

  He felt the support field strengthen and tighten to hold him immobile. He felt a tide like delirium rush into his mind. A man would have thought it was a knockout anesthetic. Brannock did not stop to wonder. He reacted directly, even as she struck. Machine fast and tiger ferocious, he put her off balance for a crucial millisecond.

  Through the darkness and roaring in his head, he lashed out physically. His hands tore through the light-play of control nexuses before him. They were not meant to withstand an assault. He could not seize command, but he could, blindly, disrupt.

  Arcs leaped blue-white. Luminances flared and died. Power output continued; the aircraft stayed aloft. Its more complex functions were in ruin. Their dance of atoms, energies, and waves went uselessly random.

  The bonds that had been closing on Brannock let go. He sagged to the floor. The night in his head receded. It left him shaken, his senses awhirl. Into the sudden anarchy of everything he yelled, “Stop, you bitch!”

  “I will,” Gaia said.

  Afterward he realized that she had kept a vestige of governance over the flyer. Before he could wrest it from her, she sent them plunging downward and cut off the main generator. Every force field blinked out. Wind ripped the material frame asunder. Its pieces crashed in the surf. Combers tumbled them about, cast a few on the beach, gave the rest to the undertow.

  As the craft fell, distintegrating, Brannock gathered his strength and leaped. The thrust of his legs cast him outward, through a long arc that ended in deeper water. It fountained high and white when he struck. He went down into green depths while the currents swept him to and fro. But he hit the sandy bottom unharmed.

  Having no need to breathe, he stayed under. To recover from the shock took him less than a second. To make his assessment took minutes, there in the swirling surges.

  Gaia had tried to take him over. A force field had begun to damp the processes in his brain and impose its own patterns. He had quenched it barely in time.

  She would scarcely have required a capability of that kind in the past. Therefore she had invented and installed it specifically for him. This strongly suggested she had meant to use it at some point of their journey. When he saw a thing she had not known was there and refused to be fobbed off, he compelled her to make the attempt before she was ready. When it failed, she spent her last resources to destroy him.

  She would go that far, that desperately, to keep a secret that tremendous from the stars.

  He recognized a mistake in his thinking. She had not used up everything at her beck. On the contrary, she had a planetful of observers and other instrumentalities to call upon. Certain of them must be bound here at top speed, to make sure he was dead—or, if he lived, to make sure of him. Afterward she would feed Wayfarer a story that ended with a regrettable accident away off over an ocean.

  Heavier than water, Brannock strode down a sloping sea floor in search of depth.

/>   Having found a jumble of volcanic rock, he crawled into a lava tube, lay fetally curled, and willed his systems to operate as low-level as might be. He hoped that then her agents would miss him. Neither their numbers nor their sensitivities were infinite. It would be reasonable for Gaia—who could not have witnessed his escape, her sensors in the aircraft being obliterated as it came apart—to conclude that the flows had taken his scattered remains away.

  After three days and nights, the internal clock he had set brought him back awake.

  He knew he must stay careful. However, unless she kept a closer watch on the site than he expected she would—for Wayfarer, in communion with her, might too readily notice that she was concentrating on one little patch of the planet—he dared now move about. His electronic senses ought to warn him of any robot that came into his vicinity, even if it was too small for eyes to see. Whether he could then do anything about it was a separate question.

  First he searched the immediate area. Gaia’s machines had removed those shards of the wreck that they found, but most were strewn over the bottom, and she had evidently not thought it worthwhile, or safe, to have them sought out. Nearly all of what he came upon was in fact scrap. A few units were intact. The one that interested him had the physical form of a small metal sphere. He tracked it down by magnetic induction. Having taken it to a place ashore, hidden by trees from the sky, he studied it. With his tool-hands he traced the (mythic) circuitry within and identified it as a memory bank. The encoding was familiar to his Wayfarer aspect. He extracted the information and stored it in his own database.

  A set of languages. Human languages, although none he had ever heard of. Yes, very interesting.

  “I’d better get hold of those people,” he muttered. In the solitude of wind, sea, and wilderness, he had relapsed into an ancient habit of occasionally thinking aloud. “Won’t likely be another chance. Quite a piece of news for Wayfarer.” If he came back, or at least got within range of his transmitter.

  He set forth afoot, along the shore toward the bay where the Remnant River debouched. Maybe that which he had seen would be there yet, or traces of it.

  He wasn’t sure, everything had happened so fast, but he thought it was a ship.

  7

  Three days—olden Earth days of twenty-four hours, cool sunlight, now and then a rainshower leaving pastures and hedgerows asparkle, rides through English lanes, rambles through English towns, encounters with folk, evensong in a Norman church, exploration of buildings and books, long talks and companionable silences—wrought friendship. In Christian it also began to rouse kindlier feelings toward Gaia. She had resurrected Laurinda, and Laurinda was a part of her, as he was of Wayfarer and of Alpha and more other minds across the galaxy than he could number. Could the rest of Gaia’s works be wrongful?

  No doubt she had chosen and planned as she did in order to get this reaction from him. It didn’t seem to matter.

  Nor did the primitive conditions of the eighteenth century matter to him or to Laurinda. Rather, their everyday experiences were something refreshingly new, and frequently the occasion of laughter. What did become a bit difficult for him was to retire decorously to his separate room each night.

  But they had their missions: his to see what was going on in this reality and afterward upload into Wayfarer; hers to explain and justify it to him as well as a mortal was able. Like him, she kept a memory of having been one with a nodal being. The memory was as dim and fragmentary as his, more a sense of transcendence than anything with a name or form, like the afterglow of a religious vision long ago. Yet it pervaded her personality, the unconscious more than the conscious; and it was her relationship to Gaia, as he had his to Wayfarer and beyond that to Alpha. In a limited, mortal, but altogether honest and natural way, she spoke for the node of Earth.

  By tacit consent, they said little about the purpose and simply enjoyed their surroundings and one another, until the fourth morning. Perhaps the weather whipped up a lifetime habit of duty. Wind gusted and shrilled around the house, rain blinded the windows, there would be no going out even in a carriage. Indoors a fire failed to hold dank chill at bay. Candlelight glowed cozily on the breakfast table, silverware and china sheened, but shadows hunched thick in every corner.

  He took a last sip of coffee, put the cup down, and ended the words he had been setting forth: “Yes, we’d better get started. Not that I’ve any clear notion of what to look for. Wayfarer himself doesn’t.” Gaia had been so vague about so much. Well, Wayfarer was now (whatever “now” meant) in rapport with her, seeking an overall, cosmic view of—how many millions of years on this planet?

  “Why, you know your task,” Laurinda replied. “You’re to find out the nature of Gaia’s interior activity, what it means in moral—in human terms.” She straightened in her chair. Her tone went resolute. “We are human, we emulations. We think and act, we feel joy and pain, the same as humans always did.”

  Impulse beckoned; it was his want to try to lighten moods. “And,” he added, “make new generations of people, the same as humans always did.”

  A blush crossed the fair countenance. “Yes,” she said. Quickly: “Of course, most of what’s … here … is nothing but database. Archives, if you will. We might start by visiting one or two of those reconstructions.”

  He smiled, the heaviness lifting from him. “I’d love to. Any suggestions?”

  Eagerness responded. “The Acropolis of Athens? As it was when new? Classical civilization fascinated me.” She tossed her head. “Still does, by damn.”

  “Hm.” He rubbed his chin. “From what I learned in my day, those old Greeks were as tricky, quarrelsome, shortsighted a pack of political animals as ever stole an election or bullied a weaker neighbor. Didn’t Athens finance the building of the Parthenon by misappropriating the treasury of the Delian League?”

  “They were human,” she said, almost too low for him to hear above the storm-noise. “But what they made—”

  “Sure,” he answered. “Agreed, Let’s go.”

  In perception, the amulets were silvery two-centimeter discs that hung on a user’s breast, below garments. In reality—outer-viewpoint reality—they were powerful, subtle programs with intelligences of their own. Christian wondered about the extent to which they were under the direct control of Gaia, and how closely she was monitoring him.

  Without thinking, he took Laurinda’s hand. Her fingers clung to his. She looked straight before her, though, into the flickery fire, while she uttered their command.

  Immediately, with no least sensation of movement, they were on board marble steps between outworks, under a cloudless heaven, in flooding hot radiance. From the steepest, unused hill slopes, a scent of wild thyme drifted up through silence, thyme without bees to quicken it or hands to pluck it. Below reached the city, sun-smitten house roofs, open agoras, colonnaded temples. In this clear air Brannock imagined he could well-nigh make out the features on the statues.

  After a time beyond time, the visitors moved upward, still mute, still hand in hand, to where winged Victories lined the balustrade before the sanctuary of Nike Apteros. Their draperies flowed to movement he did not see and wind he did not feel. One was tying her sandals … .

  For a long while the two lingered at the Propylaea, its porticos, Ionics, Dorics, paintings, votive tablets in the Pinakotheka. They felt they could have stayed past sunset, but everything else awaited them, and they knew mortal enthusiasm as they would presently know mortal weariness. Colors burned … .

  The stone flowers and stone maidens at the Erechtheum …

  Christian had thought of the Parthenon as exquisite; so it was in the pictures and models he had seen, while the broken, chemically gnawed remnants were merely to grieve over. Confronting it here, entering it, he discovered its sheer size and mass. Life shouted in the friezes, red, blue, gilt; then in the dusk within, awesomeness and beauty found their focus in the colossal Athene of Pheidias.

  —Long afterward, he stood with Laurinda on
the Wall of Kimon, above the Asclepium and Theater of Dionysus. A westering sun made the city below intricate with shadows, and coolth breathed out of the east. Hitherto, when they spoke it had been, illogically, in near whispers. Now they felt free to talk openly, or did they feel a need?

  He shook his head. “Gorgeous,” he said, for lack of anything halfway adequate. “Unbelievable.”

  “It was worth all the wrongdoing and war and agony,” she murmured. “Wasn’t it?”

  For the moment, he shied away from deep seriousness. “I didn’t expect it to be this, uh, gaudy—no, this bright.”

  “They painted their buildings. That’s known.”

  “Yes, I knew too. But were later scholars sure of just what colors?”

  “Scarcely, except where a few traces were left. Most of this must be Gaia’s conjecture. The sculpture especially, I suppose. Recorded history saved only the barest description of the Athene, for instance.” Laurinda paused. Her gaze went outward to the mountains. “But surely this—in view of everything she has, all the information, and being able to handle it all at once and, and understand the minds that were capable of making it—surely this is the most likely reconstruction. Or the least unlikely.”

  “She may have tried variations. Would you like to go see?”

  “No, I, I think not, unless you want to. This has been overwhelming, hasn’t it?” She hesitated. “Besides, well—”

  He nodded. “Yeh.” With a gesture at the soundless, motionless, smokeless city below and halidoms around: “Spooky. At best, a museum exhibit. Not much to our purpose, I’m afraid.”