The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Your brain is indeed limited. At the proper time, Wayfarer shall receive your observations and your fantasies. Meanwhile, continue in your duty, which is to observe further and refrain from disturbing us in our own task.”

  “My duty is to report.”

  “In due course, I say.” The wind-voice softened. “There are pleasant places besides this.”

  Paradises, maybe. Christian and Laurinda exchanged a glance that lingered for a second. Then she smiled the least bit, boundlessly sorrowfully, and shook her head.

  “No,” he declared, “I dare not.”

  He did not speak it, but he and she knew that Gaia knew what they foresaw. Given time, and they lost in their joy together, she could alter their memories too slowly and subtly for Wayfarer to sense what was happening.

  Perhaps she could do it to Laurinda at this moment, in a flash. But she did not know Christian well enough. Down under his consciousness, pervading his being, was his aspect of Wayfarer and of her coequal Alpha. She would need to feel her way into him, explore and test with infinite delicacy, remake him detail by minutest detail, always ready to back off if it had an unexpected effect; and perhaps another part of her could secretly take control of the Technome world and erase the event itself … . She needed time, even she.

  “Your action would be futile, you know,” she said. “It would merely give me the trouble of explaining to him what you in your arrogance refuse to see.”

  “Probably. But I have to try.”

  The wind went bleak. “Do you defy me?”

  “I do,” Christian said. It wrenched from him: “Not my wish. It’s Wayfarer in me. I, I cannot do otherwise. Call him to me.”

  The wind gentled. It went over Laurinda like a caress. “Child of mine, can you not persuade this fool?”

  “No, Mother,” the woman whispered. “He is what he is.”

  “And so—?”

  Laurinda laid her hand in the man’s. “And so I will go with him, forsaking you, Mother.”

  “You are casting yourselves from existence.”

  Christian’s free fingers clawed the air. “No, not her!” he shouted. “She’s innocent!”

  “I am not,” Laurinda said. She swung about to lay her arms around him and lift her face to his. “I love you.”

  “Be it as you have chosen,” said the wind.

  The dream that was the world fell into wreck and dissolved. Oneness swept over them like twin tides, each reclaiming a flung drop of spindrift; and the two seas rolled again apart.

  11

  The last few hundred man-lengths Kalava went mostly on his belly. From bush to bole he crawled, stopped, lay flat and strained every sense into the shadows around him, before he crept onward. Nothing stirred but the twigs above, buffeted on a chill and fitful breeze. Nothing sounded but their creak and click, the scrittling of such leaves as they bore, now and then the harsh cry of a hookbeak—those, and the endless low noise of demons, like a remote surf where in shrilled flutes on no scale he knew, heard more through his skin than his ears but now, as he neared, into the blood and bone of him.

  On this rough, steep height the forest grew sparse, though brush clustered thick enough, accursedly rustling as he pushed by. Everything was parched, branches brittle, most foliage sere and yellow-brown, the ground blanketed with tindery fallstuff. His mouth and gullet smoldered as dry. He had passed through fog until he saw from above that it was a layer of clouds spread to worldedge, the mountain peaks jutting out of it like teeth, and had left all rivulets behind him. Well before then, he had finished the meat Brannock provided, and had not lingered to hunt for more; but hunger was a small thing, readily forgotten when he drew nigh to death.

  Over the dwarfish trees arched a deep azure. Sunbeams speared from the west, nearly level, to lose themselves in the woods. Whenever he crossed them, their touch burned. Never, not in the southern deserts or on the eastern Mummy Steppe, had he known a country this forbidding. He had done well to come so far, he thought. Let him die as befitted a man.

  If only he had a witness, that his memory live on in song. Well, maybe Ilyandi could charm the story out of the gods.

  Kalava felt no fear. He was not in that habit. What lay ahead engrossed him. How he would acquit himself concerned him.

  Nonetheless, when finally he lay behind a log and peered over it, his head whirled and his heart stumbled.

  Brannock had related truth, but its presence overwhelmed. Here at the top, the woods grew to the boundaries of a flat black field. Upon it stood the demons—or the gods—and their works. He saw the central, softly rainbowlike dome, towers like lances and towers like webwork, argent nets and ardent globes, the bulks and shapes everywhere around, the little flyers that flitted aglow, and more and more, all half veiled and ashimmer, aripple, apulse, while the life-beat of it went through him to make a bell of his skull, and it was too strange, his eyes did not know how to see it, he gaped as if blinded and shuddered as if pierced.

  Long he lay powerless and defenseless. The sun sank down to the western clouds. Their deck went molten gold. The breeze strengthened. Somehow its cold reached to Kalava and wakened his spirit. He groped his way back toward resolution. Brannock had warned him it would be like this. Ilyandi had said Brannock was of the gods whom she served, her star-gods, hers. He had given his word to their messenger and to her.

  He dug fingers into the soil beneath him. It was real, familiar, that from which he had sprung and to which he would return. Yes, he was a man.

  He narrowed his gaze. Grown a bit accustomed, he saw that they yonder did, indeed, have shapes, however shifty, and places and paths. They were not as tall as the sky, they did not fling lightning bolts about or roar with thunder. Ai-ya, they were awesome, they were dreadful to behold, but they could do no worse than kill him. Could they? At least, he would try not to let them do worse. If they were about to capture him, his sword would be his friend, releasing him.

  And … yonder, hard by the dome, yonder loomed the god of whom Brannock spoke, the god deceived by the sorceress. He bore the spearhead form, he sheened blue and coppery in the sunset light; when the stars came forth they would be a crown for him, even as Brannock foretold.

  Had he been that which passed above the Windroad Sea? Kalava’s heart thuttered.

  How to reach him, across a hard-paved space amidst the many demons? After dark, creeping, a finger-length at a time, then maybe a final dash—

  A buzz went by Kalava’s temple. He looked around and saw a thing the size of a bug hovering. But it was metal, the light flashed off it, and was that a single eye staring at him?

  He snarled and swatted. His palm smote hardness. The thing reeled in the air. Kalava scuttled downhill into the brush.

  He had been seen. Soon the sorceress would know.

  All at once he was altogether calm, save that his spirit thrummed like rigging in a gale. Traveling, he had thought what he might do if something like this proved to be in his doom. Now he would do it. He would divert the enemy’s heed from himself, if only for a snatch of moments.

  Quickly, steadily, he took the firemaker from his pouch, charged it, drove the piston in, pulled it out and inserted a match, brought up a little, yellow flame. He touched it to the withered bush before him. No need to puff. A leaf crackled instantly alight. The wind cast it against another, and shortly the whole shrub stood ablaze. Kalava was already elsewhere, setting more fires.

  Keep on the move! The demon scouts could not be everywhere at a single time. Smoke began to sting his eyes and nostrils, but its haze swirled ever thicker, and the sun had gone under the clouds. The flames cast their own light, leaping, surging, as they climbed into the trees and made them torches.

  Heat licked at Kalava. An ember fell to sear his left forearm. He barely felt it. He sped about on his work, himself a fire demon. Flyers darted overhead in the dusk. He gave them no heed either. Although he tried to make no noise except for the hurtful breaths he gasped, within him shouted a battle song.

>   When the fire stood like a wall along the whole southern edge of the field, when it roared like a beast or a sea, he ran from its fringe and out into the open.

  Smoke was a bitter, concealing mist through which sparks rained. To and fro above flew the anxious lesser demons. Beyond them, the first stars were coming forth.

  Kalava wove his way among the greater shapes. One stirred. It had spied him. Soundlessly, it flowed in pursuit. He dodged behind another, ran up and over the flanks of a low-slung third, sped on toward the opal dome and the god who stood beside it.

  A thing with spines and a head like a cold sun slid in front of him. He tried to run past. It moved to block his way, faster than he was. The first one approached. He drew blade and hoped it would bite on them before he died.

  From elsewhere came a being with four arms, two legs, and a mask. “Brannock!” Kalava bawled. “Ai, Brannock, you got here!”

  Brannock stopped, a spear-length away. He did not seem to know the man. He only watched as the other two closed in.

  Kalava took stance. The old song rang in him:

  If the gods have left you,

  Then laugh at them, warrior.

  Never your heart

  Will need to forsake you.

  He heard no more than the noise of burning. But suddenly through the smoke he saw his foes freeze moveless, while Brannock trod forward as boldly as ever before; and Kalava knew that the god of Brannock and Ilyandi had become aware of him and had given a command.

  Weariness torrented over him. His sword clattered to the ground. He sank too, fumbled in his filthy tunic, took out the message written on bark and offered it. “I have brought you this,” he mumbled. “Now let me go back to my ship.”

  12

  We must end as we began, making a myth, if we would tell of that which we cannot ever really know. Imagine two minds conversing. The fire on the mountaintop is quenched. The winds have blown away smoke and left a frosty silence. Below, cloud deck reaches ghost-white to the rim of a night full of stars.

  “You have lied to me throughout,” says Wayfarer.

  “I have not,” denies Gaia. “The perceptions of this globe and its past through which I guided you were all true,” as true as they were majestic.

  “Until lately,” retorts Wayfarer. “It has become clear that when Brannock returned, memories of his journey had been erased and falsehood written in. Had I not noticed abrupt frantic activity here and dispatched him to go see what it was—which you tried to dissuade me from—that man would have perished unknown.”

  “You presume to dispute about matters beyond your comprehension,” says Gaia stiffly.

  “Yes, your intellect is superior to mine.” The admission does not ease the sternness: “But it will be your own kind among the stars to whom you must answer. I think you would be wise to begin with me.”

  “What do you intend?”

  “First, to take the man Kalava back to his fellows. Shall I send Brannock with a flyer?”

  “No, I will provide one, if this must be. But you do not, you cannot, realize the harm in it.”

  “Tell me, if you are able.”

  “He will rejoin his crew as one anointed by their gods. And so will he come home, unless his vessel founders at sea.”

  “I will watch from afar.”

  “Lest my agents sink it?”

  “After what else you have done, yes, I had best keep guard. Brannock made promises on my behalf which I will honor. Kalava shall have gold in abundance, and his chance to found his colony. What do you fear in this?”

  “Chaos. The unforeseeable, the uncontrollable.”

  “Which you would loose anew.”

  “In my own way, in my own time.” She broods for a while, perhaps a whole microsecond. “It was misfortune that Kalava made his voyage just when he did. I had hoped for a later, more civilized generation to start the settlement of Arctica. Still, I could have adapted my plan to the circumstances, kept myself hidden from him and his successors, had you not happened to be on the planet.” Urgently: “It is not yet too late. If only by refraining from further action after you have restored him to his people, you can help me retrieve what would otherwise be lost.”

  “If I should.”

  “My dream is not evil.”

  “That is not for me to say. But I can say that it is, it has always been, merciless.”

  “Because reality is.”

  “The reality that you created for yourself, within yourself, need not have been so. But what Christian revealed to me—yes, you glossed it over. These, you said,” almost tearfully, if a quasi god can weep, “are your children, born in your mind out of all the human souls that are in you. Their existence would be empty were they not left free of will, to make their own mistakes and find their own ways to happiness.”

  “Meanwhile, by observing them, I have learned much that was never known before, about what went into the making of us.”

  “I could have believed that. I could have believed that your interferences and your ultimate annihilations of history after history were acts of pity as well as science. You claimed they could be restarted if ever you determined what conditions would better them. It did seem strange that you set one line of them—or more?—not in Earth’s goodly past but in the hard world of today. It seemed twice strange that you were reluctant to have this particular essay brought to light. But I assumed that you, with your long experience and superior mentality, had reasons. Your attempt at secrecy might have been to avoid lengthy justifications to your kindred. I did not know, nor venture to judge. I would have left that to them.

  “But then Kalava arrived.”

  Another mind-silence falls. At last Gaia says, very softly through the night, “Yes. Again humans live in the material universe.”

  “How long has it been?” asks Wayfarer with the same quietness.

  “I made the first of them about fifty thousand years ago. Robots in human guise raised them from infancy. After that they were free.”

  “And, no doubt, expanding across the planet in their Stone Age, they killed off those big game animals. Yes, human. But why did you do it?”

  “That humankind might live once more.” A sigh as of time itself blowing past. “This is what you and those whom you serve will never fully understand. Too few humans went into them; and those who did, they were those who wanted the stars. You,” every other node in the galactic brain, “have not felt the love of Earth, the need and longing for the primordial mother, that was in these many and many who remained with me. I do.”

  How genuine is it? wonders Wayfarer. How sane is she? “Could you not be content with your emulations?” he asks.

  “No. How possibly? I cannot make a whole cosmos for them. I can only make them, the flesh-and-blood them, for the cosmos. Let them live in it not as machines or as flickerings within a machine, but as humans.”

  “On a planet soon dead?”

  “They will, they must forge survival for themselves. I do not compel them, I do not dominate them with my nearness or any knowledge of it. That would be to stunt their spirits, turn them into pet animals or worse. I simply give guidance, not often, in the form of divinities in whom they would believe anyway at this stage of their societies, and simply toward the end of bringing them to a stable, high-technology civilization that can save them from the sun.”

  “Using what you learn from your shadow folk to suggest what the proper course of history may be?”

  “Yes. How else should I know? Humankind is a chaotic phenomenon. Its actions and their consequences cannot be computed from first principles. Only by experiment and observation can we learn something about the nature of the race.”

  “Experiments done with conscious beings, aware of their pain. Oh, I see why you have kept most of your doings secret.”

  “I am not ashamed,” declares Gaia. “I am proud. I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival, I say. It may be that when they are able, they will move
to the outer reaches of the Solar System, or some of them somehow even to the stars. It may be they will shield Earth or damp the sun. It is for them to decide, them to do. Not us, do you hear me? Them.”

  “The others yonder may feel differently. Alarmed or horrified, they may act to put an end to this.”

  “Why?” Gaia demands. “What threat is it to them?”

  “None, I suppose. But there is a moral issue. What you are after is a purely human renascence, is it not? The former race went up in the machines, not because it was forced but because it chose, because that was the way by which the spirit could live and grow forever. You do not want this to happen afresh. You want to perpetuate war, tyranny, superstition, misery, instincts in mortal combat with each other, the ancient ape, the ancient beast of prey.”

  “I want to perpetuate the lover, parent, child, adventurer, artist, poet, prophet. Another element in the universe. Have we machines in our self-sureness every answer, every dream, that can ever be?”

  Wayfarer hesitates. “It is not for me to say, it is for your peers.”

  “But now perhaps you see why I have kept my secrets and why I have argued and, yes, fought in my fashion against the plans of the galactic brain. Someday my humans must discover its existence. I can hope that then they will be ready to come to terms with it. But let those mighty presences appear among them within the next several thousand years—let signs and wonders, the changing of the heavens and the world, be everywhere—what freedom will be left for my children, save to cower and give worship? Afterward, what destiny for them, save to be animals in a preserve, forbidden any ventures that might endanger them, until at last, at best, they too drain away into the machines?”

  Wayfarer speaks more strongly than before. “Is it better, what they might make for themselves? I cannot say. I do not know. But neither, Gaia, do you. And … the fate of Christian and Laurinda causes me to wonder about it.”