The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”

  He sighed. “It’s 51 Pegasi. I-B.”

  I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”

  “Is everything measured relative to Earth … ? Not very far. My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered—or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”

  I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.

  He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”

  “No—”

  “I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth—not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”

  “Then why did you go there?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think—and we can’t have that, can we … ?”

  I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.

  But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all.

  I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.

  There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.

  Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. “Not a peep out of the beacon.”

  Pael said, “You realize our time here is limited.”

  I asked, “The suits?”

  “He means the star,” Jeru said heavily. “Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon, the stars don’t last long before going pop.”

  Pael shrugged. “We have hours, a few days at most.”

  Jeru said, “Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet. That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.”

  Pael laughed hollowly. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  Jeru glared. “Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?”

  Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. “Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.”

  Jeru growled. She turned to me. “You. What do you know about the Ghosts?”

  I said, “They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.”

  Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect … . About one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.”

  I hesitated. “They say the Ghosts experiment on people.”

  Pael sneered. “Lies put about by your Commission for Historical Truth, Commissary. To demonize an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.”

  Jeru wasn’t perturbed. “Then why don’t you put young Case right? How do the Ghosts go about their business?”

  Pael said, “The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics.”

  I looked to Jeru; she shrugged.

  Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.

  Quagma is the state of matter that emerged from the Big Bang. Matter; when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks—a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.

  To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships like Brief Life Burns Brightly, is related.

  Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratio between those forces. And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.

  Something like that.

  Pael said, “That marvelous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed … . Because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell—hence the reflectivity.”

  “All right,” Jeru said. “So what are they doing here?”

  Pael sighed. “The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter. We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a space-time volume in which the laws of physics are—tweaked.”

  “And that’s why our equipment failed.”

  “Presumably,” said Pael, with cold sarcasm.

  I asked, “What do the Ghosts want? Why do they do all this stuff?”

  Pael studied me. “You are trained to kill them, and they don’t even tell you that?”

  Jeru just glowered.

  Pael said, “The Ghosts were not shaped by competitive evolution. They are symbiotic creatures; they derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. And they seem to be motivated—not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are—but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries—by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all.”

  Jeru said, “An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.”

  Pael said bleakly, “Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for a thousand years. We are so different, with disparate motivations—why should there be a clash, anymore than between two species of birds in the same garden?”

  I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.

  Jeru glared. She said at last, “Let’s return to practicalities. How do their fortresses work?” When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, “Academician, you’ve been inside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?”

  Acidly, Pael demanded, “What would you have me do?”

  Jeru nodded at me. “What have you seen, tar?”

  “Our instruments and weapons don’t work,” I said promptly. “The Brightly exploded. I broke my arm.”

  Jeru said, “Till snapped his neck also.” She flexed her hand within her glove. “What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?”

  I shrugged.

  Pael admitted, “I do feel somewhat warm.”

  Jeru asked, “Could these body changes be relevant?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Then figure it out.”

  “I have no equipment.”

  Jeru dumped spare gear—weapons, beacons—in his lap. “You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.” She turned to me. “As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.”

  I glanced doubtfully at Pael. “There’s nobody to stand on stag.”

  Jeru said, �
��I know. But there are only three of us.” She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. “Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?”

  Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.

  I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.

  She studied me, fingered my arm. “You up to this?”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.”

  That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. “Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.” I mimed digging a grave.

  She grinned back fiercely. “Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse—”

  Pael’s voice was trembling. “You really are monsters.”

  I shared a glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.

  I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.

  What we were hoping to find was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.

  We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable stuff is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign.

  We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water—I was getting hot—and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.

  And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, and making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?

  I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg-shape, a couple of kilometers long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps the Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.

  There were Ghosts all over the craft.

  They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection like a hole cut out of space, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.

  We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.

  We reached the outer hull, the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.

  I got an unimpeded view of the stars.

  Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.

  But the most striking sight was the fleet.

  Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organized in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colors denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of color and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.

  It was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the nearest sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me … .

  I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.

  Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes locked on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.

  She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. “You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?”

  “I’m sorry, Commissary. I’ve been trained—”

  “You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?”

  I managed a grin. “Mercury. Caloris Planitia.” Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where kids compete with the rats.

  “And that’s why you joined up? To get away?”

  “I was drafted.”

  “Come on,” she scoffed. “On a place like Mercury there are ways to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?”

  “No,” I said bluntly. “Life is more useful here.”

  She studied me. “A brief life should burn brightly—eh, tar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I came from Deneb,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Sixteen hundred light years from Earth—a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. It is quite different from the solar system. It is—organized. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation had become efficient. From preliminary exploration to working ship yards and daughter colonies in less than a century … . Deneb’s resources—its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself—have been mined to fund fresh colonizing waves, the greater Expansion—and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts.”

  She swept her hand over the sky. “Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years—nothing but mankind, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent—even the solar system itself—are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometers wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s what we’re fighting for!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She eyed me. “You ready to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.

  I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally—and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to talk.

  Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, toward the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.

  After a couple of hundred meters the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.

  Maybe fifty meters deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surfac
e appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within.

  Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.

  Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle toward the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.

  We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip. We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.

  The pod was pressurized. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapor.

  Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

  We figured it out in bioluminescent “whispers.” The Ghosts were feeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.

  So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.

  There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.

  The next section of the pod was … strange.

  It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened-out Ghosts, perhaps. They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children.