The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let me think.”

  At an expressway exit stood a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

  There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

  Sanctuary. All of them going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.

  Where? With whom?

  Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother, and was co-beneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did? She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.

  “Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.

  “Leisha—” Stewart said, and stopped.

  “I need help, Stewart.” “I’ll help you, Alice.”“I don’t need your help.” A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk and Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.

  “All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania on the route you’ll be driving east. It has to be in New York, I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an activist in her youth, her name is Janet Patterson. The town is—”

  “What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”

  “She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can be transferred to a foster home in New York, I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice—”

  “She’s resident in Illinois. You can’t—”

  “Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The result is a body of so-called ‘law’ riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run—or at least I hope not—but in the meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in meantime she won’t be returned home. But that won’t work for Alice—she’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”

  “We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”

  “No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a man in—are you crying?”

  “No,” Leisha said, crying.

  “Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”

  “Don’t be,” Leisha said.

  When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake. There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.

  To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a contract: Every first-year student knows that.

  To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown—it’s an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes.

  To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are more than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to help me, and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.

  And finally, there was only Daddy left. She could see him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh, Daddy—the specialness of Alice! You were wrong.

  As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.

  She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.

  MATTER’S END

  Gregory Benford

  Gregory Benford (born 1941) was the first among the hard science fiction writers to have mastered and integrated Modernist techniques of characterization and use of metaphor. He, more than anyone, has become the chief rhetoritician for hard SF. He coined the phrase “playing with the net up,” which he uses to describe the game of hard science fiction.

  He is the son of a career military officer, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, working in both astrophysics and plasma physics, and is an intensely competitive man of ideas who enjoys conversational fencing, both as a scientist and as a science fiction writer. He is an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. In addition to the many awards he has won within the SF field, he is also a winner of the Lord Prize for Contributions to Science and the United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1999, he published Deep Time, a popular science book subtitled How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. His most recent novel is Eater (2000), concerning an intelligent and voracious black hole headed for Earth. Like many of his earlier novels, Eater features close-focus rounded characterization of working scientists, showing how science is central to their psychological lives.

  His ideas tend to be provocative, intended to stir debate (and perhaps even to offend the dogmatic and complacent), and to be very well researched and argued. Here is an example from a recent interview:

  … the idea I want to push next, and in fact I may use in a novel, is that the United States should make Siberia a Protectorate. Pay the Russians off—a hundred, two hundred billion dollars—and simply run Siberia in an ecologically responsible way. It’s a frontier as large as the continental U.S., should be opened, will be opened, either responsibly or not, and we could use this to put the stamp of liberal western democracy on the ground in Asia.

  This idea is certain to have some readers sputtering about American imperialism, and yet it is quintessential Benford: audacious, large scale, and something he would be delighted to argue for hours on end. It is also perfectly consistent with the frontier
tradition in American SF.

  One of the primary features of American hard SF in the 1990s is the many fine novels about human exploration and settlement of Mars. Benford’s entry in this competition is his novel The Martian Race (1999), in which the U.S. government has set a thirty billion dollar prize for the first human expedition to make it to Mars and back again, inspiring space travel by private enterprise. It was nominated for the Prometheus Award for best Libertarian SF novel.

  “Matter’s End,” a story in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God,” portrays a convergence of spirituality and quantum mechanics, and shows what it would mean if certain religious interpretations of quantum mechanics were correct.

  When Dr. Samuel Johnson felt himself getting tied up in an argument over Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal, he kicked a large stone and answered, “I refute it thus.” Just what that action assured him of is not very obvious, but apparently he found it comforting.

  —Sir Arthur Eddington

  1

  India came to him first as a breeze like soured buttermilk, rich yet tainted. A door banged somewhere, sending gusts sweeping through the Bangalore airport, slicing through the four A.M. silences.

  Since the Free State of Bombay had left India, Bangalore had become an international airport. Yet the damp caress seemed to erase the sterile signatures that made all big airports alike, even giving a stippled texture to the cool enamel glow of the fluorescents.

  The moist air clasped Robert Clay like a stranger’s sweaty palm. The ripe, fleshy aroma of a continent enfolded him, swarming up his nostrils and soaking his lungs with sullen spice. He put down his carry-on bag and showed the immigration clerk his passport. The man gave him a piercing, ferocious stare—then mutely slammed a rubber stamp onto the pages and handed it back.

  A hand snagged him as he headed toward baggage claim.

  “Professor Clay?” The face was dark olive with intelligent eyes riding above sharp cheekbones. A sudden white grin flashed as Clay nodded. “Ah, good. I am Dr. Sudarshan Patil. Please come this way.”

  Dr. Patil’s tone was polite, but his hands impatiently pulled Clay away from the sluggish lines, through a battered wooden side door. The heavy-lidded immigration guards were carefully looking in other directions, hands held behind their backs. Apparently they had been paid off and would ignore this odd exit. Clay was still groggy from trying to sleep on the flight from London. He shook his head as Patil led him into the gloom of a baggage storeroom.

  “Your clothes,” Patil said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “They mark you as a Westerner. Quickly!”

  Patil’s hands, light as birds in the quilted soft light, were already plucking at his coat, his shirt. Clay was taken aback at this abruptness. He hesitated, then struggled out of the dirty garments, pulling his loose slacks down over his shoes. He handed his bundled clothes to Patil, who snatched them away without a word.

  “You’re welcome,” Clay said. Patil took no notice, just thrust a wad of tan cotton at him. The man’s eyes jumped at each distant sound in the storage room, darting, suspecting every pile of dusty bags.

  Clay struggled into the pants and rough shirt. They looked dingy in the wan yellow glow of a single distant fluorescent tube.

  “Not the reception I’d expected,” Clay said, straightening the baggy pants and pulling at the rough drawstring.

  “These are not good times for scientists in my country, Dr. Clay,” Patil said bitingly. His voice carried that odd lilt that echoed both the Raj and Cambridge.

  “Who’re you afraid of?”

  “Those who hate Westerners and their science.”

  “They said in Washington—”

  “We are about great matters, Professor Clay. Please cooperate, please.”

  Patil’s lean face showed its bones starkly, as though energies pressed outward. Promontories of bunched muscle stretched a mottled canvas skin. He started toward a far door without another word, carrying Clay’s overnight bag and jacket.

  “Say, where’re we—”

  Patil swung open a sheet-metal door and beckoned. Clay slipped through it and into the moist wealth of night. His feet scraped on a dirty sidewalk beside a black tar road. The door hinge squealed behind them, attracting the attention of a knot of men beneath a vibrant yellow streetlight nearby.

  The bleached fluorescence of the airport terminal was now a continent away. Beneath a line of quarter-ton trucks huddled figures slept. In the astringent street-lamp glow he saw a decrepit green Korean Tochat van parked at the curb.

  “In!” Patil whispered.

  The men under the streetlight started walking toward them, calling out hoarse questions.

  Clay yanked open the van’s sliding door and crawled into the second row of seats. A fog of unknown pungent smells engulfed him. The driver, a short man, hunched over the wheel. Patil sprang into the front seat and the van ground away, its low gear whining.

  Shouts. A stone thumped against the van roof. Pebbles rattled at the back.

  They accelerated, the engine clattering. A figure loomed up from the shifting shadows and flung muck against the window near Clay’s face. He jerked back at the slap of it. “Damn!”

  They plowed through a wide puddle of dirty rainwater. The engine sputtered and for a moment Clay was sure it would die. He looked out the rear window and saw vague forms running after them. Then the engine surged again and they shot away.

  They went two blocks through hectic traffic. Clay tried to get a clear look at India outside, but all he could see in the starkly shadowed street were the crisscrossings of three-wheeled taxis and human-drawn rickshaws. He got an impression of incessant activity, even in this desolate hour. Vehicles leaped out of the murk as headlights swept across them and then vanished utterly into the moist shadows again.

  They suddenly swerved around a corner beneath spreading, gloomy trees. The van jolted into deep potholes and jerked to a stop. “Out!” Patil called.

  Clay could barely make out a second van at the curb ahead. It was blue and caked with mud, but even in the dim light would not be confused with their green one. A rotting fetid reek filled his nose as he got out the side door, as if masses of overripe vegetation loomed in the shadows. Patil tugged him into the second van. In a few seconds they went surging out through a narrow, brick-lined alley.

  “Look, what—”

  “Please, quiet,” Patil said primly. “I am watching carefully now to be certain that we are not being followed.”

  They wound through a shantytown warren for several minutes. Their headlights picked up startled eyes that blinked from what Clay at first had taken to be bundles of rags lying against the shacks. They seemed impossibly small even to be children. Huddled against decaying tin lean-tos, the dim forms often did not stir even as the van splashed dirty water on them from potholes.

  Clay began, “Look, I understand the need for—”

  “I apologize for our rude methods, Dr. Clay,” Patil said. He gestured at the driver. “May I introduce Dr. Singh?”

  Singh was similarly gaunt and intent, but with bushy hair and a thin, pointed nose. He jerked his head aside to peer at Clay, nodded twice like a puppet on strings, and then quickly stared back at the narrow lane ahead. Singh kept the van at a steady growl, abruptly yanking it around corners. A wooden cart lurched out of their way, its driver swearing in a strident singsong. “Welcome to India,” Singh said with reedy solemnity. “I am afraid circumstances are not the best.”

  “Uh, right. You two are heads of the project, they told me at the NSF”

  “Yes,” Patil said archly, “the project which officially no longer exists and unofficially is a brilliant success. It is amusing!”

  “Yeah,” Clay said cautiously, “we’ll see.”

  “Oh, you will see,” Singh said excitedly. “We have the events! More all the time.”

  Pati
l said precisely, “We would not have suggested that your National Science Foundation send an observer to confirm our findings unless we believed them to be of the highest importance.”

  “You’ve seen proton decay?”

  Patil beamed. “Without doubt.”

  “Damn.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What mode?”

  “The straightforward pion and positron decay products.”

  Clay smiled, reserving judgment. Something about Patil’s almost prissy precision made him wonder if this small, beleaguered team of Indian physicists might actually have brought it off. An immense long shot, of course, but possible. There were much bigger groups of particle physicists in Europe and the U.S. who had tried to detect proton decay using underground swimming pools of pure water. Those experiments had enjoyed all the benefits of the latest electronics. Clay had worked on the big American project in a Utah salt mine, before lean budgets and lack of results closed it down. It would be galling if this lone, underfunded Indian scheme had finally done it. Nobody at the NSF believed the story coming out of India.

  Patil smiled at Clay’s silence, a brilliant slash of white in the murk. Their headlights picked out small panes of glass stuck seemingly at random in nearby hovels, reflecting quick glints of yellow back into the van. The night seemed misty; their headlights forked ahead. Clay thought a soft rain had started outside, but then he saw that thousands of tiny insects darted into their headlights. Occasionally big ones smacked against the windshield.

  Patil carefully changed the subject. “I … believe you will pass unnoticed, for the most part.”

  “I look Indian?”

  “I hope you will not take offense if I remark that you do not. We requested an Indian, but your NSF said they did not have anyone qualified.”

  “Right. Nobody who could hop on a plane, anyway.” Or would, he added to himself.