The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  They passed through innumerable villages that, after the first few, all seemed alike with their scrawny children, ramshackle sheds, tin roofs, and general air of sleepy dilapidation. Once, in a narrow town, they stopped as rickshaws and carts backed up. An emaciated cow with pink paper tassels on its horns stood square in the middle of the road, trembling. Shouts and honks failed to move it, but no one ahead made the slightest effort to prod it aside.

  Clay got out of the van to stretch his legs, ignoring Patil’s warning to stay hidden, and watched. A crowd collected, shouting and chanting at the cow but not touching it. The cow shook its head, peering at the road as if searching for grass, and urinated powerfully. A woman in a red sari rushed into the road, knelt, and thrust her hand into the full stream. She made a formal motion with her other hand and splashed some urine on her forehead and cheeks. Three other women had already lined up behind her, and each did the same. Disturbed, the cow waggled its head and shakily walked away. Traffic started up, and Clay climbed back into the van. As they ground out of the dusty town, Singh explained that holy bovine urine was widely held to have positive health effects.

  “Many believe it settles stomach troubles, banishes headaches, even improves fertility,” Singh said.

  “Yeah, you could sure use more fertility.” Clay gestured at the throngs that filled the narrow clay sidewalks.

  “I am not so Indian that I cannot find it within myself to agree with you, Professor Clay,” Singh said.

  “Sorry for the sarcasm. I’m tired.”

  “Patil and I are already under a cloud simply because we are scientists, and therefore polluted with Western ideas.”

  “Can’t blame Indians for being down on us. Things’re getting rough.”

  “But you are a black man. You yourself were persecuted by Western societies.”

  “That was a while back.”

  “And despite it you have risen to a professorship.”

  “You do the work, you get the job.” Clay took off his hat and wiped his brow. The midday heat pressed sweat from him.

  “Then you do not feel alienated from Western ideals?” Patil put in.

  “Hell no. Look, I’m not some sharecropper who pulled himself up from poverty. I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. Father’s a federal bureaucrat. Middle class all the way.”

  “I see,” Patil said, eyes never leaving the rutted road. “Your race bespeaks an entirely different culture, but you subscribe to the program of modern rationalism.”

  Clay looked at them quizzically. “Don’t you?”

  “As scientists, of course. But that is not all of life.”

  “Um,” Clay said.

  A thousand times before he had endured the affably condescending attention of whites, their curious eyes searching his face. No matter what the topic, they somehow found a way to inquire indirectly after his true feelings, his natural emotions. And if he waved away these intrusions, there remained in their heavy-lidded eyes a subtle skepticism, doubts about his authenticity. Few gave him space to simply be a suburban man with darker skin, a man whose interior landscape was populated with the same icons of Middle America as their own. Hell, his family name came from slaves, given as a tribute to Henry Clay, a nineteenth-century legislator. He had never expected to run into stereotyping in India, for chrissakes.

  Still, he was savvy enough to lard his talk with some homey touches, jimmy things up with collard greens and black-eyed peas and street jive. It might put them at ease.

  “I believe a li’l rationality could help,” he said.

  “Um.” Singh’s thin mouth twisted doubtfully. “Perhaps you should regard India as the great chessboard of our times, Professor. Here we have arisen from the great primordial agrarian times, fashioned our gods from our soil and age. Then we had orderly thinking, with all its assumptions, thrust upon us by the British. Now they are all gone, and we are suspended between the miasmic truths of the past, and the failed strictures of the present.”

  Clay looked out the dirty window and suppressed a smile. Even the physicists here spouted mumbo jumbo. They even appeared solemnly respectful of the devotees, who were just crazies like the women by the cow. How could anything solid come out of such a swamp? The chances that their experiment was right dwindled with each lurching, damp mile.

  They climbed into the long range of hills before the Kolar fields. Burned-tan grass shimmered in the prickly heat. Sugarcane fields and rice paddies stood bone dry. In the villages, thin figures shaded beneath awnings, canvas tents, lean-tos, watched them pass. Lean faces betrayed only dim, momentary interest, and Clay wondered if his uncomfortable disguise was necessary outside Bangalore.

  Without stopping they ate their lunch of dried fruit and thin, brown bread. In a high hill town, Patil stopped to refill his water bottle at a well. Clay peered out and saw down an alley a gang of stick-figure boys chasing a dog. They hemmed it in, and the bedraggled hound fled yapping from one side of their circle to the other. The animal whined at each rebuff and twice lost its footing on the cobblestones, sprawling, only to scramble up again and rush on. It was a cruel game, and the boys were strangely silent, playing without laughter. The dog was tiring; they drew in their circle.

  A harsh edge to the boys’ shouts made Clay slide open the van door. Several men were standing beneath a rust-scabbed sheet-metal awning nearby, and their eyes widened when they saw his face. They talked rapidly among themselves. Clay hesitated. The boys down the alley rushed the dog. They grabbed it as it yapped futilely and tried to bite them. They slipped twine around its jaws and silenced it. Shouting, they hoisted it into the air and marched off.

  Clay gave up and slammed the door. The men came from under the awning. One rapped on the window. Clay just stared at them. One thumped on the door. Gestures, loud talk.

  Patil and Singh came running, shouted something. Singh pushed the men away, chattering at them while Patil got the van started. Singh slammed the door in the face of a man with wild eyes. Patil gunned the engine and they ground away.

  “They saw me and—”

  “Distrust of outsiders is great here,” Singh said. “They may be connected with the devotees, too.”

  “Guess I better keep my hat on.”

  “It would be advisable.”

  “I don’t know, those boys—I was going to stop them pestering that dog. Stupid, I guess, but—”

  “You will have to avoid being sentimental about such matters,” Patil said severely.

  “Uh—sentimental?”

  “The boys were not playing.”

  “I don’t—”

  “They will devour it,” Singh said.

  Clay blinked. “Hindus eating meat?”

  “Hard times. I am really quite surprised that such an animal has survived this long,” Patil said judiciously. “Dogs are uncommon. I imagine it was wild, living in the countryside, and ventured into town in search of garbage scraps.”

  The land rose as Clay watched the shimmering heat bend and flex the seemingly solid hills.

  5

  They pulled another dodge at the mine. The lead green van veered off toward the main entrance, a cluster of concrete buildings and conveyer assemblies. From a distance, the physicists in the blue van watched a ragtag group envelop the van before it had fully stopped.

  “Devotees,” Singh said abstractedly. “They search each vehicle for evidence of our research.”

  “Your graduate students, the mob’ll let them pass?”

  Patil peered through binoculars. “The crowd is administering a bit of a pushing about,” he said in his oddly cadenced accent, combining lofty British diction with a singsong lilt.

  “Damn, won’t the mine people get rid—”

  “Some mine workers are among the crowd, I should imagine,” Patil said. “They are beating the students.”

  “Well, can’t we—”

  “No time to waste.” Singh waved them back into the blue van. “Let us make use of this diversion.”

  “But w
e could—”

  “The students made their sacrifice for you. Do not devalue it, please.”

  Clay did not take his eyes from the nasty knot of confusion until they lurched over the ridgeline. Patil explained that they had been making regular runs to the main entrance for months now, to establish a pattern that drew devotees away from the secondary entrance.

  “All this was necessary, and insured that we could bring in a foreign inspector,” Patil concluded. Clay awkwardly thanked him for the attention to detail. He wanted to voice his embarrassment at having students roughed up simply to provide him cover, but something in the offhand manner of the two Indians made him hold his tongue.

  The secondary entrance to the Kolar mine was a wide, tin-roofed shed like a low aircraft hangar. Girders crisscrossed it at angles that seemed to Clay dictated less by the constraints of mechanics than by the whims of the construction team. Cables looped among the already rusting steel struts and sang low notes in the rot-tinged wind that brushed his hair.

  Monkeys chattered and scampered high in the struts. The three men walked into the shed, carrying cases. The cables began humming softly. The weave above their heads tightened with pops and sharp cracks. Clay realized that the seemingly random array was a complicated hoist that had started to pull the elevator up from miles beneath their feet. The steel lattice groaned as if it already knew how much work it had to do.

  When it arrived, he saw that the elevator was a huge rattling box that reeked of machine oil. Clay lugged his cases in. The walls were broad wooden slats covered with chicken wire. Heat radiated from them. Patil stabbed a button on the big control board and they dropped quickly. The numbers of the levels zipped by on an amber digital display. A single dim yellow bulb cast shadows onto the wire. At the fifty-third level the bulb went out. The elevator did not stop.

  In the enveloping blackness Clay felt himself lighten, as if the elevator was speeding up.

  “Do not be alarmed,” Patil called. “This frequently occurs.”

  Clay wondered if he meant the faster fall or the light bulb. In the complete dark, he began to see blue phantoms leaping out from nowhere.

  Abruptly he became heavy—and thought of Einstein’s Gedanken experiment, which equated a man in an accelerating elevator to one standing on a planet. Unless Clay could see outside, check that the massive earth raced by beyond as it clasped him further into its depths, in principle he could be in either situation. He tried to recall how Einstein had reasoned from an imaginary elevator to deduce that matter curved space-time, and could not.

  Einstein’s elegant proof was impossibly far from the pressing truth of this elevator. Here Clay plunged in thick murk, a weight of tortured air prickling his nose, making sweat pop from his face. Oily, moist heat climbed into Clay’s sinuses.

  And he was not being carried aloft by this elevator, but allowed to plunge into heavy, primordial darkness—Einstein’s vision in reverse. No classical coolness separated him from the press of a raw, random world. That European mindscape—Galileo’s crisp cylinders rolling obediently down inclined planes, Einstein’s dispassionate observers surveying their smooth geometries like scrupulous bank clerks—evaporated here like yesterday’s stale champagne. Sudden anxiety filled his throat. His stomach tightened and he tasted acrid gorge. He opened his mouth to shout, and as if to stop him, his own knees sagged with suddenly returning weight, physics regained.

  A rattling thump—and they stopped. He felt Patil slam aside the rattling gate. A sullen glow beyond bathed an ornate brass shrine to a Hindu god. They came out into a steepled room of carved rock. Clay felt a breath of slightly cooler air from a cardboard-mouthed conduit nearby.

  “We must force the air down from above.” Patil gestured. “Otherwise this would read well over a hundred and ten Fahrenheit.” He proudly pointed to an ancient battered British thermometer, whose mercury stood at ninety-eight.

  They trudged through several tunnels, descended another few hundred feet on a ramp, and then followed gleaming railroad tracks. A white bulb every ten meters threw everything into exaggerated relief, shadows stabbing everywhere. A brown cardboard sign proclaimed from the ceiling:

  FIRST EVER COSMIC RAY NEUTRINO INTERACTION RECORDED HERE IN APRIL 1965

  For over forty years, teams of devoted Indian physicists had labored patiently inside the Kolar gold fields. For half a century, India’s high mountains and deep mines had made important cosmic-ray experiments possible with inexpensive instruments. Clay recalled how a joint Anglo-Indian-Japanese team had detected that first neutrino, scooped it from the unending cosmic sleet that penetrated even to this depth. He thought of unsung Indian physicists sweating here, tending the instruments and tracing the myriad sources of background error. Yet they themselves were background for the original purpose of the deep holes: Two narrow cars clunked past, full of chopped stone.

  “Some still work this portion,” Patil’s clear voice cut through the muffled air. “Though I suspect they harvest little.”

  Pushing the rusty cars were four wiry men, so sweaty that the glaring bulbs gave their sliding muscles a hard sheen like living stone. They wore filthy cloths wrapped around their heads, as if they needed protection against the low ceiling rather than the heat. As Clay stumbled on, he felt that there might be truth to this, because he sensed the mass above as a precarious judgment over them all, a sullen presence. Einstein’s crisp distinctions, the clean certainty of the Gedanken experiments, meant nothing in this blurred air.

  They rounded an irregular curve and met a niche neatly cut off by a chainlink fence.

  PROTON STABILITY EXPERIMENT

  TATA INSTITUTE OF FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH, BOMBAY

  80TH LEVEL HEATHCOTE SHAFT, KFG

  2300 METERS DEPTH

  These preliminaries done, the experiment itself began abruptly. Clay had expected some assembly rooms, an office, refrigerated ’scope cages. Instead, a few meters ahead the tunnel opened in all directions. They stood before a huge bay roughly cleaved from the brown rock.

  And filling the vast volume was what seemed to be a wall as substantial as the rock itself. It was an iron grid of rusted pipe. The pipes were square, not round, and dwindled into the distance. Each had a dusty seal, a pressure dial, and a number painted in white. Clay estimated them to be at least a hundred feet long. They were stacked Lincoln-log fashion. He walked to the edge of the bay and looked down. Layers of pipe tapered away below to a distant floodlit floor and soared to meet the gray ceiling above.

  “Enormous,” he said.

  “We expended great effort in scaling up our earlier apparatus,” Singh said enthusiastically.

  “As big as a house.”

  Patil said merrily, “An American house, perhaps. Ours are smaller.”

  A woman’s voice nearby said, “And nothing lives in this iron house, Professor Clay.”

  Clay turned to see a willowy Indian woman regarding him with a wry smile. She seemed to have come out of the shadows, a brown apparition in shorts and a scrupulously white blouse, appearing fullblown where a moment before there had been nothing. Her heavy eyebrows rose in amusement.

  “Ah, this is Mrs. Buli,” Patil said.

  “I keep matters running here, while my colleagues venture into the world,” she said.

  Clay accepted her coolly offered hand. She gave him one quick, well-defined shake and stepped back. “I can assist your assessment, perhaps.”

  “I’ll need all your help,” he said sincerely. The skimpy surroundings already made him wonder if he could do his job at all.

  “Labor we have,” she said. “Equipment, little.”

  “I brought some cross-check programs with me,” he said.

  “Excellent,” Mrs. Buli said. “I shall have Several of my graduate students assist you, and of course I offer my full devotion as well.”

  Clay smiled at her antique formality. She led him down a passage into the soft fluorescent glow of a large data-taking room. It was crammed with terminals and a bank
of disk drives, all meshed by the usual cable spaghetti. “We keep our computers cooler than our staff, you see,” Mrs. Buli said with a small smile.

  They went down a ramp, and Clay could feel the rock’s steady heat. They came out onto the floor of the cavern. Thick I-beams roofed the stone box.

  “Over a dozen lives, that was the cost of this excavation,” Singh said.

  “That many?”

  “They attempted to save on the cost of explosives,” Patil said with a stern look.

  “Not that such will matter in the long run,” Singh said mildly. Clay chose not to pursue the point.

  Protective bolts studded the sheer rock, anchoring cross-beams that stabilized the tower of pipes. Scaffolding covered some sections of the blocky, rusty pile. Blasts of compressed air from the surface a mile above swept down on them from the ceiling, flapping Clay’s shirt.

  Mrs. Buli had to shout, the effort contorting her smooth face. “We obtained the pipes from a government program that attempted to improve the quality of plumbing in the cities. A failure, I fear. But a godsend for us.”

  Patil was pointing out electrical details when the air conduits wheezed into silence. “Hope that’s temporary,” Clay said in the sudden quiet.

  “A minor repair, I am sure,” Patil said.

  “These occur often,” Singh agreed earnestly.

  Clay could already feel prickly sweat oozing from him. He wondered how often they had glitches in the circuitry down here, awash in pressing heat, and how much that could screw up even the best diagnostics.

  Mrs. Buli went on in a lecturer’s singsong. “We hired engineering students—there are many such, an oversupply—to thread a single wire down the bore of each pipe. We sealed each, then welded them together to make lengths of a hundred feet. Then we filled them with argon and linked them with a high-voltage line. We have found that a voltage of 280 keV …”

  Clay nodded, filing away details, noting where her description differed from that of the NSF The Kolar group had continuously modified their experiment for decades, and this latest enormous expansion was badly documented. Still, the principle was simple. Each pipe was held at high voltage, so that when a charged particle passed through, a spark leaped. A particle’s path was followed by counting the segments of triggered pipes. This mammoth stack of iron was a huge Geiger counter.