The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Clay thought of the headlines: UNIVERSE TO END. What would that do to harried commuters on their way to work?

  He watched Singh send the stuttering messages via the big satellite dish, the corrugated tin roof of the shed pulled aside, allowing him to watch burnt-gold twilight seep across the sky. Clay felt no elation, as blank as a drained capacitor. He had gone into physics because of the sense it gave of grasping deep mysteries. He could look at bridges and trace the vectored stability that ruled them. When his daughter asked why the sky was blue, he actually knew, and could sketch out a simple answer. It had never occurred to him to fear flying, because he knew the Bernoulli equation for the pressure that held up the plane.

  But this result …

  Even the celebratory party that evening left him unmoved. Graduate students turned out in their best khaki. Sitar music swarmed through the scented air, ragas thumping and weaving. He found his body swaying to the refractions of tone and scale.

  “It is a pity you cannot learn more of our country,” Mrs. Buli remarked, watching him closely.

  “Right now I’m mostly interested in sleep.”

  “Sleep is not always kind.” She seemed wry and distant in the night’s smudged humidity. “One of our ancient gods, Brahma, is said to sleep—and we are what he dreams.”

  “In that case, for you folks maybe he’s been having a nightmare lately.”

  “Ah yes, our troubles. But do not let them mislead you about India. They pass.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Clay replied, dutifully diplomatic.

  “You were surprised, were you not, at the outcome?” she said piercingly.

  “Uh, well, I had to be skeptical.”

  “Yes, for a scientist certainty is built on deep layers of doubt.”

  “Like my daddy said, in the retail business deal with everybody, but count your change.”

  She laughed. “We have given you a bargain, perhaps!”

  He was acutely aware that his initial doubts must have been obvious. And what unsettled him now was not just the hard-won success here, but their strange attitude toward it.

  The graduate students came then and tried to teach him a dance. He did a passable job, and a student named Venkatraman slipped him a glass of beer, forbidden vice. It struck Clay as comic that the Indian government spent much energy to suppress alcohol but did little about the population explosion. The students all laughed when he made a complicated joke about booze, but he could not be sure whether they meant it. The music seemed to quicken, his heart thumping to keep up with it. They addressed him as Clayji, a term of respect, and asked his opinion of what they might do next with the experiment. He shrugged, thinking ’Nother job, sahib? and suggested using it as a detector for neutrinos from supernovas. That had paid off when the earlier generation of neutrino detectors picked up the 1987 supernova.

  The atom bomb, the 1987 event, now this—particle physics, he realized uncomfortably, was steeped in death. The sitar slid and rang, and Mrs. Buli made arch jokes to go with the spicy salad. Still, he turned in early.

  11

  To be awakened by a soft breeze. A brushing presence, sliding cloth … He sensed her sari as a luminous fog. Moonlight streaming through a lopsided window cast shimmering auras through the cloth as she loomed above him. Reached for him. Lightly flung away his sticky bedclothes.

  “I—”

  A soft hand covered his mouth, bringing a heady savor of ripe earth. His senses ran out of him and into the surrounding dark, coiling in air as he took her weight. She was surprisingly light, though thick-waisted, her breasts like teacups compared with the full curves of her hips. His hands slid and pressed, finding a delightful slithering moisture all over her, a sheen of vibrancy. Her sari evaporated. The high planes of her face caught vagrant blades of moonlight, and he saw a curious tentative, expectant expression there as she wrapped him in soft pressures. Her mouth did not so much kiss his as enclose it, formulating an argument of sweet rivulets that trickled into his porous self. She slipped into place atop him, a slick clasp that melted him up into her, a perfect fit, slick with dark insistence. He closed his eyes, but the glow diffused through his eyelids, and he could see her hair fanning through the air like motion underwater, her luxuriant weight bucking, trembling as her nails scratched his shoulders, musk rising smoky from them both. A silky muscle milked him at each heart-thump. Her velvet mass orbited above their fulcrum, bearing down with feathery demands, and he remembered brass icons, gaudy Indian posters, and felt above him Kali strumming in fevered darkness. She locked legs around him, squeezing him up into her surprisingly hard muscles, grinding, drawing forth, pushing back. She cried out with great heaves and lungfuls of the thickening air, mouth going slack beneath hooded eyes, and he shot sharply up into her, a convulsion that poured out all the knotted aches in him, delivering them into the tumbled steamy earth—

  12

  —and next, with no memories between, he was stumbling with her … down a gully … beneath slanting silvery moonlight.

  “What—what’s—”

  “Quiet!” She shushed him like a schoolmarm.

  He recognized the rolling countryside near the mine. Vague forms flitted in the distance. Wracked cries cut the night.

  “The devotees,” Mrs. Buli whispered as they stumbled on. “They have assaulted the mine entrance.”

  “How’d we—”

  “You were difficult to rouse,” she said with a sidelong glance.

  Was she trying to be amusing? The sudden change from mysterious supercharged sensuality back to this clipped, formal professionalism disoriented him.

  “Apparently some of our laborers had a grand party. It alerted the devotees to our presence, some say. I spoke to a laborer while you slept, however, who said that the devotees knew of your presence. They asked for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Something about your luggage and a telephone call home.”

  Clay gritted his teeth and followed her along a path that led among the slumped hills, away from their lodgings. Soon the mine entrance was visible below. Running figures swarmed about it like black gnats. Ragged chants erupted from them. A waarrrk waarrrk sound came from the hangar, and it was some moments until Clay saw long chains of human bodies hanging from the rafters, swinging themselves in unison.

  “They’re pulling down the hangar,” he whispered.

  “I despair for what they have done inside.”

  He instinctively reached for her and felt the supple warmth he had embraced seemingly only moments before. She turned and gave him her mouth again.

  “We—back there—why’d you come to me?”

  “It was time. Even we feel the joy of release from order, Professor Clay.”

  “Well, sure …” Clay felt illogically embarrassed, embracing a woman who still had the musk of the bed about her, yet who used his title. “But … how’d I get here? Seems like—”

  “You were immersed. Taken out of yourself.”

  “Well, yeah, it was good, fine, but I can’t remember anything.”

  She smiled. “The best moments leave no trace. That is a signature of the implicate order.”

  Clay breathed in the waxy air to help clear his head. More mumbo jumbo, he thought, delivered by her with an open, expectant expression. In the darkness it took a moment to register that she had fled down another path.

  “Where’ll we go?” he gasped when he caught up.

  “We must get to the vans. They are parked some kilometers away.”

  “My gear—”

  “Leave it.”

  He hesitated a moment, then followed her. There was nothing irreplaceable. It certainly wasn’t worth braving the mob below for the stuff.

  They wound down through bare hillsides dominated by boulders. The sky rippled with heat lightning. Puffy clouds scudded quickly in from the west, great ivory flashes working among them. The ground surged slightly.

  “Earthquake?” he asked.

  “There were some e
arlier, yes. Perhaps that has excited the devotees further tonight, put their feet to running.”

  There was no sign of the physics team. Pebbles squirted from beneath his boots—he wondered how he had managed to get them on without remembering it—and recalled again her hypnotic sensuality. Stones rattled away down into narrow dry washes on each side. Clouds blotted out the moonglow, and they had to pick their way along the trail.

  Clay’s mind spun with plans, speculations, jittery anxiety. Mrs. Buli was now his only link to the Western fragment of India, and he could scarcely see her in the shadows. She moved with liquid grace, her sari trailing, sandals slapping. Suddenly she crouched down. “More.”

  Along the path came figures bearing lanterns. They moved silently in the fitful silvery moonlight. There was no place to hide, and the party had already seen them.

  “Stand still,” she said. Again the crisp Western diction, yet her ample hips swayed slightly, reminding him of her deeper self.

  Clay wished he had a club, a knife, anything. He made himself stand beside her, hands clenched. For once his blackness might be an advantage.

  The devotees passed, eyes rapt. Clay had expected them to be singing or chanting mantras or rubbing beads—but not shambling forward as if to their doom. The column barely glanced at him. In his baggy cotton trousers and formless shirt, he hoped he was unremarkable. A woman passed nearby, apparently carrying something across her back. Clay blinked. Her hands were nailed to the ends of a beam, and she carried it proudly, palms bloody, half crucified. Her face was serene, eyes focused on the roiling sky. Behind her was a man bearing a plate. Clay thought the shambling figure carried marbles on the dish until he peered closer and saw an iris, and realized the entire plate was packed with eyeballs. He gasped and faces turned toward him. Then the man was gone along the path, and Clay waited, holding his breath against a gamy stench he could not name. Some muttered to themselves, some carried religious artifacts, beads and statuettes and drapery, but none had the fervor of the devotees he had seen before. The ground trembled again.

  And out of the dark air came a humming. Something struck a man in the line and he clutched at his throat, crying hoarsely. Clay leaped forward without thinking. He pulled the man’s hands away. Lodged in the narrow of the throat was something like an enormous cockroach with fluttering wings. It had already embedded its head in the man. Spiky legs furiously scrabbled against the soiled skin to dig deeper. The man coughed and shouted weakly, as though the thing was already blocking his throat.

  Clay grabbed its hind legs and pulled. The insect wriggled with surprising strength. He saw the hind stinger too late. The sharp point struck a hot jolt of pain into his thumb. Anger boiled in him. He held on despite the pain and yanked the thing free. It made a sucking sound coming out. He hissed with revulsion and violently threw it down the hillside.

  The man stumbled, gasping, and then ran back down the path, never even looking at them. Mrs. Buli grabbed Clay, who was staggering around in a circle, shaking his hand. “I will cut it!” she cried.

  He held still while she made a precise cross cut and drained the blood. “What … what was that?”

  “A wasp-thing from the pouches that hang on our trees.”

  “Oh yeah. One of those bio tricks.”

  “They are still overhead.”

  Clay listened to the drone hanging over them. Another devotee shrieked and slapped the back of his neck. Clay numbly watched the man run away. His hand throbbed, but he could feel the effects ebbing. Mrs. Buli tore a strip from her sari and wrapped his thumb to quell the bleeding.

  All this time, devotees streamed past them in the gloom. None took the slightest notice of Clay. Some spoke to themselves.

  “Western science doesn’t seem to bother ’em much now,” Clay whispered wryly.

  Mrs. Buli nodded. The last figure to pass was a woman who limped, sporting an arm that ended not in a hand but in a spoon, nailed to a stub of cork.

  He followed Mrs. Buli into enveloping darkness. “Who were they?”

  “I do not know. They spoke seldom and repeated the same words. Dharma and samsara, terms of destiny.”

  “They don’t care about us?”

  “They appear to sense a turning, a resolution.” In the fitful moonglow her eyes were liquid puzzles.

  “But they destroyed the experiment.”

  “I gather that knowledge of your Western presence was like the wasp-things. Irritating, but only a catalyst, not the cause.”

  “What did make them—”

  “No time. Come.”

  They hurriedly entered a thin copse of spindly trees that lined a streambed. Dust stifled his nose and he breathed through his mouth. The clouds raced toward the horizon with unnatural speed, seeming to flee from the west. Trees swayed before an unfelt wind, twisting and reaching for the shifting sky.

  “Weather,” Mrs. Buli answered his questions. “Bad weather.”

  They came upon a small crackling fire. Figures crouched around it, and Clay made to go around, but Mrs. Buli walked straight toward it. Women squatted, poking sticks into the flames. Clay saw that something moved on the sticks. A momentary shaft of moonlight showed the oily skin of snakes, tiny eyes crisp as crystals, the shafts poking from yawning white mouths that still moved. The women’s faces of stretched yellow skin anxiously watched the blackening, sizzling snakes, turning them. The fire hissed as though raindrops fell upon it, but Clay felt nothing wet, just the dry rub of a fresh abrading wind. Smoke wrapped the women in gray wreaths, and Mrs. Buli hurried on.

  So much, so fast. Clay felt rising in him a leaden conviction born of all he had seen in this land. So many people, so much pain—how could it matter? The West assumed that the individual was important, the bedrock of all. That was why the obliterating events of the West’s own history, like the Nazi Holocaust, by erasing humans in such numbing numbers, cast grave doubt on the significance of any one. India did something like that for him. Could a universe which produced so many bodies, so many minds in shadowed torment, care a whit about humanity? Endless, meaningless duplication of grinding pain …

  A low mutter came on the wind, like a bass theme sounding up from the depths of a dusty well.

  Mrs. Buli called out something he could not understand. She began running, and Clay hastened to follow. If he lost her in these shadows, he could lose all connection.

  Quickly they left the trees and crossed a grassy field rutted by ancient agriculture and prickly with weeds. On this flat plain he could see that the whole sky worked with twisted light, a colossal electrical discharge feathering into more branches than a gnarled tree. The anxious clouds caught blue and burnt-yellow pulses and seemed to relay them, like the countless transformers and capacitors and voltage drops that made a worldwide communications net, carrying staccato messages laced with crackling punctuations.

  “The vans,” she panted.

  Three brown vans crouched beneath a canopy of thin trees, further concealed beneath khaki tents that blended in with the dusty fields. Mrs. Buli yanked open the door of the first one. Her fingers fumbled at the ignition.

  “The key must be concealed,” she said quickly.

  “Why?” he gasped, throat raw.

  “They are to be always with the vans.”

  “Uh-huh. Check the others.”

  She hurried away. Clay got down on his knees, feeling the lip of the van’s undercarriage. The ground seemed to heave with inner heat, dry and rasping, the pulse of the planet. He finished one side of the van and crawled under, feeling along the rear axle. He heard a distant plaintive cry, as eerie and forlorn as the call of a bird lost in fog.

  “Clayji? None in the others.”

  His hand touched a small slick box high up on the axle. He plucked it from its magnetic grip and rolled out from under.

  “If we drive toward the mine,” she said, “we can perhaps find others.”

  “Others, hell. Most likely we’ll run into devotees.”

  “Well, I—�
�

  Figures in the trees. Flitting, silent, quick.

  “Get in.”

  “But—”

  He pushed her in and tried to start the van. Running shapes in the field. He got the engine started on the third try and gunned it. They growled away. Something hard shattered the back window into a spiderweb, but then Clay swerved several times and nothing more hit them.

  After a few minutes his heart-thumps slowed, and he turned on the headlights to make out the road. The curves were sandy and he did not want to get stuck. He stamped on the gas.

  Suddenly great washes of amber light streamed across the sky, pale lances cutting the clouds. “My God, what’s happening?”

  “It is more than weather.”

  Her calm, abstracted voice made him glance across the seat. “No kidding.”

  “No earthquake could have collateral effects of this order.”

  He saw by the dashboard lights that she wore a lapis lazuli necklace. He had felt it when she came to him, and now its deep blues seemed like the only note of color in the deepening folds of night.

  “It must be something far more profound.”

  “What?”

  The road now arrowed straight through a tangled terrain of warped trees and oddly shaped boulders. Something rattled against the windshield like hail, but Clay could see nothing.

  “We have always argued, some of us, that the central dictate of quantum mechanics is the interconnected nature of the observer and the observed.”

  The precise, detached lecturer style again drew his eyes to her. Shadowed, her face gave away no secrets.

  “We always filter the world,” she said with dreamy momentum, “and yet are linked to it. How much of what we see is in fact taught us, by our bodies, or by the consensus reality that society trains us to see, even before we can speak for ourselves?”