The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  =It has broken the harmony. Join us alone.=

  I was tempted to swat at the annoying buzz in my ear.

  “You know, I’ve never told anyone about her before.”

  “Well, maybe some good has come of this after all.” I patted her on the knee. “Excuse me for a minute?” She seemed surprised that I would leave. I slipped into the hall and hardened the door bubble, sealing her in.

  “What impossibility?” I said, heading for the control room.

  =She is pleased to reopen the scanner?=

  “Not pleased at all. More like scared shitless.”

  =This is Parikkal.= My earstone translated his skirring with a sizzling edge, like bacon frying. =The confusion was made elsewhere. No mishap can be connected to our station.=

  I pushed through the bubble into the scan center. I could see the three dinos through the control window. Their heads were bobbing furiously. “Tell me,” I said.

  =Our communications with Gend were marred by a transient falsehood,= said Silloin. =Kamala Shastri has been received there and reconstructed.=

  “She migrated?” I felt the deck shifting beneath my feet. “What about the one we’ve got here?”

  =The simplicity is to load the redundant into the scanner and finalize … . =

  “I’ve got news for you. She’s not going anywhere near that marble.”

  =Her equation is not in balance.= This was Linna, speaking for the first time. Linna was not exactly in charge of Tuulen Station; she was more like a senior partner. Parikkal and Silloin had overruled her before—at least I thought they had.

  “What do you expect me to do? Wring her neck?”

  There was a moment’s silence—which was not as unnerving as watching them eye me through the window, their heads now perfectly still.

  “No,” I said.

  The dinos were skirring at each other; their heads wove and dipped. At first they cut me cold and the comm was silent, but suddenly their debate crackled through my earstone.

  =This is just as I have been telling,= said Linna. =These beings have no realization of harmony. It is wrongful to further unleash them on the many worlds.=

  =You may have reason,= said Parikkal. =But that is a later discussion. The need is for the equation to be balanced.=

  =There is no time. We will have to discard the redundant ourselves.= Silloin bared her long brown teeth. It would take her maybe five seconds to rip Kamala’s throat out. And even though Silloin was the dino most sympathetic to us, I had no doubt she would enjoy the kill.

  =I will argue that we adjourn human migration until this world has been rethought,= said Linna.

  This was the typical dino condescension. Even though they appeared to be arguing with each other, they were actually speaking to me, laying the situation out so that even the baby sapient would understand. They were informing me that I was jeopardizing the future of humanity in space. That the Kamala in reception D was dead whether I quit or not. That the equation had to be balanced and it had to be now.

  “Wait,” I said. “Maybe I can coax her back into the scanner.” I had to get away from them. I pulled my earstone out and slid it into my pocket. I was in such a hurry to escape that I stumbled as I left the scan center and had to catch myself in the hallway. I stood there for a second, staring at the hand pressed against the bulkhead. I seemed to see the splayed fingers through the wrong end of a telescope. I was far away from myself.

  She had curled into herself on the couch, arms clutching knees to her chest, as if trying to shrink so that nobody would notice her.

  “We’re all set,” I said briskly. “You’ll be in the marble for less than a minute, guaranteed.”

  “No, Michael.”

  I could actually feel myself receding from Tuulen Station. “Kamala, you’re throwing away a huge part of your life.”

  “It is my right.” Her eyes were shiny.

  No, it wasn’t. She was redundant; she had no rights. What had she said about the dead old lady? She had become a thing, like a bone.

  “Okay, then,” I jabbed at her shoulder with a stiff forefinger. “Let’s go.”

  She recoiled. “Go where?”

  “Back to Lunex. I’m holding the shuttle for you. It just dropped off my afternoon list; I should be helping them settle in, instead of having to deal with you.”

  She unfolded herself slowly.

  “Come on.” I jerked her roughly to her feet. “The dinos want you off Tuulen as soon as possible and so do I.” I was so distant, I couldn’t see Kamala Shastri anymore.

  She nodded and let me march her to the bubble door.

  “And if we meet anyone in the hall, keep your mouth shut.”

  “You’re being so mean.” Her whisper was thick.

  “You’re being such a baby.”

  When the inner door glided open, she realized immediately that there was no umbilical to the shuttle. She tried to twist out of my grip but I put my shoulder into her, hard. She flew across the airlock, slammed against the outer door and caromed onto her back. As I punched the switch to close the door, I came back to myself. I was doing this terrible thing—me, Michael Burr. I couldn’t help myself: I giggled. When I last saw her, Kamala was scrabbling across the deck toward me but she was too late. I was surprised that she wasn’t screaming again; all I heard was her ferocious breathing.

  As soon as the inner door sealed, I opened the outer door. After all, how many ways are there to kill someone on a space station? There were no guns. Maybe someone else could have stabbed or strangled her, but not me. Poison how? Besides, I wasn’t thinking, I had been trying desperately not to think of what I was doing. I was a sapientologist, not a doctor. I always thought that exposure to space meant instantaneous death. Explosive decompression or something like. I didn’t want her to suffer. I was trying to make it quick. Painless.

  I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch!

  I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur.

  I popped through the bubble door into reception D. “It’s time to board the shuttle.”

  Kamala had changed into a clingy and velcro slippers. There were at least ten windows open on the wall; the room filled with the murmur of talking heads. Friends and relatives had to be notified; their loved one had returned, safe and sound. “I have to go,” she said to the wall. “I will call you when I land.”

  She gave me a smile that seemed stiff from disuse. “I want to thank you again, Michael.” I wondered how long it took migrators to get used to being human. “You were such a help and I was such a … I was not myself.” She glanced around the room one last time and then shivered. “I was really scared.”

  “You were.”

  She shook her head. “Was it that bad?”

  I shrugged and led her out into the hall.

  “I feel so silly now. I mean, I was in the marble for less than a minute and then—” she snapped her fingers—“there I was on Gend, just like you said.” She brushed up against me as we walked; her body was hard under the clingy. “Anyway, I am glad we got this chance to talk. I really was going to look you up
when I got back. I certainly did not expect to see you here.”

  “I decided to stay on.” The inner door to the airlock glided open. “It’s a job that grows on you.” The umbilical shivered as the pressure between Tuulen Station and the shuttle equalized.

  “You have got migrators waiting,” she said.

  “Two.”

  “I envy them.” She turned to me. “Have you ever thought about going to the stars?”

  “No,” I said.

  Kamala put her hand to my face. “It changes everything.” I could feel the prick of her long nails—claws, really. For a moment I thought she meant to scar my cheek the way she had been scarred.

  “I know,” I said.

  MOUNT OLYMPUS

  Ben Bova

  Ben Bova (born 1932), a journalist and technical writer as a young man, published his first SF novel in 1959. He was technical editor on Project Vanguard, the first American artificial satellite program, wrote scripts for teaching films with the Physical Sciences Study Committee, and was manager of marketing for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts. In 1971, he became editor of Analog, where he stayed until 1978. He moved on to edit Omni from 1978 to 1982, and has been a full-time writer ever since leaving Omni, although he went back to school in the eighties, and earned a Ph.D. in Communications in 1996.

  He was the immediate heir to John W. Campbell’s job, and has always stood for science and for hard SF, and has been particularly influential in promoting each, both as editor of Analog and Omni in the 1970s and eighties and as a public figure since. He said in a recent interview:

  There’s a basic optimism to science fiction—maybe I should confine that to hard science fiction. I think the field shares the basic optimism of science itself. If there is a credo in this business, it should be a quote from Albert Einstein: “The most mysterious thing about the universe is its understandability.” We can understand the way the universe works; hard science fiction that deals with real science and technology is about people learning how the universe works, whether that universe is the solar system, the whole cosmic wonder of it, or the universe within our own body. But you can learn, and knowledge makes us better. It makes us wiser, more capable, it improves our lives. And knowledge is always to be preferred over ignorance.

  Bova’s SF books include The Kinsman Saga (1976-79, the forerunner of his current planetary books), the “Voyagers” sequence (1981-90). His recent string of interrelated novels began with Mars in 1992, and now includes Moonrise (1996), Moonwar (1998), Return to Mars (1999), Venus (2000), Jupiter (2001 ), The Precipice (2001), and The Rock Rats (2002).

  I think of them as historical novels that haven’t happened yet. My audience consists partly of science fiction fans, but mostly of people in technical fields. It’s a technically educated audience, people who are interested in realistic stories about how you get there from here.

  When writing Mars, his choice of setting led him to certain choices about character. He says:

  … when I first started plotting out the original novel Mars, the central character was a white-bread American geologist, and it just didn’t work out. So finally I came to a realization that this guy is part Navajo. So we went out to New Mexico for a month or so and absorbed the area and that’s when I started writing the novel.

  “Mount Olympus” is a Martian adventure story about two men who fly to the highest mountain on Mars, and in the process learn more about Mars and about themselves. Bova’s work is permeated by the idea of space as a new frontier, and of SF settings as opportunities for explorers and entrepreneurs, the classic Heinlein thematics of American SF.

  The tallest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars. It is a massive shield volcano that has been dormant for tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

  Once, though, its mighty outpourings of lava dwarfed everything else on the planet. Over time, they built a mountain three times taller than Everest, with a base the size of the state of Iowa.

  The edges of that base are rugged cliffs of basalt more than a kilometer high. The summit of the mountain, where huge calderas mark the vents that once spewed molten rock, stands some twenty-seven kilometers above the supporting plain.

  At that altitude, the carbon dioxide that forms the major constituent of Mars’s atmosphere can freeze out, condense on the cold, bare rock, covering it with a thin, invisible layer of dry ice.

  Tmas Rodriguez looked happy as a puppy with an old sock to chew on as he and Fuchida got into their hard suits.

  “I’m gonna be in the Guinness Book of Records,” he proclaimed cheerfully to Jamie Waterman, who was helping him get suited up. Trudy Hall was assisting Fuchida while Stacy Dezhurova sat in the comm center, monitoring the dome’s systems and the equipment outside.

  It was the forty-eighth day of the Second Expedition’s eighteen months on the surface of Mars, the day that Rodriguez and biologist Mitsuo Fuchida were scheduled to fly to Olympus Mons.

  “Highest aircraft landing and takeoff,” Rodriguez chattered cheerfully as he wormed his fingers into the suit’s gloves. “Longest flight of a manned solar-powered aircraft. Highest altitude for a manned solar-powered aircraft.”

  “Crewed,” Trudy Hall murmured, “not manned.”

  Unperturbed by her correction, Rodriguez continued, “I might even bust the record for unmanned solar-powered flight.”

  “Isn’t it cheating to compare a flight on Mars to flights on Earth?” Trudy asked as she helped Fuchida latch his life-support pack onto the back of his suit.

  Rodriguez shook his head vigorously. “All that counts in the record book is the numbers, chica. Just the numbers.”

  “Won’t they put an asterisk next to the numbers and a footnote that says, ‘This was done on Mars’?”

  Rodriguez tried to shrug but not even he could manage that inside the hard suit. “Who cares, as long as they spell my name right?”

  As the two men put on their suit helmets and sealed them to the neck rings, Jamie noticed that Fuchida was utterly silent through the suit-up procedure. Tmas is doing enough talking for them both, he thought. But he wondered, Is Mitsuo worried, nervous? He looks calm enough, but that might just be a mask. Come to think of it, the way Tmas is blathering, he must be wired tighter than a drum.

  The bulky hard suits had been pristine white when the explorers first touched down on Mars. Now their boots and leggings were tinged with reddish dust, no matter how hard the explorers vacuumed the ceramic-metal suits each time they returned to the dome’s airlock.

  Rodriguez was the youngest of the eight explorers, the astronaut that NASA had loaned to the expedition. If it bothered him to work under Dezhurova, the more experienced Russian cosmonaut, he never showed it. All through training and the five-month flight to Mars and their nearly seven weeks on the planet’s surface, he had been a good-natured, willing worker. Short and stocky, with a swarthy complexion and thickly curled dark hair, his most noticeable feature was a dazzling smile that made his deep brown eyes sparkle.

  But now he was jabbering away like a fast-pitch salesman. Jamie wondered if it was nerves or relief to be out on his own, in charge. Or maybe, Jamie thought, the guy was simply overjoyed at the prospect of flying.

  Both men were suited up at last, helmet visors down, life-support systems functioning, radio checks completed. Jamie and Trudy walked with them to the airlock hatch: two Earthlings accompanying a pair of ponderous robots.

  Jamie shook hands with Rodriguez. His bare hand hardly made it around the astronaut’s glove, with its servo-driven exoskeleton “bones” on its back.

  “Good luck, Tmas,” he said. “Don’t take any unnecessary risks out there.”

  Rodriguez grinned from behind his visor. “Hey, you know what they say: There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

  Jamie chuckled politely. As mission director, he felt he had to impart some final words of wisdom. “Remember that when you’re out there,” he said.

&n
bsp; “I will, boss. Don’t worry.”

  Fuchida stepped up to the hatch once Rodriguez went through. Even in the bulky suit, even with sparrowlike Trudy Hall standing behind him, he looked small, somehow vulnerable.

  “Good luck, Mitsuo,” said Jamie.

  Through the sealed helmet, Fuchida’s voice sounded muffled, but unafraid. “I think my biggest problem is going to be listening to Tmas’s yakking all the way to the mountain.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “And back, most likely,” Fuchida added.

  The indicator light turned green and Trudy pressed the stud that opened the inner hatch. Fuchida stepped through, carrying his portable life-support satchel in one hand.

  He’s all right, Jamie told himself. Mitsuo’s not scared or even worried.

  Once they had clambered into the plane’s side-by-side seats and connected to its internal electrical power and life-support systems, both men changed.

  Rodriguez became all business. No more chattering. He checked out the plane’s systems with only a few clipped words of jargon to Stacy Dezhurova, who was serving as flight controller back in the dome’s comm center.

  Fuchida, for his part, felt his pulse thundering in his ears so loudly he wondered if the suit radio was picking it up. Certainly the medical monitors must be close to the redline, his heart was racing so hard.

  Like the expedition’s remotely piloted soarplanes, the rocketplane was built of gossamer-thin plastic skin stretched over a framework of ceramic-plastic cerplast. To Fuchida it looked like an oversized model airplane made of some kind of kitchen wrap, complete with an odd-looking six-bladed propeller on its nose.

  But it was big enough to carry two people. Huge, compared to the unmanned soarplanes. Rodriguez said it was nothing more than a fuel tank with wings. The wings stretched wide, drooping to the ground at their tips. The cockpit was tiny, nothing more than a glass bubble up front. The rocket engines, tucked in where the wing roots joined the fuselage, looked too small to lift the thing off the ground.