The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  It seemed to take an hour for the tiny red light to get close enough to grab. With hands that trembled only slightly, Rodriguez reached up and grabbed the beacon, ripped it free and worked his arms into the climbing harness. Then he snapped its fasteners shut and gave the tether an experimental tug. It felt strong, good.

  He started to reach for the control stud that would activate the winch. Then he caught himself. “Wait one,” he whispered, in the clipped tone of the professional flier.

  He bent down and picked up the beacon. Sliding it open to its full length, he worked its pointed end into a crack in the basalt rock face. It probably won’t stay in place for long, he thought, and it won’t work at all unless the sun shines on it for a few hours per day. But he felt satisfied that he had left a reminder that men from Earth had been here, had entered the pit and gleaned at least some of its secrets and survived—maybe.

  “OK,” he said to himself, grasping the tether with one hand. “Here we go.”

  He pushed on the control stud and was hauled off his feet. Grinding, twisting, grating, he felt himself pulled up the rock slope, his head banging inside his helmet, his legs and booted feet bouncing as he was dragged upward.

  Worse than any simulator ride he’d ever been through in training. Worse than the high-g centrifuge they’d whirled him in. They’ll never put this ride into Disneyland, Rodriguez thought, teeth clacking as he bounced, jounced, jolted up to the lip of the caldera.

  At last it was over. Rodriguez lay panting, breathless, aching. Fuchida’s hard-suited form lay on the ground next to him, unmoving.

  Rodriguez rolled over on one side, as far as his backpack would allow. Beyond Fuchida’s dark silhouette the sky was filled with stars. Dazzling bright friendly stars gleaming down at him, like a thousand thousand jewels. Like heaven itself.

  I made it, Rodriguez told himself. Then he corrected: Not yet. Can’t say that yet. He touched his helmet to Fuchida’s. “Hey, Mitsuo! You OK?”

  It was an inane question and he knew it. Fuchida made no response, but Rodriguez thought that he could hear the biologist’s breathing: panting, really, shallow and fast.

  Gotta get him to the plane. Can’t do a thing for him out here.

  As quickly as he could Rodriguez unbuckled the climbing harness, then tenderly lifted the unconscious Fuchida and struggled to his feet. Good thing we’re on Mars. I could never lift him in his suit in a full g. Now where the hell is the plane?

  In the distance he saw the single red eye of another one of the geo/met beacons they had planted. He headed in that direction, tenderly carrying his companion in his arms.

  I couldn’t do this for you, Luis, Rodriguez said silently. I wish I could have, but this is the most I can do.

  The base dome was dark and silent, its lighting turned down to sleep shift level, its plastic skin opaqued to prevent heat from leaking out into the Martian night. Stacy Dezhurova was still sitting at the comm console, drowsing despite herself, when Rodriguez’s call came through.

  “We’re back in the plane,” the astronaut announced without preamble. “Lemme talk to Vijay.”

  “Vijay!” Stacy shouted in a voice that shattered the sleepy silence. “Jamie!” she added.

  Running footsteps padded through the shadows, bare or stockinged feet against the plastic flooring. Vijay, the physician, slipped into a chair beside Dezhurova, her jet-black eyes wide open and alert. Jamie and Tracy Hall raced in, bleary-eyed, and stood behind the two women.

  “This is Vijay,” she said. “What’s your condition?”

  In the display screen they could see only the two men’s helmets and shoulders. Their faces were masked by the heavily tinted visors. But Rodriguez’s voice sounded steady, firm.

  “I’m OK. Banged up a little, but that’s nothing. I purged Mitsuo’s suit and plugged him into the plane’s emergency air supply. But he’s still out of it.”

  “How long ago did you do that?” Vijay asked, her dark face rigid with tension.

  “Fifteen—sixteen minutes ago.”

  “And you’re just calling in now?” Dezhurova demanded.

  “I had to fix his battery pack,” Rodriguez answered, unruffled by her tone. “It got disconnected when he was knocked down—”

  “Knocked down?” Jamie blurted.

  “Yeah. That’s when he hurt his ankle.”

  “How badly is he hurt?” Vijay asked.

  “It’s sprained, at least. Maybe a break.”

  “He couldn’t break a bone inside the suit,” Jamie muttered. “Not with all that protection.”

  “Anyway,” Rodriguez resumed, “his suit wasn’t getting any power. I figured that getting his suit powered up was the second most important thing to do. Pumping fresh air into him was the first.”

  “And calling in, the third,” Dezhurova said, much more mildly.

  “Right,” said Rodriguez.

  “I’m getting his readouts,” Vijay said, studying the medical diagnostic screen.

  “Yeah, his suit’s OK now that the battery’s reconnected.”

  “Is his LCG working?” Vijay asked.

  “Should be,” Rodriguez said. “Wait one …”

  They saw the astronaut lean over and touch his helmet to the unconscious Fuchida’s shoulder.

  “Yep,” he announced, after a moment. “I can hear the pump chugging. Water oughtta be circulating through his longjohns just fine.”

  “That should bring his temperature down,” Vijay muttered, half to herself. “The problem is, he might be in shock from overheating.”

  “What do I do about that?” Rodriguez asked.

  The physician shook her head. “Not much you can d, mate. Especially with the two of you sealed into your suits.”

  For a long moment they were all silent. Vijay stared at the medical screen. Fuchida’s temperature was coming down. Heart rate slowing nicely. Breathing almost normal. He should be—

  The biologist coughed and stirred. “What happened?” he asked weakly.

  All four of the people at the comm center broke into grins. None of them could see Rodriguez’s face behind his visor, but they heard the relief in his voice:

  “Naw, Mitsuo; you’re supposed to ask, ‘Where am I?’”

  The biologist sat up straighter. “Is Tracy there?”

  “Don’t worry about—”

  “I’m right here, Mitsuo,” said Tracy Hall, leaning in between Dezhurova and Vijay Shektar. “What is it?”

  “Siderophiles!” Fuchida exclaimed. “Iron-eating bacteria live in the caldera.”

  “Did you get samples?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Jamie stepped back as the two biologists chattered together. Fuchida nearly gets himself killed, but what’s important to him is finding a new kind of organism. With an inward smile, Jamie admitted, maybe he’s right.

  Jamie awoke the instant the dome’s lighting turned up to daytime level. He pushed back the thin sheet that covered him and got to his feet. After the long night they had all put in, he should have felt tired, drained. Yet he was awake, alert, eager to start the day.

  Quickly he stepped to his desk and booted up his laptop, then opened the communications channel to Rodriguez and Fuchida. With a glance at the desktop clock he saw that it was six-thirty-three. He hesitated for only a moment, though, then put through a call to the two men at Olympus Mons.

  As he suspected, they were both awake. Jamie’s laptop screen showed the two of them side-by-side in the plane’s cockpit.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Extremely well,” said Fuchida.

  “This cockpit looked like the best hotel suite in the world when we got into it last night,” Rodriguez said.

  Jamie nodded. “Yeah, I guess it did.”

  Rodriguez gave a crisp, terse morning report. Fuchida happily praised the astronaut for purging his suit of the foul air and fixing the electrical connection that had worked loose in his backpack.

  “My suit
fans are buzzing faithfully,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much useful work on my bad ankle.”

  They had discussed the ankle injury the previous night, once Fuchida had regained consciousness. Vijay guessed that it was a sprain, but wanted to get the biologist back to the dome as quickly as possible for an X ray.

  Jamie had decided to let Rodriguez carry out as much of their planned work as he could, alone, before returning. Their schedule called for another half day on the mountaintop, then a takeoff in the early afternoon for the flight back to dome. They should land at the base well before sunset.

  “I’ll be happy to take off this suit,” Fuchida confessed.

  “We’re not gonna smell so good when we do,” Rodriguez added.

  Jamie found himself peering hard at the small screen of his laptop, trying to see past their visors. Impossible, of course. But they both sounded cheerful enough.

  The fears and dangers of the previous night were gone, daylight and the relative safety of the plane brightened their outlook.

  Rodriguez said, “We’ve decided that I’m going back down inside the caldera and properly implant the beacon we left on the ledge there.”

  “So we can get good data from it,” Fuchida added, as if he were afraid Jamie would countermand his decision.

  Jamie asked, “Do you really think you should try that?”

  “Oughtta be simple enough,” Rodriguez said easily, “long as we don’t go near that damned lava tube again.”

  “That’s the imperial ‘we,’” Fuchida explained. “I’m staying here in the plane, I’m afraid.”

  “Is there enough sunlight where you want to plant the beacon?” Jamie asked.

  He sensed the biologist nodding inside his helmet. “Oh yes, the ledge receives a few hours of sunlight each day.”

  “So we’ll get data from inside the caldera,” Rodriguez prompted.

  “Not very far inside,” Fuchida added, “but it will better than no data at all.”

  “You’re really set on doing this?”

  “Yes,” they both said. Jamie could feel their determination. It was their little victory over Olympus Mons, their way of telling themselves that they were not afraid of the giant volcano.

  “OK, then,” Jamie said. “But be careful, now.”

  “We’re always careful,” said Fuchida.

  “Most of the time,” Rodriguez added, with a laugh.

  MARROW

  Robert Reed

  Robert Reed (born 1956) was born and raised and lives in Nebraska. His work is notable for its variety, and for his increasing production. He has been one of the most prolific short story writers of high quality in the SF field past for the few years, averaging ten published stories a year, 1999-2001.

  His first story collection, The Dragons of Springplace (1999), fine as it is, skims only bit of the cream from his works. And he writes a novel every year or two as well. His first novel, The Leeshore appeared in 1987, followed by The Hormone Jungle (1988), Black Milk (1989), Down the Bright Way (1991), The Remarkables (1992), Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), An Exaltation of Larks (1995), Beneath the Gated Sky (1997). His most recent novel is Marrow (2000), a distant future large-scale story that is hard SF and seems to be a breakthrough in his career, which The New York Times called “an exhilarating ride, in the hands of an author whose aspiration literally knows no bounds.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction remarks that “the expertness of the writing and its knowing exploitation of current scientific speculations are balanced by an underlying quiet sanity about how to depict and to illumine human beings.”

  Reed does not characteristically write hard SF. In a Locus interview, he comments:

  I’ve always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a nineteenth-century business. There’s this tendency to try to make it all very logical—Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and the fact that you can predict the future by the present. But these are notions that, for the most part, twentieth-century science has made impractical at best. Chaos Theory, Butterfly Effects, those sorts of things … . I could never write a “Foundation Series,” because I just don’t believe it’s at all possible to predict what’s going to happens. I feel I’m very conservative in some ways, so I find myself retreating from Greg Egan’s more radical ideas. There are certain things I hold onto, and always will, in science. I am a staunch Darwinist, and won’t give that up! Mostly, though, science fiction is still a very logical, cause-and-effect, mechanistic universe—which I don’t believe in.

  “Marrow,” which takes place on a hollow planet-sized space ship, was later expanded into Reed’s novel of the same name. Alastair Reynolds mentions it as an influence (see Reynolds note). It concerns people trapped on a world within this hollow world, merging a hard SF sensibility with the nineteenth-century image of the hollow Earth. Reed said, in Locus, “Marrow takes place on a giant starship taking a luxury cruise around the galaxy. It’s an artifact-type ship; nobody knows who built it. It now has immortals on board, and it’s like a one-hundred-thousand-year voyage. It’s the core of a jupiter-class world that has been expanded and is traveling along at sub-light speed. It’s a world unto itself.” The story combines a Clarkean fascination with huge technological artifacts with a powerful vision of increasingly huge scale.

  MISSION YEAR 0.00:

  Washen couldn’t count all the captains spread out before her, and putting on her finest captainly smile, she joined them, trading the usual compliments, telling little stories about her travels, and with a genuine unease, asking if anyone knew why the Ship’s Master would want to bring them here.

  “She’s testing us,” one gray-eyed colleague ventured. “She’s testing our obedience. Plus our security measures, too.”

  “Perhaps,” Washen allowed.

  Coded orders had found Washen through secure channels. Without explanation, the Master told her to abandon her post, discarding her uniform and taking on a suitable disguise. For the last seven days, she had played the role of dutiful tourist, wandering the vast ship, enjoying its wondrous sights, then after making triple-sure that she wasn’t being monitored, boarding an anonymous tube-car that had brought her to this odd place.

  “My name is Diu,” said her companion, offering his hand and a wide smile.

  She clasped the hand with both of hers, saying, “We met at the captains’ banquet. Was it twenty years ago?”

  “Twenty-five.” Like most captains, Diu was tall for a human, with craggy features and an easy charm meant to instill trust in their human passengers. “It’s kind of you to remember me. Thank you.”

  “You’re most welcome.”

  The eyes brightened. “What do you think of the Master’s tastes? Isn’t this a bizarre place to meet?”

  “Bizarre,” Washen echoed. “That’s a good word.”

  The leech once lived here. An obscure species, ascetic by nature, they had built their home inside the remote confines of one of the ship’s enormous fuel tanks. Weaving together thick plastics, they had dangled this place from the tank’s insulated ceiling. Its interior, following a leech logic, was a single room. Vast in two dimensions but with a glowing gray ceiling close enough to touch, the surroundings made every human feel claustrophobic. The only furnishings were hard gray pillows. The air was warm and stale, smelling of odd dusts and persistent pheromones. Colors were strictly forbidden. Even the gaudy tourists’ clothes seemed to turn gray in the relentless light.

  “I’ve been wondering,” said Diu. “Whatever happened to the leech?”

  “I don’t know,” Washen confessed. She had met the species when they came on board. But that was more than a thousand years before, and even a captain’s memory was imperfect.

  The leech could have simply reached their destination, disembarking without incident. Or they could have decided to build an even more isolated home, if that was possible. Or perhaps some disaster had struck, and they were dead. Shipboard extinctions were more common than any captain would admit. Som
e of their passengers proved too frail to endure any long journey. Mass suicides and private wars claimed others. Yet as Washen often reminded herself, for every failed species, a hundred others thrived, or at least managed to etch out some little corner of this glorious ship where they could hold their own.

  “Wherever the leech are, I’m sure they’re well.”

  “Of course they are,” Diu replied, knowing what was polite. “Of course.”

  In the face of ignorance, captains should make positive sounds.

  Washen noticed how even when standing still, Diu was moving, his flesh practically vibrating, as if the water inside him was ready to boil.

  “So, madam … I’m dying to know what you think! What’s our mission? What’s so important that the Master pulls us all the way down here?”

  “Yes,” said a second voice. “What’s your best bad guess, darling?”

  Miocene had joined them. One of a handful of Submasters in attendance, she was rumored to be the Master’s favorite. An imperious, narrow-faced woman, she was a full head taller than the others, dressed in rich robes, her brindle-colored hair brushing against the ceiling. Yet she stood erect, refusing to dip her head for the simple sake of comfort.

  “Not that you know more than any of us,” the Submaster persisted. “But what do you think the Master wants?”

  The room seemed to grow quiet. Captains held their breath, secretly delighted that it was Washen who had to endure Miocene’s attentions.

  “Well,” Washen began, “I can count several hundred clues.”

  A razor smile formed. “And they are?”

  “Us.” They were standing near one of the room’s few windows—a wide slit of thick, distorting plastic. There was nothing outside but blackness and vacuum; an ocean of liquid hydrogen, vast and calm and brutally cold, lay some fifty kilometers below them. Nothing was visible in the window but their own murky reflections. Washen saw everyone at a glance. She regarded her own handsome, ageless face, black hair pulled back in a sensible bun and streaked with enough white to lend authority, her wide chocolate eyes betraying confidence with a twist of deserved pleasure. “The Master selected us, and we’re the clues.”