One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events. Even if you have superior protagonists, I hate to make them slans. I hate the whole Ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of twenty really hard-working, intelligent people couldn’t do the same thing … .
A certain element of clever scientific puzzles and games has always been present in hard science fiction, the legacy perhaps of Lewis Carroll, or of math classes and their word problems. Hard SF humor, invented in its modern form by L. Sprague de Camp, Anthony Boucher, Henry Kuttner, and Fredric Brown in the late 1930s and early 1940s, flourished in the 1950s. And logic problems of all sorts are the meat of hard science fiction. They can make such lovely, surprising plot twists.
In this story, which appeared in Analog in 1996, interstellar travel is responsible for the expansion of the universe; ecologically minded aliens ask us to behave better. There is of course a political subtext.
We were tooling along at four nines to c, relative to the Hercules cluster, when our Captain came on the intercom to tell us we were being tailed.
The announcement interrupted my afternoon lecture on Basic Implosive Geometrodynamics, as I explained principles behind the Fulton’s star drive to youths who had been children when we boarded, eight subjective years ago.
“In ancient science fiction,” I had just said, “you can read of many fanciful ways to cheat the limit of the speed of light. Some of these seemed theoretically possible, especially when we learned how to make microscopic singularities by borrowing and twisting spacetime. Unfortunately, wormholes have a nasty habit of crushing anything that enters them, down to the size of a Planck unit, and it would take a galaxy-sized mass to “warp” space over interstellar distances. So we must propel ourselves along through normal space the old-fashioned way, by Newton’s law of action and reaction … albeit in a manner our ancestors would never have dreamed.”
I was about to go on, and describe the physics of metric-surfing, when the Captain’s voice echoed through the ship.
“It appears we are being followed,” he announced. “Moreover, the vessel behind us is sending a signal, urging us to cut engines and let them come alongside.”
It was a microscopic ship that had been sent flashing to intercept us, massing less than a microgram, pushed by a beam of intense light from a nearby star. The same light (thoroughly red-shifted) was what we had seen reflected in our rear-viewing mirrors, causing us to stop our BHG motors and coast, awaiting rendezvous.
Picture that strange meeting, amid the vast, yawning emptiness between two spiral arms, with all visible stars crammed by the doppler effect into a narrow, brilliant hoop, blue along its forward rim and deep red in back. The Fulton was like a whale next to a floating wisp of plankton as we matched velocities. Our colony ship, filled with humans and other Earthlings, drifted alongside a gauzy, furled umbrella of ultra-sheer fabric. An umbrella that spoke.
“Thank you for acceding to our request,” it said, after our computers established a linguistic link. “I represent the intergalactic Corps of Obligate Pragmatism.”
We had never heard of the institution, but the Captain replied with aplomb.
“You don’t say? And what can we do for you?”
“You can accommodate us by engaging in a discussion concerning your star drive.”
“Yes? And what about our star drive?”
“It operates by the series-implosion of micro-singularities, which you create by borrowing spacetime-metric, using principals of quantum uncertainty. Before this borrowed debit comes due, you allow the singularities to re-collapse behind you. This creates a spacetime ripple, a wake that propels you ahead without any need on your part to expend matter or energy.”
I could not have summarized it better to my students.
“Yes?” The Captain asked succinctly. “So?”
“This drive enables you to travel swiftly, in relativistic terms, from star system to star system.”
“It has proved rather useful. We use it quite extensively.”
“Indeed, that is the problem” answered the wispy star probe. “I have chased you across vast distances in order to ask you to stop.”
No wonder it had used such a strange method to catch up with us! The cop agent claimed that our BHG drive was immoral, unethical, and dangerous!
“There are alternatives,” it stressed. “You can travel as I do, pushed by intense beams cast from your point of origin. Naturally, in that case you would have to discard your corporeal bodies and go about as software entities. I contain about a million such passengers, and will happily make room for your ship’s company, if you wish to take up the offer of a free ride.”
“No thank you,” the Captain demurred. “We like corporeality, and do not find your means of conveyance desireable or convenient.”
“But it is ecologically and cosmologically sound! Your method, to the contrary, is polluting and harmful.”
This caught our attention. Only folk who have sensitivity to environmental concerns are allowed to colonize, lest we ruin the new planets we take under our care. This is not simply a matter of morality, but of self-interest, since our grandchildren will inherit the worlds we leave behind.
Still, the star probe’s statement confused us. This time, I replied for the crew.
“Polluting? All we do is implode temporary micro black holes behind us and surf ahead on the resulting recoil of borrowed spacetime. What can be polluting about adding a little more space to empty space?”
“Consider,” the COP probe urged. “Each time you do this, you add to the net distance separating your origin from your destination!”
“By a very small fraction,” I conceded. “But meanwhile, we experience a powerful pseudo-acceleration, driving us forward nearly to the speed of light.”
“That is very convenient for you, but what about the rest of us?”
“The … rest … The rest of whom?”
“The rest of the universe!” the probe insisted, starting to sound petulant. “While you speed ahead, you cause the distance from point A to point B to increase, making it marginally harder for the next voyager to make the same crossing.”
I laughed. “Marginally is right! It would take millions of ships … millions of millions … to begin to appreciably affect interstellar distances, which are already increasing anyway, due to the cosmological expansion—”
The star-probe cut in.
“And where do you think that expansion comes from?”
I admit that I stared at that moment, speechless, until at last I found my voice with a hoarse croak.
“What …” I swallowed. “What do you mean by that?”
The COPs have a mission. They speed around the galaxies—not just this one, but most of those we see in the sky—urging others to practice restraint. Beseeching the short-sighted to think about the future. To refrain from spoiling things for future generations.
They have been at it for a very, very long time.
“You’re not having much success, are you?” I asked, after partly recovering from the shock.
“No, we are not,” the probe answered, morosely. “Every passing eon, the universe keeps getting larger. Stars get farther apart, making all the old means of travel less and less satisfying, and increasing the attraction of wasteful metric-surfing. It is so easy to do. Those who refrain are mostly, older, wiser species. The young seldom listen.”
I looked around the communications dome of our fine vessel, thronging with the curious, with our children, spouses and loved ones—the many species of humanity and its friends who make up the vibrant culture of organic beings surging forth across this corner of the galaxy. The COP was saying that we weren’t alone in this vibrant enthusiasm to move, to explore, to travel swiftly and see what there was to see. To trade and share and colonize. To go!
In fact, it seemed we were quite typ
ical.
“No,” I replied, a little sympathetically this time. “I don’t suppose they do.”
The morality-probes keep trying to flag us down, using entreaties, arguments and threats to persuade us to stop. But the entreaties don’t move us. The arguments don’t persuade. And the threats are as empty as the gaps between galaxies.
After many more voyages, I have learned that these frail, gnat-like COPs are ubiquitous, persistent, and futile. Most ships simply ignore the flickering light in the mirror, dismissing it as just another phenomenon of relativistic space, like the Star-Bow, or the ripples of expanding metric that throb each time we surge ahead on the exuberant wake of collapsing singularities.
I admit that I do see things a little differently, now. The universal expansion, that we had thought due to a “big bang” is, in fact, at least fifty percent exacerbated by vessels like ours, riding along on waves of pollution, filling space with more space, making things harder for generations to come.
It is hard for the mind to grasp—so many starships. So many that the universe is changing, every day, year, and eon that we continue to go charging around, caring only about ourselves and our immediate gratification. Once upon a time, when everything was much closer, it might have been possible to make do with other forms of transportation. In those days, beings could have refrained. If they had, we might not need the BHG drive today. If those earlier wastrels had shown some restraint.
On the other hand, I guess they’ll say the same thing about us in times to come, when stars and galaxies are barely visible to each other, separated by the vast gulfs that we of this era short-sightedly create.
Alas, it is hard to practice self-control when you are young, and so full of a will to see and do things as fast as possible. Besides, everyone else is doing it. What difference will our measly contribution make to the mighty expansion of the universe? It’s not as if we’d help matters much, if we alone stopped.
Anyway, the engines hum so sweetly. It feels good to cruise along at the redline, spearing the Star-Bow, pushing the speed limit all the way against the wall.
These days, we hardly glance in that mirror anymore … or pause to note the ever-reddening glow.
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
Kim Stanley Robinson
Throughout his career, Robinson has been interested in politics, as is evident in his California trilogy of the 1980s (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge), but it was in his Mars trilogy in the 1990s that Robinson was most overt in injecting large doses of political discussion into the text, but at the same time he was intensifying the overt science and expanding his portrayal of scientists at work, and (perhaps like Arthur C. Clarke) giving extensive descriptions of the natural landscape of his planetary setting in evocative language. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is an alternate history novel. The novel explores a history of the world in which the influence of European civilization ended in the fourteenth century. While not hard SF, it continues Robinson’s overt political engagement with his material.
“Sexual Dimorphism” is reprinted from The Martians (see Robinson note, above) While he was still working on the stories, he said in a Locus interview, “I’ve always called the collection A Martian Romance, which has to do with those early stories exploring fossil canyons, and ‘Green Mars,’ the novella of ’85. I’ll add one more … and then I’ll have three stories describing a relationship that lasts a really long time. That’s the Martian romance, but it’s also my romance with the planet, and also the idea of the early Martian Romances. I’m going to do some stories that will be more like folktales or fairytales—romances in the technical sense.”
This story is in that folktale mode, and is as much in the tradition of Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry” and Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” as it is firmly in the hard SF tradition of stories about the life and thought of working scientists.
The potential for hallucination in paleogenomics was high. There was not only the omnipresent role of instrumentation in the envisioning of the ultramicroscopic fossil material, but also the metamorphosis over time of the material itself, both the DNA and its matrices, so that the data were invariably incomplete, and often shattered. Thus the possibility of psychological projection of patterns onto the rorschacherie of what in the end might be purely mineral processes had to be admitted.
Dr. Andrew Smith was as aware of these possibilities as anyone. Indeed, it constituted one of the central problems of his field—convincingly to sort the traces of DNA in the fossil record, distinguishing them from an array of possible pseudofossils. Pseudofossils littered the history of the discipline, from the earliest false nautiloids to the famous Martian pseudo-nanobacteria. Nothing progressed in paleogenomics unless you could show that you really were talking about what you said you were talking about. So Dr. Smith did not get too excited, at first, about what he was finding in the junk DNA of an early dolphin fossil.
In any case there were quite a few distractions to his work at that time. He was living on the south shore of the Amazonian Sea, that deep southerly bay of the world-ringing ocean, east of Elysium, near the equator. In the summer, even the cool summers they had been having lately, the extensive inshore shallows of the sea grew as warm as blood, and dolphins—adapted from Terran river dolphins—like the baiji from China, or the boto from the Amazon, or the susu from the Ganges, or the bhulan from the Indus—sported just off the beach. Morning sunlight lanced through the waves and picked out their flashing silhouettes, sometimes groups of eight or ten of them, all playing in the same wave.
The marine laboratory he worked at, located on the seafront of the harbor town Eumenides Point, was associated with the Acheron labs, farther up the coast to the west. The work at Eumenides had mostly to do with the shifting ecologies of a sea that was getting saltier. Dr. Smith’s current project dealing with this issue involved investigating the various adaptations of extinct cetaceans who had lived when the Earth’s sea had exhibited different levels of salt. He had in his lab some fossil material, sent to the lab from Earth for study, as well as the voluminous literature on the subject, including the full genomes of all the living descendants of these creatures. The transfer of fossils from Earth introduced the matter of cosmic-ray contamination to all the other problems involved in the study of ancient DNA, but most people dismissed these effects as minor and inconsequential, which was why fossils were shipped across at all. And of course with the recent deployment of fusion-powered rapid vehicles, the amount of exposure to cosmic rays had been markedly reduced. Smith was therefore able to do research on mammal salt tolerance both ancient and modern, thus helping to illuminate the current situation on Mars, also joining the debates ongoing concerning the paleohalocycles of the two planets, now one of the hot research areas in comparative planetology and bioengineering.
Nevertheless, it was a field of research so arcane that if you were not involved in it, you tended not to believe in it. It was an offshoot, a mix of two difficult fields, its ultimate usefulness a long shot, especially compared to most of the inquiries being conducted at the Eumenides Point Labs. Smith found himself fighting a feeling of marginalization in the various lab meetings and informal gatherings, in coffee lounges, cocktail parties, beach luncheons, boating excursions. At all of these he was the odd man out, with only his colleague Frank Drumm, who worked on reproduction in the dolphins currently living offshore, expressing any great interest in his work and its applications. Worse yet, his work appeared to be becoming less and less important to his advisor and employer, Vlad Taneev, who as one of the First Hundred, and the co-founder of the Acheron labs, was ostensibly the most powerful scientific mentor one could have on Mars; but who in practice turned out to be nearly impossible of access, and rumored to be in failing health, so that it was like having no boss at all, and therefore no access to the lab’s technical staff and so forth. A bitter disappointment.
And then of course there was Selena, his—his partner, roommate, gi
rlfriend, significant other, lover—there were many words for this relationship, though none were quite right. The woman with whom he lived, with whom he had gone through graduate school and two post-docs, with whom he had moved to Eumenides Point, taking a small apartment near the beach, near the terminus of the coastal tram, where when one looked back east the point itself just heaved over the horizon, like a dorsal fin seen far out to sea. Selena was making great progress in her own field, genetically engineering salt grasses; a subject of great importance here, where they were trying to stabilize a thousand-kilometer coastline of low dunes and quicksand swamps. Scientific and bioengineering progress; important achievements, relevant to the situation; all things were coming to her professionally, including of course offers to team up in any number of exciting public/co-op collaborations.
And all things were coming to her privately as well. Smith had always thought her beautiful, and now he saw that with her success, other men were coming to the same realization. It took only a little attention to see it; an ability to look past shabby lab coats and a generally unkempt style to the sleekly curving body and the intense, almost ferocious intelligence. No—his Selena looked much like all the rest of the lab rats when in the lab, but in the summers when the group went down in the evening to the warm tawny beach to swim, she walked out the long expanse of the shallows like a goddess in a bathing suit, like Venus returning to the sea. Everyone in these parties pretended not to notice, but you couldn’t help it.
All very well; except that she was losing interest in him. This was a process that Smith feared was irreversible; or, to be more precise, that-if it had gotten to the point where he could notice it, it was too late to stop it. So now he watched her, furtive and helpless, as they went through their domestic routines; there was a goddess in his bathroom, showering, drying off, dressing, each moment like a dance.
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 64