The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  They sensed this and shifted in their seats, preparatory to changing the topic. “Oh well,” Frank said, helping them. “Lots more fish in the sea.”

  “In the pool,” one of the women joked, elbowing him.

  He nodded, tried to smile.

  They looked at each other. One asked the waiter for the check, and another said to Smith and Frank, “Come with us over to my place, we’re going to get in the hot tub and soak our aches away.”

  She rented a room in a little house with an enclosed courtyard, and all the rest of the residents were away. They followed her through the dark house into the courtyard, and took the cover off the hot tub and turned it on, then took their clothes off and got in the steaming water. Smith joined them, feeling shy. People on the beaches of Mars sunbathed without clothes all the time, it was no big deal really. Frank seemed not to notice, he was perfectly relaxed. But they didn’t swim at the pool like this.

  They all sighed at the water’s heat. The woman from the house went inside and brought out some beer and cups. Light from the kitchen fell on her as she put down the dumpie and passed out the cups. Smith already knew her body perfectly well from their many hours together in the pool; nevertheless he was shocked seeing the whole of her. Frank ignored the sight, filling the cups from the dumpie.

  They drank beer, talked small talk. Two were vets; their lane leader, the one who had been pregnant, was a bit older, a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab near the pool. Her baby was being watched by her co-op that night. They all looked up to her, Smith saw, even here. These days she brought the baby to the pool and swam just as powerfully as ever, parking the baby-carrier just beyond the splash line. Smith’s muscles melted in the hot water. He sipped his beer listening to them.

  One of the women looked down at her breasts in the water and laughed. “They float like pull buoys.”

  Smith had already noticed this.

  “No wonder women swim better than men.”

  “As long as they aren’t so big they interfere with the hydrodynamics.”

  Their leader looked down through her fogged glasses, pink-faced, hair tied up, misted, demure. “I wonder if mine float less because I’m nursing.”

  “But all that milk.”

  “Yes, but the water in the milk is neutral density, it’s the fat that floats. It could be that empty breasts float even more than full ones.”

  “Whichever has more fat, yuck.”

  “I could run an experiment, nurse him from just one side and then get in and see—” but they were laughing too hard for her to complete this scenario. “It would work! Why are you laughing!”

  They only laughed more. Frank was cracking up, looking blissed, blessed. These women friends trusted them. But Smith still felt set apart. He looked at their lane leader: a pink bespectacled goddess, serenely vague and unaware; the scientist as heroine; the first full human being.

  But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. “It’s a bad mistake to worship women,” he warned. “A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn’t worth discussing the difference. The genes are identical almost entirely, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that’s it. So they’re just like you and me.”

  “More than a couple.”

  “Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you’re better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. Penis just an oversized clitoris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent.”

  Smith stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—I’ve never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way.”

  “So what? It happens, it’s a specialized function. You never see women ejaculating either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we’re all the same. We’re all in it together. There are no differences.”

  Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

  He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artifact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bonobos and muriquis were gentle cooperators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

  But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.

  Patterns in the fossil INIA data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

  “Look here,” Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. “Here’s a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three oh four, near the juncture, see?”

  “You’ve got a female then?”

  “I don’t know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It’s in Hillis 8050 …”

  Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. “Comparing junk to junk … I don’t know … .”

  “But it’s a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation.”

  Frank squinted at the screen. “Um, well.” He glanced quickly at Smith.

  Smith said, “I’m wondering if there’s some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammals’ precursors to both these.”

  “But dolphins are not our ancestors,” Frank said.

  “There’s a common ancestor back there somewhere.”

  “Is there?” Frank straightened up. “Well, whatever. I’m not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It’s sort of similar, but, you know.”

  “What do you mean, don’t you see that? Look right there!”

  Frank glanced down at him, startled, then non-committal. Seeing this Smith became inexplicably frightened.

  “Sort of,” Frank said. “Sort of. You should run hybridization tests, maybe, see how good the fit really is. Or check with Acheron about repeats in nongene DNA.”

  “But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?”

  Frank looked even more non-committal than before. He glanced out the door of the nook. Finally he said, “I don’t see it that congruent. Sorry, I just don’t see it. Look, Andy. You’ve been working awfully hard for a long time. And you’ve been depressed too, right? Since Selena left?”

  Smith nodded, feeling his stomach tighten. He had admitted as much a few months before. Frank was one of the very few people these days who would look him in the eye.

  “Well, you know. Depression has chemical impacts in the brain, you know that. Sometimes it means you begin seeing patterns that others can’t see as well. It doesn’t mean they aren’t there, no doubt they are there. But whether they mean anything significant, whether they’re more than just a kind of analogy, or similarity—” He looked down at Smith and stopped. “Look, it’s not my field. You should show this to Amos, or go up to Acheron and talk to the old man.”

  “Uh huh. Thanks, Frank.”

  “Oh no, no, no need. Sorry, Andy. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just, you know. You’ve been spending a hell of a lot of time here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frank left.

  Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. He got some of his work done in dreams. Sometimes he found he could sleep down on the beach, wrapped in a greatcoat on the fine sand, lulled by the sound of the waves rolling in. At work he stared at the lined dots and letters on the screens
, constructing the schematics of the sequences, nucleotide by nucleotide. Most were completely unambiguous. The correlation between the two main schematics was excellent, far beyond the possibility of chance. X chromosomes in humans clearly exhibited nongene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these passages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. Frank had appeared not to believe it, but there it was, right on the screen. But how could it be? What did it mean? Where did any of them get what they were? They had natures from birth. Just under five million years ago, chimps and humans separated out as two different species from a common ancestor, a woodland ape. The Inis geoffrensis fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan sexual encounters are rape.

  One night after quitting work alone in the lab, he took a tram in the wrong direction, downtown, without ever admitting to himself what he was doing, until he was standing outside Mark’s apartment complex, under the steep rise of the dorsum ridge. Walking up a staircased alleyway ascending the ridge gave him a view right into Mark’s windows. And there was Selena, washing dishes at the kitchen window and looking back over her shoulder to talk with someone. The tendon in her neck stood out in the light. She laughed.

  Smith walked home. It took an hour. Many trams passed him.

  He couldn’t sleep that night. He went down to the beach and lay rolled in his greatcoat. Finally he fell asleep.

  He had a dream. A small hairy bipedal primate, chimp-faced, walked like a hunchback down a beach in east Africa, in the late afternoon sun. The warm water of the shallows lay greenish and translucent. Dolphins rode inside the waves. The ape waded out into the shallows. Long powerful arms, evolved for hitting; a quick grab and he had. one by the tail, by the dorsal fin. Surely it could escape, but it didn’t try. Female; the ape turned her over, mated with her, released her. He left and came back to find the dolphin in the shallows, giving birth to twins, one male one female. The ape’s troop swarmed into the shallows, killed and ate them both. Farther offshore the dolphin birthed two more.

  The dawn woke Smith. He stood and walked out into the shallows. He saw dolphins inside the transparent indigo waves. He waded out into the surf. The water was only a little colder than the workout pool. The dawn sun was low. The dolphins were only a little longer than he was, small and lithe. He bodysurfed with them. They were faster than him in the waves, but flowed around him when they had to. One leaped over him and splashed back into the curl of the wave ahead of him. Then one flashed under him, and on an impulse he grabbed at its dorsal fin and caught it, and was suddenly moving faster in the wave, as it rose with both of them inside it—by far the greatest bodysurfing ride of his life. He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

  INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT

  G. David Nordley

  G. David Nordley (born 1947) lives in Sunnyvale, California. He is retired from the Air Force and has been publishing well-thought-out hard SF since the early nineties. His primary venue is Analog, where he is a regular contributor, and where this story appeared. Tangent Online calls Nordley “one of the better Analog discoveries of this past decade.” He has written, but not yet published, three SF novels, and is working on more. His first collection, After the Vikings: Stories of a Future Mars, was published in 2002 as an electronic book.

  He majored in physics as an undergraduate with the intention of becoming an astronomer, but in 1969 joined the U.S. Air Force to avoid the draft. He worked mainly as an astronautical engineer, managing satellite operations, spacecraft engineering, and advanced propulsion research, picking up a master’s degree in systems management along the way. While working in advanced propulsion, he met and became inspired to write by physicist and author Robert L. Forward. He retired as a major at the end of 1989 and began submitting stories in 1990, using the “G. David” form of his name for fiction. Describing Nordley’s fiction, J. K. Klein says, “As a writer, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focus on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future.”

  We asked Nordley for comments and he sent a long piece from which we have extracted the following remarks:

  I was asked to provide some brief thoughts on hard science fiction. The term “hard,” I think, is meant to indicate “accurate” as opposed to the use of “soft,” or “rubber” science, but it has some unfortunate steelish connotations that might lead some to see use of real science as being in some way contrary to intuitive, character-driven, or humanistic fiction. At any rate, I’ve taken to using the term “scientific realism,” meaning simply keeping the events of the story within the laws of nature as well as one can.

  Yes, new laws of nature might be invented, but take care! Everything that happens under such new laws of nature must be consistent with the mountains of data on which the known laws of nature rest. Many a well-informed physicist has trembled at such a task.

  I’m not worried about classifying works; words are labels for fuzzy sets and apply in degree. Some stories are more scientifically realistic than others, but even stories in which magic plays a role (by magic, I mean the deliberate setting aside of natural laws) may have scientifically realistic aspects. A few honest mistakes are par for the course, but the kind of wholesale carnage of science displayed in some unmentionable media-related efforts, I think, damages whatever reputation remains of science fiction’s relevance to the human future. I think it is this reputation, established by Verne, Orwell, and Clarke and the like, which keeps people thinking “maybe …” We are concerned not with prediction but with illuminating possibilities and people’s reaction to them. The more possible, I think, the more interesting.

  In summary, I see science in scientific realism as playing the same role as history in historical fiction or law in detective fiction. I am not impressed by the argument that science may be disregarded “for the sake of the story.” Rather, I think that realism adds to the relevance and long term value of a work. All else being equal, I think that stories that can happen teach us more than stories that can’t. So, “for the sake of the story,” I do, and heed, the research.

  This story is a planetary exploration story in the same sense as Bova’s “Mount Olympus,” a space frontier story, and also a man-against-the-universe story of the Hal Clement hard SF type (see Clement note). One of the pleasures of this type is perceiving how the physics of the environment alters the rules of behavior, especially the rules of human survival.

  I

  This starts after we had already walked, crawled, and clawed our way fifty-three zigzagging kilometers into the Great Miranda Rift, and had already penetrated seventeen kilometers below the mean surface. It starts because the mother of all Miranda-quakes just shut the door behind us and the chances of this being rescued are somewhat better than mine; I need to do more than just take notes for a future article. It starts because I have faith in human stubbornness, even in a hopeless endeavor; and I think the rescuers will come, eventually. I am Wojciech Bubka and this is my journal.

  Miranda, satellite of Uranus, is a cosmic metaphor about those things in creation that come together without really fitting, like the second try at marriage, ethnic integration laws, or a poet trying to be a science reporter. It was blasted apart by something a billion years ago and the parts drifted back together, more or less. There are gaps. Rifts. Empty places for things to work their way in that are not supposed to be there; things that don’t belong to something of whole cloth.

  Like so many great discoveries, the existence of the rifts was obvious after the fact, but our geologist, Nikhil Ray, had to endure a decade of derision, several rejected papers, a divorce from a wife unwilling to share academic ridicule, and public humiliation
in the pop science media—before the geology establishment finally conceded that what the seismological network on Miranda’s surface had found had, indeed, confirmed his work.

  Nikhil had simply observed that although Miranda appears to be made of the same stuff as everything else in the Uranian system, the other moons are just under twice as dense as water while Miranda is only one and a third times as dense. More ice and less rock below was one possibility. The other possibility, which Nikhil had patiently pointed out, was that there could be less of everything; a scattering of voids or bubbles beneath.

  So, with the goat-to-hero logic we all love, when seismological results clearly showed that Miranda was laced with substantial amounts of nothing, Nikhil became a minor solar system celebrity, with a permanent chair at Coriolis, and a beautiful, high-strung, young renaissance woman as a trophy wife.

  But, by that time, I fear there were substantial empty places in Nikhil, too.

  Like Miranda, this wasn’t clear from his urbane and vital surface when we met. He was tall for a Bengali, a lack of sun had left his skin with only a tint of bronze, and he had a sharp face that hinted at an Arab or a Briton in his ancestry; likely both. He moved with a sort of quick, decisive energy that nicely balanced the tolerant good-fellow manners of an academic aristocrat in the imperial tradition. If he now distrusted people in general, if he kept them all at a pleasantly formal distance, if he harbored a secret contempt for his species, well, this had not been apparent to Catherine Ray, M.D., who had married him after his academic rehabilitation.

  I think she later found the emptiness within him and part of her had recoiled, while the other, controlling part found no objective reason to leave a relationship that let her flit around the top levels of Solar System academia. Perhaps that explained why she chose to go on a fortnight of exploration with someone she seemed to detest; oh, the stories she would tell. Perhaps that explained her cynicism. Perhaps not.