The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  We entered the great rift three days of an age ago, at the border of the huge chevron formation: the rift where two dissimilar geologic structures meet, held together by Miranda’s gentle gravity and little else. Below the cratered, dust choked surface, the great rift was a network of voids between pressure ridges; rough wood, slap-glued together by a lazy carpenter late on a Saturday night. It could, Nikhil thinks, go through the entire moon. There were other joints, other rifts, other networks of empty places—but this was the big one.

  Ah, yes, those substantial amounts of nothing. As a poet, I am fascinated by contradiction and I find a certain attraction to exploring vast areas of hidden emptiness under shells of any kind.

  I fill voids, so to speak. I am an explicit rebel in a determinedly impressionist literary world of artful obscurity which fails to generate recognition or to make poets feel like they are doing anything more meaningful than the intellectual equivalent of masturbation—and pays them accordingly. The metaphor of Miranda intrigued me; an epic lay there beneath the dust and ice. Wonders to behold there must be in the biggest underground system of caverns in the known universe. The articles, interviews, and talk shows played out in my mind. All I had to do was get there.

  I had a good idea of how to do that. Her name was Miranda Lotati. Four years ago, the spelunking daughter of the guy in charge of Solar System Astrographic’s project board had been a literature student of mine at Coriolis University. When I heard of the discovery of Nikhil’s mysterious caverns, it was a trivial matter to renew the acquaintance, this time without the impediments of faculty ethics. By this time she had an impressive list of caves, mountains, and other strange places to her credit, courtesy of her father’s money and connections, I had thought.

  She had seemed a rough edged, prickly woman in my class, and her essays were dry condensed dullness, never more than the required length, but which covered the points involved well enough that honesty had forced me to pass her.

  Now, armed with news of the moon Miranda’s newly discovered caverns, I decided her name was clearly her destiny. I wasn’t surprised when an inquiry had revealed no current relationship. So, I determined to create one and bend it toward my purposes. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. Worked to the point where it wasn’t entirely clear whether she was following my agenda, or I, hers.

  Randi, as I got to know her, was something like a black hole; of what goes in, nothing comes out. Things somehow accrete to her orbit and bend to her will without any noticeable verbal effort on her part. She can spend a whole evening without saying anything more than “uh-huh.” Did you like the Bach? Nice place you have. Are you comfortable? Do you want more? Did you like it? Do you want to do it again tomorrow?

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Say, if you go into Miranda someone should do more than take pictures, don’t you think? I’ve thrown a few words around in my time, perchance I could lend my services to chronicle the expedition? What do you think?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  My contract with her is unspoken, and is thus on her terms. There is no escape. But we are complementary. I became her salesman. I talked her father into funding Nikhil, and talked Nikhil into accepting support from one of his erstwhile enemies. Randi organized the people and things that started coming her way into an expedition.

  Randi is inarticulate, not crazy. She goes about her wild things in a highly disciplined way. When she uses words, she makes lists: “Batteries, CO2 Recyclers, Picks, Robot, Ropes, Spare tightsuits, Tissue, Vacuum tents, Medical supplies, Waste bags, etc.”

  Such things come to her through grants, donations, her father’s name, friends from previous expeditions, and luck. She worked very hard at getting these things together. Sometimes I felt I fit down there in “etc.,” somewhere between the t and the c, and counted myself lucky. If she had only listed “Back door,” perhaps we would have had one.

  As I write, she is lying beside me in our vacuum tent, exhausted with worry. I am tired, too.

  We wasted a day, sitting on our sausage-shaped equipment pallets, talking, and convincing ourselves to move on.

  Nikhil explained our predicament: Randi’s namesake quivers as it bobs up and down in its not quite perfect orbit, as inclined to be different as she. Stresses accumulate over ages, build up inside and release, careless of the consequences. We had discovered, he said, that Miranda is still shrinking through the gradual collapse of its caverns during such quakes. Also, because the gravity is so low, it might take years for a series of quakes and aftershocks to play itself out. The quake danger wouldn’t subside until long after we escaped, or died.

  We had to make sure the front door was closed. It was—slammed shut: the wide gallery we traversed to arrive at this cavern is now a seam, a disjoint. A scar and a change of color remain to demarcate the forcible fusion of two previously separate layers of clathrate.

  Sam jammed all four arms into the wall, anchored them with piton fingers, pressed part of its composite belly right against the new seam, and pinged until it had an image of the obstructed passage. “The closure goes back at least a kilometer,” it announced.

  The fiber optic line we have been trailing for the last three days no longer reached the surface either. Sam removed the useless line from the comm set and held it against the business end of its laser radar. “The break’s about fifteen kilometers from here,” it reported.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Partial mirror,” Randi explained on Sam’s behalf. “Internal reflection.”

  Fifteen kilometers, I reflected. Not that we really could have dug through even one kilometer, but we’d done some pretending. Now the pretense ceased, and we faced reality.

  I had little fear of sudden death, and in space exploration, the rare death is usually sudden. My attitude toward the risks of our expedition was that if I succeeded, the rewards would be great, and if I got killed, it wouldn’t matter. I should have thought more about the possibility of enduring a long, drawn-out process of having life slowly and painfully drain away from me, buried in a clathrate tomb.

  Then the group was silent for a long time. For my part, I was reviewing ways to painlessly end my life before the universe did it for me without concern for my suffering.

  Then Nikhil’s voice filled the void. “Friends, we knew the risks. If it’s any consolation, that was the biggest quake recorded since instruments were put on this moon. By a factor of ten. That kind of adjustment,” he waved his arms at obvious evidences of faults in the cavern around us, “should have been over with a hundred million years ago. Wretched luck, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps it will open up again?” his wife asked, her light features creased with concern behind the invisible faceplate of her helmet.

  Nikhil missed the irony in her voice and answered his wife’s question with an irony of his own. “Perhaps it will. In another hundred million years.” He actually smiled.

  Randi spoke softly; “Twenty days, CO2 catalyst runs out in twenty days. We have two weeks of food at regular rations, but can we stretch that to a month or more. We have about a month of water each, depending on how severely we ration it. We can always get more by chipping ice and running it through our waste reprocessors. But without the catalyst, we can’t make air.”

  “And we can’t stop breathing,” Cathy added.

  “Cathy,” I ask, “I suppose it is traditional for poets to think this way, so I’ll ask the question. Is there any way to, well, end this gracefully, if and when we have to?”

  “Several,” she replied a shrug. “I can knock you out first, with anesthetic. Then kill you.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “Does it matter?”

  “To a poet, yes.”

  She nodded, and smiled. “Then, Wojciech, I shall put a piton through your heart, lest you rise again and in doing so devalue your manuscripts which by then will be selling for millions.” Cathy’s rare smiles have teeth in them.

  “My dear,” Nikhil said, our helmet tr
ansceivers faithfully reproducing the condescension in his tone, “your bedside manner is showing.”

  “My dear,” Cathy murmured, “what would you know about anything to do with a bed?” Snipe and countersnipe. Perhaps such repartee held their marriage together, like gluons hold a meson together until it annihilates itself.

  Sam returned from the “front door.” “We can’t go back that way, and our Rescuers can’t come that way in twenty days with existing drilling equipment. I suggest we go somewhere else.” A robot has the option of being logical at times like this.

  “Quite right. If we wait here,” Nikhil offered, “Miranda may remove the option of slow death, assisted or otherwise. Aftershocks are likely.”

  “Aftershocks, cave-in, suffocation,” Randi listed the possibilities, “or other exits.”

  Nikhil shrugged and pointed to the opposite side of the cavern. “Shall we?”

  “I’ll follow you to hell, darling,” Cathy answered.

  Randi and I exchanged a glance which said; thank the lucky stars for you.

  “Maps, such as they are,” Randi began. “Rations, sleep schedule, leadership, and so on. Make decisions now, while we can think.” At this she looked Nikhil straight in the eye, “While we care.”

  “Very well then,” Nikhil responded with a shrug. “Sam is a bit uncreative when confronted with the unknown, Cathy and Wojciech have different areas of expertise, so perhaps Randi and I should take turns leading the pitches. I propose that we don’t slight ourselves on the evening meal, but make do with minimal snacks at other times …”

  “My darling idiot, we need protein energy for the work,” Cathy interrupted. “We will have a good breakfast, even at the expense of dinner.”

  “Perhaps we could compromise on lunch,” I offered.

  “Travel distance, energy level, sustained alertness.”

  “On the other hand,” I corrected, “moderation in all things …”

  By the time we finally got going, we were approaching the start of the next sleep period, and Randi had effectively decided everything. We went single file behind the alternating pitch leaders. I towed one pallet, Cathy towed the other and Sam brought up the rear.

  There was a short passage from our cavern to the next one, more narrow than previous ones.

  “I think … I detect signs of wind erosion,” Nikhil sent from the lead, wonder in his voice.

  “Wind?” I said, surprised. What wind could there be on Miranda?

  “The collisions which reformed the moon must have released plenty of gas for a short time. It had to get out somehow. Note the striations as you come through.”

  They were there, I noted as I came through, as if someone had sand-blasted the passage walls. Miranda had breathed, once upon a time.

  “I think,” he continued, “that there may be an equilibrium between the gas in Miranda’s caverns and the gas torus outside the ring system. Miranda’s gravity is hardly adequate to compress that very much. But a system of caverns acting as a cold trap and a rough diffusion barrier … hmm, maybe.”

  “How much gas?” I wondered.

  He shook his head. “Hard to tell that from up here, isn’t it?”

  We pushed half an hour past our agreed-to stop time to find a monolithic shelter that might prove safe from aftershocks. This passage was just wide enough to inflate our one meter sleeping tubes end to end. We ate dinner in the one Randi and I used. It was a spare, crowded, smelly, silent meal. Even Nikhil seemed depressed. I thought, as we replaced our helmets to pump down to let the Rays go back to their tent, that it was the last one we would eat together in such circumstances. The ins and outs of vacuum tents took up too much time and energy.

  We repressurized and I savored the simple pleasure of watching Randi remove her tightsuit and bathe with a damp wipe in the end of the tent. She motioned for me to turn while she used the facility built into the end of our pallet, and so I unrolled my notescreen, slipped on its headband, and turned my attention to this journal, a process of clearly subvocalizing each word that I want on the screen.

  Later she touched my arm indicating that it was my turn, kissed me lightly and went to bed between the elastic sheets, falling asleep instantly. My turn.

  Day four was spent gliding through a series of large, nearly horizontal caverns. Miranda, it turns out, is still breathing. A ghost breath to be sure, undetectable except with such sensitive instruments as Sam contains. But there appears to be a pressure differential; gas still flows through these caverns out to the surface. Sam can find the next passage by monitoring the molecular flow.

  We pulled ourselves along with our hands, progressing like a weighted diver in an underwater cave; an analogy most accurate when one moves so slowly that lack of drag is unremarkable.

  As we glided along, I forgot my doom, and looked at the marbled ice around me with wonder. Randi glided in front of me and I could mentally remove her dusty coveralls and imagine her hard, lithe, body moving in its skin-hugging shipsuit. I could imagine her muscles bunch and relax in her weight lifter’s arms, imagine the firm definition of her neck and forearms. A poet herself, I thought, who could barely talk, but who had written an epic in the language of her body and its movement.

  Sam notified us that it was time for another sounding and a lead change. In the next kilometer, the passage narrowed, and we found ourselves forcing our bodies through cracks that were hardly large enough to fit our bone through.

  My body was becoming bruised from such tight contortions, but I wasn’t afraid my tightsuit would tear; the fabric is slick and nearly invulnerable. On our first day, Randi scared the hell out of me by taking a hard-frozen, knife-edged sliver of rock and trying to commit hari-kiri with it, stabbing herself with so much force that the rock broke. She laughed at my reaction and told me that I needed to have confidence in my equipment.

  She still has the bruise, dark among the lighter, older blemishes on her hardused body. I kiss it when we make love and she says, “Uh-huh. Told you so.” Randi climbed Gilbert Montes in the Mercurian antarctic with her father and brother carrying a full vacuum kit when she was thirteen. She suffered a stress fracture in her ulna and didn’t tell anyone until after they reached the summit.

  The crack widened and, to our relief, gave onto another cavern, and that to another narrow passage. Randi took the lead, Nikhil followed, then me, then Cathy, then Sam.

  Sam made me think of a cubist crab, or maybe a small, handleless lawn mower, on insect legs instead of wheels. Articulate and witty with a full range of simulated emotion and canned humor dialog stored in its memory, Sam was our expert on what had been. But it had difficulty interpreting things it hadn’t seen before, or imagining what it had never seen, and so it usually followed us.

  By day’s end we had covered twenty-eight kilometers and were another eighteen kilometers closer to the center. That appeared to be where the road went, though Nikhil said we were more likely to be on a chord passing fifty kilometers or so above the center, where it seems that two major blocks came together a billion years ago.

  This, I told myself, is a fool’s journey, with no real chance of success. But how much better, how much more human, to fight destiny than to wait and die.

  We ate as couples that night, each in our own tents.

  II

  On day five, we became stuck.

  Randi woke me that morning exploring my body, fitting various parts of herself around me as the elastic sheets kept us pressed together. Somehow, an intimate dream I’d been having had segued into reality, and I felt only a momentary surprise at her intrusion.

  “You have some new bruises,” I told her after I opened my eyes. Hers remained closed.

  “Morning,” she murmured and wrapped herself around me again. Time slowed as I spun into her implacable, devouring, wholeness.

  But of course time would not stop. Our helmets beeped simultaneously with Sam’s wake-up call, fortunately too late to prevent another part of me from becoming part of Randi. Sam reminded
us, that, given our fantasy of escaping from Miranda’s caverns, we had some time to make up.

  Randi popped out of the sheets, spun around airborne, in a graceful athletic move, and slowly fell to her own cot in front of me, exuberantly naked, stretching like a sensual cat, staring right into my enslaved eyes.

  “Female display instinct; harmless, healthy, feels good.”

  Harmless? I grinned and reminded her: “But it’s time to spelunk.”

  “Roger that,” she laughed, grabbed her tightsuit from the ball of clothes in the end of the tent, and started rolling it on. They go on like a pair of pantyhose, except that they are slick on the inside and adjust easily to your form. To her form. I followed suit, and we quickly depressurized and packed.

  It took Sam an hour to find the cavern inlet vent, and it was just a crack, barely big enough for us to squeeze into. We spent an hour convincing ourselves there was no other opportunity, then we wriggled forward through this crack like so many ants, kits and our coveralls pushed ahead of us, bodies fitting any way we could make them fit.

  I doubt we made a hundred yards an hour. Our situation felt hopeless at this rate, but Sam assured us of more caverns ahead.

  Perhaps it would have been better if Nikhil had been on lead. Larger than Randi and less inclined to disregard discomfort, he would have gone slower and chipped more clathrate, which, as it turned out, would have been faster.

  Anyway, as I inched myself forward with my mind preoccupied with the enigma of Randi, Miranda groaned—at least that’s what it sounded like in my helmet, pressed hard against the narrow roof of the crack our passage had become. I felt something. Did the pressure against my ribs increase? I fought panic, concentrating on the people around me and their lights shining past the few open cracks between the passage and their bodies.