The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Sam cracked under the pressure, various electronic innards spilling onto the passage floor. I couldn’t see anything beyond him.

  “Sam?” I asked. Useless question.

  “Randi?”

  Nothing.

  For some strange reason I felt no pressure on me now. Too worried for Randi, too exhausted to be interested in my own death, I dozed.

  There was definitely CO2 in my helmet when I woke again. It was pitch black—the suit had turned off my glowlamp to conserve an inconsequential watt or two. Groggy, I thought turning on my back would help my breathing, vaguely thinking that the one percent weight on my lungs was a problem. To my surprise, I could actually turn.

  In the utter dead black overhead, a star appeared. Very briefly, then I blinked and it vanished.

  I continued to stare at this total darkness above me for minutes, not daring to believe I’d seen what I thought I’d seen, and then I saw another one. Yes, a real star.

  I thought that could only mean that a crack to the surface had opened above me; incredibly narrow, or far above me, but open enough that now and then a star drifted by its opening. I was beyond climbing, but perhaps where photons could get in, photons could get out.

  Shaking and miserable, I started transmitting.

  “Uranus Control, Uranus Control, Wojciech Bubka here. I’m down at the bottom of a crack on Miranda. Help. Uranus Control, Uranus Control …”

  Something sprayed on my face, waking me again. Air and mist as well.

  I opened my eyes and saw that a tube had cemented itself to my faceplate and drilled a hole through it to admit some smaller tubes. One of these was trying to snake its way into my mouth. I opened up to help it, and got something warm and sweet to swallow.

  “Thanks,” I croaked, around the tube.

  “Don’t mention it,” a young female voice answered, sounding almost as relieved as I felt.

  “My wife’s in this passage, somewhere in the direction my head is pointed. Can you get one of these tubes to her?”

  There was a hesitation.

  “Your wife.”

  “Miranda Lotati,” I croaked. “She was with me. Trying to get to the surface. Went that way.”

  More hesitation.

  “We’ll try, Wojciech. God knows we’ll try.”

  Within minutes, a tiny version of Sam fell on my chest and scuttled passed Sam’s wreckage down the compressed passage in her direction trailing a line. The line seemed to run over me forever. I remember reading somewhere that while the journey to singularity is inevitable for someone passing into the event horizon of a black hole, as viewed from our universe, the journey can take forever.

  What most people remember about the rescue is the digger; that vast thing of pistons, beams, and steel claws that tore through the clathrate rift like an anteater looking for ants. What they saw, I assure you, was in no way as impressive, or scary, as being directly under the thing.

  I was already in a hospital ship bed when they found Randi, eleven kilometers down a passage that had narrowed, narrowed, and narrowed.

  At its end, she had broken her bones forcing herself through one more centimeter at a time. A cracked pelvis, both collarbones, two ribs, and her remaining ankle.

  The last had done it, for when it collapsed she had no remaining way to force herself any further through that crack of doom.

  And so she had lain there, and, minute by minute, despite everything, willed herself to live as long as she could.

  Despite everything, she did.

  They got the first tubes into her through her hollow right boot and the plastiflesh seal of her stump, after the left foot had proven to be frozen solid. They didn’t tell me at first—not until they had convinced themselves she was really alive.

  When the rescuers reached Cathy and Nikhil, Cathy calmly guided the medic to her paralyzed husband, and as soon as she saw that he was in good professional hands, gave herself a sedative, and started screaming until she collapsed. She wasn’t available for interviews for weeks. But she’s fine now, and laughs about it. She and Nikhil live in a large university dome on Triton and host our reunions in their house, which has no roof—they’ve arranged for the dome’s rain to fall elsewhere.

  Miranda my wife spent three years as a quadruple amputee, and went back into Miranda the moon that way, in a powered suit, to lead people back to the Cavern of Dead Ends. Today, it’s easy to see where the bronze, weathered flesh of her old limbs ends and the pink smoothness of her new ones start. But if you miss it, she’ll point it out with a grin.

  So, having been to Hades and back, are the four of us best friends? For amusement, we all have more congenial companions. Nikhil is still a bit haughty, and he and Cathy still snipe at each other a little, but with smiles more often than not. I’ve come to conclude that, in some strange way, they need the stimulation that gives them, and a displacement for needs about which Nikhil will not speak.

  Cathy and Randi still find little to talk about, giving us supposedly verbally challenged males a chance. Nikhil says I have absorbed enough geology lectures to pass doctorate exams; so maybe I will do that someday. He often lectures me toward that end, but my advance for our book was such that I won’t have to do anything the rest of my life, except for the love of it. I’m not sure I love geology.

  Often, on our visits, the four of us simply sit, say nothing, and do nothing but sip a little fruit of the local grape, which we all enjoy. We smile at each other and remember.

  But don’t let this studied diffidence of ours fool you. The four of us are bound with something that goes far beyond friendship, far beyond any slight conversation, far beyond my idiot critiques of our various eccentric personalities or of the hindsight mistakes of our passage through the Great Miranda Rift. These are the table crumbs from a feast of greatness, meant to sustain those who follow.

  The sublime truth is that when I am with my wife, Nikhil, and Cathy, I feel elevated above what is merely human. Then I sit in the presence of these demigods who challenged, in mortal combat, the will of the universe—and won.

  THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Robert J. Sawyer (born 1960), who lives and works in Ontario, near Toronto, Canada, began to publish SF short stories in the 1980s. His career as a novelist took off in the 1990s, and he became one of the SF popular success stories of the decade. After five well-regarded novels, he won the Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment (1995), and has since published seven more novels, four of them Hugo Award nominees. He is a hard SF writer in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, more an idea writer than a stylist, often building neat puzzles with a complex moral dimension. His short stories are now infrequent, but clever and readable. His new novel, Hominids (2002), the first of a trilogy which involves an alternate contemporary world in which humans died out and Neanderthals are the only intelligent hominids, was serialized in Analog. His previous novel, Calculating God (2000), about what would happen if hard evidence were found for the existence of God, was a bestseller in Canada. Generally his novels involve overt politically charged dramatizations, and moral discussions of a broadly humanist nature (this is also the Asimov tradition), often of several different topics.

  The frontier themes in hard SF are one of the major dividing points between North American and European SF. David Mogen wrote a good book on the subject of the frontier in SF years ago. Yet, still, the politics of Canadian SF writers was more closely allied to the politics of U.K. writers than of the U.S. community in the 1990s.

  The germ of this story came from Marshall T. Savage’s nonfiction book The Millennial Project, in which Savage said that only a fool would set out for a long space voyage in a generation ship. Sawyer says, “My wife Carolyn and I rented a cottage, and in that rustic, wooded setting, I found myself thinking about pioneers and recalling previous trips to cottages as a teenager, during which I’d read much classic SF. The story of the colonists aboard the Pioneer Spirit is my attempt to capture the sense of wonder tha
t drew me into our genre in the first place. The title, of course, is a tip of the hat to Asimov, Clarke, Clement, Herbert, Niven, and all the others upon whose shoulders the SF writers of my generation are fortunate enough to stand.” Most specifically, it begins by retelling the classic A. E. van Vogt story, “Far Centaurus” (which introduced the idea of the ship full of slower-than-light colonists preempted by technological advance), and then taking the story farther into the future and into space.

  It seemed like only yesterday when I’d died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago. I wish the computer would just tell me, dammitall, but it was doubtless waiting until its sensors said I was sufficiently stable and alert. The irony was that my pulse was surely racing out of concern, forestalling it speaking to me. If this was an emergency, it should inform me, and if it wasn’t, it should let me relax.

  Finally, the machine did speak in its crisp, feminine voice. “Hello, Toby. Welcome back to the world of the living.”

  “Where—” I’d thought I’d spoken the word, but no sound had come out. I tried again. “Where are we?”

  “Exactly where we should be: decelerating toward Soror.”

  I felt myself calming down. “How is Ling?”

  “She’s reviving, as well.”

  “The others?”

  “All forty-eight cryogenics chambers are functioning properly,” said the computer. “Everybody is apparently fine.”

  That was good to hear, but it wasn’t surprising. We had four extra cryochambers; if one of the occupied ones had failed, Ling and I would have been awoken earlier to transfer the person within it into a spare. “What’s the date?”

  “16 June 3296.”

  I’d expected an answer like that, but it still took me back a bit. Twelve hundred years had elapsed since the blood had been siphoned out of my body and oxygenated antifreeze had been pumped in to replace it. We’d spent the first of those years accelerating, and presumably the last one decelerating, and the rest—

  —the rest was spent coasting at our maximum velocity, three thousand kilometers per second, one percent of the speed of light. My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.

  But both would agree that twelve hundred years and 11.9 light-years were equally staggering values. And now, here we were, decelerating in toward Tau Ceti, the closest sunlike star to Earth that wasn’t part of a multiple-star system. Of course, because of that, this star had been frequently examined by Earth’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But nothing had ever been detected; nary a peep.

  I was feeling better minute by minute. My own blood, stored in bottles, had been returned to my body and was now coursing through my arteries, my veins, reanimating me.

  We were going to make it.

  Tau Ceti happened to be oriented with its north pole facing toward Sol; that meant that the technique developed late in the twentieth century to detect planetary systems based on subtle blueshifts and redshifts of a star tugged now closer, now farther away, was useless with it. Any wobble in Tau Ceti’s movements would be perpendicular, as seen from Earth, producing no Doppler effect. But eventually Earth-orbiting telescopes had been developed that were sensitive enough to detect the wobble visually, and—

  It had been front-page news around the world: the first solar system seen by telescopes. Not inferred from stellar wobbles or spectral shifts, but actually seen. At least four planets could be made out orbiting Tau Ceti, and one of them—

  There had been formulas for decades, first popularized in the RAND Corporation’s study Habitable Planets for Man. Every science fiction writer and astrobiologist worth his or her salt had used them to determine the life zones—the distances from target stars at which planets with Earthlike surface temperatures might exist, a Goldilocks band, neither too hot nor too cold.

  And the second of the four planets that could be seen around Tau Ceti was smack-dab in the middle of that star’s life zone. The planet was watched carefully for an entire year—one of its years, that is, a period of 193 Earth days. Two wonderful facts became apparent. First, the planet’s orbit was damn near circular—meaning it would likely have stable temperatures all the time; the gravitational influence of the fourth planet, a Jovian giant orbiting at a distance of half a billion kilometers from Tau Ceti, probably was responsible for that.

  And, second, the planet varied in brightness substantially over the course of its twenty-nine-hour-and-seventeen-minute day. The reason was easy to deduce: most of one hemisphere was covered with land, which reflected back little of Tau Ceti’s yellow light, while the other hemisphere, with a much higher albedo, was likely covered by a vast ocean, no doubt, given the planet’s fortuitous orbital radius, of liquid water—an extraterrestrial Pacific.

  Of course, at a distance of 11.9 light-years, it was quite possible that Tau Ceti had other planets, too small or too dark to be seen. And so referring to the Earthlike globe as Tau Ceti II would have been problematic; if an additional world or worlds were eventually found orbiting closer in, the system’s planetary numbering would end up as confusing as the scheme used to designate Saturn’s rings.

  Clearly a name was called for, and Giancarlo DiMaio, the astronomer who had discovered the half-land, half-water world, gave it one: Soror, the Latin word for sister. And, indeed, Soror appeared, at least as far as could be told from Earth, to be a sister to humanity’s home world.

  Soon we would know for sure just how perfect a sister it was. And speaking of sisters, well—okay, Ling Woo wasn’t my biological sister, but we’d worked together and trained together for four years before launch, and I’d come to think of her as a sister, despite the press constantly referring to us as the new Adam and Eve. Of course, we’d help to populate the new world, but not together; my wife, Helena, was one of the forty-eight others still frozen solid. Ling wasn’t involved yet with any of the other colonists, but, well, she was gorgeous and brilliant, and of the two dozen men in cryosleep, twenty-one were unattached.

  Ling and I were co-captains of the Pioneer Spirit. Her cryocoffin was like mine, and unlike all the others: it was designed for repeated use. She and I could be revived multiple times during the voyage, to deal with emergencies. The rest of the crew, in coffins that had cost only $700,000 apiece instead of the six million each of ours was worth, could only be revived once, when our ship reached its final destination.

  “You’re all set,” said the computer. “You can get up now.”

  The thick glass cover over my coffin slid aside, and I used the padded handles to hoist myself out of its black porcelain frame. For most of the journey, the ship had been coasting in zero gravity, but now that it was decelerating, there was a gentle push downward. Still, it was nowhere near a full g, and I was grateful for that. It would be a day or two before I would be truly steady on my feet.

  My module was shielded from the others by a partition, which I’d covered with photos of people I’d left behind: my parents, Helena’s parents, my real sister, her two sons. My clothes had waited patiently for me for twelve hundred years; I rather suspected they were now hopelessly out of style. But I got dressed—I’d been naked in the cryochamber, of course—and at last I stepped out from behind the partition, just in time to see Ling emerging from behind the wall that shielded her cryocoffin.

  “’Morning,” I said, trying to sound blasé.

  Ling, wearing a blue and gray jumpsuit, smiled broadly. “Good morning.”

  We moved into the center of the room, and hugged, friends delighted to have shared an adventure together. Then we immediately headed out toward the bridge, half-walking, half-floating, in the reduced gravity.

  “How’d you sleep?” asked Ling.

  It wasn’t a frivolous question. Prior to our mission, the longest anyone had spent in cryofreeze was five years, on a voyage
to Saturn; the Pioneer Spirit was Earth’s first starship.

  “Fine,” I said. “You?”

  “Okay,” replied Ling. But then she stopped moving, and briefly touched my forearm. “Did you—did you dream?”

  Brain activity slowed to a virtual halt in cryofreeze, but several members of the crew of Cronus—the Saturn mission—had claimed to have had brief dreams, lasting perhaps two or three subjective minutes, spread over five years. Over the span that the Pioneer Spirit had been traveling, there would have been time for many hours of dreaming.

  I shook my head. “No. What about you?”

  Ling nodded. “Yes. I dreamt about the Strait of Gibraltar. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Spain’s southernmost boundary, of course. You can see across the strait from Europe to northern Africa, and there were Neandertal settlements on the Spanish side.” Ling’s Ph.D. was in anthropology. “But they never made it across the strait. They could clearly see that there was more land—another continent!—only thirteen kilometers away. A strong swimmer can make it, and with any sort of raft or boat, it was eminently doable. But Neandertals never journeyed to the other side; as far as we can tell, they never even tried.”

  “And you dreamt—?”

  “I dreamt I was part of a Neandertal community there, a teenage girl, I guess. And I was trying to convince the others that we should go across the strait, go see the new land. But I couldn’t; they weren’t interested. There was plenty of food and shelter where we were. Finally, I headed out on my own, trying to swim it. The water was cold and the waves were high, and half the time I couldn’t get any air to breathe, but I swam and I swam, and then …”

  “Yes?”

  She shrugged a little. “And then I woke up.”

  I smiled at her. “Well, this time we’re going to make it. We’re going to make it for sure.”