The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  No. No, of course not. They’d left Earth to found a colony; there was no reason to think they would have changed their minds, whatever they might be dreaming. Nobody had an emotional attachment to the idea of Tau Ceti; it just had seemed a logical target star.

  “We could ask for passage back to Earth,” I said.

  “You don’t want that,” said Ling. “And neither, I’m sure, would any of the others.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “They’d want us to go on.”

  Ling nodded. “I think so.”

  “Andromeda?” I said, smiling. “Where did that come from?”

  She shrugged. “First thing that popped into my head.”

  “Andromeda,” I repeated, tasting the word some more. I remembered how thrilled I was, at sixteen, out in the California desert, to see that little oval smudge below Cassiopeia for the first time. Another galaxy, another island universe—and half again as big as our own. “Why not?” I fell silent but, after a while, said, “Bokket seems to like you.”

  Ling smiled. “I like him.”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “What?” She sounded surprised.

  “Go for it, if you like him. I may have to be alone until Helena is revived at our final destination, but you don’t have to be. Even if they do give us a new ship, it’ll surely be a few weeks before they can transfer the cryochambers.”

  Ling rolled her eyes. “Men,” she said, but I knew the idea appealed to her.

  Bokket was right: the Sororian media seemed quite enamored with Ling and me, and not just because of our exotic appearance—my white skin and blue eyes; her dark skin and epicanthic folds; our two strange accents, both so different from the way people of the thirty-third century spoke. They also seemed to be fascinated by, well, by the pioneer spirit.

  When the quarantine was over, we did go down to the planet. The temperature was perhaps a little cooler than I’d have liked, and the air a bit moister—but humans adapt, of course. The architecture in Soror’s capital city of Pax was surprisingly ornate, with lots of domed roofs and intricate carvings. The term “capital city” was an anachronism, though; government was completely decentralized, with all major decisions done by plebiscite—including the decision about whether or not to give us another ship.

  Bokket, Ling, and I were in the central square of Pax, along with Kari Deetal, Soror’s president, waiting for the results of the vote to be announced. Media representatives from all over the Tau Ceti system were present, as well as one from Earth, whose stories were always read 11.9 years after he filed them. Also on hand were perhaps a thousand spectators.

  “My friends,” said Deetal, to the crowd, spreading her arms, “you have all voted, and now let us share in the results.” She tipped her head slightly, and a moment later people in the crowd started clapping and cheering.

  Ling and I turned to Bokket, who was beaming. “What is it?” said Ling. “What decision did they make?”

  Bokket looked surprised. “Oh, sorry. I forgot you don’t have web implants. You’re going to get your ship.”

  Ling closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. My heart was pounding.

  President Deetal gestured toward us. “Dr. MacGregor, Dr. Woo—would you say a few words?”

  We glanced at each other then stood up. “Thank you,” I said looking out at everyone.

  Ling nodded in agreement. “Thank you very much.”

  A reporter called out a question. “What are you going to call your new ship?”

  Ling frowned; I pursed my lips. And then I said, “What else? The Pioneer Spirit II.”

  The crowd erupted again.

  Finally, the fateful day came. Our official boarding of our new starship—the one that would be covered by all the media—wouldn’t happen for another four hours, but Ling and I were nonetheless heading toward the airlock that joined the ship to the station’s outer rim. She wanted to look things over once more, and I wanted to spend a little time just sitting next to Helena’s cryochamber, communing with her.

  And, as we walked, Bokket came running along the curving floor toward us.

  “Ling,” he said, catching his breath. “Toby.”

  I nodded a greeting. Ling looked slightly uncomfortable; she and Bokket had grown close during the last few weeks, but they’d also had their time alone last night to say their goodbyes. I don’t think she’d expected to see him again before we left.

  “I’m sorry to bother you two,” he said. “I know you’re both busy, but …” He seemed quite nervous.

  “Yes?” I said.

  He looked at me, then at Ling. “Do you have room for another passenger?”

  Ling smiled. “We don’t have passengers. We’re colonists.”

  “Sorry,” said Bokket, smiling back at her. “Do you have room for another colonist?”

  “Well, there are four spare cryochambers, but …” She looked at me.

  “Why not?” I said, shrugging.

  “It’s going to be hard work, you know,” said Ling, turning back to Bokket. “Wherever we end up, it’s going to be rough.”

  Bokket nodded. “I know. And I want to be part of it.”

  Ling knew she didn’t have to be coy around me. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “But—but why?”

  Bokket reached out tentatively, and found Ling’s hand. He squeezed it gently, and she squeezed back. “You’re one reason,” he said.

  “Got a thing for older women, eh?” said Ling. I smiled at that.

  Bokket laughed. “I guess.”

  “You said I was one reason,” said Ling.

  He nodded. “The other reason is—well, it’s this: I don’t want to stand on the shoulders of giants.” He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought rarely spoken aloud. “I want to be a giant.”

  They continued to hold hands as we walked down the space station’s long corridor, heading toward the sleek and graceful ship that would take us to our new home.

  A WALK IN THE SUN

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  Geoffrey A. Landis (born 1955) is a physicist who works as a civil-service scientist in the Photovoltaics and Space Environmental Effects branch at NASA Glenn. He has won a number of science prizes. He is married to the writer Mary Turzillo, and they live near Cleveland, Ohio. He is characteristically a hard SF writer, widely published in the magazines and often seen on award nomination ballots. Landis says,

  Hard science fiction is science fiction that tries to be correct about science, or at least as correct as we can be with what we know. More than that, hard SF is science fiction that’s fascinated by science and technology, science fiction in which a scientific fact or speculation is integral to the plot. If you take out the science, the story vanishes.

  He has published over fifty short stories. His first published story, “Elemental” (1984) was nominated for a Hugo Award. He won a Nebula for “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” (1988). “A Walk in the Sun” (1991) won the Hugo for Best Short Story. Editor Gardner Dozois says of Landis’s fiction, “While there’s hard science content, there’s also a rich emotionalism. Lots of science fiction is bright clever ideas. In Geoff’s case, the bright clever idea is supported by the emotional life of the story. He writes about science and the scientific world from a humanistic slant.”

  His first novel, Mars Crossing (2000), which concerns a joint NASA-private venture to go to Mars and back, was nominated for a Nebula. He hopes that the novel will help people understand why planetary exploration is important and will get them excited about exploration of Mars. His short fiction is collected in Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (2001).

  Here, Landis takes on the tale of the dying astronaut—a favorite theme of the New Wave period, used by J. G. Ballard, Barry Malzberg and others. About the origins of this story, Landis says in a Locus interview:

  When I wrote that, I was working on the question, can you make a lunar base with a s
olar array? They’re very light and cheap, compared to most other reactors, so if we could do that, it would be a great thing for a lunar base. The problem is, the moon has 14 days of darkness, and that’s an awful long time to run on a battery. Even the Energizer Bunny gets tired! One concept we had is that maybe your moonbase is not stationary. The moon doesn’t rotate very fast—about ten miles an hour—so I thought, “Well, you put wheels on your moonbase and you just keep it in the sun all the time.” (You could also do that on Mercury, which also rotates very slowly.) I wrote that up in a little piece presented at the Conference on Space Manufacturing, then as an article published in the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, then decided to turn it into a story.

  Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth” is one of the theme’s more optimistic treatments: If the protagonist is going to die anyway, he may as well have a look around first. Landis’s treatment of the theme is more optimistic still, a good old-fashioned problem-solving story in which the protagonist’s secret weapon is … her emotional inner resources. Although she goes for a look all the way around, the focus of this story is not on the glories of the lunar landscape, but on the balance between her interior and exterior worlds. This is a woman-against-the-universe story.

  The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

  Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he’d been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

  Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

  The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot’s seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.

  She stood on the gray lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black. “Magnificent desolation,” she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

  Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

  First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

  After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn’t know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. “Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish—I wish things would have been different. I’m sorry.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Go with God.”

  She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

  She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets. She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit’s solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn’t about to starve.

  Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.

  In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She’d managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium—useless—and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii—“Smith’s Sea.” The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth.

  She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit’s systems were charging properly, and set off.

  Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.

  From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains. She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. “Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?”

  She took her thumb off the TRANSMIT button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.

  “This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?” She paused again. “Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency.”

  “—shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there.” She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding it.

  After five minutes the rotation of the earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time—after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow—she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator; the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon’s rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen day–long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.

  And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.

  Too many “no”s.

  She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.

  After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. “Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?”

  “Moonshadow here.”

  She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.

  “Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?”

  She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. “Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I’ll be here waiting for you. One way or another.”

  She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn’t have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn’t see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist—Karen’s first rule of electronics, if it doesn’t
work, hit it—and reaimed the antenna, but it didn’t help. Clearly something in it had broken.

  What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you’ll die.

  They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.

  The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.

  Mission Commander Stanley stared at the x-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.

  “Your decision, Commander,” the engine technician said. “We can’t find any flaws in the x-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn’t take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw.”

  “How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?”

  “Assuming they’re okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three.”

  Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. “Normal procedure would be?”

  “Normally we’d want to reinspect.”

  “Do it.”

  He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn’t signify catastrophic failure of other systems.

  If she could find a way to survive without air.