The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Giovanni monitored the headlines very carefully, and realized before it became generally known that he had wrought a more profound change in human affairs than he had intended or supposed.

  Wars were gradually petering out.

  Terrorism was on the decline.

  Violent crime was becoming steadily rarer.

  Oddly enough, these trends passed largely unnoticed by the world at large. The majority of people did not begin to wake up to the significance of it all until a much advertised contest to settle the heavyweight boxing championship of the world was stopped in the third round when the weeping combatants realised that they could not bear to throw another punch, and left the ring together with their arms around one another’s shoulders.

  Because of these upheavals in the world’s routines, the clinical trials of Giovanni’s new hormones and enkephalins attracted a little less attention than they might have, but their outstanding success was still a matter for widespread celebration. In 2036 Giovanni was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize to set beside his earlier award, and there was some discussion about the possibility of making it the last prize of its kind, given that the world no longer seemed to require peacemakers. Giovanni became once again the darling of the world’s media. He was billed as a modern Prometheus, sometimes even as a modern Dionysus, who had brought into the world of men a divine fire more precious than any vulgar power source.

  Giovanni was still embarrassed by these periodic waves of media exposure. He still felt very self-conscious about his physical appearance, and every time he saw his own picture on newsscreen or in a videomag he blushed with the thought that half a billion viewers were probably saying to themselves: “He doesn’t look like a Casanova!” He was probably being oversensitive; nowadays it was his face and his achievements which were now called to the mind of the man in the street by the mention of the name Casanova; his ancient namesake had been eclipsed in the public consciousness.

  In addition, Giovanni no longer appeared to the unbiased eye to be as unprepossessing as he once had seemed. He was now graciously bald, and his bare pate was by no means as freakish as the tangled black hair that once had sprouted there. He still wore spectacles for his myopia, but corneal surgery had corrected his astigmatism, and his eyes now looked kind and soft behind the lenses, not at all distorted. His complexion was still poor, but his skin had been roughened and toughened by age and exposure to the elements, and its appearance was no longer offensive. His paleness and frailness could now be seen as appealing rather than appalling.

  He was startled the first time that he realized that a woman was using his own aphrodisiac technology upon him, and quickly jumped to the conclusion that she must be one of those people who used it on everyone, but he gradually became accustomed to the idea that he really was admired and desired. In time, the secretion of aphrodisiac sweat became subject to a new etiquette, whereby indiscriminate use was held to be in bad taste, and also to be unnecessary as it could now be taken for granted that everyone could love one another even without its aid.

  Politeness came to demand that a sophisticated and civilized person would use the Casanova secretion occasionally and discreetly, to signal a delicate expression of erotic interest with no offense to be taken if there was no response. As this new code of behavior evolved, Giovanni was surprised to find himself a frequent target for seduction, and for a while he revelled in sexual success. Many of the younger women, of course, were interested primarily in his wealth and status, but he did not mind that—he could, after all, claim responsibility for his status and wealth, which he had won by effort.

  Anyway, he loved them all. He loved everybody, and everybody loved him.

  It was that kind of a world, now.

  In this way, Giovanni Casanova succeeded at last in adapting to his name. He lived up to the reputation of his august namesake for a year or two, and then decided that the attractions of the lifestyle were overrated. He gladdened his mother’s heart by marrying again, and this time he chose a woman who was very like the earliest memories which he had of his mother. His new bride was named Janine. She had been born in Manchester, and she was embarked on a career in cosmetic cytogenics (which was the nearest thing to hairdressing that the world of 2036 could offer). She was much younger than Giovanni, but did not mind the age difference in the least.

  Giovanni and Janine favored one another constantly with the most delicate psychochemical strokings, and learned to play the most beautiful duets with all the ingenious hormonal instruments of Giovanni’s invention. But they also had a special feeling for one another—and eventually for their children—which went beyond mere chemistry and physiology: an affection which was entirely a triumph of the will. This was a treasure which, they both believed, could never have come out of one of Giovanni’s test tubes.

  With all these advantages, they were able to live happily ever after.

  And so was everybody else.

  REEF

  Paul McAuley

  Paul McAuley (for biographical information see the story note on his “Gene Wars,” above) was in the late 1980s the most important hard SF writer to emerge from the U.K. since lan Watson in the 1970s. At a time when the influence of Ballard, Moorcock, and Aldiss was a dominating force in U.K. SF, McAuley appeared to be writing in the earlier tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, in Four Hundred Billion Stars (1987) and others of his early works. But he was indeed writing also in reference to cyberpunk and to the political sensibilities of the left. His work later moved into many forms of SF. Yet his early work and his public stance marked him as an ally of hard SF, and he has continued to write important hard SF stories and to be a leading figure in U.K. SF circles.

  “Reef” is an excellent hard SF story from the ambitious illustrated hard SF anthology, Skylife, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski (about visions of life in space and on other planets). This story is an instant classic of hard SF. It is dense with wonderful technological and scientific images, but also fast paced, and sufficiently rounded in characterization that many readers will remember the unlikely heroine for a long time.

  Margaret Henderson Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by one and only she was left, descending slowly between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs scarcely a hundred meters apart. These were pavements of the commonest vacuum organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here and there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species that deposited iron sulphate crystals within its integument. The pavement seemed to stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the bottom of Tigris Rift, still more than thirty kilometers away. Microscopic flecks of sulfur-iron complexes, sloughed cells and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other volatiles formed a kind of smog or snow, and the vacuum organisms deposited nodes and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of superconductivity, produced a broad-band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giant’s slow heartbeat.

  All this futzed the telepresence link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was experiencing the three-hundred-twenty-degree panorama of the little proxy’s microwave radar, the perpetual tug of vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex taste of the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of the proxy’s puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter searched for a viable waveband, locked on and—pow—she was back, falling past rippled pink pavement.

  The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin Kerenyi, said in her ear, “You’re wanted, boss.”

  Margaret killed
the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometer below the previous benchmark and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swiveled the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps—

  The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cut-out.

  Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxy’s tentacles and jamming the piton into pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giant’s tongue quick-frozen against the ice. The piton’s spikes fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch that turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.

  Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. “Dzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss. Right now.”

  The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of the precise nature of their tasks only when the habitat was underway. But it was good basic pay with the promise of fat bonuses on completion: when she had won the survey contract Margaret Henderson Wu had brought with her most of the crew from her previous job, and had nursed a small hope that this would be a change in her family’s luck.

  The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the Commonwealth’s oldest patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser and spun up by vented rock vapor to give 0.2 gee on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and big reaction motors dug into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching and its refineries synthesizing exotic plastics from cane sugar biomass and gengeneered oilseed rape precursors, the new habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its construction loan from the Commonwealth Bourse, but not enough to attract new citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less than a third of its optimal population.

  Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their families, had taken a big gamble. They were chasing a legend.

  Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. The experiment had been run by a shell company registered on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.

  There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometers in the Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost among them. It had become a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.

  And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven thousand million kilometers from the Sun.

  Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it begun, but potentially it might win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured like an ancient Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunnelled into the Ganapati’s rocky skin.

  On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who maintained the citizens’ households. There were food shortages because so much biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat’s Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening everyone’s bonuses.

  “We got to defend our honor,” one of the men said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”

  “They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re—”

  Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”

  And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.

  At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris Rift, at the lumpy equator.

  Margaret’s crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulfur and ferrous iron, converting carbonaceous material into useful organic chemicals. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys, organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Water-mining organisms recruited sulfur oxidizers, trading precious water for energy and forming warty outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more than a hundred meters across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.

  All this variety, and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution! Wild beauty won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.

  Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushed her crew hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats the Ganapati’s citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would not.

  Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it had manipulated.

  Its tas
k had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow growing chemoautotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulfur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a cycle repeated every hundred days.

  But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef’s biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favorable conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.

  Margaret’s survey crew had explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty days. Cluster analysis suggested that they had identified less than ten percent of the species that had formed from the original seed population. And now deep radar suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the deepest part of Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet been able to reach.

  Margaret had pointed this out at the last seminar. “We’re making hypotheses on incomplete information. We don’t know everything that’s out there. Sampling suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands more species in the deep part of the Rift.”