The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Reliance on miracles was not, of course, a useful solution to any problem; but some of the staff occasionally, and of course very privately, felt slightly tempted. After all, the supernatural could hardly be much less useful at prediction than the math models produced so far.

  So what talk there was with the natives tended to be on the physical and material rather than emotional planes. Even mathematical abstractions, critical as they were to chemical discussion, were not progressing well. It was not even certain that the others knew—or cared—about the returning tanker.

  Tricia Whirley Feather, responsible for the final steps in guessing what the computer-derived translation attempts might actually mean, was just about certain the paraffin shipment had been received and appreciated. She had no idea whatever what, if anything, was being sent back in exchange. She was not at all certain that the concept of “exchange” was clear to the natives.

  But Candlegrease was nevertheless being grown and modified outside in the Halfbaked environment, where the more serious planning errors should show up quickly. An overpowered and overweight runabout, named Annie from another ancient literary source, and intended to tow the carrier, had been more or less finished. At least it was driveable and Erni and Dominic were testing it. There was little general doubt that these two would make the second trip, though Ben had some personal reservations. These were finally resolved almost by accident.

  The regular planetological work of the station was kept up, of course. More than two dozen satellites, in orbits out to about ten thousand kilometers above the surface, were cooperating with a seismic net slowly spreading out from Nest in working out the planet’s internal structure, surface details, and atmospheric behavior. Progress was at about two doctoral theses per hour, Ben Cloud estimated.

  And, presumably, each hour was also bringing Jessi Ware Icewall and Maria Flood Yucca seventy or eighty kilometers closer to their husbands. Jellyseal was making good speed.

  She was also getting close to the dark side.

  Actual construction of the new tanker system was going well enough, whenever decisions could be made; pseudolife techniques had taken most of the delays and difficulties out of actually making things. The problems of designing them remained, however. Ideas which seemed great by themselves would turn out to be incompatible with other equally wonderful ones when people attempted to grow them together. Whole assemblies which had promised well in computer simulation were embarrassing failures when grown and tried out. The communication lapse from Jelly was more than worrisome; her crew, who had the ordinary skills at pseudolife design even if they were not actually experts, presumably had far more knowledge relevant to the problem than anyone else on the planet.

  The supposedly straightforward problem of traction on unknown surfaces for a vehicle expected to tow several times its own weight was attaining Primary status. Erni, Dominic, and several other sets of drivers were kept busy on test runs which ran, too often, straight into a new problem. Sometimes they didn’t think of their wives for whole hours, though they never failed to check in with Senatsu when they came back in.

  “They’ll be seeing the last of the sun in an hour or two,” the analyst remarked at one of these meetings when the return distance still to be covered had shrunk to about thirty thousand kilometers geodesic. “They’re already a lot easier to spot, and don’t seem to be having any trouble finding their way. They’re swerved two or three times, but never very far, and apparently for things like that fault of yours. That, by the way, is now about three meters high and seems to be still growing; it’s lucky it’s not on their return path. I’ve suggested that Ben send someone out to see how much horizontal shift it’s shown. I can’t tell from satellite—can’t get sharp enough ground motion details without a set of retroreflectors at a known location. Want to make the run?”

  Dominic shrugged. “Okay with us, if Ben calls it. We might as well be doing something.”

  “You are already, it seems to me. Well, we’ll let him call it. If he thinks you’ll be better off growing up with Candlegrease and Annie then someone else can go. Or no one, of course, if he doesn’t think it’s important enough.”

  Cloud, after only a second or two of thought, decided the information was important enough to rate a close look, and six hours later—people still had to sleep—Quarterback was heading away from Nest on a Hotpole bearing of about seventy degrees, with her usual drivers aboard.

  Some changes along the track could be seen almost at once. The tall growths which seemed to be springing up where vegetation had been crushed on their first trip out were now much taller. What had looked like two-meter stalks of deep red, dark brown, and dead black asparagus now resembled giant saguaros with, in many cases, the bases of what had been separate stalks now grown together. A former clump or thicket now seemed like a single plant with multiple branches probing upward. Neither driver liked the idea of trying to plow through these, so progress became much slower and less direct. Sometimes they had to retrace some distance and try a new route. Eventually they settled for paralleling their former path rather than trying to follow it.

  They speculated over the chance that the organisms they had casually pulped the first trip out might be serving as food for saprophytes, and reported the idea back to Ben. Ten minutes later he told them to collect specimens. The xenobiologists also wanted data. Life on a virtually hydrogen-free world needed investigating. Especially life whose carbon content far exceeded ninety percent, as well as zero hydrogen.

  Collecting would have slowed them even more, but Erni and Nic decided to do it on the way back and rolled on, with the fence of organ pipes to their right and a relatively clear path ahead.

  The quakes produced by the still active fault made themselves felt well before the actual structure came in sight, and Quarterback was slowed accordingly. The operators stopped a short distance from the scarp, which was now, as Senatsu had reported, over two meters high. The big saprophytes, if that’s what they were, were not doing very well in the quake area, and no longer formed a barrier. It was therefore possible to follow the verge to the right for several kilometers; but no practical way down could be found. Neither man trusted the structure of their vehicle enough to drive over the edge under local gravity, even without the problem of getting back up. Also, even if the body had survived, the impact would probably have treated the men like dynamited fish.

  Servobugs—waldo-controlled pseudolife vehicles ranging from ten centimeters to half a meter in length and eight kilograms to nearly eight hundred in weight—were of course cheap, and they wasted one of the smallest and presumably sturdiest in a test drop over the edge. It did not survive, but the sacrifice was considered worthwhile.

  At this point Senatsu made another report, changing Ben’s plans and frustrating several xenobiologists. Jellyseal had passed out of the sunlit zone, and seemed to be having trouble finding its way. Guidance information had been sent from Nest as before.

  This time it was not followed.

  Requests to stop and perform specific maneuvers to show that Nest’s messages were being received also went unheeded, or at least unanswered.

  Ben, knowing his personnel, promptly suggested that Quarterback drop its present mission and try to intercept the tanker. After all, things might as well be official, and the husbands would certainly do this anyway. Senatsu and her helpers would do their best to provide guidance starting from the runabout’s current position.

  There was no need to go back to Nest for supplies, since all the vehicles had full recycling capacity and adequate energy sources. Knowing this had discouraged Cloud from even thinking of sending anyone but the two husbands. Upon hearing of the new behavior, and without even waiting for the first guidance messages, Erni swung their vehicle Hoteast—a quadrant to the right of the line toward Hotpole—and slanted away from the scarp. Haste was not exactly a priority with the two drivers, since they would be many days on the way whatever the machine driven by their wives might do, but there woul
d be no delay. Worry was back in charge.

  The geodesic connecting the two vehicles of course no longer crossed into Hotside, rather to Ben’s annoyance. He wanted more detailed information about the problems of driving in sunlight, for use in future mission planning. His nature, however, was practical as well as sympathetic, and he made no suggestion to either Senatsu or the Quarterback’s drivers about slanting a bit to the left if opportunity occurred. Two or three times in the next weeks he had brief hopes that the only practical path the mappers could find might lead a little way into sunlight, but each time he was disappointed.

  Erni and Nic were not. They were worried—still no word from their wives—and frustrated as Senatsu guided them through a maze of hillocks, around obstacles organic and topographical, past puddles and lakes of unknown composition, and once for over fifty kilometers paralleling a cliff about as high as silicate rock could be expected to lift against Halfbaked’s gravity. She had warned them against getting within a kilometer of the edge of this scarp; they were on the high side, and there was no way of telling whether or when the tonnage of Quarterback combined with the fantastically rapid erosion by the fluoride-rich wind and rain would trigger collapse of the whole section of landscape. Being part of a seven-gee landslide would not be noticeably better than being under one. She had only used the route at all because it offered tens of kilometers of relatively flat surface which would permit maximum speed; and even then, she and Cloud had debated the idea for some time with Nic and Erni out of the comm net.

  No one felt very much better when, some ten hours after the Quarterback’s passage, the cliff did collapse in four or five places as far in as the runabout’s track.

  “I wonder,” Nic remarked when Ben relayed this information, “whether I’ll yield to temptation a few years from now. It’d be so easy to turn ten hours into ten seconds when I’m telling about this to the kids.”

  Then of course it was too late to bite his tongue off. Erni, who was driving at the time, said nothing for several seconds; then his only words were, “I’m sure I would.”

  The Jellyseal was making poor progress, according to the satellite observations. Time and again she seemed to have headed into a dead-end path and had to backtrack. One encouraging fact was that the same mistake was never made twice; it looked as though the drivers were on the job. No one could yet believe that the following of the earlier instruction had been coincidence, so the general idea was now that whatever had gone wrong earlier with the tanker’s transmitters had now spread to the receivers as well. What this might be seemed unknowable until the machinery could be checked at first hand; all the communication gear in every vehicle on the planet was multiply redundant. Disabling it should take deliberate and either highly skilled or savagely extensive sabotage.

  No one could suggest a plausible or even credible motive for either the drivers or the natives to do such a thing, and it seemed highly unlikely that the latter would have the requisite specific skills in spite of their obvious familiarity with microwave transmission. Knowledge of principles does not imply ability to design or repair complex unfamiliar equipment.

  But the tanker remained silent and apparently deaf, though it continued to move as though guided by intelligence.

  “At least,” remarked Erni after they had received another report from Senatsu that their target was once more backtracking, “they’re not forcing us to make changes in our path. If the girls had actually been making headway back home, we’d have had to change our own heading all the time.”

  “Come on, young man,” came Senatsu’s indignant voice. “Don’t you think I’d have been able to work out a reasonable intercept for you? I wouldn’t have kept you heading for where they were at the moment. I know you’re worried, but don’t get insulting.”

  She was not really indignant, of course, and Erni knew it, and she knew Erni knew it. The art of trying to keep the youngster’s mind off his troubles was now being widely practiced at Nest. It was lucky that most of the divergently planned help efforts had to funnel through one person.

  In a way Erni knew all that, too. Oddly enough, the knowing did help. People may resent pity, but honest sympathy is different; it lacks the condescension.

  Maybe that was why so few people seemed to feel that Dominic needed help, too.

  Actually, the efforts were not really necessary most of the time. The journey itself was far from boring. The basic need for constant alertness when running at high speed across poorly known topography left little time for unrelated thoughts while on duty, and caused enough fatigue to ensure deep sleep between hitches. The world itself was different enough from anything familiar to human explorers; it took much of the attention not needed for guiding the runabout.

  Not all of the differences were obvious to the operators. Power consumption of the vehicle, for example, recorded at Nest, indicated that it spent over two thousand kilometers climbing one side and descending the other of a three-kilometer-high dome; Nic and Erni heard only indirect echoes of the arguments as scientists tried to match this information with that from satellites and seismograms.

  The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.

  They could tell, of course, when it was possible to keep a given speed; only rarely was the way open enough—and when it was, they had to be even more alert for the strange things which might change that happy state.

  Once, and once only, was there an animal, a definitely living thing moving sluggishly across their path leaving a track entirely stripped of vegetation, large and small. There was no way to see its underside, and hence no way to tell whether it was traveling on short legs—which would presumably have had to be numerous—or, though no trail was visible, something like the slime track of a gastropod. The biologists did manage this time to get a plea through Ben’s near-censorship. They wanted the Quarterback just to change course the slightest bit and roll the thing over en passant, and leave a servobug or two to examine it more closely …

  The drivers were not sure their vehicle could roll over something about its own size, and even less certain that the creature itself could do nothing about it if they tried. They promised to make the effort when the present emergency was ended, preferably much closer to possible help from Nest, and drove on. The bugs were controllable from only a short distance in the biological static.

  The debate was picked up by the natives, who wanted to know what “animal” meant. No one could explain with the available symbols. This was not surprising; but during the next hour Nic and Erni saw, swooping around their vehicle, objects which looked like the familiar blowing bits of black paper at a distance but which, seen close to, were clearly gliders—tossing, banking, and whirling in the wind as though barely under control, but clearly aircraft. This was duly reported to Nest. The report, presumably detectable by the natives, elicited no comment from them.

  Quarterback was now a little closer to the sunlit slightly-more-than-hemisphere (the star covered fourteen degrees of sky). The generally active tectonics had not changed significantly, but the air was decidedly warmer and the plants, possibly in consequence, more luxuriant. Nothing resembling leaves had been seen yet, again unless the apparently charred blowing sheets qualified, and there were bets among the biologists on whether such organs would be present even under direct sunlight. The drivers of Jellyseal had failed to report any, but this meant little when one considered the planet’s area. Special enlarged organs for intercepting stellar energy did seem a bit superfluous with the star scarcely a twentieth of an astronomical unit away. However, considering the illogical structure of vertebrate retinae, there was no predicting all the odd paths regular evolution might take.

  Cloud made few requests of the
husbands, no matter how urgently his halo of researchers begged. He did pass on to them the suggestion that more and bigger plants might mean more if not bigger animals, but left any changes in driving policy up to them. They made none; they were already as alert as human beings could well remain.

  The final two-thousand-kilometer segment of the run was frustrating, over and beyond the general annoyance built up over twenty-two days of unbroken driving. The men were, in what now might almost be called straight-line distance, less than three hundred kilometers from their still moving goal. They could not follow a straight line; that way was a labyrinth of seamed, faulted, broken hills where even the satellites could detect almost constant rockfalls. The Quarterback would not have to be hit by a rock; a wheelbarrow load of sand could put her instantly out of commission, and help was now tens of thousands of kilometers away. There was no option but to go around the region. Senatsu was apologetic about not having seen the details sooner, but she was easily forgiven; her attention had been confined by their own needs to areas much closer to the travelers for nearly all the trip.

  Erni responded to the news with a rather rough jerk at the steering controls; his partner fully sympathized but made the signal to change drivers. The younger man had enough self-control to obey, and the runabout set off in a new direction with Jellyseal now off toward its left rear. The sky and its omnipresent clouds flickered even more brightly than usual, as though in sympathy—or perhaps derision. Fortunately, neither driver had reached the state of personalizing the indifferent world. No one even considered how close this state might be.