The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “I think we’re finished,” Voi said.

  “Not quite,” Clavain said. “You’re not going to like this, but …” Biting his tongue he brought the shuttle’s hidden weapons online. An aiming scope plunged down from the ceiling; he brought his eyes to it and locked crosshairs onto the Ouroborus. Just like old times …

  “Damn you,” Voi said. “This was meant to be an unarmed mission!”

  “You’re welcome to lodge a formal complaint.”

  Clavain fired, the hull shaking from the recoil. Through the side window they watched the white worm blow apart into stubby segments. The parts wriggled beneath the dust.

  “Good shooting,” Voi said, almost grudgingly. “Is it dead?”

  “For now,” Clavain said. “It’ll take several hours for the segments to fuse back into a functional worm.”

  “Good,” Voi said, pushing herself out of her seat. “But there will be a formal complaint, take my word.”

  “Maybe you’d rather the worm ate us?”

  “I just hate duplicity, Clavain.”

  He tried the radio again. “Galiana? We’re down—the ship’s history—but we’re both unharmed.”

  “Thank God.” Old verbal mannerisms died hard, even among the Conjoined. “But you can’t stay where you are. There are more worms in the area. Do you think you can make it overland to the nest?”

  “It’s only two hundred meters,” Voi said. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Two hundred meters, yes—but two hundred meters across treacherous, potholed ground riddled with enough soft depressions to hide a dozen worms. And then they would have to climb up the rim’s side to reach the entrance to the hangar bay; ten or fifteen meters above the soil.

  “Let’s hope it isn’t,” Clavain said.

  He unbuckled, feeling light-headed as he stood for the first time in Martian gravity. He had adapted entirely too well to the one-gee of the Deimos ring, constructed for the comfort of Earthside tacticians. He went to the emergency locker and found a mask which slivered eagerly across his face; another for Voi. They plugged in air-tanks and went to the shuttle’s door. This time when it sphinctered open there was a glistening membrane stretched across the doorway, a recently licensed item of Demarchist technology. Clavain pushed through the membrane and the stuff enveloped him with a wet, sucking sound. By the time he hit the dirt the membrane had hardened itself around his soles and had begun to contour itself with ribs and accordioned joints, even though it stayed transparent.

  Voi came behind him, gaining her own m-suit.

  They loped away from the crashed shuttle, toward the dike. The worms would be locking onto their seismic patterns already, if there were any nearby. They might be more interested in the shuttle for now, but that was nothing they could count on. Clavain knew the behavior of worms intimately, knew the major routines which drove them; but that expertise did not guarantee his survival. It had almost failed him in Phobos.

  The mask felt clammy against his face. The air at the base of the Great Wall was technically breathable even now, but there seemed no point in taking chances when speed was of the essence. His feet scuffed through the topsoil, and while he seemed to be crossing ground, the dike obstinately refused to come any closer. It was larger than it looked from the crash; the distance farther.

  “Another worm,” Voi said.

  White coils erupted through sand to the west. The Ouroborus was making undulating progress toward them, zig-zagging with predatory calm, knowing that it could afford to take its time. In the tunnels of Phobos, they had never had the luxury of knowing when a worm was close. They struck from ambush, quick as pythons.

  “Run,” Clavain said.

  Dark figures appeared in the opening high in the rimwall. A rope-ladder unfurled down the side of the structure. Clavain, making for the base of it, made no effort to quieten his footfalls. He knew that the worm almost certainly had a lock on him by now.

  He looked back.

  The worm paused by the downed shuttle, then smashed its diamond-jawed head into the ship, impaling the hull on its body. The worm reared up, wearing the ship like a garland. Then it shivered and the ship flew apart like a rotten carcass. The worm returned its attention to Clavain and Voi. Like a sidewinder it pulled its thirty-meter long body from the sand and rolled toward them on wheeling coils.

  Clavain reached the base of the ladder.

  Once, he could have ascended the ladder with his arms alone, in one-gee, but now the ladder felt alive beneath his feet. He began to climb, then realized that the ground was dropping away much faster than he was passing rungs. The Conjoiners were hauling him aloft.

  He looked back in time to see Voi stumble.

  “Sandra! No!”

  She made to stand up, but it was too late by then. As the worm descended on her, Clavain could do nothing but turn his gaze away and pray for her death to be quick. If it had to be meaningless, he thought, at least let it be swift.

  Then he started thinking about his own survival. “Faster!” he shouted, but the mask reduced his voice to a panicked muffle. He had forgotten to assign the ship’s radio frequency to the suit.

  The worm thrashed against the base of the wall, then began to rear up, its maw opening beneath him; a diamond-ringed orifice like the drill of a tunnelling machine. Then something eye-hurtingly bright cut into the worm’s hide. Craning his neck, Clavain saw a group of Conjoiners kneeling over the lip of the opening, aiming guns downward. The worm writhed in intense robotic irritation. Across the sand, he could see the coils of other worms coming closer. There must have been dozens ringing the nest. No wonder Galiana’s people had made so few attempts to leave by land.

  They had hauled him within ten meters of safety. The injured worm showed cybernetic workings where its hide had been flensed away by weapons impacts. Enraged, it flung itself against the rim wall, chipping off scabs of concrete the size of boulders. Clavain felt the vibration of each impact through the wall as he was dragged upward.

  The worm hit again and the wall shook more violently than before. To his horror, Clavain watched one of the Conjoiners lose his footing and tumble over the edge of the rim toward him. Time oozed to a crawl. The falling man was almost upon him. Without thinking, Clavain hugged closer to the wall, locking his limbs around the ladder. Suddenly, he had seized the man by the arm. Even in Martian gravity, even allowing for the Conjoiner’s willowy build, the impact almost sent both of them toward the Ouroborus. Clavain felt his bones pop out of location, tearing at gristle, but he managed to keep his grip on both the Conjoiner and the ladder.

  Conjoiners breathed the air at the base of the Wall without difficulty. The man wore only lightweight clothes, gray silk pajamas belted at the waist. With his sunken cheeks and bald skull, the man’s Martian physique lent him a cadaverous look. Yet somehow he had managed not to drop his gun, still holding it in his other hand.

  “Let me go,” the man said.

  Below, the worm inched higher despite the harm the Conjoiners had inflicted on it. “No,” Clavain said, through clenched teeth and the distorting membrane of his mask. “I’m not letting you go.”

  “You’ve no option.” The man’s voice was placid. “They can’t haul both of us up fast enough, Clavain.”

  Clavain looked into the Conjoiner’s face, trying to judge the man’s age. Thirty, perhaps—maybe not even that, since the cadaverous look probably made him seem older than he really was. Clavain was easily twice his age; had surely lived a richer life; had comfortably cheated death on three or four previous occasions.

  “I’m the one who should die, not you.”

  “No,” the Conjoiner said. “They’d find a way to blame your death on us. They’d make it a pretext for war.” Without any fuss the man pointed the gun at his own head and blew his brains out.

  As much in shock as recognition that the man’s life was no longer his to save, Clavain released his grip. The dead man tumbled down the rim wall, into the mouth of the worm which had just kil
led Sandra Voi.

  Numb, Clavain allowed himself to be pulled to safety.

  When the armored door to the hangar was shut the conjoiners attacked his m-suit with enzymic sprays. The sprays digested the fabric in seconds, leaving Clavain wheezing in a pool of slime. Then a pair of Conjoiners helped him unsteadily to his feet and waited patiently while he caught his breath from the mask. Through tears of exhaustion he saw that the hangar was racked full of half-assembled spacecraft; skeletal geodesic shark-shapes designed to punch out of an atmosphere, fast.

  “Sandra Voi is dead,” he said, removing the mask to speak.

  There was no way the Conjoiners could not have seen this for themselves, but it seemed inhuman not to acknowledge what had happened.

  “I know,” Galiana said. “But at least you survived.”

  He thought of the man falling into the Ouroborus. “I’m sorry about your …” But then trailed off, because for all his depth of knowledge concerning the Conjoiners, he had no idea what the appropriate term was.

  “You placed your life in danger in trying to save him.”

  “He didn’t have to die.”

  Galiana nodded sagely. “No; in all likelihood he didn’t. But the risk to yourself was too great. You heard what he said. Your death would be made to seem our fault; justification for a pre-emptive strike against our nest. Even the Demarchists would turn against us if we were seen to murder a diplomat.”

  Taking another suck from the mask, he looked into her face. He had spoken to her over low-bandwidth video-links, but only in person was it obvious that Galiana had hardly aged in fifteen years. A decade and a half of habitual expression should have engraved existing lines deeper into her face—but Conjoiners were not known for their habits of expression. Galiana had seen little sunlight in the intervening time, cooped here in the nest, and Martian gravity was much kinder to bone structure than the one-gee of Deimos. She still had the cruel beauty he remembered from his time as a prisoner. The only real evidence of aging lay in the filaments of gray threading her hair; raven-black when she had been his captor.

  “Why didn’t you warn us about the worms?”

  “Warn you?” For the first time something like doubt crossed her face, but it was only fleeting. “We assumed you were fully aware of the Ouroborus infestation. Those worms have been dormant—waiting—for years, but they’ve always been there. It was only when I saw how low your approach was that I realized …”

  “That we might not have known?”

  Worms were area-denial devices; autonomous prey-seeking mines. The war had left many pockets of the solar system still riddled with active worms. The machines were intelligent, in a one-dimensional way. Nobody ever admitted to deploying them and it was usually impossible to convince them that the war was over and that they should quietly deactivate.

  “After what happened to you in Phobos,” Galiana said, “I assumed there was nothing you needed to be taught about worms.”

  He never liked thinking about Phobos: the pain was still too deeply engraved. But if it had not been for the injuries he had sustained there he would never have been sent to Deimos to recuperate; would never have been recruited into his brother’s intelligence wing to study the Conjoiners. Out of that phase of deep immersion in everything concerning the enemy had come his peacetime role as negotiator—and now diplomat—on the eve of another war. Everything was circular, ultimately. And now Phobos was central to his thinking because he saw it as a way out of the impasse—maybe the last chance for peace. But it was too soon to put his idea to Galiana. He was not even sure the mission could still continue, after what had happened.

  “We’re safe now, I take it?”

  “Yes; we can repair the damage to the dike. Mostly, we can ignore their presence.”

  “We should have been warned. Look, I need to talk to my brother.”

  “Warren? Of course. It’s easily arranged.”

  They walked out of the hangar; away from the half-assembled ships. Somewhere deeper in the nest, Clavain knew, was a factory where the components for the ships were made, mined out of Mars or winnowed from the fabric of the nest. The Conjoiners managed to launch one every six weeks or so; had been doing so for six months. Not one of the ships had ever managed to escape the Martian atmosphere before being shot down … but sooner or later he would have to ask Galiana why she persisted with this provocative folly.

  Now, though, was not the time—even if, by Warren’s estimate, he only had three days before Galiana’s next provocation.

  The air elsewhere in the nest was thicker and warmer than in the hangar, which meant he could dispense with the mask. Galiana took him down a short, gray-walled, metallic corridor which ended in a circular room containing a console. He recognized the room from the times he had spoken to Galiana from Deimos. Galiana showed him how to use the system then left him in privacy while he established a connection with Deimos.

  Warren’s face soon appeared on a screen, thick with pixels like an impressionist portrait. Conjoiners were only allowed to send kilobytes a second to other parts of the system. Much of that bandwidth was now being sucked up by this one video link.

  “You’ve heard, I take it,” Clavain said.

  Warren nodded, his face ashen. “We had a pretty good view from orbit, of course. Enough to see that Voi didn’t make it. Poor woman. We were reasonably sure you survived, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

  “Do you want me to abandon the mission?”

  Warren’s hesitation was more than just time-lag. “No … I thought about it, of course, and high command agrees with me. Voi’s death was tragic—no escaping that. But she was only along as a neutral observer. If Galiana consents for you to stay, I suggest you do so.”

  “But you still say I only have three days?”

  “That’s up to Galiana, isn’t it? Have you learned much?”

  “You must be kidding. I’ve seen shuttles ready for launch, that’s all. I haven’t raised the Phobos proposal, either. The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, after what happened to Voi.”

  “Yes. If only we’d known about that Ouroborus infestation.”

  Clavain leaned closer to the screen. “Yes. Why the hell didn’t we? Galiana assumed that we would, and I don’t blame her for that. We’ve had the nest under constant surveillance for fifteen years. Surely in all that time we’d have seen evidence of the worms?”

  “You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, maybe the worms weren’t always there.”

  Conscious that there could be nothing private about this conversation—but unwilling to drop the thread—Clavain said: “You think the Conjoiners put them there to ambush us?”

  “I’m saying we shouldn’t disregard any possibility, no matter how unpalatable.”

  “Galiana would never do something like that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” She had just stepped back into the room. “And I’m disappointed that you’d even debate the possibility.”

  Clavain terminated the link with Deimos. “Eavesdropping’s not a very nice habit, you know.”

  “What did you expect me to do?”

  “Show some trust? Or is that too much of a stretch?”

  “I never had to trust you when you were my prisoner,” Galiana said. “That made our relationship infinitely simpler. Our roles were completely defined.”

  “And now? If you distrust me so completely, why did you ever agree to my visit? Plenty of other specialists could have come in my place. You could even have refused any dialogue.”

  “Voi’s people pressured us to allow your visit,” Galiana said. “Just as they pressured your side into delaying hostilities a little longer.”

  “Is that all?”

  She hesitated slightly now. “I … knew you.”

  “Knew me? Is that how you sum up a year of imprisonment? What about the thousands of conversations we had; the times when we put aside our differences to talk about somethin
g other than the damned war? You kept me sane, Galiana. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s why I’ve risked my life to come here and talk you out of another provocation.”

  “It’s completely different now.”

  “Of course!” He forced himself not to shout. “Of course it’s different. But not fundamentally. We can still build on that bond of trust and find a way out of this crisis.”

  “But does your side really want a way out of it?”

  He did not answer her immediately; wary of what the truth might mean. “I’m not sure. But I’m also not sure you do, or else you wouldn’t keep pushing your luck.” Something snapped inside him and he asked the question he had meant to ask in a million better ways. “Why do you keep doing it, Galiana? Why do you keep launching those ships when you know they’ll be shot down as soon as they leave the nest?”

  Her eyes locked onto his own, unflinchingly. “Because we can. Because sooner or later one will succeed.”

  Clavain nodded. It was exactly the sort of thing he had feared she would say.

  She led him through more gray-walled corridors, descending several levels deeper into the nest. Light poured from snaking strips embedded into the walls like arteries. It was possible that the snaking design was decorative, but Clavain thought it much more likely that the strips had simply grown that way, expressing biological algorithms. There was no evidence that the Conjoiners had attempted to enliven their surroundings; to render them in any sense human.

  “It’s a terrible risk you’re running,” Clavain said.

  “And the status quo is intolerable. I’ve every desire to avoid another war, but if it came to one, we’d at least have the chance to break these shackles.”

  “If you didn’t get exterminated first …”

  “We’d avoid that. In any case, fear plays no part in our thinking. You saw the man accept his fate on the dyke, when he understood that your death would harm us more than his own. He altered his state of mind to one of total acceptance.”

  “Fine. That makes it all right, then.”