The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.

  I’m not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I’m not afraid. Isn’t that odd …

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.

  Ballard is shouting in the lounge. “The experiment’s over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!”

  Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floor.

  On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.

  Ballard is staring into it. “Did you hear me? I’m not playing your stupid games any more! I’m through performing!”

  The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

  So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard’s cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn’t tell me.

  How long have you known?

  Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. “You’ve got her fooled, all right,” she snarls at the fisheye, “but she’s a goddamned basket case! She’s not even sane! Your little tests don’t impress me one fucking bit!”

  Clarke steps toward her.

  “Don’t call me a basket case,” she says, her voice absolutely level.

  “That’s what you are!” Ballard shouts. “You’re sick! That’s why you’re down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you’re so far gone you can’t see it! You hide everything behind that—that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it …”

  That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That’s the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn’t until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too …

  “Thank you,” Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

  Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

  “Oh Jesus,” Ballard whimpers. “Lenie, I’m sorry.”

  Clarke stands over her. “Don’t be,” she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labelled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.

  She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

  “I think,” Clarke says, “I’ll start with you.”

  But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

  Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

  Jeanette Ballard is going home today.

  For over an hour the ’scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Systems monitor shows it setting like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe’s docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.

  Ballard’s replacement climbs down, already mostly ’skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his ’skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

  Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn’t work out?

  Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch creaks open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the ’scaphe without a word.

  Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they’ve simply figured it out. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the ’scaphe disengages.

  Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

  We don’t need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

  She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

  “I’m Lubin,” he says at last.

  Ballard was right again, she realizes. Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all.

  But she doesn’t mind. She won’t be going back.

  GOSSAMER

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter is known as one of the nineties’ best new hard SF writers, the author of a number of highly regarded novels and many short stories (See earlier Baxter note). He said in a Locus interview, “Moonseed is, in part, another response to Red Mars, and the terraforming debate, because they try to terraform the moon.”

  Baxter said in another Locus interview:

  Looking back, things do change, in terms of influences. When I was young, I was influenced by the greats of the past, Wells and Clarke. When I was kind of cutting my teeth, writing a lot of stories and finally selling stories in the eighties, it was the people who were around at the time, the dominant figures: Benford and Bear in hard SF And now, my contemporaries, roughly: Paul McAuley, Peter Hamilton, Greg Egan. And I’ve met everybody else who s still alive, probably—not Egan, but Clarke and Benford, and Bear I’ve become quite friendly with.

  With people like Bear and Benford, McAuley and Robinson, who are working off the same material as I’m working from—the new understanding of the planets, and so forth, the new understanding of cosmology (which is maybe more philosophy than science, because it’s untestable), we’re all coming from the same place. And you do have this dialogue, really, a conversation.

  And it is worth remarking that regardless of politics, the British and American hard SF writers know and talk to one another, argue with one another, and as Baxter points out, are all coming from the same place.

  Baxter here writes-in the hard science mode of Hal Clement and Robert L. Forward. This kind of SF is particularly valued by hard SF readers because it is comparatively scarce, requires intense effort by the writer to be accurate to known science, and produces the innovative imagery that is peculiar to hard SF, that sparks that good old wow of wonderment. In “Gossamer” his visions based on science are astonishingly precise and clear and that is what his fiction offers as foregrounded for out entertainment.

  The flitter bucked. Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced toward and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.

  Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die—and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for eighty years.

  She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.

  Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”

  “What? But we should have been traveling for another half—hour.”

  Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become u
nstable. The wormhole is buckling.”

  “What does that mean? Are we in danger?”

  Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds. Hold tight.”

  Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole. The Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.

  Glowing struts swept over the flitter.

  The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed spacetime yielded in a gush of heavy particles.

  Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.

  Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—

  There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.

  “Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down—we’re too close.”

  Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw …

  No. It was impossible.

  The vision was gone, receded into darkness.

  “Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.

  Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth, and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.

  She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.

  The flitter came to rest.

  A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.

  In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.

  “Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.

  Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.

  The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few percent of G, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.

  There were clouds above her: wispy cirrus, aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.

  The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.

  Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?

  Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light-hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.

  Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.

  Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.

  Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.

  Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter’s blunt prow crunching into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.

  “We’ve come down near the equator,” Cobh said. “The albedo is higher at the south pole; a cap of methane ice there, I’m told.”

  “Yes.”

  Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. “That’s the wormhole Interface, where we emerged, fifty thousand miles away.”

  Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she’d grown up with on Earth. “Are we stranded?”

  Cobh said, with reasonable patience, “For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and the wormhole has collapsed; we’re going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way round.”

  Three billion miles … “Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now this. What a mess.”

  Cobh laughed. “I’ve already sent off messages to the Inner System. They’ll be received in about five hours. A one-way GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel here, with Charon ice—”

  “How long?”

  “It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight out here—”

  “Twenty days?”

  “We’re in no danger. We’ve supplies for a month. Although we’re going to have to live in these suits.”

  “Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours.”

  “Well,” Cobh said testily, “you’ll have to call and cancel your appointments, won’t you? All we have to do is wait here; we’re not going to be comfortable, but we’re safe enough.”

  “Do you know what happened to the wormhole?”

  Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. “As far as I know, nothing like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed back into the throat … But I don’t know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “How so?”

  “Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal.” She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if embarrassed. “For a moment there, we appeared to be traveling faster than light.”

  “Through normal space? That’s impossible.”

  “Of course it is.” Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled against her faceplate. “I think I’ll go up to the Interface and take a look around there.”

  Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life support boxes. Then she strapped her data desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet’s surface, heading for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.

  Lvov’s isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.

  A reply from the Inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay in taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon. Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.

  There was other mail: concerned notes from Lvov’s family, a testy demand for updates from her research supervisor, and for Cobh, orders from her employer to mark as much of the flitter wreck as she could for salvage and analysis. Cobh’s ship was a commercial wormhole transit vessel, hired by Oxford—Lvov’s university—for this trip. Now, it seemed, a complex battle over liability would be joined between Oxford, Cobh’s firm, and the insurance companies.

  Lvov, five light-hours from home, found it difficult to respond to the mail asynchronously. She felt as if she had been cut out of the on-line mind of humanity. In the end, she drafted replies to her family and deleted the rest of the messages.

  She checked her research equipment again, but it really was unuseable. She tried to sleep. The suit was uncomfortable, claustrophobic. She was restless, bored, a little scared.

  She began a systematic survey of the surface, taking her scooter on w
idening spiral sweeps around the crash scar.

  The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines. She kept a few hundred feet above the surface; whenever she flew too low, her heat evoked billowing vapor from fragile nitrogen ice, obliterating ancient features, and she experienced obscure guilt.

  She found more of the snowflakelike features, generally in little clusters of eight or ten.

  Pluto, like its moon-twin Charon, was a ball of rock clad by thick mantles of water ice and nitrogen ice, and laced with methane, ammonia, and organic compounds. It was like a big, stable comet nucleus; it barely deserved the status of “planet.” There were moons bigger than Pluto.

  There had been only a handful of visitors in the eighty years since the building of the Poole wormhole. None of them had troubled to walk the surfaces of Pluto or Charon. The wormhole, Lvov realized, hadn’t been built as a commercial proposition, but as a sort of stunt: the link which connected, at last, all of the System’s planets to the rapid-transit hub at Jupiter.

  She tired of her plodding survey. She made sure she could locate the crash scar, lifted the scooter to a mile above the surface, and flew toward the south polar cap.

  Cobh called from the Interface. “I think I’m figuring out what happened here—that superluminal effect I talked about. Lvov, have you heard of an Alcubierre wave?” She dumped images to Lvov’s desk—portraits of the wormhole Interface, graphics.

  “No.” Lvov ignored the input and concentrated on flying the scooter. “Cobh, why should a wormhole become unstable? Hundreds of wormhole rapid transits are made every day, all across the System.”

  “A wormhole is a flaw in space. It’s inherently unstable anyway. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That’s matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—”