The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

Cobh made to turn away, but Lvov grabbed her arm. “I think you’ve found a third option. Haven’t you? You’ve found some other way to resolve this situation, without destroying either us or the flakes.”

  Cobh shook off her hand. “Yes. Yes, I think I know a way. But—”

  “But what?”

  “It’s dangerous, damn it. Maybe unworkable. Lethal.” Cobh’s hands pulled at each other.

  She’s scared, Lvov saw. She stepped back from Cobh. Without giving herself time to think about it, she said, “Our deal’s off. I’m going to tell the Inner System about the flakes. Right now. So we’re going to have to go with your new idea, dangerous or not.”

  Cobh studied her face; Cobh seemed to be weighing up Lvov’s determination, perhaps even her physical strength. Lvov felt as if she were a data desk being downloaded. The moment stretched, and Lvov felt her breath tighten in her chest. Would she be able to defend herself, physically, if it came to that? And was her own will really so strong?

  I have changed, she thought. Pluto has changed me.

  At last Cobh looked away. “Send your damn message,” she said.

  Before Cobh—or Lvov herself—had a chance to waver, Lvov picked up her desk and sent a message to the inner worlds. She downloaded all the data she had on the flakes: text, images, analyses, her own observations and hypotheses.

  “It’s done,” she said at last.

  “And the GUTship?”

  “I’m sure they’ll cancel it.” Lvov smiled. “I’m also sure they won’t tell us they’ve done so.”

  “So we’re left with no choice,” Cobh said angrily. “Look, I know it’s the right thing to do. To preserve the flakes. I just don’t want to die, that’s all. I hope you’re right, Lvov.”

  “You haven’t told me how we’re going to get home.”

  Cobh grinned through her faceplate. “Surfing.”

  “All right. You’re doing fine. Now let go of the scooter.”

  Lvov took a deep breath, and kicked the scooter away with both legs; the little device tumbled away, catching the deep light of Sol, and Lvov rolled in reaction.

  Cobh reached out and steadied her. “You can’t fall,” Cobh said. “You’re in orbit. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” Lvov grumbled.

  The two of them drifted in space, close to the defunct Poole wormhole Interface. The Interface itself was a tetrahedron of electric blue struts, enclosing darkness, its size overwhelming; Lvov felt as if she were floating beside the carcass of some huge, wrecked building.

  Pluto and Charon hovered before her like balloons, their surfaces mottled and complex, their forms visibly distorted from the spherical. Their separation was only fourteen of Pluto’s diameters. The worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue. That’s the difference in surface composition, Lvov thought absently. All that water ice on Charon’s surface.

  The panorama was stunningly beautiful. Lvov had a sudden, gut-level intuition of the rightness of the various System authorities’ rigid pan-environment policies.

  Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you’ll be fine. Remember, you’ll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the centre of an Alcubierre wave, spacetime is locally flat; you’ll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”

  “Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”

  Cobh’s desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. “The GUTdrive has fired. Just a few seconds, now.”

  A spark of light arced up from Pluto’s surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter’s GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilized by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.

  The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her faceplate, showed a spark crossing the sky.

  Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upward, climbing directly toward Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.

  “Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”

  Lvov could hear Cobh’s breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you’re scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn’t going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we’ll be home. In the Inner System, at any rate. Or …”

  “Or what?”

  Cobh didn’t reply.

  Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not—

  The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—

  “Lethe,” Cobh whispered.

  “What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.

  “Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”

  Lvov looked into her faceplate.

  Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.

  Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto—and up toward Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, toward the moon.

  “It’s goose summer,” she said.

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid … the young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer—‘gossamer.’”

  “Right,” Cobh said skeptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift … Perhaps they follow last year’s threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive—it’s remarkable. But why go to Charon?”

  Lvov couldn’t take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass on Charon’s surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto’s interior, and the glass from Charon … They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”

  “Lvov!”

  The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.

  Electric-blue light exploded from the interface, washing over her.

  There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.

  Pluto, Charon, and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.

  Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.

  The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.

  MADAM BUTTERFLY

  James P. Hogan

  James P. Hogan (born 1941), with Robert L. Forward and Charles Sheffield, was a leader in the new generation of hard SF writers in the early 1980s. At the same moment when Gregory Benford (and slightly later, Greg Bear) raised the literary standards of hard SF with their novels and stories, Hogan entered the field as if it were 1939 or 1949 and he had just discovered Heinlein and Asimov, Campbell and Astounding. Generally uninterested in reading in the contemporary field, Hogan in particular set about reinventing it from the forties onward, in novels filled with ideas and technology—such as Inherit the Stars (1977), The Genesis Machine (1978), The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979), Thrice in Ti
me (1980), and Code of the Lifemaker (1983)—that made him one of the more popular writers of that decade.

  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls him “a writer pugnaciously associated with the hard SF wing,” compares him to Eric Frank Russell, and comments:

  His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the SF imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment sequence, being followed by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978) and Giants’ Star (1981) … . The sequence is in fact a hard SF fable of humanity’s origins—we are the direct descendants of the highly aggressive inhabitants of the destroyed fifth planet, who would have conquered the Galaxy had they not blown themselves up—and espouses a vision of the Universe in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that we will, some day, come into our inheritance.

  Two of his novels won the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel: Voyage from Yesteryear (1982) and The Multiplex Man (1992). His new novel, Martian Knightlife (2001) is an SF mystery set on Mars.

  “Madam Butterfly” was first published in Free Space, edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward Kramer, the only politically-engaged Libertarian SF anthology of the decade. The book also included stories by Gregory Benford, Robert J. Sawyer, and John Barnes. It is a light-hearted Libertarian hard SF tale supposedly about “The Butterfly Effect,” or the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of chaotic systems.

  Locally, in the valley far from Tokyo that she had left long ago, it was known as yamatsumi-sou, which means “flower of the mountain spirit.” It was like a small lily, with tapering, yellow petals warmed on the upper surface by a blush of violet. According to legend, it was found only in those particular hills on the north side of Honshu—a visible expression of the deity that had dwelt around the village of Kimikaye-no-sato and protected its inhabitants since ancient times, whose name was Kyo. When the violet was strong and vivid, it meant that Kyo was cheerful and in good health, and the future was secure. When the violet waned pale and cloudy, troubled times lay ahead. Right at this moment, Kyo was looking very sorry for himself indeed.

  The old woman’s name was Chifumi Shimoto. She hadn’t seen a yamatsumi-sou since those long-gone childhood days that everyone remembers as the time when life was simple and carefree—before Japan became just a province in some vaster scheme that she didn’t understand, and everyone found themselves affected to some degree or other by rules borrowed from foreigners with doubtful values and different ways. How it came to be growing in the yard enclosed by the gaunt, gray concrete cliffs forming the rear of the Nagomi Building was anybody’s guess.

  She saw it when she came out with a bag of trash from the bins in the offices upstairs, where she cleaned after the day staff had gone home. It was clinging to life bravely in a patch of cracked asphalt behind the parked trucks, having barely escaped being crushed by a piece of steel pipe thrown down on one side, and smothered by a pile of rubble encroaching from the other. Although small, it looked already exhausted, grown to the limit that its meager niche could sustain. The yard trapped bad air and exhaust fumes, and at ground level was all but sunless. Leaking oil and grime hosed off the vehicles was turning what earth there was into sticky sludge. Kyo needed a better home if he was to survive.

  Potted plants of various kinds adorned shelves and window ledges throughout the offices. When she had washed the cups and ashtrays from the desks and finished vacuuming between the blue-painted computer cabinets and consoles, Chifumi searched and found some empty pots beneath the sink in one of the kitchen areas. She filled one of the smaller pots with soil, using a spoon to take a little from each of many plants, then went back downstairs with it and outside to the yard. Kneeling on the rough ground, she carefully worked the flower and its roots loose from its precarious lodgement, transferred it to the pot that she had prepared, and carried it inside.

  Back upstairs, she fed it with fresh water and cleaned off its leaves. Finally, she placed it in the window of an office high up in the building, facing the sun. Whoever worked in that office had been away for several days. With luck, the flower would remain undisturbed for a while longer and gain the strength to recover. Also, there were no other plants in the room. Perhaps, she thought to herself, that would make it all the more appreciated when the occupant returned.

  She locked the cleaning materials and equipment back in the closet by the rear stairs, took the service elevator back down to the ground floor, and returned the keys to the security desk at the side entrance. The duty officer checked her pass and ID and the shopping bag containing groceries and some vegetables that she had bought on the way in, and then let her out to the lobby area, where the cleaners from other floors were assembling. Five minutes later, the bus that would run them back to their abodes around the city drew up outside the door.

  The offices in the part of the Nagomi Building that Chifumi had been assigned to had something to do with taxes and accounting. That was what all the trouble was supposed to be about between the federal authorities and others in faraway places among the stars. She heard things about freedom and individualism, and people wanting to live as they chose to, away from the government—which the young seemed to imagine they were the first ever to have thought of. To her, it all sounded very much like the same, age-old story of who created the wealth and how it should be shared out. She had never understood it, and did so even less now. Surely there were enough stars in the sky for everyone.

  She had a son, Icoro, out there somewhere, whom she hadn’t seen for two years now; but messages from him reached her from time to time through friends. The last she had heard, he was well, but he hadn’t said exactly where he was or what he was doing—in other words, he didn’t want to risk the wrong people finding out. That alone told her that whatever he was up to was irregular at best, very likely outright illegal, and quite possibly worse. She knew that there was fighting and that people were getting killed—sometimes lots of them. She didn’t ask why or how, or want to hear the details. She worried as a mother would, tried not to dwell on such matters, and when she found that she did anyway, she kept them to herself.

  But as she walked away after the bus dropped her off, she felt more reassured than she had for a long time. The flower, she had decided, was a sign that Kyo still lived in the mountains and did not want to be forgotten. Kyo was a just god who had come to Earth long ago, but he still talked with the other sky-spirits who sent the rain and made the stars above Kimikaye so much brighter. Chifumi had remembered Kyo and helped him. Now Kyo’s friends among the stars would watch over her son.

  Suzi’s voice came from a console speaker on the bridge of the consolidator Turner Maddox, owned by Fast Forwarding Unincorporated, drifting 250 million miles from Earth in an outer region of the Asteroid Belt.

  “Spider aligned at twelve hundred meters. Delta vee is fifteen meters per second, reducing.” Her voice maintained a note of professional detachment, but everyone had stopped what they were doing to follow the sequence unfolding on the image and status screens.

  “No messing with this kid, man,” Fuigerado, the duty radar tech, muttered next to Cassell. “He’s going in fast.”

  Cassell grunted, too preoccupied with gauging the lineup and closing rate to form an intelligible reply. The view from the spider’s nose camera showed the crate stem on, rotating slowly between the three foreshortened, forward-pointing docking appendages that gave the bulb-ended, remote-operated freight-retrieval module its name. Through the bridge observation port on Cassell’s other side, all that was discernible directly of the maneuver being executed over ten miles away were two smudges of light moving against the starfield, and the flashing blue and red of the spider’s visual beacon.

  As navigational dynamics chief, Cassell had the decision on switching control to the regular pilot standing by if the run-in looked to go out
side the envelope. Too slow meant an extended chase downrange to attach to the crate, followed by a long, circuitous recovery back. Faster was better, but impact from an overzealous failure to connect could kick a crate off on a rogue trajectory that would require even more time and energy to recover from. Time was money everywhere, while outside gravity wells, the cost of everything was measured not by the distance moved, but by the energy needed to move it there. A lot of hopeful recruits did just fine on the simulator only to flunk through nerves when it came to the real thing.

  “Ten meters per second,” Suzi’s voice sang out.

  The kid was bringing the crate’s speed down smoothly. The homing marker was dead center in the graticule, lock-on confirming to green even as Cassell watched. He decided to give it longer.

  The Lunar surface was being transformed inside domed-over craters; greenhousing by humidifying its atmosphere was thawing out the freeze-dried planet Mars; artificial space structures traced orbits from inside that of Venus to as far out as the asteroids. It all added up to an enormous demand for materials, which meant boom-time prices.

  With Terran federal authorities controlling all Lunar extraction and regulating the authorized industries operating from the Belt, big profits were to be had from bootlegging primary asteroid materials direct into the Inner System. A lot of independent operators got themselves organized to go after a share. Many of these were small-scale affairs—a breakaway cult, minicorp, even a family group—who had pooled their assets to set up a minimum habitat and mining-extraction facility, typically equipped with a low-performance mass launcher. Powered by solar units operating at extreme range, such a launcher would be capable of sending payloads to nearby orbits in the Belt, but not of imparting the velocities needed to reach the Earth-Luna vicinity.

  This was where ventures like Fast Forwarding Uninc. came into the picture. Equipped with high-capacity fusion-driven launchers, they consolidated incoming consignments from several small independents into a single payload and sent it inward on a fast-transit trajectory to a rendezvous agreed upon with the customer.