Water.
With its unique molecular attributes and peculiar property of becoming lighter as it freezes, it could have been designed as the ideal solvent, catalyst, cleanser, as well as the midwife and cradle of life. Besides forming ninety percent of offworlders’ bodies, it provided culture for the algae in their food farms, grew their plants and nurtured their animals, cooled their habitats, and shielded them from radiation. The demand for water across the inner parts of the solar system outstripped that for all other resources.
Callisto, second largest of the moons of Jupiter and almost the size of Mercury, is half ice—equivalent to forty times all the water that exists on Earth. Mining the ice crust of Callisto was a major activity that the Terran authorities operated exclusively to supply the official space-expansion program. One of the reasons for the Space Command’s permanent presence out at the Jovian moons was to protect the investment.
Enormous lasers carved skyscraper-size blocks from the ice field, which were then catapulted off the moon by a fusion-powered electromagnetic launcher. Skimming around the rim of Jupiter’s gravity well, they then used the giant planet as a slingshot to hurl themselves on their way downhill into the Inner System. As each block left the launch track on Callisto, high-power surface lasers directed from an array of sites downrange provided final course correction by ablating the block’s tail surface to create thrust. A crude way of improvising a rocket—but it worked just fine.
Or it had all the time up until now, that is.
The robot freighter Hermit, arriving from Ganymede, was on its final, stern-first approach into the surface base serving the launch installation as the next block out was starting to roll. One of the CYA-173/B bolts securing the Hermit’s high-pressure pumps sheared under the increased load as power was increased to maximum to slow down the ship. The bolt head came off like a rifle bullet, disabling an actuator, which shut down engine number two. Impelled by the unbalanced thrust of the other two engines, the Hermit skewed off course, overshot the base area completely, and demolished one of the towers housing the course-correction lasers for the mass launcher just as the block lifted up above the horizon twenty miles away.
As a result, two million tons of ice hove off toward Jupiter on a trajectory that wasn’t quite what the computers said it ought to be. The error was actually quite slight. But it would be amplified in the whirl around Jupiter, and by the time the block reached the Asteroid Belt, would have grown to a misplacement in the order of tens of millions of miles.
If the cause of the accident were ever tracked down, Al Quentin wouldn’t be around to be fired over it. He had started a small business of his own in Tokyo, importing Old West memorabilia from home.
The Turner Maddox was back on station and accumulating crates for the first of a new series of consignments. Its drives had been overhauled, its computers upgraded, and an improved plasma-stabilization system fitted to the launch driver. But there was a strain in the atmosphere that had not been present in earlier times. Five more consolidators had disappeared, everyone without a trace.
It had to be the feds, but nobody knew how they were locating the collection points, or managing to attack so fast that nobody ever got a warning off. All the consolidators had adopted a stringent policy of moving and changing their operating locales constantly. They were deploying more sophisticated defenses and warning systems. They pooled information on suspected inside informers and undercover feds. They gave dispatch data for incoming consignments as separately encrypted instructions to each subscriber to avoid revealing where the trajectories would converge. Yet they were still missing something.
Cassell looked around the familiar confines of the operations deck. The retrieval crew were at their stations, with a crate from a new subscriber called Farlode Holdings on its way in. Icoro had graduated now and was standby pilot this time—he was OK, Doyle had decided after having him tailed for a period and commissioning a background check. A new newcomer, Ibrahim Ahmel, born in an off-world colony—he said—was about to try his first live retrieval. Not everyone had come back after the break, and taking on more new faces was another of the risks that they were having to live with. Hank Bissen had quit, which was surprising. Cassell hadn’t judged him as the kind who would let the feds drive him out. And then again, maybe he’d simply banked more money from the last few trips than Cassell had thought.
The other major change was the outer screen of six autodrones toting the needlebeams and railguns that Doyle had invested in, currently in position two thousand miles out, transforming the Maddox operation into a miniature flotilla. It brought home just how much this whole business was escalating. Cassell liked the old days better. What did that tell him about age creeping up? he asked himself.
Ibrahim was nervous. He had done OK on the simulator, but had an ultra-high self-image sensitivity that tended to wind him up. This was going to be a tense one. Cassell was glad to have Icoro there as standby, cool and relaxed behind a big, wide grin as always.
“Remember what you found on the sim; don’t cut the turn too sharp as you run in,” Suzi said from Ibrahim’s far side. “It makes it easy to overshoot on the lineup, and you end up losing more time straightening it out downrange than you save.”
Ibrahim nodded and looked across instinctively to Icoro for confirmation.
“She talks too much,” Icoro said. “Just don’t overworry. You’re not going to lose anything. I’ll cut right in if it starts to drift.”
“How did you make out on your first time?” Ibrahim asked.
“I goofed most miserably,” Icoro lied. Ibrahim looked reassured. Suzi caught Cassell’s gaze and turned her eyes upward momentarily. Cassell just shrugged. A screen on each console showed a telescopic view of the crate, still over fifteen minutes away, being sent from one of the drones. The colors of the containers that it was carrying showed one to be holding metals, one light elements, a third silicates, and two kerogen.
“It’s coming in nice and easy, rotation slow,” Icoro commented. “Should be a piece of cake.”
Suddenly the raucous hooting of the all-stations alert sounded. Doyle’s voice blasted from Suzi’s console—he had taken to being present through all operations on this trip.
“We’ve got intruders coming in fast. Cassell to the bridge immediately!”
Ibrahim froze. Suzi and Icoro plunged into a frenzy of activity at their consoles. Cassell had no time to register anything more as he threw himself at the communications rail and hauled up to the next level. As he passed through the communications room, he heard one of the duty crew talking rapidly into a mike: “Emergency! Emergency! This is Turner Maddox. We have unidentified incoming objects, believed to be attacking. Location is …”
Seconds later, Cassell was beside Doyle on the bridge. Displays flashed and beeped everywhere. Fuigerado was calling numbers from the sector-control report screen.
“How many of them?” Cassell asked, breathless.
Doyle, concentrating on taking in the updates unfolding around him, didn’t answer at once. He seemed less alarmed than his voice had conveyed a few moments before—if anything, he looked puzzled now. Finally he said, “I’m not so sure it is ‘them.’ It looks more like only one … .”
Cassell followed his eyes, scanned the numbers, and frowned. “One what? What the hell is it?”
“I’m damned if I know. The signature isn’t like any ship or structure that I’ve ever seen.”
“Range is twenty-five hundred miles,” the ordnance officer advised. “Defenses are tracking. It’s coming in at thirty miles a second.”
“I’ve got an optical lock from Drone Three,” Fuigerado called out. “You’re not gonna believe it.” Doyle and Cassell moved over to him. “Have you ever seen an asteroid with corners?” Fuigerado asked, gesturing.
It was long, rectangular, and white, like a gigantic shoe box, tumbling end over end as it approached. Cassell’s first fleeting thought was of a tombstone.
“Fifteen seconds from
the perimeter,” the OO called. “I need the order now.”
“We have a spectral prelim,” another voice said. “It’s ice. Solid ice.”
Cassell’s first officer turned from the nav station. “Trajectory is on a dead intercept with the inbound Farlode crate. It’s going to cream it.”
“Do I shoot?” the OO entreated.
Doyle looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and surprise. “Ah, to be sure, you can if you want to, Mike, but there’s precious little difference it’ll make. A rail-gun would be like bouncing popcorn off a tank to that thing. Your lasers might make a hole in a tin can, but that’s solid ice.”
They watched, mesmerized. On one screen, the miniature mountain hurtling in like a white wolf. On the other, the crate trotting on its way, an unsuspecting lamb. Maybe because of their inability to do anything, the impending calamity seemed mockingly brutal—obscene, somehow.
“That’s somebody’s millions about to be vaporized out there,” Cassell said, more to relieve the air with something.
“And a percentage of it ours, too,” Doyle added. Ever the pragmatist.
“Dead on for impact. It’s less than ten seconds,” the nav officer confirmed.
Those who could crowded around the starboard forequarter port. There wouldn’t be more than a fraction of a second to see it unaided. Eyes scanned the starfield tensely. Then Cassell nudged Doyle’s arm and pointed, at the same time announcing for the others’ benefit, “Two o’clock, coming in high.” Then there was a glimpse of something bright and pulsating—too brief and moving too fast for any shape to be discerned—streaking in like a star detached from the background coming out of nowhere … .
And all of a sudden half the sky lit up in a flash that would have blinded them permanently if the ports hadn’t been made of armored glass with a shortwave cutoff. Even so, all Cassell could see for the next ten minutes was after-image etched into his retina.
But even while he waited for his vision to recover, his mind reeled under the realization of what it meant. He had never heard of Farlode Holdings before. That inbound crate had been carrying something a lot more potent than ordinary metals, light elements, and kerogen. And a half hour from now, it would have been inside the cargo cage, just a short hop away from them.
So that was how the feds had been doing it!
The plant was a riot of bright green and yellow now, and the veins of violet were very bright. Chifumi nipped off a couple of wilted leaves with her fingers and watered the soil from the jar that she had brought from the kitchen behind the elevators. The accountant whose office it was seemed to be taking care of it, she was pleased to see. She would have to keep an eye on it for a while though, because he had not been in for several days. From the cards by his desk and the message of well-wishing that somebody had pinned on his wall, it seemed he was getting married. A framed picture had appeared next to the plant some time ago, of the accountant and the pretty girl that Chifumi had seen once or twice, who worked in the outer office. It seemed, then, that he was marrying his secretary.
Chifumi didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, but such things were accepted these days. Very likely the new wife would give up her job and have a family now, so she would no longer be his secretary, and the question wouldn’t arise. Chifumi wondered if they would take yamatsumi-sou to their new home. It would be better for Kyo than being stuck alone in an office every night, she thought.
She finished her evening’s work and went down to the lobby to wait for the arrival of the bus. While she sat on one of the seats, she took from her purse the letter that had come in from Icoro, which one of his friends from the university had printed out and delivered to her just as she was leaving.
My dearest and most-loved mother,
I hope that everything is well with you. I am doing very well myself, and have just wired off a sum to keep you comfortable for a while, which you should be hearing about shortly.
Life out here where I am continues to be wonderfully interesting and exciting. I must tell you about the most amazing thing that happened just a couple of days ago … .
UNDERSTAND
Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang (born 1967) is a technical writer who occasionally writes short SF that is then usually nominated for, or the winner of, awards. He is a private person whose short bio goes like this, “Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives in Bellevue, Washington. Of his nonfiction, written in his capacity as a technical writer, perhaps the most popular is the C++ Tutorial packaged with certain versions of Microsoft’s C++ compiler. He reads some comics, enjoys going to the movies, and watches television more than is good for him.” He has published five SF stories, all of which are distinctive and highly accomplished. Stories of Your Life and Others, his collected fiction thus far, was published in 2002.
Chiang says, “SF needn’t have anything to do with science, but to the extent that a work of SF reflects science, it’s hard SF And reflecting science doesn’t necessarily mean consistency with a certain set of facts; more essentially, it means consistency with a certain strategy for understanding the universe. Science seeks a type of explanation different from those sought by art or religion, an explanation where objective measurement takes precedence over subjective experience. And though hard SF can take many different forms, it always describes people looking for or working with that type of explanation.”
“Understand,” published in Asimov’s, takes on the grand themes of posthumanity, hyperintelligence, and the Internet as an extension of the mind. The obvious literary ancestor of this story is Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon,” as if Chiang looked at the premise and asked “What if the protagonist just kept getting smarter? What would happen if the process had no natural limits and did not reverse itself? What then?” His answer is that the emergent superhuman becomes like a political superpower. It is interesting to compare and contrast this story to Greg Egan’s explorations of intelligence and personality in “Reasons to Be Cheerful”—both Egan’s and Chiang’s stories are concerned with futuristic treatments for neurological damage with striking results.
A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold. I’ve got nothing to hold on to; my gloves just keep sliding off it. I can see people on top, running around, but they can’t do anything. I’m trying to pound the ice with my fists, but my arms move in slow motion, and my lungs must have burst, and my head’s going fuzzy, and I feel like I’m dissolving—
I wake up, screaming. My heart’s going like a jackhammer. Christ. I pull off my blankets and sit on the edge of the bed.
I couldn’t remember that before. Before I only remembered falling through the ice; the doctor said my mind had suppressed the rest. Now I remember it, and it’s the worst nightmare I’ve ever had.
I’m grabbing the down comforter with my fists, and I can feel myself trembling. I try to calm down, to breathe slowly, but sobs keep forcing their way out. It was so real I could feel it: feel what it was like to die.
I was in that water for nearly an hour; I was more vegetable than anything else by the time they brought me up. Am I recovered? It was the first time the hospital had ever tried their new drug on someone with so much brain damage. Did it work?
The same nightmare, again and again. After the third time, I know I’m not going to sleep again. I spend the remaining hours before dawn worrying. Is this the result? Am I losing my mind?
Tomorrow is my weekly checkup with the resident at the hospital. I hope he’ll have some answers.
I drive into downtown Boston, and after half an hour Dr. Hooper can see me. I sit on a gurney in an examining room, behind a yellow curtain. Jutting out of the wall at waist-height is a horizontal flatscreen, adjusted for tunnel vision so it appears blank from my angle. The doctor types at the keyboard, presumably calling up my file, and then starts examining me. As he’s checking my pupils with a penlight, I tell him about my nightmares.
“Did you ever have any before the acc
ident, Leon?” He gets out his little mallet and taps at my elbows, knees, and ankles.
“Never. Are these a side effect of the drug?”
“Not a side effect. The hormone K therapy regenerated a lot of damaged neurons, and that’s an enormous change that your brain has to adjust to. The night-mares are probably just a sign of that.”
“Is this permanent?”
“It’s unlikely,” he says. “Once your brain gets used to having all those pathways again, you’ll be fine. Now touch your index finger to the tip of your nose, and then bring it to my finger here.”
I do what he tells me. Next he has me tap each finger to my thumb, quickly. Then I have to walk a straight line, as if I’m taking a sobriety test. After that, he starts quizzing me.
“Name the parts of an ordinary shoe.”
“There’s the sole, the heel, the laces. Um, the holes that the laces go through are eyes, and then there’s the tongue, underneath the laces …”
“Okay. Repeat this number: three nine one seven four—”
“—six two.”
Dr. Hooper wasn’t expecting that. “What?”
“Three nine one seven four six two. You used that number the first time you examined me, when I was still an inpatient. I guess it’s a number you test patients with a lot.”
“You weren’t supposed to memorize it; it’s meant to be a test of immediate recall.”
“I didn’t intentionally memorize it. I just happened to remember it.”
“Do you remember the number from the second time I examined you?”
I pause for a moment. “Four zero eight one five nine two.”
He’s surprised. “Most people can’t retain so many digits if they’ve only heard them once. Do you use mnemonic tricks?”
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 125