The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

 

  Merely a savior.

  Normals might think him a tyrant, because they mistake him for one of them, and they’ve never trusted their own judgement. They can’t fathom that Reynolds is equal to the task. His judgement is optimal in questions of their affairs, and their notions of greed and ambition do not apply to an enhanced mind.

  In a histrionic gesture, Reynolds raises his hand, forefinger extended, as if to make a point. I don’t have sufficient information to generate his destruct command, so for the moment I can only attend to defense. If I can survive his attack, I may have time to launch another one of my own.

  With his finger upraised, he says, “Understand.”

  At first I don’t. And then, horrifyingly, I do.

  He didn’t design the command to be spoken; it’s not a sensory trigger at all. It’s a memory trigger: the command is made out of a string of perceptions, individually harmless, that he planted in my brain like time bombs. The mental structures that were formed as a result of those memories are now resolving into a pattern, forming a gestalt that defines my dissolution. I’m intuiting the Word myself.

  Immediately my mind is working faster than ever before. Against my will, a lethal realization is suggesting itself to me. I’m trying to halt the associations, but these memories can’t be suppressed. The process occurs inexorably, as a consequence of my awareness, and like a man falling from a height, I’m forced to watch.

  Milliseconds pass. My death passes before my eyes.

  An image of the grocery store when Reynolds passed by. The psychedelic shirt the boy was wearing; Reynolds had programmed the display to implant a suggestion within me, ensuring that my “randomly” reprogrammed psyche remained receptive. Even then.

  No time. All I can do is metaprogram myself over randomly, at a furious pace. An act of desperation, possibly crippling.

  The strange modulated sounds that I heard when I first entered Reynolds’ apartment. I absorbed the fatal insights before I had any defenses raised.

  I tear apart my psyche, but still the conclusion grows clearer, the resolution sharper.

  Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.

  I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.

  I wonder what he intends to do after he’s saved the world.

  I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.

  HALO

  Karl Schroeder

  Karl Schroeder (born 1962) was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and moved to Toronto in 1986 to pursue his writing career. His family is Mennonite, part of a community which has lived in southern Manitoba for over a hundred years. He is the second science fiction writer to come out of this small community—the first was A. E. van Vogt. His father was the first television technician in Manitoba (quite a distinction at the time) and his mother published two romance novels. (“I grew up with those books on the bookshelf—I always considered it perfectly natural to see ‘Schroeder’ on a book cover.”) He has been active in Toronto SF circles, has maintained the SF Canada list-serve, has won an Aurora Award for short fiction (for “The Toy Mill,” in collaboration with David Nickle), and has published a novel, The Claus Effect (1997) with Nickle developed out of the story. His novel Ventus (2000) is hard SF novel that feels like fantasy. His new book, Permanence, is out in 2002.

  Schroeder’s views on hard SF are unconventional:

  I write a kind of disciplined fantasy that sticks close to scientific possibility—but I don’t think of myself as a hard SF writer. I am very scientifically literate and follow the progress of most branches of science closely—but I am not a “believer” in Western Rationalism. If the definition of hard SF is that it is storytelling in which the events that occur don’t contradict known science, then I’m not a hard SF writer and never will be, because I simply don’t believe in the distinction between “real” and “pseudo” or non-science. I’m a fan of the philosophy of P. K. Feyerabend in this respect, I am a philosophical subversive in the house of Engineering SF, and I expect that will become evident to people with time … To me, science is a servant of philosophy, and so my stories are about ideas first, and scientific ideas second; in that regard, I admire authors like Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells more than authors of perhaps more technically accurate fiction. Wells in particular showed how you could use science as a gestural language to speak about things that are, in some sense, beyond science. At the moment I admire Greg Egan most of the current generation of writers. Of all of them he appears to understand best how science, philosophy and literary art interact in crafting a literature of the Natural world.

  “‘Halo’” says Schroeder, “is an attempt to be both ‘hard SF’ and character-driven fiction; to introduce a new kind of interstellar civilization and a new kind of interstellar travel; and to take the most marginal and hostile environment for life, and make it perfectly believable that people should choose to live there.” This story is in the same future setting as Permanence.

  Elise Cantrell was awakened by the sound of her children trying to manage their own breakfast. Bright daylight streamed in through the windows. She threw on a robe and ran for the kitchen. “No, no, let me!”

  Judy appeared about to microwave something, and the oven was set on high.

  “Aw, Mom, did you forget?” Alex, who was a cherub but had the loudest scream in the universe, pouted at her from the table. Looked like he’d gotten his breakfast together just fine. Suspicious, that, but she refused to inspect his work.

  “Yeah, I forgot the time change. My prospectors are still on the twenty-four-hour clock, you know.”

  “Why?” Alex flapped his spoon in the cereal bowl.

  “They’re on another world, remember? Only Dew has a thirty-hour day, and only since they put the sun up. You remember before the sun, don’t you?” Alex stared at her as though she were insane. It had only been a year and a half.

  Elise sighed. Just then the door announced a visitor. “Daddy!” shrieked Judy as she ran out of the room. Elise found her in the foyer clinging to the leg of her father. Nasim Clearwater grinned at her over their daughter’s flyaway hair.

  “You’re a mess,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Thanks. Look, they’re not ready. Give me a few minutes.”

  “No problem. Left a bit early, thought you might forget the time change.”

  She glared at him and stalked back to the kitchen.

  As she cleaned up and Nasim dressed the kids, Elise looked out over the landscape of Dew. It was daylight, yes, a pale drawn glow dropping through cloud veils to sketch hills and plains of ice. Two years ago this window had shown no view, just the occasional star. Elise had grown up in that velvet darkness, and it was so strange now to have awakening signaled by such a vivid and total change. Her children would grow up to the rhythm of true day and night, the first such generation here on Dew. They would think differently. Already, this morning, they did.

  “Hello,” Nasim said in her ear. Startled, Elise said, “What?” a bit too loudly.

  “We’re off.” The kids stood behind him, dubiously inspecting the snaps of their survival suits. Today was a breach drill; Nasim would ensure they took it seriously. Elise gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “You want them back late, right? Got a date?”

  “No,” she said, “of course not.” Nasim wanted to hear that she was being independent, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  Nasim half-smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll see you after, then.”

  “Sure.”

  He nodded but said nothing further. As the kids screamed their goodbyes at full volume she tried to puzzle out what he’d meant. See her? To chat, to talk, maybe more?

  Not more. She had to accept that. As the door closed she plunked herself angrily down on the couch, and drew her head
set over her eyes.

  VR was cheap for her. She didn’t need full immersion, just vision and sound, and sometimes the use of her hands. Her prospectors were too specialized to have human traits, and they operated in weightlessness so she didn’t need to walk. The headset was expensive enough without such additions. And the simplicity of the set-up allowed her to work from home.

  The fifteen robot prospectors Elise controlled ranged throughout the halo worlds of Crucible. Crucible itself was fifty times the mass of Jupiter, a “brown dwarf” star—too small to be a sun but radiating in the high infrared and trailing a retinue of planets. Crucible sailed alone through the spaces between the true stars. Elise had been born and raised here on Dew, Crucible’s frozen fifth planet. From the camera on the first of her prospectors, she could see the new kilometers-long metal cylinder that her children had learned to call the sun. Its electric light shone only on Dew, leaving Crucible and the other planets in darkness. The artificial light made Dew gleam like a solitary blue-white jewel on the perfect black of space.

  She turned her helmeted head, and out in space her prospector turned its camera. Faint Dew-light reflected from a round spot on Crucible. She hadn’t seen that before. She recorded the sight; the kids would like it, even if they didn’t quite understand it.

  This first prospector craft perched astride a chunk of ice about five kilometers long. The little ice-flinder orbited Crucible with about a billion others. Her machine oversaw some dumb mining equipment that was chewing stolidly through the thing in search of metal.

  There were no problems here. She flipped her view to the next machine, whose headlamps obligingly lit to show her a wall of stone. Hmm. She’d been right the night before when she ordered it to check an ice ravine on Castle, the fourth planet. There was real stone down here, which meant metals. She wondered what it would feel like, and reached out. After a delay the metal hands of her prospector touched the stone. She didn’t feel anything; the prospector was not equipped to transmit the sensation back. Sometimes she longed to be able to fully experience the places her machines visited.

  She sent a call to the Mining Registrar to follow up on her find, and went on to the next prospector. This one orbited farthest out, and there was a time-lag of several minutes between every command she gave, and its execution. Normally she just checked it quickly and moved on. Today, for some reason, it had a warning flag in its message queue.

  Transmission intercepted.—Oh, it had overheard some dialogue between two ships or something. That was surprising, considering how far away from the normal orbits the prospector was. “Read it to me,” she said, and went on to Prospector Four.

  She’d forgotten about the message and was admiring a long view of Dew’s horizon from the vantage of her fourth prospector, when a resonant male voice spoke in her ear:

  “Mayday, mayday—anyone at Dew, please receive. My name is Hammond, and I’m speaking from the interstellar cycler Chinook. The date is the sixth of May, 2418. Relativistic shift is .500435—we’re at half lightspeed.

  “Listen: Chinook has been taken over by Naturite forces out of Leviathan. They are using the cycler as a weapon. You must know by now that the halo world Tiara, at Obsidian, has gone silent—it’s our fault, Chinook has destroyed them. Dew is our next stop, and they fully intend to do the same thing there. They want to ‘purify’ the halo worlds so only their people settle here.”

  “They’re keeping communications silence. I’ve had to go outside to take manual control of a message laser in order to send this mayday.

  “You must place mines in near-pass space ahead of the cycler, to destroy it. We have limited maneuvering ability, so we couldn’t possibly avoid the mines.

  “Anyone receiving this message, please relay it to your authorities immediately. Chinook is a genocide ship. You are in danger.

  “Please do not reply to Chinook on normal channels. They will not negotiate. Reply to my group on this frequency, not the standard cycler wavelengths.”

  Elise didn’t know how to react. She almost laughed—what a ridiculous message, full of bluster and emergency words. But she’d heard that Obsidian had gone mysteriously silent, and no one knew why. “Origin of this message?” she asked. As she waited, she replayed it. It was highly melodramatic, just the sort of wording somebody would use for a prank. She was sure she would be told the message had come from Dew itself—maybe even sent by Nasim or one of his friends.

  The coordinates flashed before her eyes. Elise did a quick calculation to visualize the direction. Not from Dew. Not from any of Crucible’s worlds. The message had come from deep space, out somewhere beyond the last of Crucible’s trailing satellites.

  The only things out there were stars, halo worlds—and the cyclers, Elise thought. She lifted off the headset. The beginnings of fear fluttered in her belly.

  Elise took the message to a cousin of hers who was a policeman. He showed her into his office, smiling warmly. They didn’t often get together since they’d grown up, and he wanted to talk family.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got something strange for you, Sal. One of my machines picked this up last night.” And she played the message for him, expecting reassuring laughter and a good explanation.

  Half an hour later they were being ushered into the suite of the police chief, who sat at a U-shaped table with her aides, frowning. When she entered, she heard the words of the message playing quietly from the desk speakers of two of the aides, who looked very serious.

  “You will tell no one about this,” said the chief. She was a thin, strong woman with blazing eyes. “We have to confirm it first.” Elise hesitated, then nodded.

  Cousin Sal cleared his throat. “Ma’am? You think this message could be genuine, then?”

  The chief frowned at him, then said, “It may be true. This may be why Tiara went off the air.” The sudden silence of Tiara, a halo world half a light-year from Elise’s home, had been the subject of a media frenzy a year earlier. Rumors of disaster circulated, but there were no facts to go on, other than that Tiara’s message lasers, which normally broadcast news from there, had gone out. It was no longer news, and Elise had heard nothing about it for months. “We checked the coordinates you reported and they show this message did come from the Chinook. Chinook did its course correction around Obsidian right about the time Tiara stopped broadcasting.”

  Elise couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But what could they have done?”

  The chief tapped at her desk with long fingers. “You’re an orbital engineer, Cantrell. You probably know better than I. The Chinook’s traveling at half light-speed, so anything it dropped on an intercept course with Obsidian’s planets would hit like a bomb. Even the smallest item—a pen or card.”

  Elise nodded reluctantly. Aside from message lasers, the Interstellar Cyclers were the only means of contact with other stars and halo worlds. Cyclers came by Crucible every few months, but they steered well away from its planets. They only came close enough to use gravity to assist their course change to the next halo world. Freight and passengers were dropped off and picked up via laser sail; the cyclers themselves were huge, far too massive to stop and start at will. Their kinetic energy was incalculable, so the interstellar community monitored them as closely as possible. They spent years in transit between the stars, however, and it took weeks or months for laser messages to reach them. News about cyclers was always out of date before it even arrived.

  “We have to confirm this before we do anything,” the chief said. “We have the frequency and coordinates to reply. We’ll take it from here.”

  Elise had to ask. “Why did only I intercept the message?”

  “It wasn’t aimed very well, maybe. He didn’t know exactly where his target was. Only your prospector was within the beam. Just luck.”

  “When is the Chinook due to pass us?” Sal asked.

  “A month and a half,” said the tight-faced aide. “It should be about three light-weeks out; the date on this message would
tend to confirm that.”

  “So any reply will come right about the time they pass us,” Sal said. “How can we get a confirmation in time to do anything?”

  They looked at one another blankly. Elise did some quick calculations in her head. “Four messages exchanged before they’re a day away,” she said. “If each party waits for the other’s reply. Four on each side.”

  “But we have to act well before that,” said another aide.

  “How?” asked a third.

  Elise didn’t need to listen to the explanation. They could mine the space in front of the cycler. Turn it into energy, and hopefully any missiles too. Kill the thousand-or-so people on board it to save Dew.

  “I’ve done my duty,” she said. “Can I go away?”

  The chief waved her away. A babble of arguing voices followed Elise and Sal out the door.

  Sal offered to walk her home, but Elise declined. She took old familiar ways through the corridors of the city, ways she had grown up with. Today, though, her usual route from the core of the city was blocked by work crews. They were replacing opaque ceiling panels with glass to let in the new daylight. The bright light completely changed the character of the place, washing out familiar colors. It reminded her that there were giant forces in the sky, uncontrollable by her. She retreated, from the glow, and drifted through a maze of alternate routes like a somber ghost, not meeting the eyes of the people she passed.

  The parkways were packed, mostly with children. Some were there with a single parent, others with both. Elise watched the couples enviously. Having children was supposed to have made her and Nasim closer. It hadn’t worked out that way.

  Lately, he had shown signs of wanting her again. Take it slow, she had told herself. Give him time.