The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Elise saved the songs in an accessible format and transferred them to her sound system. She stepped out of the office, walked without speaking past Nasim and the kids, and turned the sound way up. Hammond’s voice poured out clear and strong, and she sat facing the wall, and just listened for the remainder of the day.

  Oliver called her the next morning with new orders. “You’re the only person who’s got anything like a ship near the Chinook’s flight path. Prospector Six.” That was the one that had picked up Hammond’s first message. “We’re sending some missiles we put together, but they’re low-mass, so they might not penetrate the Chinook ’s forward shields.”

  “You want me to destroy the Chinook.” She was not surprised. Only very disappointed that fate had worked things this way.

  “Yeah,” Oliver said. “Those shits can’t be allowed to get away. Your prospector masses ten thousand tons, more than enough to stop it dead. I’ve put the vectors in your database. This is top priority. Get on it.” He hung up.

  She was damned if she would get on it. Elise well knew her responsibility to Dew, but destroying Chinook wouldn’t save her world. That all hinged on the missiles, which must have already been sent. But just so the police couldn’t prove that she’d disobeyed orders, she entered the vectors to intercept Chinook, but included a tiny error that would guarantee a miss. The enormity of what she was doing—the government would call this treason—made her feel sick to her stomach. Finally she summoned her courage and called Hammond.

  “They want me to kill you.” Elise stood in front of her computer, allowing it to record her in video. She owed him that, at least. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m not an executioner, and you’ve done nothing wrong. Of all of us, you’re the one who least deserves to die! It’s not fair. Mark, you’re going to have to take back the Chinook. You said you had more people on your side. I’m going to give you the time to do it. It’s a couple of years to your next stop. Take back the ship, then you can get off there. You can still have your life, Mark! Come back here. You’ll be a hero.”

  She tried to smile bravely, but it cracked into a grimace. “Please, Mark. I’m sure the government’s alerted all the other halo worlds now. They’ll be ready. Chinook won’t be able to catch anybody else by surprise. So there’s no reason to kill you.

  “I’m giving you the chance you deserve, Mark. I hope you make the best of it.”

  She sent that message, only realizing afterwards that she hadn’t thanked him for the gift of his music. But she was afraid to say anything more.

  The city was evacuated the next day. It started in the early hours, as the police closed off all the levels of the city then began sweeping, waking people from their beds and moving the bewildered crowds to trains and aircraft. Elise was packed and ready. Judy slept in her arms, and Alex clutched her belt and knuckled his eyes as they walked among shouting people. The media were now revealing the nature of the crisis, but it was far too late for organized protest. The crowds were herded methodically; the police must have been drilling for this for weeks.

  She wished Sal had told her exactly when it was going to happen. It meant she hadn’t been able to hook up with Nasim, whose apartment was on another level. He was probably still asleep, even while she and the kids were packed on a train, and she watched through the angle of the window as the station receded.

  Sometime the next morning they stopped, and some of the passengers were off-loaded. Food was eventually brought, and then they continued on. Elise was asleep leaning against the wall when they finally unloaded her car.

  All the cities of Dew had emergency barracks. She had no idea what city they had come to at first, having missed the station signs. She didn’t care. The kids needed looking after, and she was bone tired.

  Not too tired, though, to know that the hours were counting quickly down to zero. She couldn’t stand being cut off, she had to know Hammond’s reply to her message, but there were no terminals in the barracks. She had to know he was all right.

  She finally managed to convince some women to look after Judy and Alex, and set off to find a way out. There were several policemen loitering around the massive metal doors that separated the barracks from the city, and they weren’t letting anyone pass.

  She walked briskly around the perimeter of the barracks, thinking. Barracks like this were usually at ground level, and were supposed to have more than one entrance, in case one was blocked by earthquake or fire. There must be some outside exit, and it might not be guarded.

  Deep at the back where she hadn’t been yet, she found her airlock, unguarded. Its lockers were packed with survival suits; none of the refugees would be going outside, especially not here on unknown ground. There was no good reason for them to leave the barracks, because going outside would not get them home. But she needed a terminal.

  She suited up, and went through the airlock. Nobody saw her. Elise stepped out onto the surface of Dew, where she had never been except during survival drills. A thin wind was blowing, catching and worrying at drifts of carbon-dioxide snow. Tom clouds revealed stars high above the glowing walls of the city. This place, wherever it was, had thousands of windows; she supposed all the cities did now. They would have a good view of whatever happened in the sky today.

  After walking for a good ten minutes, she came to another airlock. This one was big, with vehicles rolling in and out. She stepped in after one, and found herself in a warehouse. Simple as that.

  From there she took the elevator up sixteen levels to an arcade lined with glass. Here finally were VR terminals, and she gratefully collapsed at one, and logged into her account.

  There were two messages waiting. Hammond, it had to be. She called up the first one.

  “You’re gonna thank me for this, you really are,” said Oliver. He looked smug. “I checked in on your work—hey, just doing my job. You did a great job on moving the ice, but you totally screwed up your trajectory on Prospector Six. Just a little error, but it added up quick. Would have missed Chinook completely if I hadn’t corrected it. Guess I saved your ass, huh?” He mocked-saluted, and grinned. “Didn’t tell anybody. I won’t, either. You can thank me later.” Still smug, he rung off.

  “Oh no. No, no no,” she whispered. Trembling, she played the second message.

  Hammond appeared, looking drawn and sad. His backdrop was a metal bulkhead; his breath frosted when he breathed. “Hello, Elise,” he said. His voice was low, and tired. “Thank you for caring so much about me. But your plan will never work.”

  “You’re not here. Lucky thing. But if you were, you’d see how hopeless it is. There’s a handful of us prisoners, kept alive for amusement and because we can do some things they can’t. They never thought we’d have a reason to go outside, that’s the only reason I was able to get out to take over the message laser. And it’s only because of their bragging that we got the video and data we did.

  “They have a right to be confident, with us. We can’t do anything, we’re locked away from their part of the ship. And you see, when they realize you’ve mined space near Dew, they’ll know someone gave them away. We knew that would happen when we decided to do this. Either way I’m dead, you see; either you kill me, or they do. I’d prefer you did it, it’ll be so much faster.”

  He looked down pensively for a moment. “Do me the favor,” he said at last. “You’ll carry no blame for it, no guilt. Destroy Chinook. The worlds really aren’t safe until you do. These people are fanatics, they never expected to get home alive. If they think their missiles won’t get through, they’ll aim the ship itself at the next world. Which will be much harder to stop.

  “I love you for your optimism, and your plans. I wish it could have gone the way you said. But this really is goodbye.”

  Finally he smiled, looking directly at her. “Too bad we didn’t have the time. I could have loved you, I think. Thank you, though. The caring you showed me is enough.” He vanished. Message end, said the mailer. Reply?

  S
he stared at that last word for a long time. She signaled yes.

  “Thank you for your music, Mark,” she said. She sent that. Then she closed her programs, and took off the headset.

  The end, when it came, took the form of a brilliant line of light scored across the sky. Elise watched from the glass wall of the arcade, where she sat on a long couch with a bunch of other silent people. The landscape lit to the horizon, brighter than Dew’s artificial sun had ever shone. The false day faded slowly.

  There was no ground shock. No sound. Dew had been spared.

  The crowd dispersed, talking animatedly. For them, the adventure had been over before they had time to really believe in the threat. Elise watched them through her tears almost fondly. She was too tired to move.

  Alone, she gazed up at the stars. Only a faint pale streak remained now. In a moment she would return to her children, but first she had to let this emotion fill her completely, wash down from her face through her arms and body, like Hammond’s music. She wasn’t used to how acceptance felt. She hoped it would become more familiar to her.

  Elise stood and walked alone to the elevator, and did not look back at the sky.

  DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS

  David Langford

  David Langford (born 1953) is the most famous writer in SF fandom today, and is another ex-physicist (see David Brin, above). He is an occasional reviewer for SFX and for New Scientist, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, and is well known for his critical acumen. He publishes the fanzine Ansible, the tabloid newspaper of SF and fandom (which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone, and online: www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible). He also keeps winning best fan writer Hugo Awards (he is the most famous humorous writer in fandom today). His fan writings have been collected in Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (Langford is deaf). He is, in addition, the author of several books of nonfiction and four novels, The Space Eater (1982), a hard SF novel, The Leaky Establishment (1984), a satire on a nuclear weapons lab, Earthdoom! with John Grant, and Guts: A Comedy of Manners (2001) with John Grant, a funny horror novel reputedly requiring much readerly intestinal fortitude. In recent years, he has been publishing a steady string of impressive SF short stories, most of them hard SF.

  A few sentences from his CV are relevant to this story, which has weapons research deeply embedded in its background: “Brasenose College, Oxford. B.A. (Hons) in Physics 1974, M.A. 1978. Weapons physicist at Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, Berkshire, from 1975 to 1980. Freelance author, editor and consultant ever since.”

  “Different Kinds of Darkness,” a recent winner of the Hugo Award for best short story, is hard SF about kids, mathematics and new kinds of weapons, their use and misuse. It implies a whole future society. It is wonderful and scary, eerily plausible.

  It was always dark outside the windows. Parents and teachers sometimes said vaguely that this was all because of Deep Green terrorists, but Jonathan thought there was more to the story. The other members of the Shudder Club agreed.

  The dark beyond the window-glass at home, at school and on the school bus was the second kind of darkness. You could often see a little bit in the first kind, the ordinary kind, and of course you could slice through it with a torch. The second sort of darkness was utter black, and not even the brightest electric torch showed a visible beam or lit anything up. Whenever Jonathan watched his friends walk out through the school door ahead of him, it was as though they stepped into a solid black wall. But when he followed them and felt blindly along the handrail to where the homeward bus would be waiting, there was nothing around him but empty air. Black air.

  Sometimes you found these super-dark places indoors. Right now Jonathan was edging his way down a black corridor, one of the school’s no-go areas. Officially he was supposed to be outside, mucking around for a break period in the high-walled playground where (oddly enough) it wasn’t dark at all and you could see the sky overhead. Of course, outdoors was no place for the dread secret initiations of the Shudder Club.

  Jonathan stepped out on the far side of the corridor’s inky-dark section, and quietly opened the door of the little storeroom they’d found two terms ago. Inside, the air was warm, dusty and stale. A bare light-bulb hung from the ceiling. The others were already there, sitting on boxes of paper and stacks of battered textbooks.

  “You’re late,” chorused Gary, Julie and Khalid. The new candidate Heather just pushed back long blonde hair and smiled, a slightly strained smile.

  “Someone has to be last,” said Jonathan. The words had become part of the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive wasn’t an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a spy who was a master of disguise … .

  Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he’d found the bogey picture that someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he’d read too many stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you’d stumbled on such a splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.

  “We are the Shudder Club,” Khalid intoned. “We are the ones who can take it. Twenty seconds.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was serious. Gary, the fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened the binder and stared at the thing inside. “One … two … three …”

  He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid’s hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book, and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated him on a new record.

  Julie and Gary weren’t feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to say ten as well.

  “You sure, Jon?” said Gary. “Last time you were on eight. No need to push it today.”

  Jonathan quoted the ritual words, “We are the ones who can take it,” and took the ring-binder from Gary. “Ten.”

  In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes … an electrical storm raging somewhere in there … instant fever singing through the blood … muscles locking and unlocking … and oh dear God had Gary only counted four?

  He held on somehow, forcing himself to keep still when every part of him wanted to twitch in different directions. The dazzle of the bogey picture was fading behind a new kind of darkness, a shadow inside his eyes, and he knew with dreadful certainty that he was going to faint or be sick or both. He gave in and shut his eyes just as, unbelievably and after what had seemed like years, the count reached ten.

  Jonathan felt too limp and drained to pay much attention as Heather came close—but not close enough—to the five seconds you needed to be a full member of the Club. She blotted her eyes with a violently trembling hand. She was sure she’d make it next time. And then Khalid closed the meeting with the quotation he’d found somewhere: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

  School was a place where mostly they taught you stuff that had nothing to do with the real world. Jonathan secretly reckoned that quadratic equations just didn’t ever happen outside the classroom. So it came as a surprise to the Club when things started getting interesting in, of all places, a maths class.

  Mr. Whitcutt was quite old, somewhere between grandfather and retirement age, and didn’t mind straying away from the official maths course once in a while. You had to lure him with the right ki
nd of question. Little Harry Steen—the chess and wargames fanatic of the class, and under consideration for the Club—scored a brilliant success by asking about a news item he’d heard at home. It was something to do with “mathwar,” and terrorists using things called blits.

  “I actually knew Vernon Berryman slightly,” said Mr. Whitcutt, which didn’t seem at all promising. But it got better. “He’s the B in blit, you know: B-L-I-T, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, as he called it. Very advanced mathematics. Over your heads, probably. Back in the first half of the twentieth century, two great mathematicians called Gödel and Turing proved theorems which … um. Well, one way of looking at it is that mathematics is booby-trapped. For any computer at all, there are certain problems that will crash it and stop it dead.”

  Half the class nodded knowingly. Their home-made computer programs so often did exactly that.

  “Berryman was another brilliant man, and an incredible idiot. Right at the end of the twentieth century, he said to himself, ‘What if there are problems that crash the human brain?’ And he went out and found one, and came up with his wretched “imaging technique” that makes it a problem you can’t ignore. Just looking at a BLIT pattern, letting it in through your optic nerves, can stop your brain.” A click of old, knotty fingers. “Like that.”

  Jonathan and the Club looked sidelong at each other. They knew something about staring at strange images. It was Harry, delighted to have stolen all this time from boring old trig, who stuck his hand up first. “Er, did this Berryman look at his own pattern, then?”

  Mr. Whitcutt gave a gloomy nod. “The story is that he did. By accident, and it killed him stone dead. It’s ironic. For centuries, people had been writing ghost stories about things so awful that just looking at them makes you die of fright. And then a mathematician, working in the purest and most abstract of all the sciences, goes and brings the stories to life … .”