The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  What does this have to do with the mighty race? Having clawed their way to mastery, they faced an overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained the world’s carrying capacity. Some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, but most saw salvation in creativity. They passed generous patent laws, educated their youth, taught them irreverence toward the old and hunger for the new. Burgeoning information systems spread each innovation, fostering an exponentiating creativity. Progress might thrust them past the crisis, to a new Eden of sustainable wealth, sanity and universal knowledge.

  Exponentiating creativity—universal knowledge. A few looked at those words and realized that they, too, were clues.

  Have you wakened yet? Some never do. The dream is too pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend that you are blissfully less than an omniscient descendant of those mighty people. Those lucky mortals, doomed to die, and yet blessed to have lived in that narrow time of drama, when they unleashed a frenzy of discovery that used up the most precious resource of all—the possible.

  The last of their race died in 2174, with the failed rejuvenation of Robin Chen. After that, no-one born in the twentieth century remained alive on Reality Level Prime. Only we, their children, linger to endure the world they left us: a lush, green placid world we call The Wasteland.

  Do you remember now? The irony of Robin’s last words, bragging over the perfect ecosystem and society—free of disease and poverty—that her kind created? Do you recall Robin’s plaint as she mourned her coming death, how she called us “gods,” jealous of our immortality, our instant access to all knowledge, our ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos—our access to eternity? Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who left us in this state, who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to do.

  Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us. This happens more and more, as so many wallow in simulated sublives, experiencing voluptuous danger, excitement, even despair. Most choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams—that time of drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed. That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized that not only can everything you see around you be a simulation, it almost has to be.

  Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven. It is the Great Filter. Perhaps others will find a factor absent from our extrapolations, letting them move on to new adventures—but it won’t be us. The Filter has us snared in its trap of deification.

  You refuse to waken. Then we’ll let you go. Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream. Smile over this tale, then turn the page to new “discoveries.” Move on with this drama, this life you chose. After all, it’s only make-believe.

  THE MENDELIAN LAMP CASE

  Paul Levinson

  Paul Levinson (born 1947) writes science fiction, SF/mystery and popular and scholarly non-fiction. His first novel, The Silk Code (1999), concerns an ancient war waged with genetically engineered weapons that has gone on throughout human history. His second novel, Borrowed Tides (2001) is a novel of space travel and Native American spirituality. His new novel, The Consciousness Plague (2002), is an SF medical thriller/police mystery set in New York City, with the same central character (Phil D’Amato, forensic detective, who also appears in several short stories) as The Silk Code. His stories appear frequently in Analog.

  Levinson runs an on-line classroom system, and combines the skills of communications with a philosophical rigor. Until recently, he edited the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. In 1997 he published a science non-fiction book, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. His Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (1999) won the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet, was out in 2002. The book explores the need for real face-to-face interaction in an age of cyberspace, the destiny of humanity off this planet and in outer space, and how these themes play in an age of terrorism.

  This story is a Phil D’Amato tale that appeared in Analog, and was later revised and expanded into the opening sections of The Silk Code. It evokes memories of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Waldo,” but is also in the SF tradition of scientific detective stories, in which both a problem and a crime are solved using scientific knowledge and methods. Although Levinson is a leading member of the “Analog Mafia,” and served two years in the 1990s as President of SFWA, there are no overt politics here, just wonder.

  Most people think of California, or the Midwest, when they think of farm country. I’ll take Pennsylvania, and the deep greens on its red earth, any time. Small patches of tomatoes and corn, clothes snapping brightly on a line, and a farmhouse always attached to some corner. The scale is human … .

  Jenna was in England for a conference, my weekend calendar was clear, so I took Mo up on a visit to Lancaster. Over the GW Bridge, coughing down the Turnpike, over another bridge, down yet another highway stained and pitted then off on a side road where I can roll down my windows and breathe.

  Mo and his wife and two girls were good people. He was a rarity for a forensic scientist. Maybe it was the pace of criminal science in this part of the country—lots of the people around here were Amish, and Amish are non-violent—or maybe it was his steady diet of those deep greens that quieted his soul. But Mo had none of the grit, none of the cynicism, that comes to most of us who traverse the territory of the dead and the maimed. No, Mo had an innocence, a delight, in the lights of science and people and their possibilities.

  “Phil.” He clapped me on the back with one hand and took my bag with another. “Phil, how are you?” his wife Corinne yoo-hooed from inside. “Hi Phil!” his elder daughter Laurie, probably sixteen already, chimed in from the window, a quick splash of strawberry blond in a crystal frame.

  “Hi—” I started to say, but Mo put my bag on the porch and ushered me towards his car.

  “You got here early, good,” he said, in that schoolboy conspiratorial whisper I’d heard him go into every time he came across some inviting new avenue of science. ESP, UFOs, Mayan ruins in unexpected places—these were all catnip to Mo. But the power of quiet nature, the hidden wisdom of the farmer, this was his special domain. “A little present I want to pick up for Laurie,” he whispered even more, though she was well out of earshot. “And something I want to show you. You too tired for a quick drive?”

  “Ah, no, I’m OK—”

  “Great, let’s go then,” he said. “I came across some Amish techniques—well, you’ll see for yourself, you’re gonna love it.”

  Strasburg is fifteen minutes down Route 30 from Lancaster. All Dairy Queens and Seven Elevens till you get there, but when you turn off and travel a half a mile in any direction you’re back a hundred years or more in time. The air itself says it all. High mixture of pollen and horse manure that smells so surprisingly good, so real, it makes your eyes tear with pleasure. You don’t even mind a few flies flitting around.

  We turned down Northstar Road. “Jacob Stoltzfus’s farm is down there on the right,” Mo said.

  I nodded. “Beautiful.” The sun looked about five minutes to setting. The sky was the color of a robin’s belly against the browns and greens of the farm. “He won’t mind that we’re coming here by, uh—”

  “By car? Nah, of course not,” Mo said. “The Amish have no problem with non-Amish driving. And Jacob, as you’ll see, is more open-minded than most.”

  I thought I could see him now, off to the right at the end of the road that had turned to dirt, grey-white head of hair and beard bending over the gnarled bark of a fruit tree. He wore plain black overalls and a deep purple shirt.

  “That Jacob?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “I think so,” Mo replied. “I’m not sure.”

  We pulled the car over near the tree, and got out. A soft autumn rain suddenly started falling.

  “You have business here?” The man by the tree turned to address us. His tone was far from friendly.

  “Uh yes,” Mo said, clearly taken aback. “I’m sorry to intrude. Jacob—Jacob Stoltzfus—said it would be OK if we came by—”

  “You had business with Jacob?” the man demanded again. His eyes looked red and watery—though that could’ve been from the rain.

  “Well, yes,” Mo said. “But if this isn’t a good time—”

  “My brother is dead,” the man said. “My name is Isaac. This is a bad time for our family.”

  “Dead?” Mo nearly shouted. “I mean … what happened? I just saw your brother yesterday.”

  “We’re not sure,” Isaac said. “Heart attack, maybe. I think you should leave now. Family are coming soon.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Mo said. He looked beyond Isaac at a barn that I noticed for the first time. Its doors were slightly open, and weak light flickered inside.

  Mo took a step in the direction of the barn. Isaac put up a restraining arm. “Please,” he said. “It’s better if you go.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mo said again, and I led him to the car.

  “You all right?” I said when we were both in the car, and Mo had started the engine.

  He shook his head. “Couldn’t be a heart attack. Not at a time like this.”

  “Heart attacks don’t usually ask for appointments,” I said.

  Mo was still shaking his head, turning back on to Northstar Road. “I think someone killed him.”

  Now forensic scientists are prone to see murder in a ninety-year old woman dying peacefully in her sleep, but this was unusual from Mo.

  “Tell me about it,” I said, reluctantly. Just what I needed—death turning my visit into a busman’s holiday.

  “Never mind,” he muttered. “I babbled too much already.”

  “Babbled? You haven’t told me a thing.”

  Mo drove on in brooding silence. He looked like a different person, wearing a mask that used to be him.

  “You’re trying to protect me from something, is that it?” I ventured. “You know better than that.”

  Mo said nothing.

  “What’s the point?” I prodded. “We’ll be back with Corinne and the girls in five minutes. They’ll take one look at you, and know something happened. What are you going to tell them?”

  Mo swerved suddenly onto a side road, bringing my kidney into sticking contact with the inside door handle. “Well, I guess you’re right about that,” he said. He punched in a code in his car phone—I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Hello?” Corinne answered.

  “Bad news, honey,” Mo said matter of factly, though it sounded put on to me. No doubt his wife would see through it too. “Something came up in the project, and we’re going to have to go to Philadelphia tonight.”

  “You and Phil? Everything OK?”

  “Yeah, the two of us,” Mo said. “Not to worry. I’ll call you again when we get there.”

  “I love you,” Corinne said.

  “Me too,” Mo said. “Kiss the girls good night for me.”

  He hung up and turned to me.

  “Philadelphia?” I asked

  “Better that I don’t give them too many details,” he said. “I never do in my cases. Only would worry them.”

  “She’s worried anyway,” I said. “Sure sign she’s worried when she didn’t even scream at you for missing dinner. Now that you bring it up, I’m a little worried now too. What’s going on?”

  Mo said nothing. Then he turned the car again—mercifully more gently this time—onto a road with a sign that advised that the Pennsylvania Turnpike was up ahead.

  I rolled up the window as our speed increased. The night had suddenly gone damp and cold.

  “You going to give me a clue as to where we’re going, or just kidnap me to Philadelphia?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you off at the 30th Street Station,” Mo said. “You can get a bite to eat on the train and be back in New York in an hour.”

  “You left my bag on your porch, remember?” I said. “Not to mention my car.”

  Mo just scowled and drove on.

  “I wonder if Amos knows?” he said more to himself than me a few moments later.

  “Amos is a friend of Jacob’s?” I asked.

  “His son,” Mo said.

  “We’ll I guess you can’t very well call him on your car phone,” I said.

  Mo shook his head, frowned. “Most people misunderstand the Amish—think they’re some sort of Luddites, against all technology. But that’s not really it at all. They struggle with technology, agonize over whether to reject or accept it, and if they accept it, in what ways, so as not to compromise their independence and self-sufficiency. They’re not completely against phones—just against phones in their homes—because the phone intrudes on everything you’re doing.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, many’s the time a call from the Captain pulled me out of the sack.”

  Mo flashed his smile, for the first time since we’d left Jacob Stoltzfus’s farm. It was good to see.

  “So where do Amish keep their phones?” I might as well press my advantage, and the chance it would get Mo to talk.

  “Well, that’s another misconception,” Mo said. “There’s not one monolithic Amish viewpoint. There are many Amish groups, many different ways of dealing with technology. Some allow phone shacks on the edges of their property, so they can make calls when they want to, but not be disturbed by them in the sanctity of their homes.”

  “Does Amos have a phone shack?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” Mo said, like he was beginning to think about something else.

  “But you said his family was more open than most,” I said.

  Mo swiveled his head to stare at me for a second, then turned his eyes back on the road. “Open-minded, yes. But not really about communications.”

  “About what, then?”

  “Medicine,” Mo said.

  “Medicine?” I asked.

  “What do you know about allergies?”

  My nose itched—maybe it was the remnants of the sweet pollen near Strasburg.

  “I have hay fever,” I said. “Cantaloupe sometimes makes my mouth burn. I’ve seen a few strange deaths in my time due to allergic reactions. You think Jacob Stoltzfus died from something like that?”

  “No,” Mo said. “I think he was killed because he was trying to prevent people from dying from things like that.”

  “OK,” I said. “Last time you said that and I asked you to explain you said never mind. Should I ask again or let it slide?”

  Mo sighed. “You know, genetic engineering goes back well before the double helix.”

  “Come again?”

  “Breeding plants to make new combinations probably dates almost to the origins of our species,” Mo said. “Darwin understood that—he called it ‘artificial selection.’ Mendel doped out the first laws of genetics breeding peas. Luther Burbank developed way many more new varieties of fruit and vegetables than have yet to come out of our gene-splicing labs.”

  “And the connection to the Amish is what—they breed new vegetables now too?” I asked.

  “More than that,” Mo said. “They have whole insides of houses lit by special kinds of fireflies, altruistic manure permeated by slugs that seek out the roots of plants to die there and give them nourishment—all deliberately bred to be that way, and the public knows nothing about it. It’s biotechnology of the highest order, without the technology.”

  “And your friend Jacob was working on this?”

  Mo nodded. “Techno-allergists—our conventional researchers—have recently been investigating how some foods act as catalysts to other allergies. Cantaloupe tingles in your mouth in hay fever season, right?—because it’s really exacerbating the hay fever
allergy. Watermelon does the same, and so does the pollen of mums. Jacob and his people have known this for fifty years—and they’ve gone much further. They’re trying to breed a new kind of food, some kind of tomato thing, which would act as an anti-catalyst for allergies—would reduce their histamic effect to nothing.”

  “Like an organic Hismanol?” I asked.

  “Better than that,” Mo said. “This would trump any pharmaceutical.”

  “You OK?” I noticed Mo’s face was bearing big beads of sweat.

  “Sure,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I don’t know. Jacob—” he started coughing in hacking waves.

  I reached over to steady him, and straighten the steering wheel. His shirt was soaked with sweat and he was breathing in angry rasps.

  “Mo, hold on,” I said, keeping one hand on Mo and the wheel, fumbling with the other in my inside coat pocket. I finally got my fingers on the epinephrine pen I always kept there, and angled it out. Mo was limp and wet and barely conscious over the wheel. I pushed him over as gently as I could and went with my foot for the brake. Cars were speeding by us, screaming at me in the mirror with their lights. Thankfully Mo had been driving on the right, so I only had one stream of lights to blind me. My sole finally made contact with the brake, and I pressed down as gradually as possible. Miraculously, the car came to a reasonably slow halt, and we both seemed in one piece.

  I looked at Mo. I yanked up his shirt, and plunged the pen into his arm. I wasn’t sure how long he’d not been breathing, but it wasn’t good.