The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “It’s absorbed on the back of the tongue,” Amos said. “It works quick.”

  God, I hoped this kid was right—I’d kill him with my bare hands if this wasn’t right for Laurie. I put an ounce or two on her tongue. A few seconds went by. More. Maybe thirty seconds, forty … “Goddamnit, how exactly long does this—”

  She moaned, as if on cue. “Laurie?” I asked, and patted her face.

  “Mmm …” she opened her eyes. And smiled! “Phil?”

  “Yeah, honey, everything’s OK,” I said.

  “Laurie!” Amos called out from across the room.

  Laurie got up. “Amos? What are you doing here? Why are you tied up like that?”

  She looked at him and then me like we were both crazy.

  “Long story, never mind,” I said, and went over to untie Amos. I found myself grinning at him. “Good on you, you were right, kid,” I said.

  He smiled back.

  “Where are your Mom and Emma?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Laurie suddenly looked sadder than I’d ever seen her. “They went over to the funeral home this morning, that’s where Dad is, to make arrangements. They took your car, Mom found the keys for it in your bag.” And she started crying.

  Amos put his arms around her, comforting her.

  “You have any idea what happened to you? I mean, after your Mom and sister left?” I asked gently.

  “Well,” she said, “some nice lady was coming around selling stuff—you know, soaps, perfumes, and little household things—like Avon, but some company I never heard of. And she asked me if I wanted to smell some new perfume—and it smelled wonderful, like a combination of lilacs and the ocean, and then … I don’t know, I guess you were calling me, and I saw Amos tied up and … what happened? Did I pass out?”

  “Well—” I started.

  “Uhm, Mister, ahm, Phil—” Amos interrupted.

  “It’s Dr. D’Amato, but my friends call me Phil, and you’ve earned that right,” I said.

  “Ok, thanks, Dr. D’Amato—sorry, I mean Phil—but I don’t think we should hang around here. These people—”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I’m saying I don’t like what the light looks like in this house. They killed my father, they tried to poison Laurie, who knows what they might have planted—”

  “Ok, I see your point,” I said, and saw again the Stoltzfus farm—Amos’ farm—ashes in the dirt.

  I looked at Laurie. “I’m fine,” she said. “But why do we have to leave?”

  “Let’s just go,” I said, and Amos and I ushered her out.

  The first thing I noticed when we were out of the house was that Sarah and my car—Mo’s car—were gone.

  The second thing I noticed was a searing heat on the back of my neck. I rushed Laurie and Amos across the street, and turned back to look at the house.

  Intense blue-white flames were sticking their searing tongues out of every window, licking the roof and the walls and now the garden with colors I’d never seen before.

  Laurie cried out in horror. Amos held her close. “Fireflies,” he muttered.

  The house burned to the ground in minutes.

  We stood mute, in hot/cold shivering shock, for what felt like a long, long time.

  I finally realized I was breathing hard. I thought about allergic reactions. I thought about Sarah.

  “They must’ve taken Sarah,” I said.

  “Sarah?” Amos asked, holding Laurie tight in a clearly loving way. She was sobbing.

  “Sarah Fischer,” I said

  Laurie and Amos both nodded.

  “She was a friend of my father’s,” Laurie said.

  “She’s my sister,” Amos said.

  “What?” I turned to Amos. Laurie pulled away and looked at him too. He had a peculiar, almost tortured sneer on his face, mixture of hatred and heartbreak.

  “She left our home more than ten years ago,” Amos said. “I was still just a little boy. She said she could no longer be bound by the ways of our Church—she said it was like agreeing to be mentally retarded for the rest of your life. So she left to go to some school. And I think she’s been working with those people—those people who killed my father and burned Laurie’s house.”

  I suddenly tasted the grapes in my mouth from last night, sweet taste with choking smoke, and I felt sick to my stomach. I swallowed, took a deliberate deep breath.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m still not clear what’s really going on here. I find Laurie unconscious—you, someone, could’ve put a drug in her orange juice for all I know. The house just burned down—could’ve been arson with rags and lighter fluid, just like we have back in New York, New York.” Though I knew I’d never seen a fire quite like that.

  Laurie stared at me like I was nuts.

  “They were fireflies, Mr. D’A—Phil,” Amos said. “Fireflies caused the fire.”

  “How could they do that so quickly?”

  “They can be bred that way,” Amos said. “So that an hour or a day or week after they start flying around, they suddenly heat up to cause the fire. It’s what you scientists”, he said with ill-concealed derision, “call setting a genetical switch. Mendelian lamps set to go off like clockwork and burn—Mendel bombs.”

  “Mendel bombs?”

  “Wasn’t he a genetical scientist? Worked with peas? Insects are simple like that too—easy to breed.”

  “Yeah, Gregor Mendel,” I said. “You’re saying Sarah—your sister—was involved in this?”

  He nodded.

  I thought about the lamp on Sarah’s floor.

  “Look, Amos, I’m sorry about before—I don’t really think you did anything to Laurie. It’s just—can you show me any actual evidence of this stuff? I mean, like, the fireflies before they burn down a house?”

  Amos considered. “Yeah, I can take you to a barn—it’s about five miles from here.”

  I looked at Laurie.

  “The Lapp farm?” she asked.

  Amos nodded.

  “It’s OK,” she said to me. “It’s safe. I’ve been there.”

  “All right, then,” I said. But Mo’s car—and my car—were still gone. “How are we going to get there?”

  “I parked my buggy at my friend’s—about a quarter of a mile from here,” Amos said.

  Clop, clop, clop, looking at a horse’s behind, feeling like one—based on what I was able to make sense of in this case. Horses, flames, mysterious deaths—all the ingredients of a Jack Finney novel in the nineteenth century. Except this was the end of the twentieth. And so far all I’d done is manage to get dragged along to every awful event. Well, at least I’d managed to save Laurie—or let Amos save her. But I had to do more—I had to stop just witnessing and reacting, and instead get on top of things. I represented twentieth century science, for godsake. Ok, it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t all powerful. But surely it had taught me enough to enable me to do something to counter these bombs and allergens, these … Mendelian things.

  I’d also managed to get through to Corinne at the funeral home from a pay phone on a corner before we’d gotten into Amos’ buggy. I’d half expected his horse and buggy to come with a car phone—a horse phone?—that was how crazy this “genetical” stuff was getting me. On the other hand, I guess the Amish could have rigged up a buggy with a cellular phone running on battery at that … Well, at least I was learning …

  “We should be there in a few minutes.” Amos leaned back from the driver’s seat, where he held the reins and clucked the lone horse along. He—Amos had told me the horse was a he—was a dark brown beautiful animal, at least to my innocent city eyes. The whole scene, riding along in a horse and buggy on a bright crisp autumn day, was astonishing—because it wasn’t a buggy ride for a tourist’s five dollar bill, it was real life.

  “You know, I ate some of your sister’s food,” I blurted out the qualm that occurred to me again. “You don’t think, I mean, that maybe it had a slow-acting allergen—”

&n
bsp; “We’ll give you a swig of an antidote—it’s pretty universal—when we get to John Lapp’s, don’t worry,” Amos leaned back and advised.

  “Sarah—your sister—was telling me something about some low-grade allergen let loose on our population after World War II. Didn’t kill anyone, but made most people more irritable than they’d been before. Come to think of it, I suppose it indeed could have been responsible for lots of deaths, when you take into account the manslaughters that result from people on edge, arguments gone out of control.”

  “You’re talking the way Poppa used to,” Laurie said.

  “Your dad talked about those allergens?” I asked.

  “No,” Laurie said. “I mean he was always going on about manslaughter, and how it had just one or two little differences in spelling from man’s laughter, and how those differences made all the difference.”

  “Yeah, that was Mo all right,” I said.

  “That’s John Lapp’s farm up ahead,” Amos said.

  The meadow was green, still lush in this autumn. It was bounded by fences that looked both old, and, implausibly, in very good condition. Like we’d been literally travelling back in time.

  “So, Amos, your opinion on your sister’s idea about the allergens?” I prompted.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That was my sister’s area of study.”

  A barn, a big barn, but no different on the outside than hundreds of other barns in the countrysides of Pennsylvania and Ohio. How many of them had what this one had inside?

  Variations of Sarah’s words played in my ears. Why do we expect science to always come in high-tech wrappings? Darwin was a great scientist, wasn’t he, and just the plain outside world was his laboratory. Mendel came upon the workings of genetics by cultivating purple and white flowering peas in his garden. Was a garden so different from a barn? If anything, it was even lower-tech.

  A soft pervasive light embraced us as we walked inside—keener than fluorescent, more diffuse than incandescent, a cross between sepiatone and starlight maybe, but impossible to describe with any real precision if you hadn’t actually seen it, felt its photons slide through your pupils like pieces of a breeze.

  “Fireflight,” Amos whispered, though I had realized that already. I’d seen fireflies before, loved them as a boy, poured over Audubon guides to insects with pictures of their light, but never anything like this.

  “We have lots of uses for insects, more than just light,” Amos said, and he guided me over, Laurie on his arm, to a series of wooden contraptions all entwined with nets. I looked closer, and saw swarms of insects—bees mostly, maybe other kinds—each in its own gauzed compartment. There were several sections with spiders too.

  “These are our nets, Phil,” Amos said. “The nets and webs of our information highway. Our insects are of course far slower and smaller in numbers than your electrons, but far more intelligent and motivated than those non-living things that convey information on yours. True, our communicators can’t possibly match the pace and reach of the broadcast towers, the telephone lines, the computers all over your world. But we don’t want that. We don’t need the speed, the high blood pressure, the invasion of privacy, that your electrons breed. We don’t want the numbers, the repetition, all the clutter. Our carriers get it right, for the jobs that we think are important, the first time.”

  “We’ll they certainly get it just as deadly,” I said, “at least when it comes to burning down houses. Nature strikes back.” And I marveled again at the wisdom of these people, this boy—which, though I disagreed about the advantages of bug-tech over electricity, bespoke a grasp of information theory that would do any telecom specialist proud—

  “Nature was never really gone, Dr. D’Amato,” a deep voice that sounded familiar said.

  I turned around. “Isaac …”

  “I apologize for the deception, but my name is John Lapp. I pretended to be Jacob’s brother at his farm because I couldn’t be sure that you weren’t videotaping me with some kind of concealed camera. You’ll forgive me, but we have great distrust for your instruments.” His face and voice were “Isaac Stoltzfus”’s, all right, but his delivery was vastly more commanding and urbane.

  I noticed in the corner of my eye that Laurie’s were wide with awe. “Mr. Lapp,” she stammered, “I’m very honored to meet you. I mean, I’ve been here before with Amos,” she squeezed his hand, “but I never expected to actually meet you—”

  “Well, I’m honored too, young lady,” Lapp said, “and I’m very very sorry about your father. I only met him once—when I was first pretending to be ‘Isaac’ the other day—but I know from Jacob that your father was a good man.”

  “Thank you,” Laurie said, softly.

  “I have something for you, Laurie Buhler,” Lapp reached into his long, dark coat and pulled out what looked like a lady’s handbag, constructed of a very attractive moss-green woven cloth. “Jacob Stoltzfus designed this. We call it a lamp-case. It’s a weave of special plant fibers dyed in an extract from the glow-worm, with certain chemicals from luminescent mushrooms mixed into the dye to give the light staying power. It glows in the dark. It should last for several months, as long as the weather doesn’t get too hot. Then you can get a new one. From now on, if you’re out shopping after the sun sets, you’ll be able see what you have in your case, how much money you have left, wherever you are. From what I know of young lady’s purses—I have three teenaged daughters—this can be very helpful. Some of you seem to be lugging half the world around with you in there!”

  Laurie took the case, and beamed. “Thank you so much,” she said. She looked at me. “This is what Poppa was going to get for me the other night. He thought I didn’t know—he wanted to pick this purse up, at Jacob Stoltzfus’s farm, and surprise me for my birthday tomorrow. But I knew.” And her voice cracked and tears welled in her eyes.

  Amos put his arms around her again, and I patted her hair.

  “Mo would’ve wanted to get to the bottom of this,” I said to Lapp. “What can you tell me about who killed him—and Amos’ father?”

  He regarded me, without much emotion. “The world is changing before your very eyes, Dr. D’Amato. Twelve-hundred pound moose walk down the mainstreet in Brattleboro, Vermont. People shoot four hundred-pound bears in the suburbs of New Hampshire—”.

  “New Hampshire is hardly a suburb, and Mo wasn’t killed by a bear—he died right next to me in my car,” I said.

  “Same difference, Doctor. Animals are getting brazen, bacteria are going wild, allergies are rampant—it’s all part of the same picture. It’s no accident.”

  “Your people are doing this, deliberately?” I asked.

  “My people?—No, I assure you, we don’t believe in aggression. These things you see here”—he waved his hand around the barn, at all sort of plants and small animals and insects I wanted to get a closer look at—“are only to make our lives better, in quiet ways. Like Laurie’s handbag.”

  “Like the fireflies that burn down buildings?” I asked.

  “Ah, we come full circle—this is where I came in. Alas, we unfortunately are not the only people on this Earth who understand more of the power of nature than is admitted by your technological world. You have plastics, used for good. You also have plastic used for evil—you have semtex, that blew up your airplane over Scotland. We have bred fireflies for good purposes, for light and moderate heat, as you see right here,” he pointed to a corner of the barn, near where we were standing. A fountain of the sepiatone and starlight seemed to emanate from it. I looked more carefully, and saw the fountain was really a myriad of tiny fireflies—a large Mendelian lamp. “We mix slightly different species in the swarm,” Lapp continued, “carefully chosen so that their flashings overlap to give a continuous, long-lasting light. The mesh is so smooth that you can’t see the insects themselves, unless you examine the light very closely. But there are those who have furthered this breeding for bad purposes, as you found out in both the Stoltzfus and Buhler h
omes.”

  “Well, if you know who these people are, tell me, and I’ll see to it that they’re put out of business,” I said.

  For the first time, I noticed a smear of contempt on John Lapp’s face. “Your police will put them out of business? How? In the same way you’ve put your industrial Mafia out of business? In the same way you’ve stopped the drug trade from South America? In the same way your United Nations, your NATO, all of your wonderful political organizations have ended wars in the Middle East, in Europe, in Southeast Asia all these years? No thank you, Doctor. These people who misuse the power of nature are our problem—they’re not our people any longer but they come originally from our people—and we’ll handle them in our own way.”

  “But two people are dead—” I protested.

  “You perhaps will be too,” Amos said. He proffered a bottle with some kind of reddish, tomatoey-looking liquid. “Here, drink this, just in case my sister gave you some slow-acting poison.”

  “A brother and a sister,” I said. “Each tells me the other’s the bad guy. Classic dilemma—for all I know this is the poison.”

  Lapp shook his head. “Sarah Stoltzfus Fischer is definitely bad,” he said solemnly. “I once thought I saw some good that could be rekindled in her, but now … Jacob told Mo Buhler about her—”

  “Her name was on Mo’s car phone list,” I said.

  “Yes, as someone Mo was likely investigating,” Lapp said. “I told Jacob he was wrong to tell Mo so much. But Jacob was stubborn—and he was an optimist. A dangerous combination. I’m sorry to say this,” he looked with hurt eyes at Laurie, “but Mo Buhler may have brought this upon Jacob and himself because of his contacts with Sarah.”

  “If Poppa believed in her, then that’s because he still saw some good in her,” Laurie insisted.

  John Lapp shook his head, sadly.

  “And I guess I made things worse by contacting her, spending the night with her—” I started saying.