The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Margot’s eyes burned. She’d flown four other missions with Paul. She’d sat up all night with him drinking espresso and swapping stories while the bigwigs debated the final crew roster for the Forty-Niner. They’d spent long hours on the flight out arguing politics and playing old jazz recordings. She’d thought she knew him, thought he would hang on with the rest of them.

  Then again, she’d thought same of Ed and Tracy.

  Tracy Costa, their chief mineralogist, had been the first to go. They hadn’t known a thing about it, until Nick had caught a glimpse of the frozen corpse outside one of the port windows. Then, Ed had suffocated himself, even after he’d sworn to Jean he’d never leave her alone in this mess. Now, Paul.

  Margot pulled herself from handhold to handhold up the tubular connector, past its cabinets and access panels. One small, triangular window looked out onto the vacuum, the infinitely patient darkness that waited for the rest of them to give up.

  Stop it, Margot. She tore her gaze away from the window and concentrated on pulling herself forward.

  The Forty-Niner’s command module was a combination of ship’s bridge, comm center and central observatory. Right now, it held all of the remaining crew members. Their mission commander, Nicholas Deale, sandy-haired, dusky-skinned and dark-eyed, sat at one of Reggie’s compact terminals, brooding over what he saw on the flat screen. Tom Merritt, who had gone from a florid, pink man to a paper-white ghost during the last couple of weeks, tapped at the controls for the radio telescope. He was an astronomer and the mission communications specialist. He was the one who made sure they all got their messages from home. The last living crew member was Jean. A few wisps of hair had come loose from her tight brown braid and they floated around her head, making her look even more worried and vulnerable. She stood at another terminal, typing in a perfunctory and distracted cadence.

  Margot paused in the threshold, trying to marshal her thoughts and nerves. Nick glanced up at her. Margot opened her mouth, but her throat clamped tight around her words. Tom and Jean both turned to look at her. The remaining blood drained out of Tom’s face.

  “Paul?” he whispered.

  Margot coughed. “Looks like he over-dosed himself.”

  Jean turned her head away, but not before Margot saw the struggle against tears fill her face. Both Nick’s hands clenched into fists. Tom just looked at Nick with tired eyes and said, “Well, now what?”

  Nick sighed. “OK, OK.” He ran both hands through his hair. “I’ll go take care of … the body. Tom, can you put a burst through to mission control? They’ll want to notify his family quietly. I’ll come up with the letter …”

  This was pure Nick. Give everybody something to do, but oversee it all. When they’d reeled in the sail, he hadn’t slept for two days helping Ed and Jean go over the cable an inch at a time, trying to find out if any sections were salvageable from which they could jury-rig a kind of stormsail. When that had proven hopeless, he’d still kept everybody as busy as possible. He milked every drop of encouraging news he could out of mission control. Plans were in the works. The whole world was praying for them. Comm bursts came in regularly from friends and family. A rescue attempt would be made. A way home would be found. All they had to do was hang on.

  “In the meantime …” Nick went on

  “In the meantime we wait for the radiation to eat our insides out,” said Tom bitterly. “It’s hopeless, Nick. We are all dead.”

  Nick shifted uneasily, crunching Velcro underfoot. “I’m still breathing and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.”

  A spasm of pure anger crossed Tom’s features. “And what are you going to breathe when the scrubbers give out? Huh? What are you going to do when the water’s gone? How about when the tumors start up?”

  Tom, don’t do this, thought Margot, but the words died in her throat, inadequate against the sudden red rage she saw in him. He was afraid of illness, of weakness. Well, weren’t they all?

  Paul’s chief duty was keeping them all from getting cancer. One of the main hazards of lengthy space flight had always been long-term exposure to hard radiation. The mag sail, when it was functional, had created a shield from charged particles, which slowed the process down. Medical advancements had arisen to cover the damage that could be done by fast neutrons and gamma rays. Paul Luck maintained cultures of regenerative stem cells taken from each member of the crew. Every week, he measured pre-cancer indicators in key areas of the body. If the indicators were too high, he tracked down the “hot spots” and administered doses of the healthy cultured cells to remind bone, organ and skin how they were supposed to act and voilà! Healthy, cancer-free individual.

  The Luck system was now, however, permanently down, and the only backup for that was the AI’s medical expert system and the remaining crew’s emergency training. Right now, that didn’t seem like anything close to enough.

  “We have time,” Nick said evenly. “We do not have to give up. Come on, Tom. What would Carol say if she heard this?” Nick, Margot remembered, had been at Tom’s wedding. They were friends, or at least, they had been friends.

  “She’d say whatever the NASA shrinks told her to,” snapped Tom. “And in the meantime,” he drawled the word, “I get to watch her aging ten years for every day we’re hanging up here. How much longer to I have to do this to her? How much longer are you going to make your family suffer?”

  For the first time, Nick’s composure cracked. His face tightened into a mask of pent-up rage and frustration, but his voice stayed level. “My family is going to know I died trying.”

  Tom looked smug. “At least you admit we’re going to die.”

  “No …” began Jean.

  “Help,” said a strange, soft voice.

  The crew all turned. The voice came from the AI terminal. It was Reggie.

  “Incoming signal. No origination. Can’t filter. Incoherent system flaw. Error three-six-five …”

  A grind and clank reverberated through the hull. Reggie’s voice cut off.

  “Systems check!” barked Nick.

  Margot kicked off the wall and flew to navigation control, her station. “I got garbage,” said Tom from beside her. “Machine language, error babble. Reggie’s gone nuts.”

  Margot shoved her velcro-bottomed boots into place and typed madly at her keyboard, bringing up the diagnostics. “All good here,” she reported. She turned her head and looked out the main window, searching for the stars and the slightly steadier dots that were the planets. “Confirmed. Positioning systems up and running.”

  “Engineering looks OK,” said Jean. “I’ll go check the generators and report back.” Nick gave her a sharp nod. She pulled herself free of her station and launched herself down the connector.

  “You getting anything coherent?” Nick pushed himself over to hover behind Tom’s shoulder.

  “Nothing.” From her station, Margot could just make out the streams of random symbols flashing past on Tom’s terminal.

  “Reggie, what’s happening?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” said the voice from her terminal. Margot jerked. “Unable to access exterior communications system. Multiple errors on internal nodes. Code corruption. Error. three-four …” the computer voice cut out again in a pulse of static, then another, then silence, followed by another quick static burst.

  “Margot, can you see the comm antenna?” asked Tom, his hands still flashing across the keyboard.

  Margot pressed her cheek against the cool window, craned her neck and squinted, trying to see along the Forty-Niner’s hull. “Barely, yeah.”

  “Can you make out its orientation?”

  Margot squinted again. “Looks about ten degrees off-axis.”

  “It’s moved,” said Tom between static bursts. “That was the noise.”

  “All OK down in the power plant,” Jean pulled herself back through the hatch and attached herself to her station. “Well, at least there’s nothing new wrong …” she let the sentence trail off. “What
is that?”

  Margot and the others automatically paused to listen. Margot heard nothing but the steady hum of the ship and the bursts of static from Reggie. Quick pulses, one, one, two, one, two, one, one, one, two.

  “A pattern?” said Nick.

  “Mechanical failure,” said Tom. “Has to be. Reggie just crashed.”

  One, one, two, one.

  “You ever hear about anything crashing like this?” asked Margot.

  One, two, one.

  “Reggie? Level one diagnostic, report,” said Nick.

  One, one, two.

  “Maybe we can get a coherent diagnostic out of one of the other expert systems,” Margot suggested. Reggie wasn’t a single processor. It was a web-work of six interconnected expert systems, each with their own area of concentration, just like the members of the crew. Terminals in different modules of the ship gave default access to differing expert systems.

  “Maybe,” said Nick. “Tom can try to track down the fault from here. You and Jean see if you can get an answer out of si … the power plant.” Margot was quietly grateful he remembered what else was in sick bay before she had to remind him.

  One, one, one.

  Jean and Margot pulled themselves down the connector to the engineering compartment. As Jean had reported, all the indicators that had remained functional after they’d lost the sail reported green and go.

  “At least it’s a different crisis,” Jean muttered as she brought up Reggie’s terminal, the one she and Ed had spent hours behind when the mag sail went out.

  “Remind me to tell you about my grandmother’s stint on the old Mir sometime,” said Margot. “Now there was an adventure.”

  Jean actually smiled and Margot felt a wash of gratitude. Someone in here was still who she thought they were.

  Jean spoke to the terminal. “Reggie, we’ve got a massive fault in the exterior communications system. Can you analyze from this system?” As she spoke, Margot hit the intercom button on the wall to carry the answer to the command center.

  “Massive disruption and multiple error processing,” said Reggie, sounding even more mechanical than usual. “I will attempt to establish interface.”

  “Nick, you hear that?” Margot said to the intercom grill. She could just hear the static pulses coming from the command center as whispering echoes against the walls of the connector.

  “Roger,” came back Nick’s voice.

  “I am … getting reports of an external signal,” said Reggie. “It is … there is … internal fault, internal fault, internal fault.”

  Jean shut the terminal’s voice down. “What the hell?” she demanded of Margot. Margot just shook her head.

  “External signal? How is that possible? This can’t be a comm burst from Houston.”

  Margot’s gaze drifted to the black triangle of the window. The echoes whispered in ones and twos.

  “What’s a language with only two components?” Margot asked.

  Jean stared at her. “Binary.”

  “What do we, in essence, transmit from here when we do our comm bursts? What might somebody who didn’t know any better try to send back to us?”

  Jean’s face went nearly as white as Tom’s. “Margot, you’re crazy.”

  Margot didn’t bother to reply. She just pushed herself back up the connector to the bridge.

  “Tom? Did you hear that?”

  Tom didn’t look up. He had a clip board and pen in his hands. As the static bursts rang out, he scribbled down a one for each single burst and a zero for each pair. He hung the board in mid-air, as if not caring where it went and his hands flew across the keyboard. “Oh yeah, I heard it.”

  Nick was back at his station, typing at his own keyboard. “The engineering ex-systems seem to be intact. Maybe we can get an analysis …” He hit a new series of keys. Around them, the static bursts continued. Margot’s temples started to throb in time with the insistent pulses.

  “There’s something,” Tom murmured to the terminal. His voice was tight, and there was an undercurrent in it Margot couldn’t identify. “It’ll take awhile to find out exactly what’s happened. I’ve got Reggie recording,” he looked straight at Nick. “As long as it doesn’t crash all the way …”

  Margot and Jean also turned to Nick. Margot thought she saw relief shining behind his eyes. At least now he won’t have to find us make-work to do.

  “All right,” said Nick. “Tom, you keep working on the analysis of this … whatever it is. Jean, we need you to do a breakdown on Reggie. What’s clean and what’s contaminated?” he turned his dark, relieved eyes to Margot. “I’ll take care of Paul. Margot …”

  “I’ll make sure all the peripherals are at the ready,” said Margot. “We don’t know what’s happening next.”

  Nick nodded. Margot extracted herself from her station and followed Nick down the connector. She tried not to look as he worked the wheel on the sick bay hatch. She just let herself float past and made her way down to the cargo bay.

  The cargo bay was actually a combination cargo hold and staging area. Here was where they stored the carefully locked-down canisters holding the ore samples. But here was also where they suited up for all their extra-vehicular activities. Just outside the airlock, the explorer boats waited, clamped tightly to the hull. They were small, light ships that looked like ungainly box kites stripped of their fabric. The explorers were barely more than frames with straps to hang sample containers, or sample gatherers, or astronauts from. They’d been designed for asteroid rendezvous and landing. Margot remembered the sensation of childlike glee when she got to take them in. She loved her work, her mission, her life, but that had been sheer fun.

  For a brief moment there, they thought they might be able to use the explorers to tow the Forty-Niner into an orbit that would allow one of the Martian stations to mount a rescue, but Reggie’s models had showed it to be impossible. The delta-vee just wasn’t there. So the explorers sat out there, and she sat in here, along with the core samplers, the drillers, the explosive charges, doing nothing much but waiting to find out what happened next.

  Hang on, Margot. Margot. Stay alive one minute longer, and one minute after that. That’s the game now isn’t it? Forget how to play and you’ll be following Paul, Ed and Tracy.

  She touched the intercom button so she could hear the static bursts and Tom’s soft murmuring. It reminded her that something really was happening. A little warmth crept into her heart. A little light stirred in her mind. It was something, Tom had said so. It might just be help. Any kind of help.

  Small tasks had kept her busy during the two weeks since they lost the sail, and small tasks kept her busy now. She made sure the seals on the ore carriers maintained their integrity. She ran computer checks on the explorers and made sure the fuel cells on the rovers were all at full capacity, that their tanks were charged and the seals were tight. Given the state Reggie was in, she was tempted to put on one of the bright yellow hardsuits and go out to do a manual check. She squashed the idea. She might be needed for something in here.

  She counted all the air bottles for the suits and checked their pressure. You never knew. With Reggie acting up, they might have to do an EVA to point the antenna back toward Earth. If this last, strange hope proved to be false, she still hadn’t said good-bye to her fiancé Jordan, and she wanted to. She didn’t want to just leave him in silence.

  Reggie’s voice, coming from the intercom, startled her out of her thoughts. “Help,” said Reggie. “Me. Help. Me. We. Thee. Help.”

  Margot flew up the connector. She was the last to reach the command module. She hung in the threshold, listening to Reggie blurt out words one at a time.

  “There. Is. Help,” said Reggie, clipped and harsh. The words picked up pace. “There is help. Comet. Pull. Tow. Yourself. There is a comet approaching within reach. You can tow yourself toward your worlds using this comet. It is possible. There is help.”

  Margot felt her jaw drop open.

  Tom looked down a
t his clipboard. “What Reggie says, what we’ve got here is a binary transmission from an unknown source. Taking the single pulses as ones and the double pulses as zeroes gave us gibberish, but taking the single pulses as zero and the double pulses as one gave us some version of machine language. The engineering expert subsystem was able to decode it.”

  He gripped his pen tightly, obviously resisting the urge to throw it in frustration. “This is impossible, this can’t be happening.”

  Margot shrugged. “Well, it is.”

  “It can’t be,” growled Tom. “Aliens who can create a machine language. Reggie can read inside of four hours? It couldn’t happen.”

  “Unless they’ve been listening in on us for awhile,” Jean pointed out.

  Tom tapped the pen against the clipboard. One, two, one. “But how …”

  Margot cut him off. She didn’t want to hear it anymore. This was help, this was the possibility of life. Why was he trying to screw it up? “We’ve been beaming all kinds of junk out into space for over a hundred years. Maybe they’ve been listening that long.” She felt his doubt dribbling into the corners of her mind. She shut it out by sheer force of will.

  Jean folded her arms tightly across her torso. “At this point, I wouldn’t care if it was demons from the seventh circle of Hell, just so long as it’s out here.”

  “Jesus,” breathed Nick softly. Then, in a more normal voice he said, “OK, Margot, you and Jean are going to have to do an EVA to turn the antenna around so we can send a burst to Houston.”

  “We can’t tell Houston about this,” said Jean sharply.

  “What?” demanded Tom.

  Jean hugged herself even tighter. “They’d think we’d all gone crazy up here.”

  “What’s it matter what they think?” Nick spread his hands. “It’s not like they can do anything about it.”

  “They can tell our families we’ve all taken the mental crash,” said Jean flatly. “I, for one, do not want to make this any worse on my parents.”

  Nick nodded slowly. “OK,” he said. “We keep this our little secret. But if we do make it back, mission control is going to have a cow.”