The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  A barnacle thing with an iris mouth and long whipping eyes took a careful taste of Katrinko’s boot. She retreated to a crag with a yelp.

  “Wear your mask,” Pete chided. The damp heat was bliss after the skin-eating chill of the Taklamakan, but most of the vents and cracks were spewing thick smells of hot beef stew and burnt rubber, all varieties of eldritch mechano-metabolic byproduct. His lungs felt sore at the very thought of it.

  Pete cast his foggy spex up the nearest of the carbon-fiber columns, and the golden, glowing, impossibly tempting lights of those starship portholes up above.

  Katrinko led point. She was pitilessly exposed against the lacelike girders. They didn’t want to risk exposure during two trips, so they each carried a haul bag.

  The climb went well at first. Then a machine rose up from wet darkness like a six-winged dragonfly. Its stinging tail lashed through the thready column like the kick of a mule. It connected brutally. Katrinko shot backwards from the impact, tumbled ten meters, and dangled like a ragdoll from her last backup chock.

  The flying creature circled in a figure eight, attempting to make up its nonexistent mind. Then a slower but much larger creature writhed and fluttered out of the starry sky, and attacked Katrinko’s dangling haulbag. The bag burst like a Christmas piñata in a churning array of taloned wings. A fabulous cascade of expensive spy gear splashed down to the hot pools below.

  Katrinko twitched feebly at the end of her rope. The dragonfly, cruelly alerted, went for her movement. Pete launched a string of flashbangs.

  The world erupted in flash, heat, concussion, and flying chaff. Impossibly hot and loud, a thunderstorm in a closet. The best kind of disappearance magic: total overwhelming distraction, the only real magic in the world.

  Pete soared up to Katrinko like a balloon on a bungee-cord. When he reached the bottom of the starship, twenty-seven heart-pounding seconds later, he had burned out both the smart-ropes.

  The silvery rain of chaff was driving the bugs to mania. The bottom of the cavern was suddenly a-crawl with leaping mechanical heat-ghosts, an instant menagerie of skippers and humpers and floppers. At the rim of perception, there were new things rising from the depths of the pools, vast and scaly, like golden carp to a rain of fish chow.

  Pete’s own haulbag had been abandoned at the base of the column. That bag was clearly not long for this world.

  Katrinko came to with a sudden winded gasp. They began free-climbing the outside of the starship. It surface was stony, rough and uneven, something like pumice, or wasp spit.

  They found the underside of a monster porthole and pressed themselves flat against the surface.

  There they waited, inert and unmoving, for an hour. Katrinko caught her breath. Her ribs stopped bleeding. The two of them waited for another hour, while crawling and flying heat-ghosts nosed furiously around their little world, following the tatters of their programming. They waited a third hour.

  Finally they were joined in their haven by an oblivious gang of machines with suckery skirts and wheelbarrows for heads. The robots chose a declivity and began filling it with big mandible trowels of stony mortar, slopping it on and jaw-chiseling it into place, smoothing everything over, tireless and pitiless.

  Pete seized this opportunity to attempt to salvage their lost equipment. There had been such fabulous federal bounty in there: smart audio bugs, heavy-duty gelcams, sensors and detectors, pulleys, crampons and latches, priceless vials of programmed neural goo … . Pete crept back to the bottom of the spacecraft.

  Everything was long gone. Even the depleted smart-ropes had been eaten, by a long trail of foraging keets. The little machines were still squirreling about in the black lace of the column, sniffing and scraping at the last molecular traces, with every appearance of satisfaction.

  Pete rejoined Katrinko, and woke her where she clung rigid and stupefied to her hiding spot. They inched their way around the curved rim of the starship hull, hunting for a possible weakness. They were in very deep trouble now, for their best equipment was gone. It didn’t matter. Their course was very obvious now, and the loss of alternatives had clarified Pete’s mind. He was consumed with a burning desire to break in.

  Pete slithered into the faint shelter of a large, deeply pitted hump. There he discovered a mess of braided rope. The rope was woven of dead and mashed organic fibers, something like the hair at the bottom of a sink. The rope had gone all petrified under a stony lacquer of robot spit.

  These were climber’s ropes. Someone had broken out here—smashed through the hull of the ship, from the inside. The robots had come to repair the damage, carefully resealing the exit hole, and leaving this ugly hump of stony scar tissue.

  Pete pulled his gelcam drill. He had lost the sugar reserves along with the haulbags. Without sugar to metabolize, the little enzyme-driven rotor would starve and be useless soon. That fact could not be helped. Pete pressed the device against the hull, waited as it punched its way through, and squirted in a gelcam to follow.

  He saw a farm. Pete could scarcely have been more astonished. It was certainly farmland, though. Cute, toy farmland, all under a stony blue ceiling, crisscrossed with hot grids of radiant light, embraced in the stony arch of the enclosing hull. There were fishponds with reeds. Ditches, and a wooden irrigation wheel. A little bridge of bamboo. There were hairy melon vines in rich black soil and neat, entirely weedless fields of dwarfed red grain. Not a soul in sight.

  Katrinko crept up and linked in on cable. “So where is everybody?” Pete said.

  “They’re all at the portholes,” said Katrinko, coughing.

  “What?” said Pete, surprised. “Why?”

  “Because of those flashbangs,” Katrinko wheezed. Her battered ribs were still paining her. “They’re all at the portholes, looking out into the darkness. Waiting for something else to happen.”

  “But we did that stuff hours ago.”

  “It was very big news, man. Nothing ever happens in there.”

  Pete nodded, fired with resolve. “Well then. We’re breakin’ in.”

  Katrinko was way game. “Gonna use caps?”

  “Too obvious.”

  “Acids and fibrillators?”

  “Lost ’em in the haulbags.”

  “Well, that leaves cheesewires,” Katrinko concluded. “I got two.”

  “I got six.”

  Katrinko nodded in delight. “Six cheesewires! You’re loaded for bear, man!”

  “I love cheesewires,” Pete grunted. He had helped to invent them.

  Eight minutes and twelve seconds later they were inside the starship. They reset the cored-out plug behind them, delicately gluing it in place and carefully obscuring the hair-thin cuts.

  Katrinko sidestepped into a grove of bamboo. Her camou bloomed in green and tan and yellow, with such instant and treacherous ease that Pete lost her entirely. Then she waved, and the spex edge-detectors kicked in on her silhouette.

  Pete lifted his spex for a human naked-eye take on the situation. There was simply nothing there at all. Katrinko was gone, less than a ghost, like pitchforking mercury with your eyelashes.

  So they were safe now. They could glide through this bottled farm like a pair of bad dreams.

  They scanned the spacecraft from top to bottom, looking for dangerous and interesting phenomena. Control rooms manned by Asian space technicians maybe, or big lethal robots, or video monitors—something that might cramp their style or kill them. In the thirty-seven floors of the spacecraft, they found no such thing.

  The five thousand inhabitants spent their waking hours farming. The crew of the starship were preindustrial, tribal, Asian peasants. Men, women, old folks, little kids.

  The local peasants rose every single morning, as their hot networks of wiring came alive in the ceiling. They would milk their goats. They would feed their sheep, and some very odd, knee-high, dwarf Bactrian camels. They cut bamboo and netted their fishponds. They cut down tamarisks and poplar trees for firewood. They tended melon vines and gr
ew plums and hemp. They brewed alcohol, and ground grain, and boiled millet, and squeezed cooking oil out of rapeseed. They made clothes out of hemp and raw wool and leather, and baskets out of reeds and straw. They ate a lot of carp.

  And they raised a whole mess of chickens. Somebody not from around here had been fooling with the chickens. Apparently these were super space-chickens of some kind, leftover lab products from some serious long-term attempt to screw around with chicken DNA. The hens produced five or six lumpy eggs every day. The roosters were enormous, and all different colors, and very smelly, and distinctly reptilian.

  It was very quiet and peaceful inside the starship. The animals made their lowing and clucking noises, and the farm workers sang to themselves in the tiny round-edged fields, and the incessant foot-driven water pumps would clack rhythmically, but there were no city noises. No engines anywhere. No screens. No media.

  There was no money. There were a bunch of tribal elders who sat under the blossoming plum trees outside the big stone granaries. They messed with beads on wires, and wrote notes on slips of wood. Then the soldiers, or the cops—they were a bunch of kids in crude leather armor, with spears—would tramp in groups, up and down the dozens of stairs, on the dozens of floors. Marching like crazy, and requisitioning stuff, and carrying stuff on their backs, and handing things out to people. Basically spreading the wealth around.

  Most of the weird bearded old guys were palace accountants, but there were some others too. They sat cross-legged on mats in their homemade robes, and straw sandals, and their little spangly hats, discussing important matters at slow and extreme length. Sometimes they wrote stuff down on palm-leaves.

  Pete and Katrinko spent a special effort to spy on these old men in the spangled hats, because, after close study, they had concluded that this was the local government. They pretty much had to be the government. These old men with the starry hats were the only part of the population who weren’t being worked to a frazzle.

  Pete and Katrinko found themselves a cozy spot on the roof of the granary, one of the few permanent structures inside the spacecraft. It never rained inside the starship, so there wasn’t much call for roofs. Nobody ever trespassed up on the roof of the granary. It was clear that the very idea of doing this was beyond local imagination. So Pete and Katrinko stole some bamboo water jugs, and some lovely handmade carpets, and a lean-to-tent, and set up camp there.

  Katrinko studied an especially elaborate palm-leaf book that she had filched from the local temple. There were pages and pages of dense alien script. “Man, what do you suppose these yokels have to write about?”

  “The way I figure it,” said Pete, “they’re writing down everything they can remember from the world outside.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Kinda building up an intelligence dossier for their little starship regime, see? Because that’s all they’ll ever know, because the people who put them inside here aren’t giving ’em any news. And they’re sure as hell never gonna let ’em out.”

  Katrinko leafed carefully through the stiff and brittle pages of the handmade book. The people here spoke only one language. It was no language Pete or Katrinko could even begin to recognize. “Then this is their history. Right?”

  “It’s their lives, kid. Their past lives, back when they were still real people, in the big real world outside. Transistor radios, and shoulder-launched rockets. Barbed-wire, pacification campaigns, ID cards. Camel caravans coming in over the border, with mortars and explosives. And very advanced Sphere mandarin bosses, who just don’t have the time to put up with armed, Asian, tribal fanatics.”

  Katrinko looked up. “That kinda sounds like your version of the outside world, Pete.”

  Pete shrugged. “Hey, it’s what happens.”

  “You suppose these guys really believe they’re inside a real starship?”

  “I guess that depends on how much they learned from the guys who broke out of here with the picks and the ropes.”

  Katrinko thought about it. “You know what’s truly pathetic? The shabby illusion of all this. Some spook mandarin’s crazy notion that ethnic separatists could be squeezed down tight, and spat out like watermelon seeds into interstellar space … . Man, what a come-on, what an enticement, what an empty promise!”

  “I could sell that idea,” Pete said thoughtfully. “You know how far away the stars really are, kid? About four hundred years away, that’s how far. You seriously want to get human beings to travel to another star, you gotta put human beings inside of a sealed can for four hundred solid years. But what are people supposed to do in there, all that time? The only thing they can do is quietly run a farm. Because that’s what a starship is. It’s a desert oasis.”

  “So you want to try a dry-run starship experiment,” said Katrinko. “And in the meantime, you happen to have some handy religious fanatics in the backwoods of Asia, who are shooting your ass off. Guys who refuse to change their age-old lives, even though you are very, very high-tech.”

  “Yep. That’s about the size of it. Means, motive, and opportunity.”

  “I get it. But I can’t believe that somebody went through with that scheme in real life. I mean, rounding up an ethnic minority, and sticking them down in some godforsaken hole, just so you’ll never have to think about them again. That’s just impossible!”

  “Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a Seminole?” Pete said.

  Katrinko shook her head. “What’s that mean?”

  “They were American tribal guys who ended up stuck in a swamp. The Florida Seminoles, they called ’em. Y’know, maybe they just called my grandfather a Seminole. He dressed really funny … . Maybe it just sounded good to call him a Seminole. Otherwise, he just would have been some strange, illiterate geezer.”

  Katrinko’s brow wrinkled. “Does it matter that your grandfather was a Seminole?”

  “I used to think it did. That’s where I got my skin color—as if that matters, nowadays. I reckon it mattered plenty to my grandfather, though … . He was always stompin’ and carryin’ on about a lot of weird stuff we couldn’t understand. His English was pretty bad. He was never around much when we needed him.”

  “Pete …” Katrinko sighed. “I think it’s time we got out of this place.”

  “How come?” Pete said, surprised. “We’re safe up here. The locals are not gonna hurt us. They can’t even see us. They can’t touch us. Hell, they can’t even imagine us. With our fantastic tactical advantages, we’re just like gods to these people.”

  “I know all that, man. They’re like the ultimate dumb straight people. I don’t like them very much. They’re not much of a challenge to us. In fact, they kind of creep me out.”

  “No way! They’re fascinating. Those baggy clothes, the acoustic songs, all that menial labor … These people got something that we modern people just don’t have any more.”

  “Huh?” Katrinko said. “Like what, exactly?”

  “I dunno,” Pete admitted.

  “Well, whatever it is, it can’t be very important.” Katrinko sighed. “We got some serious challenges on the agenda, man. We gotta sidestep our way past all those angry robots outside, then head up that shaft, then hoof it back, four days through a freezing desert, with no haulbags. All the way back to the glider.”

  “But Trink, there are two other starships in here that we didn’t break into yet. Don’t you want to see those guys?”

  “What I’d like to see right now is a hot bath in a four-star hotel,” said Katrinko. “And some very big international headlines, maybe. All about me. That would be lovely.” She grinned.

  “But what about the people?”

  “Look, I’m not ‘people,’” Katrinko said calmly. “Maybe it’s because I’m a neuter, Pete, but I can tell you’re way off the subject. These people are none of our business. Our business now is to return to our glider in an operational condition, so that we can complete our assigned mission, and return to base with our data. Okay?”

  �
��Well, let’s break into just one more starship first.”

  “We gotta move, Pete. We’ve lost our best equipment, and we’re running low on body fat. This isn’t something that we can kid about and live.”

  “But we’ll never come back here again. Somebody will, but it sure as heck won’t be us. See, it’s a Spider thing.”

  Katrinko was weakening. “One more starship? Not both of ’em?”

  “Just one more.”

  “Okay, good deal.”

  The hole they had cut through the starship’s hull had been rapidly cemented by robots. It cost them two more cheesewires to cut themselves a new exit. Then Katrinko led point, up across the stony ceiling, and down the carbon column to the second ship. To avoid annoying the lurking robot guards, they moved with hypnotic slowness and excessive stealth. This made it a grueling trip.

  This second ship had seen hard use. The hull was extensively scarred with great wads of cement, entombing many lengths of dried and knotted rope. Pete and Katrinko found a weak spot and cut their way in.

  This starship was crowded. It was loud inside, and it smelled. The floors were crammed with hot and sticky little bazaars, where people sold handicrafts and liquor and food. Criminals were being punished by being publicly chained to pots and pelted with offal by passers-by. Big crowds of ragged men and tattooed men gathered around brutal cockfights, featuring spurred mutant chickens half the size of dogs. All the men carried knives.

  The architecture here was more elaborate, all kinds of warrens, and courtyards, and damp, sticky alleys. After exploring four floors, Katrinko suddenly declared she recognized their surroundings. According to Katrinko, they were a physical replica of sets from a popular Japanese interactive samurai epic. Apparently the starship’s designers had needed some preindustrial Asian village settings, and they hadn’t wanted to take the expense and trouble to design them from scratch. So they had programmed their construction robots with pirated game designs.