The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Tell you in a minute,” I said, going to the head and closing the door behind me. Of course, a closed door makes no real difference with Hypatia. She can see me wherever I am on the ship, and no doubt does, but as long as a machine intelligence acts and looks human, I want it to pretend to observe human courtesies.

  Hitting the head was the main reason I’d come back to my ship just then. I don’t like peeing in free fall, in those awful toilets they have. Hypatia keeps ours at a suitable gravity for my comfort, like the rest of the ship. Besides, it makes her nervous if I use any toilets outside the ship, because she likes to rummage through my excretions to see if I’m staying healthy.

  Which she had been doing while I was in the head. When I came out, she didn’t seem to have moved, but she said, “Are you really going to eat their food?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “You’ve been running a little high on polyglycerides. Better you let me cook for you.”

  Teasing her, I said, “June Terple says Hans is a better cook.”

  “She said he’s a good cook,” she corrected me, “but so am I. I’ve been accessing him, by the way, so if there’s anything you’d like to know about the crew …”

  “Not about the crew, but Starminder said something about a Rebecca Shapiro. Who was she?”

  “That data is not in the Phoenix shipmind’s stores, Klara,” she said, reproving me. “However …”

  She whited out a corner of my lounge and displayed a face on it while she gave me a capsule biography of Rebecca Shapiro. Rebecca had been a dramatic soprano with a brilliant operatic future ahead of her until she got her larynx crushed in a plane crash. They’d repaired it well enough for most purposes, but she was never going to be able to sing “The Queen of the Night” again. So, with her life on Earth ruined, Rebecca had signed up for my program. “Any other questions?” Hypatia said.

  “Not about Rebecca, but I’ve been wondering why they call their shipmind Hans.”

  “Oh, that was Mark Rohrbeck’s idea; he wanted to name him after some old computer pioneer. The name doesn’t matter, though, does it? I mean, why did you decide to call me Hypatia?”

  “Because Hypatia of Alexandria was a smart, snotty bitch,” I told her. “Like you.”

  “Humph,” she said.

  “As well as being the first great woman scientist,” I added, because Hypatia always likes to talk about herself.

  “The first known one,” she corrected. “Who knows how many there were whose accomplishments didn’t manage to survive? Women didn’t get much of a break in your ancient meat world—or, for that matter, now.”

  “You were supposed to be beautiful, too,” I reminded her. “And you died a virgin anyway.”

  “By choice, Klara. Even that old Hypatia didn’t care much for all that messy meat stuff. And I didn’t just die. I was brutally murdered. It was a cold wet spring in A.D. 450, and a gang of those damn Nitrian monks tore me to shreds because I wasn’t a Christian. Anyway,” she finished, “you’re the one who picked my identity. If you wanted me to be someone else, you could have given me a different one.”

  She had me grinning by then. “I still can,” I reminded her. “Maybe something like Joan of Arc?”

  She shuddered fastidiously at the idea of being a Christian instead of a gods-fearing Roman pagan and changed the subject. “Would you like me to put a call through to Mr. Tartch now?”

  Well, I would and I wouldn’t. I had unfinished business to settle with Bill Tartch, but I wasn’t quite ready to settle it, so I shook my head. “I’ve been wondering about these extinct people we’re trying to resurrect. Have you got any Heechee records of the planet that I haven’t seen yet?”

  “You bet. More than you’ll ever want to watch.”

  “So show me some.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” she said, and disappeared, and all at once I was standing on an outcropping of rock, looking down on a bright, green valley where some funny-looking animals were moving around.

  That was the difference between PhoenixCorp’s major simulations and mine. Mine cost more. Theirs were good enough for working purposes, because they showed you pretty much anything you wanted to see, but mine put you right in the middle of it. Mine were full sensory systems, too, so I could smell and feel as well as I could see and hear. As I stood there, a warm breeze ruffled my hair, and I smelled a distinct reek of smoke. “Hey, Hypatia,” I said, a little surprised. “Have these people discovered fire?”

  “Not to use, no,” she murmured in my ear. “Must’ve been a lightning strike up in the hills from the storm.”

  “What storm?”

  “The one that just passed. Don’t you see everything’s wet?”

  Not on my rock, it wasn’t. The sun overhead was big and bright and very hot. It had already baked the rock dry, but I could see that the jumble of dark green vines at the base of my rock was still dripping, and when I turned around I could see a splotch of burning vegetation on the distant hill.

  The valley was more interesting. Patches of trees, or something like trees; a herd of big, shaggy creatures, Kodiak bear-sized but obviously vegetarians because they were industriously pushing some of the trees over to eat their leaves; a pair of rivers, a narrow, fast-moving one with little waterfalls that came down from the hills to my left and flowed to join a broader, more sluggish one on the right to make a bigger stream; a few other shaggy creatures, these quite a lot bigger still, feeding by themselves on whatever was growing in the plain—well, it was an interesting sight; maybe a little like the great American prairie or the African veldt must have looked before our forebears killed off all the wild meat animals.

  The most interesting part of the simulation was a pack of a dozen or so predators in the middle distance, circling furtively around a group of three or four creatures I couldn’t easily make out. I pointed. “Are those the ones?” I asked Hypatia. And when she said they were, I told her to get me up closer.

  At close range I could see the hunted ones looked something like pigs—that is, if pigs happened to have long, skinny legs and long, squirrelly tails. I noticed a mommy pig baring her teeth and trying to snap at the predators in all directions at once, and three little ones doing their best to huddle under the mother’s belly. It was the predators I was paying attention to. They looked vaguely primate. That is, they had apelike faces and short tails. But they didn’t look like any primate that ever lived on Earth, because they had six limbs: four that they ran on, and two more like arms, and in their sort-of hands they held sharp-edged rocks. As they got into position, they began hurling the rocks at the prey.

  The mother pig didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes, two of her babies were down and she was racing away with that long tail flicking from side to side like a metronome, and the surviving piglet right behind her, its tail-flicks keeping time with its mother’s, and the six-limbed predators had what they had come for.

  It was not a pretty scene.

  I know perfectly well that animals live by eating, and I’m not sentimental about the matter—hell, I eat steak! (Not always out of a food factory, either.) All the same, I didn’t like watching what was happening on this half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive when the wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.

  So I wasn’t a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch hadn’t waited for me to call him and was already on the line.

  Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate area. He likes that kind of sexy talk. I don’t particularly, so I tried to keep the call short. The basic facts he had to convey were that he missed me and that, unspokenly, he looked as good as ever—not very tall, not exactly handsome but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about grin—and that he was just two days out. That’s not a lot of hard data to get out of what was more than a quarter-hour of talk capsuled back and forth over all those light-years, I guess, but t
he rest was private; and when I was finished, it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp people.

  Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used her effectuators to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn’t have a skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold neckband that wouldn’t be flopping around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn’t argue. And while I was getting into them she asked chattily, “So did Mr. Tartch say thank you?”

  I know Hypatia’s tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. “For what?”

  “Why, for keeping his career going,” she said, sounding surprised. “He was pretty much washed up until you came along, wasn’t he? So it’s only appropriate that he should, you know, display his gratitude.”

  “You’re pushing your luck,” I told her as I slipped into a pair of jeweled stockings. Sometimes I think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time it just wasn’t justified. I didn’t have to do favors to get a man. Christ, the problem was to fend them off! It’s just that when it’s over I like to leave them a little better off than I found them; and Bill, true enough, had reached that stage in his career when a little help now and then was useful.

  But I didn’t want to discuss it with her. “Talk about something else or shut up,” I ordered.

  “Sure, hon. Let’s see. How did you like the Crabbers?”

  I told her the truth. “Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy.”

  Hypatia giggled. “Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they’re much worse than your own remote predecessors? Because I don’t think Australopithecus robustus worried too much about whether its dinners were enjoying the meal, either.”

  We were getting into a familiar argument. “That was a long time ago, Hypatia.”

  “So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. Now, if you really want to take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business—”

  “Not yet,” I told her, as I had told her many times before.

  What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat body, with all its aches and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored intelligence. As other people I knew had done. Like Hypatia herself, though in her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of someone who had once been living meat.

  It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn’t getting as much pleasure as I would have liked out of living, but I certainly didn’t want to die. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I would never have to.

  But I wasn’t prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat person could do that a machine person couldn’t—well, one big one—and I wasn’t prepared to abandon the flesh until I had done what the female flesh was best at. For which I needed a man … and I wasn’t at all sure that Bill Tartch was the particular man I needed.

  When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking conspiratorial and expectant. “We’ve got about twenty percent of the optical sheets in place,” Terple informed me, thrilled with excitement. “Would you like like to see?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but commanded: “Hans! Display the planet.”

  The lights went dark, and before us floated a blue-and-white globe the size of my head, looking as though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was out of sight off to my right. There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas, I couldn’t see them. On the planet itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple did something that made the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even more land on the dark side, because spots of light—artificial lights, cities’ lights—blossomed all over parts of the nighttime area.

  “You see, Klara?” she crowed. “Cities! Civilization!”

  CHAPTER IV

  Their shipmind really was a good cook. Fat pink shrimp that tasted as though they’d come out of the sea within the hour, followed by a fritto misto, the same, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert. Everything was all perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly relaxing now that it had turned out we really did have something to observe.

  What there wasn’t any of was wine to go with the meal, just some sort of tropical juices in the winebulbs. June Terple noticed my expression when I tasted it. “We’re not doing anything alcoholic until we’ve completed the obs,” she said, half apologetic, half challenging, “Still, I think Hans can get you something if you really want it.”

  I shook my head politely, but I was wondering if Hypatia had happened to say anything to Hans about my fondness for a drink now and then. Probably she had; shipminds do gossip when they’re as advanced as Hypatia and Hans, and it was evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of the black hole itself, or black holes in general.

  We made a nice, leisurely meal of it. The only interruptions were inconspicuous, as crew members one after another briefly excused themselves to doublecheck how well the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over that five-hundred-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection plates into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was in-jokes, but that wasn’t a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering in my ear.

  When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly—pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren’t homesick at all, the remark was aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: “He’s pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian’s jealous,” Hypatia told me.

  Julia—that was Hoo-lia—Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Incan former schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I’d never been to Machu Picchu. “And you’ve been all over the galaxy? And never took the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?”

  The only subdued one was Mark Rohrbeck. Between the figs and the coffee, he excused himself and didn’t come back for nearly half an hour. “Calling home,” Mason-Manley said wisely, and Hypatia, who was the galaxy’s greatest eavesdropper when I let her be, filled me in. “He’s trying to talk his wife out of the divorce. She isn’t buying it.”

  When the coffee was about half gone, Terple whispered something to the air. Evidently Hans was listening, and in a moment the end of the room went dark. Almost at once the planet appeared for us again, noticeably bigger than it had been before. She whispered again, and the image expanded until it filled the room, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that I was falling into it.

  “We’re getting about two- or three-kilometer resolution now,” Terple announced proudly.

  That didn’t give us much beyond mountains, shorelines, and clouds, and the planet was still half in sun and half dark. (Well, it had to be, didn’t it? The planet was rotating under us, but its relative position to its sun didn’t change.) When I studied it, something looked odd about the land mass at the bottom of the image. I pointed. “Is that ocean, there, down on the left side? I mean the dark part. Because I didn’t see any lights there.”

  “No, it’s land, all right. It’s probably just that that part is too cold to be inhabited. We’re not getting a square look at the planet, you know. We’re about twenty degrees south of its equator, so we’re seeing more of its south pole and nothing north of, let’s say, what would be Scotland or southern Alaska on Earth. Have you seen the globe Hans put together for us? No? Hans, display.”

  Immediately a sphere appeared in the middle of the room, rotating slowly. It would have looked
exactly like the kind my grandfather kept in his living room, latitude and longitude lines and all, except that the land masses were wholly wrong. “This is derived from old Heechee data that Starminder provided for us,” Hans’s voice informed me. “However, we’ve given our own names to the continents. You see the one that’s made up of two fairly circular masses, connected by an isthmus, that looks like a dumbbell? Dr. Terple calls it ‘Dumbbell.’ It’s divided into Dumbbell East and Dumbbell West. Frying Pan is the sort of roundish one with the long, thin peninsula projecting to the southwest. The one just coming into view now is Peanut, because—”

  “I can see why,” I told him. It did look a little like a peanut. Hans was perceptive enough to recognize, probably from the tone of my voice, that I found this geography—planetography?—lesson a little boring. Terple wasn’t. “Go on, Hans,” she said sharply when he hesitated. So he did.

  Out of guest-politeness I sat still while he named every dot on the map for me, but when he came to the end, I did too. “That’s very nice,” I said, unhooking myself from my dining place. “Thanks for the dinner, June, but I think I’d better let you get your work done. Anyway, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next five days.”

  Every face I saw suddenly wore a bland expression, and Terple coughed. “Well, not quite five days,” she said uncomfortably. “I don’t know whether anyone told you this, but we’ll have to leave before the star blows.”

  I stopped cold, one hand stuffing my napkin into its tied-down ring, the other holding on to the wall support. “There wasn’t anything about leaving early in your prospectus. Why wasn’t I told this?”

  “It stands to reason, Klara,” she said doggedly. “As soon as the star begins its collapse, I’m shutting everything down and getting out of here. It’s too dangerous.”

  I don’t like being surprised by the people who work for me. I gave her a look. “How can it be dangerous when we’re six thousand light-years away?”