The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “You could do that, yes,” she said diplomatically. Then, because she was Hypatia, she added, “Let’s see, the last time you were there, you stayed exactly eleven days, wasn’t it? About six months ago?”

  She had made me feel defensive—again. I said. “I had things to do.”

  “Of course you did. Then the time before that wasn’t quite that long, was it? Just six days—and that was over a year ago.”

  “You’ve made your point, Hypatia. Talk about something else.”

  “Sure thing, boss.” So she did. Mostly what she chose to talk about was what my various holdings had been doing in the few hours since I’d checked them last. I wasn’t listening. After a few minutes of it, I swallowed the tea she’d made for me and stood up. “I’m going to soak in the tub for a while.”

  “I’ll run it for you, hon. Hon? They’ve got some new pictures from the Crabber planet if you want to see them while you soak.”

  “Why not?” And by the time I’d shucked my clothes the big onyx tub was full, the temperature perfect as always, and one corner of the bathroom was concealed by one of Hypatia’s simulations.

  The new display was almost filled by what looked like hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny buildings. We were looking down at them from something like a forty-five-degree angle, and I couldn’t make out many details. Their sun must have been nearly overhead, because there weren’t many shadows to bring out details.

  “This is the biggest city they’ve found yet,” Hypatia informed me. “It’s inland on the western part of the squarish continent in the southern hemisphere, where two big rivers come together. If you look close, you’ll see there’s a suggestion of things moving in the streets, but we can’t make out just what yet. However—”

  I stopped her. “Skip the commentary,” I ordered. “Just keep showing me the pictures. If I have any questions, I’ll ask.”

  “If that’s what you want, hon.” She sounded aggrieved. Hypatia doesn’t like to be told to shut up, but she did.

  The pictures kept coming, one city after another, now a bay with what looked like surface ships of some kind moored in it, now some more blimps sailing peacefully along, now what might have been a wide-gauge railroad with a train steaming over a bridge. I couldn’t really see the tracks, only the bridge and a hazy line that stretched before and after it across the countryside. What I could see best was the locomotive, and most of all the long white trail of steam from its stack.

  I watched for a while, then waved the display off. I closed my eyes and lay back to let the sweet-smelling foamy waters make me feel whole and content again. As I had done many thousands of times, sometimes with success.

  This was one of the successes. The hot tub did its work. I felt myself drifting off to a relaxed and welcome sleep … .

  And then, suddenly, a vagrant thought crossed my mind, and I wasn’t relaxed anymore.

  I got out of the tub and climbed into the shower stall, turning it on full; I let cold water hammer at me for a while, then changed it to hot. When I got out, I pulled on a robe.

  As I was drying my hair, the door opened and Hypatia appeared, looking at me with concern. “I’m afraid what I told you about Tartch upset you, hon,” she said, oozing with compassion. “You don’t really care what he does, though, do you?”

  I said, “Of course not,” wondering if it were true.

  “That’s my girl,” she said approvingly. “There are some new scenes, too.”

  They appeared; she didn’t wait to see if I wanted them on. I watched the changing scenes for a while, then decided I didn’t. I turned to Hypatia. “Turn it off,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

  She didn’t move, but the scene disappeared. “What’s that, Klara?”

  “While I was dozing in the tub, I thought for a moment I might fall asleep, and slip down into the water and drown. Then I thought you surely wouldn’t let that happen, because you’d be watching, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m always aware of any problems that confront you, Klara.”

  “And then it occurred to me that you might be tempted to let me go ahead and drown, just so you could get me into that machine storage you’re always trying to sell me. So I got out of the tub and into the shower.”

  I pulled my hair back and fastened it with a barrette, watching her. She didn’t speak, just stood there with her usual benign and thoughtful expression. “So, would you?” I demanded.

  She looked surprised. “You mean would I deliberately let you drown? Oh, I don’t think I could do that, Klara. As a general rule I’m not programmed to go against your wishes, not even if it were for your own good. That would be for your good, you know. Machine storage would mean eternal life for you, Klara, or as close as makes no difference. And no more of the sordid little concerns of the meat that cause you so much distress.”

  I turned my back on her and went into my bedroom to dress. She followed, in her excellent simulation of walking. What I wanted to know was how general her general rule was, and what she would have deemed a permissible exception. But as I opened my mouth to ask her, she spoke up.

  “Oh, Klara,” she said. “They’ve found something of interest. Let me show you.” She didn’t wait for a response; at once the end of the room lit up.

  We were looking again at that first little fleet of blimps. They were nearly at the coast, but they weren’t in their tidy V formation anymore. They were scattered over the sky, and two of them were falling to the sea, blazing with great gouts of flame. Small things I couldn’t quite make out were buzzing around and between them.

  “My God,” I said. “Something’s shooting them down!”

  Hypatia nodded. “So it would appear, Klara. It looks as though the Crabbers’ blimps are filled with hydrogen, to burn the way they do. That suggests a rather low level of technological achievement, but give them credit. They aren’t primitives, anyway. They’re definitely civilized enough to be having themselves a pretty violent little war.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  There wasn’t any doubt about it. The Crabbers were industriously killing each other in a kind of aerial combat that was right out of the old stories of World War I. I couldn’t see much of the planes that were shooting the blimps down, but they were really there, and what was going on was a real old-fashioned dogfight.

  I don’t know what I had hoped to see when we brought the long-dead Crabbers back to some kind of life. But that definitely wasn’t it. When the scenes changed—Hans had been assiduous in zooming down to wherever on the planet’s surface things were going on—it didn’t improve. It got worse. I saw a harbor crammed with surface vessels, where a great river joined the sea; but some of the ships were on fire, and others appeared to be sinking. “Submarines did that, I think,” Hypatia judged. “Or it could possibly be from bombing planes or mines, but my money’s on submarines.” Those strange patterns of heat in the cities weren’t a mystery any longer—the cities had been burned to the ground by incendiaries, leaving only glowing coals. Then, when we were looking down, on a plain where flashes of white and reddish light sparkled all over the area, we couldn’t see what was making them, but Hypatia had a guess for that, too. “Why,” she said, sounding interested, “I do believe we’re looking at a large-scale tank battle.”

  And so on, and on.

  So Hans’s promise had been kept. As soon as the magnification got a little better, it all did begin to make sense, just as the shipmind had promised. (I mean, if war makes any sense in the first place, that’s the sense the pictures made.) The robots on the dish were still slaving away at adding the final mirror segments, and the pictures kept getting better and better.

  Well, I don’t know if I mean “better,” exactly. The pictures were certainly clearer and more detailed, in some cases I would have to say even more excruciatingly detailed. But what they all showed was rack and ruin and death and destruction.

  And their war was so pointless! They didn’t have to bother killing each other. Their star would do it
for them soon enough. All unknowing, every one of those Crabbers was racing toward a frightful death as their sun burst over them.

  An hour earlier I had been pitying them for the fate that awaited them. But now I couldn’t say I thought their fate was all that unjust.

  Hypatia was looking at me in that motherly way she sometimes assumes. “I’m afraid all this is disturbing for you, Klara,” she murmured. “Would it cheer you up to invite. Mr. Tartch aboard? He’s calling. He says he wants to talk to you about the new pictures.”

  “Sure he does,” I said, pretty sure that Bill really wanted to talk about why he didn’t deserve being treated so standoffishly by me. “No. Tell him I’m asleep and don’t want to be disturbed. And leave me alone for a while.”

  As soon as she had left and the door had closed behind her, I actually did throw myself onto my big, round bed. I didn’t sleep, though. I just lay there, staring at myself in the mirror on the ceiling and doing my best not to think about anything.

  Unfortunately, that’s not something I’m good at. I could get myself to not think about those damn nasty Crabbers, but then I found my mind quickly turned itself to thinking whether it was better to let Bill Tartch hang or tell him to come in and then have a knock-down, drag-out, breaking-up fight with him to get it all over with. And when I made myself stop thinking about Bill Tartch, I found myself wondering why I’d squandered a fairly hefty chunk of my surplus cash on poking into the lives of a race that didn’t know any better than to take a reasonably nice little planet and turn it into a charnel house.

  I thought of calling Hypatia back in for another dull session of playing with my investments. I thought wistfully of taking another look at my island. And then I thought, screw it. I got myself into this thing. I might as well go ahead and see it through … .

  But a more pleasant thought had been stirring in the background of my mind, so first there was something else I wanted from Hypatia.

  I put on the rest of my clothes and went out to where she was reclining gracefully on the couch, just as though she’d been lounging there all along. I’m sure she had been watching those charnel-house scenes as attentively as anyone on the Phoenix ship—the difference being, of course, that Hypatia didn’t have to bother with turning the optical display on for her own needs. But I needed it, so she asked politely, “Shall I display the data for you again, Klara?”

  “In a minute,” I said. “First, tell me all about Mark Rohrbeck.”

  I expected one of those tolerantly knowing looks from her. I got it, too. But she obediently began to recite all his stats. Mark’s parents had died when he was young, and he had been brought up by his grandfather, who had once made his living as a fisherman on Lake Superior. “Mostly the old man fished for sea lampreys—know what they are, Klara? They’re ugly things. They have big sucking disks instead of jaws. They attach themselves to other fish and suck their guts out until they die. I don’t think you’d want to eat a sea lamprey yourself, but they were about all that was left in the lake. Mr. Rohrbeck sold them for export to Europe—people there thought they were a delicacy. They said they tasted like escargot. Then, of course, the food factories came along and put him out of business—”

  “Get back to Mark Rohrbeck,” I ordered. “I want to hear about the man himself. Briefly.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Well, he got a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, did well, went on to grad school at MIT, made a pretty fair reputation in computer science, married, had two kids, but then his wife decided there was a dentist she liked better than Rohrbeck, so she dumped him. And as I’ve mentioned before,” she said appreciatively, “he does have really great genes. Does that cover it?”

  I mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Just about. Don’t go drawing any conclusions from this, do you hear?”

  “Certainly, Klara,” she said, but she still had that look.

  I sighed. “All right. Now turn that damn thing back on.”

  “Of course, Klara,” she said, unsurprised, and did. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been getting any better.”

  It hadn’t. It was just more of the same. I watched doggedly for a while, and then I said, “All right, Hypatia. I’ve seen enough.”

  She made it disappear, looking at me curiously. “There’ll be better images when they finish with the mirror. By then we should be able to see actual individual Crabbers.”

  “Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, and then I burst out. “My God, what’s the matter with those people? There’s plenty of room on the planet for all of them. Why didn’t they just stay home and live in peace?”

  It wasn’t meant to be a real question, but Hypatia answered it for me anyway. “What do you expect? They’re meat people,” she said succinctly.

  I wasn’t letting her get away with that. “Come on, Hypatia! Human beings are meat people, too, and we don’t go tearing halfway around the world just to kill each other!”

  “Oh, do you not? What a short memory you have, Klara dear. Think of those twentieth-century world wars. Think of the Crusades, tens of thousands of Europeans dragging themselves all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to kill as many Moslems as they could. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, murdering their way across the Americas. Of course,” she added, “those people were all Christians.”

  I blinked at her. “You think what we’re looking at is a religious war?”

  She shrugged gracefully. “Who knows? Meat people don’t need reasons to kill each other, dear.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Hypatia had been right about what gravitational lensing plus that big mirror could do.

  By the time the mirror was complete, we could make out plenty of detail. We were even able to see individual centaur-like Crabbers—the same build, four legs and upright torso, that they’d inherited from the primitives I’d seen, but no longer very primitive at all.

  Well, what I mean is that sometimes we could see them, anyway. Not always. The conditions had to be right. We couldn’t see them when it was night on their part of the planet, of course, except in those ghosty-looking IR views, and we couldn’t see them at all when they were blanketed with clouds we couldn’t peer through. But we could see enough. More than enough, as far as I was concerned.

  The PhoenixCorp crew was going crazy trying to keep up with the incoming data. Bill seemed to have decided to be patient with my unpredictable moods, so he paid me only absentminded attention. He kept busy working. He and Denys were ecstatically interrupting everyone in their jobs so that he could record their spot reactions, while the crew did their best to get on with their jobs anyway. June Terple stopped sleeping entirely, torn between watching the new images as they arrived and nagging her shipmind to make sure we would have warning in time to get the hell out of there before the star blew.

  Only Mark Rohrbeck seemed to have time on his hands. Which was just the way I wanted it.

  I found him in the otherwise empty sleep chamber, where Hans had obligingly set up a duplicate show of the incoming scenes for him. Mark’s main area of concern was the shipmind and the functions it controlled, but all those things were working smoothly without his attention. He was spending his time gazing morosely in the general direction of the pictures.

  I hooked myself up nearby. “Nasty, isn’t it?” I said sociably, to cheer him up.

  He didn’t want to be cheered. “You mean the Crabbers?” Although his eyes had been on the display, his mind evidently hadn’t. He thought it over for a moment, then gave his verdict. “Oh, I guess it’s nasty enough, all right. It isn’t exactly what we were all hoping for, that’s for sure. But it all happened a long time ago, though, didn’t it?”

  “And you’ve got more immediate problems on your mind,” I offered helpfully.

  He gave me a gloomy imitation of a smile. “I see the shipminds have been gossiping again. Well, it isn’t losing Doris that bothers me so much,” he said after a moment. “I mean, that hurt, too. I thought I loved her, but—Well, it didn’t work out, did it? No
w she’s got this other guy, so what the hell? But”—he swallowed unhappily—“the thing is, she’s keeping the kids.”

  He was not only a nice man, he was beginning to touch my heart. I said, sounding sympathetic and suddenly feeling that way, too, “And you miss them?”

  “Hell! I’ve been missing them most of the time since they were born,” he said self-accusingly. “I guess that’s what went wrong. I’ve been away working so much, I suppose I can’t blame Doris for getting her lovemaking from somebody else.”

  That triggered something in me that I hadn’t known was there. “No!” I said, surprising myself by my tone. “That’s wrong. Blame her.”

  I startled Rohrbeck, too. He looked at me as though I had suddenly sprouted horns, but he didn’t get a chance to speak. June Terple came flying by the room and saw us. She stuck her nose in, grabbing a hold-on to yell at Mark in passing. “Rohrbeck! Get your ass in gear! I want you to make sure Hans is shifting focus as fast as possible. We could be losing all kinds of data!” And then she was gone again, to wherever she was gone to.

  Mark gave me a peculiar look, but then he shrugged and waved his hands to show that when the boss gave orders, even orders to do what he had already done, he couldn’t just stay and talk anymore, and then he was gone as well.

  I didn’t blame him for the peculiar look. I hadn’t realized I was so sensitive in the matter of two-timing partners. But apparently I was.

  Even though I was the boss, I had no business keeping the PhoenixCorp people from doing their jobs. Anyway, there was more bustle and confusion going on there than I liked. I went back to my ship to stay out of everybody’s way, watching the pictures as they arrived with only Hypatia for company.

  She started the projections up as soon as I arrived, without being asked, and I sat down to observe.