The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Good.” She smiled in a way that he knew implied a secret was about to emerge. “I really urged you to come here to get you away from Helsinki.”

  “Not to study chimpanzees?”

  “Oh that might be useful—or better still, fun,” she said with wifely nonchalance. “My main consideration was that if you had stayed in Helsinki you might be dead.”

  He stopped looking at the striking scenery. She was serious. “You think they would … ?”

  “They could, which is a better guide to action than trying to guess woulds.”

  “I see.” He didn’t, but he had learned to trust her judgment in matters of the world. “You think Imperial Industrie would … ?”

  “Knock you off for undermining their case? Sure. But they’d be careful.”

  “But the case is over. Settled.”

  He had made a successful sociometric prediction of political and economic trends in central Europe. His reputation was powerful enough to cause a fall in certain product markets. Economics increasingly resembled fashion: Commodities racheted like hemlines.

  Imperial Industrie had lost considerably—a fortune, even for a world-wrapping corporation. They had accused him of manipulating the markets, but he had in all honesty merely tried to test his new model of sociohistory. His reputation among econometric circles was enough to circulate the predictions. Imperial Industrie, he thought, was simply being childish. Reason would prevail there soon enough.

  “You intend to make more predictions, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Well, once I get some better parameter fixes—”

  “There. Then they can lose again. Imperial doesn’t like losing.”

  “You exaggerate.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand.

  Then too, he thought, perhaps he did need a vacation. To be on a rough, natural world—he had forgotten, in the years buried in Helsinki, how vivid wild things could be. Greens and yellows leaped out, after decades amid steel and glitter.

  Here the sky yawned impossibly deep, unmarked by the graffiti of aircraft, wholly alive to the flapping wonder of birds. Bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. Beyond the station walls he could see a sole tree thrashed by an angry wind. Its topknot finally blew off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Distant, eroded mesas had yellow streaks down their shanks which, as they met the forest, turned a burnt orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the valley, where the chimps ranged, lay a dusky canopy hidden behind low gray clouds and raked by winds. A thin, cold rain fell there and Leon wondered what it was like to cower beneath the sheets of moisture, without hope of shelter or warmth. Perhaps Helsinki’s utter predictability was better, but he wondered, breathing in the tangy air.

  He pointed to the distant forest. “We’re going there?” He liked this fresh place, though the jungle was foreboding. It had been a long time since he had even worked with his hands, alongside his father, back on the farm.

  “Don’t start judging.”

  “I’m anticipating.”

  She grinned. “You always have a longer word for it, no matter what I say.”

  “The treks look a little, well—touristy.”

  “Of course. We’re tourists.”

  The land here rose up into peaks as sharp as torn tin. In the thick trees beyond, mist broke on gray, smooth rocks. Even here, high up the slope of an imposing ridge, the Excursion Station was hemmed in by slimy, thick-barked trees standing in deep drifts of dead, dark leaves. With rotting logs half buried in the wet layers, the air swarmed so close it was like breathing damp opium.

  Kelly stood, her drink finished. “Let’s go in, socialize.”

  He followed dutifully and right away knew it was a mistake. Most of the indoor stim-party crowd was dressed in rugged safari-style gear. They were ruddy folk, faces flushed with excitement or perhaps just enhancers. Leon waved away the bubbleglass-bearing waiter; he disliked the way it dulled his wits. Still, he smiled and tried to make small talk.

  This turned out to be not merely small, but microscopic. “Where are you from? Oh, Helsinki—what’s it like? We’re from (fill in the city)—have you ever heard of it?” Of course, he had not.

  Most were Primitivists, drawn by the unique experience available here. It seemed to him that every third word in their conversation was natural or vital, delivered like a mantra.

  “What a relief, to be away from straight lines,” a thin man said.

  “Um, how so?” Leon said, trying to seen interested.

  “Well, of course straight lines don’t exist in nature. They have to be put there by humans.” He sighed. “I love to be free of straightness!”

  Leon instantly thought of pine needles; strata of metamorphic rock; the inside edge of a half-moon; spider-woven silk strands; the line along the top of a breaking ocean wave; crystal patterns; white quartz lines on granite slabs; the far horizon of a vast calm lake; the legs of birds; spikes of cactus; the arrow dive of a raptor; trunks of young, fast-growing trees; wisps of high windblown clouds; ice cracks; the two sides of the V of migrating birds; icicles.

  “Not so,” he said, but no more.

  His habit of laconic implication was trampled in the headlong talk, of course; the enhancers were taking hold. They all chattered on, excited by the prospect of immersing themselves in the lives of the creatures roaming the valleys below. He listened, not commenting, intrigued. Some wanted to share the world view of herd animals, others of hunters, some of birds. They spoke as though they were entering some athletic event, and that was not his view at all. Still, he stayed silent.

  He finally escaped with Kelly into the small park beside the Excursion Station, designed to make guests familiar with local conditions before their treks or immersions. There were whole kraals of domestic stock. The unique assets, the genetically altered and enhanced animals, were nowhere near, of course.

  He stopped and stared at the kraals and thought again about sociohistory. His mind kept diving at it from many angles. He had learned to just stand aside and let his thoughts run.

  Animals. Was there a clue here? Despite millennia of trying, humans had domesticated few animals. To be domesticated, wild beasts had to have an entire suite of traits. Most had to be herd animals, with instinctive submission patterns which humans could co-opt. They had to be placid; herds that bolt at a strange sound and can’t tolerate intruders are hard to keep. Finally, they had to be willing to breed in captivity. Most humans didn’t want to court and copulate under the watchful gaze of others, and neither did most animals.

  So here there were sheep and goats and cows, slightly adapted by biotechnology but otherwise unremarkable. Expect for the chimps. They were unique artifacts of this preservation deep in the rugged laboratory of central Africa. A wirehound came sniffing, checking them out, muttering an unintelligible apology. “Interesting,” he remarked to Kelly, “that Primitivists still want to be protected from the wild, by the domesticated.”

  “Well, of course. This fellow is big.”

  “Not sentimental about the natural state? We were once just another type of large mammal.”

  “The natural state might be a pleasant place to visit, but …”

  “Right, wouldn’t want to live there. Still, I want to try the chimps.”

  “What? An immersion?” Her eyebrows lifted in mild alarm.

  “As long as we’re here, why not?”

  “I don’t … well, I’ll think about it.”

  “You can bail out at any time, they say.”

  She nodded, pursed her lips. “Um.”

  “We’ll feel at home—the way chimps do.”

  “You believe everything you read in a brochure?”

  “I did some research. It’s a well-developed tech.”

  Her lips had a skeptical tilt. “Um.”

  He knew by now better than to press her. Let time do his work.

  The canine, quite large and alert
, snuffled at his hand and slurred, “Goood naaaght, suuur.” He stroked it. In its eyes he saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality.

  Significant evidence, he thought. We have a deep past together. Perhaps that was why he wanted to immerse in a chimp. To go far back, peering beyond the vexing state of being human.

  “We’re certainly closely related, yes,” Expert Specialist Ruben said. He was a big man, tanned and muscular and casually confident. He was both a safari guide and immersion specialist, with a biology background. He did research using immersion techniques, but keeping the Station going soaked up most of his time, he said. “Chimp-riding is the best immersion available.”

  Leon looked skeptical. Pan troglodytes had hands with thumbs, the same number of teeth as humans, no tails, but he had never felt great empathy for them, seen behind bars in a zoo.

  Ruben waved a big hand at the landscape below the Station. “We hope to make them more useful. We haven’t tried training them much, beyond research purposes. Remember, they’re supposed to be kept wild. The original UN grant stipulated that.”

  “Tell me about your research,” Leon said. In his experience, no scientist ever passed up a chance to sing his own song. He was right.

  They had taken human DNA and chimp DNA—Ruben said, waxing enthusiastically on—then unzipped the double-helix strands in both. Linking one human strand with a chimp strand made a hybrid.

  Where the strands complemented, the two then tightly bound in a partial, new double helix. Where they differed, bonding between the strands was weak, intermittent, with whole sections flapping free.

  Then they spun the watery solutions in a centrifuge, so the weak sections ripped apart. Closely linked DNA was 98.2 percent of the total. Chimps were startlingly like humans. Less than 2 percent different—yet they lived in forests and invented nothing.

  The typical difference between individual people’s DNA was a tenth of a percentage point, Ruben said. Roughly, then, chimps were twenty times more different from humans than particular people differed among themselves—genetically. But genes were like levers, supporting vast weights by pivoting about a small fulcrum.

  “But we don’t come from them. We parted company, genetically, six million years ago.”

  “Do they think like us?” Leon asked.

  “Best way to tell is an immersion,” Ruben said. “Very best way.”

  He smiled invitingly, and Leon wondered if Ruben got a commission on immersions. His sales pitch was subtle, shaped for an academic’s interest—but still a sales pitch.

  Ruben had already made the vast stores of data on chimp movements, population dynamics, and behaviors available to Leon. It was a rich source and with some math modeling might be fertile ground for a simple description, using a truncated version of sociohistory.

  “Describing the life history of a species mathematically is one thing,” Kelly said. “But living in it …”

  “Come now,” Leon said. Even though he knew the entire Excursion Station was geared to sell the guests safaris and immersions, he was intrigued. “‘I need a change,’ you said. ‘Get out of stuffy old Helsinki,’ you said.”

  Ruben said warmly, “It’s completely safe.”

  Kelly smiled at Leon tolerantly. “Oh, all right.”

  He spent morning studying the chimp data banks. The mathematician in him pondered how to represent their dynamics with a trimmed-down sociohistory. The marble of fate rattling down a cracked slope. So many paths, variable … .

  In the afternoons they took several treks. Kelly did not like the dust and heat and they saw few animals. “What self-respecting beast would want to be seen with these overdressed Primitivists?” she said. The others could never stop talking; that kept the animals away.

  He liked the atmosphere and relaxed into it as his mind kept on working. He thought about this as he stood on the sweeping veranda, drinking pungent fruit juice as he watched a sunset. Kelly stood beside him silently. Raw Africa made it clear that the Earth was an energy funnel, he thought. At the bottom of the gravitational well, Earth captured for use barely a tenth of a percent of the sunlight that fell. Nature built organic molecules with a star’s energy. In turn, plants were prey for animals, who could harvest roughly a tenth of the plant’s stored energy. Grazers were themselves prey to meat-eaters, who could use about a tenth of the flesh-stored energy. So, he estimated, only about one part in a hundred thousand of a star’s lancing energy wound up in the predators.

  Wasteful! Yet nowhere had a more efficient engine evolved. Why not? Predators were invariably more intelligent than their prey, and they sat atop a pyramid of very steep slopes. Omnivores had a similar balancing act. Out of that rugged landscape had come humanity.

  That fact had to matter greatly in any sociohistory. The chimps, then, were essential to finding the ancient keys to the human psyche.

  Kelly said, “I hope immersion isn’t, well, so hot and sticky.”

  “Remember, you’ll see the world through different eyes.”

  She snorted. “Just so I can come back whenever I want and have a nice hot bath.”

  “Compartments?” Kelly shied back. “They look more like caskets.”

  “They have to be snug, Madam.”

  ExSpec Ruben smiled amiably—which, Leon sensed, probably meant he wasn’t feeling amiable at all. Their conversation had been friendly, the staff here was respectful of the noted Dr. Mattick, but, after all, basically he and Kelly were just more tourists. Paying for a bit of primitive fun, all couched in proper scholarly terms, but—tourists.

  “You’re kept in fixed status, all body systems running slow but normal,” the ExSpec said, popping out the padded networks for inspection. He ran through the controls, emergency procedures, safeguards.

  “Looks comfortable enough,” Kelly observed begrudgingly.

  “Come on,” Leon chided. “You promised we would do it.”

  “You’ll be meshed into our systems at all times,” Ruben said.

  “Even your data library?” Leon asked.

  “Sure thing.”

  The team of ExSpecs booted them into the stasis compartments with deft, sure efficiency. Tabs, pressors, magnetic pickups plated onto his skull to pick up thoughts directly. The very latest tech.

  “Ready? Feeling good?” Ruben asked with his professional smile.

  Leon was not feeling good (as opposed to feeling well) and he realized part of it was this ExSpec. He had always distrusted bland, assured people. Something about this one bothered him, but he could not say why. Oh well; Kelly was probably right. He needed a vacation. What better way to get out of yourself?

  “Good, yes. Ready, yes.”

  The suspension tech suppressed neuromuscular responses. The customer lay dormant, only his mind engaged with the chimp.

  Magnetic webs capped over his cerebrum. Through electromagnetic inductance they interwove into layers of the brain. They routed signals along tiny thread-paths, suppressing many brain functions and blocking physiological processes. All this, so that the massively parallel circuitry of the brain could be inductively linked out, thought by thought. Then it was transmitted to chips embedded in the chimp subject. Immersion.

  The technology had ramified throughout the world, quite famously. The ability to distantly manage minds had myriad uses. The suspension tech, however, found its own odd applications.

  In certain European classes, women were wedded, then suspended for all but a few hours of the day. Their wealthy husbands awoke them from freeze-frame states only for social and sexual purposes. For more than a half century, the wives experienced a heady whirlwind of places, friends, parties, vacations, passionate hours—but their total accumulated time was only a few years. Their husbands died in what seemed to the wives like short order indeed. They left a wealthy widow of perhaps thirty. Such women were highly sought, and not only for their money. They were uniquely sophisticated, seasoned
by a long “marriage.” Often, these widows returned the favor, wedding freeze-frame husbands whom they revived for similar uses.

  All this Leon had taken with the sophisticated veneer he had cultivated in Helsinki. So he thought his immersion would be comfortable, interesting, the stuff of stim-party talk.

  He had thought that he would in some sense visit another, simpler, mind.

  He did not expect to be swallowed whole.

  A good day. Plenty of grubs to eat in a big moist log. Dig them out with my nails, fresh tangy sharp crunchy.

  Biggest, he shoves me aside. Scoops out plenty rich grubs. Grunts. Glowers.

  My belly rumbles. I back off and eye Biggest. He’s got pinched-up face, so I know not to fool with him.

  I walk away, I squat down. Get some picking from a fem. She find some fleas, cracks them in her teeth.

  Biggest rolls the log around some to knock a few grubs loose, finishes up. He’s strong. Fems watch him. Over by the trees a bunch of fems chatter, such their teeth. Everybody’s sleepy now in early afternoon, lying in the shade. Biggest, though, he waves at me and Hunker and off we go.

  Patrol. Strut tall, step out proud. I like it fine. Better than humping even.

  Down past the creek and along to where the hoof smells are. That’s the shallow spot. We cross and go into the trees sniff-sniffing and there are two Strangers.

  They don’t see us yet. We move smooth, quiet. Biggest picks up a branch and we do too. Hunker is sniffing to see who these Strangers are and he points off to the hill. Just like I thought, they’re Hillies. The worst. Smell bad.

  Hillies come onto our turf. Make trouble. We make it back.

  We spread out. Biggest, he grunts and they hear him. I’m already moving, branch held up. I can run pretty far without going all-four. The Strangers cry out, big eyed. We go fast and then we’re on them.

  They have no branches. We hit them and kick and they grab at us. They are tall and quick. Biggest slams one to the ground. I hit that one so Biggest knows real well I’m with him. Hammer hard, I do. Then I go quick to help Hunker.