Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  In Heads, the opening sentences define the conflict and theme: “Order and cold, heat and politics. The imposition of wrong order: anger, death, suicide and destruction.” Politics is a kind of ordering, with the laws of human behavior and interaction giving shape to the social body much as chemical bonds, hormones, and enzymes give shape to the individual. Wrong order—the rule of the incompetent or the corrupt—is a constant danger, akin to cancer or disease. But unlike the individual body, society is made what it is by decisions both instinctive and conscious. Will and resolve and training are important aspects; the people in power must be vigilant, educated, and resourceful. The people who are governed must also be informed and responsible, especially in a democracy. The failure to take these responsibilities seriously inevitably leads to calamity.

  Mickey Sandoval, the narrator of Heads, is a leader-in-training. His instincts are good; he passionately believes that politics is a necessity, when his lunar society—made up of rugged individualists, descendants of settlers and miners—tends to discredit all politics. Such disdain is a reflection of opinions generally held in the United States, where a substantial portion of the population never votes, and believes in letting somebody else take the blame for everything.

  But what immediately brought these facts home to me—and probably led to this story being written—was seven years of service to the Science Fiction Writers of America. I served on the grievance committee, edited a publication, acted as vice president and finally as president; and there are few individualists more rugged and contentious, or more suspicious of politics and politicians, than writers.

  The level of political naiveté in the SFWA—my own as well as others’—was astonishing. Constantly heart-rending were the letters which arrived from member writers, claiming, in paraphrase, “I can’t serve as an officer, or in any other capacity, because I am unqualified by reason of my philosophical opposition to governments and politics—but here’s what I think you should do …” When important votes came up (or, at least, votes which I thought were important), much less than half of the active membership voted.

  Tossed through the muse’s meat-grinder, the emotions and frustrations aroused by this service emerged as Heads.

  The other aspects of Heads—the echoing themes of science, nature, and human nature so important in science fiction—came from reading science magazines. An article on the search for absolute zero in The Sciences—unfortunately, the issue is not immediately at hand, nor the author’s name—kicked off idea and plot. Reading the entry for Principles of Thermodynamics in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1986) provided the wonderfully evocative picture of ancient Egypt and ice trays. Ice, freezing, the ideas of order and disorder, information and nonsense … What if?

  I’ve also expelled a hairball associated with young religious groups, one of which—undecided as to whether it is a science or a religion—has tried to have an impact on science fiction, in the name of its founder. This group represents just the sort of “wrong order” which must not gain power. Complacency and over-tolerant­ pluralism—which not just tolerates, but tacitly condones—could lead to political disaster. We’ve seen it happen before, and the beginnings are often deceptively benign.

  As Deep Throat is alleged to have said, Follow the money . . .

  None of this was on my mind when Deborah Beale of Legend proposed I should write a novella for their line. But what irks me for a long enough time will inevitably emerge.

  Often, the origins seem remote from the final product, as wine is remote from microbes and grape juice. Less remote, I think, in Heads.

  Simply put twelve hundred science fiction and fantasy writers on the Moon, expand them two or three thousandfold, and stir …

  The Wind from a Burning Woman

  This story is the first in my longest and most successful sequence of stories and novels—the Thistledown series. The asteroid starships described here will later form the setting for Eon, Eternity, and portions of Legacy, as well as the novella “The Way of All Ghosts.”

  “Wind” was written in Long Beach and first published in Analog. It was bought by Ben Bova, who gave it a fine cover and interior illustrations by Mike Hinge. It would become the title story for my first collection from Arkham House, and thereby hangs another tale.

  Jim Turner, at that time the editor of Arkham House, the most venerable small press publisher in SF and fantasy, was one of the most important people in my career. In 1980, he wrote a letter asking if I had a short story collection in the works. Jim had this silly notion that he wanted to publish SF writers, and not just modern horror. (Some horror writers regarded this as a gross betrayal of Arkham House’s roots as the publisher of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. But in fact August Derleth, co-founder of the small press, had published science fiction long before—notably, A.E. Van Vogt’s SLAN.)

  I was not just an avid fan of Lovecraft et. al, I was a collector of Arkham House books, and I was thrilled when Jim approached me about a collection of short fiction—thrilled and amazed, as I was still pretty much an unknown. We assembled a tentative collection, but he wanted to top it off with something phenomenal—a story better than anything I had ever done before. I obliged with “Hardfought,” which left him nonplussed for a couple of months—until he decided it met his requirements. The collection was finally published in 1983, and sold out its first printing faster than any previous book in Arkham House’s history.

  The irony of course was that Jim had approached a virtual unknown rather than the obvious up-and-comers and the established giants of the field. A then-famous agent asked him, point-blank, “Why Greg Bear? Who’s he? Why not so-and-so or so-and-so?”

  Jim just grinned—and passed the comment on to me, just to keep me in my place.

  He continued to do that, surprising people and grinning at their reactions, publishing collections from promising new SF writers as well as neglected established writers, along with the core program at Arkham House of keeping Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith in print.

  Jim was a visionary in a very restricted pond, and what he did must have rankled many, but he was right. He pulled Arkham House up in the seventies and eighties from a publisher of old classics and collectibles to one of the major forces in small-press publishing, doing, in his own way, just what Derleth had done in the thirties and forties.

  I had read a poem by Michael Bishop that contains the line, “The wind from a burning woman is always a Chinook.” I knew instantly I had the title for the following story, so I asked permission from Michael to use part of the line, which he very kindly gave me. Later, in his scrupulous attention to details and permissions, Jim Turner wrote to Michael. They struck up a friendship, and Jim bought two collections and a novel from Michael.

  Jim Turner was a remarkable man, a conscientious editor, a fine raconteur, prickly and contentious on the surface and loving underneath. I will miss him.

  Five years later the glass bubbles were intact, the wires and pipes were taut, and the city—strung across Psyche’s surface like a dewy spider’s web wrapped around a thrown rock—was still breathtaking. It was also empty. Hexamon investigators had swept out the final dried husks and bones. The asteroid was clean again. The plague was over.

  Giani Turco turned her eyes away from the port and looked at the displays. Satisfied by the approach, she ordered a meal and put her work schedule through the processor for tightening and trimming. She had six tanks of air, enough to last her three days. There was no time to spare. The robot guards in orbit around Psyche hadn’t been operating for at least a year and wouldn’t offer any resistance, but four small pursuit bugs had been planted in the bubbles. They turned themselves off whenever possible, but her presence would activate them. Time spent in avoiding and finally destroying them: one hour forty minutes, the processor said. The final schedule was projected in front of her by a pen hooked around her ear. She happened to be staring at Psyche when the readout began; the effect—red numerals and letters
over gray rock and black space—was pleasingly graphic, like a film in training.

  Turco had dropped out of training six weeks early. She had no need for a final certificate, approval from the Hexamon, or any other nicety. Her craft was stolen from Earth orbit, her papers and cards forged, and her intentions entirely opposed to those of the sixteen corporeal desks. On Earth, some hours hence, she would be hated and reviled.

  The impulse to sneer was strong—pure theatrics, since she was alone—but she didn’t allow it to break her concentration. (Worse than sheep, the cowardly citizens who tacitly supported the forces that had driven her father to suicide and murdered her grandfather; the seekers-after-security who lived by technology but believed in the just influences: Star, Logos, Fate, and Pneuma…)

  To calm her nerves, she sang a short song while she selected her landing site.

  The ship, a small orbital tug, touched the asteroid like a mote settling on a boulder and made itself fast. She stuck her arms and legs into the suit receptacles, and the limb covers automatically hooked themselves to the thorax. The cabin was too cramped to get into a suit any other way. She reached up and brought down the helmet, pushed until all the semifluid seals seized and beeped, and began the evacuation of the cabin’s atmosphere. Then the cabin parted down the middle, and she floated slowly, fell more slowly still, to Psyche’s surface.

  She turned once to watch the cabin clamp together and to see if the propulsion rods behind the tanks had been damaged by the unusually long journey. They’d held up well.

  She took hold of a guide wire after a flight of twenty or twenty five meters and pulled for the nearest glass bubble. Five years before, the milky spheres had been filled with the families of workers setting the charges that would form Psyche’s seven internal chambers. Holes had been bored from the Vlasseg and Janacki poles, on the narrow ends of the huge rock, through the center. After the formation of the chambers, materials necessary for atmosphere would have been pumped into Psyche through the bore holes while motors increased her natural spin to create artificial gravity inside.

  In twenty years, Psyche’s seven chambers would have been green and beautiful, filled with hope—and passengers. But now the control bubble hatches had been sealed by the last of the investigators. Since Psyche was not easily accessible, even in its lunar orbit, the seals hadn’t been applied carefully. Nevertheless it took her an hour to break in. The glass ball towered above her, a hundred feet in diameter, translucent walls mottled by the shadows of rooms and equipment.

  Psyche rotated once every three hours, and light from the sun was beginning to flush the tops of the bubbles in the local cluster. Moonlight illuminated the shadows. She pulled away the rubbery cement seals and watched them float lazily to the pocked ground. Then she examined the airlock to see if it was still functioning. She wanted to keep atmosphere inside the bubble, to check it for psychotropic chemicals; she would not leave her suit at any rate.

  The locked door opened with a few jerks and closed behind her. She brushed crystals of frost off her faceplate and the port of the inner lock door. Then she pushed the button for the inner door. Nothing happened. The external doors were on a separate power supply, which was no longer working or, she hoped, had only been switched off. From her backpack she removed a half-meter pry bar. The break-in took fifteen minutes.

  She was five minutes ahead of schedule.

  Across the valley, the fusion power plants that supplied power to the Geshel populations of Tijuana and Chula Vista sat like squat mountains of concrete. By Naderite law, all nuclear facilities were enclosed by multiple domes and pyramids, whether they posed any danger or not. The symbolism was two-fold—it showed the distaste of the ruling Naderites for energy sources that were not nature-kinetic, and it carried on the separation of Naderites-Geshels.

  Farmer Kollert, advisor to the North American Hexamon and ecumentalist to the California corporeal desk, watched the sun set behind the false peak and wondered vaguely if there was symbolism in the scene. Was not fusion the source of power for the sun? He smiled. Such things seldom occurred to him; perhaps it would amuse a Geshel technician.

  His team of five Geshel scientists would tour the plants two days from now and make their report to him. He would then pass on his report to the desk, acting as interface for the invariably clumsy, elitist language the Geshel scientists used. In this way, through the medium of advisors across the globe, the Naderites oversaw the production of Geshel power. By their grants and control of capital, his people had once plucked the world from technological overkill, and the battle was ongoing still—a war against some of mankind’s darker tendencies.

  He finished his evening juice and took a package of writing utensils from the drawer in the veranda desk. The reports from last month’s balancing of energy consumption needed to be revised, based on new estimates—and he enjoyed doing the work himself rather than giving it to the persona in the library computer. It relaxed him to do things by hand. He wrote on a positive feedback slate, his scrawly letters adjusting automatically into script, with his tongue between his lips and a pleased frown creasing his brow.

  “Excuse me, Farmer.” His ur-wife, Gestina, stood by the French doors leading to the veranda. She was as slender as when he had married her, despite fifteen years and two children.

  “Yes, cara, what is it?” He withdrew his tongue and told the slate to store what he’d written.

  “Josef Krupkin.”

  Kollert stood up quickly, knocking the metal chair over. He hurried past his wife into the dining room, dropped his bulk into a chair, and drew up the crystalline cube on the alabaster tabletop. The cube adjusted its picture to meet the angle of his eyes and Krupkin appeared.

  “Josef! This is unexpected.”

  “Very,” Krupkin said. He was a small man with narrow eyes and curly black hair. Compared to Kollert’s bulk, he was dapper—but thirty years behind a desk had given him the usual physique of a Hexamon backroomer. “Have you ever heard of Giani Turco?”

  Kollert thought for a moment. “No, I haven’t. Wait—Turco. Related to Kimon Turco?”

  “Daughter. California should keep better track of its radical Geshels, shouldn’t it?”

  “Kimon Turco lived on the Moon.”

  “His daughter lived in your district.”

  “Yes, fine. What about her?” Kollert was beginning to be perturbed. Krupkin enjoyed roundabouts even in important situations and to call him at this address, at such a time, something important had happened.

  “She’s calling for you. She’ll only talk to you, none of the rest. She won’t even accept President Praetori.”

  “Who is she? What has she done?”

  “She’s managed to start up Psyche. There was enough reaction mass left in the Beckmann motors to alter it into an Earth-intersect orbit.” The left side of the cube was flashing bright red, indicating the call was being scrambled.

  Kollert sat very still. There was no need acting incredulous. Krupkin was in no position to joke. But the enormity of what he said—and the impulse to disbelieve, despite the bearer of the news—froze Kollert for an unusually long time. He ran his hand through lank blond hair.

  “Kollert,” Krupkin said. “You look like you’ve been—”

  “Is she telling the truth?”

  Krupkin shook his head. “No, Kollert, you don’t understand. She hasn’t claimed these accomplishments. She hasn’t said anything about them yet. She just wants to speak to you. But our tracking stations say there’s no doubt. I’ve spoken with the officer who commanded the last inspection. He says there was enough mass left in the Beckmann drive positioning motors to push—”

  “This is incredible! No precautions were taken? The mass wasn’t drained, or something?”

  “I’m no Geshel, Farmer. My technicians tell me the mass was left on Psyche because it would have cost several hundred million—”

  “That’s behind us now. Let the journalists worry about that, if they ever hear of it.” He loo
ked up and saw Gestina still standing near the French doors. He held up his hand to tell her to stay where she was. She was going to have to keep to the house, incommunicado, for as long as it took to straighten this out.

  “You’re coming?”

  “Which center?”

  “Does it matter? She’s not being discreet. Her message is hitting an entire hemisphere, and there are hundreds of listening stations to pick it up. Several aren’t under our control. Once anyone pinpoints the source, the story is going to be clear. For your convenience, go to Baja Station. Mexico is signatory to all the necessary pacts.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Kollert said. Krupkin nodded, and the cube went blank.

  “What was he talking about?” Gestina asked. “What’s Psyche?”

  “A chunk of rock, dear,” he said. Her talents lay in other directions—she wasn’t stupid. Even for a Naderite, however, she was unknowledgeable about things beyond the Earth.

  He started to plan the rules for her movements, then thought better of it and said nothing. If Krupkin was correct—and he would be—there was no need. The political considerations, if everything turned out right, would be enormous. He could run as Governor of the Desk, even President of the Hexamon …

  And if everything didn’t turn out right, it wouldn’t matter where anybody was.

  Turco sat in the middle of her grandfather’s control center and cried. She was tired and sick at heart. Things were moving rapidly now, and she wondered just how sane she was. In a few hours she would be the worst menace the Earth had ever known, and for what cause? Truth, justice? They had murdered her grandfather, discredited her father and driven him to suicide—but all seven billion of them, Geshels and Naderites alike?

  She didn’t know whether she was bluffing or not. Psyche’s fall was still controllable, and she was bargaining it would never hit the Earth. Even if she lost and everything was hopeless, she might divert it, causing a few tidal disruptions, minor earthquakes perhaps, but still passing over four thousand kilometers from the Earth’s surface. There was enough reaction mass in the positioning motors to allow a broad margin of safety.