Lottie’s fingers press cool against Cardee’s temple, gentle over the soft light which flickers beneath the skin. Of course it was green. Lottie’s mouth lifts in a tentative smile at the sight and—
—it’s doc looking at her for the first time after the surgery, his face clear and sharp and framed by all that brilliant white light. Cardee stares the way she stared at Ross when he proposed, like she can’t understand or believe it. That was then, she tells herself, but doc tells her it won’t be perfect. It’ll run, but it’ll stutter, too, like a tank you need kick every now and then. Cardee doesn’t want it; Cardee can’t be Cardee without it, though. She understands that. The VET can reach pieces of her memory that she no longer can.
“Mama.”
That voice hauls her back to the yellow room with its curtains, with its small nut of a girl. Cardee doesn’t remember Lottie this way and the VET hums hard, as if trying to reconcile two different pieces of paperwork. The numbers don’t add up. Small Lottie waving goodbye in the driveway, Ross and Gamma at her side; this is the last image of Lottie the VET can give her. The Lottie who hasn’t outgrown the shoes that Cardee saw in the donation box as they came inside today. The Lottie who hasn’t yet flung herself off the swing at a friend’s dare.
“I’m here, baby.”
Always that: baby. Cardee clings to the word, the way she does to her daughter. She’s here, but she’s not. Part of her is still in those streets. The VET pulls up her most recent memory, running with it, because that’s what it does. Running—
Feet hit the ground hard as she and the fireteam seek another kid. There were two down here, two and—
Two kids emerge from the rubble, rifles cocked and drawn on the team. Cardee draws up, but doesn’t lower her rifle. These kids are taller, but still young. Eight, nine. Lottie’s age now, she thinks and something inside her turns over. This was not now, this was then, but something inside her hides its face.
“In-de-pen-dents?” one of the kids asks, drawing the word out into four hard syllables.
Bret strides forward, kicks up clouds of dust in the ruined street. “Co-a-li-tion,” he spits and the world erupts.
“Wrong answer!”
They don’t want to go, this band of kids, and they fight to stay. Cardee screams at Bret to back off, but it’s too late. She smells the blood, the gunpowder, and feels the sudden press of a knife against her side. Before her, the scene unfolds as it did before, the way she remembers, down to the taste of sweat on her lip. Only one of the kids gets away. Escapes to run and set a trap in the hardware store where nails— Where nails—
Memory stutters. Her mind goes blank.
“Mama?”
Cardee feels the touch of fingers on her face, pressing gentle and then with more insistence. She blinks and looks at the girl in her lap, but cannot recall her name. Does not know why she’s here. Bret would be here soon. Bret and Ginger and—
“Mama!”
But the only children she knows live in the streets. Rubble rats, sand kids, some used as weapons, others in need of rescue. This girl is whole and clean. A green bandage clings to her temple, but her feet are uninjured. Not bloody or cut and Cardee can’t process it. The girl pushes away. Those small feet thunder away.
“Da! Daaaaa!”
Cardee blinks, the room around her unfamiliar. She wanders, touching walls that should be made of ash. Why is there a ceiling and how can there be windows without cracks? Just when it seems the walls might crumble to ruin under her fingers, there’s another hand, this one drawing her own from the wall. Cardee whimpers because part of her wants to see these walls fall down. It’s what she knows, jagged lines against smoky sky.
There is mark upon one wall, where a frame used to rest. A frame that held a photograph, she thinks. Fingers trace this line, but there is no frame. Her eyes sweep the room and she’s moving past the man, rifling through drawers, careless with everything that isn’t the frame that belongs upon the wall. Careless until her fingers close around a bundle of letters. Handwritten, from far away places, they smell like ash and home both. Tears smudge the writing—before or after the sending and does it matter? Pushed to the back of the drawer, she thinks that is what matters. More letters and more and then at the bottom, the frame. The photograph.
It’s a face half familiar, dark and proud, and by her side there stands a man as pale as she is dark. That man, she thinks, looking up at him now, then back to the photograph. Behind them sprawls a lake and the shore is tangled with long grasses, willowed trees. Cardee lifts the frame and brings it to the wall, but there is no nail.
There were nails—
“Cardee. Beloved.” His hand covers hers.
“The team?” she asks.
He swallows hard. “Safe.”
A bright, striped flag across the length of a casket. The image is gone as quickly as it comes.
The man guides her toward the chair in the corner, with its quilt and tablet and cooling tea. “You’re home.”
Cardee shakes her head and a deep pain flares at her temple, burning down her spine. She presses the framed photograph into her lap. “Volatile,” she whispers. Explosive.
“Volatile Emotive Transistor,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, something Cardee cannot name. His hand tightens on hers, shaking, and the line of a ring presses into her bones. His ring. His free hand lifts, to trace her temple where green lights have stilled.
Warmth and salt burn her eyes. “I should. . .” Her head comes up. Her attention narrows on the doorway. There should be a figure there and she should have her rifle, but there isn’t and she doesn’t. A tank needs kicking, she thinks, but doesn’t know why. She looks back to the man. “I don’t remember.”
He eases his hold on her, hand sliding down, around, so that palm presses to palm. Cardee’s breath hisses and fresh fire courses through her body. Old pathways blazing into new.
“Wood violets, wild roses, my black-eyed girls,” he says.
She smells the lake now and the willows brush her shoulders as they walk, hand in hand through the almost-cold grass underfoot. He offers her a tangle of violets and one of roses and then a braided ring, a ring that slides onto her finger as though it belongs. The way he slides it onto her finger now, warm from his own body.
“Palmers’ k-kiss is holy?”
There’s something else in his eyes now. Warmth and salt and everything he put away while she was gone. He smiles slow, and it’s like nothing Cardee has seen before. Nothing and yet everything she knows, and there comes the sound of small bare feet, thumping down the hall. Toward them. My black-eyed girls.
“Come from those streets, Cardee Findar. I will remember with you.”
About the Author
E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.
Energizing Futures: How SF Fuels Itself
Stephen Gaskell
Virtual worlds. Terraforming complexes. Star-spanning generation ships. Science fiction is chock-full of massive technological artifacts born of humankind’s desire to create, to explore. What do they all have in common? They all consume energy like black holes swallow stars. Computation, mechanization, acceleration. If the future’s getting faster, it’s certainly getting more energy intensive.
Even when SF is not envisioning these glittering futures, a growing Earth population living increasingly modern lifestyles means that our collective energy needs will inevitably rise, new technologies or not. One question that’s often not given much attention is: Where does this energy come from?
System Shock
Even after Kelvin and others developed the theory of thermodynamics in the mid-19th century, early works of SF paid little heed to the energetic considerations of their invented worlds. Although Copernicus and Newton had ushered in enlightenment thinking
centuries earlier—and the heavens were no longer thought of as a Platonic realm of a different category of nature to that found on Earth—writers of this period struggled (or perhaps chose not) to engage with mechanical realities.
For example, the concept of escape velocity—the minimal speed an object must be projected to escape the gravitational attraction of the body on which it resides—was well known since Newton formulated his laws, but it did not filter into most writers’ thoughts. Locomotive means usually relied on mystical “will,” such as in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), where the narrator travels the cosmos telepathically, or highly speculative technology, most notably antigravity devices. In Charles Curtis Dail’s Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn (1890), the alien protagonist traverses the solar system with the aid of an antigravity ointment smeared over his body, while in H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1901) the inventor Cavorite famously creates a gravity-screening substance by the same name.
Despite being scientifically unsound—no evidence for either gravitationally-repulsive matter or “mind over matter” ever having been found—both methods have remained popular for dodging the killjoy of physical law. Antigravity technology adorns the decks of most starships from the USS Enterprise to Battlestar Galactica, and mental gymnastics facilitate travel for everyone from Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes of Amber to Neo of The Matrix.
One of the earliest fictionalizations of the seeds of a workable route off-world appeared in Achille Eyraud’s Voyage à Vénus (1865). Unlike Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, published in the same year, where astronauts were fired into space from a giant cannon, Eyraud had his adventurers lifted from the Earth by a water-based rocket propulsion system. Though he used the correct principle, if not the most efficient propellant, Eyraud’s novel went largely unnoticed, while Jules Verne’s became one of his world-famous masterpieces.
[An early vision of astronaut transport courtesy of Jules Verne.]
Despite Verne’s oversight on a cannon as a launching means, he carefully researched the scientific possibilities of the day, inventing many plausible technologies, and coming to understandings that were often remarkably prophetic. For example, he accurately described weightlessness in outer space, and inspired American submarine inventor Simon Lake with his tale Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Most importantly for the future of SF, Verne together with his fellow “Father of Science Fiction,” H. G. Wells, laid a framework for a new brand of SF where scientific truths, as much as they could, infused the fiction.
One of the chief consequences of this focus on scientific awareness, of course, was a renewed examination of how the myriad spacecraft, off-world bases, orbitals, etc. would be powered. Rather than expanding horizons, hard SF actually narrowed the wider genre’s remit, concentrating on places and journeys within our solar system. Here, writers could extrapolate from modern engineering principles, marrying this understanding with the knowledge of our increasingly well-charted interstellar backyard.
Arthur C. Clarke, arguably the greatest exponent of creating great sensawunda moments underpinned by scientific rationale, used the solar wind—the faint pressure of innumerable photons flung from the sun—to power solar yachts in his story “Sunjammer.” And in The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke describes the construction of a space elevator from Sri Lanka. Such an engineering feat, seriously considered by NASA among other groups, would make space exploration an energetically, and much more economically viable proposition. However, it is still reliant on the development of several technologies—including carbon nanotubes for the cable and electromagnetic propulsion for the transportation.
Perhaps tracking the optimism and successes of various space agencies, hard SF set in the local neighborhood probably attained its greatest popularity in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Cold War paranoia was in its final throes. Classic texts such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix paint detailed pictures of how the solar system might be colonized. In Red Mars, the terraforming of the red planet is kick-started by “mohole” drilling to release subsurface heat; the detonation of nuclear explosions deep in the permafrost to release carbon-dioxide and other heat-trapping atmospheric gases; and the insertion of a geosynchronous asteroid to which a space elevator cable is tethered. These steps provide the foundation for the introduction of plant life in the sequel, Green Mars.
In Schismatrix Sterling posits a fragmented humanity, an Earth shattered from ecological collapse, and pockets of Shaper/Mechanist enclaves living in artificial habitats (often asteroids or small moons scooped of their interiors and spun to create artificial gravity). Energy is harvested in myriad ways utilizing biotech, solar collection, and nuclear fusion. Interestingly, although competition between the factions is intense, warfare is considered too horrifying to contemplate—not only because the memory of Earth’s demise is fresh in mind, but because the habitats are so fragile and easy to destroy. Space as an utterly hostile environment for human life is often overlooked in SF, a lesson not forgotten here.
Recent works—such as Duncan Jones’ film Moon, Jeff Carlson’s novella The Frozen Sky, and Joan Slonczewski’s novel The Highest Frontier—continue this tradition of scientifically informed, near-Earth exploration. In both Moon and The Frozen Sky, Jones and Carlson envision the off-world mining of fuels for nuclear fusion. In Moon, Helium-3 is harvested from the dark side of the moon to power an energy-spent Earth, and in The Frozen Sky, mecha-mine deuterium from the water ice of Europa to run a fusion “gas” station at the outer reaches of the solar system. In The Highest Frontier, by contrast, the cylindrical habitat of Frontera—orbiting above a climate-threatened Earth—draws power from an outer shell of photosynthetic microbes, piggybacking on research into hydrogen-producing bacteria.
[Not simply inspiration for Pink Floyd!]
Universal Power
Modern SF, of course, hasn’t only concerned itself with the exploration and colonization of places within our own solar system. Overlapping with the declining popularity of “space-race” SF through the latter part of the 20th century, new-wave space opera married the pulp adventures of the subgenre’s early days with extensive knowledge of the wider cosmos gleaned from astronomer’s increasingly powerful telescopes.
Seeing deeper and more up-close than ever before, writers such as Alistair Reynolds, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, and Justina Robson have utilized the exotic playground of dark energy, pulsars, binary stars, exoplanets, nebulae, and black holes (among other phenomena) to depict human stories against the widest, most awe-inspiring backdrops. And the energy sources have often been equally spectacular.
Adam Roberts, in his first novel, Salt, begins with a 37-year starship journey powered by a captured comet: “Our comet, fuel and buffer, building speed slowly. Us, strung out along the cable behind, eleven little homes like seashells on a child’s necklace-string.” Not only does using a comet as fuel source remove the need to bring millions of tones of propellant up the energy-sapping gradient of the Earth’s gravitational well, but affixing it to the front of a starship also means the ship is ingeniously shielded from interstellar debris, which even in tiny clumps could be lethal when traveling at appreciable fractions of light speed.
But why take any fuel at all, when the interstellar medium is chock-full of ionized hydrogen anyhow? That was the astronomical fact that inspired an American physicist to conceive of the Bussard ramjet, a space drive powered by scooping up protons using powerful electromagnetic fields, fusing those protons in a fusion reactor, and using the exhaust like a conventional rocket. Despite both theoretical and technical challenges concerning the frictional force of the interstellar gas, insufficient cloud densities, and the difficulty of fusing hydrogen, Larry Niven immortalized the Bussard ramjet by using it as a staple in his Known Space universe, most notably as the engines of his eponymous Ringworld.
[Giant space jellyfish, er, Bussard ramjet, ahoy!]
If you really want a decent, inno
vative power source for your galactic civilization though, you’re going to want to move away from the relatively pedestrian concepts of combustion or fusion. Burning stuff has been old hat for millennia, and fusing nuclei for magnitudes longer, the domain of a trillion stars. Antimatter is one such candidate. With impeccable scientific credentials—theorized by Dirac and discovered by Andersen a mere four years later—antimatter packs a colossal energetic punch. Being the antithesis of normal matter in every regard except mass, any antiparticle can be combined with its particle sibling in an annihilation reaction that produces oodles of energy in accordance with Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence equation, E = mc2. Although Captain Kirk was exaggerating in the Star Trek episode “Obsession,” when he told an ensign that a pound of antimatter could destroy a solar system, the annihilation of fifteen pounds of antimatter is approximately equal to the energy that Hurricane Katrina unleashed in 2005.
As well as powering the warp core of the USS Enterprise, antimatter has a long history in the genre as an energy source. Back in 1942, Jack Williamson published his story “Collision Orbit” in Astounding Science Fiction, in which engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene (antimatter) asteroids. Most recently, antimatter can be found propelling the ISV Venture Star, the vessel that carried Jake Sully to Pandora in Avatar. What’s often not confronted in these stories is where this antimatter comes from. To this day, for reasons physicists still don’t fully understand, the universe seems almost entirely matter-dominant, with no sign of the vast gamma ray displays that would occur along the boundaries between matter and antimatter regions. And although antiparticles can be easily created and trapped in places like CERN, if you have to make the stuff in the first place, energy considerations render the idea a non-starter.
Making stuff up is, of course, meat and potatoes for SF writers. Dubious science (Asimov’s positronic brains, anyone?) has never been a barrier to speculative power sources, as Iain M. Banks readily admits in a passage in his famous essay “A Few Notes On the Culture”: “Between each universe [in Banks' Culture series] there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it’s what the Culture starships run on.”
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