by Eric Flint
Five steps . . . four.
One.
She threw herself against him, grabbing high with hand and dagger. He curled forward, lifting her off her feet. For a nightmare heartbeat she thought he would carry her all the way to Garrick, but her weight pulled his path onto a lurching diagonal. His left knee buckled, recovered, then the right failed. He went down one limb at a time, as though they couldn't agree to die together.
Elena jumped clear and studied the Lord Advisor. He should have fallen sooner, strength and consciousness bled away. The lessons she had taken so seriously to make up for her poor magic had served well, but he was a big man, and vengeance had run in his veins.
She shed her fouled cloak. washed her hands and arms with water from the bottle on Hefger's saddle, and did her best to dilute the stains on her clothing. Garrick hadn't yet turned from Jevin's body, but he had been witness to too much. She didn't want to go to him savage with blood.
She didn't feel savage; she felt calmer than she would have thought possible. Perhaps later, what had happened here would crash onto her like snow from a rooftop. Not now. For now, the mask of her rank had become part of her flesh, armor for her soul.
She would take Garrick home, send men for the bodies. Burials with full honors for Jevin and Rafe. Such a small thing to do, such an inadequate thing.
Garrick was kneeling next to Jevin, rocking, repeating what sounded like one phrase, over and over. She approached carefully, full of half-realized prayers that her son's mind had not been driven away. Her heart sank when she heard what he was repeating.
"Please get better. Please get better."
She bent to stroke his hair. "Jevin was very brave, but we can't help him now."
"Get better."
"Garrick . . ." It was a trick of the light, it had to be. The sun was setting, blurring reality with its gold light and long shadows. There would be a flint in Jevin's saddlebag, and there was dry brush everywhere for a fire. Tomorrow she would take her son home to Freida and his nanny, to Snowball; they'd find his new pony. They'd make his life normal again.
As normal as they could.
There, again. She . . . This flutter was no trick of the light. Jevin's eyes came fully open.
"Your Majesty?"
"Jevin . . . I thought you . . . I thought you were dead."
"When that sword came down . . . I thought I was. Did I get him? I tried . . ."
"Yes. Hefger's dead too." She stopped his questions with a raised hand. "Time for that later. We have to see to your wounds, plan a way to move you so a physician—"
"Mama." Garrick's face was streaked with blood and tears, but he was smiling.
"He doesn't need a physician, Mama. He's better. Really. Look!"
Afraid to restart the bleeding, she parted the ripped, red rag that had been Jevin's shirt. The gash below was three hand-lengths from top to bottom. She couldn't tell how deep it had been; it was knit together. Still angry, a scar in the making, but healing.
She looked at Garrick—just a little boy happy because his friend was better. Just a little boy.
"Let's gather wood for a fire," she said.
* * *
"It was called 'The King's Touch' then, Ma'am—that's what my grandmother told me. She remembered it from when she was a girl. The people would line up in the castle courtyard and the king would walk by, touch them on the head and give them a copper. I always thought the copper was what did the most good; now, I don't know."
Jevin had mustered enough strength to move away from the scene of the battle, the fire blazed high, and there was more food in Jevin's saddlebags than any of them wanted.It was a somber reflection of the picnic they had pretended, but exhaustion and warmth had settled them into easy conversation.
"Was that Richard's grandfather? Did he outlaw his own magic?"
"His great-grandfather, more likely, Ma'am. My grandmother was an old woman when I was just a boy. By the time she was married, there was a new king. Talk was he hated his father. Whatever the reason, all manner of magic arts were forbidden. Even the priests were speaking against them."
Laws could be changed. Prejudices would take longer. If she started now, gradually, perhaps the people would be ready to accept . . .
Garrick snuggled onto her lap, playing with her locket. "I can see myself, Mama."
"Of course you can, silly. It's a mirror."
"Not that one; the one inside. I look like Papa in his king clothes, but it's me."
She tried to make light of it, but her mind raced. He was so young, and already . . . His Powers might eventually rival her father's. Could the people accept that? She had so little ability; the Gifts must have lain dormant in Richard's bloodline as well. Would that history make it all seem less foreign and frightening?
Regardless, Garrick would need training, guidance, protection.
Jevin was pretending to watch the fire. "I'll tell no one about tonight, if that's what you want, Ma'am. I'll keep my coat on when we return and let everyone think the blood's not mine."
Training and guidance could be found in Chetrive when Garrick was older. Protection and discretion were needed now. "Thank you, Jevin. That would be best."
Garrick was losing his battle to stay awake. She tucked him into a roll of blanket. "Good night, Mama," he said, then smiled sleepily at Jevin. "Good night, Sir."
Jevin picked up his half of the game. "Not 'Sir.' Jevin."
Garrick settled deeper into the blanket. "Very well, Sir Jevin, Sir Jevin."
She hugged the blanket bundle and almost called him a silly boy, but his words echoed and grew in her mind as she settled back to watch cloud-scarves sail near the moon.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I think that can be arranged."
* * *
Rubber Sciences
Written by Norman Spinrad
Science fiction and politics are, in theory, arts of the possible, just as fantasy and religion are arts of the impossible. In actual practice, however, politics usually turns out to be the art of the all-too-probable, whereas science fiction usually turns out not to give much of a damn about probability at all. In fact, a case could be made that the more improbable science fiction is, the better it is as science fiction. Until it crosses the line between improbability and impossibility and becomes fantasy.
This, then, will be a chapter about precisely that murky area between "hard science fiction" and "hard fantasy" in which most science fiction writers work most of the time.
Indeed, it's rather difficult to come up with a definition of "hard science fiction" that doesn't end up being somewhat self-contradictory. "Hard scientific content" in science fiction is usually defined (at those rare moments when anybody bothers to define it at all) as known scientific fact. "Hard science fiction," then, is science fiction written around known scientific facts or at least not-unproven theories generated by "real" scientists. But is it? All fiction is lies—if it weren't, it would be biography, history, or reportage. Science fiction or speculative fiction is a form in which at least one element of the reality in which the imaginary characters move is also imaginary. Not impossible but not a fixture in the universe of the writer and reader either. The speculative element, it's usually called. Where does that leave "hard science fiction"? If there is no speculative element, it isn't science fiction; and if there is a speculative element in the so-called scientific background, we're then into measuring "degree of hardness" on some kind of technological peter-meter.
Larry Niven, for example, is generally considered a writer of "hard science fiction." J. G. Ballard is not. Niven's stories are full of two-headed aliens, telepathic powers, various flavors of time-travel, galactic cataclysms, hyper-drives, tractor beams, and so forth. Most of Ballard's novels have been rather tight extrapolations of a world drastically altered by one reasonably plausible meteorological change, and even his later more stylistically dense works don't ask the reader to swallow very many scientific improbabilities whole. Hal Clement's alien creatures are part of
the hard science fiction canon, but Cordwainer Smith's Underpeople are not. Aficionados of hard science fiction accept Poul Anderson's medieval space cultures without a murmur but eschew the future worlds of Mack Reynolds which are worked out with a much more sophisticated and rigorous knowledge of economics and politics.
On the other hand, it's easy enough to recognize the diametric opposite of hard science fiction—full-bore space opera, which is really straight fantasy in science fiction drag. Jockstrap-clad superheroes swinging their swords through hyperspacial extensions of time-probability worlds while planets ricochet off the cushions of the cosmic pool table in three-corner bank shots from the übercues of beings from the 27th dimension with a perverted lust for brass-bound boobs and human pain, opposed only by our blaster-armed hero, his positronic robot horse Trigger, and the Galactic Overmind, who in reality is Lamont Cranston, playboy energy creature from the center of the sun. We've all read that one, and too many of us have written it as well.
But somewhere between the Scylla of Jungian archetype opera and the Charybdis of the kind of rigid Gernsbackian "scientifiction" that is hardly written anymore lies the great main current of science fiction. Including, I would submit, most of what is called "hard science fiction."
Indeed, if there is any meaningful definition of hard science fiction at all, it is that science fiction which convinces the reader that its scientific content is as sound, metallic, and conservative as a Swiss franc. It's really a matter of technique more than content, a technique explored elsewhere in this book.
Here we will discuss other techniques for achieving the same basic end: an illusion of verisimilitude around imaginary content. Isn't that what science fiction is all about?
* * *
Having to some extent pooh-poohed the possibility of writing real science fiction based on real scientific fact, I should hasten to point out that scientific illiteracy is by no means a prime qualification for a science fiction writer. In fact, the kind of science fiction I'm going to talk about probably requires a firmer grounding in the Weltanschauung, philosophy, history, and psychology of science and technology than what is usually called hard science fiction.
After all, a reasonably intelligent writer can read a piece in Time about quasars, black holes, organ transplants, or the latest model space capsule and write a story with this material as trappings or setting. No different from reading a good book about the American West or Timbuktu and setting a story there.
But when you really head for the wild blue yonder there are no road maps or almanacs to crib from. When you get down to essences, descriptive knowledge is not enough—you must really understand. And that, of course, is a deeply scientific attitude in itself.
When you're writing about tomorrow's technology, it's enough to be accurate, to more or less faithfully describe the gizmos, theories, and discoveries that scientists and engineers are speculating about in their own magazines and bull-sessions. But when you're writing about scientific discoveries, technological innovations, scientific theories or even whole new sciences that you've made up yourself, you can't rely on accuracy to give the reader a sense of verisimilitude. There's nothing anywhere in the reader's world or your own for you to describe accurately.
Instead, you must be plausible, which is a bem of a different color.
To give an example of what I'm herein calling "Rubber Science" as opposed to straightforward pseudoscientific doubletalk, let us consider the granddaddy of them all, FTL, hyperspace, overdrive, spaceships exceeding the speed of light.
As we all know (we do all know, don't we?), in our current Einsteinian picture of the universe, a mass traveling at the speed of light becomes infinite, and it would therefore take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it to that speed and a transfinite amount of energy to accelerate it beyond that speed. Which is why faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible within Einsteinian parameters.
Which may be tidy for cosmologists and astrophysicists but which is a pain in the neck to science fiction writers. The literary necessity for faster-than-light travel is all too obvious. Without it, we could have no stories of galactic empires, not much anthropological science fiction, few pictures of alien cultures or outré planets, a dearth of first-contact stories—in short, science fiction writers would be pretty much confined to our own solar system. Of course many fine stories have been written about just this light-speed limitation problem, but science fiction is the literature of multiplex realities, and to confine it within a strict relativistic straitjacket would simply be literarily unacceptable.
Thus hyperspace. Or overdrive. Or whatever it takes to get our literary spaceships from star to star in literarily usable time. Given FTL as a story necessity, the question then becomes how do you get the reader to accept it smoothly, how do you make what is currently a scientific impossibility seem plausible?
One obvious and frequently successful method is simply to ignore the problem. "He switched on the hyperdrive and five minutes later they arrived at Epsilon Bootes." After all, if you're writing a story set in the present, you can have your hero drive from Hollywood to Pasadena without pausing to explain the internal-combustion engine.
However, if you choose this method, you must really be consistent. If you're not going to offer an explanation of hyperdrive, then you'd better not explain any other futuristic technology in your story, because what you're really doing is writing from the viewpoint of the people in your future time. And you'd better not have any element of your plot dependent on the hyperdrive. "He switched on the hyperdrive and five minutes later they arrived at Epsilon Bootes, beating out the space pirates by a good twelve parsecs due to the superior juxtaposition of their frammis-wrap to the space-time matrix" is dirty pool.
Also, even if you're not explaining your hyperdrive, you still have to make the rest of your universe consistent with known scientific facts unless you want to point a big red finger to the fact that you're not explaining it because you're an ignoramus. Further, even an unexplained hyperdrive must operate according to at least internally self-consistent rules. It can go from anywhere to anywhere in five minutes, or it can propel a ship at a hundred times the speed of light, but not both interchangeably. The point is that you want the hyperdrive to seem scientifically plausible whether you attempt to explain how it works or not, which means that the logic of its operation must seem reasonable, must feel scientifically correct. Internal consistency is a necessity no matter how much or how little you choose to explain. Rule One of the Rubber Sciences.
Of course it's more of a challenge to try to actually explain your hyperdrive. Moreover, if you do explain the thing consistently and establish its parameters at the outset, you can use its workings and properties for later plot points. If, for example, you establish that a larger mass moves faster in hyperdrive than a smaller one, you can have your hero's ship beat the space pirates to Epsilon Bootes by dragging a small asteroid into hyperspace with it. But this property of hyperdrive must have been established long before it is used, otherwise it becomes the equivalent of "With a superhuman effort, he leapt out of the pit." Rule Two of the Rubber Sciences: any pseudoscientific fact or principle that is going to be used for plot purposes must be planted in the reader's mind near the beginning of the story and long before it surfaces as a plot element.
Okay, so rather than gloss it over, you're going to invent a hyperdrive. Right away you are faced with a fundamental choice. Current best scientific knowledge says that faster-than-light travel is impossible, so you must either come up with a "bugger factor" in Einsteinian relativity, or forthrightly state that by the 25th Century Glockenspiel proved that Einstein was wrong.
I wrote a story called "Outward Bound" using the first method, and it worked well enough at least to convince John W. Campbell, Jr. Here I accepted Einsteinian relativity and had a theoretical mathematician talk about "transfinite substitutions in Einstein's equations.
". . . if you accept the Special Theory of Relativity, the reason
that the speed of light cannot be exceeded is that mass is infinite at the speed of light, hence it would take an infinite force to accelerate it to that speed.
"But, if there were a drive whose thrust was a function of the mass it was accelerating, then, as mass increased, thrust would increase, and at the speed of light, theoretically, where mass was infinite, thrust would also be infinite. And if the thrust-mass equation involved a suitable exponential function . . . thrust could become transfinite.
"Making it possible to go faster than light!"
What kind of drive has a thrust which is an exponential function of the mass it is accelerating? Are you kidding? If I knew that one, I'd be writing my Nobel acceptance speech, not this chapter.
Rule Three of the Rubber Sciences: you are not Albert Einstein—know when to stop explaining.
Here I have pointed to a possible hole in relativity through which an FTL ship might sneak, but I have not succumbed to the hubris of trying seriously to design the actual hyperdrive. I've contented myself with establishing a theoretical basis for the thing in something like the Einsteinian universe, so that later on the artifact will seem plausible. The same principle applies to tachyon drives, black hole gates between the stars, and other "bugger factors" in relativity. If you think you can explain the whole thing from bugger factor to actual hardware, you may find yourself in a funny farm having long conversations about it with Napoleon.