Analog SFF, October 2010
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Cover Art by Bob Eggleton
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: SENTIENCE AND SIMPLICITY by Stanley Schmidt
Short Story: THE RIFT by John G. Hemry
Science Fact: VISIT TO THE FORGOTTEN PLANET: WHAT SCIENTISTS ARE LEARNING AS MESSENGER PREPARES TO ORBIT MERCURY by Richard A. Lovett
Novelette: MIDWIFE CRISIS by Dave Creek
Novelette: THE WHOLE TRUTH WITNESS by Kenneth Schneyer
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: PULSAR TIMING AND GRAVITY WAVE DETECTION by John G. Cramer
Poem: WE JUST WANT TO DANCE by Mary A. Turzillo
Novelette: THE ALIEN AT THE ALAMO by Arlan Andrews
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: NEVER SAW IT COMING by Jerry Oltion
Novelette: THE GREAT GALACTIC GHOUL by Allen M. Steele
Novelette: GHOSTS COME HOME by Justin Stanchfield
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXX No. 10 October 2010
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: SENTIENCE AND SIMPLICITY by Stanley Schmidt
Recently I found myself on the sidelines of a discussion between two Analog authors. One said he found it hard to believe stories in which humans simply moved in and set up housekeeping on a world with an established native ecosystem, rather than isolating themselves and studying that ecosystem from afar, to learn all they could about it without disturbing it. The other suspected (to paraphrase loosely) that such fastidious adherence to a “prime directive” of noninterference was unrealistic and would effectively preclude any human colonization elsewhere.
The choice doesn't appear likely to present us with a serious real-world moral dilemma anytime soon, though the possibility can't be completely ruled out (even within this solar system). But science fiction tries to consider all kinds of possibilities, not just the most immediately likely. It's certainly conceivable that some of our descendants will eventually find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to colonize a world with native life, or keep their hands off.
What should they do?
Such a dilemma has been a central element in a lot of science fiction, and much of it has assumed that the key to the decision should be whether any of the natives are “sentient” or “self-aware.” If they are, we are often told, we should leave them alone to develop along their own path. If they aren't, it doesn't matter; if they're “just animals,” we can help ourselves to their land without compunction.
This has long seemed to me an excessively simplistic dichotomy, and I've had a number of difficulties being entirely comfortable with it. For starters, “sentient” and “self-aware” seemed at best rather vaguely defined.[1] A quick look at an unabridged dictionary will show quite an assortment of definitions, none of them really sharp. The gist of it, though, is that we'll consider a species sentient if its members show some capability for logical and/or abstract thought, language, moral decision-making, or some combination of those traits. Tool use, social organization, and planning for the future are often taken as manifestations of those qualities, if not primary defining characteristics in their own right.
One of the most basic problems I have with the dilemma as it appears in fiction is that it's often presented as a yes-no decision based on a yes-no test. Reality is seldom that simple, despite the ongoing and ever-escalating efforts of humans to act as if it were. A great deal of human thought and education has been dedicated to the proposition that we humans are uniquely superior to everything else, with abilities differing not just in degree but in kind from those of other animals. Inconveniently, research keeps finding new ways in which our “uniqueness” is more a matter of degree than kind. Chimps and ravens unequivocally use tools; apes and dolphins use their own versions of language and show some ability to learn to use ours; a great many kinds of animals have complex social organization and pass knowledge on to later generations. Some people react to these discoveries by outright denial and others by “raising the bar,” changing the definitions of criteria so that only humans still meet them—until we find something else that does. But those who follow that strategy have to keep raising the bar over and over. Eventually they may just have to recognize that sentience, by whatever yardstick you measure it, is more a continuous spectrum than a clear-cut dichotomy.
And the same may be true of appropriate responses to it. Instead of saying, “Yes, the natives are sentient, so we must go away and never set foot here again,” or, “No, they're not sentient, so we can move in and do whatever we want,” we may have to say, “There are beings here that are advanced this far in some ways and that far in others, so we have to be careful with them, but we don't necessarily have to avoid all possible contact."
The discussion I mentioned at the beginning of this musing went beyond the sentience question, in a way I find characteristic of the particular time and place in which we live. The question there was not whether colonization should be acceptable in a place that already had sentient life, but whether it should be acceptable in a place that already had any life. That criterion goes far beyond the one so familiar from much older science fiction. If followed rigorously, it would rule out the vast majority of science-fictional colonies, allowing the possibility only on worlds utterly devoid of preexisting life.[2]
That anyone would even consider such a stringent restriction seems to me very symptomatic of our current era, in which it's fashionable to profess an unprecedented aversion to intruding on any preexisting ecosystem. Such a view has seldom, if ever, been common in the past, and I find it hard to believe that it will continue to be at all times in the future. Prevailing views on just about any subject have fluctuated frequently and dramatically in the past, and I think it's quite likely that they will continue to do so in the future—sometimes just because people are desperately looking for
something new to latch onto (which often means rediscovering or reinventing something old), and sometimes in direct response to new pressures. In a time when large-scale migration is impractical and most folks are pretty content with what they have, for example, it's easy to say that explorers discovering a new Earthlike planet should look but not touch, regarding their mission as one of pure scientific discovery. But if spaceflight becomes easier than it now looks, and population or political pressures drive significant numbers of people to want new places to live, it may be a lot harder to sell the idea that they should just look at a piece of prime real estate from afar. Relatively few people consider pure scientific discovery sufficient cause to support an expensive project, especially when it could be serving other purposes as well. Those whose interests are purely scientific may have to decide to what extent they can support other goals in order to get financing for their own.
If we grant the acceptability of ever colonizing any new planet, we'll need to allow for some purely practical considerations. Would we really want to limit the options to worlds having absolutely no life of their own? In principle, maybe it could be done—but creating an entire ecosystem from scratch would be a far larger and more daunting job than adapting to, or even modifying, one that already exists and is reasonably similar to the one we evolved in. We have a strong preference for an atmosphere containing a sizable amount of free oxygen, for example. But that's not how pristine worlds are delivered. By the nature of the processes by which they seem to be made, newly formed worlds that have atmospheres at all will have chemically reducing atmospheres, which we don't need and can't use. The oxidizing atmosphere we inhabit and enjoy on Earth seems to be a direct result of the biggest ecological catastrophe in history: the evolution of organisms that released oxygen in sufficient quantities to overwhelm and replace the earlier reducing atmosphere. If we want a colony planet that already has a breathable atmosphere, fairly advanced native life would seem to be a prerequisite.
So the simplest dichotomy we face may be this: Either we learn to deal with moving into an established ecosystem, or we forget about colonizing other worlds.
Period, and permanently.
Besides, our experience on the one planet we have shows that ecosystems can be wondrous, fascinating things. If there are others out there, as wondrous and fascinating as our own but uniquely different, wouldn't it be a shame of monumental proportions to develop the capability to experience them firsthand and then refuse to take advantage of it?
It's undeniably true that our ancestors have often done what they did in a heavy-handed and insensitive way. But shouldn't it be possible for us to learn something from their experience, something that might enable us to proceed with a lighter and more enlightened touch?
I think that's what the advocates of “remote science only, no colonization” are trying to do—but the lesson they're drawing from history is an unnecessarily extreme one. Yes, we should be able to move into new territories in far less destructive ways than has been often done in the past. But if our ancestors had always been as timid about expanding into places we weren't born to as some would have us be now, we would still be confined to the Olduvai Gorge—and might have been long since out-competed even there. To decide that we must never move into new territories at all amounts to withdrawing from the evolutionary race—and that's a luxury affordable only for those who have already won the current lap, and assume (perhaps to their peril) that there are no more to be run.
Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt
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1 “Self-aware” is particularly troublesome, and it took me quite a while to grasp the concept that an organism or machine could carry out sophisticated analysis of other things without being aware of its own existence as an entity and possible subject of thought. These waters were further muddied by often-cited experiments showing that apes recognize their own reflections in a mirror while monkeys don't. Such experiments are often cited as proving that apes are self-aware and monkeys aren't, a conclusion which seems to willfully ignore the possibility that monkeys do have a concept of self, but don't make the connection between it and reflection.
2 Some would rule out even that, saying we shouldn't disturb any natural place—such as Mars, even if an exhaustive search turns up no trace of past or present life. In the intermediate situation where life exists, but only primitive life, we're sometimes told we should leave it alone because of the potential for something more advanced in the far future. Analyzing a possible connection between this view and an absolute opposition to even very early abortion is left as an exercise for the reader.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Short Story: THE RIFT by John G. Hemry
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Illustrated by Mark Evans
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To understand what others do, you must understand how they see the world—which can be much easier said than done.
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Imtep—Fifth planet from its star. Close to Earth-like (.95 on Ming-Hoffman Scale). Dominated by a single massive continent sprawled across equatorial regions. Eastern areas of the landmass are very rugged, but the central and western regions feature extensive prairies or steppes around a large, shallow inland sea. Native sentient species the Izkop ("People") are humanoid, organized into tribes or clans, the majority living on the plains in agrarian/ herder communities. Technology is very limited, primarily craft-metallurgy which allows the construction of durable implements. The Izkop are evaluated as “competitive but non-belligerent,” research reports identifying their dominant culture as well-integrated with their environment. A research facility with a staff of eighty has been established on Imtep. Imtep is classified Type Three for human visitation, with pre-clearance required and only small parties allowed to avoid disrupting relations with the native population.
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They had to pry Goldera out of the last set of armor when the power pack drained to exhaustion. After forcing open enough of the suit to get Goldera free, they left the armor lying there as they resumed walking, the empty carcass sprawled in the short, tough grass like a body denied the benefit of burial. There wasn't any simple way to conceal it, and they lacked the time and the strength to do anything else. The blast rifle, useless without power, lay abandoned alongside the armor.
No one had spoken for at least an hour, everyone concentrating on walking, putting one foot before the other despite the fatigue filling their bodies and minds. Corporal Johansen squinted up at the too-bright sun, trying to remember what had happened over that long day since reveille had sounded at zero-three-hundred to awaken everyone for the rescue operation. But he couldn't focus on any single, clear memory, his mind filled with disjointed images of the deathtrap that had been a place called Amity.
Johansen brought his gaze down to stare at the back of Sergeant Singh. The sergeant's last command had been “follow me,” given as they looked down at a valley where nothing now moved or lived except swarms of Izkop warriors. Since then, Singh had been leading them over the hills around Amity, down through patches of woods and shrubbery, and now across this open area. Fear had lent them speed at first, but now nothing kept them moving except the sergeant's steady pace in front.
With a major effort, Johansen called out just loudly enough for Sergeant Singh to hear. “Sarge."
The sergeant didn't stop, instead turning his upper body and head to look back at the corporal as he kept moving, his face locked into the same expressionless mask as someone under inspection. “Yeah?"
"Gotta rest. They're on their last legs."
"Understood. Not out here.” Singh raised one arm to point ahead, toward a tree line. “There. Under cover."
Tall, dark Private Adowa looked toward the trees, her eyes framed by runnels of sweat on her dust-streaked face. “How far is that?"
One corner of Singh's mouth turned upward slowly. “Check the map,” his voice grated out sardonically.
The map had been digital, of course, linked to s
atellite arrays which the Izkop had already shredded. Normally, the soldiers would have called up the map, gotten their precise location, and a precise distance to the trees ahead. But the navigation units had been built into the powered armor, and that was gone along with the sats. All any of the soldiers could do now was look around, inexperienced with judging distances by eye and unaccustomed to marching this far without power assist from their armor.
How far had they come since the dropship set down hard on one side of the valley that had held the human presence on this world? As the platoon had spilled out of the broken dropship, they had been presented with a balcony view of the disaster unfolding in the valley itself. Debris from what had been the buildings of the human civilian community still falling back to the surface, craters marking the graves of damaged dropships that had plowed in too hard for any survivors, scattered groups of soldiers firing frantically at the masses of Izkop swarming over the entire valley floor. More Izkop popped up, among and all around the platoon, their heavy spears flashing in the light of the morning sun, surging into the dropship to wipe out the crew, dragging down soldiers and tearing apart the robotic mules carrying the backup power packs. Sergeant Singh had rallied them, tried to get as many soldiers as he could up the side of the valley, while everyone shot as fast as they could and members of the platoon got swamped one by one.
Where had all of the aliens come from? Somebody had been screaming “out of the ground” on the comm circuit before their signal cut off.
Johansen focused on that puzzle to distract himself from the fatigue that threatened to overwhelm him. Out of the ground. He hadn't had much time to look around during the fight. None of them had. But he recalled visions of slabs of turf lying neatly cut and overturned. “The ground,” he muttered. “The bastards were all lying under the sod."
Private Stein turned partway to frown at Johansen, then his expression cleared with understanding. “That's where they came from? Because nobody said anything going in. Landing fields are clear, they said."