Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014

by Penny Publications

  She crept through the pipe for ages until finally, her air gauge flashing red, she punched out a sheet metal panel somebody had screwed over the end of the pipe. She crawled out, collapsed onto sand that was still damp from the rain, tore off her mask and gulped the air.

  After a bit, she sat up and looked around.

  The sun was high. The storm had moved off. There was a rainbow. In the distance she saw the silver ribbon of the 'fill's perimeter fence. She was outside, sitting in the old leachate collection pool. The pumping equipment was long gone. She glimpsed a bright patch on her forearm, and when she looked closer she saw that the strip clipped onto the arm of her CBRN suit—her military-surplus CBRN suit— glittered with bright blocks of color.

  "Well bless my soul," she said.

  There weren't any guards or fencing at the methane plant, so she went unchallenged almost all the way to the office trailers. A man in a hardhat with a New World Petrochem patch on his coveralls stepped up and looked at her muck-encrusted CBRNs and blood-smeared face.

  "Beausant," she said. "Margaret Moreno to see Mister Beausant."

  After a brief radio exchange, Beausant came from between two trailers and crossed the sand, the tails of his suit jacket flapping in the wind. When he got within earshot, Maggie said, "Can we deal?"

  Beausant, his eyes inscrutable behind his dark goggles, gestured to hardhat, who left them alone.

  "So here's what I need from you," Maggie said. "First, send one of those corporate SWAT teams to get my kids out of the 'fill. That's not negotiable. I'll provide the code phrase to bring them out of hiding. Second, obviously I need one of your fancy high-tech doctors. There's probably enough toxins in my system to wipe out a city block."

  Beausant smirked. "Anything else?"

  "Yeah, I want a fair price for my husband's stake, a one-year contract as an extraction consultant with full benefits, a fat salary, and two points on the take. On second thought, make it three years and two and a half points. Gross."

  "And what are you offering?"

  Maggie brought out the hazmat indicator strip she'd pulled off the arm of her suit—the forgotten hazmat strip that warned soldiers about exposure to exotic substances. She held it up for Beausant to see what had activated the color blocks. Heavy metals, rare earths, radioactives, all in bright, neat rows. A fortune collecting for decades in the bottom of the forgotten sump.

  "I'll give you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Mister Beausant."

  He paused, and the muscles around the edges of his goggles clenched while he referenced current prices on the Globnet. Gradually, his smirk spread into a genuine smile.

  "We'll get that SWAT team airborne."

  * * *

  Our New Overlords

  Probability Zero Jerry Oltion | 941 words

  When the aliens took up orbit around the Moon, no one knew whether they would attack us, enslave us, eat us, or what. We flooded them with communications, from radio to modulated lasers to flashing lights to stamping out geometric symbols in corn crops, all to no avail.

  The aliens didn't respond to anything for nearly a month. People were growing frantic, expecting doom to rain out of the sky at any moment. Others expected largesse once the aliens figured out what we wanted most. Half a dozen countries went to war in an attempt to ensure that their rivals didn't benefit from alien technology at their expense.

  Then on day twenty-eight, exactly one lunar month (sidereal) from the moment they'd arrived, they broadcast a video message on TV, taking over every channel that was relayed via satellite.

  "As you probably suspected by our presence here," said their spokesman—a greenand-brown hexaped with a bulbous, quivering head, big, sail-like ears, six tiny eyes on stalks, and a mouth like a knothole in a board, "there is a galactic federation of spacefaring worlds. We came here to invite you to join, after receiving signals depicting your voyages to your moon, but in the time it took us to get here it looks like you've pretty much given up any meaningful attempt at continuing your progress. That puts us in a bit of a bind, because we can't invite a species to join the Federation if they can't actually reach the Federation, which at the moment means us here in orbit around your moon. We have a rule against providing advanced technology to primitive worlds, you see, and the ability to travel from your home planet to other bodies within your own solar system is the bare minimum criterion for an equal trading partner. But we've been examining your landing sites here and we find clear evidence that you did meet the test half a century ago, so we're willing to make this compromise: If you can do it again before we're refueled and ready to head back, we'll take one of you with us as an ambassador. That ambassador can plead your case for membership with the Grand Council, whose decision will be final. The first one to reach us will be that ambassador, so choose wisely." The hexaped turned its big head partway around, then swiveled back. "Oh, right. We'll be another two months fueling up. No pressure. Ha ha. Little joke."

  He sat there for a moment like a TV news anchor waiting for the red light to go out on the cameras, then the picture swirled into static, to be replaced by the normal programming it had preempted.

  If their mere presence had sparked wars, the conflicts their offer set off can only be called jihads. Nobody wanted the wrong people to become the ambassadors for all of humanity. Imagine what might happen if a Muslim or a Mormon made it there first. Or, God forbid, a Baptist.

  The Japanese coolly prepared one of their H–2B rockets for a one-way flight, strapped a pair of solid cargo boosters to the main stack, selected their most trusted and venerated statesman to ride into orbit and sent him off within a week.

  The Chinese, of course, shot him down with one of their antisatellite weapons.

  The Chinese sent up their secret clone of Deng Xiaoping, but his capsule ran afoul of the debris from the Japanese attempt.

  Russia tried to modify a Soyez originally intended for the International Space Station, but someone (everyone suspected the CIA) hacked its guidance computer and sent it tumbling out of control. The aliens rescued it and delivered it to the ISS with the terse message, "Nice try, but no gork."

  Israel tried one of its Jericho ICBMs with an astronaut in place of the warhead, which not only proved that they had built one capable of reaching the U.S., but also that they had a saboteur somewhere in the system when the rocket blew up in the silo.

  The European Union, Iran, Bolivia, even Cuba gave it a whirl, all to no avail.

  The United States, of course, deliberated fiercely in congress for a month and a half before giving NASA the authorization and a budget of a dollar thirty-eight.

  That left private enterprise, which had been busy blowing up rockets one after another for weeks. Humanity was coming right down to the wire when one of the last remaining players realized they would never be able to keep a human alive all the way to the Moon, so they sent the one thing they figured they could keep kicking: a cat. It was an eight-month-old kitten, healthy and curious and playful and resilient as only an adolescent cat can be. They padded its capsule with sacks of cat food and water, gave it one final noogie on the forehead, and sent it to the aliens to show them that somebody, at least, could send something alive to the Moon.

  "We've received your Ambassador," the alien spokesman said when it arrived. "What a delightful little creature. You're smarter than we thought."

  We all breathed a sigh of relief and stopped killing one another, at least for a few days. The alien ship finished fueling up, then roared off into interstellar space, somewhere in the direction of Boötes. We awaited their return with eagerness, sure the kitten would charm them into accepting us with full trading status.

  Well, they did come back, and imagine our surprise to learn that cats have a language all their own, one that the aliens could learn. And our little kitten was apparently quite a negotiator. There've been some changes around here. Let's just say I'm glad I was never a dog person.

  * * *

  Lockstep: A Possible Galac
tic Empire

  Science Fact Karl Schroeder | 3992 words

  Traveling to the stars is a grand aspiration. But is it the right problem to solve?

  In January 2012, DARPA and NASA announced a grant to establish the 100 Year Starship Foundation. The grand aim of the Foundation is to develop the technologies, systems, economic plans, and sociology that might get us to the stars. It's a fantastic endeavor, which has already caught the imaginations of some of the best thinkers of the age. I think it's a great and worthy endeavor, and I hope they're successful.

  When I was seven years old, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, so I grew up on the vision too. Or—well, no, that's not entirely true. I grew up on stories of easy, nearly-instant star travel, mostly Andre Norton's tales of galactic civilizations: I grew up on the dreams of space opera. In space opera, we don't just have star travel; we have aliens walking our streets, we have Free Traders, Scouts, and the uniformed Patrol carrying blasters at their hips. We have extinct Forerunner civilizations that have scattered their ruins and mysterious artifacts across the galaxy. And our heroes and heroines can board a starship, travel to exotic and far-distant worlds, have adventures, and return before dinner—or at least, before New Year's.

  That is not quite the same vision that the 100 Year Starship Foundation is pursuing. You see, back in the early twentieth century—just at the time that science fiction writers were beginning to write about those mysterious alien worlds and empires spanning multiple star systems—Einstein showed that nothing could travel faster than light. This little problem would henceforth hang over the head of any science fiction reader who dreamed about the grand vision of space opera.

  A universe in which you can board a star-ship, sail to a planet light-years away in a matter of days, and then return to find no one back home aged any more than you... that wouldn't be our universe. Despite the theorizing of generations of physicists (most recently Alcubierre), FTL travel remains pure speculation.

  I think the grand epic mythology of space opera was early twentieth-century science fiction's greatest gift to humanity. It was a vision of hope, of endless growth and discovery made possible by our technological civilization. That vision has inspired generations of young people to take up careers in science and engineering, and try their hand at actually improving the world they live in. I'm pretty sure it inspired most of the people working on the 100 Year Starship project. I think covertly (or, quite openly) many of them still hope that, even if they don't succeed in building the space opera future, that somebody, perhaps standing on the shoulders of their work, will. And they think that the big problem to solve in order to make that future possible is the problem of star travel.

  After all, the enabler for space opera is faster than light travel; or, if not FTL, at least, star travel of some kind. And when you frame the problem this way, it's a hard problem. You'll probably need one hundred years to crack it, if it can be cracked at all. A lot of people are working very hard to solve this problem.

  But is it the problem we need to solve? We want the space-opera future of unlimited galactic travel to exotic planets. That's what we want. Is there a way to frame that goal that doesn't require faster than light travel?

  I've been thinking about this for a while. In 2002 I took a stab at solving the problem with my novel Permanence. That book was based on the premise that brown dwarf stars were far more common than had been suspected. If there were dozens of brown dwarfs for every lit star, then they could serve as way stations, and even destinations in their own right. The stars might be as far away as ever, but exotic and colonizable planets might be closer than we'd thought.

  It turns out that brown dwarfs are not that common. Permanence didn't quite solve the problem of how to have a space-opera future in the universe we've got. I always felt I was on the right track, though: the question we want to answer is not how to travel faster than light, but how to create the kind of future that faster-than-light travel would give us. In other words, FTL would give us a particular kind of civilization; but what else could give us that civilization?

  (Less than) interstellar travel

  In late 2011, I stumbled across an astronomy preprint on Arxiv.org, called "Nomads of the Galaxy," by Louis E. Strigari, Matteo Barnabé, Philip J. Marshall, and Roger D. Blandford—and I thought I might have what I needed. The paper is simple and direct: the authors estimate that there are one hundred thousand free-floating "nomad" planets for every star in the galaxy. This estimate is based on microlensing studies; basically, we keep seeing stars blink as something tiny passes in front of them, and it's become clear that the vast majority of those little eclipses are not caused by planets bound to the star in question. They're full-scale worlds that were ejected from the stars that gave them birth, and now they wander rootless and invisible through the galaxy. We'd never know they were there if they didn't occasionally pass in front of something else.

  At about the same time, several other astrobiology papers were suggesting that some nomad planets, if they existed, could provide life-sustaining conditions, usually deep underground. Superearth planets in particular could retain habitable conditions under a thick blanket of atmosphere for billions of years, without needing energy from a nearby sun. Even an Earth-sized planet, frozen over at the surface, might nurture a Europan-style subsurface ocean, kept alive by the residual heat of the world's formation. This, along with the Strigari et al. paper, implied there could be dozens, even hundreds of potential targets for human colonization between our world and the nearest star.

  The size distribution of these planets almost certainly follows a power law, meaning that the smallest worlds will be by far the most common, and Earth-sized or larger worlds pretty rare. Still, out of a population of one hundred thousand, there might be dozens that could provide sustenance to earthly life without terraforming. It was a dazzling idea—but not quite good enough to invent a whole civilization around it.

  Aside from the rarity of truly habitable worlds, there was the little problem that no matter how many of these worlds there might be in our vicinity, they're still separated from one another by vast distances. A thumbnail calculation suggested that there's about 1/10 of a lightyear between them. The first human-built object to reach interstellar space and until recently the fastest artificial object ever made, the Voyager 1 space probe, would take 1,700 years to travel between two of these nomad worlds.

  So, in a sense this puts us back to Square One: how to solve the problem of distance.

  Lockstep time

  Solving the problem of distance, though, is not the same as solving the problem of speed. Speed (or velocity), distance and duration are related, but not identical issues. A space-faring civilization with the resources of an entire solar system at its disposal can probably solve the problem of speed. We can probably eventually build gigantic starships that travel at some respectable fraction of lightspeed—if we all pull together. In the space opera universe, though, families, companies, religious splinter groups, and criminal organizations buy or build their own starships. Anybody can travel between the worlds. Because I'm a storyteller, that was the particular future I wanted to enable.

  What was needed was a truly crazy idea— something completely possible and utterly ridiculous, that would solve the problem. The truly ridiculous but possible solution I'd like to propose is something I call locksteps.

  Locksteps don't involve faster than light technology because they don't have to. In my novel of the same name, no ship travels at more than a couple of percent lightspeed. The lockstep empire's seventy thousand worlds are separated by huge distances, but the entire civilization is less than two light years across. I assumed that the capital planet, Destrier, is in the center of this rough sphere of worlds. In that case, ships heading out from Destrier at 1.5% of the speed of light could reach a substantial fraction of the worlds in only thirty years.

  We haven't built the engines that could power a ship to such velocities, but we know how they would wor
k. The simplest design for a lockstep-quality drive is something called a Fission Fragment Rocket (FFR). Its power source is a small dense cloud of uranium powder held together by magnetic fields and allowed to reach a near-critical chain reaction. In this state the cloud throws off shattered bits of uranium atom at high velocities, and you just deflect these out of the back of the engine using magnetic fields. The FFR is so simple, in fact, that you can imagine little colonies on the smallest and poorest lockstep worlds building their own.

  Thirty years between planets is still nothing like the hours or days pictured in your average SF movie. This is not our space opera future. So, here's the ridiculous part: what if those thirty years could be made to seem like a single night, both to the travelers and to the people back home and at the destination?

  Some ideas are impossible and loony. Some (like faster than light travel) seem reasonable but are impossible. And some, like the lock-step empire, are loony and (just) possible.

  In Canada we have these tiny wildflowers that grow during our brief Arctic summer. They're the most fragile things imaginable, and they winter over in negative-fifty-degree temperatures, under blasting winds and air as dry as any desert on Earth. They've thrived in conditions like this for millions of years because they don't try to fight the cold. They work with it.

  It wouldn't be enough for a human civilization to cower under the ice of a few frozen-over Earth-sized nomads. A true interstellar empire—one that actually prospered between the stars—would have to have the same attitude toward resources as Arctic life. It would have to gather and use energy and material in those brief periods when it could, and it would have to be able to hibernate the rest of the time. So, imagine colonies on far-flung nomad worlds, whose citizens spend most of their time in a difficult-but-not-impossible state of artificial hibernation, while their machines patiently gather the energy and resources needed for a brief flowering of activity. The longer you can hibernate, the more time your machines have to harvest and build, and the more extravagant a lifestyle you can have during those times when you're awake. The Arctic summer is extravagant; why shouldn't the interstellar one be as well?