Analog SFF, May 2011
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Cover art by John Allemand for “Tower of Worlds"
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: TOO EASY? by Stanley Schmidt
Novella: TOWER OF WORLDS by Rajnar Vajra
Science Fact: TO THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM AND BEYOND: PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES IN DEEP SPACE by Nick Kanas, M.D.
Short Story: BOUMEE AND THE APES by Ian McHugh
Short Story: THE WOLF AND THE PANTHER WERE LOVERS by Walter L. Kleine
Probability Zero: WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION by Jerry Oltion
Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ‘GOLDILOCKS’ GLIESE 581G: A FAIRY TALE? by John G. Cramer
Short Story: THE OLD MAN'S BEST by Bud Sparhawk
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: ELLIPSES by Ron Collins
Novelette: BLIND SPOT by Bond Elam
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. CXXXI, No. 5, May 2011
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: TOO EASY? by Stanley Schmidt
One of the great attractions of improved technologies has always been that they make it easier to do things. But can they ever be made too easy?
We seldom find fault with innovations that make it easier for us to do what we want or need to do, but we may not be so enthusiastic about making it easier for others to do things unto us. Might there be cases in which, once a new technology has made a class of actions much easier, it becomes necessary to artificially reintroduce difficulties or limitations—to deliberately make them less easy under at least some circumstances?
Most of us have probably felt that way about e-mail sometimes. Sure, we like being able to send letters, casual notes, and pictures with so little effort that we can do it on a spur-of-the-moment whim. But if we've had an e-mail address for more than a few days or at most weeks, we've also sometimes felt as if we were drowning in unwanted e-mails from people we don't know and wouldn't want to. A sizable business has grown up in spam filters and other ways to make it harder for unwanted e-mail to reach us.
I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg. It recently occurred to me that we may be on the brink of getting a whole class of legislative and/or judicial decisions devoted to putting limitations on certain uses of new technologies because they make it too easy to do things that used to be too difficult to cause serious problems.
A recent example that helped start me down this philosophical road was an October Associated Press article about a California man who took his car in for an oil change and discovered, thanks to his observant mechanic, that FBI agents had surreptitiously attached a GPS tracking device to his car.
That case and similar ones have wound up in various courts, with mixed results. Some courts have decided that no warrant is needed for such government action, while other courts—and individual judges in dissenting opinions—have argued that such monitoring without a warrant effectively hands governments carte blanche to track anybody and everybody at any time and for any reason. Many people who still believe that citizens still have some right to privacy—ranging from defense attorneys to civil liberty advocates—share that concern.
So how does anyone justify the casual approval of government agents sneaking a GPS tracker onto a citizen's car? Prosecutors and enforcement officers like the idea, of course, because it makes their jobs easier. Putting a tracker on a suspect's vehicle and monitoring it for a few weeks is a lot less labor-intensive than a conventional tail, with one police car physically following a person of interest. But “convenient” does not automatically equate to “right."
One legal scholar, Orin Kerr of George Washington University, opined that when such cases reach the Supreme Court, that august assemblage will decree that no warrant is needed for such “armchair tails” because the target is on a public road, where anybody could follow anybody without breaking any laws. Another, a judge named Douglas Ginsburg, said that even if a suspect is GPSed for a month, his movements during that period aren't really “exposed to the public” because it's unlikely that anyone will actually look at all those movements.
Each of these arguments, I respectfully submit, ignores at least one key point—and I'm not even talking about the obvious fact that a vehicle “tagged” on public land will not always stay there. (Will the monitors be magically turned off whenever it turns onto private property, and blank out all information about which private property it turned onto?)
Key point number one: Relatively few people would object to a police car tailing a car seen leaving a crime scene. Such an action is an obvious way to increase the chances of apprehending somebody for whom there is strong immediate reason for suspecting involvement in a specific dire deed. There's not much danger of such a tactic being applied widely and indiscriminately to anybody some official has a grudge against because it's too expensive in money and manpower. A patrol car tailing somebody is not available to do other things that may be more important. Planting a GPS unit on somebody's car and programming a computer to monitor its every move indefinitely is so much cheaper and easier that it can be done widely and indiscriminately. If it's allowed without a warranty, any citizen who crosses any official—which can be done easily, unwittingly, and for reasons posing no threat to society—has cause for concern.
&
nbsp; Key point number two: While it's true that most of the data collected in such a search will never be looked at it, it can be looked at. Computer memory has become so cheap that huge amounts of information about the movements of citizens can be collected and archived. If someone later wants to find dirt on a political enemy, there's a fertile hunting ground already stashed away. And computer processing power has become so cheap that searching it is quick and easy.
What the two points have in common is that technology has taken something that used to be so hard that it was fairly reasonable to assume nobody would bother doing it without a decent reason, and made it so easy that it can be done routinely, with or without a good reason. It's a frighteningly small step from that to Big Brother's keeping track of everybody's every move, just in case somebody someday finds it useful to know.
Before the days of such technology, the sheer difficulty of carrying out long-term, round-the-clock surveillance provided enough incentive not to do it without a good reason that requiring a warrant seemed unnecessary. With that difficulty gone, I further respectfully submit, the system needs to provide its own substitute incentive to prevent abuse. Maybe we do need to require warrants for this kind of surveillance, because without them temptation can dwarf cost.
Despite superficial differences, the situation is fundamentally similar to the one I wrote about a decade ago in “Redefining Copyright” (March 2001). Then courts had to step in and put limits on the file-sharing service Napster, which was providing a ridiculously easy way for people to get recorded music without paying for it. From the standpoint of a music-lover (especially one with means as limited as mine were in my student days) such a service seemed a godsend: not only cheap, but ever so convenient (much as slapping a GPS unit on somebody's car is ever so convenient for the police). In addition to very low cost, Napster offered something that made it seriously competitive with the commercial music distributors of the time: the option of getting a single song instead of a whole album containing a dozen others that the downloader didn't want. Napster argued that what they were doing was perfectly legal because copyright didn't forbid making, or even giving away, unauthorized copies of recordings, but only selling them.
Technically, they were right, because the copyright law in effect then had been written that way. People could and did make private copies of records and broadcasts, but nobody worried about it because making a copy took work and time. Nobody was likely to make enough of them to make a significant dent in legitimate sales. The internet changed that radically. Napster and its ilk could make copies and give them away in such huge numbers that they competed very seriously with legal sales. Since copyright exists not because governments want to pamper artists but because they want to encourage artists to produce things of value for everybody, both the courts and the recording industry had to take notice. When copying and sharing copies was laborious, a few people doing it didn't matter. When it became trivially easy, the rules had to change. Napster had to stop what it was doing, and record distributors had to develop new business models like the iTunes Store, where people could download single tracks but had to pay a fee for them, part of which went to the creators of content.
With Napster, we learned that making a formerly hard operation too easy encouraged the “bad guys,” so we had to invent a new way to make it harder. Seems to me that the same principle applies to the “good guys,” lest too much power lead them into temptation. And I suspect we'll be seeing many more applications as things continue to evolve.
Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt
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Novella: TOWER OF WORLDS by Rajnar Vajra
Given a really extreme problem, there's no substitute for extreme adapt.
Erik Acharius Bateson was a kind-hearted young man with an easy sense of humor and a meek disposition. Yet the morning of his twentieth birthday, he awoke and gave the armed wardens surrounding his bed a glare so venomous that four of the six tough veterans took a step backwards.
"My trial happens today,” he said. “So I get to do what I want and go where I want. Unless the Queen's reneged."
Chief Fuchs, the only warden present with a cross as his forehead Kin tattoo, frowned at the unpatriotic comment but let it slide. “You got until noon. After that, you go where Her Majesty wants."
"Then take me to Hooke Park. Now.” The park was Erik's favorite place in the entire level. If he wanted to enjoy it again he needed to hurry because by tonight, he'd be dead. “The Queen can wait."
The warden's hard face all but petrified. “We serve at Her Majesty's pleasure. Anything special you want for breakfast, boy?” If his rough voice didn't drip with irony, it was only because the irony seemed to cling.
Yesterday, Erik would've backed down fast. Instead, he met Fuchs's iron stare with eyes that appeared to gaze toward a final emptiness and it was the warden who first looked away.
"Not so hungry,” Erik said. “Soon as I'm dressed, we're on our way."
He threw off his blankets, swung around to get his feet on the bamboo floor, and stood up. Every guard's hands darted toward holsters. As a journeyman biologist, Erik knew better than most what the blunt weapons could do. These were flesh-eating bacteria launchers, often called “devolvers.” Short-lived designer germs within their projectiles, targeted to his DNA and held in suspended animation until impact, would consume his heart and brain within ninety seconds should he be shot in a toe. They'd kill him faster if he were shot anywhere else. Since his DNA was changing, the gram-positive nastiness had been updated weekly.
No one would explain why so many wardens had been assigned to him, or if Liana Adari, the woman who'd also “won” the annual lottery, had her own half-dozen peeping toms. And he couldn't imagine why his sextet carried the deadliest small weapons in the Queen's Armory. It made no sense. If he survived the latest antiviral—fat chance!—the Royals would finally have their cure and he'd be a national hero. If he died like so many others before him, what threat could he pose? Surely Queen Vanessa, Her Glorious Majesty Cori IV, wasn't worried he might run away? He'd gotten the final injection two days ago. No point in running now.
So why were his guards constantly on edge?
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There can be no place in the universe, Erik thought, more soothing than right here. Sitting on a cracked wooden bench, he drank in Hooke Park, its shining dome of a Buddhist stupa, its birches and oaks, and the big central pond with its lotuses, meter-long koi, and frogs. He had a crazy urge to dive in. As always, he felt larger here, more grounded and accepting of whatever life, or death, might bring. Even the wardens couldn't spoil this effect, not entirely. It helped that he'd had time to adjust to his fate although the year had been heavy with grief. He hoped his female counterpart was finding a little peace.
With the artificial sun risen to quarter mast, the frogs had little to say, but bubbles rising from the pool's center, not Batrachian related, produced an endless series of expanding ripples and tranquil plashes. According to Erik's uncle Niels, who'd married into the secretive Plumber's Guild, an immense tank lay hidden beneath this park. The tank not only supplied the pond, it fed every decorative water feature from Fermi Falls to the Queen's Jeweled Fountain, closed to the public since the Royal Plague appeared fifty years ago.
Erik found the notion of underground pipes and pumps here hard to accept. The scenery looked so . . . natural. In a sense, he supposed, it was. Real trees and bushes, dirt and stones and sparkle likewise. Honest scents of greenery and air clean enough to squeak. Of course the sky was faked, and its sun, while a genuine source of light and heat, had more in common with a light bulb than it did with a star.
Hooke Park was seldom crowded, but three families with small children had been visiting when Erik and his entourage arrived. The parents had seen them, gathered up their sparse flocks, and departed with willingness that bordered on panic. The park became quieter after that.
Remembering those families, Erik contemplated what life mi
ght be like in a society where people were allowed more than two children, where heterosexuality wasn't discouraged. Then he got distracted. Someone new showed up and calmly sat down on the opposite side of the pond. Erik blinked hard, twice, but the newcomer remained nonhuman. Erik had never seen a Gelpie from so close.
Some warden muttered a very audible "Gaadt," earning a glare from Fuchs.
According to historical reports, Gelpies had been visiting the level for a century, but sporadically. Every one that had shown up previously had meandered for hours before departing, so constantly on the move that anyone wishing to converse with them had to do so while walking. A few biologists had theorized that like sharks, Gelpies couldn't breathe while still. So much, Erik thought, for that theory. Typically, this one had thick, ivory-colored fur except for black patches around its eyes. But its stationary behavior was, so far as Erik knew, unprecedented.
He studied the creature, reminded of the giant pandas he'd only seen in pictures; but here was a mutant panda after a starvation diet: perhaps one and a half meters tall, with a tube-like mouth and the long skinny arms and prehensile tail of capuchin monkeys. Each arm had twin hands—opposable hands, not thumbs—with six flat fingers on each; the tail had a few extra finger-ribbons. Its amber eyes were huge, as proportionally oversized as those he'd seen in antique Japanese comics. Erik couldn't guess the gender, assuming Gelpies had genders.
Strange beings for sure, not just cloaked in mystery but encased in the stuff. No human knew where they came from, how they came and went despite attempts to catch them in either act, how they'd become fluent in Pol, or why they could speak any human language considering their oral anatomy. No one could even say why they came and they always ignored the question. Still, they were welcome visitors because they occasionally shared invaluable knowledge. Without them, not even the level's most brilliant scientists might have ever discovered that many other levels existed, or that all levels were part of an unimaginably colossal structure Gelpies translated into Pol as the “Tower of Worlds.” Without them, no human would've heard that creatures even more mysterious than Gelpies had assembled the Tower and maintained it: the Captains.