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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVI No. 11, November 2006
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by Jean Pierre Normand
SERIAL
ROLLBACK, Part II of IV, Robert J. Sawyer
Novella
THE GOOD KILL, Barry B. Longyear
Novelette
WHERE LIES THE FINAL HARBOR?, Shane Tourtellotte
Short Stories
PREVENGE, Mike Resnick & Kevin J. Anderson
MAN, DESCENDANT, Carl Frederick
Science Fact
THE INTERSTELLAR CONSPIRACY, Les Johnson & Gregory L. Matloff
Reader's Departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
Vol. CXXVI No. 11
November 2006
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: THE TYRANNY OF PHYSICAL LAW by Stanley Schmidt
THE GOOD KILL by Barry B. Longyear
SCIENCE FACT: THE INTERSTELLAR CONSPIRACY by Les Johnson & Gregory L. Matloff
PREVENGE by Mike Resnick & Kevin J. Anderson
Man, Descendant by Carl Frederick
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THANKSGIVING MUSINGS Jeffery D. Kooistra
WHERE LIES THE FINAL HARBOR? by Shane Tourtellotte
ROLLBACK: PART II OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
BRASS TACKS
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EDITORIAL: THE TYRANNY OF PHYSICAL LAW by Stanley Schmidt
We've all heard the joke about the patient who tells the doctor, “It hurts when I do this."
To which the doctor replies, “Don't do that."
It's funny but also wise. While the patient can reasonably hope the doctor will be able to cure the problem and restore the ability to “do this” without hurting, unless and until that happens, the patient is well advised not to do the thing that hurts.
But how many of us actually have the patience and self-control to follow that advice—and how many can't resist the temptation to keep trying it to see if it still hurts?
The lesson extends far beyond medicine. There are plenty of things that the physical universe won't let you do, but people persist in trying to do them anyway. If a hose or electric cord is obviously caught on some unseen obstacle, people will often yank on it over and over, in just the same way except maybe harder and harder, all the while muttering coarser and coarser language in frustration that it won't behave the way they want it to. Drivers stand tall bags of groceries upright and unfettered on car seats and get angry when they plunge forward and spill their contents at the first less than perfectly gentle stop, even though they've seen it happen many times before. Or leave plastic toothbrushes or CDs on the dashboards of locked cars on hot summer days, and feign surprise and indignation when they melt and flow into amusing but otherwise useless shapes.
We're often advised, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.” But often the more sensible and useful advice would be, “If at first you don't succeed, try something else.” Simply repeating something that you've already established doesn't work is most unlikely to work any better now than it did then—because physical objects follow physical laws, quite consistently, whether you like them or not. At the macroscopic level, at least, a particular action will almost certainly produce a particular result—the same result, time after time.
Simply pulling again, or harder, on a stuck hose or cord accomplishes nothing because the obstruction is still there and still has the same effect it did. (If you pull hard enough, of course, something may break, but that will probably have unwelcome side effects.) Newton's laws of motion dictate that if a car comes to a fairly rapid stop, loose objects with high centers of mass will try to keep going and thereby tip forward. The greenhouse effect as applied to a sunlit car with glass windows dictates that objects with low melting points left there will melt.
All of these things are annoying, sometimes to the point where it may seem that the Universe has it in for us. But none of them is surprising, if we think about what's going on and remember some of the very basic things we all know about how the world works. So rather than railing at the Universe for making bad things happen to us or not letting us do things exactly the way we'd prefer, we'd be well advised—like the aforementioned pain patient—to refrain from doing the things that we know don't work, and concentrate instead on learning to do the ones that do.
In this respect, we have one big advantage over that hapless patient. Physical laws unequivocally forbid some actions, but they just as unequivocally allow, and even require, others. It's pointless to grumble about the things nature won't let you do (like leaving a toothbrush on the dashboard in the desert and expecting to use it the next morning). We should concentrate instead on learning to utilize the things it does allow (like protecting the toothbrush from the heat by keeping it an insulated container in a shaded place).
The spray hose in my kitchen sink sometimes gets caught as I described above, by getting a loop behind one of the shutoff valves under the sink. Pulling repeatedly in the same way does nothing to free it because it's still behind the valve, but snaking it in and out a few times while gently twisting can easily move it out of that position and end the problem. If grocery bags keep flying off the seat when you brake your car, there are at least a couple of ways to prevent that in the future—e.g., strapping the bag in with a seat belt, or simply loading it so the heaviest items are at the bottom. Or both.
I must, of course, say a few words about “Murphy's Law [1]"and the “innate perversity of inanimate objects.” Both seem so perfectly descriptive of so much human experience that it's sometimes hard not to think of them as rigorous scientific concepts. And it's true that some real objects don't seem to behave consistently. An electronic device may work fine at some times and not at all at others because of a loose wire that sometimes makes good contact and sometimes doesn't. Anybody who's been driving very long has probably had car problems that occurred only when the car was hot, or cold, or turning left or turning right.
[Footnote 1. If anything can go wrong, it will.]
Yet in all of these cases, if you look closely enough, it turns out that even intermittent problems are following the same relatively few and simple physical laws. If you find that loose wire, for instance, and resolder it securely, the gadget it occupies will again work reliably.
And often the “innate perversity” of objects simply means they're doing exactly what they're made to do, which does not coincide with what we'd like them to do. In many of these cases the objects are human artifacts and the limitations are technological—not fundamental physical principles, but the sorts of things that computer users call “bugs” and computer salespeople call “features.” In many such cases you can change the limitations by changing the design, though implementing the improved design may be expensive. If you can't or don't want to do that, you can often learn to achieve your main goals with what you have, simply by learning what the design
limitations are and how to work within them.
My house, for example, has an integrated heating and hot water system in which water is heated when needed by a coil attached to the boiler. One of its less endearing design features is that the bathtub faucet can draw water at a considerably faster rate than the coil can heat it, so if I want to fill the tub with nice hot water as quickly as possible, turning the hot water on full and leaving it that way is exactly the wrong way to do it. If I do that, I'll always wind up with a tub full of cold (or at best lukewarm) water. Fully opening the valve first quickly pulls the cold water out of the pipes so you (briefly) get very hot water; but soon you exhaust that and it continues to draw water that hasn't stayed in the coil long enough to get hot. Once you understand that that's what's happening, you can use a method that gives much better, if somewhat slower, results: turn the hot on full only until the water gets hot, then cut the flow back to maybe half that and adjust the temperature with the cold knob. That way the hot water is heated as fast as it's drawn off, and you can maintain the temperature you want.
That doesn't mean it's trivially easy; you have to develop a feel for what the maximum allowable flow is, because if you exceed it by even a little you're soon back to cold water. And it does take longer to fill the tub this way than if you could just turn the hot water full on and expect it to maintain full temperature. There are systems that can do that, and we'll buy one eventually (likely as soon as this year, since fuel prices are now so high that a more efficient system shouldn't take long to pay for itself). But so far it's been a relatively low priority because the new system will be a substantial investment, there've been more urgent demands on the budget, and we know a usable workaround.
And in some cases, the option of upgrading to a better system just doesn't exist because the limitation is not just a matter of technological design, but a fundamental physical law. A favorite example for science fiction readers is the apparent speed-of-light limitation on mechanical travel. It's conceivable that a loophole may someday be found even there, in basically new science as yet undiscovered; there are even hints that a way around it may be implicit but not obvious in the existing theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Unless and until such a thing is found, though, any aspiring starfarers will have to accept that limitation and find other ways, such as highly relativistic speeds, suspended animation, or generation ships.
For a more mundane example, humans spent thousands of years wishing they could fly like birds; but no matter how hard they flapped their arms, with or without things attached to them, they couldn't get off the ground. It just isn't possible to generate enough lift that way to raise a human mass against the pull of Earth's gravity. But if you learn enough about fluid dynamics and combustion and materials science, you can develop other ways that work well enough to routinely carry hundreds of passengers at a time on regularly scheduled transcontinental and transoceanic flights.
Learning, of course, is the key. It's frustrating that the laws of nature are absolutely unyielding in denying us the ability to do certain things. But because those laws apply consistently, understanding them gives us the power to do a great many other things. All of us understand this on at least some level. It's fashionable in too many circles to say almost with pride, “I don't know any physics,” and to sneer at any display of interest in learning any. But the people who say they don't know any physics are wrong. People (or other beings) who don't understand any physics don't survive to adulthood.
If you've ever thrown a baseball, driven a car, guided food to your mouth, walked across a room, or even rolled out of bed without breaking anything, you were applying quite complicated physics. What most people don't understand is not physics, but the formal language that physicists use to talk about it. More of them need to understand the value of learning at least some of that language, because that is the way to understanding the ways of the world well enough to make them work for you in ways beyond your own body—things like building cars, planes, and microwave ovens that work, and buildings and bridges that stand up.
For while the laws of nature are in one sense tyrannical, they are in another sense empowering. They tell us not only what we can't do, but also what we can—and how. The better we understand them, the more we can shape our lives to be the best they can.
Copyright © 2006 Stanley Schmidt
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THE GOOD KILL by Barry B. Longyear
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Illustrated by John Allemand
Changing times can put an end to old traditions—unless they can find untraditional ways to adapt. Very untraditional, in this case....
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The Rent-A-Mech, Walter, had just put my breakfast on the table when D. Supt. Matheson rang me. "Forgive me for ringing you so early, Jaggers, but London ABC wants us to look into that fox hunting matter at Dartmoor. Apparently there's an amdroid involved. It's an outdoor scene and if you don't move quickly the evidence may become contaminated.... “
Matheson hadn't begun with a knock-knock joke, which meant he was troubled. The Miles Bowman death was the biggest story to hit Devon in decades. The wealthy and charismatic Master of Houndtor Down Hunts had died, I had gathered from yesterday's news reports, when he had been thrown by his horse during a run. Apparently someone in the park police was exploring another theory.
Val momentarily looked up from the table where she had been lapping her single cream. Seeing nothing to distress her, she twitched her tail as if to launch an unwelcome insect and resumed emptying the saucer. A sepia and golden Tonkinese, her soft coat colored in a random watermarked silk pattern, she was much too elegant ever to be observed using the litter box, although I supposed she must be using it. It was, after all, being used. Perhaps she had friends in.
"Jaggers? Jaggers, there. Pay attention. Blast! When are you getting a modern screen phone? Bloody hell. Jaggers?"
With a parting glance at my rapidly cooling eggs and bacon, I responded into the handset, “Yes, Superintendent. You were saying?"
"Now, I've made a good number of allowances for you, Jaggers, because of your record. You were once an impressive detective. Do not take advantage. Am I understood?"
"Certainly, Superintendent."
"You're going to want to get to the scene before it rains."
I shifted my gaze to the glass door that looked into the garden as Matheson continued. The mid-March sky over the city was gloomy grey with curtains of mist coming up from the river. "The park constabulary think they have their murderer, Jaggers. London wants us to go through everything. After all, artificial beings are our bailiwick. Ready to receive?"
I toggled the receive on my hand desk. “Go ahead, Superintendent."
"Sending now."
As the case file form and location instructions loaded, I mulled the late Miles Bowman's place in the scheme of things. In certain upwardly crusted circles, Bowman's death was
immense. Houndtor Down had brought riding to the hounds and the good kill back to Albion after an eight-decade hiatus, dotted with less than satisfying drag hunts and those absurd experiments with AI-equipped robotic foxes. Houndtor's answer was to introduce genuine bio fox amdroids for prey, but imprinted with human engrams. The fox, therefore, would be physically a fox, but no longer a fox according to the prohibition against fox hunting, in that the creature understood the consequences and could volunteer. In actuality, the vermin was a human in a fox's “meat suit,” entitled under law to engage in whatever absurd, but legal, occupation he or she chose. Nevertheless, where one got volunteers was a puzzle.
I'd never been at the Houndtor Down Lodge, although I had witnessed a bit of one of the operation's hunts on Cripdon Down the year before when I was on an easily resolved poodle abuse enquiry. The amdroid poodle had undeniably abused her owner, a Harley dealer from Torbay. However both poodle and woman confessed to being consensual S&M partners in the area for a hunt, hence no crime. Too bad really. The poodle matter promised to be the most interesting case I'd been on since being assigned to the Exeter office. Nevertheless, since I was on the moor then and a hunt was on, I watched. Except for the chase being followed above by a hoard of hovercraft, the hunt itself had been something caught in amber. Elegantly costumed riders mounted on magnificent steeds chasing a huge pack of handsome foxhounds, the peculiar warbling notes of the Master's tiny horn signaling the sighting of the prey. As long as you weren't particularly fond of foxes, it was rather uplifting.
The lodge was twenty-five kilometers southwest of the city, just beyond the village of Lustleigh on the east edge of the moor. The enormously lucrative concession had its own skydock, and the park detective in charge, one DCI Stokes, condescended to have a constable at Houndtor Down to bring us up to speed. “Superintendent, on the killing, did the park cops get a verbal?"
Analog SFF, November 2006 Page 1
