Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Marker. As in genetic marker. I turn to my father.

  “That's what you meant by designed. I'm some kind of test subject. I have some kind of genetic modification.”

  “No,” he says. “Or yes. Or I'm not sure. You see, we think that anyone sent out on a Dignity Vessel had to have been bred or genetically modified to work around stealth tech. Then the ships got stranded and the Dignity crews left them and mingled with the rest of the population. Some of us have the marker. You do. I do. Your mother didn't.”

  He says that last with some pain. He still grieves for her. I don't doubt that. But somehow he got mixed up in this.

  “There were no Dignity Vessels this far out,” I say. “They weren't designed to travel huge distances, and they weren't manufactured outside of Earth's solar system.”

  “Don't insult my intelligence,” he says. “We know you found a Dignity Vessel a few years ago. I've seen it.”

  Because I salvaged it and got paid for it. I couldn't leave it in space, a deathtrap to whoever else wandered close to it.

  Like this Room is.

  I salvaged the vessel and gave it to the government so they could study the damn stealth tech.

  And now my father has seen the vessel.

  “That's how I knew how to find you,” he says.

  “You didn't need me,” I say. “You had the others.”

  “We needed all of you,” Riya says. “The government wouldn't give us a go unless we had a one hundred percent success rate. Which we do. Your friend Karl simply proves that those who go in need the marker or they're subject to the interdimensional field.”

  Karl and Junior and my mother and who knows how many others.

  “How long has the government known?” I ask. “How long have they known that the Room is a stealth-tech generator?”

  She shrugs. “Why does it matter?”

  “Because they should have shut it down.” I'm even closer to her than I was before. She's backing away from me.

  “They can't,” my father says. “They don't know how.”

  “Then they should have blocked off the station,” I say. “This place is dangerous.”

  “There are centuries’ worth of warnings to keep people away,” Riya says. “Besides, it's not our concern. We have scientists who can replicate that marker. We think we've finally discovered a way to work with real stealth tech. Do you know what that's worth?”

  “My life, apparently,” I say. “And my mother's. And Karl's.”

  Riya is looking at me. She's finally understanding how angry I am.

  “Don't,” my father says.

  “Don't what?” I ask. “Don't hurt her? Why should you care? I could have died in there. Me, the daughter you swore to protect. Or did you abandon that oath along with your search for my mother? Was that even real?”

  “It was real, honey,” he says. “That's how I found out about this. Riya and I met at a survivors’ meeting. We started talking—”

  “I don't care!” I snap. “Don't you understand what you've done?”

  “You wouldn't have died,” he says. “That's why we approached you last. Once we were sure the others made it out, then we came to you. Besides, you've done much more dangerous things on your own.”

  “And so has Karl.” I'm close to both of them now. I'm so angry, I'm trembling. “But you know what the difference is?”

  My father shakes his head. Riya watches me as if she's suddenly realized how dangerous I can be.

  “The difference is that we chose to take those risks,” I say. “We didn't choose this one.”

  “I heard you tell the team,” Riya says, “that someone might die on this mission.”

  “I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”

  “But this time you believed it,” my father says.

  “Yeah,” I say softly. “I thought that someone would be me.”

  * * * *

  And that's the crux of it. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would die on this mission and, apparently, I was fine with that.

  I thought I'd die in multicolored lights and song, like I thought my mother had died, and I thought it a beautiful way to go. I'd even convinced myself that I would die diving, so it would be all right.

  I would be done.

  But it's not all right. Karl's dead, and I can't even prove fault, except my own. Only when I review the decisions we made, we made the right ones with the information we had.

  The thought brings me up short, prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.

  Somehow I get out of that bay without harming either of them.

  I don't speak to them as the Business leaves the station. I don't speak to them until I drop them at the nearest outpost. Then I expressly tell them that if they contact me or my people again, I will find a way to hurt them—but I don't know exactly how I would do that.

  Riya's right. The government would back them because they're working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and my father can get away with anything.

  And—stupid me—I finally realize that my father has no feelings for me at all. He never has. The clinging I remember is just him pulling me free of the Room, leaving my mother—my poor mother—behind.

  I can't even guarantee that we weren't part of some early experiment on the same project. While my father was telling my mother's parents to care for me while he tried to recover her, he might have been simply trying to recoup his losses from that trip, experimenting with people and markers and things that survive in the strangest of interdimensional fields.

  After we leave my father and Riya on the outpost, we have a memorial service for Karl. I talk the longest because I knew him the best, and I don't cry until we send him out into the darkness, still in his suit with his knife and breathers.

  He would have wanted those. He would have appreciated the caution, even though it was caution—in the end—that got him killed.

  As we head back to Longbow Station, I have decided to resuscitate my business. Only I'm not going to wreck dive like I used to. I'm going to find Dignity Vessels. I'm going to capture anything that vaguely resembles stealth tech and I'm going to find a place to keep it where our government can't get it.

  I'm going to run a shadow project. I'm going to find out how this stuff works and I'm going to do it before the government does because I won't have to follow the regulations.

  The government and the people like my father, they have to follow certain rules and protocols, all the while keeping the project secret.

  I won't have to. If I go far enough out of the sector, I won't have to follow any rules at all.

  I can make my own. Change the way the battle is fought. Redefine the war.

  I learned that from Ewing Trekov. Don't fight the war you're given; fight the war you can envision.

  Once the government has stealth tech, they'll have a seemingly invincible military. They'll be stronger in ways that can hurt the smaller governments in the region and anyone who works at the edges of the law, like I do.

  But if we have stealth tech too, then all sides are equal. And if we can figure out how to use that tech in ways they haven't imagined, then we get ahead.

  All my life, I searched the past for my purpose. I sensed that something back there opened the key to my future.

  Who knew that I would find all that I'd lost in the one place that had taken everything from me.

  There are no souls in that Room, just like there are no voices.

  There's only the harshness of time.

  And like the ancients before me, I'm going to harness that harshness into a weapon, a defense, and a future.

  I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

  Maybe I'll just wait, and let the future reveal itself like the habitats on the station, one small section at a time.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  [Back to Table of Contents]

 
; * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS: THE MULTIVERSE

  by Norman Spinrad

  KEEPING IT REAL

  by Justina Robson

  Pyr, $15.00

  ISBN: 1933368365

  —

  IN WAR TIMES

  by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Tor, $25.95

  ISBN: 1597800457

  —

  BRASYL

  by Ian McDonald

  Pyr, $25.00

  ISBN: 0345478258

  * * * *

  It seems to happen at irregular intervals, in different journals, written by different writers, with somewhat differing slants, but it's always the same old bollocks, because it's always based on the same misconception. The latest incarnation, in Discovery Magazine, is “Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality,” by one Bruno Maddox.

  Don't stop me if you've heard this before, because of course you have, it's one more screed about how the accelerating pace of science and technology has overtaken and surpassed science fiction; “Sci-fi helped make the present; now it's obsolete,” as the slug line puts it.

  It's the usual such stuff, if more scientifically ignorant than most. It is framed with an amusing, well-written, and mildly devastating con report on the scene at the last Nebula event in New York, but it descends to silly stuff like:

  “In the real world, quantum foam is a term used by hard-core physicists standing beside vast, cantilevered chalkboards full of squiggles to describe a theoretical state, or scale, or reality at which particles of time and space blink in and out of existence in a soup of their own mathematical justification. But in (Michael) Crichton's hands, it's actual foam. His heroes step into their time machine, pass quickly through a metaphysical car wash of suds, and then spend the rest of the novel jousting with black-armored knights and rolling under descending port-cullises. The science, in other words, is pure nonsense, and the science fiction is not so much ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ as what you might call, well, ‘bad.'”

  So much for cutting edge quantum physics!

  My point in quoting Maddox here is not to attack (or for that matter defend) Crichton's literary use of what quantum physics, so ignorantly pooh-poohed by him, more and more is telling us is the actual nature of physical reality, but to make a different literary point upon which Maddox is even more abysmally misguided. This is not at all disconnected from the scientific point, and is intended to refute something that James Gunn said in the Paraliteraria on-line forum, a refutation that I don't think Jim Gunn will mind at all.

  I doubt that very many people reading this magazine need to be told that it is quite impossible for science to render science fiction “obsolete,” let alone for the “reality” of the present to do so. But perhaps a clarifying image might be in order, of the simple sort that might even enlighten the likes of Bruno Maddox as to why this is so and why he is dead wrong.

  Picture the sincere writer of serious science fiction—someone really trying to do the job—as standing in the bow of a boat in a moment we might call the present. The boat is human history and all scientific knowledge available in that moment, and the waters that the boat is sailing through is the ocean of time. The science fiction writer is riding the vessel of all that knowledge, and his or her mission is to peer ahead from that vantage into the fog-bank of the future ahead of the boat utilizing all the knowledge upon which he or she stands, “stands on the shoulders of giants,” as this sort of thing is often put.

  Thus, while the accumulation of scientific and other forms of knowledge as well as the profusion of technological innovation may be accelerating as the boat sails forward through the sea of time, no matter how fast it goes, no matter how much cargo is accumulating in the hold, the science fiction writer is always standing in the bow of the boat looking forward.

  That is why it is impossible for science, technology, evolution, or history to render science fiction obsolete. There are all too many ways that a civilization can end up destroying science fiction as a commercially viable literature or even as a visionary mode of thought, but the necessary visionary function performed by science fiction in a progressively evolving civilization can never be rendered obsolete. If nothing is performing that visionary function, it is the civilization in question that in the end renders itself obsolete, as has happened many times in world history.

  Simple, right? If you're reading this magazine, you probably knew all that already.

  However....

  However, I came across a discussion of Maddox's article in the Paraliteraria forum in which no one really agreed with such nonsense, but there seemed to emerge a consensus that science fiction had not dealt with or introduced any “Big New Ideas” in a long time. James Gunn declared that Neuromancer, way back in the 1980s, was the last work of science fiction to do so, but that he still had hope.

  You can relax, Jim, there are two of them, and they are both a lot bigger and far more drastic than “cyberspace.”

  The lesser one—and lesser it is only by comparison to the greater one which will be the main topic of this essay—is Vernor Vinge's concept of the “Singularity,” which he has promulgated and explored in articles, interviews, scholarly papers, and his own science fiction, and which has been picked up by enough other science fiction writers to have become something of a fixture of the genre.

  Chez Vinge, technology, particularly computer and software technology, is proceeding at such a rapid and rapidly accelerating pace that sooner or later Artificial Intelligences will be created by humans that will be capable of creating Artificial Intelligences superior to themselves, which will create the next generation of AIs. And so on and so forth, Artificial Intelligence raising itself by its own virtual bootstraps generation after rapid-fire generation exponentially until there arises a generation of AIs not only far advanced beyond human intelligence, not only forever beyond mere human understanding, but advancing to a point where they somehow transcend naturally evolved reality to create a virtual reality that is even more “real.” This they will inhabit and continue to evolve within at an ever-increasing rate, and in it humans will at best be honored pets or at worst disappear entirely.

  The Singularity. The creation of a level of reality where humans can never go.

  I have had my dialectical arguments with this concept, but neither I nor anyone else can seriously argue that the Singularity is not a “Big New Idea” emerging in and from science fiction. Whether it's inevitable in real world terms or not, it is certainly a most puissant literary trope that has generated, is generating, and no doubt will continue to generate, interesting and significant science fiction. We can argue about it, but no one in their right mind can say that it is trivial.

  But even the Singularity as an engine for the generation of works of science fiction and the thematic revitalization of the literature pales beside the greater of the “Big New Ideas” in question which may, among even greater things, in the end prove also to be its dialectic antithesis.

  The Multiverse.

  Okay, in purely fictional terms, the Multiverse, the idea that there is no such thing as a single fixed base reality, but rather a multiplexity of subjective realities, each of which is “equally real” or “unreal,” is not exactly a new idea, being the central theme of the work of Philip K. Dick, and, in literary terms at least, the necessary premise of the alternate world story, among other things.

  Indeed, despite all the alternate world stories that have been written afterward and the few that were written before, it is Dick's classic novel of a world in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II, and the alternate reality within it in which they didn't, The Man in the High Castle, which really opened the door for the alternate history story as a sub-set of “science fiction"—as well, in a way, at least in literary terms, for a certain kind of “fantasy” as a subset of “SF.”

  In literary terms, science fiction, or speculative fiction if you will, is by definition the literature of the could-be-but-isn't, and fantasy by definitio
n is the literature of the demonstrably impossible. The alternate history story takes place in a region between, a fictional reality in which the laws of mass and energy may be the same as in our own, but which never “happened.”

  But when Mr. Tagomi, in The Man in the High Castle, has a vision of, or is transported to, our world for a time, Dick introduces the powerful fictional concept that both worlds, and by extension others as well, could simultaneously “happen,” could be equally “real” by some elusive definition.

  And thereby introduces the Multiverse as science fiction, rather than fantasy.

  This, it could certainly have been argued up until fairly recently, is a strictly literary game irrelevant to anything but literary definition, and fantasy could just as well be defined as fiction set in alternate worlds where the physical laws are different, so that what we call “magic” works like a technology; worlds, which like alternate histories, just happen to have never “happened.”

  And, indeed, something like Justina Robson's Keeping It Real is a “Multiverse” novel of sorts which reads more like science fiction than fantasy, even though it's full of elves, demons, elementals, and all sorts of well-worn fantasy tropes, including various species of magic.

  The set-up is that a technological artifact called a Quantum Bomb (an interesting choice of label right there) has breached the barriers between several alternate universes including our own, each with different laws of physics or magic, releasing such literarily conventional fantasy creatures into the human realm and, to a more limited extent, humans into theirs.

  But whether Robson consciously intended to declare it or not when she titled the novel, keeping it real is just what Keeping It Real does, the “it” being that this Multiverse is literarily science fiction, not fantasy. Each of these alternate realities has its own more or less rigorous physical laws, call what's going on magic or not. When beings from one of them travel to another, humans included, the mix of realities is complexly and believably rendered. One of the lead characters is a male elf come to our world to become a rock star. The other is his female cyborged bodyguard.