The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Avast!” roared Kalava. He sprang down the foredeck ladder and went among the crew. “Be you men? Up on your feet or die!” With kicks and cuffs he drove them back to their duties. One yelled and drew a knife on him. He knocked the fellow senseless. Barely in time, Gray Courser came again under control. She was then too near shore to get the huukin harnessed. Kalava took the helm, wore ship, and clawed back to sea room.

  Mutiny was all too likely, once the sailors regained a little courage. When Kalava could yield place to a halfway competent steersman, he sought Ilyandi and they talked awhile in her cabin. Thereafter they returned to the foredeck and he shouted for attention. Standing side by side, they looked down on the faces, frightened or terrified or sullen, of the men who had no immediate tasks.

  “Hear this,” Kalava said into the wind. “Pass it on to the rest. I know you’d turn south this day if you had your wish. But you can’t. We’d never make the crossing, the shape we’re in. Which would you liefer have, the chance of wealth and fame or the certainty of drowning? We’ve got to make repairs, we’ve got to restock, and then we can sail home, bringing wondrous news. When can we fix things up? Soon, I tell you, soon. I’ve been looking at the water. Look for yourselves. See how it’s taking on more and more of a brown shade, and how bits of plant stuff float about on the waves. That means a river, a big river, emptying out somewhere nigh. And that means a harbor for us. As for the sight we saw, here’s the Vilku, our lady Ilyandi, to speak about it.”

  The skythinker stepped forward. She had changed into a clean white robe with the emblems of her calling, and held a staff topped by a sigil. Though her voice was low, it carried.

  “Yes, that was a fearsome sight. It lends truth to the old stories of things that appeared to mariners who ventured, or were blown, far north. But think. Those sailors did win home again. Those who did not must have perished of natural causes. For why would the gods or the demons sink some and not others?

  “What we ourselves saw merely flashed overhead. Was it warning us off? No, because if it knew that much about us, it knew we cannot immediately turn back. Did it give us any heed at all? Quite possibly not. It was very strange, yes, but that does not mean it was any threat. The world is full of strangenesses. I could tell you of things seen on clear nights over the centuries, fiery streaks down the sky or stars with glowing tails. We of the Vilkui do not understand them, but neither do we fear them. We give them their due honor and respect, as signs from the gods.”

  She paused before finishing: “Moreover, in the secret annals of our order lie accounts of visions and wonders exceeding these. All folk know that from time to time the gods have given their word to certain holy men or women, for the guidance of the people. I may not tell how they manifest themselves, but I will say that this today was not wholly unlike.

  “Let us therefore believe that the sign granted us is a good one.”

  She went on to a protective chant-spell and an invocation of the Powers. That heartened most of her listeners. They were, after all, in considerable awe of her. Besides, the larger part of them had sailed with Kalava before and done well out of it. They bullied the rest into obedience.

  “Dismissed,” said the captain. “Come evening, you’ll get a ration of liquor.”

  A weak cheer answered him. The ship fared onward.

  Next morning they did indeed find a broad, sheltered bay, dun with silt. Hitching up the huukin, they went cautiously in until they spied the river foretold by Kalava. Accompanied by a few bold men, he took a boat ashore. Marshes, meadows, and woods all had signs of abundant game. Various plants were unfamiliar, but he recognized others, among them edible fruits and bulbs. “It is well,” he said. “This land is ripe for our taking.” No lightning bolt struck him down.

  Having located a suitable spot, he rowed back to the ship, brought her in on the tide, and beached her. He could see that the water often rose higher yet, so he would be able to float her off again when she was ready. That would take time, but he felt no haste. Let his folk make proper camp, he thought, get rested and nourished, before they began work. Hooks, nets, and weirs would give rich catches. Several of the crew had hunting skills as well. He did himself.

  His gaze roved upstream, toward the hills. Yes, presently he would lead a detachment to learn what lay beyond.

  5

  Gaia had never concealed her reconstructive research into human history. It was perhaps her finest achievement. But slowly those of her fellows in the galactic brain who paid close attention had come to feel that it was obsessing her. And then of late—within the past hundred thousand years or so—they were finding her reports increasingly scanty, less informative, at last ambiguous to the point of evasiveness. They did not press her about it; the patience of the universe was theirs. Nevertheless they had grown concerned. Especially had Alpha, who as the nearest was in the closest, most frequent contact; and therefore, now, had Wayfarer. Gaia’s activities and attitudes were a primary factor in the destiny of Earth. Without a better understanding of her, the rightness of saving the planet was undecidable.

  Surely an important part of her psyche was the history and archeology she preserved, everything from the animal origins to the machine fulfillment of genus Homo. Unnumbered individual minds had uploaded into her, too, had become elements of her being—far more than were in any other node. What had she made of all this over the megayears, and what had it made of her?

  She could not well refuse Wayfarer admittance; the heritage belonged to her entire fellowship, ultimately to intelligence throughout the cosmos of the future. Guided by her, he would go through the database of her observations and activities in external reality, geological, biological, astronomical.

  As for the other reality, interior to her, the work she did with her records and emulations of humankind—to evaluate that, some purely human interaction seemed called for. Hence Wayfarer’s makeup included the mind-pattern of a man.

  Christian Brannock’s had been chosen out of those whose uploads went starfaring because he was among the earliest, less molded than most by relationships with machines. Vigor, intelligence, and adaptability were other desired characteristics.

  His personality was itself a construct, a painstaking refabrication by Alpha, who had taken strands (components, overtones) of his own mind and integrated them to form a consciousness that became an aspect of Wayfarer. No doubt it was not a perfect duplicate of the original. Certainly, while it had all the memories of Christian Brannock’s lifetime, its outlook was that of a young man, not an old one. In addition, it possessed some knowledge—the barest sketch, grossly oversimplified so as not to overload it—of what had happened since its body died. Deep underneath its awareness lay the longing to return to an existence more full than it could now imagine. Yet, knowing that it would be taken back into the oneness when its task was done, it did not mourn any loss. Rather, to the extent that it was differentiated from Wayfarer, it took pleasure in sensations, thoughts, and emotions that it had effectively forgotten.

  When the differentiation had been completed, the experience of being human again became well-nigh everything for it, and gladsome, because so had the man gone through life.

  To describe how this was done, we must again resort to myth and say that Wayfarer downloaded the Christian Brannock subroutine into the main computer of the system that was Gaia. To describe what actually occurred would require the mathematics of wave mechanics and an entire concept of multileveled, mutably dimensioned reality which it had taken minds much greater than humankind’s a long time to work out.

  We can, however, try to make clear that what took place in the system was not a mere simulation. It was an emulation. Its events were not of a piece with events among the molecules of flesh and blood; but they were, in their way, just as real. The persons created had wills as free as any mortal’s, and whatever dangers they met could do harm equal to anything a mortal body might suffer.

  Consider a number of people at a given moment. Each is doing s
omething, be it only thinking, remembering, or sleeping—together with all ongoing physiological and biochemical processes. They are interacting with each other and with their surroundings, too; and every element of these surroundings, be it only a stone or a leaf or a photon of sunlight, is equally involved. The complexity seems beyond conception, let alone enumeration or calculation. But consider further: At this one instant, every part of the whole, however minute, is in one specific state; and thus the whole itself is. Electrons are all in their particular quantum shells, atoms are all in their particular compounds and configurations, energy fields all have their particular values at each particular point—suppose an infinitely fine-grained photograph.

  A moment later, the state is different. However slightly, fields have pulsed, atoms have shifted about, electrons have jumped, bodies have moved. But this new state derives from the first according to natural laws. And likewise for every succeeding state.

  In crude, mythic language: Represent each variable of one state by some set of numbers; or, to put it in equivalent words, map the state into an n-dimensional phase space. Input the laws of nature. Run the program. The computer model should then evolve from state to state in exact correspondence with the evolution of our original matter-energy world. That includes life and consciousness. The maps of organisms go through one-to-one analogues of everything that the organisms themselves would, among these being the processes of sensation and thought. To them, they and their world are the same as in the original. The question of which set is the more real is meaningless.

  Of course, this primitive account is false. The program did not exactly follow the course of events “outside.” Gaia lacked both the data and the capability necessary to model the entire universe, or even the entire Earth. Likewise did any other node, and the galactic brain. Powers of that order lay immensely far in the future, if they would ever be realized. What Gaia could accommodate was so much less that the difference in degree amounted to a difference in kind.

  For example, if events on the surface of a planet were to be played out, the stars must be lights in the night sky and nothing else, every other effect neglected. Only a limited locality on the globe could be done in anything like full detail; the rest grew more and more incomplete as distance from the scene increased, until at the antipodes there was little more than simplified geography, hydrography, and atmospherics. Hence weather on the scene would very soon be quite unlike weather at the corresponding moment of the original. This is the simplest, most obvious consequence of the limitations. The totality is beyond reckoning—and we have not even mentioned relativistic nonsimultaneity.

  Besides, atom-by-atom modeling was a practical impossibility; statistical mechanics and approximations must substitute. Chaos and quantum uncertainties made developments incalculable in principle. Other, more profound considerations entered as well, but with them language fails utterly.

  Let it be said, as a myth, that such creations made their destinies for themselves.

  And yet, what a magnificent instrumentality the creator system was! Out of nothingness, it could bring worlds into being, evolutions, lives, ecologies, awarenesses, histories, entire timelines. They need not be fragmentary miscopies of something “real,” dragging out their crippled spans until the nodal intelligence took pity and canceled them. Indeed, they need not derive in anyway from the “outside.” They could be works of imagination—fairy-tale worlds, perhaps, where benevolent gods ruled and magic ran free. Always, the logic of their boundary conditions caused them to develop appropriately, to be at home in their existences.

  The creator system was the mightiest device ever made for the pursuit of art, science, philosophy, and understanding.

  So it came about that Christian Brannock found himself alive again, young again, in the world that Gaia and Wayfarer had chosen for his new beginning.

  He stood in a garden on a day of bright sun and mild, fragrant breezes. It was a formal garden, graveled paths, low-clipped hedges, roses and lilies in geometric beds, around a lichened stone basin where goldfish swam. Brick walls, ivy-heavy, enclosed three sides, a wrought-iron gate in them leading to a lawn. On the fourth side lay a house, white, slate-roofed, classically proportioned, a style that to him was antique. Honeybees buzzed. From a yew tree overlooking the wall came the twitter of birds.

  A woman walked toward him. Her flower-patterned gown, the voluminous skirt and sleeves, a cameo hung on her bosom above the low neckline, dainty shoes, parasol less an accessory than a completion, made his twenty-third-century singlesuit feel abruptly barbaric. She was tall and well formed. Despite the garments, her gait was lithe. As she neared, he saw clear features beneath high-piled mahogany hair.

  She reached him, stopped, and met his gaze. “Benveni, Capita Brannoch,” she greeted. Her voice was low and musical.

  “Uh, g’day, Sorita—uh—” he fumbled.

  She blushed. “I beg your pardon, Captain Brannock. I forgot and used my Inglay—English of my time. I’ve been—” She hesitated. “—supplied with yours, and we both have been with the contemporary language.”

  A sense of dream was upon him. To speak as dryly as he could was like clutching at something solid. “You’re from my future, then?”

  She nodded. “I was born about two hundred years after you.”

  “That means about eighty or ninety years after my death, right?” He saw an inward shadow pass over her face. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She turned entirely calm, even smiled a bit. “It’s all right. We both know what we are, and what we used to be.”

  “But—”

  “Yes, but.” She shook her head. “It does feel strange, being … this … again.”

  He was quickly gaining assurance, settling into the situation. “I know. I’ve had practice in it,” light-years away, at the star where Alpha dwelt. “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be quite natural to you.”

  “I have been here a little while myself. Nevertheless—young,” she whispered, “but remembering a long life, old age, dying—” She let the parasol fall, unnoticed, and stared down at her hands. Fingers gripped each other. “Remembering how toward the end I looked back and thought, ‘Was that all?’”

  He wanted to take those hands in his and speak comfort, but decided he would be wiser to say merely, “Well, it wasn’t all.”

  “No, of course not. Not for me, the way it had been once for everyone who ever lived. While my worn-out body was being painlessly terminated, my self-pattern was uploaded—” She raised her eyes. “Now we can’t really recall what our condition has been like, can we?”

  “We can look forward to returning to it.”

  “Oh, yes. Meanwhile—” She flexed herself, glanced about and upward, let light and air into her spirit, until at last a full smile blossomed. “I am starting to enjoy this. Already I am.” She considered him. He was a tall man, muscular, blond, rugged of countenance. Laughter lines radiated from blue eyes. He spoke in a resonant baritone. “And I will.”

  He grinned, delighted. “Thanks. The same here. For openers, may I ask your name?”

  “Forgive me!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was prepared. I … came into existence … with knowledge of my role and this milieu, and spent the time since rehearsing in my mind, but now that it’s actually happened, all my careful plans have flown away. I am—was—no, I am Laurinda Ashcroft.”

  He offered his hand. After a moment she let him shake hers. He recalled that at the close of his mortal days the gesture was going out of use.

  “You know a few things about me, I suppose,” he said, “but I’m ignorant about you and your times. When I left Earth, everything was changing spinjump fast, and after that I was out of touch,” and eventually his individuality went of its own desire into a greater one. This reenactment of him had been given no details of the terrestrial history that followed his departure; it could not have contained any reasonable fraction of the information.

  “You went to
the stars almost immediately after you’d uploaded, didn’t you?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Why wait? I’d always longed to go.”

  “Are you glad that you did?”

  “Glad is hardly the word.” He spent two or three seconds putting phrases together. Language was important to him; he had been an engineer and occasionally a maker of songs. “However, I am also happy to be here.” Again a brief grin. “In such pleasant company.” Yet what he really hoped to do was explain himself. They would be faring together in search of one another’s souls. “And I’ll bring something new back to my proper existence. All at once I realize how a human can appreciate in a unique way what’s out yonder,” suns, worlds, upon certain of them life that was more wonderful still, nebular fire-clouds, infinity whirling down the throat of a black hole, galaxies like jewelwork strewn by a prodigal through immensity, space-time structure subtle and majestic—everything he had never known, as a man, until this moment, for no organic creature could travel those reaches.

  “While I chose to remain on Earth,” she said. “How timid and unimaginative do I seem to you?”

  “Not in the least,” he avowed. “You had the adventures you wanted.”

  “You are kind to say so.” She paused. “Do you know Jane Austen?”

  “Who? No, I don’t believe I do.”

  “An early-nineteenth-century writer. She led a quiet life, never went far from home, died young, but she explored people in ways that nobody else ever did.”

  “I’d like to read her. Maybe I’ll get a chance here.” He wished to show that he was no—“technoramus” was the word he invented on the spot. “I did read a good deal, especially on space missions. And especially poetry. Homer, Shakespeare, Tu Fu, Basho, Bellman, Bums, Omar Khayyam, Kipling, Millay, Haldeman—” He threw up his hands and laughed. “Never mind. That’s just the first several names I could grab out of the jumble for purposes of bragging.”