The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Who was she?” I said. “What did you talk about?”

  “Her name was Margaret Ase. She was ninety-seven years old and I think she had been some kind of counselor. Her husband and her daughter had both died and she was alone. I didn’t find out much about her; she made me do most of the talking. She asked me about my friends and what I was learning in school and my family. Things like that … .”

  Her voice trailed off as my fingernail started to flash. I answered it.

  =Michael, I am pleased to call you to here.= Silloin buzzed in my ear. She was almost twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

  “See, I told you we’d make the time fly.” I stood; Kamala’s eyes got very wide. “I’m ready if you are.”

  I offered her my hand. She took it and let me help her up. She wavered for a moment and I sensed just how fragile her resolve was. I put my hand around her waist and steered her into the corridor. In the micrograv of Tuulen Station, she already felt as insubstantial as a memory. “So tell me, what happened that was so sad?”

  At first I thought she hadn’t heard. She shuffled along, said nothing.

  “Hey, don’t keep me in suspense here, Kamala,” I said. “You have to finish the story.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I do.”

  I didn’t take this personally. My only real interest in the conversation had been to distract her. If she refused to be distracted, that was her choice. Some migrators kept talking right up to the moment they slid into the big blue marble, but lots of them went quiet just before. They turned inward. Maybe in her mind she was already on Gend, blinking in the hard white light.

  We arrived at the scan center, the largest space on Tuulen Station. Immediately in front of us was the marble, containment for the quantum nondemolition sensor array—QNSA for the acronymically inclined. It was the milky blue of glacial ice and big as two elephants. The upper hemisphere was raised and the scanning table protruded like a shiny gray tongue. Kamala approached the marble and touched her reflection, which writhed across its polished surface. To the right was a padded bench, the fogger, and a toilet. I looked left, through the control room window. Silloin stood watching us, her impossible head cocked to one side.

  =She is docile?= she buzzed in my earstone.

  I held up crossed fingers.

  =Welcome, Kamala Shastri.= Silloin’s voice came over the speakers with a soothing hush. =You are ready to open your translation?=

  Kamala bowed to the window. “This is where I take my clothes off?”

  = If you would be so convenient.=

  She brushed past me to the bench. Apparently I had ceased to exist; this was between her and the dino now. She undressed quickly, folding her clingy into a neat bundle, tucking her slippers beneath the bench. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tiny feet, heavy thighs, and the beautiful, dark smooth skin of her back. She stepped into the fogger and closed the door.

  “Ready,” she called.

  From the control room, Silloin closed circuits which filled the fogger with a dense cloud of nanolenses. The nano stuck to Kamala and deployed, coating the surface of her body. As she breathed them, they passed from her lungs into her bloodstream. She only coughed twice; she had been well trained. When the eight minutes were up, Silloin cleared the air in the fogger and she emerged. Still ignoring me, she again faced the control room.

  =Now you must arrange yourself on the scanning table,= said Silloin, =and enable Michael to fix you.=

  She crossed to the marble without hesitation, climbed the gantry beside it, eased onto the table and laid back.

  I followed her up. “Sure you won’t tell me the rest of the secret?”

  She stared at the ceiling, unblinking.

  “Okay then.” I took the canister and a sparker out of my hip pouch. “This is going to happen just like you’ve practiced it.” I used the canister to respray the bottoms of her feet with nano. I watched her belly rise and fall, rise and fall. She was deep into her breathing exercise. “Remember, no skipping rope or whistling while you’re in the scanner.”

  She did not answer. “Deep breath now,” I said and touched a sparker to her big toe. There was a brief crackle as the nano on her skin wove into a net and stiffened, locking her in place. “Bark at the ferrets for me.” I picked up my equipment, climbed down the gantry, and wheeled it back to the wall.

  With a low whine, the big blue marble retracted its tongue. I watched the upper hemisphere close, swallowing Kamala Shastri, then joined Silloin in the control room.

  I’m not of the school who thinks the dinos stink, another reason I got assigned to study them up close. Parikkal, for example, has no smell at all that I can tell. Normally Silloin had the faint but not unpleasant smell of stale wine. When she was under stress, however, her scent became vinegary and biting. It must have been a wild morning for her. Breathing through my mouth, I settled onto the stool at my station.

  She was working quickly, now that the marble was sealed. Even with all their training, migrators tend to get claustrophobic fast. After all, they’re lying in the dark, in nanobondage, waiting to be translated. Waiting. The simulator at the Singapore training center makes a noise while it’s emulating a scan. Most compare it to a light rain pattering against the marble; for some, it’s low volume radio static. As long as they hear the patter, the migrators think they’re safe. We reproduce it for them while they’re in our marble, even though scanning takes about three seconds and is utterly silent. From my vantage I could see that the sagittal, axial, and coronal windows had stopped blinking, indicating full data capture. Silloin was skirring busily to herself; her comm didn’t bother to interpret. Wasn’t saying anything baby Michael needed to know, obviously. Her head bobbed as she monitored the enormous spread of readouts; her claws clicked against touch screens that glowed orange and yellow.

  At my station, there was only a migration status screen—and a white button.

  I wasn’t lying when I said I was just the doorman. My field is sapientology, not quantum physics. Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing I could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10-33 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.

  On my status screen I could see that the signal which mapped Kamala Shastri had already been compressed and burst through the wormhole. All that we had to wait for was for Gend to confirm acquisition. Once they officially told us that they had her, it would be my job to balance the equation.

  Pitter-patter, Pitter-pat.

  Some Hanen technologies are so powerful that they can alter reality itself. Wormholes could be used by some time traveling fanatic to corrupt history; the scanner/assembler could be used to create a billion Silloins—or Michael Burrs. Pristine reality, unpolluted by such anomalies, has what the dinos call harmony. Before any sapients get to join the galactic club, they must prove total commitment to preserving harmony.

  Since I had come to Tuulen to study the dinos, I had pressed the white button over two hundred times. It was what I had to do in order to keep my assignment. Pressing it sent a killing pulse of ionizing radiation through the cerebral cortex of the migrator’s dupli
cated, and therefore unnecessary, body. No brain, no pain; death followed within seconds. Yes, the first few times I’d balanced the equation had been traumatic. It was still … unpleasant. But this was the price of a ticket to the stars. If certain unusual people like Kamala Shastri had decided that price was reasonable, it was their choice, not mine.

  =This is not a happy result, Michael.= Silloin spoke to me for the first time since I’d entered the control room. =Discrepancies are unfolding.= On my status screen I watched as the error-checking routines started turning up hits.

  “Is the problem here?” I felt a knot twist suddenly inside me. “Or there?” If our original scan checked out, then all Silloin would have to do is send it to Gend again.

  There was a long, infuriating silence. Silloin concentrated on part of her board as if it showed her first-born hatchling chipping out of its egg. The respirator between her shoulders had ballooned to twice its normal size. My screen showed that Kamala had been in the marble for four minutes plus.

  =It may be fortunate to recalibrate the scanner and begin over.=

  “Shit.” I slammed my hand against the wall, felt the pain tingle to my elbow. “I thought you had it fixed.” When error-checking turned up problems, the solution was almost always to retransmit. “You’re sure, Silloin? Because this one was right on the edge when I tucked her in.”

  Silloin gave me a dismissive sneeze and slapped at the error readouts with her bony little hand, as if to knock them back to normal. Like Linna and the other dinos, she had little patience with what she regarded as our weepy fears of migration. However, unlike Linna, she was convinced that someday, after we had used Hanen technologies long enough, we would learn to think like dinos. Maybe she’s right. Maybe when we’ve been squirting through wormholes for hundreds of years, we’ll cheerfully discard our redundant bodies. When the dinos and other sapients migrate, the redundants zap themselves—very harmonious. They tried it with humans but it didn’t always work. That’s why I’m here. =The need is most clear. It will prolong about thirty minutes,= she said.

  Kamala had been alone in the dark for almost six minutes, longer than any migrator I’d ever guided. “Let me hear what’s going on in the marble.”

  The control room filled with the sound of Kamala screaming. It didn’t sound human to me—more like the shriek of tires skidding toward a crash.

  “We’ve got to get her out of there,” I said.

  =That is baby thinking, Michael.=

  “So she’s a baby, damn it.” I knew that bringing migrators out of the marble was big trouble. I could have asked Silloin to turn the speakers off and sat there while Kamala suffered. It was my decision.

  “Don’t open the marble until I get the gantry in place.” I ran for the door. “And keep the sound effects going.”

  At the first crack of light, she howled. The upper hemisphere seemed to lift in slow motion; inside the marble she bucked against the nano. Just when I was sure it was impossible that she could scream any louder, she did. We had accomplished something extraordinary, Silloin and I; we had stripped the brave biomaterials engineer away completely, leaving in her place a terrified animal.

  “Kamala, it’s me. Michael.”

  Her frantic screams cohered into words. “Stop … don’t … oh my god, someone help!” If I could have, I would’ve jumped into the marble to release her, but the sensor array is fragile and I wasn’t going to risk causing any more problems with it. We both had to wait until the upper hemisphere swung fully open and the scanning table offered poor Kamala to me.

  “It’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen, all right? We’re bringing you out, that’s all. Everything’s all right.”

  When I released her with the sparker, she flew at me. We pitched back and almost toppled down the steps. Her grip was so tight I couldn’t breathe.

  “Don’t kill me, don’t, please, don’t.”

  I rolled on top of her. “Kamala!” I wriggled one arm free and used it to pry myself from her. I scrabbled sideways to the top step. She lurched clumsily in the microgravity and swung at me; her fingernails raked across the back of my hand, leaving bloody welts. “Kamala, stop!” It was all I could do not to strike back at her. I retreated down the steps.

  “You bastard. What are you assholes trying to do to me?” She drew several shuddering breaths and began to sob.

  “The scan got corrupted somehow. Silloin is working on it.”

  =The difficulty is obscure,= said Silloin from the control room.

  “But that’s not your problem.” I backed toward the bench.

  “They lied,” she mumbled and seemed to fold in upon herself as if she were just skin, no flesh or bones. “They said I wouldn’t feel anything and … do you know what it’s like … it’s …”

  I fumbled for her clingy. “Look, here are your clothes. Why don’t you get dressed? We’ll get you out of here.”

  “You bastard,” she repeated, but her voice was empty.

  She let me coax her down off the gantry. I counted nubs on the wall while she fumbled back into her clingy. They were the size of the old dimes my grandfather used to hoard and they glowed with a soft golden bioluminescence. I was up to forty-seven before she was dressed and ready to return to reception D.

  Where before she had perched expectantly at the edge of the couch, now she slumped back against it. “So what now?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” I went to the kitchen station and took the carafe from the distiller. “What now, Silloin?” I poured water over the back of my hand to wash the blood off. It stung. My earstone was silent. “I guess we wait,” I said finally.

  “For what?”

  “For her to fix …”

  “I’m not going back in there.”

  I decided to let that pass. It was probably too soon to argue with her about it, although once Silloin recalibrated the scanner, she’d have very little time to change her mind. “You want something from the kitchen? Another cup of tea, maybe?”

  “How about a gin and tonic—hold the tonic?” She rubbed beneath her eyes. “Or a couple of hundred milliliters of serentol?”

  I tried to pretend she’d made a joke. “You know the dinos won’t let us open the bar for migrators. The scanner might misread your brain chemistry and your visit to Gend would be nothing but a three-year drunk.”

  “Don’t you understand?” She was right back at the edge of hysteria. “I am not going!” I didn’t really blame her for the way she was acting but, at that moment, all I wanted was to get rid of Kamala Shastri. I didn’t care if she went on to Gend or back to Lunex or over the rainbow to Oz, just as long as I didn’t have to be in the same room with this miserable creature who was trying to make me feel guilty about an accident I had nothing to do with.

  “I thought I could do it.” She clamped hands to her ears as if to keep from hearing her own despair. “I wasted the last two years convincing myself that I could just lie there and not think and then suddenly I’d be far away. I was going someplace wonderful and strange.” She made a strangled sound and let her hands drop into her lap. “I was going to help people see.”

  “You did it, Kamala. You did everything we asked.”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t not think. That was the problem. And then there she was, trying to touch me. In the dark. I had not thought of her since … .” She shivered. “It’s your fault for reminding me.”

  “Your secret friend,” I said.

  “Friend?” Kamala seemed puzzled by the word. “No, I wouldn’t say she was a friend. I was always a little bit scared of her, because I was never quite sure of what she wanted from me.” She paused. “One day I went up to 10W after school. She was in her chair, staring down at Bloor Street. Her back was to me. I said, ‘Hi, Ms. Ase.’ I was going to show her a genie I had written, only she didn’t say anything. I came around. Her skin was the color of ashes. I took her hand. It was like picking up something plastic. She was stiff, hard—not a person anymore. She had become a thing, lik
e a feather or a bone. I ran; I had to get out of there. I went up to our apartment and I hid from her.”

  She squinted, as if observing—judging—her younger self through the lens of time. “I think I understand now what she wanted. I think she knew she was dying; she probably wanted me there with her at the end, or at least to find her body afterward and report it. Only I could not. If I told anyone she was dead, my parents would find out about us. Maybe people would suspect me of doing something to her—I I don’t know. I could have called security but I was only ten; I was afraid somehow they might trace me. A couple of weeks went by and still nobody had found her. By then it was too late to say anything. Everyone would have blamed me for keeping quiet for so long. At night I imagined her turning black and rotting into her chair like a banana. It made me sick; I couldn’t sleep or eat. They had to put me in the hospital, because I had touched her. Touched death.”

  =Michael,= Silloin whispered, without any warning flash. =An impossibility has formed.=

  “As soon as I was out of that building, I started to get better. Then they found her. After I came home, I worked hard to forget Ms. Ase. And I did, almost.” Kamala wrapped her arms around herself. “But just now she was with me again, inside the marble … I couldn’t see her but somehow I knew she was reaching for me.”

  =Michael, Parikkal is here with Linna.=

  “Don’t you see?” She gave a bitter laugh. “How can I go to Gend? I’m hallucinating.”