The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding it with oxygen and anti-inflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Then they began to repair the vital organs and spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materials and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating salt water and blood, and after a little while, the body grew noticeably smaller.

  An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through Washen. It was a favorable sign. She squirmed and wailed, and with weak hands, freed herself from her ruined chair. Then with her sloppy rebuilt legs, she forced herself to stand.

  Washen was suddenly twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she was able to limp over to Diu’s body, finding him shriveled and in agony, but defiant—a fierce grin and a wink, then he told her, “You look gorgeous, madam. As always.”

  The others were alive, too. But not one machine in the wreckage would operate, not even well enough to say, “I’m broken.”

  The six captains healed within a day, and waited at the crash site, eating their rations to reclaim their size and vigor. No rescue team arrived. Whatever crippled their car must have done the same everywhere, they decided. Miocene was as powerless as them. And that left them with one viable option:

  If Washen and the others wanted help, they were going to have to walk half-way around Marrow to find it.

  MISSION YEAR 4.43:

  The bridge resembled a rigid thread, silvery and insubstantial. Sheered off in the high stratosphere, it was far too short to serve as an escape route. But it made a useful landmark. Washen’s team steered for the bridge during those last days, picking their way across the knife-like ridges and narrow valleys between. Wondering what they would find, whenever they rested—for a moment, now and again—they let themselves talk in hopeful tones, imagining the other captains’ surprise when the six of them suddenly marched out of the jungle.

  Except when they arrived at the bridge, there was no one to catch off guard. The main encampment had been abandoned. The hilltop where the bridge was rooted had been split open by quakes, and the entire structure tilted precariously toward the east. A simple iron post kept the main doors propped open, and there was a makeshift ladder in the shaft, but judging by the rust, nobody had used it for months. Or, perhaps years.

  A sketchy path led west. They followed, and after a long while, they came to a fertile river bottom and wider paths. With Washen at the lead, they were jogging, and it was Miocene who suddenly stepped into view, surprising them.

  The Submaster was unchanged.

  In uniform, she looked regal and well-chilled. “It took you long enough,” she deadpanned. Then she smiled, adding, “It’s good to see you. Honestly, we’d nearly given up hope.”

  Washen swallowed her anger.

  The other captains bombarded Miocene with questions. Who else had survived? How were they making do? Did any machines work? Had the Master been in contact with them? Then Diu asked, “What kind of relief mission is coming?”

  “It’s a cautious relief mission,” Miocene replied. “So cautious that it seems almost nonexistent.”

  Her captains had built telescopes from scratch, and at least one captain was always watching the base camp overhead. The transparent blister was intact. Every building was intact. But the drones and beacons were dead, which meant that the reactor was offline. A three kilometer stub of the bridge would make the perfect foundation for a new structure. But there wasn’t any sign that captains or anyone was trying to mount any kind of rescue.

  “The Master thinks we’re dead,” Diu offered, trying to be charitable.

  “We aren’t dead,” Miocene countered. “And even if we were, she should be a little more interested in our bones, and answers.”

  Washen didn’t talk. After three years of jogging, eating lousy food and forcing hope, she suddenly felt sickened and achingly tired.

  The Submaster led them along a wide trail, working back through their questions. “Every machine was ruined by the Event. That’s our name for what happened. The Event left our cars and drones and sensors as fancy trash, and we can’t fix them. And we can’t decide why, either.” Then she offered a distracted smile, adding, “But we’re surviving. Wooden homes, with roofs. Iron tools. Pendulum clocks. Steam power when we go to the trouble, and enough homemade equipment, like the telescopes, that we can do some simple, simple science.”

  The jungle’s understory had been cut down and beaten back, and the new encampment stretched out on all sides. Like anything built by determined captains, the place was orderly, perhaps to a fault. The houses were clean and in good repair. Paths were marked with logs, and someone had given each path its own name. Everyone was in uniform, and everyone was smiling, trying to hide the weariness in the eyes and their voices.

  A hundred captains shouted, “Hello! Welcome!”

  Washen stared at their faces, and counted, and finally forced herself to ask, “Who isn’t here?”

  Miocene recited a dozen names.

  Eleven of them were friends or acquaintances of Washen’s. The last name was Hazz—a Submaster and a voyage-long friend of Miocene’s. “Two months ago,” she explained, “he was exploring a nearby valley. A fissure opened up suddenly, without warning, and he was trapped by the flowing iron.” Her eyes were distant, unreadable. “Hazz was perched on a little island that was melting. We tried to build a bridge, and tried to divert the current. Everything half-possible, we tried.”

  Washen stared at the narrow face, at the way the eyes had grown empty, and it was suddenly obvious that Miocene had been more than friends with the dead man.

  “The island shrank,” she told them, her voice too flat and slow. “It was a knob, if that. Hazz’s boots dissolved, and his feet were boiling, and his flesh caught fire. But he managed to stand there. He endured it. He endured it and even managed to turn and take a step toward on us, on his boiling legs, and he fell forward, and that’s when he finally died.”

  Washen had been mistaken. This wasn’t the same Miocene.

  “I have one goal,” the Submaster confessed. “I want to find a way to get back to the Master, and I’ll ask her why she sent us here. Was it to explore? Or was it just the best awful way to get rid of us … ?”

  MISSION YEAR 6.55:

  The iron crust rippled and tore apart under a barrage of quakes, and with its foundation shattered, the bridge pitched sideways with a creaking roar, then shattered, the debris field scattered over fifty kilometers of newborn mountains.

  Its fall was inevitable, and unrecorded. Geysers of white-hot metal had already obliterated the captains’ encampment, forcing them to flee with a minimum of tools and provisions. Lungs were seared. Tongues and eyes were blistered. But the captains eventually stumbled into a distant valley, into a grove of stately trees, where they collapsed, gasping and cursing. Then as if to bless them, the trees began releasing tiny balloons made from gold, and the shady, halfway cool air was filled with the balloons’ glint and the dry music made by their brushing against one another.

  Diu coined the name virtue tree.

  Miocene set her captains to planning new streets and houses, several of the virtue trees already downed when the ground ripped open with an anguished roar.

  Wearily, the captains fled again, and when they settled, finally, they built strong simple houses that could be rebuilt anywhere in a ship’s day.

  Nomadic blood took hold in them. When they weren’t stockpiling food for the next migration, they were building lighter tools, and when they weren’t doing either, they studied their world, trying to guess its fickle moods.

  Washen assembled a team of twenty observant captains.

  “Breeding cycles are key,” she reported. Sitting in the meeting hall, looking up and down the iron table, she reported that virtue trees spun their golden balloons only when the crust turned unstable. “If we see another show like the last one,” she promised, “we’re screwed. We’ve got a day, or less, to get out o
f here.”

  Staff meetings were patterned after conferences with the Master, except they came on an irregular schedule, and Miocene presided, and despite her best intentions, the captains kept the atmosphere informal, even jocular, and because of the absence of soap, more than a little sour.

  “How are our virtue trees acting?” asked Aasleen.

  “As if they’ll live forever,” Washen replied. “They’re still happy, still early in their growth cycle. As far as we can tell.”

  Miocene acted distant that day. Squinting at nothing, she repeated the word:

  “Cycles.”

  Everyone turned in their heavy chairs, and waited.

  “Thank you, Washen.” The Submaster rose and looked at each of them, then admitted, “This may be premature. I could be wrong for many reasons. But I think I’ve been able to find another cycle … one that’s unexpected, at least for me …”

  There was the distant droning of a hammerwing, and then, silence.

  “Volcanic activity is escalating. I think that’s obvious.” The tall woman nodded for a moment, then asked, “But why? My proposal is that the buttresses have begun to relax their hold on Marrow. Not by much. Certainly nothing we can measure directly. But if it did happen, the metals under us are going to expand, and that’s why, according to my careful computations, our home is growing larger.”

  Washen’s first impulse was to laugh; it was a joke.

  “Several kilometers larger,” Miocene told the stunned faces. “I’ve gathered several lines of evidence. The buttresses’ light has diminished by two or three percent. The horizon is a little more distant. And what’s most impressive, I think: I’ve triangulated the distance to our base camp, and it’s definitely closer than it was last year.”

  A dozen explanations occurred to Washen, but she realized that Miocene must have seen them, then discarded them.

  “If Marrow isn’t teasing us,” said the Submaster, “and if the buttresses don’t reverse the cycle, then you can see where we’re going—”

  Washen cried out, “How long will it take, madam?”

  A dozen captains shouted the same question.

  “The calculations aren’t promising,” Miocene replied. But she had to laugh in a soft, bitter way. “At the present rate, we’ll be able to touch that three kilometer stub of the bridge in about five thousand years …”

  MISSION YEAR 88.55:

  It was time for the children to sleep.

  Washen had come to check on them. But for some reason she stopped short of the nursery, eavesdropping on them, uncertain why it was important to remain hidden.

  The oldest boy was telling a story.

  “We call them the Builders,” he said, “because they created the ship.”

  “The ship,” whispered the other children, in one voice.

  “The ship is too large to measure, and it is very beautiful. But when it was new, there was no one to share it with the Builders, and no one to tell them that it was beautiful. That’s why they called out into the darkness, inviting others to come fill its vastness.”

  Washen leaned against the fragrant umbra wood, waiting.

  “Who came from the darkness?” asked the boy.

  “The Bleak,” young voices answered, instantly.

  “Was there anyone else?”

  “No one.”

  “Because the universe was so young,” the boy explained. “Only the Bleak and the Builders had already evolved.”

  “The Bleak,” a young girl repeated, with feeling.

  “They were a cruel, selfish species,” the boy maintained, “but they always wore smiles and said the smartest words.”

  “They wanted the ship,” the others prompted.

  “And they stole it. In one terrible night, as the Builders slept, the Bleak attacked, slaughtering most of them in their beds.”

  Every child whispered, “Slaughtered.”

  Washen eased her way closer to the nursery door. The boy was sitting up on his cot, his face catching the one sliver of light that managed to slip through the ceiling. Till was his name. He looked very much like his mother for a moment, then he moved his head slightly, and he resembled no one else.

  “Where did the survivors retreat?” he asked.

  “To Marrow.”

  “And from here, what did they do?”

  “They purified the ship.”

  “They purified the ship,” he repeated, with emphasis. “They swept its tunnels and chambers free of the scourge. The Builders had no choice.”

  There was a long, reflective pause.

  “What happened to the last of the Builders?” he asked.

  “They were trapped here,” said the others, on cue. “And one after another, they died here.”

  “What died?”

  “Their flesh.”

  “But what else is there?”

  “The spirit.”

  “What isn’t flesh cannot die,” said the young prophet.

  Washen waited, wondering when she had last taken a breath.

  Then in whisper, Till asked, “Where do their spirits live?”

  With a palpable delight, the children replied, “They live inside us.”

  “We are the Builders now,” the voice assured. “After a long lonely wait, we’ve finally been reborn … !”

  MISSION YEAR 88.90:

  Life on Marrow had become halfway comfortable and almost predictable. The captains weren’t often caught by surprise eruptions, and they’d learned where the crust was likely to remain thick and stable for years at a time. With so much success, children had seemed inevitable; Miocene decided that every female captain should produce at least one. And like children anywhere, theirs filled many niches: They were fresh faces, and they were cherished distractions, and they were entertainment, and more than anyone anticipated, they were challenges to the captains’ authority. But what Miocene wanted, first and always, were willing helpers. Till and his playmates were born so that someday, once trained, they could help their parents escape from Marrow.

  The hope was that they could rebuild the bridge. Materials would be a problem, and Marrow would fight them. But Washen was optimistic. In these last eight decades, she’d tried every state of mind, and optimism far and away was the most pleasant.

  And she tried to be positive everywhere: Good, sane reasons had kept them from being rescued. There was no one else the Master could trust like her favorite captains. Perhaps. Or she was thinking of the ship’s well-being, monitoring Marrow from a distance. Or most likely, the access tunnel had totally collapsed during the Event, and digging them out was grueling, achingly slow work.

  Other captains were optimistic in public, but in private, in their lovers’ beds, they confessed to darker moods.

  “What if the Master has written us off?” Diu posed the question, then offered an even worse scenario. “Or maybe something’s happened to her. This was a secret mission. If she died unexpectedly, and if the First-chairs don’t even know we’re here …”

  “Do you believe that?” Washen asked.

  Diu shrugged his shoulders.

  “There’s another possibility,” she said, playing the game. “What if everyone else on the ship has died?”

  For a moment, Diu didn’t react.

  “The ship was a derelict,” she reminded him. “No one knows what happened to its owners, or to anyone else who’s used it since.”

  “What are you saying?” Diu sat up in bed, dropping his legs over the edge. “You mean the crew and the passengers … all of them have been killed … ?”

  “Maybe the ship cleans itself out every hundred thousand years.”

  A tiny grin emerged. “So how did we survive?”

  “Life on Marrow is spared,” she argued. “Otherwise, all of this would be barren iron and nothing else.”

  Diu pulled one of his hands across his face.

  “This isn’t my story,” she admitted, placing her hand on his sweaty back. Their infant son, Locke, was sleeping in th
e nearby crib, blissfully unaware of their grim discussion. In three years, he would live in the nursery. With Till, she was thinking. Washen had overheard the story about the Builders and the Bleak several months ago, but she never told anyone. Not even Diu. “Have you ever listened to the children?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, he asked, “Why?”

  She explained, in brief.

  A sliver of light caught his gray eye and cheek. “You know Till,” Diu countered. “You know how odd he can seem.”

  “That’s why I never mention it.”

  “Have you heard him tell that story again?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  Her lover nodded, looking at the crib. At Locke.

  “Children are imagination machines,” he warned. “You never know what they’re going to think about anything.”

  He didn’t say another word.

  Washen was remembering her only other child—a long-ago foster child, only glancingly human—and with a bittersweet grin, she replied, “But that’s the fun in having them … or so I’ve always heard …”

  MISSION YEAR 89.09:

  The boy was walking alone, crossing the public round with his eyes watching his own bare feet, watching them shuffle across the heat-baked iron.

  “Hello, Till.”

  Pausing, he lifted his gaze slowly, a smile waiting to shine at the captain. “Hello, Madam Washen. You’re well, I trust.”

  Under the blue glare of the sky, he was a polite, scrupulously ordinary boy. He had a thin face joined to a shorter, almost blockish body, and like most children, he wore as little as the adults let him wear. No one knew which of several captains was his genetic father. Miocene never told. She wanted to be his only parent, grooming him to stand beside her someday, and whenever Washen looked at Till, she felt a nagging resentment, petty as can be, and since it was directed at a ten year old, simply foolish.

  With her own smile, Washen said, “I have a confession to make. A little while ago, I overheard you and the other children talking. You were telling each other a story.”