The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  But she didn’t chat anymore. She was absorbed in her thoughts, and tended to keep her back to him. No—it was all going away.

  They had met in an adult swim club in Mangala, while they were both grad students at the university there. Now, as if to re-invoke that time, Smith took up Frank’s suggestion and joined him at an equivalent club in Eumenides Point, and began to swim regularly again. He went from the tram or the lab down to the big fifty-meter pool, set on a terrace overlooking the ocean, and swam so hard in the mornings that the whole rest of the day he buzzed along in a flow of beta endorphins, scarcely aware of his work problems or the situation at home. After work he took the tram home feeling his appetite kick in, and banged around the kitchen throwing together a meal and eating much of it as he cooked it, irritated (if she was there at all) with Selena’s poor cooking and her cheery talk about her work, irritated also probably just from hunger, and dread at the situation hanging over them; at this pretense that they were still in a normal life. But if he snapped at her during this fragile hour she would go silent the whole rest of the evening; it happened fairly often; so he tried to contain his temper and make the meal and quickly eat his part of it, to get his blood sugar level back up.

  Either way she fell asleep abruptly around nine, and he was left to read into the timeslip, or even slip out and take a walk on the night beach a few hundred yards away from their apartment. One night, walking west, he saw Pseudo-phobos pop up into the sky like a distress flare down the coast, and when he came back into the apartment she was awake and talking happily on the phone; she was startled to see him, and cut the call short, thinking about what to say, and then said, “That was Mark, we’ve gotten tamarisk three fifty-nine to take repetitions of the third salt flusher gene!”

  “That’s good,” he said, moving into the dark kitchen so she wouldn’t see his face.

  This annoyed her. “You really don’t care how my work goes, do you?”

  “Of course I do. That’s good, I said.”

  She dismissed that with a noise.

  Then one day he got home and Mark was there with her, in the living room, and at a single glance he could see they had been laughing about something; had been sitting closer together than when he started opening the door. He ignored that and was as pleasant as he could be.

  The next day as he swam at the morning workout, he watched the women swimming with him in his lane. All three of them had swum all their lives, their freestyle stroke perfected beyond the perfection of any dance move ever made on land, the millions of repetitions making their movement as unconscious as that of any fish in the sea. Under the surface he saw their bodies flowing forward, revealing their sleek lines—classic swimmer lines, like Selena’s—rangy shoulders tucking up against their ears one after the next, ribcages smoothed over by powerful lats, breasts flatly merged into big pecs or else bobbing left then right, as the case might be; bellies meeting high hipbones accentuated by the high cut of their swimsuits, backs curving up to bottoms rounded and compact, curving to powerful thighs then long calves, and feet outstretched like ballerinas’. Dance was a weak analogy for such beautiful movement. And it all went on for stroke after stroke, lap after lap, until he was mesmerized beyond further thought or observation; it was just one aspect of a sensually saturated environment.

  Their current lane leader was pregnant, yet swimming stronger than any of the rest of them, not even huffing and puffing during their rest intervals, when Smith often had to suck air—instead she laughed and shook her head, exclaiming “Every time I do a flip turn he keeps kicking me!” She was seven months along, round in the middle like a little whale, but still she fired down the pool at a rate none of the other three in the lane could match. The strongest swimmers in the club were simply amazing. Soon after getting into the sport, Smith had worked hard to swim a hundred-meter freestyle in less than a minute, a goal appropriate to him, and finally he had done it once at a meet and been pleased; then later he heard about the local college women’s team’s workout, which consisted of a hundred hundred-meter freestyle swims all on a minute interval. He understood then that although all humans looked roughly the same, some were stupendously stronger than others. Their pregnant leader was in the lower echelon of these strong swimmers, and regarded the swim she was making today as a light stretching-out, though it was beyond anything her lane mates could do with their best effort. You couldn’t help watching her when passing by in the other direction, because despite her speed she was supremely smooth and effortless, she took fewer strokes per lap than the rest of them, and yet still made substantially better time. It was like magic. And that sweet blue curve of the new child carried inside.

  Back at home things continued to degenerate. Selena often worked late, and talked to him less than ever.

  “I love you,” he said. “Selena, I love you.”

  “I know.”

  He tried to throw himself into his work. They were at the same lab, they could go home late together. Talk like they used to about their work, which though not the same, was still genomics in both cases; how much closer could two sciences be? Surely it would help to bring them back together.

  But genomics was a very big field. It was possible to occupy different parts of it, no doubt about that. They were proving it. Smith persevered, however, using a new and more powerful electron microscope, and he began to make some headway in unraveling the patterns in his fossilized DNA.

  It looked like what had been preserved in the samples he had been given was almost entirely what used to be called the junk DNA of the creature. In times past this would have been bad luck, but the Kohl labs in Acheron had recently been making great strides in unraveling the various purposes of junk DNA, which proved not to be useless after all, as might have been guessed, development being as complex as it was. Their breakthrough consisted in characterizing very short and scrambled repetitive sequences within junk DNA that could be shown to code instructions for higher hierarchical operations than they were used to seeing at the gene level—cell differentiation, information order sequencing, apoptosis, and the like.

  Using this new understanding to unravel any clues in partially degraded fossil junk DNA would be hard, of course. But the nucleotide sequences were there in his EM images—or, to be more precise, the characteristic mineral replacements for the adenine=thymine and cytosine=guanine couplets, replacements well-established in the literature, were there to be clearly identified. Nanofossils, in effect; but legible to those who could read them. And once read, it was then possible to brew identical sequences of living nucleotides, matching the originals of the fossil creature. In theory one could re-create the creature itself, though in practice nothing like the entire genome was ever there, making it impossible. Not that there weren’t people trying anyway with simpler fossil organisms, either going for the whole thing or using hybrid DNA techniques to graft expressions they could decipher onto living templates, mostly descendants of the earlier creature.

  With this particular ancient dolphin, almost certainly a fresh-water dolphin (though most of these were fairly salt tolerant, living in river-mouths as they did), complete resuscitation would be impossible. It wasn’t what Smith was trying to do anyway. What would be interesting would be to find fragments that did not seem to have a match in the living descendants’ genome, then hopefully synthesize living in vitro fragments, clip them into contemporary strands, and see how these experimental animals did in hybridization tests and in various environments. Look for differences in function.

  He was also doing mitochondrial tests when he could, which if successful would permit tighter dating for the specie’s divergence from precursor species. He might be able to give it a specific slot on the marine mammal family tree, which during the early Pliocene was very complicated.

  Both avenues of investigation were labor-intensive, time-consuming, almost thoughtless work—perfect, in other words. He worked for hours and hours every day, for weeks, then months. Sometimes he managed to go home on
the tram with Selena; more often he didn’t. She was writing up her latest results with her collaborators, mostly with Mark. Her hours were irregular. When he was working he didn’t have to think about this; so he worked all the time. It was not a solution, not even a very good strategy—it even seemed to be making things worse—and he had to attempt it against an ever-growing sense of despair and loss; but he did it nevertheless.

  “What do you think of this acheron work?” he asked Frank one day at work, pointing to the latest printout from the Kohl lab, lying heavily annotated on his desk.

  “It’s very interesting! It makes it look like we’re finally getting past the genes to the whole instruction manual.”

  “If there is such a thing.”

  “Has to be, right? Though I’m not sure the Kohl lab’s values for the rate adaptive mutants will be fixed are high enough. Ohta and Kimura suggested ten percent as the upper limit, and that fits with what I’ve seen.”

  Smith nodded, pleased. “They’re probably just being conservative.”

  “No doubt, but you have to go with the data.”

  “So—in that context—you think it makes sense for me to pursue this fossil junk DNA?”

  “Well, sure. What do you mean? It’s sure to tell us interesting things.”

  “It’s incredibly slow.”

  “Why don’t you read off a long sequence, brew it up and venter it, and see what you get?”

  Smith shrugged. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing struck him as slipshod, but it was certainly faster. Reading all bits of single-stranded DNA, called expressed sequence tags, had quickly identified most of the genes on the human genome; but it had missed some, and it ignored even the regulatory DNA sequences controlling the protein-coding portion of the genes, not to mention the so-called junk DNA itself, filling long stretches between the more clearly meaningful sequences.

  Smith expressed these doubts to Frank, who nodded, but said, “It isn’t the same now that the mapping is so complete. You’ve got so many reference points you can’t get confused where your bits are on the big sequence. Just plug what you’ve got into the Lander-Waterman, then do the finishing with the Kohl variations, and even if there are massive repetitions, you’ll still be okay. And with the bits you’ve got, well they’re almost like ests anyway, they’re so degraded. So you might as well give it a try.”

  Smith nodded.

  That night he and Selena trammed home together. “What do you think of the possibility of shotgun sequencing in vitro copies of what I’ve got?” he asked her shyly.

  “Sloppy,” she said. “Double jeopardy.”

  A new schedule evolved. He worked, swam, took the tram home. Usually Selena wasn’t there. Often their answering machine held messages for her from Mark, talking about their work. Or messages from her to Smith, telling him that she would be home late. As was happening so often, he sometimes went out for dinner with Frank and other lane mates, after the evening workouts. One time at a beach restaurant they ordered several pitchers of beer, and then went out for a walk on the beach, and ended up running out into the shallows of the bay and swimming around in the warm dark water, so different from their pool, splashing each other and laughing hard. It was a good time.

  But when he got home that night, there was another message on the answering machine from Selena, saying that she and Mark were working on their paper after getting a bite to eat, and that she would be home extra late.

  She wasn’t kidding; at two o’clock in the morning she was still out. In the long minutes following the timeslip Smith realized that no one stayed out this late working on a paper without calling home. This was therefore a message of a different kind.

  Pain and anger swept through him, first one then the other. The indirection of it struck him as cowardly. He deserved at least a revelation—a confession—a scene. As the long minutes passed he got angrier and angrier; then frightened for a moment, that she might have been hurt or something. But she hadn’t. She was out there somewhere fooling around. Suddenly he was furious.

  He pulled cardboard boxes out of their closet and yanked open her drawers, and threw all her clothes in heaps in the boxes, crushing them in so they would all fit. But they gave off their characteristic scent of laundry soap and her, and smelling it he groaned and sat down on the bed, knees weak. If he carried through with this he would never again see her putting on and taking off these clothes, and just as an animal he groaned at the thought.

  But men are not animals. He finished throwing her things into boxes, took them outside the front door and dropped them there.

  She came back at three. He heard her kick into the boxes and make some muffled exclamation.

  He hurled open the door and stepped out.

  “What’s this?” She had been startled out of whatever scenario- she had planned, and now was getting angry. Her, angry! It made him furious all over again.

  “You know what it is.”

  “What!”

  “You and Mark.”

  She eyed him.

  “Now you notice,” she said at last. “A year after it started. And this is your first response.” Gesturing down at the boxes.

  He hit her in the face.

  Immediately he crouched at her side and helped her sit up, saying “Oh God Selena I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he had only thought to slap her for her contempt, contempt that he had not noticed her betrayal earlier, “I can’t believe I—”

  “Get away,” striking him off with wild blows, crying and shouting, “get away, get away,” frightened, “you bastard, you miserable bastard, what do you, don’t you dare hit me!” in a near shriek, though she kept her voice down too, aware still of the apartment complex around them. Hands held to her face.

  “I’m sorry Selena. I’m very very sorry, I was angry at what you said but I know that isn’t, that doesn’t … I’m sorry.” Now he was as angry at himself as he had been at her—what could he have been thinking, why had he given her the moral high ground like this, it was she who had broken their bond, it was she who should be in the wrong! She who was now sobbing—turning away—suddenly walking off into the night. Lights went on in a couple of windows nearby. Smith stood staring down at the boxes of her lovely clothes, his right knuckles throbbing.

  That life was over. He lived on alone in the apartment by the beach, and kept going in to work, but he was shunned there by the others, who all knew what had happened. Selena did not come in to work again until the bruises were gone, and after that she did not press charges, or speak to him about that night, but she did move in with Mark, and avoided him at work when she could. As who wouldn’t. Occasionally she dropped by his nook to ask in a neutral voice about some logistical aspect of their break-up. He could not meet her eye. Nor could he meet the eye of anyone else at work, not properly. It was strange how one could have a conversation with people and appear to be meeting their gaze during it, when all the time they were not really quite looking at you and you were not really quite looking at them. Primate subtleties, honed over millions of years on the savanna.

  He lost appetite, lost energy. In the morning he would wake up and wonder why he should get out of bed. Then looking at the blank walls of the bedroom, where Selena’s prints had hung, he would sometimes get so angry at her that his pulse hammered uncomfortably in his neck and forehead. This got him out of bed, but then there was nowhere to go, except work. And there everyone knew he was a wife beater, a domestic abuser, an asshole. Martian society did not tolerate such people.

  Shame or anger; anger or shame. Grief or humiliation. Resentment or regret. Lost love. Omnidirectional rage.

  Mostly he didn’t swim anymore. The sight of the swimmer women was too painful now, though they were as friendly as always; they knew nothing of the lab except him and Frank, and Frank had not said anything to them about what had happened. It made no difference. He was cut off from them. He knew he ought to swim more, and he swam less. Whenever he resolved to turn things around he would swim
two or three days in a row, then let it fall away again.

  Once at the end of an early evening workout he had forced himself to attend—and now he felt better, as usual—while they were standing in the lane steaming, his three most constant lane mates made quick plans to go to a nearby trattoria after showering. One looked at him. “Pizza at Rico’s?”

  He shook his head. “Hamburger at home,” he said sadly.

  They laughed at this. “Ah, come on. It’ll keep another night.”

  “Come on, Andy,” Frank said from the next lane. “I’ll go too, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” the women said. Frank often swam in their lane too.

  “Well …” Smith roused himself. “Okay.”

  He sat with them and listened to their chatter around the restaurant table. They still seemed to be slightly steaming, their hair wet and wisping away from their foreheads. The three women were young. It was interesting; away from the pool they looked ordinary and undistinguished: skinny, mousy, plump, maladroit, whatever. With their clothes on you could not guess at their fantastically powerful shoulders and lats, their compact smooth musculatures. Like seals dressed up in clown suits, waddling around a stage.

  “Are you okay?” one asked him when he had been silent too long.

  “Oh yeah, yeah.” He hesitated, glanced at Frank. “Broke up with my girlfriend.”

  “Ah ha! I knew it was something!” Hand to his arm (they all bumped into each other all the time in the pool): “You haven’t been your usual self lately.”

  “No.” He smiled ruefully. “It’s been hard.”

  He could never tell them about what had happened. And Frank wouldn’t either. But without that none of the rest of his story made any sense. So he couldn’t talk about any of it.