The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  They might not have time.

  The same harsh sunlight the work crews had been admitting waited when she got home. It made the jumble of toys on the living room floor seem tiny and fragile. Elise sat under the new window for a while, trying to ignore it, but finally hunted through her closets until she found some old blankets, and covered the glass.

  Nasim offered to stay for dinner that night. This made her feel rushed and off-balance. The kids wanted to stay up for it, but he had a late appointment. Putting them to bed was arduous. She got dinner going late, and by then all her planned small talk had evaporated. Talking about the kids was easy enough—but to do that was to take the easy way out, and she had wanted this evening to be different. Worst was that she didn’t want to tell him about the message, because if he thought she was upset he might withdraw, as he had in the past.

  The dinner candles stood between them like chessmen. Elise grew more and more miserable. Nasim obviously had no idea what was wrong, but she’d promised not to talk about the crisis. So she came up with a series of lame explanations, for the blanket over the window and for her mood, none of which he seemed to buy.

  Things sort of petered out after that.

  She had so hoped things would click with Nasim tonight. Exhausted at the end of it all, Elise tumbled into her own bed alone and dejected.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. This whole situation had her questioning everything, because it knotted together survival and love, and her own seeming inability to do anything about either. As she thrashed about under the covers, she kept imagining a distant, invisible dart, the cycler, falling from infinity at her.

  Finally she got up and went to her office. She would write it out. That had worked wonderfully before. She sat under the VR headset and called up the mailer. Hammond’s message was still there, flagged with its vector and frequency. She gave the reply command.

  “Dear Mr. Hammond.

  “I got your message. You intended it for some important person, but I got it instead. I’ve got a daughter and son—I didn’t want to hear that they might be killed. And what am I supposed to do about it? I told the police. So what?

  “Please tell me this is a joke. I can’t sleep now, all I can think about is Tiara, and what must have happened there.

  “I feel … I told the police, but that doesn’t seem like enough, it’s as if you called me, for help, put the weight of the whole world on my shoulders—and what am I supposed to do about it?” It became easier the more she spoke. Elise poured out the litany of small irritations and big fears that were plaguing her. When she was done, she did feel better.

  Send? inquired the mailer.

  Oh, God, of course not.

  Something landed in her lap, knocking the wind out of her. The headset toppled off her head. “Mommy. Mommy!”

  “Yes yes, sweetie, what is it?”

  Judy plunked forward onto Elise’s breast. “Did you forget the time again, Mommy?”

  Elise relaxed. She was being silly. “Maybe a little, honey. What are you doing awake?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s both go to bed. You can sleep with me, okay?” Judy nodded.

  She stood up, holding Judy. The inside of the VR headset still glowed, so she picked it up to turn it off.

  Remembering what she’d been doing, she put it on.

  Mail sent, the mailer was flashing.

  “Oh, my, God!”

  “Ow, Mommy.”

  “Wait a sec, Judy. Mommy has something to do.” She put Judy down and fumbled with the headset. Judy began to whine.

  She picked reply again and said quickly, “Mr. Hammond, please disregard the last message. It wasn’t intended for you. The mailer got screwed up. I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you, I know you’re in a far worse position than I am and you’re doing a very brave thing by getting in touch with us. I’m sure it’ll all work out. I …” She couldn’t think of anything more. “Please excuse me, Mr. Hammond.”

  Send? “Yes!”

  She took Judy to bed. Her daughter fell asleep promptly, but Elise was now wide awake.

  She heard nothing from the government during the next while. Because she knew they might not tell her what was happening, she commanded her outermost prospector to devote half its time to scanning for messages from Chinook. For weeks, there weren’t any.

  Elise went on with things. She dressed and fed the kids; let them cry into her shirt when they got too tired or banged their knees; walked them out to meet Nasim every now and then. She had evening coffee with her friends, and even saw a new play that had opened in a renovated reactor room in the basement of the city. Other than that, she mostly worked.

  In the weeks after the message’s arrival, Elise found a renewal of the comforting solitude her prospectors gave her. For hours at a time, she could be millions of kilometers away, watching ice crystals dance in her headlamps, or seeing stars she could never view from her window. Being so far away literally give her a new perspective on home; she could see Dew in all its fragile smallness, and understood that the bustle of family and friends served to keep the loneliness of the halo worlds at bay. She appreciated people more for that, but also loved being the first to visit ice galleries and frozen cataracts on distant moons.

  Now she wondered if she would be able to watch Dew’s destruction from her prospectors. That made no sense—she would be dead in that case. The sense of actually being out in space was so strong though that she had fantasies of finding the golden thread cut, of existing bodiless and alone forever in the cameras of the prospectors, from which she would gaze down longingly on the ruins of her world.

  A month after the first message, a second came. Elise’s prospector intercepted it—nobody else except the police would have, because it was at Hammond’s special frequency. The kids were tearing about in the next room. Their laughter formed an odd backdrop to the bitter voice that sounded in her ears.

  “This is Mark Hammond on the Chinook. I will send you all the confirming information I can. There is a video record of the incident at Tiara, and I will try to send it along. It is very difficult. There are only a few of us from the original passengers and crew left. I have to rely on the arrogance of Leviathan’s troops, if they encrypt their database I will be unable to send anything. If they catch me, I will be thrown out an airlock.

  “I’ll tell you what happened. I boarded at Mirjam, four years ago. I was bound for Tiara, to the music academy there. Leviathan was our next stop, and we picked up no freight, but several hundred people who turned out to be soldiers. There were about a thousand people on Chinook at that point. The soldiers captured the command center and then they decided who they needed and who was expendable. They killed more than half of us. I was saved because I can sing. I’m part of the entertainment.” Hammond’s voice expressed loathing. He had a very nice voice, baritone and resonant. She could hear the unhappiness in it.

  “It’s been two and a half years now, under their heel. We’re sick of it.

  “A few weeks ago they started preparing to strike your world. That’s when we decided. You must destroy Chinook. I am going to send you our exact course, and that of the missiles. You must mine space in front of us. Otherwise you’ll end up like Tiara.”

  The kids had their survival class that afternoon. Normally Elise was glad to hand them over to Nasim or, lately, their instructor—but this time she took them. She felt just a little better standing with some other parents in the powdery, sandlike snow outside the city watching the space-suited figures of her children go through the drill. They joined a small group in puzzling over a Global Positioning Unit, and successfuly found the way to the beacon that was their target for today. She felt immensely proud of them, and chatted freely with the other parents. It was the first time in weeks that she’d felt like she was doing something worthwhile.

  Being outside in daylight was so strange—after their kids, that was the main topic of conversation among the adults. All remembered their own class
es, taken under the permanent night they had grown up with. Now they excitedly pointed out the different and wonderful colors of the stones and ices, reminiscent of pictures of Earth’s Antarctica.

  It was strange, too, to see the city as something other than a vast dark pyramid. Elise studied it after the kids were done and they’d started back. The city looked solid, a single structure built of concrete that appeared pearly under the mauve clouds. Its flat facades were dotted with windows, and more were being installed. She and the kids tried to find theirs, but it was an unfamiliar exercise and they soon quit.

  A big sign had been erected over the city airlock: HELP BUILD A SUNNY FUTURE, it said. Beside it was a thermometer-graph intended to show how close the government was to funding the next stage of Dew’s terraforming. Only a small part of this was filled in, and the paint on that looked a bit old. Nonetheless, several people made contributions at the booth inside, and she was tempted herself—being outdoors did make you think.

  They were all tired when they got home, and the kids voluntarily went to nap. Feeling almost happy, Elise looked out her window for a while, then kicked her way through the debris of toys to the office.

  A new message was waiting already.

  “This is for the woman who heard my first message. I’m not sending it on the new frequency, but I’m aiming it the way I did the first one. This is just for you, whoever you are.”

  Elise sat down quickly …

  Hammond laughed, maybe a little nervously. His voice was so rich, his laugh seemed to fill her whole head. “That was quite a letter you sent. I’m not sure I believe you about having a ‘mailer accident.’ But if it was an accident, I’m glad it happened.

  “Yours is the first voice I’ve heard in years from outside this whole thing. You have to understand, with the way we’re treated and … and isolation and all, we nearly don’t remember what it was like before. To have a life, I mean. To have kids, and worries like that. There’re no kids here anymore. They killed them with their parents.

  “A lot of people have given up. They don’t remember why they should care. Most of us are like that now. Even me and the fathers who’re trying to do something … well, we’re doing it out of hate, not because we’re trying to save anything.

  “But you reminded me that there are things out there to have. Just hearing your voice, knowing that you and Dew are real, has helped.

  “So I decided … I’m going to play your message—the first one, actually—to a couple of the people who’ve given up. Remind them there’s a world out there. That they still have responsibilities.

  “Thank you again. Can you tell me your name? I wish we could have met, someday.” That was all.

  Somehow, his request made her feel defensive. It was good he didn’t know her name; it was a kind of safety. At the same time she wanted to tell him, as if he deserved it somehow. Finally, after sitting indecisively for long minutes, she threw down the headset and stalked out of the room.

  Nasim called the next day. Elise was happy to hear from him, also a bit surprised. She had been afraid he thought she’d been acting cold lately, but he invited her for lunch in one of the city’s better bistros. She foisted the kids off on her mother, and dressed up. It was worth it. They had a good time.

  When she tried to set a date to get together again, he demured. She was left chewing over his mixed messages as she walked home.

  Oh, who knew, really? Life was just too complicated right now. When she got home, there was another message from Hammond, this one intended for the authorities. She reviewed it, but afterward regretted doing so. It showed the destruction of Tiara.

  On the video, pressure-suited figures unhooked some of Chinook’s hair-thin Lorentz Force cables, and jetted them away from the cycler. The cables seemed infinitely long, and could weigh many hundreds of tons.

  The next picture was a long-distance, blue-shifted image of Obsidian’s only inhabited world, Tiara. For about a minute, Elise watched it waver, a speckled dot. Then lines of savage white light crisscrossed its face suddenly as the wires hit.

  That was all. Hammond’s voice recited strings of numbers next, which she translated into velocities and trajectories. The message ended without further comment.

  She was supposed to have discharged her responsibility by alerting the authorities, but after thinking about it practically all night, she had decided there was one more thing she could do. “Mr. Hammond,” she began, “this is Elise Cantrell. I’m the one who got your first message. I’ve seen the video you sent. I’m sure it’ll be enough to convince our government to do something. Hitting Dew is going to be hard, and now that we know where they’re coming from we should be able to stop the missiles. I’m sure if the government thanks you, they’ll do so in some stodgy manner, like giving you some medal or building a statue. But I want to thank you myself. For my kids. You may not have known just who you were risking your life for. Well, it was for Judy and Alex. I’m sending you a couple of pictures of them. Show them around. Maybe they’ll convince more people to help you.

  “I don’t want us to blow up Chinook. That would mean you would die, and you’re much too good a person for that. You don’t deserve it. Show the pictures around. I don’t know—if you can convince enough people, maybe you can take control back. There must be a way. You’re a very clever man, Mr. Hammond. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a way. For … well, for me, maybe.” She laughed, then cleared her throat. “Here’s the pictures.” She keyed in several of her favorites, Judy walking at age one, Alex standing on the dresser holding a towel up, an optimistic parachute.

  She took off the headset, and lay back feeling deeply tired, but content. It wasn’t rational, but she felt she had done something heroic, maybe for the first time in her life.

  Elise was probably the only person who wasn’t surprised when the sun went out. There had been rumors floating about for several days that the government was commandeering supplies and ships, but nobody knew for what. She did. She was fixing dinner when the light changed. The kids ran over to see what was happening.

  “Why’d it stop?” howled Alex. “I want it back!”

  “They’ll bring it back in a couple of days,” she told him. “They’re just doing maintenance. Maybe they’ll change the color or something.” That got his attention. For the next while he and Judy talked about what color the new sun should be. They settled on blue.

  The next morning she got a call from Sal. “We’re doing it, Elise, and we need your help.”

  She’d seen this coming. “You want to take my prospectors.”

  “No no, not take them, just use them. You know them best. I convinced the department heads that you should be the one to pilot them. We need to blockade the missiles the Chinook’s sending.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What do you mean, that’s all? What else would there be?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Okay. I’ll do it. Should I log on now?”

  “Yeah. You’ll get a direct link to your supervisor. His name’s Oliver. You’ll like him.”

  She didn’t like Oliver, but could see how Sal might. He was tough and uncompromising, and curt to the point of being surly. Nice enough when he thought to be, but that was rare. He ordered Elise to take four of her inner-system prospectors off their jobs to maneuver ice for the blockade.

  The next several days were the busiest she’d ever had with the prospectors. She had to call Nasim to come and look after the kids, which he did quite invisibly. All Elise’s attention was needed in the orbital transfers. Her machines gathered huge blocks of orbiting ice, holding them like ambitious insects, and trawled slowly into the proper orbit. During tired pauses, she stared down at the brown cloud-tops of Crucible, thunderheads the size of planets, eddies a continent could get lost in. They wanted hundreds of ice mountains moved to intercept the missiles. The sun was out because it was being converted into a fearsome laser lance. This would be used on the ice mountains before the missiles flew by; t
he expanding clouds of gas should cover enough area to intercept the missiles.

  She was going to lose a prospector or two in the conflagration, but to complain about that now seemed petty.

  Chinook was drawing close, and the time lag between messages became shorter. As she was starting her orbital corrections on a last chunk of ice, a new message came in from Hammond. For her, again.

  In case this was going to get her all wrought up, she finished setting the vectors before she opened the message. This time it came in video format.

  Mark Hammond was a lean-faced man with dark skin and an unruly shock of black hair. Two blue-green earrings hung from his ears. He looked old, but that was only because of the lines around his mouth, crow’s-feet at his eyes. But he smiled now.

  “Thanks for the pictures, Elise. You can call me Mark. I’m glad your people are able to defend themselves. The news must be going out to all the halo worlds now—nobody’s going to trade with Leviathan now! Total isolation. They deserve it. Thank you. None of this could’ve happened if you hadn’t been there.”

  He rubbed his jaw. “Your support’s meant a lot to me in the past few days, Elise. I loved the pictures, they were like a breath of new air. Yeah, I did show them around. It worked, too; we’ve got a lot of people on our side. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to kick the murderers out of here, like you say. We wouldn’t even have considered trying, if not for you.”

  He grimaced, looked down quickly. “Sounds stupid. But you say stupid things in situations like this. Your help has meant a lot to me. I hope you’re evacuated to somewhere safe. And I’ve been wracking my brains trying to think of something I could do for you, equal to the pictures you sent.

  “It’s not much, but I’m sending you a bunch of my recordings. Some of these songs are mine, some are traditionals from Mirjam. But it’s all my voice. I hope you like them. I’ll never get the chance for the real training I needed at Tiara. This’ll have to do.” Looking suddenly shy, he said, “Bye.”