The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  Someone asked about ramifications for the human exploration of Mars, and the answers were scattered. "Very severely problematized," someone said; it would be a matter for discussion at the very highest levels, NASA of course but also NSF, the National Academy of Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, various UN bodies—in short, the scientific government of the world.

  Mike laughed. "The human mission people must be freaking out."

  Nassim nodded. "The Ad Martem Club has already declared that these things are only bacteria, like bathroom scum, we kill billions of them every day, they're no impediment to us conquering Mars."

  "They can't be serious."

  "They are serious, but crazy. We won't be setting foot there for a very long time. If ever."

  Suddenly Bill understood. "That would be sad," he said. "I'm a humans-to-Mars guy myself."

  Mike grinned and shook his head. "You better not be in too much of a hurry."

  Bill went back into his office. He cleaned up a little, then called Eleanor's office, wanting to talk to her, wanting to say, We did it, the mission is a success and the dream has therefore been shattered, but she wasn't in. He left a message that he would be home around the usual time, then concentrated on his TO DO list, no longer adding things to the bottom faster than he took them off at the top, trying to occupy his mind but failing. The realization was sinking in that he had always thought that their work was about going to Mars, about making a better world there; this was how he had justified everything about his life, the killing hours of the job, the looks on his family's faces, Eleanor's fully sympathetic but disappointed, frustrated that it had turned out this way, the two of them caught despite their best efforts in a kind of 1950s marriage, the husband gone all day every day—except of course that Eleanor worked long hours too, so that their kids had always been daycare and after-school care kids, all day every weekday. Once Bill had dropped Joe, their younger one, off at daycare on a Monday morning, and looking back in through the window he had seen an expression on the boy's face of abandonment and stoic solitude, of facing another ten hours at the same old place, to be gotten through somehow like everyone else, a look which on the face of a three-year-old had pierced Bill to the heart. And all that, all he had done, all the time he had put in, all those days and years, had been so that one day humans would inhabit Mars and make a decent civilization at last; his whole life burned in a cubicle because the start of this great project was so tenuous, because so few people believed or understood, so that it was down to them, one little lab trying its best to execute the "faster better cheaper" plan which contained within it (as they often pointed out) a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics among other problems, a plan that they knew could only really achieve two out of the three qualities in any real-world combination, but making the attempt anyway, finding that the only true "cheaper" involved was the cost of their own labor and the quality of their own lives, rocket scientists running like squirrels in cages to make the inhabitation of Mars a reality—a project which only the future Martians of some distant century would truly appreciate and honor. Except now there weren't going to be any future Martians.

  Then it was after six, and he was out in the late summer haze with Mike and Nassim, carpooling home. They got on the 210 freeway and rolled along quite nicely until the carpool lane stalled with all the rest, because of the intersection of 210 and 110; and then they were into stop-and-go like everyone else, the long lines of cars brake-lighting forward in that accordion pattern of acceleration and deceleration so familiar to them all. The average speed on the L.A. freeway system was now eleven miles per hour, low enough to make them and many other Angelenos try the surface streets instead, but Nassim's computer modeling and their empirical trials had made it clear that for any drive over five miles long the clogged freeways were still faster than the clogged streets.

  "Well, another red letter day," Mike announced, and pulled a bottle of Scotch from his daypack. He snapped open the cap and took a swig, then passed the bottle to Bill and Nassim. This was something he did on ceremonial occasions, after all the great JPL successes or disasters, and though both Bill and Nassim found it alarming, they did not refuse quick pulls. Mike took another one before twisting the cap very tightly on the bottle and stuffing it back inside his daypack, actions which appeared to give him the feeling he had retuned the bottle to a legally sealed state. Bill and Nassim had mocked him for this belief before, and now Nassim said, "Why don't you just carry a little soldering iron with you so you can reseal it properly."

  "Ha ha."

  "Or adopt the NASA solution," Bill said, "take your swigs and then throw the bottle overboard."

  "Ha ha, now don't be biting the hand that feeds you."

  "That's the hand people always bite."

  Mike stared at him. "You're not happy about this big discovery, are you, Bill."

  "No!" Bill said, sitting there with his foot on the brake. "No! I always thought we were the, the bringing of the inhabitation of Mars. I thought that people would go on to live there, and terraform the planet, you know, red green and blue—establish a whole world there, a second strand of history, and we would always be back at the start of it all. And now these damn bacteria are there already, and we may never land there at all. We'll stay here and leave Mars to the Martians, the bacterial Martians."

  "The little red natives."

  "And so we're at the start of nothing! We're the start of a dead end."

  "Balderdash," Mike said. And Bill's spirits rose a bit; he felt a glow like the Scotch running through him; he may have slaved away in a cubicle burning ten years of his life on the start of a dead-end project, a project that would never be enacted, but at least he had been able to work on it with people like these, people like brothers to him now after all the years, brilliant weird guys who would use the word "balderdash" in conversation in all seriousness; Mike who read Victorian boys' literature for his entertainment, who was as funny as they got; who had not even in the slightest way appeared on TV while playing the Earnest Rocket Scientist, playing a stupid role created by the media's questions and expectations, all them playing their stupid roles in precisely the stupid soap opera that Bill had dreamed they were going to escape someday, What does life mean to you, Dr. Labcoat, what does this discovery mean, Well, it means we have burned up our lives on a dead-end project. "What do you mean balderdash!" Bill exclaimed. "They'll make Mars a nature preserve, a bacterial nature preserve, for God's sake! No one will risk even landing there, much less terraforming the place!"

  "Sure they will," Mike said. "People will go there. Eventually. They'll settle, they'll terraform—just like you've been dreaming. It might take longer than you were thinking, but you were never going to be one of the ones going anyway, so what's the rush? It'll happen."

  "I don't think so," Bill said darkly.

  "Sure it will. Whichever way it happens it'll happen."

  "Oh thank you! Thank you very much! Whichever way it happens it'll happen? That's so very helpful!"

  "Not your most testable hypothesis," Nassim noted.

  Mike grinned. "You don't have to test it, it's that good."

  Bill laughed harshly. "Too bad you didn't tell the reporter that! Whatever happens will happen! This discovery means whatever it means!" and then they were all cackling, "This discovery means that there's life on Mars!" "This discovery means whatever you want it to mean!" "That's how meaning always means!"

  Their mirth subsided. They were still stuck in stop-and-go traffic, in the rows of red blinks on the vast viaduct slashing through the city, under a sour-milk sky.

  "Well, shit," Mike said, waving at the view. "We'll just have to terraform Earth instead."

  Prometheus Unbound, At Last

  Please append your report here

  This novel postulates that science is an ongoing utopian proto-political experiment poorly theorized as such and lacking a paradigm within which to exert power in human affairs commensurate with its actual pr
oductive capacity and life-maintenance criticality. Scientists are first seen marginalized from macro-decision-making in a backstory (written in the style of a Cold War thriller) in which agents sequester science by convincing Truman et al. that science's metastasizing wartime ability to create new technologies crucial to victory (radar, penicillin, atom bomb, etc.) might constitute a threat to postwar civilian-corporate control of society.

  Scientists, subsequently inoperative in surplus value investment and allocation decisions, produce goods and services unconscious of themselves as a group and individually willing to work within the existing hierarchical extractive non-sustainable system for $100,000±50,000 annually plus pension, stock options and a light teaching load. (This chapter is in the form of a zombie novel, highly amusing.)

  Then the scientifically augmented human population catastrophically overshoots the long-term carrying capacity of the planet. Scientists in their various toothless non-decision-making organizations conclude that the anthropogenically initiated climate change, and mass extinction event associated with it, probably threatens their descendants' welfare, and thus scientists' own evolutionary fitness. The sleepers awake.

  Meanwhile a certain proportion of humanity makes a cost-benefit analysis comparing fifteen years' work learning a science with saying "I believe" and through group political action controlling more calories per capita than scientists do, also more power over funding and rather more offspring. Many conclude faith-based parasitism on science less costly to the individual, so more adaptive. (Vampires living off zombies, guns brandished, chases by night: the novel gets pretty lurid at this point.)

  Then at a modelling conference a discussion springs up concerning Hamilton's rule, which states that altruism should evolve whenever the cost to the giver, C, is less than the fitness benefits, B, obtained by helping another individual who is related by r, with r being calculated as the proportion of genes these two individuals share by common descent (as in Hrdy, 1999): C ≤ Br.

  A geneticist at the conference points out that as humans share 60% of their genes with fruitflies, and all eukaryotes share 938 core genes, r is probably always higher than heretofore calculated. An ecologist mentions the famous Nature article in which the benefits provided by the biosphere to humans were estimated at $33 trillion a year (R. Costanza et al. Nature 387, 253–260; 1997). An economist suggests that the cost for individual scientists wanting to maintain these benefits could be conceptualized in the form of a mutual hedge fund, with initial investment set for the sake of discussion at $1,000 per scientist.

  Comic scene here as modellers debate the numbers, with a biologist pointing out that the benefit of life to every living organism could justifiably be defined as infinity, considerably altering equation's results. (Shouting, fights, saloon demolished in Wild West manner.)

  Conference attendees conclude altruism is probably warranted, and hedge fund is established. (Readers of novel wishing to pre-invest are directed to a website http://www.sciencemutual.net.) Participating scientists then vote to establish a board; a model constitution for all governments to adopt; a policy-research institute tasked with forming a political platform; and a lobbying firm. All scientific organizations are urged to join the fund. Fund's legal team goes to World Court to claim compensation for all future biospheric damage, to be paid into the fund by those wreaking the damage and the governments allowing it.

  Many meetings follow, no doubt explaining the presence in this chapter of most of the novel's sex scenes. Author seemingly familiar with and perhaps overfond of the bonobo literature. Strenuous attempts to maximize reproductive success in Davos, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, etc.

  Novel's style shifts to amalgam of legal thriller and tolkienesque high fantasy as scientists take power from corporate military-industrial global élite. A spinradian strategic opacity here obscures the actual mechanism that would allow this to work in the real world, said opacity created by deployment of complicated syntax, phrases low in semantic content ("information cascade"), especially active stage business (man runs through with hair on fire), explosions, car chases, and reinvocation of Very Big Numbers—in this case Science Mutual's potential assets if World Court returns positive judgment, after which subsequent chapter (with toll-free number as epigraph!) emerges in newly utopian space, looking plausible to those still suspended in coleridgean willed non-disbelief.

  Speed of narration accelerates. Science Mutual arranges winners in all elections everywhere. Hedge fund continues to grow. Scientific organizations form international supra-organization. Black helicopters proliferate. Entire population decides to follow new scientific guidelines indicating that reproductive fitness is maximal the closer behaviour conforms to palaeolithic norms, this being the lifestyle that tripled brain size in only 1.2 million years. Widespread uptake of this behavioural set augmented by appropriate technology (especially dentistry) reduces global resource demand by an order of magnitude despite demographic surge to UN-predicted mid-range peak of ten billion humans. A rationally balanced positive feedback loop into maximized universal fitness obtains. (Novel ends with standard finale, singing, dancing, reproducing. All Terran organisms live optimally ever after.)

  Please give your recommendation

  Reader recommends acceptance for publication, but suggests that the apparent size of the text's strategic opacity be reduced to three seconds of arc or less. Publisher should take steps to secure domain name sciencemutual.com. (Also, more car chases.)

  The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942

  First movement: Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso

  The first movement is about death. It begins with a little joke, that's Beethoven for you—the most terrifying music ever, yet he begins by making it sound like the horn players are warming up their lips and mouthpieces, the strings tuning their note against the oboe, the flashier ones throwing in a fifth below as if to test even the harmonics—and then the whole thing falls over a cliff into something urgent and loud, jagged and dark. The timpanist got to hammer this sudden fall home with the most violent entrance of his life. The stroke of doom, the bad news—he hit his D and A drums like the sledgehammer of Death, killing everything. A complete Götterdämmerung in sixteen notes; the perfect music for the evening, in other words. Because they were all doomed.

  Furtwängler knew it of course, none better; he had marched up to the podium as if to the gallows, and begun conducting the instant he got there, as he always did now—but this time it was different, the grim look on his face unprecedented and frightening. Behind him, out among the packed audience filling the big hall of the Philharmonie, the timpanist could see any number of uniformed men with eyepatches, arms in slings, bandaged noses, missing legs. In his peripheral vision he could see the giant swastikas draped to each side of the stage, and there was another one above and behind them. The Nazi officials sat in the front row, Goebbels chewing his underlip like a rabbit. It was best not to look at them. During the short rests between his assaults, and throughout the second theme, as the counter-tune kept trying to tiptoe out of the room, the timpanist locked his gaze on their conductor; nevertheless he still saw the bandaged men, also a scattering of soberly dressed women, their faces twisted with pity, dread, longing, regret. When the return of the first theme caught them all he brought his sticks down harder than ever, pounding out their doom.

  Not that this music was only about death. The first movement of Beethoven's Ninth was an entire world in itself, one relearned this every time one traversed it; its seventeen or eighteen minutes expanded into a Greek tragedy that felt like it filled years. There were shifts, respites, restless searches, kindly moments… In certain bars the woodwinds followed a pause with a little cantabile, a pulse of life, and the strings carried it away in a nervous interrogation, asking Can this sweetness exist? Can we get away with such delicate play? Can we leave all the rest of the world behind? Only to be answered NO, the little tune smashed down in another flood of doom, the dark plunge, the knell in the heart
of the first theme, its falling thirds and fifths like tripping down cliffs at the edge of an abyss. Struggle away as hard as they could, they kept falling back. This was not like the famous first theme of the Fifth, which was a very different call, a matter of adversity defied, Fate heraldic, its eight notes quickly elaborated, woven together, lifted up in a shout that was ultimately heroic; yes, the Fifth's first movement was heroic; while the Ninth's was simply death, arriving without any possibility of denial, right there in the great hall of the Philharmonie. April 19, 1942.

  And everyone there knew it, everyone who was not a fool, anyway, and in such fundamental things there were very few fools. Perhaps Goebbels was a fool, if he was not a calculating opportunist, or simply mad. But most of the people in the hall knew very well. They had heard the bombers at night, had descended into the Untergrund when the air raid sirens howled, had stood in the dark listening as the whole world above them became a throbbing band of kettle drums. They saw the maimed boys sitting among them. They read the newspapers, they listened to the radio, they talked in kitchens late at night with friends they trusted. They were Berliners, they knew.

  Recently the timpanist had discovered that in the extremity of the violent passages throughout the middle minutes of the first movement, the long rolls Beethoven had given him to play could be made to sound precisely like the bombers at night overhead, and different kinds of bombers at that, depending on how close to the rim he hit and how fast, so that he could imitate the low grumble of Heinkels struggling for take-off, or the high staccato of de Havillands, or the creamy thrum of Lancasters rushing by on a massed run. These engine rolls were punctuated by explosive hits mid-drumhead, like anti-aircraft fire; it was amazingly like. From within his prophetic solitude the deaf old man had apparently heard the deadly future reverberating back to him, had translated it into x's and tr's and sf's and fff's, and the diagonal crosses through the notes that meant bomber.