Analog SFF, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT

  Vol. CXXVII No. 10, October 2007

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  Cover Art by Bob Eggleton

  NOVELLA

  AN ANGELHEADED HIPSTER ESCAPES, Daniel Hatch

  NOVELETTES

  EL DORADO, Tom Ligon

  THE HANGINGSTONE RAT, Barry B. Longyear

  SHORT STORIES

  A BRIDGE IN TIME, Joseph P. Martino

  VIRUS CHANGES SKIN, Ekaterina Sedia

  ON THE QUANTUM THEORETIC IMPLICATIONS

  OF NEWTON'S ALCHEMY, Alex Kasman

  SCIENCE FACT

  NANOTECH ROCKET FUEL, Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.

  READER'S DEPARTMENTS

  THE EDITOR'S PAGE

  IN TIMES TO COME

  BIOLOG: EKATERINA SEDIA, Richard A. Lovett

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton

  BRASS TACKS

  UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL: GESTURES by Stanley Schmidt

  AN ANGELHEADED HIPSTER ESCAPES by DANIEL HATCH

  NANOTECH ROCKET FUEL by STEPHEN L. GILLETT, PH.D.

  A BRIDGE IN TIME by JOSEPH P. MARTINO

  BIOLOG: EKATERINA SEDIA by RICHARD A. LOVETT

  VIRUS CHANGES SKIN by EKATERINA SEDIA

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW: REAL NUCLEAR FUSION ON A TABLETOP by JOHN G. CRAMER

  ON THE QUANTUM THEORETIC IMPLICATIONS OF NEWTON'S ALCHEMY by ALEX KASMAN

  EL DORADO by TOM LIGON

  THE HANGINGSTONE RAT by BARRY B. LONGYEAR

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

  IN TIMES TO COME

  BRASS TACKS

  UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS

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  EDITORIAL: GESTURES by Stanley Schmidt

  'When I make a joke,” Will Rogers said, “it doesn't harm anyone; you can take it or leave it. But when Congress makes a joke, it's a law."

  You may have heard it in a slightly different form, and they may all be true; he made lots of speaking appearances and probably varied the details from time to time. But the essence of it is the same, and it contains an uncomfortable nugget of truth: when Congress—or any governing body—does something foolish and calls it legislation, it has real consequences for real people, and they may not be funny. And legislation is, after all, what governing bodies do.

  Right?

  Well, at least some of the time. (Some might say too much of the time. Remember Robert Heinlein's suggestion of a bicameral legislature with one house to make laws and another to repeal them?) Lately, it seems, we've been having an epidemic of such bodies spending their time and taxpayers’ dollars making proclamations that may or may not be jokes, but are expressly presented as not being laws.

  Consider two recent examples at very different levels of government. I'm writing this in March, at a time when the newly Democratic-led Congress is playing with “nonbinding resolutions” expressing disapproval for the president's latest plan for dealing with the war in Iraq. And several local school boards have promulgated “bans” or “moratoriums” on “the N-word” or the currently fashionable teen slang phrase “That's so gay,” even though they say quite openly that they aren't really bans because they won't be enforced.

  So what, if anything, is the value of such actions?

  To answer that, I think, we have to consider what these groups are really doing, which may or may not be what they say they are doing. The simplest case is to suppose that they are actually doing what they say: making a symbolic statement (to borrow the term used by a representative of one of those school boards) of what they consider a moral position, without trying to compel anybody to agree with it or act on it. In principle, there's nothing wrong with that. We all express opinions without demanding that anybody accept them; I do it all the time, right here in these pages. But to what extent is it a worthwhile or desirable thing for a legislative body or a school board to do?

  Bear in mind that we are paying these people to produce particular kinds of results. In the real world, merely saying what they would like to happen will seldom ensure that it will happen. To ensure actual effects, they need to lay down specific requirements for what people will do, and impose—really, not just on paper—penalties for noncompliance. For example, if Congress really expects to block a president's policies (on anything) they must do things like cutting off funding to carry them out. If a school board really wants to make sure nobody says the N-word, it will have to ban it and punish those who say it anyway. Those are such drastic steps, with such foreseeable repercussions, that they're understandably reluctant to take them.

  But if they don't, it's awfully tempting to see such “nonbinding” or “symbolic” gestures as empty and meaningless, wasting time and money that they're employed to use more productively. (Though again, as Will Rogers hinted in my opening quote and others have also suggested in cynical moments, that's not necessarily such a bad thing. After all, if they're not really doing anything, at least they're not hurting anything. I'm reminded of Clarence, the sidekick of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, who made a surprisingly persuasive case for why a cat might be a better king than a man.... )

  But let's consider another option that may be more likely: that those who put forth symbolic or nonbinding resolutions are being disingenuous and actually have more than that up their sleeves. This possibility, too, breaks down into a couple of likely cases. Both Congress and those school boards have indicated that although they are not making laws with teeth, they are hoping to influence people's behavior. At least one of the education people has said they hope their “moratorium” will get people to thinking more about their heretofore casual use of offensive words or phrases, and as a result to use them less. Congress (or rather, the current majority of its members which has so voted) has indicated that it hopes to nudge the president to rethink his policies by making explicit that he no longer has their overwhelming support. In each case, if we take them at their word, we are still to believe that they are really not trying to force anybody to do anything, but simply hope that gentle persuasion will lead others to straighten up and fly right. (Or, more precisely, what those attempting the persuasion see as right, which is not necessarily the same thing, no matter how popular or unpopular their views may be).

  If that is the case, I still wonder whether it's a worthwhile use of their time and energy. Or should I, as a taxpayer (and one of their employers) expect something a bit more likely to produce tangible results?

  If so, maybe I needn't worry, because maybe what's really going on is the last possibility I hinted at: that the “nonbinding” and “symbolic” acts are merely trial balloons, preliminary feeling out of public or official opinion as a prelude to similar acts that do have teeth. Maybe the idea is that making such gestures will (a) give people a face-saving opportunity to do “voluntarily” what the resolvers would like them to do, and (b) pave the way for the use of force if the
y fail to do so. In the deviously wonderful world of Washington, I can well imagine that this is the case; and I suspect that the same principle, if on a smaller scale, applies to local school boards as well. So maybe in some, if not all, of these cases, the folks making nonbinding and symbolic resolutions do intend to make things happen, and see what they've done so far only as a first step.

  If so, is their approach a subtle and commendable use of diplomatic skills to do something that needs to be done, but would be hard to directly and in one swell foop? Or is it a stealthy and insidious step toward something that shouldn't be done at all?

  The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask, and on what ends they would consider desirable. And if you conduct a survey, you'd do well to weigh the answers carefully, bearing in mind that a great many people find it easy to shrug off one principle they claim to believe in if it gets in the way of another about which they care even more.

  Consider, for example, the congressional resolutions scolding the president for his Iraq policies. (And please bear in mind that since many relevant developments will probably have happened by the time you read this, this is not about those policies, but about the kinds of processes currently being used in the effort to modify them, which are also used in many other contexts). Many citizens, including a majority of the recently reconstituted Congress, sincerely believe that the president's policies have so far taken the country too far down a dangerous path, and we need to get onto a new course with all possible haste. The president, and a significant number of other citizens, believes just as sincerely that it's necessary to finish what's been started, and that going along with the current congressional motions would be the disastrous course. Those in the first camp are likely to applaud anything Congress can do to get things to come out their way; those in the second will understandably do anything they can to prevent that.

  This is as it should be—up to a point. The legislative and executive branches should argue, frequently. That forces both of them to consider other points of view and come to compromises, instead of either getting its way too easily (as can happen when too much of the government is controlled by a single party [any single party]). But both of them, at least in this country, need to keep in mind during all such arguments—and be forcibly reminded, if and when necessary—that there are limitations on what kinds of tactics are acceptable, and that those that go beyond the limits (many of them conveniently gathered in the Constitution) won't be tolerated.

  The case is perhaps a bit clearer, and not quite as inflammatory, in the case of the school board resolutions. After all, a great many of us, perhaps even an overwhelming majority, find some terms of “hate language” extremely offensive. Surely no governing body in this country would go on record as endorsing their use—but does that mean any such body should even pretend to ban them? To me, that seems a dangerous precedent to set, because banning a word—really banning it, and enforcing the ban—would be a clear and flagrant violation of one of the most basic freedoms guaranteed by our constitution: the freedom of speech.

  But that doesn't mean it can't happen. Everybody talks about the virtues of freedom, and we all want it for ourselves. But frighteningly few of us are willing to take the next step and recognize, deep down, that freedom only means anything if it applies equally to ourselves and to others—even others with whom we disagree as strongly as possible. And many of us are quite adept at rationalizing exceptions to basic freedoms—for other people. Another much-publicized case near the time of my writing this involved students who, in an “open mike” session at a high school, uttered “the V-word” in a reading after having allegedly promised not to, and were punished with suspension (later rescinded after heated public controversy). School officials defended their suspension by saying it wasn't about censorship, but only about insubordination and breaking a promise, but that's a transparent smoke screen. The students denied making the promise, but whether they did or not, censorship clearly is the central issue here. If administrators even asked them to make such a promise, that request is as clear an act of censorship as I can imagine.

  So when I hear groups in power making nonbinding or symbolic gestures that would be censorship or otherwise illegal or immoral if they were enforced, I have to wonder: what's next? Will they attempt a binding one if public reaction to the “symbolic” gesture suggests they could get away with it? In the particular case I just mentioned, they didn't get away with it; I suspect public reaction made the administrators feel as if they had their feet painfully far down their gullets. But I can't assume it would always be so.

  Certainly at least some members of Congress have made it clear that they will try to enact enforceable laws if they don't get their way by other means. I respectfully suggest that when any powerful body puts forth a nonbinding or symbolic statement about what others should do, we should examine it critically in the light of this question: what if they did enforce it? If it's not something we'd be willing to have enforced, it probably shouldn't be enacted at all.

  And in any case, their time would be better spent doing what we hired them for: making real laws that we need (and repealing ones that we don't).

  Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt

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  AN ANGELHEADED HIPSTER ESCAPES by DANIEL HATCH

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  Illustration by John Allemand

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  "You can't change human nature” may contain some truth, but not as much as some would like to think....

  Four of us were working at the New Palomar L-1 Solar Observatory on the day of the rescue—Roger, Anne Marie, Torazel, and me.

  Roger was a burnout. He had his head wired so completely into the machinery, his endorphins and neuroreceptors plugged so directly into the I/O bus, his memory so totally off site, that he had become little more than one more module on the network. He had become what they wanted us all to become.

  But not completely. When you talked to him—and he responded—he was the same old Roger. Rude, self-centered, insulting, and arrogant. Once a jerk, always a jerk, no matter how much of it is plugged in. He'd been a soldier. And a bigot.

  "You know what we called people without implants?” he asked for the thousandth time since I'd arrived at the lab. “'Mud people.’ They were stuck in the mud. Leftovers from the past. People without a future."

  "You know, they always wanted special treatment while the rest of us didn't get jack,” he said. “Always whining about how unfair the world is, while guys like you and me were making history, doing the hard work, making the future."

  It wasn't a discussion I ever wanted to pursue, but he was my only social contact for thousands of kilometers. I tried to put up with it. The worst of it was the boredom it inspired by repetition.

  On this day, however, with the first indication that great events were about to transpire, he interrupted his screed and was all bu
siness.

  "What's that noise at the edge of the corona?” he asked suddenly.

  I turned my attention to the array of solar monitors. At first, there seemed to be a large explosion of mass and energy on the limb of the sun, but the configuration was all wrong for a coronal discharge. I checked the visuals from one of the telescopes and saw that the boundaries of the event were expanding at a terrific rate—approaching relativistic speeds, if the figures were correct.

  "It's anomalous,” I said. “But I'm dumping all the data to a hard file if you want to review it."

  The machines were clicking away, but none of them had anything to say out loud. They were awful at integrating real-time events, so I didn't expect them to. That was what they had Roger and me and the others for.

  Torazel made some odd noises, but nothing that could be considered an attempt to communicate. She used to be a dancer. She had given it up long ago, when she thought all she had was arthritis. It turned out to be bone cancer. She was another burnout, but not like Roger. She had cross-scripted her inputs and could produce endorphins on command. The command came whenever she felt something—anything. We kept her off the network as much as possible. She was damaged goods long before she got to L-1. The machines had been ripped off by a clever salesman. All right, he probably didn't have to be too clever to rip off the machines.

  "This data doesn't make much sense,” Roger said. “Are you sure the monitors are working right? Did you calibrate them properly? Are you dumping the data multichannel or broadband?"

  "The data's right,” I said. Then an idea struck me.

  And that was really what the machines had us around for.

  Ideas never struck them. Without us, they'd just click along until protons decayed, collecting data without knowing why, without understanding what it was, without pursuing the interesting, the unusual, the anomalous—the profitable.