The Hard SF Renaissance: An Anthology

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Introduction

GENE WARS - Paul McAuley

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

WANG’S CARPETS - Greg Egan

GENESIS - Poul Anderson

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

ARTHUR STERNBACH BRINGS THE CURVEBALL TO MARS - KIM Stanley Robinson

ON THE ORION LINE - Stephen Baxter

BEGGARS IN SPAIN - Nancy Kress

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

MATTER’S END - Gregory Benford

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

THE HAMMER OF GOD - Arthur C. Clarke

THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR - James Patrick Kelly

MOUNT OLYMPUS - Ben Bova

MARROW - Robert Reed

MISSION YEAR 0.00:

MISSION YEAR 1.03:

MISSION YEAR 1.22:

MISSION YEAR 4.43:

MISSION YEAR 6.55:

MISSION YEAR 88.55:

MISSION YEAR 88.90:

MISSION YEAR 89.09:

MISSION YEAR 114.41:

MISSION YEARS 511.01–1603.73:

MISSION YEAR 4895.33:

MISSION DATE—INCONSEQUENTIAL

MICROBE - Joan Slonezewski

THE LADY VANISHES - Charles Sheffield

BICYCLE REPAIRMAN - Bruce Sterling

AN EVER-REDDENING GLOW - David Brin

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM - Kim Stanley Robinson

INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT - G. David Nordley

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS - Robert J. Sawyer

A WALK IN THE SUN - Geoffrey A. Landis

FOR WHITE HILL - Joe Haldeman

A CAREER IN SEXUAL CHEMISTRY - Brian Stablelord

REEF - Paul McAuley

EXCHANGE RATE - Hal Clement

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL - Greg Egan

ONE

TWO

THREE

GRIFFIN’S EGG - Michael Swanwick

GREAT WALL OF MARS - Alastair Reynolds

A NICHE - Peter Watts

GOSSAMER - Stephen Baxter

MADAM BUTTERFLY - James P. Hogan

UNDERSTAND - Ted Chiang

HALO - Karl Schroeder

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS - David Langford

FAST TIMES AT FAIRMONT HIGH - Vernor Vinge

REALITY CHECK - David Brin

THE MENDELIAN LAMP CASE - Paul Levinson

KINDS OF STRANGERS - Sarah Zettel

THE GOOD RAT - Allen Steele

BUILT UPON THE SANDS OF TIME - Michael Flynn

TAKLAMAKAN - Bruce Sterling

HATCHING THE PHOENIX - Frederik Pohl

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

IMMERSION - Gregory Benford

Copyright Acknowledgments

Copyright Page

Introduction

NEW PEOPLE, NEW PLACES, NEW POLITICS

The hard SF tradition is continuous from at least the late 1930s. In our 1994 hard SF anthology, The Ascent of Wonder, we argued that There has been a persistent viewpoint that hard SF is somehow the core and the center of the SF field. But while hard SF was never entirely out of fashion, since the 1940s it has not been as central to popular SF, nor as fashionable, as it became in the 1990s.

The term was coined by P. Schuyler Miller in 1957, and in its origins has always been to some extent nostalgic, in that it was coined to describe fiction that measured up to the real SF of the past. But it has also always signified SF that has something centrally to do with science, and it is this latter aspect of the term that we choose to emphasize, and it is this latter aspect that is most evident in the renaissance of hard SF in the 1990s.

The big names in hard SF in the nineties, based on number of stories published, were Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, G. David Nordley, Paul McAuley, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, Brian Stableford, Allen Steele, Bruce Sterling, Robert J. Sawyer, etc. Many of them wrote a number of stories in other genres or subgenres, but also made significant contributions in SF Otherwise the big names of this and earlier generations, Poul Anderson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Hal Clement, Ben Bova, and Larry Niven, Jack Williamson, etc., wrote significant novels, and published less than ten stories in the whole decade, although some of those stories were certainly important. And Arthur C. Clarke, following the deaths of Heinlein and Asimov, became the standard bearer for the old ideals of hard SF unmixed with overt politics and remained a bestselling writer.

Those old ideals, of vision of the future distant in time and space, and filled with wonder far removed from the politics of today, did not disappear in the 1990s. But they began to seem old fashioned, because many of the main ideas of hard SF had become politicized in the real world in the 1980s, associated with either the right or the left—near future space travel and weaponry with the right, nuclear dangers and the environment with the left, etc.

Here is the legend of right-wing political involvement in the real world USA in hard SF, the origin story of the SF advisors to President Reagan, who inspired the Star Wars defense plan in the early 1980s (as told by Greg Bear in his 2001 World SF convention guest of honor speech):

Jerry Pournelle got together Poul [Anderson], and Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Dean Ing, Robert Heinlein, and a number of other writers—Bjo Trimble was there with her daughter, Lora—lots of science fiction writers getting together with generals, rocket scientists young and old, new and experienced, and people from NASA, and politicians, discussing this possibility: that perhaps nuclear war was going to become a push-button affair where computers would make the decision.

No one could tolerate that, and we had to start building defensive shields. So we started putting together different ideas. General Danny Graham had one vision, and some of the writers had another. And they had a science fiction fan for a president; his name was Ronald Reagan.

Now we laugh. Do you want your presidents to be smart? Do you want them to be dreamers? Or do you want them to be lucky? Because this thing that went forth that Ronald Reagan did was the vastest bluff in the blue-bottom baboon history of the whole Cold War. Ronald Reagan said we could put a whole umbrella over the United States and protect [it] … . Science fiction writers helped the rocket scientists elucidate their vision and clarified it. They put it together in prose that Ronald Reagan could understand, and Ronald Reagan who read science fiction, said Why not? And he was lucky and so, that thing that had terrified me as a child surviving the Cuban missile crisis, … the ever present shadow of nuclear war, all of that, suddenly wasn’t really there anymore.

All political narratives are oversimplified in fiction, especially when the narrative is repeated by opponents of the group in question. Probably this story has been as well, but the committee was a fact, and it was a committee formed by the political right in SF, that, a decade after the famous Vietnam ads (and see Joe Haldeman For White Hill story note for more on this), added significant credence to the identification of American hard SF with right-wing politics and fulfilled one of the dreams of SF—that if our stories were read by and our prophecies were listened to by the people who run the world, then the world would change for the better.

Certain writers such as Ted Chiang, Catherine Asaro, Paul Levinson, Michael Flynn, Alexander Jablokov, David Langford, Ian MacDonald, Robert Reed, George Turner, James Patrick Kelly, and Robert Charles Wilson also came into prominence (some after decades of publishing) as hard SF or space opera writers, each with several highly regarded stories. (Many of them wrote other kinds of fiction.)

There were other significant threads, and significant works by important writers, that are not part of this argument, or this anthology. (This is not intended as a comprehensive literary history of 1990s SF.) Many popular, talented, and award-winning SF writers such as Connie Willis, John Kessel, Jack Womack, Howard Waldrop, James Morrow, Terry Bisson, Tim Powers, Harry Turtledove, Karen Joy Fowler, and Neal Stephenson, wrote in other areas in the 1990s. (The 1990s was also the decade of the rise of Alternate History as a main form of SF, for instance.)

In this anthology we present representative examples from among the significant SF writers and hard SF stories of the decade, and try to point out linkages and relationships to give some clearer understanding of how hard SF, often mixed with space opera (or vice versa) has evolved in recent years, escalating into the new century. This book focuses on what has been called The New Hard SF, Baroque Hard SF Space Opera (or Baroque Space Opera), Hard Character SF," and a number of other unwieldy terms. The New Thing of the nineties, was broader than just hard SF, but there was certainly a hard SF renaissance and the stories in this book prove it.

No consensus has emerged as to what to call it: a lot of diverse things happened, even within the compass of this book. It is sometimes called Radical Hard SF and that is the term we will trace because it illuminates certain interesting things about the evolution of the field in the last couple of decades.

This term originated in an Interzone editorial by David Pringle and Colin Greenland (in Interzone #8) and was then preempted by Bruce Sterling in his polemical fanzine Cheap Truth, as a description of what Sterling wanted the Movement to be. (See the note for Sterling’s Bicycle Repairman.) And of course neither cyberpunk nor the stories in Interzone turned out as anticipated in the various calls for Radical Hard SF. But seeds had been planted. It was clear that what Radical Hard SF was in opposition to was a perceived trend in American SF in the 1980s toward militarist, right-wing or libertarian, space war fiction marketed as synonymous with hard SF. The pages of Cheap Truth were filled with attacks on that stuff.

Some issues in the evolution of space opera need to be addressed, before we can fully understand what happened to hard SF. So let us turn there for a moment.

The Hugo Awards for best novel for the last twenty years have generally been given to space opera or hard SF, from David Brin and C.J. Cherryh to Vernor Vinge, Lois Bujold, and Orson Scott Card—as opposed to the shorter fiction awards, which have been distributed much more widely over the range of SF and fantasy styles and possibilities. It is arguable that the Hugo Award has always gone primarily to space opera, as currently defined, though many of the earlier winners, up to the end of the 1970s, would have been mortally offended to be identified as such. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating the worst form of formulaic hackwork.

But in the early and mid-1980s space opera completed a redefinition process begun in the late 1970s in particular by influential editors Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and in the 1990s space opera had become synonymous with popular science fiction adventure fiction. It was also the term most often used in the U.S. to describe Star Trek and Star Wars fiction. It is clear that both films and television helped promote this redefinition. And finally, it is evident that this redefinition was intended to conflate hackneyed work with ambitious SF adventure fiction, to blur distinctions in order to sell more books and make the media tie-in writing-for-hire fiction seem more respectable.

In the 1980s, the traditional optimistic, problem-solving kind of hard SF was marginalized by the advent of cyberpunk (originally the Movement: radical reformers of hard SF) and by the ascendence of the Humanists (originally—and self-parodyingly—the Boffos of Sycamore Hill: the boring old farts of the writing workshop in Sycamore Hill, North Carolina, who were actually the same age as the cyberpunks). Both groups, and the outer circles of imitators and followers of both, rejected space opera and the common forms and styles of hard SF, and the politics of the Right, in favor of new attitudes and approaches, new dress codes and new critical value systems, and left-leaning politics. The standard essay on the subject is Michael Swanwick’s User’s Guide to the Postmoderns.

The real attention in the 1980s and the early 1990s went to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and their cohorts and emulators, on the one hand, and to Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, and Orson Scott Card on the other. Lois McMaster Bujold (published by Baen books and serialized in Analog) became prominent, and Dan Simmons too. Orson Scott Card’s two-volume anthology of 1980s SF (Future on Fire [1991] and Future on Ice [1998]) is the best available selection of eighties writers. There is no comparable anthology for the 1990s. But Card’s long and judgmental story notes must be read along with and in juxtaposition to the general introductions to Gardner Dozois’ annual Year’s Best Science Fiction (in which the fashions and prevalent attitudes are clearly presented, sometimes in very different terms than in Card’s books).

Promoting hard SF in the 1980s was left primarily to influential editor Jim Baen, first at Tor Books and then from 1983 on at Baen Books, and to Analog. (Examples of what Baen was promoting and what the Movement was attacking included the Libertarian fiction of Vernor Vinge, the late work of Robert A. Heinlein, and the There Will Be War anthology series edited by Jerry Poumelle.) Hard SF, it seemed, was narrowing to a subgenre concerned primarily with military fiction and political attacks, usually from the right, on liberal causes and politicians, and with artificially set up problems solved by stereotypical characters, in neither venue valuing literary style.

In The Ascent of Wonder, an anthology we felt was a necessary corrective to this seeming narrowing, we examined the historical origins of hard SF and tried to tease out what hard SF had actually to do with science. The book had three introductions, one each by Gregory Benford, Kathryn Cramer, and David G. Hartwell. Benford argued for hard SF’s fidelity to facts: Hard SF plays with the net of fact up and strung as tight as the story allows. Cramer remarked that in the decades since John W. Campbell’s death, the hard SF attitude became a saleable commodity of its own, separable from scientific content. Particularly during the Reagan years, hard SF evolved into right-wing power fantasies about military hardware, men killing things with big machines … She invited the reader instead to explore the myriad ways science could be used in hard SF. Hartwell described hard SF as being about the beauty of truth and the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is true, portraying hard SF as a literature of faith in science, in opposition to literary modernism.

Some fine and popular writers emerged from Baen Books and from Analog (Lois Bujold at Baen Books, Michael Flynn at Analog), but with these and a few other significant exceptions, Baen Books and Analog didn’t get much serious attention, nor many award nominations in the field, by the beginning of the 1990s. Nor were many of the stories selected for prestigious reprint in Year’s Best anthologies, despite the fact that Analog was, and always has been, the magazine with the highest circulation in the SF field. A bunch of the Analog writers, whose fiction was published nearly exclusively therein, got together in the nineties as a booster group and had themselves photographed on several occasions at conventions with editor Stanley Schmidt as the "Analog Mafia." But they did not succeed in appearing as a hip, young, cutting-edge group.

It was among the British writers in particular that a new space opera (which was the most obvious U.K. response to the call for Radical Hard SF) conspicuously flowered in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. British SF critic Paul Kincaid, in 2001 in an essay on 1990s SF, The New Optimism, says:

British science fiction, meanwhile, was following exactly the opposite trajectory [from American SF]. While cyberpunks admitted the influence of the British New Wave, writers such as Colin Greenland in Take Back Plenty and Ian McDonald in Desolation Road were paying self-conscious homage to the freewheeling American SF adventures of their youth.

… the most influential writer in Britain today is lain (M.) Banks … . Certainly in science fiction terms there are lines of descent clearly visible from Banks to Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds. The science fiction they have created is big, sprawling, often funny or at least idiosyncratic, and undeniably optimistic. Banks’s Culture, a world of plenty and diversity and the ability to do just about anything one might desire, is the most utopian vision of the far future I have encountered in a very long time. Here is a future to aim for that is wealthy and free, a future in which competent women and men can succeed against heavy odds. A future that is, except for its distinctly left-wing bias, remarkably like the dream that used to be found in American SF during the optimistic fifties.

There are no neat divisions and clear boundaries; we merely observe large groupings and general tendencies. And new literary forms do not replace older ones, but coexist with them. There are examples of all forms of space opera, to the tv tiein, romance or westerns couched in SF clothing, including the crudely executed, to be found in publications of the 1990s and today. And all the forms of hard SF, from the Gemsbackian idea story to the Campbellian problem-solving story and all, sometimes, in rudimentary prose. The new did not drive out the old, but neither did the bad old overwhelm the good new.

What did happen was that significant attention began to focus in the early 1990s on new writers, such as Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, lain M. Banks, Ian MacDonald, and Gwyneth Jones, who were doing striking new things in SF, most often with a left-wing (or at least certainly not right-wing) political bent, and most often in hard SF or space opera. Most of them are British writers, not American, and by the mid and late 1990s they had been joined by many others, both British and American, in advancing hard SF and in bringing new energy and variety to space opera. It was the decade of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and also of many other Mars novels. It was the decade that Australian and Canadian SF writers became significant groups in SF and particularly in hard SF, rather than a few disparate talents of generally unknown nationality. We will continue this discussion throughout the book in the story notes, and of course in the choice of stories as examples, trying to tease out the threads of hard SF.

Here, in this book, we present the very real resurgence in 1990s science fiction of ambitious and complex strains of hard SF.

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

Pleasantville, New York

GENE WARS

Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley (born 1955) is a British writer who often writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, lain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the UK part of the hard SF/space opera renaissance of the 1990s. With degrees in botany and zoology, McAuley did scientific research in Britain and in Los Angeles before becoming a professor in the U.K. A few years ago, he gave up teaching to become a full-time writer. I’m a science junkie—always have been, he says. "If I’d been a writer before becoming a scientist I think I’d still be writing about science and I’m certainly still excited by the rich strangeness of the universe … . As a scientist, I hope I’ve acquired a certain meticulousness about thinking things through, the ability to see things from the bottom up, and to not be afraid of research. I’m definitely writing more and more about biology and the culture of science now that I’m no longer a scientist—it’s something I know a little bit about."

His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 (with Rudy Rucker’s Wetware). He has since published a number of SF novels, of which Fairyland (1994) won the Arthur C. Clarke and the John W. Campbell Awards for best novel, and Pasquale’s Angel (1994) won the Sidewise Award for alternate history fiction. He completed a trilogy of SF novels, The Book of Confluence (Child of the River, 1997; Ancient of Days, 1998; Shrine of Stars, 1999). In 2001, he published two new novels, The Secret of Life, a hard SF near-future thriller about life on Mars, and Whole Wide World, a novel of high-tech intrigue. He has two collections of short fiction, The King of the Hill and Other Stories (1991) and The Invisible Country (1996). He also writes reviews for Interzone.

In Nick Gevers’ interview with McAuley for Infinity Plus in 1999, when asked what it meant that he referred to himself as a writer of radical hard SF, McAuley replied:

Radical hard SF was a term coined by David Pringle and Colin Greenland in an Interzone editorial some years ago. [Interzone #8, Summer 1984—eds.] They suggested that there was room in SF for new fictions that would be critical and investigative, facing up to the science and technology of the present and future … using the hard-edged language and imagery of technology for imaginative interpretations of reality. More recently, Gardner Dozois has appropriated it to describe the subgenre of revisionist widescreen baroque space opera—which is only partly what I think radical hard SF can do. I use the definition very loosely: SF rooted in the core traditions of SF but also surfing the wave of the present, with rounded characters, bleeding edge science, an attempt to convey the complexity of a world or worlds. It’s a reaction to the trad SF approach of filtering the future through One Big Change—nanotechnology, immortality, biotech. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the twentieth century, it’s that change is continuous and is advancing on a thousand different fronts.

The influence of this notion of a Radical Hard SF, which has meant different things to different writers, is one of the central concerns of this anthology.

Gene Wars, with its themes of a biotech growing out of control, the politics of technology, and the emergence of a posthumanity, is certainly a story about change continuous and advancing. It is hard-edged future history of the alterations wrought by genetic engineering upon society and, as in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, McAuley’s characters are transformed almost beyond recognition. Another element of newer breeds of hard SF is that they are often engaged with the politics of the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This story shows the strong influence of the political movements against globalization and genetically engineered crops, a far cry from the techno-libertarian and/or promilitarist stance (still epitomized by many writers associated with Baen Books) that increasingly characterized a significant amount of hard SF in the early and middle 1980s.

1

On Evan’s eighth birthday, his aunt sent him the latest smash-hit biokit, Splicing Your Own Semisentients. The box-lid depicted an alien swamp throbbing with weird, amorphous life; a double helix spiralling out of a test-tube was embossed in one corner. Don’t let your father see that, his mother said, so Evan took it out to the old barn, set up the plastic culture trays and vials of chemicals and retroviruses on a dusty workbench in the shadow of the shrouded combine.

His father found Evan there two days later. The slime mould he’d created, a million amoebae aggregated around a drop of cyclic AMP, had been transformed with a retrovirus and was budding little blue-furred blobs. Evan’s father dumped culture trays and vials in the yard and made Evan pour a litre of industrial-grade bleach over them. More than fear or anger, it was the acrid stench that made Evan cry.

That summer, the leasing company foreclosed on the livestock. The rep who supervised repossession of the supercows drove off in a big car with the test-tube and double-helix logo on its gull-wing door. The next year the wheat failed, blighted by a particularly virulent rust. Evan’s father couldn’t afford the new resistant strain, and the farm went under.

2

Evan lived with his aunt, in the capital. He was fifteen. He had a street bike, a plug-in computer, and a pet microsaur, a cat-sized triceratops in purple funfur. Buying the special porridge which was all the microsaur could eat took half of Evan’s weekly allowance; that was why he let his best friend inject the pet with a bootleg virus to edit out its dietary dependence. It was only a partial success: the triceratops no longer needed its porridge, but it developed epilepsy triggered by sunlight. Evan had to keep it in his wardrobe. When it started shedding fur in great swatches, he abandoned it in a nearby park. Microsaurs were out of fashion, anyway. Dozens could be found wandering the park, nibbling at leaves, grass, discarded scraps of fastfood. Quite soon they disappeared, starved to extinction.

3

The day before Evan graduated, his sponsor firm called to tell him that he wouldn’t be doing research after all. There had been a change of policy: the covert gene wars were going public. When Evan started to protest, the woman said sharply, You’re better off than many long-term employees. With a degree in molecular genetics you’ll make sergeant at least.

4

The jungle was a vivid green blanket in which rivers made silvery forked lightnings. Warm wind rushed around Evan as he leaned out of the helicopter’s hatch; harness dug into his shoulders. He was twenty-three, a tech sergeant. It was his second tour of duty.

His goggles flashed icons over the view, tracking the target. Two villages a klick apart, linked by a red dirt road narrow as a capillary that suddenly widened to an artery as the helicopter dove.

Flashes on the ground: Evan hoped the peasants only had Kalashnikovs: last week some gook had downed a copter with an antiquated SAM. Then he was too busy laying the pattern, virus-suspension in a sticky spray that fogged the maize fields.

Afterwards, the pilot, an old-timer, said over the intercom, Things get tougher every day. We used just to take a leaf, cloning did the rest. You couldn’t even call it theft. And this stuff … I always thought war was bad for business.

Evan said, The company owns copyright to the maize genome. Those peasants aren’t licensed to grow it.

The pilot said admiringly, Man, you’re a real company guy. I bet you don’t even know what country this is.

Evan thought about that. He said, Since when were countries important?

5

Rice fields spread across the floodplain, dense as a handstitched quilt. In every paddy, peasants bent over their own reflections, planting seedlings for the winter crop.

In the centre of the UNESCO delegation, the Minister for Agriculture stood under a black umbrella held by an aide. He was explaining that his country was starving to death after a record rice crop.

Evan was at the back of the little crowd, bareheaded in warm drizzle. He wore a smart onepiece suit, yellow overshoes. He was twenty-eight, had spent two years infiltrating UNESCO for his company.

The minister was saying, We have to buy seed genespliced for pesticide resistance to compete with our neighbours, but my people can’t afford to buy the rice they grow. It must all be exported to service our debt. Our children are starving in the midst of plenty.

Evan stifled a yawn. Later, at a reception in some crumbling embassy, he managed to get the minister on his own. The man was drunk, unaccustomed to hard liquor. Evan told him he was very moved by what he had seen.

Look in our cities, the minister said, slurring his words. Every day a thousand more refugees pour in from the countryside. There is kwashiorkor, beri-beri.

Evan popped a canapé into his mouth. One of his company’s new lines, it squirmed with delicious lasciviousness before he swallowed it. I may be able to help you, he said. The people I represent have a new yeast that completely fulfills dietary requirements and will grow on a simple medium.

How simple? As Evan explained, the minister, no longer as drunk as he had seemed, steered him onto the terrace. The minister said, You understand this must be confidential. Under UNESCO rules …

There are ways around that. We have lease arrangements with five countries that have … trade imbalances similar to your own. We lease the genome as a loss-leader, to support governments who look favourably on our other products …

6

The gene pirate was showing Evan his editing facility when the slow poison finally hit him. They were aboard an ancient ICBM submarine grounded somewhere off the Philippines. Missile tubes had been converted into fermenters. The bridge was crammed with the latest manipulation technology, virtual reality gear which let the wearer directly control molecule-sized cutting robots as they travelled along DNA helices.

It’s not facilities I need, the pirate told Evan, it’s distribution.

No problem, Evan said. The pirate’s security had been pathetically easy to penetrate. He’d tried to infect Evan with a zombie virus, but Evan’s gene-spliced designer immune system had easily dealt with it. Slow poison was so much more subtle: by the time it could be detected it was too late. Evan was thirty-two. He was posing as a Swiss grey-market broker.

This is where I keep my old stuff, the pirate said, rapping a stainless-steel cryogenic vat. Stuff from before I went big time. A free luciferase gene complex, for instance. Remember when the Brazilian rainforest started to glow? That was me. He dashed sweat from his forehead, frowned at the room’s complicated thermostat. Grossly fat and completely hairless, he wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and shower sandals. He’d been targeted because he was about to break the big time with a novel HIV cure. The company was still making a lot of money from its own cure: they made sure AIDS had never been completely eradicated in third-world countries.

Evan said, I remember the Brazilian government was overthrown—the population took it as a bad omen.

Hey, what can I say? I was only a kid. Transforming the gene was easy, only difficulty was finding a vector. Old stuff. Somatic mutation really is going to be the next big thing, believe me. Why breed new strains when you can rework a genome cell by cell? He rapped the thermostat. His hands were shaking. Hey, is it hot in here, or what?

That’s the first symptom, Evan said. He stepped out of the way as the gene pirate crashed to the decking. And that’s the second.

The company had taken the precaution of buying the pirate’s security chief: Evan had plenty of time to fix the fermenters. By the time he was ashore, they would have boiled dry. On impulse, against orders, he took a microgram sample of the HIV cure with him.

7

"The territory between piracy and legitimacy is a minefield, the assassin told Evan. It’s also where paradigm shifts are most likely to occur, and that’s where I come in. My company likes stability. Another year and you’d have gone public, and most likely the share issue would have made you a billionaire—a minor player, but still a player. Those cats, no one else has them. The genome was supposed to have been wiped out back in the twenties. Very astute, quitting the grey medical market and going for luxury goods. She frowned. Why am I talking so much?"

For the same reason you’re not going to kill me, Evan said.

It seems such a silly thing to want to do, the assassin admitted.

Evan smiled. He’d long ago decoded the two-stage virus the gene-pirate had used on him: one a Trojan horse which kept his T lymphocytes busy while the other rewrote loyalty genes companies implanted in their employees. Once again it had proven its worth. He said, I need someone like you in my organization. And since you spent so long getting close enough to seduce me, perhaps you’d do me the honour of becoming my wife. I’ll need one.

You don’t mind being married to a killer?

Oh, that. I used to be one myself.

8

Evan saw the market crash coming. Gene wars had winnowed basic foodcrops to soybeans, rice, and dole yeast: tailored ever-mutating diseases had reduced cereals and many other cash crops to nucleotide sequences stored in computer vaults. Three global biotechnology companies held patents on the calorific input of ninety-eight percent of humanity, but they had lost control of the technology. Pressures of the war economy had simplified it to the point where anyone could directly manipulate her own genome, and hence her own body form.

Evan had made a fortune in the fashion industry, selling templates and microscopic self-replicating robots which edited DNA. But he guessed that sooner or latter someone would come up with a direct-photosynthesis system, and his stock-market expert systems were programmed to correlate research in the field. He and his wife sold controlling interest in their company three months before the first green people appeared.

9

"I remember when you knew what a human being was, Evan said sadly. I suppose I’m old fashioned, but there it is."

From her cradle, inside a mist of spray, his wife said, Is that why you never went green? I always thought it was a fashion statement.

Old habits die hard. The truth was, he liked his body the way it was. These days, going green involved somatic mutation which grew a metre-high black cowl to absorb sufficient light energy. Most people lived in the tropics, swarms of blackcaped anarchists. Work was no longer a necessity, but an indulgence. Evan added, I’m going to miss you.

Let’s face it, his wife said, we never were in love. But I’ll miss you, too. With a flick of her powerful tail she launched her streamlined body into the sea.

10

Black-cowled post-humans, gliding slowly in the sun, aggregating and reaggregating like amoebae. Dolphinoids, tentacles sheathed under fins, rocking in tanks of cloudy water. Ambulatory starfish; tumbling bushes of spikes; snakes with a single arm, a single leg; flocks of tiny birds, brilliant as emeralds, each flock a single entity.

People, grown strange, infected with myriads of microscopic machines which reengraved their body form at will.

Evan lived in a secluded estate. He was revered as a founding father of the posthuman revolution. A purple funfur microsaur followed him everywhere. It was recording him because he had elected to die.

I don’t regret anything, Evan said, except perhaps not following my wife when she changed. I saw it coming, you know. All this. Once the technology became simple enough, cheap enough, the companies lost control. Like television or computers, but I suppose you don’t remember those. He sighed. He had the vague feeling he’d said all this before. He’d had no new thoughts for a century, except the desire to put an end to thought.

The microsaur said, In a way, I suppose I am a computer. Will you see the colonial delegation now?

Later. Evan hobbled to a bench and slowly sat down. In the last couple of months he had developed mild arthritis, liver spots on the backs of his hands: death finally expressing parts of his genome that had been suppressed for so long. Hot sunlight fell through the velvet streamers of the tree things; Evan dozed, woke to find a group of starfish watching him. They had blue, human eyes, one at the tip of each muscular arm.

They wish to honour you by taking your genome to Mars, the little purple triceratops said.

Evan sighed. I just want peace. To rest. To die.

Oh, Evan, the little triceratops said patiently, surely even you know that nothing really dies anymore.

WANG’S CARPETS

Greg Egan

Greg Egan (born 1961) is the most prominent SF writer from Australia on the world stage. He has a degree in mathematics and has worked as a computer programmer, mostly in jobs supporting medical research. He remains socially isolated from the SF field—almost no one in the field has met him in person—and he has written a strongly worded attack on national identities in SF. He does not identify himself as an Australian SF writer, but as a writer of SF in the English language who happens to live in Australia. His Web site (www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan) reprints several interviews that yield some further insight into Egan, perhaps the most interesting hard SF writer to emerge in the 1990s. He says, I have a vision of a universe that we’re increasingly able to understand through science—and that includes understanding who we are, where we came from, and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake—things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they’re beautiful and elaborate and fascinating—but also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation, and use what we’re learning constructively. And I don’t think SF will ever be enough, but it’s the easiest place to start examining new technologies, a few decades (or centuries, sometimes) before anyone else is discussing them.

His first novel (not SF) was published in 1983. His SF writing burst into prominence in 1990 along with several fine stories that focussed attention on his science fiction and launched his books. His SF novels to date are Quarantine (1992), Permutation City (1994), Distress (1995), Diaspora (1997), Teranesia (1999), and Schild’s Ladder (2001), a disaster novel on a cosmic scale. His short story collections are Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995), Axiomatic (1995), and Luminous (1999).

Wang’s Carpets first appeared in editor Greg Bear’s flagship SF anthology, New Legends (1995) (which, along with Far Futures [ed. Gregory Benford], was one of the two most ambitious and important original anthologies of the decade for hard SF). It is one of Egan’s finest stories to date. Though Wang’s Carpets is most memorable for the image of a naturally-occurring computer program in which exists virtual life, this is contrasted with a solipsistic transhumanity: nearly immortal post-humans who search the universe for non-human intelligence because their survival depends on finding that the universe is not just all about them. Identity and gender are changed at will; physical appearance is manifested at will. Their identities have become so fluid that they search for an Other to define themselves in opposition to.

Stories such as this seem far beyond the political issues of today, though Egan is not apolitical. Egan said, "When I write about the far future, I’m not interested in pretending that all our current problems—things like disease, poverty, war and racism—are going to be with us for the next ten thousand years. Human nature is a physical thing, and eventually we’ll transform it as much as we like. But those ‘temporary’ problems are still enormously important to us, right now. So, although I’ve written a couple of short stories since Diaspora which share the idea that in the long run we’ll find software the most convenient form—especially for space travel—I’m backing off now, and concentrating on the near future."

There is a literary politics implicit in the subtext of Wang’s Carpets: The solipsism of what remains of humanity might be seen to stand in for the post-modern/post-structuralist lit-crit point of view that the world as we perceive it, and even science, is a symbolic construct of language; it’s contrasted here to the scientific stance that there is a real universe out there to which words must refer and which they can only in part represent—mathematics is the foundation of science. Being a hard SF writer, Egan of course comes down on the side of science.

Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree—but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.

As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles—decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.

The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen possible fates.

An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.

One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anticlimax, certainly—but there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis, but not all of them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And remaining a member of the wider Earth-based community, plugged into the entire global culture in real time, would have been an attraction in itself.

Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated—but non-sapient—self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed likely to be an enriching experience for him—with the distinct advantage that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z’s population would have fallen by more than half—and many of his closest friends would have been absent—but he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.

Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.

Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous signs of life—and that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the moment of the prelaunch cloning—a subjective instant before the chimes had sounded—no reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There’d been no guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun, then zoomed in on the trajectory that described his own journey. It had taken three centuries to reach Vega—but the vast majority of the polis’s twenty thousand inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them prior to the cloning and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a suitable destination. Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative: experiencing every voyage of the diaspora from start to finish, risking disappointment, and even death. Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had been struck by debris and annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two, briefly. He hadn’t been close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the particular versions who’d willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of flesh.

Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout probes—and the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fast—and already halfway through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.

Vega’s sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best lunar interferometers; now Paolo gazed down on its blue-green crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer—a billion kilometers took the edge off Vega’s heat—and almost drowning in liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both poles—far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic darkness.

The Orphean atmosphere was mostly nitrogen—six times as much as on Earth; probably split by UV from primordial ammonia—with traces of water vapor and carbon dioxide, but not enough of either for a runaway greenhouse effect. The high atmospheric pressure meant reduced evaporation—Paolo saw not a wisp of cloud—and the large, warm oceans in turn helped feed carbon dioxide back into the crust, locking it up in limestone sediments destined for subduction.

The whole system was young, by Earth standards, but Vega’s greater mass, and a denser protostellar cloud, would have meant swifter passage through most of the traumas of birth: nuclear ignition and early luminosity fluctuations; planetary coalescence and the age of bombardments. The library estimated that Orpheus had enjoyed a relatively stable climate, and freedom from major impacts, for at least the past hundred million years.

Long enough for primitive life to appear—

A hand seized Paolo firmly by the ankle and tugged him beneath the water. He offered no resistance, and let the vision of the planet slip away. Only two other people in C-Z had free access to this environment—and his father didn’t play games with his now-twelve-hundred-year-old son.

Elena dragged him all the way to the bottom of the pool, before releasing his foot and hovering above him, a triumphant silhouette against the bright surface. She was ancestor-shaped, but obviously cheating; she spoke with perfect clarity; and no air bubbles at all.

Late sleeper! I’ve been waiting seven weeks for this!

Paolo feigned indifference, but he was fast running out of breath. He had his exoself convert him into an amphibious human variant—biologically and historically authentic, if no longer the definitive ancestral phenotype. Water flooded into his modified lungs, and his modified brain welcomed it.

He said, Why would I want to waste consciousness, sitting around waiting for the scout probes to refine their observations? I woke as soon as the data was unambiguous.

She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down, instinctively reducing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the bottom of the pool, kissing.

Elena said, You know we’re the first C-Z to arrive, anywhere? The Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So there’s only one other pair of us. Back on Earth.

So? Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if any other version of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell each of the remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. What am I meant to say? You’re a thousand times more precious to me, now?

Yes.

Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred times would be closer to the truth.

There’s no poetry in five hundred.

Don’t be so defeatist. Rewire your language centers.

She ran her hands along the sides of his rib cage, down to his hips. They made love with their almost-traditional bodies—and brains; Paolo was amused to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into overdrive, but he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his self-consciousness and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasn’t like making love in any civilized fashion—the rate of information exchange between them was minuscule, for a start—but it had the raw insistent quality of most ancestral pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay beneath the radiant sunless sky.

Paolo thought, I’ve crossed twenty-seven light-years in an instant. I’m orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I’ve sacrificed nothing—left nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selves—it was hard to imagine them faring as well, without Elena, without Orpheus—but there was nothing he could do about that now. Although there’d be time to confer with Earth before any more ships reached their destinations, he’d decided—prior to the cloning—not to allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by any change of heart. Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them were powerless to alter the criteria for waking. The self with the right to choose for the thousand had passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would find—or construct—their own reasons for happiness. And there was still the chance that one of them would wake to the sound of four chimes.

Elena said, If you’d slept much longer, you would have missed the vote.

The vote? The scouts in low orbit had gathered what data they could about Orphean biology. To proceed any farther, it would be necessary to send microprobes into the ocean itself—an escalation of contact that required the approval of two-thirds of the polis. There was no compelling reason to believe that the presence of a few million tiny robots could do any harm; all they’d leave behind in the water was a few kilojoules of waste heat. Nevertheless, a faction had arisen that advocated caution. The citizens of Carter-Zimmerman, they argued, could continue to observe from a distance for another decade, or another millennium, refining their observations and hypotheses before intruding … and those who disagreed could always sleep away the time, or find other interests to pursue.

Paolo delved into his library-fresh knowledge of the carpets—the single Orphean life-form detected so far. They were free-floating creatures living in the equatorial ocean depths—apparently destroyed by UV if they drifted too close to the surface. They grew to a size of hundreds of meters, then fissioned into dozens of fragments, each of which continued to grow. It was tempting to assume that they were colonies of single-celled organisms, something like giant kelp—but there was no real evidence yet to back that up. It was difficult enough for the scout probes to discern the carpets’ gross appearance and behavior through a kilometer of water, even with Vega’s copious neutrinos lighting the way; remote observations on a microscopic scale, let alone biochemical analyses, were out of the question. Spectroscopy revealed that the surface water was full of intriguing molecular debris—but guessing the relationship of any of it to the living carpets was like trying to reconstruct human biochemistry by studying human ashes.

Paolo turned to Elena. What do you think?

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to death while he slept. "The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly what the carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. What’s the risk? Culture shock?"

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the impulse seemed to come with the amphibian body. You can’t be sure that they’re not intelligent.

Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million years after it was formed?

Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isn’t Earth, though.

True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are intelligent, do you think they’d notice the presence of robots a millionth their size? If they’re unified organisms, they don’t appear to react to anything in their environment—they have no predators, they don’t pursue food, they just drift with the currents—so there’s no reason for them to possess elaborate sense organs at all, let alone anything working on a submillimeter scale. And if they’re colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens to collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors … what conceivable harm could that do?

I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety.

Elena splashed him back. "The only way to deal with your ignorance is to vote to send down the microprobes. We have to be cautious, I agree—but there’s no point being here if we don’t find out what’s happening in the oceans right now. I don’t want to wait for this planet to evolve something smart enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If we’re not willing to take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before we learn anything."

It was a throwaway line—but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they all have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data backed up to all the farflung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the moment—or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget that they’d ever made the journey.

Paolo recalled the honest puzzlement of a friend from Ashton-Laval, Why go looking for aliens? Our polis has a thousand ecologies, a trillion species of evolved life. What do you hope to find, out there, that you couldn’t have grown at home?

What had he hoped to find? Just the answers to a few simple questions. Did human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence, in order to explain itself? Or had a neutral, preexisting universe given birth to a billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same delusions of grandeur—until they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology was used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the physical universe was created by human thought, it had no special status that placed it above virtual reality. It might have come first—and every virtual reality might need to run on a physical computing device, subject to physical laws—but it occupied no privileged position in terms of truth versus illusion. If the ACs were right, then it was no more honest to value the physical universe over more recent artificial realities than it was honest to remain flesh instead of software, or ape instead of human, or bacterium instead of ape.

Elena said, We can’t lie here forever; the gang’s all waiting to see you.

Where? Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn’t be the same.

I’ll show you.

Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again … night-side, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multicolored shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean’s smoothly tapered thermal glow spelt three hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as backlighting the atmosphere’s tell-tale infrared silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir, aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line. Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange—and he recognized most of the old signposts by color. He had his bearings now. Twenty degrees away from Sirius—south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside him—superficially unchanged, although they’d both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this environment mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free fall and vacuum, but it wasn’t set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren’t embedded in the physics at all, but were running directly on the processor web.

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition—and being human was largely self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged from the experience, he felt as if he’d broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate. The last flesh human had died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart from the communities of Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as conservative as a transhuman society could be. The balance seemed right to Paolo, though—acknowledging the flexibility of software, without abandoning interest in the physical world—and although the stubbornly corporeal Gleisners had been first to the stars, the C-Z diaspora would soon overtake them.

Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

Do you like our humble new meeting place? Hermann floated by Paolo’s shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It’s desolate up here, I know—but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface.

Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe’s close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, and expanse of fissured red rock. More desolate down there, I think. He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.

Ignore Hermann, Liesl advised. "He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the