Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (454 page)

I ground out my cigarette on the beautiful floor, and found my notebook. A strange fury rose within me as I stood.

And I walked into the Temple to preach the Black Gospel according to Gallinger, from the Book of Life.

* * * *

There was silence all about me.

M’Cwyie had been reading Locar, the rose set at her right hand, target of all eyes.

Until I entered.

Hundreds of people were seated on the floor, barefoot. The few men were as small as the women, I noted.

I had my boots on.

Go all the way
, I figured.
You either lose or you win—everything!

A dozen crones sat in a semicircle behind M’Cwyie. The Mothers.

The barren earth, the dry wombs, the fire-touched.

I moved to the table.

“Dying yourselves, you would condemn your people,” I addressed them, “that they may not know the life you have known—the joys, the sorrows, the fullness. —But it is not true that you all must die.” I addressed the multitude now. “Those who say this lie. Braxa knows, for she will bear a child—”

They sat there, like rows of Buddhas. M’Cwyie drew back into the semicircle.

“—my child!” I continued, wondering what my father would have thought of this sermon.

“…And all the women young enough may bear children. It is only your men who are sterile. —And if you permit the doctors of the next expedition to examine you, perhaps even the men may be helped. But if they cannot, you can mate with the men of Earth.

“And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.

“But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said ‘Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’

“And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It
is
vanity, it
is
pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us. —All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”

I was working up a sweat. I paused dizzily.

“Here is the Book of Ecclesiastes,” I announced, and began:

“‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all if vanity. What profit hath a man…’“

I spotted Braxa in the back, mute, rapt.

I wondered what she was thinking.

And I wound the hours of the night about me, like black thread on a spool. Oh, it was late! I had spoken till day came, and still I spoke. I finished Ecclesiastes and continued Gallinger.

And when I finished there was still only a silence.

The Buddhas, all in a row, had not stirred through the night. And after a long while M’Cwyie raised her right hand. One by one the Mothers did the same.

And I knew what that meant.

It meant, no, do not, cease, and stop.

It meant that I had failed.

I walked slowly from the room and slumped beside my baggage.

Ontro was gone. Good that I had not killed him.…

After a thousand years M’Cwyie entered.

She said, “Your job is finished.”

I did not move.

“The prophecy is fulfilled,” she said. “My people are rejoicing. You have won, holy man. Now leave us quickly.”

My mind was a deflated balloon. I pumped a little air back into it.

“I’m not a holy man,” I said, “just a second-rate poet with a bad case of hubris.”

I lit my last cigarette.

Finally, “All right, what prophecy?”

“The Promise of Locar,” she replied, as though the explaining were unnecessary, “that a holy man would come from the Heavens to save us in our last hours, if all the dances of Locar were completed. He would defeat the Fist of Malann and bring us life.”

“How?”

“As with Braxa, and as the example in the Temple.”

“Example?”

“You read us his words, as great as Locar’s. You read to us how there is ‘nothing new under the sun.’ And you mocked his words as you read them—showing us a new thing.

“There has never been a flower on Mars,” she said, “but we will learn to grow them.

“You are the Sacred Scoffer,” she finished. “He-Who-Must-Mock-in-the-Temple—you go shod on holy ground.”

“But you voted ‘no,’” I said.

“I voted not to carry out our original plan, and to let Braxa’s child live instead.”

“Oh.” The cigarette fell from my fingers. How close it had been! How little I had known!

“And Braxa?”

“She was chosen half a Process ago to do the dances—to wait for you.”

“But she said that Ontro would stop me.”

M’Cwyie stood there for a long time.

“She had never believed the prophecy herself. Things are not well with her now. She ran away, fearing it was true. When you completed it, and we voted, she knew.”

“Then she does not love me? Never did?”

“I am sorry, Gallinger. It was the one part of her duty she never managed.”

“Duty,” I said flatly.…Dutydutyduty! Tra-la!

“She has said good-bye, she does wish to see you again.

“…and we will never forget your teachings,” she added.

“Don’t,” I said automatically, suddenly knowing the great paradox which lies at the heart of all miracles. I did not believe a word of my own gospel, never had.

I stood, like a drunken man, and muttered “M’narra.”

I went outside, into my last day on Mars.

I have conquered thee, Malann—and the victory is thine! Rest easy on thy starry bed. God damned!

I left the jeepster there and walked back to the
Aspic
, leaving the burden of life so many footsteps behind me. I went to my cabin, locked the door, and took forty-four sleeping pills.

* * * *

But when I awakened I was in the dispensary, and alive.

I felt the throb of engines as I slowly stood up and somehow made it to the port.

Blurred Mars hung like a swollen belly above me, until it dissolved, brimmed over, and streamed down my face.

* * * *

Copyright © 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc.

(1975–1990)

Unlike the New Wave that dominated the 1960s, science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s defied simple characterization. The Cyberpunk movement deservedly drew a lot of attention, but just as important were new hard-SF writers like Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, the space opera revival led by C. J. Cherryh, Mike Resnick, and Lois McMaster Bujold, historians like Harry Turtledove and Kim Stanley Robinson, storytellers like Connie Willis and S. P. Somtow, and difficult-to-characterize writers like Gene Wolfe, John Kessel, and Michael Swanwick.

Genre publishing was at its height. New SF publishers like Tor Books and Bluejay Books emerged, and bigger publishers started up their own SF imprints. Independent bookstores were everywhere, and bookstore chains like Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and B. Dalton grew rapidly as well. By the late 1980s, an upstart chain called Borders had begun opening what they called “superstores”—giant bookstores that encouraged browsing and featured music and food as well as books. Despite competition from bookstores, the rack system was holding up well. Many of the old magazines had fallen by the wayside, but old stalwarts like
Astounding
(now renamed
Analog
),
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, and
Weird Tales
remained, and new magazines like
Asimov’s
had emerged to fill in gaps in the marketplace.

But the seeds of decay were already in place. Bigger publishers began absorbing small and medium-sized publishers, including most of the science fiction publishers. With size came corporate structure and a need for higher profits; risky publishing choices became harder to justify. At the same time, a wave of consolidations among book and comic distributors devastated the rack system, wiping out many non-bookstore outlets for books and magazines. This hurt sales of genre books significantly, but it really devastated SF magazines, which never had a big newsstand presence and depended on the rack system and on subscribers for most of their sales. The slow decline of SF magazines became a much quicker decline, leaving a few of the better established magazines still standing but most of the others gone or reduced to much smaller status.

New entertainment forms competed with books as well. The rise of cable television meant dozens of channels instead of three networks, and videocassette recorders meant people could watch movies from their own homes. Video games spread from pinball arcades to home systems. And while
Star Wars
revitalized science fiction as a movie genre, SF literature found itself competing with an increasingly high-tech present.

(1951– )

Brought up in a Navy family, Greg Bear spent his childhood in places ranging from San Diego to Alaska, Japan, and the Philippines. In Bear’s case, it led to an early start to his SF career: Bear sold his first story, “Destroyers,” to
F&SF
when he was only sixteen. He began writing full-time in 1975, two years after graduating from San Diego State University, and his first novel, the planetary romance
Hegira
, was published four years later.

Bear’s real arrival as a hard SF writer came with the publication of the Hugo and Nebula–winning “Blood Music.” Expanded into a novel in 1985, it was the first of a string of novels built around powerful scientific ideas. Bear has won two Hugos and five Nebulas, most recently for
Moving Mars
(2000).

Bear’s wife, Astrid Anderson Bear, is the daughter of SF writers Poul and Karen Anderson.

First published in
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact
, June 1983

There is a principle in nature I don’t think anyone has pointed out before. Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—bacteria, microbes, “animalcules”—are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their existence and the accumulation of their tiny effects. They do not perceive deeply. They don’t suffer much. A hundred billion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

That, at least, is the principle. I believe Vergil Ulam was the first to violate it.

It had been two years since I’d last seen Vergil. My memory of him hardly matched the tan, smiling, well-dressed gentleman standing before me. We had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employee’s cafeteria at the Mount Freedom Medical Center.

“Vergil?” I asked. “My God, Vergil!”

“Good to see you, Edward.” He shook my hand firmly. He had lost ten or twelve kilos and what remained seemed tighter, better proportioned. At university, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed whiz kid who hot-wired doorknobs, gave us punch that turned our piss blue, and never got a date except with Eileen Termagent, who shared many of his physical characteristics.

“You look fantastic,” I said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”

We stood in line at the counter and chose our food. “The tan,” he said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sunlamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk where no one will listen close.”

I steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three die-hard puffers were scattered among six tables.

“Listen, I mean it,” I said as we unloaded our trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”

“I’ve changed more than you know.” His tone was motion-picture ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”

Gail was doing well, I told him, teaching nursery school. We’d married the year before. His gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie—and he said, his voice almost cracking, “Notice something else?”

I squinted in concentration. “Uh.”

“Look closer.”

“I’m not sure. Well, yes, you’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”

“No. I don’t need them anymore.”

“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”

“Candice isn’t—wasn’t—responsible for the improvement in my clothes,” he said. “I just got a better job, more money to throw around. My taste in clothes is better than my taste in food, as it happens.” He grinned the old Vergil self-deprecating grin, but ended it with a peculiar leer. “At any rate, she’s left me, I’ve been fired from my job, I’m living on savings.”

“Hold it,” I said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”

“Genetron Corp.,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”

“I haven’t heard of them.”

“You will. They’re putting out common stock in the next month. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs. Medical—”

“I know what MABs are,” I interrupted. “At least in theory. Medically Applicable Biochips.”

“They have some that work.”

“What?” It was my turn to lift my brows.

“Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”

That was quite impressive. Bernard’s reputation was spotless. Not only was he associated with the genetic engineering biggies, but he had made news at least once a year in his practice as a neurosurgeon before retiring. Covers on
Time, Mega, Rolling Stone.

“That’s supposed to be secret—stock, breakthrough, Bernard, everything.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”

I whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”

“If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time with me before rushing off to your broker.”

“Of course.” He hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “So tell me more.”

“Well, in med school I was training for lab work. Biochemical research. I’ve always had a bent for computers, too. So I put myself through my last two years—”

“By selling software packages to Westinghouse,” I said.

“It’s good my friends remember. That’s how I got involved with Genetron, just when they were starting out. They had big money backers, all the lab facilities I thought anyone would ever need. They hired me, and I advanced rapidly.

“Four months and I was doing my own work. I made some breakthroughs,” he tossed his hand nonchalantly, “then I went off on tangents they thought were premature. I persisted and they took away my lab, handed it over to a certifiable flatworm. I managed to save part of the experiment before they fired me. But I haven’t exactly been cautious…or judicious. So now it’s going on outside the lab.”

I’d always regarded Vergil as ambitious, a trifle cracked, and not terribly sensitive. His relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Science, for him, was like the woman you couldn’t possibly have, who suddenly opens her arms to you, long before you’re ready for mature love—leaving you afraid you’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize, screw up royally. Apparently, he had. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”

“Edward, I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”

“You want a five-thousand-dollar exam?”

“Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, thermogram, everything.”

“I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment. NMR full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive way—”

“Then ultrasound. That’s all you’ll need.”

“Vergil, I’m an obstetrician, not a glamor-boy lab-tech. OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”

He leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely and you’ll…” He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Just examine me.”

“So I make an appointment for ultrasound. Who’s going to pay?” “I’m on Blue Shield.” He smiled and held up a medical credit card.

“I messed with the personnel files at Genetron. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars’ medical, they’ll never check, never suspect.”

* * * *

He wanted secrecy, so I made arrangements. I filled out his forms myself. As long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. I didn’t charge for my services. After all, Vergil had turned my piss blue. We were friends.

He came in late at night. I wasn’t normally on duty then, but I stayed late, waiting for him on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein wing. I sat on an orange plastic chair. He arrived, looking olive-colored under the fluorescent lights.

He stripped, and I arranged him on the table. I noticed, first off, that his ankles looked swollen. But they weren’t puffy. I felt them several times. They seemed healthy, but looked odd. “Hm,” I said.

I ran the paddles over him, picking up areas difficult for the big unit to hit, and programed the data into the imaging system. Then I swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit, the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses.

I integrated the data from the hum-hole with that from the paddle sweeps and rolled Vergil out, then set up a video frame. The image took a second to integrate, then flowed into a pattern showing Vergil’s skeleton.

Three seconds of that—my jaw gaping—and it switched to his thoracic organs, then his musculature, and finally, vascular system and skin.

“How long since the accident?” I asked, trying to take the quiver out of my voice.

“I haven’t been in an accident,” he said. “It was deliberate.”

“Jesus, they beat you, to keep secrets?”

“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. I’m not damaged.”

“Look, there’s thickening here,” I indicated the ankles, “and your ribs—that crazy zigzag pattern of interlocks. Broken sometime, obviously. And—”

“Look at my spine,” he said. I rotated the image in the video frame.

Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projections, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.

“I can’t find it,” I said. “It’s all smooth back there.” I let go of him and looked at his chest, then prodded his ribs. They were sheathed in something rough and flexible. The harder I pressed, the tougher it became. Then I noticed another change.

“Hey,” I said. “You don’t have any nipples.” There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations at all.

“See?” Vergil asked, shrugging on the white robe. “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out.”

* * * *

In my reconstruction of those hours, I fancy myself saying, “So tell me about it.” Perhaps mercifully, I don’t remember what I actually said.

He explained with his characteristic circumlocutions. Listening was like trying to get to the meat of a newspaper article through a forest of sidebars and graphic embellishments.

I simplify and condense.

Genetron had assigned him to manufacturing prototype biochips, tiny circuits made out of protein molecules. Some were hooked up to silicon chips little more than a micrometer in size, then sent through rat arteries to chemically keyed locations, to make connections with the rat tissue and attempt to monitor and even control lab-induced pathologies.

“That
was something,” he said. “We recovered the most complex microchip by sacrificing the rat, then debriefed it—hooked the silicon portion up to an imaging system. The computer gave us bar graphs, then a diagram of the chemical characteristics of about eleven centimeters of blood vessel…then put it all together to make a picture. We zoomed down eleven centimeters of rat artery. You never saw so many scientists jumping up and down, hugging each other, drinking buckets of bug juice.” Bug juice was lab ethanol mixed with Dr. Pepper.

Eventually, the silicon elements were eliminated completely in favor of nucleoproteins. He seemed reluctant to explain in detail, but I gathered they found ways to make huge molecules—as large as DNA, and even more complex—into electrochemical computers, using ribosomelike structures as “encoders” and “readers,” and RNA as “tape.” Vergil was able to mimic reproductive separation and reassembly in his nucleoproteins, incorporating program changes at key points by switching nucleotide pairs. “Genetron wanted me to switch over to supergene engineering, since that was the coming thing everywhere else. Make all kinds of critters, some out of our imagination. But I had different ideas.” He twiddled his finger around his ear and made theremin sounds. “Mad scientist time, right?” He laughed, then sobered. “I injected my best nucleoproteins into bacteria to make duplication and compounding easier. Then I started to leave them inside, so the circuits could interact with the cells. They were heuristically programed; they taught themselves more than I programed them. The cells fed chemically coded information to the computers, the computers processed it and made decisions, the cells became smart. I mean, smart as planaria, for starters. Imagine an E. coli as smart as a planarian worm!”

I nodded. “I’m imagining.”

“Then I really went off on my own. We had the equipment, the techniques; and I knew the molecular language. I could make really dense, really complicated biochips by compounding the nucleoproteins, making them into little brains. I did some research into how far I could go, theoretically. Sticking with bacteria, I could make a biochip with the computing capacity of a sparrow’s brain. Imagine how jazzed I was! Then I saw a way to increase the complexity a thousandfold, by using something we regarded as a nuisance—quantum chit-chat between the fixed elements of the circuits. Down that small, even the slightest change could bomb a biochip. But I developed a program that actually predicted and took advantage of electron tunneling. Emphasized the heuristic aspects of the computer, used the chit-chat as a method of increasing complexity.”

“You’re losing me,” I said.

“I took advantage of randomness. The circuits could repair themselves, compare memories and correct faulty elements. The whole schmeer. I gave them basic instructions: Go forth and multiply. Improve. By God, you should have seen some of the cultures a week later! It was amazing. They were evolving all on their own, like little cities. I destroyed them all. I think one of the petri dishes would have grown legs and walked out of the incubator if I’d kept feeding it.”

“You’re kidding.” I looked at him. “You’re not kidding.”

“Man, they
knew
what it was like to improve! They knew where they had to go, but they were just so limited, being in bacteria bodies, with so few resources.”

“How smart were they?”

“I couldn’t be sure. They were associating in clusters of a hundred to two hundred cells, each cluster behaving like an autonomous unit. Each cluster might have been as smart as a rhesus monkey. They exchanged information through their pili, passed on bits of memory and compared notes. Their organization was obviously different from a group of monkeys. Their world was so much simpler, for one thing. With their abilities, they were masters of the petri dishes. I put phages in with them; the phages didn’t have a chance. They used every option available to change and grow.”