Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (10 page)

A true future scientist would not have let this slow her down for a second, of course. She would have been blowing up her garage or classifying plants with the best of them.

Still. I could have read Darwin, and would have, had it been suggested. I was a curious girl. Instead, I immersed myself, and gladly, in classical, medieval, and seventeenth-century literature. After college, a great stroke of luck, hunger, or foresight caused me to take a master’s-equivalent Montessori certification course. As Maria Montessori was a scientist, and her method of teaching quintessentially scientific, I thereby learned the magic, the potency, of the simple act of dispassionate observation, which is the basis of understanding how children learn.

I caught a glimpse of the other culture.

Like most writers, I always defined myself, past, present, and future, as one. When I finally moved from poet to short story writer to novelist, a strange thing happened. The other culture, the one that sustained my very life but was as invisible and as taken for granted as air, grabbed me and took hold. Books written by scientists in plain English were suddenly available. I noticed that the magazine
Science
, to which my father subscribed, was actually fascinating. And when I began writing for publication, at age thirty-five, something strange happened. Science fiction came out.

At first, it resembled fantasy, and might feel quite at home today, in a market where science and fantasy freely mix in the same work. But there was no box of old musty pulp magazines under the bed in my grandmother’s guest room lurking in my literary subconscious, ready to supply the rules, the bones, the tone. In 1961, I was reading the big fat paperbacks from Drug Fair that littered the house—
Catch-22
,
Hawaii
,
Exodus
. And though science fiction was quite fairly represented, I rarely read it. I’m not sure why. Just out of high school I worked in a book store, and read just about every Lin Carter Ballantine fantasy out at that time. I also read
Steps
,
Hopscotch
,
The Trial
; anything that brought me into the territory of strangeness; mysteries, philosophy, and history, all at a marvelous discount. Had their work been available, I would have added E. O. Wilson, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson, and, probably, ever more esoteric works. I may even have become interested in pursuing in college the world they opened.

So why write science fiction? Perhaps it was just a process of waking up. Without an overview of how our technological world came about, despite my father’s repeated explanations of how radar works and, for that matter, how everything works, I was previously asleep to everything except the intellectual world of one culture, that of literature. The culture of science was as irrelevant, I thought, as it was impenetrable. And in these rather backward and quaint educational times in which we live, I don’t think that many American children will be pulled toward the culture of science very soon.

But I write SF because I am trying to catch up with the world, to explore the insights that others more accomplished in using the tools of science have had, and to ponder. The fruits of science—artificial DNA, atomic energy, the ability to explore space and the human mind—cannot be ignored, as they are in most literary fiction.

Science has brought our present into being, and will create our future. It is my goal, in the time I have left, to understand. I don’t. I can see only fragments. When they use words, scientists tell stories that often can only be accurately shown through mathematics, which I have not adequately studied. But from those fragments I can read, peopled stories emerge. These stories are niched, labeled, and marketed as science fiction, and they fit all the parameters. Yet, like most science fiction, which encompasses a spectrum of work, they are more than their confining labels. Marketing forces limit us, as writers. They always have. It’s nothing new.

Perhaps, in the future, we will beam our stories at one another in changing patterns of color, like squid, and maybe, enhanced by a singular human grammar, they will mean more than “Let’s mate.” Science fiction is an art form, and to survive, it must grow. Science, and its fiction, is the fabric of the future. No matter what it may be called in the future, it will survive, if literature survives.

At its best, science fiction has the power to unite the two cultures. It has the power to show anything—love, death, war, peace—and the power to ring the great bells.

That is what I’m trying to do, however imperfectly, when I write science fiction.

 

 

“
G
ramma, I’m scared.”

The poor girl wasn’t just scared, she was terrified. Behind a faceplate fogged with rapid breaths, her skin was pale and clammy and her sapphire-blue eyes twitched like small frightened animals.

Helen wasn’t exactly calm herself. “Don’t fret, Sophie,” she said, but her own voice trembled. She muted her helmet mike and took a deep breath before continuing. “We’ll be safe here.” For a while, anyway, she added silently.

In all Helen Buchanan’s seventy-eight years she’d never seen a solar flare so strong come on so fast. They’d had barely enough warning to reach this abandoned mining module before a storm of protons moving at near-lightspeed began to scour this sector of the Belt. And her lightweight two-seater jump bug offered almost no shielding against the radiation, so they were trapped here until the storm passed. Which might be hours, or days, or weeks.

“Now, you just try to keep calm,” she told Sophie, “while I see what we have in the way of supplies.” But the module’s cupboards contained only dust. Its oxy tanks were still welded to the wall, but when she put her helmet against each one and tapped it with her hand light, all she heard was the dim
tink
of metal in vacuum.

That wasn’t good. Not good at all.

She took another calming breath, then checked the oxy meter on her wrist: twenty-one hours at the current rate of consumption. She tweaked the mixture a little leaner; it might give her headaches, but that beat the alternative. “All right now, sugar, let me check your tanks.” Helen turned Sophie around, stopping the rotation with a practiced tap on the shoulder as she bent to peer at the girl’s tank-mounted meter. And gasped.

Only six hours left.

“W-what’s wrong, Gramma?”

She considered her response while thinning Sophie’s mix. Panic would drive the child’s oxy consumption up, but she’d know if she was being lied to. She turned Sophie to face herself and looked her straight in the eye. “Well, kiddo, we’re a little light on the oxy. Now, most flares only last a few hours, but this one’s a real whopper—no telling how long it’ll go on.” She reached behind herself and began unshipping her #3 tank. “So I’m going to give you some of mine. Hold still.”

The emergency connector hose was too short, the light was giving out, and Helen hadn’t done this kind of detail work with gloves on in years. But eventually she got everything connected together and bungeed the extra tank to the child’s pack.

Sophie’s meter now read ten hours.

Only four hours more? That tank would have kept Helen going for seven! The poor frightened child was gulping down the oxy like nobody’s business.

This had to stop.

Standard practice was to use sleeping pills, but Sophie’s bubblegum-pink suit lacked such grown-up supplies. She’d have to find another way.

Helen thought back to her days raising Sophie’s mother, but no situation this worrisome had ever come up then. Then she thought back a little further . . .

And she had just the thing.

“Sweetie, do you know about Titanium Mike?”

Sophie didn’t reply, just shook her head slowly inside her helmet.

“Well then, looks like I need to fill in a few holes in your education.” She drew Sophie to herself, chestplate against chestplate, so the girl could feel her voice in her bones, not just hear it filtered through radio. “Titanium Mike is . . . well, he’s more a force of nature than a man, really. They say his father was Gravity and his mother was Vacuum.”

“Is he going to come and help us?”

Helen considered the question for a moment. “Well, he might—you never can tell where old Mike might show up. When Cassandra Station was coming apart, he stuck the two halves back together with spit. And he’s the one who stopped Ceres from spinning.”

“Ceres doesn’t spin. Everyone knows that.”

“Not anymore! But back in the old days she rolled like a stuck gyro and it wasn’t safe to get near. Mike lassoed her with a bungee cord and straightened her out.”

Sophie looked mighty dubious at that. But dubious didn’t use nearly as much oxy as panicked.

“No, really, it’s true. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Mike yourself the next time you see him. He’s done all sorts of things. Why, when he was just a kid, he put rockets in his pockets and scrubbers in his rubbers and walked all the way around the Sun just to see where he’d come from.”

At that, Sophie actually managed a weak little smile.

Helen smiled back at her. As she warmed to her subject, she found her own mood changing—the stories took her back to the early days of the Aurora Mining Company, when a certain amount of privation and danger was just a part of the job.

“Mike was born on Earth, but he never fit in there. He was a big man and always kept hitting his head on things, or tripping over his own big feet. One day he said to himself, ‘Why can’t I just float around and avoid all this bother?’ So he decided to go to space, where he could do just that.

“But he realized he’d need something to breathe when he got there, so he took an old pickle jar, stuck some seaweed on the bottom, and screwed it onto the neck of his suit, and that was the beginning of hydroponics. Then he found some old thrusters that were lying around, but he was too big for just one thruster to lift so he stacked up a few of them on top of each other, and that was the beginning of the multi-stage lifter.

“When he got to space all the people were just drifting around with nothing to do. So he took some old foil food wrappers and spun them together into a big shiny dish to concentrate the sunlight, and then he went down to Luna and started throwing rocks into the hot spot, and that was the beginning of solar smelting.

“Mike took the smelted ore and started making cans and spikes and bubbles and donkeys and all kinds of other things that no one had ever seen before, but they didn’t know how to use them. So Mike started to teach them . . .”

And so it went, the end of each tale sparking the beginning of the next, and pretty soon Sophie started asking questions, and it wasn’t long before she was contributing her own outlandish details. Then Helen’s voice grew tired and they both slept for a while, and when Sophie woke up she asked for another Mike story.

When the all-clear sounded, somehow it had gotten to be twelve hours later. And Sophie still had more than an hour left in her tank.

 

“Don’t give me that bull!”

Orchekowski brought his massive fist down on the metal table with a resounding blow that knocked a squeeze-bulb of coffee loose from its grip-pad, but nobody at the table noticed the bulb as it tumbled away—they were all busy shouting at each other.

Javon Carter, floating near the door, snagged the bulb from the air with one long brown hand. He stared at it a moment, then stuck it to the wall beside him with a sigh. The canteen was the largest space they had, and it still wasn’t big enough to contain the tension between the two groups of miners—as thick and foul as the air that puffed from the helmet rings of their well-worn suits with every vehement gesture.

“Listen to me!” Orchekowski was yelling over and over. The muscular sapper had enough lung power to overtop the others. “We need to take what we can and get out!”

“No way!” Enriquez shouted back, veins standing out on his forehead. “We’ve all worked too hard to give up now!”