Carbide Tipped Pens Part 1

Carbide Tipped Pens.

Ben Bova, Eric Choi.

Ben Bova: To the memory of Isaac Asimov, whose heart was as great as his mind.

Eric Choi: To Paul Keough, David DeGraff, Paul Urayama, Mark Grant, David Soltysik, and Tue Sorensen- the original Carbide Tipped Pens.

PREFACE.

"When I talk about this book, I get a lot of questions about the t.i.tle," Paul Stevens, our editor at Tor, once told me. "What does the t.i.tle come from?"

Carbide Tipped Pens (CTP) was the name of a hard SF writing group to which David DeGraff and I belonged in the late 1990s. Founded by Paul Keough, the group demanded a strict regimen of in-depth biweekly critiques and regular story submissions to markets every three months. The group's grand ambition was to help revitalize the hard SF genre and perhaps even foster a new literary movement. By the early 2000s, however, the obligations of mundane life began to intrude and the members of CTP went their separate ways.

Almost a decade later, I found myself with the honor of sharing an author signing table with Ben at the 2011 Ad Astra convention in Toronto. We chatted about the resurgence of hard SF with the publication of anthologies such as Jonathan Strahan's Engineering Infinity in the United Kingdom, and that the time was right for a new collection of hard SF in North America. I even had a pretty good idea for the t.i.tle.

Hard SF is the literature of change, the genre that examines the implications-both beneficial and dangerous-of new sciences and technologies. The founding fathers of hard SF, Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr., decreed that science fiction had to make sense, following the laws of nature and exploring the impact of science and technology on society-past, present, or future-in a manner that is imaginative and profound. Campbell guided masters like Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, and Jack Williamson into the Golden Age of SF, where the entire universe was their playground.

For Carbide Tipped Pens the anthology, Ben and I were looking for stories that follow the cla.s.sic definition of hard SF, in which some element of science or technology is so central to the plot that there would be no story if that element were removed. The science and engineering portrayed in the stories would be consistent with current understanding or be a logical and reasonable extrapolation thereof.

Furthermore, we wanted to put together a collection that would refute some of the stereotypes often a.s.sociated with hard SF in terms of both the stories themselves and the people who write them. We sought diverse stories that emphasized not only science but also character, plot, originality, and believability in equal measure. Our contributors came to us from the United States, Canada, Australia, China, Germany, and France. Ben and I both have scientific backgrounds, as do many of the authors, but we also have contributors with backgrounds in literature, history, and cultural studies.

Our fondest wish is for Carbide Tipped Pens to not only entertain but also to educate and convey the sense of wonder of the Golden Age to a new generation of readers.

Many thanks are in order: to Paul Stevens for championing this anthology and being a constant source of advice and support, to Paul Keough and the members of CTP for generously allowing us to use the name, and to Alana Otis Wood and the Toronto Ad Astra 2011 convention committee for putting the two of us together at the same author signing table. Most of all, thank you, Ben, for your wisdom and friends.h.i.+p. This is what Carbide Tipped Pens came from.

-Eric Choi.

THE BLUE AFTERNOON THAT LASTED FOREVER.

Daniel H. Wilson.

Science fiction is so intriguing because it can examine the cosmic and the infinitesimal, the future and the past, the human and the immeasurable.

Daniel H. Wilson's story does all that, in less than four thousand words.

"It's late at night, my darling. And the stars are in the sky. That means it is time for me to give you a kiss. And an Eskimo kiss. And now I will lay you down and tuck you in, nice and tight, so you stay warm all night."

This is our mantra. I think of it like the computer code I use to control deep s.p.a.ce simulations in the laboratory. You recite the incantation and the desired program executes.

I call this one "bedtime."

Marie holds her stuffed rabbit close, in a chokehold. In the dim light, a garden of blond hair grows over her pillow. She is three years old and smiling and she smells like baby soap. Her eyes are already closed.

"I love you, honey," I say.

As a physicist, it bothers me that I find this acute feeling of love hard to quantify. I am a man who routinely deals in singularities and asymptotes. It seems like I should have the mathematical vocabulary to express these things.

Reaching for her covers, I try to tuck Marie in. I stop when I feel her warm hands close on mine. Her brown eyes are black in the shadows.

"No," she says, "I do it."

I smile until it becomes a wince.

This version of the bedtime routine is buckling around the edges, disintegrating like a heat s.h.i.+eld on reentry. I have grown to love tucking the covers up to my daughter's chin. Feeling her cool damp hair and the rea.s.suring lump of her body, safe in her big-girl bed. Our routine in its current incarnation has lasted one year two months. Now it must change. Again.

I hate change.

"OK," I murmur. "You're a big girl. You can do it."

Clumsily and with both hands, she yanks the covers toward her face. She looks determined. Proud to take over this task and exert her independence. Her behavior is consistent with normal child development according to the books I checked out from the library. Yet I cannot help but notice that this independence is a harbinger of constant unsettling, saddening change.

My baby is growing up.

In the last year, her body weight has increased sixteen percent. Her average sentence length has increased from seven to ten words. She has memorized the planets, the primary constellations, and the colors of the visible spectrum. Red orange yellow green blue indigo violet. These small achievements indicate that my daughter is advanced for her age, but she isn't out of the record books or into child genius territory. She's just a pretty smart kid, which doesn't surprise me. Intelligence is highly heritable.

"I saw a shooting star," she says.

"Really? What's it made of?" I ask.

"Rocks," she says.

"That's right. Make a wish, lucky girl," I reply, walking to the door.

I pause as long as I can. In the semidarkness, a stuffed bear is looking at me from a shelf. It is a papa teddy bear hugging its baby. His arms are st.i.tched around the baby's shoulders. He will never have to let go.

"Sweet dreams," I say.

"Good night, Daddy," she says and I close the door.

The stars really are in Marie's bedroom.

Two years ago I purchased the most complex and accurate home planetarium system available. There were no American models. This one came from a j.a.panese company and it had to be s.h.i.+pped here to Austin, Texas, by special order. I also purchased an international power adapter plug, a j.a.panese-to-English translation book, and a guide to the major constellations.

I had a plan.

Soon after the planetarium arrived, I installed it in my bedroom. Translating the j.a.panese instruction booklet as best I could, I calibrated the dedicated shooting star laser, inserted the disc that held a pattern for the Northern Hemisphere, and updated the current time and season. When I was finished, I went into the living room and tapped my then-wife on the shoulder.

Our anniversary.

My goal was to create a scenario in which we could gaze at the stars together every night before we went to sleep. I am interested in astrophysics. She was interested in romantic gestures. It was my hypothesis that sleeping under the faux stars would satisfy both constraints.

Unfortunately, I failed to recall that I wear gla.s.ses and that my then-wife wore contact lenses. For the next week, we spent our evenings blinking up at a fuzzy Gaussian shotgun-spray of the Milky Way on our bedroom ceiling. Then she found the receipt for the purchase and became angry. I was ordered to return the planetarium and told that she would rather have had a new car.

That didn't seem romantic to me, but then again I'm not a domain expert.

My thin translation book did not grant me the verbal fluency necessary to negotiate a return of the product to j.a.pan. In response, my then-wife told me to sell it on the Internet or whatever. I chose to invoke the "whatever" clause. I wrapped the planetarium carefully in its original packaging and put it into the trunk of my car. After that, I stored it in the equipment room of my laboratory at work.

Three months later, my then-wife informed me that she was leaving. She had found a job in Dallas and would try to visit Marie on the weekends but no promises. I immediately realized that this news would require ma.s.sive life recalibrations. This was upsetting. I told her as such and my then-wife said that I had the emotional capacity of a robot. I decided that the observation was not a compliment. However, I did not question how my being a robot might affect my ability to parent a one-and-a-half-year-old. Contrary to her accusation, my cheeks were stinging with a sudden cold fear at the thought of losing my daughter. My then-wife must have seen the question in the surface tension of my face, because she answered it anyway.

She said that what I lacked in emotion, I made up for in structure. She said that I was a terrible husband, but a good father.

Then-wife kissed Marie on the head and left me standing in the driveway with my daughter in my arms. Marie did not cry when her mother left because she lacked the cognitive capacity to comprehend what had happened. If she had known, I think she would have been upset. Instead, my baby only grinned as her mother drove away. And because Marie was in such good spirits, I slid her into her car seat and drove us both to my laboratory. Against all regulations, I brought her into my work s.p.a.ce. I dug through the equipment stores until I found the forbidden item.

That night, I gave my daughter the stars.

The cafeteria where I work plays the news during lunch. The television is muted but I watch it anyway. My plastic fork is halfway to my mouth when I see the eyewitness video accompanying the latest breaking news story. After that, I am not very aware of what is happening except that I am running.

I don't do that very much. Run.

In some professions, you can be called into action in an emergency. A vacationing doctor treats the victim of an accident. An off-duty pilot heads up to the c.o.c.kpit to land the plane. I am not in one of those professions. I spend my days crafting supercomputer simulations so that we can understand astronomical phenomena that happened billions of years ago. That's why I am running alone. There are perhaps a dozen people in the world who could comprehend the images I have just seen on the television-my colleagues, fellow astrophysicists at research inst.i.tutions scattered around the globe.

I hope they find their families in time.

The television caption said that an unexplained astronomical event has occurred. I know better than that. I am running hard because of it, my voice making a whimpering sound in the back of my throat. I scramble into my car and grip the hot steering wheel and press the accelerator to the floor. The rest of the city is still behaving normally as I weave through traffic. That won't last for long, but I'm thankful to have these few moments to slip away home.

My daughter will need me.

There is a nanny who watches Marie during the day. The nanny has brown hair and she is five feet four inches tall. She does not have a scientific mind-set but she is an artist in her spare time. When Marie was ten months old and had memorized all of her body parts (including the phalanges), I became excited about the possibilities. I gave the nanny a sheet of facts that I had compiled about the states of matter for Marie to memorize. I intentionally left off the quark-gluon plasma state and Bose-Einstein condensate and neutron-degenerate matter because I wanted to save the fun stuff for later. After three days I found the sheet of paper in the recycling bin.

I was a little upset.

Perez in the cubicle next to me said that the nanny had done me a favor. He said Marie has plenty of time to learn about those things. She needs to dream and imagine and, I don't know, finger paint. It is probably sound advice. Then again, Perez's son is five years old and at the department picnic the boy could not tell me how many miles it is to the troposphere. And he says he wants to be an astronaut. Good luck, kid.

Oh, yes. Running.

My brain required four hundred milliseconds to process the visual information coming from the cafeteria television. Eighty milliseconds for my nervous system to respond to the command to move. It is a two-minute sprint to the parking lot. Then an eight-minute drive to reach home. Whatever happens will occur in the next thirty minutes and so there is no use in warning the others.

Here is what happened.

An hour and thirty-eight minutes ago, the sky blushed red as an anomaly streaked over the Gulf of Mexico. Bystanders described it as a smear of sky and clouds, a kind of glowing reddish blur. NASA reported that it perturbed the orbital paths of all artificial satellites, including the International s.p.a.ce Station. It triggered tsunamis along the equator and dragged a plume of atmosphere a thousand miles into the vacuum of s.p.a.ce. The air dispersed in low pressure but trace amounts of water vapor froze into ice droplets. On the southern horizon, I can now see a fading river of diamonds stretching into s.p.a.ce. I don't see the moon in the sky but that doesn't mean it isn't there. Necessarily.

All of this happened within the s.p.a.ce of thirty seconds.

This is not an unexplained astronomical event. The anomaly had no dust trail, was not radar-detectable, and it caused a tsunami.

Oh, and it turned the sky red.

Light does funny things in extreme gravity situations. When a high-ma.s.s object approaches, every photon of light that reaches our eyes must claw its way out of a powerful gravity well. Light travels at a constant speed, so instead of slowing down, the photon sacrifices energy. Its wavelength drops down the visible spectrum: violet indigo blue green yellow orange red.

Reds.h.i.+fting.

I am running because only one thing could reds.h.i.+ft our sky that much and leave us alive to wonder why our mobile phones don't work. What pa.s.sed by has to have been a previously theoretical cla.s.s of black hole with a relatively small planet-sized ma.s.s-compressed into a singularity potentially as small as a pinp.r.i.c.k. Some postulate that these ent.i.ties are starving black holes that have crossed intergalactic s.p.a.ce and shrunk over the billions of years with nothing to feed on. Another theory, possibly complementary, is that they are random crumbs tossed away during the violence of the big bang.

Perez in the next cubicle said I should call them "black marbles," which is inaccurate on several fronts. In my papers, I chose instead to call them pinp.r.i.c.k-size black holes. Although Perez and I disagreed on the issue of nomenclature, our research efforts brought consensus on one calculation: that the phenomenon would always travel in cl.u.s.ters.

Where there is one, more will follow.

Tornado sirens begin to wail as I careen through my suburban neighborhood. The woman on the radio just frantically reported that something has happened to Mars. The planet's crust is shattered. Astronomers are describing a large part of the planet's ma.s.s as simply missing. What's left behind is a cloud of expanding dirt and rapidly cooling magma, slowly drifting out of orbit and spreading into an elliptical arc.

She doesn't say it out loud, but it's dawning on her: we are next.

People are standing in their yards now, on the sidewalks and gra.s.s, eyes aimed upward. The sky is darkening. The wind outside the car window is whispering to itself as it gathers occasionally into a thin, reedy scream. A tidal pull of extreme gravity must be doing odd things to our weather patterns. If I had a pen and paper, I could probably work it out.

I slam on the brakes in my driveway to avoid hitting the nanny.

She is standing barefoot, holding a half-empty sippy cup of milk. Chin pointed at the sky. Stepping out of the car, I see my first pinp.r.i.c.k-size black hole. It is a reddish dot about half the intensity of the sun, wrapped in a halo of glowing, superheated air. It isn't visibly moving so I can't estimate its trajectory. On the southern horizon, the crystallized plume of atmosphere caused by the near-miss still dissipates.

It really is beautiful.

"What is it?" asks the nanny.

"Physics," I say, going around the car and opening my trunk. "You should go home immediately."

I pull out a pair of old jumper cables and stride across the driveway. Marie is standing just inside the house, her face a pale flash behind the gla.s.s storm door. Inside, I lift my daughter off the ground. She wraps her legs around my hip and now I am running again, toys crunching under my feet, my daughter's long hair tickling my forearm. The nanny has put it into a braid. I never learned how to do that. Depending on the trajectory of the incoming ma.s.s, I may not ever have the chance.

"What did you do today?" I ask Marie.

"Played," she says.

Trying not to pant, I crack open a few windows in the house. Air pressure fluctuations are a certainty. I hope that we only have to worry about broken gla.s.s. There is no bas.e.m.e.nt to hide in here, just a cookie-cutter house built on a flat slab of concrete. But the sewer main is embedded deep into the foundation. In the worst case, it will be the last thing to go.

I head to the bathroom.

"Wait here for just a second," I say, setting Marie down in the hallway. Stepping into the small bathroom, I wind up and violently kick the wall behind the toilet until the drywall collapses. Dropping to my knees, I claw out chunks of the drywall until I have exposed the main sewer line that runs behind the toilet. It is a solid steel pipe maybe six inches in diameter. With shaking hands, I shove the jumper cable around it. Then I wedge myself between the toilet and the outside wall and I sit down on the cold tile floor, the jumper cables under my armpits anchoring me to the ground. This is the safest place that I can find.