Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 Part 19

"I feel great!" said the nearest man. "I could eat a horse!"

The other men all made faces.

"Well, a small forest, anyway," he amended.

"Permission granted," said the leader. The men began walking rapidly back to the s.h.i.+p. "And bring me a couple of heads of lettuce, and maybe an apple or two," he called after them.

"You can join them if you wish," said the elephants, who were coming to the conclusion that eating a horse wasn't half as disgusting a notion as they had thought it would be.

"No, my job is to make contact with aliens," explained the leader. "Although when you get right down to it, you're not as alien as we'd expected."

"You're every bit as human as we expected," replied the elephants."I'll take that as a great compliment," said the leader. "But then, I would expect nothing less from traditional friends such as yourselves."

"Traditional friends?" repeated the elephants, who had thought nothing a man said could still surprise them.

"Certainly. Even after you stopped being our partners in war, we've always had a special relations.h.i.+p with you."

"You have?"

"Sure. Look how P. T. Barnum made an international superstar out of the original Jumbo. That animal lived like a king-or at least he did until he was accidentally run over by a locomotive."

"We don't want to appear cynical," said the elephants, "but how do youaccidentally run over a seven-ton animal?"

"You do it," said the leader, his face glowing with pride, "by inventing the locomotive in the first place.

Whatever else we may be, you must admit we're a race that can boast of magnificent accomplishments: the internal combustion engine, splitting the atom, reaching the planets, curing cancer." He paused. "I don't mean to denigrate you, but truly, what have you got to equal that?"

"We live our lives free of sin," responded the elephants simply. "We respect each other's beliefs, we don't harm our environment, and we have never made war on other elephants."

"And you'd put that up against the heart transplant, the silicon chip, and the three-dimensional television screen?" asked the leader with just a touch of condescension.

"Our aspirations are different from yours," said the elephants. "But we are as proud of our heroes as you are of yours."

"You have heroes?" said the leader, unable to hide his surprise.

"Certainly." The elephants rattled off their roll of honor: "The Kilimanjaro Elephant. Selemundi.

Mohammed of Marsabit. And the Magnificent Seven of Krueger Park: Mafunyane, s.h.i.+ngwedzi, Kambaki, Joao, Dzombo, Ndlulamithi, and Phelwane."

"Are they here on Neptune?" asked the leader as his men began returning from the s.h.i.+p.

"No," said the elephants. "You killed them all."

"We must have had a reason," insisted the men.

"They were there," said the elephants. "And they carried magnificent ivory."

"See?" said the men. "Weknew we had a reason."

The elephants didn't like that answer much, but they were too polite to say so, and the two species exchanged views and white lies all through the brief Neptunian night. When the sun rose again, the men voiced their surprise.

"Look at you!" they said. "What's happening?"

"We got tired of walking on all fours," said the elephants. "We decided it's more comfortable to stand upright.""And where are your trunks?" demanded the men.

"They got in the way."

"Well, if that isn't the d.a.m.nedest thing!" said the men. Then they looked at each other. "On second thought,this is the d.a.m.nedest thing! We're bursting out of our helmets!"

"And our ears are flapping," said the leader.

"And our noses are getting longer," said another man.

"This is most disconcerting," said the leader. He paused. "On the other hand, I don't feel nearly as much animosity toward you as I did yesterday. I wonder why?"

"Beats us," said the elephants, who were becoming annoyed with the whining quality of his voice.

"It's true, though," continued the leader. "Today I feel like every elephant in the universe is my friend."

"Too bad you didn't feel that way when it would have made a difference," said the elephants irritably.

"Did you know you killed sixteen million of us in the twentieth century alone?"

"But we made amends," noted the men. "We set up game parks to preserve you."

"True," acknowledged the elephants. "But in the process you took away most of our habitat. Then you decided to cull us so we wouldn't exhaust the park's food supply." They paused dramatically. "That was when Earth received its second alien visitation. The aliens examined the theory of preserving by culling, decided that Earth was an insane asylum, and made arrangements to drop all their incurables off in the future."

Tears rolled down the men's bulky cheeks. "We feel just terrible about that," they wept. A few of them dabbed at their eyes with short, stubby fingers that seemed to be growing together.

"Maybe we should go back to the s.h.i.+p and consider all this," said the men's leader, looking around futilely for something large enough in which to blow his nose. "Besides, I have to use the facilities."

"Sounds good to me," said one of the men. "I got dibs on the cabbage."

"Guys?" said another. "I know it sounds silly, but it's much more comfortable to walk on all fours."

The elephants waited until the men were all on the s.h.i.+p, and then went about their business, which struck them as odd, because before the men came they didn'thave any business.

"You know," said one of the elephants. "I've got a sudden taste for a hamburger."

"I want a beer," said a second. Then: "I wonder if there's a football game on the subs.p.a.ce radio."

"It's really curious," remarked a third. "I have this urge to cheat on my wife-and I'm not even married."

Vaguely disturbed without knowing why, they soon fell into a restless, dreamless sleep.

Sherlock Holmes once said that after you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Joseph Conrad said that truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither.Walt Whitman suggested that whatever satisfied the soul was truth.

Neptune would have driven all three of them berserk.

"Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true," said George Santayana.

He was just crazy enough to have made it on Neptune.

"We've been wondering," said the men when the two groups met in the morning. "Whatever happened to Earth's last elephant?"

"His name was Jamal," answered the elephants. "Someone shot him."

"Is he on display somewhere?"

"His right ear, which resembles the outline of the continent of Africa, has a map painted on it and is in the Presidential Mansion in Kenya. They turned his left ear over-and you'd be surprised how many left ears were thrown away over the centuries before someone somewhere thought of turning them over-and another map was painted, which now hangs in a museum in Bombay. His feet were turned into a matched set of barstools, and currently grace the Aces High Show Lounge in Dallas, Texas. His s.c.r.o.t.u.m serves as a tobacco pouch for an elderly Scottish politician. One tusk is on display at the British Museum. The other bears a scrimshaw and resides in a store window in Beijing. His tail has been turned into a fly swatter, and is the proud possession of one of the lastvaqueros in Argentina."

"We had no idea," said the men, honestly appalled.

"Jamal's very last words before he died were, 'I forgive you,'" continued the elephants. "He was promptly transported to a sphere higher than any man can ever aspire to."

The men looked up and scanned the sky. "Can we see it from here?" they asked.

"We doubt it."

The men looked back at the elephants-except that they had evolved yet again. In fact, they had eliminated every physical feature for which they had ever been hunted. Tusks, ears, feet, tails, even s.c.r.o.t.u.ms, all had undergone enormous change. The elephants looked exactly like human beings, right down to their s.p.a.ce suits and helmets.

The men, on the other hand, had burst out of their s.p.a.ce suits (which had fallen away in shreds and tatters), sprouted tusks, and found themselves conversing by making rumbling noises in their bellies.

"This is very annoying," said the men who were no longer men. "Now that we seem to have become elephants," they continued, "perhaps you can tell us what elephantsdo? "

"Well," said the elephants who were no longer elephants, "in our spare time, we create new ethical systems based on selflessness, forgiveness, and family values. And we try to synthesize the work of Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Berkeley into something far more sophisticated and logical, while never forgetting to incorporate emotional and aesthetic values at each stage."

"Well, we suppose that's pretty interesting," said the new elephants without much enthusiasm. "Can we do anything else?"

"Oh, yes," the new s.p.a.cemen a.s.sured them, pulling out their .550 Nitro Expresses and .475 Holland &Holland Magnums and taking aim. "You can die."

"This can't be happening! You yourselves were elephants yesterday!"

"True. But we're men now."

"But why kill us?" demanded the elephants.

"Force of habit," said the men as they pulled their triggers.

Then, with nothing left to kill, the men who used to be elephants boarded their s.h.i.+p and went out into s.p.a.ce, boldly searching for new life forms.

Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens thirty-seven different times. It has seen forty-three wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths. More of the vast tapestry of galactic history has been played out on Neptune's foreboding surface than any other world in Sol's system.

Planets cannot offer opinions, of course, but if they could, Neptune would almost certainly say that the most interesting creatures it ever hosted were the elephants, whose gentle ways and unique perspectives remain fresh and clear in its memory. It mourns the fact that they became extinct by their own hand. Kind of.

A problem would arise when you asked whether Neptune was referring to the old-new elephants who began life as killers, or the new-old ones who ended life as killers.

Neptune just hates questions like that.

COMMENTARY: JOYS AND JEREMIADS.

As I pointed out in my introduction, speculative fiction is actually many fields, each with its separate pleasures, difficulties, and histories both commercial and literary. No one will ever agree where the boundaries lie among these subsets of SF, least of all their pract.i.tioners. But let us pretend, for convenience's sake, that we can name the fields, and let us listen to the joys and jeremiads of those who resonate there in this early twenty-first century.

HARD SCIENCE FICTION.

Geoffrey A. Landis Geoffrey Landis is the author of much first-rate hard SF, including the well-received novelMars Crossing.

I have a secret to tell you: Science is a game.

It's a team sport, for the most part, although there are occasional superstars who dazzle all with theirspeed and skill. And it's a game where, for the most part, the opponent is not really the other player.

Like golf, I suppose: all the players are aiming for the same goal, and it's only a question of which one gets there a bit faster, a bit more elegantly. (Although it would be an amusing game of golf indeed in which all of the players were in the woods, and none quite sure in which direction was the hole.) Science is an exciting game with bold strokes of skillful play, blending meticulously crafted strategy and wild improvisation; full of sudden reverses and agonizing fumbles and unexpected goals.

The universe is the real opponent, and the rules of the game are always changing, but the objective is always the same: trying to understand a universe of infinite subtlety. The trophy isn't a medallion given away in Stockholm; that's just an afterthought, no more the actual game than the summary in the morning paper the day after a baseball game. The real prize is to understand something that has never before been understood.

People liken science to a puzzle more often than to a game, but, puzzle or game, it's the ultimate sport, one which athletes devote decades to training for, a sport which will consume them for the rest of their lives.

It's a very slow game-a single play can take decades; one match can take a lifetime. Some of us train hard and play hard but never score a goal. It's a slow sport for spectators, but for an aficionado, it has more subtlety than chess, more thrills than a bullfight, more chained horsepower than the Indy 500.

Science fiction-or the stuff we call "hard" science fiction- then, is a way for amateurs to join the sport.

The universe, in hard science fiction, is a puzzle, and the challenge the author sets is, Can you understand it? Science fiction invents worlds to match wits against and in which the match can take less than a lifetime.

Like science, hard science fiction is always changing. The atomic s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps of the 1940s have given way to puzzles of alien ecologies and wormhole physics, with cosmology and quantum physics taking the place of orbital mechanics. As science gets more sophisticated, hard SF is getting harder to write (or perhaps I should say thatgood hard SF is getting harder to write; there certainly is still enough fiction with the trappings of hard SF, with marvelous machines and blazing buzzwords of science flying majestically through the purple sky). But as we unlearn much of the things we once knew about the planets and about the universe, we learn new things about our own solar system and others, and the new solar system we are entering is as strange and wonderful as the old-perhaps stranger-and no less a place for science fiction. For the best hard SF engages the edges of real science and poses puzzles that draw on all that we now know about the universe. Good hard science fiction makes us think about the universe we live in, with all its possibilities and weirdness and wonder.

Kenneth Brewer once asked Freeman Dyson what it felt like when he had put together the puzzle of quantum electrodynamics and for a moment knew something that n.o.body else in the world knew. "Well,"

Dyson said, "you have to know that it's the greatest feeling in the world."

SOFT- AND MEDIUM-VISCOSITY.

SCIENCE FICTION.

Scott Edelman Scott Edelman is a longtime SF editor.

Science keeps marching on, and for the past century (or perhaps even longer, depending upon which critic does the carbon dating) science fiction has been by its side, marching merrily along with it. In fact, one of science fiction's proudest achievements has always been that we're usually a few steps ahead, with science struggling to catch up, huffing and puffing as it attempts to weave reality out of our dreams.