The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Read online

  I’ve given this new cultivar the official name of Tiny Tango, a name to please the seed catalogue writers. Privately I think of it as Male Impersonator (or sometimes—a pun—Atomic Power Plant). Its rind is tan and thin, netted like the rind of an ordinary cantaloupe, and its flesh is a beautiful deep salmon-orange, as sweetly, intensely delicious as any I ever tasted.

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  Out of Copyright

  One of the best contemporary “hard science” writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked in the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. His books include the best-selling nonfiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, The McAndrew Chronicles, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, and Proteus Unbound, as well as the collection Erasmus Magister. His most recent novel is Summertide. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Here he slyly suggests that finding the right tool for the right job is more than half the battle—particularly if you’re smart enough to know which jobs are really the important ones … and just what kind of tools you need to do them right.

  Out of Copyright

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  Troubleshooting. A splendid idea, and one that I agree with totally in principle. Bang! One bullet, and trouble bites the dust. But unfortunately, trouble doesn’t know the rules. Trouble won’t stay dead.

  I looked around the table. My top troubleshooting team was here. I was here. Unfortunately, they were supposed to be headed for Jupiter, and I ought to be down on Earth. In less than twenty-four hours, the draft pick would begin. That wouldn’t wait, and if I didn’t leave in the next thirty minutes, I would never make it in time. I needed to be in two places at once. I cursed the copyright laws and the single-copy restriction, and went to work.

  “You’ve read the new requirement,” I said. “You know the parameters. Ideas, anyone?”

  A dead silence. They were facing the problem in their own unique ways. Wolfgang Pauli looked half-asleep, Thomas Edison was drawing little doll-figures on the table’s surface, Enrico Fermi seemed to be counting on his fingers, and John von Neumann was staring impatiently at the other three. I was doing none of those things. I knew very well that wherever the solution would come from, it would not be from inside my head. My job was much more straightforward: I had to see that when we had a possible answer, it happened. And I had to see that we got one answer, not four.

  The silence in the room went on and on. My brain trust was saying nothing, while I watched the digits on my watch flicker by. I had to stay and find a solution; and I had to get to the draft picks. But most of all and hardest of all, I had to remain quiet, to let my team do some thinking.

  It was small consolation to know that similar meetings were being held within the offices of the other three combines. Everyone must be finding it equally hard going. I knew the players, and I could imagine the scenes, even though all the troubleshooting teams were different. NETSCO had a group that was intellectually the equal of ours at Romberg AG: Niels Bohr, Theodore von Karman, Norbert Weiner, and Marie Curie. MMG, the great Euro-Mexican combine of Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft, had focused on engineering power rather than pure scientific understanding and creativity, and, in addition to the Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev and the American Nikola Tesla, they had reached farther back (and with more risk) to the great nineteenth-century English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had been one of the outstanding successes of the program; I wished he were working with me, but MMG had always refused to look at a trade. MMG’s one bow to theory was a strange one, the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but the unlikely quartet made one hell of a team.

  And finally there was BP Megation, whom I thought of as confused. At any rate, I didn’t understand their selection logic. They had used billions of dollars to acquire a strangely mixed team: Erwin Schrodinger, David Hilbert, Leo Szilard, and Henry Ford. They were all great talents, and all famous names in their fields, but I wondered how well they could work as a unit.

  All the troubleshooting teams were now pondering the same emergency. Our problem was created when the Pan-National Union suddenly announced a change to the Phase B demonstration program. They wanted to modify impact conditions, as their contracts with us permitted them to do. They didn’t have to tell us how to do it, either, which was just as well for them, since I was sure they didn’t know. How do you take a billion tons of mass, already launched to reach a specific target at a certain point of time, and redirect it to a different end point with a different arrival time?

  There was no point in asking them why they wanted to change rendezvous conditions. It was their option. Some of our management saw the action on PNU’s part as simple bloody-mindedness, but I couldn’t agree. The four multinational combines had each been given contracts to perform the biggest space engineering exercise in human history: small asteroids (only a kilometer or so across—but massing a billion tons each) had to be picked up from their natural orbits and redirected to the Jovian system, where they were to make precise rendezvous with assigned locations of the moon Io. Each combine had to select the asteroid and the method of moving it, but deliver within a tight transfer-energy budget and a tight time schedule.

  For that task the PNU would pay each group a total of $8 billion. That sounds like a fair amount of money, but I knew our accounting figures. To date, with the project still not finished (rendezvous would be in eight more days), Romberg AG had spent $14.5 billion. We were looking at a probable cost overrun by a factor of two. I was willing to bet that the other three groups were eating very similar losses.

  Why?

  Because this was only Phase B of a four-phase project. Phase A had been a system design study, which led to four Phase B awards for a demonstration project. The Phase B effort that the four combines were working on now was a proof-of-capability run for the full Europan Metamorphosis. The real money came in the future, in Phases C and D. Those would be awarded by the PNU to a single combine, and the award would be based largely on Phase B performance. The next phases called for the delivery of fifty asteroids to impact points on Europa (Phase C), followed by thermal mixing operations on the moon’s surface (Phase D). The contract value of C and D would be somewhere up around $800 billion. That was the fish that all the combines were after, and it was the reason we would all overspend lavishly on this phase.

  By the end of the whole program, Europa would have a forty-kilometer-deep water ocean over all its surface. And then the real fun would begin. Some contractor would begin the installation of the fusion plants, and the seeding of the sea-farms with the first prokaryotic bacterial forms.

  The stakes were high; and to keep everybody on their toes, PNU did the right thing. They kept throwing in these little zingers, to mimic the thousand and one things that would go wrong in the final project phases.

  While I was sitting and fidgeting, my team had gradually come to life. Fermi was pacing up and down the room—always a good sign; and Wolfgang Pauli was jabbing impatiently at the keys of a computer console. John von Neumann hadn’t moved, but since he did everything in his head anyway, that didn’t mean much.

  I looked again at my watch. I had to go. “Ideas?” I said again.

  Von Neumann made a swift chopping gesture of his hand. “We have to make a choice, Al. It can be done in four or five ways.”

  The others were nodding. “The problem is only one of efficiency and speed,” added Fermi. “I can give you an order-of-magnitude estimate of the effects on the overall program within half an hour.”

  “Within fifteen minutes.” Pauli raised the bidding.

  “No need to compete this one.” They were going to settle down to a real four-way fight on methods—they always did—but
I didn’t have the time to sit here and referee. The important point was that they said it could be done. “You don’t have to rush it. Whatever you decide, it will have to wait until I get back.” I stood up. “Tom?”

  Edison shrugged. “How long will you be gone, Al?”

  “Two days, maximum. I’ll head back right after the draft picks.” (That wasn’t quite true; when the draft picks were over, I had some other business to attend to that did not include the troubleshooters; but two days should cover everything.)

  “Have fun.” Edison waved his hand casually. “By the time you get back, I’ll have the engineering drawings for you.”

  One thing about working with a team like mine—they may not always be right, but they sure are always cocky.

  * * *

  “Make room there. Move over!” The guards were pushing ahead to create a narrow corridor through the wedged mass of people. The one in front of me was butting with his helmeted head, not even looking to see whom he was shoving aside. “Move!” he shouted. “Come on now, out of the way.”

  We were in a hurry. Things had been frantically busy Topside before I left, so I had cut it fine on connections to begin with, then been held up half an hour at reentry. We had broken the speed limits on the atmospheric segment, and there would be PNU fines for that, but still we hadn’t managed to make up all the time. Now the first draft pick was only seconds away, and I was supposed to be taking part in it.

  A thin woman in a green coat clutched at my arm as we bogged down for a moment in the crush of people. Her face was gray and grim, and she had a placard hanging round her neck. “You could wait longer for the copyright!” She had to shout to make herself heard. “It would cost you nothing—and look at the misery you would prevent. What you’re doing is immoral! TEN MORE YEARS”

  Her last words were a scream as she called out this year’s slogan. TEN MORE YEARS! I shook my arm free as the guard in front of me made sudden headway, and dashed along in his wake. I had nothing to say to the woman; nothing that she would listen to. If it were immoral, what did ten more years have to do with it? Ten more years; if by some miracle they were granted ten more years on the copyrights, what then? I knew the answer. They would try to talk the Pan-National Union into fifteen more years, or perhaps twenty. When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get.

  Joe Delacorte and I scurried into the main chamber and shuffled sideways to our seats at the last possible moment. All the preliminary nonsense was finished, and the real business was beginning. The tension in the room was terrific. To be honest, a lot of it was being generated by the media. They were all poised to make maximum noise as they shot the selection information all over the System. If it were not for the media, I don’t think the PNU would hold live draft picks at all. We’d all hook in with video links and do our business the civilized way.

  The excitement now was bogus for other reasons, too. The professionals—I and a few others—would not become interested until the ten rounds were complete. Before that, the choices were just too limited. Only when they were all made, and the video teams were gone, would the four groups get together off-camera and begin the horse trading. “My ninth round plus my fifth for your second.” “Maybe, if you’ll throw in $10 million and a tenth-round draft pick for next year.…”

  Meanwhile, BP Megation had taken the microphone. “First selection,” said their representative. “Robert Oppenheimer.”

  I looked at Joe, and he shrugged. No surprise. Oppenheimer was the perfect choice—a brilliant scientist, but also practical, and willing to work with other people. He had died in 1967, so his original copyright had expired within the past twelve months. I knew his family had appealed for a copyright extension and been refused. Now BP Megation had sole single-copy rights for another lifetime.

  “Trade?” whispered Joe.

  I shook my head. We would have to beggar ourselves for next year’s draft picks to make BP give up Oppenheimer. Other combine reps had apparently made the same decision. There was the clicking of data entry as the people around me updated portable databases. I did the same thing with a stub of pencil and a folded sheet of yellow paper, putting a check mark alongside his name. Oppenheimer was taken care of, I could forget that one. If by some miracle one of the four teams had overlooked some other top choice, I had to be ready to make an instant revision to my own selections.

  “First selection, by NETSCO,” said another voice. “Peter Joseph William Debye.”

  It was another natural choice. Debye had been a Nobel prizewinner in physics, a theoretician with an excellent grasp of applied technology. He had died in 1966. Nobel laureates in science, particularly ones with that practical streak, went fast. As soon as their copyrights expired, they would be picked up in the draft the same year.

  That doesn’t mean it always works out well. The most famous case, of course, was Albert Einstein. When his copyright had expired in 2030, BP Megation had had first choice in the draft pick. They had their doubts, and they must have sweated blood over their decision. The rumor mill said they spent over $70 million in simulations alone, before they decided to take him as their top choice. The same rumor mill said that the cloned form was now showing amazing ability in chess and music, but no interest at all in physics or mathematics. If that was true, BP Megation had dropped $2 billion down a black hole: $1 billion straight to the PNU for acquisition of copyright, and another $1 billion for the clone process. Theorists were always tricky; you could never tell how they would turn out.

  Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft had now made their first draft pick, and chosen another Nobel laureate, John Cockroft. He also had died in 1967. So far, every selection was completely predictable. The three combines were picking the famous scientists and engineers who had died in 1966 and 1967, and who were now, with the expiration of family retention of copyrights, available for cloning for the first time.

  The combines were being logical, but it made for a very dull draft pick. Maybe it was time to change that. I stood up to announce our own first take.

  “First selection, by Romberg AG,” I said. “Charles Proteus Steinmetz.”

  My announcement caused a stir in the media. They had presumably never heard of Steinmetz, which was a disgraceful statement of their own ignorance. Even if they hadn’t spent most of the past year combing old files and records, as we had, they should have heard of him. He was one of the past century’s most colorful and creative scientists, a man who had been physically handicapped (he was a hunchback), but mentally able to do the equivalent of a hundred one-hand push-ups without even breathing hard. Even I had heard of him, and you’d not find many of my colleagues who’d suggest I was interested in science.

  The buzzing in the media told me they were consulting their own historical data files, digging farther back in time. Even when they had done all that, they would still not understand the first thing about the true process of clone selection. It’s not just a question of knowing who died over seventy-five years ago, and will therefore be out of copyright. That’s a trivial exercise, one that any yearbook will solve for you. You also have to evaluate other factors. Do you know where the body is—are you absolutely sure? Remember, you can’t clone anyone with a cell or two from the original body. You also have to be certain that it’s who you think it is. All bodies seventy-five years old tend to look the same. And then, if the body happens to be really old—say, more than a couple of centuries—there are other peculiar problems that are still not understood at all. When NETSCO pulled its coup a few years ago by cloning Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the other three combines were envious at first. Leibniz was a real universal genius, a seventeenth-century superbrain who was good at everything. NETSCO had developed a better cell-growth technique, and they had also succeeded in locating the body of Leibniz in its undistinguished Hanover grave.

  They walked tall for almost a year at NETSCO, until the clone came out of the forcing chambers for indoctr
ination. He looked nothing like the old portraits of Leibniz, and he could not grasp even the simplest abstract concepts. Oops! said the media. Wrong body.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. The next year, MMG duplicated the NETSCO cell-growth technology and tried for Isaac Newton. In this case there was no doubt that they had the correct body, because it had lain undisturbed since 1727 beneath a prominent plaque in London’s Westminster Abbey. The results were just as disappointing as they had been for Leibniz.

  Now NETSCO and MMG have become very conservative; in my opinion, far too conservative. But since then, nobody has tried for a clone of anyone who died before 1850. The draft picking went on its thoughtful and generally cautious way, and was over in a couple of hours except for the delayed deals.

  The same group of protesters was picketing the building when I left. I tried to walk quietly through them, but they must have seen my picture on one of the exterior screens showing the draft-pick process. I was buttonholed by a man in a red jumpsuit and the same thin woman in green, still carrying her placard.

  “Could we speak with you for just one moment?” The man in red was very well-spoken and polite.

  I hesitated, aware that news cameras were on us. “Very briefly. I’m trying to run a proof-of-concept project, you know.”

  “I know. Is it going well?” He was a different type from most of the demonstrators, cool and apparently intelligent. And therefore potentially more dangerous.

  “I wish I could say yes,” I said. “Actually, it’s going rather badly. That’s why I’m keen to get back out.”