Analog SFF, May 2009 Read online

  -----------------------------------

  Analog SFF, May 2009

  by Dell Magazine Authors

  -----------------------------------

  Science Fiction

  * * *

  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.com

  Copyright ©2009 by Dell Magazines

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  Cover art by NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: NOISY SIGNALS by Stanley Schmidt

  Novelette: AMONG THE TCHI by Adam-Troy Castro

  Science Fact: GEOLOGY, GEOHISTORY, AND “PSYCHOHISTORY": THE (CONTINUING) DEBATE BETWEEN UNIFORMITARIANS AND CATASTROPHISTS by Richard A. Lovett

  Novelette: QUICKFEATHERS by Alexis Glynn Latner

  Novelette: RENDEZVOUS AT ANGELS THIRTY by Tom Ligon

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Reader's Department: RADIOACTIVE DECAY AND THE EARTH-SUN DISTANCE by John G. Cramer

  Novelette: A STORY, WITH BEANS by Steven Gould

  Novelette: THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES by Robert R. Chase

  Reader's Department: GUEST REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don D'Ammassa

  Reader's Department: MINI-REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

  * * * *

  Vol. CXXIX No. 5, May 2009

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

  * * *

  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

  Susan Mangan: Executive Director, Art and Production

  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Irene Lee: Production Artist/Graphic Designer

  Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager

  Evira Matos: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

  Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales

  Bruce W. Sherbow: VP, Sales and Marketing

  Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services

  Advertising Representative: Connie Goon, Advertising Sales Coordinator, Tel: (212) 686-7188 Fax:(212) 686-7414 (Display and Classified Advertising)

  Editorial Correspondence Only: [email protected]

  Published since 1930

  First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

  * * *

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: NOISY SIGNALS

  by Stanley Schmidt

  "...think ... broken .... Help ... pl..."

  Dispatcher Schneller scowled, straining to get the information that she needed—and an unidentified someone else needed her to have—through the static that nearly masked the cell phone signal. “Please speak slowly and loudly,” she said, as distinctly as possible. “Where are you?"

  But the caller apparently couldn't speak loudly, and only an occasional word got through. But Schneller already knew from the few she'd caught so far that somebody in her department's jurisdiction was in bad trouble. “Where ... are ... you?” she repeated.

  For several seconds, nothing but rushing noise. Schneller glanced over her shoulder at Lekarz and whispered, “Still no GPS fix?"

  Lekarz shook his head. “No. Maybe that part was broken in the crash. Or maybe it's an old phone that doesn't have it."

  So they'd have to make do with the little information they could get through the lousy cell phone connection.

  The faint, garbled voice surfaced again. “Help...” it repeated. “...baby ... help..."

  I already know you need help, an irritable part of Schneller's mind muttered. Repeating it doesn't help either of us any more than this static. I need to know where to send it. Again speaking as clearly as she could, she asked, “What road were you on?"

  Another long silence. Then she caught the single word, “...hollow..."

  Schneller deliberated for a few seconds, then decided it was time to act. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

  There were three roads in the county with “hollow” in their names. She quickly located the deputies closest to Ramsey Hollow, Clark Hollow, and Metcalf Hollow Roads, and told each of them to drive the length of one of the roads, looking for a car in a ditch or against a tree.

  Then she went back to the man in the ditch. “Help is on its way,” she said, and she hoped it was.

  * * * *

  That little vignette might seem to have nothing to do with the political process, but I thought of it after talking to one of my more reliable fonts of inspiration shortly before the last election. He commented on the ironic conundrum that we're constantly admonished to become informed voters, but in practice that often seems discouragingly close to impossible. All we know about the candidates, he said, is what their campaigns tell us about how wonderful they are and how terrible their opponents are, and that's mostly lies. So how can we really know anything?

  To a considerable extent, I had to agree. Probably most of us have noticed that in a typical campaign, precious little is said by either candidate about the important issues or what, exactly, he or she proposes to do about them. Still less is said to give us any reason to believe that promises made will be kept. As the campaign wears on (and “wears” is all too apt a word), even less is said about these important matters. The campaign degenerates into increasingly vicious mudslinging and name-calling, with both candidates hurling scurrilous and largely unsubstantiated allegations about the other's character and past misdeeds. Many of these eventually prove to be, at best, loaded distortions of the truth. By the time the election rolls around, you could be forgiven for feeling that you wouldn't want to vote for anybody who acts like that.

  And then, after the election, the loser congratulates the winner and everybody puts on smiles and affects mutual admiration and respect, acting as if none of those terrible things had ever been said. “Acting,” I fear, is another all-too-apt word, and the whole charade could easily make a cynical person wonder whether any of them ever meant anything they said.

  And yet, on reflection, I couldn't completely agree that one can't be an informed voter. If I did, I would also have to conclude that there's no real point in voting. I can't believe that, especially after the special election in which my wife was unable to vote and a wildly unreasonable school budget passed by one vote. Every vote does count, sometimes very small numbers can make a crucial difference in the outcome, and often the outcome will profoundly affect the lives of a great many people. So it is important to vote, and it is important to base our votes on the best information we can get, even if that isn't easy.

  And the dubious claims made by the candidates and their campaign publicists aren't really the only things we have to judge them by. We can get some clues to character by watching and listening for nonverbal clues when they speak, though the value of those is limited by the fact that successful politicians devote a lot of effort to learning to look and sound the way they want to be perceived. In other words, they have to be good actors; and as the cliche goes, once you learn to fake sincerity, you've got it made.

  The one thing we can count on is that one of the candidat
es will be elected, and will then do things that affect the rest of us. So it's to our advantage to make our best efforts to pick the one who will do the best job—or at least the least damage. One bit of hard data that can be helpful is the past voting record of the candidates—especially in the recent past. That information is a matter of public record, and open to anybody's scrutiny. It's also worthwhile to listen to what they say while campaigning, though not necessarily with the idea of believing what they say about themselves or anybody else. Expecting them to actually keep their campaign promises is a long shot, but if a candidate is promising to do things that you would hate to see done, that's a pretty good reason to vote against him or her.

  The voting citizen's situation is a little like that of the dispatcher in my opening anecdote. We can't get the information we need in the neat, clean, complete form that we'd like, but we must try to solve an important problem and we need to base our actions on the best knowledge we can gather. Not having a clean signal at our disposal, we have to try to extract the useful information from a lot of noise—static in the dispatcher's case, campaign bluff and bluster (and now rumors running amok on the internet) in the voter's.

  But extracting a useful signal from a noisy background is hardly a new, unique, or necessarily overwhelming problem. Radio amateurs and professionals have dealt with it for as long as radio has been around, developing special technology to improve signal-to-noise ratio, and sometimes still just having to make their best efforts to extract the meaningful from an irreducible amount of hash. Scientists regularly deal with it: research experiments are normally efforts to isolate and measure a particular well-defined effect, but in the real world, actual measurements are always influenced by other factors and ways must be found to see through those.

  In my thesis research, I was often trying to measure effects that only showed up as less than a one percent change in a radiation count. But radioactive decay is an inherently random process, so there's an inherent uncertainty in the “background” rate from which I was trying to measure a small deviation. The simple “solution” would have been to say that the statistical uncertainty would mask the effect I was looking for, so I should find another project. But the uncertainty can be calculated, and becomes a smaller fraction of the total count as the total becomes larger. So to measure our effects, we sometimes had to run the equipment collecting data for more than a week, to make the uncertainty smaller than the effect we were looking for, and then use computer fitting programs to separate the part of the signal we were after from the random part that meant nothing to us.

  Voters don't have such well-defined means of extracting a useful signal from a noisy one, but we still need to try. We'll never get as clean a signal as we'd like; but, like the dispatcher or a research scientist, we need to make our best efforts to extract as much real information as we can. There's too much at stake to just give up because it isn't easy.

  Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt

  * * * *

  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 5, May 2009. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2009 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: AMONG THE TCHI

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  Obviously, this story could only take place on a very alien world....

  Brian Carlson emerged from the transport wearing the curdled expression native of any man who had just spent his entire journey enduring the disdain of all forty fellow passengers.

  This was not an unusual experience for him. As a professional novelist, he was well used to the disdain of others; it was the medium in which he lived. But four days on a Tchi transport with nobody but grumpy Tchi to talk to was a little too much disdain even for a man who last four novels had “betrayed his minimal but undeniable early promise” (New London Literary Journal, Vol XXXVIIII, ch 3, col. 2). Until realizing that his fellow passengers would have treated any human being no matter how accomplished with the same level of contempt, Carlson had spent most of the journey wondering if he'd spilled something on himself.

  He was therefore encouraged to find another human being waiting at the gate, even if that human being happened to be Everett Finn, who had never been one of his favorite ten thousand people.

  Finn was not just a novelist, but a critic as well.

  Their relationship had never been happy.

  For a moment, the two men glared at each other, each struggling to construct a witticism with sufficient pith. This was crucial. Whenever hostile novelists encounter one another in unclaimed territory, the author of the most cutting witticism is awarded dominance. The principle is so dear that some personalities, Dorothy Parker for one, are remembered by subsequent generations more for their barbed tongues than for anything they ever put down on paper. All these centuries later, Carlson knew nothing about Parker except that she drank, that she liked her tables circular, and that by all accounts anybody who wised off to her took his reputation in his hands. He wanted an immortality as lasting as hers and suspected, from his sales and reviews, that his prose would not get him there: the consolation being that, judging from his even poorer sales and reviews, neither would Finn's.

  No witticisms materialized.

  The two novelists resorted to locking horns.

  “Finn,” Carlson said, with the intonation he would have reserved for a highly suspect brown suspect on the sole of his shoe.

  “Carlson,” said Finn, in the manner of an ailing man who had just been told the name of an alien disease that would soon make his arms fall off.

  The contest ended in a tie, complicated by the waves of revulsion on the faces of all the surrounding Tchi, who like most Tchi seemed to regard humans the same way they regarded suspect brown substances or arm-dissolving diseases.

  Realizing that somebody had to act lest the face-off go on for hours, Carlson took the initiative, as per the one-time review in the Neklortun Review that had praised him for marching where so many lesser literary lights feared to tread. “What are you doing here?”

  Finn responded in the bold, incisive manner that had earned his latest novel special kudos in a review printed in the Xanan Journal of Letters. “What are you doing here?”

  Carlson made himself taller. “I'm going to be this semester's Author in Residence at the Tchi University Seminar in the Fiction of Human Beings.”

  “Ah,” Finn said, without changing his own height one millimeter. “How honored you must be.”

  Carlson's neck had already achieved full extension, but he managed to elevate his nose another millimeter. “They paid my fare, my expenses, and a healthy honorarium.”

  “More than you got for your last two novels combined.”

  “Yes,” Carlson said. “How would you know?”

  Finn said, “They paid me the same.”


  For the first time, Carlson suspected that his new sinecure would not be quite as exclusive as his agent and his ego had led him to believe. “I was told they'd send a driver.”

  Finn spread his arms. “I'm the driver.”

  Carlson struggled to maintain the illusion of great height, and for a moment or two succeeded in wrenching the space-time continuum beyond its natural parameters by peering down his nose at this upstart who according to all considerations involving sheer physical measurement was actually several centimeters taller than himself. The attempt failed only because he was unable to imagine any plausible series of events that could lead to Everett Finn agreeing to drive him anywhere that didn't promise explosive decompression at the destination. “Oh? You're on the support staff?”

  “I'm one of the other Authors in Residence, you arrogant twit, and if you want to know why I volunteered to pick you up, it's because my overweening pride in the human literary tradition as a whole trumps the crashing tidal wave of contempt I feel for you as a particular individual. Period. You need to be warned what to expect before your press conference.”

  Carlson's heart fluttered. “Warned?”

  “Yes, warned. We'll talk about it on the way back to campus. Carry your own bags, will you? I'm a harbinger of doom, not your own personal mule.”

  * * * *

  The skimmer bore all the design joys of every other Tchi ground vehicle: unlike its human equivalents, which provided transparent surfaces on all sides to foster the illusion that the pilot bore some measure of control over the direction or speed of its flight, it was completely sealed in, providing only a narrow slit at what the typical Tchi passenger would have considered eye level. The glass there was translucent, not transparent; and tinted a sickly shade of amber that made the world outside look like it had been dipped in pudding.

  Tchi architecture tended toward big puffy inflatables bobbing atop obelisks. The pedestrians were, of course, all Tchi; and though there was no way for any of them to have singled out this one unmarked skimmer as the one ferrying the famous Hom saps, the expressions of all the pedestrians within Carlson's truncated line of sight seemed to glow with a special scorn that couldn't have been explained away by their disdain for whoever programmed the skimmer with the Tchi rules of the road.