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  ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT

  Vol. CXXVII No. 9, September 2007

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  Cover Art by David A. Hardy

  Novellas

  SOME DISTANT SHORE, Dave Creek

  VERTEX, C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley

  Novelettes

  STRANGER THINGS, E. Mark Mitchell

  GINGER EAR AND ELEPHANT HAIR, Uncle River

  Short Stories

  A PLUTOID BY ANY OTHER NAME, Richard A. Lovett

  PALIMPSEST, Howard V. Hendrix

  Science Fact

  BEYOND THIS POINT BE RFIDS, Edward M. Lerner

  Reader's Departments

  THE EDITOR'S PAGE

  IN TIMES TO COME

  BIOLOG: E. MARK MITCHELL, Richard A. Lovett

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton

  BRASS TACKS

  UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL: ADAPTING by Stanley Schmidt

  SOME DISTANT SHORE by DAVE CREEK

  SCIENCE FACT: BEYOND THIS POINT BE RFIDS by EDWARD M. LERNER

  STRANGER THINGS by E. MARK MITCHELL

  BIOLOG: E. MARK MITCHELL by RICHARD A. LOVETT

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE SUPPLEMENTAL VIEW by JEFFERY D. KOOISTRA

  A PLUTOID BY ANY OTHER NAME... by RICHARD A. LOVETT

  PALIMPSEST by HOWARD V. HENDRIX

  IN TIMES TO COME

  GINGER EAR AND ELEPHANT HAIR by UNCLE RIVER

  VERTEX (A STORY OF THE BLACK HOLE PROJECT) by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

  BRASS TACKS

  UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS

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  EDITORIAL: ADAPTING by Stanley Schmidt

  For many years we've been hearing a growing chorus of voices—and data—warning us that the Earth as a whole is in a warming trend that has been going on for many decades. One of the loudest and most recent (as I write this) was the first 2007 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wherein scientists from 113 countries declared that global temperatures and sea levels are rising fast enough to cause humanity serious problems soon and for many decades, or even centuries, to come. The panel (which has been issuing progressively stronger reports since the early 1990s) also found that the warming trend is, with very high probability, largely a result of human activity, and therefore we have to do something about it.

  What if we can't?

  Oh, certainly there are things that we can do that should help to alleviate the problem—but how much can they do? The obvious actions individuals can take are things we've all been hearing for years: recycle, compost, drive less, use public transportation when available, insulate houses, replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, buy energy-efficient vehicles and appliances, wear sweaters or use fans instead of running furnaces and air conditioners unnecessarily, use programmable thermostats to run them minimally when people are sleeping or away, favor local foods and biodegradable cleaning materials. You can easily extend the list for yourself.

  Certainly these things can help, but many of us are already doing them (though others, such as many suburban SUV drivers and politicians who fly private jets to speaking gigs about conservation, are not). There are also obvious things that could be done in public places, such as stopping the widespread but illogical practice of expecting people to wear jackets and ties to work in hot, humid weather and then air-conditioning the daylights out of their workplaces to make them tolerable.

  But the impact of all of these things, even taken together, is small compared to that of the huge underlying problem that hardly anybody wants to recognize, much less seriously try to do anything about: the fact that the population is so large and growing so fast. Unless and until that changes, it seems improbable that any lifestyle changes likely to happen in the real world will do more than slow the rate of warming. If everybody in the world reduces his or her energy use and greenhouse gas production by m%, as soon as the population increases by m% (which won't take long) we'll be right back where we started.

  So we're probably going to be stuck with it, to at least some extent. How bad is it, and how much can we do about it? Some skeptics still shrug the whole thing off because estimates vary considerably, but that's hardly surprising and certainly doesn't disprove the principle. A planet is a very complicated system, and computer simulation is only beginning to be able to model it realistically. So it's not surprising that the latest estimates coming out of the IPCC range from 2 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit for the increase in average temperature by 2100 if we continue doing what we're doing, and 7 to 23 inches for the rise in sea level—with the caution that those last numbers may be low because recent observations indicate polar ice sheets are melting faster than we thought. None of the estimates are zero or negative; everybody doing the math is estimating enough rise in the two main variables to cause changes going well beyond two innocuous-looking numbers.

  What kinds of changes? Well, any rise in sea level means some coastal real estate will be going under—and much of the most valuable real estate in the world is coastal. Depending on the actual amount of sea level rise, small to large amounts of cities like New York and Amsterdam will be submerged, meaning they will have to be either abandoned or radically (and expensively) rebuilt to deal with constant salt water flooding, wave action, tides, and storm surges. Any rise in temperature means that some plants and animals will no longer thrive where they now do, and the crops that are the economic lifeblood of agricultural regions will no longer grow there. Weather will grow more violent, with an increase in droughts, wildfires, and destructive storms (of which the unprecedented 2006 Atlantic hurricane season may be a sample).

  And if we do the best we can with getting greenhouse gases “under control” (as Seth Horenstein put it in an AP article)? The numbers get smaller—e.g., a temperature rise of 3° F instead of 11—but the principle is the same. Barring unforeseen alleviating factors (which can be neither ruled out nor counted upon), it looks like we have to plan on some significant adjustments. We can hope that the more optimistic estimates are the more accurate ones, and that the changes they demand will be relatively small.

  But what if they aren't? Is it the end of the world if sea levels and temperatures rise a lot and huge areas of cropland become unusable?

  Literally and emphatically, it is not. Sloganeers who shout, “Save the planet!” are indulging in melodramatic and anthropocentric hyperbole. What they really mean is, “Save us!," which has a considerably less noble ring to it. The planet is (at least so far) in no danger from us. It has taken far more in the past than we're capable of dishing out, and will undoubtedly do so in the future. It will still endure quite a while; if we mess things up badly enough to destroy ourselves, the Earth will simply go on without us, striking a new (and, as always, temporary) balance with whatever is left over. It simply doesn't care whether we're part of that future.

  So if we care, we shall have to take responsibility for ensuring our own place in it. And that means we must do some combination of two things: (1) minimize changes that would hurt us, and (2) learn to live with the changes we can't prevent.

  That's one of the things we've always been best at. Adaptability is one of the most important characteristics of our species. We evolved in tropical Africa, yet we have found ways to live not only there, but in nearly every kind of environment found on this planet: deserts, wetlands, Arctic tundra, the extreme altitudes of the Andes and Himalayas.... Small numbers of us have even managed to live for significant periods in the very harsh climate of Antarctica and in an orbiting capsule, and some of us dream quite seriously of colonizing other planets or the Asteroid Belt. If we must, surely we can find ways that at least some of us could live with a climate altered from the one we've taken for granted.

  For example, if it becomes too hot to live or grow corn in middle latitudes where we now do those things, it may become easier to do so in higher latitudes where it's now too cold—and corn country may become coconut or cactus country (and while it may not occur to some northerners, some cacti are food sources, even for humans). Farmers may be able to remain farmers, but only if they're willing to relocate or learn to grow new crops. They may even have to develop new crops: new varieties of plants and breeds of livestock better suited to new conditions. Some activities now concentrated in cities may simply disperse; a great deal of our current economy is centered on the exchange of information, and so much of that is done electronically that it little matters where the people doing it are physically located. Other activities, such as large-scale manufacturing and shipping, will probably still concentrate in cities; but if old cities like New York must be a
bandoned, new ones may grow to take their places much farther from the equator—e.g., on Hudson Bay or in Greenland.

  There's no denying that all this would be inconvenient in the first degree. Our current civilization has massive investments of time, money, materials, and emotion in coastal cities, agricultural and industrial infrastructure, and the like. Comparable investments would be required to build replacements for them in remote new places. Vast numbers of lives would be torn up by the roots, and putting them back together in viable new ways would be a huge challenge physically, psychologically, and financially. It might even be that the new world, while it can still support some of our adaptable type, cannot support today's huge numbers of us. I mentioned earlier that excessive population and population growth are the root causes of a great many of our problems, very likely including this one of global warming. It may turn out that that's a self-limiting danger: while we can't currently destroy the planet, we may be able to make it so uncongenial that our population crashes—in other words, a lot of people die. That solves the problem as far as the Earth is concerned, but it's a highly unsatisfying solution from our point of view.

  For all these reasons, we need to take the UN panel's findings seriously and look for—and implement—ways to slow the observed increase in greenhouse warming as much as possible. But we—all of us, and science fiction writers in particular—need to also be looking beyond that, at what we can do to cope if the more pessimistic estimates turn out to be the more accurate. As an editor, I see a great many stories that are no more than cautionary tales, portraying a future in which the world has become ugly, harsh, and depressing, and the characters mope around bemoaning the loss of a beloved way of life because their ancestors (that's us) messed things up. A story that does no more than that serves little purpose; we already know that things can get ugly if we don't take measures to prevent it. What would be far more useful would be to suggest concrete, plausible ways to make sure that doesn't happen—or, if it does anyway, ways that the survivors could build a new world order that would again be worth living in.

  Because we may turn out to need those ways, despite our best efforts to head off danger. Our best efforts may not be enough, or completely different events may create a similar situation—e.g., a change in the Sun's output, or a large asteroid impact or volcanic eruption. Climate changes are hardly new, and there's no reason to suppose they happened only in the past, even if we have no effect at all on them. The time scale of the changes we've been witnessing is geologically insignificant. There have been big climatic variations, some of them on a scale of decades or centuries, even in human history. There have been far larger ones on a longer scale, and for most of its history the Earth has been much warmer even than the levels we're currently worried about.

  So if humans think they're in for the long haul, they really need to be prepared to deal with climate changes—even big ones—whatever their cause. The current round of worries may provide just the motivation we need to think seriously about how to do that.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt

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  SOME DISTANT SHORE by DAVE CREEK

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  It's a truism of science that the observer affects the thing being observed—but it works the other way, too.

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  Afterward, watching the long spectacle of the debris of two star systems going their separate ways, Mike Christopher didn't think of the stupendous forces he'd witnessed as much as he thought of the dead. Even planetary collisions, he thought, don't affect the soul as profoundly as watching a loved one die.

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  A month earlier

  Mike Christopher called up a holo display of the planet the starcraft Asaph Hall was orbiting. The gas giant, called Heuri, was about eight AU out from its primary, Moruteb. Mike told Rosa Sandage, the Hall's captain, “This planet's the Drodusarel's first goal—it's why they made sure to get here before us. Pretty natural for methane-breathers. It's similar to their homeworld. And it has an extensive series of rings, again, just like their homeworld."

  Rosa spun her command chair toward Mike and asked, “Why are the rings important?"

  "Primitive life—the equivalent of the first algae on Earth—arose in the Drodusarel system's rings. They, in turn, seeded the planet, letting life form within its atmosphere."

  "How the hell did that happen?"

  "No one knows. Correction—no human knows. But the Drodusarel would be drawn to that type of planet the way humans would be drawn to a terrestrial world with large oceans."

  Mike called up a more detailed holo giving the planet's vitals—a year nearly twenty-four Earth years long, a day not quite nine hours, the typical bands of clouds, and an extensive ring system.

  But as usual with such a world, the stats weren't as impressive as the sheer power of looking at its image on the viewscreen. The cloud bands covering Heuri ranged from tan to brown to red, dotted with dozens of storm systems. Those clouds were mostly hydrogen and helium, with minor components of ammonia, methane, and water.

  Heuri's ring system wasn't as magnificent as Saturn's, but neither was it as tenuous as Jupiter's. Mike could make out at least four broad segments, and the system as a whole, though it was only a few hundred meters thick, still made a magnificent sight as the Hall drew closer.

  Magnificent, perhaps, but also doomed, with the rogue star Neska drawing ever closer.

  But that was weeks away at the earliest. Mike looked toward the main screen. The smooth silver surface of the Drodusarel craft Dirat was easily visible against a couple of the darker bands of Heuri's clouds. Its orbital path was a couple of hundred K lower than Asaph Hall's. Soon it would pass below them and move ahead.

  Rosa tilted her head in such a way that Mike knew she was listening to a transmission over her datalink. She said, “Codari says the Dirat's not responding. What the hell are they doing?” Captain Codari was the commander of the Cetronen starcraft Cerenam and of their four-starcraft fleet that had spent five months traveling to the Moruteb system. That system was made up of four worlds: Jilan, a vaguely Mars-type world; Heuri, a gas giant; Itherin, a smaller gas giant; and a smaller icy world, Risula.

  Mike called up small holos and other readouts in front of him. “I've got Drodusarel shuttles passing through Heuri's atmosphere. I'd bet they're taking samples, probably inserting probes.” When he looked more closely at the readouts, though, he said, “Wait a minute. Look at these life-form readings. They've been down to the planet. Or, I should say, in its atmosphere."

  Rosa nodded. “They got here first, and they're bringing life-forms up from Heuri. I thought this system didn't have any life-forms."

  Mike said, “No intelligences, as far as we knew. These life-forms may not be intelligent. But I'd bet they're similar to the Drodusarel."

  Rosa said, “Could they be mounting a rescue effort?"

  "It's a pretty poor one if they are. They'd have brought a lot more ships to take off a significant portion of a planetary population. I'd like to take a shuttle over there. Try to find out what they're up to."