Explorers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  The Sentinel

  Moonwalk

  Grandpa

  The Red Hills of Summer

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  The Longest Voyage

  Hot Planet

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Drunkboat

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  Becalmed in Hell

  Nine Hundred Grandmothers

  The Keys to December

  Vaster than Empires and More Slow

  A Meeting with Medusa

  1. A DAY TO REMEMBER

  2. “BECAUSE IT’S THERE”

  3. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

  4. THE VOICES OF THE DEEP

  5. THE WHEELS OF POSEIDON

  6. MEDUSA

  7. PRIME DIRECTIVE

  8. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

  The Man Who Walked Home

  Long Shot

  In the Hall of the Martian Kings

  Ginungagap

  Exploring Fossil Canyon

  Promises to Keep

  Lieserl

  Crossing Chao Meng Fu

  Wang’s Carpets

  A Dance to Strange Musica

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Approaching Perimelasma

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  At one time, all humans were explorers, nomads who wandered ceaselessly over the face of the Earth. And even now, thousands of years later, after the invention of agriculture and towns, when most of us stay at home most of the time, many of us still feel a twinge of restlessness every once in a while, a desire to see what’s over the next hill or in the next valley—a desire that we can sublimate and satisfy by listening to the travel tales of those who don’t stay home, the explorers … those brave and reckless and restless enough to venture into unknown, uncharted territory and return to tell us what they’ve found.

  Certainly humans have been telling tales of exploration for millennia—it was a venerable tradition even when Homer was telling his tales of danger-filled voyaging around Bronze Age campfires, and who knows what prehistoric Odysseys, now lost and forgotten, were being told around campfires thousands of years before that? Not surprisingly, those tales have often contained elements of fantasy, elements that probably crept in on a slow night when the tale-teller noticed that his audience was becoming bored and threw in a dragon or a cockatrice or a hundred-headed monster to spice things up a bit … and thus we got stories about the men over the next hill who wore their heads upside down, or the people of a distant country who drank human blood, or the land where the ants were as big as horses and mined gold.

  Possibly the more sophisticated members of Homer’s fireside audiences recognized these fantasy elements as fantasy even then and suspected that there weren’t really man-eating Cyclops or sorceresses who turned men into swine out there, but it made for a good story—and besides, who knew for sure that there weren’t such things, eh? The world was wide. There were many corners of it that no one had ever seen. Who knew what could be out there?

  This uncertainty as to what was Out There has served authors well ever since, from Herodotus to Sir John Mandeville and Baron Münchausen, and even as late as the nineteenth century was enabling authors to get away with peppering the still largely unexplored (from a European perspective) continents of Africa and Asia with fabulous Lost Cities and Lost Civilizations, chock-full of ugly subhuman Beast-Men and beautiful Caucasian girls in skimpy slave-girl outfits and/or revealingly sheer diaphanous gowns. But by the twentieth century the We-Don’t-Know-What’s-Out-There alibi was beginning to wear a little thin. Edgar Rice Burroughs littered his Africa with Lost Civilizations, as had H. Rider Haggard before him, but even in the first few decades of the new century, the Dark Continent wasn’t quite as dark as it used to be, and it was becoming hard for all except the most determinedly credulous reader to believe that those gleaming alabaster Lost Cities were really out there somewhere in the jungle, waiting for Scientific Expeditions consisting of an Absentminded Professor and his Beautiful Daughter to stumble across them in chapter 2. Perhaps this is what motivated Burroughs to set up a competing shop on Mars, where it was harder to check up on him.

  In fact, as the twentieth century progressed, as even the remotest and most inaccessible places on Earth—the poles, the Gobi Desert, the Congo, the Matto Grosso—were visited by explorers, and the formerly blank areas on the map began to fill up with tidy countries, or at least with detailed information, it became increasingly obvious that to explore really unknown territory, places where nobody had ever gone before, future explorers, both real and fictional ones, would have to move off Earth altogether—and into the depths of space.

  Writers of Space Opera had been banging around the solar system since the late twenties or early thirties, of course, and had even launched paper armadas into interstellar space, but as World War II approached, perhaps influenced by visionaries such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Herman Oberth, Robert Goddard (who had himself been influenced by H. G. Wells), Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and the founding fathers of the British Interplanetary Society, people who actually wanted to go into space, for real, and who were carrying out the first crude experiments that might someday make that a possibility (and influenced as well by the Campbellian Revolution in science fiction, circa 1939, when the new editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, began downplaying the melodramatic pulp stuff in favor of more thoughtful material that actually made a stab at rigor and scientific accuracy), we began to get stories that took the idea of space exploration seriously, as something that might actually happen, as something that could actually be done, in the real world … that treated space as a real frontier that one day could be—and would be!—explored, rather than just as a setting, a colorful backdrop for chase-and-fight pulp fantasies that wouldn’t have been much different in their essentials if the setting had been the Spanish Main rather than the rings of Saturn.

  By the fifties, as the science-fiction world began to get into full swing again after the partial interregnum of World War II, new writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, and a dozen others had perfected the realistic space exploration story—and, ironically, by so doing, had helped to invoke the very thing they dreamed about, to call it into being, as if by incantation, by impressing their dream upon hundreds of young men and women who, inspired, would then go on to become the very scientists and engineers and technicians and astronauts who would make manned space travel a physical reality in the sixties and seventies.

  By the mid- and later seventies, though, perhaps because of the prominence of the “New Wave” revolution in science fiction, which concentrated both on introspective, stylistically “experimental” work and work with more immediate sociological and political “relevance” to the tempestuous social scene of the day, perhaps because the space probes of the late sixties and early seventies had “proved” that the solar system was nothing but an “uninteresting” collection of balls of rock and ice, dull as a supermarket parking lot, with no available abodes for life, perhaps because of the feeling that the Space Age was behind us, a social aberration fading away into nostalgic memory (a feeling that started in the seventies and grew throughout the eighties as years—and finally decades—went by without
a return to the Moon or seemingly any further progress into space), science fiction as a genre would tend to turn away from the Space Exploration tale, with most of the stories published taking place on Earth, often in the near-future, and dealing centrally with the sociological and/ or dystopian problems of society.

  But then, in one of those ironic reversals characteristic of the genre, in the late seventies and early eighties a new crew of writers such as John Varley, Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vernor Vinge, Jack McDevitt, and others began to become interested in exploring the solar system again, began to find the solar system romantic and fascinating just as it was, lifeless balls of rock and all, even before the later Voyager probes to the Jupiter and Saturn system had proved the solar system to be a lot more complex, contradictory, and surprising place than people thought that it was … and by now, by the end of the nineties, the realistic Space Exploration story, reinvented to better fit the aesthetic style and tastes of the day in the hands of writers such as Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Allen Steele, Paul J. McAuley, G. David Nordley, Charles Sheffield, Geoffrey A. Landis, Ian McDonald, Alexander Jablokov, and a dozen others, is once again at the artistic center of the field.

  This anthology, then, brings you a sampling of some of the best stories about explorers and exploration from almost fifty years of science-fiction writing, from 1950 to 1998. This kind of story has gone out of fashion occasionally during that time and may go out of fashion again, but it always comes back, and I suspect that it will continue to fascinate us as long as we look up at the stars at night and wonder what, or who, is Out There, as long as something deep inside us feels that restless itch to know what’s over the far horizon—in other words, as long as we remain human, as we currently recognize the term.

  So sit back and relax—you’re about to go on a series of marvelous voyages, to explore strange new worlds and uncharted territories, to face strange new dangers and even stranger wonders, dangers and wonders of a sort that could never be encountered on our familiar, present-day Earth, to learn for yourself what’s around the bend and over the next hill … and all without leaving your chair!

  Enjoy.

  The Sentinel

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science-fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by the late Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey but is also renowned as a novelist, short-story writer, and a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as spaceflight. He has won three Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous with Rama, A Fall of Moondust, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, Songs of Distant Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. He has also written many nonfiction books on scientific topics, the best-known of which are probably Profiles of the Future and The Wind from the Sun, and is generally considered to be the man who first came up with the idea of the communications satellite. His most recent books are the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey and the nonfiction collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds: Collected Works 1944-1998. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka and was recently knighted

  Clarke may well have written more, and more memorably, about the theme of exploration, particularly space exploration, than any other science-fiction writer, dealing with it with one degree or another of centralness in novels and stories such as Rendezvous with Rama, “A Meeting with Medusa” (to be found elsewhere in this anthology), “Before Eden,” The Sands of Mars, The City and the Stars, “Rescue Party,” “Summertime on Icarus,” “Out of the Sun,” Songs of Distant Earth, “The Star,” “Transit of Earth,” and all of the Odyssey novels, as well as in scores of other stories and in dozens of nonfiction articles.

  He’s seldom handled the theme better, though, than in the classic story that follows, the inspiration for the later movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I think actually works better than the film in some ways—a near-perfect miniature that captures the odd blend of minutely detailed scientific accuracy and sweeping Stapeldonian mysticism that is the essence of Clark’s work and a story still capable of delivering in its last few lines that shiver of mingled fear and wonder that is one of the hallmarks of science fiction at its best.

  The next time you see the full Moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

  Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.

  I was geologist—or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic—in charge of the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliffs, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.

  We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the space suits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.

  I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisium is a vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young. Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.

  We kept Earth time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 2200 hours the final radio message would be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone would switch on the shortwave radio from Earth. Indeed, whe
n the smell of frying sausages began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world—everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.

  It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favorite melodies, the old Welsh air “David of the White Rock.” Our driver was already outside in his space suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.

  As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.

  Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.

  I lifted my eyes toward the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullenly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.