Greg Bear - Hardfought

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HARDFOUGHTby Greg Bear "Hardfought" was purchased by Shawna McCarthy

toward the beginning of her regime and appeared in the February 1983 issue of

IAsfm, with illustrations by H.R. Van Dongen. It was the first IAsfm story to

carry a "warning label"—usually a notice that the story contains explicit

sexual material and/or "hard" language; in the case of "Hardfought," it was

not so much used for that as to warn people that what they were about to read

was wildly unlike anything that had ever appeared in IAsfm before—vaultingly

ambitious, stunningly complex, and staggering in scope. The purchase of

"Hardfought" was a real gamble on McCarthy's part—and one that paid off

handsomely. "Hardfought" became one of the most critically acclaimed stories

of the year, hailed everywhere as a "breakthrough" novella, a step forward in

the evolution of the genre. It went on to win a Nebula Award that year, as did

Bear's "Blood Music," from our sister publication, Analog. Bear has not

appeared subsequently in IAsfm, alas, but we intend to Keep After Him. Born

in San Diego, California, Greg Bear made his first sale at the age of fifteen

to Robert Lowndes' Famous Science Fiction, and has subsequently established

himself as one of the top young professionals in the genre. His books include

the novels Hegira, Psychlone, Beyond Heaven's River, Strength of Stones, The

Infinity Concerto, and the collection The Wind From a Burning Woman. His most

recent books are the novels Blood Music, an expanded version of his Nebula

winning story, Eon, The Serpent Mage, and The Forge of God. Humans called

it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs,

glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Its central core was a ghoulish green

flecked with watery black. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as

many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula's magnetic field.

The Medusa was a huge womb of stars —and disputed territory. Whenever

Prufrax looked at it in displays or through the ship's ports, it seemed

malevolent, like a zealous mother displaying an ominous face to protect her

children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the

fibs. At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangee's mission and

her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of

indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know

and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she

would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding

the brood mind. "Zap, Zap," she went with her lips, silent so the tellman

wouldn't think her thoughts were straying. The tellman peered at her from

his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared

straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellman's spiderlike

teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. "How many branch

individuals in the Senexi brood mind?" he asked. He looked around the

classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. "Pru?" "Five," she

said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She

was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not

nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the

surgery done to adapt them to the gloves. "What will you find in the brood

mind?" the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead

as wide as his shoulders. Some of the ferns thought tellmen were attractive.

Not many—and Pru was not one of them. "Yoke," she said. "What is in the

brood-mind yoke?" "Fibs." "More specifically? And it really isn't all fib,

you know." "Info. Senexi data." "What will you do?" "Zap," she said,

smiling. "Why, Pru?" "Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life

of the team's five branch inds." "Zap the brood, Pru?" "No," she said

solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class's

inception. "Hold the brood for the supreme overs." The tellmen did not say

what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern. "Fine,"

said the tellman. "You tell well, for someone who's always half-journeying."

She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were

four. "Zap, Zap," she went with her lips. Aryz skidded through the thin

layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment.

He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort

the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for

him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind

made up one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for

ninety-three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status

geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and

out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the

rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure

and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a

hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature. The

Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during

the time of the starglobe when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been

a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of

generations, and not just because of their intellectual handicaps. In those

times elements heavier than helium had been rare, round only around stars that

had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and

blue, and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon

and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost

nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much

smaller palette of chemical combinations in producing the offspring of the

primary Population II stars. Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a

branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seed-ship

were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The

Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz's

perspective was expanding with each day of his new assignment. In the early

generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility

had made them avoid contact with the Population I species. They had never

begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds;

the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring

cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts

of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had retreated for

three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on

cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, conserving, holding back for the inevitable

conflicts. As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had

found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy's first stars. They had

moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mutability of

organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways,

evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi. Aryz raised the upper

globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the

forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though

his twain hadn't existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from

the total store of nearly twelve billion years' experience, an awesome amount

of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods.

Through the brood mind Aryz could share the memories of a hundred thousand

past generations, yet the brood mind itself was younger than its branch

individuals. For a time in their youth, in their liquid-dwelling larval form,

the branch inds carried their own sacs of data, each a fragment of the total

necessary for complete memory. The branch inds swam through ammonia seas and

wafted through thick warm gaseous zones, protoplasmic blobs three to four

meters in diameter developing their personalities under the weight of the

past; and not even a complete past. No wonder they were inflexible Aryz

thought. Most branch inds were aware enough to see that—especially when they

were allowed to compare histories with the Population I species, as he was

doing--but there was nothing to be done. They were content Oa s they were. To

change would be unspeakably repugnant. Extinction was preferable . . . almost.

But now they were pressed hard. The brood mind had to m a number of

experiments. Aryz's team had been selected from the seedship's contingent to

oversee the experiments, and Aryz had been chosen as the chief investigator.

Two orbits past, they had captured six human embryos in a breeding device, as

well as a highly coveted memory storage center. Most Senexi engagements had

been with humans for the past three or four generations. Just as the Senexi

dominated Population II species, humans were ascendant among their kind.

Experiments with the human embryos had already been conducted. Some had been

allowed to develop normally; others had been tampered with, for reasons Aryz

was not aware of. The tamperings had not been very successful. The newer

experiments, Aryz suspected, were going to take a different direction, and the

seedship's actions now focused on him; he believed he would be given complete

authority over the human shapes. Most branch inds would have dissipated under

such a burden, but not Aryz. He found the human shapes rather interesting, in

their own horrible way. They might, after all, be the key to Senexi survival.

The moans were toughening her elfstate. She lay in pain for a wake, not

daring to close her eyes; her mind was changing and she feared sleep would be

the end of her. Her nightmares were not easily separated from life; some, in

fact, were sharper. Too often in sleep she found herself in a Senexi trap,

struggling uselessly, being pulled in deeper, her hatred wasted against such

power. When she came out of the rigor, Prufrax was given leave by the

subordinate tellman. She took to the Mellangee's greenroads, walking stiffly

in the shallow gravity. Her hands itched. Her mind seemed almost empty after

the turmoil of the past few wakes. She had never felt so calm and clear. She

hated the Senexi double now; once for their innate evil, twice for what they

had made her overs put her through to be able to fight them. She was growing

more mature wake by wake. Fight-budding, the tellman called it, hate coming

out like blooms, synthesizing the sunlight of his teaching into pure fight.

The greenroads rose temporarily beyond the labyrinth shields and armor of the

ship. Simple transparent plastic-and-steel geodesic surfaces formed a lacework

over the gardens, admitting radiation necessary to the vegetation growing

along the paths. Prufrax looked down on the greens to each side of the paths

without much comprehension. They were beautiful. Yes, one should say that,

think that, but what did it mean? Pleasing? She wasn't sure what being pleased

meant, outside of thinking Zap. She sniffed a flower that, the signs

explained, bloomed only in the light of young stars not yet fusing. They were

near such a star now, and the greenroads were shiny black and electric green

with the blossoms. Lamps had been set out for other plants unsuited to such

darkened conditions. Some technic allowed suns to appear in selected plastic

panels when viewed from certain angles. Clever, the technicals. She much

preferred the looks of a technical to a tellman, but she was common in that.

She wished a technical were on the greenroads with her. The moans had the

effect of makingher receptive—what she saw, looking in mirrors, was a certain

shine in her eyes—but there was no chance of a breeding liaison. She was quite

unreproductive in this moment of elf-state. She looked up and saw a figure

at least a hundred meters away, sitting on an allowed patch near the path. She

walked casually, as gracefully as possible with the stiffness. Not a

technical, she saw soon, but she was not disappointed. Too calm. "Over," he

said as she approached. "Under," she replied. But not by much—he was

probably six or seven ship-years old and not easily classifiable. "Such a

fine elfstate," he commented. His hair was black. He was shorter than she, but

something in his build reminded her of the glovers. He motioned for her to

sit, and she did so with a whuff, massaging her knees. "Moans?" he asked.

"Bad stretch," she said. "You're a glover." He was looking at the fading

scars on her hands. "Can't tell what you are," she said. "Noncombat," he

said. "Tuner of the mandates." She knew very little about the mandates,

except that law decreed every ship carry one, and few of the crew were ever

allowed to peep. "Noncombat, hm?" She mused. She didn't despise him for that;

one never felt strongs negatives for a crew member. "Been working on ours

this wake," he said. "Too hard, I guess. Told to talk." Overzealousness in

work was considered an erotic trait aboard the Mellangee. Still, she didn't

feel too receptive toward him. "Glovers walk after a rough growing," she

said. He nodded. "My name's Clevo." "Prufrax." "Combat soon?" "Hoping.

Waiting forever." "I know. Just been allowed access to the mandate for a

half-dozen wakes. All new to me. Very happy." "Can you talk about it?" she

asked. Information about the ship not accessible in certain rates was

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Greg Bear - Hardfought

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