The Ouroboros Wave (38 page)
Caliban
still showed faintly on the monitor. The light from its
engines reminded Agnes of a newborn star.
And for Shi’en, that fading gleam was herself in another life—a solitary figure trekking slowly across a desert, carving a new destiny through the badlands of Mars.
THUS HUMANKIND
took their first steps toward the stars. Was it accident or necessity? There is more than one way to answer this
question. After all, we are not omniscient.
We can say this much: these first steps enabled humans to encounter nonhuman intelligences. Without these steps, humanity would never have been able to achieve empathy with entities such as ourselves. Contact with humans has taught us that there are more ways to perceive the universe than via mass and gravity waves alone. We now perceive light and sound, just as humans perceive
gravity waves.
Of course, many complications, many twists and turns were required to reach this point. Differences in the structure of consciousness brought AADD and the inhabitants of Earth to the brink of violence, despite the fact that they were members of the same species. And ironically, the same differences allowed humans and nonhumans to communicate successfully. That success will
become the necessity of the future.
We know this—that happenstance is necessity in disguise.
I FIRST CONCEIVED THE IDEA
of an artificial accretion disk on March 14, 1988. But it was eleven years before the first story, “The Dragons of Europa,” appeared in
SF Magazine
, and fourteen years before this book was published—a very long gestation period, even for me.
I can pinpoint the date with accuracy for a simple reason. I recorded it in the book that inspired the idea: Jun Fukue’s
Kōchaku Enban heno Shōtai
(Introduction to Accretion Disks, Kodansha, 1988). As I turned the pages, I experienced a wave of intellectual excitement. After I finished it, I was almost a different person, and the impression it made is still fresh in my memory.
And the idea of an artificial accretion disk was born.
Naturally, my original concept was quite different from the stories that finally became this book. This included the construction of the artificial accretion disk as well as the organization and culture of AADD. Possibly the only ideas that survived unchanged were the concept of creating an artificial accretion disk around a small black hole, of using it to terraform Mars and create an energy transmission system on the scale of the solar system.
In fact, there is one other element that remained unchanged, but I will set that aside for now. One hint, though, would be that this linked series of short stories is a history of the development of the solar system, and at the same time is planned as a work of First Contact SF. Ultimately, humanity will probably reach the center of the galaxy by one means or another. The story will probably take me several years more to write. If the reader would be kind enough
to accompany me on the journey, I will be extremely gratified.
In any event, this world of short stories about AADD was inspired by a single scientific text. While I have not conducted a survey and cannot speak in quantitative terms, I think most ideas for so-called “hard science fiction” are inspired by actual contact with the front lines of science. The inspiration might come from a book or might arise out of a conversation with a practicing researcher. Of course, a work of hard SF is neither scientific analysis nor educational text.
It is strictly fiction.
Still, basing the core of a novel on a scientific idea takes it beyond the boundaries of the concept story. Different authors will probably derive different meanings from the same idea. It may be that the act of writing hard SF is itself a search for meaning. In my case,
that search will probably occupy the rest of my life.
In closing, I would like to thank Atsushi Noda, Naru Hirata, Masao Hirota, Tomohiro Araki, Jun Fukue, and Masahiro Maeno, as well as the members of the Minor Body Exploration Forum (
http:// www.as-exploration.com/mef/index.html
), for their invaluable suggestions and guidance. I would also like to thank the members of the Osaka Chapter of the Space Authors Club, especially Housuke Nojiri and Yasumi Kobayashi, for many stimulating discussions.
In “Hydra’s Ice,” I dubbed the Mars orbital elevator Tsutenkaku, after the landmark tower in Osaka. As far as I know, the first writer to apply this name to an orbital elevator was Sakyo Komatsu, in his short story
Tsūtenkaku Hakkutsu
(The Excavation of Tsutenkaku) in the January 11, 1965, edition of
Sankei Sports
newspaper. (The author refers to the orbital elevator as a “space bridge.”) I obtained
Komatsu’s kind permission to do the same in this work.
From the appearance of the various stories in magazines to their publication here, I was the grateful recipient of unfailingly spot-on counsel from Yoshihiro Shiozawa, editor-in-chief of
SF Magazine
. In a sense, this book is a Hayashi/Shiozawa collaboration. I acknowledge my debt to him and the other individuals
mentioned herein.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife for all her help during the writing of these stories.
—Jyouji Hayashi
July 2002
Born in Hokkaido in 1962. Having worked as a clinical laboratory technician, Jyouji Hayashi debuted as a writer in 1995 with his cowritten
Dai Nihon Teikoku Oushu Dengeki Sakusen
. His popularity grew with the
Shonetsu no Hatou
series and the
Heitai Gensui Oushu Senki
series—both military fiction backed by real historical perspectives. Beginning in 2000, he consecutively released
Kioku Osen
,
Shinryakusha no Heiwa
, and
Ankoku Taiyo no Mezame
, stories that combine scientific speculation and sociological investigations. He continues to write and act as a flag-bearer for a new generation of hard SF.