Well, I don't know about SRD's ego being the culprit, but something is impaired about a story involving a spaceship full of Earth's descendents being defended by a shield called c-vector that functions "at right angles to the speed of light". Such an impairment might have been brought on by smoking too much cannabis while trying to brainstorm for story ideas; guess we'll never know. (At least, that's what it would take for me to come up with such an idea; I have no idea how SRD arrived at it.)
"What Makes Us Human" doesn't strike me as a bad story (I'm not inclined to think anything Donaldson writes is bad, but not everything has appealed to me), as Donaldson's descriptive powers are as evident here as anywhere. But, it's a tale that manages to mix charm with goofiness. The charm is in the likeability of our heroine Temple and in the determined optimism of the people of planet Aster. The goofiness is in the idea of a c-vector shield and in there being pages of backstory building up to a very simple plot of a stalemate with a robot spaceship being overcome by human trickery.
Before I get to discussing Temple and her partner (in terms of being co-worker and lover) Gracias, I'll go over the backstory leading up to the plot.
Sometime in the future, a crisis on planet Earth prompts authorities to send out ships through the galaxy to ensure the continuation of the human race, and the nature of this crisis becomes forgotten over time. Most of the people on these ships are in a cold-based suspended animation, except for the "nicians" (mechanics/engineers) and the "puters" (programmers) who live out their lives for generations keeping the ships safe (hmmm... I sense a potential problem of eventual inbreeding some years down the road, but maybe the nicians and puters get to "unfreeze" people they desire as prospective mates).
Anyway, one of these ships, called Aster, crash-lands on a slightly hotter and heavier planet (compared to Earth) which the new human inhabitants named after their defunct spaceship. The crash on this mainly jungle planet destroyed a lot of technology, and not all the sleeping people who were awakened were of much use in re-establishing civilization among the people.
Heh-heh. Digs like this are part of this story's charm for me, too.As for the sleepers: according to legend, a full ten percent had been politicians. And another twenty percent had been people the politicians deemed essential--secretaries, press officers, security guards, even cosmeticians. That left barely six hundred individuals who were accustomed to living in some sort of reality.
So, people from Earth had to learn how to survive in primitive conditions all over again, living to seek and create food and shelter.
Two thousand years later, the spherical spaceship Aster's Hope was built to go back and rediscover Earth (a thousand light years away) by following radio transmissions back to their source (presumably Earth).Next they struggled. After all, what good did it do them to have a world if they couldn't fight over it?
But Asterin people wanted Aster's Hope to have a protective shield.
The spaceship Aster's Hope is launched with 390 people (diplomats, meditechs, linguists, theoretical biologists, physicists, scholars, librarians) in chilled suspended animation, and with nician Temple and puter Gracias running the ship, one of twenty-five nician/puter pair-ups (the other twenty-four pairs staying in suspended animation until their respective shifts come up).So she wasn't built until a poorly paid instructor at an obscure university suddenly managed to make sense out of a field of research that people had been laughing at for years: c-vector.
For people who hadn't done their homework in theoretical mathematics or abstract physics, c-vector was defined as at right angles to the speed of light. Which made no sense to anyone--but that didn't stop the Asterins from having fun with it. Before long, they discovered that they could build a generator to project a c-vector field.
If that field were projected around an object, it formed an impenetrable shield--a screen against which bullets and laser cannon and hydrogen torpedoes had no effect.
The plot begins with them running within the ship in a lighthearted chase, as Temple and Gracias are trying to outwit each other as a prelude to lovemaking. They are interrupted in this by an alarm indicating that a large object is heading their ship's way, decelerating from above the speed of light.
This object is a ship that scans Aster's Hope and then tries to break into the computer system. Gracias keeps it out with a chain of evolving encryption codes. Temple and Gracias are concerned that Aster is in danger, as they are only about .4 light-years away from it, and an ion trail from the ship to the planet makes it easy for the hostile ship to locate. Temple suggests sending a warning message to Aster, but the alien ship jams it. This ship and Aster's Hope maneuver around each other, firing at each other. Although the alien ship has an inferior shield, Aster's Hope's weapons can't do it any real damage. The alien ship, entirely mechanical with no living beings aboard, steadily does damage by firing torpedoes at the exact same spot through the c-vector shield. And a mechanical voice then tells Temple and Gracias: " Surrender, badlife. You will be destroyed." It's obviously bent on destroying any "inferior" biologically-based intelligence (like Nomad in the original Star Trek series episode "The Changeling") But it can't read the life-forms of the people in the sleeping tubes through the c-vector shield.From above the speed of light. Even though the best Asterin scientists had always said that was impossible. Oh well, she [Temple] muttered to herself. One more law of nature down the tubes. Easy come, easy go.
This gives Temple an idea, which I won't spoil by explaining in detail, here. Suffice to say it involves her heading alone in a space suit towards the robot ship with a c-vector generator under pretense of surrendering.
For sure, being alone with all that dark nothingness would be frightening and potentially destabilizing. Sometimes I wonder how astronauts can handle space walks, even with all that training.For an instant, her own smallness almost overwhelmed her. No Asterin had been where she was now: outside her ship half a light-year from home. All of her training had been in comfortable orbit around Aster, the planet acting as balance to the immensity of space. And there had been light! Here there were only the gleams and glitters emitted by Aster's Hope's cameras and scanners--and the barely discernible bulk of the alien, its squat lines only slightly less dark than the black heavens.
But she knew that if she let herself think that way she would go mad. Gritting her teeth, she focused her attention--and her thrusters--toward the enemy.
This doesn't bother machines, of course, but machines don't have the advantages of inspiration and unpredictability born of human desperation, either. That determines the outcome, here.
Maybe humans will live in INFINITE happiness one day, even with all our unpredictable quirks, probably on the same day we learn to function at tangents of right angles to the speed of light--whatever that means. I'll put the pipe down, now.