Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  “Well then, a good thing you included at least one octogenarian on this panel.” The Himmists were shocked at this interjection, and showed it. They’d expected no cooperation from the True Church Elder whatsoever, let alone support.

  “Call it an old man’s pride,” the Elder continued, “but I see no point in denying common knowledge, even if it isn’t common to anyone in this room but me. And anyway, it’s a matter of public record, and I’m getting pretty tired of all this Imperial bureaucratic grandstanding, as if we were a bunch of apes. ” With this he glared at the row behind Sargon. The row ignored him.

  “Prince Samual’s World. Iron and steel industrial. Navy stumbled across its threshold, and the Sammies got wind somehow”—at this, a glance toward Asach—“that if they didn’t have spaceflight, a bunch of aristos would be granted colonial concessions, and they’d not be admitted as a Classified world. So they upended a big salad bowl, mounted a chain cannon in it, and plopped a tin can on top. Stuffed in a girl and a bunch of artillery shells and gyroscopes. Not in that order. Fired artillery shells non-stop into the bowl. The blasts drove everything up. Damned near killed her, but she made it to orbit.”

  “What about re-entry!”

  “No need. Put out a distress call when she got up there, and the Navy obligingly picked her up.”

  “And that got them a Classification?”

  “The main thing was, nobody could—or, anyway, nobody said they could—prove that the design had come from offworld.”

  “Did it?”

  “Well, there were rumors. One was, they found it in a Temple archive on Makassar.” Another rheumy glance toward Asach, who again did not respond.

  “Makassar? Why Makassar?”

  With an uncharacteristic but perhaps understandable lack of reserve, Colchis Barthes interrupted. “Why anywhere? I’m always amazed that people are shocked to find things in archives. That’s what they’re for.”

  “Well, yes, amen to that, but I was really referring to the fact that she wound up exiled there.”

  “On Makassar?”

  “Yep.”

  “How do you know that?” Barthes marveled silently at HG’s capacity to greet any new bit of information as a personal affront.

  The Elder continued with tired patience. “I really must ask what they teach you people in school these days. I’m an Elder of the True Church. It’s my job to know where people come from. And go to. And what their genealogies are.” He delivered this last glaring directly into Asach’s eyes, did not drop the stare when he’d finished, and continued. “Not sure my memory is still up to a word-for-word quote, but I think the ruling was something like:

  ‘in the absence of challenge by any interested party, we conclude that the craft qualifies as a spacecraft of marginal performance characteristics, and may be accepted as evidence of limited space-faring capability existing on Prince Samual’s World at the time of application for membership.'

  That about right?”

  The Librarian spared Asach making any reply. “Verbatim, actually. And lest anyone feel tempted to slander me with a charge of treason for confirming that quote,”—this to HG—”I will tell you that I first read those words in the New Utah True Church Temple Archives last month.”

  “Why?!”

  “No idea. They were queued up on a reader when I arrived.”

  “Who!”

  “Again, no idea. It was a public reader. I can only presume some local space buff.” And, tit for tat, Barthes was looking directly at the Elder now.

  “Why did you not just say—”

  “Forgive me, but I think it has been made quite clear that I am not at liberty to say anything. I’d just hoped that, the point having been made, we might move on, because as an observer, it is also clear to me that anyone attempting to charge that the newsreader in question did not already exist here would simply be wasting more of His Majesty’s time.”

  “Newsreader?”

  “Yes. Bog-standard news release, for general circulation. Clearly, it circulated.”

  “ENOUGH!”

  Apart from Asach, the humans in the room started as one and snapped their attention to Sargon’s amazingly, perfectly, human voice.

  “You will cease endless talk. You will list ways to launch. You will list ways to orbit. You will list ways to carry passenger. You will list ways to communicate. You will defend ar of this world. YOU, and YOU,” pointing to Barthes and HG with two right hands, “will record this Meeting. You,” pointing to Asach with the gripping hand, “will help explain words. You,” pointing to Laurel, “will speak for Him. You,” pointing to Geery, “will speak for human Engineers. You,” pointing to Michael Van Zandt, “will keep order. Begin. Explain.”

  They sat for a moment, still stunned. Asach broke the silence. “Michael, I will interpret as needed, but, I think you will find that The Protector has rather a broader grasp of Anglic than you realize.”

  “It’s no good,” Geery said. “It won’t make any damned difference. It’s not just the mass of the passengers that’s at issue here. It’s the mass of life support, and landing shields, and stabilizers. Hell, there’ll be eight gees of spin on that thing, never mind the launch. You could put a kid in there, but they wouldn’t survive the trip.”

  “But how much mass are we talking about here? What do we really need for re-entry? And eight gees—so what? I mean, during the first flight ever Yuri Gagarin stayed up an hour and three-quarters, hit over eight gees on re-entry, then still managed to eject and land by parachute. Alan Shepard stayed up there over fifteen minutes, withstood six gees on takeoff, and then a whopping 11.6 gees on reentry. And that was over a millennium ago! Surely we can manage that much?”

  Geery shook his head emphatically. “Look it up. Check your space history. Their rocket launch programs rested on the backs of huge existing military infrastructure and a few hundred million people. And then, even after nearly half a century of pretty regular orbital flight, two of five space vehicles broke up—one on take-off, one on re-entry. We get one shot at this, and we have—how many weeks?”

  The—what to call it?—New Utah Planetary Executive’s rapid-fire internal discussion sounded like a cross between an aviary and an open-pit mine. The conference table vibrated with every basso communication; the window vibrated with the highs. Sargon spoke.

  “You will explain again ways to launch and show Miners.”

  Michael operated the conference table. The window darkened, so that what was projected on the table top in front of each seat was also projected on-screen for all to see. Asach spoke slowly. In summary. Among them, Sargon, Farmer John, and the Doctor interpreted. The engineers pulled and showed schematics.

  “One. Rockets. We have a fireworks industry. We use small chemical rockets to launch weather instruments. The physics are known, but we have nothing capable of delivering a payload as large as an adult human, plus the fuel required, to orbit. We could use Lynx-type pocket rocket technology, but we run the risk of a ruling that it is of “offworld” origin, not our own.

  “Two. A Prince Samual’s World-type chain cannon. Ironically, too primitive. Again, the physics are known, but we do not have the right style of heavy industry. We have no way to build either the cannon or the shells in time.”

  “Three. Magnetic Linear Accelerator. The New Utah solar-powered mining flinger was unarguably developed from pre-Empire, local technology. It can handle the payload. Under ideal conditions, we might be able to push that payload to orbital velocity without blowing the top off the rails. But, in the time allowed, we can’t do it without killing the passenger.”

  “Four. Space Planes. Back to the Lynx problem. This time, not with the motor, but with the airframe itself. We don’t have one. The SunFish is a long-wing solar glider. We could push it up to high-altitude atmospheric limits, but there’s no way to put it into orbit. It might work as a launch platform for something else, but what? We are back to the small-rocket problem. We don’t have anything big enough
to carry a passenger plus life support into orbit.”

  “Five. Laser launcher. We got excited about this for a minute, because no one can dispute our leadership in solar and light technologies. We arrived here with ‘em, and never lost ‘em. Even when spare parts became a problem. In theory, we could pool all of our laser capacity—rip everything we’ve got out of all that Friedlander armor; remount and refocus all of our mining cannons, you name it—pool all of our solar capacity to power it, and then drop a spinning, shiny thing like a child’s top, with a gas expansion chamber below it, into the photon stream to launch it. Two problems. Three. First, it’s not like shining a bunch of flashlights. We can’t get all of that aligned into one coherent beam. Second, payload. It takes a lot of light to do that. Third. Power. We’d definitely suck the grid dry and induce a planetary blackout. Not a great way to greet the Imperials: Hi! We have spaceflight, but no lights or refrigeration! Did I say three? Four. Fourth is spin. That’s what we were just talking about. Let’s assume that we could overcome the rest, and make a capsule big enough to hold a person. We’d have to put tremendous spin on it to stabilize its launch trajectory. Too much. We’d probably kill the passenger. Centrifuge the blood right out of their head.”

  The room was quiet, hushed in the dark as the screen dimmed. They had, at best, weeks before the tramline opened and the Imperial Navy arrived. Never mind the engineering constraints; all humans there—clergy included—could see that none of the options were socially doable in time. They required too much coordination; too much cooperation; too much explanation.

  A Miner boomed, quietly. Farmer John answered. They both swiveled toward Lagash. Lagash consulted his accountants, and then chirped in reply, apparently to the Miner. Hesitantly, the Miner stepped forward to the table. It boomed again, to Sargon. Sargon actually leaned toward Asach, but spoke directly.

  “The Miners ask: why not make a sailboat?”

  The TC Elder snorted; his nearest ecumenical colleagues heard him mutter “you see? Apes!” under his breath.

  One of the more Asperger-ish engineers sneered, “because sailboats don’t fly.”

  But Sargon was immune to the implied insults. Another short consultation with Asach followed.

  “The Miner means: a Phoenix.”

  “Well, at least they’re talking birds now.”

  “The Miner will show you.”

  And to the amazement of all humans except Laurel and Asach, the Miner’s hands began moving very quickly on the surface of the table. Its left hand drew a crooked cross with a very long axis, then a line traveling along the cross, into a spiral. Simultaneously, its lower right hand drew a concave slope, with a dished depression at its top, while the upper right hand drew parallel lines emanating from the dish. It slashed an arc intersecting the parallel lines, with the spiraling line also intersecting just below it, fizzling into a scatter of dots. Above the arc, it drew a bullet-shaped object, with an arrow encircling its base, and what looked like a handkerchief floating above the nose end. Then, it drew a series of glyphs to the right of the image, with a line from one to the base of the parallel lines. Finally, next to the bullet, it drew what looked like two small bowls, with a slash through each. With no prompting from Michael, it pressed the thumb of its gripping hand to the table edge, and stepped back. The image appeared on the window screen.

  The reaction was mixed. Before it disintegrated into cacophony, Sargon drew a circle around the spiral.

  “This is Phoenix.”

  Then a circle around the bullet-with hanky.

  “This is sailboat.”

  At which point, HG actually jumped from his chair, then gasped and sat again as Barthes kicked him under the table.

  “What is that?”

  “Wait. That looks like an airstrip.”

  “Not an airstrip. The airstrip. The SunFish hopper strip at the Orcutt concession outside Bonneville.”

  “The one on Orcutt’s ranch?”

  “Not Orcutt Station. OLaM Station. The SunRail mining terminal. Mined out now, though.”

  “So what’s the squiggle?”

  But the answer was overlaid by a simultaneous interjection.

  “ What’s that bullet thing?”

  “What do you mean, sailboat?”

  “Why the dots?”

  “I don’t see where this gets us.”

  “What the—”

  “What is this?”

  They all stopped when Laurel spoke. She circled one glyph, hesitantly, then another. “I know those. I mean, I think I do. I must. I have seen them, over and over. Now I think I know. That’s His Eye.” The line pointed to the dish atop the slope. “And beside it, That’s His Eye, Opened.”

  Several of the clergy groaned. Laurel froze, staring at her feet.

  Michael interjected. “Please, to order. I believe that Defender Courter has information we might all benefit from.”

  Laurel closed her eyes. It was like being back in Sargon’s House. She was very afraid, and very alone. She listened to her own breathing for a minute. Harsh, loud, like Agamemnon’s, when he had shivered before Farmer John on that first day, a lifetime ago. She looked at Farmer John. That permanent smile. Like a rock, embedded in soil. His Eye was no longer hers alone.

  “Please, forgive me. I can only use the words I know. But I am the only Gathered human here”—she resolutely did not look at Asach—“I mean, the only human who has seen the Earthly Eye. This mark here.” she circled again, pointed again, “you find it in the foothills. It marks all the safe routes into Swenson’s Mountain. So I guess it’s just a road sign, really. ‘This way to Swenson’s Mountain.’ But this one,” she circled the glyph beside it, “this one rings the Eye itself. It marks—well, you don’t go past this, ever. Lest you be consumed by His Gaze.”

  There was some pained murmuring. This time, Laurel cut it off herself. “Hear me out! I never went to school. I studied at home. I don’t know what you know. But you don’t know what I know, because you’ve never been there. What I know now. I have thought about it since that final day, when they fought on the plains. Fought the Friedlander amour. I saw them there, those bright green lights, and I thought it then: like little eyes, blinking open and shut. The laser cannons. Blinking open and shut. Like His Eye.”

  She looked around. Sargon’s delegation simply waited, patiently, for the very slow humans to comprehend. Asach stared carefully at folded hands. HG squirmed, uncomprehending and bored. The ecumenical council, attuned to the subtext of personal spiritual insight, had fallen silent. Laurel raised her eyes, and met the stares of the—unbelieving—engineers. “It’s a laser. His Eye. It’s a giant, giant laser. A giant laser that blinks on and off, once a day, for sixteen weeks, every twenty-one years.”

  And the shoe finally dropped for Michael as well. “In the volcano? The opal meerschaum? It erodes out of the volcano?”

  Laurel nodded. “And we Gather there. In His sight. Every twenty-one years. Only—” she looked to Sargon—“only, they were there first. And Swenson knew. That’s why he claimed the mountain. That’s why his daughters led us there. To protect it, so no one else would come.”

  And then the astrophysicist rose, hands to his mouth, creating a ripple of craning heads as he blocked the big-screen view. He waved a hand at the screen. “Do you see that? Do you see that?!”

  He turned and pointed at the Miner. “That man’s a genius. A genius. We can do this. We can do this. We can do the engineering.” He swiveled between the human and non-human doctors. “Can we do this? Can we do the life support? Can we do enough life support to get them up there?””

  “A genius?”

  “Do what?”

  “What genius?”

  “What does he mean, gen—”

  “Life support?”

  The astrophysicist was flapping his hands about to quiet the room. “Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are looking at here is Aldrich Saxe’s napkin. This Miner—your Excellency, does this Miner have a name?—This Miner has
sketched for us a way to put a capsule in orbit using existing technology, plus the Eye as a laser cannon.”

  Forgetting the conference table, he ran up to the screen.

  “Look at this. This is the old OLaM airstrip. It’s the closest to Swenson’s Mountain. You strip a SunFish of everything—everything—non-essential, and load it with a space-worthy capsule. You use thermal uplift to gain airspeed, and use airspeed to gain altitude, as high as you can get. Then you use all remaining onboard power for the final whip up to the top of the atmosphere—and time it to drop and glide straight down into the Eye on its last leg. The airframe gets burned up, but that puts the laser capsule into the photon stream at the top of the troposphere. That’s the Phoenix. Same system as we talked about earlier—the laser ablates the bottom surface of the bullet to create thrust, and it heats the air chamber, forcing superheated air out of a hole to create stabilizing spin. But it doesn’t have far to go now, so it doesn’t need so much spin, and it does not need it for so long. You get a—I don’t know how many seconds, I’ll work it out in a minute—countdown, until you are out of atmosphere. Then you pop out a light sail. That’s the sailboat. We aren’t going anywhere in particular, just parking in orbit, so we don’t really need to steer it. We just get the extra push, then jettison the sail and tip into orbit. At this point, we might not even need attitude adjustment. Depends on how far out we want to go, how long we want to stay up, how much total mass, how precise an orbit.”

  He broke off and, shoving past now-furiously-scribbling engineers, threaded his way to the head of the table, behind Sargon, clasping the now very befuddled Miner, right hand thrust forward.

  “Sir, I want to shake your hand—” momentary confusion—“er, hands. What is your name, sir?”

  The Miner made a burbling warble.

  Asach smiled. “Might I suggest Alhacen?”

  As the engineers huddled in working groups to put meat on the bones of this concept, Asach and the accountants helped with the arduous process of translating the mathematical notations to understandable equations, and the numerical notations to base ten from base twelve. Even the civil administrators followed along eagerly, but this left the ecumenical council with little to do. Until the High Church primate cleared his throat.