Analog SFF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Phil Majeski's simulation team would have its hands full in the coming weeks.

  Valerie Clayburn was among the nomads, leaving Marcus to wonder how they would synch up for dinner. Whenever she popped in he treated her like anyone else—this was work, not a date, and her coworkers were all around, too—while second-guessing himself whether he was being too distant.

  Why, but for a getting-back-on-the-horse-that-threw-you theory, had he asked her out?

  Because Lindsey—the horse who had thrown him—was three months gone. Because life went on. Because Valerie was smart, intriguingly intense, and, despite her apparent efforts not to show it, hot.

  “. . . until they're in the way.”

  They? Marcus had let his mind wander. Again. “Say that again?”

  “Are we going too fast?” Tamara Miller asked. “Moving targets. How will we know where they are until they're in our way?”

  Going too fast would serve as an excuse. Marcus opened a datasheet window for the auto-transcription function. With everyone chiming in at will, the voice-recognition output was half gibberish, but half was more than he had processed over the past few seconds. He skimmed. Aha. Migration.

  All powersats, not just PS-1, would be built near Phoebe and its mines and factories. After completion and checkout, the powersats would be boosted—slowly, because they were so massive—to their final destinations. In geosynchronous Earth orbit, GEO, they would be all but stationary overhead.

  “So your concern,” Marcus inferred, “is the trek to GEO, with the powersat's orbit spiraling out till it arrives.”

  Tamara nodded. “Yeah. How will I know when and where it's going to get in my way? Or maybe they, if there may be more than one powersat migrating at once.”

  “Not just us,” Valerie said, back again. “Optical astronomer, too. And pity the poor Earth-based infrared astronomers. A structure that's miles square soaks up a lot of sunlight.”

  “Kind of the idea,” Marcus said, getting laughs. “But I see your point. You need a way to plan around the powersats even before they settle into geosynch. I can recommend an Internet application anyone can access for tracking and orbital predictions. And real-time position, too, as determined by GPS. Okay?”

  “What about flight plans?” Tamara countered. “Shouldn't powersats be in FAA files?”

  Marcus took notes. “Probably a good idea.” And around Phoebe and The Space Place, essential for safety too.

  “Real-time access,” Ernesto Perez added, “so we can input the powersat orbital predictions into our scheduling software.”

  When Valerie disappeared again, around four p.m., Marcus thought maybe she had left to change clothes. (He planned to change, but after his first visit he had known to leave coat and tie in the car.) When she reappeared half an hour later, though, she still wore the same blue jeans and tan sweater. Even in sneakers, she was almost his height. He guessed she was about five foot ten.

  She could wear a flour sack and be gorgeous. As for his coat and tie, they could stay where they were.

  Five-ish, Aaron Friedman left with a parting shot of, “See you later, Valerie.”

  Marcus waited for her to correct her colleague. She did not. He thought he had asked Valerie out. On a date. Had “can I take you out to dinner?” somehow changed meanings during his time with Lindsey?

  Shit, he was not ready for this.

  The two of them finally had the lounge to themselves. “Ready for dinner?” he asked.

  She smiled awkwardly. “Sure. That'll be nice.”

  “I'll need you to suggest someplace to eat.”

  “Not hard.” She smiled again, and this time it came across more sincere. “We don't have many to choose among.”

  They headed in his car for Durbin, only slightly less tiny than Green Bank. Instead of making get-acquainted chat (not that he seemed to remember how), he focused on the narrow, twisty roads. The ten-mile, thirty- minute drive took most of his attention.

  Unless dimness counted as décor, the family restaurant and bar had none. Several people he recognized from today's meeting, including Aaron Friedman, occupied stools at the bar. Banter with the bartender suggested they were regulars. That was one mystery solved, anyway. As for Valerie's expectations for the evening? Time would tell.

  Compared to the afternoon's free-for-all, the conversation once he and Valerie were seated felt stiff. His scars were too fresh. Her scars, whatever they were, seemed to run deeper. He called it a toss-up who felt more ill at ease.

  Ruling out shoptalk might have been a mistake. What did people talk about on first dates? He couldn't remember. The short menus, when the waitress brought them by, offered few possibilities to eat or discuss.

  “How old is your son?” he asked as they waited for their appetizers. “Simon?”

  Getting the name right got him another of those too-rare natural smiles. “Simon. He's nine. Precocious guy, in a mischievous kind of way. Reminds me . . .”

  Of his father, Marcus filled in the blank. It felt too soon to ask. All he came up with, gracelessly, when enough time had passed was, “What have you read recently for fun?”

  She named two novels he had never heard of, but he asked about them anyway. The waitress arrived with their entrées and the conversation trailed off again. This evening was a disaster.

  Valerie told herself she should be home with her son. Only she knew that for a lie: Simon did just fine with babysitters, had more or less adopted Brianna as his big sister. Lying to yourself is never a good sign.

  * * * *

  Her head was not in the game.

  She found little to say when Marcus asked about favorite movies and music, or volunteered his own. When he launched into gadgets—about which, as an engineer, he was predictably enthusiastic—she shot that down too. Sorry even as she said it, she disgorged some inanity about devices that would not function in the quiet zone or were a pain tethered to an ethernet cable.

  And when he unintentionally brought Keith to mind, she shut down even more.

  She should have asked around about first-date topics. Clearly, she would not need to ask about second dates. “Will you excuse me? I should check on Simon,” she said.

  “Sure.” Reflexively reaching for his cell, Marcus laughed at himself. (She liked that in a guy. Too bad she was such a failure at this.) “I guess the restaurant has landlines you can use.”

  “For regulars, the house phone. It's behind the bar.” She stood. “I'll be right back.”

  She found Patrick Burkhalter holding down a barstool. The rest of the Green Bank regulars appeared to have left.

  Patrick must not have shaved that day. She thought he had worn the same pants and shirt the day before. He was heavier every time she saw him, his clothes tighter, his gut bulging over his belt. The mound of buffalo wings in front of him would do nothing to reverse the trend. And he drank alone far too often. Poor guy: No one to go home to.

  “How's the big date going?” Patrick asked her.

  “Just colleagues,” she said. After the fact, if not by original intent. “Hand me the phone?”

  To judge by the giggling in the background when Brianna answered, Simon was doing fine.

  Patrick was nursing a beer with one hand, prodding his datasheet with the other. An ethernet cable snaked behind the bar from the datasheet. Something about Patrick tickled at the back of her mind.

  Damn! Maybe she had gadgets to share after all. And they were wireless in a big way.

  * * * *

  Black, sterile landscape hung in a shallow arc before Marcus. Up close, churned ground. In the left distance, a range of low hills. Straight ahead, receding into the distance, a pockmarked plain. In the right distance, rippled terrain that blended into more hills.

  Phoebe, as he had never experienced it.

  He and Valerie sat side by side on her living-room couch, an ordinary game controller in front of each of them on the coffee table. “What do you think?”

  Marcus hardly minded being
invited inside after dinner—but he was more than a little surprised. She had insisted she had something to show him. What was this about? “Interesting,” he offered neutrally.

  “Give it a shot,” she said.

  He glanced down at his game controller. Landscape shifted as his head moved. Infrared laser beams shining into his eyes and sensors tracking eye motions from the reflections. He looked up and the landscape shifted again. “The hills to my extreme left and right look alike.”

  “Identical, in fact. The bot's full-circle view is compressed into ninety degrees, because you, unlike the bot, can't see three-sixty. To your far left and far right, about ten degrees of landscape overlap for continuity. You get used to it.”

  Marcus had never seen the attraction of the Phoebe tourist bots. Moon bots, maybe. Over the years robotic lunar landers had deployed those to far-flung and quite varied terrain. The catch was cost: Lunar bots were expensive. Once an armchair explorer sent a lunar rent-a-bot over a cliff or into a crevasse—that was that. And because of the comm delay to/from the moon, accidents did happen. And so, time on lunar bots did not come cheap.

  Lose a bot on tiny, nearby Phoebe—much less likely, anyway, given the shorter comm delays—and often someone could retrieve it. Recoverability made armchair exploration of Phoebe affordable.

  But Marcus “saw” PS-1 and Phoebe almost daily, with clearance to operate the surface-camera systems. (Not bots, though. For security purposes, work bots could only be accessed with much higher clearance than he had, and then only from local terminals.) He had come to think of the rent-a-bots creeping about parts of Phoebe's surface—when, from time to time, they strayed outside the tourist zone—as so much optical clutter.

  Still . . .

  He swept a hand across his controller. Gesture-sensing logic read the motion—more clever processing of infrared reflections. With an all but imperceptible delay the landscape slid to his right as the bot turned. Motion somehow emphasized the duplicated scenery at the extremes of the holo.

  If he recalled correctly, and the fast response suggested he did, Phoebe was all but overhead at the moment. He swept his hand back—and nothing happened.

  “Hold your fingers together,” Valerie said, “so you don't clutter the IR reflections. Fingers don't control individual tentacles.”

  Walking by gesture would be a great user interface. If his hand had eight opposable fingers. If the round-trip delay, ping-ponged through comsats, though far more manageable than in the lunar case, did not sometimes approach a full second. “Walking” involved a joystick and then only indicated a general direction. The bot's onboard nav software figured how to locomote across the landscape.

  He swept his hand again, keeping his fingers straight, still, and together. This time, the landscape shifted as he expected. “I don't get it. Exploring Phoebe seems like the last thing that would interest you.”

  “Patrick, a guy I work with, was into these bots right after Phoebe rentals came online.” She seemed about to say more, and to reconsider. “I tried to interest Simon in remote-controlled exploration. Any kid his age is going to spend time in VR, and this seemed much more civilized than the usual shoot-'em-ups.”

  “How'd that go over?”

  “About as well as you'd expect.”

  Marcus kept gesturing, the landscape swaying in response. “Am I ready to take a step?”

  “Uh-huh. Let's find a pair of bots somewhere interesting.” She did something with her controller and a translucent pop-up materialized over the landscape. “Okay, here's an idle pair of bots near the Grand Chasm. You take bot 327.” With a gesture, she changed the scene.

  He had seen the Grand Chasm often enough, but never like this. Never so vast. What had changed?

  The horizon was way too close.

  “These bots can't be more than a foot tall,” he said. “I'm used to watching from the safety cameras, atop eight-foot posts.”

  “Size isn't everything,” she said. And blushed.

  Marcus pretended not to notice, guessing the words had just slipped out. If Valerie was one for flirting or double entendres he had yet to see it.

  He waggled a tentacle at her bot. “So, come here often?”

  Laughing, she managed to make her bot shrug. “Only twice, both times long ago.”

  “Hmm. Maybe this can be our place.” The line felt hokey, and yet like the first uncontrived comment he had managed all evening.

  They each arched a tentacle over the railing to peer into the abyss, where scree piles dotted the dark, undulating depths. He saw bots stranded partway down and the tentacle tips of others peeking out from beneath piles of rubble. Trapped before the barrier went up, or did tourists climb their bots over the railing?

  The chasm sides looked unstable, but exactly how treacherous were they? Marcus needed several tries to grasp and drop a stray pebble over the railing. Under Phoebe's scant gravity, the rock more floated than fell. Finally, picking up speed, it struck a canyon wall and triggered a slow-motion rockslide.

  Few people had ever entered the Grand Chasm, and—as much as geologists ached to explore Phoebe's most prominent feature—none had gone down very far. Too dangerous, the risk assessments always concluded. Even flying in, a hopper's exhaust could start an avalanche. Some day, perhaps, when mining was less of a priority, the staff could tunnel into the bottom of the rift.

  Someday remained distant.

  Marcus had long suspected an excess of caution after the early—and unrelated—incident during the establishment of Phoebe base. One geologist had already died on Phoebe, and NASA was determined not to see more.

  Now, in eerie silence, as the slo-mo rockslide went on and on, Marcus reconsidered.

  Only how was he seeing this? Not sunlight—ever. Not earthlight, given the minimal comm delay. Phoebe had to be more or less overhead at the moment, deep inside Earth's shadow. Moonlight? The Moon was just past first quarter. The light it cast would strike obliquely, the shadows pointing in one direction—only the shadows around the bots pointed every which way. That suggested artificial lighting, yet he saw neither lamps nor spotlights.

  He gave up trying to work it out. “I'm confused. Where is our light coming from?”

  “Not light. Not as you mean it, anyway. The bots use lidar.”

  Like radar, only based on laser beams. “So this is all computer-synth imagery?”

  “Uh-huh.” She stood and stretched. “I feel like coffee. How about you?”

  “Sure.” He followed her into the kitchen, where a pair of binoculars sat on the counter near the back door. “Wildlife?” he guessed, pointing.

  “Stargazing.” She finished putting up the pot of coffee and grabbed the binocs. “Come outside.”

  The night was cool and cloudless. After the moon, waxing gibbous as he had remembered, The Space Place, playground of petrocrats, kleptocrats, and the other superrich, was the brightest object in the sky. Only this was a sky unlike any he had seen in a long time. Far from big-city lights, the stars blazed. Thousands of them.

  “Try these.” She handed him the binoculars—

  Through which countless more stars shone. And there, aglow in infrared from the residual heat of their last passes through sunlight, tiny shapes: an oval, a rectangle, and, the brightest of the three, a not-quite-round pearl. Phoebe's sunshield and PS-1, seen at a bit of an angle, and The Space Place. Phoebe itself was too dark and cold to spot even with thermal imaging.

  Her hand was on his back, turning him. “Now look. No, up a little. A little higher.”

  “At what?”

  “You'll know it when you're there.”

  The Milky Way looked like spilt milk—with a scattering of diamond chips.

  “Wow,” he said. “Thanks.” He slowly turned, taking in the grandeur of the night sky. He eventually thought to offer Valerie her binocs. To the naked eye the night now seemed blacker than ever. “It's very dark out here.”

  “Oh, crap!”

  Huh? “What's wrong?”
<
br />   “You didn't plan to drive back tonight, did you? If you think it's dark here . . .”

  Think how dark it will be in the forest, crossing the mountains, he completed. “Not a problem. I have a room for the night in the observatory residence hall. You don't need to chase me off just yet.”

  “That's good.” A sudden, unexpected peck on the cheek suggested she meant it. “And if you'd like, how about you come by in the morning for breakfast?”

  Turning, slipping his arms around her waist, Marcus said, “I'd like that a lot.”

  * * * *

  Monday, May 8

  From the secluded anonymity of a black stretch limo, shared only with a longtime assistant, Yakov Nikolayevich Brodsky watched urban streets slip past.

  He always enjoyed visiting Chicago. With its extensive expatriate community, he dined well here, on everything from blini to borscht to stroganoff. The finest elaborate banquet cost less than a passable snack in Moscow—Because few here could have afforded Moscow prices.

  And so, in a very different way he relished the signs of America's decline. The weed-choked medians. The empty stores and shuttered factories. The would-be day laborers milling about in a 7-Eleven parking lot. Most of all he enjoyed the waiting lines and per-gallon prices as they passed neighborhood gas stations.

  What a difference a decade could make.

  The limo sped downtown amid an escort of blue-and-white Chicago police cruisers. Lights flashing, they crossed under the rickety elevated-train tracks that demarcated the Loop.

  “We're almost there, sir,” the driver announced soon after. “Five minutes.”

  A driver! How quaintly decadent. But doubtless the driver with whom he had been provided also spied on him. “Very well.”

  Yakov savored, too, Chicago's distinctive architecture. Perhaps his favorite example was the masterpiece that came into view as the motorcade turned onto Jackson Boulevard.

  For decades the Chicago Board of Trade Building had towered over everything else in this city. From the speeding car, alas, Yakov could not fully appreciate the edifice's art deco distinctiveness. He could scarcely even see the three-story statue of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, which crowned the building's peak.