by Ed Finn
The Chinese had built an industrial empire with autocratic methods, but they had never opened a frontier before. They found it hard to let enterprises compete. The instincts of Late Marxism were hard to overcome. On the other hand, they were an eager market for products from space. Toward the end of the decade, Chinese billionaires competed to top the latest lavish champagne party in the Spherical Hilton.
2037
Harold and Sara took their first flight to the big new Spherical Hilton together. The two-stage to orbit shuttle was smooth, in a big rugged composite airframe. Out the porthole they could see Phoenix, now more like Jericho or Ur, with it shriveled relics of golf courses and the dusty hulls of swimming pools beside abandoned homes.
The Spherical was ornate in its lightweight way. They had a suite, which meant a big bubble window they could float within and see the universe passing in review. Hanging there in an ocean of night, they made love. Each time with her he felt a new depth, an unexpected flavoring. She was moist and cool as diamond-sharp stars drifted behind her. Energy rippled along their skins, somehow liberated by the weightlessness. Yes, here was their center. Bodies said what their words could not.
They had a preference for the spherical swimming drop. He plunged into the ten-meter-diameter shimmering cool ball and felt it coil around him in a way water on Earth did not. He hung suspended and kissed her foot, grinning madly. Kick, stroke, and he was back in air, barely in time, gasping.
The hotel furniture was as light as air. Carbon fibers with diamond struts, all puffed into a foamy shape. Their stick-to chairs faced the huge window where Earth slid by. The sights somehow loosened their tongues as they sipped from wine spheres. Lightly, Sara revealed that before him she had been the happy hypotenuse of a triangular domestic ménage.
“You gave that up for me?”
“No, for me. That way I got you.”
Over dinner she finally got him to talk about his odd childhood. Maybe the altitude gave perspective? He grimaced. “Look, the information age rewards people who mature fast, are verbally and socially sophisticated, can control their impulses. Girls were way better at that. Schools praised diversity but were culturally the same. Different skin color, same opinions. The girls ran my senior class and I slept through classes.”
“So you got out.” They watched a gyrating hurricane, the fifteenth already this summer, churn across the Atlantic.
“They wanted to teach me how to share. I wanted a curriculum that taught how to win.” He grinned. “And how to lose. I’ve done my share of that, too.”
She turned to look at him. “Teachers wrote my parents that I was ‘a fiercely rambunctious girl.’ After a while they found out they couldn’t tame me by assigning some of those exquisitely sensitive Newbery-award-winning novellas.”
“Yeah. Social engineering ain’t that easy. You’re always going to get malcontents who like money and movement more than contentment.”
“You’re after the money?”
He noticed that she had deftly turned the talk back to him, but let it go. “Oh, you mean those investments in nanotech and 3-D printing? Sure, to get cash for the Botworks orbiter up here.”
“What about all that opposition to nanotech? They teamed up with that failed campaign to stop your launches of cold nuke rockets.”
“Marches don’t stop markets. So maybe nanotech pushes noses out of joint. Big social impacts, sure. Life’s like that. The world’s getting stranger and I’m going to get stranger right along with it.”
WHEN THEY TOOK THE trans-orbital shuttle to the Botworks in higher orbit, Australia was burning again. An angry black shroud north of Melbourne cloaked the already parched lands. Geoengineering with aerosols in the stratosphere was redistributing rainfall to counter this, but imperfectly. At least it was cooling the world and avoiding the terrible droughts of the early 2030s. Meanwhile chemical plants steadily worked to offset the rising alkalinity of the oceans.
Harold immediately used his phone to call through to his company office, Astromines AU, in Melbourne. “Give extra compensations to staff in the burn area,” he said to his operations manager. “And make a corporate donation, say a hundred million, to the disaster zone.”
He could tell from Sara’s expression that she was surprised. “Y’know what I miss most in this warming-up world—the North Pole.” He pointed to the south, where Antarctica was smaller but still brilliant white. To the north no sea ice remained.
She nodded. “Maybe we should spread more aerosols, bring the summer sea ice back?”
“The Russians want the sea lanes open wide. It’s a trade-off.” He sighed.
The Botworks were served by the big nuke complex and the attendant rocket, floating like a shark beside a clumpy whale. Astromines had snagged into high orbit a nominal working asteroid fifty meters across. Bots swarmed over it, directed by an octagonal manager craft secured to the dark rock by a carbon-fiber tower. Bots walked on this, their thick legs swinging from one toe-hold to the next with startling speed. They then spread over a mesh that grasped the asteroid, helping the smelting units grind and heat. The nuke power plant gave electricity and hot smelting fluids through a flexible, stark white piping array.
“Looks like a spiderweb around its prey,” Sara said.
“Not far wrong,” Harold said. “The Chinese have one like this, but many more people. See that hab on top of the command ship?” He pointed at the busy octagonal assembly. “Has three crew, all women. They work together better out here, seems like.”
“The Journal says they’re undercutting your price.”
Harold shrugged. “They want to win not a space race, but a space marathon. They learned the big lesson from the 2020s. Manufacturing is all that matters in the long run. Service economies only shuttle money from person to person. Manufacturing creates wealth, services distribute it.”
“The Euros want to keep space public—something that every citizen feels like they’re involved in, a public utility rather than a private playground.”
“Yeah,” Harold said, “I saw that speech. ‘Not just billionaires doing their bungee jumping in reverse.’ Good line, bad logic.”
The three women aboard were all agog that the CEO had come out to see them. Sara and Harold got into skinsuits and “the gals” tugged them around the asteroid, pointing out bots as they performed complex tasks. Bots all had AIs that knew kinetic tasks down to the millimeter, and bots never tired. “They don’t get retirement plans,” Harold remarked.
Their departing gift was a chunk of the ore. Sara sniffed it. “Smells like gunpowder.”
“Smells like the future,” Harold said.
After they left, Sara said, “My, they prettied themselves up for you. Skirts in space?”
He shrugged. “A nice gesture.”
“They didn’t know I was coming, did they?”
“I may have neglected to mention it.”
“I almost laughed at how their faces fell. Didn’t your staff send a manifest?”
“I don’t use staff much. Like to work hands-on.”
“Obsessive, the Journal said.”
“People exaggerate.”
That evening, their last in orbit, she said, “I’m not going to marry you.”
He blinked just once. “How did you know?”
“Private pod dinner, stunning view, waiter who says nothing, gleam in eye—little clues.”
“And—no?”
“I’m CEO of three companies, you of two. We have cross-lateral contracts with constraints under that damned ExoLegal legislation. Even a contract marriage—”
“I was going for the whole thing.”
“Trad marriage? I’m not an antique.”
He returned the already palmed ring back to his jacket pocket while she sipped from her wine bulb. “Okay, but a contract marriage of five years—”
She leaned over and kissed him slowly. “It’s a wonderful thought, and we love each other, but—look at our lives. Always on the move. Eighteen-hour
days. Legal thickets.”
“At least we couldn’t testify against each other.”
“Now there’s an incentive! Just what a girl wants to hear.” She smiled into some distant future.
“So long as we don’t commit any crimes, it’ll keep the lawyers off us.”
“No, I like it better this way. I’m here because I want to be. And you realize that Marquand fellow I also see isn’t going to hedge you out, yes?”
He raised eyebrows, pursed his lips. “I was kinda hoping.”
“I don’t need a ring to stay with you. Or you me. We see others, we live intersecting lives. Great lives.”
He nodded. Most of the way down from orbit they were relaxed, discussing how Harold could arrange to designate countries as “commissionaires” rather than wholesalers of raw metal in cylindrical ingots. Because commissionaires never took possession of ingots, which would mean paying taxes on them, an agent in France could sell them on behalf of a subsidiary in low-tax Singapore, people he had never even seen. The ingots themselves never saw Singapore, either. They came down in capsules that parachuted directly onto the grounds of assembly factories. Once in the landing yard, robots took ingots to processors.
From that commissionaires’ maneuver he got money to pay for more astronomy studies, for finding new asteroids to visit, prospect, mine, for new engineering designs. Plus he could intervene where governments were slow to act, as with the Australian fires. Capital could move faster.
A few months later, exhausted with work, he needed some downtime. He spent a week on Maui having his longevity looked after, using a service LifeCode had just started.
Most of aging was failure to do maintenance. The latest innovation used genetic information to spot repair genes, then stimulate them into doing better. While a team poked and prodded him, fed him odd, thick, slurpy drinks, and got him into lab-rat-style exercises, he let his mind roam, thinking about his boyhood dreams.
It was time to fund them.
His excuse for spending the money was a celebration. Sara had finally agreed to a five-year contract marriage. The stock in his companies leaped over 10 percent.
2040
Dr. Katherine Amani looked up from her work. Harold said, “I made an appoint—”
“You actually are Harold Mann. I thought it might be a joke.”
“Uh, that’s what I said, ma’am—”
“I thought it was a . . . boast.”
“More like a confession.”
He knew her wry look. Didn’t this man know that in the ’30s no sophisticated person divulged wealth or talent or ability? It was unseemly, unsettling, and rude.
“Or a prank—that was my second guess.”
“Your friends masquerading?”
“Last week my boyfriend . . . never mind. What do you want?”
“I want to know about the follow-on to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite.”
“What? Oh . . . WISE.”
“Oh, should’ve known. Nobody uses full names; I really am out of it.”
“WISE, that’s ancient . . . and there was no follow-on.”
“My people tell me one was built, but not launched.”
“Ah, that. Too expensive back in the Drawback era. Still is. It’s probably sitting on a shelf in Maryland.”
“You agreed with the conclusion—no brown dwarfs closer than five light-years?”
She got up and made a graphic display open on the well. “Here’s the final 3-D plot. We surveyed the sky—well, nearly all—”
“How much did you miss?”
“About two percent, as I recall. Some cycling glitch with the ’scope.”
“How sure are you of the five light-year number?”
She grinned. “You mean the contradiction with the average density of brown dwarfs? It was indeed a puzzle. There should’ve been several closer, but we didn’t see them.”
He decided to use a method that worked in business planning. “Suppose I told you there was one? What would explain why you missed it?”
“Um . . . I always wondered if our method was right. See, we surveyed in three spectral bands and used the ratio of luminosity between those bands to see if it was a dwarf.”
“How did you know the ratio test?”
“Modeling of dwarf atmospheres. See, dark stars have methane clouds at the top of their cold atmospheres. We used metalicity plus methane and water absorption bands to select out the millions of faint dots we had.”
“How about a pure hydrogen dwarf?”
She gave him the wry look again. “You’ve read up on this. A pure hydrogen star would be undetected in these kind of model-driven observations.”
“Good answer. How much would it cost me to have all the data examined again, using a less narrow band model?”
She blinked. “Funding like that—maybe a million, even.”
“You and a team could do it? I’ll make it a gift to the university.”
“Uh, yes, we could. And . . . wow. We never see such grants anymore.”
“Hard times. Sad. And stupid.” He leaned against a filing cabinet. “How does an infrared astronomer like you get new data?”
“Mostly we don’t.”
Harold allowed himself a smile. She was still trying to take in his offer. He liked keeping people off balance; they told you more that way. “How much would it cost to pull that old WISE satellite off that shelf, update all the electronics, launch?”
Another blink, eyes to the ceiling, lips moving. “Um . . . we haven’t gone much further in e-development, and launch costs are down thanks to—” She stopped. “To you guys, I guess.”
“And a hundred million others.”
“With people living full-time offworld, too.” He could see the question in her eyes. A tycoon comes visiting an astronomer? What’s up?
“Estimate the cost of a new WISE with broader modeling in the analysis?”
“Maybe two hundred million.”
“Okay, let’s redo the old data first. And work up a sharper cost estimate for a relaunch.”
She was still trying to take it all in when he left for a business appointment, feeling the old dazzle of opportunity lifting his eyebrows. The university got out the paperwork in three days; they were feeling the long-term research pinch. He delivered the check himself and then took her out to dinner with her postdocs. She got a bit tipsy.
2041
The several-year recession—even worse than the Great Recession—took its toll on his enterprises. Trimming programs and people was part of business, he knew, just like gardening. Indeed, he took up gardening to get his mind off the failures.
Chief of these was the inevitable collapse of the Muslim countries that had run for a century on oil revenues. Their reserves were depleting, green tech was lowering consumption, and their vast overpopulation was getting ugly in the streets. The Arab states began their collapse, plus Indonesia. Of course that didn’t affect Pakistan and the other Stans, or the coming Muslim majority in Sweden. Older countries stiffened their immigration, letting few in but the very skilled. Financial markets turned turtle, heads in, going nowhere.
Plus he put some of his own money into a start-up study of building a space elevator. It seemed like a great idea, a crucial component to get into space cheaply and effectively. There were superstrong composites, part diamond, and his self-managing AI bots made it seem plausible.
His engineers used a junk debris mass left over from mining to build the first lengths, with multiple redundant cables with cross-strapping to distribute loads around a break. When a meteorite or dead satellite inevitably hits, you would only need to replace a small part.
But the first high launch tower went into rapid launch mode then, chopping lift costs considerably below even the traditional two-stage to orbit. Plus there were tech failures and the corporate treasurer turned out to have his hand in the till. It was the big, final hit. Harold could not for the life of him hold together the investment coalition to build
further.
He had to fold and take a considerable haircut. The unfinished cable became an embarrassment. He finally sold the useful parts for orbital scrap use, just to stop people taking pictures of it and laughing.
For three years he took a dollar-a-year salary and sent his stock option profits to the astronomers for their infrared work. Sara offered to help, but he thought it safer to keep their assets separate. She got miffed at that, and they didn’t see each other for two months.
Then she appeared at his skyscraper office at quitting time, in a fine new red dress. Red was always a signal between them, better than roses any day.
“That damned treasurer,” he said to Sara that evening. “Takes all kinds but—”
“It must.” She smiled as she shed the red. “They’re all here, like ’em or not.”
2043
His first target back in the 2020s had been an asteroid rich in rare earths. That paid back all start-up costs in a single shipment.
Spin could throw the robots off, so he paid rockhounds, with their satellite telescopes and fast-flight sail craft, to find one with a tiny spin and good elements. The key innovation was a rock filter that worked best in microgravity, and not at all on Earth. It separated molecules by charge and mass, using tribocharging induced by simple friction, the same process that yielded sparks on doorknobs after walking across a rug. His first half-dozen asteroids made him rich, and then he got started on truly adventurous ideas.
As soon as he had robots that could manage well even on the surface of rocks that spun around several axes, he made spin an asset. There was board opposition, but he called in favors and won a straight up/down vote with the board.
A new class of robots spun out long, rigid armatures of carbon fiber, creating a throwing arm. Cargo got hoisted out on the arm, and then released. Careful calculation of spin phase and orientation made it possible to send packages on precise trajectories to High Earth Orbit. With a midcourse correction nudge, they nosed into nets waiting to receive them—free transport, paid for by a slight decrease in the asteroid spin. Fuel depots, orbital factories, and hab colonies got their goods delivered, for the minor trouble of snagging them as they passed by.