At every waypoint—at Vandenberg, here at Connor Station in low orbit, next at Crossroads on Luna, and again at L2, where he would join his ship for Mars—Peter had electronic postcards to send. They were expensive views, fine-grained reproductions, of supraorbital scenery. The message line allowed for 128 bytes, and he poured his soul into them. In return, he was hoping for a good word, for "Hello, I love you," for "Please come back," for "I'm coming next flight," for anything.
So far she had not replied. Maybe later, as he got closer to the final jumping-off place.
But not this time.
Now his watch counted off the last seconds to the double bong, 16:05:00. The hatchway back to Connor Station's docking manifold closed—he could just see the edge of it from where he was strapped down for the primary acceleration—and the ship's air pressure changed slightly, brushing his skin with invisible fingers and clogging his ears with a new closeness.
Yen
Riyals
Neumarks
Dollars
Hong Kong Two, British Columbia, March 11
Winston Qiang-Phillips watched as the tide came in. Before the sun could rise beyond the Coast Mountains, the first long fingers of cash were seeping into the HK2 Exchange, sniffing out new opportunities and bidding up the price of even the penny stocks.
"Watching the tide come in" was not merely a poetic image that he had made up. Seeing with senses other than his eyes, Qiang-Phillips actually witnessed the influx of bids, moving like a green gas in the spaces between the trading booths, gently raising the lighted indices that were posted beside each one. Winston paused for a moment to admire the effect before dialing himself into his own booth.
Everyone said the tidal bulge of cash which chased the open and active markets westward around the world was fifty trillion in "Double-D," or dollar-denominated, currencies. No one knew the exact figure. The interlinked markets involved in the trade acted as if pinning a hard number on the amount might be bad luck. Still, fifty terabux sounded about right to Winston's ear.
But, of course, there was the velocity to take into account. A dollar at rest was intrinsically less potent than a dollar in motion. If it was traded once a year, or even once a day, the currency had only a certain puny effect in the financial scheme of things. The punch of a weak and sickly man. But if that same dollar could be traded four and five times a day, it thereby gained velocity. And momentum could invest it with terrifying power. The punch of a stevedore rushing headlong into a bar fight.
So, perhaps the sum was less than fifty—but still in the trillions, certainly. Even twenty, with the right velocity on it, could seem like two or three times that to anyone who stood neck-deep in the flood and traded as fast as he could for eight hours a day. Then everyone turned their eyes westward, across the Pacific, and watched the cash bulge rush on toward the Nikkei.
There once was a time, seventy-odd years ago—Winston Qiang-Phillips had learned this from a university course on the history of money—when the world's financial markets had trended toward twenty-four-hour operation and wholly computerized bidding. Make money all the time, the people said, even while you sleep in your bed. But those pleasant dreams had gone into meltdown during the Mechanics' Panics of 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009.
Now human beings ran things again, with a little computer help. And, while people might need to sleep, the money didn't. After the day's frenzied transactions, in the closing minutes before the market bell, people on the far side of the world parked their earnings in overnight certificates of deposit and other instruments that would earn them a few fractional points while they went home to eat and play and dream. In the meantime their money went out, almost of its own accord, looking for investments on the daylight side. It pumped up the world's volume of "available free credit" enormously.
So, when dawn came up on a trading center, its activity heated up as the cash flowed in from the east, beyond the terminator, and the buying began. And when the sun set on that same trading center, then the selloff came as the money fled westward toward the next opportunity.
"Rising tide lifts all boats." That was what Grandfather Qiang Nu-Lin had taught him as a boy. And he had even believed it, then. Now Winston himself would add, "Except those on a short anchor chain."
Winston Qiang-Phillips made his living as a professional contrarian. That is, when the sun went down and the money went west, while everyone was selling out and moving on, Winston bought stock like mad. He bought even those companies which had suffered most during the daily trade, so he could pay a relative pittance for their equity. In that way, he scalped those who were caught out in distress and had to watch the force drain out of the market
Then, when the sun came back and the money flowed in, while everyone else was buying eagerly, Winston sold his overnight holdings. He made his greatest profits from those traders who were weighted down with cash, watching it lose momentum in their pockets, and so were hungriest for equity.
And in between, when the market threatened to drown any companies whose anchor chains were an inch too short, Winston Qiang-Phillips shored them up with credit.
So, this morning, he watched the tide come in and marshaled his holdings. He tidied his best wares on the shelf behind his trading position, arranging them alphabetically like book spines. As usual he expected to unload them at a significant uptick over their purchase price in last night's panic selloff.
Qiang-Phillips had some good local coal stocks, grouped together in his energies section. During the six months since he'd bought them in a trading frenzy, the coals had been a quirk on the market. What with the long-standing governmental bans on fossil burning and coking, they were mostly ornamental. But now coal was looking promising again because of rumors about renewed interest in carbon chemistry and fiber structurals. Someone would likely pluck them just as soon as he opened his hand.
Winston owned one lumber stock, a real antiquity. This company had certified title to harvest—not just to manage in perpetuity, but to actually harvest—fourteen acres of third-growth fir in the Cascade Range. That was a gem which one day would trade on its novelty value alone.
He also had a handful of other items, mostly trading instruments and options, but all interesting just the same—especially when the tide was coming in. These were the daily business, the offloads to be handled by nine in the morning. Then he could return his attention, for a few hours at least before sellout time, to his latest personal project.
Qiang-Phillips had scented opportunity in the most recent announcements from the Titan Cartel. They were finally about to bring in the first drop-shipment of liquid methane, which despite the widespread fossil ban was a valuable chemical feedstock for the world's industry. This first shipment—for which the Cartel had announced a firm scheduled arrival in Earth orbit—would prove that their recovery system actually worked. It could be expected to deflate the current high price of natural gas from the Alberta Field Producers Association and so erode the price of that group's joint stock, along with the assets of every other gas collection cooperative and pipeline company on the planet. Time for a contrarian to step in!
Winston Qiang-Phillips had been hoarding his cash for weeks now, taking the inevitable hit on its momentum, in order to be in position to buy and buy and buy. And when the dealers realized that one test shipment, launched a year ago on an automated carrier and only now coming to orbit, does not make for a dependable energy supply—then who would they have to deal with if they wanted to, had to, were dying to buy their way back into the market? Why, Winston Qiang-Phillips, of course, the House of Qiang, Baron of the Gas Fields, Emperor of the Blue Flame, Winston the First.
Contrarians always win. That also was something Grandfather Qiang Nu-Lin had taught him.
Jellied Eels
Lamb Testes in Honey
Flaming Baby Quail
Lark Tongues in Pepper Sauce
Pompeii, August 24, 79 A.D.
Jerry Kozinski sat on the patio of his villa ove
rlooking the Bay of Naples and chewed his breakfast. Although some of the food the kitchen slaves had offered him sounded disgusting as they described it, actually most of the stuff tasted pretty good. The flavors simulated by the Virtuality™ cyber banks were a lot closer to the sterile manufactured proteins and clear processed sugars of Jerry's normal diet than they were to any wild birds snared in the nest and fried in some rancid oil.
Kozinski was a prominent man in Pompeii, owing his wealth partly to family resources—he was a long-lost branch of the Sullae—and partly to the rich Egyptian corn trade. Functioning as a dealer with an imperial monopoly, and humping the market as a sometime speculator, Jerry could turn a profit of anywhere from five hundred to five thousand percent. According to the game script, such huge returns gave him the leisure to sit on his hillside terrace for most of the morning and watch the town and bay below him.
That would be a nice life, except for the heat. The sun was already high by what they called "the eighth hour" here, and not a breath of wind was stirring. Other than a few dogs and stray children, the streets below were deserted: no traveling tinkers or traders or jugglers in the marketplace, no gladiator fights in the amphitheater, no rich senators debating in the forum, no crying beggars, no wandering scholars, nothing of the city life that the script had told him to expect. All die normal townspeople must be indoors, Jerry thought, hiding from the heat.
Where was everyone else, though? Virtuality, Inc.'s promotionals had said hundreds of thousands of gamers were continuously looped into the simulation. The company had promised that Jerry could expect to interact competitively with most of them during the game's twelve-hour course. He didn't know all the rules, certainly, but he hardly thought that most people would pay the huge entry fee to end up a house slave, a child, or a dog—which were all of the active beings he'd seen so far.
Out in the bay, a few fishing smacks and a broad-hulled merchant ship sat becalmed like models glued to a mirror. Only the military galley—it looked like a trireme from here—moved over the water. In the still air Kozinski could hear the beat of its drum and the creak of its oars in their leather slings. How many people would want to be a fisherman or a galley slave, either? And, if so, what kind of a fee had they paid for such a lousy starting position?
The hot, still air felt to Jerry like earthquake weather. Indeed, the game script said the land around here—Campania, it was called—had been buffeted by earthquakes for the past sixteen years. That would be almost all of Jerry's lifetime. Each rumbler was supposed to be worse than the last, and by now he guessed they must be up on the Richter scale with the great quakes of Tokyo and San Francisco. But so far this morning, nothing. The flagstones on the patio didn't even show a pattern of cracks, and he'd looked for those first thing.
Although no one in Pompeii was supposed to know exactly what was coming—except for Jerry and the other virtual presences, of course—clearly everyone expected something pretty awful to happen soon. But still, if most of them were players, why would they be huddling indoors? Why not be out exploring the town and seeking out the possibilities?
Jerry Kozinski sipped a goblet of really delicious red wine, which was guaranteed not to get him drunk, and studied the outline of streets and docks, plazas and roads laid out below him. He was looking for his escape route, of course. By now he had three very promising candidates.
This game was going to be a piece of cake.
Turn
Turn
Turn
Turn
Orbital Slot 37-C at 625 Kilometers, March 13, 2081
The orbit of Day's Ease Geriatric Residence No. 8 was too low by at least a hundred kilometers—or so said the survey report from Azimuth Partners, Inc.
Megan Patterson, R.N.Ast., who was the Day's Ease station manager, shucked the flimsy printout across her desk and watched it take a shallow microgravity arc over the curved surface, blip lightly against the far edge, flip over, and sail off toward the steel bulkhead.
But altitude wasn't the only or the worst problem—or even the hardest one to fix. The API survey had told her that the station's shape was all wrong, too.
Sitting up here in partial gravity, Patterson sometimes found it hard to remember that the floor was not really down but just felt that way. The residence facility's gravity was inertial, not real. And, looking out the portholes to the steady stars and the broad stretch of white, Earthly clouds revolving below them, she could easily forget that the station wasn't built as a complete torus, either.
Day's Ease was actually three pressurized canisters suspended at the ends of a Y-shaped yoke, like an Argentine gaucho's bolas swinging through the sky. At the center of the wye were the universal docking hub, a ring of storage boxes and mechanical facilities at null-gee, and the postsurgical recuperation quarters. Out along each of the three limbs were the gee-rated residences, the hydroponics section, food services, exercise rooms, and anything else that responded well to modest acceleration. These limbs were arranged two long and one short, with the variable lengths corresponding to the moment arm of each attached module. It was not a compact configuration, but it had been cheap to build and easy to launch.
That was the problem, all the way around, Patterson decided: cost-cutting at the home office. Pick a low orbit. Put up a simplified modular structure. Give it a nice, slow turn. Then forget about it and rake in the bucks from either the clients' living trusts or their grateful family members.
The home office had made just one tiny miscalculation. Only one, but it was a doozy. Without understanding that they had zero margin for error, the mechtechs had set this three-legged circus spinning at right angles to the planet's surface instead of parallel to it. Sure, the brochures said this orientation gave every patient an admirable view of the planet they could never go home to. But, more importantly, it was also easier to align and spin a walking wye in orbit than a flat one. Costs, again.
But what the configuration really signified was a long-term instability. With every turn, that one longer module dipped proportionally farther into the upper atmosphere, taking more drag than the other two. Over time—maybe six months, the API estimate said—this drag was going to destabilize the structure. Then the staff and the engineers would have to evacuate all the residents to alternate facilities, bolt everything down, kill the spin, reorient, realign, and respin. And, if that didn't work, they would have to boost to a higher orbit—if one was available, and if the home office would pay for it.
Either way, there went Patterson's budget. Quarterly, annual, bonus and dividend. Shot to hell.
And who was going to get blamed for this snafu? Not the pimpleheads who had mucked up the design of this tin can. Not the bean counters in the back room who had cut corners without a thought. But Megan Patterson, R.N.Ast., that's who!
She stared at the report, which was lying where she'd thrown it, over against the foot of the bulkhead. The flimsy sheets trembled against each other now, making a soft rustling sound.
Sweet Jesus! Patterson hoped that was just a stray draft from the ventilation system—and not the start of a wobble. Her hand dropped against the desktop and felt for random vibrations, but she couldn't sense anything definite.
Or not yet, anyway.
Slice
Fold
Press
Seal
Duquesne Municipal Airport, McKeesport, Pennjersey, March 14
Brian Holdstrup found working with the aluminized, polychain film really tedious. The material was just over one-micron, or point-oh-five mils, thick and clung like a layer of soapsuds to anything it touched. To handle it, Holdstrup had to arrange for cleanroom conditions—but over a floorspace larger than an old-time sailmaker's loft. Which meant renting an entire hangar at the defunct local airport; sealing the doors and windows and the cracks in the corrugated tin ceiling; putting in an airlock, pumps, and filtration equipment; gleaning, scouring, and sanding the floor, walls, and rafters; then evacuating the room and repressurizing with a high partial pre
ssure of pure nitrogen. All of that meant he also had to wear breathing equipment while he worked.
Then Brian had to manipulate the material, strong as it was, with bridge wires, pinpoint airflows, and antistatic paddles. He couldn't use his hands, because the moisture of his fingertips, even through cotton gloves, would draw the tissue so it would wrap around and cling to them like flypaper. Rubberized or plastic gloves, which might block the moisture, would too quickly build up their own static charge.
Holdstrup's sail design was a complicated one, composed of twenty-two weighted vanes in an autogyrating configuration. Once it was launched he had to spin the structure to keep it taut and at maximal reflectivity. Each vane was going to be a kilometer long and a hundred meters wide, made up of the pleated strips he was now cutting and folding, compressing and loading into the launch package.
It was tedious work, all of it. Brian Holdstrup was more than willing to pay for some manual help, but that was against the rules. Not that the particular race he was entering had been announced yet, but all the solar sail competitions followed a pattern: you could enter any structure you liked, so long as you designed and built it yourself.
These competitions were not for the weak, because hauling around square kilometers of the film, even at one-micron's thickness, took muscle. They were not for the easily bored, because packing the sail—all those cuts, folds, and hot-seals—took up to fifteen thousand repeated motions. And they were not for the poor of pocketbook, either, because who would spend a hundred thousand dollars on equipment and materials to win a prize that averaged only one percent of that amount?
At least the competitions did not have any requirements about amateur status. Brian Holdstrup was owner and manager of Photon Power, Inc., as well as the firm's foremost designer. He could only keep ahead of his corporate competitors by entering and winning the Translunar, the Circum-Belter, the Sun Dog, and the other races that made up the decennial calendar. And, with four firsts and a third to his credit so far, his commercial designs now commanded top dollar.
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