by Neil Clarke
Only then would they be moving slowly enough to aerobrake in the planet’s atmosphere, and that would take a few dozen passes before they could ride the ship down on its heatshield to the surface.
If there was a planet. If it had an atmosphere.
ZIA (2120)
As a child he was lord of the dark—finding his way at night, never stumbling, able to read books by starlight; to read also, in faces and landscapes, traces and glimmers that others missed. Darkness was warmth and comfort to him.
A cave in Ephesus. In the Qur’an, Surah Al-Kahf. The sleepers waking after centuries, emerging into a changed world. Trying to spend old coins.
After the horror of his teen years, he’d found that dark was still a friend. Looking through the eyepiece of an observatory telescope, in the Himalayan foothills, in Uttar Pradesh. Describing the cluster of galaxies, one by one, to the astronomer. You see the seventh? What eyes!
Nothing moved but in his mind. Dreams of tenacity and complication. Baffling remnants, consciousness too weak to sort. Every unanswered question of his life, every casual observation, every bit of mental flotsam, tossed together in one desperate, implicate attempt at resolving them all. Things fell; he lunged to catch them. He stood on street corners in an endless night, searching for his shoes, his car, his keys, his wife. His mother chided him in a room lit by incandescent bulbs, dim and flickering like firelight. Galaxies in the eyepiece faded, and he looked up from the eyepiece to a blackened sky. He lay waking, in the dark, now aware of the dream state, returning with such huge reluctance to the life of the body, that weight immovable on its slab.
His eyelid was yanked open. A drop of fluid splashed there. A green line swept across his vision. He caught a breath and it burned in his lungs.
He was awake. Aboard Gypsy. It was bringing him back to life.
But I’m cold. Too cold to shiver. Getting colder as I wake up.
How hollow he felt. In this slight gravity. How unreal. It came to him, in the eclipsing of his dreams and the rising of his surroundings, that the gravity of Earth might be something more profound than the acceleration of a mass, the curvature of spacetime. Was it not an emanation of the planet, a life force? All life on Earth evolved in it, rose from it, fought it every moment, lived and bred and died awash in it. Those tides swept through our cells, the force from Earth, and the gravity of the sun and the gravity of the moon. What was life out here, without that embrace, that permeation, that bondage? Without it, would they wither and die like plants in a shed?
The hollowness came singing, roaring, whining, crackling into his ears. Into his throat and and nose and eyes and skin it came as desiccation. Searing into his mouth. He needed to cough and he couldn’t. His thorax spasmed.
There was an antiseptic moistness in his throat. It stung, but his muscles had loosened. He could breathe. Cold swept from his shoulders down through his torso and he began to shiver uncontrollably.
When he could, he raised a hand. He closed his eyes and held the hand afloat in the parodic gravity, thinking about it, how it felt, how far away it actually was. At last, with hesitation, his eyes opened and came to focus. An old man’s hand, knobby, misshapen at the joints, the skin papery, sagging and hanging in folds. He couldn’t close the fingers. How many years had he slept? He forced on his hand the imagination of a clenched fist. The hand didn’t move.
Oh my god the pain.
Without which, no life. Pain too is an emanation of the planet, of the life force.
It sucked back like a wave, gathering for another concussion. He tried to sit up and passed out.
Nikos Kakopoulos was a short man, just over five feet, stocky but fit. The features of his face were fleshy, slightly comic. He was graying, balding, but not old. In his fifties. He smiled as he said he planned to be around a hundred years from now. His office was full of Mediterranean light. A large Modigliani covered one wall. His money came mostly from aquifer rights. He spent ten percent of it on charities. One such awarded science scholarships. Which is how he’d come to Roger’s attention.
So you see, I am not such a bad guy.
Those foundations are just window dressing. What they once called greenwash.
Zia, said Roger.
Kakopoulos shrugged as if to say, Let him talk, I’ve heard it all. To Zia he said: They do some good after all. They’re a comfort to millions of people.
Drinking water would be more of a comfort.
There isn’t enough to go round. I didn’t create that situation.
You exploit it.
So sorry to say this. Social justice and a civilized lifestyle can’t be done both at once. Not for ten billion people. Not on this planet.
You’ve decided this.
It’s a conclusion based on the evidence.
And you care about this why?
I’m Greek. We invented justice and civilization.
You’re Cypriot. Also, the Chinese would argue that. The Persians. The Egyptians. Not to mention India.
Kakopoulos waved away the first objection and addressed the rest. Of course they would. And England, and Germany, and Italy, and Russia, and the US. They’re arguing as we speak. Me, I’m not going to argue. I’m going to a safe place until the arguing is over. After that, if we’re very lucky, we can have our discussion about civilization and justice.
On your terms.
On terms that might have some meaning.
What terms would those be?
World population under a billion, for starters. Kakopoulos reached across the table and popped an olive into his mouth.
How do you think that’s going to happen? asked Zia.
It’s happening. Just a matter of time. Since I don’t know how much time, I want a safe house for the duration.
How are you going to get up there?
Kakopoulous grinned. When the Chinese acquired Lockheed, I picked up an X-33. It can do Mach 25. I have a spaceport on Naxos. Want a ride?
The VTOL craft looked like the tip of a Delta IV rocket, or of a penis: a blunt, rounded conic. Not unlike Kakopoulos himself. Some outsize Humpty Dumpty.
How do you know him? Zia asked Roger as they boarded.
I’ve been advising him.
You’re advising the man who owns a third of the world’s fresh water?
He owns a lot of things. My first concern is for our project. We need him.
What for?
Roger stared off into space.
He immiserates the Earth, Roger.
We all ten billion immiserate the Earth by being here.
Kakopoulos returned.
Make yourselves comfortable. Even at Mach 25, it takes some time.
It was night, and the Earth was below their window. Rivers of manmade light ran across it. Zia could see the orange squiggle of the India-Pakistan border, all three thousand floodlit kilometers of it. Then the ship banked and the window turned to the stars.
Being lord of the dark had a touch of clairvoyance in it. The dark seldom brought surprise to him. Something bulked out there and he felt it. Some gravity about it called to him from some future. Sun blazed forth behind the limb of the Earth, but the thing was still in Earth’s shadow. It made a blackness against the Milky Way. Then sunlight touched it. Its lines caught light: the edges of panels, tanks, heat sinks, antennas. Blunt radar-shedding angles. A squat torus shape under it all. It didn’t look like a ship. It looked like a squashed donut to which a junkyard had been glued. It turned slowly on its axis.
My safe house, said Kakopoulos.
It was, indeed, no larger than a house. About ten meters long, twice that across. It had cost a large part of Kakopoulos’s considerable fortune. Which he recouped by manipulating and looting several central banks. As a result, a handful of small countries, some hundred million people, went off the cliff-edge of modernity into an abyss of debt peonage.
While they waited to dock with the thing, Kakopoulos came and sat next to Zia.
Listen, my friend—
I
’m not your friend.
As you like, I don’t care. I don’t think you’re stupid. When I said my foundations make people feel better, I meant the rich, of course. You’re Pakistani?
Indian actually.
But Muslim. Kashmir?
Zia shrugged.
Okay. We’re not so different, I think. I grew up in the slums of Athens after the euro collapsed. The histories, the videos, they don’t capture it. I imagine Kashmir was much worse. But we each found a way out, no? So tell me, would you go back to that? No, you don’t have to answer. You wouldn’t. Not for anything. You’d sooner die. But you’re not the kind of asshole who writes conscience checks. Or thinks your own self is wonderful enough to deserve anything. So where does that leave a guy like you in this world?
Fuck you.
Kakopoulos patted Zia’s hand and smiled. I love it when people say fuck you to me. You know why? It means I won. They’ve got nothing left but their fuck you. He got up and went away.
The pilot came in then, swamp-walking the zero g in his velcro shoes, and said they’d docked.
The ship massed about a hundred metric tons. A corridor circled the inner circumference, floor against the outer hull, most of the space taken up by hibernation slabs for a crew of twenty. Once commissioned, it would spin on its axis a few times a minute to create something like lunar gravity. They drifted around it slowly, pulling themselves by handholds.
This, Kakopoulos banged a wall, is expensive. Exotic composites, all that aerogel. Why so much insulation?
Roger let “expensive” pass unchallenged. Zia didn’t.
You think there’s nothing more important than money.
Kakopoulos turned, as if surprised Zia was still there. He said, There are many things more important than money. You just don’t get any of them without it.
Roger said, Even while you’re hibernating, the ship will radiate infrared. That’s one reason you’ll park at a Lagrange point, far enough away not to attract attention. When you wake up and start using energy, you ‘re going to light up like a Christmas tree. And you’re going to hope that whatever is left on Earth or in space won’t immediately blow you out of the sky. The insulation will hide you somewhat.
At one end of the cramped command center was a micro-apartment.
What’s this, Nikos?
Ah, my few luxuries. Music, movies, artworks. We may be out here awhile after we wake up. Look at my kitchen.
A range?
Propane, but it generates 30,000 BTU!
That’s insane. You’re not on holiday here.
Look, it’s vented, only one burner, I got a great engineer, you can examine the plans—
Get rid of it.
What! Kakopoulos yelled. Whose ship is this!
Roger pretended to think for a second. Do you mean who owns it, or who designed it?
Do you know how much it cost to get that range up here?
I can guess to the nearest million.
When I wake up I want a good breakfast!
When you wake up you’ll be too weak to stand. Your first meal will be coming down tubes.
Kakopoulos appeared to sulk.
Nikos, what is your design specification here?
I just want a decent omelette.
I can make that happen. But the range goes.
Kakopoulous nursed his sulk, then brightened. Gonna be some meteor, that range. I’ll call my observatory, have them image it.
Later, when they were alone, Zia said: All right, Roger. I’ve been very patient.
Patient? Roger snorted.
How can that little pustule help us?
That’s our ship. We’re going to steal it.
Later, Zia suggested that they christen the ship the Fuck You.
Eighty years later, Zia was eating one of Kakopoulos’s omelettes. Freeze-dried egg, mushrooms, onion, tarragon. Microwaved with two ounces of water. Not bad. He had another.
Mach 900, asshole, he said aloud.
Most of the crew were dead. Fungus had grown on the skin stretched like drums over their skulls, their ribs, their hips.
He’d seen worse. During his mandatory service, as a teenager in the military, he’d patrolled Deccan slums. He’d seen parents eating their dead children. Pariah dogs fat as sheep roamed the streets. Cadavers, bones, skulls, were piled in front of nearly every house. The cloying carrion smell never lifted. Hollowed-out buildings housed squatters and corpses equally, darkened plains of them below fortified bunkers lit like Las Vegas, where the driving bass of party music echoed the percussion of automatic weapons and rocket grenades.
Now his stomach rebelled, but he commanded it to be still as he swallowed some olive oil. Gradually the chill in his core subsided.
He needed to look at the sky. The ship had two telescopes: a one-meter honeycomb mirror for detail work and a wide-angle high-res CCD camera. Zoomed fully out, the camera took in about eighty degrees. Ahead was the blazing pair of Alpha Centauri A and B, to the eye more than stars but not yet suns. He’d never seen anything like them. Brighter than Venus, bright as the full moon, but such tiny disks. As he watched, the angle of them moved against the ship’s rotation.
He swept the sky, looking for landmarks. But the stars were wrong. What had happened to Orion? Mintaka had moved. The belt didn’t point to Sirius, as it should. A brilliant blue star off Orion’s left shoulder outshone Betelgeuse, and then he realized. That was Sirius. Thirty degrees from where it should be. Of course: it was eight light-years from Earth. They had come half that distance, and, like a nearby buoy seen against a far shore, it had changed position against the farther stars.
More distant stars had also shifted, but not as much. He turned to what he still absurdly thought of as “north.” The Big Dipper was there. The Little Dipper’s bowl was squashed. Past Polaris was Cassiopeia, the zigzag W, the queen’s throne. And there a new, bright star blazed above it, as if that W had grown another zag. Could it be a nova? He stared, and the stars of Cassiopeia circled this strange bright one slowly as the ship rotated. Then he knew: the strange star was Sol. Our Sun.
That was when he felt it, in his body: they were really here.
From the beginning Roger had a hand—a heavy, guiding hand—in the design of the ship. Not for nothing had he learned the Lab’s doctrine of dual use. Not for nothing had he cultivated Kakopoulos’s acquaintance. Every feature that fitted the ship for interstellar space was a plausible choice for Kak’s purpose: hibernators, cosmic-ray shielding, nuclear rocket, hardened computers, plutonium pile and Stirling engine.
In the weeks prior to departure, they moved the ship to a more distant orbit, too distant for Kak’s X-33 to reach. There they jettisoned quite a bit of the ship’s interior. They added their fusion engine, surrounded the vessel with fuel sleds, secured anti-proton traps, stowed the magsail, loaded the seed bank and a hundred other things.
They were three hundred AU out from Alpha Centauri. Velocity was one-thousandth c. The magsail was programmed to run for two more years, slowing them by half again. But lately their deceleration had shown variance. The magsail was running at higher current than planned. Very close to max spec. That wasn’t good. Logs told him why, and that was worse.
He considered options, none good. The sail was braking against the interstellar medium, stray neutral atoms of hydrogen. No one knew for sure how it would behave once it ran into Alpha’s charged solar wind. Nor just where that wind started. The interstellar medium might already be giving way to it. If so, the count of galactic cosmic rays would be going down and the temperature of charged particles going up.
He checked. Definitely maybe on both counts.
He’d never liked this plan, its narrow margins of error. Not that he had a better one. That was the whole problem: no plan B. Every intricate, fragile, untried part of it had to work. He’d pushed pretty hard for a decent margin of error in this deceleration stage and the subsequent maneuvering in the system— what a tragedy it would be to come to grief so close, wi
thin sight of shore—and now he saw that margin evaporating.
Possibly the sail would continue to brake in the solar wind. If only they could have tested it first.
Zia didn’t trust materials.Or, rather: he trusted them to fail. Superconductors, carbon composite, silicon, the human body. Problem was, you never knew just how or when they’d fail.
One theory said that a hydrogen wall existed somewhere between the termination shock and the heliopause, where solar wind gave way to interstellar space. Three hundred AU put Gypsy in that dicey zone.
It would be prudent to back off the magsail current. That would lessen their decel, and they needed all they could get, they had started it too late, but they also needed to protect the sail and run it as long as possible.
Any change to the current had to happen slowly. It would take hours or possibly days. The trick was not to deform the coil too much in the process, or create eddy currents that could quench the superconducting field.
The amount of power he had available was another issue. The plutonium running the Stirling engine had decayed to about half its original capacity.
He shut down heat in the cabin to divert more to the Stirling engine. He turned down most of the LED lighting, and worked in the semidark, except for the glow of the monitor. Programmed a gentle ramp up in current.
Then he couldn’t keep his eyes open.
At Davos, he found himself talking to an old college roommate. Carter Hall III was his name; he was something with the UN now, and with the Council for Foreign Relations—an enlightened and condescending asshole. They were both Harvard ‘32, but Hall remained a self-appointed Brahmin, generously, sincerely, and with vast but guarded amusement, guiding a Sudra through the world that was his by birthright. Never mind the Sudra was Muslim.