by Unknown
This spacesuit was light, thin, too comfortable. Like a toddler’s fleece playsuit with slippers and gloves. Even the helmet was soft. He was more used to heavy Russian engineering, but whatever. They’d argued over whether to include a suit at all. He’d argued against. EVA had looked unlikely, an unlucky possibility. So he was happy now to have anything.
The soles and palms were sticky, a clever off-the-shelf idea inspired by lizards. Billions of carbon nanotubes lined them. The Van der Waals molecular force made them stick to any surface. He tested it by walking on the interior walls. Hands or feet held you fast, with or against the ship’s rotational gravity. You had to kind of toe-and-heel to walk, but it was easy enough.
ΠoũdeM. Let’s go. He climbed into the hatch and cycled it. As the pressure dropped, the suit expanded and felt more substantial. He tested the grip of his palms on the hull before rising fully out of the hatch. Then his feet came up and gripped, and he stood.
In darkness and immensity stiller than he could comprehend. Interstellar space. The frozen splendor of the galactic core overhead. Nothing appeared to move.
He remembered a still evening on a lake, sitting with a friend on a dock, legs over the edge. They talked as the sky darkened, looking up as the stars came out. Only when it was fully dark did he happen to look down. The water was so still, stars were reflected under his feet. He almost lurched over the edge of the dock in surprise.
The memory tensed his legs, and he realized the galactic core was moving slowly around the ship. Here on the outside of the ship its spin-induced gravity was reversed. He stood upright but felt pulled toward the stars.
He faced forward. Tenth of a light-year from Alpha, its two stars still appeared as one. They were brighter than Venus in the Earth’s sky. They cast his faint but distinct shadow on the hull.
They were here. They had come this far. On this tiny splinter of human will forging through vast, uncaring space. It was remarkable.
A line of light to his left flashed. Some microscopic particle ionized by the ship’s magnetic shield. He tensed again at this evidence of their movement and turned slowly, directing his beam over the hull. Its light caught a huge gash through one of the hydrogen tanks. Edges of the gash had failed to be covered by a dozen geckos, frozen in place by hydrogen ice. That was bad. Worse, it hadn’t been in the log. Maybe it was from the impact Sophie had referred to. He would have to see how bad it was after freeing the magsail.
He turned, and toed and heeled his way carefully aft. Now ahead of him was our Sun, still one of the brightest stars, the heavens turning slowly around it. He approached the circular bay that held the magsail. His light showed six large spools of cable, each a meter and a half across and a meter thick. About five metric tons in all, seventy kilometers of thin superconductor wire. Current injection should have caused the spools to unreel under the force of the electric field. But it wasn’t getting current, or it was somehow stuck. He was going to have to . . . well, he wasn’t sure.
Then he saw it. Almost laughed at the simplicity and familiarity of it. Something like a circuit breaker, red and green buttons, the red one lit. He squatted at the edge of the bay and found he could reach the thing. He felt cold penetrate his suit. He really ought to go back inside and spend a few hours troubleshooting, read the fucking manual, but the cold and the flimsy spacesuit and the immensity convinced him otherwise. He slapped the green button.
It lit. The cable accepted current. He saw it lurch. As he smiled and stood, the current surging in the coils sent its field through the soles of his spacesuit, disrupting for a moment the molecular force holding them to the hull. In that moment, the angular velocity of the rotating ship was transmitted to his body and he detached, moving away from the ship at a stately three meters per second. Beyond his flailing feet, the cables of the magsail began leisurely to unfurl.
As he tumbled the stars rolled past. He’d seen Orion behind the ship in the moment he detached, and as he tumbled he looked for it, for something to grab on to, but he never saw it or the ship again. So he didn’t see the huge coil of wire reach its full extension, nor the glow of ionization around the twenty-kilometer circle when it began to drag against the interstellar medium, nor how the ship itself started to lag against the background stars. The ionization set up a howl across the radio spectrum, but his radio was off, so he didn’t hear that. He tumbled in silence in the bowl of the heavens at his fixed velocity, which was now slightly greater than the ship’s. Every so often the brightness of Alpha crossed his view. He was going to get there first.
4.
Their biggest single problem was fuel. To cross that enormous distance in less than a human lifetime, even in this stripped-down vessel, required an inconceivable amount of energy. Ten to the twenty-first joules. 250 trillion kilowatt-hours. Twenty years’ worth of all Earth’s greedy energy consumption. The mass of the fuel, efficient though it was, would be several times the mass of the ship. And to reach cruising speed was only half of it; they had to decelerate when they reached Alpha C, doubling the fuel. It was undoable.
Until someone found an old paper on magnetic sails. A superconducting loop of wire many kilometers across, well charged, could act as a drag brake against the interstellar medium. That would cut the fuel requirement almost in half. Done that way, it was just possible, though out on the ragged edge of what was survivable. This deceleration would take ten years.
For their primary fuel, Roger pointed to the hundreds of thousands of bombs in orbit. His bombs. His intellectual property. Toss them out the back and ignite them. A Blumlein pulse-forming line—they called it the “bloom line”—a self-generated magnetic vise, something like a Z-pinch—would direct nearly all the blast to exhaust velocity. The vise, called into being for the nanoseconds of ignition, funneled all that force straight back. Repeat every minute. Push the compression ratio up, you won’t get many neutrons.
In the end they had two main engines: first, the antiproton-fusion monster to get them up to speed. It could only be used for the first year; any longer and the antiprotons would decay. Then the magsail would slow them most of the way, until they entered the system.
For the last leg, a gas-core nuclear rocket to decelerate in the system, which required carrying a large amount of hydrogen. They discussed scooping hydrogen from the interstellar medium as they traveled, but Roger vetoed it: not off the shelf. They didn’t have the time or means to devise a new technology. Anyway, the hydrogen would make, in combination with their EM shield, an effective barrier to cosmic rays. Dual use.
And even so, everything had to be stretched to the limit: the mass of the ship minimized, the human lifetime lengthened, the fuel leveraged every way possible.
The first spacecraft ever to leave the solar system, Pioneer 10, had used Jupiter’s gravity to boost its velocity. As it flew by, it stole kinetic energy from the planet; its small mass sped up a lot; Jupiter’s stupendous mass slowed unnoticeably.
They would do the same thing to lose speed. They had the combined mass of two stars orbiting each other, equal to two thousand Jupiters. When Gypsy was to arrive in 2113, the stars in their mutual orbit would be as close together as they ever got: 11 astronomical units. Gypsy would fly by the B star and pull one last trick: retrofire the nuclear rocket deep in its gravity well; that would multiply the kinetic effect of the propellant severalfold. And then they’d repeat that maneuever around A. The relative closeness of 11 AU was still as far as Earth to Saturn, so even after arrival, even at their still-great speed, the dual braking maneuver would take over a year.
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 has 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.