by Paula Guran
They acquired frozen zygotes of some ten thousand animal species, from bacteria to primates. Hundred thousands more complete DNA sequences in a data library, and a genome printer. Nothing like the genetic diversity of Earth, even in its present state, but enough, perhaps, to reboot such diversity.
At Roger’s lab, panels of hydrogenous carbon-composite, made to shield high-orbit craft from cosmic rays and to withstand temperatures of two thousand degrees Celsius, went missing. Quite a lot of silica aerogel as well.
At a sister lab, a researcher put them in touch with a contractor from whom they purchased, quite aboveboard, seventy kilometers of lightweight, high-current-density superconducting cable.
After a year, Roger decided that their web had grown too large to remain secure. He didn’t like the number of unused keys going out. He didn’t like the page patterns he was seeing. He didn’t consult with the others, he just shut it down.
But they had their pieces.
SERGEI (2118)
Eat, drink, shit. That’s all he did for the first day or three. Water tasted funny. Seventy-seven years might have viled it, or his taste buds. Life went on, including the ending of it. Vital signs of half the crew were flat. He considered disposing of bodies, ejecting them, but number one, he couldn’t be sure they were dead; number two, he couldn’t propel them hard enough to keep them from making orbit around the ship, which was funny but horrible; and finally, it would be unpleasant and very hard work that would tire him out. An old man—he surely felt old, and the calendar would back him up—needs to reserve his strength. So he let them lie on their slabs.
The logs told a grim story. They were slow. To try to make up for lost time, Sophie had reprogrammed the magsail to deploy later and to run at higher current. Another steward had been wakened at the original deployment point, to confirm their speed and position, and to validate the decision to wait. Sergei didn’t agree with that, and he especially didn’t like the handwaving over when to ignite the nuclear rocket in-system, but it was done: They’d gone the extra years at speed and now they needed to start decelerating hard.
CURRENT INJECTION FAILED. MAGSAIL NOT DEPLOYED.
He tapped the screen to cycle through its languages. Stopped at the Cyrillic script, and tapped the speaker, just so he could hear spoken Russian.
So he had to fix the magsail. Current had flowed on schedule from inside, but the sail wasn’t charging or deploying. According to telltales, the bay was open but the superconducting cable just sat there. That meant EVA. He didn’t like it, but there was no choice. It’s what he was here for. Once it was done he’d shower again under that pathetic lukewarm stream, purge his bowels, get back in the Mylar suit, and go under for another, what, eight more years, a mere nothing, we’re almost there. Ghost Planet Hope.
He was the only one onboard who’d been a career astronaut. Roger had conveyed a faint class disapproval about that, but needed the expertise. Sergei had been one of the gene-slushed orbital jockeys who pushed bomb sleds around. He knew the feel of zero G, of sunlight on one side of you and absolute cold on the other. He knew how it felt when the particle beam from Shackleton swept over you to push you and the sleds into a new orbit. And you saluted and cut the herds, and kept whatever more you might know to yourself.
Which in Sergei’s case was quite a bit. Sergei knew orbital codes and protocols far beyond his pay grade; he could basically move anything in orbit to or from anywhere. But only Sergei, so Sergei thought, knew that. How Roger learned it remained a mystery.
To his great surprise, Sergei learned that even he hadn’t known the full extent of his skills. How easy it had been to steal half a million bombs. True, the eternal war economy was so corrupt that materiel was supposed to disappear; something was wrong if it didn’t. Still, he would never have dared anything so outrageous on his own. Despite Roger’s planning, he was sweating the day he moved the first sled into an unauthorized orbit. But days passed, then weeks and months, as sled followed sled into new holding orbits. In eighteen months they had all their fuel. No traps had sprung, no alarms tripped. Sophie managed to make the manifests look okay. And he wondered again at what the world had become. And what he was in it.
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.
Пойдем. 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. Two hundred fifty 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: eleven 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 maneuver around A. The relative closeness of elevenAU 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 Q’uran, 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 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 greying, 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 was 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.
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br /> 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 U.S. 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.