“Come on.” Myra clambered out of the car, and helped her mother follow stiffly.
It was March, but even so the heat hammered down on Bisesa. They were on a stretch of tarmac—not a road or a parking lot, it looked more like a runway, stretching off into the distance, lined with blockhouses. On the horizon she saw gantries, some of them orange with rust, so remote they were misted with distance. To the north—it had to be that way, judging from the wind blowing off the sea—she saw something glimmering, a kind of line scratched onto the sky, tilted a little away from the vertical. Hard to see, elusive, perhaps it was some kind of contrail.
There couldn’t be any doubt where she was. “Cape Canaveral, right?”
Myra grinned. “Where else? Remember you brought me here on a tourist trip when I was six?”
“I expect it’s changed a bit since then. This is turning into quite a ride, Myra.”
“Then welcome back to Canaveral.” A young man approached them; a smart suitcase trundled after him. Ident-tattooed, he was sweating inside a padded orange jumpsuit plastered with NASA logos.
“What are you, a tourist guide?”
“Hi, Alexei,” Myra said. “Don’t mind my mother. After nineteen years she got out of bed on the wrong side.”
He stuck out his hand. “Alexei Carel. Good to meet you, Ms. Dutt. I suppose I am your guide for the day—sort of.”
Twenty-five or twenty-six, he was a good-looking boy, Bisesa thought, with an open face under a scalp that was shaven close, though black hair sprouted thickly, like a five o’clock shadow. He looked oddly uncomfortable, though, as if he wasn’t used to being outdoors. Bisesa felt like an ambassador from the past, and wanted to make a good impression on this sunstorm boomer. She gripped his warm hand. “Call me Bisesa.”
“We don’t have much time.” He snapped his fingers and the suitcase opened. It contained two more orange suits, neatly folded, and more gear: blankets, water bottles, packets of dried food, what might have been an assembly-kit chemical toilet, a water purifying kit, oxygen masks.
Bisesa looked at this junk with apprehension. “It’s like the gear we used to take on field hikes in Afghanistan. We’re taking a ride, are we?”
“That we are.” Alexei hauled the jumpsuits out of the suitcase. “Put these on, please. This corner of the facility is low on surveillance, but the sooner we’re in camouflage the better.”
“Right here?”
“Come on, Mum.” Myra was already unzipping her blouse.
The jumpsuit was easy to put on; it seemed to wriggle into place, and Bisesa wondered if it had some limited smartness of its own. Alexei handed her boots, and she found gloves and a kind of balaclava helmet in a pocket.
In the Florida sun, once she was zipped up she was hot. But evidently she was headed somewhere much colder.
Myra bundled their clothes into a smaller pack she took from the car, which also contained their spare underwear and toiletries. She threw the pack into the suitcase, which folded closed. Then she patted the car. Empty, it closed itself up and rolled away.
Alexei grinned. “All set?”
“As we’ll ever be,” Myra said.
Alexei snapped his fingers again. The tarmac under Bisesa’s feet shuddered.
And a great slab of it dropped precipitately, taking the three of them and the suitcase down into darkness. A metal lid closed over them with a clang.
“Shit,” Bisesa said.
“Sorry,” Alexei said. “Meant for cargo, not people.”
Fluorescents lit up, revealing a concrete corridor.
10: LAUNCH COMPLEX 39
Alexei led them to an open-topped vehicle a little like a golf cart.
They clambered aboard. Bisesa felt bulky and clumsy, moving in her jumpsuit. Even the suitcase was more graceful than she was.
The cart moved off smoothly down the tunnel. It was long and crudely cut, and it stretched off into a darkness dimly lit by widely spaced fluorescent tubes. There was a musty smell, but at least it was a little cooler down here.
“This is kind of a cargo conduit,” Alexei said. “Not meant for passengers.”
“But it’s away from prying eyes,” Bisesa said.
“You got it. It’s a couple of klicks but we’ll be there in no time.”
His accent was basically American, Bisesa thought, but with an odd tang of French, long vowels and rolled r’s. “Where are we going?”
“You’ve slept through the rebuilding, haven’t you? We’re heading for LC-39.”
Faint memories stirred in Bisesa’s head. “Launch Complex 39. Where they launched the Apollos from.”
“And later the space shuttles, yeah.”
“Now it’s used for something else entirely,” Myra said. “You’ll see.”
“Of course it had to be LC-39 they used,” Alexei said. “As indeed it had to be Canaveral. I mean, it’s not an unsuitable site, especially now they have the hurricanes licked. There are better locations, closer to the equator, but no, it had to be here. The irony is that to launch the new Saturns that are taking the Apollo retreads into orbit, they had to build a new pad altogether.”
Bisesa still didn’t know what they were talking about. They used the pad for what? “Carel—how do I know that name?”
“You may have met my father. Bill Carel? He worked with Professor Siobhan McGorran.”
It was a long time since Bisesa had heard that name. Siobhan had been Britain’s Astronomer Royal at the time of the sunstorm, and had ended up playing a significant role in mankind’s response to the crisis—and in Bisesa’s own destiny.
“My father was with her as a graduate student. They worked together on quintessence studies.”
“On what?…Never mind.”
“That was before the sunstorm. Now Dad’s a full professor himself.” The cart slowed. “Here we go.” He hopped nimbly off the cart before it had stopped. The women and the suitcase followed a bit more cautiously.
They gathered on a block of tarmac. A lid opened above them with a metallic snap, revealing a slab of blue sky.
Alexei said, “We shouldn’t be challenged aboveground. If we are, let me do the talking. Hold tight, now.” He snapped his fingers.
The tarmac block became an elevator that surged upward with a violence that made Bisesa stagger.
They emerged into sunlight. Alexei had seemed more comfortable underground; now he flinched from the open sky.
Bisesa glanced around, trying to get her bearings. They were at the focus of roads that snaked out over the flat coastal plain of Canaveral, crammed with streams of vehicles, mostly trucks. There was even a kind of monorail system along which a train of podlike compartments zipped, glistening and futuristic. All this traffic poured into this place.
And before her was a vast rusting slab, a platform that reminded her oddly of an oil rig, but stranded on the land, and mounted on tremendous caterpillar tracks. The crude metal shell of the thing was stamped with logos: mostly “Skylift Consortium,” a name that rang faint bells. Close by stood more strange assemblies, squat tubes that stood erect in mobile stands, like cannon pointing up at the pale blue sky.
“This platform looks for all the world like one of those old crawlers they used to use to haul the Saturns and the shuttles out to the pad.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Alexei said. “A mobile launch platform, reused.”
“And what are those cannon? Weapons?”
“No,” Alexei said. “They’re the power supply.”
“For what?”
Myra said gently, “Things have changed, Mum. Look up.”
Mounted on top of the big crawler was what looked like a minor industrial facility, where unlikely-looking machines rolled around in a kind of choreography. They seemed to be trucks, basically, but with solar-cell wings on their flanks, and on their roofs were pulleylike mechanisms that made them look like stranded cable-cars. Their hulls were all stamped with the Skylift logo.
These peculiar engines wer
e lining up before a kind of ribbon, shining silver, looking no wider than Bisesa’s hand, that rose up from the platform. Each truck in turn approached the ribbon, dipped its pulley spindle, clung to the ribbon, and then hauled itself off the ground, rising rapidly.
Bisesa stepped back and lifted her face, trying to see where the ribbon went. It rose on up; Bisesa could see the trucks climbing it like beads on a necklace. The ribbon arced upward, narrowing with perspective, becoming a shining thread tilted slightly from the vertical, a scratch ruled across the sky. She tipped her head back higher, looking for whatever was holding the ribbon up—
Nothing was holding it up.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “A space elevator.”
Alexei seemed interested in her reaction. “We call it Jacob’s Ladder. In 2069, it’s an everyday miracle, Bisesa. Welcome to the future. Come on, time to find our ride. Are you up to a little climbing?”
They had to scramble up rusty rungs, fixed to the side of the mobile platform. Bisesa struggled, Hibernaculum-enfeebled, encased in her suit. The others took care of her, Alexei going ahead, Myra following.
Once on the upper surface of the platform they gave her a few seconds to catch her breath. The trucks rolled to and fro in their orderly way, their motors whirring gently.
Embarrassed, she tried to say something intelligent. “Why use a crawler?”
Alexei said, “It’s best to keep the base of your elevator mobile. Most of them are based on facilities at sea, actually—reused oil rigs and the like—including Bandara, the first.”
“Bandara?”
“The Aussie elevator, off Perth. They call it Bandara now. Named for an Aboriginal legend of a world tree.”
“Why do you need to move your base? In case a hurricane comes?”
“Well, yes, though as I said they’ve got hurricanes pretty much licked these days.” He glanced at the sky. “But further up there are other hazards. Relic satellites in low Earth orbit. Even NEOs. Near–Earth objects. Asteroids. This thing goes a long way up, Bisesa, and has to deal with a lot of perils along the way. Are you ready to move on?”
He brought them to one of the trucks. He called it a “spider.” It had solar-cell wings folded up against its flanks, and that complicated pulley mechanism on its roof. Its transparent hull was loaded up with some kind of cargo, palettes and boxes. The spider was actually moving, though slower than walking pace, rolling in a line of others identical save for registration numbers stamped on its hull—the spiders were making for the thread in a kind of complicated spiral queuing system, Bisesa saw.
Alexei walked alongside the spider. He dug a plastic disc the size of a hockey puck out of his pocket, and slapped it to the spider’s hull. “Just give it a moment to break through the protocols and establish its interface—” He briskly leapt up onto the spider’s roof, and stuck another hockey puck to the pulley mechanism up there. By the time he was down on the ground again a transparent door had slid back, and he grinned. “We’re in. Myra, can you give me a hand?” He jumped easily inside the hull, and began to bundle the cargo carelessly out of the door. Myra helped by shoving it aside.
“Just so I’m clear,” Bisesa said uncertainly, “we shouldn’t be doing this, should we? In fact we’re stowing away in a cargo truck.”
“It’s human-rated,” Alexei said confidently. “Pressurized. Good radiation shielding, and we’ll need it; we’ll be spending rather a long time in the van Allen belts. We’ll be fine with the gear I brought along. It was thought best to get you off the planet as fast as possible, Bisesa.”
“Why? Myra, are you on the run? Am I?”
“Sort of,” Myra said.
Alexei said, “Let’s move it. We’re nearly at the ribbon.”
Once the cargo was cleared, Alexei summoned his suitcase. It extended little hydraulic legs to jump without difficulty into the spider’s hull. Myra followed, and then only Bisesa was walking alongside the trundling spider.
Mura held out her hand. “Mum? Come on. It’s an easy step.”
Bisesa looked around, beyond the jungle of spiders, to the blue sky of Canaveral, the distant gantries. She had an odd premonition that she might never come this way again. Might never set foot on Earth again. She took a deep breath; even among the scents of oil and electricity, she could smell the salt of the ocean.
Then she stepped deliberately off the crawler platform and into the hull, one step, two. Myra gave her a hug, welcoming her aboard.
The hull’s interior was bare, but it was meant for at least occasional human use. There was a handrail at waist height, and little fold-down seats embedded in the walls. The view through the transparent hull was obscured by those big folded-away solar panel wings.
Alexei was all business. He spread a softscreen over the inner hull, tapped it, and the door slid shut. “Gotcha.” He took a deep breath. “Canned air,” he said. “Nothing like it.” He seemed relieved to be shut up in the pod.
Bisesa asked, “You’re a Spacer?”
“Not strictly. Born on Earth, but I’ve lived most of my life off the planet. I guess I’m used to environments you can control. Out there in the raw, it’s a little—clamoring.” He reached up and peeled his tattoo off his face.
Bisesa touched her cheek, and found her own tattoo came away like a layer of wax. She tucked it in a pocket of her suit.
Alexei advised them to sit down. Bisesa pulled down a seat, and found a narrow pull-out plastic belt that she clipped around her waist. Myra followed suit, looking apprehensive.
The spiders before them in the line were clearing away now, revealing the ribbon, a vertical line of silver, dead straight.
Alexei said, “What’s going to happen is that our spider will grab onto the ribbon with the roller assembly above our heads. Okay? As soon as it has traction it will start to climb. You’ll feel some acceleration.”
“How much?” Bisesa asked.
“Only half a G or so. And only for about ten seconds. After that, once we hit our top speed, we’ll climb smoothly.”
“And what’s the top speed?”
“Oh, two hundred klicks an hour. The ribbon’s actually rated for twice that. I’ve disabled the speed inhibitor, if we need it.”
“Let’s hope that’s not necessary,” Bisesa said dryly.
Myra reached over and slipped her hand into her mother’s. “Do you remember how we went to see the opening of the Aussievator? It was just after the sunstorm. I was eighteen, I think. That was where I got to know Eugene again. Now there are elevators all over the world.”
“It was quite a day. And so is this.”
Myra squeezed her hand. “Glad I woke you up yet?”
“I’m reserving judgment.” But her grin was fierce. Who could resist this?
Alexei watched this interplay uncertainly.
They were rolling toward the ribbon. Over their heads, with a clumsy clunk, the pulley assembly unfolded itself. The ribbon really was narrow, no more than four or five centimeters across. It seemed impossible that it could support the weight of this car, let alone hundreds—thousands?—of others. But the spider trundled forward without hesitation.
The roller assembly tipped up, closed itself up around the ribbon, and, with a surge like a punch in the belly, the spider leapt skyward.
11: RIBBON
In that first moment they left the spider farm behind, and were up and out in the bright sunlight. Glancing up, Bisesa saw the ribbon arrowing off into invisibility in a cloudless sky, with the bright pearls of other spiders going ahead of her, up into the unknown.
And when she looked down, peering around the obstruction of the solar panels, she saw the world falling away from her, and a tremendous view of the Cape opening up. She shielded her eyes from the sun. There were the gantries and blockhouses, and the straight-line roads traveled by generations of astronauts. A spaceplane of some kind rested on a runway, a black-and-white moth. And a bit further on a white needle stood tall beside a rusted gantry. It had to b
e a Saturn V, perhaps bearing a recreation of Apollo 10, the next precursor of the century-old Moon landings. But she had already risen higher than the Saturn’s needle nose, already higher than the astronauts climbing their gantries to their Moon ships.
The ascent was rapid, and just kept going. Soon she seemed able to see down the beach for kilometers. Canaveral looked more water than land, a skim of earth on the silver hide of the great ocean that opened up to the east. And she saw cars and trucks parked up on the roads and beside the beach, with tiny American flags fluttering from their aerials.
“People still come to see,” Alexei said, grinning. “Quite a spectacle when the Saturns go up, I’m told. But the Ladder is more impressive, in its way—”
There was a jolt.
“Sorry about that,” Alexei said. “End of the acceleration.” He tapped his softscreen, and a simple display lit up, showing altitude, speed, air pressure, time. “Three hundred meters high, speed maxed out, and from now on it’s a smooth ride all the way up.”
The ground fell away, the historic clutter of Canaveral already diminishing to a map.
A minute into the journey, four kilometers high, and the world was starting to curve, the eastern ocean horizon an immense arc. And with a snap the big solar-cell wings folded down flat.
“I don’t get it,” Bisesa said. “This is for power? The solar cells seem to be on the underside.”
“That’s the idea,” Alexei said. “The spider’s power comes from ground-based lasers.”
“You saw them, Mum,” Myra said.
“You leave your power supply on the ground. Okay. So how long is the ride?”
“To beyond geosynch? All the way out to our drop-off point? Around twelve days,” Alexei said.
“Twelve days in this box?” And Bisesa didn’t like the sound of that phrase, drop-off.
“This is a big structure, Mum,” Myra said, but she was evidently a novice herself and didn’t sound convinced.
A few more minutes and they were eight kilometers high, already higher than most aircraft would fly, and there was a clunk, the mildest of shudders. Over their heads the pulley mechanism alarmingly reconfigured itself, bringing a different set of wheels and tracks into play.
A Time Odyssey Omnibus Page 68