And then, suddenly, the ribbon itself changed, from a narrow strip the width of Bisesa’s hand to a sheet as wide as an opened-out newspaper. It was sharply curved, she saw. Their spider now clung to one outer edge of the ribbon.
Alexei said, “This is the standard width of the ribbon, most of the way to orbit. It’s kept narrower in the lower atmosphere because of the threat regime down there. Of course most of the bad weather is kept away nowadays. The ribbon’s worst problems actually come when they launch one of those Saturns; the whole damn earth shakes, and I can tell you there’s a lot of grumbling about that.”
Ten kilometers, twelve, fifteen; the distance simply peeled away. Earth’s curve became more pronounced, and the sky above Bisesa’s head started to fade down to a deeper blue. She was above the bulk of the atmosphere already, she realized.
Another abrupt transition came when the ribbon turned gold: a plating to protect it from the corrosive effects of high-altitude atomic oxygen, Alexei said, ionized gas in Earth’s wispy upper air.
And still they rose and rose.
“So let’s get comfortable.” Alexei ordered his suitcase to open. “The pressure will drop to its spaceside mix—low pressure, a third atmospheric, but high on oxygen. In the meantime I brought oxygen masks.” He showed them, and a rack of bottles. “And it’s going to get cold. Your jumpsuits ought to keep you warm. I have heated blankets too.” He rummaged about in his suitcase. “We’re going to be in here a while. I have fold-out camp beds and chairs. A bubble tent in case you don’t want to sleep under the stars, so to speak. I have heaters for food and drink. We’re going to have to recycle our water, I’m afraid, but I have a good treatment system.”
“No spacesuits,” Bisesa said.
“Shouldn’t need them, unless anything goes wrong.”
“And if it does?”
He looked at her, as if assessing her nerve. “Second worst case is, we get stuck on the cable. There are a whole slew of fail-safe mechanisms to save us until rescue comes, via another spider. Even if we were to lose pressure, we have survival bubbles. Hamster balls. Not comfortable, but practical.”
Hamster balls? Bisesa hoped fervently that it wouldn’t come to that. “And the worst case?”
“We become detached from the ribbon altogether. You understand that a certain point on the elevator is in geosynch—geosynchronous orbit, turning around the Earth in exactly twenty-four hours. That’s the only altitude that is actually in orbit, strictly speaking. Below that point we are moving too slowly for orbit, and above too fast.”
“So if the spider were to lose its grip—”
“Below geosynch, we fall back to Earth.” He rapped the transparent hull. “Might not look like it, but it is designed to survive a low-speed reentry.”
“And after geosynch? We’d fall away from Earth, right?”
He winked. “Actually that’s the idea. Don’t worry about it.” He held up a flask. “Coffee, anybody?”
Myra grunted. “Maybe we ought to get your fancy toilet set up first.”
“Good thinking.”
While they fiddled with the toilet, Bisesa gazed out of the window.
Riding silently into the sky, soon she was a hundred kilometers high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X-15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, a point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight mass that she knew had to be at the ribbon’s end, nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.
By an hour and a half in, the fast pace of the events of the early moments of the climb was over. Somewhere above three hundred kilometers high, she could already see the horizon all the way around the face of the Earth, with the ribbon arrowing straight down to the familiar shapes of the American continents far beneath her. Though the stars would wheel around her during this extraordinary ascent, she realized, the Earth would stay locked in place below. It was as if she had been transported to a medieval universe, the cosmos of Dante, with a fixed Earth surrounded by spinning stars.
When she stood she felt oddly light on her feet. One of Alexei’s softscreen displays mapped the weakening of gravity as they clambered away from Earth’s huge mass. It was already down several percent on its sea-level value.
The silent, straight-line ascent, the receding Earth, the shaft of ribbon-light that guided her, the subtle reduction of weight: it was a magical experience, utterly disconcerting, like an ascent into heaven.
Two hours after “launch” the ribbon changed again, spreading out to a curved sheet twice the width of its standard size—still only about two meters across, and gently curved.
Bisesa asked, “Why the extra thickness?”
“Space debris,” Alexei said. “I mean, bits of old spacecraft. Lumps of frozen astronaut urine. That sort of stuff. Between five and seventeen hundred kilometers, we’re at the critical risk altitude for that. So we have a bit of extra width to cope with any impact.”
“And if we are hit by something—”
“Anything so big it would slice the ribbon right through is tracked, and we just move the whole shebang out of the way using the crawler on the ground. Anything smaller will puncture the ribbon, but it’s smart enough to mend itself. The only problem is if we’re unlucky enough to be hit by something small coming sideways in, across the face of the ribbon.”
“Which is why the ribbon is curved,” Bisesa guessed.
“Yes. So it can’t be cut through. Don’t worry about it.”
Myra, peering up, said, “I think I see another spider. On the other side of the ribbon from us. I think—oh, wow.”
The second spider came screaming down out of the sky, passing just half a meter away. They all flinched. Bisesa had a brief reminder of their huge speed.
“A builder,” Alexei said, a bit too quickly for his studied calm to be convincing. “Traveling down the ribbon, weaving an extra couple of centimeters onto the edge.”
Bisesa asked, “What’s the substance of the ribbon?”
“Fullerenes. Carbon nanotubes. Little cylinders of carbon atoms, spun into a thread. Immensely strong. The whole ribbon is under tension; the Earth’s spin is trying to fling the counterweight away, like a kid swinging a rock on a rope. No conventional substance would be strong enough. So the spiders go up and down, weaving on extra strips, and binding it all with adhesive tape.”
Mechanical spiders, endlessly weaving a web in the sky.
They rose largely in silence, for the others wouldn’t talk.
“Come on. We’re off the Earth. Now you can tell me what’s going on. Why am I here, Myra?”
The others hesitated. Then Myra said, “Mum, it’s difficult. For one thing the whole world is listening in.”
“The hull is smart.” Alexei spun a finger. “All ‘round surveillance.”
“Oh.”
“And for another,” Myra said, “you already know.”
Alexei said, “Believe me, we’ll have plenty of time to talk, Bisesa. Even when we get to the drop-off, it’s only the start of the journey.”
“A journey to where? No, don’t answer that.”
Myra said, “I think you’ll be surprised by the answer, Mum.”
Bisesa would have welcomed the chance to talk to Myra, not about high-security issues and the fate of the solar system, but simply of each other. Myra had told her hardly anything of her life since Bisesa had gone into the tank. But, it seemed, that wasn’t going to happen. Myra seemed oddly inhibited. And now the presence of Alexei sharing this little capsule with them inhibited her even further.
Bisesa started to feel tired, her face and hands cold, her stomach warmed by coffee, her mind dulled by the relentless climb. She pulled on the hat and gloves she found in h
er pockets. She piled up blankets from the suitcase onto the floor, pulled one over herself, and lay down. There was no sound, no sense of motion; she might have been stationary, suspended above the slowly receding Earth. She gazed up at the ribbon, seeing how far she could follow its line.
There was another transition when the ribbon reverted from gold to its customary silver. And later the width narrowed. More than seventeen hundred kilometers high, eight hours since leaving Earth, they were higher than almost all mankind’s satellites had ever flown.
Bisesa was vaguely, peripherally aware of all this. Mostly she dozed.
She was woken with a jolt, a brief surge of acceleration that pressed her down into her blankets.
She sat up. Alexei and Myra sat on their fold-down seats. Myra was wide-eyed, but Alexei seemed composed. Alexei’s softscreen on the wall flashed red.
They were thirteen hours into the journey, more than twenty-six hundred kilometers up. When Bisesa moved she felt as if she was going to float into the air. Gravity was down to about half sea level. Earth seemed trivial, a ball dangling at the end of a silver rope.
Other spiders flashed past them, overtaken by their own rapid climb.
“We sped up, right? So what’s wrong?”
“We’re being pursued,” Alexei said. “We had to expect it. I mean, they know we’re in here.”
“Pursued?” Bisesa had a nasty vision of a missile clambering up from a derelict Canaveral launch pad. But that made no sense. “They wouldn’t risk damaging their ribbon.”
“You’re right,” Alexei said. “The ribbon is a lot more precious than we are. Likewise they won’t want to spoil the flow of spiders. They could do that, block us off. But there is cargo worth billions being carried up this line.”
“Then what?”
“They have super-spiders. Capable of greater speeds. It would take a few days, but the super-spider would catch us up.”
Myra thought that over. “How does it get past all the other spiders in the way?”
“The same way we do. The others just have to get out of the way. We’re matching the super-spider’s ascent rate, twice our nominal. In fact I slaved us to the super-spider, so we’ll mirror its ascent. It can’t possibly catch us. As soon as the ground authorities realize that, they’ll give up.”
“Twice nominal. Is that safe?”
“These systems are human-rated; they have heavy safety margins built in.” But he didn’t sound terribly sure.
It only took a few minutes for the softscreen to chime and glow green. Alexei smiled. “They got the message. We can slow down. Hold onto something.”
Bisesa braced against a rail.
They decelerated for a disconcerting few seconds. Blankets floated up from the floor, and the chemical toilet whirred as suction pumps labored to keep from spilling the contents into the air. Myra looked queasy, and Bisesa felt her stomach turn over. They were all relieved when gravity was restored.
But the screen flashed red again. “Uh oh,” Alexei said.
Bisesa asked, “What now?”
He worked his softscreen. “We’re not climbing as we should.”
“Some fault with the spider?”
“Not that. They are reeling in the ribbon.”
“Reeling it in?” Suddenly Bisesa saw the spider as a fish on the end of a monstrous angler’s line.
“It’s kind of drastic, but it can be done. The ribbon is pretty fine stuff.”
“So what do we do?”
“You might want to close your eyes. And hold onto something again.” He tapped his softscreen, and Bisesa had the impression that something detached itself from the hull.
She clamped her eyes shut.
There was a flash, visible even through her eyelids, and the cabin rocked subtly.
“A bomb,” Bisesa said. She felt almost disappointed. “How crude. I think I expected better of you, Alexei.”
“It was just a warning shot, a micro fusion pulse. No harm done. But very visible from the ground.”
“You’re signaling your intent to blow up the ribbon if they don’t leave us alone.”
“It wouldn’t be difficult. Kind of hard to protect a hundred thousand kilometers of paper-thin ribbon against deliberate sabotage…”
Bisesa asked, “Wouldn’t people get hurt?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking, Mum,” Myra said. “Isolationist terrorists attacked Modimo a few years back.”
“Modimo?”
Alexei said, “The African Alliance elevator. Named for a Zimbabwean sky-god, I think. Nobody got hurt, and they wouldn’t now. I’m making an economic threat.” But he glanced uncertainly at his softscreen.
Bisesa said sharply, “And if they call your bluff? Will you go through with it?”
“Actually I don’t think I would. But they can’t afford to take the risk, can they?”
Bisesa said, “They could just kill us. Turn off the power. The air recycling. We’d be helpless.”
“They could. But they won’t,” Alexei said. “They want to know what we know. Where we’re going. So they’ll be patient, and hope to get hold of us later.”
“I hope you’re right.”
As if in response, the softscreen turned green again. Alexei’s grin broadened. “So much for that. Okay, who’s for beans?”
12: MOUNT WEATHER
Bella had expected Bob Paxton’s briefing to take place in her offices in the old NASA headquarters building on E Street in Washington, a block of concrete and glass repaired and refurbished since weathering the sunstorm.
But Paxton met her outside the building. He stood by the open door of a limousine. “Bella.” The car was one of a convoy, complete with uniformed naval officers and blue-suited FBI agents.
She thought he looked comical, an elderly man rigid in his much-cherished uniform, standing there like a bellboy. His face was twisted in the morning light. He was, she had learned, a man who distrusted the sun, even more than most of his bruised generation.
“Morning, Bob. Going for a ride, are we?”
His smile was disciplined. “We should relocate to a more secure situation. We have issues of global importance, of significance for the future of the species. I recommend we convene at Mount Weather. I took the liberty of making the arrangements. But it’s your call.” He eyed her, and the tension that had existed since the day she took the job crackled between them.
She’d never heard of Mount Weather. But she couldn’t see any harm in indulging him. She climbed into the car, and he followed; they would be alone together.
They pulled out. The convoy took Route 66 and met Highway 50, heading west. The road was full of traffic, but their speed was high.
“How far are we going?”
“Be there in half an hour.” Paxton sat there and glowered, visibly irritated.
“I know what’s bugging you, Bob. It’s Professor Carel, isn’t it?”
The muscles in his grizzled cheeks worked, as if he longed to be chewing gum. “I don’t know anything about this old English guy.”
“No doubt you had him vetted.”
“As best we could. He doesn’t have anything to do with this. Not part of the team.”
“He’s coming at my invitation,” she said firmly. In fact, in a sense, to her this elderly British scientist was part of the team, a deeper and older team-up than anything she was involved in with Paxton.
Professor Bill Carel had once been a graduate student working with Siobhan McGorran, another British astronomer who had become involved in the grand effort to build the sunstorm shield—and who had, in its aftermath, married Bud Tooke, and then nursed him through his cancer, a cruel legacy of that astounding day. That personal link was in fact the channel through which Carel had contacted her, and had tried to persuade her that he had a contribution to make regarding the presence of the object in the solar system, which he had heard of in whispers and leaks.
She tried to express some of this to Paxton, but he just waved it away. �
�He’s a cosmologist, for Christ’s sake. He’s spent his life staring into deep space. What use is he going to be today?”
“Let’s keep an open mind, Bob,” she said firmly.
He fell into a silence that lasted all through the rest of the drive. Bella had raised a child, she was used to sulks, and she just ignored him.
After eighty kilometers they pulled off onto Route 101, a narrow two-lane rural road that clambered up a ridge. At the crest of the ridge they came to a line of razor-wired fencing. A faded sign read:
U.S. PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
Beyond that Bisesa could make out a few battered aluminum huts, and beyond them, a glassy wall.
They had to wait while their cars interfaced with the base’s security systems. Bella was aware of a faint speckle of laser light as she was probed.
“So, Mount Weather,” she prompted Paxton.
“Five hundred acres of Blue Ridge real estate. In the nineteen-fifties they set up a bunker here, a place to shelter government officials from D.C. in the event of a nuclear exchange. It fell into disuse, but was revived after 9/11 in 2001, and again after 2042. Although now it’s essentially a loan from the U.S. government to the World Space Council.”
Bella tried not to grimace. “A bunker from the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the War with the Sky. Appropriate, I suppose.”
“Manned by navy officers mostly. Used to confinement and canned air. Mount Weather is a good neighbor, I’m told. They keep up the roads, and send out the snow plows in winter. Not that there’s much snow nowadays…”
She had been expecting the convoy to pass on to a gate in that shining impenetrable wall. She was shocked when, with a rip of foliage, the whole chunk of land beneath the car turned into an elevator and dropped her into darkness.
Bob Paxton laughed as they descended. “I feel like I’m coming home.”
As smiling young naval officers security-processed the party and escorted it to its conference room, Bella glimpsed a little of Mount Weather.
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