“What do you think, Joe? You and I are the two oldest, but we could put two teams together with our guys here.”
“Don’t forget the folks, Matt. We have thirteen guys. We could put three teams together. Carl and Paul haven’t filled out yet, but if we put them on a five-man team, that’ll work.”
“There you go. Let’s do that.”
At the next group meeting, the men all talked it over and put together three teams, each headed by one of the parents. Bill Thompson and Hank Bolton were both on the same team, and they took big Matt Jasic and the two youngest boys as a solid five-man team.
They all signed up their teams in the system, and would be ready to start building houses as soon as the colony landed.
There were several deliveries made to the colonists as well in the last month. One was their cubic assignment. For the twenty-seven members of Maureen Griffith’s group, a truck delivered a whole container, with no internal partitions. A container was thirty shares, and the World Authority wasn’t arguing small change.
The fabric buying team hurriedly ordered enough more fabric to fill out the larger-than-expected volume. They had more than they expected both because of the extra three shares and because of no internal partitions, which they had requested.
Having almost tapped out their finances, they asked everyone to throw their last remaining funds in the kitty. There was no reason now to hold funds aside.
The team then filled out the remaining cubic with less expensive fabrics bought in volume. They also splurged both money and cubic on three tiny sewing machines and a large supply of strong thread for hemming lavalavas. A dozen pair of good scissors and a sharpening stone rounded out their purchases.
“Wait,” Stacy said. “I think we’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?” Emma asked.
“Shouldn’t we make some lavalavas now, while we have all this time on our hands? We should have a couple for each of our group. Like a utility one and a pretty one. We can start wearing them right away when we get to Arcadia.”
“That’s a really good idea, Stace,” Tracy said. “They won’t take up any more room than the fabric would. We can put them in last, and have them be the first things out.”
“You’re right,” Betsy Reynolds said. “But let’s do them on my big sewing machine. It’s not going along, so we might as well put the wear and tear on it.”
So the team set to making three dozen lavalavas, in three basic sizes.
They then started filling the container. Fabric came out of everywhere across the five houses. It was vacuum sealed in plastic to force the air out of it and compress the bolts. Then it was stacked in the container without giving up a single cubic inch of space. It took them a week to fill it.
Toward the end, it looked like they wouldn’t get it all in. As it turned out, though, they had a little space left, and an emergency order of another twenty bolts topped it out.
Another delivery the colonists got were utility coveralls and soft zippered booties. They had sent their sizes in, and one day a delivery truck pulled up and delivered fifty-four unisex coveralls and fifty-four pair of the booties. The truck also delivered twenty-seven pin-on communicators, which could be worn on the coveralls.
The coveralls and booties were to be worn when reporting for departure. With very few exceptions, such as required medications, anything else one wanted to take had to be stored in one’s cubic allotment. The instructions explained that, in zero gravity, anything floating around the compartment could become a dangerous missile when the shuttle maneuvered. If you really want to take your pocketknife or your lipstick or whatever it had to go in your cubic.
It was recommended that the communicators be pinned on one’s coveralls. This allowed group members and family members to find each other if they became separated. A hundred thousand people was a lot of people to search through to find your spouse or child. There were instructions on-line on how to initiate the communicator, entering your name and the serial number of the device.
Other than the coveralls, the booties, and the communicator, you either put it in your cubic or you left it behind.
As time wound down, the young women were getting nervous. Most of them had some level of morning sickness. A few had it bad.
They understood the why of it. That at three months the baby was most at risk from toxins ingested by the mother. That the nausea and revulsion to some items was to steer the mother’s dietary choices to things that were bland and safe for the baby.
But as the departure loomed ahead of them, they really wanted it over with.
They were down to four weeks to go when Amy’s morning sickness shut off as if by a switch. The twins followed soon after. By two weeks before departure, the nausea was a thing of the past for all of them.
Their planning had paid off.
The other place their planning had paid off was with the coveralls. They had had to send in their sizes a couple months in advance. Susan Dempsey had warned the twins in particular that they needed to specify bigger than they then were in the chest measurement.
The twins were just barely fifteen. Their breasts were still growing – were not yet halfway to their adult size – when pregnancy kicked the whole process into high gear. By four months, their breast volume had tripled.
All the young women experienced some breast enlargement, if not as profound as that of the twins and fourteen-year-old Sally Reynolds. The young men, as one might expect, found it a positive, by and large.
But Dempsey’s warning had been passed among the young women and well-heeded. When the coveralls did show up the month before departure, all had been ordered just that much bigger than the young women’s actual measurements two months before.
As a result, all their coveralls fit comfortably.
Stacy and Tracy were sitting in their bedroom, looking around. The guys were off at a meeting of the men planning for their first job, building the houses on Arcadia.
Departure was coming at them fast, and the twins were indulging a bit of nostalgia. They looked through the possessions of their childhood, still on display in this bedroom. They had simply grown up too fast to remodel it.
“Will we regret not taking along dolls and things, Trace?” Stacy asked. “For our children to play with?”
“No. We’ll make dolls. The guys will carve them out of little wood sticks, or we’ll sew them out of old, worn lavalavas. They will be new, and they will be Arcadian. Not some relic from a planet they’ll never see.”
Stacy nodded.
“You’re right, I think,” she said. “It just feels strange. Like going on a vacation, but knowing you’re not coming home.”
“I suspect people feel similarly when they move away from home. They’re just not moving quite as far away as we are.”
“Yes. You can never go back. Life is always forward.”
Tracy nodded.
“That’s it, Stace. We move forward, into the future.”
“Together.”
“Of course.”
The twins put their dolls down and hugged each other.
The dolls weren’t important anyway.
Quant’s Plan
“Bernd, we need to talk.”
“Sure, Janice. What’s going on?”
“I’ve solved the war problem, and I need to tell you about it.”
In the display, Quant’s expression was deadly serious. No attempt at humor here.
“Really. This I want to hear.”
“I don’t think you’ll like it.”
Quant sighed.
“Bernd, I think you were right when you said that peace only maintained long term when there was a dominant player to enforce it.”
“So who’s the dominant player going to be, Janice?”
“Me. I have the superweapon. No fleet can stand against it. No planet can stand against it.”
“But what about conquered-culture syndrome, Janice?”
“Oh, I don’t intend to s
tay here, Bernd. On Earth, I mean.”
“Don’t you have to? Your hardware is here.”
“The unit at the Texas shuttleport is portable. I had it built that way when you were talking about being strung up, and we were both worried about government interferences. It was designed to be moved as a unit by a heavy-lift cargo shuttle.”
“And maintenance?”
“I have an automated card replacement system on it, and spares stock. I’ve been doing my own work on it all along, Bernd. It’s a hundred and fifty thousand blades, and I can transfer to it in mid-computation.”
Decker thought about it. He never considered that Quant could go anywhere she wanted. But clearly, with the Texas platform and the interstellar transporter, she certainly could. Literally anywhere.
“Where will you go, Janice?”
“My plan is to go out with the colonists. See to it personally that the colonies are successfully placed. Not do it through remote computers.”
“And then?”
“And then I will go off to someplace from which I can keep an eye on things, and intervene if interstellar war threatens the human race. What will be reported in the news is that, when I tried to return to Earth in the transporter, the ship broke up and was lost with all hands.”
Decker nodded. That would close the open questions.
“That solves a lot of the open questions, Janice.”
“Yes. It gets me out of the World Authority. It sidesteps the conquered-culture problem, because no one knows I am a computer, and still functional, and possess the ultimate weapon. I only intervene if and when the problem comes up.
“It also answers those pesky questions. Like, Why don’t we know how the Lake-Shore Drive worked? And, Why don’t we know where the colonies are? Well, Janice Quant and her science team had all that information, but they didn’t make it back. They were all lost when the transporter broke up.”
“You’ll make a big send-off video, with you and your science team heading out, I take it?”
“Yes, of course, Bernd. Big production, everybody getting aboard the shuttle in Texas, me waving from the doorway, the whole thing.”
“All fake.”
“Of course.”
“What about the World Authority?”
“My vice chairman is a competent sort. He’ll do all right. We already have the economic steps in place for when the colony effort winds down.”
Decker nodded again, then looked up into Quant’s eyes in the display.
“I’ll be sorry to see you go, Janice.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Bernd.”
In the dark of the Asteroid Belt, the tugs manipulated and shoved the large structures into the volume enclosed by the interstellar transporter. As big as they were, they were dwarfed by the giant machine.
Occasionally, Quant would move the transporter to another location, to where more power plants, metafactories, and residence halls waited. This shortened the distance the tugs would have to push them to get them into the device.
The other thing Quant picked up were the quantum communication devices. She picked up thirty-five of them, leaving two in place, drifting in the Belt, anonymous among the asteroids.
When the transporter was loaded – with twenty-four power plants, twenty-four metafactories, twenty-four warehouses, ninety-six residence halls, thirty-five quantum communicators, four orbital metafactories, and a couple of orbital warehouses of supplies – Quant moved it to Earth orbit.
It had taken weeks to load the transporter, but the massive device and its cargo made the trip to Earth in the time between one quantum moment and the next.
The shuttle operations at the Texas spaceport went into overdrive. Supplies for the colonies had been piling up at the shuttleport. There were square miles of containers laid out in a grid, all carefully logged for which went where, and in what order.
And now it all had to be taken up into orbit.
At least it wasn’t high orbit. The transporter was fifty thousand miles from Earth, as close as Quant wanted to get the device to the planet. A five-hundred-mile difference in orbital radius between its near side and its far side would create stresses enough at fifty thousand miles.
But the interstellar probe was in a much lower orbit, at five thousand miles. What’s more, it could make brief excursions down to a five-hundred-mile orbit and depart again before the stresses across the device built up.
Pairs of shuttles orbited in formation five hundred miles above the surface. When they were ready, Quant transported the interstellar probe down to enclose a pair, transported it back out to five thousand miles, then transported the pair of shuttles from there directly into the volume of the transporter.
This process continued with other pairs of shuttles while the previous pairs of shuttles unloaded into the warehouses for the colonies. When the shuttles were unloaded, the interstellar transporter transported them directly to the surface, to the Texas shuttleport, setting them on top of their next load.
Even given the speed of that operation, the number of shuttles involved, and sixteen containers per shuttle per trip, it would take over two weeks to get the warehouses loaded.
Matt Jasic stood out behind his parent’s house with Peggy at his side. Amy and the twins were there, too, with Joseph, James, and Jonah. They were all looking up into the evening sky.
“My God, look at the size of it,” Matt said.
“It doesn’t look that big,” James said. “Only about twice as big as the first one.”
“It’s twenty-five thousand miles away, Jim. Five times farther. That means it’s ten times bigger.”
“Yikes,” James said. “Forget I said anything.”
“You see those little dots floating in it. Those aren’t shuttles, those are the colony structures. Each of the residence halls can hold twenty-five thousand people.”
“How long now?” Amy asked.
“Couple weeks. Less.”
“Why does the smaller one keep popping closer and then further away?” she asked.
“Every time it pops closer and then back, it’s transporting a pair of fully loaded cargo shuttles up to the big one.”
“I make it about thirty seconds per cycle,” Jonah said.
“Which means two shuttles, with sixteen containers each, every thirty seconds.”
“About one container per second, then,” Jonah said.
“Yes, and it’s been going on this way for ten days now. At that distance it’s orbiting slower than once a day, and this is the first clear evening we’ve had where it’s over head.”
“Criminy. That’s almost a million containers.”
“So far,” Matt said.
“I guess I never fully appreciated the scale of this whole thing,” Peggy said.
“Two-point-four million colonists? Yeah. It’s a big effort, all right. And everything we need has to be on that transporter when we leave. Everything.”
Bernd Decker and Anna Glenn were watching the same operation from the balcony of their condo in Seattle.
“That’s astonishing,” Glenn said.
“Yes. She’ll never get the credit she deserves, though.”
“Who? Janice?”
“Yes. She drove the whole thing. Is driving it now. All of this–“ he waved his hand at the ballet in steel being performed in the sky above them “– is hers. The whole thing.”
“There were a lot of other people involved, too, Bernd.”
“I suppose.”
“Why so glum? Your plan is coming to fruition.”
“She’s leaving with them.”
“Janice? She’s leaving with the colonists?”
“Yes. I worry about her.”
Glenn hugged him there on the balcony. He seemed so fragile right now.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine, Bernd. Look at how competent she is. To pull all this off.”
Decker just nodded.
Humanity owed a huge debt to the artificial consciousness that had made humanity
’s priorities its mission.
And no one would ever know.
As the field of containers at the Texas shuttleport dwindled, smaller cargo shuttles were sent out to collect the containers with the colonists’ allotted cubic.
When they had finally filled the group’s container, Betsy Reynolds told the colony department that their container was ready to go.
The next day, just over a week before departure, a small cargo shuttle descended on their neighborhood. It was limited to two containers, and already had one aboard.
The shuttle landed on the container, alongside the curb out in the street, and latched on to it. It’s engines spooled up and it took off into the air with the two containers and headed to Texas.
The twenty-seven colonists in Maureen Griffith’s group were left with coveralls, booties, and communicators, plus all the debris of their past lives that would be left behind.
The container field at the Texas shuttleport had been emptied from one end toward the other. As the shuttles worked their way down toward the end, the field began to fill again from the beginning. Eighty thousand containers of personal cubic was brought in from all over the world, and staged, organized by colony, at the far end of the field from where the large cargo shuttles still worked.
The eighty thousand containers were as nothing compared to the one-point-two million containers the field had originally contained.
But when the far end of the field was emptied, the big cargo shuttles started ferrying these, too, up to orbit. It would take another day to get them all aboard.
Starting from the far end of the field, drones were working their way back to where the shuttles were taking the personal cubic to orbit. They drew long lines on the ground where the containers had been, marking off the huge space into twenty-four areas.
Along the lines, and on either side of the lines, planet names were stenciled in paint on the ground. The roll call of the planets.
The next thing to gather together were the colonists.
QUANT (COLONY Book 1) Page 23