Want the truth? I’d been expecting something like this. Really.
You see, for all our problems, it was starting to look as if people had finally begun to grow up … as if we’d learned some lessons and were starting to work well together at last. Perhaps we had things too well in hand. So, by conservation of crises, here comes something new to frighten us half to death.
It’s just an idea, and admittedly a half-baked, unlikely one. Still, picking apart ideas is what the net is all about.
• EXOSPHERE
Alone inside a locked spaceship, she wasn’t expecting anybody. And yet, there came a knock at the door.
Teresa had been wriggling through a cramped space, using a torque wrench to tighten a new aluminum pipe. She stopped and listened. It came again—a rapping at the shuttle’s crew access hatch.
“Just a minute!” Her voice was muffled by the padded tubing around her. Teresa writhed backward out of the recess where she’d been replacing Atlantis’s archaic fuel-cell system with a smaller, more efficient one stripped out of a used car. Wiping her hands on a rag, she stepped across rattling metal planks to peer through the middeck’s solitary, circular window.
“Oh, it’s you, Alex! Hold on a sec.”
She wasn’t certain he could hear her through the hatch, but it took only a few moments to crank the release and swing the heavy door aside. Repairing and cleaning the hatch had been her first self-appointed task, soon after arriving on this tiny island of exile.
Alex waited atop the stairs rising from the pediment of the Atlantis monument. Or the shuttle’s gibbet, as Teresa sometimes thought of it. For the crippled machine seemed to hang where it was, trapped, like a bird caught forever in the act of taking off.
“Hi,” Alex said, and smiled.
“Hi yourself.”
The slight tension elicited by June Morgan’s visit Was quite over by now. Of course she shouldn’t have felt awkward that her friend’s lover happened to pass through from time to time. Alex carried heavy burdens, and it was good to know he could relax that way on occasion. Still, Teresa felt momentary twinges of jealousy and suspicion not rooted in anything as straightforward as reason.
“Thought it time I dropped by to see how you’re doing.” Alex raised a sack with the outlines of a bottle. “Brought a housewarming present. I’m not disturbing, I hope?”
“No, of course not, silly. Watch your step though. I’ve torn up the deck plating to get at some cooling lines. Have to replace a lot of them, I’m afraid.”
“Um,” Alex commented as he stepped over one of the yawning openings, staring at the jumble of pipes and tubing. “So the catalysts June brought you helped?”
“Sure did. And those little robots you lent me. They were able to thread cabling behind bulkheads so I didn’t even have to remove any big panels. Thanks.”
Alex put the sack down near the chaos of new and old jerry-rigging. “You won’t mind if I ask you a rather obvious question?”
“Like why? Why am I doing this?” Teresa laughed. “I honestly don’t know, really. Something to pass the time, I guess. Certainly I don’t fool myself she’ll ever fly again. Her spine couldn’t take the stress of even the gentlest launch.
“Maybe I’m just a born picture straightener. Can’t leave an honest machine just lying around rusting.”
Peering into the jumble of wires and pipes, Alex whistled. “Looks complicated.”
“You said it. Columbia-class shuttles were the most complex machines ever built. Later models streamlined techniques these babies explored.
“That’s the sad part, really. These were developmental spacecraft. It was dumb, even criminal, to pretend they were ‘routine orbital delivery vehicles,’ or whatever the damn fools called them at the time.… Anyway, come on. Let me give you a tour.”
She showed him where NASA scavengers had stripped the ship, back when the decision had been made to abandon Atlantis where she lay. “They took anything that could be cannibalized for the two remaining shuttles. Still, there’s an amazing amount of junk they left behind. The flight computers, for instance. Totally obsolete, even at the time. Half the homes in America had faster, smarter ones by then. Your wristwatch could cheat all five at poker and then talk them all into voting Republican.”
Alex marveled. “Amazing.”
Teresa led him up the ladder to the main deck, where South Pacific sunshine streamed in through front windows smudged and stained by perching seagulls. The cockpit was missing half its instruments, ripped out indelicately long ago, leaving wires strewn across dim, dust-filmed displays. She rested her arms on the command seat and sighed. “So much love and attention went into these machines. And so much bureaucratic ineptitude. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got as far as we did.”
“Say, Teresa. Is there a way to get into the cargo bay?”
She turned around and saw Alex peering through the narrow windows at the back of the control cabin. It was pitch black in the bay, of course, since it had no ports to the outside. She herself had been back there only once, to discover in dismay that midges and tiny spiders had found homes there, lacing the vast cavity with gauzy webs. Probably they used cracks Atlantis had suffered when she fell onto her 747 carry-plane, ruining both ships forever. The Boeing had been scrapped. But Atlantis remained where she lay, her cargo hold now home only to insects.
“Sure. Through the airlock on middeck. But—”
He turned. “Rip.… There’s a favor I have to ask.”
She blinked. “Just name it.”
“Come outside then. I brought something in the truck.”
The crate had to be winched up the pediment steps. From there it was a tight squeeze through the crew-egress hatch.
“We can’t leave it here,” Teresa said, panting and wiping her brow. “It blocks my work space.”
“That’s why I asked about the bay. Do you think we can get it through?”
Just left of the toilet cubicle stood the shuttle’s airlock, now the only way into the cargo bay. Teresa looked, and shook her head dubiously. “Maybe if we uncrate your whatever-it-is.”
“All right. But let’s be careful.”
She saw why he was so nervous when they peeled away the inner packing. There, resting inside a gimbaled housing, lay the most perfect sphere Teresa had ever seen. It glistened almost liquidly, causing the eye to skip along its flanks. Somehow, vision flowed on past, missing the thing itself.
“We’ll have to carry it by the housing,” Alex told her. Teresa bent to get a good grip on the rim as he took the other side. It was very heavy. Like a gyroscope, the silvery ball seemed to stay oriented in exactly the same direction, no matter how they shifted and jostled it. But then, that might have been an illusion. For all Teresa knew, it was spinning madly right in front of her. No ripple in the convex reflection gave any clue.
“What … is this thing?” she asked as they paused for breath inside the airlock. There was barely room for the globe and its cradle, forcing them to squeeze side by side to reach the opposite hatch. The close press of Alex’s shoulder, as they sidled together, felt at once familiar and warm, recalling times not so long ago of shared danger and adventure.
“It’s a gravity resonator,” he told her, caressing the sphere with his gaze. “A completely new design.”
“But it’s so small. I thought they had to be big cylinders.”
“They do, to generate a broad spectrum of search waves. But this one’s a specialist. This one’s tuned. For Beta.”
“Ah,” Teresa commented, impressed.
They resumed wrestling the shimmery globe into the bay, now lit by three small bulbs. “So why … do you want to store a tuned gravity resonator … inside a broken space shuttle?”
“I … thought you’d ask. Actually, I’m not … so much setting it up here as hiding it.”
As they rested for a moment, Teresa mopped her forehead. “Hiding? Do you mean from Spivey?”
Alex nodded. “Or his ilk. You know those Maori
guards Auntie Kapur insisted on sending us? Well they’ve already caught spies trying to sneak into the compound. One Nihonese, another pair from the Han. And I’m sure Spivey’s got people on the island as well. Auntie’s sending reinforcements, but even so I’d rather keep my ace in the hole well concealed.”
He rubbed his palms on his trousers to dry them and grabbed the housing again. Together they resumed lifting.
“Hidden up …” She grunted as they hauled the resonator over a rib longeron into a stable position near one of the payload attachment points. “Hidden up my sleeve.” Teresa straightened. “No, that’s okay, Alex. I approve. It’s not just Spivey. I don’t trust any of them, not farther than I could spit.
“So,” she continued as Alex fastened the machine down. “Was that a bottle I saw in your hand earlier, I hope?”
Still short of breath, Alex grinned back at her, eyes glittering in the spotlights and their reflection off the perfect superconducting sphere. “Yeah. I know you Yanks like your beer cold. But once you’ve tasted this I’m sure you’ll give up that beastly habit.”
“Hmph. We’ll see about that.” Teresa brushed a wisp of cobweb from her eyes. As Alex turned to go, she paused to watched the tiny shred of spider silk flutter, descend to touch the round globe, and instantly disappear.
It was, indeed, a potent, bitter brew, and Teresa rather liked it. Still, for appearances she said the stuff explained a lot about Englishmen. It obviously stunted your emotional growth. He only laughed and leaned over to refresh her glass.
Teresa sat in the shuttle’s command chair while Alex perched cross-legged in the copilot’s seat. Neither of them felt any particular need to fill the long silences. So it often was, in Teresa’s experience, between people who had faced death together.
“You’re worried,” she surmised at last, after one extended pause. “You don’t think the deal can hold.”
“It was hopeless from the start.” Alex shook his head. “In retrospect, I can’t understand why it took so long for Spivey to find us. But at least we were a small conspiracy, operating on a shoestring. Now? Our beams are producing detectable phenomena all over the globe. The alliances can’t keep a thing like this under wraps, not with everyone on Earth prying to find out what’s going on.”
“Then why did Spivey and Hutton agree to try?”
He shrugged. “Oh, it seemed a good idea at the time. Take care of Beta, get the situation stabilized, then present the world with a fait accompli. And of course it’s giving us a chance to characterize the singularity, to prove its origin. Our technical report should let the science tribunals extend inspection to the Earth’s core, preventing any new arms race over gazers and such. Then, in an open debate, it could be decided whether to keep Beta around, as a possible planetary-defense weapon, or try to expel it forever.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Teresa nodded, grudgingly.
“The only problem is, that time’s already come! Beta’s relatively stable, I have data for a full report, and I’m certain the other great powers have already started clandestine graviscan programs of their own. There was a pulse from Nihon, yesterday—” He shook his head. “I wish I knew what Spivey was waiting for.”
“Did you hear about the meeting at the U.N.?” Teresa asked. “Everyone, all the delegates, were talking in parables and double-entendres. Moralizing and posturing, and saying nothing any of the reporters could sink their teeth into.”
“Hm.” Alex frowned. She sensed him begin to say something, stop, and then start again.
“I … I’ve started fighting him, you know.”
“Fighting who?” Then she stared. “You’re fighting Spivey! But how?”
“I’m tweaking the beams from South Africa and Rapa Nui, the ones I still control. Using them to pump Beta’s orbit higher … out to where it’ll lose mass faster. And also where the damn thing doesn’t leave those weird tracks in the lower mantle anymore—”
She interrupted. “Has he reacted? Has Spivey noticed?”
Alex laughed. “Oh has he! Got George to send me a telex. Here’s a copy.” He pulled the flimsy sheet from a breast pocket. “They’re both urging me to go along … not to let the side down. You know? All hang together or we’ll surely hang separately?
“Then, this morning, New Guinea fired three microseconds late on a routine run.”
“What did that do?”
He shook his head. “It pulled energy from Beta’s orbit, Rip, letting it fall a little lower. Seems our colonel isn’t about to let his mirror lose mass. Not while there are more experiments to run.”
Silence reigned for many heartbeats, their only measure of time’s passage. Finally, Teresa asked, “What can Glenn be trying to do? Surely he can’t be planning to use it as a weapon? His superiors can’t be that mad!”
Alex stared out through the streaked windshield, beyond a stretch of black-topped runway to a bluff of scrub grass growing scraggly out of the thin volcanic soil. Beyond lay the foam-capped waters of the ash-gray Pacific.
“I wish I knew. But whatever he’s after, I’m afraid you and I are mere pawns.”
How hot is it? You folks really want to know how hot it is? I see farmer Izzy Langhorne sitting under a cottonwood right now, having his lunch while watching the show. Hey, Izzy, how dumpit hot would you spec it?
Aw, no, Izzy, gimme euthanasia! Not with your mouth full! We’ll go back to Izzy after he’s cleaned up. Lessee now, gettin’ a shout-back from Jase Kramer, over by Sioux Falls. Looks like you’re having some trouble with your tractor, Jase.
“No, Larry. It’s just you … have to climb under the suspension of these Chulalongkorn Sixes and clear the deadwood by hand. See, it gets trapped over here by the—”
Well that’s great, Jase. Nice of you to take the holo under with you so we could all get a look. Now tell me, how hot is it?
“Well, hell, Larry. Yesterday my chickens laid hard-boiled eggs …”
Thank you, Jase Kramer. Whew. Send that codder some relief!
Now hold it just a millie … here’s an actinic flash for you current affairs junkies. Seems the latest round of those secrety-secret talks—pardon my urdu—have broken up for lunch over in New York village. Our affiliates there have joined the mob of news-ferret types chasing the delegates to the deli. For a direct feed, shout a hop-link to News-Line 82. For play-by-play plus color, call Rap-250. Or you can cake-and-eat-it. Just hang around with us while your unit does a rec-dense for later.
While we’re talking about the gremlin crisis, have any of you out there seen anything new today? Anything that might’ve been a gremmie? Yesterday Betty Remington of St. Low showed us a perfectly circular patch of amaranth where the kernels had all been mysteriously turned inside out. And in Barstow, Sam Chu claims one of his prize brood carps up and exploded, right in front of him! Day-pay-say!
So who’s got an opinion out there? You know the code, let’s hear the mode.…
• HOLOSPHERE
Jen remembered what a wise man told her long ago when she was similarly obsessed with the problem of consciousness. It had been an astronomer friend of Thomas’s, a very great mind, she recalled, who listened patiently for hours as she expounded the hottest new concepts of cognition and perception. Then, when at last she ran out of steam, he commented.
“I’m uneducated in formal psychology. But in my experience, people generally react to any new situation in one of four ways:
Aha! … Ho-hum … Oy Vey! … and Yum, yum.…
“These illustrate the four basic states of consciousness, dear Jennifer. All else is mere elaboration.”
Years later, Jen still found the little allegory delightful. It made you stop and ponder. But did those four “states” actually map onto human thought? Did they lead to new theories that might be tested by experiment? She recalled the astronomer’s smile that evening. Clearly he knew the deeper truth—that all theories are only metaphors, at best helpful models of the world. And even his clever notion was no more real than a
mote in his own eye.
There are one hundred ways to view Mount Fuji, as Hokusai showed us. And each of them is right.
Jen wished she had someone like that old astronomer to talk to now.
Today I’m the aged professor with no one to talk to but a bright high school dropout. So who is there to give me reality checks? To tell me if I’m off on a wild goose chase?
She was treading a narrow path these days, skirting all the pitfalls of pure reason—that most seductive and deceptive of human pastimes. Jen had always believed philosophers ought to have their heads knocked repeatedly, lest they become trapped in the rhythms of their own if-thens. But now she was hardly one to cast stones. While crises roiled on all sides, the compass of her own existence contracted, as if her once far-flung reach were drawing inward now, preparing for some forthcoming contest or battle.
But what battle? What contest?
Clearly she wasn’t equipped to participate in the struggles being waged by Kenda and her grandson. Likewise, the ferment surging through the Net would go on unaffected by anything she offered. By now it was starting to reach stochastic levels. A billion or more anxious world citizens had already been drawn from their myriad endeavors, hobbies, and distractions toward a single strange attractor, one gnawing focus of angst. Nothing like it had been seen since the Helvetian War, and back in those days the Net had been a mere embryo.
Messages piled up in her open-access mailbox as numberless correspondents sought her opinion. But rather than get involved, Jen only retreated further into the circumscribed world of thought.
Oh, she left the catacombs regularly, for exercise and human contact. In Kuwenezi’s squat, fortresslike ark she spent ninety minutes each day with her only student, answering his eager questions with puzzlers of her own, marveling at his voracious mind and wondering if he’d ever get a chance to develop it.
But then, walking home under the merciless sun, she would pass near towering termite mounds, built by patient, highly social creatures at regular intervals across the dry hills. They hummed with unparsed commentary, a drone that seemed to resonate inside her skull, even after the rickety lift cage started descending into the cool silence of the abandoned mine, gliding past layer after gritty layer of compressed sediments, returning her to those caverns where hard-driven men labored like Homeric figures under her grandson’s long-distance guidance, wrestling for the fate of the world.