easily, shoulders and hips unbound.
“Come on,” he said, almost whining. “You’ve got to, before I leave.”
“Not again,” she sighed.
He pushed himself over to the control panel besides the sliding exit doors, the fine print engraved beneath. The same two letters and three digits labeled every piece of equipment on the slingship. They had since the first years, when it needed to be differentiated from every other survival project, to when the slingship was the only human project that remained. “Just tell me what it stands for. The ‘100’ I get—your favorite, and we’ve made it with six months to spare. But the ‘GR’?”
Luckily, the buckygold ring on her shrunken middle finger began to vibrate, allowing her to busy herself with the information parading in blue around its circumference. The call was coming from the surface, so she knew what it was about. A family problem, and, like most in this abandoned era, a problem with the Firstborn Law.
It was the other piece of social engineering that she—the Arkitect! Our own visionary!—had been able to ram through in those early, grieving decades. The poorer half of humankind may have expired, but even the planned slingship, huge as it would be, could not accommodate more than a fraction of the richer half’s descendants. However, if only certified Firstborns, adult or child, would ever be allowed on board...
The added restriction proved an admirably ruthless incentive for four generations of birth control. First exclude the very eldest with the Century Law, then minimize the redundant young.
Of course, there were the contraceptive failures, societally shunned Mistakes like the great-whatever-grandchild calling her, a hapless mid-life male who’d spent his adult life trying to join his older sister, happily ensconced above. Even worse—to him, at least—he’d been saddled with a Mistake of his own, a tow-haired boy that, to her surprise, she’d found herself grown fond of. More fond of than the boy’s spoiled twin, older by seconds, whose head-butting exit both drained their mother’s blood and guaranteed a well-appointed cabin off the staterooms of his Firstborn paternal aunt.
“Looks like someone’s eager to get on,” the Captain said, craning. “I could help with that as well, you know.”
With a low look and a slow shake of the head, she cupped her ring-hand to her ear, a universal gesture that the Captain was forced to respect. Cupped, but did not answer, only watched him he returned to puzzling over the slingship’s designation. Soon he was diverted by his refection in the capsule’s polished walls, and casually flexed a biceps in the skintight uniform of his own design. Eventually, though, he floated back around, glanced at his chunky buckystainless watch, and silently mouthed, ‘Please?’
After murmuring a few final-sounding syllables into her hand, she shook it out as if to terminate the call. Deceleration was nearing; all she needed was a few more minutes. The first was occupied by a thorough throat-clearing, a prerogative of her great age. Then she began, with, “Every year you ask...”
He drifted slightly to the left, restraining himself.
“...And every year I say, ‘Great Russia’.”
“Oh, not that—”
“The second Soviet empire was history by your time, but they ruled the world... and thoroughly buckyballed it... just before.”
It had been a lovely Russian scientific dream, a way to lock the world’s overload of atmospheric carbon in spherical geodesic molecules, to safely fall in a fine black rain to the hungry soil. She’d even been assigned to the project, a visiting young molecular engineer from a recently re-colonized Amerika. As the sole cautionary voice—something that would be well remembered—she was there to witness the tiny cloud-seeding rocket, the pop and blur of tropospheric dust.
She’d stood and sweated through her uniform on that globally-warmed afternoon, watching as the self-generating nanoparticles jumped between the clouds and seeded more, heard the champagne corks as deep and deeper shadows chased across the green Caucasus hillsides. A great success, they’d said, gray darkening to lead and then to charcoal, as far as eyes could see.
“I don’t need another lesson,” the Captain said. “And don’t knock buckyballs.” A point he emphasized by reaching out and, in fact, knocking on the nearest cabin wall. “They made this slingship happen.”
She didn’t trust herself to respond. Because the clouds, as she had feared, had loved the buckyballs too well to release them to the land below—with exactly the same passion as the nanoweight buckyballs, sated with carbon but still throbbing with unrequited electron charges, embraced every microdrop of moisture the clouds could and would contain. Cloud and buckyball proved a truly winning combination, a forever-buoyant marriage that could not be annulled.
Over the following twelve months, their unholy chemical union grew and merged into a glowering shell that began to starve all growing things of sun and water. Before a decade passed, the lightning-struck global monocloud proceeded to ignite great dry swaths of a tinderbox Earth and then, in a post-warming winter that the most apparatchik politician could not deny, chilled its ashes.
The Captain looked back, unmoved. Her type, the ones who were left, were all about the mess they’d made. But he was young—relative to her, at least, and healthier than most men half his age. The buckyclouds had never been his problem. He came after the great famine: his generation was all about the solution.
The cabin’s floor began to inch up toward them; the capsule was beginning to slow. With the surprising agility that was free-fall’s gift to the superannuated, she pushed off towards the couch, swung herself down and began to strap in. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s all it is. An old name from an old Bolshevik, looking for redemption.”
“That’s what you say, but I’m still not buying it.” As he drifted towards the deck, he tried to read her, but her eyes had closed again.
Behind those lids, she relived her first journey above the atmosphere: winding up the Russians’ first nanothread Space Elevator, gathering samples as she passed through the occlusive cloud to a research station tethered at the edge of the void. When the blinding, unfiltered sunlight hit the grayish mist, the measurements from her prototype instruments revealed a hint, just a hint, of early breakdown in the bucky-hydrocarbon linkages.
Hope had surged but then, after she’d concluded her calculations, receded further than before. It would take years—nearly a perfect one hundred years—for the microchanges to have the slightest discernable effect. Worse, almost any reasonably-sized human population, no matter how eco-sensitive, was bound to pump out enough fresh carbon to keep the buckyballs in business.
And so she’d fudged the results and kept her discovery to herself, at first out of kindness. Until she’d seen how the geodesic nanomaterials that had created the problem might, someday, resolve it.
Beside her, the Captain nattered on. “Maybe... maybe the G is for... Gaia?”
Please. She fought back a smile, but opened her eyes to find him peering at her.
“The ‘Earth Mother’? Sorry—‘Goddess Earth’.” He shook his head in disappointment, even pity. “The Arkitect, a Gaia-worshipping Greenie.” By then he’d landed on his feet, and, if she was any judge, was out to prove his hypertrophic muscles were strong enough to keep him upright through the buckycapsule’s mounting deceleration. “Which must be why you’re staying.”
His perky hairstyle was flattening, the sprayed polymers giving it up to his forelock’s increasing weight. Not buckymers, she thought—they’d stay rigid until he was a puddle on the floor.
“Staying to die,” he grunted, and then his voice grew muffled as her head sank deep into the cushioned gel. “G for Gaia...”
He stood, vibrating with effort, a tower of semi-wrinkled human strength. “And R...” he squeezed out, “for... I don’t... care.” His jaw clamped tight to keep it from being pulled open, his surgically-lifted jowls sagging with the combined power of gravity and frustrated momentum.
Close, she thought. But no cigar. Losing consciousness, blessedl
y—consciousness of the growing pain, and especially of the looming Captain.
Sweet dust of Earth, I thank thee.
It wasn’t a prayer—not a chance—but pure gratitude for the Captain’s second tears of the day, an outpouring that began shortly after they’d staggered from the downtube. Once the ShipNet recorder had relaunched itself and buzzed a lazy circle in the air around them, he’d squatted, his uniform snug around his haunches, on the vast loading dock’s buckyluminum lip. Reaching to the fine dust just beyond it, he let a handful sift through his fingers, then looked out to the brown horizon with reddened, gleaming eyes. And just as she was wondering if she’d somehow gotten him wrong, her fine pseudo-young Captain dissolved in a remarkably violent fit of sneezing, not an entirely unexpected reaction after years of sterile shipboard air. Standing, he wiped his swollen lids, waved the camera back to a safer distance, and—before she could get her elbows up—enclosed her in another forced and not-quite-suffocating embrace.
No threats this time; this time she endured it, secure in the knowledge that it would soon be over. And after she’d made her last recorded comments for the coming generations—wise, benign, personally resigned but looking forward to their bright future—it really was over, and the Captain had turned his broad back and, without one