more worrisome question, hurried into the pressurized uptube and was gone.
She looked back to that sere horizon, and found it had not changed. An electric loading cart took her the modest distance to her shelter, its rubber wheels drawing two straight lines over the interwoven mesh of tracks. After waiting with a dumb mechanical patience for her to hobble off, it whirred back into the huge illuminated dock.
The shelter, a tent but much more than a tent, had drum-tight ecofabric walls and all the facilities, medical and otherwise, that a very elderly hermit could possibly require. Until, of course, those facilities failed, a problem that lay years away. The accommodations were entirely comfortable, but she preferred the packed dirt porch in front, and lowered herself to sit, suspended in a mesh chair of recycled plastic, in the cool dry air. Looking, for no good reason, at the lowest incurving panels of the ship.
The dock’s two loading doors were slowly precessing closed, the gap between them less than twenty yards wide. Early the day before, they’d rolled the final section of the old admin building—The Office of The Arkitect—inside.
Long ago, she’d scoffed at the building’s dedication, but she must have grown attached since then, and yesterday had made a point of busying herself in her tent as that last big load was winched, with a rumble that the finest engineering could not disguise, towards the sky. A slow but accelerating climb through the slingship and then up the buckycable, where its freight-train mass would join the other raw materials, radioactive and otherwise, that had already been stripped from the fallen cities and every salvageable landfill on six continents. Ready to be remanufactured and serve the civilization that first secreted them, an old world’s poisons to fuel a new, man-made world among the stars.
And there they whirled, compacted, like a stone permanently attached to a sling—a cable stretched taut with the power of the earth’s rotation, tugging almost hard enough to pull the silver slinger from the surly bonds of Earth.
That last chunk of mass should be nearly there by now, the final weight, the final spinning lift needed for liftoff. How absolutely fitting that her title, that awful honorific, should be crumpled within the terminal load’s ferroplastic panels.
Yes.
In the distance, a series of low thumps as the land bridges to the launch area were blown. Probably unnecessary, but a way to keep those camped near this high plateau from throwing themselves at the ship’s departing hull. They numbered only in the thousands—out of the millions of Mistakes and Centarians scattered around the inhabitable band that girdled the globe—poor fools who had traveled here to plead their final case.
Her ring buzzed again and this time she answered it, to hear her landbound descendant, the father of the boy, ask, “What’s with the bridges? Wasn’t that supposed to be after the ceremony?”
“Just a precaution,” she said. Not exactly a lie, and she thought she pulled it off rather well. Two hundred yards away, the last workman, framed in the slot of the cargo door, squinted in her direction. One hand over the control box, the other shielding his eyes from the bay’s florescent glare. “Everything’s going exactly as planned.” she added, on a almost-honest roll.
“We brought our bags,” he said.
“You know what I told you.”
“And I know security won’t stop me—not with all your pals, the high-and-mighty there.”
The workman waited in silent supplication. She waved until he shrugged and returned it. “Just come,” she sighed into her empty palm. “I want you and Petey at my side.”
Perhaps his older sister, Petey’s aunt, was watching from a porthole far above. More likely not. She wasn’t a romantic, and had been afraid of her brother for a lifetime, afraid of what his desperation might make him do. As well as appalled with the incomprehensible stubbornness, the pure contrariness of her Earth-hugging great-whatever-grandmother.
Over the ring’s tiny speaker she heard the sound of footfalls on dirt, running, that and a squeaky wheel of the sole carry-on allowed. No further words, only his labored breathing in the unforgiving atmosphere of this high Ecuadorian plain. In the closing cargo door, the workman’s face narrowed—a single eye, then none—as its edges came together in a thin illuminated line that vanished as she watched.
Almost there.
Before the hour had passed, she heard that rhythmic squeak again, this time coming across the dirt behind her tent, growing louder in the still dead air. Then Petey’s father, a morose lump of a man, was sweating at her side. That and staring at the unbroken expanse of the slingship’s sealed base, as his young son rolled their suitcase around the tent.
“But—” he panted.
“I told you.”
“But—”
“The ceremony was on the flight deck.” She looked up and he did as well, looked at the fine thin necklaces of bright ports, their circumferential lines blurring to nothingness where the hull penetrated the cloud. “No last-minute crowds.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” he said, then actually stamped his foot, producing a flat and less than satisfying thud that was quickly absorbed by the dirt.
Soft and fifty, he was more a child than his son. Would he survive? A few decades, certainly, and he’d certainly outlive her, which was all she really asked. A handful of decades in a world with too minor a human presence to keep the buckyclouds alive—if the sun kept working on that stratospheric layer, he might even live to see it shine. And then what? Would Petey plant his father’s grave with stones or living grass?
“I didn’t have the heart,” she tried, “to tell you.”
“You didn’t have the heart.” He slapped the dust off his palms—once, twice against his pants—and, after an exaggerated sigh of his own, lowered himself to the edge of the platform. Then sat with his nanoplastic oxfords in the desiccated soil, examining the pale gray handprints on the buckywool that covered his thick thighs.
His bitterness would last until the next full meal, she guessed, and she had a nearly unlimited amount in cryostorage. And that heart she didn’t have? It must still be in there somewhere, and not quite as frozen as those rock-hard meals. In fact, it was the reason she hadn’t pulled the strings he’d asked for. If anyone cried out for another chance, he did.
Besides, Petey needed a parent. The boy had left the wheeled suitcase by the tent’s oval entry, crossed to squat beside her, and was playing with the dried wishbone of a recently extinct species of poultry. After a moment, he found her hand and whispered, “I’m glad we’re staying, Grandma.”
They both looked at his father, who hadn’t heard; she nodded, once, and left it at that.
Finally.
It began with the subtlest movement of air, an almost-inaudible hush that slid over and around the fabric of the tent. The breeze gained speed as it approached the slingship, where a thin line of uncertainty was forming at its base. As they watched, the line grew wider, sucking a smooth silk-brown layer of dust into the narrow gap—a few inches, a few more—that slowly, glacially widened without the slightest sideways drift.
She rose from her camp chair and the boy stood to support her, leaning against her side with an arm around her waist. His father came to his feet as well, then placed a rounded heel on the porch’s edge and stepped back on it, stumbling and then recovering in the growing wind. It whipped his white shirt and dusty pants, cinched with an ancient leather belt around his gut. His face stricken, left and lost and, despite their presence, alone.
Petey started to say something but she placed a hand on his shoulder. The gap was enlarging, already a few feet in height. Soon it would be beyond his father’s reach, beyond his straining fingertips if he was mad enough to run there with a hurricane at his back.
Sixty thousand miles above, she knew, that last load had arrived at the buckycable’s terminus, where its added mass had tipped the scale. Lifting its gleaming doppelganger from the planet that created both of them—their shared future irreversible, ‘up’ the only option, up to where they would whip out
ward, spinning towards a solar orbit too distant for return.
The hull’s progress was still stately, now twenty, thirty, forty feet and rising. As it did, the enormous buckalloy base sagged slightly, with a subsonic groan and a newly sack-like shape. By design, and perfectly harmless, but that deep, internal unbending caused it to rotate slowly on its roiling base of dust. From the left, three towering black numbers rolled into view.
Petey’s lips moved as he read them in the growing gale, and he turned to her and asked, “One hundred?”
“One hundred years!” his father answered, voice raised and hoarse against the wind. “My father, my father’s father and his father—they gave up everything. And what did you and I get? Nothing!”
She rolled her eyes, but he was looking up at the hull, as was Petey. It wasn’t shrinking, not yet, and remained a surreal mountain levitating from the earth. Still turning, enough that Petey could see the rest of the stern’s hull designation. “R..,” he read aloud, then, “G...” He looked up at her. “GR?”
“Great Russia!” his father shouted. The moaning wind wavered as the slingship rose higher, and his angry bark cut through it. “Another favorite—another one of her lost dreams!”
His son’s fingers reached to his and tugged; reluctantly, he took another step back to stand beside them, his creased