30: Telescope
Ever since President Alvarez’s devastating announcement in December 2037, the sunstorm crisis had been oddly bound up with Christmas. The last Christmas before the sunstorm, in 2041, with only four months left before the storm was due to break, was a frenzy of forced gaiety. Bisesa suspected that everybody was secretly glad when it was over.
As for herself, she bought a telescope. And one bright morning in January 2042, with the help of Myra and Linda, she hauled it up to the roof of her apartment block. On this January day, bright and clear, the sun was low in the eastern sky, and the view from this Chelsea rooftop was spectacular. The Dome’s buttresses gleamed like sunbeams, and the smartskin blankets draped over every exposed surface shone like so many huge flowers.
The telescope was a ten-centimeter refractor, secondhand, a big clunky thing more than twenty years old, and it was cheap. But it was smart enough that it could determine its own position and attitude by consulting the Global Positioning System. And then, if you told it what you wanted to look at, with a hum and a whir it would point itself that way and immediately begin tracking, compensating for the Earth’s rotation. Linda had laughed at the gadget’s antiquated user interface—it actually featured that comical horror, a menu system—but it worked well enough.
In central London, with an increasing fraction of the sky blocked out by the Dome, telescopes were of little use, unless you wanted to spy on the gangs of workers who crawled over the inside of the Dome’s roof day and night. But what Bisesa wanted to look at was the sun.
When Bisesa told it what she wanted to see, the telescope’s nanny software immediately started bleating warnings about safe usage. Bisesa already knew all about the dangers. You couldn’t look directly at the sun through a telescope, unless you wanted your eye burned out, but you could project an image. So Bisesa brought up a folding chair and set up a broad sheet of white cartridge paper behind the telescope’s eyepiece. The final positioning of the paper in the telescope’s shadow, and the focusing of the instrument, was a little tricky. But at last, in the middle of the telescope’s complicated shadow, a disk of milky white appeared.
Bisesa was surprised by the clarity of the image, and its size, maybe a third of a meter across. Toward the rim of the disk the brightness faded a little, so she had a clear sense that she was looking at a sphere, a three-dimensional object. Sunspot groups were speckled around the sun’s midlatitudes, easily visible, looking like motes of dust in a shining bowl. It was galling to think that each of those dwarfed dust-speck anomalies was larger than the whole Earth, and, glowing at temperatures of thousands of degrees, they showed as shadows only because they were cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface.
But it was not sunspots that Bisesa had bought her telescope to see.
A line crossed the face of the sun, a stripe of watery gray that traversed from northeast to southwest. It was, of course, the shield. Hanging up there at its station at L1, it was still turned almost edge-on to the sun. But already it cast a shadow on the Earth.
Bisesa hugged Myra. “You see? There it is. It’s real. Now do you believe?”
Myra stared at the shadow. Now thirteen years old, she was a bit too quiet for her age. Bisesa had meant this display to comfort Myra, who was not alone in having trouble believing in the reality of the great project in space.
But her reaction wasn’t what Bisesa had anticipated. She seemed afraid. This was a human-made object, four times as remote as the Moon, and yet visible from Earth. Standing here in the watery sunlight of a London morning, the cosmic vision was astonishing, awe inspiring—crushing.
This is why the Greeks coined the word hubris, Bisesa thought.
31: Perspectives
For lovers, zero G was a lot trickier than the low gravity of the Moon.
That was despite decades of experience, Siobhan had learned. In the days of low Earth orbit flights there had been something called the “Dolphin Club,” so named because in the analogous conditions of floating in the ocean, a dolphin couple would sometimes be helped in their intimacy by the bracing support of a third . . . Siobhan was the Astronomer Royal; she wasn’t about to put up with any of that.
So Bud had improvised equipment to enable her to retain her privacy. With its cuffs, ropes, and restraints his cabin now looked like a bondage parlor, but in giving you something to grip and push against, this stuff supported the ancient arts surprisingly well. But in the isolated little zero-G township of the shield Bud had clearly had help figuring all this out. She made him take down the little plaque above his bed:
COURTESY OF
U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS
ENJOY!
Still, the sex was as deep and rich and satisfying and, damn it, comforting as ever; she was old enough to admit she needed consolation as much as passion.
Afterward, though, as they lay under a thick blanket, with Bud a silent warm mass beside her, her thoughts turned to the reasons she had come here.
This cabin had once been a storeroom; you could still see the marks where shelving and cupboards had been ripped off the walls. Over the years Aurora had been cannibalized, and now it was a husk containing nothing but life support systems, comms centers, and hastily improvised living quarters. But to Bud, she knew, this battered old ship was home. Even when the project was over, no doubt he would always miss it.
It was going to break his heart if she had to bring him home before the job was done. But that was one possible outcome of her visit, and they both knew it.
Bud said at last, “You know, at times like this I still miss a cigarette.”
“At heart you’re just an unreconstructed high school jock, aren’t you?”
“Salt of the earth.” He stared at the ceiling. “But this trip is business, not pleasure, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be. But look—as far as everybody else is concerned, you’re here for the AI switch-on. Nobody but my PA knows about the other stuff.”
Faintly irritated she said, “I’m not here to hurt morale, Bud. I’m supposed to be strengthening the project, not weakening it. That’s the whole point. But—”
“But this business of the audit has to be cleared up.” He held her hand. “I know. And I trust you to handle it well.”
She churned with guilt. “Bud, we both have our duty. And we can’t let anything get in the way of that.”
“I understand. But a bit more pleasure before business.” He sat up. “We’ve got twelve hours before we boot up the AI. Let’s go do some sightseeing.”
They washed, dressed, and drank a coffee. Then Bud escorted her to the little ship he called the V-Eye-P.
The project’s one and only one pressurized inspection module was just a platform laden with spherical fuel and oxidizer tanks and a small set of hydrazine rocket motors—actually attitude thrusters cannibalized from a retired spaceplane. On top was a pressurized tent of Kevlar and aluminum, within which two people could stand side by side. That was it, save for a simple set of controls based on a joystick that sprouted from the floor, and a life support system that would keep you alive for six hours at a pinch.
The shield engineers used variants on this design, but just the platform and the engines, without the tent: why bother with a pressure cabin when you had a perfectly good spacesuit? So you would see engineers skimming over the surface of the shield riding their rocket-propelled boxes like scooters. Only this one special little craft was kept aside for VIPs, visitors like Siobhan who didn’t have the time or inclination to get trained up on how to use a pressure suit.
“Not,” Bud said with a faintly malicious grin, “that this Kevlar tent would be much protection if anything went wrong . . .”
The V-Eye-P was launched from Aurora by an electromagnetic induction rail, like a miniature version of the Sling, the giant mass driver on the Moon. The acceleration was smooth, like a rapid elevator; Siobhan quite enjoyed the feeling of her feet being pressed to the floo
r.
When they had climbed sufficiently far, Bud tested the little ship’s rockets, “burping” them as he called it. It sounded as if small explosions were going off all around the Kevlar hull. Bud explained that there was no exhaust from the induction rail, and rockets, however small, were never used close to the shield. “We’re building a mirror made of frost laced on spiderweb,” he said. “We try not even to breathe on it.”
The craft swiveled and pitched to and fro. It was like being aboard a rather odd fairground ride.
When he was satisfied, Bud brought the craft to a halt and tipped it forward so Siobhan could see down. “Behold the mother ship,” he said.
The venerable old Aurora 2 was still the centerpiece of the shield, still the spider at the center of the web. Despite extensive cannibalization, Siobhan could make out the main features she remembered: the long, elegant spine with the fat habitation module at one end, and the complex clusters of power plants, fuel tanks, and rocket engines at the other. “She’s a game old bird,” Bud said fondly. “I hope she forgives us. She still has a role to play, keeping the shield spun up and oriented correctly. Of course all that will change when the AI comes online and the shield starts to control itself.”
He pulled back on his control stick, and the platform’s thrusters banged. The little ship rose up smoothly, rising away from the shield along an axial line that led straight up from the embedded Aurora.
Siobhan stared out, fascinated, as the shield opened up beneath her. Away from the old Mars ship the shield was a floor so flat and smooth it was like a mathematical abstraction, a semi-infinite plane that cut the universe in half. The surface shimmered, as delicate as a soap bubble, and as she rose higher prismatic rainbows fled across the surface. But the shield was still edge-on to the sun, and the low light streamed through that delicate membrane, so that she could make out the spindly skeleton beneath, struts, spars, and ribs of delicate lunar glass, a fairyland scaffolding that cast long, slim shadows.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “The most massive engineering project anybody ever undertook, and yet it is nothing but glass and light. Like something from a dream.”
“Which is why,” Bud said a bit mysteriously, “I’ve chosen the name I have for her—the shield’s AI, I mean.”
Her? But he would say no more.
He pulsed the attitude control thrusters again and tipped the platform backward, so its windows swiveled to face the Earth. The home planet was a perfect blue marble hanging in space. The Moon, white-brown, sailed beside its parent, some thirty Earth diameters away. L1 was far beyond the orbit of the Moon; from here, there was no doubt this was a twin world.
“Home,” Bud said simply. “Stuck out here it’s good to be reminded of what we’re working our butts off for.” He leaned close to her, and pointed so she could sight along his arm. “See there? And there? . . .”
Against the velvety darkness of space she saw sparks drifting, two, three, four of them in a rough line, like fireflies in the night, passing from Earth to shield.
Bud tapped the window. “Magnification please.”
The image in the window before Siobhan exploded in rapid jumps. Now she could see perhaps a dozen ships. Some were just large enough to show detail, hull markings, solar-cell arrays, antenna booms. The convoy looked like toys, models suspended against velvet.
“A caravan from Earth, bringing up the smartskin.” Bud was grinning. “Crawling its way up the gravity hill to L1. Isn’t that a fantastic sight? And it’s been going on, day and night, for years. If you turn a scope on the dark side of Earth, you can see the sparks of all those launches, over and over.”
On the ground, Siobhan had inspected the collection processes. Smartskin blankets, grown out of household windows like Bisesa Dutt’s in London, were gathered at neighborhood collation points, and then shipped to big storage centers at the airports and spaceports, and finally bundled up and sent to one of the great launch centers at Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Kourou, or Woomera. Just the ground operation was a stupendous enterprise, a mighty international flow across the face of the Earth. And it culminated in these sparks bravely crossing the night.
Bud said, “You know the picture. We’re throwing everything we’ve got into the launches, just like every other aspect of the project. They even dug the space shuttles out of their museums at the Smithsonian and Huntsville, and got those beautiful birds flying again. Worn-out shuttle main engines, too beat-up to be human-rated anymore, are being recycled: you can make a pretty useful throwaway booster out of a shuttle tailplane and a cargo pallet. The Russians have brushed off their old plans for Energia and have got those big old rockets flying again too.
“But even that isn’t enough. So Boeing and McDonnell and the other big contractors are churning out boosters like sausages. Why, some of those new birds aren’t much more sophisticated than a Fourth of July firecracker, and all you can do is point and shoot. But they work, with nearly a hundred percent reliability. And we’re getting the job done . . .”
To Bud, Siobhan supposed, this mighty space project was a boyhood dream come true—space engineering fast and brutal and efficient and on a massive scale, the way it used to be, before cost and politics and risk aversion got in the way.
“You know,” he said, “I think this will change everything.” He waved a hand at the shield. “Surely there will be no going back to the old timid ways after this; surely we’ve broken the bonds. This has set our new direction. And it’s outward.”
“If we all live through the sunstorm.”
He looked faintly resentful. “If that, yes.” There was a subtext: I might be a space buff but I know my duty.
She felt a pang of regret, and wished she could take the words back. Was a barrier forming between them, even before she got to the meat of her mission here?
Bud pushed at the control stick, and the platform swiveled and scooted forward.
Now Siobhan was looking across the shield, as if she were flying over a shining ground. Her eye was drawn out to the shield’s “horizon”—but unlike the Earth’s surface the shield was utterly flat, right to its limits, and the straight-line horizon was sharp as a razor in the vacuum. It was oddly bewildering, the perspective all wrong, as if she were flying over the surface of some monstrous planet a thousand times bigger than the Earth.
Bud said, “Sometimes it fools you. You’ll think you see the horizon curve, like from a low-flying plane. Or you’ll make out a group working and imagine they’re a few hundred meters away—but they’re kilometers off.” He shook his head. “Even now I have trouble grasping the scale of what we’ve done, that two of my guys, working on opposite edges of the shield, can be separated by the whole width of the Earth. And we built it all.”
The platform dipped, and Siobhan flew low over shimmering prisms and glass struts, littered by small structures like shacks, and vehicles like tractors that toiled patiently. One astronaut made her cautious way across the surface bearing a huge strut of gossamer-light lunar glass; she looked like an ant bearing a leaf many times its own size.
And Siobhan made out what looked like flags, held out stiffly by wire in the absence of any breeze. “What are those?”
Bud said bluntly, “We don’t have graves up here. We just push you away, off into interplanetary space. But we give you a marker: a flag of your country or your creed, or whatever you want. As we build the shield we’re working in a spiral, around and around the center, moving farther out all the time. We just plant your flag at the position of the leading edge, wherever it happens to be when you die.”
Now that she looked for them, she could see flags, dozens of them within a single glance. “Hundreds have died up here.” She hadn’t known the numbers.
“These are good people, Siobhan. Even without the direct risks of the construction work, some of them have worked in zero G without a break for two years or more. The medics say we are all storing up problems with our bone structure and cardiovascular systems and lymph syste
ms and the rest. You know what the most common surgery procedure is up here? For kidney stones, nodules of calcium leached from your bones. And not to mention radiation exposure. Everyone knows about the damage to DNA, the cancer risks. But how about the brain? Your noggin is particularly vulnerable to cosmic radiation, and has a limited ability to repair itself. Space makes you dumb, Siobhan.”
“I didn’t know that—”
“I bet you didn’t,” he said, a hardness under his even tone. “Medical studies on shield workers themselves have proved this. Every year up here you shave ten years off your life. And yet these people stay, and work themselves to death.”
“Oh, Bud—” Impulsively she grabbed his hands. “I’m not here to attack your people; you know that. And I don’t want us to fall out.”
He said heavily, “But—“
“But you know why I’m here.”
It was a question of corruption.
Earthbound accountants, poring over their voluminous electronic books, had found that a fraction of the funds and materials flowing up into space had gone astray—and that the decision making behind that siphoning-off had to lie up here, on the shield itself.
“Bud, the administration couldn’t ignore it if they wanted to. After all, if this goes on the whole project could be put at risk—”
He cut her short. “Siobhan, get real. I’m not going to deny the skimming-off. But, Jesus, look out the window. This project is soaking up a significant proportion of the GDP of the entire planet. Croesus himself couldn’t peel off enough to make a dent in that. You’ve got to get this in perspective. In percentage terms—”
“That’s not the point, Bud. You have to think about the psychology. You say your people here are making sacrifices. Well, so we are on Earth too, just as hard, to fund this thing. And if any of it has been stolen—”
“Stolen.” He snorted and turned away from her. “Siobhan, you’ve no idea how it is to work up here. Two million kilometers from your home, your family. Yes, here I am saving the planet. But I also want to save my own son.”