“What’s it like up there?” I asked him. He was getting frustrated and I thought he might benefit from a break.
“Oh, you have seen the model, I am sure. It is quite accurate, in the externals which can be viewed by your telescopes. Of course, most of the Forty Thousand never see any of that. Only the internals of the Orbstack where they live their whole lives.” He was speaking of the living heart of the Daban Urnud: sixteen hollow spheres, each a bit less than a mile in diameter, clustered about a central axis that rotated to produce pseudogravity.
“That’s what I’m asking about,” I said. “What’s that community of ten thousand Laterrans like?”
“Split, now, between the Fulcrum and the Pedestal.” The Fulcrum was the opposition movement, led by Fthosians.
“But in normal times—”
“Until we came here, and the positions of Pedestal and Fulcrum became so hard, it was like a nice provincial town with perhaps a university or research lab. Each orb is half full of water. The water is covered with houseboats. On the roofs of them, we grow our own food—ah, I remember food!”
“Each race has four of the orbs, I assume?”
“Officially, yes, but there is of course some mixing of the communities. When the ship is not under acceleration, we can open certain doors to join neighboring orbs, and one moves freely between them. In one of the orbs of Laterre, we have a school.”
“So there are children?”
“Of course we have children and raise them very, very well—education is everything to us.”
“I wish we did a better job of that on Arbre,” I said. “Extramuros, that is.”
Jules thought about it, and shrugged. “Understand, I do not describe a utopia! We do not educate the young ones purely out of respect for noble ideals. We need them to stay alive, and to allow the voyaging of the Daban Urnud to continue. And there is competition between the children of Urnud, Tro, Laterre, and Fthos for the positions of power within the Command.”
“Does that even extend to fields such as linguistics?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. I am a strategic asset! To make its way to new cosmi and to carry out new Advents is the Rayzon Det of the Command. And almost nothing is more useful to them, in an Advent, than a linguist.”
“Of course,” I said. “So, your nice town of ten thousand is big enough for people to marry, or whatever you do—”
“We marry,” he confirmed. “Or at least, sufficient of us do, and have children, to maintain ten thousand.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Are you married?”
“I was,” he said.
So they had divorces too. “Any kids?”
“No. Not yet. Never, now.”
“We’ll get you back home,” I told him. “Maybe you’ll meet someone new up there.”
“Not like her,” he said. Then he got a wry look and shrugged. “When Lise and I were together, I always would have said such things. Sweet nothings. ‘Oh, there is no one like you, my love.’” He sniffled, and looked away. “Not insincerely, of course.”
“Of course not.”
“But the manner of her passing made so clear, so bright, the truth of it—that there truly was no one like her. And in a community of only ten thousand, cut off forever from its roots in the home cosmos—well—I know them all, Raz. All the women of my age. And I can tell you as a matter of fact that in the cosmos where you and I are standing, there is no one like my Lise.” Tears were running freely down his face now.
“I am terribly sorry,” I said. “I feel such a fool. I didn’t understand your wife was dead.”
“She is dead,” he confirmed. “I have, you know, seen the pictures of her body—her face—all over the Convox.”
“My god,” I exclaimed. I wasn’t in the habit of using religious oaths, but could think of nothing else strong enough. “The woman in the probe at Orithena—”
“She was my Lise,” said Jules Verne Durand. “My wife. I have already told Sammann.” And then he broke down altogether.
Jules and I were sitting together in the darkened cell, nothing to see by except simulated sunlight, reflecting from a simulated Arbre and a simulated moon. Simulated persons in spacesuits drifted silently around us. He was hunched over sobbing.
I remembered our Messal conversations about how we could interact in simple physical ways with the Geometers even if biological interaction was not possible. I went over and wrapped my arms around the Laterran until he stopped crying.
“He told me,” I said to Sammann later.
He knew immediately who and what I was speaking of. He broke eye contact and shook his head. “How’s he doing?”
“Better…he said something good.”
“What’s that?”
“I touched Orolo. Orolo touched Lise—gave himself up for her. When I touched Jules, it was like—”
“Closing a cycle.”
“Yeah. I told him how we had prepared her body. The respect we showed it. He seemed to like hearing that.”
“He told me on the plane,” Sammann said. “Asked me not to tell the others.”
“You have anyone like that, Sammann?” For in all the time we’d spent together, we’d never broached such topics.
He chuckled and shook his head. “Like that? No. Not like that. A few girlfriends sometimes. Otherwise, just family. Ita are—well—more family oriented.” He stopped awkwardly. The contrast with avout was too obvious.
“Well, in that vein,” I finally said, “could you help me close another cycle?”
He shrugged. “Be happy to try. What do you need?”
“You got a message off to Ala the other day. Just before the plane took off. I was sort of—shy.”
“Because of the lack of privacy,” he said. “Yeah, I could see that.”
“Can you send her another?”
“Sure. But it won’t be any more private than the last.”
I sort of chuckled. “Yeah. Well, considering everything, that’ll be acceptable.”
“Okay. What do you want me to tell Ala?”
“That if I get to have a fourth life, I want to spend it with her.”
“Whew!” he exclaimed, and his eyes glistened as if I’d slapped him. “Let me type that in before you change your mind.”
“All we do now is go forward,” I said, “there’ll be no changing of minds.”
* * *
Rod: Military slang. To bombard a target, typically on the surface of a planet, by dropping a rod of some dense material on it from orbit. The rod has no moving parts or explosives; its destructiveness is a consequence of its extremely high velocity.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
I spent the entire journey to orbit convinced that the rocket had failed and that this was what dying was. The designers hadn’t had time or budget to put in fripperies like windows, or even speely feeds: just a fairing, a thin outer shell whose functions were to shield the monyafeek from wind-blast; to block out all light, ensuring we’d make the trip in absolute darkness and ignorance; and to vibrate. The latter two functions combined to maximize the terror. Think of what you’d feel going down white water in a barrel. Keeping that in mind, think of being nailed into a rickety crate and then thrown from an overpass onto an eight-lane freeway at peak traffic. Now think of putting on a padded suit and being used for stick-fighting practice in the Ringing Vale. Finally, imagine having giant speakers glued to your skull and pure noise pumped into them at double the threshold for permanent hearing loss. Now pile all of those sensations on top of each other and imagine them going on for ten minutes.
The only favorable thing I could say about it was that it was much better than how I’d spent the preceding hour: lying on my back in the dark, wedged and strapped in a fetal position, and expecting to die. Compared to that, actually dying was turning out to be a piece of cake. Most unpleasant—and, in retrospect, most embarrassing—had been the philosophical musings with which I’d whiled away the time: that Orolo’s
death, and Lise’s, had prepared me to accept my own. That it was good I’d sent that message to Ala. That even if I died in this cosmos I might go on living in another.
A stowaway hit me in the spine with a pipe. No, wait a second, that was the engine exploding. No, actually it had been the explosive charges blowing off the fairing. A system of cracks split the darkness into quadrants, then expanded to crowd it out. The four petals of the fairing fell aft and I found myself looking down at Arbre. Some of the buffeting’s overtones (aero turbulence) lessened, others (combustion chamber instability) got worse. The acceleration, so far, had not been a big deal compared to the buffeting, but about then it became quite intense for half a minute or so as the missile’s engine concluded its burn. Made it hard to appreciate the view. Another spine-crack told me that the booster had fallen off. Good riddance. It was just me and the monyafeek now. A few moments’ drift and weightlessness came to a decisive end as the steering thrusters got a grip and snapped the stage into the correct orientation with a crispness that was reassuring even if it did make some of my internal organs swap places. Then a sense of steadily building weight as the monyafeek’s engine came on for its long burn. To all appearances—the sky was black—I was out of the atmosphere, and the roof of the gazebo was doing nothing more than blocking my view ahead. But as the monyafeek’s engine pushed me ahead toward orbital velocity, blades of plasma grew out from the roof’s edges and twitched around my shoulders and feet, just close enough to make it interesting. This was the upper atmosphere being smashed out of the way with such violence that electrons were being torn loose from atoms.
At the launch site, just after I’d swallowed the Big Pill (an internal temperature transponder) and donned the suit, the avout who’d been pressed into service as launch crew had mummified me in kitchen wrap, stuffed me into the gazebo, bracing their shoulders against the soles of my feet, and strapped me together with packing tape. They had taken measurements with yardsticks: freebies from the local megastore. More tape work had ensued, until they’d compressed me into an envelope that matched the diagrams on their hastily printed, extensively hand-annotated documents. Then they had converged on me with cans of expanding foam insulation and foamed me into position, being sure to get the stuff between my knees and my chest, my heels and my butt, my wrists and my face. Once the foam had become rigid, someone had reached in and peeled the plastic back from my face shield so that I could see, patted me on the helmet, and stuck a box cutter into my skelehand. The importance of the measurements became obvious during the early minutes of the second stage burn, as I saw those jets of white-hot atmosphere playing within inches of my feet. But they faded as we climbed out of the atmosphere altogether. The entire gazebo sprang off (literally—it was spring-loaded) and drifted away, leaving me as hood ornament. Then I was powerfully tempted to get free of the packing material. But I knew the velocity-versus-time curve of this trajectory by heart, and knew I was still far from reaching orbital velocity. Most of the velocity gain was going to happen in the final part of the burn, when the monyafeek had left in its wake three-quarters or more of its mass in the form of expended propellants. The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as “near-fatal.” “But it’s okay,” he’d said, “you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.”
I tried to look around. During the last three days, I’d fantasized that the view would be fantastic. Inspiring. I’d be able to see the other rockets going up: two hundred of them, all arcing up and east on roughly parallel courses. But the suit had more air bags inside of it than Jesry had let on, and all of them had been pumped up to maximal inflation (meaning: I was lying on a bed of rocks), locking my head and torso into the attitude deemed least likely to end in death, paralysis, or organ failure. My spleen could rest easy; my eyes could see nothing but a starfield, and a bit of Arbre’s glowing blue atmosphere down in the lower right. Those grew blurry as my eyes began to water, and the eyeballs themselves were mashed out of shape by their own weight, like Arsibalt sitting on a water balloon…
I was falling. I was hung over. I was not dead. My suit was talking to me. Had been for a bit. “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to deflate the restraint system and to commence the next stage of the operation,” suggested a voice in Orth, over and over: some suur with good enunciation who’d been drafted to read canned messages into a recording device. I wanted to meet her.
“Ruzzin duzzle,” I said, thinking that this would impress her.
The suit drew breath, then said, “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to—”
“Rustin Deplo!” I insisted. She was beginning to get on my nerves. Maybe I didn’t want to meet her after all.
“Issue the ‘Restraint—’”
“Restirraynt. Dee. Press. Your. Eyes.”
The bags deflated. “Welcome to Low Arbre Orbit!” said the voice, in an altogether different tone.
My head and torso were now free to move about the HTU, but my arms and legs were still taped and foamed. I got busy with that box cutter. It was slow going at first, but soon hunks of foam and snarls of tape were flying out of the monyafeek, drifting away, keeping station in my general vicinity. Eventually, because of their low mass and high drag, they’d re-enter and burn up. Until then, they’d make a lot of visual clutter to confuse the Geometers.
Speaking of clutter, I was beginning to see brilliant specks of light around me. There were two kinds: millions of tiny sparkles (strips of chaff sent up on other missiles) and dozens of large, steady beacons. Some of the latter were near enough that my eyeballs—gradually resuming their former shape—could resolve them as disks, or moons. Depending on where they, I, and the sun were situated, some looked like full moons, some like new ones, others somewhere in between.
There was a half moon off to my right, steadily getting larger as my orbit and it converged. It was a metallized poly balloon five hundred feet across, sent up in the same missile-barrage as I. By measuring its apparent size against the reticle on my face mask, I was able to estimate its distance: about two miles. This must be the one I was supposed to make for.
Feeling around inside the arm-stumps, I got my left hand on the trackball and my right on the stick. They were dead until I uttered another voice command, and confirmed it by flicking a switch. This brought the monyafeek’s thrusters under my control. Up to now, the built-in guidance system had been managing them. And, assuming that the nearby balloon was the one that I was supposed to be aiming for, it seemed to have done a respectable job. But it had no eyes, no brain by which it could home in on the balloon. And as long as the Geometers kept jamming our nav satellites, it could only get me so close. From here on, my eyes would have to be the sensors and my brain the guidance system. I gave the trackball the tiniest rotation, just to verify that the system was working, and the thrusters spat blue light and spun me around to a new attitude. I got my bearings, squared Arbre’s horizon below me, figured out which way was southeast (the direction of my orbital travel), made a mental calculation, thought about it one more time for good measure, and gave the joycetick a shot in two directions. The monyafeek hit me with a one-two punch. Other than that, nothing terrible happened, and I liked what the balloon was now doing in my visual field, so I was tempted to repeat. But I thought better of it. That was how we’d frequently got into trouble in the video game: by doing too much of the right thing.
I had a long-distance wireless transceiver, for use only in emergencies. I left it switched off. When the balloon was close enough for the short-range system to work, I said “Reticule scan,” and a few moments later the suit came back with “Network joined,” drowned out by Sammann’s voice: “How was that for a ride?”
“I want my money back,” I said, and suppressed a feeling of wild joy that came over me on hearing his—anyone’s—voice. Glancing down at a display below my face mask (actually, projected into my eyeballs so that it looked that
way), I saw ikons for myself, Sammann, and Fraa Gratho. But as I was looking, Esma’s face and then Jules’s were tacked on. I looked around to see two other monyafeeks converging on us. They were flying in improbably close formation. Actually, one of them—Esma—was towing the other. “I grappled Jules. He was drifting,” Esma said. Fortunately, I had grown accustomed to the Valers’ habit of modest understatement. I’d only just managed to get here alone. In the same time, Esma had tracked someone else, maneuvered to snag him, and brought him home.
“Jules? What’s up? You okay? Is this what passes for a joke on Laterre?” Sammann asked.
“I locked him out of the reticule,” Esma said. “He was speaking incoherently of cheese.”
“Twenty minutes to line of sight,” said an automated voice—referring to the time when the Daban Urnud would be able to see us. The balloon now was huge in my vision, and I could see Sammann hovering to one side of it in his monyafeek, Gratho in his about fifty feet away. Both looked strangely colorful and fuzzy, like toddlers’ toys. The monyafeeks, and the other, non-human payloads that had been sent up at the same time, were surrounded by unruly clouds of fibrous netting that had been crammed into sealed capsules for the ride up, but that had popped open once we’d hit orbit, and expanded to ten times their former volume. We looked like drifting red pompoms.
“You guys performed the star check?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Gratho, “but I invite you to verify our results.”
I used the trackball to nudge myself around until I could see the vaguely circular constellation that outlined the Hoplite’s shield, and compared its position to those of Arbre and of the balloon. This was a simple way of assuring that when our orbit took us around to where telescopes on the Daban Urnud might be able to see us, the balloon would be between us and them.
By now, the Geometers must know that something big was afoot. We had timed it, though, in such a way that Arbre had blocked their view of the two-hundred-missile launch. That was soon to change. Our orbit was almost perfectly circular—its eccentricity, a measure of how unround it was, was only 0.001—and it skimmed just above the atmosphere, at an altitude of a hundred miles. It took us around Arbre once every hour and a half. The Daban Urnud’s orbit was more elliptical, and its altitude ranged between fourteen and twenty-five thousand miles. It took ten times as long—about fifteen hours—to make one revolution. Imagine two runners circling a pond, one staying so close to the shore that his feet got wet, the other maintaining a distance of half a mile. The one on the inside would lap the one on the outside ten times for every circuit made by the other. Whenever we were lapping the Daban Urnud, they could look down and see us against the backdrop of Arbre. Soon, though, we would scoot around behind the planet and be lost to their view for anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. We had launched during one of those intervals of privacy; now it was halfway over.