by Wil McCarthy
From that point on, things began to happen more slowly. Ganymede itself began to dwindle, now beneath us, now behind, now a world, an object, a bauble. But this took hours, and the bridge crew's conversation and task loading dwindled right along with it. On the orbital schematic, our apoapsis, the high point of our projected orbit, shot away from the little moon, out into Jovian space, our departure conic no longer an ellipse but an open, saddle-shaped curve, a hyperbola that would not bring us back to our starting point. But no, as I zoomed the image back I saw the path did not swing out to infinity at all, but curved back on itself in an arc many thousands of times larger. Still an ellipse, this time around Jupiter itself, and the new apoapsis continued to climb, if languidly.
A faint gray line on the display marked the limit of influence, the point at which (a dictionary check informed me) the distant sun's gravity would exceed that of Jupiter. And then what? An open curve leading away from Jupiter, swinging down into an enormous, sun-centered ellipse? There must be more to it than that; somehow, we had to get all the way down to the inner planets, some billion kilometers distant. Measured against Ganymede and Jupiter and the rest of the Immunity, our velocity steadily increased, but the heliocentric counter showed us slowing down with respect to the sun. Falling inward, canceling out the centrifugal pull that held us away? That made a kind of sense to me, but I resolved to find out more. For the forseeable future, these geometries would be running my life.
It would take an hour for the apoapsis to climb out of Jovian space, and another sixty before Louis Pasteur did so herself. Like the old cartoon, the hungry-looking donkey following behind a carrot it could never catch, a carrot dangling from a stick tied to its own head. The faster we went, the farther away the carrot retreated. Anyway, seeing that there was time—an awful infinity of it, in fact—I cleared my throat and broke the silence.
“Captain, it looks like we're through here for the time being. If you don't mind, I'd like to go aft and have a word with Rapisardi.”
“Hmm?” Wallich turned to look at me, his laughing eyes standing out against a distant, troubled expression. “Rapisardi? Yes? What about?”
“My job,” I said. “We're off on entirely the wrong foot, here, and I need to know some things before I can start to put a report together.”
A giggle formed and died in Wallich's throat, though his expression barely flickered. “A report. Yes, well. We'll be doing a lot of maintenance drills, you know, especially in light of what's happened, and I'll expect you to pull your own mass. We'll teach you to tear down that console and put it back together again, at the very least. But we can start all that tomorrow. Yes, you can go aft and talk to Rapisardi.”
“Thanks,” I told him, reaching for my harness release and disengaging it carefully. Under the two-tenths gee thrust, I turned and lowered myself until I found footing on the step behind Baucum's chair. I'd done this several times in Ganymedean gravity without mishap, and though Baucum swiveled her head to glare nervously as I climbed down, I managed the operation without stepping or falling on her.
“Don't thank me,” Wallich said mildly when he saw I was safely down. “We've all got our jobs to do. Only one thing, Strasheim: run your material past me before you transmit. I wouldn't want to see anything... inflammatory come down looking like official word. You see the potential for problems, I'm sure.”
And then he laughed.
So that was how it was going to be, eh? The walls seemed to close in a little more tightly, but I smiled back at him pleasantly enough. “Sure I do. Yeah, sure I do.”
Sure I did. Renata Baucum turned toward me again, flashing a look I couldn't interpret. Emphasis—wide, rolling eyes, the eyebrows arching. Whatever the message, I wasn't getting it, and her manner suggested she'd drop the expression the moment Wallich looked her way.
Oh, the hell with it, I thought, and turned to go. If it was important, she could jolly well tell me later.
~~~
“Mr. Rapisardi, Ms. Davenroy,” I said as I entered the engine room. Or entered its hatchway, more properly—the room, dim and gray and lined with humming pipes, wasn't big enough for three. Wasn't even big enough for the two that were in it, really.
“Mr. Strasheim,” they chorused in reply, and we all shared an uncomfortable, unhappy little laugh.
“Tug Jinacio,” I said after a pause. “I don't understand why he died. I was hoping one or both of you could answer some questions.”
Davenroy frowned. “About what?”
“Ladderdown,” I said, and the two of them relaxed a bit. “This talk of bombs, it's very puzzling. Is such a thing really possible?”
Rapisardi nodded. “Yes. You know, it's an interesting accusation, because we don't normally think of ladderdown in this way. A source of energy and raw materials, yes, but also it can be made to explode. We don't do this, of course, but whoever planted the rumor must have known a little physics.”
“You say 'planted'?” I led.
“Well, yes. These detectors, which I designed my own self, are not explosive. I would know this, you agree?
“Presumably.”
“So the rumor is maybe to disrupt our voyage. There are those who disapprove, as well you know, and they are maybe not always the ones you expect. We're spending a lot of money, and this upsets people, as the spending of money will do.”
“I thought we'd kind of got beyond money,” Davenroy mumbled with more than a touch of sarcasm.
“Yes, of course,” Rapsiardi agreed in the same tone, his eyes flicking from me to Davenroy and back. “Now that we are dependent on heavy metals rather than fossil organics and sunlight, economics have simply gone away. You want a lesson in economics from a biophysicist's point of view? It works like ecology—it breeds and selects. Not that we actually carry them in our pockets, but the gram of uranium has become our most basic unit of currency. Thanks to chronic short-staffing, we consider it equivalent to half an hour of human labor, though its energy potential is some twenty-six million times greater. Aside from ourselves, it is the first driver of our economy, the reasons for which are not at all arbitrary.”
“For energy reasons,” I said.
He winced slightly, shifted position in his chair. “Energy? Well, yes and no. Energy is less important than transmutation potential. In rough terms, a fusion reactor cascading a gram of deuterium/tritium up into a gram of iron—the basin of the binding energy curve—will liberate enough energy to boil about twenty thousand tons of water. A gram of uranium in a ladderdown reactor produces approximately the same. And yet, the uranium is worth ten thousand times more, because in laddering it down, we don't have to sink all the way to iron. We can stop anywhere along the way, and our waste products are isotopes of hydrogen which we can cascade back up, again stopping wherever we like below that magic number, iron fifty-six. A ladderdown economy sees value not only in what a substance is, but also in what it can become, and uranium, alone among the stable elements, can become anything.”
That was an interesting precis, a perspective I'd never quite heard before, but meaning what? I shook my head. “What does this have to do with today? I'm not following.”
“No?” Rapisardi banged the wall with his fist, producing a flat, solid thump. “Heavy metals. Particularly with its t-balance jacketing, this vehicle is very literally made of money.”
“The starship has almost universal support,” I pointed out, “And it's much bigger and more expensive. No one has started any blooms over that.”
“Not yet, no, but maybe someday. At the moment, it's mostly coming together out of iron, an essentially valueless material. But even now the labor costs are punishing, and heaven help us when we start to fuel it. The endeavor may kick us forcibly from a uranium economy to an antimatter one.”
“Again,” I sighed, “I'm afraid you've lost me. Try to imagine I'm not viewing life through a biophysicists eyes. Or an economist's.”
He shook his head. “You can view through mine, if you like. Forgive me; I
'm used to having this conversation over and over again with the same people. Eventually it becomes its own shorthand. What I'm getting at is that every g.u. we spend outside the Immunity is a g.u. that has to be earned back through human labor. And where are we supposed to find that? Many people are surprised to learn that lead's energy potential is only 25% less than uranium's, but the thing to remember is that lead has ten fewer transmutation targets—eighty-one versus ninety-one—which translates into a factor of a thousand reduction in its value. Gold, three rungs lower still, is worth about a five-thousandth as much as uranium. It has beautiful mechanical and electrical properties, but really, the major cost of paving the streets with it is the labor1. <
“And believe me, that starship will make its costs apparent soon enough. The energy density of antihydrogen is about 250 times what we can achieve with ladderdown, and the production and storage are difficult. Wonderful fuel, the best, but the last time I checked, a gram of it cost over eighty thousand g.u., which basically means the ship is not going anywhere this decade, nor probably the next. But we will continue to pay, you see? There is bound to be impatience, and backlash.”
I still wasn't satisfied—Rapisardi was answering the question he wanted to answer, which wasn't really the one I had asked. I pressed for clarification: “You're saying you don't think the Temples of Transcendent Evolution had anything to do with the attack?”
“Eh?” He looked up from his gray, almost blank-looking console, looked straight at me for what seemed the first time. Suddenly realizing, no doubt, that he was speaking for the record, that the next words he spoke would cling to him, remain associated with him for a time in the public zeitgeist. His face went cautious. “No, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. The problem I'm discussing is systemic throughout the Immunity, but the Temples have their own private complaints as well. Twice as many motives as anyone else. By the crudest possible logic, I'd say there's a sixty-six percent chance they were involved in the incident in some way. Neither outcome would surprise me very much, let me say that. Is this an interview, Strasheim?”
“If you like,” I said with some reluctance. “It doesn't seem like the best time. Really, I just wanted clarification on the bomb question.”
He nodded, thinking about that. “You need something to tell the people back home, I see. I didn't know Jinacio all that well, but I liked him. His loss— well, naturally it's very upsetting. Maybe you could mention that, as well.”
Was that resentment I heard? Probably, yes. The price of reporting for a living, I supposed, of being seen as one who reports. In a way, I actually was a spy. I noticed Davenroy, sitting quietly in her little niche, looking at me. She had known Jinacio rather better than the rest of us. Possibly, I was intruding on her grief? How not to intrude, in this tiny vessel? Facts of life, problems I'd better start solving here and now.
“I'll do that,” I said to both of them, now looking past them at their instrument niches, crowded together like the dark spaces under opposite desks. “I liked him, too; some people are just better at inspiring confidence. Um, ungraceful change of subject: I'm curious about how the engines are performing. Not for the home audience, but for my own peace of mind.”
“All nominal,” Davenroy said, amicably enough, “but I hope you like microgravity. First burn should end in about forty-eight hours, and after that we're weightless. If you're going to barf all over everything, dear, you should think about staying in your quarters.”
My coffin, she meant. My eggshell-thin plastic tomb. “I'll be fine,” I assured her, “But thanks for the warning. I'll, uh, I'll be on the bridge. See you later.”
“Undoubtedly,” Davenroy said, and as I turned away, I thought in the shadows of her face I maybe saw the glimmer of a teardrop, or possibly a wink.
EIGHT:
Snapshots
The evacuation of Earth was much like that of the Titanic a century and a half before; we see the same bravado, denial, lifeboats floating away half empty, and only in about the final quarter of the crisis do its participants really begin to voice and act on their peril. In Earth's case, this equates to a span of maybe thirty-six hours. Not a long time to clear a whole planet.
Within a hundred kilometers of a major spaceport, you had just about a one in a thousand chance of making it to orbit alive; outside these areas the odds dropped to less than one in a million. And from there, another five percent failed to make it to Luna before their air or water or luck ran out. Those that made it, of course, completely swamped the Lunar bases' ability to cope, so mortality continued in a steady grind for weeks and months afterward. The state of emergency never ended, and no sense of normalcy was ever established, which turned out to be a fortunate thing when the spores started falling and the bare, sterile Lunar soil itself began to bloom. In a very real sense, the Second Evacuation was a mere appendix to the First, the continued unfolding of a single event.
For a number of reasons, from the astrodynamic to the mycoric to the geopolitical to plain coincidence, evacuees from Earth's tropical regions ended up mostly at Mendeleev and Moscoviense on the Lunar farside. With notable exceptions, those unfortunates starting out between 30 and 45 degrees north or south latitudes didn't make it out at all, while those from the high temperate zones found themselves at Tycho and Clavius and Pingre in the nearside's southern latitudes.
These groupings were largely preserved in the Second Evacuation, in that the farsiders—actually the first to leave in many cases—settled primarily in the asreroid belt, while nearside refugees, fearing the spread of a Mycosystem whose limitations were by no means clear at that time, pressed straight on to Jupiter. The wide Bode gap separating these two regions proved a formidable barrier to sustained commerce, which in turn limited contact to the time-lagged data channels, permitting the regions' cultural evolution to diverge significantly. Within a decade, the Immune/Gladholder distinction had taken firm hold, and indeed has changed little since that time.
Less to survive on out here, yes, but more to compete with down there. Who can say which life is harder? And to those who express surprise that the Gladholders have hung on as long as they have, let me assure you: they say exactly the same about us.
—from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure,
(c) 2101 by John Strasheim
~~~
Image: Engine room, starboard instrument niche; closeup, main oversight console. Text Enhance: The panel is nearly featureless, just a flat Teflon grid marked off into domino sectors by little white lines. Made active and useful mainly by the zee-spec—see technical specification for further detail. Schematic Enhance: 0.75-second overlay of the console projections. APDX: Adjust resolution and color palette to favor little yellow lines! Also, just for yucks, show human figure as wireframe around cartoon skeleton. Image: (restore previous).
Voiceover: The disquiet of knowing the engines can in fact explode is mitigated somewhat by the knowledge that Davenroy sits here most of the time, monitoring reactor status whether the engines are firing or not. In an environment like this, you learn very quickly to trust your crewmates. Smile for the camera, dear. Perfect, perfect. They love you already.
Image: closeup, contamination and environmental monitoring station. Voiceover: Sudhir Rapisardi backs Davenroy up with constant assessments of the fuel supply and engine surfaces, watching not only for TGL infestation but for invaders as mundane as sterile interplanetary dust, and for such homegrown dangers as cracking or hot spots i
n the materials. So, how's it going? Rapisardi: Ok. Voiceover: A man of few words, ladies and gentlemen, but if you do get him talking you'd better have some time on your hands.
Image: Engine room. Pan (i.e., float) back two meters; zoom out to max viewing angle, focus infinity. Text Enhance: Engine room crew work overlapping 15-hour shifts, and either station can be reconfigured to perform some or all of the functions of the other. See technical specification for further detail. Schematic Enhance: 1 pt. grid overlay, calcium white, 10 cm spacing, conformal with inanimate surfaces. Hold one second, fade one second. APDX: Human figures should eclipse grid lines. Fix in post!
Voiceover: What you see now is the view of the engine room from the wardroom hatchway, which shows you most of what there is to see, but which is also a little misleading visually. It's difficult to convey how dim and cramped this space really is, but my bedroom closet back home has more light and more maneuvering room, and probably yours does, too. Rapisardi and Davenroy are like little troglodytes back here in their cave. Turning around...
Image: Yaw 180 degrees; medium zoom, focus three meters. APDX: Too washy. Adjust color pallette for greater ambient light. Text Enhance: The fanfold doors are of stiffened carbon mesh, anchored at two corners and able to slide in tracks at the other two. Surfaces colored, thank God, by a double layer of spray-enamel. The latching mechanism (not visible) includes the ability to lock quarters from inside, but any fool could pop the door open if need arose. The blue door is of course the restroom, or “head.” Green is the shower, and all others are crew quarters. The lack of red anywhere reflects a merchant spacer prejudice which equates that color with danger, but you do get to missing it pretty quickly.
