Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Home free, pretty much,” Davra said. “We're within the ship's magnetic field. But it would be better to get down to the spheres where we're behind some water."

  The runabout glided neatly onto the docking attachment with a satisfying clank. Air whooshed into the airlock.

  We were greeted by Jill, who hurried us out of the lock toward G. P. Weaver, and a very tall East Asian woman with dramatically long hair, wearing a simple black jumpsuit. Her face seemed familiar, but my European-trained eyes couldn't place her for certain. She asked how we were, seemed satisfied, and then told us very gently that we would not get many second chances out here. She looked at Weaver the way a disapproving parent would look at a child, shook her head, and left. I'd thought she was the ship's physician until I'd gotten a clear look at the nametape on her jumpsuit. Despite over a decade of being no farther from her than the length of a football field, that was the first and only time I met Captain Lee Hyun Sil face to face.

  “Let's get downstairs,” Weaver said.

  Tension drained from me as we entered the Sphere Three Park area. I turned to Emma. “You saw our light spot, then?"

  She looked at Davra. They giggled.

  “We had a better homing beacon,” Emma said. “Uh, ‘cold fish,’ I recall."

  “'...wouldn't really have that much else to do ... ‘” Davra added.

  “'...just needs some leadership'?” Emma raised an eyebrow.

  “'...likely into sophisticated things'?” Davra stuck out her tongue at me and wiggled it.

  “Your suit transceivers were fried,” she added, “but the microphone preamps worked just fine."

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  Aboard the Admiral Byrd,

  In the Epsilon Eridani System,

  November 2272

  Meeting in the Sphere Three Park the next day, we put the banter all behind us.

  “We aren't achieving exponential growth,” Weaver said. “Between an increasing impact rate and particle storm damage, we're barely achieving any growth at all."

  Emma sighed. “Star weather, like all weather, is chaotic. In all likelihood, our best strategy may be simply to slog on and wait for it to get better."

  Dagger shook his head. “And when will that be? The impactor should start on its way in less than two years, and we'll need to have the array up to full power within a month of that."

  Davra, for once entirely serious, nodded. “We try to optimize for one set of conditions, and the conditions change, with no rhyme or reason to it."

  Weaver's face looked grim. “We've got to come up with something, folks. I'm counting on you, along with people on three other planets, not to mention the impact station."

  I looked at him. This was leadership, aye. But where were the ideas going to come from? Everyone sat silently.

  Well, this was not so different from uncounted faculty meetings. I could at least get a ball rolling. “I'm no technical genius, but if you don't mind some input from a historian, there's an old engineering problem-solving technique called brainstorming. You sit around and throw out ideas, no matter how crazy they seem. No criticism, just throw out ideas; one then suggests another and you record all of it. Then you display what you got, note the problems and maybe solutions to the problems. Those that have no solutions, you winnow out."

  “I reckon that sounds like a way to start, anyway,” Weaver said. “Let's try it. Dr. Macready?"

  He wanted me to set an example, so I thought of the craziest thing I could. “We seem to be fighting a hostile intelligence. Maybe we can communicate with it?"

  Emma groaned.

  Dagger laughed. “Can't critique yet, if I got the gist of the rules. Okay. Maybe Davra here is in cahoots with all the anti-Black Hole Project people back on Earth and is secretly sabotaging the robots. We fire her and it gets better. We're going round robin on this? You're next, Davra."

  She clenched her hands together in front of her and stared down, then took a deep breath. “We don't need the power right now. Maybe we can store everything in one protected place, then unfold it when we really need it. G. P.?"

  Weaver seemed surprised at the notion that he would participate in the brainstorming session, but he smiled. “Haven't had to saddle that stallion for a while. Well, now. If we think there may be an optimum strategy outside our search area ... something extreme ... Maybe we don't make any more arrays at all, just grow array makers exponentially. Less area to worry about. Then we turn ‘em loose all at once.” He smiled again and shrugged his shoulders. “Emma?"

  She gave a short laugh. “It's an engineering problem, really. I don't recall reading of any similar situation."

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Oh, very well. Impact damage goes as the square of velocity. So we could start over farther out where the relative velocities are lower and the particle cloud is less dense. We'd use thin film reflectors to concentrate light and make up for the loss of insolation."

  We went round and round in this way for an hour. Everyone leaned forward as they threw out their ideas. Good, I thought, as the words flew across the grassy floor of the dome.

  I had trouble visualizing the problem, so I asked the Admiral for a view of the Epsilon Eridani system and the cloud of debris.

  The Admiral portrayed the system on the dome ceiling. The debris cloud looked like a fat translucent doughnut, with Epsilon Eridani a spark in the center of the hole. The plane of the orbits of the planets sliced through the doughnut the way one would slice a bagel. The debris cloud got less and less dense the farther one got from that plane.

  “Pity we can't orbit the arrays over the poles,” I offered.

  Emma groaned. “Basic astrodynamics. Sorry, Bruce. Critiquing, aren't I. The project plan is for an equatorial ring. But even in a polar orbit, the arrays would still pass through the debris torus, and then there will be precession...."

  “Okay, okay,” Dagger said. “But they only have to pass through the debris cloud twice an orbit, right? Most of the time the array is out in the clear. That's better than being in the mess all the time, isn't it?"

  We all looked at him.

  "Admiral?" Weaver said with renewed interest.

  “The problem is one of rates,” the Admiral responded. “Lowering the exposure lowers the rates, giving the robots a chance to catch up. We should be back into exponential growth in a few weeks. As far as visibility toward the impact station, we can tilt the array ring up to thirty-seven degrees inclination and still give the beam drivers a clear shot at the impactor."

  “Well, this works for me,” Weaver said.

  “Don't we want to critique the rest of the ideas?” Emma said. “If it's a good process, the process should be served."

  I thought about enduring a critique of my hostile intelligence idea. “'Tis not always necessary, if ye hit on something that looks good right away,” I offered.

  Davra grinned at me. She'd caught the excitement of a potential solution. I winked back, happy to be noticed by her and relieved that the team seemed to be reinvigorated and pulling together.

  Emma didn't react; she had that faraway look of one communing with the computer over her neural net. “Very well. In these conditions, we should need at least 28.75 degrees inclination to cut the impact rate down enough for exponential growth. The reaction mass needed to push the array elements into the new orbit would be about as much as the mass of the array itself."

  “Yeah, well, I've got an idea about that,” Dagger said. “We can have array elements north and south of the orbital plane push on each other by tossing mass back and forth with rotating tethers. It's like a couple of sailboats with fans, each blowing the same wind back and forth at each other."

  Emma frowned. “But half of the array segments would go into an orbit tilted one way and the other half would go in an orbit tilted in the opposite direction."

  “So?” Dagger replied. “All we care about is that the orbits are out of the debris most of the time."


  “Hmm,” Weaver said. “This begins to sound like it might work. Admiral?"

  The group dynamic was still working, I thought, but with some unvoiced concern. Weaver looked relieved. I was partly worried, and partly impressed, by how hands-off he was. There were lots of smiles and nods, but very little involvement in the discussion or even managing the discussion. There are techniques for leading problem-solving efforts, but he seemed to rely mainly on his personality and aura of command. Would that take us far enough? I wondered.

  “Dr. Dickson's idea would significantly reduce the time to achieve exponential array growth,” the AI said.

  “Davra?” Weaver nodded her way.

  “Coaxial electromagnetic launchers would make more sense than tethers,” Davra said. “Simpler."

  Dagger laughed. “Only if you're fixated on things going in and out...."

  “I fail to get your point,” Emma said. “What does that ... Oh, my!"

  Davra gave her a lopsided ironical grin. “I don't think anyone's been getting Dagger's point lately."

  Groans all around signified the end of the meeting. But they were groans with smiles.

  * * * *

  Chapter 4

  Asgard, Epsilon Eridani System,

  25 March 2274

  Two months passed. Schemes may unfold in one's mind in an instant and be communicated in a few minutes. But when such schemes involve the rearrangement of the heavens, some time is required. Meanwhile, we got ahead of the game enough to allocate some resources to finishing the habitat.

  About two hundred fifty days after our arrival in the system, the habitat shell was finally completed, and we all piled into a runabout to watch the flipover and spinup. It lay before us like a huge silver egg, with one long end toward the star. Brilliant violet plumes erupted around the shell's shadow line/fusion rocket exhaust. The rockets began the spinup with their initial thrust vectors just enough canted that the shell slowly swung up as the applied forces and moments of inertia performed their complex, carefully calculated dance. After three hours of ponderous, majestic twisting, the fusion flames vanished and the habitat was left with its long axis at right angles to its orbital plane and spinning fast enough to provide one third of an Earth gravity. We were all suitably impressed.

  Over the next few days, a thin film mirror, angled to reflect sunlight down into the habitat, was erected over its north pole on a “despin platform” that rotated in the opposite sense of the habitat, to keep it pointed at the star and to provide a landing place for the various runabouts and shuttles. Magnetic fields sprang up to protect the area from particle storms.

  Finally, near the first anniversary of our arrival, Weaver gave the welcome command to defrost the rest of the crew and move everyone to the newly completed habitat. I moved my things into my new quarters, a cottage on a tributary to the equatorial lake surrounded by saplings.

  But grass still grows more quickly than trees, and Dagger soon had a place for his second-favorite recreational activity: the game of golf. The course was laid out in a great circle a couple of kilometers north of the central river so that one almost always struck the ball in the direction of the habitat's rotation; this brought a drive down about as quickly as it would have come down on Earth, despite the lower centrifugal gravity of the habitat. Dagger was a fanatic, and I soon found that, embarrassing as it was for a Scot, I could not play at his level.

  The habitat needed a name. In line with the Norse mythology theme of the rest of the system, it became Asgard. We all settled in. Trees, aided by modified genes and soil additives, grew rapidly. So did the culture, for which we had plenty of time. That culture, as one might suspect, had much in common with other remote outposts throughout the history of exploration.

  With the habitat up and running, our original group had blended into the general populace. While I still took careful note of what was going on, a certain routine had set in. I'd taken up my previous profession, and begun a class on the history and philosophy of astronautics. This, of course, meant the joy of imparting knowledge was balanced by the drudgery of grading. So I welcomed Emma's call.

  On screen.

  There was a rather un-Emma-like twinkle in the astrophysicist's eye. “We're having a little reunion of the early birds at Dagger's place tonight. Can you come?"

  “Aye, it would be good to see everyone."

  “1000 hours, tomorrow. You'll not mention this to Dagger now?"

  “You mean a surprise party?"

  “Indeed. Cheers!"

  If Dagger reacted true to form, I thought, it could be fun. Dagger enjoyed pulling practical jokes, so getting one back on him would be quite the ticket.

  “We'll meet where his path turns off the West River."

  “Aye, see you then."

  * * * *

  Dagger's cottage of cast stone looked something like one might find in the middle of his native Maine. It even had a replicated stone wall along the front of the house with wild roses lovingly tended by microbots. We were kept outside for a couple of minutes—long enough to wonder who else might be there.

  The front door, a large piece of solid replicated wood, opened and Dagger, looking half asleep, looked out at us. I saw that his right arm was covered in a cast.

  “Surprise!” We all shouted.

  He suddenly awoke, shook his head, and blinked his eyes.

  “That'll teach me to run simulations past midnight. Well, come on in!"

  We filed in and took seats around Dagger's grand stone fireplace, complete with simulated fire. It was cool enough in here that the warmth was welcome. We ordered drinks and his domestic robot brought them.

  Dagger thrust the appliance on his arm toward me. “Will you look at this, Bruce?” Dagger's face was a mixture of mock disbelief and outrage. “I went to bed in perfect health and woke up with this! You're a historian of technology. Do you know what this is?"

  I dutifully looked the appliance over. “It's a cast.” They were made to immobilize the arm to allow it to heal from a break. But nowadays, of course, we'd simply have a robosurgeon glue the bones back together. But I gained my comm implant in a similar way, so I'm sure there must be some other medical explanation. Jill?"

  The biologist shrugged, but the twinkle in her eye told me she was in on it.

  “Oh, come on,” Dagger implored. “Something's up, someone knows!"

  “Ladies,” Emma said, “I think we're being asked for a diagnosis."

  “Better tell our Don Juan what this appliance is for,” Jill said, “or he's likely to go crazy."

  Davra grinned. "Admiral?"

  “It had come to my attention that Dagger's hand was in danger of repetitive stress syndrome caused from his efforts to modify his golf swing to compensate for Coriolis force."

  We could hold our laughter no more. Seeing which way this was going, I touched the net to ask the Admiral to send us some of my replicated Talisker.

  Dagger looked at us with disgust. “So that's it now. I'm warning you, I'll be getting even."

  “Dagger dear,” Davra cooed, “you could just let it ride and call it even."

  “Oh, no. Letting things ride, that's not me. The chase is on."

  I looked at him in apprehension, then he broke out in a laugh. “Just kidding. Maybe. I think she wants you next, Bruce. If I were you, I'd look out."

  The whisky arrived. “I'll be trying a bit of bribery instead,” I said. “Shall we toast to the balancing of the books?” The robotic servant produced glasses of the amber liquid, and I passed them out.

  G. P. Weaver arrived as I did so. He seemed unhappy, but not, perhaps, about our escapade.

  “Sorry I'm late, folks. What's this about retribution?"

  We told him and he shook his head. “Folks, this is a fifty-year mission.” Then he raised his glass of whisky and joined the party.

  * * * *

  Within our diverse community of scientists and engineers, there was a great sharing of cultural conditions. About six months after Dagger
got his cast, I let him, Emma, and Davra talk me into a rendition or two on the bagpipes. I remembered that Emma had not done badly on the lute herself the previous month, while wearing an Elizabethan dress, even.

  I had invited the gang over for libations, but my real purpose was to fill in some details on our debris problem. They were having fun sidetracking me, of course.

  “So, having done my duty,” Emma continued, “why don't you consider upholding your end of the British Isles? Play the pipes for us."

  I smiled. If you would know the truth, I am a wee bit more of a science historian than Scots culture historian, but I had played the pipes a time or two and could do serviceable renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Scotland the Brave” along with a few lesser known tunes requiring a more cultivated ear. “Some,” I replied.

  “And you could come up with suitable national dress?” Dagger wanted to know. “You'd look nice in a dress."

  I gave him a withering look. So, I thought, if I was going to do the bagpipes, I'd have to come up with a kilt. “I dinna bring one with me, but with the help of our replicator, I should be able to manage that as well. And, it is not a dress!"

  “Okay, okay,” Davra said. “Pipes and kilt at 1900 Thursday?"

  “It shall be done.” I was eager to get back to my job as an historian. “How are things going?” I asked her.

  “Our doubling period is down to about forty-five days and pretty much holding there. The more robots we make, the higher the debris flux gets.” She looked at Emma. “Tell him about your sims."

  “My simulations show that the system had been moving toward resonance before the latest increase in magnetic activity. Things were settling into rings, Lagrange points, and so on. But the increase in flare activity, starting about six years ago, caused a lot of outgassing and nongravitational accelerations."

  “Heat up an asteroid with a lot of ice in it, and it turns into a steam rocket,” Davra commented.