by Adam Roberts
‘Valuable how?’ I said, a nervous sensation crunching in my stomach. ‘What am I, some sort of slave? Some sort of …’ But in my nervousness I couldn’t think of a synonym. ‘Slave?’
‘Jesus my Saviour,’ said the captain, loudly. ‘No, no. No slaves in New America. What you think we are?’
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.
‘But women are welcome, of course they are. Young women. We got to look to the future. But go getting yourself a husband, maybe a wealthy husband, that don’t make you a slave.’
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘Here we go,’ said the third figure. ‘Mama.’
The captain heaved open the hatch, and clambered out. I understood later that he was going to attach the crane-hook to the grapple-point so that the whole craft could be winched out of the snow and loaded onto an enormous hovercraft. I understood that later, and understood too why there was such a deal of clanking and banging. But at the time I knew none of that, because I was hypnotised, utterly hypnotised by the sudden, glorious sight of clear sky. Clear blue sky, through the rectangle of the hatchway.
‘Out you go,’ prompted one of the other men, heaving me on my rear to help me up and out. And, wide-eyed as a child, I climbed through into endlessness, into the white and the blue and the sharp, clear, ozone tang of fresh air. I stepped onto the fringe of the hovercraft without even realising that it was there, so astonished was I by the breadth and depth of the colour, of the blue.
Around me, bright as a searchlight, was the sunlit snowfield, white to all horizons. And above it stretched a cloudless sky of such purity, of such distilled essence of blue, that it made my heart yammer. It made my heart flip and buck about in my chest like an epileptic having a fit. I stood for long moments with my head back just looking up at it. It was the colour of a gas flame turned low, bright and shining from horizon to horizon. Blue. Blue. ‘Jesus,’ grunted a man behind me, wanting me to hurry up, wanting me to go inside the hovercraft. But I was hypnotised, I was the snake looking into the infinite blue eye of the snake charmer. And, as softly as a lover’s caress, falling from a clear blue sky, occasional flakes of snow brushed against my face.
So You Want To Be A Food-Miner?
[You’ve read Tira’s narrative.]1 Its account of the world before the Snow either reminds you of what you have lost, or perhaps awakens you to a knowledge of what has passed away (depending on how old you are!). But do you want to know the truth? The world has not passed away completely! The world described in this tale is still there – still perfect, preserved by the cold. For many, the snow is the roof of their tomb, and may they Rest in Peace: never forget that their sacrifice helped us forge a new world here in the broad sunlit snowlands. But there is a great deal else down below, pristine, waiting for enterprising and brave citizens to dig it out and bring it up to us. Even a small list of the sort of wealth locked underneath the snow would be too long for us to list here: all sorts of money, all manner of technology, raw materials – metals, plastics and wood – precious things, beautiful things, fine art, self-defense equipment. Above all, food.
Understand this: our Democracy needs this wealth! Our enemies grow stronger, and threaten our very existence, our very way of life. Make no mistake the challenges are severe and testing. But God and the People will prevail, and this great mass of raw material will be properly exploited. Heroic companies like Novadic, Novemi, NovaMicron and New Affiliated Miners undertake the constant struggle to wrest profit and glory from the dangers of the deep snow; heroic Food-Miners like Sam Appleseed, Bernard le Farrar and the great Andy d’Intino make lucrative careers for themselves and bring glory and wealth to the People. Perhaps you have what it takes to follow in their great steps?
Contact your nearest certificated Ladder agent, and take the first step up to a lucrative and publicly important career – start to train as a Food-Miner! Contact: 756–778–8570. 3-yr min medical insurance a requirement.
Interview with Gerard Louis Seidensticker
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SCIENCE FOR FREEDOM The question, of course, is: where on earth did all this snow come from? It’s a question we all hear constantly, of course.
G S SEIDENSTICKER It sure is – and I’ve heard as many theories as there are flakes of snow in a blizzard! It’s in the nature of science to play with theories. That’s a natural and healthy thing.
SFF But, perhaps, a little distracting for the general population?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Indeed. But the mystery, if I can call it that, is not such a big one.
SFF You say that, but most people don’t know the real cause of the Snow. Do you think the government is justified in restricting knowledge on such an area of – we might say – pressing public interest?
G S SEIDENSTICKER I don’t think you can say that the government is actively restricting knowledge. The government has a very difficult job to do, a difficult balancing act. Society has changed so much, and preserving the things that are important to us – free enterprise, freedom, quality of life – means making some tough choices. I think they’ve got it about right at the moment; actively disseminating the truth might be destabilising to our fragile new order – that, after all, is how people in government tend to think. But neither have they actually banned the information … not yet anyway!
SFF You say the truth of the situation might be destabilising, yet you’re talking to us here today?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Science is about the truth, first and foremost. I believe, deep down, that the truth cannot harm us. I believe in freedom, of course, but I also believe the old adage, that the truth will set us free. So I’m happy to talk about things if anybody asks me – and you guys asked me!
SFF When you describe knowledge of the true source of the Snow as ‘destabilising’, what do you mean?
G S SEIDENSTICKER I mean it might turn people against science and scientists. This would be destabilising because so much of our future depends upon the proper development and articulation of science. We have so many new challenges in this new world, and new enemies as well: we need scientific and technological innovation to address these problems.
SFF In what way would the ‘truth’ about the coming of the Snow cause resentment against scientists?
G S SEIDENSTICKER It’s very difficult. Rationally we know that all the most significant technical advances in human society were produced at risk, with some often unpleasant side-effects along the ‘research ’n’ development’ way. Marie Curie died of X-ray poisoning, yet X-rays are a crucial component of our modern society’s fight against disease. We know this sort of thing, know it in our heads if you see what I mean; but in our hearts there is sometimes an instinc
tive revulsion against the price that science asks of us. It’s that kind of knee-jerk that I’m talking about.
SFF So the Snow was an unfortunate by-product of scientific research?
G S SEIDENSTICKER I was part of a team that had been working for six years, or nearer seven, on a number of topics in magnetoanisotropy. In particular we were developing and testing the concept of the electron sheath. Now, we know about electrons from TV, from scanning microscopes and the like, but the genius of our team was in finding more and more stable ways to arrange electrons.
SFF Who funded your research?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Defence Industries Corporated; the old Novadic.
SFF So it was military research?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Actually, no. The shooting-off point for the research had been military. The Navy was interested in the compacted focusing of electron beams as a possible weapon. But it became pretty evident pretty soon that the military applications were negligible. Credit to Novadic, DIC as was, that they didn’t pull the plug when they realised that.
SFF Why didn’t they?
G S SEIDENSTICKER They saw the commercial possibilities, I think. The market in patent trades and – especially – patent futures was very large back then, and my understanding is that they were speculating on the futures market for what they thought would be a very lucrative commercial patent. Assuming we could get the electron sheath properly working, that is!
SFF Tell us more about this electron sheath.
G S SEIDENSTICKER Electrons occupy certain positions around nuclei, certain energy levels, called their shells. For a while it was thought that electrons circled their nuclei in set orbits, like little planets around a star. Then, with quantum physics, we began to think of electrons as occupying certain bands, like the skins of an onion. But it’s more proper to think in terms of what the physicists call orbitals; the electron is not so much a well-defined point as a quantum-uncertain wave that moves in the orbital. If you’re doing basic calculations about the charge of an atom and the like then you can think of the orbital as an area around the nucleus in which the electron is, like, smeared out – and not necessarily evenly smeared either. Scientists have spent a lot of effort now mapping out the shape of these orbitals, and perhaps surprisingly, we discover that they’re not necessarily circular, or even elliptical, in cross-section, although obviously they can be. Indeed, there are some very peculiar shaped orbitals out there in nature.
The idea behind the electron sheath began with us manipulating some of the weirder shaped electron orbitals. We began to think that we could fit some of these things together into a circle, like a carbon-ring only without the nuclei – a stable form of electron existence. Link these together, stripping electrons from the outer orbitals of heavier elements and realigning them in an interlocked series of these rings, and you have the sheath. Early experiments took place in very attenuated vacuums, which were very expensive to maintain, because we found that the electronegativity of ordinary matter was too great for the coherence of the sheath. But after a year or so of tinkering, we discovered a form of the orbitals jigsaw that was much, much more stable. We called it the lattice. Since then, we’ve discovered seven variants on the same lattice, and we’ve also very much speeded up the way in which these sheaths can be spooled out of the originary matter. Our best time, I think, is under an hour to spool out a nineteen-thousand-kilometer electron sheath – pretty good going!
SFF You said that these electron sheaths had no military application. What sorts of commercial applications were you thinking of?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Well, it’s not really a researcher’s job to think of practical applications for his or her work, but as we worked through the project the sorts of possible uses for the technology were just so obvious to us. Imagine a tube running, let’s say, for the sake of argument, from a freshwater lake in northern Europe all the way down to the Sahara2; a tube in which the electrical potential of the thing itself meant that it acted like a siphon. You could irrigate millions of hectares of barren ground. You could put out forest fires with the flick of a switch; you could revolutionize the trade in a thousand products – fresh goat’s milk from India could be piped to consumers in Canada as cheaply as it could be hauled down the road to the next village in pails. A million uses. A million and one.
SFF I’ve heard the electron sheaths described as ‘wormholes’.
G S SEIDENSTICKER They are most definitely not wormholes. Wormholes are a science-fiction invention, some sort of instantaneous tunnel through the fabric of spacetime. I hate science fiction. Electron sheaths do not ‘tunnel through spacetime’, they are part of the spacetime fabric. Travel down an electron sheath is most certainly not instantaneous – no faster-than-light travel here. Think of it as water coming down a hose. Although, having said that, travel along the sheath is very efficient, because the electrical potential insulates the product from friction. And, if I remember my Star Trek, wormholes are supposed to just ‘open’ like doors, aren’t they? Well, electron sheaths have to be spun out using some very high-tech equipment. So, no, they’re real, not sci-fi.
SFF How stable are the sheaths?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Perfectly stable.
SFF What were the downsides of the technology?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Once we got the proper matrix developed – the lattice – there were very few downsides. The major drawback is the volume capacity. We hoped to be able to manufacture electron sheaths of industrial diameters – let’s say a metre across, or ten. But the Planck Constant won’t let us do so. We can squeeze one lattice out to a sizeable fraction of a millimeter, but that’s the best we can do. We got around that by binding a hundred or so sheaths together, twining them about one another and upping the capacity. It was a very workable technology for fluids, provided only they were not too viscous. With time I think we’d have been able to handle any sort of fluid, and maybe solids too.
SFF You ran out of time?
G S SEIDENSTICKER The Snow overtook us.
SFF How is the coming of the Snow connected to your research?
G S SEIDENSTICKER We had done a number of larger-scale experiments. By larger scale, I mean spooling out longer and longer electron sheaths to see how far material could be practicably transported. Theoretically, we couldn’t see any reason why an electron sheath tethered on one of Jupiter’s satellites, Europa say, couldn’t transport water all the way to – I don’t know, Earth’s moon. There’s no theoretical limit to the length of these things, although I suppose physical shearing forces would compromise the integrity over really larger distances. But, anyway, we were trying out different lengths.
The trouble happened with a sheath of a little under nine thousand kilometers. It was braided, which is to say it was made up of over a hundred individual sheaths coiled together into one rope. So, we hoped to generate it between our American laboratory and an affiliated institution in the Nederlands. It was the sort of experiment we had done before.
SFF You had done this exact experiment before?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Not that exact one, but very similar ones. We’d run a very lengthy sheath down from the USA into South America without any problem at all.
SFF So why was there a problem with this one, do you think?
G S SEIDENSTICKER With hindsight I’d say that it was the lateral lay of it. It spooled out and up into the atmosphere before coming down in Europe, which meant that it crossed the global lines of magnetic force at a right angle. The sheath we’d sent down to Latin America had lain neatly within those lines of force, and they hadn’t disrupted it. But this US-Europe sheath got tangled up in the lines of force.
SFF You didn’t anticipate that?
G S SEIDENSTICKER No, we didn’t. Easy to be wise after the event, but it didn’t occur to us before. Think of the Earth as a huge bar magnet, with lines of magnetic force running from north pole to south. That was the problem, right there. We set up the sheath – we hoped to send some coffee from a cup in our lab to ou
r colleagues in Holland.
SFF Cold coffee!
G S SEIDENSTICKER Oddly enough, it was cold coffee; it took us so long to set the thing up, the coffee went cold! The stuff would have been heated a little by the environment of the sheath as it passed through, but no more than a few degrees – so it would have come out cold at the other end. Still, some people like cold coffee, I’ve heard; some people actually prefer it!
SFF Give me my joe steaming and hot!
G S SEIDENSTICKER Me too. Anyway, we set up the sheath: nine thousand kilometers of it running latitudinally across the globe. Now we’re still not entirely sure how or why, but the lines of magnetic force disrupted the thing. Didn’t interfere with the coherence of the sheath itself, but did wrench it out of position. Ripped it clean from its tethers! In a way, the very fact that the sheath didn’t then disintegrate is a testament to the integrity of our original design.
SFF Shouldn’t it have disintegrated?
G S SEIDENSTICKER What probably happened is this: some of the outer sheaths – remember there were over a hundred, all braided in together – probably did degrade. But the bulk was preserved by the highly energetic environment of the magnetosphere, through which it was whipping like a string in a hurricane. And afterwards, when it settled down, the likelihood is that the passage of so much water produced a sort of electron rub against the insides of the sheaths that kept them coherent. Water is very reactive. Or maybe the thing is maintained purely by the electrical potential of the magnetosphere – there are several theories.
SFF Did the sheath go straight to the north pole?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Probably not; it probably slid up and down along the lines of force for a while, empty, high in the atmosphere. But given the electrical potential, it was inevitable that it would be attracted to the north pole, and our best guess is that it slid northwards in a matter of days.
SFF And then?
