Year's Best SF 8
Page 12
Flight Correction
KEN WHARTON
Ken Wharton
“Flight Correction” was published in Analog. It is about several intertwined themes, including the daily life of scientists, ingrained prejudice in physics and engineering against evidence from “softer” sciences, and how the human relations of people in science can hinder as well as help the solution of problems. It is set in an interesting future in which the space elevator has been constructed in the Galápagos Islands, perhaps a technological triumph and most likely an ecological disaster.
“Albatross, Daddy!” Sally’s freckled face was pure excitement. “Albatross!”
Hank blinked a few times from his position in the hammock under the red mangroves. His daughter stood just beyond his reach. “How do you even know what an albatross looks like?”
“Just come quick, Daddy! C’mon…” She stepped forward and tugged at the remnants of his favorite shirt, a threadbare blue oxford from his professor days back in the states.
Hank finally got to his feet and followed his daughter down to the narrow lagoon. Splashing across after her, he realized he had forgotten his hat. “Wait a sec, Sally…”
Whether she heard him or not, she didn’t turn around. Screw it , he thought, still following her. If he fried his bald spot in the equatorial sun, it wouldn’t be the first time. Stepping out of the water, they turned left, following the main path across the white sand beach. “Where’s your mother?” he asked at last.
“Finches,” was all Sally said, clearly doing her best to be patient with her slow-paced father.
Of course. Those boring little critters that he’d never learned to tell apart. If his wife had studied some of these other birds he might actually be interested in her research. At that very moment Hank was walking right past a pair of goofy-looking masked boobies, brilliant white except for the dark mask around the yellow-orange bill. The two birds were waddling around their sorry excuse for a nest, which looked for all the world like a random pile of rocks on the ground. Meanwhile, three beautiful red-pouched frigate birds sat within reach just overhead in the mangrove tree, inflating their sacs and ululating madly. All the birds ignored the humans with their usual Galápagos detachment, which could have made them easy to study. But instead Julia went roaming all over the island in search of those damn finches.
Sally led him up the trail toward the two solar-powered lighthouses that guided those intolerable mini-cruiseships into the heart of Genovesa. After a minute of climbing, Hank was embarrassed to find himself panting with exertion. He glanced down into the blue expanse of Darwin’s Bay and made a half-hearted resolution to start swimming again.
Finally Hank made it over a crest, and there it was. Standing on an ancient memorial plaque at the edge of the cliff was an enormous white bird with a hooked, yellow beak. It was, in fact, an albatross.
“Wow,” muttered Hank, his interest growing despite himself. He had been told that these birds were endemic to Española, at the far south of the Galápagos archipelago. Hank had even seen them down there once, a huge breeding colony next to the cliffs. But on this island, a hundred miles to the north, he had never seen one. Not a single one, for the three years they had lived here.
“Must have gotten lost, I guess,” Hank said to his daughter. “Mom’ll be interested.”
But Sally apparently wasn’t finished yet. She was already halfway to the next crest. Hank sighed and started walking again. “What’s up there? Another…?”
Hank broke off as he approached the top and could see the far side of the island. There was another one! And another…. With every step his jaw dropped a little further.
Here on Genovesa, a hundred miles off course, five dozen albatross had gotten lost in the exact same place.
Hank watched from the shade under the lighthouse while Julia filmed an albatross flopping toward the edge of the cliff.
“Their feet are funny, Mommy,” Sally was saying. “They’re way too long.”
“They’re not made for walking,” Julia explained. “Wait, watch this…”
The bird hesitated at the edge of the cliff, extending its six-foot wingspan once, twice, and then backing off as if it was scared to death by the prospect. After a couple more fakes, it stepped forward and jumped. Jumped, not flew. Hank saw a white form plummet out of view, then reappear, enormous wings outstretched, speeding away over the calm water.
“See, Sally,” his wife was saying, “they don’t really flap. Takes too much energy, so they soar instead. Dynamic soaring, it’s called.”
“Where’s it going?” Sally asked.
“To fish, probably. Maybe around here, maybe down off the coast of Peru. Or maybe it’s going back to Española, where they all live.”
“But then…what are they doing here?”
Julia lifted her gaze from the camera, smiled at her daughter. “Very good question. Usually they know right where to go.”
Hank spoke up. “Know any bird people down south?”
Julia nodded. “Fernando does satellite migration tracking. Probably has some tagged ones right here, actually.”
“Hmm. Maybe you’ll get a call from him,” Hank said.
“Oh, I’m sure the birds will all be gone before sundown.”
Sally looked a bit sad. “But, but…it was nice of them to visit, right?”
Julia beamed down at Sally. “And it was nice of you to spot them for us. Otherwise we might never have known they were here.”
Ten days later, the albatross population was pushing a hundred and fifty.
The population of bird people was skyrocketing as well: Fernando’s arrival this evening made four. Five, counting Julia. Their little island was getting awfully crowded. Not to mention their home.
Hank normally would have simply left, gone outside to read his new download in private, but tonight El Meaño had sent yet another nasty rainstorm. And with the birders living in tiny two-man tents, the family’s semipermanent shelter was the only spot for them all to gather.
Hank couldn’t imagine how Sally managed to sleep through the noise; he couldn’t even read with all their chatter. And if he heard the word “migratory” just one more time…. Finally, in frustration, he picked up the sim-finch he had designed for his wife’s research and started morphing the beak into implausible shapes.
It was an impressive piece of machinery, Hank modestly told himself. Back in the early days of finch research, before nano’geering enabled such devices, academics had resorted to more gruesome techniques. One ancient study even reported chopping the heads off of dead birds, swapping them around with the bodies, and then setting the chimeras in seductive poses to see who would try to mate with the corpses.
“I don’t think that one is going to see many suitors, honey.” Julia was speaking to him from across the room, referring with her eyes to the avian Cyrano. Hank shrugged and set it back down, nearly spilling his bottle of rum. Julia turned back to the main conversation.
“I’m telling you,” Julia insisted. “The albatross are getting confused by the Line.”
Hank rolled his eyes and turned away. His wife was always complaining about the space elevator; nothing new there. But still, he couldn’t tune out the conversation.
“I don’t buy it, Julia,” said the only other female in the group, a penguin expert. “One new star is not going to mess up these birds. They’ve done studies—”
“One star that doesn’t rotate with all the others,” Julia countered. “It’s not natural.”
“It’s been fully clouded over the last few nights,” noted Fernando. “And they keep arriving. So it can’t be the stars.”
“Well, what does that leave? Landmarks and dead reckoning?”
Hank looked back over at the group, surprise
d at the obvious omission. “Don’t forget magnetic fields.” Even a washed-up N.E. professor knew that much about bird migration.
The penguin expert shook her head. “Not here at the equator. Sure, albatross have traces of magnetite in their brains like other birds, but the fields are so much weaker here that they don’t rely on them at all.”
Fernando stroked his white beard. “Still, he has a point. Flying up from Peru, it’s a pretty small angular shift between here and Española. You know Tuttle, up in the states? He’s bred a strain of pigeon that’ll ignore all other cues, steer by magnetic fields alone. It must be an innate module in pigeons, so maybe all birds have it to some degree. Not at all inconceivable that new fields could gently steer the albatross off course.”
“Maybe,” Julia said. “Maybe that’s what the Line is doing to them. Changing the fields.”
“Enough about the Line, already,” said Hank. Five pairs of eyes swiveled to glare at him, with varying levels of intensity. Hank retreated into his book, making an important mental note: don’t mention the Line around Galápagos ecologists.
Hank supposed that the primary responsibility lay with generations of science fiction writers. If Ecuador hadn’t been so certain about Quito they wouldn’t have campaigned so heavily for a space elevator in the first place. They wouldn’t have weaned two generations on the premise that Ecuador would be the gateway to orbit, finally giving their country the first-world status they deserved. Eventually, they dreamed, Ecuador would become the richest and most powerful nation-state on Earth.
So the initial site report had taken them very much by surprise. High elevations weren’t recommended. Sure, altitude meant slightly less cable, but compared to the total distance to geosynch orbit, the percentages involved were so small as to be almost meaningless. Besides, in the mountains there wasn’t easy access to a seaport—an essential part of the high-volume operation.
Then there was the disaster scenario. Dropped equipment, hazardous spills, broken cables snapping down onto the surface of the earth…A remote location was deemed necessary for safety concerns alone. Ecuador was hit hard on both fronts: everything was too mountainous or too crowded. Or both. Suddenly Brazil and Indonesia were being discussed as possible elevator locations.
For Ecuador, faced with the loss of its dreams, the sacrifice of its most famous national treasure hadn’t come hard. The largest of the Galápagos islands, Isabela, was the only one to actually span the equator. If Quito wasn’t possible, Ecuador had told the world, Isabela would be just perfect.
Predictably, the ecologists went daytrader on the whole idea. The Galápagos was not only a pristine ecological laboratory, but the very birthplace of evolutionary theory. They hadn’t spent millions of dollars ridding Isabela of the wild goats, fighting the unending battles with the local fishermen, only to have the island turned into the biggest port on the planet. Years of intense protest followed, but the initial public opposition faded as Ecuador spared no expense on the propaganda wars. Hardly any of the islands would be affected, the government promised. The giant land tortoise population of Isabela would be protected. A portion of the future tax revenue was even allotted to environmental research to help sow dissension in the ecologists’ midst.
And, as always, the money had won. The space elevator had been completed five years ago, and all of the rosy predictions were now proven rubbish. Isabela was almost completely developed, and many of the other islands were heading in the same direction. The smaller outlying islands were still relatively unaffected, but no one knew how long that would last.
To Hank, the Line had once dangled the promise of tropical employment. Three years back, when he had sacrificed his job for his family, he had held out hope of finding work on the space elevator. The entire structure was nanoengineered, after all. His specialty. And with that fantasy in mind, giving up his tenure-track position hadn’t seemed quite so final.
But the reality down here had been different. The completed elevator had no need for academic types. The only jobs available were loading cargo—and Hank’s back certainly couldn’t handle that.
So now he was just living for his family, and the occasional bottle of rum. No more Paula, no more cheating around, no more rat race…no more anything. But I’m doing the right thing, Hank told himself, reciting his mantra. I’m doing the right thing.
From across the room Julia glanced in his direction, with a smile that said she still loved him despite his terribly insensitive comment about the Line. He tried to return the smile, tried to return a bit of love to his wife, but came up empty on both counts. Hank raised his book to cover his face, and buried himself in the meaningless words.
They didn’t speak again until halfway through breakfast.
“Hank…”
He knew that voice, that look. Hank took a shallow breath and steeled himself for another painful argument.
“Why wouldn’t you expect a magnetic field from the space elevator? Shouldn’t there be currents every now and then?”
His pulse skipped a beat as he realized it wasn’t going to be that sort of argument. He managed a smile.
“Yeah, that was a big worry. The cable goes right up through the Van Allen belts, after all. Wouldn’t do to have an induced current yanking on the Line. So they spun it to be nonconducting.”
“But buckytubes are…”
Hank broke into a full grin. Finches might be boring, but this stuff was cool. He arrayed his napkin in front of him, smoothed it out. “Not always. OK, say this is a single sheet of carbon atoms, arrayed like hexagonal chicken wire. You make it into a buckytube simply by rolling it up.” He did so. “But there are lots of different classes of buckytubes, depending on how you line up the hexagons.”
He demonstrated this by first making a cylindrical tube—with the corners of the napkins touching—and then sliding one edge of the napkin with respect to the other. Now the axis of the tube was no longer perpendicular to the bottom edge of the napkin.
“There are lots of buckytube topologies, and each one has a different conductivity. So the tubes in your computer conduct, but the tubes in the Line don’t.”
Julia looked skeptical. “Thousands of miles of buckytube cable and they’re sure it’s all the non-conducting kind?”
“The fibers are all continuous. If there was a transition between two buckytube geometries, there has to be a discontinuity, a weak link. The tube hasn’t snapped, so I think that’s a good sign.”
Hank was exaggerating; a single-point failure wouldn’t snap the Line. It had been given the same design as the successful multifiber space tethers, which contained many redundant strands that weren’t even in use. If one strand failed, two others would instantly snap into place to take up the load.
Julia just shook her head. “I don’t know, Hank…. But I do know that’s got to be the answer. These birds think they’re on Española. Something has messed them up, and we’ve dismissed pretty much every other explanation. Think about it, will you?”
“Sure, honey.” Hank’s gaze skipped over to the rum supply, then back to Julia. “Sure.”
By afternoon, he wasn’t thinking about much of anything. The bottle had been out of reach for a while, but it wasn’t worth the effort to get off his hammock.
How many hours had he spent in this thing? he wondered. More likely the time should be measured in months. The hammock was the fabric of spacetime, Hank decided, and he was a gravitational sink, warping the geodesics around his body. By now he knew every fiber of the netting; at that very moment he could tell that there was a single crease running under his left buttock. He tried to mentally picture the folded topology down there—the strands in the middle doing no work at all, forcing its neighbors to pull twice their weight.
Just like the Line, he realized. Only the Line was different because…
Hank bolted up straight, nearly spinning the hammock and dumping him onto the sand. The topology shift didn’t have to be in the primary fibers, he realized. The slack
fibers could carry a current as well. And if they were starting to shift…
Five minutes later he was at his wife’s computer, commencing his first literature search in nearly two years.
“So there you have it,” Hank told his wife two nights later. “That’s my best guess.”
Julia squinted at the pencil sketches that Hank had just drawn for her, shaking her head. “I might understand the concept, but certainly not the details. What am I supposed to do with this?”
Hank shrugged, got up from the table and padded into the bathroom to get ready for bed. “I don’t know what you do with it,” he called over his shoulder. “That’s for you to decide.”
He was in the middle of brushing his teeth when he saw in the mirror that Julia was standing beside him, glaring with a fury he hadn’t seen in years.
“For me to decide?! Me? What about you?!”
Hank spun to face her, his mouth full of foam. “Whmmh?”
“Do you know how glad I’ve been these last two days, seeing you actually do some work you enjoy? I know you’re not happy here. I know these islands are sapping the life out of you. But now that you’ve figured out this problem you’re just going to drop it? You’re just going to flop right back into your hammock, back to the way things were?”
Hank spat into the sink, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and looked up to stare at his own reflection. “This was just a one-time coincidence. As soon as you report it, like it or not, things will be right back where they were. I’m not needed here.”
“Sally needs you, you know that. Hell, if you’re right about this, the whole goddamn solar system needs you.”
He turned again to face her. “And you?”
“I…” Julia drew a breath through pursed lips. “I need my husband. But what I don’t need is—”
Julia broke off as Sally appeared in the doorway, half-asleep and obviously frightened. Hank dropped to a squat and she ran into his arms.