Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  Paolo patted him on his head. “Si, Alesso. You will be able to see the whole world as we go up.”

  They passed through airport sensors so sensitive that the operators could have identified their grandparents in a genetic line-up, and then a mag-lev carriage whisked them silently along the highway towards the space-elevator five miles away.

  It grew to fill their field of view as they approached. Paolo had seen it before at a distance, but the sheer scale astonished him.

  The circular base of the elevator was one kilometre in diameter, and surrounded by a field of hydraulic machinery, stress indicators, repair drones in fast-response sheds and soldiers. There was a plastisteel wall surrounding the field, and inside that three concentric electrified barbed-wire fences. There were guard towers and assault robots manning high-speed gun platforms. There was NO unauthorised access.

  Paolo, Franco and Alesso, however, had been scanned at the airport. Their vehicle was waved through the checkpoint at the gate. The mag-lev stuck to its pre-programmed route and drove straight into the vehicle entrance of the nearest building.

  Inside, they were met by two armed guards, their passports were scanned again, and they were led to what was probably the dullest hotel ever built. It had been constructed by the military for a temporary purpose, admittedly, but it appeared almost deliberately soulless. They ascended one floor in an open lift with a folding mesh door, and emerged into a grey corridor with a bare concrete floor. 200 doors to 200 identical rooms were lined up along one wall. The other wall, where an architect would normally have placed a long row of panoramic windows, was plain and grey, and made of rough oblongs of recycled plastic.

  The soldiers stopped outside room 101 and handed them their access card.

  “Is there anywhere we can get something to eat?” asked Paolo quickly, seeing they were about to leave.

  The man nearest to him, with sunken eyes and cheeks and harsh black stubble on his jaw, answered mechanically. “Take the service elevator one floor down and you’ll find the mess hall just about directly below where we’re standing now, sir.”

  Both men gave a casual sort of salute and marched swiftly off down the corridor, army boots clacking along the hard surface of the corridor.

  They went into their room. There were three identical metal beds with olive green pillows and olive green blankets, like a militarised scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. There was also a wardrobe. But no bathroom. A small sign on the wall indicated the position of the nearest communal washroom. There was a tiny square window high up above where the beds were lined up. The floor was bare concrete, like the corridor outside.

  They dumped their luggage on the floor and went down to the mess hall. Bit by bit, noticed Paolo, the niceties of life were being abandoned. Was he doing the right thing for his children? And yet how long could the zattera survive? The storms were more frequent and worsening every year. It was only now he realised he knew very little about conditions on Mioumu, where they were to spend the rest of their lives. During his career, especially in the last ten years, he had been to America often to deliver lectures on robotic farming techniques. He had become more and more interested in the first settlers of the Americas, the founding fathers, the stories of John Smith and Pocahontas and the later wagon trains that set out to discover and colonise the west coast. He had concocted a vivid analogy which was that the early settlers were like termites, trying to build a mound. Two or three termites can build a small mound, but it is easily destroyed by anyone passing by. But then ten more termites come, and then a hundred, and although these mounds can be destroyed too, they may be big enough to build on the ruins, to build something too big, too permanent to be easily dislodged. He had seen pictures, taken not long after the invention of photography, of settlers living under tarpaulins in holes in the ground, almost like gophers, in the midst of an arid plain, their possessions, small occasional tables, a fringed rug, ridiculous against the huge, desolate, uncaring landscape. Was this his destiny? Did he have the guts to become a settler, living a hard, comfortless live building the infrastructure that would allow those who came after to benefit from his toil? And then the scientist in him, or, perhaps, the small boy, would whisper 'But what about the adventure?' A new world, uninhabited by intelligent life, unexplored, unmapped save by satellite drones three hundred miles up, just waiting for us to colonise and build and tame! Grab some land before officialdom carves up the map! Live like the British colonial elite in India and South Africa and build your own kingdom!”

  Paolo Pirelli looked across the metal mess hall table at Franco and Alesso, happily eating processed burgers and trying to push mustard on their fingers up each other’s noses. Earth was dying. It might not die in his lifetime, but it probably would in theirs. He had to save them. And on Mioumu, he could give them something long since lost on Earth: freedom.

  “Gentlemen, good morning,” said Bav Farber, the Orientation Manager. “I have been to the surface of Mioumu, the first habitable planet to have been discovered outside of our solar system, and I am here to take questions from all you guys this morning. This will probably be a long session, so if you haven’t had coffee yet, then please grab it while you can!”

  There was a ripple of uncomfortable laughter. Paolo was there in the second row. Franco and Alesso were in the play area with all the other children in the mess hall, being terrorised by an army PT instructor who was hoping for a seat on one of the craft bound for Mioumu.

  Bav drank his own coffee. He was sixty-eight years old, still considered middle-aged in a world where life-expectancy was averaging one hundred and twenty, but he was beyond piloting age in the US airforce on Earth. So he had applied to fly excursion and reconnaissance craft on Mioumu, and had been accepted. Flying was his life, and he had the opportunity to move several billion light years away from his ex-wife. Bav was a happy man.

  “Gentlemen, Mioumu is exactly the same size as Earth, so the gravitational pull is one G. You will be able to walk and jump and run with no impedance to your movement or locomotion of any kind whatsoever. It has several moons, so tidal movements are interesting, to say the least, but what may be of a greater interest to some of you is that there are other habitable planets in the system”. He waved a hand over a display panel and a holograph appeared beside him of a planet.

  “This is Imo. It is about half a million miles closer to Mioumu’s sun and considerably warmer. We think the equatorial regions are uninhabitable, but beyond Imo’s equivalent of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, we think there’s a pretty nice Californian climate!”

  There were some murmurs of amusement from the crowd, but Paolo watched the gently spinning holograph with interest. There were wide seas here, and he immediately translated ‘Californian climate’ as ‘Mediterranean climate’. A proto-Italia…? Perhaps.

  The talk continued for another three hours. Bav was replaced by a climatologist; the climatologist gave way to someone who built survival domes; he was followed by a man who specialised in security issues. Paolo drifted away pretty soon, to wander around the trade stalls set up in the conference room. Imo had aroused his interest, and he soon found a stand that could answer is questions. There was a young girl behind the trestle table, Mexican, probably no more than eighteen years old, but she was extraordinarily bright and well informed and comfortable with the electronic display devices she had with her. Paolo could see her working well in his agriculture team.

  And so he and his boys endured another two weeks of talks and physicals, emergency procedure drills and bushcraft until launch day arrived. All television had gone off-air one week in. They were isolated and ringed with the might of nearly the entire US army up here in the mountains. Paolo had seen the last few broadcasts. In fact, vast crowds assembled in the mess hall of an evening to watch the news channels on the big TV screen there. Cities everywhere were on fire, burning out of control with no emergency services to extinguish the flames or attend to the injured. He knew it was the end-game fo
r human civilisation on Earth, because there were no riots. There were no riots because there were no authorities attempting to restore order. The authorities were all here, their tickets off the stricken Earth clutched in their sweaty, blood-soaked palms.

  One image haunted him for weeks afterwards. He saw a black man in a ragged coat run out of a burning electrical shop with one of the latest holographic display cubes – a device that would have cost him something like eight thousand dollars to buy – the pinnacle of entertainment technology. The remote news drone followed his progress for a block and a half. Eventually, the man slowed to a walk, and then halted in the middle of the road and looked around at the devastation. He dropped the cube, and sat down in the middle of the road and burst into tears. Tears of loss and regret and anger and hopelessness. There was nothing left to fight against, or to fight for. He was a man moving a piece of moulded plastic with some wiring and circuit boards inside from one place to another. All meaning had evaporated. The director, in the tv station gallery, had cut to the newsreader, and the newsreader had tossed his script onto the desk with a shake of his head and walked out. The director had switched to another live feed, a burning boat drifting in the bay of Los Angeles, the 'H' of the old Hollywood sign behind it on the shoreline, silhouetted against an orange sky, and then some colour bars came up. Then the signal cut off, and roaring static flared across the faces of the crowd in the mess hall. Someone switched off the tv, and then there was silence.

  Launch day. Soldiers knocked hard and loud at Paolo’s door around five-thirty am, before marching to the next door and repeating their actions. There was no need. He and his boys had been up for an hour already, everything packed. They exited their tiny concrete room to see more soldiers with intel-pads lining the corridor. He gave his name and those of his children and their pass-code to the nearest one. They were marched out of the hotel and across the tarmac to the massive blast-proof lift doors at the far end of the base, where there was an open-air enclosure, surrounded by more security than he had ever seen in his life. The ultimate V.I.P. area. The massive trunk of the space lift snaked magnificently above them until it was lost to sight at a dizzying height above the thin clouds. And snaked was the correct word; it described a twisted, curving path up into low-Earth orbit. But this was no ordinary lift. It had no fixed external architectural plan to dictate its form. Like a reed in the wind, it bent to survive the storm, it did not attempt to hold a rigid shape in the face of powerful elemental forces, like the oak. In truth, it was more a tunnel than a lift. There were no cables to hoist the carriage – the carriage was a vehicle in its own right, a spacecraft with its own power, escape mechanisms and, in the face of an emergency, its own engines, heat shields and parachutes. The lift shaft simply provided a protective shield from all the hazards of the atmosphere as it slowly climbed its way out of Earth’s gravity well on gigantic titanium-toothed gear wheels.

  It was here that Paolo met with his team again, and their families, and scientists from other countries with similar expertise.

  “Paolo, the game begins”, said Sergio, thrusting his sharp hair and beard close to his face. Sergio, the Neopolitan, big and hairy, thriving on chaos and tumult. End of the world? Just like Napoli on a Saturday afternoon with Napoli playing Fiorentina. Paolo clapped him on his shoulder. “Si, my friend. We came to New York all those centuries ago and made it our own, now we do the same amongst the stars!”

  They hugged then, and took each other’s cheeks in their hands and roared in each other’s faces - so much bravado, but both men knew this was a leap of faith.

  CHAPTER 17

  Franco and Alesso lay on the short, rubbery plants that served as grass on the planet Imo and gazed in awe at the magnificent ringed body of Mioumu as it orbited slowly through the sky above them. They were flushed from their football game, and from the higher oxygen levels of Imo’s atmosphere. Nearby, the town of pre-fab buildings was steadily growing. Sergio, father’s friend, had planted a vineyard (against government instructions) and now, in its third year, was ripening towards harvest on the gentle slopes in the distance. In the opposite direction, the freshwater sea glistened. Yellow research craft bedecked with robot drones ready for deep-sea exploration bobbed benignly. The suns, Yar and Yeg, followed one another closely across the sky, one large and yellow, one small and blue-white, casting their double shadows across the land.

  Franco and Alesso played football every day after school. They had never had the space for such games before. To have dry land as far as one could see, to be able to go off for hours, just walking across grass and rocks and solid earth was like a dream for them.

  “Alesso?”

  “Si?”

  “Tomorrow we go over the ridge.”

  There was silence from his brother. Franco turned his head. Alesso turned his head. They stared at each other across the tiny lobes of grass between them.

  “Okay,” he said, getting up and grabbing the ball.

  This was a big deal. Satellites had mapped Imo to such a resolution that you could zoom in on any of the millions of maps to see details on the planet’s surface as small as a coin. But here and there, particularly across Imo 2, their landmass, were wide pockets of forest under perpetual mist. Even geo-physical probes had revealed little more than the rough outlines of dells and escarpments. Beyond the ridge was V-1123-I2, a steep-sided valley more than seven hundred kilometres long and averaging forty to fifty kilometres across.

  “Maybe we will catch our dinocat,” said Alesso as they walked back to their house.

  That was exactly what Franco wanted. Two weeks previously, Franco had kicked their ball hard into the trees at the far end of their land. He had been aiming at Alesso, but Alesso ducked, and the ball sailed into the vegetation surrounding their land and now he scrambled through the undergrowth with Alesso’s laughter in the air. He could see nothing in the deep shadows under the trees, which were not really trees at all, but giant funghi with rubbery trunks one could gouge holes in with one’s fingers. Like many funghi, they sported wide caps instead of branches, and beneath them, the darkness was nearly complete. Luckily, their ball was white, and he soon saw it nestled between two smaller trees ahead. He was nearly upon it when something leapt upon the ball in a blur of skinny legs and whip-like tail, and rolled with it out of sight, hissing and gurgling. Franco froze. Imo 2 had no land animals larger than a rat, according to all the collected biological data. There were some freakishly large things that lived under the sea – his father had seen them – but the land was a haven for insect-like creatures, mostly, and small scurrying things that lived in burrows, and presumably lived off the insect-like things. Taxonomy was not yet high on the list of priorities for the Imo settlers.

  Taxidermy, however, was high on Franco’s. “Allesso!”

  “Si?”

  “There’s an animal in here!”

  “Where?”

  “Behind the last two trees. We’re gonna catch it!”

  The two boys crept deeper into the wood. Insects droned woozily through the shade. Behind the last two trees, they heard more hissing and the sound of something rolling around in the undergrowth.

  They peered around the trunk of the last of the giant mushrooms and saw a lizard-like creature the size of a cat pounce on the white ball and fall off it and kick it away with its long, spindly legs. It had six legs in all, two sets of vestigial arms in addition to its hind legs, a long tail that hissed through the air as it swished it from side to side, a long, thin neck, and a head that sported two large, black, forward facing eyes and a deep purple beak, short and strong with ornate nostril holes at the top. It was panting from its play, and made ready for another leap on its mysterious prey.

  Franco jumped out from behind the tree and picked up the ball. The creature tensed, its big eyes darted from his face to the ball, and then stalked cautiously up to him, and hooted. Franco held out the ball towards it. The creature jerked its head forward on its long neck and knocked the ball out of his
hands and ran off with it, knocking the ball in front of it with its head. It was fast. Alesso jumped out as it came by, and fell back again in surprise.

  “Alesso! Catch it!”

  “I don’t know what it is!”

  “Neither do I! Catch it!”

  The boys ran off in pursuit. The lizard seemed to enjoy the game. It was quick with the ball, keeping it ahead of itself as it sprinted through the woods, jumping obstructions, weaving around obstacles. It hooted with a high pitched voice, almost like a cry of elation. Franco and Alesso crashed through the trees after it

  Before them, the land rose. Mist eased out of the valley beyond, the trees were soft beneath the veil. A vast warmth rose from beyond its lip. The lizard skittered up the tiny ridge and disappeared over the edge, taking the ball with it.

  Franco and Alesso came to a stop on the tip of the incline, and were bathed in the immense wet heat rising up from beyond. Mist and the curling shadows of exotic trees, lost in a pearl-like miasma greeted them. And night was falling. The evensong calls of animals alien to them rose up from the steep slope, and Franco and Alesso, tired and spooked, turned for home.

  Papa left early. This was the day Franco and Alesso had been waiting for. Sergio’s mother Velma was supposed to look after them, but she mainly came over to the house to sunbathe on the lawn and make cakes in the large kitchen.

  Franco left a note for Velma after they had packed food, water, torches and a big knife into their rucksacks. As the sun rose over the sea, they strode across the lawn to the funghi copse and the ridge beyond.

  It was steep going, where the lizard went. Mostly they slipped and hopped and danced with the sliding soil down, down to the stinking valley floor.

  There was a thin stream here, babbling over stones and through vegetation. It bubbled up from the ground in great flat whaps of water to spill over the detritus on the valley floor. The valley dipped sharply down, but they could see very little amidst the mist and the curling, dripping limbs of the valley trees, that faded into white.