Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  “But will the laser work if the city is struck?” Richard asked.

  “We only need it for a few minutes,” Mike said.

  The cage opened. Toshiro Sada, the shuttle pilot, was standing on the ramp, motioning for them to board.

  Basil pushed Richard ahead. “Thanks,” Richard heard Mike say to Sada as they went up the ramp into the shuttle’s midsection.

  Inside, most of the seats were full. Richard climbed up the floor rungs and approached the first pair of empty seats. Mike struggled along next to him and they strapped in, facing straight up.

  Richard looked out through the port at his right. How can this be happening? He turned and looked into Mike’s face, which was close to his in the cramped seats.

  “Somebody has decided to cut himself a piece of the world,” Mike said quietly.

  “Do you think we’ll respond?”

  There was a look of resignation in Mike’s blue eyes. “I don’t see how we can avoid it. Some of the warheads are bound to get through. The best we can hope for is a measured, target-by-target response—but if the war doesn’t finish us, the bulerite will.”

  We might have had a chance with the war alone.

  Richard felt a vibration. Below him, he knew, the laser beam had come to life, nursing the shuttle with heat energy. The shuttle started to rise slowly, gaining speed as it fed on the awesome power of the beam, which would follow the craft until it reached escape velocity.

  Bulero Port fell away; clouds rushed by the porthole. In a minute stars appeared on the horizon. The acceleration pinned Richard to his seat, squeezing a few tears out of his eyes. He tried to breathe more deeply, knowing that he would have a bruise from the case in his shirt.

  The shuttle shook a little; then the acceleration cut off and the weight was lifted from him. He saw the western curve of the earth at his right, where the sun was being prevented from setting by the shuttle’s climb. The Pacific came into view on the blue-violet horizon.

  Two flashes appeared, false suns rising and suddenly fading.

  “Los Angeles and San Francisco,” Mike said. “Chicago is probably gone below us.”

  The shuttle continued its climb into the west, tipping over into a horizontal position as it made orbit. The rungs retracted into what was now the floor, creating an aisle.

  The stars grew numerous over the dying earth. Thanks, Jack, Richard thought. The planet might have destroyed itself without you, but you helped eradicate my world, where I might have made my mark. Yet a part of him looked away, telling him that he would have gone from the cage of earth as he had gone from home, that the bulerite disaster had only delayed him. If it had not been for Margot’s return to earth, and the lingering help that he had given Bulero Enterprises, he would have been on the moon when all this happened. Now the war was quickening his departure, and he felt guilty.

  A new fear crept into his mind. “Do you think Asterome might become a target?”

  “Depends,” Mike said, “on who started the war, and who they think Asterome will side with.”

  “Is Asterome armed?” He thought of Margot and his family.

  “I don’t know, but there would be enough time for Alard to send out a crew to trigger or disarm the warheads some ways off. One might get through.”

  He and Mike might reach Asterome just before it died.

  “Sada will know if missiles are headed for Asterome,” Mike said. “They’ll be on radar before we enter a trajectory for L-5. Let’s go sit up front.”

  The Bulero passengers were watching the war as Richard and Basil drifted out of their seats into the aisle.

  “Mr. Bulero, remember me?”

  Richard looked toward a redheaded man in the seat ahead.

  “I fixed your intercom in the office last week.”

  “Oh—yes, how are you?”

  “My wife and kid didn’t get out of New York.”

  “I’m sorry, Hank.”

  “The way I see it is that the rest of us have to go on.” Hank stared fixedly at Richard for a moment, looking for a confirmation; there was terror in the man’s green eyes.

  “I think so, Hank,” Richard said as he turned away and drifted forward.

  When they reached the bulkhead, Richard caught a glimpse of nuclear flashes through the port at his right; he tried not to look.

  8. The World Swallower

  “Janet?”

  Sam came into the hotel room and sat down on the bed. She lay on her stomach with her face in the pillow. He touched her shoulder. “Richard is safe—we’ve had a radio message. A few Bulero shuttles will reach us within a day.” He rubbed her shoulder. She turned over slowly and looked at him.

  “People will be coming up from earth,” she said, as if to show him that she was in control of herself. He knew that she had been waiting for bad news. “Can the moon handle all the refugees?”

  “I don’t think there will be more than we can handle,” Sam said. “It won’t be possible for large numbers to escape. The moon has well-developed communities. Asterome and the moon will help each other.”

  “It’s horrible,” Janet said. “We’re responsible, the Buleros.”

  “The war is over,” he said, realizing that he had never thought of himself as a real Bulero, or privileged; the thought startled him, confronting him with the degree of his alienation from Jack. “The big defense control centers are gone,” he continued, “including a few no one knew existed until they showed their teeth. The big cities are gone, and the surface temperature is rising. Magma is still spilling out, but the ocean crack seems to have stopped for now.”

  “How can you talk about it?”

  He looked at her carefully. “I try to understand what is happening, because it helps me to live, as it always has. It’s all I can do now.” It’s all I’ve ever done.

  She reached up suddenly and pulled him down to her. He was quiet as she held him, and all her fears seemed to drain into him. He stayed with her until she fell asleep.

  Orton sat in the low-gravity waiting room. Richard’s shuttle—the last one from the Bulero Complex—would arrive in a few minutes. Refugees from earth, and from the smaller, supply-dependent near-earth stations within the radius of geosynchronous orbit, were being given the choice of remaining on Asterome or of going on to the moon. About a third of the arrivals were accepting Alard’s offer, but the rest held back, still loyal to the Earth-Moon UN Authority, refusing to believe that this disaster would not right itself in time. Of course, Asterome would have to close its doors after a while.

  Orton knew that he would become a part of Asterome; he had wanted it before, and now it was the only place for him. “Natural planets are too big,” Alard had told him a few hours before, “too big to run properly, given the variables of our history. It’s always been a bad start—never a world government that works properly, not even good local ones. If the earth’s population had always been small, then maybe we could have worked up to a large democracy. Sure, we’ve had some peace and a lot of creativity and production, policed by large powers. But the smaller nation—gangs start a war at the first sign of weakness among the police. I’ve had it, planets have too much room to hide nasty schemes. Humanity can do better with worlds like this. We’ll reproduce, keep a loose association, scatter across the galaxy, ensuring both survival and human diversity.”

  Orton felt close to the man, and he knew that Richard would also respond. Alard made him grasp after dreams in a practical way. Most important, they both saw the danger in the scattered power centers left in the solar system. After it was clear that earth would not recover for a long time, these might begin to work against one another, depending on their previous loyalties.

  Asterome would be a valuable piece in this game. Its computer libraries, manufacturing facilities, and skilled personnel would be decisive wherever it went. Alard’s feeling was that the moon could take care of itself, but that Mars, Ganymede, and the asteroids might need help. He was planning to shift Asterome’s position to
the Jovian system in order to keep a balance between the various sunspace sectors. Maybe we’ll turn out to be bloody fools also, Orton thought. He knew that the dream of an interstellar macrolife would have been better served with a whole earth behind it. Now the view back from the stars would be a bitter one; migrant humanity would know that the small yellow sun carried a corpse through space; the inner stains would never be washed away for those who had lived through the end.

  A sense of helplessness came over him, and he felt that he understood Janet’s withdrawal, Sam’s stunned passivity, and Margot’s quiet rage.

  “Hello, Orton,” Richard said as he stepped carefully into the room.

  Orton stood up. Suddenly dreams seemed to be the most urgent things he knew. They shook hands. Richard seemed tired, but well. There was a look in his face, Orton saw, an ethereal, longing gaze, capable of peering across the dark light-years of an entire galaxy without flinching.

  Just a little while ago it had seemed that all the waiting in her life was over; that within a reasonable set of compromises things would be the way she wanted them, with no more subtle threats, no more tedious striving for appearances, no more unexpected irritations.

  “But can you get the Bulero outposts to listen to you?” Orton was asking from the lounge chair at her right.

  Janet looked at the orange curtains as they moved in the slight breeze coming into the solarium from the hollow. “We’ve got to pull what’s left of the company together,” she said. “I know all the division heads by phone, and I met the chiefs of the centers on the moon, Mars, and Ganymede, when they first went out to their jobs. They’ll listen to me, but the question is what to tell them.” She looked at Sam sitting across from her in the sofa. “Should they stay where they are, or come to Asterome with their families?”

  “Alard wants to take Asterome out to Mars, then to Ganymede,” Orton said.

  She thought of Richard and Margot, sleeping in the nearby bedroom. Alard would like to go farther than that, she suspected, out of sunspace completely, especially if things got any worse. Orton, together with Richard and Margot, was sympathetic to the idea. They were taking a long view, but it was the short-term possibilities that pained her most.

  “What did Soong learn from his conference on the moon?” she asked.

  “They’re asking that Alard send out all his shuttles to earth, to help bring out survivors,” Orton said, “primarily friends and families of those on the moon. Fewer large ships are making it to Luna. Alard agreed to send as many shuttles as possible.”

  “But they’ve got a whole fleet in mothballs,” Sam said.

  “Those are deep-space vessels,” Orton said, “incapable of landing on a large planet. Some will be sent, but the most they can do is stand off in earth orbit and wait for survivors to come up.”

  “Technical and skilled people,” Sam said, “may be the only ones in a practical position to be rescued. And they are the ones most needed, if civilization is to recover. We’ve lost most of the engineering and scientific community, as well as those who could train a new generation.”

  She felt her expression harden as she looked at Sam. “Everyone deserves a chance,” she said.

  “But even with all the cooperation possible down there,” Orton said, “and with our best efforts here, we can only save a few hundred thousand at most. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a handful—and time is growing short. After a while it will not be possible to go to earth at all. The decontamination alone….”

  We’re guilty, she thought as she listened to them trying to break her ties with those who were dying. She felt her own tendency to turn cold, to protect herself; it frightened her. Their words were a tyranny of reason and facts, as oppressive to them as to her. She had helped sign the execution order for a world, hundreds of times, with her name and Jack’s on Bulero work orders. There was no way to deny that.

  She sat in the hotel lounge and watched the turning discus of the old American space station on the screen. The station turned slowly on its axis, four hundred miles above the Pacific. Suddenly she remembered that almost a month had passed since her conversation with Sam and Orton in the solarium.

  The screen view shifted to show two old moonships hanging like toys near the wheel. The wine-bottle shapes seemed so small, capable of carrying away only a few lives. Orton was with Alard, she knew, planning and discussing; Sam, Richard, and Margot went daily to the docks, to help receive the refugees. I’m not doing anything, a voice said within her, but it was so far away that she could ignore it.

  She felt helpless as she struggled with herself. The great majority left behind had more right to be called humanity than we do, the voice continued. There are so few of us, yet we have all the advantage.

  Her heart beat faster and a weakening fear spread through her body; her eyes opened wide and she felt the muscles in her face tighten; she was a stranger in her own body, trapped, looking out through frozen eyes.

  The main conference and communications hall of Asterome was a large drum space with a polished black floor and twelve screens running around the ribbon of wall. The ceiling was a solid circle of white light. A giant desk console dominated the center of the room, surrounded by a dozen chairs.

  Governor Alard sat behind the desk, Soong at his right. Sam, Richard, Margot, and Orton sat in a semicircle, facing Alard.

  Sam looked around at the screens. Four showed a full quarter of earth in close-up; two showed entire hemispheres from relays in geosynchronous orbit; one pictured the entire day side, another the night face; and four contained views of earth-moon space and the moon itself.

  Orton coughed, creating an echo in the hard-surfaced chamber.

  Alard leaned forward and said, “You can see that the earth’s atmosphere has taken on a strange glow.”

  The yellow-white effulgence had appeared suddenly less than twenty-four hours earlier, varying in intensity, pulsating into white, then back to yellow.

  If I had taken more of an interest in Jack, Sam told himself, then I might have convinced him to look into the problem of bulerite. I might have saved his life.

  “Radio contact is now gone completely,” Alard said. “This shroud is clearly not a result of the nuclear war. We’ve measured its balloon-like expansion. Something has affected earth’s normal electromagnetic and gravitational fields to generate this anomaly.”

  This, too, Sam suspected, was caused by bulerite’s presence.

  He heard steps behind him. Mike Basil sat down next to him.

  “Mr. Basil has been doing some checking,” Alard said. “Do you have anything to tell us?”

  Mike ran a hand through his thinning brown hair and sat back.

  “Look at that!” Orton said just as Basil was about to speak.

  The membrane around earth was now clearly larger than the planet’s atmosphere. Stars shone through the edge of the radiance—streaks, as if someone had smeared them.

  Alard opened the audio channels with earth, releasing the machine-metal roar of a million gears into the room for a moment before breaking the link.

  “Radio is still out,” he said.

  Suddenly Sam saw a clear view of the earth on all the screens. The field had become transparent, leaving only a silvery glow in the atmosphere. Surface features, however, seemed distorted, enlarged, as if seen through a warped glass.

  The earth was stately, silent in its prison.

  A huge spark erupted across North America and disappeared into the arctic tundra; others appeared intermittently. Within a half hour, as they watched, the globe was crisscrossed by an awesome system of electrical arteries, glowing brilliantly inside the optical distortion of the shroud.

  “There is a measurable increase in rotation,” Alard said as he looked at his computer display screen.

  With a sinking feeling, Sam realized that this was the end of all rescue operations on earth.

  The screen room came to dominate Sam’s life during the next month, because it was from there that Asterome
confronted every new development of the crisis. Sam was there with Orton, Richard, and Margot, observing and commenting, together with the countless officials and spokesmen who came through the hall daily in search of solutions to myriad problems. The chamber was screen-linked to every human outpost in sunspace, receiving a storm of feedback. Ultimately this information passed through Asterome’s computers and was acted on by Alard and Soong when a course of action became clear. When a problem was ambiguous, more information was sought until a resolution was found; and if this failed, the problem would be shelved for discussion by a larger body of citizens. Asterome’s constitution provided for checks and balances among judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government, except that a high level of interest and expertise was demanded of the citizenry; every person from the age of fifteen could enter a discussion or, through the communications system, record an opinion into the community computers, where it would be compared and weighed against what was known, what was desired, and what was possible. Policymaking, Sam realized, had not escaped the hazards of human error, ethical failure, or power-seeking; these failures were present in subtler ways, but in a context that permitted them to be more easily exposed.

  Janet came with him only occasionally, preferring to spend her time walking around Asterome. In the evenings she would tell him about the shops, the arts, and the landscaping skills of the people who lived in the towns of the hollow. Sam felt that contact with their well-ordered life would help Janet, and he encouraged her to tell him about what she had seen. He needed it as much for himself as for her, to set against the tragedy of the last few months, knowing that it would take a commitment to a new life, a resolve greater than any he had made in the past, to enable him to hope again.

  “I went up to the lake,” she had said one night as they lay in bed, “where the refugees have set up a tent city. A boy was fishing in the lake. His father came by and told him to stop, then he took a look at me and asked if I was Janet Bulero. When I said yes, he came up to me and pushed me, saying that it was because of people like me that he had lost everything. He thought that the Bulero family had started the war, Sam.” She had turned and sought to hide her tears in the pillow. “I tried to tell him that we were refugees also, but he cursed at me and walked away.”