A lesser man would have been flattered by the attention of such a talented group, but Alard was unimpressed. He waited until everyone was seated, then he sat down behind the desk. He seemed to grow smaller as he welcomed them with a few subdued words.
Sam, Orton, and Margot came in and sat down next to Richard in the front row. Margot looked at him, and her eyes told him that there was no improvement in Janet’s nervous condition.
At nine o’clock the last ships left the moon. All the screens were on, showing earth-moon sunspace. The swarm of ships looked like fireflies as they boosted from the pocked surface, becoming almost invisible when their rockets cut off; some were launched from catapults, with brief bursts of correcting thrust. Only a few ships had enough power to catch up with Asterome; most would reach Mars in unpowered orbits, sometime during the next year.
The view pulled back suddenly, revealing the rogue field, a huge man-of-war blister growing from minute to minute; earth was lost within the milkiness, visible only during brief fluctuations.
By ten o’clock the edge neared the moon. Luna’s shape became distorted as the space around her began to glow; silvery streamers reached out to the satellite and caressed it.
The moon protruded into normal space, half submerged, sinking into a shining lake.
It was gone by a quarter past the hour.
Our moon, Richard thought in the silence, the moon of dreaming ages—shield for lovers, puller of tides, timepiece for uncounted generations—gone to swim in a strange sea, with a stranger earth below it.
9. The Minor System
Alone in the hotel suite, Janet watched the approach to Jupiter on the screen. Galileo had described the gas giant as the center of a miniature solar system, with the moons as planets, unaware that his analogy had any literal truth in it. Jupiter was not a sun, but the giant planet was all that remained of the sun’s unborn companion, a protostar which had failed to burst into prominence for lack of mass.
The stillborn image persisted in her mind.
The Galilean moons were circling wolves.
The stars watched.
The plain below Sam was cut in two by a dirt roadway leading to the landing area three kilometers away, where six tugs squatted against the background of ragged hills. Each vehicle was being unloaded by a stocky, waldo-armed surface module. The cartons were placed on the open platforms of balloon-wheeled vehicles, which ran in a steady flow to the base of the main dome in which he stood.
The main dome of Ganymede City covered three square kilometers of the moon’s surface. Here on the top level, the observation screens covered the interior of the dome; they could be turned on individually or en masse to show a panorama of sky and surrounding terrain. A direct view would have left the observation level with too little shielding against the leakage of solar radiation trapped by Jupiter’s magnetic field; even though Ganymede City sat in the moon’s radiation shadow, the aboveground portion was protected, as an added precaution, by meters of water in the outer shell, piped in from the nearby ice field. Natives called Ganymede City “the big igloo,” because of the liquid that was kept frozen in its insulating space. In addition to the physical shielding against stray radiation and occasional meteors, the laser-fed fusion reactor powered the super conducting units which cast a magnetic shield over the domes.
Ganymede plowed through a sea of death; but despite this, ships had visited all the Galilean satellites by 2015. Built at the Martian space docks on Phobos and Deimos, the water—and magnetically shielded tin cans, as the ships came to be called—had penetrated into Jupiter’s radiation belts, setting up research bases on Callisto and Ganymede, as well as temporary facilities on a few of the close-in rocks whipping around the edges of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
To make power for building the first underground living quarters, the tin cans had deployed a giant sun mirror. The collector was no more than a few molecules thick, but its huge size and focusing capacity made up for the fact that the sun’s intensity was only about four percent of what it was in the vicinity of earth.
While Ganymede City’s first levels were being built, a mass driver track had been constructed beyond what was now the tug port. Using the three-kilometers-per-second escape velocity from the Jovian moon, the track began to toss copper ingots toward Jupiter, whose escape velocity was twenty times greater; this large energy difference was expressed in the form of eddy currents of electricity forming in the copper as it rushed through Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field; these were lased back to Ganymede by a small disposable unit, continuing right up to the moment when the ingot hit the atmosphere for a final, dramatic surge of electricity. Current flow was evened out by storage facilities at the receiving station on Ganymede.
As a result of this and other systems, Ganymede became one of the energy-self-sufficient places for science, attracting research and development from earth. The solar mirror was still working; the lofter still threw ingots into Jove’s face; and a second fusion LFR had recently been completed.
Ironically, Sam thought, success on Ganymede had slowed the building of facilities on Saturn’s moons, as well as delaying development of the larger asteroids such as Ceres. A whole system of worlds waited to come alive out here, offering conditions for industry and research, room for a civilization to grow. He understood why the Bulero chiefs had convinced Jack to invest in such a large facility here; they had, of course, played on his guilt about basic research, but the purely factual merits of the case were also strong.
In any case, valuable work was continuing, despite the psychological blow of losing earth. Janet’s visits to the various projects had cheered the scientists and their families, even though nothing could ever cushion the fact that they would never see home again.
Earth is not there, he told himself, at least not the earth that he had known. He had tried to occupy himself with an interest in the history of life here, to shut out what had happened nearer the sun. A lot of human history, he was learning, had been made out here also.
Jupiter was a color-streaked colossus in the black sky, a sphere of solid marble held up by the ragged mountains. As Sam watched the reverse eclipse cast Ganymede’s moving shadow across Jove’s full face, he found it hard to think of today as Saturday morning.
He reached down to a control terminal and turned up the magnification on one of the higher screens. Asterome appeared, circling Jupiter within Ganymede’s orbit, its sun mirror drawing strength from the distant sun. The stubble of sensors and communications equipment reminded him of a strange metallic moss. Slowly the ovoid spun on its ten-mile axis. The worldlet was a long way from home, but for more than a third of surviving humanity it was the only homeland left. Curious, he thought as he searched the rocky outer shell of the space-borne community, that he could not see the nuclear engines that had pushed it into the Martian sun orbit.
The rendezvous with Mars had been an unpleasant experience, especially for Janet; by the time Asterome matched the orbital speed of Mars, it was well known that Buleros were aboard. Alard and Richard received all the cautious and angry words in the screen room.
The Martian officials had been sympathetic, but they did not wish to divide their own leadership further; refugees would be received as agreed, but no members of the Bulero family would be permitted to land. The population—a million or more, counting the refugees—was angry; a garbled version of the bulerite disaster had reached Mars, resulting in riots; Bulero executives and employees had been beaten and murdered. The arrival of new refugees had only made the situation worse. Janet even felt unwelcome on Asterome, where angry words were not frequent.
Alard had broadcast a speech to Mars, explaining his understanding of the war on earth. Sam remembered Alard’s voice thundering on the screens, the holo of his face hovering in the hollow as he argued for understanding and courage. The speech had stopped some of the more hysterical criticism from Mars, but the sense of doubt remained, reflected in the occasional hostile stares; not even Alard could chan
ge the facts.
Richard had been impressed with the restraint of the UN military presence on Mars. He had introduced Sam to Commander Alberta Mason, a gray-haired, blue-eyed woman of immense charm who seemed deeply concerned about the strife that might yet develop between the surviving communities of sunspace.
“We should not set a precedent for violent solutions,” she had said during her visit to Asterome, “yet some level of force might become necessary to keep what peace we have left.”
With Asterome’s departure for Ganymede, Janet’s spirits had risen; there, it seemed, the atmosphere would be more neutral. Once again she looked forward to pulling together the remains of Bulero Enterprises.
Bulero authority, as it turned out, was still recognized, at least tacitly; Greg Michaels and many of the old employees seemed friendly. Richard and Janet had been given a tour by the research chief and had reported that loyalty among the small group of scientists was genuine.
General Kiichi Nakamura, a Hawaiian, was the UN authority on Ganymede. He was governing under emergency rules, but it was not clear what his relationship would be with authorities on Mars and Asterome. Sam thought of him as a man with an irritating dullness of manner; he had greeted them with too many words, making Janet anxious during the introductions.
Sam and Janet had taken an apartment on the first underground floor of Ganymede City’s main dome; Orton, Richard, and Margot had stayed on Asterome, visiting regularly at first, then infrequently.
Sam and Janet had busied themselves with helping Greg Michaels, but it soon became obvious that the research community did not need them, except for busy work that did not have to be done on a schedule. After a few weeks, Janet isolated herself in the apartment.
Margot, sensing that a strain was developing between Richard and his mother, came and stayed with her as often as possible, but Janet began to feel guilty about keeping her away from Richard and their new life; slowly Margot realized how troubled Janet had become.
Sam felt out of place. The unpacking outside reminded him of the movers who had brought his cartons of books when he had moved into his instructor’s quarters at Princeton. The view was a relief from the windowless apartment he shared with Janet.
There had been talk of setting up a college faculty for the younger people, and he had been asked to join; almost no one wanted to abandon the community in order to join Asterome. In time, many argued, Ganymede might be terraformed—a heat trap of some kind could be cast around the moon, one that would hold in an atmosphere warmed by the sun; but this was still very speculative and full of problems.
There was comfort in watching Jupiter. After a month, Sam could picture Ganymede’s motion around the big planet. Ganymede, cupbearer of the gods, circled Jove once every week, always keeping one side toward the giant as his face changed from crescent to full phase. On Monday the sun would rise and Jupiter would be in half phase. The sun was such a small thing, less than a fifth of its size on earth. On Tuesday the sun would move behind Jupiter, making it glow around the edges for up to three hours. The stars would be brilliant during the eclipse. After three and a half days, the sun would set, making Jupiter’s other moons more prominent; at one point in its orbit between Ganymede and the giant, Europa would grow as large as earth’s moon. He had watched Europa and Io chase each other’s shadows across Jove’s clouds. By the weekend the planet was in full phase, its colors becoming brightest when the sun was down. The great red spot was a crimson wound twenty thousand miles across, yet small when compared to the planet’s nearly ninety-thousand-mile diameter. As he watched, Ganymede’s crisp circle of shadow crept across the face of colors six hundred thousand miles away; a mere speck, yet it took a three-thousand-mile diameter to make it. By Monday the sun would rise, Jove would be in half phase, and the cycle would repeat itself as the gas giant carried its system of minor planets around the sun every twelve years.
Jupiter’s ring was an eighteen-mile-thick band of meter-sized boulders only thirty-six thousand miles out. More a belt than a ring, it could be glimpsed during crescent phase, near the terminator. Callisto was larger than Luna and Mercury; Europa was as big as Luna. In addition to the thirteen moons of various sizes, there were countless fragments, ranging from a few feet in diameter to miles across. Richard had mentioned the possibility of using the larger ones to build Asterome-type habitats. Humanity would not lack for space to grow. If Ganymede were given an atmosphere, it would disperse the sunlight to give earthlike daylight, as far as the human eye could tell.
The Bulero Research Center was on the floor below the observation deck. Sam would go there frequently to escape his constant sense of uselessness. There was usually some kind of discussion going on among the scientists and technicians about the earth anomaly, the future, about what could be done. Alard held brainstorming sessions via screen link, which Sam was often invited to join. He wished that Janet would reconsider going back to Asterome, but she wouldn’t even discuss it. It was as if she were exiling herself from useful work, believing that she had lost all right to hope; Asterome was for Richard and Margot, not for her.
Today, before coming up to the observation floor, Sam had listened to a discussion of Jupiter as an undersized companion to the sun, stillborn for lack of mass, hovering between being a planet or a star, but like a star giving off more energy than it received, in the form of heat and radio energy; Jupiter was most like a faint M-type star, a sun just hot enough to burn hydrogen. He had tried to interest Janet in what he had learned, hoping to distract her, but she had screamed for him to leave the room….
Like Asterome, Ganymede City had been built just when bulerite was coming into wide use, and what small amounts were present had been comparatively easy to remove; it had been ferried up to an unmanned barge and kicked into an orbit that would slowly take it out of sunspace.
Sam thought about Alard’s plans to take Asterome out of the solar system. Could anyone stop him? Did the remaining UN authorities have any jurisdiction over Asterome? From a practical viewpoint, the surviving localities were answerable only to their local leaders. The pre-bulerite UN Space Navy was in orbit around Mars; it seemed doubtful that it would be needed to enforce order; the ships had done their job in bringing survivors out of earthspace. Their most likely role would be as a physical link between Mars, Ganymede, the belt outposts, and Asterome.
Sam touched the terminal and picked up earth on the electronic telescope. The rogue field was now more than a quarter million miles across; it had slowed its pace of expansion and seemed to be stopping. Soon the earth’s motion would carry it to the far side of the sun, where it would be difficult to see.
The sight reminded him of a huge effulgence on a photographic plate, the sun’s light brightening the inside into whiteness. A month ago it had been possible to see stars through the membrane; now the anomaly suggested a bloated creature washed up from a strange sea beyond space-time.
Sam wiped the image away and sat down in the nearest inflatable chair. He tried to cheer himself; everything that could be done was being done. Richard and Margot had transferred Asterome’s complete computer memory into the computers at the Bulero Center; they had done the same during the Mars stopover. That memory, shouted into space from the dying moon, was the birthright of every human being, living and to be born.
Another lien on the future had been established in the form of a frozen cell bank, distributed from Asterome’s stores to the medical facilities on Mars and Ganymede. The banks now included animal cells, plant cells, human egg and sperm deposits, contributed by Asterome’s population to increase the previous holdings. All of them, except Janet, had contributed. Blackfriar had advocated that the restrictions on human cloning should be lifted, arguing that all forms of human reproduction possible should be made available to ensure a variety of human types, especially after so many billions had died.
Sam thought of the past. All research into earth’s historical and natural past would now be limited by the amount of stored informatio
n and materials; all roads leading back would now end more abruptly than ever; the interpretive and observational cleverness of investigators would be tested to the limit.
Richard, Alard, and Blackfriar, he knew, were looking beyond sun-space, to the nearer stars. Asterome’s engineers wanted to add an outer urban shell, thus making the hollow the basis of a larger structure as the population increased. Alard was recruiting skilled people from Ganymede; it was an open thing, and no one had objected yet.
Create a new society, Richard said, reach beyond sunspace into the greater world of the galaxy—into the real world. It seems like running away, Sam thought, realizing suddenly that this was perhaps the reason for Janet’s coolness toward her son; maybe she saw his ambitions as another form of the irresponsibility Jack had exhibited; but it might also be that she was afraid of losing him forever.
News came from Mars in a steady flow. Venus had been abandoned. All the remaining orbital installations had been fitted with nuclear propulsion units and were moving toward Mars. The Martian population was expected to grow by a third; Ganymede’s had leveled off at slightly more than fifty thousand after the outlying bases had been closed down. An inventory of skilled persons, fusion power capacity, and food production was being made.
The Bulero Research Center continued with its previous projects. Among them were laser scanners, steps toward the dream of materials synthesis—the creation of anything out of basic materials and information; bulerite was being reevaluated, to see whether its instabilities could be avoided; work was being done on improved deflector shields for star-ships attempting significant fractions of light speed. Many of the engineers thought that the failure of the previous type of energy shield was responsible for the disappearance of the first interstellar expedition; a bulerite shield might protect a starship from bombardment by particles at high velocity, if a stable form was possible, perhaps together with a conventional repelling field. The anomaly might yet make it necessary for us to get out of sunspace fast, Orton had said a few days ago.
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