Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Maya, point taken. So what would you do to fight corruption?”

  She got right up in my face, close enough that I could see the fine dark hairs on her upper lip—she and her cohort had rejected the hair removal mania of the previous decade, putting umpteen Brazilian waxers and threaders and laser hair zappers on the breadline—and smell the smoothie on her breath. “Greg, what are you talking about? Ending corruption? Like there’s a version of this society that isn’t corrupt? Corruption isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. It’s baked in. The whole idea of using markets to figure out who gets what is predicated on corruption—it’s a way to paper over the fact that some people get a lot, most of us get not much, and so we invent a deus ex machina called market forces that hands out money based on merit. How do we know that the market is giving it to deserving people? Well, look at all the money they have! It’s just circular reasoning.”

  “So, what then? Anarchist collectivism? Communism?”

  She looked around at all of us. “Duh. Look at you three. You’ve organized your whole lives around this weird-ass gift-economy thing where you take care of yourself and you take care of everyone else.”

  “Burning Man isn’t real life,” Blight said. “God, I knew I should have waited until you were over eighteen before I took you to the Playa.” Her tone was light, but given their earlier fury at each other, I braced for an explosion.

  But Maya kept her cool. “It’s a bitch when someone reminds you of all the contradictions in your life, I know. Your discomfort doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true, though. Come on, you all know this is true. Late-stage capitalism isn’t reformable. It’s an idea whose time has passed.”

  We all stared at one another, a triangle of adulthood with solitary, furious adolescence in the center.

  “You’re right, Maya. She’s right. That’s why the only logical choice is the moon colony.”

  “You’re going to secede from Earth?” Blight said. “Start a colony of anarcho-syndicalist moon-men?”

  “Not at all. What I want is, you know, a gift economy dangling like a carrot, hanging in the sky over all our heads. A better way of living, up there, in sight, forever. On the moon. If civilization collapses and some chudded-out mutant discovers a telescope and points it at the moon, she’ll see the evidence of what the human race could be.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

  He stood up, groaning a little, the way he’d started to do, and half shuffled to his bookcase and picked up a 3D-printed miniature of the Gadget, run up on one of Minus’s SLS powder printers. It even had a tiny, optically correct lens that his favorite lab in Germany had supplied; the whole thing had been a premium for a massively successful kickstarter a couple of years before. He handed it to me and its many legs flexed and rattled as it settled on my palm.

  “I want to put Gadgets on the Moon. Mod ’em to print moondust, turn ’em loose. Years will pass. Decades, maybe. But when our kids get to the moon, or maybe Maya’s kids, or maybe their kids, they’ll find a gift from their ancestors. Something for nothing. A free goddamned lunch, from the first days of a better nation.”

  One part of me was almost in tears at the thought, because it was a beautiful one. But there was another part of me that was violently angry at the idea. Like he was making fun of the world of the living from his cozy vantage point on the rim of the valley of death. The two of us had a way of bickering like an old married couple, but since his diagnosis, every time I felt like I was about to lay into him, I stopped. What if, what if. What if this was the last thing I said to him? What if he went to his deathbed with my bad-tempered words still ringing in the air between us? I ended up with some kind of bubbling, subcutaneous resentment stew on the boil at all times.

  I just looked thoughtfully at the clever little Gadget in my palm. We’d talked about making it functional—a $7 Gorseberry Pi should have had the processing power, and there were plenty of teeny-tiny stepper motors out there, but no one could figure out a way of doing the assembly at scale, so we’d gone with a nonfunctional model.

  “Can you print with moondust?”

  Pug shrugged his shoulders. “Probably. I know I’ve read some stuff about it along the way. NASA runs some kind of ‘what the fuck do we do with all this moondust?’ challenge every year or two—you can order synthetic dust to play around with.”

  “Pug, I don’t think we’re going to get a printer on the moon in a couple of months.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I expect I’ll be ashes long before you’re ready to launch. It’s gonna take a lot of doing. We don’t know shit about engineering for low-gravity environments, even less about vacuum. And you’re going to have to raise the money to get the thing onto the moon, and that’s gonna be a lot of mass. Don’t forget to give it a giant antenna, because the only way you’re going to be able to talk to it is by bouncing shortwave off the moon. Better hope you get a lot of support from people around the equator; that’ll be your best way to keep it in range the whole time.”

  “This isn’t a new idea, is it?”

  “Honestly? No. Hell no. I’ve had this as a tickle in the back of my brain for years. The first time we put a Gadget out in the dust for the summer, I was 99 percent certain that we were going to come back and find the thing in pieces. But it worked. And it keeps on getting better. That got me thinking: Where’s there a lot of dust and not a lot of people? I’d love to stick some of these on Mars, send ’em on ahead, so in a century or two, our great-greats can touch down and build Bradburytown pretty much overnight. Even better, make a self-assembling RepRap version, one that can print out copies of itself, and see how fast you can turn any asteroid, dustball, or lump of interstellar rock and ice into a Hall of Martian Kings, some assembly required.”

  None of us said anything for a while.

  “When you put it that way, Pug . . .” Blight said.

  Pug looked at her and there were bright tears standing in his eyes. Hers, too.

  “Oh, Pug,” she said.

  He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. I was the first one to reach him. I put an arm around his shoulders and he leaned into me, and I felt the weird lump where his dislocation hadn’t set properly. He cried for a long time. Long enough for Blight, and then Maya, to come and put their arms around us. Long enough for me to start crying.

  When he straightened up, he took the little Gadget out of my hand. “It’s a big universe,” he said. “It doesn’t give a shit about us. As far as we can tell, there’s only us out here. If our grandchildren—your grandchildren, I mean—are going to meet friendly aliens, they’re just going to be us.”

  PUG LIVED LONGER THAN they’d predicted. The doctors said that it was his sense of purpose that kept him alive, which sounded like bullshit to me. Like the stuff he’d railed against when he’d bitten my head off about “positive attitudes.” If having a sense of purpose will keep you alive, then everyone who died of cancer must not have had enough of a sense of purpose.

  As Pug would have said, Screw that with an auger.

  It was a funny thing about his idea: you told people about it and they just got it. Maybe it was all the Gadgets out on the playa percolating through the zeitgeist, or maybe it was the age-old sorcerer’s apprentice dream of machines that make copies of themselves, or maybe it was the collapse of the Chinese and Indian Mars missions and the bankruptcy of the American company that had been working on the private mission. Maybe it was Pug, or just one of those things.

  But they got it.

  Which isn’t to say that they liked it. Hell no. The day we broke our kickstarter goal for a private fifty-kilo lift to the moon—one-fifth the weight of a standard-issue Gadget, but that was an engineering opportunity, wasn’t it?—the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space called a special meeting in Geneva to talk about prohibitions on “environmental degradation of humanity’s moon.” Like we were going to mess up their nice craters.

>   The Green Moon Coalition was a weird chimera. On the one hand, you had a kind of axis of paranoid authoritarianism, China and Russia and North Korea and what was left of Greece and Cyprus, all the basket-case countries, and they were convinced that we were a stalking horse for the American spookocracy, striking in the hour of weakness to establish, I don’t know, maybe a weapons platform? Maybe a listening post? Maybe a killer earthquake machine? They weren’t very coherent on this score.

  Say what you will about those weird, paranoid creeps: they sure understood how to play UN procedure. No one could game the UN better except for the USA. If only we’d actually been a front for Big Snoop, maybe they would have had our back.

  But that was only to be expected. What I didn’t expect was the other half of Green Moon: the environmental movement. I sincerely, seriously doubt that anyone in the politburo or Damascus or the Kremlin or Crete gave the tiniest, inciest shit about the moon’s “environment.” They just hated and feared us because our government hated and feared them.

  But there were people—a lot of people—who thought that the moon had a right to stay “pristine.” The first time I encountered this idea—it was on a voice chat with a reporter who had caught a whiff of our online chatter about the project—I couldn’t even speak coherently about it.

  “Sorry, could you say that again?”

  “Doesn’t the moon have a right to be left alone, in a pristine state?”

  “There’s a saying, ‘That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.’ The moon doesn’t have rights. It’s a rock and some dust, and maybe if we’re very lucky, there’s some ice. And the moon doesn’t do ‘pristine.’ It’s been hammered by asteroids for two billion years. Got a surface like a tin can that’s been dragged behind a truck for a thousand miles. There’s no one there. There’s nothing there.”

  “Except for craters and dust, right?”

  “Yes, except for those.”

  The call developed the kind of silence I recognized as victorious. The reporter clearly felt that she’d scored a point. I mentally rewound it.

  “Wait, what? Come on. You’re seriously saying that you think that craters and dust need to be preserved? For what?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Because they’re inanimate matter.”

  “But it’s not your inanimate matter to disturb.”

  “Look, every time a meteor hits the moon, it disturbs more dust than I’m planning on messing up by, like, a millionfold. Should we be diverting meteors? At what point do we draw a line on nature and say, all right, now it’s time for things to stop. This is it. Nature is finished. Any more changes to this would be unnatural.”

  “Of course not. But are you saying you don’t see the difference between a meteor and a machine?”

  There was no hesitation. “Human beings have just about terminally screwed up the earth and now you want to get started on the moon. Wouldn’t it be better to figure out how we all want to use the moon before we go there?”

  I don’t remember how I got out of the call. It wasn’t the last time I had that discussion, in any event. Not by a very, very long chalk. They all ended up in the same place.

  I don’t know if the mustache-and-epaulet club were useful idiots for the deep greens or vice versa, but it was quite a combo.

  The one thing we had going for us was the bankruptcy of Mars Shot, the private Mars expedition. They’d invested a ton in the first two stages of the project: a reusable lifting vehicle and a space station for it to rendezvous with. The lifter had been profitable from day one, with a roaring trade in comsat launches. But Mars Shot pumped every dime of profit into SkyHaven, which was meant to be a shipyard for the Burroughs, a one-way, twenty-person Mars rocket with enough technology in its cargo pods to establish a toehold on our neighboring planet. And SkyHaven just turned out to be too goddamned expensive.

  I can’t fault them. They’d seen Mir and SkyLab and decided that they were dead ends, variations on a short-lived theme. Rather than focusing on strength, they opted for metastability: nested, pressurized spheres made of carbon-fiber plastic that could be easily patched and resealed when—not if—it ripped. Free-floating, continuously replenished gummed strips floated in the void between the hulls, distributed by convection currents made by leaking heat from within the structure. They’d be sucked into any breach and seal it. Once an outer hull reached a critical degree of patchiness, a new hull would be inflated within the inner hull, which would be expanded to accommodate it, the inside wall becoming the outside and the outside becoming recyclable junk that could be sliced, gummed, and used for the next generation of patchwork. It was resilient, not stable, and focused on failing well, even at the expense of out-and-out success.

  This sounded really good on paper, and even better on video. They had a charismatic engineering lead, Marina Kotov, who’d been laid off from JPL during its final wind-down, and she could talk about it with near-religious zeal. Many were the engineers who went into one of her seminars ready to laugh at the “space condom” and bounded out converts to “fail well, fail cheap, fail fast,” which was her battle cry.

  For all I know, she was totally right. There were a lot of shakedown problems with the fabric, and one of their suppliers went bust halfway through, leaving them with a partial balloon and nothing they could do about it. Unfortunately for them, the process for making the fabric was patented to hell and back, and the patents were controlled by a speculator who’d cut an exclusive deal with a single company that was a lot better at bidding on patent licenses than it was at making stuff. There was a multimonth scramble while the bankruptcy trustees were placated and a new licensor found, and by then, SkyHaven was in deep shit.

  Mars Shot had attracted a load of investment capital and even more in convertible bonds that they’d issued like raffle tickets. Building a profitable, efficient orbit-lifter wasn’t cheap—they blew billions on it, sure that they’d be able to make it pay once SkyHaven was done and the Mars Shot was launched. I’ve seen convincing analysis that suggests that they would never have gotten there—not if they’d had to repay their lenders and make a 10x or 20x exit for their investors.

  Bankruptcy solved that. I mean, sure, it wiped out thousands of old people’s pensions and destroyed a bunch of the frail humans who’d been clinging to financial stability in a world that only needed banks and robots—people like me. That sucked. It killed people, as surely as Pug’s cancer had killed him.

  The infrastructure that Mars Shot owned was broken up and sold for parts, each of the lifter vehicles going to different consortia. We thought about kickstarting our own fund to buy one, but figured it would be better to simply buy services from one of the suckers who was lining up to go broke in space. Blight had been a small child during the dot-com crash of the 1990s, but she’d done an AP history presentation on it once, about how it had been the last useful bubble, because it took a bunch of capital that was just being used to generate more capital and turned it into cheap dark fiber bundles and hordes of skilled nerds to fill it with stuff. All the bubbles since had just moved money from the world of the useful into the pockets of the hyperrich, to be flushed back into the financial casino where it would do nothing except go around and around again, being reengineered by high-speed-trading ex-physicists who should know better.

  The dot-com legacy was cheap fiber. Once all the debt had been magically wiped off the books and the investors had abandoned the idea of 10–20x payouts, fiber could be profitable.

  Mars Shot’s legacy was cheap lift. All it took was a massive subsidy from an overly optimistic market and a bunch of hedgies with an irrational belief in their own financial infallibility and bam, there it was, ten glorious cents on the dollar, and all the lift you could want, at a nice, sustainable price.

  IT’S A GOOD THING there was more than one consortium running lifters to orbit, because our Indonesian launch partner totally chickened out on us a month before launch. They had deep trade ties to Russia and China, and afte
r one of those closed-door plurilateral trade meetings, everyone emerged from the smoke-filled room convinced that nothing destined for the moon should be lifted by any civilized country.

  It left me wishing for the millionth time that we really were a front for Uncle Sam. There was a juicy Colombian lift that went up every month like clockwork, and Colombia was the kind of country so deep in America’s pocket that they’d do pretty much anything that was required of them. OrbitaColombia SA was lifting all kinds of weird crap that had no business being in space, including a ton of radioisotopes that someone from GE’s nuclear division blew the whistle on much later. Still gives me nightmares, the thought of all those offensive nukes going into orbit, the ghost of Ronald Reagan over our heads for the half-life of plutonium.

  In the end, we found our home in Brazil. Brazil had a strong environmental movement, but it was the sort of environmental movement that cared about living things, not rocks. My kind of movement, in other words.

  We knew Pug’s death was coming all along, and we had plenty of warning as he got sicker and the pain got worse. He got a morphine pump, which helped, and then some of his chemist friends helped him out with a supply of high-quality ketamine, which really, really helped. It wasn’t like he was going to get addicted or OD. At least, not accidentally.

  The last three weeks, he was too sick to get out of bed at all. We moved his bed into the living room and kept the blinds drawn and the lights down. We worked in whispers. Most of the time, he slept. He didn’t get thin the way that people with cancer can get at the end, mostly because of his decision to bow out early, without chemo and radiation therapy. He kept his hair, and it was only in the last week when I was changing his bedpan that I noticed his legs had gotten scarily thin and pale, a stark contrast to the day we’d met and the muscular, tanned legs bulging with veins as he crouched by the proto-Gadget.