Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “They can arrest you.” Lin gave them a that’s how it is shrug. “Not likely maybe, but it depends on who’s got the helm of the North American Community when you land. You have enemies in the Mexican faction.”

  Harold remembered the friction surrounding the adoption of the Community Constitution. Yes, the Mexicans wanted a Right of Confiscation and he spent a lot to block them. The Mexican Constitution from over a century ago stopped foreigners from owning land in Mexico. Now there was a French-style tax on net worth, too. He sighed. “It doesn’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.”

  Lin said softly, “The sitting chairman called you out publicly for using corporate funds to further your ‘hobbies’ yesterday.”

  “I thought hobbies were supposed to broaden you,” Harold said. “Mine is R&D.”

  Sara’s mouth twisted into a cautious tilt. “Silence is sometimes the best answer.”

  Lin said, “I started the legal defenses running.”

  “How about my reserves—and Sara’s—in Earthbound accounts?”

  “I got them posted free to Lunar Holdings last night. It caused a drop in several markets this morning.”

  Sara said, “No hiding when you’re this big, I guess.”

  Lin nodded. “I had to sacrifice some transactions in progress. Resource plays, a convertible debenture or two.”

  Harold got to his feet in the 0.4 grav. “I smell Keegan over at Consolidated.”

  Lin said, “I do too. Rumor says he hates you. He wants to weaken you, maybe create opposition on our board.”

  “I’ll work the board some.” Harold shrugged. “Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got. Let’s go for a swim.”

  Their new swim sphere was forty meters in diameter. For safety a black cable lanced through the middle, so swimmers too far from air could haul themselves out quickly. He made a point of never using it and lapped furiously around the perimeter, letting drops scatter everywhere. The blue-green water cohered, enhanced surface tensions gathering up the drops amid the air currents. Sara was not so proud; she swam subsurface most of the time, using an oxy enhancer. When she surfaced, he was there with a frown, and after her first gasp for air, she said, “Don’t worry, you’ve faced troublemakers like this before.”

  One of his signs of anxiety was a slight lapsing back into his southern accent. “The biggest troublemaker you’ll prob’ly ever have to deal with watches you from the mirror every mornin’.”

  2085

  In principle it was simple: stay in orbit, use the centrifugal 0.4 grav advantage that the Mars Effect people had shown did indeed lessen damage to the general neuro and cardio systems. But some were shy of orbiting at all, so they lost old friends. Harold and Sara were too tired of orbital life, of running their far-flung businesses electronically—so they had battalions of lawyers fight the Community edicts. This allowed them some immunity to prosecution and seizure while on the ground. Still, they made visits short, mostly to see the latest work on robotics and catch up with the red dwarf star scientists. A hobby of sorts, he still maintained for the lawyers.

  2093

  A reporter accosted him and Sara in their home overlooking Kings Canyon. It was an “arranged surprise opportunity” as his media advisors called it, so he feigned being startled.

  “You’re certainly the man behind Dr. Amani’s announcement of Redstar’s discovery, Mr. Mann. Now you’re launching a probe to look at it.” The reporter feigned astonishment, as required. “So you knew about it for years!”

  “Decades, actually.” Deadpan. Hold Sara close, he thought. And smile, dammit. After all, it was their umpteenth five-year-contract anniversary. She smiled, also obligatory. He couldn’t hold his smile for long. He focused on the view. The distant pines and elegant granite peaks weren’t clear and sharp like the old days, since the warming gave a heat ripple everywhere.

  “Why did you and your scientists not announce—”

  “I wanted to get my ducks in a row. Now the whole world is training their ’scopes on Redstar, to tell us what they can. I’ll give us all a close-up.”

  “That’s arrogant!”

  “I suppose so. This isn’t a hobby, it’s a lifelong obsession. I wanted to do it my way.”

  “The entire world scientific establishment—”

  “Is just that, an establishment. Funded by governments—that is, by you citizens of so many nations. I wanted to move faster than that. And make a profit while I built the INS.”

  “What will Sundiver XI find?” The reporter seemed to be getting desperate.

  “I don’t know. That’s the point, yes?”

  As they walked on Sara said, “Y’know, people are saying that, after all this, we’d decide to retire. We’ve finally accomplished everything we set out to do, so . . .” She gave him a raised-eyebrow glance.

  “I don’t think we’re safe, just retired.”

  “Oh—the Universal Rights rules?”

  The inevitable collision between a stressed, overrun planet and lots of retired but vigorous well-to-do was looking like a train wreck. The central political message seemed to be, You have that cash, see, and I have this gun . . . and these lawyers.

  “So they’ll come after us for more taxes,” Sara said. “We can live with that.”

  “It’s getting harder to stay Earthbound. There’s no government space program anymore; can’t afford to get it out from under their bureaucracies. That Exceptional Needs Tax alone—”

  She jostled him, kissed him. “Enough worries! Don’t let tomorrow use up too much of today. Let’s go for a hike on the John Muir Trail.”

  She was right. He went. They had friends to meet later, a good cabernet tasting—life was good. He should lap it up. Even so, in the back of his mind on the trail that afternoon he thought of Sundiver XI and mulled, Even better to see it in person. No, that’s silly. Not that I can. Too damn old.

  2100

  He and Sara arrived at the robo-control station in a high arc ship. The zero grav was a blessing to his joints.

  As he swam through the transfer bubble, looking out through UV filter walls, he saw a waiting array of ceramic and carbon-fiber bots. The gliding serenity of deep space made a slow, artful ballet of even routine industrial processes.

  He knew their designs well, had even worked on some of the coupling joints. Stubby robots sat dutifully in a fiber rack array, drawing power from the idling nuke a few meters away at their backs.

  Zero-grav bots had no front/back bias. They could spin their heads to bring digital eyes or metal sensors to bear, all housed in a rotating platform that sported microwave antennas and a laser feed, too. Omni-able, the industry pundits called it. He was proud to be one of the fifty-nine inventors listed on the patent—he had given his fraction to Sara when they’d celebrated one of their five-year-contract marriages.

  Bot bodies were chunky mech pistons and grapplers, driven by fluid hydraulics. No beauty, but they were yellow and red and blue as suited their jobs, so the control bot could tell them apart. People in space made their habitats and work areas gaudy, a reflex against the surrounding black. The color splashes would have driven an Earthside decorator to violence.

  And here came the orange transfer pressure gate at the end of the tube. The door dilated.

  “Officer aboard!” a young woman declared firmly as he popped through the dilating lock. Her name badge woven into her flexsuit said NGUYEN and she gave him a grin. “It’s protocol, sir—I know you’re not an officer.”

  “Daddy Spacebucks aboard would be better,” he said.

  The man next to her laughed, but it seemed unlikely anyone here knew the reference. “Yessir.” He wore a T-shirt that proclaimed SAME SHIRT DIFFERENT DAY. Harold sniffed and was thankful that habitat air cleanup was well developed. “Sorry you’re not an actual daddy?” Sara said beside him.

  “Um, what? Oh . . . I never wanted to be. I’d have been terrible at it.”

  “I felt the same, for me. We’re better at making things w
ork.”

  “Too bad about the genes not getting passed on.”

  She chuckled. “What makes you think that?”

  He couldn’t suppress his grin. “Okay, we’ve all got stuff stored. We live quantified lives with backed-up selves. Your eggs . . . ?”

  “I might want to use them someday. Or another lady.”

  “Way things are going, could be another, well, guy.”

  “So be it.” She shrugged.

  “We’re here as a luxury to the species. We expand horizons—most people live inside them. Hey!” Harold looked around, uncomfortable with abstractions, as usual. “I’m here to catch that new rock work.”

  Later they watched the magnetic catapult cast an entire iceball cylinder to high velocity. It picked up considerable speed in the magcat, a big lumbering beer can with a snow-white cargo. Then the catapult sleeve fell away as the cylinder’s ion jets cut in. It shrank with bewildering speed, faster than any takeoff he had ever seen.

  “It can rendezvous up to what speed?” Sara asked Nguyen.

  “A hundred klicks a sec,” Nguyen said. “Maybe better.”

  “Um, what’s the commercial app?”

  “Emergency supplies needed in a habitat,” Harold said crisply. “Funded it myself.”

  She smiled. “You belong out here, you know.”

  “I’ve been here, one way or the other, since I was driving a cab.”

  Man’s got to throw long in this life, he thought.

  2102

  At first he had noticed the years accelerating. Now it was the decades.

  He and Sara did all the new techy health things plus taking a special LifeCode series of molecules targeted on their own genes. They up-regulated their repairs and kept their bodies fixing the innumerable insults of advancing age. Tedious, sometimes, but it worked. They wanted to be around when Sundiver XI arrived. Harold didn’t say so, not even to Sara, but he wanted even more.

  He had to tell his advisors repeatedly: Become a mere steward of your own assets? Boring!

  A rich bank account did not mean rich ideas; in fact, often the reverse. The bigger your ass, the more you want to cover it.

  So the second step was the comet-grabbers.

  Investors care a lot more about return on invested capital than about optimized hardware or new technology. But give them dividends and they will give you your technologies. Start with an easy consumer come-on first.

  Luna was in many ways a pleasant place—right distance from the sun, quite nearby, light gravity. But it was bone dry; if ordinary Earthside sidewalks had been there, miners would have leaped at them to suck out moisture.

  With air and water, people would visit the moon’s striking plains and mountains. For now, bubbles blown in excavated cavities would suffice for flying, the best sport of all. The retaining bubble was actually the new flux-diamond, a carbon liquid that condensed into a rigorous firm seal. So he invested in the new Lunatic Hotels and luck intervened. Their first cavity struck a totally unexpected lode of ice, so they had no water problems—the enterprise went profitable. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Luna was a soft, stony sponge.

  He paid off the support loans at the earliest possible no-penalty date. When the comet nuclei he had ordered sent in from beyond Uranus by robot crews finally arrived, they weren’t essential, thanks to the lake discovery—and he ordered a swimming sea made of them. They crashed onto the surface, but succulent machines captured a lot of their moisture.

  Nobody knew it, but this was the beginning of the terraforming process that would take many decades before a filmy skin of moist air clung to the lunar craters. That shallow gravitational well could still hold for ten thousand years the atmosphere slammed into it by a cascade of comets. But a full atmosphere could wait. Soft winds would blow across those ancient lava fields, eventually, but the Loonie Hotel business made profits now.

  So did throwing ice and hydrocarbons sunward, the real point. The robot teams that snagged floating mountains of iceteroids and steered them inward had their troubles, but bots worked 24/7 with little maintenance cost, with no vacation time or health care or retirement plan. They benefited humans who loved the interplanetary splendor they saw on their screens, then went to the sunny sandy beach after their twenty-hour workweeks.

  Profit made his own research teams possible. They developed a way of shaping iceteroids and torpedoing them at very high speeds into the hoppers of passing nuke rockets. Vapor flared in the nuclear chambers and forked out at furious speeds. The magnetic catapult system led to efficiencies in nudging comet-candidates onward. In turn this increased the profitability of supplying light molecules in shimmering spheroids to the inner solar system colonies.

  But such distant wonders were scarcely the whole point. The shareholders thought so, and Harold obligingly said so. He owned the largest share fraction but ruled through a coalition on the board. Still, he ran his latest corporation, Farscape, with bigger goals in mind.

  “I sold my debris companies,” Sara said with a sigh. “We’ve done most of the job. Mop-up is boring, casting big sheets to grab small stuff. Time to get out.”

  “Good. I have a trip planned, we’ll be free to go.”

  He lounged back while a nurse did the daily IV. He did not allow her to joggle his hand holding a vintage red wine; it was part of the medication, too. Deductible, even, though they had stopped thinking about such accounting matters decades ago. Then a good swim in the spherical pool, yes. They were on the 0.4 g level of the Great Cylinder Hotel, which seemed to be the right gravitation for longevity. Turned out the studies using lab mice and pigs had been right. Sara especially was aging very slowly; he had to hustle to keep up with her.

  © 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

  She smiled. Time had been kind to her wrinkles; indeed, she had few. They had just recently finished a long celebration of their one hundredth birthdays, three months apart, and even a thousand kilometers from Earth the media hammered on the walls, metaphorically. It was hard to escape the grasping Earth.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “To the whatever end there is.”

  2103

  Sundiver XI plunged by Redstar in less than a day. It ran on a high-efficiency, nuke-driven ion drive that gathered molecules from in front of the sailship. The combination shaved many centuries from the voyage. It also meant the big sail was a relativistic missile streaking through, swiveling its cameras and sensors to grab torrents of data.

  Harold watched intently between Sara and Katherine Amani. The smart sail was tacking as well as it could, zooming by the star. All this had happened nearly a year ago, of course, delayed by the light travel time.

  The team below them studied their screens and abruptly a startled shout came up from them. On the big screen appeared a reddish world with a shimmering ivory haze of atmosphere surrounding it. Harold saw an unmistakable glint of sunlight from the left edge. Polar caps were a dirty gray.

  “An ocean,” he said. “On a tide-locked planet.”

  Katherine Amani said, “We picked it up earlier but this is the freshest image. There are plenty of spectral signatures. There’s an odd cutoff in the far infrared, something like the edge we see in light reflecting from Earth plants. This spectrum is really dark red, down to reddish brown to black.”

  The next image showed clear continents and somber seas, even big lakes and some white-capped mountains. Reams of data slid down screens around the room as the sail did its job.

  Katherine said, “There’s going to be so much to study—”

  “I’m going,” Harold said. “Now.”

  “No, no, no,” Sara said. “We are.”

  2104

  Lin was in a hurry. “You’re not safe here anymore. The legal walls around you have come down.”

  Harold said, “It’s that bad?”

  “The North American Community reached a midnight agreement with the Euros. They got new laws passed, to let them seize assets and argue their case later. It applies to
anyone offworld, too. No matter how big.”

  Lin had worked for Harold for decades, so he knew she was holding the worst back for last. “And . . . personally?”

  “There are criminal charges available.” She said it calmly but he could tell she wasn’t.

  “Could they come up here with warrants?”

  “I’m afraid it’s explicitly allowed for you two, plus about fifty others. The ones on Luna will get more warning—”

  “But we’re just an hour away,” Sara said.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Could this be just intimidation?” Sara asked.

  “It doesn’t smell that way,” Lin said, presenting a projected summary of the legislation. Harold had read enough bad prose to know the bomb was buried in the footnotes, and with a tap Lin brought up their names.

  Harold Mann, indicted.

  Sara Ernsberg, indicted.

  Subject to precautionary arrest.

  Sara seemed undisturbed. “We’re packed for a long boost. I’ve got our vital memorabilia in a carry case. Clothes, meds, the rest.”

  Harold watched the two women get the staff moving—hustle, bustle, rustle. He didn’t regret growing older, it was a privilege denied to many. But he had trouble grasping the unspoken assumptions behind these new societies. Boundaries got redrawn at the point of a sword, and the legal frame followed. When he was growing up, the paradigm had been with liberty and justice for all, but now on a world stage jammed with swarming masses in desperate need, it seemed to be three hots and a cot and whatever you got.

  “You were right, back decades ago,” Lin said in passing, “going for high-efficiency boost. And building that development complex out in the asteroids, where bot teams could do the assembly.”

  “Bots don’t blab,” Sara said.

  Harold smiled and nodded. “This is going to be more fun than retirement to a prison.”

  2105

  Harold had started letting people call him Harry, now that he was over a hundred.

  They pushed him into the ship on a zero-grav gurney. It was massive with med devices and monitors, all wrapped around a lean though not frail body.