by John Varley
It's the sort of predicament that appeals to Plutonians, a fatalistic bunch. They get a kick out of telling newly arrived tourists about the latest catastrophic prediction.
The Oberon engineers rejected the Pluto Solution, mostly because of the almost unimaginable expense and the time it would take. Black holes are very rare, and cost the planetary income of some asteroids. They are not labor-intensive, and one hoped-for side effect of the Gravity Project was putting a lot of people to work, jazzing the economy.
And I suspect they decided to wait a few centuries, see if Pluto did fall into a black hole.
The third and fourth ways are also related, and don't involve actual gravity but the illusion of gravity. If a spaceship accelerates at a steady rate, it will seem just like real gravity to an observer inside the ship. Einstein noted that no experiment done inside the ship could distinguish between "real" gravity and the force of acceleration. If you're wondering how I, a mathematical dunderhead, know all this stuff, it's simply that I had to memorize great swatches of it as dialogue when I played the old windbag in Einstein and Marx, the techo-philosopho-porno extravaganza you've never heard of because it played three times before going to a richly deserved extinction. ("Ken Valentine manages to bring some much-needed humor to the role of Albert. But this will only appeal to communist theoretical-physicist necrophiles. There must be two of them in the system, maybe three. Let them have it.—The Phlegethon Phlogiston)
There are several insurmountable hurdles to using method number three for "residential" gravity. For one thing, your residence would spend most of its time moving like a bat out of Pluto. After a few months (weeks? Do the math yourself), you'd be moving near the speed of light and time contraction would be a problem. Well, then why not accelerate twelve hours out, turn around, and accelerate twelve hours back? Oddly enough, that would work, though the expense would probably be prohibitive. It would avoid the other problem of constant acceleration, though: the fact that we have yet to produce a means of propulsion that can operate indefinitely, at any useful thrust. When you got home, you could refuel.
One of the many unlikely propositions I have sold in a lifetime of selling was based on that idea. We set up a Big Store, selling shares in a company that was "right on the edge of a breakthrough!" in the field of light-speed travel. The dodge was to put your money in the bank, get on the ship, and return a few hundred years later to reap the compound interest. The trip would only be a few months subjective time. Brilliant! Of course, we were the bank. And I already mentioned what happened to W. C. Fields's bank account. But you'd be surprised how easy a proposition it was to put over.
So now we come to the fourth method, or 3A, depending on how you apply the rules. This is the wheel, or the bucket on a rope.
Put some water in the bucket and whirl it around your head. The water doesn't spill out. Magic! Actually, centripetal force, which is a constant acceleration toward the center of a circle.
If you build a wheel in zero gee and set it spinning, you can walk around on the inside of that wheel just as if you were in real gravity. If you want to be heavier, you spin the wheel faster. Slow it down for less gravity.
Make the wheel very large....
We've been building structures like this since humans went permanently into exile in deep space. The asteroid belt, the lunar Trojan points L4 and L5, the Jupiter and Saturn Trojans, J4 and J5 and S4 and S5, all are thick with wheels like this, or more often, cylinders. Up until the inception of the Oberon Gravity Project the largest of these artificial worlds was about sixteen miles in diameter.
The Gravity Project proposed a wheel one thousand miles in diameter.
To make a leap like that you need a significant new technology, or a major breakthrough in an old one. The Oberoni had a little of both.
When I had last come through about twenty years before, Oberon II had looked like this:
(—o—)
The O was the hub of the wheel-to-be, hollow in the center. If you were building an interplanetary Conestoga wagon that was where you'd put the axle. The long lines were the first pair of a proposed twelve spokes of the wheel. The two little arcs at the end were all that had been built so far of the outer rim of the wheel, the place where people would live and work.
Today it looked like this:
Four more spokes finished, and two separate portions of wheel arc. Each spoke was five hundred miles long. Each arc had reached a length of about six hundred miles. It looked like the project was half through but it was actually further along than that. You learn as you go, and getting started was much tougher than getting finished. They expected to wrap the whole thing in ten more years. That is about half a mile of rim every day. Don't ask me how they do it. I've stood at Edge City and watched the work, and I still don't know.
Oddly, a thousand-mile wheel turning once an hour produced just about the 0.4 gravity the engineers had in mind. From Luna, with a decent telescope, you could tell time by Oberon II. And since the diameter was one thousand miles the circumference was π thousand miles: 3,141.592654 miles. That led to the first of a long line of disparaging nicknames during the early construction: Pi in the Sky. But nobody was laughing now.
* * *
"Yeah, whaddaya want?"
"Is this the computerized answering service of Oberon National?"
"You got a problem with that?"
"I got a problem with your tone of voice."
"Fuck you. You dialed the aggressive-response number. Hold on, asshole, I'll connect you with obsequious response, if that's all you can handle. Good afternoon! I hope I can be of service.
I took a deep breath. Folks, is modern science wonderful, or what?
"Checking for an account in the name of Elmer Prettywillie."
"I am so sorry. We carry no such account."
"Then surely you've heard of S. Quentin Quale."
"I am devastated to inform you that I've made no such acquaintance."
"Well, you must know Linus Spaulding. Captain Linus Spaulding."
"Well... There is an account for the Linus Pauling Foundation."
"I'll bet it's right next to Jake's Clams. No, Spaulding. Captain Spaulding. The African explorer."
"Quel dommage. I am devastated."
Christ. When programmers have nothing better to do, they dick around with stuff like that. And what's worse, people use them. I'm told it got started with cutesy answering machine messages, back at the dawn of the Electronic Age. I wish it had stayed there.
* * *
If I were an extraterrestrial tour guide bringing a shipload of Betelgeusan caterpillar people for five days and four nights in the quaint little Sol System, I'd put Oberon II and its environs in the top-three places of Things to See.
Actually, maybe it would look like a primitive log cabin to the caterpillar people. Maybe they'd want to swap beads and trinkets and planet-busting bombs for our native handicrafts or buy a few million slaves. But for my money, you can't beat the Uranian system.
Uranus has rings. Nothing like the gaudy gold bands around Saturn, but impressive in their own, more subdued glory. And because the axis of Uranus is so far askew from the plane of the other planets, you get a great bull's-eye view of them as you approach.
Uranus has moons. Five major ones, all different colors, all showing a disk as you move closer. Then dozens and dozens of smaller ones, looking like very bright stars.
Uranus has Oberon II, which I've already described, but which cannot be easily grasped unless you have seen it grow from an odd X in the sky into the most outrageous object mankind has yet built. The hub alone is larger than anything else man-made in space.
Uranus has Oberon I, the original moon. If you are lucky, your ship can come very close to it on the way in, and it looks wrong. Red-orange streaked with black and light brown and cream, it looks like a family-size pepperoni, black olive, and anchovy pizza, the sort that might be delivered to a family living at the top of a beanstalk. But they've already been eating it
. A hundred years ago Oberon was reasonably round. Not anymore. Great gouges have been torn from it, a hundred miles wide and deep. Oberon is being cannibalized to provide the raw materials for building Oberon II. Down there on its surface Oberon has become a vision of hell, with mining robots the size of ocean liners chomping their way through veins of ore, and with plants transmuting stuff we don't need into stuff we can't do without. The dark side is aglow with the terrible fires of these operations. They plan to use it all up, every grain of sand, and then move on to Ariel. But most of all, Uranus has tailings.
For the first century after the Invasion, there was little of organized government beyond the orbit of Mars. There were plenty of people. Just no government. Very few rules other than the ones you enforced yourself, and such rules tend to be only things that matter to you as an individual. And only those things that matter to you now. The environs of Uranus and Neptune were settled and developed by the rough-and-ready breed that always gravitates to the frontier. On Earth there were gold miners, buffalo hunters, trappers, and eventually farmers when the frontier was the American West. Later, in the Brazilian rain forests, it was lumbermen, miners, then slash-and-burn farmers. All of them despoiled the environment. There was nobody to tell them not to, and besides, there were zillions of square miles of wilderness. What's all the fuss about, amigo?
At Uranus, it was miners. I'm sure they'd heard of the environmental disasters of Old Earth, but why should they worry about that? There were no buffalo to be driven to extinction, no native peoples to evict and practice genocide on, no tropical forests to turn into arid Saharas. There's nothing out here but rock, Lord love you! How can even the most rapacious businessman fuck up a rock?
The answer was obvious, even when the destruction was going on, so nobody mentioned it, or if they did, they were sure no problems would be evident for thousands of years. The reality took less than fifty. Finally the mining companies were losing so many ships that something had to be done. They changed their mining practices, but that was far from enough.
Tailings, as defined on Old Earth, was that monstrous pile of crap you can see sitting beside the ore refineries in old photographs. Tailings was what you had left after you'd taken out what you were digging for. In gold and diamond mines, that could be 99.9% of what you dug up. But ugly as it was, on Earth, when you were through with a bucket of rock, the tailings just sat there, seldom harming anybody. The big deal was the air pollution produced by the refining process, or the contamination of water that ran off the pile of waste. At Uranus, and Neptune, things were different.
Don't imagine this mining was done by grizzled old desert rats leading space donkeys at the end of a rope, pickaxes in hand. You think mining, you visualize either that, or men with soot-blackened faces riding a cart down the shaft of a coal mine. The reality of mining back on Old Earth was usually different from that. There was strip mining, in which the topsoil and everything else was scraped away with bulldozers until the coal seam was reached. There was placer mining, which involved leveling fair-sized mountains with streams of high-pressure water. And there was open pit mining, which depended on blasting away entire cliffs of virgin rock. The easiest, quickest, cheapest way to mine the Uranian moons was by blasting. They used plastic for the smaller veins, mini-nukes for the major digging.
Because of the negligible surface gravity of even the largest moons, each of these explosions hurled thousands, millions of rocks into space. The rocks varied from no larger than a grain of sand up to some fairly hefty boulders. Up into the sky and... gone. They never fell back to the ground. Some ended up in orbit around one of the moons, others took up every variety of orbit around Uranus itself. The mining companies had no problem with this. Every chunk of useless rock that achieved escape velocity was a chunk of rock that wouldn't have to be shoved out of the way to get to the valuable ores. It just vanished into the blackness, and good riddance.
Actually, no. The stuff was gone, but far from forgotten.
A certain small percentage of debris achieved Uranus-escape velocity, and could more or less be ignored. An even smaller portion went solar-escape, and was even less of a worry. But the great bulk of all that junk took up orbits that crisscrossed the space lanes from every direction, and usually at an alarming relative speed. A grain of dust could leave a pit the size of your fist in the foam insulation that covered the hulls of most ships. Something the size of a pea could ruin your whole day, punching right through the thin skin and entering the life support or engine as a burst of blue-hot plasma. With luck, you might have time to patch and repair. Anything bigger than an apple might as well be an atomic bomb.
There were an estimated six hundred trillion apples in orbit around Uranus and its major moons. That sounds horrific until you realize the Uranian system is about fourteen quintillion cubic miles. That's one apple for each twenty-two thousand cubic miles—one heck of a lot of nothing, with a rock lurking somewhere. Which sounds great, until you realize that's a cube only twenty-eight miles on a side. Now add in the fact that most ships are themselves several miles long, quite a large target, and on approach and departure will pass through many millions of cubes that size. If that doesn't make you squirrelly, nothing will.
Not to worry. Sparky's on the job!
The Oberon Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Bureau claims that, left to itself, the situation would result in one major hit for every ten thousand trips. That figure is in great dispute, but it really doesn't matter, since the situation has not been left to itself. Each ship that enters this solar pinball field carries good radar and good lasers, and fries an average of six rocks on the trip in and out. Most of those would, of course, never have troubled the ship, but ship's captains hate tailings with a mighty passion. They never let one go.
This would actually be enough to reduce ship/tailings encounters to one every few decades. But it's not enough for the Oberoni, who hate tailings even more than captains do. For one thing, they are a hazard to the great structure of Oberon II. For another, they give the system a terrible black eye in the minds of the traveling public, one hit per decade or not. So the Great Wheel bristles with radars and lasers, which clear a thousand rocks an hour... or was that per second? Go look it up. It's a bunch.
And that's still not enough for the fifteen moons of the Uranian League: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Peasblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Pyramus, Thisbe, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Moth. (I once met a fellow who hailed from Bottom; he said his people called themselves Bottom-dwellers, but the neighbors, naturally, referred to them as Assholes. I always wondered what inhabitants of Snug and Snout were called.) The League aims to clean up the system in a few centuries, and their main weapon is a genengineered cyborg critter called a snark.
You're unlikely to see a snark during your trip to Uranus. Though they number in the billions, they're not very big and they cover a lot of space. (Spacers believe sighting one is very bad luck.) But they all look like lengths of pipe, ranging from a few feet long up to about fifty feet. They have gossamer "wings" that they spread to soak up solar radiation. They have radar eyes and a system that generates gas for propulsion: hydrogen + oxygen = bang! They survive on a meager diet of ice and rock, which they get by dipping into the rings. They are alive, semi-intelligent, self-reproducing, and their mission in life is to destroy tailings. They drift, ever-alert, conserving their strength by using their thrusters only at orbital points where it can be used most economically, like eagles soaring on a desert thermal. When they spot a rock, they vaporize it.
Like most perfect solutions, the snarks revealed a few problems not long after they were let loose. One toasted a group of seven spacedivers during the first month postrelease. A viral program had to be devised and broadcast on the wavelength they used to talk to one another, making sure they only attacked objects smaller than a basketball. Anything larger would be reported to human agencies which would track it down and dispose of it.
And a few decades after that they began
showing up at Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, all the related Trojan points, and the asteroid belt, where they were about as welcome as rabbits in Australia. But they did no real harm.
I mention all this for two reasons. One is that, during the fifth season, Sparky found an injured snark and nursed him back to health. B.J. the Snark became one of the most beloved members of the Gang, along with Toby the Dog, sometimes outselling Sparky in action-figure totals. Of course, B.J. had a friendly face—real snarks have nothing that looks like a face—and had no trouble flying around inside municipal pressure, which would have made a real snark helpless as a butterfly in a blender.
The other reason is to explain the glorious, continuous fireworks show surrounding Oberon II as my ship began her final approach. The black sky was alive with a thousand points of scintillating light, light that was all the colors of the spectrograph as the mostly sand-sized particles were vaporized, announcing their chemical composition in their final seconds, to anyone with the knowledge to read the colors.
I didn't have that knowledge, but who cares?
It was even more beautiful than I remembered it.
* * *
"Is this Hank's Bank?"
"Yes, you have—"
"Automated answering service?"
"That's right, you have—"
"Looking for an account in the name of Otis B. Driftwood."
"We have no—"
"Cleopatra Pepperday?"
"We have no—"
"T. Frothingwell Bellows?"
"We have no—"
"So long."
Three more down. It was looking like a losing proposition.
* * *
I wish I could say I had time, leisure, and the temperament to enjoy the approach to Oberon II. If you don't like fireworks, there are also the holoboards, which we started picking up while still a thousand miles out. Miles on a side, they trumpet the allures of the big hotels and casinos and shows, with more glitter per square foot than anyplace since Old Las Vegas.
