Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “Yes,” Steel replied, “we’ve got to finance this adventure somehow.”

  Oh, well. I was confused again. What were they doing? Making a Reality of Vesper from orbit? Then again, something like that might sell. Vesper is awfully pretty.

  Marcus said, “The equipment is already loaded in the dirigible. All we need to do is mount the handle and take off.”

  Steel turned her emerald eyes on Yuri. “And you think the handle is ready to go?”

  Yuri looked at me and then back at Steel. “We checked it out as well as we could. To do a really meaningful check would take a couple of weeks.”

  Steel thought hard for a moment. “No. We’ll have to take our chances. We’ve been away too long as it is. And there’s the question of Drake. I had to bring him down to the surface, but I don’t want to keep him here any longer than absolutely necessary.” She looked at Yuri again. “The design is sound?”

  Yuri shrugged, “I did as well as I could with the available tools.”

  “And you trust those tools?” she pressed.

  “They were what I had to work with.”

  She looked at him long and hard. Then she pressed her hands to the table and said, “All right. Let’s get moving.”

  Steel paid our bill and we headed for the airfield.

  Sperry and Alta had set already, and Ruby was quite a ways farther west, but there was even more light than before because Jumbo had just cleared the mountains in the east. It sat on the jagged horizon like a silver, cratered beach ball, pierced in a couple of places by the tallest peaks.

  Attaching the handle wasn’t difficult. The hangar had cranes capable of assembling entire lighter-than-air craft, but it sure looked strange. Of course the blimp itself looked very little like the first zeppelins built a couple of thousand years ago. The gasbag was spherical and spun to create lift as well as to maneuver. The handle was fixed to the ends of the frame that secured the gondola to the gasbag. But there was an extra pair of mounts part way up the handle for the extra bag that Yuri wanted to add up at Manlung La. When the whole thing was put together the handle would arch over the entire width of the blimp, held vertical by the two bags, one on top of the other. But right then it just lay on the ground hanging from the set of mounts on the ends. When we took off, it would swing underneath us till we landed at the pass. Steel pulled Yuri aside and asked him, “What the hell did you tell them we were going to do with that?”

  Yuri laughed, “They think we’re all nuts anyway,” he said, “I just smiled mysteriously and said it was experimental. Our credit is good. That’s all they really care about.”

  We mounted up. Marcus sat up front, but he had Archie fly it, as she had one trip more experience than Marcus did, having flown it down from Manlung La. We rose silently into the night air until the handle was swaying gently beneath us; then Archie fired up the propellers and headed us toward the mountains.

  Manlung La was one of the lowest passes through the great spine, but even so it was over eight thousand meters up. We could see the valley leading up to it winding back into the range, flanked by colossal cliffs of granite and schist that glowed in the moonlight. As we gained altitude, the valley floor became filled with a sweeping, crevassed glacier, silently but inexorably grinding its way west.

  As we rose to the height of the first ice-carved spires, the true giants beyond them seemed to just get bigger. We wound our way up the valley between them, crystalline walls scalloping back and back, up and up. Hanging glaciers sat like thick frosting on every tier, soft white blankets that were cleaved sharp and blue at the edge of the cliffs. Snow on the knife-edged arêtes fluted into countless avalanche chutes that gathered into larger snow-filled couloirs plunging dizzily to the valley floor far below. Alluvial fans of broken ice and rock encroached on the sides of the glacier there, attesting to the active nature of those chutes.

  My ears kept popping as we gained altitude and I said to Yuri, “I thought Marcus said this thing was pressurized.”

  “It can be, but if we want to get the door open up at the pass we have to let the air pressure drop inside as it falls outside.” He turned and yelled forward, “Hey, Marcus, how high are we?”

  Marcus looked at the altimeter and said, “Just passing four thousand meters.”

  Yuri looked back at me, “We might as well put on our pressure suits now.” He headed for the cargo hold in the back of the gondola.

  “You have one for me?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Steel answered me. “You’re why we came down in the first place. It would have been silly to not be able to get you back up to the ship.”

  She was smiling at me. I smiled back. She and the crew and the population of Kindu knew more about me than anyone I had met since Mary left me. I wondered how they felt about me.

  Yuri passed out the suits and we all put them on, and I have to say that Ham looked pretty silly in his. They weren’t true space suits. They were lighter and not as bulky, but they would keep you alive for a little while even in a hard vacuum. Although sturdy enough for working at eight thousand meters, they reminded me of the risky nature of our upcoming voyage.

  I asked Steel, “None of you are on the net right now?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “My system interfaces with the net, but we’re not directly linked.”

  “So you can call for help if you need to.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think we’ll need to.”

  “How good is your medical program?”

  “It’s excellent. We can even re-boot people in most cases. If we need extra capability we can borrow it from the net, but we’re pretty self-sufficient. Why?”

  “Well, I was wondering if you were going to put me on it.”

  “Of course,” she said, “just as soon as we get up to the Lightdancer.”

  That’s what I thought. “As soon as we get up to the Lightdancer.”

  “Yes. Everything is up there. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing important.” So I was going to ride a blimp to orbit without a net, so to speak. My genome wasn’t preserved anywhere. If people did that the entire capacity of the net would be used up memorizing the structure of its components. It wasn’t necessary in most circumstances. If you got in trouble you just went online and your genome was encoded temporarily until you were put back together. No need to fill up valuable memory with information that was always available.

  Except that mine wasn’t available. I wasn’t on the net, and I wasn’t on Steel’s I.S. I was flying solo. If anything went wrong with our surefire patented planetary launch system and I got spread out over a mountainside, there I would stay. I wondered how I felt about that.

  My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Steel said, “Oh. I see your point.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “I see my point, too.”

  Lots of things crossed her face. Concern, fatigue, determination. She smiled at me and said, “Yuri’s very good. His stuff will get us to orbit.”

  She didn’t realize that all she needed to do was smile at me.

  We continued to wind our way higher into the mountains. The pass itself was broad and flat, a stone field swept clean of snow by almost perpetual westerly winds. To our right the sheer north face of Manlung shot up another four thousand meters; to our left the gradient wasn’t nearly as steep but rose almost as far. I could see the camp nestled between two desolate mounds of talus. Some of the boulders were bigger than our gondola; some of them were bigger than the whole blimp. A pressure-suited figure left the shelter as Archie brought us in, dropping three anchors, one in the front and two in the rear. We could hear and feel the handle dragging over the rocks until they caught and brought us to a stop. The pressure-suited figure started piling rocks on top of the anchors as Archie said, “Everybody out.” Jemal opened the hatch and we filed out onto the jumbled stones.

  Yuri led me over to the figure that had set the anchors. “Let me introduce you to my best friend,” he said.

  The figure punc
hed him in the shoulder. “Best friend,” she replied, “Everybody’s your best friend.” I couldn’t see much of her face through her helmet, but she had very pretty blue, almond shaped eyes. A shock of blond hair hung over her forehead.

  “Hey, people like me. I can’t help it,” Yuri responded and then said, “Alice, meet the new guy.”

  “Hi, new guy,” she said. “I’m the problem.”

  Yuri laughed. I didn’t understand. He went on, “His name’s Mo. He’s actually relatively useful.”

  “Hello, Alice.” I offered my hand. She shook it.

  “Welcome aboard, I guess,” she said.

  “Thanks, I guess,” seemed the appropriate response.

  Yuri asked her, “How’s our patient? Did those herbs and stuff help any?”

  Alice collapsed into herself a little before she responded. “I don’t think so. He’s about the same.”

  Marcus yelled over to us, “Social time later. Let’s get moving.”

  “Well,” I said, “nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah.”

  We spent the next several hours preparing the blimp for the trip. We not only had to mount the extra gasbag, we had to bleed quite a bit of gas into it from the first bag. We’d top it off with more hydrogen made from snow as soon as the sun came up to power the solar cells that Alice had brought up, but we wouldn’t fill either bag completely; we needed them to be partially deflated so the gas inside would have room to expand as we headed for the edge of the stratosphere. We also removed the two dozen lightweight seats from the gondola and replaced them with seven heavy-duty acceleration couches, plus a big one for Ham.

  I asked Steel, “Aren’t there eight of us?” She replied: “Drake is in a special container. We’ll put him on board right before we take off. I don’t want to disturb him now.”

  “Oh.” Then I asked, “Did you bring these couches down from the ship?”

  She smiled at me—that sophisticated, knowing smile that turned my volitional capabilities to mush—and said, “We rode them down. We parasail from orbit. It’s fun. You’ll like it.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” is what I said, but I was thinking, ‘Why?’ Why would they go to such lengths to not land on the surface? Why would they design a system for commuting from orbit to the ground and back in such a low-tech fashion? It made no sense at all.

  By dawn the big jobs were done. We started melting snow and separating out the hydrogen by electrolysis, pumping it into the spare bag. Our chariot to the stars looked like a big Easter basket with two huge, half-inflated eggs in it, one on top of the other. At one point Yuri looked up at it and said to me, “With any luck at all we’ll crash on something soft.”

  The Lightdancer was in a polar orbit with a period of about eighty minutes. She made exactly sixty-nine orbits in one rotation of Vesper so each orbit brought her a little over five degrees closer to passing directly overhead. Things got tenser and more hurried as the time approached. We finally loaded Drake’s pod into the gondola, but I couldn’t see into it. It was covered with an insulating sheath that only left a small window right over his face. Everyone seemed very concerned for him. We moved him very carefully and gently.

  That was another thing that didn’t make sense. What could be wrong with Drake that the net couldn’t handle? Or if security was so important that it overrode the health of a crewman, why didn’t they fix him with the medical program on Steel’s system? If she could re-boot people she ought to be able to handle almost anything, injury or disease. I didn’t get it.

  It was time to get aboard. I felt very strange—light and detached. I looked around at the harsh, spectacular landscape, the last I might ever see of Vesper. The last I might see of anything. Prime was low in the east, sending bronze fire across the dry interior plains to burnish the cliffs and peaks. The valley we had come up was still in shadow, Prime wouldn’t rise high enough to touch Kindu or Spam-town for another hour or two.

  Spam-town. What a hellhole, but I’d managed to get out of it. I wondered how Sheila was doing. Was she missing me, or just relieved that I was gone? She’d be opening the store soon. If I hadn’t left with Steel I’d be sneaking out the back door and heading for ’Burbs’ place. I guessed this was better.

  I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. This whole situation had been brought on by my refusing to bow to the government. But it could have been any power structure. The corps, the syndicates, it didn’t matter.

  Sometimes it mattered. It had mattered on Scarpus; that was the last time it had mattered. But then it was time to re-boot and Mary had left me and then it didn’t matter anymore. Another cycle. Another bout of fatalism. I wondered if maybe I’d simply lived long enough, or maybe far, far too long. I wondered if my wife was still on the wheel of Karma, as my father’s great-great-grandfather would have believed, or if she was an angel now, as my—as my—

  If we didn’t make it, would I be seeing her soon? Was that what I wanted? “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns ...” No one went to that country anymore.

  I looked around at the golden mountains, the glaciers glinting fire. Out across the dusty plains, where the biosphere project hadn’t yet reached. I hadn’t been involved in seeding Vesper, but I had helped make more than one world. I had done many things. And now Steel needed me to help her do something, something that seemed very important to her. Perhaps it would become important to me as well.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. Steel’s voice said softly, “Hey, sky pilot, are you going to start shouting at the sun like Zarathustra?”

  I turned and smiled at her. “Now there’s an obscure reference. You must be from earth.”

  She smiled back. “It’s time to go. I promise you we’ll get you to the Lightdancer in one piece.”

  People had promised me things before, but I said, “It should be a hell of a ride.” We climbed in and closed the hatch.

  For a while we just sat there as compressors raised the pressure inside the gondola to almost two atmospheres. Yuri wasn’t sure how quickly air would bleed out once we were in space, and we were going to need all the cushion we could get. Even so, we stayed in our pressure suits. Can’t have too many backups.

  All of the extra guys we had rigged to keep the blimp from blowing away in the night had been taken down; the anchors had been cleared. As we settled into our couches, Marcus ordered the anchors weighed and we released from the surface of Vesper. The brooding north wall of Manlung started to slip down as we lifted, slowly at first, then with gathering speed as we accelerated upward. I could feel the alertness of the crew; there was no fear, really, but a definite state of enhanced readiness.

  Marcus was in constant communication with Tamika on the Lightdancer. The tether had been unreeled for the crew’s descent two quads ago so it was already at speed, ready to pick us up. Tamika was passing over the south pole as we took off and would be on the other side of the planet for most of our ascent, coming over the north pole as we approached the altitude where she would grapple us, rolling toward us like a juggernaut with a two-thousand klick diameter.

  As we cleared the summit of Manlung the rest of the range came into view, stretching roughly north and south from us, a seemingly endless rampart of chiseled, icy teeth. I could see the shadow of the range stretching out across the jungled lowlands we had so recently left, the coastline, the ocean. In the other direction the inland plains stretched out to the horizon, waiting to be developed.

  Marcus was flying now, with Alice in the co-pilot’s seat. Alice was the newest mystery. What had she said when I met her? She was the ‘problem.’ Wasn’t Drake the problem? Another puzzle. Maybe she was just being funny, self-deprecating or something.

  Marcus said to Steel, “We’re approaching 16,000 meters.”

  Steel said, “How’s she handling?”

  “Nothing even remotely resembling an ultralight.”

  “Are we going to be able to maintain position?”

  Yuri looked at me li
ke, ‘Are these people crazy, or what?’

  Marcus said, “It’s going to be tough, but I think we have a chance. Every air current shoves us around. Whoa! Hold on—”

  The engines roared as Marcus gunned them. We swung around to port and then steadied again. He said, “Yes, I know.” Then to Steel, “Tamika’s complaining that we keep drifting around.”

  Steel asked, “Where’s the ship?”

  Alice said, “It’s just come over the pole.” Her voice reminded me of Steel’s.

  Of course, Steel could have gotten on her system and asked Tamika directly, but she wanted to let Marcus have a free line.

  The engines roared again as Marcus maneuvered. “Twenty thousand meters. We’ve arrived,” Marcus turned to Alice. “You watch the altitude. I’ll cover our lateral drift.”

  “I’ve got altitude, aye.” Alice’s eyes were glued to the instruments.

  “Damn, we keep drifting east.” The engines gunned again. He called out to all of us, “Everybody strap down! Ten minutes to rendezvous.”

  My stomach decided to visit various parts of my anatomy. Considering the way we were rolling around and the knowledge of how critically that rolling was affecting our chances of success, and, not incidentally, my chances of survival, I thought my metabolism was holding up rather well. Under the circumstances.

  “Archie! Strap down!” Marcus ordered.

  I looked back at where she was bending over Drake’s pod. She said, “I’ll strap down in plenty of time. I just want to keep an eye on Drake—”

  “You can’t do anything for him right now, and this elephant is hard enough to handle without people moving around. Now sit down and strap yourself in.”

  Archie moved to her couch, “Aye-aye, sir.”

  My feet started to tingle. Being in a lighter-than-air craft is unlike anything else; you’re floating, but you’re not weightless. You can feel gravity trying to pull you through the bottom of the gondola. And you’re not really flying; you’re just hanging there. With a whole bunch of planet below you and nothing but a skin of carbon and epoxy between you and it.

  “How’s the altitude holding?” Marcus asked.