Skye Object 3270a

by Linda Nagata

  She straightened her shoulders, glancing nervously at Commandant Penwo’s office, sheltered behind a transparent wall on one side of the jump pit. She could see him, dressed in street clothes and rocking in a high-back chair. He didn’t look happy. He wanted to veto this jump, but Skye was fourteen now, and by Silk’s city charter that meant she was free to do any activity approved for ados. It was a giddy freedom that she had been cherishing over the five days since her birthday.

  Penwo caught her glance. He shook his head. “Somewhere between six and sixty people lose their good sense,” he said. “We don’t call this phase ‘dumb ado’ for nothing.”

  Skye’s fingers twitched. “Can you remember that far back, Commandant?”

  Penwo grinned. “Have fun, Skye Object. Hope you live.”

  “Forever.”

  Usually, it was necessary to wait on the floor of the jump pit while other jumpers took their turn. This time, though, they’d been delayed so long the floor was clear. Skye was glad of it. She didn’t like waiting under any circumstances, but especially not when she’d been toasted by embarrassment. Her body was screaming for a jump. There was no better way to scare out all the cramped, ugly feelings everybody stored up from day to day.

  With Zia, she loped across the jump pit, stopping at the railing that guarded the abyss. Skye’s gloved hands closed on the top rail. Her booted toes curled over the edge, yet she had no sensation of any great height. She wouldn’t get that until she looked down. For now, she looked across the abyss, twenty meters to a massive, curving wall.

  It was the wall of the elevator column.

  In Silk, when people talked about the elevator column, they were never referring to the puny machines that ran between the city’s industrial levels, or that carried people up and down inside the high rises that studded the city’s outer slope. This elevator column was far larger than any of those. It was a space elevator, a massive cable that rose from the surface of the planet called Deception Well, all the way up through the atmosphere and into the airless vacuum of space beyond. Tens of thousands of kilometers separated its beginning from its end. The elevator cars that moved up and down this long highway were the size of multi-story buildings, and a journey to the top took days.

  The space elevator was a beautiful balancing act. It could stand only because the downward pull of Deception Well’s gravity exactly equaled the outward pull on the mammoth counterweight at the column’s end.

  On the whole column only one point was actually in orbit. That was at PSO—planetary synchronous orbit, a point high on the column where a freely-orbiting satellite would require exactly one day to complete one trip around the planet. Above PSO, any object dropped from the elevator would fall away from the planet. Below that point, a dropped object would plunge downward into Deception Well.

  Skye smiled. That was why it was possible to jump. The city of Silk was built on the elevator column. Like a bead on a string, it dangled 300 kilometers above the surface of Deception Well.

  She leaned against the rail. There was no danger. The railing would curl to catch her if she started to go over before she was tethered. Or so the real people promised. Skye wanted to test the system, but she knew she’d lose jumping privileges for half a year if she ever tried it, so she curbed her curiosity.

  Two blisters inflated in the surface of the elevator column. Skye braced herself, as a cable shot out of each of them, moving with the speed of a chameleon’s tongue. One hit her in the belly with a feather-touch of pressure. A thin gold cord spooled off the cable’s end, sliding into a socket on her royal blue suit. “Compatibility check in progress,” the suit DI announced. “Ten, nine, eight …”

  As the countdown proceeded, the other cable reached Zia, and linked to her skin suit.

  The cables were a color between gold and copper, shimmering in the weird, angled light of the jump pit. This close, it was easy to see that they were made of thin, tightly coiled cord. They flexed and stretched like living things.

  As the countdown finished, Skye found herself bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Compatibility check complete,” the DI announced. “Integration at one hundred percent.”

  “You’re too close together,” Commandant Penwo complained. “Space yourselves, until you’re at least twenty meters apart, or I can’t give you clearance.”

  “Fus-sy,” Zia muttered, but they each took a few steps to the side.

  “That’s it then,” Penwo said. “Do be sure to jump straight, ladies, because you are going to have a long, long fall, and that means a long, long time to tangle your lines.”

  “We know the dynamics,” Skye muttered.

  “I hope so. Cleared to jump.”

  Zia whooped. Skye grinned, glancing overhead one more time at the ados watching through the observation bubble. A few of them were jumping up and down. More were pumping their fists, their mouths moving as if they were chanting something. Zia raised a hand in greeting, like a soccer star walking onto the field, but Skye felt horribly self-conscious. All she could bring herself to do was look down.

  The elevator column looked like a huge, slightly curving wall. Below the jump pit it was bathed in sunlight. Skye’s gaze followed it down, down, down. Massive at first, it tapered slowly with distance, until she couldn’t see it anymore, as it plunged into the glowing green crescent of Deception Well’s equatorial continent, over 300 kilometers below.

  Three hundred kilometers straight down.

  If the cable failed, Skye knew she would not stop falling until she burned up in the atmosphere.

  Her heart ran fast. Her skin felt hot with a sweat that was wicked away by her skin suit almost before it could form. Skye drew a deep breath, then she turned to catch Zia’s eye. “Ready ado?”

  “Ready,” Zia echoed. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

  Still holding each other’s gaze, they dove together, headfirst off the platform.

  Chapter 2

  Acceleration.

  Skye felt as if an invisible hand had reached up from the planet and grabbed her, pulling her down, faster, and faster, in a sublime dive. Black lines had been painted on the massive wall of the elevator column, so it was easy to see her speed increase, until the lines all blurred together and all she was aware of was an overwhelming rush.

  There was nothing here to slow her down.

  Close to the planet, air would have slowed her plunge. She would have reached terminal velocity—the maximum speed that she could reach—in only a few seconds and the thrill would be over. But above the atmosphere there was nothing to hold her back … except the thin gold cord feeding out behind her.

  The wall of the elevator column flashed in a stroboscopic mix of silver and black. The glare of daylight from the planet was blinding. She could see Zia, twenty meters away, soaring head-down, her arms tight against her sides. She could hear Zia over her suit radio, flying downward on a jubilant howl.

  They had never jumped so far before, or fallen with such speed. The equations played like music in Skye’s head. In five seconds they would fall a tenth of a kilometer, but double the time to ten seconds, and the distance would quadruple to four tenths of a kilometer as Deception Well’s gravity pulled them down ever faster.

  Fifteen seconds → one kilometer.

  Twenty seconds → 1.8 kilometers

  Twenty-five seconds → 2.8 kilometers

  Thirty seconds → 4.0 kilometers

  Thirty-one seconds → 4.3 kilometers

  No one jumped farther than four point three kilometers. Not the most experienced sky jumper in the city, because that was the limit of tolerance of the jump cable.

  Thirty one seconds passed much too soon—and hit hard.

  Skye was falling at over 250 meters per second—or over 900 kilometers an hour—when the cord reached its limit. It yanked tight. Zia’s cry of glory snapped off like a broken stick while Skye felt crushed, a fly slammed flat under a swatting hand. She couldn’t breathe. Her bones might have been pulverized,
her brain flattened. And still she was falling. The stripes on the column continued to flash past, though ever more slowly now as the cord stretched and stretched, uncoiling to absorb her momentum, until at last, she stopped.

  She did not bounce back up, but the thrill ride wasn’t over yet. Her plunge had carried her away from the column. Now, hanging from the end of the taut cord, she swung back in toward the silver wall. It rushed up at her. She scrambled to grab the cord, pulling herself upright so that she slammed into the wall feet first. Her skin suit hardened to receive the blow and still she felt as if she’d been dropped from Old Guard Heights. Her ears buzzed, and darkness loomed in her vision. She thought she was going to pass out.

  Maybe she did.

  When next she looked, she discovered that her gloves and the hot zones on her shins had knitted to the wall, gluing her in place. She couldn’t remember that happening. “Zia … ?”

  Panic seized her, as she realized Zia was not at her side. She leaned away from the wall, her gaze searching the vast, bright expanse. There. Skye spotted Zia’s golden skin suit, far away around the curve of the elevator column. She looked like a speck. Some gaudy fly resting a moment before it flew again …

  “Zia!”

  “Skye … ?” Zia sounded as rattled as Skye felt. “You … okay?”

  “Sooth. Or anyway, I’ll fix.”

  “Hey ado,” Zia said softly. “We did it.”

  “Yeah.” Skye’s body ached with victory. So why did she feel disappointed?

  She leaned back, looking up the elevator column to try to spot the crawl cart that would pick them up. From this perspective, the base of the city looked like a distant parasol gleaming in the sunlight, surrounded by the black void of space. Not so much different, really, than it looked from two point eight kilometers. Except smaller.

  A flash of motion drew her eye. The crawl cart. It was skimming down its narrow track, still maybe a kilometer away. Skye squinted, and thought she could make out another jumper inside it. She spoke to her suit DI, “Hark. Release right hand.” The hot zone on her glove switched off, and her hand came unstuck from the wall. She reached up to wave hello—and the sky exploded. A fierce white flash punched through the darkness beyond the city, like a tiny sun, flaring into dazzling life, than fading almost instantly.

  “Yeah!” Zia whooped. “Did you see that?”

  Skye was suddenly aware of the hard pounding of her heart. “What was it?”

  “Something big! The meteor defense lasers hit it. We were lucky to see it. I’ve never even heard of anything that big falling out of the nebula.”

  Skye squinted, trying to see past the city’s glare. At night the sky above Silk would glow with the thin, milky light of Kheth’s nebula, a veil of dust and tiny stones that surrounded the inner system. The debris was all that was left of Kheth’s other planets, destroyed in some ancient alien war, long, long before humans had even evolved from their primate ancestors on distant Earth. Tiny life forms lived among the debris. They were called butterfly gnomes because of their wing-like solar panels. Sometimes the nebula’s particles would brush against one another and stick, to form a larger stone. But before the clusters could grow to more than a few grams, the butterfly gnomes would discover them, and use an electric charge to blast them apart again. Now and then though, the gnomes failed, and an occasional pebble would escape the nebula and wander into the inner-system. The city’s meteor defense lasers were always on guard against bits of debris that might strike the city. Skye had seen them flash hundreds of times before, but never with such brilliance. “Zia, there’s no way the butterfly gnomes would have missed an object that big.”

  “Hmm. Maybe it was an asteroid that’s been wandering around the inner system for the last few eons. Or maybe it was a chunk from the swan burster.”

  The swan burster was a great ring, 3000 kilometers across, that orbited Deception Well like a dark moon. The dead remnant of an alien weapon, it was estimated to be thirty million years old. Only twenty years ago its surface had been shattered in a collision. Fragments of the swan burster had been spinning through the inner system ever since.

  “Is there anything else it could have been?” Zia asked. “There’s not much out there …”

  “There is one other thing,” Skye said softly.

  Zia’s voice grew sharp with suspicion. “What are you thinking, ado?”

  “Well …” Skye hesitated, afraid to say it, afraid that by saying it she might somehow make it true. “We know the butterfly gnomes don’t attack animate matter… .”

  Living things were animate, their tissues busily interacting at the scale of atoms and molecules. A lot of manufactured objects were animate too, made of smart molecules that responded to the environment around them. Ord was animate matter. So was a skin suit. So were the hulls of most spacecraft.

  Skye swallowed against a throat made dry by fear. “Zia, maybe it was another lifeboat … like the one that brought me here.”

  Skye had dropped out of nowhere.

  No one knew where she had come from. Thirteen years ago an astronomer had seen a gleam on the outer edge of the nebula. Days passed, and the light grew brighter. A solar sail, already a full kilometer across, was growing from the animate hull of a tiny incoming spacecraft.

  The solar sail was huge, but it was thinner than aluminum foil. It was designed to catch sunlight the way a boat’s sail would catch the wind, using the pressure of light to slow the tiny lifeboat that it carried. But as the sail swept through the nebula it was bombarded by pebbles and flecks of dust that tore its fragile sheet faster than the sail could heal and re-grow. By the time a research ship reached the lifeboat a year had elapsed and only a few shreds remained of the once-bright fabric.

  Within the lifeboat, the researchers discovered the frozen body of a nameless two year old girl. All the records aboard her vessel had been erased. There was no way to know how long she had been in cold sleep, if it had been two years or two hundred … or more. There was no way to know who had put her in the lifeboat, or why. When the researchers revived her, she had only a two-year-old’s fuzzy memory.

  They had named her after the astronomer’s designation for her lifeboat, Sky Object 3270a, adding only an e to her first name.

  “It wasn’t another lifeboat,” Zia said. “If the object was that big, someone would have spotted it.”

  “Maybe.”

  Skye was not at all convinced. Lifeboats were dark. In the lightless deeps of space they were almost impossible to see. They were made that way, because the only reason to use one was for escape.

  For centuries, people had moved outward from Earth, making homes on new worlds that circled alien suns. Now and again, they found fossil traces of long vanished civilizations, but nothing else, until the frontier had been pushed a thousand years from home … and then they found the Chenzeme warships.

  It was a terrible discovery. The robotic Chenzeme vessels might have been thousands, even millions of years old. There were no aliens aboard them. Machine minds steered the ships, and ordered them to attack any vessel that was not of their own kind.

  No one knew for sure why Skye was in the lifeboat, but everyone could guess. She had probably been born on a great ship, like a self-contained city tower faring across the sky, carrying human passengers on a hundred year voyage from one star to another. A great ship was an irresistible target for a prowling Chenzeme warship. When it seemed certain they would come under the warship’s guns, Skye’s parents must have put her aboard a lifeboat.

  As the lifeboats were ejected, most of them would have been spotted and destroyed by the Chenzeme pursuer—but at least one had escaped, to drift (for how many centuries?) until it encountered the nebula that sheltered Deception Well, and its star, called Kheth.

  I can’t be the only survivor.

  City Authority didn’t agree. “It’s a miracle even you made it here,” they told her, over and over again.

  She stared into the darkness beyond the city. Th
e glare of sunlight on the elevator column was so bright she could not see any stars, only the silvery tower of the column rising, rising as if to infinity, dwindling finally to a thread as it disappeared from sight.

  The Silkens had never looked very hard for other lifeboats. Maybe they just didn’t want to find them.

  Chapter 3

  “Stop sulking,” Zia said, as they sipped an icy slush at a balcony table. It was near-noon, and the grand walk was crowded with lunch time throngs.

  Skye leaned back in her chair, turning her face to a cool breeze that swept up the city’s slope. Like Zia, she had changed from her skin suit into shorts and a light shirt. “I’m not sulking.”

  Zia scowled. “So what do you call this? Celebrating? You haven’t stopped brooding since the crawl cart picked us up.”

  Skye had stood at the crawl cart’s railing, her gaze fixed on the brilliant white clouds so far below, and the crystal blue of the ocean. She had hardly heard the congratulations of the other jumpers who climbed aboard the cart as it worked its way back up to the city. She’d been happy to see Ord, though. The little robot had met them at the gate, looking no worse for its encounter with Buyu. Its tentacles had wrapped happily around Skye’s wrist. Now it lurked under the table. Skye felt Ord’s gentle, reassuring taps against her ankle, but she was not comforted.

  “I’m not brooding,” she said after a minute. “I’m just … thinking.”

  “So stop it. It’s not good for you.”

  Skye smiled. “Careful,” she said, “or I’m going to start confusing you with Buyu.”

  Zia took a mock swipe at her head. Skye ducked, and one of the drinks almost went over. A woman at the next table gave them a sour look. Zia shrugged and picked up her slush. Then she leaned back, resting her knees against the railing. “Let’s go over this one more time. That which went flash was a fragment of the swan burster, just like I said. City Authority had been tracking it for years. There was an announcement in the media this morning, predicting today’s lightshow, and if we hadn’t been so caught up in our jump, we might have heard about it. So that which went flash was not a lifeboat, so cheer up.”