October on the northern hemisphere of Earth, so glossy and full. All her body-planet interfaces humming. Suddenly life in space seemed a stark nightmare, an exile to the vacuum, everyone locked in sensory-deprivation tanks, separate, virtual, augmented. Here the real was real.
“Robber!”
“Robber robber robber robber…”
The moment itself, robbed from them as it happened. Here she was, passing through a space. Flit of the now. Dusk in a marsh in a transient universe, so strange, so mysterious. Why should anything be like this? The wind was cool, the clouds had a little twilight left in them. Looked like rain. The leaves of the thorny vine on the ground were as red as maple leaves. The marsh was like a person out there breathing. Crows flew over cawing, headed into the town and its heat islands. Swan knew a little of the crow language; they would say to each other, “Caw, caw, caw,” as now, just chatting, and then one would shout a word out so clearly that it had become an English word—“Hawk!”—and they would scatter. Of course the word crow also came from their language. In Sanskrit they had it as kaaga. Imported words from another language.
There were some people, standing by the buildings next to the trees. They were small somehow. Weighted down. Could this be so close to the great city? Was it indeed part of the city, part of what made it work, not just the wetlands but the legions of poor marginal people, living in the half-drowned ruins? The weight of the planet began to drag her down. Those people over there were like figures out of Brueghel, people from the sixteenth century, bowed down with time. Maybe these were the people living a real life, and what she did in space nothing more than the dilettantism of a gaga aristos. Maybe what she really needed to do was to live here and build things, maybe houses, little but functional, a different kind of goldsworthy. Under the sky, in the full light of the sun—the utter luxury of the real. The only real world. Earth, heaven and hell both—natural heaven, human hell. How could they have done such a thing, how could they have not tried harder?
Maybe they had. Maybe the trying included the flight to space, as some kind of desperate hope. Cast from Earth as if in a seed pod, out to where one was sure to freeze and rot and turn back into soil. This dirt by the side of the road. She lay on it, avoiding the thorny vine; squirmed around as if to burrow into it. A spacer fucking the dirt—they must see that all the time, not be impressed anymore. Those poor lost people, they must think. Because there was nothing like this in space, not really—not the wind and the big sky over her, almost night now, with moisture that was not yet cloud—Oh how could they have left! Space was a vacuum, a nothingness. They had inhabited it only by deploying little rooms, little bubbles; the city and the stars, sure, but it wasn’t enough! There needed to be a world in between! This was what city people forgot. And indeed off in space they had better forget, or they would go mad. Here one could remember and yet not go mad—not exactly.
But how sad it was. Grubby, tawdry, beaten down. Pitiful. Sad to distraction, to a stabbing despair. That they had let it come to this. That she had done what she had done to herself. Even Zasha thought she had gone too far, and Z was a very tolerant person. Would have stayed with her, maybe, if she hadn’t gone off. And now she was no longer the person Zasha had parented a child with, she could feel that, even though she didn’t know exactly what had changed. Unless it was the Enceladan bugs in her… In any case a strange person. A person for whom the only place that made her truly happy also made her deeply sad. How was she to reconcile this, what did it mean?
She sat up. Sat there on the dirt, feeling it lumpy under her.
She saw a motion from the corner of her eye and tried to leap to her feet, misjudged the g and crashed back down. She peered into the gloom:
A face. Two faces: mother and daughter. Here it was such a clear thing; it looked like parthenogenesis. Moonlight just now breaking over the skyglow of the city.
The younger stepped toward Swan. Said something in a language Swan didn’t recognize.
“What is it?” Swan said. “Don’t you speak English?”
The woman shook her head, said something more. She looked around her, called quietly behind her.
Two more figures appeared next to her, taller than her and broader. Two young men. They leaned over and muttered to the daughter.
“You have antibiotics?” one of them said. “My coz is sick.”
“No,” Swan said, “I don’t carry those on me.” Although possibly her belt had something, she wasn’t even sure.
They took a step closer. “Who are you?” one said. “What are you?”
“I’m visiting friends,” Swan said. “I can call them.”
The young men approached her, shaking their heads. “You’re a spacer,” the first speaker said, and the other added, “What you doing here?”
“I have to go,” Swan said, and started for the road—but the two of them grabbed her by the arms. Their grips were so strong that she didn’t even try to jerk free. “Hey!” she said sharply.
The first speaker called out toward the dark behind the two women: “Kiran! Kiran!”
Soon another figure appeared out of the dark—another young man, the tallest yet, but willowy. The two holding Swan had grips that felt to her like something they had done before.
The new young man was startled at the sight of Swan and said something sharp to the two holding her, in a language she didn’t recognize. A quick urgent conversation passed between them; this Kiran was not pleased.
Finally he looked at Swan. “They want to keep you for money. Give me a second here.”
More urgent talk in their tongue. Kiran appeared to be making them nervous or defensive; then he approached and took Swan by the upper arm, squeezing once as if to send a message, and gestured the others away with a flick of his head. He was telling them what to do. The other two finally nodded, and the one who had spoken first said to her, “Back soon.” Then the first two slipped away into the night.
Swan looked Kiran in the eye, and he grimaced and let go of her arm. “Those are my cousins,” he said. “They had a bad idea.”
“A stupid idea,” Swan said. “They could have just asked me for help. So what did you tell them?”
“That I would keep you here while they got their mother’s car. So now I think you should get out of here.”
“Come walk me back,” Swan said. “I want you along, in case they come back.”
His eyebrows shot up his forehead, and he regarded her closely. After a while he said, “All right.”
They walked quickly on the road. “Will you get in trouble for this?” Swan asked at one point.
“Yes,” he said gloomily.
“What will they do?”
“They’ll try to beat on me. And tell the old guys.”
Her arms were still burning where they had been gripped, and her cheeks were hot. She regarded the gloomy youth walking next to her. He looked good. And he had without a moment’s hesitation removed her from a bad situation. She recalled how sharp his voice had been when he’d spoken to his cousins. “Do you want to leave?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to go into space?”
After a pause he said, “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said.
They stopped outside Zasha’s, and Swan looked him over. She liked the look of him. He looked at her with an expression curious, wondering—eager. She felt a shiver run down her.
“My friend who lives here is a diplomat for Mercury. So… come in if you want. We can get you up there if you want,” she said, looking skyward briefly.
He hesitated. “You won’t… get me in trouble?”
“I will get you in trouble. Trouble in space.”
She started toward Zasha’s, and after a moment, he followed her. She opened the door. “Zasha?” she said.
“Just a sec,” Zasha called out of the kitchen.
The boy was staring at her, clearly wondering if she was on the level.
Swan said, �
��They called you Kiran?”
“Yes, Kiran.”
“What language were you speaking?”
“Telugu. South India.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We live here now.”
So he was already an exile. And there were all kinds of immigrant residency requirements on Earth; possibly he was not in compliance.
Zasha appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, washcloth in hand. “Uh-oh. Who’s this?”
“This is Kiran. His friends were kidnapping me, and he helped me to escape. In return I told him I would get him off Earth.”
“But no!”
“But yes. So… here we are. And I need to keep my word.”
Zasha looked at Swan skeptically. “What is this, Stockholm syndrome already?” Z glanced at the youth, whose gaze was fixed on Swan. “Or Lima syndrome?”
“What are those?” Kiran said without shifting his gaze.
Zasha made a little grimace. “Stockholm syndrome is where hostages become sympathetic to their captors and advocate for them. Lima syndrome is where the kidnappers become fond of their victims and let them go.”
“Isn’t there a Ransom of Red Chief syndrome?” Swan said sharply. “Come on, Z. I told you, he rescued me. What syndrome is that? I want to repay a favor, and I need your help. Quit trying to take over the situation like you always do.”
Zasha turned away with an annoyed look; thought it over; shrugged. “We can get him off if you really want it. I’ll have to do it through a friend who helps me with this kind of thing. He’s at the Trinidad-Tobago elevator, it’s a hawala. We have a kind of pass-through agreement, although after this I’ll owe him. Meaning you’ll owe me.”
“I always owe you. How will we get to Trinidad?”
“Diplomatic pouch.”
“What?”
“Private jet. We’ll have to get a worm box too.”
“A what?”
“We have a system. It’s always supposed to be a box of soil or worms, and there’s an understanding that it doesn’t get inspected.”
“Worms?” Kiran said.
“That’s right,” Zasha told him with a grim little smile. “I’m going to get you off-planet, because of Ms. Stockholm here, but given the circumstances, we have to do it off the record. That takes using the systems we have. So you might have to go up in a big box of worms, all right? Are you going to be okay with that?”
“No problem,” said Kiran.
Extracts (4)
At the end of the period of planetary accretion, about 4.5 billion years ago, there were more planets than there are now, all slung around by close calls and orbital resonances and pulled together by gravity, so that they sometimes collided. They had been doing it for a billion years to get to this point, and this was the last stage of that process of accretion. During this period every one of the inner planets took at least one very big hit.
A planet called Theia grew at Earth’s L5 point until it was about the size of Mars, then drifted into a collision with Earth. It hit at a forty-five-degree angle, at something less than four kilometers per second—not fast in astronomical terms. Theia’s iron core plunged in and merged with Earth’s core, and Theia’s mantle and some of Earth’s mantle were thrown into orbit. The angular momentum imparted by the hit spun Earth to a five-hour day. Two moons accreted from the ejected material rather quickly; estimates range from a month to a century. Eventually the smaller moon splatted onto the larger one, leaving behind the jagged mountains on the anti-terran side of the resulting moon, Luna.
Around the same time, a small planet about three thousand kilometers in diameter struck Mars and created the Borealis Basin, which is basically Mars’s northern hemisphere, still six kilometers lower than the southern hemisphere.
Venus was struck by a Mars-sized planet, creating a moon like Earth’s, called Neith; ten million years later, another impactor gave Venus its slow retrograde motion. This change in rotation slowed Neith and caused it to plunge back into Venus and merge with it.
Mercury was struck by a protoplanet half its size, at such a speed and angle that Mercury’s mantle was stripped off and cast throughout Mercury’s orbit. Ordinarily Mercury would have swept these pieces back up, but in the four million years this process would have taken, most of the material was pushed outward by solar radiation and thus never made it back to Mercury. About sixteen quadrillion tons of Mercury’s crust eventually ended up on Earth, and more on Venus. In the end only the heaviest 70 percent of Mercury remained, essentially the planet’s core. Thus the Mars g for a diameter smaller than Titan’s.
Somewhat later, the young Jupiter and Saturn fell into a one-to-two orbital resonance, with Jupiter spinning through two of its years for every one of Saturn’s. This created a very powerful combined gravity wave, swinging around the solar system at varying strength, depending on where the two giants were in relation to each other. This new wave at its strongest caught Neptune, which had grown just outside Saturn, and threw it away from the sun! Neptune flew out past Uranus, pulling Uranus outward too, also onto its side. Only at that point did the two smaller gas giants end up in the orbits they now occupy.
Inside Jupiter’s orbit, meanwhile, that same Jupiter-Saturn resonance wave caught asteroids and threw them like pinballs all over the system, in the period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, 3.9 billion years ago. All the inner planets and moons were pummeled with impacts, to the point where the surfaces of these planets often were seas of molten rock.
The Era of Big Hits! The Late Heavy Bombardment! Never let it be said that the great merry-go-round is entirely fixed and regular in its motion—that it doesn’t sometimes resemble more a swirl of bumper cars. Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with matter, and somehow the result is complex motion. Invisible waves slinging rocks this way and that.
What if human history has such invisible waves? Because ultimately the same forces apply. What big hits made us what we are? Will some new resonance create a wave and throw us in a new direction? Are we entering our own Late Heavy Bombardment?
KIRAN AND SWAN
From the moment Kiran saw the woman his cousins had grabbed, everything changed. She was old, tall, good-looking. She moved as if she were swimming. He knew immediately that she was a spacer, and that kidnapping her was a terrible idea. After that everything went a bit too fast for him actually to be deciding what to do. This is what happened to him when he was in a pinch: he watched himself do what he did from just behind and to one side. People said he was cool, but really he was slow. And yet good things still seemed to happen.
Her hair was black; she looked Chinese or Mongol. Her eyes were brown, with a little blue patch at the bottom of one eye; and really it was her eyes that captured him. Some kind of coincidence—the girls back home had those same dark eyes with luminous whites, in a dark face—it was very compelling to him. She had looked to him the moment he had taken her arm, to show how much she wanted to be free—a very passionate look, as if she knew what being held captive was like, and was afraid. It shocked him how expressive her face was, how firmly she grabbed his attention. Her friend Zasha had called it Lima syndrome—maybe so. Maybe now he was an incompetent Peruvian.
But he was going to space. That meant leaving—but he could send money back to his relatives. They were tired of putting him up anyway. He could go and see what he had always dreamed of seeing—which was really just anywhere, but space in particular, ever since he was a small boy. Mars, the asteroids—anywhere out there. Everyone heard stories.
The woman drove them out to Newark. Jammed in the little seat behind them, he began to realize it was really happening—something, anyway. His idiot cousins were not going to be able to find him and beat him. A new life: he began to quiver slightly, as if he were the hostage who had been kidnapped. In a way it was almost true. Captured by a look, stuffed into the backseat of a car.
They came to an airport that did not look like Newark. They drov
e out to a hangar and were escorted up a stand of stairs into a small jet. He had never been in anything like it, and was impressed by its speed as they took off. They gave him a window seat and he watched Manhattan below, like a great ship of light. Off they went into the night.
Eventually he leaned his head on the window and fell asleep. Later he woke with a stiff neck, watched the ocean get closer. The jet landed on a green island with reddish soil.
Out into a pungent evening, humid air like mid-August in Jersey, almost like his childhood home in Hyderabad. Rice fields. Childhood memories sparked out of what he saw and smelled, and again he walked as if a little beside himself. He was very distracted as they entered a building. Mercury House, a sign said.
Inside, they took him to a big room, where immense white plastic tubs like those used in industrial kitchens were being sealed and loaded onto a pallet. “All right, young man,” said Swan’s friend Zasha, clearly still a little disgusted to have to be doing this for Swan. “In you go. Put on this spacesuit first, then the helmet. After that we’re going to cover you in dirt and worms, and up you go.” To Swan: “My friend won’t inspect the boxes that have my sign on them. He’s got the next shift.”
“Why the worms?”
“It’s a way to show I’m not using it casually. I only send up a couple people a year like this. And naturally he gets favors back from me.”
“What about the AI inspections?”
“What about them? We do a lot of stuff outside that system.” Zasha grinned fiercely at her. “This is a hawala elevator, the whole thing is set up to skip certain scans.”
Then Kiran was in a crinkly one-piece and had a helmet on and was breathing cool coppery air. They helped him in and laid him out in the tub as if in his coffin, and a wriggling mass of worms and black dirt was dumped over his body and face. He was going to leave Earth buried in worms. “Thank you!” he called out to the woman and her friend.
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