What they discovered sent a shiver down the spines of all who heard it.
The computer simulations clearly showed that the object was not going to collide with Earth. It was slowing down…
7
Today was the day. Though his computer reminded him of that fact, there was no need. He wouldn’t have forgotten.
Jens Rasmussen went to his office safe, opened it, and took out the padded envelope Hiroshi Kato had pressed into his hands the last time they saw each other. He had named a day and said, “If I don’t get in touch by then, open this.”
He did so. Inside were a sheet of paper and a rewritable CD. He read the letter, choked for breath, then read it through again. “If everything has worked as I planned, then a very large object will have been moving toward Earth for the last several days,” he read in Hiroshi’s neat, elegant handwriting. “Maybe this has not become public knowledge yet, but there could be rumors; they’re true. I have recorded a short lecture on the accompanying CD that explains the whole story. Please send the file to the press, and put it on the Internet.”
What was this all about? Rasmussen took the CD from its jewel case, slotted it into his computer drive, and started the video. Hiroshi Kato appeared on the screen. He was sitting in the chair by the window of his meditation room, the garden visible behind him through the window. He wasn’t smiling. He held a neat little stack of index cards in his hands that presumably held the notes for what he was going to say, though he never looked at them once.
“Most of you will remember the mysterious rocket launch in the north of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan,” he began. “I did that. I built the launch site, I sent the rocket on its way, and then I dismantled the site, which regrettably caused considerable damage to that region. What most of you don’t know is that there was already one such mysterious launch, from a Russian island. At the time it was officially designated a test launch, and it dropped out of the headlines quite quickly. In the next few minutes I will tell you what actually happened and how that relates to the object currently approaching Earth.”
He told the whole story of what had happened on Saradkov Island, about the probe that had landed on Earth thousands of years ago and been frozen in the eternal ice ever since, and about what had happened when it became active. He explained how he had saved some of the nanites to research on his own. He sketched out his own studies in self-replicator theory, and how this had helped him to unriddle how these nanites worked.
“The megastructure currently approaching Earth is a space station, a habitat for at least a million people. It was built by the nanites I sent out to the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. It’s an area where the remains of a former planet orbit the sun. These asteroids are a rich resource for mining all kinds of materials, which is what the nanites duly did, following my orders. First they replicated until there were enough of them—meaning trillions upon trillions of them, so many that we barely have the words to express such numbers. We have to rely on powers of ten. Next, they set out to build the space station out there in the twilight of the asteroid belt in interplanetary space. Once they were done, the nanites withdrew and gave the station its launch command, which fired the rockets to set it off toward Earth. By my calculations it will take up a stable orbit around Earth within a few weeks, ready for the moment when we decide to settle it.
“I would like to be able to say I built this space station, but that’s not actually the case. Rather, the control unit of every nano-complex contains an information-storage function that we might best imagine as equivalent to the DNA within our cells. Our DNA contains something like a history of all human evolution, with genes that—to simplify somewhat—could help us grow limbs and organs that we no longer need, and these genes are switched off. Similarly, these information-storage functions contain the blueprints for objects that were not part of the task the nanites were launched into space to fulfill. There are millions of these blueprints. They’re hard to understand, and it will take decades even to find out what each one of these programs can build. And even once we know that, we will still know very little about what these objects are and what they are capable of.
“I’m saying all this to tell you that the blueprint for the space station was supplied by the creators of the nanites. However, they didn’t include the instructions. Meaning that anyone who goes near it should do so with all due care and attention. According to my simulations, there should be no danger; there seem to be no weapons aboard or anything like that. But whoever boards the space station is in the same situation as a medieval human trying to make sense of a jumbo jet. We cannot expect to understand all that we see.
“You will ask why I did this. For a very simple reason: I wanted to point the way. The space station is large enough to be seen in the night sky from anywhere in the world, and it is built with technology far, far more advanced than our own. I invite all space-faring nations to send their expeditions to this station and to discover all of its workings. Humanity has the chance to learn an immense amount from such research.
“And that’s just the beginning. Once we have learned how to use them, the nanites could change—and improve—our lives in ways we can barely imagine today. The possibilities offered by manipulating matter at the atomic level are limitless. There will never again be any shortage either of energy or of raw materials. We will be able to recycle everything we no longer need, one hundred percent. Nobody will ever have to go hungry again; nobody will ever have to do unpleasant work. We can make a paradise on Earth—and it won’t even take any effort on our part.”
He stopped and seemed to have finished, then remembered something. “Ah yes, another thing: there won’t be just this one space station. The nanites in the asteroid belt are already at work on the next habitat, and they’re still self-replicating. In a few years’ time, there will be enough habitats available for all of us to move off-world if we so desire.”
The video ended there.
Rasmussen shut his eyes for a moment. So that had been the secret. That’s what he had been hiding all this time. He had always had the feeling Hiroshi hadn’t been telling him everything, but now…now all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Now it all made sense. But that wasn’t what had made him choke for breath when he read the letter. Rather, it had been the closing lines.
Jens—if you’re reading this, then chances are we’ll never see one another again. I’d like you to know that I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me, and I have always considered you my friend. The business side of things was just a game we played together.
All the best,
Hiroshi
They didn’t let him fasten his own seat belt—not on a space shuttle. Bill Adamson watched the man in the Roscosmos overalls check and double-check the straps and wondered once more how things could have gotten this far.
That conversation in the director’s office. How long ago had that been? Just a few days before, it seemed to him. Weeks. Months. In any event, Roberta Jacobs had not been alone; there had been a great many men in there as well when he finally entered the room, summoned from his own office by her secretary’s almost-hysterical phone calls. Old men. Men who looked exactly as important as they were. One of them could have been Sidney Poitier’s twin brother, in uniform, with yard upon yard of service ribbons across his chest.
“Space colonization is your field now,” the director said after a few words of introduction that he missed entirely, he was so surprised.
My field is robots! But he hadn’t said so. Instead, he had simply asked, “And what does that mean in concrete terms?”
Whereupon the Sidney Poitier clone had looked at him impatiently and said, “Means you’re flying.”
Rhonda had almost flipped out when he told her. “You’re no astronaut, Bill! They can’t ask you to do that!”
“Doc says I’m fit enough.”
“They wa
nt you to fly off to an alien spaceship?”
“Someone’s got to do it,” Adamson had said, managing somehow to hide the fact that on the inside he was cheering. Hallelujah! Kato, that arrogant kid, had certainly never dreamed of this twist. Serves him right for being too darned snooty to join the Robot 21 project. And now he was helping Bill Adamson take the ride of his life.
On the flight over to Baikonur, it had gradually dawned on him he would be aboard one of the brand-new shuttles, and then he had suddenly had misgivings after all. He had asked someone whether there had even been any test flights.
“Of course,” they told him.
“How many?”
“One.”
Because they had to be built fast, it had been one of those harebrained international-cooperation projects, and he could only hope they hadn’t made any dumbass conversion mistakes between inches and metric. The space shuttle was strapped to a gigantic Russian carrier rocket that the Russian copilot, a shaggy blond guy called Boris, would steer during the climb. Then Jackson, the pilot, would fly the shuttle itself.
“Say, boys.” Boris’s voice came over the headset. He was talking to mission control. “How about you let us get started, huh? We don’t want the Chinese getting there before us.”
In fact, the countdown had started a while back. The hatches were closed and bolted, checklists ticked off—the whole thing sounded reassuringly routine. There were eight of them onboard, four Americans and four Russians, all scrupulously fair and politically aboveboard. The whole equal-rights arrangement only wobbled a little when you remembered that there was only one woman in the crew, a Russian engineer called Ilena.
Lift-off at last. A fist slammed him back into his seat, just as he had been warned. The soft material of the couch suddenly seemed rock hard. Breathing became difficult, and all he could do was pant and rasp. And yes, everything around him was roaring, though not as loudly as he had imagined it might. It basically felt like an uncommonly long roller-coaster ride. And judging by all the shaking and rattling, the rails had built up some rust.
Then the pressure suddenly let up, and his stomach lurched into his throat. Good thing he’d hardly had anything to eat. There was a crash somewhere that sounded as though some important part had broken.
“Carrier rocket disengaged,” Boris announced.
“Taking over controls,” Jackson said.
A moment later the shuttle’s own engines roared to life. It was louder than before, but not quite so brutal. Adamson took a ragged breath. All things considered, he’d had easier rides. Hiroshi Kato could go to hell. The way he’d shot him down at that party back then. As though the project were mere child’s play, not worth taking seriously. There had been good people working on it, good minds, the best of the best. Hiroshi Kato had been an arrogant prick. And he had been right, as everyone now knew. That was the worst of it.
Finally, they were up and away and the engines could cut out. Zero gravity. He had been warned that a great many people experienced nausea and was given a good number of sick bags just in case, but he didn’t feel anything of the sort—quite the opposite: he felt euphoric. They had to stay strapped in, of course, as the flight wasn’t over yet. But he could set his ballpoint pen floating in the air in front of him, and when he nudged it gently it would rotate, dancing around its own axis. Fascinating.
He found himself thinking of the old TV footage of the space missions and what his father had told him about Apollo 11. “Back then we thought, well, anything’s possible,” his dad had said more than once, with a visionary gleam in his eye. “We thought that’s the first step into space, nothing can stop us now. I was convinced my kids would live on the moon, that my grandkids would live on Mars, that my great-grandkids would set out for distant stars.”
Adamson had always thought his father was naive. As far as he was concerned, the moon landings went hand in hand with the summer of ’68, hippies, free love, LSD, and flower power. America had thrown one huge, collective, wild party in those days; no wonder people got a little starry-eyed when they looked back. But here and now, sitting in a space shuttle on his way to an absolutely unbelievable object, he understood his father for the first time. The first step into space. Hell, yeah!
“There it is,” Jackson suddenly said.
He could see a pale fleck out the window that was too big to be a star. The space station. The habitat orbiting Earth at a height of around eight hundred miles. Their destination. The fleck rapidly grew larger until it was a blurry circle and then bigger than the pockmarked face of the moon, growing ever larger as they approached. The space station was colossal. Six miles long. By comparison, their shuttle was a fly headed for a sixteen-wheeler. Even an aircraft carrier, if they somehow managed to boost it into space, would be small next to this. Hell, even a supertanker would have been dwarfed. What they saw out there was nothing less than a city in flight.
He tried to imagine how this incomprehensibly vast object had been built atom by atom, the way Hiroshi had explained it in his video address, by quadrillions of nano-assemblers. It was unimaginable. Now anything really was possible. But this is all stolen tech, Adamson told himself bitterly. All that Hiroshi Kato did was make use of an alien technology. Nothing more than that.
They flew across its face. He found himself thinking of Star Wars, the sequence where Luke Skywalker and the others attack the Death Star. It was all so huge, so immense, so crowded with curious clusters of equipment, antennae, and machines.
“I keep expecting Darth Vader to show up,” Ilena said to him, and the pilot laughed in agreement.
They were all thinking the same thing. He found that oddly touching. He had to blink; there was something in his eye. Well damn it—he admired Kato. He always had but had never been able to admit it to himself. Hiroshi Kato was a genius if ever he had met one, but he hadn’t seen it; he had only ever felt threatened…how idiotic. Kato had made it; he was writing history here, preparing humanity’s way toward a better, brighter future. And he, Bill Adamson, still bore a grudge because that skinny little Japanese kid had an idea that he could have had if only…well, if only he had had it.
The space station was rotating slowly. So that was true. The radar readings had indicated as much, and the space-flight experts had been expecting it. It only made sense for a large, cylindrical space station to rotate, since that produced artificial gravity on the inside. However, it also meant that it would be practically impossible to dock on the outer edge.
Jackson took the shuttle around to the front of the station with short bursts from the steering nozzles, which made a noise like hammers pounding on the hull. They were approaching the hub.
“Looks like a docking area,” the pilot announced.
It was more than that: it was a lock. The hub was a slightly protruding cylinder that didn’t rotate along with the station but turned the other way, so that in effect it stood still. As the shuttle approached, an enormous hatch opened in a weightlessly elegant motion.
“Okay. Houston, did you see that? Looks like we’re expected.”
“Best of luck,” came the voice from mission control.
Adamson held his breath as the shuttle drifted into the lock, which was comfortably big enough for a cruise ship. The hatch glided closed behind them. For a moment nothing happened, and then another hatch opened up in front.
“We have atmosphere out there,” their flight engineer announced with astonishment in his voice. “Oxygen-nitrogen mix. Air pressure is just slightly below sea level.”
“We’ve lost radio contact with Earth,” the copilot reported.
“Let’s go, then,” Jackson said.
Another nudge from the nozzles took them through to a gigantic hall beyond the hatch, where something grabbed hold of them ever so gently and guided them in to land on the floor.
“Seems to be some kind of magnetic effect,” the pilot said.
Four of them would go out, in extravehicular-activity suits just to be on the safe side. That was the plan, and there was no reason to deviate from it at the moment. And Bill Adamson was only there because a couple of months ago he had been promoted downward into the hitherto insignificant position of head of space-colonization research.
He was glad there were experienced astronauts on hand to help him put on the EVA suit. Sure, he had practiced how to do it, as much as he could in the short time available, but not in zero-G. He was all agog as he passed through the boarding lock—after Ilena, who had insisted on ladies first and thereby made sure she was the first human being to set foot on Earth’s new companion.
The magnetic soles of their EVA suits functioned just as intended. It was strange to put one foot in front of the other like this; he felt as though he were hanging head down. Step by step. Doors led to rooms, corridors, hallways. Take pictures of everything; describe everything; document everything. They had no trouble with radio contact back to the shuttle. Buttresses, walls, load-bearing structures, sliding doors—they were all astoundingly thin but felt ultrastable when the explorers put their hands on them and applied pressure. Most astonishing of all was the precision of the construction. A staircase, a balcony with rails as fine as spaghetti strands—and he could see at once they were all of exactly the same diameter, that everything onboard this structure was built exactly to specification.
Of course, Adamson thought. Build at the scale of individual atoms and every single one is accounted for. Compared with this technology, every production technique in human history was ham-handed: forged metal, turned steel, machine finishing, polished or drilled or whatever you like—it was all just a marginal improvement on the hand ax with which, once upon a time, the march of technology had begun.
Lord of All Things Page 59
