Chapter 34


The sea roared in an endless code behind the wall, as immensely wide breakers rolled in from the darkness. In the other direction, a row of box buildings extended along the coast at regular intervals, with high-rises on the horizon. From a distance they looked like standard office towers, but up close they had more ornate, seemingly hand-sculpted shapes, an occasionally sloppy effect. The massive gantries of a Quasar pad were backlit by the sunset.
  Rick, Demillia, and a bodyguard who didn't talk had arrived at Great Circle Spaceport, symbol of a developing continent. The African Commonwealth was so successful there were four of them. They turned generalists into specialists.
  A door opened, and a woman wearing layers of equipment waved them inside. The night began with a slam of cold air.
  "I'm Janice Murano, telepresence director," she said. "So you're the VIP's." Janice could usually read her visitors, but the normal rules had been suspended.
  Demillia coldly introduced Rick in the third person, as if he didn't understand English. He had apologized for his deception yesterday, but would do it again. Inspectors could lie when necessary.
  They walked past a maze of shelves where tireless manipulators were rearranging the clutter. It took months to prepare a launch payload as complex as a small organism. A long window overlooked the integration bay, where a mobile-home-sized cylinder came together, solar panels folded like accordions. Tiny parts were suspended in a web of filaments.
  Stopping before a row of lockers, Janice said: "We're entering a clean room. Put any loose devices in a locker or in your pockets. We'll be wearing environmental suits one hundred molecules thick. You'll hardly notice them."
  She waved a wand over her guests, and a device rapidly sculpted transparent helmets with the outlines of individual hairs. They fit comfortably, but the breathing masks made a hissing sound. Janice pointed Rick into a closet with yellow-black diagonal stripes.
  "Raise your arms," she said.
  He was instantly wrapped in a thin membrane like a second skin. The guard and Demillia followed. After a few steps, they no longer noticed the paintlike suits.
  "All done," Janice said, satisfied. "The bathroom is over there. The sign explains what to do" Everything was laminated.
  As they walked, the coveralls formed flexible ribs and joints. Janice used a bubble suit attached to the soles of her feet, that anticipated her movements by air balance.
  After a decontamination booth, the final door hissed open on white space, a floor as bright as a sky. Articulated segments reflected their faces in a row. The gleaming robot looked like a wheeled refinery.
  "Too close," Rick said. They were the only fuel in the room.
  "The first lunar Von Neumann," Janice said. "It consumes too many volatiles. We'll be happy if it ever copies half its components." Her whole career had been a gamble.
  Behind the robot, a collection of antique spacesuits hung in glass cases. A row of egg-like orbital capsules stood in cradles against the wall, their heat shields seamless as skin.
  Janice aimed a control at the pods, and markings appeared. Hidden doors opened to reveal well-lit interiors of plush velvet.
  "Orbital X3M pods," she said. "Built for a canceled secret mission. Guaranteed to interface with all space-based hardware." She watched her guests. "You better hurry. My colleagues wonder what you're up to."
  "This looks great," Rick said. "Thank them for us."
  He and Demillia climbed in their spaceships. Designed for weightlessness, the rugged capsules were packed with equipment, with no wasted floor or ceiling space. The guard sat casually on a platform, ignoring the robot.
  Once inside, Rick leaned back. The chair surrounded him like a claw, the hard plastic smelling like a ride. He had no long-term plans.
  "I'll be in the MVIB-F-POR," Janice said.
  In the next pod, Demillia still reported to Ravi, but she had made new contacts in the Resistance.
  Rick was ready. The door snapped shut a centimeter from his face. In the bright light he felt alert. The velvet was actually plastic over a needle bed, but even steel could feel like a pillow if it had the right shape.
  An oval screen brightened. Laser points at the edge of his vision. Test patterns blinked with impressive rows of numbers. The chair tilted back to simulate acceleration, but he wasn't going anywhere.

  A sudden shift, and he floated three meters above a desert floor. "Where is this?" Demillia asked.
  "Lake Otero, New Mexico." It would be a brief visit. They seemed to be hanging over a dried lake bed from a robot crane.
  The long curving hull of the space shuttle was bigger than expected. A portable hangar covered the side cargo door, and he saw the wheels of a huge fuel truck behind it. Covered with skull colored bricks, some shuttles looked like old running shoes. Atyleomi was a smooth gray gradient, changing at every point. Mounted on pylons on the back was the transfer scramjet, or tranjet. Sharp fins gleamed in the sunlight.
  He typed an address and said: "Greetings, this is UN inspector Parkland requesting executive control of micron Batch T78."
  "Confirming UN authorization. Confirming transfer," a control voice said.
  A shadow fell away as the landscape turned. He changed viewpoints to a ground camera. The crane was lifting a cube like crushed aluminum foil in a glass box, but it was mostly made of carbon. One side sparkled in the sun. The surface of the cube formed a compound camera. For several more minutes, it would be the most advanced object on Earth. A large fraction of mankind had helped design it.
  The cube was made of tiny machines called microns. The smallest were a tenth of a millimeter long, still millions of times heavier than a virus. Each performed a few simple actions. Microns could build and disassemble many things, but not yet themselves. Their molecular components had been made in old-fashioned factories.
  Designed to interface with all orbital hardware, the final update was one hour old. He looked up at the bright sky. RedList was hiding in plain sight.
  The crane and the hangar extended from a wheeled building, parked on a plain of cracked earth. Distant mountains floated over a heat reflection. The cube settled in the cargo bay cradle, which was now officially overloaded. The door closed, and the day slivered from a thin line to nothing.
  "Damon, are you out there?" Rick asked.
  "Nice documentary," Damon replied. "I'm proud to help pay for this."
  "Did you find out who controlled yesterday's relay satellites?" He might not be ready to sacrifice his sources.
  "Ownership logs are deleted hourly. ItSat split RedList into ten to the ninth packets, disguised as error signals. The Net ignored them as censorship bypassing." Some countries had laws against static, because it was possible to hide information there. It was forbidden to photograph a sunset, and every image had to be compressed with state-approved algorithms. People couldn't be vague, or use code in private messages. "Whoever did it was not the Mole."

  The shuttle sat on a trailer under an empty sky. A hundred meters behind, the heavy tractor started its engines, a half-million horsepower hot-rod. Blue flames flared and focused, fire cones tearing the air. The tractor started to push the shuttle over the bulldozed alkali flats. Rick felt each bump of the great acceleration, the rough mud crenulations merging into a smooth rumble. Stuck in the payload bay, he chose the rearview cam. White dust and salt formed spiraling vortices that quickly receded. The passing landscape trembled and blurred, then sudden peace as the shuttle leaped upward.
  Ahead was pure blue. Every second counted on the shortest path to space. He was falling up. Rick wanted to cheer, but restrained himself. Demillia saw the same view, but she had been unable to feel exhilaration since being raped years ago. If Rick had known, he would have asked if they had caught the guy.
  As the shuttle raced skyward, the tractor rolled on below with its wheelbarrow raised in the air, a dust front marking its path. Brakes glowed over a dark plain of parallel skidmarks toward a red cliff. An American Indian fortress city had been recreated in the giant wall. Their agriculture practices might have helped form this lakebed.
  The shuttle had already broken the sound barrier, canards twisting to maintain optimum climb rate. A camera looked back over a straightened knife wing, a strip of fog rolling over the edge. Fuel was supposed to be mixed with the shockwave to cancel the sonic boom, but in practice the desert inhabitants would have to endure the noise.
  Seen from below, the pulse engine left a blazing trail of shockwave diamonds that expanded into a string of beads, as loud as the Hercules Falls that had filled up the Mediterranean millions of years ago. For a few hours, it would have been possible to surf down that great curving sky river . . .
  The optimal air intake switched to ramjet-mode as the distant ribbon of the Rio Grande came into view. Ten seconds later it became a cold exhaust scramjet. High over the Texas Great Plains, the impulse transfer scramjet came on, further cooling the overheated core. The thrust came from hydrogen ejected at extreme speed. Igniting in a timed pulse as it mixed with the air, it generated a current that ejected more hydrogen.
  Strange colors flared as the engine shut off at Mach 20, and pure rocket propulsion took over. The sky became darker than night. Ahead, the Gulf of Mexico rolled in the sunlight. Clouds passed below like cars seen from an overpass. He saw the edge of tropical storm Gerardi. The dense clouds looked like a committee had arranged them. A hurricane was not a moving object, but like a chain of falling dominoes. One enormous thunder tower rose a quarter of the way to space, folding back like mashed potatoes, raining on itself.
  "Space Station Centauri at one zero zero K," the control voice said.
  The exhaust nozzle compensated for the lost air pressure. As the shuttle climbed, the horizon widened and became one. Curving rows of clouds fell away, still only a small fraction of the world. The gravity up here was nearly as strong as it had been on the ground.
  "Shuttle Atyleomi has left Earth's atmosphere," the voice announced.
  There it was, black on blue. The deadly absence in his eyes was half-real, the illusion that separated worlds. Something that big had to be valuable, but every cubic centimeter remained a mystery.
  Everyone felt naked in space. In the sky he could see almost a million stars, older than the imagination. Compared to the universe as a whole, they were like dust on his eyes. If he were to hold a tiny grain of dust at the end of his extended arm, barely larger than the amount of the enzyme nitrogenase under the roots of a tree (in a sense the whole tree had to pass through that speck), that grain would cover ten trillion suns no human would ever see, but that were almost in range of the newest telescopes. If he could sweep a stick as long as the universe back and forth across the sky, it would take only a few seconds to touch an Earthlike planet, but he'd have to jiggle it at a small patch of sky for a lifetime to hit the same planet twice.
  The cargo bay door opened to sunlight bright enough to kill, and the payload cradle rotated outward. The sea was a blue gradient visible forever, a curving carpet with tiny clouds casting individual shadows.
  "Final approach to Lasso Ranch," the voice said.
  The space station was a bright star overhead, but the shuttle would rendezvous with the bottom of its tether. Navigation lights blinked on the low-gravity parking lot, also called God's Doormat. From the side balcony, the earth stayed in the same place, but it was always changing. Cities looked less intimidating from above.
  The platform hung from a row of cables rising to the main station, covered with self-repairing foam. Several times a week there was a meteor flash. Currents pushed against the earth's magnetic field to maintain orbit.
  A manipulator arm flipped down acrobatically. When it grabbed the cargo module, there was a spark, and the screen went gray. Looking down, Rick saw the shuttle fall away. By a strange legal fiction it was worth only one dollar, but the service fee was much higher. Unable to hang around, it would reenter the atmosphere within minutes, after spending only a quarter hour in space; then make a U-turn over the narrowest part of the Atlantic, and land at Amazon Spaceport.

  The sun fell while the payload climbed at highway speed. Rick switched off the screen, and returned to nighttime Region Fifty-Two, sometimes still known as Somalia. For a few seconds, the small capsule felt like a prison. The micron module would pass to the south of this location in eighteen minutes. Had they launched to the polar station as originally planned, it would have passed directly overhead.
  He opened the door, and called Lino Wen, director of the Applied Mathematics Center. Last week's visit was a distant memory. Since Qiyuan, all his calls had gone through at once.
  "What the hell is going on?" Lino exclaimed.
  "I'm making steady progress," Rick replied, his voice distorted by the breathing filter.
  Lino sighed with relief. "I didn't want to live forever anyway. I assume you have a problem that only I can solve."
  "I need to check all objects in Earth orbit, using the SyyScope NEA network right now. I would like to hire your associate Ortef on space station Centauri for this job."
  There was silence while Lino did something else. "Ortef is busy," he said. "If it stops working, it dies."
  "Millipol will triple the usual fee. As its authorized agent, you get ten percent." He sent a standard contract.
  "I'll see what I can do."
  "I'm confident in your abilities."

  Rick returned to the widest view of the night. The payload camera simulated ideal seeing conditions. He watched the Andromeda Galaxy rise over the horizon, and thought about cataclysms still to come. A faint smudge, apparently only a few meters away, it had been there his whole life, like a bee circling his head, subtending about sixty arc minutes.
  In infrared, the earth looked smooth and artificial, a gray neon screen. It was an incredible pile of debris formed grain by grain. He imagined dust raining endlessly from the sky, year after year after year, larger clumps and rocks colliding, the fragments rebounding into brilliant sparks, a cavalcade of impacts and glowing lava like World War Trillion. Reduce the gravity enough, and it would all blow apart.
  Its very existence was an accident. It was possible for vast, almost empty areas in the middle of nowhere to rapidly collapse into the center of future stars. Starting with a tiny pressure increase, triggering bigger densifications, radiating gas spiraled inward, and sound was born. The center could never be a comfortable place for humans, since the ideal temperature and pressure phases were decades apart.
  At some level, everyone thought what they were doing at this instant helped sustain reality. This time, Rick hoped it was true.
  The sun rose over a field of catastrophic orange and brown shadows. A tiny piece of metal flew through the sky below, hurtling through time. He glimpsed a green volcano, as if through a window to the surface.