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From Emma’s perspective, sitting in her office in Vegas, everything was starting to fall apart.
The legalistic vultures were hovering over Malenfant and his toy spaceships, and meanwhile the investors, made distrustful by rumours of Malenfant’s growing involvement with bizarre futurian types, were starting to desert.
If Malenfant had made himself more available, more visible to shore up confidence, it might have made a difference. But he didn’t. Right through Christmas and into the New Year Malenfant remained locked away with Cornelius Taine, or holed up at his rocket test site.
It seemed to Emma events were approaching a climax. But still Malenfant wouldn’t listen to her.
So Emma went to the Mojave.
Emma stayed the night in a motel in the town of Mojave itself. She was profoundly uncomfortable, and slept little.
Her transport arrived before dawn. It was an Army bus. When she climbed aboard, George Hench was waiting for her. He had a flask of coffee and a bagel. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. She accepted gratefully; the coffee was industrial strength, but welcome.
The other passengers were young engineers, trying to sleep with their heads jammed in corners by the windows.
The drive out to the BDB test site was dull but easy. The sun had risen, the heat climbing, by the time they hit the thirty-mile road to Malenfant’s BDB launch complex – or launch simplex, as he liked to call it.
Hench jammed open the bus window. ‘Natural air conditioning,’ he said, cackling.
She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.
Hench shrugged. ‘They’ll sleep.’
At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.
The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.
There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People – engineers, most of them young – moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.
And there was the pad itself, the centre of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown Shuttle external tank and the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would some day ride into space.
Hench said gruffly, ‘I’ll tell you, Ms Stoney –’
‘Emma.’
‘Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design … but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything fail before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished …’
And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls – he even had a spanner in a loop at his waist – and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.
‘So what do you think of Nautilus? Isn’t she beautiful?’
‘Kind of rough and ready.’
Malenfant laughed. ‘So she’s supposed to be.’
An amplified voice drifted across the desert from the launch pad.
‘What was that?’
Hench shrugged. ‘Just a checklist item.’
‘You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?’
Malenfant said, ‘Demonstration test only. We’re planning two tests today. We’ve done it a dozen times, already. Later today we’ll even have that damn squid of Dan Ystebo’s up in the payload pod, on top of a fully fuelled ship. We’re ready. And Cruithne is up there waiting for us. And who knows what lies beyond that. As soon as you can clear away the legal bullshit –’
‘We’re working on it, Malenfant.’
Malenfant took her for a walk around the booster pad, eager to show off his toy. Malenfant and Hench, obviously high on stress and adrenaline, launched into war stories about how they’d built their rocket ship. ‘… The whole thing is a backyard rocket. It has Space Shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from a MD-11 airliner. In fact the BDB thinks it’s an MD-11 on a peculiar flight path. We sent the grad school kids scouring through the West Coast aerospace junkyards, and they came back with titanium pressure spheres and hydraulic actuators and other good stuff. And so on. Assembled and flight-ready in six months …’
He seemed to know every one of the dozens of engineers here by name. He was, by turns, manipulative, bullying, brutal, overbearing. But he was, she thought, always smart enough to ensure he wasn’t surrounded by sycophants and yea-sayers.
Maybe that’s why he keeps me on.
‘How safe is all this, Malenfant? What if the ship blows up, or a fuel store –’
He sighed. ‘Emma, my BDBs will blow up about as often as a 747 blows up on take-off. The industries have been handling LOX and liquid hydrogen safely for half a century. In fact I can prove we’re safe. We’ve kept the qual and reliability processes as simple as possible – no hundred-mile NASA paper chains – and we put the people on the ground in charge of their own quality. Qual upfront, the only way to do it.’ He looked into the sun, and the light caught the dust plastered over his face, white lines etched into the weather-beaten wrinkles of his face. ‘You know, this is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘Right now this is Kitty Hawk. You got to start somewhere. But some day this will be a true spaceport.’
‘Like Cape Canaveral?’
‘Oh, hell, no. Think of an airport. You’ll have concrete launch pads with minimal gantries, so simple we don’t care if we have to rebuild them every flight. We’ll have our own propellant and oxidizer manufacture facilities right here. The terminal buildings will be just like JFK or O’Hare. They’ll build new roads out here, better rail links. The spaceport will be an airport too. We’ll attract industries, communities. People will live here …’
But she heard tension in his voice, under the bubbling faith. She’d gotten used to his mood swings, which seemed to her to have begun around the time he was washed out of NASA. But today his mood was obviously fragile, and, with a little push, liable to come crashing apart.
The legal battle wasn’t won yet. Far from it. In fact, Emma thought, it was more like a race, as Bootstrap lawyers sought to find a way through the legal maze that would allow Malenfant to launch, or at least keep testing, before the FAA inspectors and their lawyers found a way to get access to this site and shut everything down.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow I have to confront him with the truth. The fact that we’re losing the race.
As the sun began to climb down the blue dome of sky, Emma requested an Army bus ride back to her motel in Mojave. There she pulled the blinds and spread out her softscreen. She fired off mails, ate room service junk, tried to sleep.
… The phone rang, jarring her awake. It was Malenfant.
Go to your window.
‘What?’
I’m simplifying a few bureaucratic processes, Emma.
He sounded a little drunk. And dangerous. She felt a cold chill settle at the pit of her stomach. ‘What are you talking about?’
Go to the window and you’ll see. I’ve been talking to Cornelius about Doctor Johnson. Once Johnson was asked how he would refute solipsism. You know, the idea that only you exist, all else is an illusion constructed by your mind …
She opened her shutters. In the direction of the test range, a light was spreading over the bottom half of the sky: a smeared yellow-white rising fast, not like a dawn.
Johnson kicked a rock. And he said, ‘I refute it thus’…
Oh, Malenfant. What have you done?’
They came to shut me down, Emma. We lost the race with those FAA assholes. One of those smart kids of George’s turned out to be an FBI plant. The inspectors arrived … They would have drained the Nautilus and broken her up. And then we’d never have reached Cruithne. I decided it was time to kick that rock. Emma, you should see the dust we’re raising!
And now a spark of light rose easily from the darkened horizon, climbing smoothly into the sky. It was yellow-white, like a fleck of sunlight, and it trailed a pillar of smoke and steam that glowed in the light spark.
She knew what that was, of course. The yellow-white was the burning of the solid propellents of the twin boosters, half-combusted products belching into the air; the central hydrogen-oxygen main engine flame was almost invisible. Already, she could see, the arc of the climbing booster was turning east, towards the trajectory that would take it off the planet.
And now the noise arrived, rocket thunder, billowing over her like the echo of a distant storm.
This is just the beginning, Malenfant whispered.
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And so some day
The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe
Ringed around with hostile force
Will yield and face decay and come crumbling to ruin …
– LUCRETIUS
Sheena 5:
Drifting between worlds, the spacecraft was a miniature planet, a bubble of ocean just yards across.
The water was sufficient to protect its occupants from cosmic and solar radiation. And the water sustained concentric shells of life: a mist of diatoms feeding off the raw sunlight, and within them, in the deeper blue water, a shell of krill and crustaceans and small fish schools, hunting and browsing.
And, at the centre of it all, a single enhanced cephalopod.
… Here was Sheena, swimming through space.
Space: yes, she understood what that meant, that she was no longer in the wide oceans of Earth, but in a small, self-contained ocean of her own that drifted through emptiness, a folded-over ocean she shared only with the darting fish and the smaller, mindless animals and plants on which they browsed.
She glided at the heart of the Nautilus, where the water that passed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the assemblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black mass before her, suspended in dark water, lights winking over its surface, weeds and grasses clinging to it. Sheena saw no colours; she swam through a world of black, white and grey. But she could discern polarized light; and so now she saw that the light which gleamed from the polished surfaces of the machinery was subtly twisted, this way and that, giving her a sense of the solidity and extent of the machinery.
When the ship’s roll took her into shadow, she hunted and browsed.
She would rest on the sand patches that had been stuck to the metal, changing her mantle colour so as to be almost invisible. When the fish or the krill came by, all unawares, she would dart out and snatch them, crushing them instantly in her hard beak, ignoring their tiny cries.
Such simple ambushes were sufficient to feed her, so confused did the fish and krill appear in this new world which lacked up and down and gravity. But sometimes she would hunt more ambitiously, luring and stalking and pursuing, as if she was still among the rich Caribbean reefs.
But all too soon the ship’s languid roll brought her into the light, and brief night gave way to false day.
Rippling her fins, she swam away from the machinery cluster, away from the heart of the ship, where she lived with her shoals of fish. As she rose the water flowing through her mantle cooled, the rich oxygen thinning. She was swimming out through layers of life, and she sensed the subtle sounds of living things washing through the sphere: the smooth rush of the fish as they swam in their tight schools, the bubbling murmur of the krill on which they browsed, and the hiss of the diatoms and algae which fed them, and the deep infrasonic rumble of the water itself, compression waves pulsing through its bulk.
And just as each successive sphere of water was larger than the one it contained, so Sheena knew there was a hierarchy of life. To sustain her, there had to be ten times her weight in krill, and a hundred times in diatoms.
And if there had been other squid, of course, those numbers would increase. But there was no other squid here but herself.
For now.
She could see, through misty, life-laden water, the ship’s hull, a membrane above her like an ocean surface. Except that it wasn’t above her, as it would be in a true ocean. And there was no sandy ocean floor below. Instead the membrane was all around her, closed on itself, shimmering in great slow waves that curled around the sphere’s belly.
This was self-evidently a complex world, a curved world, a world without the simple top and bottom of the ocean; and the light was correspondingly complex, its polarization planes random, or else spiralling down around her.
But Sheena hunted in three dimensions. She could come to terms with all this strangeness. She knew she must, in fact.
She reached the wall of the ship.
The membrane was a firm, if flexible, wall. If she pushed at it, it pushed back. Human eyes could see that the wall was tinted gold. Dan had told her how beautiful this great golden egg had been in the skies of Earth, as it receded to the stars. Sheena ship good pretty, he said. Like Earth. Ship people see, gold bubble, ship of water …
Grass algae grew on the wall, their long filaments dangling and wafting in the currents. Crabs and shellfish grazed on the grass algae. The benthic grazers helped feed her, and in the process kept the walls clean.
Every creature in this small ocean had a part to play. Here, for instance, she drifted past a floating bank of seaweed. The seaweed cleaned the water, and used up drifting food that the algae and diatoms could not consume. And the seaweed was useful in itself. One of Sheena’s jobs was to gather the weed, when it grew too thick, and deliver it to a hopper in the machinery cluster. There it could be spun into fibres that Dan called sea silk. The sea silk would be used when she got to her destination, to make and repair the equipment she would use there.
Now the ship’s slow rotation carried Sheena into the light of a milky, blurred disc. It was the sun – dimmed by the membrane so it did not hurt her eyes – with, near it, a smaller crescent. That, she knew, was the Earth, all its great oceans reduced to a droplet. The craft scooted around the sun after Earth like a fish swimming after its school, seeking the rock that was the target for this mission.
Once, swimming under the arching membrane like this, she had been startled by a starburst of light, only a few moments’ swim from her. It had disappeared as soon as it had occurred – but it seemed to her that there was a flaw in the membrane, a small patch that had lost its lustrous glow; and she could see from the muddled polarization how the composition of the water had been disturbed beneath the flaw.
Then she had seen something moving, outside the membrane. She cowered, flashed signals of false threat and concealment, thinking it was some deep space predator.
It was no predator. It was just a box that squirted back and forth, emitting gentle little farts of glittering crystals. It was pulling a patch over the hole.
Dan told her it was a firefly robot, a smart little box with its own power supply and fuel and miniaturized machinery and cameras and machine intelligence. The ship carried a shoal of these small craft for external inspection and repairs like this.
But the little craft’s life was limited, intended for a single use only, and it could achieve only one thing, which was to fix the membrane – unlike Sheena, who could do many different things. When its job was done, its fuel expended, the craft neatly folded away its tool-bearing arms, and used the last breath of its fuel to push itself away from the ship. Sheena had watched as the little craft, discarded, dwindled to a sunlit point.
She had learned that her ship leaked all the time anyway, from tiny flaws and miniature punctures. And every few days the throwaway robots would scuttle over the membrane, tracking the vapour clouds, fixing the worst of the leaks, before sacrificing themselves.
She let the lazy, whale-like roll of the ship carry her away from the glare of the sun, and she peered into the darkness, where she could see the stars.
The stars were important. She had been trained to recognize many of them. When she had memorized their positions around the ship she would return to the machinery cluster and work the simple controls Dan had given her. By this means she could determine her position in space far more accurately than even Dan could have, from far-off Earth.
Then the rockets would flare, sending hails of exhaust particles shooting into space. They would push at the hide of the ship like a squid shoving at the belly of a whale. Waves, flaring with light, pulsed back and forth across the meniscus, illuminating the drifting clouds of algae, and Sheena could detect the subtle wash of gravity around her as the great mass of water was nudged back to its proper trajectory.
But to Sheena the stars were more than navigation beacons. Sheena’s eyes had a hundred times the number of receptors of human eyes, and she could see a hundred times as many stars.
To Sheena the universe was crowded with stars, vibrant and alive. The Galaxy was a reef of stars beckoning her to come jet along its length.
But there was only Sheena here to see it.
She found it hard to rest.
Sheena was utterly alone. Though she knew there were no predators here, that she was as safe as any squid had ever been, she could not rest: not without the complex protection of the shoal around her, its warnings and sentinels. And, of course, without the shoal she was cut off from the society of the squid, the mating and learning and endless dances of daylight.
Dan had provided a kind of dream shoal for her: squid-like shapes that swam and jetted around her, glimmering. But the polarization of the light from their false hides was subtly wrong, and the fake shoal was no comfort. She was surprised Dan had not understood.
As the mission progressed, as she grew progressively more weary, her loyalty to Dan crumbled, grain by grain.
