Alternate Gerrolds, page 24
Daddy nodded, considering it. “It almost makes sense. This wasn’t a village. It was a farm, and these are a bunch of kennels or coops and storage sheds. The tripods would wander around the crops, eating bugs and insects and little crawling things, whatever. But the horns…?”
Dr. Blom looked annoyed, that same look she always got when Daddy was right. Had she just spent four months excavating a chicken coop? But to her credit, she tried on the idea to see if it fit. “We know that chickens can be designer-trained. We’ve done it ourselves. If you can train chickens to use a toilet, you don’t have to shovel the poop. So why not put out the horns and let them fertilize the field for you.”
Mom chimed in then. “Wait a minute. You’re not going far enough. Remember that jar of seeds you found? It’s part of the process. The farmer puts out horns and scatters seeds in the field. The chickens roam the field, eating the seeds. Some of the seeds get digested, but some don’t; they pass right through the chickens. The chickens poop in the horns, and the seeds get planted in their own personal package of fertilizer. Then the farmer picks up the horns and moves them to the next part of the field and starts again the next day. He’s planted his crop and fertilized it.”
They all looked at each other, surprised. It fit. In a bizarre kind of way.
“That’s the only explanation so far that fits all the available facts,” Daddy said slowly.
Dr. Blom held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Not so fast. Answer one question. Why would any rational being deliberately design a three-legged chicken?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. They all turned to me, surprised that I even had an opinion. “A three-legged chicken gives you an extra drumstick.” I took Zakky from Mom; his diaper was full. “Yick. Come on, baby. The skywhale is waiting.”
Out in the asteroid belt, the mountains fly. They tumble and roll silently. Distant sparkles break the darkness. Someday we’ll get out there, we’ll catch the mountains, we’ll break them into kibble to get at the good parts. We’ll find out if the centers are nougat or truffle. And some of us—some of us will even become comet-tossers, throwing the mountains around like gods.
Riding Janis
If we had wings
where would we fly?
Would you choose the safety of the ground
or touch the sky
if we had wings?
—Janis Ian & Bill Lloyd
THE THING ABOUT PUBERTY is that once you’ve done it, you’re stuck. You can’t go back.
It’s like what Voltaire said about learning Russian. He said that you wouldn’t know if learning Russian would be a good thing or not unless you actually learned the language—except that after you learned Russian, would the process of learning it have turned you into a person who believes it’s a good thing? So how could you know? Puberty is like that—I think. It changes you, the way you think and what you think about. And from what I can tell, it’s a lot harder than Russian. Especially the conjugations.
You can only delay puberty for so long. After that you start to get some permanent physiological effects. But there’s no point in going through puberty when the closest eligible breeding partners are on the other side of the solar system. I didn’t mind being nineteen and unfinished. It was the only life I knew. What I minded was not having a choice. Sometimes I felt like just another asteroid in the belt, tumbling forever around the solar furnace, too far away to be warmed, but still too close to be truly alone. Waiting for someone to grab me and hurl me toward Luna.
See, that’s what Mom and Jill do. They toss comets. Mostly small ones, wrapped so they don’t burn off. There’s not a lot of ice in the belt, only a couple of percentage points, if that; but when you figure there are a couple billion rocks out here, that’s still a few million that are locally useful. Our job is finding them. There’s no shortage of customers for big fat oxygen atoms with a couple of smaller hydrogens attached. Luna and Mercury, in particular, and eventually Venus, when they start cooling her down.
But this was the biggest job we’d ever contracted, and it wasn’t about ice as much as it was about ice-burning. Hundreds of tons per hour. Six hundred and fifty million kilometers of tail, streaming outward from the sun, driven by the ferocious solar wind. Comet Janis. In fifty-two months the spray of ice and dye would appear as a bright red, white and blue streak across the Earth’s summer sky—the Summer Olympics Comet.
Mom and Jill were hammering every number out to the umpteenth decimal place. This was a zero-tolerance nightmare. We had to install triple-triple safeguards on the safeguards. They only wanted a flyby, not a direct hit. That would void the contract, as well as the planet.
The bigger the rock, the farther out you could aim and still make a streak that covers half the sky. The problem with aiming is that comets have minds of their own—all that volatile outgassing pushes them this way and that, and even if you’ve wrapped the rock with reflectors, you still don’t get any kind of precision. But the bigger the rock, the harder it is to wrap it and toss it. And we didn’t have a lot of wiggle room on the timeline.
Janis was big and dark until we lit it up. We unfolded three arrays of LEDs, hit it with a dozen megawatts from ten klicks, and the whole thing sparkled like the star on top of a Christmas tree. All that dirty ice, thirty kilometers of it, reflecting light every which way—depending on your orientation when you looked out the port, it was a fairy landscape, a shimmering wall or a glimmering ceiling. A trillion tons of sparkly mud, all packed up in nice dense sheets so it wouldn’t come apart.
It was beautiful. And not just because it was pretty to look at, and not just because it meant a couple gazillion serious dollars in the bank either. It was beautiful for another reason.
See, here’s the thing about living in space. Everything is Newtonian. It moves until you stop it or change its direction. So every time you move something, you have to think about where it’s going to go, how fast it’s going to get there and where it will eventually end up. And we’re not just talking about large sparkly rocks, we’re talking about bottles of soda, dirty underwear, big green boogers or even the ship’s cat. Everything moves, bounces and moves some more. And that includes people too. So you learn to think in vectors and trajectories and consequences. Jill calls it “extrapolatory thinking.”
And that’s why the rock was beautiful, because it wasn’t just a rock here and now. It was a rock with a future. Neither Mom nor Jill had said anything yet; they were too busy studying the gravitational ripple charts, but they didn’t have to say anything. It was obvious. We were going to have to ride it in, because if that thing started outgassing, it would push itself off course. Somebody had to be there to create a compensating thrust. Folks on the Big Blue Marble were touchy about extinction-level events.
Finding the right rock is only the second-hardest part of comet-tossing. Dirtsiders think the belt is full of rocks, you just go and get one; but most of the rocks are the wrong kind; too much rock, not enough ice—and the average distance between them is fifteen million klicks. And most of them are just dumb rock. Once in a while, you find one that’s rich with nickel or iron, and as useful as that might be, if you’re not looking for nickel or iron right then, it might as well be more dumb rock. But if somebody else is looking for it, you can lease or sell it to them.
So Mom is continually dropping bots. We fab them up in batches. Every time we change our trajectory, Mom opens a window and tosses a dozen paper planes out.
A paper plane doesn’t need speed or sophistication, just brute functionality, so we print the necessary circuitry on sheets of stiff polymer. (We fab that too.) It’s a simple configuration of multi-sensors, dumbprocessors, lotsa-memory, soft-transmitters, long-batteries, carbonnanotube solar cells, ion-reservoirs and even a few micro-rockets. The printer rolls out the circuitry on a long sheet of polymer, laying down thirty-six to forty-eight layers of material in a single pass. Each side. At a resolution of 3,6002 dpi, that’s tight enough to make a fairly respectable, self-powered paper robot. Not smart enough to play with its own tautology, but certainly good enough to sniff a passing asteroid.
We print out as much and as many as we want, we break the polymer at the perforations; three quick folds to give it a wing shape, and it’s done. Toss a dozen of these things overboard, they sail along on the solar wind, steering themselves by changing colors and occasional micro-bursts. Make one wing black and the other white and the plane eventually turns itself; there’s no hurry, there’s no shortage of either time or space in the belt. Every few days, the bot wakes up and looks around. Whenever it detects a mass of any kind, it scans the lump, scans it again, scans it a dozen times until it’s sure, notes the orbit, takes a picture, analyzes the composition, prepares a report, files a claim and sends a message home. Bots relay messages for each other until the message finally gets inserted into the real network. After that, it’s just a matter of finding the publisher and forwarding the mail. Average time is fourteen hours.
Any rock one of your paper planes sniffs and tags, if you’re the first then you’ve got first dibsies on it. Most rocks are dumb and worthless—and usually when your bots turn up a rock that’s useful, by then you’re almost always too far away to use it. Anything farther than five or ten degrees of arc isn’t usually worth the time or fuel to go back after. Figure fifty million kilometers per degree of arc. It’s easier to auction off the rock, let whoever is closest do the actual work, and you collect a percentage. If you’ve tagged enough useful rocks, theoretically you could retire on the royalties. Theoretically. Jill hates that word.
But if finding the right rock is the second-hardest part of the job, then the first-hardest part is finding the other rock, the one you use at the other end of the whip. If you want to throw something at Earth (and lots of people do), you have to throw something the same size in the opposite direction. Finding and delivering the right ballast rock to the site was always a logistic nightmare. Most of the time it was just difficult, sometimes it was impossible, and once in a while it was even worse than that.
We got lucky. We had found the right ballast rock, and it was in just the right place for us. In fact, it was uncommonly close—only a few hundred thousand kilometers behind Janis. Most asteroids are several million klicks away from their closest neighbor. FBK-9047 was small, but it was heavy. This was a nickel-rich lump about ten klicks across. While not immediately useful, it would someday be worth a helluva lot more than the comet we were tossing—five to ten billion, depending on how it assayed out.
Our problem was that it belonged to someone else. The FlyBy Knights. And they weren’t too particularly keen on having us throw it out of the system so we could launch Comet Janis.
Their problem was that this particular ten billion-dollar payday wasn’t on anyone’s calendar. Most of the contractors had their next twenty-five years of mining already planned out—you have to plan that far in advance when the mountains you want to mine are constantly in motion. And it wasn’t likely anyone was going to put it on their menu for at least a century; there were just too many other asteroids worth twenty or fifty or a hundred billion floating around the belt. So while this rock wasn’t exactly worthless in principle, it was worthless in actuality—until someone actually needed it.
Mom says that comet tossing is an art. What you do is you lasso two rocks, put each in a sling, and run a long tether between them, fifty kilometers or more. Then you apply some force to each one and start them whirling around each other. With comet ice, you have to do it slowly to give the snowball a chance to compact. When you’ve got them up to speed, you cut the tether. One rock goes the way you want, the other goes in the opposite direction. If you’ve done your math right, the ballast rock flies off into the outbeyond, and the other—the money rock—goes arcing around the solar system and comes in for a close approach to the target body—Luna, Earth, L4, wherever. This is a lot more cost-effective than installing engines on an asteroid and driving it home. A lot more.
Most of the time, the flying mountain takes up station as a temporary moon orbiting whatever planet we throw it at, and it’s up to the locals to mine it at their leisure. But this time we were only arranging a flyby—a close approach for the Summer Olympics, so the folks in the Republic of Texas could have a sixty-degree swath of light across the sky for twelve days. And that was a whole other set of problems—because the comet’s appearance had to be timed for perfect synchronicity with the event. There wasn’t any wiggle room in the schedule. And everybody knew it.
All of which meant that we really needed this rock, or we weren’t going to be able to toss the comet. And everybody knew that too, so we weren’t in the best bargaining position. If we wanted to use 9047, we were going to have to cut the FlyBy Knights in for a percentage of Janis, which Jill didn’t really want to do because what they called “suitable recompense for the loss of projected earnings” (if we threw their rock away) was so high that we would end up losing money on the whole deal.
We knew we’d make a deal eventually—but the advantage was on their side because the longer they could stall us, the more desperate we’d become and more willing to accept their terms. And meanwhile, Mom was scanning for any useful rock or combination of rocks in the local neighborhood—approximately five million klicks in any direction. So we were juggling time, money and fuel against our ability to go without sleep. Mom and Jill had to sort out a nightmare of orbital mechanics, economic concerns and assorted political domains that stretched from here to Mercury.
Mom says that in space the normal condition of life is patience; Jill says it’s frustration. Myself…I had nothing to compare it with. Except the puberty thing, of course. What good is puberty if there’s no one around to have puberty with? Like kissing, for instance. And holding hands. What’s all that stuff about?
I was up early because I wanted to make fresh bread. In free fall, bread doesn’t rise, it expands in a sphere—which is pretty enough, and fun for tourists, but not really practical because you end up with some slices too large and others too small. Better to roll it into a cigar and let it expand in a cylindrical baking frame. We had stopped the centrifuge because the torque was interfering with our navigation around Janis; it complicated turning the ship. We’d probably be ten or twelve days without. We could handle that with vitamins and exercise, but if we went too much longer, we’d start to pay for it with muscle and bone and heart atrophy, and it takes three times as long to rebuild as it does to lose. Once the bread was safely rising—well, expanding—I drifted forward.
“Jill?”
She looked up. Well, over. We were at right angles to each other. “What?” A polite what. She kept her fingers on the keyboard.
“I’ve been thinking—”
“That’s nice.”
“—we’re going to have to ride this one in, aren’t we?”
She stopped what she was doing, lifted her hands away from the keys, turned her music down and swiveled her couch to face me. “How do you figure that?”
“Any comet heading that close to Earth, they’ll want the contractor to ride it. Just in case course corrections have to be made. It’s obvious.”
“It’ll be a long trip—”
“I read the contract. Our expenses are covered, both inbound and out. Plus ancillary coverage.”
“That’s standard boilerplate. Our presence isn’t mandatory. We’ll have lots of bots on the rock. They can manage any necessary corrections.”
“It’s not the same as having a ship onsite,” I said. “Besides, Mom says we’re overdue for a trip to the marble. Everyone should visit the home world at least once.”
“I’ve been there. It’s no big thing.”
“But I haven’t—”
“It’s not cost-effective,” Jill said. That was her answer to everything she didn’t want to do.
“Oh, come on, Jill. With the money we’ll make off of Comet Janis, we could add three new pods to this ship. And bigger engines. And larger fabricators. We could make ourselves a lot more competitive. We could—”
Her face did that thing it does when she doesn’t want you to know what she really feels. She was still smiling, but the smile was now a mask. “Yes, we could do a lot of things. But that decision has to be made by the senior officers of the Lemrel Corporation, kidlet.” Translation: Your opinion is irrelevant. Your mother and I will argue about this. And I’m against it.
One thing about living in a ship, you learn real fast when to shut up and go away. There isn’t any real privacy. If you hold perfectly still, close your eyes and just listen, eventually—just from the ship noises—you can tell where everyone is and what they’re doing—sleeping, eating, bathing, defecating, masturbating, whatever. In space, everyone can hear you scream. So you learn to speak softly. Even in an argument. Especially in an argument. The only real privacy is inside your head, and you learn to recognize when others are going there, and you go somewhere else. With Jill…well, you learned faster than real fast.
She turned back to her screens. A dismissal. She plucked her mug off the bulkhead and sipped at the built-in straw. “I think you should talk this over with your mom.” A further dismissal.
“But Mom’s asleep, and you’re not. You’re here.” For some reason, I wasn’t willing to let it go this time.
“You already have my opinion. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She turned her music up to underline the point.
I went back to the galley to check on my bread. I opened the plastic bag and sniffed. It was warm and yeasty and puffy, just right for kneading, so I sealed it up again, put it up against a blank bulkhead and began pummeling it. You have to knead bread in a non-stick bag because you don’t want micro-particles in the air-filtration system. It’s like punching a pillow. It’s good exercise and an even better way to work out a shitload of frustration.
