Sleep and the Soul, page 19
Jesse mulled it over. “You’re probably right, but I don’t know what other story I could feed him to convince him to hand it over.”
“You can’t tell him you want to demonstrate it in New York, while he’s busy here?” Anderson suggested. “Spreading the good news farther and faster?”
Jesse shook his head. “He’s so jealous of anyone else getting their hands on this potion—” He caught himself. “But maybe we don’t have to ask him at all. Maybe there’s another way.”
“What other way?”
Jesse didn’t want to raise the man’s hopes without reason. “Give me half a day,” he said. “I might be mistaken, but it shouldn’t take long to find out.”
Harlow had mentioned that sulfuric ether was one of the ingredients of a popular remedy known as “Hoffman’s Drops.” Jesse spent an hour walking around Boston, until he finally came across a pharmacist willing to sell him, not the compounded drug, but a bottle of the crucial component in its pure form.
One sniff of the contents told him that Letheon contained the same substance, though that didn’t quite prove that there was nothing else in Morton’s formulation. Prof. Jackson had insisted that sulfuric ether alone could send an animal safely to sleep, but Jesse wasn’t going to hand the bottle over without verifying its effectiveness.
In his room, alone, he sat on a chair in his shirt-sleeves, and took one of the bath towels his hosts had provided. He soaked the cloth in ether, and held it over his face.
The fumes were sickly sweet, but irritating beyond the most cloying perfume, leaving his eyes watering, his nose running, his throat stinging. He started coughing, and it was all he could do not to cast the towel aside and spit up every trace of the odious residue trickling down from his burning palate.
At the same time, he felt his head growing light, and the unpleasant sensations, without changing in any detail, lost their oppressiveness, leaving him curiously happy and carefree.
Don’t bury me, he thought, unable to speak the words, wishing he had written a note in case someone found him in this state. He tried to decide if his spirit was merely loosening its ties to his body, or if the Letheon was leaching into his soul and diminishing its capacity, but then he concluded that his struggle to settle on an answer was the answer itself. Even the preternatural bliss that had accompanied him as he receded from his senses now cut itself loose and drifted away, a smear of white light falling into darkness.
13
At first, the oddness of his posture was all there was: a brute fact connected to nothing else. Then, like an ice crystal growing around a speck of dirt, other aspects of the situation accreted. His body was twisted, slumped in the chair. The towel had fallen across his lap. His throat was dry, and his stomach tight.
Jesse opened his eyes and groped for the bucket he’d left beside the chair. When he was done, he checked his pocket watch. He had been gone for more than half an hour.
He felt cold. He fetched a basin of water and splashed his face, but a dull ache remained behind his eyes. The dust in the room, on the sideboard and mirror, seemed thicker than he remembered, or at least more prominent.
For the second time in his life, he had stopped being himself, and then started again. But now he had no struggle for air to distract him – and no cheering crowd to laud his feat, nor solicitous friends to offer their opinions.
He had stopped, and he had started. The furniture and keepsakes of his memory and character had survived beneath the drop cloths while the house fell silent, but he hadn’t borne them away for safe-keeping elsewhere. Everything was, and always had been, contained within his skin. His soul was simply the way his body felt, when it was capable of feeling. When he slept, it was absent. When he died, it would be gone forever.
Jesse put on a coat, tidied the room, gathered his thoughts. Anderson returned, promptly at five as they’d agreed.
“Any luck with your plan?” he asked.
“Yes. I have it.” Jesse handed him the bottle.
“You stole this from Morton?”
“No.” Jesse explained what he’d bought, and how he’d tested it. “The secret won’t last long; every dentist and surgeon in the country will know soon. Morton won’t end up a rich man, though perhaps he’ll retain the glory of being the first to reach a few milestones.”
“Hmm.” Anderson had other things on his mind.
“This raid into Virginia,” Jesse began. “Could you use an extra pair of hands? I ain’t no military man, but I’m not bad with my fists if it comes to that.”
“You want to end up hanged?” Anderson asked dubiously.
“Not if I can help it. But now I got my life back, I can’t just sit around wishing and praying that everything else will make itself right.”
Anderson laughed. “You don’t sound like the usual firebrand for the cause, but I won’t hold that against you. I seen you handle yourself all right when it mattered. We got six more days before we leave, and if the others are agreeable, we can get you acquainted with the details.”
Jesse wrote to Felicia, trying to walk a line between his wish not to deceive her and the risk of implicating her in the conspiracy he was joining.
Morton’s demonstrations, and most especially this last one in Boston, look to have set things on the right course for us, and I am hopeful that I will be restored very soon to sufficient respectability, or at least anonymity, to have no trouble finding employment again. But there remains some further business that I am obliged to attend to, that will prevent me from returning for two or three more weeks.
Until then, know that you are in my heart every minute of the day. All my strength and comfort comes from knowing that we’ll be together soon, and all my worth from recalling that you stood by me when no one else would.
Your devoted husband,
Jesse
AFTER ZERO
2060
Latifa’s watch hummed, softly but persistently, until she stirred and raised her wrist above her face in the darkness. The display brightened slowly, giving her eyes time to adapt; it was just after three o’clock, but apparently her assistant had judged the message important enough to wake her.
“Play,” she requested hoarsely.
The watch painted a scene on her retinas: Sian MacDonald standing in the workshop in Boston, in front of the reactor.
“There is no easy way to put this,” Sian began. “The finance we’ve been seeking hasn’t come through, and we’ve run out of other possibilities. In a couple of days, Mass Fusion will be going into liquidation.”
Latifa barely listened to the rest: the thanks, the apologies, the promises of the staff’s priority among creditors. She was sure that Sian was sincere in all of this, but none of it changed what really mattered. After twenty-three years of striving, the team’s efforts had come to nothing.
She curled up against the blanket and closed her eyes, falling into the pit that had opened up beneath her. Surrendering to despondency felt better than fighting it – and when a part of her mind started interjecting with all manner of implausible last-minute reprieves, it was about as useful as if her descent was being punctuated by a tangle of slender rootlets: too flimsy to grab on to, too abrasive to ignore.
After a while, though, she found herself seeking more honest reasons for solace. If Mass Fusion was dead, at least they’d fallen to a worthy rival. She’d always hoped there’d be room for both themselves and Aneutronic, but so long as at least one of them thrived, the larger dream survived. Had she wasted her time? Maybe. But if both designs had not remained in play for so long, the question of which was most viable might never have been truly settled.
She opened her eyes and checked her watch again; on the street above it had come down to 36 degrees, but the forecast for the day ahead had been revised up to 50. Whatever balm she found for her ego, the real harm would be spread much wider. Aneutronic might prosper, but the rollout of fusion would still suffer from the lack of a second supplier. All the optimistic curves showing powered CO2 capture clawing back the overshoot by 2070 would need to be redrawn. The immiserated world would stay hotter for longer, forcing people who were barely hanging on to endure another decade of what was already unendurable. More species would die, more ecosystems collapse, and the chance of methane erupting from the melting permafrost would just keep ratcheting up.
Latifa rose to her feet, massaging her lower back as the room lights came on. She poured herself a glass of water and drained it; the air in the burrow wasn’t hot, but it remained as relentlessly dry as it was up on the surface.
Her watch hummed again. It was Emily, querying her wakefulness and willingness to talk; Latifa answered without hesitation.
“You’re up,” Emily began. “So you’ve heard the news?”
“Yes. How are you taking it?”
“I think I’ve finished screaming obscenities, but if I suddenly mute myself you’ll know why.”
Latifa smiled. “Did the screaming help?”
“Absolutely. And now it’s out of my system, so I can move on.”
“All right.” Latifa found the notion jarring, but it wasn’t as if a prolonged mourning would do any good. “Move on to what? Have you had an offer from Aneutronic already?”
Emily chortled. “Hardly! They poached all the people they wanted years ago.”
“So you’re planning to retire and grow vegetables?”
“No. I’m planning to build the Scatterer.”
Latifa hesitated, searching her friend’s face for some hint that she was teasing her in a misconceived attempt to cheer her up. “Fair enough,” she replied. “But if we’re playing that game, I want world peace, and a pony too.”
“It’s doable,” Emily insisted. “And you know it would work.”
“There are a thousand things that would work.”
“Yes, and it’s a shame people didn’t try more of them, sooner. But this is our chance. We’ll have time on our hands, and no better way to spend it.”
Latifa swallowed a reflexive retort about how happy she’d be spending time with her grandchildren. Her own response to the complaints from her daughters had always been that she could do far more for their welfare by working than any amount of grandmotherly devotion could achieve.
“So who’s going to pay for this daydream, when we can’t even get a working fusion reactor bankrolled?”
“I have no idea,” Emily confessed. “I’m plasma, you’re magnets, but it’s only been thirty minutes; you can’t expect me to have assembled the whole team.”
Latifa said, “You make it sound like a heist. All we’re missing is the safe-cracker and the get-away driver.”
“Except we won’t be stealing anything, just ... redistributing it.”
“Seriously, though. I don’t think we ever costed it, but it must come to at least—”
Emily cut her off. “Don’t you dare pluck a number out of the air, as an excuse to give up. We need to dust off the old files first, and bring them up to date. There are better materials now, for everything. Once we know exactly what we’re talking about, we can start being brutal about the costs.”
“All right.”
Emily beamed at her. “So you’re in?”
“I agree that we should look at it,” Latifa replied warily. “That’s all.”
“I’ll do a first pass through the specification. It’s morning here in Sydney, so it makes sense for me to get started while you get back to sleep.”
Latifa murmured assent. Emily said, “I’ll be in touch.”
Latifa lay down, and when the lights faded she stared into the darkness. She didn’t want to spend her last years bitterly rehashing all the old lost battles. As likely as not, she would fail again, but at least she’d get to fail at something new.
#
Half an hour before dawn, Latifa left the burrow and walked into the village. The sky was bright enough to light the way; on either side of the road, fields of stunted wheat with curled brown edges on the leaves stretched out beneath a canopy of protective gauze. There was a mineral scent lingering in the air from the irrigation water, forced up from some insane depth by the solar-powered pumps chasing the retreating aquifer. When she was a girl, the Kajaki Dam had drawn both power and water from the Helmand River, but now her memories of that vast green reservoir felt like something out of a dream.
In the market, she bought enough food to last three or four days. Okra had almost doubled in price since the last time she’d checked, and even flour and oil were creeping up again. The families she was helping needed more assistance every month, and every month there were more needing help. Now that her absurd salary from Boston was about to be cut off, she was going to need to juggle everything more carefully.
She set off home, quickening her step to escape the sun rising behind her.
“Latifa!”
She turned to see a woman silhouetted against the glare. “Fatema?” She waited for her cousin to catch up.
“Let me carry some of that,” Fatema offered.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Latifa insisted.
“How have you been? We never see you!”
“You know what it’s like.”
“How is your work going?” Fatema asked. “The reactor?”
Latifa was embarrassed. She had stood in front of the girls in Fatema’s science class, year after year, supposedly inspiring them with her efforts. “I’ve moved on to something new,” she said. “Maybe even more useful.”
“Really?”
“We call it the Scatterer. I probably mentioned it to you, years ago, but it’s only just started coming together.”
Fatema frowned thoughtfully, but her efforts to recall the term didn’t seem to bear fruit. Latifa said, “You know the first Lagrange point, between the Earth and the sun?”
“Where the forces cancel out, and a spacecraft can stay in place without much effort?”
“Exactly. Suppose you put a device there that makes a strong magnetic field. When the solar wind hits the field, it piles up in front of the magnet, a bit like the way the Earth’s magnetic field keeps the same particles at bay. But if you modulate the field in just the right way, the plasma will be full of ripples. The refractive index of plasma is a little less than one; a convex lens like that would bend light away from its axis, and if the ripples are shaped carefully you get the same effect. So now you have a kind of corrugated lens built of plasma, thousands of kilometers wide, sitting between the Earth and the sun, scattering light away from us.”
“How much of the light?” Fatema asked skeptically.
“Less than one percent,” Latifa admitted. “The plasma’s not that dense. But one percent less irradiance ... ” She looked around at the parched landscape. “It could make all the difference, while we wait for the CO2 to be drawn down.”
Fatema was too polite to remind her of all her predictions that Mass Fusion’s reactors would do the job in a decade.
They reached Latifa’s burrow and parted. Inside, her workstation had already downloaded Emily’s new file from the repository and was running the revised model through a set of simulations.
There were better high-temperature superconductors available than the last time they’d worked on the idea, supporting much higher current densities for the same mass. Emily had incorporated the new materials, but now Latifa set up a search to optimize the geometry of the coils under the new constraints. She watched the magnets morph in front of her, deforming and shrinking as they probed the landscape of possibilities; the software did a good job, but she went back and nudged it into some valleys it had skirted, and managed to find a better solution than its first, fully automated attempt.
After three days’ work, the final result looked like a strange, three-dimensional labyrinth rendered in almost invisibly fine wire. If this material had been meant as a shield, nothing could have been flimsier. But when Latifa ran the plasma simulator, the approaching wind spiraled back on itself along a vast, curved shock-front, swirling with turbulent eddies, that carried the field out far beyond the structure that seeded it. When she ray-traced an image of the sun seen from Earth, the softening of the disk was almost imperceptible – but the total radiance was reduced by four-fifths of a percent.
It was late when she updated the repository, but Emily responded straight away.
“You think we’re ready to build something and put it in a plasma chamber?”
“Do we have a plasma chamber?”
“MF aren’t doing anything with theirs. If we make an offer, the liquidators might be happy to get it off their hands.”
“And ... we rehire the technicians to run it?”
Emily said, “That seems the simplest way.”
They still had no backers, and no legal structure for the venture. They didn’t even have any intellectual property; they’d designed the Scatterer outside work hours, so Mass Fusion didn’t own it, but they’d put it into the public domain in the hope that someone else would build it while they carried on with the main game.
“I can’t help with the funding,” Latifa confessed. “I know it sounds crazy for me to be crying poor, but I’ve taken on obligations that I can’t just drop.”
Emily said, “I understand. Don’t worry; I’ve roped in another twenty people, and I think they’ll be able to pitch in enough to get us the chamber.”
“All right. So who exactly will own it?”
“Scatterbrain LLC,” Emily replied. “I’ve had a draft contract of incorporation drawn up; you can find it in the repo and tweak anything you don’t like.”
Latifa felt a pang of vertigo. She was almost sixty years old, and she was about to launch herself into a new career. “Will I need to go up into space and assemble the coils by hand?”
“Only if the robots go on strike,” Emily promised. “If we treat them well, I’m sure they’ll be happy to play their part.”
