Rich Man's Sky 03 Beggar's Sky, page 29
part #3 of Rich Man's Sky Series
“Or all of the above,” Isaiah said. “Big gaudy fucking thing.”
Alice couldn’t tell if Isaiah was being ironic or not. Igbal was not big on flashy clothes, or flashiness in general, but he was a huge fucking nerd, and would probably love it from a metallurgy standpoint alone.
Jeanette had been going kind of crazy lately with the metallurgy, after working out a new process to extract noble metals from the station’s mining slag. Not because they were valuable per se; antimatter was worth a billion times more, and anyway the costs of moving precious metals around vastly exceeded their market price. Also not because they resisted oxidation; there was no oxygen in space. But gold was ductile, and a good reflector of infrared, and it alloyed surprisingly well with other metals. And platinum was tough, and silver was a great conductor. Or so Jeanette had said. Every part of the buffalo.
So her “blue iron” was iron with gold and platinum in it, and it really was shockingly blue, more like the paint job on a car than any actual metal Alice had ever seen. She’d also come up with platinum steel (white), aluminum bronze (pale red), and a bunch of other stuff that was easy to make in a zero-gee foundry. The thought of making a spacesuit out of all that was . . . well, Alice wanted to hate the idea, but not nearly as much as she wanted (God help her) to see that spacesuit.
“Igbal would love that,” she admitted, as they drifted from gamma corridor to alpha corridor.
And then they were at the docking module.
Pelu Figueroa was already there. At Alice’s quizzical look, Pelu shrugged and said, “Fresh coffee on that boat. Not enough to go around.”
“Ah,” Alice said.
“And hot sauce from Bolivia,” Pelu said, now somewhat conspiratorially.
“Bolivia? Really?” Alice said, thinking more about the shipping cost than the taste.
“Oh, stop it,” Pelu chided. “We’re not exactly destitute up here.”
The docking hatch thumped lightly, then banged and clattered open, revealing the interior of the ion ferry, crowded with people in bright, new jumpsuits of RzVz blue.
And then, as though they’d rehearsed it, everyone around Alice said, at the same time: “Welcome to ESL1!”
1.16
Post-Encounter Deposition
Matt Lang, PhD
U.S. National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
Never again. It was like being locked in a coffin full of spiders.
5.5
31 October
Thalia Buoyant Island
Southern Stratosphere
Venus
Almost the whole village was gathered outside, in hats and kaftans, masks and gloves. The cloud deck was high today, only a few hundred meters below the bottom of the island, and the air was technically too acidic for anything but brief exposure, or spacesuits.
But nobody cared. Everyone was looking up, trying to spot an orange dot in the vastness of the blue Venusian sky.
“I’m very proud of you, guy,” Julian said to Frédéric, over the murmur of the crowd.
“I’d wait for a safe landing before you start celebrating,” Frédéric said.
Julian waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t care about that. We have all we need here. Anything extra is . . . extra. Let me be proud of you, okay? You’re a doer. You saw something you could do, for yourself and the people around you, and you did it. That’s how your mother and I started our company back in Colombia, and that’s how we sold it to move to another planet.”
Frédéric’s mother, on Julian’s other side, added, “You come from a long line of doers, little Frito. You make us both proud.”
“Thank you,” Frédéric said. Nothing more; he was both genuinely touched by this show of support, and also afraid of spoiling the video he was shooting. It wasn’t supposed to be about him; it was about this big, important day in the life of the island. If people were ever going to move here for real, they needed to feel immersed in the place itself. They needed to understand that it was as physically and emotionally real as their own hometowns.
Pointing his tablet at the sky again, Frédéric held a hand up on the left side of it, to shield the camera from glare. The days were longer than ever now—a hundred hours, give or take, and it was a matter of some debate which was worse: the daylight or the darkness. But either way, right now Thalia’s long night was over; the Sun was up above the cloud horizon, strong enough for the optical sensors on the landing package to look down and see, hopefully, against the white of the clouds, a gray speck of alien matter. The island.
“I see it!” Juanetta called out, pointing a finger into the sky.
Frédéric reoriented the tablet toward where she was pointing, but did not immediately see anything. Then, taking his face away from the screen and simply looking up, he did see it: the orange and white pie wedges of a tiny parachute, high up in the sky.
“Can you see this?” he asked his joiners rhetorically. “This is something you did. Not me; all I did was ask for help. All of you made this possible, with money and time and . . . enthusiasm. So much enthusiasm! When I first met you all I was in a low place, trapped on this island, and trapped in my own head. You all showed me that Venus is part of the world, not separate from it. You showed me that I could reach out. There was a place to reach out to.”
Frédéric had prepared a speech for this occasion, but it had fled right out of his mind, and he was now winging it, taking whatever nonsense occurred to him and sending it directly to his vocal cords. He hoped it would make sense later, but he knew it didn’t really matter. His joiners were pretty forgiving, and the few who were not, he happily unjoined.
“I can see the package now,” he said. “I don’t know if you can see this, but there’s a little dot underneath that parachute. That’s our landing craft. That’s a ton of structure and four tons of cargo. This island, everything you see here, grew from a seed not much bigger than that. Actually, only ten times the size of that, so try and imagine what a big difference four more tons could make around here. Five more!”
Under pressure from Tohias, Frédéric had relented and let the adults of Thalia vote on what supplies were most needed. It ended up being mostly a lot of titanium and copper, and a few kilograms of rare earth metals that simply could not be obtained here. Other than that, there were a few complete machines, another surgical tube, fifty kilograms of assorted seeds, some useful electronics, and a handful of specialty chemicals that Tohias had never figured out how to synthesize. Plus the structure of the lander itself, which was mostly aluminum and tungsten that would be stripped and melted and put to good use.
Even the parachute—real silk, barfed out by Chinese caterpillars—had properties no Venusian material could match. There were no actual luxury items, though, because what good would that do, to get a fleeting taste of chocolate or cognac and then run out again? Or so Tohias had insisted. Now there was some good, solid adult thinking.
However, Frédéric had non-negotiably set aside ten kilograms for himself, for a new tablet computer, a backup tablet computer, some backup batteries, a camera tripod, some lights and reflectors and microphones, and a pop-up green screen he could assemble anywhere. If his network content had gotten him this far, then even better network content had the potential to get them even further, right? Much of that stuff, or some inferior version of it, could technically be manufactured here on Thalia (especially now), but he did not trust sixty-six percent of the council—i.e., of the voting population of the island—to see it that way and ever allocate the resources.
Also, since there was an entire empty apartment building waiting for new colonists to come and colonize, Frédéric had quietly allocated one of the empty storage rooms to serve as his recording and editing studio. By the time anyone caught onto him, he hoped Thalia’s online presence would be seen as a critical resource, every bit as important as the trawler or the photovoltaic array.
Nearby, Basilio del Campo—Juanetta’s father—was cradling his wife, Noemi. Tohias was cradling his own wife, Candide, and his son, Tabor, who was five years Frédéric’s junior. Julian was cradling Wilma. Everyone was cradling everyone, and Frédéric was surprised that Juanetta hadn’t seized the opportunity to seize him. She seemed too wrapped up in the landing itself.
Almost jealously, he moved behind her and said, “Big day for you?”
“For all of us,” she said, without turning around. “I counted up all the metal on the island, and do you know what I came up with? Three thousand, four hundred kilograms. Can our standard of living be measured that way? If so, it’s about to double. We’re going to have a surplus, for the first time ever.”
You’re welcome, Frédéric thought but did not say. It was just like Juanetta, to not acknowledge him at a moment like this. But he supposed maybe it was a good thing, that she was thinking about the future and the island, and not scheming a way to make him hold her hand.
Stepping forward, he reached out and held hers. The landing package was now big enough and close enough to be clearly visible on the tablet’s screen, and he could aim the camera well enough with only his left hand.
“Is that a rocket engine?” she asked suddenly, for the lander had begun to belch flame, not only from its bottom, but also from one side.
“There should be several on the lander,” Frédéric confirmed.
“Won’t that set fire to the carbónespuma?” she asked, sounding alarmed.
“The engineers say not. Anyway, I think it’s just centering itself over the landing pad. The parachute’s what will actually bring it down.”
A thing that seemed suddenly imminent; the lander was now visible as a contraption of legs and springs and circular feet, with a sort of barrel on top that held all the cargo. Just exactly like the CAD drawings the engineers had sent him. And even though its terminal velocity was much lower than it would have been on Earth, it was still coming down faster than a person could walk.
“Are you seeing this?” Frédéric asked his joiners again. “You probably can’t feel the excitement in the air here, but I will tell you, nothing like this has ever happened to us before. Look! Look, there it is, a thing manufactured on Earth and flung across the heavens, because one young man asked nicely. Incredible!”
And then the lander was below the level of the radio tower, and then below the tops of the greenhouse domes and the apartment buildings. And then with a gentle thump it was down—really down—and a circular ripple expanded through the carbónespuma beneath everyone’s feet, firmly marking the occasion.
“Earth and Venus are one people,” Frédéric said, and cut the video.
3.11
01 November
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
3,336 A.U. from Earth
Harv slept poorly that night. He often slept poorly, so that was no surprise, but this was no ordinary night. No, this was more like the night before he fried his brain in a neuro-quantum time machine. It was so much like that night, twelve years and a lifetime ago, that he couldn’t help replaying those events in his mind. It had all made sense, right? It was something he had to do, right? The results had been amazing, right? And yet, the experience had broken his career and his personal life, and left him absent-minded and prone to headaches. And a laughingstock, too, as he had no ironclad way to prove he’d sent his consciousness backward in time.
And here he was again, about to subject his brain to unnatural stimuli in hopes of gaining arcane knowledge of he-knew-not-what. Some people never learn.
Could he back out? Yes. It was in his contract. Would he? No way. It wasn’t in his nature. But, once bitten and twice shy, he at least had the good sense to be nervous about it. Very.
Thenbecca spent the night drifting, untethered, within the confines of her closed cabin. She’d been apprehensive about going to space the first time, and apprehensive about launching on a starship powered by ten tons of antimatter. And she was apprehensive now.
There was no way to work off the tension on the dead-quiet ship, so she put the lights down to their lowest setting and simply floated, banging gently into the walls and ceiling and padded bunk, sometimes singing in whispers, sometimes praying, sometimes reciting recipes in her mind.
Would she be changed by what was about to happen? Would the changes be for the better? She didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and so she drifted, until—after a long time—a light sleep finally settled over her.
Michael was generally a good sleeper, but even he had trouble.
Finally, it was time. Michael exited his cabin and poked a head into the Encounter Bubble, where it seemed nearly everyone was out of their sleep sacks already. As he hovered silently by, those who were still cocooned, and who weren’t awakened by the activity around them, were gently shaken awake by their fellow passengers.
“Wake up!” they said. “Wake up and make history!”
It was 4:55 a.m.
Michael returned to the crew quarters to find Harv and Hobie both opening their rollup doors and peeking out.
That noise prompted Thenbecca, who opened her door and said, “Oh, thank God. I’ve been awake a long time.”
That got Igbal and Rachael up, and soon Dong followed suit. Meaning everyone was up except Sandy.
“I think she might actually be asleep,” Igbal said with some amazement.
“Should we wake her?” Rachael asked. Rachael, who had gotten a total of perhaps eight hours of sleep over the past two days, but looked as wired-fresh as she ever had.
“Let her sleep,” Igbal said. “Let’s get everyone fed, and do what we came here for.”
Breakfast was light—a granola bar, a pouch of synthetic, non-dairy “yogurt,” and a pouch of that century-old astronaut favorite, Tang. All easy to digest and not much of any of it, so that in an hour everyone’s stomachs would be basically empty again, though with stabilized blood sugar. Sandy woke up toward the end of it, and ate and drank in hasty silence.
In the Bubble, people were careless with their crumbs and trash, prompting Michael to scold: “Listen, the crew’s got better things to do than clean up after you lot. I want this place spotless, and I think it isn’t much to ask.”
And then it was really time. Igbal took a big plastic case out of storage, and each crew member grabbed two big handfuls of vape pens and started passing them out to the passengers.
“Don’t puff on it until you’re told!” Michael called out to several miscreants. He supposed it didn’t actually matter whether they all dropped into the spirit world at exactly the same moment, but it was one of the few things Igbal had concretely planned, and Michael thought he deserved that much, after bringing them all here like Nerd Moses.
But then everybody had a vape pen in hand, including Michael himself, and he found he was a lot more nervous than he’d expected. Some of the things people said about psychedelic drugs were flatly terrifying, after all, and Michael did not particularly want to “spend years drifting in a peaceful void” or any such thing. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to meet the Beings, on their terms or any other. Such a life-altering prospect was the very biggest of deals, not to be entered into lightly. But on the other hand, he did want to, very much, for they were also God’s children. How much did they know, that humanity could only guess at?
“Speech!” people in the crowd began to say. But this time they were looking at Michael, for Igbal had promised them he would say a few words.
He foolishly hadn’t prepared any, but he held up his hands now and cleared his throat.
“Ladies and gentlemen and others, we find ourselves on the precipice of discovery, and I, for one, find the step ahead of us more daunting than I had supposed years ago, when I first agreed to take part. We do not know what great or terrible or wonderful things may await us on the other side, and there is no shame in backing out now. Indeed, we may have reason to be grateful if a few of you do exactly that.”
“Fat chance!” said someone from the crowd, provoking scattered, nervous laughter.
“In public I don’t speak often of God,” Michael said, “as many people find this off-putting, not least because His name has been invoked to justify innumerable atrocities. But I’ll invoke it now, to remind you all how improbable it is, for a universe to exist that contains this moment, and all of us, within it. If you don’t mark this as evidence of a loving creator, then perhaps at least mark it as your own great good fortune.”
He paused there, and though he might have said more, a scattered clapping broke out, and then a sort of sigh ran through the crowd, like a breeze that swept away the smell of fear.
“Igbal,” Michael said, turning to find him almost eclipsed by the hull of the ship. “Would you like to count us down?”
Smiling, Igbal said, “Aw, hell. Puff ’em dry, everyone. Go! Go!”
And then some people were lifting the vape pens to their lips, and some were laughing too hard to puff, and Michael, who had never ingested any drug stronger than wine, took a long drag, held it, exhaled, and then—before he could lose his nerve—drew deeply from the pen once again.
And the universe, for better or worse, was changed forever.
1.17
Post-Encounter Deposition
Igbal Renz, Founder and CEO
Renz Ventures
So, yeah, this wasn’t a charity expedition. Well, I guess it was, if we were the charity cases. My point is, we were not there for some generic betterment of mankind. Well, okay, that’s not true, either. First contact with intelligent beings happened the moment we started building the really creepy AIs, but the first contact with extraterrestrials . . . that’s a big event, for all of us. It tells us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it. But my point is, I spent two trillion dollars of my own money to get a hundred people out there, and I fully expected to make that money back. At least break even, you know what I’m saying?
