The Almighty has his own purposes.
—Abraham Lincoln
"Go right in, Dr. Crewe." The secretary was blond, with a stylish reserve. "The chairman is waiting for you." She smiled a less reserved smile than she had been trained to give, enough to hint that perhaps she could make herself available after work, if Josh Crewe cared to ask. He was handsome, with a hint of distinguishing grey at his temples and the casual authority of a man accustomed to being in charge. She watched as he went through the heavy oak doors, still lean in his lower fifties, old enough to be her father but still attractive. The doors closed behind him and she looked out the panoramic windows, far away for a long moment. The lights were bright in the Aerospace Consortium's lobby, and a miniature waterfall splashed down one wall. The power-wasting luxuries were tangible displays of the Consortium's wealth in a world where too many people competed for too little. The luxuries made her own cramped flat with its two puny lightpanels seem even more dingy and rundown. She looked to the doors, imagining what life would be like with a man rich enough and powerful enough that she would never have to worry about material needs again. She smiled, daydreaming. Never being hungry, hot showers whenever she wanted them, the freedom to stay up late reading without worrying about what it was costing her; that was the way things were meant to be.
"Assemblyist Crewe. How can I help the United Nations today?" Harmon Michaud's office was immaculate and expensively appointed, as befitted the chairman of the Aerospace Consortium. His desk held a notepad, a screen and a few models of famous air and spacecraft, nothing else. Michaud dressed in expensive and restrained taste, and his keen eyes assessed his visitor dispassionately.
Crewe took one of the plush leather seats. "You may have heard I'm planning to run for secretary-general."
"There have been rumors."
Crewe spread his hands. "The rumors are true. I need your support."
"Hmmm." Michaud steepled his fingers. "What support can we give you?"
"Money and influence. What else is there?"
"And to ask the obvious question, what is in it for the aerospace industry?"
Crewe picked up a small silver cylinder from Michaud's desk. It had a shiny Mylar parabola attached, a model of one of a sensor-swarm probe. The model was full-sized, except for the solar sail, which would have been miles across. "How would you like to see another deep-space exploration program launched?"
"I wouldn't be uninterested, but frankly, Dr. Crewe, there isn't a lot of money to be made in pure research."
"That could change."
"It could." Michaud stroked his chin, thinking. "It will be difficult for you to convince me that you're the person to change it, given you're the one most responsible for legislating profit limits on government-funded research."
"That puts a negative spin on what I've done."
"And how would you spin it?"
"I would say that I've acted to maximize the amount of research we've been able to do on a strictly limited budget. I've also fought hardest to increase that budget for you."
"My companies are interested in profits, not volume."
"Volume brings profits to efficient competitors. Your industry is a lot leaner and more aggressive now. I'd like to think I've helped set the conditions to make that true."
"And did you do that for us? Or for your own purposes?"
"Does it matter, so long as my purpose overlaps with your business model?"
"It matters."
Crewe nodded. "I'll make you a promise, my first campaign promise. More money for space industry, deep-space exploration revived."
Michaud waved a hand. "Space represents a few percent of the aerospace market, at most, research is a fraction of that. I'd rather see energy credits for commercial air carriers."
"You won't see that." Crewe's voice was flatter than he meant it to be. "That's a mature market."
Michaud arched his eyebrows. "Perhaps I'll see subsidies if I support Assemblyist Plant instead of you."
"Plant is running with the support of the Believers. Even if he were inclined to give you subsidies, his constituency wouldn't allow it."
Michaud laughed mirthlessly. "Politics is the process of getting money from the rich and votes from the poor by exploiting their fear of each other. I have no doubt Markham Plant will do what he has to do to gain the office he seeks. He may have to be more circumspect about how he presents an aerospace subsidy to the public than you would, but I have no doubt he'll repay loyalty in good measure. What will you do for me if I give you my support?"
"You'll see me encourage your industry to align its efforts with the long-term best interests of the world."
Michaud laughed again, with more humor this time. "You have a certain naïve charm, Dr. Crewe. Still, I don't see how I'll benefit from supporting you."
Crewe paused, studying the other man. "I have something else to offer. You'll have to keep it in strictest confidence."
Michaud leaned forward. "What is it?"
"Iota Horologii."
"What?"
"A class-G0 star. Its second planet has a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. There's life there. It may be inhabitable for people."
Michaud nodded. "I remember this now. Proof of life beyond the solar system. Exciting news, five years ago. You won't gain any support with this."
"What about launching a colony ship?"
Michaud raised his eyebrows. "Dr. Crewe, I'm not unfamiliar with your work on interstellar ship design, but this is not possible. We don't have the technology."
"What do you care, so long as your industry gets paid to try?"
Michaud picked up the model probe that Crewe had put down. "These get up to ten percent of lightspeed by the time they leave the system. Interstellar gas comes in like hard cosmic rays. Your seedship will fly slower, I could imagine as much as one percent percent of lightspeed with a speed-optimized design, but even so I can't imagine an embryo surviving that environment, to say nothing of gestating them at the far end."
"I'm not talking about embryos, I'm talking about people. Not a seedship but a colony ship."
Michaud snorted. "You can't be serious."
"I'm quite serious; I've looked at the problem from every angle. You're right about radiation flux, and there are other problems, like braking at the far end, like somehow raising a bunch of embryos into a competent colonization team. Seedships are an impossible dream."
"And somehow sending a person isn't? Say your ship weighs a thousand metric tonnes, which is ridiculously conservative." Michaud looked away for a second while he ran the numbers in his head. "There wouldn't be enough energy in the world to launch that even to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime."
"Think larger. The ship will weigh one billion tonnes."
Michaud's jaw didn't quite drop. "Impossible."
"Trip time is on the order of ten thousand years, assuming we still want to go to Iota Horologii by the time it's ready to launch." Josh Crewe smiled, appearing to enjoy Michaud's incredulity. "We may decide to change the destination. We're sure to learn a lot more by then. There may be closer worlds, and better."
"It would take a hundred years to build such a thing."
"Again, does that matter to you? The Aerospace Consortium will be a thriving concern for your great-grandchildren."
Michaud considered. "No, perhaps it doesn't matter." He paused, contemplating his steepled fingers. "I have a question for you."
"What is it?"
"Why?"
Crewe paused, choosing his words carefully. "Because humanity's destiny is in the stars."
"No doubt. But what I want to know is why you in particular are committed to that destiny." Michaud leaned forward, his eyes locked on Crewe's. "I know your history, Dr. Crewe." He slid a piece of paper out of a folder on his desk and read from it. "Parents divorced, raised by your aunt. Your sister died at age nineteen . . ." If Michaud caught the momentary tightening of Crewe's expression at those words he gave no notice. ". . . no other close relatives. Top honors at Caltech in aerospace engineering, seven years at Boeing, five at Aerospatiale, left there for academia and taught at Oxford for four years, then Samara State Aerospace University in Russia for another four, fluent in English, French and Russian, with a passable knowledge of Arabic and Chinese. Five years ago you abandoned the ivory tower for politics, first regional and now global. As UN secretary of transportation you have been, if I may be frank, a persistent thorn in the side of the aerospace industry. You remain unmarried, despite occasional attachments, and you show no signs of settling down anytime soon. You have little contact with your aunt, none with your parents, and your sister is dead. With no impediments you've been free to do as you choose, and you've made good use of that freedom. Your achievements show you're an intelligent man, your life shows you to be a driven one too. You are accordingly a man to be reckoned with." Harmon leaned back steepling in his fingers. "Before I throw my support to such a man I want to know where that drive comes from, the better to predict where he will go."
"I will go to the stars."
"Again, why?"
"Because we can, because they're there. There are no more frontiers on Earth, not mountains, not ocean depths, not even the solar system anymore. We have solved all the great problems of science and as many of those of humanity as I believe are solvable. We must have challenges, something to inspire us outward, or we will turn inward and collapse."
Michaud cocked an eyebrow. "If you were still a scientist I might believe you believed that, but not now. Those words will play too well on a newsfeed for me to give them credibility."
"Why do you think I left science for politics, if not to see this ship made?" Crewe's eyes searched the other man's face. "I see you still doubt me. I'll give you the best proof I can. Five years ago we found a habitable world at Iota Horologii. Five years ago I left my research for politics. I did that to gain the power I needed to make this voyage real."
"You'll never live to see this ship launched."
"King Cheops never lived to see his pyramid completed. He still made building it his lifework."
"Is this what you want? Your memory carried down the generations through this vast project?" Michaud snorted. "A pyramid won't buy you immortality."
"Not for me. It will for the human race. If we're going to survive we need to leave this planet. Our civilization can't last forever."
Michaud shook his head. "Your thinking is fuzzy. Every generation thinks it's the last one, death by a comet or an ice age, greenhouse gases or nuclear war or global plague. Death by divine decree if nothing else. A life in politics has rusted your scientific method, Dr. Crewe. Those challenges have all been faced, and conquered. There's no evidence that the world is about to end."
"I don't think our generation is the last one, that's not the same as realizing that civilizations have a lifespan. There have been hundreds of civilizations since the dawn of history. They last four hundred and thirty-five years, on average. We're already living on borrowed time."
"That average doesn't apply to us. We aren't Easter Islanders or Hittites, building idols of stone and temples out of logs. We aren't even the Greeks or the Romans. There's never been a civilization even a tenth the size of ours, never been one that includes every nation on every continent. We command technologies our ancestors couldn't dream of. We can avert comets, cure plagues, adjust the thermal balance of the globe as we need to. War is a memory. Humanity has come into its adulthood, and our childhood afflictions are behind us."
"Which doesn't exempt us from resource depletion. Most civilizations die of starvation. We have twelve billion people, chewing through more power and resources in an hour than most of humanity's civilizations used in their entire history. That simply can't last."
Michaud shrugged. "So if civilization must fall, it must rise again. History shows that too, and certainly neither you nor I nor our children will have to deal with it."
Crewe shook his head. "No, this is where our civilization really is different. We've exhausted all the easy resources, coal and oil and uranium, even copper and iron and tin. What's left takes high technology to extract. If the technology is lost, there are no more stepping-stones out of the stone age—and when the end comes, it will be the final end. We mark the ages of humanity by the raw materials they use, the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age. The industrial revolution began the fossil fuel age, though we don't call it that. We're in the energy age now. Power is the most basic raw material we have. With it we can do anything, without it we can do nothing. We've had power shortages in North America since I was young, now they're severe. The rest of the world has caught up in power consumption per capita, but now the number of available kilowatts per person is falling. World population is still going up. You do the math. In a few years those shortages will be worldwide. This planet can't support twelve billion people without high technology. We've used up our world, and sooner or later, a lot of people are going to die. If our species is to survive, we must claim the stars."
Michaud nodded. "You've convinced me, Dr. Crewe. I don't think your hypothesis is true, but I think you do." He smiled without humor. "You don't want to build your pyramid for personal glory but because you truly believe it will bring the favor of the gods. You are an idealist, and more dangerous than I thought."
Crewe spread his arms wide. "When Cheops built his pyramid, his quarrymaster became a wealthy man. Harness me then, for you own ends, or oppose me to our mutual sorrow."
"I'll present your case to my board." Michaud nodded slowly, contemplating his guest. "You understand the final decision on whether to support you or not will be theirs."
"What will your recommendation be?"
"I will have to consider that."
"While you're considering it, consider this." Crewe tossed a thick folder onto Michaud's desk. "Thanks for your time." He rose to leave and shook Michaud's hand. "I hope we'll be working together."
Harmon Michaud watched him leave and then picked up the folder and looked at it. The title page read "Engineering Design Considerations for a Multi-Generational Interstellar Colonization Ship." He opened it, saw on the first page an outline drawing of the ship itself, a long cylinder with spherical fuel tanks clustered around its forward section. Something caught his eye and he raised his eyebrows. The outline itself was unsurprising; a generation ship would need to spin to simulate gravity, and so would inevitably be configured as a disk or cylinder. What was unusual was the scale marker in the lower left-hand corner, which marked not in tens of meters or even hundreds of meters but kilometers. Thirty from end to end, by far the largest thing the human race might ever build. Why so large? The brief descriptive note at the bottom answered his question. To ensure ecological stability over a ten-thousand-year voyage. Ten thousand years, longer than all of recorded history. The man is mad, stark raving mad. The next page unfolded to show the internal details of the vast habitat, a ring-shaped lake twelve kilometers long at the aft end, a cliff city built into the forward wall. The whole habitat was to be filled with twenty meters of rich alluvial topsoil, land to sustain successive generations of colonists on the centuries-long voyage, and mass as a shield against the hard radiation of deep space. Crewe is not just driven but insane. There was no way such a construction could ever be built. It would require the up-orbit transfer of millions of tons of material. It would not only take generations to reach its destination but generations to build; a hundred years was an optimistic guess. It was like some great medieval cathedral, a grandiose monument to the glory of God and the vanity of Man, immense and beautiful and pointless. The cost would be beyond comprehension, and several nations' worth of roads and power plants, schools and hospitals would go unbuilt to see its completion. It would be politically unsellable to a world population growing restive beneath the inevitable restrictions that occurred when twelve billion people tried to share a medium-size planet. The human sacrifice implicit was incredible, if not directly measurable. He looked again to the door, as though expecting to see Crewe still there, watching for his reaction. A brilliant mind unhinged.
He looked back to the folder and flipped through the section headings: Drive Design, Ecocycle, Technology Roadmap, Radiation Management . . . He scanned through the documentation on the drive, saw the fusion tube running down the long axis of the vast habitat cylinder, saw heat-transfer equations and superconductor specifications, and realized that the waste heat from the drive would be dumped to a quartz-shielded tungsten sheath to heat it incandescent and make an artificial sun. There was a huge transparent dome at the forward end, cast as a single vast lens of amorphous diamond, a window to provide sunlight in the years, decades of construction, to establish the ecology before the drive could be turned on. The dome would serve another purpose during the voyage, dumping internal heat to space. Water vapor evaporated from the ocean at the aft would convect up the axis to condense against the dome, forming ice, clouds, and a perpetual gentle rain that would fall to percolate back through the soil to the ocean, nourishing it along the way. It was a working water cycle built on a vast scale with no moving parts. He may be mad but he's no fool. He moved to another section that listed target stars with the characteristics of their known planets, another full of calculations of thrust and drive efficiency, boost gravities, cruising velocities, turnaround points. More figures—an initial crew of ten thousand, with room to grow to a hundred thousand in the course of the journey. There were eight million tonnes of hydrogen tankage to fuel the drive, a fifteen-centimeter-thick shell of steel, the first layer of a radiation shield that included the ten meters of soil and water that formed the biosphere. Crewe had chosen steel because it was cheap, but the design was sophisticated, each plate faced in nickel-chromium stainless steel, backed by successive layers of high-tensile alloy. There were calculations that showed that the hull, exposed to water, would lose five centimeters of thickness in that time despite the almost nonexistent corrosion rate of the alloy. To prevent that, there was an inner shell of amorphous diamond on a silicon-nitride substrate that would float inside the outer shell on a cushion of carbon fiber. It was a design meant to absorb failures gracefully, with no single weak point. It was a design meant to endure.
Michaud pushed the document away and leaned back. What arrogance the man possesses, to design such a thing. It was insanity, a masterwork perhaps, but insane nonetheless. He closed the folder, saw that Crewe had not put his name on it. He wants this built, he doesn't care about the credit. He leaves his name off so I can't use it against him if I decide to oppose him. No question Dr. Joshua Crewe was smart. Smart and rapidly growing powerful, and that made him dangerous. He was the kind of man who would stop at nothing to realize his dream, and devil take the consquences. And what is it that drives him to this vision? Not the answer he'd given, but the real answer was important, and unknowable. Michaud drummed his fingers on the closed folder, contemplating possiblities. The best thing would be to avoid such a man, by the widest berth possible, but Crewe's ambitions precluded that. Perforce he must choose sides, for him or against him. It was true the final decision would be up to the board, and of course the board could only in turn make suggestions to the myriad companies that made up the Aerospace Consortium. Nevertheless the board's suggestions carried as much weight with the organization's members as his own did with the board, which meant that, ultimately, the decision he made would be the decision that was implemented. Crewe would see, or not see, tens of millions of euros and a huge amount of political support based on Michaud's word. Crewe knew that, of course; it was why he had come in the first place.
So the plan was a practical impossibility, but was that any reason to oppose it? Harmon Michaud wasn't afraid of making an enemy of Josh Crewe if he had to. He hadn't risen to the position held now by avoiding conflict. More to the point, Crewe's primary argument was right. If the UN set out to build the ship it would divert a substantial fraction of Earth's talent and treasure to the aerospace sector, which would grow accordingly. Michaud's own power and prestige couldn't fail to grow along with it, and a person with foreknowledge of the program could invest intelligently and make a fortune. He thought about that for a while, turning the idea over in his head. Aerospace was a commodity industry now, growth was flat, the moon base as developed as it was ever going to be, the grand adventure to Mars over and done and unlikely to be repeated, the satellite industry was limited not by boost capacity but by orbital slots, and commercial air transport was hard up against the energy wall. This project, this vast, grandiose project, would change the basic economics of his business for generations to come. Michaud picked up the folder again and flipped through it, reading chapter headings and musing. Aneutronic Fusion Ignition. Ecocycle Considerations. Extreme Lifetime Technology Design. Crewe's research was exhaustive if nothing else. He flipped back to the diagram of the vast ship and considered. Starting the wheels in motion to launch this project could secure his posterity. He leaned back and opened the folder again. The last chapter was Life Aboard Ark. Michaud stroked his chin. Ark. That's exactly what it is, the Biblical parallel is exact. He saw now how the project could be, would be sold to the masses. For the largely Christian West, the appeal was direct, but even for the non-Christian part of the world the emotional appeal was powerful. Humanity does have a drive to explore, and this will play into that as much or more than the Mars mission did. The public would applaud the great adventure.
And yet the cost will be staggering. The public will not applaud that. A project so large carried a large risk of failure, and a failure so grandiose would destroy the ability of the Consortium to influence the government for decades, certainly for the rest of his career. Risk and opportunity, opposite sides of the same coin. The full scope of the project would be kept secret at first, the required infrastructure built on other pretexts. When it later turned out to be useful for Ark as well they would be seen as simply prudent for taking advantage of investments already made. Even so this is tantamount to the construction of the Pyramids. Sooner or later they would have to come out and ask the public to shoulder the economic burden. Which side to pick?
He keyed his intercom. "Miss Dorian."
"Sir."
"Call a board meeting. We have a decision to make."
Snow was falling, lending a superficial layer of purity to the dingy streets of midtown New York. The power was off to the subway, and perforce Abrahim Kurtaski had to take a rickshaw through the streets to the UN Secretariat. Kurtaski smiled to himself at the pedestrians bundled against the cold and the way the pedcars slid and skidded in the slush. New Yorkers weren't used to such weather. In Moscow this much snow wouldn't rate a scarf.
There was a prayer group on the steps of the UN building, singing a hymn while their leaders beseeched Heaven to intervene on some political issue. Abrahim skirted around them and went up the stairs to the main entrance. The Secretariat was not a particularly impressive building, lacking both the sheer scale necessary to compete with the towering spires of the Manhattan skyline and the historical weight of power centers like the Kremlin or Whitehall. Nevertheless he paused to breathe deep before he continued in the doors, because the UN did not need grandeur to convey its power. The Secretariat ran the world, and though national governments frequently balked at its rulings, none dared defy it.
And if they did not, who was a junior professor of engineering to defy a summons from the secretary-general? That he was an old friend seemed to make no difference; it was a daunting prospect. He breathed out and walked forward, into the impressive lobby where Foucault's pendulum swung to mark the turning of the Earth, to the main desk where his appointment was confirmed, through a security checkpoint and into a private elevator, through another checkpoint, past oak-paneled offices and meeting rooms and finally to the door of the man who ran the world.
"Abrahim! Zdras'te! Come in." Josh Crewe smiled with real pleasure. "How is Samara doing without me?"
Abrahim laughed. "Pri'viet, muy droog. It's much the same, as is your Russian."
"By which you mean to say not as bad as it might be."
"I would never say that out loud." At the sight of his old mentor all Abrahim's misgivings vanished. It was the same face, more lined perhaps, made more patrician by the weight of his office, grey now streaking his beard, but still the same quick eyes, the same ready smile he had shown at the university. They shook hands warmly. "Mr. Secretary-General. You've done well since you've left."
"I would rather have stayed. Politics isn't research."
"I don't envy you that." Abrahim laughed and sat down as Crewe waved him into a seat. "Is this your daughter?" he asked, indicating a picture of a pretty, dark-eyed girl on Crewe's desk. "Surely not your wife."
"My sister."
"She's beautiful. In all these years I didn't know you had a sister."
"She died. I don't usually talk about her . . . " A flash of pain appeared in Crewe's eyes and was gone.
"I'm sorry." Abrahim paused, not sure what to say. He had caught Crewe's brief expression and knew it as a rare openness. "She was ill?"
"In a way . . . She died because she couldn't escape any other way. It's been thirty years now, longer." For a long moment Crewe looked away, and Abrahim feared he had said the wrong thing. The silence stretched out and then Crewe looked back. "I have a job for you, Abrahim, if you want it."
"What's that?"
"I want you to build the Ark for me."
"The Ark?" For a moment the Russian looked confused.
"The senior design exercise, I'm sure you remember. I had you working on fusion enhancers for the drive." Crewe took a thick folder from a drawer and passed it across. "That's the complete design package."
Abrahim looked at the folder, read the words on the cover. "You want it built? It couldn't be built! It was a tremendous design problem, but the technologies don't exist, the resources required . . ."
"I'm secretary-general now. You tell me what resources you need and you'll get them."
"But—"
Crewe held up a hand. "No objections."
"Half the systems are pure speculation!"
"So you will lead the research teams that make them real."
"Josh, I can't do that. I'm a junior engineering professor, nothing more. I give exciting lectures about automated assembly systems and stay late in the lab only to save power at home. This isn't even my field."
"You're the world's leading expert on sky cables."
"Only because nobody's managed to build one. That was a history paper, nothing more. I can't . . ."
Crewe stood up. "No! Don't say you can't do it. I need you for your vision. I've taught a hundred graduate students in my time, and none ever saw as deeply into a problem as you, not one."
"I'm complimented of course . . ."
"It's no compliment, that's a simple truth. This is not a job for some tenured fossil who puts his name on his students' papers. This requires youth and energy, someone with the yajtza to get it done, if only because he's got nothing to lose. You're the one I need."
"Josh, I can't just quit and move to the other side of the world. I have classes to teach and a mortgage to pay."
"The university will find someone to take over your course load."
"Someone to replace me, you mean. I don't have tenure, I'll have to start all over again somewhere else, and what about my house?"
"The salary I'll give you will more than compensate for what you'll lose in moving, and there's enough in this project to occupy you for the rest of your career, for the rest of your lifetime. You won't be starting over again anywhere else."
"And if it fails?"
"Even to fail at this would be to fail attempting greatness. You'll have director rank within the UN. If we can't make this work you'll have your pick of positions at any university in the world."
Abrahim shook his head. "I can't build this ship, it's too big, too . . ."
"I don't need you to build the ship, the ship will take generations to finish. I need you to build the organization that will build it." Abrahim started to object again but Crewe cut him off, leaning forward. "Abrahim, listen to me. I have made it the focus of my life to see the Ark become real."
"Why?"
"Because . . ." Crewe looked away, his eyes distant before they fell on the picture on his desk. "Because we all need to escape, one way or another." He was silent a long moment, then looked back to the other man. "I want to build it myself, you understand. I always planned it that way." He looked up to meet Abrahim's eyes. "I can't, that's a reality that comes with this office. You're the best I can find, Abrahim, and you're a friend."
Kurtaski considered the thick folder. Even to fail would be to fail attempting greatness . . . "If I were to do this, and I emphasize the if, when would we start?"
"Immediately. Time is what we don't have. We need to have significant progress inside of two years."
"Haste is risky."
Crewe nodded. "We'll do it in stages. We need the sky cable first. That has to go up fast, and that's all the public needs to know about at first. It's going to take years to get enough steel up there to even start building the hull."
"How are you going to explain building a sky cable to ship steel into orbit and not explain what you're going to use the steel for?"
"International Metals has been exploring the idea of building a cable for an on-orbit solar aluminum smelter. Venezuelan bauxite is cheap and high-grade, so they can make aluminum oxide for almost nothing, but SouthAm power is too expensive to process it into aluminum economically. They ship it to Africa now, and that's almost as costly. We'll build the cable for them, and then when it's ready we'll use it to get our steel up there as well, maybe even ship the bauxite itself up. It's got a significant fraction of iron oxide as well. We process it all, ship the aluminum back down to pay International Metals' profits, keep the iron to make steel for the Ark and save the oxygen to make her atmosphere when we're ready. All the work on the ship will be pure research until then. Once I have a second term secure we can announce the full project."
"I can't believe it takes less power to smelt a pound of bauxite on the ground than to ship it into orbit, even if sunlight is free."
"It won't be, but with us building the cable, IM will just have to pay the incremental cost and that will turn loss into profit for them. We need an equatorial site for the base tower, on a mountain if possible, and they own rights on Mount Cayambe in Ecuador. It's close enough to Quito to make logistic support easy, and IM is owned by Lundstrom, who have a construction subsidiary based there. Lundstrom will make money on building the base tower even as IM makes money using the cable; they'll know a free lunch when they see it. The Aerospace Consortium will be on board, because they're going to see all the contracts for the on-orbit construction, and they know they're going to see all the business for Ark as well. We're going to see a lot of support on this."
"You think a base tower is necessary? The cost . . ."
"It's essential. Cost isn't going to be an issue."
"And the General Assembly will accept us subsidizing private companies like that?"
"The General Assembly does little other than subsidize private interests, I've learned. I entered politics with a certain amount of idealism." Josh laughed. "I've since learned that cynicism is more realistic, and pragmatism gets better results."
"I'll let you worry about the politics." Abrahim looked away for a moment, thinking. "It's the engineering that concerns me. Even trying to build the cable is risky. As for the ship . . ." He ticked off points on his fingers. "We don't even know if building such a large fusion drive is even theoretically possible. We have no idea how to build a sealed ecology that will function for thousands of years. We can't even imagine how the society inside it will evolve, but it will be hard to maintain the technical knowledge within the limited population it could carry. That means that not only do our systems have to be able to last that long, they have to be built to run entirely maintenance-free. I could go on . . ." He looked up to meet Josh's gaze. "What's the target star?"
"Iota Horologii."
Abrahim nodded. "It would have to be. You know, we only think it's got life. There's not enough data to say it's habitable."
"There's enough to start. We'll know more before we launch it. If we build it for a fifty-light-year range, that gives us three thousand stars we could go to, most of which we know nothing about yet. The important thing is to start building now."
Abrahim nodded, leafing through the folder. "The scale of this is almost too large to contemplate."
Crewe got up and walked to the broad windows, looking out into the snow falling over Manhattan. "You're right, of course. This is an enormous venture. You have to understand that if we don't undertake it nobody will. The world has enough problems, enough other priorities that will always come before unchaining humanity's fate from this planet's." He turned back to Abrahim. "There will be problems we can't even imagine right now. I'm not asking you to finish, neither of us will live that long. Just get it started. We need to entrench this in the public consciousness and the economy so deeply that no future administration will be able to kill it."
"That sounds more cynical than pragmatic."
"Abrahim, you have no idea . . ." Josh paused, considering his words. "There's an old saying. 'Those who enjoy sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made.' I can add something to that. You can't be a butcher without getting blood on your hands. Politics is the same way."
"Hmmm." Abrahim paused to flip through the design section on the space-cable portion of the project. "We start with the sky cable as necessary infrastructure and build from there. We have two problems, as I recall from when we studied this. One is that we can't spin continuous cable anywhere near fast enough. The other is that the base tower is going to be exposed to the ozone layer, and to monatomic oxygen as well. It's going to get eaten alive."
"There's some data now about fully fluorinated nanotube fibers. We'll use those for the tower structure. Above the ozone the monatomic oxygen partial pressure is low enough that we won't have to worry so much."
Josh nodded. "How much time?"
"Offhand, five years for the tower, five years to spin the cable. We can do both at once, but that's only if we can solve the problem of spinning cable fast enough. If we can't solve it . . ." Abrahim shrugged. ". . . maybe never."
"How about a cable-only solution, even one that won't carry loads?"
"What's the point of that?"
"It's a political thing. The general public won't know the difference, and once the project is a fait accompli it'll be that much harder to kill."
"That could be done in two years, or three, given that we didn't build a tower, and it would be useless for any practical purpose. A minimal cable might mass ten tons, but the ozone layer would erode it fairly quickly, and it wouldn't support a spinner so we could never repair it or strengthen it."
"It's probably not the best plan, just something to consider if all else fails." Crewe paused, meeting his ex-student's gaze. "I need you, Abrahim, to make this happen. I need your vision, but more than that I need someone I can trust. Will you do it?"
Abrahim hesitated. "I'll do it. I'll try."
"Good man. Just tell me what you need and you'll get it."
"Time." Abrahim pursed his lips. "It's time that will make or break us. We don't have much of it, if you want this done in time for your second term, quite possibly not enough. Frankly, I don't think you can do this as fast as you want to."
Crewe nodded. "I know the problems, but it has to be done. Politics is a far less certain game than science. We can't announce Ark until the cable is up, and we need to be able to announce it, to get the establishment committed to it. The project has to be well under way before the next election."
"I'll do my best." Abrahim stood up and they shook hands. He was glad he didn't have to deal with politics, and with luck the world would continue to not ask him to. Questions of resource allocation were beyond his scope, but it was clear Josh Crewe was under a lot of pressure. As if to underscore the point the lights of New York started going off outside Crewe's office window. When I was young this city never slept. There had been time when power didn't have to be rationed on a continental scale. Every civilization is limited by its resources. If we don't build this ship now, it might never get built.
"Come on," said Josh. "I'll show you your new offices. Tomorrow you can meet Eric Smithson, he's chief engineer for International Metals."
Abrahim laughed. "You were so sure I'd agree."
"If you'd been able to turn down the challenge, then you weren't the one I needed to run this project."
Half an hour later Abrahim's head was spinning as he tried to coordinate the details of his resignation from Samara, a completely unexpected transoceanic move, and the workings of his new office suite on the thirtieth floor of the Secretariat building. The entire floor had been given over to him, proof of Crewe's serious intent to realize his dream. It was already furnished and supplied with an administrator and receptionist, the frosted lettering behind the reception desk read "United Nations Initiative for Space Exploration" and the nameplate on his own door said "Abrahim Kurtaski—Director." Everything was ready for him to start, the administrative machinery was there, all he had to do was pull the levers. He sat down behind his new desk and looked around, taking in the incongruously utilitarian furniture and the sweeping view of New York City. It was a far cry from his cramped office at the university, where his shelves were overflowing with papers and journals and the air smelled of ancient chalk dust, where students and colleagues would drop in and talk and argue over engineering problems and political points with equal passion, often into the small hours of the night. He pried the nameplate off with his fingernails and handed it to the administrator. "Here, get me one that reads 'Chief Engineer.' " Josh Crewe had abandoned design work for administration as a necessary precondition of realizing his dream. Abrahim Kurtaski didn't intend to make the same compromise.
Over the next weeks he found he had to make compromises enough, as he struggled to come to grips with the demands of forging a multibillion-euro government agency. As he did, he began to realize how ambitious the undertaking really was. Even the sky cable was a grand vision, dreamt of for a hundred years, attempted twice before, but never actually completed. It would start with a base tower on the equator a hundred kilometers high, built of truss sections made of wound carbon nanofilament and pressurized with nitrogen to trade their incredible tensile strength for compressive strength. From the top of the base tower four nanofiber strands would stretch forty thousand kilometers into space, cross-linked to form a locally rigid structure to support the boost tracks. At the upper end the platform that spun the cable would counterweight it, defying gravity like a child's ball whirled on a string, with the Earth's fifteen-hundred-kilometer-per-hour rotation doing the whirling. When it was finished it would serve as a railway to space, with boost cars sliding on an eight-day journey to orbit, driven up the cable by immense launch lasers.
And even those lasers are an engineering challenge, and they're the simplest part of this project, which itself is just a prelude to the real effort. How can I even dream of building a ship to fly light-years? Abrahim pushed aside a pile of paperwork at the end of his first week in office and rubbed his eyes. He had been working no less than sixteen hours a day, and every problem he solved seemed to create two new ones. He was starting to doubt that they could possibly meet the aggressive schedule Josh Crewe had laid out for him. He switched off his desk and went to grab a nap in the small dayroom attached to his offices. He went to sleep only to dream of monumental failure, and woke up to spend the next day dealing with the thousand administrative crises that seemed to spring up every time he turned his back.
Over the next week his core team began to arrive, chosen from a short list of colleagues. They had all jumped at the chance to work on the ambitious project, though he told them only of the sky cable portion of the plan. Ark itself was to remain a secret held within the walls of the secretary-general's office. They all came needing laboratories, administrative assistants, technicians and equipment, and it seemed that none of those things could happen without paperwork and frustration administered in equal and heavy doses. As the first month slipped past, the pitfalls seemed endless, but so too did the resources available for dealing with them. As people and equipment began to pour in, the once cavernous office space filled and became bustling, the impossibly tight deadlines feeding an infectious energy. The lights of the thirtieth floor burned around the clock as engineers brought breakfast to work and stayed long after dark to tackle unexpected problems. With some amazement Abrahim realized that it was he who was responsible for that, that his choice of people, his direction and leadership were what was driving the process. The sky cable became known as simply the Cable, capitalization implicit, and its realization became the single-minded goal of an organization that seemed to be exploding in all directions.
Even given boundless energy being applied, at first it seemed that the effort was doomed before it began, with too many essential problems not only going unsolved but seeming unsolvable; however, as the weeks stretched into months and more and more of his colleagues rallied to the cause the outlook began to improve. He was well acquainted with the capabilities of a first-rate engineering team given a really challenging problem, but he hadn't understood how unlimited resources would accelerate the process. Within a month they had test samples of carbon-bonded-carbon nanotube matrix that would serve as the Cable's material, within two months they had confirmation that the material was physically strong enough to do the job, and six weeks after that they had a fluorination process that would protect the base tower's trusses from the chemical ravages of ozone in the upper atmosphere. It remained to find a cable-spinning process that would produce a single cable strand thirty-eight thousand kilometers long, with the required exponential taper over its entire length. But that's just an engineering problem, we just have to figure it out. For the first time Abrahim began to believe his mentor's grand dream might actually succeed. We will do this.
He looked out over the Manhattan waterfront, the still darkness interrupted here and there by the lights of hospitals and other essential services. UNISE itself was gifted with the power credits to work all night on a whim, and the lights were usually on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes Abrahim wondered if that was wise. The citizens would see the lights burning from their candlelit apartments. Those who could not afford light and heat could not help but resent what to them could only seem like government wastage. Thus the world is divided, no longer into the nations of race or language and geography but into nations of rich and poor. He looked up from the darkened city to the star-dappled sky. And perhaps it's wrong to commit the world to this project while people go without lights, without heat, even without food, but we do need to go to the stars if we're going to survive.
"This project is an abomination in the eyes of God." The True Prophet raised his arms on the word "God," as though summoning lightning from heaven. The camera panned around, showing the jammed arena and the cheering crowd on Joshua Crewe's screen. The Prophet lowered his arms, waiting for the crowd to quiet before continuing. "We are entering the end times. People are sleeping in the cold and in the dark while the secretary-general builds monuments to his own greatness. We have to, we must, save them. This is the will of our Lord." Riotous cheering flooded the arena as the camera view panned around to take in the Prophet's supporters screaming their approval. "God struck down the Babylonians for trying to build a tower to heaven." The Prophet was tapping into a fundamental energy, and the crowd was lapping up every word. "Now they are building another one. They are trying to bring God's wrath down upon us all. Are we going to let them?" He threw the words at the crowd, and it roared back "NO!" until the stadium shook. Most of the people in the audience belonged to the Believers, the Prophet's core group of followers. He was saying exactly what they wanted to hear.
Josh Crewe made a gesture and the newsfeed froze on a frame with the Prophet pumping his fist in the air in triumph. People turn to their gods in time of crisis.The True Prophet's name was Norman Bissell, and he had clawed himself from obscurity to power purely on the strength of his oration, playing on popular desperation with a ready-made set of divinely inspired solutions, and then with consummate skill he had blended the twin appeals of pragmatic self-interest and religious fervor into an unshakable constituency. A cynic might wonder if he believed what he said, but his voice carried the passion of the true believer. The speech was the throwing-down of a gauntlet, his castigation of the government a direct challenge to the authority of the secretary-general. Crewe studied his opponent's face as though through close enough inspection he could divine his thoughts. His incom chimed and he pointed the call up to the screen.
"The True Prophet is here."
"Send him in." Crewe blanked the display and turned in his chair to greet his visitor. "Mr. Bissell." He nodded as the man came into the room and took a seat. You could not be in the same room as Norman Bissell without being drawn to his eyes. He was not an otherwise memorable man, surprisingly young for someone who commanded such a following, of medium height and medium build. He was the kind of man you could imagine living a life of quiet desperation, never quite failing in life, never coming close to his dreams. His eyes told you that wasn't true. They were sharp and compelling, the eyes of a man convinced of his own rightness, and they held a subtly veiled cunning.
"Secretary-General." The Prophet kept his gaze locked on Crewe's. He was not about to be impressed by any office on the planet.
Crewe leaned forward. "I'm pleased to meet you at last."
"Untrue, I'm sure. You'd ignore me, if you could." The Prophet pursed his lips.
Crewe conceded the point with a slight nod. "Then let's get down to business. What can I do for the Believers?"
"You can cancel your grandiose plans for space exploration until the cold and hungry right here on Earth are looked after."
"You make the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive."
The Prophet made a dismissive gesture. "They are mutually exclusive. Every euro that goes to your pet project is wasted, every kilowatt you consume could be used to improve someone's life."
"I heard your speech."
"You'll hear many more like it, if you don't redirect this government's priorities where God wants to see them."
Crewe leaned back, regarding his opponent. Does he realize that amounts to a direct threat? The Prophet sounded sincere, but then he would not say anything that might alienate his faction anywhere where he might be recorded. "The cable project has barely begun, and its costs are tiny in the overall budget. I can't believe you have no higher priority than to end it."
"Your lack of belief tells against you, Secretary-General. I know your background. You worship at the altar of technology, and its brass temptations have led you to create this Tower of Babel."
"This isn't a tower to heaven, it's a ladder to space. This will be of incalculable benefit to people worldwide. The world doesn't have the resources to support our current population. We have to turn to the solar system, first for the raw power to process raw materials, then for the materials themselves."
"So you say. My supporters say otherwise." The Prophet held up a hand to forestall Crewe's reply. "Our salvation isn't going to be found in asteroid mining, it's to be found in prayer." He held up a hand as Crewe started to interject. "There is no point in arguing with numbers, I know the numbers. I speak for people who are afraid. They don't want you tempting the wrath of God."
"A fear that exists because you pander to it."
Norman Bissell shrugged. "I am just the voice for ten million people."
Crewe laughed without humor. "And God, evidently."
"God's will is written for all who care to read it, I am only his servant. The Book of Genesis, Chapter Ten, tells us that God forbade the construction of a tower to heaven. You are creating an abomination in his eyes."
"I doubt the Bible explicitly forbids space travel."
"God struck down the first Tower of Babel. It is not for man to know the heavens. And the ship you plan to build with it." The Prophet's eyes narrowed. "Noah was commanded to build an ark. Were you?"
How does he know about that? Crewe bit his lip. For a moment he considered saying "Yes," just to see what the Prophet would do with that answer. Instead he said, "What are you driving at?"
"I mean this vast colony ship you're planning on building to violate Heaven."
"There's no such plan." Crewe's voice was flat.
The Prophet laughed. "Come now, Dr. Crewe. Your research on the subject is on record." He took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and held them out. "You even call it Ark."
Crewe leaned back in his chair, keeping his expression neutral. It was inevitable that news of Ark would leak out. I didn't think it would happen so soon. "When I was a researcher I studied the question. Interstellar travel is a challenging technical problem. I left research for politics and now I study other problems." I should have found some other name for the ship. Except what else would you call such a ship other than Ark, and he hadn't been thinking of the political ambitions of hard-line religious sects when he'd first conceived the project, some twenty years ago.
"And you appointed your protégé to head UNISE."
"UNISE is simply continuing our current space exploration program."
"And participating in building this tower for International Metals, at public expense."
"International Metals is paying the UN for research and consulting. They're subsidizing our research and development, not the other way around."
"That's not how I do the math. Let's not play games, Secretary-General. I may not have courtroom proof of your intentions, but I've heard about your ambition, and the evidence that you're putting your plan into action is there for anyone to read. Why are you building this ship?"
Crewe paused a moment before answering, choosing his words carefully. "I'm committed to space exploration because of the long-term benefits it will bring to the human race."
"My ten million Believers do not want to see man violating God's Heaven."
"And canceling the Cable won't make a material difference to any of your ten million followers, nor can I imagine how God would care one way or another. He seems to have tolerated satellites and the moon base and star probes alike without much concern."
The Prophet smirked. "The man in the street sees nothing but blackouts and an economy in free fall. His job is at risk, if not already lost. He's scared, and he wants someone to blame. This is a high-profile undertaking. If you keep going against my opposition, that blame is going to land on you. I'm sure you know the political risk you're undertaking in opposing me."
Crewe leaned back in his chair. "Let us go deeper than that. Your opposition is based on your personal political ambitions."
The Prophet kept his voice flat. "I don't expect a man like you to understand what it is to serve a higher calling."
"Is that what you call it? If you wanted me to cancel the Cable project you would have come to me beforehand. You have instead made your stand, and your demand that it be canceled, very public. You've cast it in religious terms, which will allow you to claim credit if we do cancel it and to claim divine guidance if we don't."
"I don't intend to make it easy for you, I intend to make it embarrassing." The True Prophet narrowed his eyes. "Very embarrassing."
"In order to weaken my position so you can dictate terms to the government. So you can prove your political strength to your followers, and thus gain more followers."
"And thus save more souls, Secretary-General. The wider world is the Devil's Playground. I work to save the common man from temptation. Simplicity is the proper approach to life, and humility before God is the proper attitude for man. I will not see Heaven defiled with your creation."
"Right now there's only your assertion that I intend to build such a ship. I have yet to hear any proof."
Bissell leaned forward. "I know what I know. I've told you I don't have any proof, not direct proof. That might change, but it also doesn't matter. If I tell the public that you plan to squander countless trillions on this colony ship, they'll believe me. What will you say then?"
"I'd say that right now there is only basic research going on, with no plans to go beyond that stage. Ark is only a design concept, years old now, one of dozens UNISE is working on, nothing more."
"And you would be on the defensive in having to say that. You'd be better off to call me a liar directly."
Crewe shrugged. "I think that engaging in direct confrontation would only give you a credibility you don't deserve."
"I already have all the credibility I need." The Prophet spread his arms expansively. "You've seen the level of support I have. Religion is a powerful motivator. People will go to great lengths to prevent the sacred from being assailed by the secular." The faintest hint of populist exhortation entered his tone, a low-key version of his pulpit voice. "This sky cable is the Tower of Babel, and you will violate Heaven itself."
Crewe snorted, refusing to be drawn. "I can't bring myself to believe you mean that literally."
The Prophet lowered his arms and leaned forward, his gaze intense. "But I do mean it literally, and more important for you, my followers mean it literally."
Crewe observed the Prophet carefully. Does he truly believe this, or is his faith a matter of expediency? Either way he wants me to know that he's doing this quite deliberately. Even a true believer can act strategically. He leaned back. "Your constituents are a fraction of the population of one continent. Most of the world doesn't subscribe to your philosophy." He put enough emphasis on "your" to underline the fact that he understood that Prophet's expressed beliefs were not his private ones.
"My Believers have influence well beyond their numbers. Your hold on the North American bloc is shaky. You would be wise to make a deal."
"I wasn't aware you were offering one."
"Cancel the sky cable now, and I'll be your political ally."
Crewe shook his head. "You'll be my political master, once you've proven you can force your will on me."
The Prophet tightened his lips. "I will be anyway. You can accept that gracefully or oppose me and have me destroy everything you've worked for."
"Come up with a policy I agree with and I'll support it with everything I've got. I'm not going to derail humanity's future so a few pampered Westerners can avoid some long-overdue belt tightening."
The Prophet snorted. "Humanity's future. Are you expecting a flood?"
"The Bible predicts Apocalypse, doesn't it? The Bible may be right." The Prophet's eyes widened, just a fraction, and Crewe leaned forward to press his momentary advantage. "Perhaps now you think we should have a colony ship after all."
"And who is going to decide who gets to escape the end of the world in this lifeboat you're building? It's God's place to choose those who will survive the Apocalypse, not yours."
Crewe put on a politician's smile. "You asked me if God had ordered me to build an Ark. How do you know I'm not the next Noah?"
The Prophet looked at him, his momentary uncertainty resubmerged. "Because I know what God commands." His eyes were intense, and Josh Crewe found himself revising his estimate of the man. He believes, however expedient that may be. That only made him more dangerous, because a cynical operator would take a good deal if it were offered him. A zealot would have no choice but to go down fighting, and devil take the consequences.
"You take your orders from the Aerospace Consortium," the Prophet went on. Crewe raised his eyebrows and his adversary smirked. "Oh yes, I know where your support comes from. Let me warn you, Dr. Crewe. God will not allow his will to be turned aside."
The Prophet got up and left, and Crewe breathed out, feeling the tension of the interview leave his body. That one will be trouble. How much trouble remained to be seen. He pointed his phone line up and gestured for Janice Jansky, head of Interpol.
Her face appeared in his screen. "Do you know the True Prophet?"
"Which one?"
"Norman Bissell, leader of the Church of the Believers movement, mostly active in NorAm."
"I know of him."
"I need you to find out what makes him tick."
"Has he broken the law?"
"I doubt it. Don't do anything active, just pull in all the information we have on file, plus what's available open-source. I want to know who it is I'm dealing with. I have a feeling he could be a problem."
"A problem how?"
"I don't know yet. I just had him in my office and the interview didn't go well."
Jansky nodded. "I'm on it."
Crewe waved the connection closed, and gestured to dial again. Thom Pelino appeared, under a logo that read United Nations Directorate of Communications.
"Josh, what can I do for you?" Thom was a gift from Harmon Michaud, once the Aerospace Consortium's chief spin doctor, more recently the architect of Crewe's drive for the secretary-general's chair.
"We need a public awareness campaign about the importance of space industry to the economy. Something about jobs today, hope for tomorrow. You know the kind of thing I'm looking for."
"Target audience?"
"Middle class and lower in NorAm. I'm specifically looking at the demographic that's likely to follow evangelical fundamentalism. I want to steal that audience, or at least inoculate them against the True Prophet's message."
"The leader of the Believers of God?" Thom looked puzzled.
"Right. He's on widecast. Tune in, find out what who he's talking to and sell them on the idea of space exploration in general and space industry in specific."
Thom nodded. "I've already got the pitch. Something about how the superiority of NorAm technology and know-how uniquely position the continent to lead the world into the next century. Jobs are the carrot and xenophobia is the stick."
"You're going to want to put something in there about how it's going to make everybody's life better too."
"You know it. Leave it with me."
Crewe cut the connection. Thom was a wizard of public opinion, and technology was always an easy sell in NorAm, despite the back-to-basics philosophy of the Believers. Still, there was only so much spin they could put on the current situation. The reality was the world didn't have enough power and the global economy was stalled because of it. NorAm, with the most advanced economy, was inevitably suffering the most. The True Prophet was simply doing what demagogues did best, giving the masses someone to blame for their troubles. A public-relations offensive would buy some time, but at the end of the day he was going to have to do something substantive about the problem or lose the next election.
And I can't allow that to happen, not when I'm this close. But we still have some time. Putting up the Cable required solving daunting technical challenges. Satisfying the world's insatiable demand for energy was incalculably more difficult. That required either convincing people to make conservation a permanent way of life or a miracle.
Josh steepled his fingers and looked out his window at the vast expanse of the New York megalopolis. Of the two a miracle seemed much more likely.
Norman Bissell left his car at the top of the lane and got out. Only machines driven by muscle were allowed on his farm, in keeping with strict Believer creed. He would have rather done without the car at all, but it was a necessity if he was to obey God's command to go out into the world and proselytize. So much of what I have to do falls outside the life I want to live. He did it willingly, uncomplainingly, as Jesus had borne his burdens, but still . . . It's good to be home. He paused a moment to inhale the rich, earthy scent of the apple orchard, feeling the stresses of the secular world drain away, then started up toward his house, through the simple wooden arch with the word BELIEVE engraved on it, a reminder to remain faithful to God, and humble before the glory of His creation. There was a heavy mist and the air was warm and still, the legacy of a tropical storm battering the coast some hundreds of miles south and east. He walked up the gravel drive, avoiding puddles as he went. The jingle of harness bells sounded in the distance; on the other side of the trees Jacob Eby was plowing his fields. Bissell's own fields needed attention, and he was looking forward to a good few days with horse and plow, away from the devil's playground and all its temptations. It was a heady thing to walk the corridors of power, to command the loyalty of a movement millions strong, but such power bred arrogance. I am only God's servant, a tool he is using to remake the world as he meant it to be. It was important to remember that, and to remember how very long the road ahead was. Only a small fraction of his followers lived on the land, most of them Mennonites and rejectionist Mormons who were already living that way before adopting the Believer creed. The bulk of his flock were evangelical Protestants, who accepted the idea of simplicity in theory, but who had little idea what it meant to live it in practice.
And that is my fault, and so leading them to the true path is my burden. With enough followers he could force the government to impose change from above, he could stop the headlong rush to damnation the world had set itself upon. There was strength in obeying God's will. He came around the corner to the house to find Marta waiting on the doorstep. She greeted him with open arms and a kiss, her smile and the warmth of her body healing his doubts.
"Where's the baby?"
"Sleeping. Come in, Beth's making dinner."
He kissed her, then went into the kitchen to embrace his second wife. Her belly was straining against her plain blue dress, swollen visibly over the week since he'd gone. Her child was due in just a month now, her third, his sixth. A large family was both a privilege and a duty, but the miracle of new life seemed nearly wondrous every time. All miracles belong to God. It was important to remember that.
"North America, the future is ours." The woman's voice was pitched as though she were about to make an indecent proposal, and her megawatt smile seemed to suggest the same thing. It faded from the screen to be replaced by a glowing image of the continent, a visual suggestion that the present might again see the casual wealth of the past. Abrahim smiled to himself. Sex sells everything. Of course the commercial spots weren't actually selling anything physical. They were selling a vision, a dream, for the working masses of the North American population. The reality was that NorAm was no longer the center of global economic power, no longer the place to be if you wanted to have a hand in forging the future. First to achieve universal wealth, it was now leading the world into decline as more and more people competed for fewer and fewer resources. It no longer had more opportunity than anywhere else in the world. What it did have was a disproportionate number of seats in the General Assembly, and that made it important to make the population feel that what had once been true still was.
"Dr. Kurtaski, we'll be landing in Quito shortly." Abrahim raised his vidgoggles. The flight attendant was an attractive woman of thirtysomething, and her professional smile was more genuine than the one that had just faded from the screen.
"Thank you." He moved his seat upright and fastened his seat belt without making her tell him to. On charter jets they never asked you to do anything right away, they gave you the chance to do it yourself first, in order to preserve the illusion that the high-ranking passengers were more than just self-loading cargo. In order to preserve the illusion for the passengers. Abrahim was sure the flight crew themselves were quite comfortable in their own minds about who was in charge of the flight. He wasn't entirely comfortable with the subtle deference, but he'd grown used to it. As long as I don't come to expect it. All his life he'd found the self-important to be laughable. He didn't want to pick up that particular governmental infection. The attendant had a nice figure and a wedding ring. He looked away from her and out the window, trying to spot the snowcapped peak of Mount Cayambe, but there were a lot of snowcapped peaks in the Andes, and without knowing exactly where he was it was impossible to tell which was which from altitude.
Twenty minutes later he was on the ground, and in thirty he was in the backseat of a diesel-powered Land Rover, heading north through the bustling streets. The driver pointed out Mount Cayambe, just visible over the tops of the shorter peaks that formed the high mountain valley that cradled the Ecuadorean capital. The cab was diesel, because Orinoco heavy crude was cheaper in SouthAm than hydrogen cracked with electrical power imported from NorAm. Kurtaski's eyes stung with the gritty pollutants of five million belching internal-combustion engines, the heavy air held hanging between the mountain ridges that flanked the city to east and west. North American cities might have trouble turning the lights on reliably, but at least the air isn't palpably toxic. He found it hard to breathe too, though that might have been due simply to the city's ten-thousand-foot elevation. The altitude was not the deciding factor in selecting a site for the Cable base tower, but every kilometer above sea level helped.
It was a two-hour drive over rough roads to the small farming community of Cayambe, named after the volcano that overshadowed it, jutting up to dominate a landscape that was already two kilometers high. Cayambe was a world apart from bustling Quito, where everything was new and modern, crowded and dirty. Here it looked like nothing had changed in a hundred years. And quite possibly nothing has. The UNISE team was set up in a small hotel that looked as if it had been built by the conquistadores. He dismissed the driver, checked in with the liberal use of sign language to compensate for his minimal Spanish, and dumped his suitcases in his room. His phone went to satellite mode for want of a usable ground signal, and he mused that UNISE would have to install the most basic of infrastructure before they could start building the tower. The peaceful town was about to undergo a lot of major changes.
Eric Smithson, International Metals' engineer-in-charge of the build site, was staying in the same hotel but wasn't in his room when Abrahim knocked on the door. He tried to call but couldn't get an uplink. Finally he went back down to the front desk to borrow the phone there. The proprietor was happy to loan it to him, but his sign language proved inadequate to the task of learning the appropriate international dialing codes. And it says something about the world we live in that I can't talk to a man in the same hotel without placing a transcontinental call. He had just resigned himself to wait when a white utility truck pulled up in front of the hotel. A woman in a white hard hat got out and came in. She was looking for something, and when her eyes met his he realized that she was looking for him.
"Dr. Kurtaski?"
"Yes. And you are?" Abrahim assessed her. She was in her mid-twenties, with blond hair and blue eyes that were tougher than he might have expected. An attractive young woman in a leadership role in a rough-and-tumble industry that was still very much a man's world, she would be strong and she would be smart. Whether she was good remained to be seen.
"Daffodil Brady. Eric sent me to take you around." She offered her hand, gave him a solid handshake. "I go by Daf."
"Eric couldn't find time to come down himself?"
"He didn't think you'd want him to slow down surveying just because you're here."
Kurtaski nodded. And no doubt Eric knew I wouldn't mind being shown around by a pretty woman. Smithson was a shrewd man. Daf smiled a smile that would melt ice at ten paces, and unlike the flight attendant she wasn't wearing a ring. Abrahim reminded himself that it would be a mistake to pursue her. She doubtless spent too much time fending off unwanted advances to appreciate even the most well-meant compliment, and it would only complicate the project to get involved with one of the engineers. The responsibilities of office lie heavy indeed.
Daf was still speaking. "My time is more expendable." She turned and said something in Spanish to the proprietor, who nodded, smiling, and answered, and then she turned back to Abrahim. "Eric's gone up to the base camp on the volcano. I can take you there if you like."
He nodded. "I would." He paused. "I'm glad you're here. I have to admit my Spanish isn't as good as I thought it was."
"The dialect here is difficult. I grew up speaking Spanish and I still have to work to follow it." She laughed. "At least in town most people do speak Spanish. A few miles out from here the primary language is still Quechua." She led him out of the hotel and opened the passenger door of her truck for him.
"I didn't even know there was such a language."
"You already know the important words." She climbed in her side of the truck.
He raised an eyebrow. "I do?"
" 'Cocaine' and 'quinine.' " She started the engine and pulled away from the hotel, carefully steering around a tired-looking mongrel asleep at the curb. "Quinine. Mosquitoes aren't a problem above fifteen hundred meters, but if you go down in the valleys make sure you take your antimalarials. Cocaine. It's everywhere, so if you see someone guarding a field with a Kalashnikov, just walk the other way. That's all you need to know to be safe in Ecuador."
"I'll keep that in mind."
" 'Cacao' is another important Quechua word, especially after a long day up on the mountain. Our cook isn't the best, but this is where they invented chocolate. He does it with scalded whole milk and nutmeg, no sugar." She smacked her lips. "It gets cold up on the mountain." She gestured to a canteen on the dashboard. "Try some."
"Give me a chance to get cold first. What can you tell me about the site?"
Daf frowned, guiding the truck around a farm wagon laden with produce. "Logistics is the big problem. We've got work under way on a class-one road, and we're going to be starting on the rail yard as soon as we can get heavy equipment up to the site. The geosurveys are in. There's no significant ground movement, and the tremors are small enough to be manageable—as long as they don't get any bigger." She paused. "I'm not a geological engineer, my specialty is carbon fiber, but it seems to me that this might not be the best site for the base tower. We've got major active volcanoes within forty kilometers on every side, and Cayambe itself blew up just three hundred years ago. That's not long enough that we can really call it dormant."
"Where would you put the tower?"
"In Africa, Mount Kenya." Her tone showed she'd considered the question already. "It's been quiet three million years, and the ground geology is better. It's close to Nairobi, which can provide better support than Quito, in my opinion, even discounting the volcanism."
"And without the risk of being ambushed by a trigger-happy coca farmers." Abrahim nodded. "I agree with you, but there are deeper considerations."
"Like what?"
Abrahim paused, choosing his words carefully. "If we want to get this project built, it's essential we have the support of the North American public. That isn't right, but it is the way the world works. The equator doesn't run through NorAm, so we simply can't build it there. With a little coaxing they'll get behind a sky cable built in SouthAm, because at least that's in their backyard. Most of the NorAm public see Africa as a great rival. If we build it in Africa, we'll get no support there. If we get no support in NorAm, Secretary-General Crewe won't get reelected. If he doesn't get reelected, this project won't get finished."
"If Cayambe erupts it won't get finished either." Daffodil Brady pursed her lips. She started to say something, then stopped. After a moment she said something else. "All right, politics aren't my job. The area looks acceptable, given that the volcano doesn't go off. We've got an idea of how we want to set up the build site." She pointed at a file folder on the dashboard. "My preliminary layout is there, along with an assessment of tasks."
"Good." Abrahim took the package and leafed through it. It wasn't a polished report, just a collection of working documents and scribbled notes. That made it harder to read, but he preferred to see the raw data before it had been massaged into a presentation. It often contained truths that didn't make it into the final draft. He nodded approvingly. Daf Brady's work was thorough and well put together even at this early stage. He leafed through the section about infrastructure, noted a problem. "We're going to need to put in a high-tension line and a substation. That's going to have to go all the way back to Quito. Cayambe only has forty-kilovolt service."
"Actually, I had an idea about that," Daf said.
"Oh? Tell me."
"We put in our own power plant. It'll be cheaper in the long run, and we'll be independent of the SouthAm grid."
"Cheaper? It'll take us ten years just to get the permits, and we've got no easy source of water." He pointed to the looming white bulk of Mount Cayambe. "Running a line seems a lot easier to me."
"Not geothermal, solar." She held up a hand before he could object. "I know the usual arguments, but we are in a unique environment here. We're right on the equator, above most of the atmosphere. If we put it up on the peak we'll have better than three hundred cloud-free days in a year. You can't get more solar flux anywhere on the planet."
"There's still no easy water source."
"You're thinking of solar steam generation. I'm talking about direct photovoltaic conversion."
Abrahim raised an eyebrow. "The cost . . ."
"Won't be a factor. There's a company I've been following, they make photocell sheet out of semiconductor plastic. They can give you acres of it for pennies a square meter. Twelve percent conversion efficiency."
"And we'll still need to put in power lines for the cloudy days."
"We'll need to put in the power lines to sell the power we generate. We could pay for this thing just selling the power."
"I've worked with plastic solar cells before, they don't stand up to weather well." He saw the disappointment in her face at his dismissal, and modified it. "Look, do the detailed math on it for me, will you? You're right that we're going to need a lot of power to get this thing built, and a lot more once we start sending payloads up the Cable. It's worth a look."
"I've got a question for you, actually, regarding the math on this project." Daf's voice was cautious.
"Yes?"
"The best aluminum refineries here on Earth use ten kilowatt-hours of power for every kilogram of aluminum they put out. It's also going to take ten kilowatt-hours of energy to get a kilogram of anything up the Cable to geostationary orbit."
"And so . . ."
"And so it takes two kilograms of alumina to make one kilo of aluminum. That's twenty kilowatt-hours of energy just to get it up-orbit. Even given that the power cost for on-orbit smelting is zero, this just doesn't make economic sense."
"Except we can deliver it anywhere in the world when we deorbit it. That twenty kilowatts includes worldwide transportation."
Hmmm. "Which wouldn't amount to ten kilowatts per kilogram, no matter where we sent it. Even if it did, we'd just be where we started, in terms of production costs, except with this huge orbital infrastructure inserted into the middle. Aluminum refining isn't rocket science, or at least it shouldn't be. I've run the numbers in some detail, and under the most optimistic assumptions I can make this is barely a break-even project. Factor in the technological risk . . ." She shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of the Cable, I love the concept, and for a carbon-fiber structural engineer, let's just say that this will make my career. I just don't understand why International Metals is doing this, or UNISE."
Abrahim nodded slowly. It's a pity she can't be told the real reason. Ark remained a closely held secret. "IM is doing this because UNISE is covering their capital costs. They get an orbital refinery for free, so all they have to pay is that twenty-kilowatt-hour boost fare. It's a win-win situation for them."
"And for UNISE?"
"For us, we get a high-capacity railway to space. Their usage pays for all the maintenance and ongoing operational costs. We get to piggyback on that essentially for free."
"For free, after we pay the ten-billion-euro capital cost. That doesn't sound like win-win for us."
"We're the government. We don't have to win; our role is to invest in primary research and new capacities."
Daf nodded, absorbing that. "I also saw some International Metals documents that talked about shipping bauxite directly into orbit, rather than extracting the alumina on the ground first. That's even less efficient; you're sending the iron ore fraction into space for no good reason. Granted you could get the steel out as a by-product, but there's no way it would be cost-competitive with a ground-based refinery."
Abrahim looked at her. She was concentrated on driving, seemingly unaware of the impact her questions were having. She's very close to unraveling the whole cover story.
Daf was still talking. "I've heard a rumor that the secretary-general wants to build a colony ship. If that were true I could see a reason for all that steel going up the Cable."
Her voice was musing, conversational, but Abrahim felt adrenaline surge through his system. She has all the pieces she needs to put the puzzle together. That probably wouldn't be a problem with a UNISE engineer committed to getting the Cable up. But if she's so close so soon, other people will not be far behind, and not all of them will want us to succeed. "Right now all the options are on the table," he said, trying to keep his tone casual. "I can't say if the secretary-general has a colony ship in mind." Which is true in that I can't say anything about the Ark project. I'm learning to speak like a politician. "But any on-orbit infrastructure we want to build is going to take materials in orbit. We ship up bauxite and get back not just steel and aluminum to use up there, but oxygen as well, which we'll recover from the smelting process. This cable is half-experimental; the whole project is. We're going to wind up using it in ways we can't even imagine yet." He watched at the window in silence for a minute as the looming white peak of Mount Cayambe grew larger. Change the subject. "Talk to me about carbon fiber. What's the biggest risk we're going to face?"
Daf began to talk about her specialty, distracted for the moment from the economic realities of the Cable project. Abrahim listened with interest as she went on enthusiastically about the tremendous material properties of long-fiber nanofilament. It was important information, but he couldn't still the little voice in the back of his mind. Daf had nearly figured out the secret behind the sky cable, and if she had others would soon. This is all going to become public before were ready, and if that happens the Ark will never get built.
As the truck took the grade up the mountain the main cone of Mount Cayambe loomed so high in the darkening sky that it seemed it must already reach all the way to space. The farms that surrounded the town crowded close to the volcano's skirts, climbing up the lower slopes to cling there at improbable angles. Every square foot possible was under cultivation, taking advantage of the rich volcanic soil and the twelve-month growing season. The road grew steeper and narrowed as they approached the mountain, changing from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Their progress slowed as Daf maneuvered the truck around potholes, pedestrians and a small herd of llamas being shepherded by a pair of young boys. They climbed past the highest fields and onto a track so twisting and rock-strewn it would have challenged a mountain goat. The sun was slipping below the horizon by the time they reached their destination. Cayambe base camp was a collection of inflatable shelters, hidden from the constant wind in a small valley on the mountain's southeastern flank. A crude helipad had been hacked out of the rocky valley floor, its corners marked by flashing red strobes in the twilight. Farther up the hillside an array of solar sheets glinted darkly, thick cables running down from them to power the camp. A pair of heavy walkers were parked by the main structure, awkward mechanical camels resting with their legs folded. Abrahim looked around at the rugged terrain. Movement past the base camp would have to be by walker, or on foot. All this effort to save just five kilometers of tower height. Building at sea level had been one of the options in the site search, but gaining those first five kilometers avoided most of the lower atmosphere and saved a significant amount of the construction cost. Everything is a compromise. A third walker heaved itself over the crest at the upper end of the valley and lumbered toward them. Daf pointed.
"That'll be Eric. We might as well go down to dinner and meet him there."
At the mention of dinner Abrahim realized he hadn't eaten since his plane lifted out from La Guardia. As they turned to go down there was a deep thud, felt more than heard, and the ground jolted hard enough to make him stagger.
"Just a tremor," Daf answered the unspoken question on his face. "Nothing to worry about."
Abrahim nodded. "Everything is a compromise." He paused and looked up to where Smithson's walker was still making its way down the slope, its steady gait unaffected by the bump. "I just hope we're making the right ones."
Josh Crewe met Janice Jansky over lunch on the top floor of the UN building in his private dining room. His predecessor had installed the room and a personal chef to go with it. Crewe didn't like the elitism that implied and preferred to eat in the general cafeteria. But this needs more privacy than that would allow. Jansky had brought her newly opened file on Norman Bissell. They talked over inconsequentialities over the curry, and when they were done she pushed the dishes aside and laid a folder on the table.
"It's all there." She patted it. "Everything is public-source. We did some interviews to fill in details."
Crewe nodded and flipped the document open. "Good." He scanned it briefly, riffling through the pages. We can transform a man's life into an open book, but it's what's not written here that may be most important. "Give me the highlights."
Jansky pushed her chair back from the table. "Bissell himself was originally a fundamentalist Mormon, born to a farm family in Plentiful, Utah, seventeenth of thirty-eight children. He joined a Mennonite sect in—"
Crewe looked up. "Did you say thirty-eight children?"
"That's correct. The group in Plentiful is polygamous; his father had nine wives. That's why Bissell left. He was the ninth son, so he didn't have much hope of inheriting land or getting married by staying at home."
"Explain."
"Polygamous groups work by sending the young men away and keeping the young women in the community to become brides for the elder landowners. Somewhere between sixteen and eighteen a woman's father declares her marriageable, at which point the Church will assign her to a husband. It's called 'placement.' "
"I see. Go on."
"He left at seventeen and worked as a carpenter's apprentice building houses. He joined a Mennonite sect in South Dakota, age nineteen, by marrying Bridget Klassen. He became a bishop at twenty and was evidently passionate about converting outsiders to the faith. That put him at some odds with the Mennonites—they aren't big on converting other people—but he was evidently well liked in the community, at least at first. He stayed there four years, then left."
"Why?"
"He was shunned, cast out. The Mennonites refused to discuss why. We spoke to his former wife, and all she would say is that it was difficult for outsiders to truly live their faith. These are horse-and-buggy Mennonites, no power, no datagrid, no fuel cells, hand-pumped wells for water, hand labor for building and farming. It would be hard to adapt for anyone not raised in that culture. They had no children."
Crewe raised an eyebrow. "So why did he go there in the first place?"
"You'd have to ask him." Jansky shrugged. "If you want my guess . . . Mennonite teenagers sometimes go out and live in the wider world before they settle down, as a part of what they call rumspringa, running around. That's part of their culture too. If he met this girl during her rumspringa, it wouldn't seem too big a jump from his own background, raised in a strictly religious farming community. He didn't stray too far from home." She smiled. "And of course he was in love."
Crewe nodded, pursing his lips. "But then when he has to give up all the pleasures of the modern world it's harder than he thought it would be."
"That's my read. He worked as an assistant to a cabinetmaker with the Mennonites, building on his carpentry experience. According to them he was good at the trade, he had a talent for woodworking. After he left them he tried to start his own handmade furniture shop, but it failed. He drops off the radar after that, nobody seems to know where he went or what he did. The next place we see him is a year later in Alabama. He's got a little church and his own congregation, and he's preaching what's now the Believer creed, although at the time he called it the Baptist Church of Believers."
"Which is?"
"A blend of Mormon fundamentalism, Mennonite simplicity and Baptist evangelicalism. The most radical stands the Believers take are for polygamy and against technology, but in reality those elements aren't strong in the Believer Church. They preach it, but most don't practice it."
"Why not?"
"They couldn't. It's a mass, evangelical movement. No mass movement in our civilization is going to turn its back on technology in any real sense; it's too powerful a force in our world."
Crewe nodded his head. "And polygamy?"
"Polygamy is official Believer doctrine, and it's a big driving force behind the Church's growth."
"How does that work?"
"Church doctrine is that all marriages must be approved by the Church. It also holds that good Believers evangelize, go out and spread the word and win converts. If you bring in a lot of new members to the Church you get rewarded with the Church's blessing for more wives." Jansky chuckled dryly. "Evidently that's a powerful motivator for ambitious young men. In six years he's gone from nothing to over ten million Believers, with a hard core of probably a million who believe he's literally speaking for God, and maybe as many as a hundred million who wouldn't call themselves Believers per se, but would certainly take seriously anything he said."
"And why would the women go along with this?"
"For the most part they don't. Actual polygamy is limited to a very small percentage of Believers, mostly high up in the Church hierarchy. For everyone else it's more of a goal than a way of life. The fundamentalist Mormon groups make it work because they're small and very tight-knit, so young women have a lot of social pressure to do what they're told. In the great, big, wild world . . ." Jansky shrugged. "Getting Church approval to marry two women is one thing, convincing two women to marry you is something else."
"This small percentage includes Bissell himself, I imagine."
Jansky nodded. "He's still legally married to Bridget Klassen; the Mennonites don't recognize divorce and he never filed for one. He's had a string of lovers, but since founding the Church he's settled down. He has two wives—not legal marriages, of course, but recognized by the Church."
"The most important question is, what's making them so successful?"
"It's a cult, nothing more or less, just a very effective one. A cult is really an emotional pyramid scheme. People are sucked at the bottom with the offer of social support and a ready-made community. That's an attractive proposition nowadays. The future is uncertain and people feel scared and alone. Once you're in, you're kept in by the chance of advancing to the next level, which offers more power and privilege. Of course, most people don't advance to the next level; it's their effort and labor that serve to give the next level the very power and privilege they covet. The polygamy angle serves to motivate young single men to go out and sell the product, but the product itself is a sense of belonging and reassurance. I doubt Bissell himself would describe it that way, but that's what it amounts to. If you Believe then the future will get better."
"Which is why he's had such success in NorAm." Crewe looked away, contemplating. "There's despair enough to go around on this continent."
"Mostly in NorAm. He's got some traction in Europe, nothing serious in Africa, yet, and nothing at all anywhere else."
"Not yet. Right now the standard of living is still improving for most of the world, but that's not going to last. He's built this in four years, from nothing. He's put himself in direct opposition to us and in a position where we can't simply ignore him. What do you have on his organization?"
"He's at the top, and below him is the Elder Council. They take care of the practical running and organization of the Church. He appoints them from the bishops, who are the next level down and run districts, which vary in size. Below that it gets a little fuzzy. Districts have their own Elder Councils, and individual congregations are run by committees. It's a very populist structure. Open at the bottom, closed at the top."
"Can we penetrate it at the top?"
"Covertly? It would be difficult. And illegal, unless there's a crime I should know about?"
"No. No crime." Crewe picked up the folder and stood up. "Keep on this, please, Janice."
"I've done as much as I can without at least due cause to suspect a crime. You're stepping close to the line yourself here, Josh, asking me to investigate a private citizen. Interpol isn't the right tool for this."
"Norman Bissell has power and the ambition to have more. He started out attacking the Cable project. Since we started building he's got a loud minority of NorAm assemblyists to stand up in opposition in the General Assembly, and he's broadened his attacks to take in the whole of the government. He's gaining adherents in the public, and the politicians are sensing which way the wind is blowing. He has the leverage to do a lot of damage, and I believe he's starting to think of entering politics directly. He claims to speak for God, and I think he believes that himself. He's dangerous."
"I think you're probably right, but I still don't have anything to justify an investigation."
"What can you do, legally?"
"I can look at open sources, gather what's already out there." She laid a hand on Bissell's dossier. "I've already done all that."
"What about doing the same for his organization?"
"How soon do you need it?"
"Let's say thirty days. We'll schedule a meeting of the executive council, maybe get Michaud from the Aerospace Consortium in on it as well. Bissell's major problem seems to be the Cable project, so he has an interest."
Jansky nodded. "I'll see what I can get."
The blackout went on at ten p.m., and decent citizens in New York made it a point to be in bed by then. By that measure the Believers were not decent citizens, their rally had begun at sundown, and it would last until sunrise. Harmon Michaud's plane had been delayed getting into La Guardia, and when his car finally emerged from the Midtown Tunnel the streets thronged with Believers. Despite the hour they didn't seem dangerous. They were all well dressed, well scrubbed, generally urban middle class, and the streets were lit up with dozens of portable floodlamps, power cables snaking through the streets to trailer-mounted fuel cells, venting steam. Michaud raised his eyes at that. This rally must be costing them a fortune. The easy route to UN headquarters was blocked, and so his chauffeur threaded them carefully through the jammed streets trying to find an alternate route. The Believers were in a state of high arousal, carrying lit torches and chanting prayers or singing songs. Animated peelsigns had been slapped up on every horizontal surface, alive with glowing messages. With Faith You Will Live Forever! He Is Risen! The Blood of the Lamb Shall Be Spilled in Resurrection! The Believers didn't seem dangerous, but Harmon was uneasy. He knew how fast a crowd could become a mob, especially when emotions were running high. If that happened the last place he wanted to be was caught in a limousine, an obvious outsider and an obvious target. With sudden decisiveness he pushed the intercom button to talk to the driver.
"Pull over here, I'll walk the rest of the way. Bring the car around when you can."
"As you wish, sir."
Michaud climbed out into the warmth of a midsummer night and made his way north.
"It's a beautiful night, brother." The speaker was a large man with a large smile on his face. He offered his hand to Michaud. Michaud shook it, somewhat amused. "His spirit is with us. Tonight we have the power." The man's voice was eager, enthusiastic, his grip strong on Michaud's hand.
Michaud nodded. "His power is with us," he agreed. He went on his way before the man could engage in further conversation. He proved to be only the first of many; it seemed to be expected among the Believers to greet complete strangers as if they were long-lost friends. He was called brother, was invited to join with groups singing, or praying, or listening to inspirational speakers preaching from improvised pulpits set up in the street. Fireworks burst overhead, their reports echoing among the office towers, and long thin streamers drifted down from them, colorful snakes undulating in the bright light of the full moon. The streamers fragmented as they fell, until they were rain of confetti-like strips a few inches long. He picked one up and looked at it, found an inscription. Rejoice! Rejoice! He Is Coming in His Glory! Another, more ominously, said Rise up Ye Believers and Smite Down the Enemies of the Lord! He looked around at the crowd. The Believers seemed an unlikely group to riot, but they thronged in tens of thousands and any call to action seemed dangerous.
Moving through the rally was an unsettling experience, but at the same time exhilarating. Michaud had lived a long time in circles of power that prevented him from having to mix with street crowds. Normally his authority sped him through airports and checkpoints, at public events he enjoyed VIP seating, and he traveled in private aircraft. He had intended to walk the few blocks to UN both to save time and because of his fear of standing out as a target. Once among the Believers he found himself irresistibly drawn deeper into the gathering. He wound up walking away from the UN, toward Times Square, where the True Prophet was going to address the faithful at midnight.
"Be one with the Prophet! Be one with the Prophet, right here!" The voice lacked the semi-rapture of a Believer; it was hard-edged, huckstering. A fat man stood behind a wheeled booth laden with images of Jesus Christ and the True Prophet. Holograms showed moving images of the Transformation and the Resurrection, or the Prophet delivering a sermon in full three-dimensional color. "Hey buddy." The voice was directed at him. "Show your faith, be one with the Prophet." Michaud looked around, noticed that most of the Believers were wearing holographic medallions or bracelets. He went over to the booth.
"How much for one of these?" He picked up a bracelet, protective coloration.
"Twenty euros."
"That's steep."
"Take or leave it, buddy, I'm almost sold out."
Michaud looked around. A middle-aged couple with their teenage daughter had already formed a line behind him. "I'll take two," he said. He picked a pair of bracelets, one with Christ, one with the Prophet, and thumbed for the charge.
"You won't be sorry, buddy, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience." The huckster was already moving to serve the couple and Michaud walked on, slipping on his bracelets. The crowd thickened as he got closer to Times Square, with more of New York's ever-eager entrepreneurs hawking their wares from sidewalk stalls and pushcarts. The crowd's mood grew almost euphoric as he moved toward the center. Some families had brought their children, many had brought blankets or lawn chairs and had set themselves up little squares of territory in what they judged to be an advantageous place. There were a few police circulating in the crowd, including some on horseback, but they seemed relaxed. They too had judged it an unlikely crowd to riot.
"He is coming, brother, He is coming." A well-dressed man clapped him on the shoulder, full of cheery enthusiasm.
"Amen." Michaud tried to put enthusiasm into his voice, even though he felt oddly uncomfortable. There was no reason he shouldn't be on the street, no reason he shouldn't watch the rally. It was a public gathering, after all. Nevertheless he felt like an impostor, an outsider whose impersonating ruse might be detected at any moment. He was not one of the Believers, and in fact he represented all that they opposed. I'm late for my meeting, if I had any sense I'd go to it. He couldn't deny the reasonableness of the thought, but he didn't change his direction. Instead he took out his phone and called Josh Crewe on his private line.
"Crewe."
"It's Michaud. I'm held up by this demonstration. Better to start without me."
"Do you want me to send an escort?" The tone in Crewe's voice was not quite concern; that might be taken as an insult to a man as powerful as Harmon Michaud. Nevertheless his readiness to take action on Michaud's behalf was clear. The Believers were just citizens, but their leader had declared himself an enemy of the secretary-general, and by extension of the Aerospace Consortium. Michaud felt that hostility even though nobody in the crowd could know who he really was, and it was clear that Crewe felt it too.
"No. No, I'll be fine. My car couldn't get through, I'm coming on foot. I'll be there shortly." He disconnected and walked on. Michaud strode ahead. They aren't actually dangerous. The True Prophet was a man of God, after all, though he preached the dissolution of the General Assembly and a return to religious basics. The Believers were strongly against technology, a position that they somehow found not at all at odds with the demand that the foremost political priority had to be solving the energy crisis. He could learn a lot here, walking among his adversaries. It was not in Harmon Michaud's character to dirty his hands with such things. He was a power broker, the eminence grise behind the aerospace industry, a man who other men feared without even knowing his name. Chance had made him a spy of sorts in the house of his enemies. There was something heady about the sudden switch in roles, and he felt alive, charged with adrenaline as he hadn't been in years.
Another volley of fireworks boomed overhead, and he looked up to see the word BELIEVE picked out in sparkles and slowly descending toward him. The sparkles exploded, and BELIEVE vanished, the letters replaced with larger, more diffuse ones that spelled S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E. The S-A and C-E were dimmer than the other letters for some reason. He watched the word fall and fade. There were more bursters in the volley, and more streamers floated down, breaking up into individual message slips as they dropped to join those already littering the sidewalk. Something tickled his neck and he fished out a slip that had fallen down his collar. It read simply You Are Chosen. He looked up and found himself on the outskirts of a small crowd gathered around a man preaching from atop a box.
". . . and I tell you, brethren, He is coming, and I tell you, brethren, He is the Lord, and He is angry with this world!" The man stopped and swept his gaze across the crowd. For an instant his eyes met Michaud's, and Harmon felt himself transfixed, as though the man were looking into his soul. "He is angry with the waste, He is angry with the sinners, He is angry with those who challenge His power in their arrogance! And He will smite them in His mighty wrath, He will strike them down and He will consign their souls to burn in eternal hell! Do you hear me, brethren!?"
"Amen, brother!" chorused the crowd.
"DO YOU HEAR ME, BRETHREN!?"
"AMEN, BROTHER!" The shouts echoed from the buildings, momentarily drowning out the constant chatter of the larger crowd. The energy was contagious, and Michaud had to suppress the urge to scream amen with them. He felt an irrational surge of anger at those who might oppose the righteousness of this group. Some still cool part of his brain smirked at himself. I'm the one they're talking about, I am the Prince of Sinners, the evil God of technological capitalism. Emotion was not thought; it would be good to remember that.
He moved on, past another huckster selling hot sausages. Despite various wayside distractions there was a definite current to the crowd as people moved steadily in toward Times Square, where the main event would take place. The crowd density grew in the darkened streets, faces made strange by the glare of the floodlamps. More fireworks boomed overhead, and he felt his pulse quicken. He passed a side street blocked off by police cruisers, red and blue lights flickering. Beyond the cruisers he saw cops in what might have been riot gear. The sight was at once relieving and worrisome—relieving because it showed the authorities were ready to deal with problems, worrisome because it showed they took the possibility of problems seriously. For a moment he considered heading back, but something drew him forward and the unease passed. A few blocks farther on, something was different, and it took him a while to realize that the streetlights were on. The city was making concessions to the demonstration—probably a wise precaution from a safety standpoint, but a bad precedent to set. It was not a good idea to give a group like the Believers the idea that they had power to force their will upon any level of government. He passed a couple more side streets blocked off with police troops held in readiness behind the barriers, and then he was forced to slow his pace as the crowd compacted into Times Square itself. At the far end a platform had been set up, with enclosed tents behind it. Floodlights lit the stage, illuminating a forty-foot hologram of Christ dangling from the cross, bleeding from violated wrists. The image's face was full of the death rapture as it twisted against its torture, and the breeze rippled the holographic film to lend it a ghostly unreality.
The night was warm and humid, and Michaud found himself sweating. He moved forward again and found himself a face-to-face with a young woman in a white hooded robe.
"Have you been saved?" She had dark hair, and impossibly huge eyes that locked on to his and drew him in.
His instinct was to say yes, to dodge her as he had dodged the rest of the brethren throughout his exploration. Somehow that instinct never made it to the surface.
"No . . . No, I haven't . . ." Michaud was uncertain.
The girl reached out and took his hand. "Come with me." Her touch was electric, and Michaud found himself suddenly unable to think. He followed her unquestioningly, being led by the hand toward the floodlit stage. As he went he noticed other figures in white robes moving through the crowd. She led him around behind one of the tents, and through a flap. The inside was lighted, and he could see a fuel cell and tanks in one corner. A table had been set up with a row of computers, and power cables snaked across the floor to the fuel cell. Unlike the affable chaos of the crowd outside, the people in the tent worked with serious purpose, intent on the thousand operational minutiae necessary to stage the rally.
"Are you nervous?" the girl asked him.
"I'm . . . " Harmon found himself unsure what to say. In the light he could see that she was heartbreakingly beautiful. I'm married, I love my wife. A distant part of his brain tried to push the words past his lips, as though that would break the spell he found himself under, but his lips wouldn't move.
"Don't worry, everybody is at first." She smiled at him. "I'm Holly, I'm a Virgin." He could hear her put the capital on Virgin the way that the secretary-general put the capital on Cable.
"Don't worry about anything," she went on. "The True Prophet is wonderful. You'll be saved by him, it's a tremendous privilege." Michaud could see the rapture in her face when she spoke of the True Prophet. "Brother Michael will take care of you."
She led him to the end of a line of six other awkward-looking people, presumably other candidates for salvation. "I'll be back in a while." She squeezed his hand and went back through the tent flap into the crowd.
Brother Michael was a man of about twenty-five, with shoulder-length blond hair and intense blue eyes. He too wore a white robe, and he was entering people's names into one of the computers. The line moved quickly, and then he was asking Harmon for his name. He hesitated, then gave his first and middle names, Harmon Bernard, and let brother Michael think that Bernard was his last name.
"Go through there and wait," Michael said, pointing to a flap leading to another section of the tent, where he had sent the others. "You will be saved."
Michaud went through, wondering what he was getting himself into. He considered just leaving but didn't. I may never get another chance to meet the True Prophet. Some part of his mind realized that that wasn't important, that if it were necessary that the Aerospace Consortium make contact with the True Prophet, he had access to people who were trained in intelligence and infiltration work, as he was not. At the same time, he realized that being saved would be a very public spectacle on the stage in the full glare of the floodlights, and almost certainly on widecast media. It wouldn't do for a man in his position to be seen in such circumstances, the repercussions would be far-reaching. He fought off the fog in his head and was about to leave the tent, when he saw the other initiates being dressed in hooded robes like the senior faithful, only green and not white. The hoods were large, leaving the face inside in shadow. A matronly woman with her own white hood thrown back touched him on the shoulder and offered him a green cloak. Wordlessly he put his arms into the sleeves and shrugged it on, pulling the hood up and over his head. He had a vague sense that events were proceeding beyond his control, but he did not consider that his motivation for staying might really be the hope of seeing Holly again, pleasing her with his transformation, impressing her with the status that would accrue in her eyes if he was saved by the True Prophet. Surely I'm too old to be led into this by a girl. But he wasn't.
There followed a period of waiting. For the most part the other initiates stood silently, and he stood with them. There was a large sound and light board hooked up to another computer on a raised platform, arranged so that the operator could see the stage. After a while the presentation began, not with the True Prophet, but with a lesser preacher. The stacked speakers on either side of the stage were facing in the other direction, and so, though the volume was loud, Michaud could not make out the words clearly. From the wild responses of the crowd, the shouted echoes of "Amen!" and "Praise the Lord!," he could tell they were being whipped into a frenzy. Classic mob psychology, put them into an emotional state, a receptive state, build their anticipation and then introduce their master. Harness the crowd's power and use it to take control of them. It was nothing that Hitler hadn't done, nothing in fact that any talented demagogue didn't do, or even any half-decent politician—Joshua Crewe, just for example. The principles were well understood, but Michaud still found himself fascinated by the process being demonstrated so masterfully here.
And what am I doing here? He still couldn't properly answer that question. He felt giddy, energized, nervous in a way that he hadn't felt in years, perhaps a way that he had never felt. Another volley of fireworks burst overhead, invisible through the tent roof, but close enough that he felt their concussion as much as heard it. The volleys were going up more frequently, punctuating the words of the speaker as the time for the True Prophet's appearance grew closer. The operator at his raised console was whispering into a headset microphone, controlling the spectacle with the precision of a general orchestrating a battle. Michaud knew that his own role in the show would be as a prop, a living puppet to dance his way into enlightenment at the command of the Prophet in order to prove the Master's omnipotence to the crowd. I should leave now. The voice in the back of his brain was insistent, but somehow he didn't want to obey it. He looked around to see if Holly had returned, but he didn't see her. Outside there was a sudden lull in the performance, silence from a crowd that had been madly cheering a second ago. The silence stretched out, and then the new voice rolled out over Times Square, deep, powerful, confident in its control. The True Prophet had taken the stage.
Again Michaud couldn't make out the words, but he felt their impact, felt a nameless thrill building up in him as they rolled over the crowd. They're doing something with the sound system, infrasonics to create an emotional response. He knew it had to be true, because his own response was completely divorced from any content the words might have, but the knowledge did not lessen the result. He found himself almost childishly eager to get onstage, to be in the presence of this great man face-to-face, to receive his benediction. Then he was being led onto the platform with the other initiates. Four red-robed figures stood guard at the corners—inquisitors, he'd heard someone call them—and he saw the True Prophet for the first time, intense blue eyes and long hair, his gaze skewering Michaud before it moved on to the other initiates. Hands behind him removed his hood, and he found himself unable to protest though he knew that his image was being widecast, that his anonymity had been compromised. And then the Prophet was standing before him, and a hand on his shoulder urged him to kneel as the other initiates were, and he did so. The Prophet touched him then, his palm on Michaud's forehead, and his touch seemed to burn its way into his flesh. For the brief moment he felt a powerful connection to the man, and through him to the entire universe.
"Believe in the Faith!" the Prophet commanded, and Michaud believed. The experience was rapture, purer than love, more powerful than sex. When the contact was broken he yearned for nothing more than the man's touch again, but the moment was gone and the Prophet moved on to the next initiate in line, and the next and the next, and then returned to his speech.
"My brethren!" The Prophet raised his arms, arching his back as if to open himself to heaven. "You see here before you the newest lambs of our flock. You see those who have been called to the way of Christ, our father. You see those who have chosen to deny themselves to those who defy the word of God." The Prophet brought his arms down, locking his gaze on the crowd. "This city, this nation, this world lives in darkness. Look around you! Those who claim to rule you cannot even bring light to your lives. They talk, they argue, they plead for patience, but they are powerless in the face of global collapse. They take your money and send it to the godless masses, that they may enjoy the wealth that you have earned. Look at me!" Instinctively, reflexively Michaud moved, as though the command to look was a command to prostrate himself, and he felt the other initiates do the same beside him. "I am the voice of God, and I alone speak for you." The Prophet was yelling now, his voice thundering through the square. "God has told me He will strike down the Tower of Babel, and so I prophesy to you. Listen to me! I alone can bring light into your lives. For God has said, 'I shall strike down all those who defy me, for I know the heart of every man, and I am coming in my holy wrath to smite the enemies of the Word.' " He paused, as if inviting anyone to challenge him. "God has spoken to me again, God has directed me to lead His legions on this earth. God has ordered me to be His shield, God has commanded me to be His sword, and I bow in obedience to the will of God." His words grew to a crescendo, his eyes sweeping the crowd with his piercing gaze. "And believe me, my brethren, God will wield me without mercy. I shall strike terror into the hearts of those who oppose His mighty power! I shall slay His enemies in the certain knowledge of the righteousness of His cause." The Prophet's words shook the city, and Michaud shook with emotion at their power. The Prophet advanced to the edge of the stage. "And you, my children, you shall be my sword as I am God's sword! You shall be the cutting edge of a new world order. You will show no mercy to the unbelievers, as God shows no mercy to those who would deny Him. You shall rise up against those will oppress you, you shall overthrow those who deny you the birthright that was your parents. You will unshackle yourselves from the bondage of a government which counts you no better than those who do not know God." The Prophet raised his fist in the air, hitting the words hard. "You are the Chosen, and your will, my will, God's will, shall be done!"
The Prophet brought his fist down, and silence crashed down on the crowd, the vast audience staring up at him spellbound, as enraptured as Michaud himself was. For a long moment the silence stretched out, and then there were shouts from the edge of the square. Michaud raised his head to see their source, saw a ripple of commotion spread through the crowd. More shouts rose, and then a gunshot split the night. Galvanized, he leapt to his feet. The Prophet was speaking again, screaming into the microphone with wild eyes. "Smite them! Smite the enemies of our Lord! Strike them down . . ."
There was a hand on Michaud's shoulder, and he turned and found himself looking into Holly's eyes. She spoke quickly, her voice low and urgent. "Come with me, we've planned for this."
Wordlessly he followed her. The other new initiates were also coming. She let them down through the tent and behind it, through a barricaded area free of people, through a less thick section of the crowd, to a street at the edge of the square. Ahead of them a phalanx of police in riot gear were moving toward the square. Behind them a volley of shots rang out, and screams of pain and fear rose over the commotion.
"Link arms!" It was a new voice, another woman. Holly moved him, put him in line with the other initiates, put his arm through the arm of the man next to him. He found himself part of a human chain facing the oncoming wedge of ballistic shields. Behind him more bodies were lining up, forming a solid human wall to prevent the police from entering the square. The True Prophet's voice echoed from the buildings. "Resist them, my children! You have the strength of God behind you." A bottle arced over his head, thrown by someone several ranks behind him. It shattered in front of the police, spreading flame. Some of the Believers had come prepared.
Michaud looked around to see if he could spot Holly, but she was gone. The police advanced past the flames, truncheons raised above their shields. Another bottle flew over, but this one failed to ignite when it shattered, spreading just the pungent smell of gasoline. He felt fear and for an instant he considered running, but the crowd was pressed tight behind him and there was nowhere to run. The police line stopped in front of him, close enough that he could have reached out and touched the nearest shield.
"Faith, brother, faith." The man next to him tightened his arm against Michaud's, his voice mixing determination and ecstasy. A six-wheeled armored vehicle growled forward behind the police line. An array of spotlights on its root switched on, the blinding beams dazzling him. He squeezed his eyes shut and averted his face from the glare. Sirens rose in the distance.
"Disperse at once, or we will use force!" The voice was bullhorn-magnified, drowning out the Prophet, and as painful to Michaud's ears as the light was to his eyes.
"Faith!" His neighbor yelled the word with the same kind of rapture that Michaud had been feeling minutes before in the presence of the Prophet. Now he felt only fear and confusion.
"Disperse now, this is your last warning!"
Some of the Believers began singing a song, but seconds later it cut off and in that instant an invisible fist slammed Michaud in the face. He reeled back, suddenly soaked from head to toe. He barely had time to register what had happened when the water cannon hit him again, driving him back against the people behind him and then throwing him bodily to the pavement. Pain burned where exposed flesh was abraded raw. Instinctively he rose to his hands and knees, and a truncheon came down on his shoulder. Bone crunched and pain flared anew, hard and bright, and he went down again. Somebody stepped on him, and then somebody else grabbed him from behind, forced his hands behind his back. Plasticuffs zipped around his wrists, cutting off circulation; another set went around his ankles, immobilizing him, and then he was alone with his pain. He opened his eyes, and ahead of him he could see the police line advancing into the crowd. The armored vehicle ground past, looming huge from his prone position with its water cannon still jetting into pockets of resistance. He watched as the follow-up squad efficiently secured other fallen brethren, leaving them as he was, to be collected when they had the situation under control. He could no longer hear the voice of the Prophet. The square was alive with shouts and screams and the bullhorn commands of advancing police squads.
Reality washed over him, replacing fear as quickly as fear had replaced the rapture of the Prophet's presence. What am I doing here? He was Harmon Michaud, senior director of the Aerospace Consortium. He was supposed to be in a government meeting of the highest level, plotting strategy with the secretary-general to advance the Cable project against the opposition of groups exactly like the one he was part of now. Instead he was lying soaked on dirty pavement, trussed like a hog for slaughter in the robes of an initiate of the Believers, with his shoulder broken, having allowed his face to be widecast receiving salvation from the True Prophet. He groaned, the anticipation of humiliation overshadowing even the pain of his shoulder. He could do nothing but lie there and wait for the police. Suddenly he felt very old and tired. The sounds of the fight intensified, though he could see little, and another volley of gunfire broke loose, automatic this time. The distant sirens grew closer, and he knew he would be lying there for a long time.
He was still lying there when the Believers rallied and broke through the police line, the mob surging forward behind a barrage of Molotov cocktails, swarming over the water-cannon vehicle, setting it on fire. Those cops not overrun turned and fled back to the safety of their barricades. The mob pursued them, screaming for vengeance, coming at Michaud like a living tidal wave as the scattered police ran past him. In sudden terror he tried to roll out of their way, trying to make it to the edge of the street, to the edge of the buildings there where the crush might be less intense. His shoulder crunched with blinding pain every time he turned over, and a dozen lesser hurts assaulted his body as rough pavement dug into his flesh. He ignored them all in his panic, vaguely aware that the other trussed prisoners were doing the same. It was an impossible task; there was not enough time and the mob was coming too fast. They thundered over him like a herd of cattle. The first ones jumped his body, and for an instant he thought he might survive, but those behind the leaders couldn't see him in time to avoid him and feet kicked him, stepped on him, tripped over him. He screamed as his injured shoulder was broken a second time, and the adrenaline was such that he barely felt the ribs shatter when a heavy man who was already falling drove his boot into them.
It took the police until dawn to restore order, but Michaud had been dead for hours by then, his broken body lying in the dirty street in a pool of blood vomited from his internal injuries. His last thought had been of the girl named Holly, but no one would ever know that.
Abrahim Kurtaski's ears popped as his jet descended once again toward Quito. A year ago, having his own jet at his service had seemed the height of privilege; now the twice-weekly journey was more of a chore. Out the window the sunrise was blood-red, the legacy of last month's eruption of Nevada Cumbal, one hundred kilometers north of Cayambe. The pillar of dust and ash had climbed to the stratosphere and forced aircraft to deviate around it, and the plume had already circled the globe. Cumbal had given Abrahim some worry, because the heavy tremors that presaged its eruption had shaken Cayambe as well. For a while he had fretted that perhaps Cayambe would go up instead.
But it hadn't, though Cayambe's seismic instruments had become more active than he'd have liked to see them. He went to the other side of the plane to see if he could spot his mountain. He found it almost at once, not because of his growing familiarity with Andean topography but because the growing spire of the sky-cable base tower made it impossible to miss. The tower climbed for the heavens from its southwestern flank, not one structure but three, set in a triangle four kilometers on a side. Each subtower was a tripodal open latticework of trusses, three hundred meters at the base, the highest almost seven kilometers up now. The trusses were made of wound carbon nanofilament, nitrogen-pressurized to trade the material's tremendous tensile strength for compressive strength. Even the lowest was over five kilometers high now.
He gestured to the flight attendant. "Ask the pilot to take a spin around the tower, if he can."
His request went forward to the cockpit, and Abrahim heard the copilot asking air traffic control for a deviation from their planned approach. A couple of moments later the aircraft banked and swung around. Even from the plane Kurtaski found the base tower impressive, given scale as it outstretched the towering peaks around them. The latticework subtowers stretched down ten thousand feet from their flight altitude, up at least another ten thousand to the point where they disappeared in the cloud deck overhead. They would meet and unify twenty kilometers above to form a tripod, with interties every five kilometers to maximize the strength of the structure where the atmosphere would batter it hardest. Each subtower carried a boost track, a superconducting magnetic levitation carrier system that took cargo climbers full of construction materials to the automated assembly heads at their tops. The heads would build a level, then jack themselves up another ten meters. It took two hours or so for the robots to complete the cycle, and their surefooted grace as they moved around the latticework was something to behold, a carefully coordinated mechanical ballet of construction.
As they banked closer he could just make out multijointed rigger robots moving over the latticework at the first intertie level, building the cross braces that would link the three towers into one. Automation was the only way to achieve the required build rate, and human workers would have had to work in pressure suits. The cost of such specialized labor would have been prohibitively high even for the open-ended budgets of the Cable project.
Abrahim frowned. Not that the project was on schedule at all; far from it. Translating research into reality was proving frustratingly slow. His eye found the rail line snaking away from the base of the tower. Far below, a freight train loaded with prefabricated structural elements inched its way toward the railhead. At full throttle the assembly heads could handle a trainload of nanofilament beams every twenty-four hours, but the steep and winding transandean rail line rarely managed to deliver that many. They'd lost train time to volcanic-ash falls in the highlands, to storm-induced washouts in the coastal jungles and to derailments on the treacherous Nez de Diablo switchback that carried the trains between them. And of course we aren't the only traffic on the line. Daf Brady was right; Kenya would've been a better site.
But Kenya wasn't the site, and rail delays were not even his biggest challenge. Standard carbon nanofiber was sufficient to build the lower levels of the tower, but it was vulnerable to chemical attack by ozone in the upper atmosphere. The UNISE team had devised a method of fluorinating the fibers without destroying the ability of the binder resin to hold them together, but the fluorination process was tricky, and it took time and it took power credits, and the political situation was making it difficult to get enough of either. Josh told me not to worry about the politics, and now I tell other people not to worry about the politics while I fight political battles for resources we can't do without. It was not the role he had envisioned for himself, but it was what he had to do if the project was to have even a chance of success.
The plane banked steeper and for a single terrifying instant Abrahim thought they were going to collide with the structure. The pilot knew his business, though, and while they skimmed close to the red flashing warning lights that studded the latticework, there was no danger of collision. He looked up, his eye again following the towering spires as they reached for the clouds. Even to fail in building this would be to fail attempting greatness. Those words had been true when he'd accepted the project from Josh Crewe, but now that he'd committed his life to it, Abrahim Kurtaski wanted very much to avoid failure. The jet leveled out to continue its descent and the towers vanished behind them. Fifteen minutes later they were on the ground and he was climbing into one of the two UNISE Kamovs that were assigned to the Cable base. He had consulted on the helicopter's automated assembly line back in his Samara days, and he felt a twinge of pride as the pilot spun up the rotors and pulled them into the air. There will again be a day when I am an engineer, when I design things and don't just supervise other designers.
Shortly they were coming in to land at the build site helipad. The primitive base camp Daf Brady had shown him a year before had been transformed into the most advanced construction site in the world. A semiautomated loading gantry was taking bundles of prefabricated structural subassemblies off a long line of flatcars and loading them on to the stream of dedicated haulers that would carry them to the tower bases. Each subassembly was coded with an embedded identification chip that specified its place in the final structure. The control computers in the prebuild shed would read the codes and assign robotic work teams to put them together into structural units, and then each unit would be boosted to the tower-top assembly heads. Eventually the boost tracks would connect to the cable-climber system that would take ten-tonne loads of high-grade bauxite into space in under an hour, though the trip all the way to geostationary orbit would take the better part of a week.
The skids touched down and Abrahim clambered out, instinctively ducking beneath the rotor blades. Just as instinctively he looked up at the soaring north subtower, the closest to the landing pad. He felt awe and frustration in equal measure. We're so far behind schedule. A group of four men with a widecast camera and a zap mic went past to get on the helicopter he'd just vacated; another documentary. The tower project had been a media circus since its inception. The publicity had been helpful at first, but now they were documenting delays, shortfalls and missed schedule dates. The knowledge that the schedule was politically imposed and practically impossible did not remove the stress. An immense heavy hauler rumbled past with its cargo deck loaded high with wound monofilament truss sections. A four-by-four utility truck pulled in from behind it and Daf Brady waved to him from the driver's side. He went over and got in, aware all over again of how lovely she was. It isn't that I didn't remember, it's that memory is not presence. I should find more reasons to come here.
And it wasn't reasonable to even consider a relationship, no matter how many reasons he found to come to the tower site. He shook her hand professionally, and kept his eyes on hers. "So tell me all your problems. What's the biggest obstacle right now?"
She pointed to where the news crew was strapping into the Kamov. "There's a documentary team sticking their cameras in my face every time I turn around."
Abrahim laughed. "I share your frustration, but if that's your biggest problem I'm paying you too much."
A faint tremor shook the ground. Daf pursed her lips. "Our mountain is restless. We're lucky Cumbal has taken the pressure off the system. There are a few other issues. The operation is well tuned right now. We're getting materials from manufacturing at a good pace, and we're getting them up the tower as soon as we get them. We can go faster; we have ample spare handling capacity here on the ground, ample prebuild capacity at the tower bases, and the assembly heads are working at only half-capacity. To take up the slack we need to speed up the pace of delivery from manufacturing, but that would just create a bottleneck at tower base unless we boost our upship tonnage, and that will take more power."
"It all comes down to power." Abrahim sighed.
"It's probably above my level to suggest this . . ." Daf hesitated while she maneuvered the truck around a series of deep ruts gouged out of the hardpack by the heavy haulers. ". . . but if we had our own power plant . . ."
Abrahim nodded. "It would make a difference, I know . . ."
"We could double the amount we upship, more than double it, if we had the power to run the boost tracks at full throttle." There was a suppressed eagerness in the young woman's voice. She believed in the project. She wanted to see it finished.
"Yes, if we had the power available we could do that. You've suggested we put in our own plant, but as you said the system is well tuned right now. Rail capacity would be the bottleneck then, and it would take months, maybe a year to get a plant running anyway."
"Actually, sir . . ." Abrahim winced at the word "sir." Daf went on, oblivious of his reaction. "I've worked the numbers pretty thoroughly. We aren't using the trains we've got as well as we could be, and we've got the handling gear at railhead to boost throughput. I know I can double the efficiency at prebuild. Manufacturing is the real key, but I've spoken to the fab plants and not one of them is running at more than half capacity. If you can get us more trusses faster, I guarantee we'll get them up-tower and installed. If we use a photovoltaic plant we can have it up and running in two months from the word go."
There was a certainty in her voice that went far beyond her years, and Abrahim looked at her with new respect. "Smithson always sends me his best, doesn't he?"
"Of course." Daf Brady took the implied compliment matter-of-factly. "You're the chief engineer, what else would he do?"
She pulled the truck up in front of the field office attached to the north tower's prebuild shed and they got out. The heavy hauler they had been following had run up under the unloading gantry, and automated hydraulic arms were already grabbing sections of truss from its cargo deck and carrying them into the building. Abrahim followed her inside. Inside the office she handed him a hard hat and a set of safety goggles, then took him onto the assembly floor.
The floor was a beehive of activity. Automated arms took the truss sections coming in on the gantry and, with motions both powerful and precise, rotated them into position so that multijointed assembler robots could pin-seal them into a completed subsection. As they watched, the assemblers swung into position like so many mechanical spiders, walking along the extending truss as each new beam section slid into place. Abrahim allowed the oddly compelling display to distract him from his various concerns, caught up in the mechanical dance. He had not designed the system, but he had contributed several key ideas to the team that put it together. The protective gear was a simple formality. In contrast to the mud and dust surrounding the build site, the prebuild shed was almost surgically clean, and humans weren't allowed into the robots' operating area. It took twenty minutes for them to complete the assembly as it grew to extend the length of the shed. Another set of gantry arms at the other end of the building took the completed truss and slid it out to another waiting heavy hauler and on its way to the boost track. Already the assemblers were working on the next subsection.
Abrahim looked at Daf. She had promised she could double the efficiency of this operation but from where he stood it seemed there wasn't enough slack in the operation to achieve such gains. But of course she doesn't intend to make them busier, she intends to make them more efficient. It still seemed an ambitious task.
He chose his words carefully. "Power is the key to manufacturing too. The fab plants are running below capacity because we can't get power credits for them."
"Well, the UN is going to have to make up its mind. We have no hope of getting this thing done on schedule if they won't give us the resources to do it." There was some frustration in Daf's voice. "Thirty meters a day is just ten kilometers a year."
Abrahim smiled paternally. "Politics is like engineering: Everything is a trade-off. The secretary-general would like nothing more than to see this project completed. He's taken considerable political risks to give it the resources it has now."
Daf nodded. "I understand. At the same time he has to understand . . ." She looked him in the eye. ". . . and you have to understand that we will not be able to meet our schedule unless we can increase material flow to the assembly heads. I can show you the math."
"I don't need to see the math." Abrahim turned his gaze back to the busy robots on the build floor. "I know the realities. Besides . . ." He hesitated, but there was no reason not to tell her. "Besides, we still don't know how to fabricate the Cable. It would be a tremendous embarrassment to get the tower finished and have nothing to connect to it."
Daf's reply was cut off by a sudden deep thump, felt more than heard over the whine of hydraulics in the build shed. A distant rumble followed it, and it took a long moment for Kurtaski to realize what it was. Explosion! They traded a glance, then instinctively turned and ran for the door.
Kurtaski's first thought was that one of the high-capacity nitrogen tanks used to pressurize the truss sections had ruptured, but the scene outside seemed completely normal, except that the workers around the tower base were also looking around as if trying to find the source of the detonation. For a long moment he wondered if he had imagined it. There was no expanding cloud of smoke, no shattered metal, no wreckage, nothing, but then there came a sound. It was faint at first and far away, a low-pitched rumbling that grew steadily louder and higher, like the wind noise in an accelerating race plane. He couldn't understand what might be making it. Then a worker yelled, "Run! Eruption!"
He looked up and saw in horror the entire top of Mount Cayambe exploding upward into a boiling mass of black and grey, fountaining red-hot lava in jets hundreds of meters high. Workers were running frantically downhill in a vain attempt to outrun the catastrophe. Abrahim instinctively grabbed Daf's hand and turned to run as well, glancing over his shoulder to see a wall of ash avalanching down the slope toward them. Pyroclastic flow! The ash would be searing hot, and though distance made it seem almost stationary it loomed visibly larger even in the two-second glimpse he took. Pyroclastic flows could move over a hundred kilometers an hour, which gave them . . . he visualized the distance to the peak . . . two minutes, maximum. There was no point in running. We need shelter. Except the base tower complex was an industrial worksite, its buildings made of nothing more substantial than sheet metal, not nearly enough to protect them from the onrushing conflagration. A chunk of rock the size of a truck fell out of the sky and landed on a parked walker, obliterating it and spraying fiery gobbets from its still molten interior like an exploding bomb. Flames rose where they landed, and more rocks began to rain down, most smaller than the first, some even bigger.
And even the smallest is big enough to be lethal. A second glance back showed the ash wall looming closer. With luck they might evade the falling rock, but when the pyroclastic flow hit them, they would die. We need shelter, now.
"Tower coming down!" A worker was yelling and pointing. Abrahim followed his fingers, looked up to see the towering structure swaying, starting to topple. Key support elements had been taken out by the flying boulders. His throat constricted, the pain at seeing his creation destroyed overwhelming for an instant the peril of their situation. All that work. His dream was destroyed. Josh Crewe's political enemies would use this to destroy him, and with it humanity's single opportunity to unshackle its fate from Earth's.
No time to worry about that now. The added danger of falling tower debris seemed insignificant in the disaster unfolding around them. Shelter was the priority, and there was none to be had. The ash flow would scrub away the construction camp's flimsy buildings like a fire hose turned on a sandcastle. He looked around desperately. There! The base tower's leg footings were solid concrete, thirty meters on a side and ten high. They offered no cover overhead, they would still be vulnerable to falling boulders and chunks of tower, but their downslope sides would at least be protection from the direct impact of the scalding ash.
He glanced up to see a jagged array of black carbon-monofilament struts falling toward him seemingly in slow motion. He was still holding Daf's hand, and he hauled her toward the tower footing. It went against every instinct to run toward the looming ash cloud as it thundered toward them, a decision made psychologically harder because everyone else was running the other way. The footing was upslope from their position, two hundred impossible meters of rock-strewn ground away. A boulder slammed down twenty meters in front of them and a fist-size chunk of still glowing rock hit him in the chest, hard enough to knock him down. He lay there for a second, too stunned to even feel pain, and then Daf was pulling him to his feet and they ran again. The ground was shaking now, hard enough to make the rocks underfoot dance, and it became impossible to run properly. Their progress slowed to an awkward, broken half-shuffle. More boulders rained down, intermixed now with chunks of carbon-fiber truss. Above them the onrushing ash cloud enveloped the base of the upslope subtower. They were rapidly running out of time.
It seemed to take forever to reach the dubious protection of the tower base, but they made it before the pyroclastic flow arrived. The main section of destroyed subtower landed first, its impact hard enough to noticeably shake the already rocking ground. The force of the impact drove the wreckage deep into the moist earth, spraying dirt and blotting out the view. Abrahim threw Daf prone behind the heavy concrete support block and threw himself down on top of her. The onrushing ash cloud reached them at the same moment, blotting out the sun as it swept over and around their hiding place, the blasting roar of its passage droning out even the explosive rumble of the eruption. It began to rain gravel and ash hot enough to scorch whatever it touch, and he was overwhelmed with the burning stench of sulfur dioxide. If you can smell it, there's not enough to be lethal. That removed only one of a dozen ways the mountain might yet kill them. A few other souls had been running for the tower footing, and Abrahim looked up to see if he could see them, squinting to keep the ash from his eyes, but he couldn't even see the wall he was pressed up against. The burning dust was agonizing where it touched bare skin, and each breath he drew seemed to be coming from a blast furnace. And then something struck the back of his head, and there was darkness.
* * *
"What in hell was Michaud doing there?" Josh Crewe stood at the front of his executive council, his anger palpable. "He called me and said he was walking the last few blocks. The next thing I know his face is on all the widecasts as this cult's latest member." He directed his gaze at Janice Jansky. "What do you know about this?"
Jansky swiveled her chair to face Crewe. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep as what should have been a routine meeting had turned into a twenty-four-hour emergency session. "I have no idea why he chose to get out of his car, but once he was out he was vulnerable. Whoever put those fireworks together for the Believers put in a few extra ingredients."
Crewe raised his eyebrows. "Explain."
"Those message streamers they dropped from their fireworks were laced with a mood synergizer, Ceranine. If he happened to pick one up to read it he would have absorbed the drug through his skin."
"What would the effect have been?"
"It would have made him excited and suggestible, responsive to the crowd's mood. I would put odds on that being exactly what happened. He picked up a slip out of curiosity. Ceranine works fast but not for long, and while he was under the influence one of their recruiters picked him up."
"Right. You were wondering about a crime, now we have one. Let's pick up the True Prophet and anyone else in his organization we can get for this."
"Wait a second." Jansky held up a hand. "We don't have anything strong enough to make arrests on. This needs some more work."
"More work? You must have traces of the drug in his blood, traces on the streamers."
"No. Ceranine metabolizes very quickly in the body, and breaks down in the presence of oxygen."
"So how do you know they used it?"
"It's all circumstantial, based on the behavior of the crowd and the presence of certain breakdown products in the message slips."
"Are those compounds unique to Ceranine?"
"Normally yes, but not this time. They were clever, they also soaked the strips in a catalytic compound that degrades Ceranine-breakdown products but not Ceranine itself. We can prove the presence of the catalyst, but there's nothing illegal about that. We'll get them in the end, though. I've got a team working on this. Those streamers didn't come from nowhere, and it wasn't a ghost that laced them. We'll get evidence, and we'll get convictions." There was hard determination in her voice.
Crewe nodded. "Do that." He looked around the room. "This is getting out of hand. We have a serious problem with these hard-line fundamentalists here in North America. I've been hoping we'd get ahead of them in our programs and the problem would evaporate, but I can see now that was a mistake. We need a strategy and we need it now."
Thom Pelino finished scribbling a note on his datapad. "I think ignoring them remains the best strategy. Responding tells them that they have power. It will only encourage them."
Jansky shook her head. "These people already have power; they've taken it and they demonstrated that they're willing to use it. It would be a mistake to fail to recognize that reality."
"They represent a fraction of a percent of the people on this planet. We can't let them blackmail us."
She gave him a look. "Neither can we let riots go unchecked."
Crewe raised his hand before the argument could go further. "What about the True Prophet, can we pick him up on general principles?"
Pelino shrugged. "I'd be amazed if his hands were dirty on the Ceranine issue. We'd be courting trouble if we locked him up and couldn't make the charges stick."
Crewe's face darkened. "We need to shut this organization down."
Jansky pursed her lips. "We don't need any Ceranine evidence to take the True Prophet off the street. He was clearly inciting the riot, and we have that on video. We have that on widecast. No one would fault us for picking him up on that basis."
Pelino leaned forward. "What we saw last night would be nothing compared to what the Believers would do if we made a martyr of him."
"What we're seeing with this movement is the start of an avalanche." Crewe paced back and forth at the head of the conference table, then shook his head. "No, we can't pull him in until we have him dead to rights. Does anyone know what started the fighting?"
Jansky dropped a folder on the table. "I have the NYPD preliminary report. So far as we can tell everything was peaceful until someone started an altercation with one of the mounted units. An officer was pulled off his horse and beaten. His partner fired a warning shot and the crowd charged them both." She paused, looking away for moment. "Of course, the official report isn't going to point the finger anywhere but squarely at the Believers. What really happened . . ." She turned her hands palm up. ". . . we'll see if we got it on surveillance video. If not we'll probably never know."
Pelino pulled the folder over in front of him, glanced at it. "It's really irrelevant who started it. The important thing is that we prevent it from happening again." He held up a hand before Jansky could interrupt him. "Not by locking up the True Prophet on a minor charge."
The Interpol chief turned to him. "Incitement to riot isn't a minor charge. A lot of people died last night, Thom."
Pelino shook his head. "It isn't big enough. These people are very good at propaganda, and you know the Prophet's team will take that and run with it. They'll turn him from a prophet into a saint, a crucified saint. We'll be buying ourselves problems we can't even imagine now."
Jansky looked angry. "A hundred thousand people just rioted in midtown New York." She took the file back from Pelino, glanced at it. "Four hundred people are dead, there's at least half a billion euros in property damage. This wasn't an accident; the Believers planned for this to turn into a riot. They drugged people, used infrasonics and God only knows what else to get the crowd pumped up. They came with gas masks and body armor, they used firebombs. They expected to fight, they were organized to fight, and they fought." She stood up and made a gesture to bring the widecast footage of the riot onto the screen. "This was supposed to be a peaceful religious gathering to raise awareness on the energy crisis, and it wasn't. They didn't say a single thing about the blackouts, they spoke about holy war and smiting enemies."
On the screen the churning chaos of the riot replayed itself once more, and Crewe could see the corner near Broadway where Harmon Michaud had died. Harmon had not been a friend, exactly—the realities of high-level politics denied them that kind of relationship—but he had been an ally, and for his own reasons he had shared Crewe's dreams. Crewe felt a chill run down his spine. Dreams come with costs. I didn't think the cost would be blood.
Jansky was still talking. "We cannot allow this to go unanswered, and it must be answered publicly. I don't know what we'll buy if we start breaking this organization up, but if we let this self-styled prophet get away with this . . ." She looked around the room, meeting everyone's gaze. ". . . we're buying ourselves a civil war." She sat down again, and the silence stretched out in the wake of her words.
"Other than incitement to riot, what do we have on the True Prophet?" Crewe asked.
Jansky's fingers made quick symbols in the air, and data flowed across the surface in front of her. "Nothing. He doesn't maintain bank accounts, stays completely off the transaction net, handles everything through flunkies. He's always had a small following; it's only started to snowball in the last six years or so."
Crewe nodded. "Six years ago. That's when people started to get scared about the future." And I know my own election hinged on that very fear. Opportunity and crisis were two sides of the same coin. "How many followers does he have?"
"It's hard to know. There's a small core group of a few hundred that've been with him from the beginning, essentially cultists though they wouldn't use that term themselves. Probably three or four million would identify themselves as belonging to the Church of the Believers, or following the True Prophet. His widecast channel brings in well over ten million people daily, and he's reached a hundred million for his Easter service. As for the amount of support he enjoys, probably half of North America agrees with him in principle on issues like the economy and power distribution, and the role of the UN. Probably more than half. Maybe a third of those would go along with him on religious grounds as well."
Pelino leaned forward. "The fundamental issues are what counts. There's always going to be a minority who will follow some self-appointed messiah. The vast majority are getting on his bandwagon because he tells them what they want to hear. People are scared—they're scared of losing their jobs, they're scared of seeing their families go cold and hungry. The world is changing. NorAm is losing its place. The citizens don't like that; they aren't used to it and they want it to stop. They don't want to hear complicated reasoning, and they don't want show patience. They want things to turn around, immediately and at no cost to them." He spread his arms. "That isn't rational, but that's what people want. We can go after this guy, we can shut down his organization. And then some other messiah will come along and do exactly what the Prophet is doing now. We're not actually going to change anything until we change the underlying reality. The Prophet has his faction in the General Assembly and they will use those votes to win the next election. The back-to-religion movement is going to keep growing until we change the economic fundamentals."
"So what about the fundamentals?" Crewe looked at Ira Roberts, the minister of finance and economics.
Roberts shrugged. "The basic problem is that NorAm industry has lost its leadership position. The continent has become a cash-crop energy exporter, because SouthAm and Africa and Eurasia can pay more for NorAm power than NorAm citizens can. That can't be fixed until the energy problem is fixed globally. I defer to Minister Dudek for the answer to that question."
Crewe switched his gaze to his resources minister and raised an eyebrow.
"In the short term there's not much we can do." Dudek tabbed his datapad and the vidwall displayed a graph showing power production and demand curves. "Our installed capacity is climbing worldwide, actually faster than it ever has before. The problem is demand growth is so high right now, and it's going to keep right on growing."
"Could we stop that, or throttle it back?"
"We have the option, but it won't help North America to put barriers in the way of its biggest export. Force the producers to sell to the local market and the citizens will be able to afford power, it'll be food they can't buy." He shrugged. "That's just an economic reality. Africa is the fastest-developing part of the economy right now. The bottom line is, they can do more with a kilowatt than NorthAm can, and they pay more for them. It's a working market and we interfere with it at our peril."
"What if we did interfere?"
"We'd have to force the producers to sell at below-market prices to meet NorthAm demand, and the African assemblyists would certainly invoke the Free Market laws. The legal battle would take years. And if we did manage to force the issue the power generators are going to scream loud and long. Africa has almost as much influence in the General Assembly as the North American Union. They'll point out quite rightly that NorthAm still gets more power per capita than they do, and does less with it in terms of productivity gains."
"How long until we turn the situation around?"
"At the current rate of power capacity installation, we've got about five years." He smirked sardonically.
"Not soon enough."
Dudek spread his arms. "The system has gotten so far behind the curve that there isn't the flexibility to do it faster. The limit is how fast we can grow our installation capacity." He shrugged. "It takes time to build a reactor, that's all there is to it."
Crewe nodded, then stood up to address the room in general. "The True Prophet put a shot across my bow on the Ark project. The Believers are getting a political foothold. That's what concerns me, far more than this riot."
Pelino snorted. "It's not a foothold they've got, it's a stronghold. Soon it'll be a stranglehold."
"How can they be against technology and still protest against the energy crisis?" Jansky asked the question of no one in particular.
Dudek looked annoyed. "It's purely an emotional response. Surely they can read the numbers as well as anyone. Yes, we have problems, but North American power production is catching up with demand. The current situation is purely temporary."
Crewe nodded. "It's the emotional response that matters. Our support numbers are slipping badly, and the True Prophet is building a swing constituency to make himself the kingmaker in three years. A lot of assemblyists are going to go where the wind blows, and anger linked to fundamentalism is a powerful wind. We need a coherent plan in place to turn the North American demographic around and peak our support to get us back into power."
Pelino shook his head. "It isn't right that NorAm has this much power."
"It isn't right. It is the way the UN is built. Give me another five years in office and I'll start changing that." Crewe looked around the room, meeting the eyes of his key advisers. "We know what the problem is, we need an answer. Let's work on that, ladies and gentlemen."
The meeting adjourned and Crewe went back to his office. Dudek followed him back. "Can I steal a couple more minutes, boss?"
Crewe waved him into a seat and sat down behind his desk. "Talk to me."
"Listen, my power grid construction priority list puts the Panama link upgrade on top, at your direction."
"I know that. I put it there."
"That's a lot of transmission capacity, and it's all outbound from NorAm."
Crewe shook his head. "I know that too, and if you're going to—"
Dudek raised a hand. "Hear me out, boss. I know I've said this before but I would be remiss in my duty if I didn't say it again. All these fundamentalists believe the rest of the world is stealing power from them. Putting in another outbound transmission line is—"
"—only going to worsen the situation." Crewe sighed. "I know. The Ark project needs the power to speed up construction, and then to boost steel up-orbit."
"Can't that wait? You don't even have a final design yet."
"Design isn't the issue. It's going to take decades just to get all the material into space."
"If it's going to take decades then another year or two won't matter to the project. If we held back a year or two it would make a huge difference, politically. This project is beginning to extract a measurable percentage of the economy, and power costs are certainly not the end of it. Maybe now isn't the time—"
"No!" Crewe slammed a fist down on the table. "Now is the only time. We have to get it done. I don't care what it takes."
"You may be handing the election to the Prophet and his Luddites. Have you considered that?"
"We have three years to get this project so entrenched in the economy they won't be able to stop it even if they tried. I don't care what happens then."
Dudek shook his head. "I was talking to Kurtaski. He doesn't think the major research and development for Ark is going to be done in five years, let alone three."
"It doesn't matter. Getting iron into orbit for the hull is most of the effort right now, iron and carbon that's it. We're paying good money for power and raw materials. If we keep that spending up and increasing for three years a lot of people are going to have a vested interest in seeing it continue."
"Josh." Dudek paused, choosing his words carefully. "You put me on your team because you trusted me to make the right decisions. Trust me now. I know you're hoping make this project unkillable, but this won't be enough. Harmon Michaud just died."
"The Aerospace Consortium will still be behind me. Even without Michaud."
"I'll wait and see on that—but even if they are, this is going to take more than money and power, it's going to take votes. You got into office because a lot of NorAm people are unsatisfied with the way the world has been working."
Josh shook his head. "The world isn't working, and it's beyond anyone's power to save it at this point. We can check the tide, maybe, for a generation or two. I hope we can, because the only hope our civilization has is to get this ship launched. Right now we're worried about power, but sooner or later we're going to run out of food. There's too many people, and too few resources." He spread his hands. "I wish I had better news for you, but unless you can find a way to stop people from having babies, that's it."
"That's a cop-out, Josh. Maybe we are doomed, but it doesn't matter. What matters is, the people of the world chose you to turn the situation around for them. If they don't see you delivering you, we, are finished. And as for your pet project, realistically you need the Ark itself well under way before you leave office, not just tonnes of steel in orbit. You need to have every aspect of the economy getting a slice of the Ark pie. This is politics, this is reality. The True Prophet's people aren't the only ones who don't like your priorities. You need another term, and to get another term you have to address the concerns of the North American public. It doesn't matter what you think of their beliefs, it doesn't even matter if those beliefs are completely constructed by the True Prophet for his own purposes. It only matters that you have three years to convince them that you are making their world better."
"They already have it better than most of the world."
"The public doesn't have to care about that, and they don't." Dudek hesitated, then continued carefully. "There's more to this than the pursuit of your own personal goals. The electorate have a right to good governance. Maybe we really need to get a colony ship out there, maybe we don't. That's a question bigger than I can answer. It isn't going to happen if we don't turn public opinion away from the True Prophet."
"Okay." Crewe breathed out slowly, his eyes far away for a long minute. "Okay, so what do we do?"
"We need to solve the energy problem. Get more power into NorAm, throttle back Afro-Eurasia. Find a way to do it subtly so AE doesn't realize what we're doing, and move the Panama link priority down. That's a flash-point issue in the making." Dudek held up a hand to forestall Crewe's objection. "I'm not saying stop building the Cable. I'm just saying use South American power and resources. Put a few high-profile contracts here in NorAm, let the people think they're gaining from SouthAm hubris. Give me some of those resources to get generation capacity online faster."
"How much can we grow power production?"
"If we do all that? I can keep up with NorAm population growth. The citizens won't see more kilowatts but at least they won't see less."
"Africa will see less. Eurasia will see less."
Dudek shrugged. "It's a zero-sum game. Worldwide the population is growing faster than production. Somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose. NorAm has the swing bloc and that means we have to win their approval if we want to win the future. It isn't what's best for the whole world but if we want to have any influence it's what we have to do now."
Crewe nodded. "I'll take it under consideration." Dudek got up to go and Crewe called after him. "Jack!" The other man turned around. "Thanks."
"It's my career too, Josh. It's all of our careers." There was concern in Dudek's voice. "And it goes farther than that too. A lot of people died last night. We knew one of them. The decisions we make have real consequences." He paused. "Just keep that in mind."
Crewe nodded. "That reminds me. I need to know who's replacing Michaud with the Aerospace Consortium." The secretary-general's eyes were intense, but his voice was mild. "That's a resources question. Find out for me, will you?"
Dudek opened his mouth to protest the callous dismissal of a man's life, then closed it without saying anything and went out. It took a driven man to become secretary-general, driven to an unhealthy degree. The Ark project was a symptom of Josh Crewe's disease. It would serve no useful purpose to challenge him on it. What Crewe's obsession would cost them all was another question.
Crewe's desk chimed as Dudek left, and he pointed the call live. Eric Smithson's face appeared on the screen. He was haggard and wild-eyed, and the picture had the jumpiness of a handheld phone.
"Eric, what is it?'
"Cayambe is erupting. The base tower has collapsed. We're . . ." He suddenly looked off-camera for moment, his eyes widening in horror, and then the screen went blank.
Daf Brady woke to the brilliance of dawn cascading through tall, white-curtained windows. At first she didn't know where she was, and then vague memories came back, corridor lights flashing overhead, concerned voices, a helicopter, hands lifting her onto a stretcher. Why? More images, the searing grey wall of Cayambe's pyroclastic flow thundering toward her, Abrahim's hand on hers, pulling her toward the base-tower footing. She had run with him, knowing his judgment was right, though it went against every instinct to run toward certain doom. And his body over mine, and the heat.
"Good morning." The nurse's words came with a heavy overtone of Quechua-laced Spanish.
"Good . . . good morning." Daf found it hard to form the words. Her throat was throbbing sore, and for the first time she became aware of the IV drip attached at the crook of her elbow, the oxygen mask on her face, the dressings that wrapped her forearms. The nurse's accent suggested she was still in Ecuador, but there were blanks in her memory. Where's Abrahim?
"I'll just look you over. You're in Hospital Metropolitano, in Quito, in case nobody's told you." The nurse bustled about, took Daf's temperature, checked the pulse monitor by the bed and adjusted her mask. She wore a crisp white uniform and starched cap of a kind that had been out of style for a hundred years in NorAm health care. "You're doing well. You were very lucky."
"And Abra—Dr. Kurtaski. How is he?" There was a screen on the wall at the foot of Daf's bed, showing some SouthAm drama series with the sound off.
"I'll check for you." The nurse tapped her pad. "He's here . . ." She paused, reading, and Daf saw the sudden shadow come into her eyes. "He's in intensive care."
"I want to see him." Daf sat upright, then fell back, suddenly short of breath. The nurse sat down beside her to check her oxygen again. "I need to see him."
"We're keeping him asleep for now. You can see him later, right now you need to rest. You inhaled a lot of sulfur dioxide up there and your airway is still swollen." She pulled a styrette from her duty pouch and slid it into the IV's injection port. "I have to change your dressings now, you have a few burns. This will make it more comfortable for you."
We're keeping him asleep for now. That was a gentle way of saying he was in a medically induced coma, which meant his condition was grave. Daf wanted to ask questions, at least get the information, but the drug, whatever it was, quickly slid her into a state of blissful relaxation and it became hard to translate thought into speech. The nurse went to work. The pain was still sharp, but she wouldn't have cared even without medication. She had seen the nurse's expression when she'd called up Abrahim's information. A medically induced coma. He had been on top of her, his burns would be worse . . . She remembered the chunks of rock that had rained down around them and prayed that none of them had hit him. Please God, let him be safe, let him survive and heal. Somewhere in the process she drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep.
She awoke a long time later, unaware of how much time had passed. It was dark outside her window. At least twelve hours then. There was someone with her, a man, with a face she felt she should recognize . . .
"Ms. Brady, I'm Josh Crewe."
"Mr. Secretary, I . . ." She struggled to sit upright.
He held up a hand. "Call me Josh." He helped her, pushing the bed-adjustment buttons that she couldn't with her swaddled hands, and arranging her pillows behind her back. "I understand you're the one who kept saying we should build in Kenya."
"I was. I didn't think Cayambe was stable enough."
"You were right. For the record, Abrahim pushed your opinion forward in very strong terms. I overrode him, for purely political reasons. I was wrong, and I'm paying for that now. Not as much as you are, or he. A lot of people have paid for my error with their lives." Crewe looked out here window and over the darkened city. "I'm sorry, for what it's worth."
"I . . . I don't know what to say."
"You can say that you'll step up as the chief engineer until Abrahim is able to step back into that role."
"Chief engineer?" She looked at him in disbelief. "Of what? There's no project left."
"We're starting again. In Kenya. I need you to oversee the site selection. You're going to have to drive the project hard."
"I can't, I'm here."
"It's your brain I want, not your body. You'll have to dictate memos until your hands heal, but that won't be long."
"Eric Smithson . . ."
"Dead at Cayambe, though we probably won't find his body."
Daf swallowed hard. Eric had chosen her, mentored her, shown his confidence in her. Now he was gone. How many more friends have I lost today?
"Will you take the job? I need someone who can make things happen, make the right decisions, now more than ever. Cayambe has been a setback, to say the least. I'm sure I don't need to tell you there's a lot of opposition to this project."
"I'm flattered. I don't know if I should accept. There must be dozens of people on the project with more experience than I have."
"None better than you, in Abrahim's judgment."
Daf's eyebrows went up. "Abrahim said that? He's awake?"
Josh shook his head. "No, he's told me that often in his reports."
"He barely knows me."
"He knows your work. That's his job. I need you, until he can do that job again." He saw the look in her eyes and put a hand on her shoulder. "He will be better. You can have faith in that."
Tears welled up in Daf's eyes, springing from some emotion she couldn't even describe. She blinked rapidly to clear them and nodded. "This is very sudden. Can I think about it?"
He tossed her a fat file folder. "Here, you can think about this."
She opened it, saw the title: "Engineering Design Considerations for a Multi-Generational Interstellar Colonization Ship." She looked up to meet his gaze. "So you are going to build this thing."
"It's still a secret."
"Not a good one. There are all kinds of rumors. Why make it secret at all?" She leafed through the document, scanning. "Why not just come out with it? It's a fantastic vision."
"A lot of people would oppose it. Their support is growing steadily. They have a lot of seats on their side in the General Assembly, mostly in NorAm, but also now in Eurasia."
Daf raised an eyebrow. She'd expected to discuss rebuilding the tower. "I didn't know. I don't follow politics too closely."
"The True Prophet is using the average citizen's fears to his own advantage." Crewe looked out the window. "And he's right. Things have gone downhill in the last five years, and when people are scared they turn to religion."
"You mean when they're scared and ignorant."
"It isn't ignorance, it's the very human desire for a simple explanation, and for hope. If we can't provide that then we can't succeed." Crewe paused. "I'm really still an engineer. Politics doesn't come easily. I haven't managed to show people that I have an answer as good as the True Prophet's."
Daf spread her arms as though she were beseeching Heaven for its indulgence. "We live in a complex universe. There are no simple answers, and surely people are responsible for creating their own hope. God helps those who help themselves."
Crewe laughed without humor. "You're an engineer too. I've learned in politics that people don't want complex long-term solutions. They want simple answers, and they want them right now. And yes, they want to be given hope, they want to be given a lot of things, and given that they pay the government to provide them, they have a right to expect that we do our best to give them what they want. What they don't want right now is a fantastic vision that won't pay off for generations. Their concerns are more immediate."
"So if they don't want the Ark, why are we giving it to them?"
"Because humanity needs it. Because we're either going to escape this planet or die on it." There was a sudden venom in Josh Crewe's voice. "I won't see us bound to this sorry globe through glorified superstition."
"Excuse me for saying so, but that seems . . ." Arrogant. Daf wasn't going to say that to the secretary-general. She let her sentence trail off instead.
Crewe seemed to understand what she had been about to say. "I have a dream, Daffodil. I want to see humanity make it to the stars. I don't give a damn about being secretary-general except as how it aids that dream. The best I can do is start it on its way. That's something I believe in, something that's good for the whole world. I've fought for that, sometimes I've fought dirty, but just imagine your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, growing up under another star. That's worth something. Norman Bissell isn't interested in anything but his own power. "People have to be free to make their own choices, even bad ones. And they have to be able to believe what they want to believe, right or wrong. That's the way people are."
Josh nodded. "You're right, of course." He sighed. "I'd just like to be able to take action without worrying about those who hold the True Prophet to be some sort of higher power."
Daf smiled a sardonic smile. "As long as you don't aspire to that higher power for yourself. Dictatorships are efficient. That doesn't mean they're good for people. I believe in this project, too, but it isn't up to us to decide what's right for the world."
Crewe gave her a look. "I can see why Abrahim speaks so highly of you."
"Why's that?"
"A lot of people might not speak their mind to the secretary-general. Your point is taken. I'll let the True Prophet make his speeches."
Daf laughed. "Once again the Church serves to restrain the ambition of the state."
Crewe gave her a look. "You aren't a Believer, are you, Daffodil?"
She shook her head. "I'm a Catholic. There's no love lost between us and them."
"And yet it's the same God, isn't it?"
"God is a He, not an it. And yes, He is the same God. We don't worship Him in the same way."
"Hmmm." Josh looked away, musing. "When you think about it, there only can be one God, can't there?"
"How do you mean?"
Crewe sat back in his chair. "Really, all monotheistic religions have to have the same God. The universe only has room for one all-powerful deity. Jawah, Jehovah, Allah, the Holy Trinity, whatever you want to call it, or him, or her even. Any all-encompassing God is the same as any other all-encompassing God, by definition."
Daf shook her head. "That's true only so far as omnipotence and omniscience go. We can still imagine different Gods who want different things from humanity, or who act in different ways. Religions can differ on these points without disputing the fundamental nature of God." She looked at Crewe for a long moment. "What do you believe in, if I can be so bold as to ask?"
Crewe shrugged. "I believe in science. I believe the universe follows fundamental rules, and that if we ask the right questions we can learn those rules. Perhaps there is some great awareness out there with the power to alter those rules on a whim. Maybe some vast, sentient being created the universe through sheer force of will. Science can't prove that didn't happen. All science can say is that whatever or whoever it or he or she is doesn't seem to intervene in the operation of the universe in any statistically recognizable way."
Daf looked at him. "Do you believe in life after death?"
The secretary-general's face showed pain for a second. "I'd like to."
"But you don't."
"No."
"Then why live, if it's all going to be erased?"
"That's a question I don't have an answer for."
"Doesn't that make life pointless, not knowing what you're here for, believing that you're going nowhere?"
"I think we're here because our parents had children. That doesn't mean our purpose is procreation, it just means that all of our ancestors managed to reproduce. Life is a gift for us to do what we want with. As to where we're going, if I have anything to say about it we're going to the stars."
"A belief you hold as dogmatically as any priest or bishop."
Crewe smirked. "A goal I pursue as relentlessly as Norman Bissell pursues power."
Daf pursed her lips. "And you have no room for God in your universe?"
"I don't have an answer for that either. Physics tells us the universe began some twelve billion years ago. Physics doesn't tell us how that happened, or why. Perhaps some vastly powerful being set the wheels in motion, perhaps we simply haven't figured out enough physics yet." Crewe leaned forward. "I can tell you I've got no room for the kind of God Norman Bissell is pushing. I believe man created that particular God in his own image, which is why we see a vengeful, capricious God who plays favorites among his creations, punishes them on a whim and rewards them for groveling at his feet. I couldn't imagine a less worthy God if I tried."
"You sound bitter."
"My parents believed in that God, and justified everything they did with the Bible." The secretary-general looked away, his face distant. "They did a lot that was unjustifiable."
Daf Brady watched the secretary-general for a long minute. I've seen his public persona, his tremendous strength and his resolve. Now he's letting me see his weakness, and perhaps where all that ambition comes from. It was a rare privilege, but not a comfortable one. Change the subject, but not too drastically. "Perhaps the problem is that Norman Bissell chooses to use his power to oppose your own."
"The problem is, he sells power from heaven." Crewe shook his head. "Just send him money, and he'll invoke the might of God for you, but look what that means. At the behest of this God's priests, our supposedly kind and generous deity has sanctified mass slaughter and gross persecution. Intolerance is raised to holiness through the imprecations of those who claim to preach peace and acceptance."
"Priests are only human, and it's true some have misused God's word. There are also those who have worked to improve the human condition. Religion can be a great force for good."
"Marx said, 'Religion is the opiate of the masses.' I think it's a far more dangerous drug than that."
"Marx did his masses no favors in weaning them from their drug of choice. People need faith, Josh. They need to believe in something bigger than they are."
"I believe in this project." Josh's voice grew intense. "It's bigger than I am, bigger than this whole world. When we reach the stars it won't be because God has brought us there, it won't be because some priest has prayed that we'll reach them. It will be because you and I and people like us have invested our thought, our sweat, our lives in making it happen. The tools we're using have been developed by all of humanity, through our own ingenuity over thousands of years. Prometheus didn't bring us fire and God didn't give us the wheel—people figured out how to work with the world around them, and then other people built on those innovations. The True Prophet wants people to believe in him. I want people to believe in themselves."
"I'm not arguing. I'm an engineer too. I'm just saying there's more to the universe than we can encompass with math and science. Prayer has its place."
"Prayer." The secretary-general slid open the side-table drawer by her beside, pulled out the Gideon Bible there. "I'll tell you what I believe. I believe that if I drop this book, it will hit the ground. I believe that no matter how many times I pick it up and let it go, it will hit the ground every single time, without fail. I believe that because I believe in physics, and if you give me a few minutes with pencil and paper I'll work out how fast it will fall and how hard it will hit and any other detail of its trajectory that you care to ask me for, and I'll guarantee those predictions will be more accurate than any prophecy written inside it. And they'll keep right on being accurate as long as there's a book to drop and a planet to drop it on. But!" Josh met Daf's gaze. "If you can, through the power of prayer, just delay that fall a single second beyond what I predict it to be, I'll be a believer."
"It doesn't work like that, Josh."
"No, I didn't think it did." Josh put more sarcasm into his reply than he'd meant to, and Daf didn't answer him. They sat in uncomfortable silence for a minute.
"You want me to fill in for Abrahim." Daffodil changed the subject "What's the main effort going to be?"
"The engineering is well in hand; we're ahead of the game there, if only because it's going to take time to recover from Cayambe. What I need is popular support, some way to sell this project, not as a great scientific endeavor, not as the exploration of the final frontier, nothing so poetic. We need a way to sell it to the average citizen, to make them embrace it as something which will impact their lives in a positive way, something that's worth what it is costing them."
Daf shook her head. "That's the wrong approach. People are scared because they see shortages. Build power plants. Energy is the bottleneck in the economy right now, not enough power for manufacturing, for heat and light. Let them see abundance and they won't care what grand visions are built with the public purse."
"We're building them. We just need more time to get ahead of the population-growth curve."
"I can build the Cable for you. The growth curve doesn't have an engineering solution."
Josh nodded. "I know, I know." He turned to look out the windows. "Just keep it in the back your mind. And work fast. If we get enough momentum into the project the fundamentalists won't be able to kill it when they get into power."
Daf took a deep breath. There was a subject she didn't want to discuss, which didn't mean it didn't need to be discussed. "Which brings up a current problem. I'm sure Abrahim was about to bring this to your attention, if he hasn't already."
"What's that?"
"The required time frames. There is absolutely no way the Cable can get done in two years. Even five years is seriously pushing the envelope."
"It has to be done."
"Josh, you're thinking like a politician." Daf held up a hand, to forestall Crewe's answer. "I know you have to, I know that's the name of the game, but the engineering reality and the political reality just don't match up. We can build the Cable, but there are limits to how fast we can get it up."
"We can build a new tower faster than the original. Whatever limits there are we have to overcome them. If it's more money . . ."
"It's not more money, it's the basic physics of cable synthesis. We can get as many factories as we want building tower struts, but the cable has to be spun in one continuous strand, from orbit. That alone is going to take two and a half years, but we're not even going to get the platform launched for another three months, if we're lucky. International Metals has been in charge of the spin platform design and building, and frankly they've been a bottleneck."
"What's their problem?"
"They want a complete orbital refinery complex. That's a lot of extra design work above and beyond a bare-bones spin platform."
"It's supposed to be modular."
"It isn't modular enough. They've got some internal power play happening and it's making a hash out of the design process."
Crewe waved a hand. "That's easy to fix. We'll take them off the project. The original concept is obsolete anyway, we aren't going to be shipping Ecuadorian bauxite up a Cable based in Kenya."
Daf raised an eyebrow. "That will completely strip any pretense that this thing is being built with private funds, for a commercial purpose."
"We're beyond that now. Just get the Cable up."
"People are going to want to know what we're putting it up for. And we won't be able to evade that question, because no matter what we do, this project is going to overlap the next election cycle."
"Now you're the one talking like a politician."
"It's what we're up against, like it or not."
"We'll find a reason. In the meantime, focus on the spin platform. We should be able to get faster production as we gain experience with it."
"First we need to get the new tower site confirmed."
Crewe nodded. "Whenever you're ready. Say two weeks from today, you should be well enough by then." He pulled out his datapad and tapped it. "You've got my personal line now. Call me."
He left her alone with her thoughts then. Two weeks from now. She looked at her bandaged hands, lifted one to touch the oxygen mask over her nose. I won't be fit to get out of bed for a month. She opened the design folder and began reading. Ark was a grand design, no doubt, and she immersed herself in its details, marveling at the sheer scope of the project. Hours later she finished, not having read everything, but having gained a good understanding of the entire concept. At least now I understand why the bauxite economics never made sense. They were never intended to. The economics of the colony ship were something else entirely. Whatever dividends humanity would reap from it would never be seen on Earth. A tremendous act of faith, or a tremendous waste of resources.
She became aware that the hustle and bustle of the hospital had faded. She pointed the screen at the foot of her bed live, just in time to see the time flick over to three a.m. Wide awake in the middle of the night. She was more upset than she cared to admit over Josh Crewe's rejection of her ill-defined religious beliefs. It isn't as if I'm devout. Catholicism had been part of her childhood, but the last time she'd been in a church had been for her father's funeral. She'd been seventeen, and she'd left for university a week later.
Her hand went to the small gold cross she wore on a chain around her neck. I'm a trained engineer, I have as much faith as he has in physical equations. I know there's nothing below us but rock and molten iron, nothing above but endless space and countless stars. The cross was a gift from her mother for her confirmation; she wore it to feel close to her family, not to affirm her faith. But I prayed to survive in the Cayambe eruption, and I pray for Abrahim's recovery now. What, exactly, did she expect her prayers to do? It seemed unlikely that God had altered the flight of a boulder that might otherwise have killed her at Cayambe. And if he did it for me, why didn't he do it for the hundreds who died? "The Lord works in mysterious ways," her mother had said, the first time she'd asked "Why . . . " Why did God let my father die? It was all supposed to be part of some grand plan, but it seemed random and arbitrary to her. Of course God's plan was supposed to be too intricate for mere humans to understand. But science exists to explain the world. If science could let her understand the inner working of stars and the DNA helix, why couldn't it reveal God's mind? Science was simply a way of understanding that which was systematic in the universe. If A then B. If God's will was truly unknowable, then it must truly be random, and that could hardly be considered a plan. Even random events bow to statistical analysis.
And if religion lost every time it collided with science, as it had with the shape of the Earth and the paths of the planets, as it had with the location of Heaven and Hell and the origin of humanity, why should she put any stock in it at all. "You must have faith," the priest had told her after the funeral, and given her Saint Paul to read. She'd read it in between the textbooks of first-year engineering. To her, faith was simply belief in the absence of evidence. And perhaps I believe because I don't want to know my father is really gone.
With nothing better to do she gestured up the channel menu, relieved that the screen could read her hands even with bandages on. There was one English-language channel and she selected it, saw to her surprise an image of the base tower in the first moments of the Cayambe eruption. It was shot from an aircraft, with the sound of rotor blades for accompaniment—that news crew that got on the helicopter when Abrahim arrived. She watched with a combination of horror and fascination as the whole top of the mountain exploded. The boiling ash cloud soared skyward as the helicopter banked around to better frame the event. She watched as the pyroclastic flow formed at the edge of the crater rim and thundered down the slopes toward the tower. Abrahim and I are down there. At first she thought the helicopter was too far away for people to show up in the image, but then the camera operator zoomed in on the build site, and she saw running figures, still too small to identify as individuals. The camera panned up the mountain to show the onrushing cloud of hot gases and ash. Someone yelled something offscreen that she couldn't understand over the sound of the rotors, and then the view jerked suddenly sideways and back, recentering on the tower, which was now coming down, support elements fractured by boulders blown out of the crater by the eruption. The camera followed the fragile structure through its collapse, and as it fell the pyroclastic flow came back into view, now almost to the build site. She saw then how it was she had come to survive the disaster, how the main force of the flow had been diverted into a valley uphill from the site and channeled around and past it. What had washed over the build site itself was just the debris thrown up from the sides of the main event. The camera switched views again to show a second subtower falling, and then the third. The scale of the disaster was awesome. I'm down there, in that somewhere.
The view on the screen panned back, to show the images she'd been watching projected on a huge vidwall on a large stage. A well-dressed man with a microphone was there, gesturing at the display as though he'd just completed a magic trick.
". . . and God has struck down this Tower of Babel, exactly as I have prophesied! Brethren! It is up to us to make sure that it is never rebuilt . . ." The True Prophet's voice was sonorous and sincere, full of passion and conviction in the truth of what he said. "Hear me, brethren! See how God is angry at the secretary-general! Mankind was never meant to violate the sanctity of Heaven—"
Daf pointed the widecast off in disgust. Perhaps her faith was belief in the absence of evidence, but the True Prophet's creed was faith in the face of the evidence, faith not hopeful but defiant. There was something poisonous there, though she couldn't put her finger on it. She would take Josh Crewe's offer, if only to prove to the world just how wrong the True Prophet was. She fell asleep with images of carbon-fiber lattice dancing in her head.
The wind was cold in the cemetery, and Josh Crewe kept himself from shivering through an effort of will. The day was right for a funeral, grey and blustery, with a cold mist enshrouding the barren trees. Harmon Michaud was gone, and a priest was chanting words over his grave, promising the mourners that their friend and loved one had gone to a better, happier place. The words were meant to comfort, but they left Josh feeling empty. He scanned the faces of Michaud's family, etched with grief and tears. The priest's blessing was mercifully short, and then he raised his head. "Amen," he said, and the crowd echoed him.
The cemetery keeper pushed a lever and the coffin slowly sank into the grave. Harmon Michaud was gone, vanished into the embrace of the Bordeaux countryside that had sired a hundred generations of his ancestors. One by one his family filed past the grave, his mother and father, both in their eighties, his brother and sister, his young wife and two young children, all crying, his mother barely able to walk. After they had gone by, the dignitaries went past in order, Josh in front, the movers and shakers of the Aerospace Consortium behind him. He remembered the first time he had met Michaud, how urbane and confident he had been, assessing the upstart assemblyist with his wild-eyed project. They had become allies after that, almost friends. For such a man to die in the way he had died . . . Unconsciously Crewe set his jaw. This didn't just happen, and the answer must be found.
Behind the dignitaries came the public. It was not a large funeral, for all the high-ranking people in attendance. Harmon Michaud had been very much a power behind the throne, his name unknown outside of the rarefied circles in which he walked. There were perhaps a few hundred, dressed in black, heavy overcoats warding off the cold, folded umbrellas carried in case the mist turned into rain. Josh quickened his step and caught up to Mme. Michaud as she ushered her children into the waiting limousine. Her stylish black dress looked inadequate against the chill, but Harmon's wife looked beyond caring, beyond crying, her expression somehow disconnected, as though she were only a puppet being worked by some poor apprentice of a puppeteer. Perhaps Parisian society had made assumptions about the nature of the relationship between a man of wealth and power and his young and pretty bride, but she had clearly loved her man.
And why did he choose to get out of his car?
"I'm sorry for your loss." The words seemed inadequate.
"Merci, M'sieur." She gave him a brief smile, a mere formal acknowledgment of his merely formal condolences, but it showed for a brief instant the vivacious beauty she must have radiated on any other day.
Another man stepped forward. "He's with God now." Crewe looked up to meet the eyes of the speaker. Norman Bissell. "I can't tell you how sorry I am about the way he died."
"Merci, M'seur."
The driver was ushering the rest of the family into the vehicle, and Crewe stepped back, and found himself standing next to Bissell.
"It was a terrible thing," Bissell said.
"It's under investigation." Crewe tried to keep his voice level, to speak as a diplomat should. My anger won't serve any purpose here.
"This man died having accepted God into his heart." Even speaking softly, Bissell's voice carried the intensity of one of his sermons. "He died in a state of grace. God will punish the guilty, you can rest assured of that."
"I'm surprised you came."
"Why? Because I oppose you, because he was your ally? Harmon Michaud died in sacrifice to the glory of his Lord." Bissell paused, reflecting for a moment. "Such sacrifice must be honored, that's why I came. The Lord asks a great deal of his Believers. In return he gives eternal life."
"Some might say it was you who asked for his sacrifice."
"I am only the Savior's servant, I do as I am called to do, as your friend did." The Prophet pursed his lips. "I sense you suspect my motives."
"No. Your motive is power. It's a common enough drug."
"Power is your drug, Dr. Crewe, but it doesn't surprise me that you see it in me. We all see ourselves reflected in those around us. I do seek power, but only because I seek the salvation of mankind. To me it's only a means to an end, nothing more. I would rather not fight for power, for position." Bissell laughed. "You don't believe me when I say that. Your doubt is obvious. Come and visit me in my home, and see how I live. I use the tools of power, yes, but I do not yield to its temptations in my private life."
Crewe considered his adversary for a long moment. "Perhaps we have more in common than you or I might believe."
"How is that?"
"I don't want power either."
"Really? Then why do you have it?"
"As with you, it's a means to an end."
"And what is your end?"
"This isn't the time or place to discuss it."
"Not your starship?" The True Prophet cocked his head questioningly. "Surely you've abandoned that madness."
"This isn't the time, Mr. Bissell."
"God has struck down your tower, as he struck down Babel's tower. You trifle with forces you little understand, Dr. Crewe."
Crewe turned to look in his adversary's eyes. He kept his voice low, but his words carried a vehement force. "The tower will be rebuilt."
Bissell looked genuinely surprised. "And how do you intend to justify it this time?"
Crewe didn't answer right away. Instead he turned to watch as the funeral procession pulled away, and other cars began to follow it. He looked over to where his own motorcade was waiting, smartly turned out gendarmes on motorcycles ready to clear his way through the streets to the airport. "I have to go. I appreciate your coming here today." A political truth, necessary to say, impossible to disprove, and absolutely valueless because of that. There was a time when Josh Crewe had disdained such empty words. Since taking office he had come to master them.
"I am obedient to God's command." The True Prophet's voice grew intense and the evangelical light flashed for a second in his eyes. "There's still time to be saved, Dr. Crewe. Jesus loves all his children, he asks only for your love in return."
Crewe didn't respond at once. Here and there, on high ground, at chokepoints, his security detail had positioned themselves unobtrusively, quiet figures dressed in black for the service, noticeable only in their unusual alertness as they scanned the area for potential threats. The trappings of power came with the job of secretary-general, and for good and sufficient reasons they couldn't be forgone, no matter what his personal preference. And I really wanted none of this. I have no desire to struggle for power with this man. He returned his attention to Norman Bissell. "Perhaps we'll meet again,"
"Good day, Dr. Crewe."
In the car Josh Crewe called his secretary to set up a meeting with Janice Jansky on his return. I need to know where we stand with this man. He spent the remainder of the trip studying briefs that had nothing to do with Ark. It amazed him that the business of running the world could be distilled down to a series of executive summaries that one man could, with effort and diligence, absorb, consider and make some sort of coherent decision on. And every decision must be made right. It was a fearsome responsibility, but one he couldn't avoid if he wanted to get what he wanted.
"Sloochylovs." Abrahim's eyes flickered open, just for a moment, but it was enough. "What happened?" By his bedside Daf Brady smiled and pushed the button to call the nurse. By the time the nurse arrived Abrahim was waking up. She took his hand, as well as she could with the cast he was wearing. He tried to speak but the effort was obviously painful and she put a finger to her lips. "Just rest. You're doing fine."
He tried to speak again, his lips moving gently. She leaned forward to listen, made out the question. "The tower?"
"It fell, but we're building a new one, in Kenya. The secretary-general—Josh is already getting that started." She squeezed his hand. "You saved my life, did you know that?"
He shook his head. The nurse bustled about, reading his vital statistics off the monitor, checking his IV. "I'll go let the doctor know he's awake." She went out again.
Daf went on, grateful for the temporary privacy. "When you pushed me down beside that wall. A girder section came down almost on top of us. It grazed you, but if you hadn't done that it would have hit me, much harder." His eyes registered surprise. "I owe you," she said, and suddenly found her throat constricting. She blinked back a tear before he could see it.
"How long?" His lips formed the words.
"You've been unconscious over a month. Your mother will be glad to see you awake, she came in from Russia."
"And you?"
"I come here whenever I can."
"Thanks." The word was a whisper, and he squeezed her hand almost imperceptibly. "Where is 'here,' exactly?"
"You're back in New York. Josh wanted to make sure you were looked after." She hesitated. "He's under a lot of pressure right now. The True Prophet has thrown his support behind Assemblyist Plant. The NorAm bloc is calling for his resignation."
"Believers." Abrahim rolled his eyes. "They're Luddites, throwing their shoes in the machinery because they're afraid of it."
"Abrahim . . ." Daf took his other hand so she was holding both of them. "I'm going to space. We're starting the spin platform, I'm going to oversee that." Daf bit her lip, unsure of how he'd take the news.
"You're doing my job?"
"Just until you're better."
Abrahim nodded. "Do it right." He seemed to think about something for a moment, then smiled. "Make me proud."
"I will." Daf released the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, feeling tears well up. "Abrahim . . ."
"Yes?"
Daf opened her mouth to speak, but the words wouldn't come. Instead she leaned forward and kissed him, gently, on the lips. She took her time, and when she leaned back his eyes met hers.
"That's a nice surprise." There was a bit of the old twinkle in his eyes.
"It was." She smiled, surprised at herself as much as he was. "It's to help you get better."
The nurse came back carrying a styrette. "Your vital signs are good. The doctor will be in this afternoon." She turned to Daf. "I need to give him his needle. He needs more rest."
"Yes, of course." Daf got up, but kept holding Abrahim's hand while the nurse slid the needle into his arm and slowly pushed the plunger down, kept holding it until his eyes slid closed again. She watched him for a while, then kissed him gently on the cheek. "I'll go tell his mother he was awake. She'll want to know."
"He's going to be better," said the nurse. "The scans don't show any permanent brain damage. It's all been edema, no structural injury that we can see."
"That's good to know."
Daf went out, down the hospital corridor, dialing Mrs. Kurtaski as she walked. Abrahim's mother was out, so she left a message. He's going to live. The doctors had assured her that he would, but she hadn't been quite willing to believe until she saw him awake for herself. He saved my life. He'd pushed her down and thrown himself on top of her. It was only when the ash and dust cleared and she'd looked up to see daylight shining through the twisted wreckage that had nearly buried them that she'd understood. She'd been afraid he would die before she could thank him for that. I kissed him. She felt giddy suddenly, like a schoolgirl who'd kissed her teacher. Enough of that, Daffodil, you've got a lot of work in front of you.
Fall in New York, and the evening air was chill in the vents as Josh Crewe guided his volanter down to the landing pad on the top of the UN building. The demands of office had kept him away from New York, and allowed him to forget the challenge posed by the True Prophet and his Believers for the duration of the journey. He was reminded as soon as he opened the door of his flier. There was a crowd of demonstrators gathered in UN Plaza below, several thousand strong, dressed warmly against November's chill. A line of uniformed New York City police held the crowd back from the steps to Secretariat building. They carried signs that read God's Power to God's People, and Crewe Out, Lights On, and God Is the Power, He Struck Down the Tower. They had a projector rigged, and there was a thirty-meter image of the True Prophet up on the wall of the opposite building. He was in midsermon, but his amplified words were being drowned out by the chanting of the crowd. Crewe listened, but couldn't quite make out what they were saying. Nothing important. As long as they were watching the sermon they weren't rioting. There had been more Believer riots since Times Square, none so large or so devastating, and none that showed the same evidence of central organization. The True Prophet had demonstrated his power once. Now he had as much interest in keeping it harnessed as the UN did. Crewe stood and watched the sermon, finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the Prophet as he appeared in public with the Norman Bissell he had met.
Crewe went in to the elevator and down to his office. Janice Jansky was waiting and followed him in.
He waved her into a chair and sat down at his desk. "What have you got for me?"
"Good news and bad news."
"Bad news first."
"It doesn't run in that order." She smirked. "The good news is, we have arrests on the Ceranine question. They're Believers."
"Good work. And the bad news?"
"It looks like they were working for Assemblyist Markham Plant."
"The True Prophet's main puppet in the General Assembly. I'm not surprised, though I don't see how that's bad news."
Jansky pursed her lips. "We don't have hard evidence to link them to Plant, and they aren't naming names. This is going to become a very risky investigation if we continue with it. If we start pursuing Plant and don't come up with hard evidence, he could make this very uncomfortable for us."
Josh Crewe nodded slowly. "We need to get this taken care of. This amounts to a very direct challenge to UN authority."
The Interpol chief raised an eyebrow. "Do you want me to manufacture evidence?"
"I want you to find the evidence you and I both know must exist. This took organization and support. Those bursters were an integral part of his rally. We're not dealing with a few fanatics who took the Prophet's imprecations too far."
"Oh, I'm quite sure he's behind it, ultimately. Certainly, he's the one who pulls Plant's strings. Nevertheless, going after Plant is risky. This could blow up in our faces."
"Hmm." Crewe put his hand to his chin, pondering. "Have they done anything similar since?"
"We've been monitoring every public event he's held since then. They use bursters a lot, usually with message streamers, but they've been clean."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course. We have people at every one of those events, testing the air, testing the water, testing everthing that might be a delivery vehicle. I don't think we'll see that tactic used again. They applied it when it really counted to generate chaos and attention. The violence at the Times Square rally set the Prophet up as a defender of the common man, and set us up as the repressive and incompetent government. It's what boosted him out of the merely religious sphere and into the political arena. It was a very carefully planned, one-off event designed to achieve a certain effect. That effect has been achieved. He has nothing to gain by repeating it, and a lot to lose."
Crewe leaned back in his chair with his hand on his forehead, pondering. "We can still use the fact that the culprits are Believers. The public will infer the link."
"That might not be a good thing. A broad swath of the public sympathizes with them. They're gaining a lot adherents." She gestured to the window and by implication to the chanting crowd on the street below and the millions of True Prophet supporters out in the world.
Crewe shook his head. "I can't understand why."
"He offers certainty in uncertain times. People are angry, Josh. They're scared. He's giving them someone to blame for that, and that someone is you. If we try to smear him without pinning the crime, he's just going to have something else to throw back in our faces. You can bet that Assemblyist Plant and the NorAm faction will make an issue of it if we do. I have to be careful. There are probably a few Believer sympathizers on my own staff. I don't want to give anyone anything to leak."
"If you have any loyalty risks, fire them." Crewe's words were emphatic.
"For what? Holding religious beliefs?" Jansky raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure you want to open that door, Josh?"
"No, you're right." He paused, thinking. "What are the details?"
"We still don't have the whole picture, we still have to link our culprits to the actual modification of the bursters. It seems unlikely they were tampered with in transit, the bursters are sealed at the factory. We've checked with the shipping company anyway. Their records are complete. According to the paperwork they were handled in accordance with the appropriate dangerous-goods shipment regulations, which includes secure storage."
"According to the paperwork?"
"Paperwork can lie, of course."
"Is it in this case?"
"We're still verifying that, comparing the freeway log times of the trucks involved, verifying who had warehouse access, and so on. So far it checks out."
Crewe nodded slowly. "What about the breakdown catalyst? Is there something we can link there?"
"Markham Plant owns a big stake in Pharmacorp, who make it. Again, there's a link but not a case. We can try to make something out of that, but it won't be a strong argument, and if it fails . . ."
"The True Prophet will be able to make it seem like persecuting him for being a Believer."
"Exactly."
"I don't want to see them getting away with murder, Janice." Crewe stood up and went to the window to look down into the chanting crowd on the street. "I don't care if Plant is an assemblyist." He turned back to face her. "We can't let these people take over. It would be the dawn of a new dark age."
Jansky shook her head. "We'll get them. I can guarantee that."
"How can you be sure?"
"He might get away with the Ceranine. We've got his people linked to it now though, and I'm betting that if we keep pulling that thread, we're going to start rolling over people higher in his organization. Maybe someone will take the fall for him. That doesn't matter, because someone like that, someone who feels he's above the law, is going to keep right on breaking it. Sooner or later he'll slip up, and when he does I'll be there waiting for him." Jansky's voice had a hard edge to it.
"That's the bottom line, isn't it?" Crewe smiled. "I'm glad you're on my team, Janice."
"That is the bottom line. The progress report is here." She pointed his screen live, and gestured up the document. "You don't need to read it. You already know the important part."
"How long is it going to take to finish this?"
"I can't answer that. It'll happen, mark my words." She gave him a terse smile in return. "You've just got to have faith." She smiled a predatory smile. "Not in God, in me."
"I will."
Crewe watched her leave before turning his attention to her report. It contained nothing of import that she hadn't already told him, but he had to know the facts when he met the press. He grimaced. He would rather be reading progress reports on the status of the Cable project, but the best way he could serve its interests was to pay attention to the minutiae of government and not let his merely personal preferences dictate how he spent his time. He drummed his fingers on his desk as he read. The work was thorough, the report detailed, but there was nothing there that could stop the steamroller of the Prophet's popularity. The people want certainty. They want someone who tells them what they want to hear. Crewe pointed his vidwall live, called up the True Prophet's widecast channel. The Prophet's face filled the screen, the same widecast the protesting crowd outside was watching. Crewe guestured to mute the volume and watched the performance in silence. His power is growing, and I'm running out of time.
He sat for some time contemplating the image. The chants from the demonstrators in the street below occasionally grew loud enough to faintly penetrate his office. Finally he gestured to dismiss the image and called up the latest reports on the tower construction. They were not encouraging. It would take six months to get back to where they had been before. That wasn't as bad as it might have been, because problems with the spin platform had put that part of the project over two months behind already. The extra time would let them catch up with the on-orbit part of the project, but still . . .
He pointed up his scheduler. The Cable-project timeline was a stack of multicolored bars, each bar indicating the estimated time required for each of the project's many critical subtasks. He waved a hand to scroll the display to the left. After the end of the Cable project came the start of the Ark construction program. Some of Ark's subtasks were already in motion, concurrent with Cable construction. Right now they were mostly research programs and none were officially connected to each other. But nothing on the sheer scale of Ark could be kept truly secret. The space-technology press was full of speculation. And I'm neglecting the duties of my office, and I can't allow that to happen either.
Crewe drummed his fingers on his desk. Somehow the mundanities of running the world couldn't compete with the urgency he felt over the Ark project. The loss of secrecy was a bad thing, for Ark had to be born in secret if it was to be born at all. Another bad thing was the political timelines laid out beneath the engineering charts. There just wasn't enough time until the election, and it looked like the Cable wouldn't be finished until after that was over. The Cayambe disaster had pushed them past the critical point. He had intended to make the Cable a showpiece, and now it threatened instead to drag him down. God has once more struck down the Tower of Babel. The way the Prophet said the words it sounded as if God had done so on the Prophet's command. Why does anyone believe this? It didn't matter. Norman Bissell's popular following had gained him growing support on the floor of the General Assembly. He wouldn't run for secretary-general himself, of course, but he would control the agenda of the Secretariat. Space would be shut down as a visible sacrifice to the demands of the people. It would take years, decades to restart, if it ever did it all, and nobody else would ever have the strength of will to get humanity off the planet. He looked at the picture on his desk. No, I will not fail.
Which meant he had to take action. He keyed his intercom. "Get me a connection with Daf Brady."
The African sky was brilliant blue, and Daf Brady marveled at the contrast with the surrounding green jungle spreading out below the trail leading up the slopes of Mount Kenya. Josh Crewe led the way up, his long stride making it hard for her to keep pace beside him. Her lungs were still recovering from the hot gases she'd breathed during the eruption at Cayambe, though she was no longer coughing up sputum made gritty by ash. The burns on her hands weren't yet healed but they were healed enough, the doctors had admitted when she pressed them. They'd wanted to keep her another two weeks, but Daf hadn't let them. She smiled to herself. You take your victories when you find them.
Behind them the town of Nanyuki was waking up, streetlights winking out as the sun rose into the clear Kenyan sky. Nanyuki had once been a British garrison town, in the days when Africa had been sliced up into colonies by competing European empires. It had become, through a painful history of exploitation, poverty and privation, an exclusive resort. Now the newly wealthy elite of Africa came to play at the Safari Club, to hike and ski the high slopes of Mount Kenya, but Josh had no time for either recreation or history, and with all her efforts devoted to keeping up with him, neither did Daf. The mountain loomed above them in the thin air, sloping steeply upward, beckoning them higher.
Josh pointed up at the peak. "This is the place." Daf caught up and followed his finger. "We should have built here from the start."
She nodded. "Politics . . ."
"Politics." Crewe made a slashing motion with his hand. "I should never have let that sway my judgment." He paused, considering. "I knew this project might cost lives. It's a big industrial operation, that happens. I just never thought it would be my fault, directly my fault."
"You played the odds."
"No, I played political games. I knew Cayambe was a gamble. The whole area is geologically active. I bought off the NorAm assemblyists, I bought the support of International Metals, and those decisions took me to Cayambe. I took the easy solution, and I paid for it."
"It might have been five hundred years before the next eruption. You couldn't have known."
Crewe gave his acting chief engineer a look. "I could have guessed. The volcano was due, the seismography said as much. I took the risk. People died." He pointed up at the distant peak again. "This is the mountain we should have been at all the time. We've lost a year's work at Cayambe. Starting over will be that much harder, but we'll do it." He looked back down the trail toward Nanyuki, hidden now by the lush forest. "We'll need to upgrade that rail line."
Daf Brady nodded, musing. "We're going to have to ship every last strut over from NorAm now. That's going to increase our transportation costs."
The secretary-general shook his head. "No. There are perfectly good carbon fabs on this continent. We'll build everything right here." He looked up at the peak above them. "Let's go, we've got a lot of climbing in front of us."
They hiked higher, the exertion of the climb preventing further conversation. Eventually they came to the first survey camp, high on the mountain's northern flank, and then they borrowed a walker to cover the ground more efficiently. There were survey teams everywhere, getting the detailed data needed to lay out the footings for the new tower, but it was important to get a feel for the area. Finding the right location for the base tower required balancing the competing demands for altitude and ease of access. Daf Brady rode in the back while Crewe gave the driver directions. She listened to the whine of the walker's servomotors as it negotiated the difficult slopes.
The walker turned downslope, and the sunglare made her squint. She looked away and rubbed her eyes. And why are they damp? Abrahim should be here. She forced her thoughts to the task at hand, refusing to show tears in front of the secretary-general. Power was once again going to be a problem, even more at a premium in Africa than in SouthAm. Once the Cable climbers were off the tower boost tracks and on the Cable itself they would depend on power beamed up to them with lasers, and the energy coupling efficiency of the laser/receptor system didn't amount to a quarter percent. A farm of solar sheets on the mountaintop, well above most of the clouds, would go a long way to feeding the voracious power beams. It was a shame they couldn't extend the boost tracks all the way to orbit. Then they could put solar sheets in orbit, arrays a kilometer on a side if they wanted, and power the tracks from the other end. Power from heaven indeed!
She paused. And why can't we do that? Carbon nanotubes could be made to superconduct. The necessary doping would cost them tensile strength, but not so much that a carbon-superconductor power line couldn't carry most of its own weight while hanging from a central support cable. No, four support cables, with the boost tracks strung like rungs on two sides and the superconductors in the middle. She felt the thrill of new understanding, visualizing the configuration. There would be no need to beam power to the climbers . . .
Suddenly the details of the new base tower's foundations seemed like a trivial concern. She needed her computer to run simulations, she needed to talk to the space engineering team, she needed . . .
"Take us back to Nanyuki."
"What's wrong?" Josh Crewe turned around in his seat, speaking loudly over the din of the walker. Briefly, Daf outlined her concept. Crewe nodded and motioned to the driver to turn around. On the way down the mountain they discussed how the Cable could be reconfigured to carry the boost tracks all the way to orbit. The superconductor concept might not be viable. Cooling will be a problem in sunlight outside the atmosphere. But even uncooled already carried power a thousand times better than copper, and perhaps that would be enough. Daf did rough calculations on her datapad, while Josh pulled figures and formulas out of his head. By the time they were back at the Safari Club they had a rough concept, a cable that would allow transport both up and down, and recover almost all the launch energy of a climber on the downward trip through regenerative braking. There would be problems in development, of course, there always were, but the only real concerns were cost and time. The redesign would take time, and reconfiguring the spin platform would take time, and doing those things fast would take money.
"Don't worry about money," said Josh. "I'm done trying to placate anyone. Let the NorAm bloc complain, we're going to do this or die trying." He gave her a smile. "How do you feel about going to space?"
"To space?" Daf looked at him, incredulous. "Are you joking?"
"The spin platform is going to be the key component of the project. You don't have to go, but it would be—"
"Of course I'll go." Daf cut him off. "Try to stop me."
The peaches were ready, and the farmhands were working hard to gather them at the peak of ripeness. Norman Bissell worked with them, picking, sorting, driving wagonloads of overflowing baskets to the end of the drive where the distributor's truck would come to pick them up. Handpicked and organically grown, Believer-grown produce commanded a premium price in city supermarkets. He wore a broad smile as he worked, encouraging the hands, praising God for the bountiful crop. Farming was far more satisfying than political power games, though he did what he had been Called to do, as any dutiful Christian should. Nevertheless he looked forward to the time when he could hand over the reins of the Church to some worthy successor and spend all his time celebrating God through a life of hard work and humility. The only problem was finding a worthy successor, someone capable of guiding the Church in these turbulent times, someone capable of bringing the word of Jesus Christ to the masses so their souls would be pure on Judgment Day. He didn't worry overmuch about that problem. The day would come when his successor arrived, when a new Prophet arose to lead the Believers forward until every man on Earth knew the glory of God in his heart. God would reveal the new Prophet to him, just as he had revealed the Calling of Norman Bissell. Until then, he would serve as his visions had foretold.
Norman guided his wagon team between the ranks of trees, stopping here and there to heave a full basket up onto the wagon bed. When the wagon was full he climbed up onto the buckboard, stirred up the horses and went out to the end of the drive. There was a shiny black limousine waiting for him there; a portly, round man, his hair grey, his face jolly, was waiting beside the car. Assemblyist Markham Plant.
"Blessings, Prophet." Plant extended a hand in greeting as Bissell climbed down.
"Blessings, Markham. What brings you here?"
"We have an opportunity, if we play our cards right."
"What's that?"
"Our support has reached a critical mass. We have leverage now, if we choose to use it."
"Are you sure?"
"We have enough of a margin in enough assembly districts to take control of the General Assembly."
"God has been kind to us."
"We have worked hard, very hard, for a very long time."
An expression of distaste came across the True Prophet's face. "You went too far with the Ceranine, Markham."
"The Lord's way is written in the blood of the Lamb. It was necessary. Our victory depends upon the populace seeing the government as the enemy, and that's what we achieved that night. And the results have proven me right. How many souls will be saved, for the sacrifice of those few we lost?"
"Perhaps." Norman Bissell's expression showed he remained unconvinced.
"You don't understand power. What we did was necessary."
"Necessary. The dead won't come back to life."
"They'll know eternal glory in heaven." Plant's smile was almost convincing.
He turned to face his orchards, away from the assemblyist, and his car, and the secular world. "Well, if we are ready then we must move. God has been kind to us. May He guide us now to victory." He turned back. "I'll prepare my next sermon to open the way for you. Once it's delivered, you can act."
"Yes, Prophet." There was nothing more to say. The assemblyist got back in his car, motioned for his driver to take him away. Norman Bissell watched him go, then remounted the wagon and turned it back toward the orchards. He would have the rest of today to spend with his farm and his family, and then he would have to return to the wider war for human salvation.
To Daf Brady, Baikonur Cosmodrome seemed to have been dropped onto the trackless Kazakh desert from outer space. Beyond its borders there was nothing but windblown desert, a desolation that was as alien in its relentless emptiness as the Cosmodrome itself was in its advanced technology. At Baikonur, so the joke went, even the phone calls had to be flown in. That wasn't quite true, but certainly everything else was. Even the delicious strawberries served in the communal mess hall came in on cargo flights from Georgia. When she'd first got off the plane herself the wind had nearly knocked her off her feet, so hot she'd thought she'd accidentally stood in the jet exhaust of another aircraft. Nighttime saw wind and temperature fall together, until the desert was wrapped in an icy stillness, with air so clear the stars were diamond-bright, and the Milky Way spilled across the sky with undiminished brilliance.
Perhaps it had been as bright at Cayambe, but there the mountain had always dominated the sky. Here the sky overarched the land with nothing to challenge it but the skeletal frameworks of the launch pads.
She was given the obligatory museum tour on the first day, but the artifacts on static display were nothing compared to the living history of the launch complex itself. Here is where Sputnik went up, where Yuri Gagarin became the first person to leave our world. And here is where I will leave it.
She had to go through three months of training at Baikonur before she could go to space. She had to qualify in the vacuum suit and on all the orbital process facility's systems, had to prove she could function in zero g and that she could withstand the six g the crew shuttle would subject her to on launch. She was poked and prodded and assessed by platoons of medical people, who wanted to make sure she was carrying no contagious pathogens into the closed environment of the spin platform. Failing any of the tests would end her long-held-secret dream of spaceflight. The injuries Cayambe had inflicted on her body had healed, but she was weak from the time spent in hospital and recovery.
She took to running every day to bring up her fitness level, something she had enjoyed in university but hadn't had time for since. Something I haven't made time for since. The distinction was important, because it let her know she was in control of what she did with her life. There was satisfaction in the feel of sweat on her body, in the pull and stretch of muscles pushed to a goal, of the pounding of her pulse in her ears as the kilometers slipped past beneath her feet. She found a stark beauty in the arid emptiness, and learned to carry extra water in case she got caught in one of the ferocious dust storms that could whip up in minutes and make it impossible to do anything but find shelter behind a rock and wait.
On top of the training were the demands of her new position. Baikonur didn't work on weekends, so she would use that time to fly down to Africa to monitor progress and troubleshoot at the Mount Kenya site. Fortunately, with the experience gained at the Cayambe site, the African installation went quickly and with no more than the expected snags.
After her first month the workload abated, as Abrahim recovered enough to take over his old position again, leaving her free to concentrate on the spin platform. She ruthlessly sliced away InterMet's sophisticated additions until there was nothing left but the cable spinner itself, and just enough habitat for the skeleton crew who would oversee it. The design was still modular, but now the modules would be self-contained, flown into orbit as they were finished and not all at once to form an interdependent whole. The vast thin-film melt mirrors that were the core of the on-orbit smelter concept, and that had been giving so many problems in development, she simply canceled. Officially there was no change in the mission, but nobody in UNISE still thought that there would be an on-orbit smelter, or that space industry was going to show a profit in primary-resource extraction. The mirrors would still go up, when the bugs were worked out of them, but they would be used to forge Ark's diamond and steel hull from the carbon and iron the Cable would bring into orbit, not to wring aluminum out of bauxite. In the meantime the thin-film inflation technology that was still inadequate to narrow their focal point sufficiently would work just fine to stabilize the huge arrays of polymer solar cells that would serve to power the Cable's boost track—if hard ultraviolet didn't destroy the polymer, if local charge buildups didn't short them out, if they didn't get tangled, if . . . if . . . if . . .
Using carbon fiber to conduct power was nothing new, but a thirty-six-thousand-kilometer superconducting power line was. The new Cable design required six strands instead of one, and all of them were significantly larger than the original design had planned for. That change radically altered the spinner design, and the new design also required spacers to hold the cables apart and in the proper relative positions.
And there was never enough time to get done all she wanted to get done in a day. She spoke to Abrahim almost daily, but their conversations were strictly professional. Was there a desire for more behind his eyes, a reluctance to terminate the calls? Perhaps she was only imagining it. She wanted very much to take time off to fly down to New York to see him, but her schedule forbade it. She did wonder about him, in particular what had made him shield her body with his when the tower came down. Maybe nothing more than reflex. He wouldn't have had time to think about what he was doing, only time to react. Of course it was reflex. That was all it could be. And why did I kiss him? He's too old for me to be having those kinds of thoughts. But she couldn't deny that she found him attractive, had done so from the first time they'd met. She sent a card and flowers when he came out of hospital, idly wrote out mash notes to go with them that she crumpled and threw away. You're not a teenager anymore, Daf.
By then she'd been at Baikonur for a month, training hard at International Metals' simulators. She had to learn every one of the orbital smelter's systems well enough to repair them in case of emergency. It was a challenge she hadn't had since graduate school, and she found herself enjoying the mental exercise as much as the physical.
They solved the cable rate production problem by developing a method of annealing monofilament strands together, making the entire cable into a single carbon molecule. It was not crystalline, despite the repeating hexagonal pattern of the atomic-scale carbon tubes that made it up, nor was it truly a polymer, since the microtubes that made it up did not bind to each other in predictable repeating patterns. They dubbed the new thing a macrotube, which was only slightly more accurate than the competing term "macromesh." They were breaking new ground, and the old guidebooks were out of date. They tested constantly, of course, building strands of monofilament with different lengths and taper profiles and stressing them until they snapped, firing dust grains at them at orbital velocities and then examining the impact points to see how the material behaved. They exposed the strands to high-flux proton radiation to simulate what would happen in the Van Allen belts. They shot them full of micrometeorite craters and then ran the self-heal annealers over them, to see if the heat of annealing at the weakened spot would cause the cable to fail before it could be fixed. They did steady pull tests and jerk tests and oscillation tests. But ultimately we can't be sure the Cable will work until we get it up. It could not be tested at small scales; it was all or nothing.
And then there was the glorious day that the spin platform got launched atop a heavy Proton V booster, and the whole platform team stood at the back of the control room in nail-biting silence, awaiting nameless disaster, until finally the ground controllers reported it was safe in geostationary orbit, floating right where it was supposed to be. It would still take a little nudging to position it right over Mount Kenya, but that was a mere detail. There was a party that night, where she drank too much champagne and stayed up far too late, singing and laughing and shouting. She spent the last half of it kissing a dark-eyed cosmonaut named Konstantin, and woke up late the next day with a headache and the realization that she was taking off herself in two days, and she very much wished to see Abrahim before she left.
He was in the crew room on the day she was to take off, and he called her aside after the preflight briefing.
He embraced her and stepped back, smiling broadly. "You're doing what I've always dreamed of doing. Thank you for the flowers."
"They were the least I could do." She smiled. "I still owe you my life."
He waved a hand. "You owe me nothing. Get Ark started up there and we'll both be happy."
She nodded. "I'm glad to see you're better, Abrahim."
"I'm a Russian, we're known for having hard heads."
She laughed at that, and he pulled a flask from inside his jacket. "Here, a toast to a good flight." He unscrewed the cap to reveal two thimble-size shot glasses, and poured each full.
"I can't drink that," she protested. "I'll be flying in two hours."
He laughed and handed her one of the glasses. "Just as a passenger. You're in Russia now, and we aren't so concerned with such rules. This is fine paper vodka, Lavochkin, and there isn't enough there to get a mouse drunk."
She took the glass, and didn't point out that Baikonur was in Kazakhstan, which hadn't been part of Russia for a very long time now. They clinked glasses and drank, and in truth there was barely a mouthful of alcohol. That was good, because although Lavochkin was doubtless a premium brand to a connoisseur of vodka, to her it tasted like nothing more then unadulterated jet fuel. She swallowed hard to down the burning liquid and managed to avoid grimacing.
"Good flight!" he said, and embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks, and then just when she thought he was going to let her go, he kissed her the way she had kissed him in the hospital, slowly and thoroughly and long enough to make her dizzy. "Perhaps I'll follow you up there one day."
He let her go before she had a chance to recover and held the door open so she could catch up with the rest of the team. The dusty, dry heat of the Kazakh summer rolled in, beading sweat on her brow almost instantly, and she reflected that it was the last time for a long time that she'd have to worry about weather. And the last time I'll see Abrahim for a long time. I want time with him, just to talk, to get to know him more.
She pushed the thoughts out of her mind as the countdown ticked away the minutes and seconds. There were more immediate things to think about. She ran over her checklists in her head as they taxied, made sure she knew what she was going to be doing once she got on station.
And then the turbines spooled up and the g-forces pressed her back hard in her seat as the carrier jet thundered down the runway, and hauled itself into the sky so steeply that she wondered if somehow the rockets had fired out of sequence. That doubt was erased sixteen minutes and sixty thousand feet later. There was a sudden lurch and momentary weightlessness as the carrier dove away beneath them, and then the main engines ignited with a roar that vibrated her entire being. The roar rapidly faded as they left the atmosphere. The engine's power was transmitted through air but not through the shuttle's frame; the craft was too well tuned for that.
The sky outside faded from purple to black and the stars shone hard through her window. I'm in space. The realization felt strange; the ride was too short for such a momentous change. The acceleration eased, then stopped, and they went weightless. It was the same sensation she'd had in training, but it went on and on. Occasionally there were surges as the pilots maneuvered them into their rendezvous orbit, and then she just had to sit there and wait while they caught up with the spin platform to dock. Sixty-seven minutes in all, from runway to geostationary orbit. Flying home from the UNISE office took longer.
Docking took a while, and so she experimented with the gravity, letting her pen float in front of her, trying the now impossible task of juggling the three squeeze balls of orange juice that came in her meal pack. Eventually she settled down and brought out the well-thumbed copy of Anna Karenina she'd been reading. How quickly the fantastic transforms itself into the mundane. It would have been different if she'd been able to look down and see Earth down below, but her window looked out only into endless night.
More surges, gentler this time, and then the pilot got on the PA to tell them they were docking. There were six other passengers on her flight, including Konstantin Khondovsky. The others were riggers from the Baikonur team, experienced experts in spacewalking and specially trained to run the robots that would connect the subsequent modules that would expand the spin platform into a functional on-orbit construction facility. They were the ones who would deploy the melt mirrors and her solar arrays when they arrived. And perhaps I should have taken a later flight, to make sure those deployment problems were solved first. Except she couldn't be everywhere at once, and the cable spinner was having its own issues, and she was the expert on nanotubes, and they had eight months to solve the mirror problem before it became a project-delay issue.
The riggers were all Russian and Ukranian, and though they all spoke the English required by global transportation standards for aircrew and spacecrew, they spoke Russian among themselves for convenience. That left Daf out of the conversation, but she didn't mind. The docking module had a viewport that faced down, unlike her seat window, and with not a trace of guilt about hogging the view she pulled herself over to it and floated there, watching the planet as if seeing it for the first time. Which in a way I am. She'd heard that floating weightless while the globe slid past underneath felt like flying, but in geostationary orbit the planet was fixed underneath her and there was no sensation of motion. Earth was the size of a fat grapefruit, and it looked like she could just reach out and pick it up. I don't feel like a bird, I feel like a goddess, dwelling up here in the heavens. Africa was directly below her, and she strained her eyes to see if she could pick up the base tower in Kenya, but of course she couldn't. Below, the terminator line was creeping across western Asia. She found France and then England, and imagined she could see London. Somewhere west of there was the town she grew up in. In the twilight zone around the terminator it was easy to find the cities, outlined with their own lights like jeweled frosting. She picked up Saint Petersburg, where Abrahim had grown up. Later at night they would be impossible to see as the blackout followed the terminator around the globe. On the dayside she could find them, but it was a challenge. There once was a time when the cities were so bright they lit up whole continents. She shifted her gaze to the spin platform. The cable spinner had already spun thirty kilometers of leader line, and she followed its path until it vanished against the atmospheric haze. Once the leader line was anchored the spin platform would start spinning the four-stranded main transport cable with its two superconductor conduits. Perspective made it look like it already stretched to the planet's surface, though in fact it wasn't even being spun down but forward—"prograde," in the parlance of orbital mechanics. When it was complete the far end would be deorbited with a thruster firing a long, gentle retrograde burn, and flown into the atmosphere to mate with the tower. Another technology we can't even test until we try it. It had worked in the simulations, but . . .
Something jostled her, and Daf became aware of the shuffle of people and baggage around her. The experienced platform crew were treating her like an obstacle. I'm just another spacestruck space tourist to them. She smiled to herself as the commander turned and went up the hatchway to the passenger deck. But here I am in orbit looking down on my beautiful planet. Nothing can take this away for me. Taking over the role of chief engineer disallowed her much of the work that she loved to do, but it had opened the door to space. This time it would only be temporary, but if—no, when—they started building the colony ship she would be moving to orbit permanently. She didn't allow herself to consider the future if the project was canceled. One step at a time, Daf. First you have to finish the Cable.
"Beautiful, yes?" Konstantin smiled at her as she pushed herself away from the viewport to make room for the rest of the passengers to come through the docking tube. "You never forget the first time seeing it. Never."
"It's like a jewel." She scooted herself and her meager ten kilos of baggage through the docking tube and into the spin platform itself. Khordovsky and the others followed.
"A busy jewel. Too many people, not enough space. Not like up here."
Daf looked doubtfully around the confines of the spin-platform habitat. It was a large space, but crammed full of equipment and ultimately meant to accommodate twenty people living and working. The only privacy anyone would get was behind the cloth screen of their sleeping bunk. "I can only imagine we're going to be pretty crowded."
"Not in here, out there." Konstantin pointed out the viewport. "You and the stars, nothing else. I built the second Mars ship, twelve hours in the suit every day. Out there you are alone with God. Truly, up here we live in heaven."
Daf turned her gaze back out the viewport, drinking in the brilliant, fragile Earth against its star-dappled black background, and let the beauty of the universe fill her soul. I'm not just living in heaven, I'm living as a goddess.
Josh Crewe frowned as the monorail slid into the Nanyuke station. A belt of rainy-season thundershowers had forced his plane down at Nairobi, and though the journey by train itself was just half an hour, the entire detour had cost him three hours, most of it spent negotiating traffic from the airport to the station. That delay was the least of his worries, but it was a frustration he could do without. There was a car waiting to take him up Mount Kenya to the new base tower. And really, I should be happy. The site had been transformed in six short months, the rough-cut roads now paved, and the heavy hauler convoys replaced by a continuous rail conveyor system, linked to the bustling logistics yard at the mountain's base. The delay in relocating the project from South America was frustrating, but the experience gained there had been put to good use in creating the new installation. The new assembly heads could build height at twice the rate of the original ones, and the new towers were going up as fast as the trains could deliver structural materials. The bottleneck now was manufacturing capacity, but with money not an object new fabrication plants were being qualified on an almost weekly basis. Everything was going as well as it could have been. But four kilometers a month isn't fast enough.
A car and driver were waiting for him at the station, along with an Interpol escort. Thom Pelino was waiting in the back of the car.
"Have you heard the news?" Pelino looked upset.
"What news?"
"The True Prophet is on the air every day now calling for you to be thrown out of office over this project."
"That's nothing new."
"It's new that he's doing it in every sermon, every day. It's new that the newsfeeds are covering it in detail. Most importantly, it's new that Assemblyist Plant just proposed a no-confidence vote on the floor of the General Assembly. The NorAm faction is solidly behind him."
"What!? Why haven't I heard anything about this before now?"
"You've been wrapped up in the Cable, Josh. The increase in Believer rhetoric is in your weekly public-opinion status report. The vote . . . it just happened. I tried to get word to you in the air, the storm had the secure channel shut down, and I didn't think you'd want to hear about this on the air-traffic-control frequencies."
"Damn." Crewe was silent for a minute. "What have you got?"
"They've pulled off a coup, gathered their support without a ripple. They're counting the votes now, but you can be sure Plant wouldn't have made his move without being positive of his support."
Crewe picked up the car's phone. "I'll get the jet turned around."
Pelino shook his head. "Don't do that, Josh."
Crewe's face darkened. "What do you mean, 'Don't do that'? I'm the secretary-general. If my government is going to be challenged like this I have to be there."
"It's too late for that. The motion was moved, the vote is in progress. They have a majority on the floor. They are going to win, and there's going to be an election. We have to start getting ready for that."
"How do you know? How did they get a majority?"
"The Believers have been building their political base for years now. They've finally gotten it to a critical mass." Pelino shrugged. "As to who they've gotten on their side, we'll have to wait and see who votes on their side."
"I should be there. At least I can show my face." Crewe ground his teeth.
"All you'll accomplish by coming in now is to make yourself look desperate, and it'll be worse because we're going to lose. The best thing we can do now is prepare our response, have it out to the media the instant the vote is done."
Crewe nodded, breathing heavily. "There's something wrong here. We've had our own counterpropaganda running. I don't see how they could have come up so quickly."
Pelino nodded. "Something very wrong, boss. We've dropped the ball somewhere, and I'll take responsibility for that. In the meantime we have to get a grip on this."
"This is too soon." Josh looked out the window to the bustling hive that was the build site. "I need more time."
"We have to play the cards we're dealt."
"Right." Crewe inhaled, exhaled slowly. "I'll be back tomorrow. Call a general staff meeting and we'll work out how we're going to handle this." He met Pelino's gaze. "Losing this isn't an option. There's too much at stake to hand the world over to a bunch of religious fanatics."
Pelino smirked. "Losing is never an option. Losing is what happens when you run out of options. Don't worry, boss, we'll win or go down fighting."
"You're right about that. I need to think about this for a while." Crewe turned to watch out the window as the car took the grade up the mountain. He could see the thunderheads building up out on the plain, soaring, billowing masses of pure white cloud, and he envied the ease with which they climbed to the edge of the stratosphere. If he could command his world as Cheops had commanded Egypt he would not have had to worry that his vision might not be realized, but Cheops' people had not found fulfillment in hauling stone for his glory. I am not a tyrant, and I will not allow myself to become one.
Abrahim Kurtaski was waiting for them at the control center at the base of the northernmost subtower. He sent Thom Pelino back in the car to fly back to New York and start working on the election campaign, and went to greet his old friend.
"Abrahim, z'draste, are you well?"
"Better than the last time you saw me." Abrahim smiled. "Come and see what we've done."
For an hour Josh toured the site with his chief engineer and lost himself in the details of the vast construction project, issues of politics forgotten while he took in the scope of what had been accomplished there. The towers were soaring skyward so quickly their tops were already far out of sight, and almost out of the stratosphere. The assembly building, using advances Abrahim had gleaned from his experience at Cayambe, was pure poetry in motion, and the organized chaos that was the logistics yard was crowded and busy, keeping raw materials flowing up-tower at the optimum speed. Initially the tower struts had all been prefabricated and shipped in ready-to-assemble form, but there was a huge nanofilament spinning plant going up to custom-build the struts on-site and save the delay in shipping. Another building housed a facility that made the boost cars, each one a twenty-meter spacecraft without engines. The complete system would use hundreds, and though they were still years from completion, that much lead time was required to make sure the Cable would have a full complement of cars when it was finally up. It was hard to believe that had been only an idea a year ago. It was harder to believe that it might be undone in just three months. We are so close to making this happen.
When they had finished the tour they went back to Abrahim's spartan office, where the chief engineer poured thick Russian coffee and laced it with vodka.
"Budmo!" Abrahim raised his cup. "We've come a long way, muy droog."
"Budmo!" Josh raised his own cup, and they both drank deep. He hesitated before he spoke again, not wanting to ruin the mood. But silence will not change reality. "I have some bad news."
Abrahim cocked his head. "What is it?"
Josh outlined the political situation, and the no-confidence vote. ". . . and if Markham Plant is secretary-general, this entire project will be over."
Abrahim considered that for a while before speaking. "So what are your chances of winning another term?"
"I still have support on the assembly floor, but not enough. Plant has the True Prophet behind him, and the True Prophet can swing a lot of critical votes. It's going to be an uphill battle." He drummed his fingers on Abrahim's desk. "I need to show progress on something, particularly something that's going to make a difference in NorAm."
"What about the Aerospace Consortium? International Metals? We are providing a lot of work for a lot of people."
"We'll have them on board, but I don't think it will be enough this time. I got in with their backing, and with the dissatisfaction of the public with the previous government. Their backing isn't what it once was; we lost a lot with Harmon Michaud. More important, public dissatisfaction is now Plant's weapon, not mine. That's the source of the Believers' strength." He looked out the window at the bustling logistics yard. "If we could at least finish the Cable and hand it over to private industry, it would be beyond the ability of the General Assembly to take it down." He looked back at Abrahim, the question he didn't dare ask written in his face.
Abrahim read it, and answered it. "I'm sorry, Josh, it's impossible. Three months is another twelve kilometers of tower, no more. If I cut quality control and some safety margins I could make that twenty kilometers, maybe. That would mean accepting some fairly large risks." He spread his arms. "More than that just isn't physically possible."
"I know." Josh leaned forward, rubbing his forehead. "I just need something, anything, to create at least the appearance of success here. I need something to give people faith in civilization, or they're going to turn their backs on us and embrace the True Prophet."
"And vote in Markham Plant." Abrahim furrowed his brow, then looked up. "Give them power."
"Power?"
"Power, electrical energy, to heat their homes, and light their lives. People are pessimistic. Why is that? Because they see their children will live less well than they do. And why is that? Because too many people compete for too few resources. There is no more fundamental resource then energy. Give the people energy and you give them hope. People don't want a great project like the Ark if they don't have hope first."
"Nobody knows about Ark."
"Josh, everybody knows, it's an open secret now."
"There's been some speculation, but . . ."
"Speculation that everyone believes, and belief is more important than reality."
"So people know." Josh Crewe's voice held an edge of irritation. "This project makes no material difference to the global economy, it takes no food from anyone's mouth."
"No, but the True Prophet has turned it into a symbol, a symbol of government indifference to the needs of the common man, of the official decadence. Symbols are powerful things."
Josh stroked his chin, considering. "I thought we had that countered. Obviously I was wrong. You're right about the need for hope, and you're right that energy is what it's going to take to restore it for the world, but I can't create power plants from nothing."
"No, but you can turn the Cable into one. We are already putting solar foil in orbit to run the boost cars. We can't finish the cable to carry cargo much ahead of schedule, that's a reality. Maybe we can just get a pair of leader lines down in time to tie them to the grid. It won't be a lot of power, but . . ."
Josh nodded. ". . . but it will be a symbol. More important, it will eliminate their symbol." He stood up, reenergized. "That's brilliant, Abrahim. Let's make it happen."
"Of course it's brilliant. That's why I'm chief engineer."
For Daffodil Brady, zero gravity had evolved from an exciting novelty to a frustrating challenge to a simple fact of life. The view of Earth and the stars through the viewports was still breathtaking, but she found that life on-orbit allowed little time for sightseeing. The cable spinner had worked fine on the ground, but it had been impossible to test it fully under zero-gravity conditions, and the process needed refinement and tweaking. Experiments that would have been trivial on Earth were greatly complicated by the requirement to go EVA just to make an adjustment or collect a sample of extruded cable. A lot of care was required to prevent longer samples from snarling into hopelessly tangled balls of braided monofilament. It took a month before the process was running the way it should be, and another month of careful testing to prove that the material properties of the Cable were what they should be. And then came the order to change the spin configuration, eliminating both the four main load-carrying strands and the boost-car guide tracks, and spinning only the power conductors. What that was about she couldn't guess, and Abrahim refused to tell her on an open circuit. He would be coming up-orbit to help with the deployment of the solar array, and he would tell her then.
In the meantime, they had to completely reconfigure the spinner head. The new template was shipped up on the next shuttle, and installing it meant yet another EVA. She volunteered for it, not because she wanted more work, but because she wanted to get better at working in space. She went out with Konstantin Khordovsky, and they started the delicate dance, first removing and securing the old spinner head, and then installing the new one. It was tricky work to position them properly in zero gravity while wearing pressure gloves, and every movement had to be made slowly and carefully.
Which was only typical of her EVA experience. Earth floated above her, a brilliant blue orb, and she realized that once more she would not even have time to glance at it. In reviewing the design for the spin platform she had never considered that such a change might need to be made, and so it was a difficult and painstaking job, complicated by the sensitive X-ray diffraction cameras used to monitor the quality of the extruded strands. They had to be carefully removed first, and then, once they had a replacement template installed, the cameras had to be replaced and carefully realigned.
And then finally they were finished. She reattached her connection tool to her tool belt and gave Khordovsky a thumbs-up. He returned it and she turned to find the airlock, only to hear him come over the radio.
"Platform, this is Khordovsky. We're almost done, we'll be inside in thirty minutes."
"Thirty minutes—" Daf was about to protest, but he put a finger to his faceplate to warn her to silence, then pushed his helmet against hers so he could talk to her without using the radio.
"We have oxygen left. Let's enjoy the view." He swept his arm to take in the Earth and the stars. She nodded and he pushed away gently, to float gently at the end of his tether. Daf breathed out and looked down, aware only of her own breathing. Earth looked so small and fragile, a grapefruit-size beacon of light and life set in infinite empty blackness. Alone with God, Khordovsky had said on her first day in space. She put out her hand as though to pick up the blue-white sphere. Twelve billion people down there, and only a few thousand have seen what I'm seeing now.
She had thought that thirty minutes would be a long time to float alone in space, but when Khordovsky tapped her on the shoulder to say was time to go in it seemed as if he had only just left. A line from a poem came to her. For I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. Neither said anything on the way in, nor as the lock cycled. They didn't have to.
They stripped out of their suits in the postlock chamber, and he took the opportunity to kiss her. It was gentle, almost casual, a natural extension of the experience they'd just shared. He was a good kisser, and Daf felt herself responding to his well-muscled body, hard against her softness through the thin fabric of their suit liners. And why shouldn't I have a fling up here if I want one? Konstantin was handsome and intelligent, and he would know enough to be discreet. And what about Abrahim? You're too old for crushes, Daffodil. She and Abrahim had no established relationship, and their respective positions stood in the way of one ever developing. His hands were on her hips, pulling her close, but the postlock chamber wasn't private enough for anything more. She let her lips linger on his for what seemed at once a long time and a short one.
"Later," she whispered, finally.
"Will you come to me?" He didn't let her go.
She gave him a look. "There's no privacy here."
"If you want something enough, you'll find it." He moved to kiss her again, then stopped, just short. "Will you come to me?"
"Maybe," she said, and smiled.
He smirked " 'Maybe' means no, but I think you'll change your mind."
Without waiting for a reply he kissed her, hard this time, and broke away before she quite realized that he'd started, winning a small gasp from her throat. He turned to pull on his jumpsuit, and Daf just watched him, the scientist in her already analyzing the contents of the brief encounter. He's so sure I'll change my mind. He's cocky, that's for sure. She smiled to herself, admiring his lean, muscular form. He might also be right.
"Markham Plant. Because he believes in your future." The image cut to a profile shot of Assemblyist Plant with an expression of resolve on his face, backdropped by the darkened silhouette of New York. The voice-over faded and the music rose while the lights across the cityscape winked on one after another until the scene blazed with light. Crewe made a gesture to freeze the display on the last frame. The most effective thing about the advertising was the emphatic way it drove its point home. Plant's endorsement by the True Prophet was never stated, simply underscored by the emphasis the voice-over put on the word "believes." That told the Believers all they needed to know, while doing nothing to alienate those who might disagree with a blatantly religious political agenda. The lighting up of New York implied that Plant would solve the energy crisis, but by making the claim nonverbally it spared him any questions on how he might accomplish that. The NorAm faction's unrelenting attacks on Crewe's government on the energy issue were enough for a public hungry to lay blame for the current state of the situation.
He made another gesture and the True Prophet's most recent widecast replaced the commercial spot. It was an outdoor rally, and the crowd was angry, shouting and carrying signs denouncing the government. The scene cut back to the Prophet, arms upraised as he exhorted the cheering throng of Believers. His speech was on the Cable project, castigating the government for defying the will of God while people went cold and hungry on Earth.
Crewe blanked the display. The election was still a month away, and a lot could change in that time. But if nothing changes, then they are going to win. The fact was there, black and unpleasant but undeniable, written in poll numbers that bespoke the frustration of the world's public with the status quo. The Believers had expanded far beyond their NorAm base now. Eurasia had come to support their position, as the inexorable laws of supply and demand drove the price of energy out of reach of the average citizen in the nations of the Old World and the East. All told no more than five percent of the world's population would swing their vote to the True Prophet's command. The built-in inequities of the General Assembly gave them a voting bloc of perhaps ten percent of the floor. A small number, but in a world where every region voted for its own agenda it made the Believer faction the largest single voting bloc. Their voices would override the rest of the world.
And more people will start to follow them. Whatever humanity's long-term future, in the short term there could only be more power shortages, less resources, higher prices, less opportunity. That was a reality beyond the ability of any mere politician to change. In the long term the energy crisis might yet be eased, but that would come too late to save Josh Crewe. Or the Ark.
And the Cable project was spinning power leads down from orbit as fast as it could, but there was no guarantee the system would be in place in time to sway the election. Crewe waved his hand angrily to bring up his contact list, pointed live a call to a number he'd had for a while had never used. The other end rang and a man answered, and he spoke. "I need a meeting with Norman Bissell."
In politics you learned fast or you failed. Josh Crewe had enough experience to know when it was time to cut a deal.
A week later he found himself on his way to Norman Bissell's private residence. He would rather have flown his own volanter; instead a UN jet flew him into Richmond, Virginia, and then he went in a ground car with an escort. It was not a publicized media event, but neither was he trying to keep his visit secret. As Thom Pelino pointed out, it would do his public image no harm in Noram to be seen visiting the True Prophet. Such are the times we live in.
Bissell's home was on a large farm in the rolling hills of rural Virgina, set in tilled fields and extensive orchards of apples and peaches, and surrounded by well-built barns. Bearded men in plain blue serge shirts worked the fields with horse-drawn plows and wagons. The house itself was large but plain, clapboard-sided with big windows. He left his escort outside and went in to be greeted by an attractive young woman waiting outside the door. She introduced herself as Beth, and he wondered if she was one of the True Prophet's wives. Inside, the house seemed to be a step back in time, with oil lanterns hanging on walls and hand-thrown rugs on the waxed hardwood floor, wood stoves in the rooms to provide heat. Beth showed him in to Bissell's inner sanctum. The True Prophet's study was surprisingly spartan. In this I have something in common with him. Crewe filed the observation as potentially useful. I'm here to find common ground. With their positions so diametrically opposed, even the smallest shared characteristic might prove to be a useful lever. The desk was wood and looked handmade. The prophet might well have made it himself; he had started out as a carpenter. The vidscreen on the wall seemed jarringly out of place.
Crewe's reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Bissell himself, who came in and shook his hand with restraint. So he will not pretend we are friends, which may be good or bad. His host waved him into a plush leather armchair by the glass-topped coffee table, and he took one himself. "And how is Dr. Kurtaski?" Norman Bissell's tone didn't hold the concern that his words expressed.
"He's recovered, and back working." Crewe clenched his jaw unconsciously with the effort of remaining cordial with his adversary. He's telling me this to let me know that he knows my friendships, knows the details of my life, knows me.
"Good, good." The Prophet's smile was almost genuine. "The eruption was such a tragedy. An act of God . . ." The smile broadened. ". . . although not unforeseen. I had hoped you might act to avoid further tragedy."
"Meaning what?"
"Isn't it obvious? God has sent you a message. You would be wise to listen."
Crewe met the Prophet's gaze and held it. "If you think I'm going to shut down the Cable project, you're wrong."
"Mr. Secretary-General." Norman Bissell spread his arms expansively. "You defied God, and God struck you down. How many times will you try His patience?"
"As many times as necessary. The world needs this project, and I am going to see it finished." His words carried the force of angry conviction, and he pushed himself back in his chair as a physical reminder to retain self-control. If he can goad me to anger he wins. He took a deep slow breath to calm himself.
The Prophet shook his head. "That's where you're wrong, Dr. Crewe. The world does not need this project. The world needs hope, the world needs faith, and the world needs a government that understands those values." He walked over to look out the windows and out over the harbor. "The world needs a leader, not a deluded visionary with stars in his eyes." He turned back and gestured behind him. "It's dark out there, Dr. Crewe. There are riots in the streets, there is hunger and there is fear. Thirty percent of the NorAm crop was lost this summer because the farmers couldn't get the power credits to harvest it. Thirty percent. We are living in the end times, Dr. Crewe. The people understand that."
"We won't solve today's problems by turning our back on technology."
"Simplicity and devotion to God are the way to salvation, and we are going to need salvation soon. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled and waiting. Famine is only the first to ride. War is not far behind, and where War and Famine scythe souls, Plague follows close. And Death, Dr. Crewe . . ." Bissell's eyes burned demon-bright. "Death will stride high over the land and strike down the ungodly in their millions. Your Ark is no salvation."
Crewe snorted. "My Ark is our only salvation."
Norman Bissell smiled a nasty smile. "So you admit your true goal at last."
"Perhaps you've convinced me that it's the only way to save our civilization."
"You say that because you have no faith in your heart. I don't fear the Apocalypse. The Messiah is coming and those who have accepted God into their hearts will be saved." The Prophet's eyes burned with the zeal of the true believer, almost frightening in their intensity. "Those who don't will be condemned to burn in Hell. No starship can save you from that."
Crewe looked at him. "You know, Mr. Bissell, I can never decide if you are the most cynical and manipulative man I have ever met, or simply the most deluded." Even as he said it Josh Crewe regretted the words. I am goading him for goading me.
The Prophet just laughed. "So if I believe what I say I'm deluded, if I don't I'm simply fraudulent. It seems I have no way to gain your respect, Dr. Crewe." He stood up. "Of course, it is more complicated than that. You didn't become secretary-general without understanding the dynamics of power, or the power of ambition. Let me be perfectly frank with you." The Prophet pointed at the ceiling-high figure of Jesus Christ on the cross that hung on the wall across from his desk. "The Bible commands that we do not worship graven images, and yet we do. The Bible tells us that the meek shall inherit the Earth, and yet it is the strong who rule it. People have always worshipped lifeless stone made into the shape of their gods, and people have always elevated men strong enough to command them into living Gods on Earth." He paused and met Crewe's gaze. "I am such a man, Mr. Secretary-General. I have wrought myself into a form that other men will worship. I have shaped myself with care, because I aspired to become God's Voice on the earthly plane, to rule the world as God intends it to be ruled. I have anointed myself as Prophet to command the spiritual obedience of my followers. That has required more than just simple faith, that has required tactics and strategy. You might call that manipulative, but I would say I simply understand the realities of power. You see how I preach against technology and yet use the tools of civilization to advance my goals, and you might call that cynical." He shrugged. "I would say I use the tools of Satan to do God's work. I will bend the General Assembly to command the lawful obedience of everyone else. Humanity will face the End Time in a state of grace under my leadership."
Josh Crewe looked at his adversary with more than a little awe. His arrogance is total, and yet . . . Coming from anyone else such a grandiose ambition would have seemed ludicrous. Coming from the True Prophet it seemed . . . prophetic.
The Prophet sat down again. "Look in the mirror, Dr. Crewe, and tell me that your vision is any less arrogant than mine. You're as much a true believer in your vision as I am in mine, maybe more. The difference between us is that your faith is built on secular sand, while mine is founded on the rock of the Word."
"Perhaps. That doesn't mean we can't find common ground."
"You're forgetting one thing, Dr. Crewe."
"What's that?"
"God has ordained my victory." The True Prophet paused, considering. "It's true that He helps those who help themselves, I don't expect to win without fighting, without sacrificing. I do think I can expect to win without making a deal with Satan."
"Is that what you believe?" Crewe looked at the Prophet with disbelief.
"That you are the devil incarnate?" Bissell laughed. "No, of course not, Dr. Crewe, but in defying God's will you ally yourself with His Adversary."
"I notice your obedience to God's commands seems well allied with your own personal interests."
Bissell's face darkened. "Are you implying that my motives are less pure than yours? Look around you. I live simply, not in splendor. The earthly power I claim is used in the service of God, and in the service of those who suffer here on Earth. My followers are real, live people who are suffering every day, Dr. Crewe. They are real, live people whose immortal souls are at stake in the coming Judgment."
And now is the time to apply the pressure. "Interpol is investigating the use of Ceranine at the Times Square rally."
The Prophet nodded and smiled a tight smile. "A regrettable incident. We've cooperated with the investigation fully, of course."
"They've made linkages to believers, and more to Markham Plant."
The Prophet raised an eyebrow. "I think you're angry with me, Dr. Crewe, but I wasn't the one who struck down your Tower of Babel, it was God."
"It wasn't God who laced those streamers with Ceranine."
"Neither was it me. You tread a dangerous line, Mr. Secretary-General." The Prophet's expression hardened. "That riot was caused by the police, not the Believers."
"There's video of you inciting the crowd to riot. There's enough evidence there to see you in prison."
"You underestimate the power of belief, Dr. Crewe. Those who have pledged to follow me through Heaven and Hell will surely rise up at my arrest." Bissell leaned back in his chair, contemplating Crewe as though he could measure his soul through sufficient scrutiny. "Perhaps you could attain a conviction, but it would cost you all you've labored for."
"According to you, I've lost it anyway." The Prophet's eyes narrowed, and Crewe took a deep breath. I must not lose sight of my goal here. "I haven't come here to argue, I've come to find how we might find our own interests aligned. We don't have to be enemies."
"And how would that work?"
"I need you, I need your people."
"You won't buy my support, not at any price."
"I don't want political support, politics are just a means to the end. What I need is your faith, and your commitment, and your way of life. Not for any political ambition of mine, I have none beyond seeing Ark built. The voyage will take thousands of years. The major ship systems can be designed to last that long, the ecology will be self-sustaining. The society is another question. It will have to be built around hand labor and basic farming. Your people are almost unique in having preserved those skills. It will have to be built around faith and tradition, to keep alive the memory of Earth and the vision of the future. Who better than the Believers to do that?"
Bissell stood up. "You dare to suggest—"
"Hear me out. You say we're living in the end times, and I think you're right. We have too many people and not enough land, not enough power, not enough food. Our civilization can't last, our species may not long survive it, at least not in its present form. You say my sky cable is the Tower of Babel. What if it's really Jacob's ladder, a stairway to heaven. What if Ark is really humanity's last hope?"
"You aren't the next Noah, Dr. Crewe."
"I know I'm not. Have you considered that perhaps you are?" Appeal to his ego.
"An interesting idea." The Prophet sat down again and stroked his chin. "Where are you going with it?"
"Ark won't be a ship, it'll be a world, a world with its own sun, its own sea, its own soil. I can build it to run for ten thousand years, give it power to reach the stars. What I can't do is give it all the resources of Earth. It won't have minerals to mine or hydrocarbons to pump. Whoever lives there will have to build their own tools of wood and sinew, grow their own food with their own hands."
Bissell's face hardened. "You want to exile me."
Crewe shook his head. "It will be decades before the ship is ready, and you'll be here on Earth for all that time. You're a young man, you might live to see it launched. I certainly won't. My goal is simple: I want to see humanity reach the stars. I'm offering you the chance to shape a whole world in your own image. I need you, and your people, to realize my own vision."
The Prophet leaned back, considering. "It's tempting, of course, but temptation is what the Serpent does best. God is using you to test me, and I won't falter. It is against His will for mankind to violate the Heavens."
"Wherever heaven is, it isn't in space. Consider the value of what I'm giving you here, it's an opportunity that no man has had since Moses led his people to the Promised Land. We don't have to be enemies."
"Thank you for your offer." The True Prophet stood up. "Unfortunately I have other business to attend to now. I'll pray for your soul, Dr. Crewe." He offered his hand.
Crewe shook it, nodded formally and went out. Outside the door he breathed out slowly to release the tension. I've failed. Everything is up to Abrahim now. The woman who'd shown him in showed him out again. Outside it was starting to rain.
The New York City police said there were a million people in Central Park, and the tumultuous babble of their voices was a steady backdrop to the steady buzz of conversation in Norman Bissell's control tent. The True Prophet didn't know how they came up with their crowd size estimate, but there was no question it was a big rally. He smiled at that thought. It had been a struggle to get approval for it, given what had happened at the last one, but there were differences. This one was in daylight, for starters. And this time Markham Plant is under control. The True Prophet was unconvinced of the sincerity of Plant's devotion to the Believer creed; the man was too opportunistic a politician, too willing to let the end justify the means to be fully trusted. And yet the end does justify the means when the cause is the glorification of God. He glanced out the half-open door of the control tent, at the crowd. The white and red and green robes of his followers formed solid wedges of color in the sea of faces. Inside the tent there was a steady buzz of activity as his inquisitors and bishops coordinated the myriad details required to make the event run while he went over the notes for his sermon. The point of today's rally was not to challenge the government but to solidify political support for the Believer faction in the General Assembly. And Markham Plant remains a tool in my plan, for all his opportunism. God's will would not be denied, and the assemblyist would come into office knowing to whom he owed his position.
He looked over to where Plant was going over his own notes. There had been a NorAm-wide blackout just three days previously, and public frustration was at an all-time high, anger that would be put to good use in the imminent election. God has ordained it for our victory.
Outside, the crowd was starting to chant. "Believe! Believe! Believe!" He stood up. It was time, and there was now nothing that could stand in their way.
As the only passenger on the shuttle, Abrahim rode on the flight deck, in the observer's seat behind and between the pilot and the navigator. Launch was exhilarating, a roller-coaster ride that ended in orbit. Orbital maneuvering was not, though it got more interesting once the spin platform came into view. From a distance it was unremarkable, a fat disk against the star-spattered blackness, looking like a bad imitation of a flying saucer. Abrahim was impressed anyway; he knew what had gone into making it fly. As the shuttle drew closer details began to resolve themselves. Antennas and solar panels protruded from the top, and the gossamer strands of nanofilament conductor extruded themselves from the bottom, visible at this distance only when the sunlight caught the separators that linked the two wires together. They had managed to successfully deorbit the assembly, now connected to a header station hastily constructed atop the Mount Kenya space tower. We are so close to making this happen. The reduced cable was a fragile thing; doped for conductivity at the expense of strength, it was barely capable of supporting its own weight, incapable of being repaired. It would not long survive the ravages of the upper atmosphere. It would carry power, not cargo, and not even a great deal of power, when measured against the insatiable demand of an overcrowded world. But it will be a symbol, and right now a symbol is what we need. If they were successful the real Cable would soon take the place of this one. If they weren't—then the shuttle he was on would be one of the last shuttles to fly, ever. Abrahim frowned. I mustn't allow myself to consider failure.
Beyond the spin platform, showing just a brilliant crescent but still dwarfing the platform, was the main mirror of the orbital smelter, a project currently suspended so that all available resources could be concentrated on making some kind of orbital power station a functional reality. It was five hundred meters across, a film of aluminized plastic just a few molecules thick, bent into a faceted parabolic dish by inflatable struts hardly more substantial than the mirror surface itself. At its focus half a gigawatt of sunlight was concentrated into a space just a meter square, power enough to flash-boil aluminum. It was the largest human-crafted object ever to fly in space, but it was going to be far eclipsed by the solar array they were about to deploy.
The pilot fired the thrusters to position them for docking, and the view rotated until he could see only stars. He kept quiet while the pilot and navigator chattered back and forth, guiding them in on instruments. Eventually there was a gentle thunk and they were docked. Abrahim waited impatiently for the lock to cycle, more anxious to see Daf Brady than he cared to admit. It's been so long. Devoting one's life to a mission had its costs, and one was that personal relationships tended to go by the wayside. It was perhaps too much to ask to expect a woman as intelligent and attractive as Daf Brady to stay unattached for any length of time. We had an attraction, a kiss, another kiss, that's all. He had hoped to see her—the original plan had slated her to come back to Earth once the cable was spun—but the reality of the compressed development schedule had meant that she had simply stayed in orbit.
She was there, but there was time only for the briefest meeting as he came aboard, a handshake when he was introduced to the whole spin-platform crew. Was it longer, was it warmer than it should have been? If it was it wasn't by much. The tall Khordovsky stood beside her, his hand casually on her shoulder. Is there something there?
Push the thought aside, Abrahim, you have work to do. After his gear had been brought aboard and the pilots had gone back to the shuttle to begin off-loading the solar-array package, he held a briefing, using finger and sketchscreen to brief the EVA crew on the next day's operation. It would be tricky. The solar array used the same inflated-strut technology that the smelting mirror did, but it was a hundred times bigger, large enough to generate ten gigawatts of electrical power, enough to power the transport cars on the cable's boost track, enough to power Ark's construction, enough, most importantly, to supply a surplus to Earth's power-starved billions and provide some immediate justification for the continuation of the project.
Which won't placate those who claim we're violating God's heaven. It amazed Abrahim that in this day and age there were still those who believed such things. He pulled his mind back to the briefing and carried on with his key points. The solar array was cobweb-fragile, and the most delicate automated assembly task that Abrahim had ever designed. Because of its fragility, as every fold opened up it had to be checked for snags, and they had to be cleared with the utmost care before the deployment could continue. That meant four people in suits with maneuvering backpacks had to go outside for the deployment, checking each blossoming section as it opened, ready to tease apart stuck sections with special compressed-gas cylinders.
"Be careful," Abrahim emphasized. "Even these can exert enough force to tear the film. And be very careful when you're maneuvering close to the film. The reaction gas from your backpacks is strong enough to blow holes in it if you get too close. Take your time. Remember, haste is not speed. We've only got one chance to do this right."
The briefing ended, and he'd hoped to find time to talk to Daffodil then, but there was too much to be done first, preparing equipment, testing procedures, getting the power connections ready, and then exhaustion overcame him. With the preparations for launch in Baikonur he hadn't slept in thirty hours. His body clock and the spin-platform clock both agreed that it was noon, but he went to sleep anyway, so he would at least have some rest before deployment started at sunset. Four hours later the harsh bleating of his alarm dragged him from a pleasant dream, its fragments dissolving as he woke, leaving only a memory of Daf's face as he had dreamed it.
Supper was served in tubes, augmented by fresh fruit brought aboard the shuttle. Again there was no chance to talk to Daf. Immediately after eating they began preparations for the deployment. The election was in less than a week. If this symbol is to have any influence, it must come into play immediately. We can afford no more delays. If the Cable was complete and sending power down to the grid before the election, it would be deemed a success. Josh Crewe might then hold on to his position, and then the Ark project could begin in earnest. If it wasn't complete, the whole effort would be for nothing. And that isn't the only consequence. If the Believer faction wins, science will suffer everywhere, and humanity will begin its long slide back to the stone age.
They had another short briefing before the EVA, just to confirm everybody's role. Khordovsky led the outside team; the shuttle crew would use the shuttle's manipulators to position the packed array, and the shuttle's inertial mass would serve to stabilize it and, hopefully, keep it from getting folded over on itself and tangling as it expanded. Abrahim would supervise the deployment from inside the spin platform, using a series of cameras that were integral to the solar array's frame, as well as a free-floating camera bot with its own attitude jets. The original plan had Daf inside to assist, but the outside team was shorthanded as it was, and she was not only suit-qualified but good at it. He was disappointed by that, but tried not to let it show. I'm letting my personal feelings get in the way of my work. That could be a problem.
They timed the start of the deployment for sunset. That gave them slightly under twelve hours to get the array deployed, the time when the sun would be hidden behind the Earth. Taking longer than that would expose the gossamer web of photoplastic to full sunlight, and the full ten gigawatts of power would begin to flow. If any of the array was still folded when that happened, the sandwiched fine web of carbon-fiber conductors that that both held the structure together and carried its electrical output would short out, and the array would destroy itself. It was all or nothing. In simulation on the ground it took eight hours to get the whole job done, and in simulation a fifty-percent safety margin had seemed ample. Doing the job for real, with so much riding on it, made the risk suddenly seem much higher.
The central conductors were no thicker than heavy twine, not true superconductors, but still carrying more current than a copper wire a thousand times thicker. Farther from the center the conductors' diameter decreased until they were delicate threads barely visible under close inspection with the naked eye. The riggers suited up and went outside while Abrahim watched them through the external cameras, orchestrating their movements over the radio as the operation began. The EVA crew had to be supremely careful, because even without direct sunlight, the glow of the crescent moon was enough to put thousands of volts through the system. Accidental contact with a main conductor would be fatal. His part of the work was delicate and painstaking, monitoring the deployment system that itself monitored the gas pressure in the inflatable strutwork.
Initially the deployment went well. The shuttle off-loaded the bulky deployment packages with its onboard manipulator and then, its mission complete, disengaged from the spin platform, backed slowly away, and then deorbited. The initial assembly of the packages also went quickly, but inevitably they fell behind getting the framework erected; once opened, the huge array sections were unwieldy and their considerable inertia made them difficult to handle and difficult to lock into position. Working in the sharp darkness of the Earth's shadow only made the task harder, and Abrahim began to worry that they might not finish in time. Each section had to be erected individually, its separate segments teased into opening by the riggers, working delicately with their gas jets to overcome the film's natural tendancy to stick to itself. The power leads fed into the huge control rectifiers mounted on top of the spin platform, and from there Abrahim's instruments monitored the power output. As the first section of array opened, the voltage readings slowly rose, and the immense array blossomed like some cybernetic flower under the ministrations of its human keepers.
They were in the last phases when they ran into trouble. The first sign was fluctuating voltage readings from one of the deploying sections. He ordered Daffodil over to check it out, and she quickly found the problem. There was a tear in one of the inflatable tubes that provided rigidity to the structure. Gas leaking from the rip had set the section into a semirhythmic undulating motion, which in turn had wrapped the superfine foil around itself. The voltage fluctuations were coming from microscopic short circuits where the collector wires were touching each other. The potential across the shorts wasn't high enough to do serious damage, not yet, but when the sun rose and hit the array, they would arc and burn out.
Khordovsky jetted over to join her. "It looks bad," he radioed. "We may have to cut this section out."
"Stand by." Abrahim called up the elaborate mesh of the solar array's wiring diagram. Some sections could be removed with little impact on the array. Some sections were primary current carriers that were necessary to collect power from other sections. He quickly traced the problem, only to realize that cutting out the damaged section would be a hazard to the power production capability of the entire array. He keyed his microphone. "Negative, we have to fix it."
"What are the voltage readings?"
Abrahim checked his instruments. "Three hundred kilovolts, approximately. Be careful."
There was silence for a time, then, "I don't think we can do this. The foil is moving too much. It's too risky."
Too risky. Abrahim balled his fists in frustration. Doesn't he know what's at stake here? "Daffodil, what's your assessment?"
Her transmitter clicked on, but for a long moment there was only the hiss of empty air. "I have to agree, getting that close is asking for trouble. I could tape the leak easily enough if the foil wasn't moving. As it is . . ." She left the sentence unfinished.
Abrahim ground his teeth and glanced at the mission clock. They had just under two hours left before the sun came up and fully energized the array. I should suit up myself and go fix it . . . He knew that idea wasn't going anywhere. Khordovsky was an experienced space rigger, Daf had six months on-station, and while Abrahim was trained in a suit, he wasn't skilled in it. Just getting himself ready would take most of those two hours, and he'd probably fry himself on the array as soon as he got out there. But I can't just abandon this, I owe it to Josh to get this running. He's the one who believed in me.
He keyed his transmitter again. "Confirmed. Stand by." He drummed his fingers on his console. If the shuttle hadn't departed he might have used its manipulators to correct the problem, though the strength of its attitude jets would put the fragile solar film at some risk. No use considering that, Abrahim, the shuttle is gone. The first thing to do was stop the problem from getting worse. He keyed his console, shutting off the gas flow to that section of the array, then swung his external cameras around to give him the best view, and ordered the camera bot to move up behind Khordovsky and Daffodil to get a better view of the damaged section.
What he saw was not encouraging. The tear was only as big as his thumb, but the tangled section was fifty meters long, and included a six-meter section of the main power bus. He glanced around the control cabin; a broom handle would give enough insulation and distance, if they put the tape on the end of the handle and then gently slid it onto the damaged section . . . A second later he was laughing at himself for looking for such a thing as a broom on a space station in zero gravity.
But there must be something. He slid himself into the main cabin and found Ruiz, the station chief. "I need an insulated pole, about so long." He held his arms apart to indicate the length, and shortly the entire onboard crew was ripping open storage lockers and tool chests looking for anything that might help in solving the problem. And really, we should have brought something like this, we should have anticipated the problem and planned for it. Of course, they hadn't, because the accelerated schedule necessary to meet the artificial deadline of the unexpected election had completely short-circuited the normal checkout and test process. We threw this together at the last minute for purely political reasons, and now we're paying the price for it. Like Cayambe.
And of course there was nothing on the station they could use as an insulated pole—nothing they could afford to rip out, at any rate. Abrahim went back to his station and called Khordovsky. "I'm looking at getting you something insulated so you can get close enough to take the leak. Any bright idea you have, now is the time to bring it out."
"We need at least two meters of length," he radioed back. "And we need it fast."
"Da, acknowledged." Abrahim glanced at the mission clock again. They'd lost half an hour already and were no closer to a solution. He maneuvered his camera bot closer to the damaged area to get a better look. Such a tiny tear to change the course of history. He zoomed in, the better to document his downfall.
Zoomed in. What if we used the camera bot? "Daffodil, can you put a length of sealing tape across the camera lens on the camera bot? I'm going to try to fly it into position."
"I can. Are you sure you're going to have fine enough control?"
"I don't know. I'm the automated assembly expert. If I can't make a robot do it, nobody can. I'm going to try."
"I'll do it." There was a pause, and then her hand obscured the screen as she positioned the tape. "Okay, go for it."
The tape blurred the camera's view, but not too badly. Abrahim held his breath, and nudged the bot's translation joystick, just a fraction, to start it toward the torn tube. Very slowly the solar array began to get closer in the image. The trick was to do everything very gently. He glanced at the mission clock again. Not too slowly. They were running out of time. He rotated the bot slightly, nudged the controller again to speed up its approach rate slightly. The tape on the lens obscured the rip, but that was exactly what he needed. As long as he kept bringing the bot closer and kept the rip invisible, the tape would line up over it perfectly on contact.
Except that when the rip was invisible, it was impossible to tell if he was lined up properly. In practice he had to wait until he saw a corner of it peeking out from beyond the edge of the tape, and then make an ever-so-gentle correction to the bot's trajectory. He also had to watch out for the overhanging folds of solar foil. Allowing one of the embedded conductors to touch the bot would destroy it as surely as it would kill a person. Almost as an afterthought he ordered Khordovsky and Daffodil to back away from the operation. No need for them to be close if something goes wrong. As the image of the support tube grew steadily closer the corrections became more and more frequent. The scene became blurry as the camera lens got closer to the target than its autofocus mechanism allowed it to adjust for, making the job even harder. Finally, inches away, he made one final correction, and let the bot drift into the support tube while he watched to see if he'd found his target.
The screen went black, and he nearly screamed in sudden frustration. He must've lost track of where the overhanging foil was, or a random ripple had somehow brought it into contact with the bot's metal casing. He hit the joystick controller by reflex to bring the bot back out of the area, but even as he did so he knew it was too late. The bot was destroyed, and with it any chance he had of salvaging the deployment operation. It would be possible to get a replacement module for that array section sent up, but that wouldn't happen until after the election, which really meant it wouldn't happen at all.
He became aware of voices in his head set. Daffodil. "Abrahim, you did it, you did it. It's in position! The tape is right where it needs to be."
"I lost the screen, what happened to the bot?"
"It looks like the top bracket hit a conductor. It's fried, Abrahim, but it doesn't matter. The support tube is fixed. Give it some gas pressure, and we'll see if it holds."
Abrahim hit keys, restarting the gas flow to the damaged array section, and soon he could see the support tube stiffening, and in the process unfolding the tangled foil. Daffodil and Khordovsky moved in, using their gas jets to separate stuck sections. The deployment continued, and there were seven minutes left on the mission clock when the airlock door finally closed behind the EVA team. There was champagne then, four bottles of it that Abrahim had smuggled up on the shuttle. Nobody was supposed to drink in space, but . . . I am the chief engineer, and who's going to tell me not to today?
The party went on for some hours, inviting all the usual horseplay that zero gravity invited, and Abrahim went to bed in his tiny bunk when he could no longer hold his eyes open. He was awakened some timeless time later by a hand on his chest. He opened his eyes, struggling to focus in the darkness, and saw Daffodil. She held a finger to her lips, then whispered, "We have to be very quiet. There's no privacy here." She slid herself into the narrow confines of his bed, her body warm and soft against his. He started to say something, but she kissed him first, and really that seemed like a more important thing to do.
* * *
"We're ready when you are, Josh." Thom Pelino was relaxed and confident, in his element orchestrating the press, the cameras, the myriad details that went into a major address by the secretary-general on the eve of a critical election.
Josh Crewe nodded. He was tired from three months of nonstop campaigning, tired of interviews, tired of speeches, tired of shaking hands and smiling at people, but most of all just tired. But this is the road I've chosen for myself, and tonight is not the night to falter. Thom stepped onto the stage to introduce him, and he took that moment to gather himself before following a moment later. He took the podium as photo flashes lit up the briefing room.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I know you all have a lot of questions about the election, about the direction that I have been taking the General Assembly. Before I go into those issues, I'd like to address one in particular. A large number of people have expressed a great deal of concern over the money that we have been investing in UNISE, in particular in the Cable project." No need to mention the Believers by name. "They have been quite right to do so. In a democratic world it is the responsibility of the government to ensure the needs of the people are met." He paused to look around the room, to meet every eye in it. This is the critical moment. "I can now tell you that we have successfully deployed the largest solar array ever built in orbit, connected to the Cable's spin platform. This solar array is now providing gigawatts of free power to the Central African power grid, and will provide even more as we expand the system. This world faces a great many challenges right now. It faces no challenge so great as the need for energy. Energy to light and heat our homes, energy to fuel the production necessary to raise the standard of living worldwide. It's no secret that as our population has gone up, quality of life has gone down for much of the world. I intend to see that trend reversed. There are those who have preached simplicity as the answer to the challenges we face. Simplicity can be part of the answer, but without cheap and abundant energy resources, simplicity alone will not suffice for the needs of an advanced civilization the size of ours." He let that sink in for a moment, and then stood back from the podium, to let his audience know he was finished. Immediately every hand in the press gallery shot up. He picked a reporter at random.
"Secretary-General, this project is in Africa. Can you tell us how soon NorAm will see similar benefits?"
"Immediately. The power added to the Central African grid will offset power normally imported over the transatlantic power system from NorAm. In addition, we are now in a position to rapidly add more solar arrays to the system, and we are planning one for the NorAm/SouthAm grid right now." Josh picked another reporter. "Next question?"
"Secretary-General, what about the rumors that you intend to use the Cable as boost infrastructure to mine the asteroids. Can you comment on those?"
Josh smiled. "They're true. Of course energy alone is not the entire answer. We also need raw materials. When the Cable project is complete it will provide us with easy access to high orbit, and to the rest of the solar system and the vast and untapped resources within it. With the success of this technology, I think I can safely say that my government is now prepared to lead the world into a new age of prosperity." He paused. "I would also like to take this opportunity to announce a new project, a project only made possible by the capabilities the Cable has brought us. A project to fire the imaginations of not just our generation but generations to come. This will be a tremendous undertaking, one which will ensure the future of human civilization for all time. I have directed the United Nations Institute for Space Exploration to build an interstellar colony ship, to carry the seeds of humanity to the stars and beyond."
There was stunned silence in the room, and then the same reporter continued. "Sir, if I can ask why?"
"Because I believe in the human race, and I believe in our future. I believe that we must ensure our posterity by spreading it far beyond this tiny globe. I believe that humanity needs the inspiration of great projects, and the challenge of reaching out, and as long as I'm secretary-general, I'm going to pursue programs that realize the small dreams of individuals, and the great dreams that are common to us all."
Josh stopped there and looked out at the thunderstruck faces of the press, every one of them now frantically taking notes. The biggest news of the day had lasted under thirty seconds before it was replaced by even bigger news. In a few minutes the story would break, and the political ambitions of Markham Plant and every other Believer assemblyist would end forever with the next newsfeed. The True Prophet was finished as a power broker. The Believer movement itself wouldn't end so quickly, but it would fade now, and by the time it was finally gone its ending wouldn't rate even page-four news. We needed a symbol. Now we have it, and the people have something better to believe in than self-styled prophets. The Ark had seized the stage, and with another term to entrench its position in the economy he knew it would be built.
One or two of the reporters had stopped jotting notes and looked up to see what bombshell he might drop on them next, perhaps to see if he really meant what he had said. He smiled broadly "Yes, it's true, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to build that ship. That's official, you can publish that. Humanity is going to the stars." He smiled broadly. "You can publish that too."