It was here, in front of the reception building, where his taxi had landed twelve years ago and he met Eleanor for the first time. She had invited him, the Birthplace bishop, to her “little shop” for lunch and a special proposal that she thought he might be interested in hearing about.
Meewee turned from the building and walked down the hill. For his last hike at Starke headquarters he chose a meandering path through the soybimi fields. Nearly five kilometers to his apartment, his evening walks usually took him an hour to complete. They had become his favorite part of the day and a priceless perk of his job (She couldn’t have foreseen that, could she?). For not only was the air alive with life, it was about the safest outdoor air on the planet that a person could breathe. The whole ranging campus was secure under its own canopy, which was in turn located under the Greater Bloomington canopy. A bubble within a bubble, it was a countryside free of fear of bandits large and small.
The soybimi fields weren’t exactly fields but rapid growth systems five tiers high, towering over his head. And the land had been cut into kilometer-wide slabs and the slabs tilted a few degrees north to allow for generous southern skylights for the arcology underneath. The tilted slabs of earth gave the horizon a weird sawtooth profile. He walked along the ridge of one of these slabs, protected from the sun by the wall of soybimi bushes. He paused more often than usual to savor the views and birdsong and chirpy crickets in this blessed refuge. He stopped to balance wobbily on one leg and pour powdery dirt, like diamonds, from his shoe. It was still early afternoon and warm, and his overalls kicked into cooling cycle. He wore no hat and let the sweat roll down his neck. When would he have access to a private reserve like this again?
At the end of one slab, Meewee reached a concrete promontory that overlooked a shallow valley beyond. This was the spot where she had brought him on that first day when he was so resistant to her and everything she stood for. She was, in his informed opinion, one of the chief architects of the slow corporate strangulation of Gaia, and he couldn’t fathom any proposal from her to have any possible merit. He prided himself in the righteousness of his cause and felt himself to be immune to her fresh-faced charisma.
She’d brought him here in a little cart and parked it overlooking the valley beyond. On the valley floor sat the Heliostream Target Array Facility, which was shaped like a three-kilometer-diameter trampoline. The plasfoil skin that was stretched across it was utterly black because, as Eleanor explained to him, it absorbed all EM frequencies. From where they sat, the black oval target looked to him like a giant hole punched into the planet, and the image had only increased his ire.
“Look up there,” she said and pointed to the sky. He saw a double halo, one above the other, of what looked like boiling air. “That’s where the microwave beam passes through the canopies,” she said. “Although the microbeam is nearly one terawatt in strength and the electricity it generates powers all the agriculture and cities from Terre Haute to Indianapolis, we can’t see it. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“I suppose,” he said.
“Well, let’s fix that,” she said and drew two pairs of spex from a seat pocket. “Put this on, your excellency.”
He put on a pair of spex and looked into the valley again. At first all appeared as before, but gradually the landscape darkened as though at sunset, and the huge array target in the valley below gave off a ghostly glow. No longer black, the oval target took on the appearance of a creamy disk, when, suddenly, it was stabbed from the sky by a shimmering shaft of the purest, whitest light Meewee had ever seen. “Ah!” he said.
“Ah, indeed.” Eleanor chuckled.
They sat for a while silently dazzled by the beam of raw energy, and then she said, “I’ve given a lot of thought to something you once said about your organization, your excellency.”
“Oh? And what was that?”
“About how Birthplace International’s mission covers only part of the job.”
“I don’t remember saying anything like that.”
“Mind if I quote you?” He shook his head, and Eleanor continued. “You said that the Birthplace organization was dedicated to ‘helping Gaia recover from a deadly infestation.’ The infestation you were referring to was the human race, I imagine. Then you said it was a pity that Gaia couldn’t infect all the other planets with the same blight, for then the disease might lose some of its virulence.”
Meewee was appalled. He remembered saying that, but it was an offhand remark made in confidence to several of his most trusted Birthplace colleagues. Furthermore, he’d expressed that opinion within the supposedly total security of a null room. How—?
“Did I misquote you, Bishop Meewee?”
“No,” he muttered, “but those words were not meant for public consumption.”
“Which is exactly why I trust their sincerity,” she said, “and why I believe my offer will be of interest to you. Care to take a little journey with me?”
“Journey? Where?”
“Up Jacob’s ladder,” she said with a laugh. “Up the beanstalk. Let’s climb the microbeam.”
She reached out her hand, which appeared as an icon in his spex, and pulled them right next to the pulsating shaft of pure energy. Meewee was so close to the microbeam, he could feel it buzzing. He knew it was all vurt, of course, but it was frightening nevertheless. Eleanor touched the beam with her hand, and they shot up along its length. Meewee’s perspective changed, and he saw their cart parked on the hilltop, with them inside, shrinking to a mere dot. The entire valley became one fold in a wrinkled green quilt. He saw the outline of the Eastern Seaboard, then the whole hemisphere and the rim of the planet.
They stopped ascending when they were in space and had reached the Heliostream Relay Station, which was an island of mirrors many square kilometers in area. From there, fourteen separate microbeams, including the one they rode up on, fanned out to hit ground targets across eastern North America. The beams looked like strings pinned to a globe.
“This relay is forty thousand kilometers up,” Eleanor said, “in geosynchronous orbit above the equator. From here we have a line of sight to our solar harvesters orbiting the sun ninety-nine percent of the time.” The sun was to their left, too bright to look at. “Each of those microbeams, when converted at their ground stations, provide between 985 and 1004 gigawatts of electricity for an average of twenty-three hours fifty-eight minutes a day, every day.”
Meewee knew he was safely seated in a cart in Indiana, but the view of Earth from this height was dizzying. Intoxicating. At his feet was the very orb he had dedicated his life to protecting. Eleanor drew his attention to fifteen more geosynchronous stations encircling the globe and binding the planet in a spiderweb of energy.
“Very impressive,” he said, “but what is your point?”
“I brought you up here, Bishop Meewee, to make a donation to your cause. Take a look around and choose one of these microbeams. Heliostream will donate to Birthplace International all of the proceeds earned by selling the electricity of that beam for a period of ten years. It’ll be your organization’s own private sunbeam.”
Meewee was incredulous. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“Several reasons. First, because I can. Second, to be a good corporate citizen. And third, to show you how serious I am. But mostly to pull those plugs from your ears so that you can really hear what I’m about to propose to you.”
Meewee removed the spex from his face, and his perspective returned to the cart. He turned to the girl sitting next to him and said, “I’m listening.”
She, too, removed her spex. “I’m offering you a part in a little project I call Garden Earth. It involves some heavy hitters in the business world, a fleet of starships, extra-system colonization, something I call a title engine, and a scheme to harness the most powerful force in Nature.”