“No. Wrong placement and frequency. I…” Alex blinked. “Of course. I have it.”
He turned to face George.
“The other singularity must have been aboard the space station itself. It’s the only possible explanation. Their being directly in line with the beam wasn’t coincidental. The station hole resonated with Beta and caused the alignment. It fits.”
“Alex…”
“Let’s see, that would mean the outer assembly of the station would be carried off at a pseudo-acceleration of…”
He paused and looked up through a gap in the branches at the stars overhead. His voice hushed in awe. “Those poor bastards. What a way to go.”
George Hutton blinked, trying to keep up. “Are you saying the Americans had an unlicensed…”
Again, however, Alex’s momentum carried him. “We’ll need a name, of course. How about ‘gravity amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’? Might as well stay with traditional nomenclature.” He turned to look at George. “Well? Do you like it? Shall we call it a ‘graser’? Or would ‘gazer’ sound better. Yes, ‘gazer,’ I think.”
Alex’s eyes glittered. Pain dwelled there, mixed equally with a startled joy of discovery. “How does it feel, George, to have helped unleash the most powerful ‘modality’ ever known?”
The two men looked at each other for a stretched moment of time, as if each were suddenly acutely aware of the pregnant relevance of sound. The silence was broken only when Stan Goldman called from the door of the pub.
“Alex? George? Where are you fellows? You’re taking a long time relieving yourselves. Are you too drunk to find your zippers? Or have you found something else out there that’s interesting?”
“We’re over here!” George Hutton called, and then looked back at Alex, who was staring at the stars again, talking to himself. In a somewhat lower voice, George added, “And yes, Stan, it appears we’ve found something interesting after all.”
[INSERT IMAGE HERE]
PART V
PLANET
In the new world’s earliest days, there was no-one to speak ill of carbon dioxide, or methane, or even hydrogen cyanide. Under lightning and harsh sunlight those chemicals merged to stain the young ocean with amino acids, purines, adenylates… a “primeval soup” which then reacted still further, building complex, twisting polymers.
Mere random fusings would have taken a trillion years to come up with anything as complex as a bacterium. But something else was involved beyond just haphazard chemistry. Selection. Some molecules were stable, while others broke apart easily. The sturdy ones accumulated, filling the seas. These became letters in a new alphabet.
They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few of which survived and accrued… the first genetic words. And so on. What would otherwise have taken a trillion years was accomplished in a relative instant. Sentences bounced against each other, mostly forming nonsense paragraphs. But a few had staying power.
Before the last meteorite storm was over or the final roaring supervolcano finally subsided, there appeared within the ocean a chemical tour de force, surrounded by a lipid-protein coat. An entity that consumed and excreted, that made true copies of itself. One whose daughters wrought victories, suffered defeats, and multiplied.
Out of alphabet soup there suddenly was told a story.
A simple tale as yet. Primitive and predictable. But still, a raw talent could be read there.
The author began to improvise.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546] Steering Committee Report.
For weeks now there’s been a marathon debate going on over in subgroup six (techno-cures), category nine, forum five, concerning the relative merits of nano-constructors versus Von Neumann machines as possible sources of wealth to replace our tired planet’s exhausted mines and wells.
The word “exhausted” applies as well to the weary moderators of this tag-team endurance round. Finally the forum chair said, “Enough already! Don’t any of you people have jobs? Families?”
We agree. It’s all very well to talk about how these two technologies might someday “generate enough wealth to make even TwenCen America look like a Cro-Magnon tribe.” But one of the purposes of this SIG is to take ideas beyond mere speculation and offer the world feasible plans!
So let’s call a pause on this one, people. Get some sleep. Say hello to your children. Come back when you can show a workable design for a truly sophisticated machine that can make copies of itself — whether grazing on lunar soils or swimming in a nutrient bath. Then the rest of us will happily supply the carping criticism you’ll need to make it work.
In sharp contrast, the soc-sci freaks in group two have had some very witty forums about the current fad of applying tribal psychology to urban populations. At one point over half a million Net users were tapping in, taking our SIG, once more, all the way up to commercial-grade use levels! Digest-summaries of those forums are already available, and we commend group two’s organizers for running such a lively, productive debate.
• EXOSPHERE
They were still pumping out Houston from last week’s hurricane when she got into town. Teresa found it marvelous how the city had been transformed by the calamity.
Avenues of inundated shops rippled mysteriously just below floodline, their engulfed wares glimmering like sunken treasure. The towering glass office blocks were startling vistas of blue and white and aquamarine, reflecting the summer sky above and bright-flecked waters below.
Limp in the humidity, rows of canted trees marked the drowned borderlines of street and sidewalk. Their stained trunks testified to even higher inundations in the past. Under fluffy clouds pushed by a torpid breeze, Houston struck Teresa like some hypermodernist’s depiction of Venice, before that lamented city’s final submergence. A wonderful assortment of boats, canoes, kayaks, and even gondolas negotiated side streets, while makeshift water taxis plowed the boulevards, ferrying commuters from their residential arcologies to the shimmering office towers. With typical Texan obstinacy, nearly half the population had refused evacuation this time. In fact, Teresa reckoned some actually reveled living among the craggy cliffs of this manmade archipelago.
From the upper deck of the bus she saw the sun escape a cloud, setting the surrounding glazed monoliths ablaze. Most of the other passengers instantly and unconsciously turned away, adjusting broad-brimmed hats and polarized glasses to hide from the harsh rays. The only exceptions were a trio of Ra Boys in sleeveless mesh shirts and gaudy earrings, who faced the bright heat with relish, soaking in it worshipfully.
Teresa took a middle path when the sun emerged. She didn’t react at all. It was, after all,, only a stable class G star, well-behaved and a safe distance removed. Certainly, it was less dangerous down here than up in orbit.
Oh, she took all the proper precautions — she wore a hat and mild yellow glasses. But thereafter she simply dismissed the threat from her mind. The danger of skin cancer was small if you stayed alert and caught it early. Certainly the odds compared favorably with those of dying in a helizep accident.
That wasn’t why she’d avoided taking a heli today, skipping that direct route from Clear Lake, where the NASA dikes had withstood Hurricane Abdul’s fury. Teresa had used a roundabout route today mostly to make sure she wasn’t being followed. It also provided an opportunity to collect her thoughts before stepping from frying pan to fire.
Anyway, how many more chances would she have to experience this wonder of American conceit, this spectacle that was Houston Defiant? Either the city moguls would eventually succeed in their grand, expensive plan — to secure the dikes, divert the water table, and stabilize everything on massive pylons — or the entire metropolis would soon join Galveston under the Gulf of Mexico, along with large patches of Louisiana and poor Florida. Either way, this scene would be one to tell her grandchildren about — assuming grandchildren, of course.