Her dancing career, which had arced between the end of her college days and the beginning of her medical years, had been the same. Too easy, no patience with the routine work needed to rise to the top of the profession, find something else.
She’d even taken a fling at martial arts. She was good at it, and knew she could have picked up a black belt had she been willing to invest the time.
The problem with her life, she’d decided shortly after Collingdale had come aboard, was that there had never been a serious challenge. No use for a black belt in the great game of life because she could find nobody she wanted to clobber.
And now here came the cloud.
Collingdale thought of it as a kind of personal antagonist. It was his great white whale, the thing that had crushed the crystal cities of Moonlight. When this was over, when he got back, he was going to lead a crusade to find a way to destroy the things. He thought the experience at Lookout, which had generated worldwide sympathy for the Goompahs, would make this the right time.
It was an effort she would probably join. In any case, she was finally in a fight she wasn’t sure she could win. And it was an exhilarating feeling.
The AV3 was waiting. Like the Hawksbill, it wasn’t compatible with the Moorhead, so Julie had parked it a hundred meters away. The chimney packages floated in the night like so many barrels of beer. Marge had been in hostile environments before in the e-suit, but always on a planetary surface. Floating in the void, tethered to Julie, was a bit different, but not as disorienting as she’d been led to expect.
The hauler’s airlock opened as they approached, and Julie took them in. Lights went on, more hatches opened and closed, and they were in the cabin.
Green lamps glowed as the hauler came out of sleep mode. Julie got coffee for them, and Marge settled into the right-hand seat and got out her notebook.
“Anybody ever try this before?” Julie asked.
“Cloud-making?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, sure. The technique’s been used to modify droughts.”
“How come I never heard of it?”
“I don’t know. How much time do you spend at home?”
THEY TOOK TWO landers on the first flight. And a Benson Brothers water pump. “Got a big, dry lawn? Depend on Benson.” They could have saved time by having Bill simply take over the controls on all four landers and pilot them down, but AIs were notoriously deficient if it became necessary to respond to a surprise, like a sudden storm. Especially if they were trying to do too many things at once. It was the price paid for artificial intelligence. Like biological intelligence, its higher functions produced a single consciousness. Or at least, they seemed to. Multiple tasks requiring simultaneous judgment could lead to trouble. They were too far from home to risk losing a vehicle. If one went down, the operation would be over.
Marge had spent much of the voyage to Lookout reviewing weather and topographical maps she’d constructed from information forwarded by the Jenkins and deciding where to place the rainmakers. The target area for the first one was on the eastern side of the upper continent, midway between Roka and Hopgop. (How, she wondered, could you take anyone seriously who named a city Hopgop?)
It was dark, and the omega was just rising when they descended toward the edge of a heavy forest. Beyond, scattered trees and hills ran unbroken to the sea. A small stream, its source somewhere in the high country, wound through the area. There was no sign of nearby habitation.
“Enough water?” Julie asked.
“It’ll do,” said Marge. “Take her down.”
Julie put them as close to the trees as she could, shearing off a few in the process. The forest was loud with insects. “Anything here that bites?” asked Marge.
“Not that we’ve been told about.”
They switched on their night-vision lenses. The trees were of several types, but all were tall, spindly, not much to look at. Marge would have preferred something with a bit more trunk.
“What do you think?” asked Julie.
The wood seemed solid enough. “They’ll have to do,” she said. She headed directly for a section she’d spotted from the air, a cluster of trees forming an irregular circle, roughly forty meters in diameter. There were a few other growths within the perimeter, which they dropped with laser cutters.
“Got a question for you,” said Julie.
“Go ahead.”
“Why do we need the landers? If the hauler has enough lift to bring the rainmaker packages down, why isn’t it enough to support one of them when it’s extended? It won’t weigh any more.”
“When it’s extended,” she said, “the chimney will encounter resistance from air currents. It would take more than the hauler to keep it stable.”
They got back inside the AV3, and Julie touched a press-pad. The cargo door in the rear opened. “Bill,” she said, “put the landers under cover of the trees.”
“Yes, Julie. I’ll take care of it.”
The AI used a dolly to move the landers outside, then activated them and flew them into the shadow of the forest. Meantime, the dolly unloaded the pump.
Marge saw lightning in the west. “Maybe you won’t need the chimneys,” said Julie.
“Unlikely,” she said.
THEY PICKED UP the second pair of landers and delivered them to the same site. They still needed a chimney package and the helicopter. They’d run simulations on what would happen if they tried moving both on the same flight. It was tempting to try it, and save time. But the simulations weren’t encouraging. The chimney was heavy, and the load didn’t balance right. Given almost any kind of aerial disturbance, they would go down in flames.
So they would make the additional flight. “To be honest,” Julie told her, as they approached one of the cylinders floating off the Jenkins’s port bow, “getting down with this thing slung on our belly will be enough of a battle.”
The package was big. A large cylinder more than thirty meters wide, maybe forty-five meters long. Marge had been impressed with Julie’s cool performance as she locked onto the rim, attaching it so that the mouth of the cylinder faced down. Listening to the heavy bang as the clamps engaged, she decided the pilot’s caution was justified.
The unit was equipped with guidance thrusters, which she now jettisoned. The Jenkins could retrieve them later.
They were on the night side, approaching the terminator, chasing the sun. “Not the best planning,” Julie said. “We’ll have to go around once before we start our descent.”
At this point it didn’t matter. Marge sat back to enjoy the ride. The skies were clear and bright. The omega was behind them somewhere, not visible unless they called it up on the scopes. The rising sun picked out a couple of islands and a few drifting clouds.
They were passing through daylight. Marge watched the oceans and landmasses rotating beneath, thinking how green it all was, how lovely, and she began to wonder whether it would draw settlers eventually, people who would argue that the Goompahs only used a small part of the world anyhow, so why not? It occurred to her for the first time that terrestrial governments might eventually find themselves unable to enforce their edicts about interfering with other civilizations. Might not even be able to stop groups of exploiters from seizing distant real estate.
Ah, well. That was a problem for another age.
Behind them, the sun sank below the horizon and they soared through the night. “Starting down in five minutes,” said Julie.
It was okay by Marge.
MOMENTS BEFORE THEY entered the atmosphere, Julie switched on the spike, reducing the gravity drag. Marge noticed that they’d dropped out of orbit earlier than the point where they’d started the other three descents. “Losing weight isn’t the same as losing mass,” Julie explained. “We’re still carrying a load, and we need more space to get down.”
There were a few clouds over the area, and she didn’t see the shoreline until they were directly over it. Then they raced inland, over rolling hills and, finally, the forest. The omega had set, and the eastern sky was beginning to brighten.
Julie eased the vehicle down among the cluster of trees where they’d landed earlier. When her cargo touched the ground she held steady, keeping the weight of the AV3 off it. “Okay, Bill,” she said, “release the package.”
Marge felt it come free.
They continued to hover immediately overhead. “Bill,” Julie said, “peel the wrapper.”
Marge watched the tarp protecting the rainmaker fall away. Grapplers took it up and stored it in the cargo bay.
When it was done, Julie banked off to one side so they could see. The chimney was made of ultralight, highly reflective cloth. It was a flexible mirror, and it was virtually invisible.
And that was it for the night. It was getting too close to sunrise to try to do any more. The next day, when they came back, they would bring the helicopter.
The mood has changed. You can’t really miss it. Everywhere you go at night, Goompahs are looking up over their shoulders at the thing in the sky that won’t go away and gets bigger every day. The sense of something deadly, of something supernatural, coming this way has become a palpable part of everyday life here. The streets aren’t as crowded at night as they used to be. And the Goompahs talk in hushed tones, as if they were afraid the monster overhead might hear them.
It might be that the most disquieting aspect of the thing is that it looks like a squid. The Goompahs are familiar with squids, or with something very like a squid. They’re a delicacy here, as they used to be in some cultures at home. But the Goompahs, like us, are struck by their grasping capabilities, and they, too, find the creatures unsettling. I overheard a group of them today describing an incident that is probably apocryphal, but which they were convinced was true: Someone in a fishing boat was seized by a squid and dragged overboard while his comrades watched, too frightened to assist. Did it really happen? I don’t know. The interesting thing is that the story surfaces just as the time when a celestial squid seems to be coming after the entire Intigo.