Bud pushed at the control stick, and the platform swiveled and scooted forward.
Now Siobhan was looking across the shield, as if she were flying over a shining ground. Her eye was drawn out to the shield’s “horizon”—but unlike the Earth’s surface the shield was utterly flat, right to its limits, and the straight-line horizon was sharp as a razor in the vacuum. It was oddly bewildering, the perspective all wrong, as if she were flying over the surface of some monstrous planet a thousand times bigger than the Earth.
Bud said, “Sometimes it fools you. You’ll think you see the horizon curve, like from a low-flying plane. Or you’ll make out a group working and imagine they’re a few hundred meters away—but they’re kilometers off.” He shook his head. “Even now I have trouble grasping the scale of what we’ve done, that two of my guys, working on opposite edges of the shield, can be separated by the whole width of the Earth. And we built it all.”
The platform dipped, and Siobhan flew low over shimmering prisms and glass struts, littered by small structures like shacks, and vehicles like tractors that toiled patiently. One astronaut made her cautious way across the surface bearing a huge strut of gossamer-light lunar glass; she looked like an ant bearing a leaf many times its own size.
And Siobhan made out what looked like flags, held out stiffly by wire in the absence of any breeze. “What are those?”
Bud said bluntly, “We don’t have graves up here. We just push you away, off into interplanetary space. But we give you a marker: a flag of your country or your creed, or whatever you want. As we build the shield we’re working in a spiral, around and around the center, moving farther out all the time. We just plant your flag at the position of the leading edge, wherever it happens to be when you die.”
Now that she looked for them, she could see flags, dozens of them within a single glance. “Hundreds have died up here.” She hadn’t known the numbers.
“These are good people, Siobhan. Even without the direct risks of the construction work, some of them have worked in zero G without a break for two years or more. The medics say we are all storing up problems with our bone structure and cardiovascular systems and lymph systems and the rest. You know what the most common surgery procedure is up here? For kidney stones, nodules of calcium leached from your bones. And not to mention radiation exposure. Everyone knows about the damage to DNA, the cancer risks. But how about the brain? Your noggin is particularly vulnerable to cosmic radiation, and has a limited ability to repair itself. Space makes you dumb, Siobhan.”
“I didn’t know that—”
“I bet you didn’t,” he said, a hardness under his even tone. “Medical studies on shield workers themselves have proved this. Every year up here you shave ten years off your life. And yet these people stay, and work themselves to death.”
“Oh, Bud—” Impulsively she grabbed his hands. “I’m not here to attack your people; you know that. And I don’t want us to fall out.”
He said heavily, “But—“
“But you know why I’m here.”
It was a question of corruption.
*********
______
Earthbound accountants, poring over their voluminous electronic books, had found that a fraction of the funds and materials flowing up into space had gone astray—and that the decision making behind that siphoning-off had to lie up here, on the shield itself.
“Bud, the administration couldn’t ignore it if they wanted to. After all, if this goes on the whole project could be put at risk—”
He cut her short. “Siobhan, get real. I’m not going to deny the skimming-off. But, Jesus, look out the window. This project is soaking up a significant proportion of the GDP of the entire planet. Croesus himself couldn’t peel off enough to make a dent in that. You’ve got to get this in perspective. In percentage terms—”
“That’s not the point, Bud. You have to think about the psychology. You say your people here are making sacrifices. Well, so we are on Earth too, just as hard, to fund this thing. And if any of it has been stolen—”
“Stolen.” He snorted and turned away from her. “Siobhan, you’ve no idea how it is to work up here. Two million kilometers from your home, your family. Yes, here I am saving the planet. But I also want to save my own son.”
She felt cold. He’d never told her he had a son.
And she thought it through further. “You’re in on this, too. You’re doing your share of skimming, aren’t you?”
He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Look,” he said at last. “There’s a firm in Montana. They bought up old nuclear weapon silos from the USASF, long ago decommissioned. Those things were designed to survive a nuclear strike, and to support their crews for weeks afterward. I’ve seen the specs. It’s possible that if you were stuck down there, you might survive the sunstorm.”
“Even if the shield failed?”
“It’s a chance,” he said defiantly. “But you can imagine the cost of a ticket. Can’t you see? Up here I can’t do a thing for Todd and his kids; I can’t so much as dig a hole in the ground. But this way, just by diverting a tiny fraction of one percent of one percent of the shield budget—”
“And everybody else up here is doing it too?”
“Not everybody.” He was watching her. “So now you know. When we go back to AuroraI’ll give you all the records you want, of every last damn cent that went astray … I know you could have me recalled to Earth over this.”
“That would be suicidal when we’re just months from the goal.”
His relief was obvious.
“But the graft can’t go on,” she said. “The idea that you are using shield funds to preserve your own families is corrosive of trust—and trust is fragile enough right now.” She thought it over. “We have to bring this out in the open. But your people up here are away from their families in a time of unprecedented crisis, and most of you will stay here right through the storm itself. You ought to be reassured that everything possible will be done to protect your families on your behalf. I’ll see to it. Call it an advance on your salaries. And I’ll try to persuade them not to prosecute until after you’ve finished saving the Earth.”
He grinned. “I’ll settle for that.” He pushed forward on the stick to take them home.
She said carefully, “Bud, you never told me you had a son.”
“Long story. A messy divorce, long ago.” He shrugged. “He isn’t part of my life, and never would have been part of yours.”
In that moment Siobhan knew she had lost him—if she’d ever had him at all. But her affair with Bud wouldn’t be the only relationship to have cracked under the strain of these strange times.
She turned to watch the vast landscape of the shield as it prepared to swallow her up.
32: Legal Person
Back on the shield, with relief, Siobhan made ready for the formal purpose of her visit.
The shield might have been big enough to wrap up the Moon like a Christmas present, but the people who had built it had given themselves precious little space, and there was no room for ceremonial. For this special moment, the quickening of the shield’s AI, Bud had decided that only the bridge of the grand old Aurorawould do. It was a shame that it had long since been converted to a shower room, but a hasty reconversion took only a few hours, leaving just a faint lingering smell of soap and sweat.
Siobhan drifted at the front of the room, clinging with one hand to a strut. Bud was here, with a handful of his co-workers. Other shield workers were linked to this place electronically, as were friends on the Moon and on the Earth, including representatives of the governments of Eurasia and the United States.
“And,” Siobhan said as she began her speech, “the most important person today is here too—not in this room, but all around us, like God—”