Thales spoke smoothly in Bisesa’s ear. “I think the ceremony is about to begin.”
Siobhan sighed. “Well, we know that,” she snapped. “Do you ever miss Aristotle? Thales has this annoying habit of stating the bleeding obvious.”
“But we’re glad to have him even so,” Bisesa said.
Siobhan linked Bisesa’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go see the show.”
50: Elevator
Bisesa and Siobhan walked through the marquee to an area at the center of the rig. The children swarmed forward, at last distracted by something more interesting than each other.
The center of attention was an object like a squat pyramid, perhaps twenty meters tall. Its surface had been coated with marble slabs that gleamed in the sun. This unassuming structure was to be the anchor point for the Space Elevator, a line of nano-engineered carbon that would lead all the way up from the Earth to geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand kilometers high.
“Look at that lot.” Siobhan pointed upward. The clear blue sky was filling up with airplanes and helicopters. “I wouldn’t want to be flying around when thousands of kilometers of bucky-tube cable come uncoiling down into the atmosphere …”
The Prime Minister of Australia clambered, a bit heavy-footed, up a staircase to a podium right at the apex of the flat-topped pyramid. She held up a sample of the cable that was even now being cautiously dropped into Earth’s atmosphere. It was actually a broad ribbon, about a meter wide but only a micron thick. And she began to speak.
“A lot of people have expressed surprise that Australia was chosen by the Skylift Consortium as the site for the anchor of the world’s first Space Elevator. For one thing it’s a common myth that you have to anchor an elevator on the equator. Well, the closer the better, but you don’t have to be right on it; thirty-two degrees south is close enough. And in many other ways this is an ideal spot. Out here in the ocean we’re very unlikely to suffer lightning strikes or other unwelcome climatic phenomena. Australia is one of the most stable places on Earth, both geologically and politically. And we’re just a short hop away from the beautiful city of Perth, which is anticipating its role as a key hub in a new Earth—space transportation network …”
And so on. It was always this way with space projects, Bud had once told Bisesa, a mix of bullshit and wonder. On the ground it was always turf wars and pork-barrel politics—but today a cable from space really was to be dropped above the heads of this preening throng: today, in the sunshine, an engineering feat that would have seemed a dream when Bisesa was a child would be completed.
Of course the Elevator was just the beginning. The plans for the future were astonishing: with space opened up at last, asteroids would be mined for metals, minerals, and even water, and solar power stations the size of Manhattan would be assembled in orbit. A new industrial revolution was about to begin, and with the flow of free energy up there in space the possibilities for the growth of civilization were unbounded. But the heavy industries that had done so much harm in the past, mining and energy production among them, would now be transferred off the planet. This time Earth would be preserved for what it was good for: serving as the home of the most complex ecosystem known.
The shield, the first great astronautical engineering project, was already destroyed, though fragments of it would forever be cherished in the planet’s museums. But the confidence that the project’s success had given had not been lost.
Space, though, wasn’t just about power stations and mines. The sunstorm had bequeathed strange new worlds to humankind. Traces of life on Mars, dormant for a billion years, were now being discovered all over that world. Meanwhile a new Venus awaited a human footstep. Almost all of that planet’s suffocating coat of air had been conveniently blasted away. What was left was sterile, slowly cooling—and terraformable, some experts claimed, capable of becoming, at last, a true sister to Earth.
Beyond the transformed planets, of course, lay the stars, and deeper mysteries yet.
But at this moment, this crux of human history, the pyramidal cable anchor reminded Bisesa of the ziggurat she had once visited on Mir, in an ancient Babylon revived through the time-bending technology of the Firstborn. That ziggurat had been the prototype for the Bible’s myth of the Tower of Babel, the ultimate metaphor for humankind’s hubris in its challenge of the gods.
Siobhan was studying her. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I was just wondering if anybody else here is thinking about the ziggurat of Babylon. I doubt it somehow.”
“Mir is always with you, isn’t it?”
Bisesa shrugged.
Siobhan squeezed her arm. “You were right, you know. About the Firstborn. The Eyes we found in the Trojan points confirmed it. So what do you make of it all now? The Firstborn made the sun flare so it would torch the planet—and they watched. What are they, sadists?”
Bisesa smiled. “You’ve never been forced to kill a mouse? You’ve never heard how they have to cull elephants in African game parks? Breaks your heart every time—but you do it anyhow.”
Siobhan nodded. “And you don’t turn away when you do it.”
“No. You don’t turn away.”
“So they’re conflicted,” Siobhan said coldly. “But they tried to exterminate us. Regret doesn’t make that right.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop them trying again.” Siobhan leaned closer to Bisesa and spoke softly. “We’re already looking for them. There’s a huge new telescopic facility on the farside of the moon—Mikhail is heavily involved. Even the Firstborn must obey the laws of physics: they must leave a trace. And of course the traces they leave may not be subtle; it’s just a question of looking in the right places.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why should we assume that it’s only here the Firstborn have intervened? Remember S Fornax, Mikhail’s flaring star? We’re starting to look at the possibility that that event, and a number of others, wasn’t natural either. And then there’s Altair, where that rogue Jovian came from. According to Mikhail, over the last three-quarters of a century, about a quarter of the brighter novae—exploding stars—we have observed have been concentrated in one little corner of the sky.”
“The Firstborn at work,” Bisesa breathed.
Siobhan said, “And maybe, even if we don’t see the Firstborn themselves, we’ll find others fleeing from them.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’ll come looking for them. After all we aren’t supposed to be here. It may have been the intervention of some faction of them, through you, that gave us sufficient warning to save ourselves. Against us, the Firstborn have missed their one chance. They won’t get another.”
Her tone was confident, forceful. But it made Bisesa uneasy.
Siobhan had seen the sunstorm, but on Mir Bisesa had witnessed firsthand the astonishing rebuilding of a world, a whole history; she knew that the powers of the Firstborn were far more profound than even Siobhan could imagine. And she hadn’t forgotten the glimpse she had been granted of a far future Earth on her way home from Mir—an eclipse, a ground apparently pulverized by war. What if humanity got itself involved in a Firstborn war? Humans would be as helpless as characters in a Greek drama caught in a conflict between wrathful gods. She had a feeling that the future might be a good deal more complex, and even more dangerous, than Siobhan imagined.
But it wasn’t hers to shape. She looked at the faces of Eugene and Myra, turned up fearlessly into the light of the sun. The future, in all its richness and danger, was in the hands of a new generation now. This was the beginning of humankind’s odyssey in space and in time, and nobody could say where it would lead.