Authors: John Barnes
Mother of Storms (71 page)
A good thing too, because as she slows down, the iron bars are moving faster and faster relative to
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, so that there is less and less time to push against them, and positioning gets trickier. Every so often there’s a “wild throw” that he has to let just go on by, unable to move far enough and fast enough laterally to intercept it. Whenever that happens, he transmits the equivalent of a catcall back at whichever wiseguy threw it; the solar system echoes with radio chatter, cheerful razzing between the wiseguys, like a good tight infield.
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, so that there is less and less time to push against them, and positioning gets trickier. Every so often there’s a “wild throw” that he has to let just go on by, unable to move far enough and fast enough laterally to intercept it. Whenever that happens, he transmits the equivalent of a catcall back at whichever wiseguy threw it; the solar system echoes with radio chatter, cheerful razzing between the wiseguys, like a good tight infield.
At least it looks like there’s going to be some time. After dropping its murderous daughter, Clem swings back into the upper reaches of the North Pacific, and then appears to stall out and zigzag, wobbling north to south and occasionally looping. From August 28, its closest approach to Japan, until September 6, when it rakes over the dead bones of Hawaii again, Clem sends out gigantic and dangerous waves, fascinates meteorologists, has as few as one and as many as eight outflow jets—but destroys very little, partly because it is where it has been before. Louie watches this from far out, hours later by radio, and breathes a slight sigh of relief—he will have that much more time.
On September 6, 56.23 astronomical units from the sun (though his route there was a long arc of almost 70 AU), Louie Tynan brings the main body of
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into orbit around 2026RU. He is now just over thirty-six times farther out from the sun than he went on the First Mars Expedition, and that had been the record. He’s breaking a lot of records now that he’s dead.
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into orbit around 2026RU. He is now just over thirty-six times farther out from the sun than he went on the First Mars Expedition, and that had been the record. He’s breaking a lot of records now that he’s dead.
As had been confirmed by a couple of impact probes he had sent on ahead, 2026RU is a cometoid, a ball of ice, about 790 miles across, with a rock and iron core about 80 miles in diameter and many large embedded nodes of chondrite, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen ice, and various rocks and metals.
It’s the kind of snowball Louie used as a kid when matters got serious—rocks and bits of iron, surrounded by hard ice, surrounded by frozen fluff.
The first couple of hundred packages have already taken up their orbits or descended to the surface, and the first robots are now crawling out on the icy surface or burrowing deep toward the stone and metal core. Within four hours, the first loads of metal are coming up to the surface to feed the hungry fabricating plants; it’s going to take a week, and Louie intends to be busy.
September 9 is a Saturday and things are going so well that Louie kids himself that he ought to get the day off, as hard as he’s been working. Clem is still stomping on the dead bones of Hawaii, sending storm surges crashing through Oahu so frequently that all evidence of Honolulu vanishes down to bare lines of foundations, with everything else washed out to sea. But there is no one there to be harmed, nothing to be damaged that isn’t already rendered worthless.
Meanwhile, out here in the darkness, the replicators, robots, and automated plants have been running flat out, after two days of feverish selfduplication, and much of the core is chewed up and re-extruded into a forest of pipes, towers, supports, girders. 2026RU is going to be the strongest comet ever built. But then, not many comets have ever had to boost at 3 or 4 g’s, and the final approach to Earth is going to require at least that much.
Originally Louie had planned to start spinning off the “ice Frisbees” and then-by climbing back down a rising column of more iron bars—to beat the Frisbees back home to direct them in. If he didn’t get there, well, Louie-on-the-moon could undoubtedly deal with it instead. But that was before Global Riot Two and his decision to kill his flesh so that he could get here in time; now anything he takes back will have to boost at the acceleration he’s using.
This led him to decide to take the whole comet back with him, or the whole comet minus a lot of stuff he’s going to throw off the back. It adds
a day to the process, getting the giant engines and the fusion reactors to drive them built, threading steel through the ice and re-freezing the pathways onto the structural members, but when he’s done he’s days, not months, from Earth.
a day to the process, getting the giant engines and the fusion reactors to drive them built, threading steel through the ice and re-freezing the pathways onto the structural members, but when he’s done he’s days, not months, from Earth.
When he’s finished, the next day, the iceball has a forest of twelve-mile-high towers on one side, and most of the rest of the surface is covered with radiators, immense plates under which he circulates the fluids that will cool the 100 fusion chambers at the base of the towers.
He’s going to throw away about forty percent of the mass of 2026RU, and a great deal of
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in the balance. Since he needs the water ice for when he gets to Earth, and the other volatiles are useful as refrigerants and working fluids, he’s going to throw away what he doesn’t need—most of the iron core is still there even after he’s woven everything he needed out of it, and he doesn’t really need anything from
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except its processors, robots, and energy systems.
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in the balance. Since he needs the water ice for when he gets to Earth, and the other volatiles are useful as refrigerants and working fluids, he’s going to throw away what he doesn’t need—most of the iron core is still there even after he’s woven everything he needed out of it, and he doesn’t really need anything from
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except its processors, robots, and energy systems.
He wonders what Goddard, Von Braun, Verne, or Heinlein would have thought about a spaceship made out of ice that used iron plasma as a propellant. Probably they’d have approved of anything that was a spaceship.
Time to initiate boost draws closer, and though he’s ready enough, he’s curiously not eager to get started. It might be a while before he gets out here in person … but time means so little to him … .
It’s not curiosity, even—he’s leaving relays behind here, and a couple of the wiseguys have dispatched several probes on long orbits that are going out to about 1,200 AU, boosting off and on to get there within a few years, so if there’s anything interesting out there he’ll get a look at it soon enough.
It seems silly to pay attention to this feeling, but after all he’s vastly more complicated mentally than he used to be. He probes his memories, the many memories inherited from the wiseguys, all the psychoanalytic literature. It seems strange that he still remembers emotions or that he still has them.
Maybe it’s different now that he’s all assembled on 2026RU, so that the time lags aren’t there and he doesn’t have radio lag as an artificial “glandular” system? No, if anything, the feelings are as strong as ever with effectively no lag; hysteresis alone suffices.
When he probes far enough, he realizes what the matter is. Among the first batch of general junk to be vaporized and blasted out of the engines is what remains of his body. He’s already recovered all the water and a variety of other complex organics, but there was still a sizable chunk, a kind of little desiccated mummy of himself, that he had stacked with other junk.
He looks at it now; it looks like a little, wrinkled prune of himself, not
even close to what he looked like. But there was a time … he finds himself thinking that just maybe he is going to miss having a body more than he thought he would.
even close to what he looked like. But there was a time … he finds himself thinking that just maybe he is going to miss having a body more than he thought he would.
Oh, well, Earth needed saving, terrestrial life needs a terraformed solar system, and anyway he’s enjoyed too much about this voyage to wish it hadn’t happened. Still, it’s a little too much, emotionally, to just throw out his body with some galley leavings and old bolts. It takes him only a few moments to get some spare instrument access covers and weld them together into a casket, and to put the body in that.
He makes it the first shot; an He-3 pellet is laserfused below it, the expanding plasma is squashed, elongated, accelerated within the central tower, another laser heats the plasma that whirls up the tube—and his body leaves the solar system as a miles-long wisp of stripped ions moving at close to light speed. A few of those ions will undoubtedly fall down into some sun or other; mostly, they will gradually reacquire electrons, lose energy in their rare collisions, and become atoms drifting through the galaxy.
It seems like a good way to go. And now that he feels better, he begins to heave iron in with a will. He has places to go.
He plans a fast drop in, much faster than can be achieved with the sun’s gravity alone. Then he will whip around the sun, taking the heat inside Mercury’s orbit, orbiting retrograde (opposite the direction the planets go) in order to pop out and use the gravity of Mercury to slow him first, then another braking swing by Venus … from here to Earth in about three weeks, all told. It’s another leap in human abilities—along with the all-but-over-night industrialization of the solar system, and for that matter the fact that Louie himself is currently running on a bit over two thirds of the computing capacity in the solar system, with Louie-on-the-moon making more all the time … .
It’s not the world it used to be … and that’s okay, he’s not the Louie he was. And he’s got more to say about what this new world will be like than he did about the old one.
The fusion engines are blazing now, the many tons of iron vaporized every second leaving the hundred towers—fifty times as high as the World Trade Center—as great white-hot plumes at near light speed. If there were naked eyes to see it, the plasma trail extends one hundred thousand miles out, but whoever had those naked eyes had better not be standing on the surface—2026RU is boosting at an acceleration that is more than high enough to overcome its own gravity; if you stood on the side with the towers, you would fall off; if you stood on the other side, you would sink into the snow. The robot treaded tractors, busy laying in mirroring and insulation, still occasionally jam into place, even with their very broad, flat treads.
By the time he recrosses Neptune’s orbit on September 19—the “real” boundary of the solar system, since Pluto and Charon are pretty clearly captured cometoids, like 2026RU but much larger—there’re all kinds of jammed junk sunk in the ice, and he’s been strongly reminded that amorphous water ice, like plate glass and some rocks, is really a very slowflowing fluid—under the 2.3 g’s he’s been running, 2026RU has dribbled slowly like an ice-cream cone on a warm day, forcing him to shore up the thrust towers and do a lot of re-engineering as lines and internal struts break and warp. At least, as the iron core slowly sinks through the ice, it gets closer to the engines and to the spare-parts manufacturing operations he runs from engine waste heat.
A few hours after crossing Neptune’s orbit, he flips 2026RU over and begins deceleration. With the speed he has built up as he raced in from the outer darkness, he will have to “stand on the brakes” most of the way, just to get recaptured by the sun.
By that time, Earth’s luck is running out.
From the San Francisco Bay right down to Ensenada in Baja, there is so little still standing and there are so few survivors from previous passes that neither the American nor the Mexican governments pay much attention to Clem’s rampage down that coast. The news media follow suit. Far to the south, Mary Ann and Jesse have almost reached Oaxaca, and that’s more newsworthy.
The extra rain breaks the Colorado open, partly fills the Grand Canyon, and helps the storm surge break through to rejoin the Gulf of California to the Salton Sea.
Randy Householder watches the news with a certain fascination. Even he has to admit that it’s a big deal. At least, after the flash floods tore through Boise, and with so many other disasters happening, even if they’ve traced him they’re not looking for him yet. He will have lots of time to track down Harris Diem.
The trouble is, a guy who works in the White House, physically close to the President, is just about the hardest of hard targets.
Randy passes the time, sitting in his car anyplace where he can watch for Diem, by experiencing Synthi Venture. She’s a great lady, and that boy with her is a nice kid.
He wonders if Kimbie Dee would have turned out that nice. Probably, he decides. Similar backgrounds and all. Beautiful girls that fought their way to the top.
He sighs. He really wishes he could put on the goggles and muffs and experience this more thoroughly. It’s been a long time since he’s lived in a
world of love, hope, and courage. But without his eyes and ears, there would be little point.
world of love, hope, and courage. But without his eyes and ears, there would be little point.
Diem will come home sooner or later. All these guys do; their rigs are in their houses. Randy managed to strike up a conversation with the cleaning woman and ascertained that Diem is alone in the house at night, when he’s home—which hasn’t been for four days. Between stress and no time to come home to relieve it, Diem’s craving must be killing him right now.
When he comes home, it’s going to be fairly easy. He’ll use the rig—Randy has studied these people too much to have any doubt about that. While he’s plugged in he’s helpless.
There’s a Self Defender in Randy’s glove compartment. It will summon the police, and that’s what he wants it to do; if he can kill Diem, it’s a good start, but if the world can know why … well, it’s just justice, that’s all. Just plain justice after all these years. More than Kimbie Dee ever got.
Synthi Venture, or Mary Ann, whichever, is climbing a hill just now, and part of Randy’s brain fills with warm Mexican sunlight and a road leading up into the sky, with hundreds of good, strong, brave friends all around her. It’s so beautiful and peaceful; why the hell can’t people get addicted to this?
Then again, addiction may not be the best thing anyway. A couple of weeks ago, while he was crossing up his path and generally making himself hard to find, he stayed in a camp in Wyoming, where he made damn good money because he seemed to be one of about a dozen people who would dig a latrine or peel potatoes. Everyone else was too busy with XV, experiencing Synthi Venture—as she dug latrines and peeled potatoes. They kept upping the bonuses at the camps for that.
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