Mark felt a gentle surge of inertia that pushed him into the plush seat. The televator was ascending. The walls of the tower blurred, making the vertical rows of lights turn into beaded strands. Ev settled onto the generously wide arm of Mark’s chair, the better to see out.
The deck had filled up. There was conversation in the background, sporadic exclamations louder than the general conversational buzz.
“We’re the last off the pad,” Ev said, “Look up through the skylight. You can see the next to last.”
Another televator was going up too, higher than their own and on the opposite side of the tower: a twelvesided cylinder with a twelve-sided hole in the middle of it, through which ran a barely visible, vertical wisp of smoke. There were other smoke streams in the tower, a dozen in all. Ev explained, “It’s a vacuum here inside the Tower. Those particle streams are ionized molecules—to be exact, Carbon-60, buckminster-fullerene. The streams flow up to lift the televators or cushion them on the return. There are five televators going up ahead of us tonight to the ship. The streams also keep the ship up. It’s riding on the particle turnaround—on top of the whole thing.”
Mark could see no other televators beyond the one just above their own, only the tower walls, dwindling to an apparent point of closure. It was a horribly long way up, he thought, with four televators and a starship out of sight in the vertical distance.
Ev reflected. “C60. Stardust. We are being lifted up by the same kind of soot that exists in cold dust clouds between the stars. It was also the ion propellent for the Athena series of star probes back in the 2030s and ’40s. Appropriate, isn’t it?”
That other televator rotated. So did their own. Theirs was just like the one just ahead of it, a torus in midair, slowly circling a thin stream of soot. That was why this observation deck was centered on a column with twelve blank walls: the particle stream went through the middle of the televator, and all three stories of it were being lifted up by insubstantiality, up, and up. Little spiders of panic danced along Mark’s spine. “Ev,” Mark choked. “Are we safe?”
“I think so. The president can’t do anything as crude as turning off the particle streams. Or shooting down the ship. It was chartered as an international effort. More likely, he’ll send the Space Force up from the Earth bases—from the White Sands and Cascade bases. That is,” Ev continued, speaking softly, “he’ll so decide and so order, but I don’t think we have to worry about it.”
“No?”
“No.” Smiling slightly, Ev made a hand motion which Mark interpreted as, wait and see.
Ascending at an already terrifying speed while rotating, the televators were still accelerating. The beaded strands of lights on the wall of the tower twisted into helixes. To Mark’s alarmed fascination, the top of the tower was now close enough to appear as a definite circle full of stars.
Ev followed Mark’s gaze. “Ever hear the one about being able to see the stars from a deep enough well?”
The televator rocketed out of the top of the tower. Mark instantly recalled that the Star Tower terminated above the thickest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The particle streams kept going. So did whatever they carried. From here on up, this machine was called the Space Fountain.
Below, but not quite below them, the edge of the planet glowed crimson with the Sun disappearing behind it, the red rim of the sea of air which they had just crossed.
And now that they were out in the open, somebody could turn the Fountain off. Or shoot the televator down with the La Jolla Launcher. Or—
“Ev! Why’s the televator still spinning? Is it under control?”
“As far as I know, the rotation is just for the view, which is magnificent. Relax and enjoy it. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t look down. Or up,” Ev added, by which time Mark already had.
Above, in unbounded, black, starry space, a square platform hung, suspended. The flanks of the starship Primordium bowed past the platform’s edges. In an inverted bowl under the platform, the Star Tower’s particle streams were magnetically turned around. Only the thrust of the turnaround, only the turning soot, kept the platform up. And ominously, like a loose falling object, the platform and ship parked on it rotated.
It was the televator rotating, Mark reminded himself, trying to clamp down his jumpy nerves.
“Don’t look up. Look outward,” Ev reminded him.
But gazing out stirred up feeling deeper than simple phobia, and more painful. Space was black, with stars, like night. It was eternal night out here. Mark had left blue sky behind, with white clouds, celadon salt waters, and the rosy morning and evening colors of the Earth’s Sun on the horizon—all behind him, in his past and irretrievable. His chest tightened, making it hard to breathe.
Rotating, the televator swung them away from their destination and back over the face of the Earth. Sunlight brightened Asia, but night had fallen over North America. The wide land was plainly fevered. Cities showed up as yellow splotches, connected by glowing trails of electricity like the tracks of a cancer’s metastasis.
Talk in the observation deck quieted. People were clustered by the windows, watching. Some cried, sniffling sounds audible in the absence of chatter.
With thumb and forefinger Mark squeezed the inside corners of his eyes to hold in tears. He whispered, “Life is down there. Green land. Blue sky. Only there. And it’s dying. And, oh, God, everything else is dark. Cold. Lifeless. Ev, we’ve got an impossible job to do. To try to give a world like that back to the Universe.”
Silent, Ev processed what Mark had said. Earth slipped across the window. In the background, conversation built up again, with people pointing out favorite landmarks on the home planet to each other, voices low, as if in attendance at a wake. The televator inexorably rotated back toward the cold bright stars.
Ev said quietly, “The Genesis Foundation was prepared for what happened today. We’re coming away with a tremendous quantity and variety of seeds and animal germ cells, and we’ll—”
“And bug eggs,” said a voice behind them, loud enough to be startling and even more so because it was a very familiar voice. “Efry one forgets to mention much less thank God for the insects!”
Ev whirled toward the thin, blonde, middle-aged woman, with surprise written on his face.
She said, “I saw you perched here like a fine-feathered songbird, and I thought to myself, so! Such a surprise to see him!”
“The surprise is mutual, Professor van Leeuwen,” said Ev. Mark did not recover as smoothly. “Anna!” he gasped. “You?”
She answered simply, “I have finally decided Samantha was not such a fool to go to the stars.”
“Did you bring beetles and butterflies or did customs get them?” asked Mark.
“I did not decide to come just today, so already many of my species are up there. Good ones.” She added, “I smuggled more butterfly eggs through customs just a little while ago. My precious butterfly eggs, disguised as makeup in my purse. To be exact, eyeshadow.”
“You don’t ever wear eyeshadow,” said Mark.
“The customs agent knew that, I think. There he was, a nice-looking gentleman with hair gray around the edges, and I, a forty-eight-year-old lady with some gray hair too, am explaining to him my blue and mauve, some green, and bright yellow eyeshadow. He let me through and said not a word to those people in the suits which were the ones to watch out for. So they did not confiscate the eggs.” Anna saddened. “Oh, Mark. Remember the poor restoration prairie?” Tears leaked onto Anna’s cheeks.
It was a memory etched with the acids of shame and anger. Mark put his arms around Anna’s bony shoulders. In Mark’s own eyes, tears blurred the Earth as it slid by behind Anna with all its burned forests, polluted seas, and blasted prairies. “We’ll try it again,” he managed to say.