"RNA! You shot memory RNA into me! You dirty sons of bitches," he cried in English. "You did it again!"
"Corbell-"
"What'll I be this time? What have you made me into?"
"You'll keep your memory," said Skatholtz, also in English. "You'll remember things you never lived through. You'll tell us. Watch the show."
He was nearly sixty light-years from Sol, viewing what had been the State. A voice spoke in a language Corbell had never heard. He didn't try to understand it. He watched with a familiar fascination. Good-bye, CORBELL Mark II, he thought in the back of his mind. In thin defiance, But I'm still a lousy loser.
Certain stars glowed more brightly than others... and planetary systems circled them, greatly enlarged for effect. Now all but two of these systems turned sullen red-turned enemy. These were the worlds that had turned against the State.
One of the red systems sparkled and faded into the background, its colony destroyed.
The two neutral systems went red.
Another system faded out.
The view closed on Sol system... on more of Sol system than Corbell had known, with three dark gas giants beyond Pluto, and countless swarming comets.
Fleets of spacecraft moved out toward the renegade colonies. Other fleets invaded. Sometimes they came like a hornet's nest, many ships clustered around a Bussard ramjet core. Sometimes like a Portuguese man-of-war: thousands of ships as weights around the fringe of a great silver light-sail. Early fleets included hospital ships and return fuel; later there were massive suicide attacks.
It went on for centuries. The State utopia became a subsistence civilization, turning all its surplus energy to war. The fleets moved at just less than lightspeed. News of success or failure or need for reinforcements moved barely faster. The State was Boys and Girls and dictators all united for the common good. Corbell hurt with the loss of that unity.
He watched a beam of light bathe Sol system: laser cannon firing from Farside colony. Farside launched warships by light-sail at terrific accelerations. The ships dropped their sails and decelerated most of the way to Sol, arriving just behind the beam itself, long before the State could prepare. Corbell squirmed in his chair; he wanted to cry warning. For the State beat the invaders back, but failed to stop their hidden treachery.
The war continued. Farside, economically ruined by its effort, fell before the counterattack. It took a man's lifetime... too much time, before Astronomy noticed what the Farside traitors had done in the dark outside their dazzling light beam, in the distraction provided by the invasion.
The State had looked for the light of fusion spacecraft, not the dim watery light of a new planet. The trans-Plutonian planet called Persephone had had a peculiar orbit, tilted nearly vertical to the plane of the solar system. Its new path had already taken it deep into the system.
10 to the power 23 tons of hydrogen and hydrogen-compound ices were aimed to strike the sun at solar-escape velocity. Earth's oceans would boil...
The State did what it could. Tens of thousands of fusion bombs, Sol system's entire armory, were set off at the dawn side of Persephone, just above the atmosphere. A thick rind of the planet's atmosphere peeled away and streamed off like a comet's tail, its mass pulling at Persephone's dense core. A streamer of gas far more massive than the Earth broke free, and rounded the sun, and sprayed back toward the cometary halo.
If the bombs could have been placed earlier, Persephone's core would have done the same. It was rock and iron, yellow-hot, and it glowed X-ray hot as it streaked into the solar photosphere and disappeared.
The sun grew bright.
Oceans shrank, crops withered, tens of millions died before the State could place a disk of reflecting tinsel between Earth and Sol. It was a temporary measure. The sun's new heat was permanent, at least on the human scale of time. Fusion would run faster in Sol's hotter interior. The buried heat would leak to the photosphere and out.
The State had one chance for survival. It could move the Earth by the method Farside had used to stop Persephone cold in its orbit.
"Do you understand what you're seeing?"
Corbell made a shushing gesture. "Yeah."
"Good. We were afraid. The light show and the bottled memory are both very old. They date from the end of the rule of the Girls. They have been stored in zero-time for... perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps more. We feared they must have decayed," said Skatholtz.
"So you tried it on me." But his anger seemed impersonal, remote.
The State had had to abandon the Mercury mines: a serious industrial handicap. Nonetheless they were building something out there in the asteroid belt-something huge, like a starship big enough to carry the whole human race to safety. But no, that wasn't it. Corbell was fascinated. He knew it might be the memory RNA, but he was fascinated anyway. He hardly heard what Skatholtz was saying: "It was sensible, Corbell. The Girls who made the light show ruled the sky. You are familiar with such things. Do you know now who hurled a moon at us?"
"Not yet. Shut up and let me..."
They had finished the thing. Two tubes, concentric, each a hundred miles long; the inner tube a mile wide, with thick walls of complex construction; the outer tube thinner and twice as wide. At one end, a bell-shaped rocket nozzle. At the other... Corbell knew more than he was seeing. Reworked military laser cannon, and vents, and a flared skirt, and thick stubby fins, there at the bottom end. Now temporary liquid hydrogen tanks were attached. Now the structure moved under its own power... it was a tremendous fusion motor... moving outward, circled by tiny ships... yeah.
Corbell said, "How do you climb down off an elephant?"
"Should I know that?"
"You don't climb down off an elephant. You climb down off a duck."
"Why?"
"It's so much safer. How do you move the Earth?"
Small wonder if the light show meant little to Skatholtz. Watching the construction of the motor-in the naked sunlight and sharp-edged, totally black shadows of space-was bewildering. The diagrams made sense to an architect, but they were only rotating lines to Skatholtz. But without bottled memory and without Corbell's career in space, Skatholtz was still bright enough to make some sense of what he was seeing.
"You move something else," Skatholtz said. "The damage done by the rocket's thrust and by mistakes you might make will not kill anyone if nobody lives on the working body. Then the working body can be moved until the world falls toward it as a rock falls to the ground. What was the working body? Ganymede?"
"Uranus. Can you stop the light show at that picture?"
The lecture froze on an "artist's conception": a blurred, curved arc of Uranus's upper atmosphere. The motor looked tiny floating there. Corbell said, "You see? It's a double-walled tube, very strong under expansion shock. It floats vertical in the upper air. Vents at the bottom let in the air, which is hydrogen and methane and ammonia, hydrogen compounds, like the air that the sun burns. You fire laser cannon up along the axis of the motor, using a... color hydrogen won't let through. You get a fusion explosion along the axis."
"I don't understand all your words. Fusion?"
"Fusion is the way a star burns. You probably used fusion bombs against the Girls."
"Okay. The hydrogen fusions in the middle of the motor-"
"-and the explosion goes out and up. It's hottest along the axis, cooler when it reaches the walls of the motor. The whole mass blasts out the top, through the flared end. It has to have an exhaust velocity way higher than Uranus's escape velocity. The motor goes smashing down into deeper air. You see there's a kind of flared skirt at the bottom. The deep air builds up there at terrific pressure, stops the tube and blasts it back up. You fire it again."