Alas, his second reply from Luyten was lost in transmission, garbled beyond the ability of even a telecom hypercomputer to repair, and he mourned its vanished impressions and experiences almost as he would mourn a true copy of himself. But even that made for a good anecdote, and spiced his character with a fashionable tinge of melancholy.
In this way Conrad became, over time, a seasoned and cosmopolitan adult, a galactic citizen who was widely seen, with only the mildest of envy, as rising above the inherent provinciality of this little province—humanity's first extrasolar experiment.
One thing Conrad never did, though, was send himself to Sol. He'd already been there, after all, and while it might be nice to see his parents and some of the casual friends he'd known who had not themselves become colonists, he never felt any true need to send them more than text messages, or the occasional video monologue. And even that was expensive, by colonial standards. Too, as with Xmary, he had less and less in common with them as the years rolled on. The messages became dutiful rather than warm, and as terse as his sense of duty permitted.
But of course Conrad's fate was intertwined with the Queendom of Sol, and could not be so easily separated. And he had twice received his own visitors from the sky, pen pals writing back to him with animate messages of their own, and so in the fullness of time he was only a little bit surprised to find the Queendom of Sol coming to visit him, as a mountain had once allegedly called upon the residence of the prophet Mohammed.
Chapter twelve.
Messages, bottled and un-
In the twenty-fifth decade of the Kingdom of Barnard, in an orbital tower looking down upon the world of P2, the architect Conrad Mursk stands with a warm mug in his hand, staring across forty thousand kilometers of vacuum at his latest creation: the Gravittoir. This consists of a skyhook station, known artfully as “Skyhook Station,” suspended by three electromagnetic grapples “hooked” to Barnard, Gatewood, and Van de Kamp, as a triangular hammock might be slung between a trio of trees.
There will be times, alas—a few years out of every century—when these bodies will be poorly aligned, and will fail to support the station (being “beneath” it in a gravitational sense), and at these times the station will be forced to descend back to the planet's surface, and the citizens of Barnard will have to rely instead on the older and less elegant Orbital Tower, upon which Conrad presently stands.
A synchronous orbit for Skyhook Station—one which completed its turns at the same rate as the planet itself—would have been much better in this regard, but there are no such orbits here. With the star so close and the planet's rotation so slow, the altitude of an orbit like that would be well outside the planet's sphere of gravitational influence. Or so Conrad's gravity specialists have persuaded him: this is the best solution for the given environment, and will in no way reduce the esteem of Barnard's First Architect.
The purpose of the Orbital Tower is simple: to provide an elevator up out of the atmosphere. It was never intended as a permanent solution, and while the Gravittoir will be a great improvement, there is nothing permanent about it, either. Indeed, it's just another stopgap on the road to faxation; once the collapsiter grid is in place, none of this will be necessary. The Gravittoir is also simple: Skyhook Station has a weak gravity laser pointing downward, which creates a column of funny weather, but more importantly makes it possible for a properly designed spacecraft to be yanked off the surface of the planet and into space, where its thrusters can place it in orbit without drag or fuss.
Stand with Conrad, and see what he sees: the tower stretching down beneath you: a narrow, gleaming cone of impervium whose base is roughly the size of a soccer pitch, whose nearly cylindrical apex is, by coincidence, almost exactly as wide as the starship Newhope, which brought you here long ago. The interior of the structure includes a sleeve of diamond which is technically capable of supporting the tower's entire weight, but with almost no safety margin. Know that for practical purposes, the structure is held up by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots, and runs a serious risk of collapse in the unlikely event that the power ever fails. Feel the meaning of that in your boots, in the wellmetal deck beneath you. A temporary structure, indeed.
Because the tower is so purely vertical, and its base so distant beneath P2's tall atmosphere, you cannot see the foot of it. What you can see, if you strain your eyes, is the black line of a tuberail link joining the base of the tower with the city of Domesville, which even now is built in rings and circles—a concession to the domes that were never erected. It's a style; even the new construction falls into the same general pattern, so that from up here the city looks like a scattering of saucers and old-style shirt buttons around a pair of midsized dinner plates.
There are just over twenty thousand people down there (or fourteen thousand individuals with an average of 1.4 instantiations apiece, if you prefer to count it that way) going about their daily business, which mainly involves the maintenance and expansion of Domesville itself, the rearing and education of its growing ranks of children, and the planning and governance and sociopolitical groundwork for the much larger population which is to follow in the centuries ahead.
Then, running east from Domesville and perpendicular to the Tower Line, you can just make out the city's other tuberail, which runs thirty-five thousand kilometers east to Bupsville (officially Backupsville), the planet's only other major community. Not everyone lives in these two towns, and indeed, not everyone lives on the surface of the planet, or even anywhere near it. But together, the towns account for about ninety percent of the colony's population, and at least ninety-nine percent of its cultural output. If you squint, you can just make out Bupsville through a yellow-brown haze at the edge or “limb” of the planet. It doesn't look like much, just a gray discoloration, gleaming here and there with the bright orange-white of reflected sunlight. There is another tuberail line south from Bupsville, joining it to the Gravittoir's ground station, which, like the Orbital Tower, is located on P2's equator. But that line is far too thin and faint, too obscured by chlorine haze and water vapor and dust, to be visible from here.
The ground station itself is visible only because Conrad has asked the windows to mark it for him, with a reticle of glowing red. Another reticle—this one green—marks the position of Skyhook Station, which fortunately is visible, if only because it gleams in full sunlight, like a tight little cluster of stars.
Conrad is here because he's seen the Gravittoir, the latest of his children, from every other sort of angle, and wants to see it from this one before it goes online. Before the Orbital Tower becomes an afterthought, useful only for rustic vacations and cargoes of the very lowest priority. Before Domesville ceases to be the planet's main spaceport, and becomes instead merely its political capital.
Imagine yourself hovering invisibly beside Conrad, in a circular chamber at the tower's very top. All around you, the walls are transparent, though the ceiling has been opaqued to provide some shade from the noonday sun, and the floor has been similarly darkened to prevent vertigo, which from this vantage can be considerable. The launching tracks, running up along the outside of the tower, are also transparent (remarkably so, to your eye), and are only really visible if you know what to look for: four man-wide tuberails of wellstone spaced around the tower at ninety-degree intervals. Here and there, they catch the light in interesting ways, shooting rainbow-speckled sprays of it along the silver-gray wellmetal of the deck beneath your feet. It's rather cold here, and Conrad is bundled in a wellcloth jacket he brought with him from home, thinking ahead because he knows it's always cold here.