“The Miners ask: why not make a sailboat?”
The TC Elder snorted; his nearest ecumenical colleagues heard him mutter “you see? Apes!” under his breath.
One of the more Asperger-ish engineers sneered, “because sailboats don’t fly.”
But Sargon was immune to the implied insults. Another short consultation with Asach followed.
“The Miner means: a Phoenix.”
“Well, at least they’re talking birds now.”
“The Miner will show you.”
And to the amazement of all humans except Laurel and Asach, the Miner’s hands began moving very quickly on the surface of the table. Its left hand drew a crooked cross with a very long axis, then a line traveling along the cross, into a spiral. Simultaneously, its lower right hand drew a concave slope, with a dished depression at its top, while the upper right hand drew parallel lines emanating from the dish. It slashed an arc intersecting the parallel lines, with the spiraling line also intersecting just below it, fizzling into a scatter of dots. Above the arc, it drew a bullet-shaped object, with an arrow encircling its base, and what looked like a handkerchief floating above the nose end. Then, it drew a series of glyphs to the right of the image, with a line from one to the base of the parallel lines. Finally, next to the bullet, it drew what looked like two small bowls, with a slash through each. With no prompting from Michael, it pressed the thumb of its gripping hand to the table edge, and stepped back. The image appeared on the window screen.
The reaction was mixed. Before it disintegrated into cacophony, Sargon drew a circle around the spiral.
“This is Phoenix.”
Then a circle around the bullet-with hanky.
“This is sailboat.”
At which point, HG actually jumped from his chair, then gasped and sat again as Barthes kicked him under the table.
“What is that?”
“Wait. That looks like an airstrip.”
“Not an airstrip. The airstrip. The SunFish hopper strip at the Orcutt concession outside Bonneville.”
“The one on Orcutt’s ranch?”
“Not Orcutt Station. OLaM Station. The SunRail mining terminal. Mined out now, though.”
“So what’s the squiggle?”
But the answer was overlaid by a simultaneous interjection.
“ What’s that bullet thing?”
“What do you mean, sailboat?”
“Why the dots?”
“I don’t see where this gets us.”
“What the—”
“What is this?”
They all stopped when Laurel spoke. She circled one glyph, hesitantly, then another. “I know those. I mean, I think I do. I must. I have seen them, over and over. Now I think I know. That’s His Eye.” The line pointed to the dish atop the slope. “And beside it, That’s His Eye, Opened.”
Several of the clergy groaned. Laurel froze, staring at her feet.
Michael interjected. “Please, to order. I believe that Defender Courter has information we might all benefit from.”
Laurel closed her eyes. It was like being back in Sargon’s House. She was very afraid, and very alone. She listened to her own breathing for a minute. Harsh, loud, like Agamemnon’s, when he had shivered before Farmer John on that first day, a lifetime ago. She looked at Farmer John. That permanent smile. Like a rock, embedded in soil. His Eye was no longer hers alone.
“Please, forgive me. I can only use the words I know. But I am the only Gathered human here”—she resolutely did not look at Asach—“I mean, the only human who has seen the Earthly Eye. This mark here.” she circled again, pointed again, “you find it in the foothills. It marks all the safe routes into Swenson’s Mountain. So I guess it’s just a road sign, really. ‘This way to Swenson’s Mountain.’ But this one,” she circled the glyph beside it, “this one rings the Eye itself. It marks—well, you don’t go past this, ever. Lest you be consumed by His Gaze.”
There was some pained murmuring. This time, Laurel cut it off herself. “Hear me out! I never went to school. I studied at home. I don’t know what you know. But you don’t know what I know, because you’ve never been there. What I know now. I have thought about it since that final day, when they fought on the plains. Fought the Friedlander amour. I saw them there, those bright green lights, and I thought it then: like little eyes, blinking open and shut. The laser cannons. Blinking open and shut. Like His Eye.”
She looked around. Sargon’s delegation simply waited, patiently, for the very slow humans to comprehend. Asach stared carefully at folded hands. HG squirmed, uncomprehending and bored. The ecumenical council, attuned to the subtext of personal spiritual insight, had fallen silent. Laurel raised her eyes, and met the stares of the—unbelieving—engineers. “It’s a laser. His Eye. It’s a giant, giant laser. A giant laser that blinks on and off, once a day, for sixteen weeks, every twenty-one years.”
And the shoe finally dropped for Michael as well. “In the volcano? The opal meerschaum? It erodes out of the volcano?”
Laurel nodded. “And we Gather there. In His sight. Every twenty-one years. Only—” she looked to Sargon—“only, they were there first. And Swenson knew. That’s why he claimed the mountain. That’s why his daughters led us there. To protect it, so no one else would come.”
And then the astrophysicist rose, hands to his mouth, creating a ripple of craning heads as he blocked the big-screen view. He waved a hand at the screen. “Do you see that? Do you see that?!”
He turned and pointed at the Miner. “That man’s a genius. A genius. We can do this. We can do this. We can do the engineering.” He swiveled between the human and non-human doctors. “Can we do this? Can we do the life support? Can we do enough life support to get them up there?””
“A genius?”
“Do what?”
“What genius?”
“What does he mean, gen—”
“Life support?”
The astrophysicist was flapping his hands about to quiet the room. “Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are looking at here is Aldrich Saxe’s napkin. This Miner—your Excellency, does this Miner have a name?—This Miner has sketched for us a way to put a capsule in orbit using existing technology, plus the Eye as a laser cannon.”
Forgetting the conference table, he ran up to the screen.
“Look at this. This is the old OLaM airstrip. It’s the closest to Swenson’s Mountain. You strip a SunFish of everything—everything—non-essential, and load it with a space-worthy capsule. You use thermal uplift to gain airspeed, and use airspeed to gain altitude, as high as you can get. Then you use all remaining onboard power for the final whip up to the top of the atmosphere—and time it to drop and glide straight down into the Eye on its last leg. The airframe gets burned up, but that puts the laser capsule into the photon stream at the top of the troposphere. That’s the Phoenix. Same system as we talked about earlier—the laser ablates the bottom surface of the bullet to create thrust, and it heats the air chamber, forcing superheated air out of a hole to create stabilizing spin. But it doesn’t have far to go now, so it doesn’t need so much spin, and it does not need it for so long. You get a—I don’t know how many seconds, I’ll work it out in a minute—countdown, until you are out of atmosphere. Then you pop out a light sail. That’s the sailboat. We aren’t going anywhere in particular, just parking in orbit, so we don’t really need to steer it. We just get the extra push, then jettison the sail and tip into orbit. At this point, we might not even need attitude adjustment. Depends on how far out we want to go, how long we want to stay up, how much total mass, how precise an orbit.”