But it was a good story and sometimes a fitting lie can do more good than a mundane truth. Particularly when used to raise funds.
Lars Arcsen, leader of the Deacon Blues, brought the ring to a halt, using tugs and endless miles of monofilament. He lost thirty ships. Six hundred men and five AIs lost their lives, and when the ring finally stopped it was 50,000 miles further out than Lars had predicted.
Which worried Lars not a fuck, since there had been thirty-six hours towards the end when Lars was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to halt the ring at all.
And once Samsara was in position, getting it spinning properly took Lars another three months. And then came creation, except that took twenty-eight years, not six days, and no one got Sunday off to rest. Water came from the dirty ice of a captured comet, not filtered but purified by nanites that ate heavy metals. Nanites also shredded Samsara’s molecular bonds, feeding on pale sunlight as they separated out original elements, only to build them back into mountains, rocks, cliffs…
The comet ice was split into hydrogen and oxygen, mixed with nitrogen and fed back as atmosphere. Unbreathably thin at first, but getting thicker with each passing year.
But then, twenty-one years into creation, with the framework to this new landscape already grown, the project hit its biggest wall. Soil. Leaf litter. Loam. That broken-down biomass that gave Earth its actual name. Creating enough soil proved beyond the ingenuity of even Lars Arcsen.
Aged seven—sat in exile in a vast apartment on West 64th that had been sandblasted down to a stripped urban shell—the brand-new Dalai Lama flipped off the browband of his birthday Sony tri-D long enough to ask one question. ‘How many people die each year?’
Initially, WheelOfGod Enterprises expected resistance to their request for donated bodies. They ended up charging for the privilege. To start with, the whole of the West Coast America wanted to be recycled. Elderly models from Bel Air covenanted condos provided their dumb-fuck red setters could come too.
A Hollywood actress, three face transplants on from the v’Actor still making her hit movies, had her agent hold a press call at the Dome to announce she’d be donating her body to the Wheel. But then, as her first husband bitched, what was the big deal? She’d already donated it to everyone else.
At one time your annual salary plus post & packing on a shrub or tree secured you a place on one of the coffin ships (basically, a refrigerated Niponshi food transport too old and battered to pass NASA standards for the Luna run). It also bought you a rice-paper prayer tacked to the rim of the wheel. A street sweeper in Delhi went Wheelside for a tattered Jimsen weed and $23.60, the head of Team Rodent donated $238,000,000 and a forest of oak saplings, and still there were grumbles that it didn’t properly reflect his true remuneration.
Turnover proved to be high on Samsara when the living finally started to arrive. The Tibetan exiles thrived, but the refugees died faster and so did the tortured. Some died of injuries, others of shock. A few killed themselves, unable to live with the silence, temple bells and slightly-distant kindness of the monks.
But to start with, before Samsara had inhabitants, the dead got shredded into bone-filled fragments, mixed with disassemblers and sprayed over every surface, whether it stuck or not. Later, insects broke mounds of delivered bodies into mulch that got spread thin across the central valley. And then, that done, Niponshi drones hosed mulch onto the bare rock face of the mountainside which trickled down to pool again in the valleys.
Much later, mosses were planted, trees and shrubs, starting their own cycle of growth and corruption, though the bodies kept coming.
The Dalai Lama furnished the faith but the reclusive, obscenely-rich sandrat Lars Arcsen provided the knowledge. Few people knew where he got the skills or the technology, but then few people had ever been out to where Lars lived, surrounded by animals on a private orbital. All Lars did was take what had first been done in the Arc, and do it again, but larger. He was the one who called it all. Everyone else regarded it as a miracle.
Entrance to the Wheel of God wasn’t down through the atmosphere. It was up through a single hole in the shell. Besides the numerous lengths of high-tensile molywire rumoured to span from one side of the wheel to its opposite, there were two reasons for this. The reason given was that entry this way kept the side effects of atmospheric re-entry out of the loop. The real reason was that it allowed the Wheel’s pacifist AI, Tsongkhapa, to screen all incoming refugees for weapons and disease.
Chapter Nineteen
Monosyllabic/Monochromatic
‘Wake now,’ said the stewardess and Axl did, into the darkness he was coming to dread. Almost half of his life hadn’t been enough to come to terms with losing his internal backing track and he knew the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough for him to learn to face being blinded with anything other than gut-churning self pity. That knowledge was almost as sickening as being swallowed by the blackness.
‘Come on, wake up,’ repeated the voice.
Just by listening he knew she was out of reach. Cramps were spreading up his left arm and he guessed she’d just pumped norAdrenaline into his wrist implant to kick him awake. It worked, he was jumpier than a rattlesnake.
‘We’re here.’
‘Where?’ Axl asked.
‘Where you’re going.’ Her answer was bright, accurate and utterly unhelpful. ‘I’m going to get the cabin chief now…’
There was a sudden silence to go with the blackness. So Axl just waited, keeping his thoughts to a bare minimum. Which was pretty easy given the steady thud of blood in his head and a writhing ratking knot in his stomach that gnawed like hunger but was probably fear.
Two-thirds of the human mind is taken up processing sight. And okay, not even Axl knew what was being logic-chunked through his unconscious mind, but his conscious brain knew only too well that it was missing visual input. And since over sixty percent of information stored in the brain got there via sight, his brain was missing it bigtime.
The cabin he was in was almost completely noiseless, Axl realised. Just the low thud of airfilters lazily converting his breath back into oxygen.
‘You feeling better now?’ The voice of the cabin chief was polite, but not that polite. Axl flipped out a hand and grinned when he heard the overgrown toy take a quick step backwards.
‘Maybe not,’ the voice said petulantly. And then there was silence again.
Outside, the Nuncio’s cruiser kept pace with the edge of Samsara, rising slowly towards the wheel while the ship waited for the opening of a steel iris to let it pass into the first of many locks. Coming into its approach, the Boeing’s AI had passed control to Tsongkhapa. Though what took control of the Boeing, moving the cruiser up through the iris, its forward speed exactly matching that of the Wheel’s outer rim, was a subset of a subset, obviously enough. A mere fragment of intelligence.
But still it was running code it knew intimately and the Nuncio’s Boeing hung exactly in the centre of the closing lock: from outside the wheel it would have looked as if the silver, purple and gold vessel was framed by a circle of black.
Below the cruiser the metal iris closed, vents opened as pressure was equalised and then an iris overhead unfurled like the petals of a chrysanthemum folding back into nothing. The elegant cruiser climbed a level and then that iris closed below it. Vents hissing softly as the ceiling overhead began to unfurl. There were a dozen locks, maybe more. Axl didn’t count them, he just heard the hiss of vents, each one louder than the one before as the pressure began to reach atmospheric.