Scholes checked his data slate. “We’ve almost completed our orbit. Three million miles of a Solar great circle traversed in three hours…”
“So our journey’s nearly done.” She folded her hands neatly in her lap once more, and turned her face to the clear wall; corona light played around her profile, making her look remote, surprisingly young.
He felt suddenly moved by her — by this lonely, bitter woman, isolated by her age and fragility from the rest of mankind… and, he suspected obscurely, isolated by some much more dramatic secret.
He tried to reassure her. “Another hour and you’ll be safely inside the habitat. You’ll be a lot more comfortable there. And — ”
She turned to him. She wasn’t smiling, but her face seemed to have softened a little, as if she understood what he was trying to do. Again she reached out and touched the back of his hand, and the sudden human contact was electric. “Thank you for your patience, Dr. Scholes. I’ve not given you an easy time, have I?”
He frowned, troubled. “I don’t think I’ve been patient at all, actually.”
“Oh, but you have.”
His curiosity burned within him, like the Sun’s fusion core, illuminating everything he saw. “You’re at the heart of all this, aren’t you? The Superet project, I mean. I don’t understand what your role is… But that’s the truth, isn’t it?”
She said nothing, but let her hand remain on his…
He frowned. She seemed so fragile. “And how do you feel about it?”
“How do I feel?” She closed her eyes. “Do you know, I’m not sure if anyone has asked me that before. How do I feel?” She sighed, raggedly. “I’m scared, Dr. Scholes. That’s how I feel.”
He let his fingers close around hers.
There was a subtle push in the base of his spine, and the sound of the Lightrider’s drive was a deep, low vibration, a seismic rumble he felt deep within the fabric of his body.
Slowly, the little ship climbed away from the Sun’s boiling surface.
4
The flitter tumbled from the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Port Sol to Earthport. Louise Ye Armonk peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth. Mark sat beside her, a bookslate on his lap.
Earthport was a swarm of wormhole Interfaces clustered at L4 — one of the five gravitationally stable Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, leading the Moon in its orbit around Earth by sixty degrees. From here, Earth was a swollen blue disc; wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the old planet like electric-blue, tetrahedral snowflakes.
The flitter — unmanned save for its two passengers — surged unhesitatingly through the tangle of Interfaces, the mesh of traffic which passed endlessly through the great cross-System gateways. In contrast to the desolation of the outer rim, Louise received a powerful, immediate impression of bustle, prosperity, activity, here at the heart of the System.
At the flitter’s standard one-gee acceleration the final leg from L4 to Earth itself would take only six hours; and already the old planet, pregnant and green, seemed to Louise to be approaching rapidly, as if surfacing through the complex web of wormhole Interfaces. Huge fusion stations — constructed from ice moons towed into Earth orbit from the asteroid belt and beyond — sparkled as they crawled above green-blue oceans. The planet itself was laced with lights, on land and sea. In the thin rim of atmosphere near the North Pole Louise could just make out the dull purple glow of an immense radiator beam, a diffuse refrigerating laser dumping a fraction of Earth’s waste heat into the endless sink of space.
Louise felt an absurd, sentimental lump rise to her throat as she studied the slowly turning planet. At moments like this she felt impelled to make private vows about spending more time here: here, at the vital core of the System, rather than on its desolate edge.
…But, she reminded herself harshly, the rim was where the Northern was being built.
Louise had work to do. She was trying to equip a starship, damn it. She didn’t have the time or energy to hop back to Earth to play guessing games with some unseen authority.
Growling subvocally, Louise rested her head against her couch and tried to sleep. Mark, patient and placid, called a new page of his bookslate.
The little ship landed in North America, barely thirteen hours after leaving Port Sol — all of four billion miles away. The flitter brought them to a small landing pad near the heart of Central Park, New York City. Louise saw two people — a man and a woman — approaching the pad across the crisp grass.
The flitter’s autopilot told them to make their way to a small, anonymous-gray building close to the pad.
Louise and Mark emerged into the sunshine of a New York spring. Louise could see the shoulders of tall, ancient skyscrapers at the rim of the park, interlaced by darting flitters. Not far away, shielded by trees at the heart of the park, she made out one of the city’s carbon-sequestration domes. The dome was a sphere of dry ice four hundred yards talclass="underline" sequestration was an old Superet scheme, with each dome containing fifty million tons of carbon dioxide boldly frozen out of the atmosphere and lagged by a two-yard layer of rock wool.
Mark raised his face to the Sun and breathed deeply. “Mmm. Cherry blossom and freshly cut grass. I love that smell.”
Louise snorted. “Really? I didn’t know cherry trees grew wild, on Titan.”
“We have domes,” he said defensively. “Anyway, every human is allowed to be sentimental about a spring day in New York. Look at those clouds, Louise. Aren’t they beautiful?”
She looked up. The sky was laced by high, fluffy, dark clouds. And beyond the clouds she saw crawling points of light: the habitats and factories of near Earth space. It was a fine view — but quite artificial, she knew. Even the clouds were fakes: they were doped with detergent, to limit the growth of the water droplets which comprised them. Smaller droplets reflected more sunlight than larger ones, making the semi-permanent clouds an effective shield against excessive Solar heating.
So much for sentiment. Everything was manufactured.
Louise dropped her head. As always on returning to Earth, she felt disoriented by the openness of the sky above her — it seemed to counter every intuition to have to believe that a thin layer of blue air could protect her adequately from the rigours of space.
“Come on,” she said to Mark. “Let’s get this over with.”
Following the instructions of the autopilot they approached the nearby building. The structure was brick-shaped, perhaps ten feet tall; there was a low doorway in the center of its nearest face.
As they got closer, the two people Louise had noticed from the air walked slowly toward them from the rear of the building.
The two parties stared at each other curiously.
The man stepped forward, his hands behind his back. He was thin and tall, physical-fifty, with a bald, pallid scalp fringed by white hair. He stared frankly at Louise. “I know your face,” he said.
Louise let her eyebrows lift. “Really? And you are — ”
“My name is Uvarov. Garry Benson Deng Uvarov.” He held out his hand; his voice had the flat, colorless intonation of the old Lunar colonies, Louise thought. “My field is eugenics. And my companion — ” He indicated the woman, who came forward. “This is Serena Milpitas.”
The woman grinned. She was plump but strong-looking, about physical-forty, with short-cropped hair. “That’s Serena Harvey Gallium Harvey Milpitas,” she said. “And I’m an engineer.”