Glass Sky (17 page)

The foldout bed was down, unmade. It must have belonged to one of the astronauts who’d died on Sharon’s last trip here. Jie lacked the emotional strength to call Zhenzhen and Cheng, so he sent an email. Then he lay back on the bed, the thin mattress soft as feathers in the low gravity.
The hive. My new home.
Death seemed to permeate the walls.

That could be my body out there. She did nothing wrong.
Isabel was a casualty in an unforgiving game of chance. A game that was just beginning.

ENEWS: APRIL 7, 2050

THE Dutch government announced today that it is abandoning plans to raise the height of Amsterdam’s sea defenses. “Dikes are not just walls that we can add to at will,” said Jan van Ieperen, spokesman for the Amsterdam Water Board. “They have a pyramid shape, so each meter we add to the top extends the base by five. Not only does the amount of material grow exponentially, but we’ve run out of space. Another round of construction is simply not cost effective. If the shield does not reduce surface temperatures to 20th century levels, Amsterdam will follow the fate of Venice.”

***

Khan Tengri’s assistant looked stoically ahead. “Mr. Tengri will be along in a minute. Wait here.”

“No problem,” said Tania. She walked to the window. Far below the First Avenue Parkway, pink with spring blossoms, vanished into endless skyscrapers. Workers were fitting the last colored blocks into the East River Levee at the point where it connected to the higher ground midtown. Just in time for the summer hurricane season.

A door opened. Tania caught Tengri’s reflection in the glass. He was wearing his gray suit as always, scroll slung across his chest, as if he’d just come from an important meeting.
He probably has come from an important meeting.

“Tania!” said Tengri. “Nice job on the Witty show. I think you just bought yourself some job security.”

“That’s good news,” said Tania, “because we’ve got our work cut out for us. I was in Ethiopia, field-checking a UNBio preserve. I thought we should talk in meatspace.”

She turned to face him. Tengri pulled back in surprise, an instinctive flicker of disgust giving way to instant concern. “Tania! What happened?”

Tania wrapped her arms around herself.

“Ethiopia you said? Are you…? Were you…?”

“No, I wasn’t.” Tania blinked. Looked away. Her missing teeth made it hard to speak. “It could have been worse.  I… I’d rather not talk about it.”

Tengri nodded. “Yes, of course…” There was an awkward silence. “What did you find out?” he asked finally.

“We’ll be lucky if 10% of native species are still harvestable,” said Tania. Her frown cracked her lip at the stitches. She felt blood beading. “Even if Ethiopia weren’t so corrupt, global weather patterns have changed too much: heat waves, droughts, floods. I’ll have to bioharvest a lot of preserves – even well-managed ones. And if we want to save what’s left, we need to act. We’ve got to start planning the postshield world.”

“Know who I just met with?” asked Tengri. “The Canadian Prime Minister.”

Tania groaned. “I hope you washed your hands afterwards.”

Tengri couldn’t hide his smile. “You’ve got to stop saying stuff like that. It doesn’t help our cause.”

“Come on, it’s not like you disagree,” said Tania. “Besides, I’ve been assaulted, and I’ll be signing a bio-harvest warrant on my first ecosystem this week. I’m not in a charitable mood. What did the scheming villain want?”

“Like you, he wants a plan for the post-shield world. He’s worried about the Northwest Passage shipping lanes. He wants assurances that temperatures won’t drop so far that they refreeze in the winter.” Tengri shook his head. “Getting the UN to agree on a shield plan isn’t going to be easy. And that’s assuming we can even build the damn thing. And assuming the US and China cooperate.”

Tania put her hands to her face and slumped into a chair. Her swollen eye throbbed. “What are the US and China saying?”

“Right now they’re still pretending to play nice. But I don’t think they want
the UN to have anything to do with running the shield.” Tengri sank down across from Tania. “Can you blame them? They have the power right now. And we could build a second shield if we sewed all the broken UN treaties together.”

“So where does this leave us?” asked Tania. “Who’s working on a longterm plan?”

“Nobody,” said Tengri. He leaned forward to make his point. “The Climate Council are barely talking. The switch to Nanoglass harmed a lot of powerful people. Apparently Malikov promised the Russian crime syndicates that they would be building Russia’s new space facilities; he spent three weeks with a ‘cold’ while his fixers paid everyone off.”

“It’s not my fault that the original disk array project was a self-serving money funnel,” said Tania.

“Correct actions have consequences, too,” said Tengri. “Politics is a mean, petty, vengeful game.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here,” said Tania. “I think I should create the shield plan. I’m neutral. I’ve got experience from Guatemala and Chengdu. And I’ll bring in biosphere experts. It’ll be cheap. Fifty people, tops. I can lay out a framework at the July Climate Summit. A starting point for discussion. All I need is some funding.”

“It’s a good idea.” Tengri stroked his beard. Then he shook his head. “I can’t let you do it though. It’s outside your mandate. You are funded to manage the UNBio preserves and provide scientific advice.”

“A plan is scientific advice,” said Tania.

“It’s policy. And you don’t
create policy unless asked. Citizens demand a say on how their money is spent. That’s the whole point of elections. And coups.”

What? Is he serious?
“World leaders don’t create policy either. They ask civil servants to create policy. And I’m a civil servant.”

“And you haven’t been asked.”

“I’m not some pawn you can just put back in the box.” Tania glared at Tengri. “You said I’d write my job description. It’s not a lot of money. I’m trying to stop a calamity.”

“And you already stopped one, when we switched to Nanoglass.” Tengri stabbed at her with his finger. “I’m serious, Tania. Manage the UNBio preserves. Gather better data. Clean up your department. But don’t go stepping on more toes. Not now.”

“Stepping on toes?” Tania’s lip split even wider. She wiped it with the back of her hand, drawing scarlet. “How can I step on toes? I’m the only one on the
fucking
dance floor! The UN’s doing nothing while the earth comes apart. Do you understand how serious this is?”

“Enough!” Tengri’s voice was an iron door slamming shut. “There’s a pace to diplomacy, Tania. I know you’re upset. But you spent your political capital on Nanoglass. Not to mention a good chunk of mine. Your Witty Show appearance may have made you popular with the public. But you’re as welcome as cancer at the Climate Council right now. I can’t have you running amok while I’m trying to heal the wounds. I will not fund this.”

***

Tania fueled her morning bike ride with anger.
Tania Black, UNBio figurehead.
Exactly why she hadn’t wanted the job.
A pace to diplomacy?
Diplomacy had created Kyoto. Diplomacy had created the Carbon Accord. Diplomacy had created the Emergency Sulfur Plan.
I’m like the doctors in that damn refugee camp: in the bottom of a hole with nothing but a shovel.
She stomped through the UNBio lobby, ignoring the stares her face was drawing.
We should feed the fucking diplomats into the last coal plants. Maybe then we’d make some fucking progress.

A message from Gordon Hill waited on her monitor. “See me. Urgent.”

Tania closed herself in her office and forced herself through a short yoga sequence. Then she walked down the hall to the Simulations Department. She found Gordon hidden behind a wall of computer screens, thirties met-hop leaking from headphones buried underneath his long hair. He bounced to the beat, his fingers dancing between the keyboard, the control pad, and the monitor.

“Ahem.”

“You’re back? How was Ethiopia?” He hit enter with an exaggerated flourish and looked up. “What the…?”

Tania longed to turn her face away, to hide her missing teeth. “I can’t talk about it,” said Tania. “But the preserve’s going on the bio-harvest pile.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Gordon mumbled. His eyes searched for a safe place to land.

“It’s OK,” said Tania. “I know I look like shit. What is it you wanted to show me?”

Gordon rolled his chair over to make space. He brought up a map of the Atlantic Ocean, colored in blues and reds. “This is yesterday’s simulation run. Sea surface temperature predictions for this summer, using the new data you authorized.” He pointed to the area that had already caught Tania’s attention, an angry red blotch extending from the tip of Florida halfway across the Atlantic.
Right where hurricanes gather strength.

“How much above normal is it?” asked Tania.

“Four degrees,” said Gordon. “We think it’s caused by the end of sulfuring; it goes away if we run the models with sulfur in the atmosphere.”

Oh. Shit.
“What about wind shears?”

“This is our bestfit-quadratic simulation.” Gordon tapped the screen and the jet streams appeared, two rings of highspeed wind whipping around the planet. The northern one dipped south over Canada. A classic hurricane-busting pattern. Warm ocean water and sunlight fed hurricanes, but the right mix of high-altitude winds could carry away excess energy, preventing the storms from becoming too dangerous.

“That doesn’t look so bad…”

Gordon tapped the screen again. “Unfortunately, this is our neural-net simulation.” The lines shifted menacingly north.

“So it’s unclear,” said Tania. “The simulations disagree.”

“The problem is the North Atlantic oscillation,” said Gordon. “We’ve got low pressure over both Iceland and the Azores right now, and the models don’t have enough history to decide which way the NAO will resolve. The best I can do is average the simulations, which gives a 40% chance of a category six.” His voice held an edge of involuntary excitement, a part of him fascinated by the prospect.

“What would you do?” The temperature blotch throbbed in time with her headache.

“The only way to prevent potential storms is to start sulfuring again,” said Gordon.

“And the only way to delay the next famine is to avoid sulfuring,” said Tania. “Lose-lose.” She tapped his screen to bring up the probability curve.

It’s unraveling. It’s all unraveling. And I’m supposed to twiddle my thumbs and wait for fucking diplomacy.

SHARON, IN A T-shirt and cotton shorts, slopped out bowls of porridge. “Our mission continues,” she said.

Jie stuck a spoon into his breakfast.
At least my food isn’t floating away.
“We can continue with four?”

“We have no choice,” said Sharon. “Earthcon won’t have a return-vehicle ready for months.”

Rajit studied the silk banners hanging off the utilitarian wall frames, as if he were trying to memorize the signed names in their different scripts and languages. Chinese. English. Russian. The richly colored fabrics gave an exotic feel to the place, like a high-ceilinged Bedouin tent, as if the airlock led to camels and palm trees, instead of deadly emptiness.

“Did you diagnose Isabel’s suit yet?” asked Sally. Her eyes were puffy with sorrow.

“You got her suit already?” asked Jie.

“Sharon and I retrieved it last night,” said Rajit. “While Sally was wiping up the dust I tracked into the cargo dome.”

While I was cowering in my room.
Jie felt even less like an astronaut. “What did you learn?”

“It was a stupid mistake,” said Sharon. “A piece of leftover packaging jammed in Isabel’s scrubber seal. The other suits are fine.” Sharon held Jie’s gaze. “Earthcon has cleared us to resume walks. You should come outside for the funeral. Isabel’s family wants a quick burial. Brazilian custom.”

Jie nearly dropped his spoon. “Me? Out there? I can’t. I am not trained.”

Sharon’s eyes drilled into him. “Isabel died last night,” she snapped. “Sorry if it’s inconvenient. But we're going to need you to step up.”

***

Jie walked to the airlock as if to the gallows. The astronauts had all stripped to their underwear revealing their lean, trained physiques. Sally’s stomach muscles rippled as she pulled on her suit.

Jie tried to suck in his gut, which jiggled in the low gravity. He pulled his suit off the hook, wrinkling his nose at the stale-sweat smell.
I hope we can wash these.
He replaced his air scrubber and pressed the test button. Nothing.
Dog testicles! What is it with these things?
The label said “Made in China,” so it wasn’t even a cheap American knockoff. The next cartridge worked fine.
This is not helping my confidence.

Sharon entered the airlock first, followed by Sally. Jie twisted his helmet into place.

‹Jie, I’m Zhao,› came a voice in Mandarin. ‹I’m your outside support today. I’ll be monitoring your suitcams and vitals. Let me know if you have any questions.›

Any tips on dealing with terror?
‹I’m OK.›

Breathe in, breathe out. I can do this.
He stepped forward and the door slid shut behind him, trapping him in the tiny room. A hiss of pumps. His suit stiffened as the pressure dropped.
This is where she died. Alone.
He concentrated on the pressure indicator. The moment it turned green, he pulled open the door.

Sharon and Sally stood side by side, gazing at the sliver of Earth. Jie joined them. Other than Jie’s breathing, the stillness was absolute. The sun had moved noticeably, but Earth still hung between the same two mountains, just grazing the horizon. Because the moon was tidally locked to Earth, always presenting the same face, the earth barely moved in the lunar sky. The earth still had phases though, and the sunlight smile had changed, bigger now. Jie could make out bits of land, and on Earth’s dark side distant storms reflected pale moonlight. But even with his helmet magnification turned up, continents and countries eluded identification.
I can’t even tell which way is “up”. 
As if “up” had any more meaning than sovereign borders.

Isabel’s body, wrapped in white cloth now, lay where they’d left it. Rajit exited, and on Sharon’s orders Rajit and Sally lifted the ends of the cloth. Sharon led them around the far side of the cargo dome. Every step away from the airlock increased Jie’s unease, as if he were swimming away from a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. At his handler’s suggestion, Jie concentrated on mimicking Sharon’s easy gait, matching her steps. She hopped over the inky shadows with expert glides and skips, like a child playing on the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks.

Two rovers were parked in charging pods. No windows. No roof. No doors. Just platform seating on balloon tires. Sharon took the single driver’s seat and pressed the start button.

“Damn it! The battery is flat.”

Jie measured the distance to the airlock.
A human can survive a minute in vacuum.
Could they haul me back in time?

The second rover started. After strapping Isabel’s shrouded body onto the cargo tray, Jie, Rajit, and Sally climbed onto the rear bench. They crawled up the ridge, sticking as much as possible to lit patches of ground. Mountains stretched to the fisheye horizon, though scale was hard to judge without the hazy atmospheric fuzz of distance. The summit above them bristled with solar panels, thousands of them, hung like flags on slender poles, tracking the sun like a garden of giant silicon flowers.

Sharon stopped on a flat piece of ground just short of the panel array. “We’re here.”

Three graves marked the lunar cemetery, each regolith mound decorated with a colored rectangle of fabric. The headstones were made of alloy construction scraps, hand inked with a name and a date. The soil had been patted flat to contrast with the landscape’s roughness, the handprints still visible in the dirt. Sharon’s handprints. From all those years ago. Sharon’s mirrored helmet hid her expression, but she looked bent and frail, despite the low gravity.

They lifted Isabel off the rover, laying her carefully in a fresh trench. A robotic mining truck watched from a few meters away, headlight eyes glowing behind the shovel nose. It was a mechanical proxy for Isabel’s family, who’d gathered in a small church in Brazil. They’d requested a private funeral: no television coverage, no public outpouring of grief from strangers.

Sharon raised her voice, speaking for the benefit of all the listeners. “Yesterday, we lost a friend and a teammate. Isabel did not choose her sacrifice. But like all of us, she arrived knowing that she might be called on to pay a terrible price. And she judged that price an acceptable risk, if it could help us become stewards of our beautiful world. We will honor Isabel the best way we can. By completing our mission, with courage, and integrity.”

Isabel’s parents and husband spoke a sobbing farewell in Portuguese, the guttural sounds of grief needing no translation.
What must it feel like to lose a child? To lose Cheng?
The mining truck’s lights blinked farewell, and then the blade dipped and it pushed a pile of gray dirt over the grave. Sharon used her hands to pat down the mound, removing stones as she went. Sally, Rajit, and Jie joined, adding their own handprints, smoothing out the surface. The dirt felt strange through his gloves, like talcum powder through oven mitts. Soon the surface was as smooth as freshly poured concrete, a memorial more permanent than anything on Earth. With the passage of eons, these simple markers would vanish under the impacts that still sometimes rocked this barren world. But by then humans would be far beyond such concerns. Assuming the species survived that long.

Jie looked up, his gaze pulled home yet again. Earth had rotated, bringing a pinwheel of cloud into the sunlight, a storm, gathering strength, the first harbinger of the summer hurricane season. Viewed from the moon it was beautiful.

***

Whether it had been respect for Isabel or initial caution that had held her back, Sharon showed much less restraint on the return drive. The low gravity gave the rover an undulating rhythm as it bounced down the rough road. When they reached the habitat, Sharon didn’t slow.

“Sorry, Jie. I talked to Earthcon on private. They’d like all of us to help on the unload.”

“I have no training,” protested Jie. “I died in the simulator. Two times. And I flooded my helmet in the dive tank. I am a safety hazard!”

“You’ve already spent as much time in low gravity as all our simulator time combined,” said Sharon.

‹You’ll be fine,› said the handler.

Jie watched glumly as the airlock vanished behind them. They drove along their footsteps from the day before and pulled up at the LDC. It perched on spindly legs like a spidery alien, its top half stacked with cargo.

Sharon scampered up the ladder. “The original plan was to drop us sideways on landing,” she said. “It would’ve made unloading trivial. But some bright light in engineering realized that a round capsule and 5 kilometer hill aren’t compatible.”

She tossed down a cord, which Sally and Rajit anchored into the surface with long, spiraled screws. Then Rajit climbed up and helped Sharon slide cargo boxes down the zip line. Endless rolls of solar panel material followed. Jie and Sally stacked everything, and though it was -50 in the sunlight, Jie soon had sweat running down his face, tormenting him inside his helmet. The surrounding vacuum was a great insulator, like a thermos, so overheating was actually the hardest problem to solve. The suit’s cooling system dumped excess heat through the conduction pads on his feet. Clearly it wasn’t efficient enough for heavy work.

Another roll of solar material slid down. Jie moved to grab it. ‹Careful, Jie, watch your step,› Sally cautioned.
I wish she’d stop. It’s making me nervous.
She’d been reminding him of dangers every few minutes, hovering nearby as if she expected him to accidentally hole himself.

Finally only the massive nanolab remained: Jie’s baby was 30,000 kilograms of hoses and wires packed in a metal box. Although it had been hardened to survive the launch, enough internals protruded to give an impression of fragility.
If it’s damaged – don’t even think about it.

Rajit and Sharon climbed down to guide the mining truck into position. The sides of the truck’s cargo box unfolded, transforming it into a large mobile platform. One corner of the platform had a circular mount for an articulated crane, which had been disassembled and stowed in a holder behind the rear wheels.

“I’m curious about the nanolab,” said Rajit. He hopped up next to the crane mount. “I understand that it lets you manipulate atoms. And you’ll interface from inside and try out low-gravity manufacturing techniques.”

“Yes,” said Jie. He passed Rajit a tubular crane segment. “But I must be on the moon, otherwise the time lag is impossible. Like playing video game on too slow network.”

“I got that part,” said Rajit. He snapped the crane segment into position. “What I don’t get is how the nanolab actually controls such small particles. Wave interference?”

“Exactly! We use coherent light – whoops!” With his restricted helmet vision and the lack of surface noise, he’d walked right into Sally. His reflexes were all wrong, and he overcompensated, stumbling. He watched in slow motion horror as his arms flailed and he fell to the ground, thudding on his back. Sally quickly helped him up, checking his suit.

‹You’re OK,› she assured him. ‹No leaks.›

Nobody needed to scold him. The graveyard where they’d buried Isabel mere hours ago was still visible in the distance.

***

Jie settled into his bunk, exhausted from the long day on the surface and the subsequent hours spent ferrying supplies through the airlock’s dust control system. A vent woke in the ceiling, as it did every few minutes, the metronomic respiration of the machines that kept him alive. The shiny gray membrane above his desk bulged where the blanket of protective rocks pressed down from outside. A few layers of polymer between him and death.

Sleep would not come. Dark tendrils reached invisibly through the walls.
Intruder. You don’t belong here.
Twisted images of Isabel in the airlock jumbled with fragmented worries about the coming Nanoglass research.
What if my design instincts are wrong here? What if the nanolab is damaged?
At one point he sat upright, shaking at a vision of Cheng thrashing on the airless surface.

After an eternity, he heard noises. The smell of breakfast drew him, hobbling, into the hive.
I ache.

“Morning, Jie,” said Sharon. The furrows in her forehead had lessened overnight. Rajit was up too. He grunted, not looking up from the scroll he was studying. Jie glanced at the title as he passed. “Tensor Calculus in M-Theory.”
To each their own.
Jie tended towards animated novels.

Sally appeared in the kitchen door, oatmeal pot in hand. She grimaced. “Are you guys as sore as me? I can barely lift my arms. We’re taking a day off, right Sharon?”

“Your stabilizer muscles aren’t used to low G,” said Sharon. “But you’ll be inside today helping Jie set up his lab. Rajit and I will do what we can on the surface.” She glanced at a spot on the hive wall, where they’d hung a small Brazilian flag last night. “Isabel,” said the neatly printed letters. The hive seemed to grow colder.

Sally forced a smiled at Jie. “Let’s see if we can assemble your lab in a day.”

After breakfast, Jie and Sally took the arched connecting tunnel into the cargo dome. Unlike the crew dome, which had a ring of rooms surrounding the central “hive”, the ground floor of the cargo dome was mostly open. The wall closest to the crew dome was lined with a variety of machinery: air filters, water recyclers, 3d printers, heat exchangers, and other bits of equipment needed to keep them alive. The rest of the space was mostly storage: shelves covered with neatly labelled supplies. Near the airlock sat the stack of silver boxes that they had brought in from the landing vehicle the day before.