Hieroglyph (56 page)

Chief of these was the inevitable collapse of the Muslim countries that had run for a century on oil revenues. Their reserves were depleting, green tech was lowering consumption, and their vast overpopulation was getting ugly in the streets. The Arab states began their collapse, plus Indonesia. Of course that didn't affect Pakistan and the other Stans, or the coming Muslim majority in Sweden. Older countries stiffened their immigration, letting few in but the very skilled. Financial markets turned turtle, heads in, going nowhere.

Plus he put some of his own money into a start-up study of building a space elevator. It seemed like a great idea, a crucial component to get into space cheaply and effectively. There were superstrong composites, part diamond, and his self-managing AI bots made it seem plausible.

His engineers used a junk debris mass left over from mining to build the first lengths, with multiple redundant cables with cross-strapping to distribute loads around a break. When a meteorite or dead satellite inevitably hits, you would only need to replace a small part.

But the first high launch tower went into rapid launch mode then, chopping lift costs considerably below even the traditional two-stage to orbit. Plus there were tech failures and the corporate treasurer turned out to have his hand in the till. It was the big, final hit. Harold could not for the life of him hold together the investment coalition to build further.

He had to fold and take a considerable haircut. The unfinished cable became an embarrassment. He finally sold the useful parts for orbital scrap use, just to stop people taking pictures of it and laughing.

For three years he took a dollar-a-year salary and sent his stock option profits to the astronomers for their infrared work. Sara offered to help, but he thought it safer to keep their assets separate. She got miffed at that, and they didn't see each other for two months.

Then she appeared at his skyscraper office at quitting time, in a fine new red dress. Red was always a signal between them, better than roses any day.

“That damned treasurer,” he said to Sara that evening. “Takes all kinds but—”

“It must.” She smiled as she shed the red. “They're all here, like 'em or not.”

2043

His first target back in the 2020s had been an asteroid rich in rare earths. That paid back all start-up costs in a single shipment.

Spin could throw the robots off, so he paid rockhounds, with their satellite telescopes and fast-flight sail craft, to find one with a tiny spin and good elements. The key innovation was a rock filter that worked best in microgravity, and not at all on Earth. It separated molecules by charge and mass, using tribocharging induced by simple friction, the same process that yielded sparks on doorknobs after walking across a rug. His first half-dozen asteroids made him rich, and then he got started on truly adventurous ideas.

As soon as he had robots that could manage well even on the surface of rocks that spun around several axes, he made spin an asset. There was board opposition, but he called in favors and won a straight up/down vote with the board.

A new class of robots spun out long, rigid armatures of carbon fiber, creating a throwing arm. Cargo got hoisted out on the arm, and then released. Careful calculation of spin phase and orientation made it possible to send packages on precise trajectories to High Earth Orbit. With a midcourse correction nudge, they nosed into nets waiting to receive them—free transport, paid for by a slight decrease in the asteroid spin. Fuel depots, orbital factories, and hab colonies got their goods delivered, for the minor trouble of snagging them as they passed by.

The “right to mine” industry took off then. Brokers traded those rights and gathered capital. Only when shipments started did he fully own the rock he had paid options on. There were plenty of tricky accounting riffs to play, especially since the rules kept changing. The U.S. Geological Survey, which originally had been formed in 1879 to discover ore and stimulate the mining industry, was still in the Department of the Interior. It soon became an interplanetary agency. Then under the North American Community rules, taxes and deductibles became even more fraught with peril.

Plus a new one: hijackers could grab the cargoes in flight. It did not take long for other companies operating in near Earth space to figure this out. Such pirates then inadvertently supplied a defense against the main danger—big masses missing their targets and slamming down through Earth's atmosphere. But with better beacons and tracking, piracy dropped off.

Three multiseason series about the exotic gangs of 'roid pirates had run on worldwide 3-D—all before Harold ordered arming of his robot 'roid escorts.

2045

He got to Katherine Amani's office within an hour. “Where is it?”

She grinned. “Less than a light-year away. Small, cold, but there.”

“How?”

She blinked, used to his abrupt questioning style by now. “We had those suspicions, recall? Early estimates predicted as many brown dwarfs as typical stars, but the WISE survey showed just one brown dwarf for every six stars. So how could we have missed some? If they were close to us, they could move enough between our two surveys. Not showing up again eliminated them.”

He nodded eagerly. “So you looked at them again.”

She nodded and showed him a star map of many small blotches. One she circled. “It took a while. Atmosphere temperature is a tad above this room's.”

He pursed his lips and leaned forward. “Wow, lower end of the Y dwarf range. And close!”

“As you wished.” She smiled.

Harold got up, started pacing, then looked at her intently. “You saw last month's discovery—an Earthlike with an ozone line?”

“Yes, great, clearly a biosphere. Nearly a hundred light-years away. All attention's focused on it. Both the Chinese and USA/Euro want to put up new satellites to pick up as many pixels as they can, analyze the atmosphere, maybe get a picture.”

He stopped pacing, sat down. “It'll get all the attention. Let's keep this quiet for now. How about putting WISE 2 up?”

Her eyes widened. “Withhold—? Ah, I see. Let them ignore infrared studies while we get more data.”

“If you don't mind.”
What's my action item here?
he always asked himself. “I like springing surprises, but they have to be substantiated.”

“There's not much chance anyone's going to revisit this old data soon. If you have the money to put up another, better WISE . . . I suppose so . . .”

There.
“Done, then.” She blinked. Her mouth opened and nothing came out.
She's being handed a hundred million bucks, after all. I know CEOs who can keep their cool at moments like this, but they are few. So . . . keep it mellow . . .
“Let's keep all this quiet for now. Meanwhile, I want to put some money behind a way to get there.”

“But our rockets would take—”

“Better than rockets. We can leave the engine on the ground.”

2052

He discovered a useful rule: If you want to know what's going on, don't ask the person in charge. To get the truth, especially from the edgy government bodies that regulated space industries, you had to come in from the top management, and then drill down.

That was how he learned of a new profit angle—asking actual astronomers, not NASA managers. The craters near the moon's north and south poles were like the dusty attic of the solar system—an attic in a deep freeze. In a hundred-square-kilometer area there were a billion gallons of water in the top meter of dirt—and even better, the same load of mercury. Water made the place livable for the few shivering humans who had to run the robot teams mining the metals. Pure hydrogen poured out when a reactor's waste heat warmed the soil, capturing the harvest in big balloons inflated by the gases. This rocket fuel spread throughout the swelling fleets of mining craft.

All this wealth squatted in the dark craters. After exhausting the several hundred asteroids that were energetically easier to reach than Luna, the frozen poles were the latest economic hot spots.

2055

By now Harold Mann was one of the
ultras,
the chummy though distant club of the trillionaires. Some said there were mysterious others, the transcendental rich, or “transrich,” but Harold didn't think they existed. If they did, they left no signs among the vast and fast trading markets. The constrained AIs who governed those provinces would not say if any transrich existed, but then, they were coy.

Definitions didn't interest him. He was of the
determined elderly
now, rich and harboring the ambition of those who knew they had little time to accomplish more . . . much more.

Sara said, “You're exercising those stock options close to the line, given all this new legislation.”

They were swimming off Maui, so the subject seemed odd. “I need cash for R&D.”

“I've picked up some legal sniffers around my operations,” she said. “The North American Community needs cash so—”

“They always do. Hey, see if we can bodysurf this wave!”

His advisors told him not to discuss his ambitions so much, and certainly not his intricate finances, what with all the suffering in the world. The vast differences between economic levels had led to the fashionable view humans had messed up enough worlds already. So if life were detected on a distant Earthlike world, humanity had best leave it alone.

The same argument had arisen over the subsurface life discovered on Mars decades before. That life, organized through microbial plants, was remarkably strange and showed clear signs of consciousness. It was entirely anaerobic, oxygen-free, and of separate and earlier origin than Earth's. Many scientists thought that the undeniable connections between Martian and Earthly DNA, going back to the Archea ages, proved that we were Martians. Thus we were not damaging an entirely separate phylum of life. There was no damage anyway, since human Martian colonies had no biological transactions with the true Martians at all, which were far below ground.

Still, Harold made no secret that he had plans for future exploration. He wouldn't say what they were, ever. He funded propulsion studies by exercising stock options in several minor companies, taking his profits, then plowing them into secretive companies pursuing low-probability/high-payoff technologies.

Secrets created their own fandoms, in the sprawling, intensively interacting solar economy. He was quite surprised when the mysterious aura around his name made the public like him more; people wanted intriguing puzzles now, a sense of things coming.

2059

Some asteroids were icy, with up to 20 percent water and frozen carbon dioxide; miners called them iceteroids. Melt the 'roid rock with circulating nuke heat fluids and the water comes off first. Condense and separate it out, squirt it into expando spheres for packaging and let it freeze in free space. Hang the spheres on frames holding a bare nuke engine, with no shielding needed. Then robo-ship the whole unlovely contraption to near Earth habitats for life support or, with the CO
₂
, for propellants.

The rocky, metal-rich asteroids got teams of mining craft that deployed smart minebots, which could siphon off metals by weight and fluidity. Platinum was the biggest prize, so prospector bots sought it first when they touched down on a new rock. “Fat plat” was pure strain metal that could go straight into Earthside catalytic converters. Auto-facs and 3-D printers made electronics or even jewelry. High-value ore shipped in low-energy orbits arrived at Working Earth Orbit space with its market value already set—never less than $50,000 New Bucks a kilogram—because it had been mass spectrum sorted by bots along the way. Those rugged devices could take all the time they needed to get the measures right. They were slaved to the MarketWatch integrators, beyond question more honest than a human could even pretend to be. The lesser stuff—iron, copper, aluminum—got fed into orbital factories to make spacecraft fittings and hulls in vacuum-dry foundries. Behind all this was the laser comm Net that kept bots coordinated and standards aligned.

Yields accelerated in what became known as the Astro Moore's law, though in fact the similarity was superficial. The true driver was the plentitude of free fresh mass, coasting out there among the planets.

His was not the first mining company to go out into the main asteroid belt. It wasn't even the tenth. But it lasted.

So did Harold's personal R&D budget. He was surprised one morning to find a news story calling him the biggest research funder except for China, the USA, and Europe, in that order.

2060

Dr. Katherine Amani handled the press well. Harold sat in the back and watched her proclaim discovery of not one but two dwarf stars nearer than Alpha Centauri. Yes, she said, she had taken the years of study essential to be quite sure these stars were truly there.
One of the virtues of not reporting to government panels,
he thought, but said nothing.

Press attention was still focused on the distant, Earthlike world called Glory by the public. Of course no expedition was feasible, but reporters immediately asked about this new star. Did Redstar, the nearest, have planets?

Dr. Amani demurred. It was too early to tell, but “anonymous donors” were readying a far more sensitive infrared study of the region close around Redstar.

The possibility of going there got little attention in the press. The current worldwide depression had bled most of the sense of opening possibilities from the general class who paid attention to more than just getting through their difficult days.

And who named this dull dwarf Redstar, anyway? Surely the International Astronomical Union had naming rights?

Dr. Amani opened her mouth and looked at the back of the room, but Harold was already gone. You get better coverage if the media uncover the story themselves, he had learned—then feed their eager faces.