Hieroglyph (57 page)

2063

Harold sighed. “Did you ever think that we're just stuff, the odd sort of stuff that comes into consciousness, reproduces, swims through this universe, and dies, that's it?”

Sara frowned. “You don't believe that.”

“No, I don't. But I could.”

They were inside a tight capsule of Mooncrete, heavy shielding against a solar storm of great lancing ferocity. This first trip to the L1 resort was not turning out very well and Harold felt claustrophobic—the most common affliction among deep space travelers.

She kissed him. “Have another glass of wine.”

2069

Often when he was in an immersion tank having his body scanned, inspected, and improved, he would reflect that the meeting about WISE 2 was where his life began to accelerate. The sensation of time collapsing along its own axis was common with aging, of course. It arose from the lack of novelty in later life. Travel, new friends, fresh hobbies—these helped. But he had been to every country he wondered about, eighty-seven of them when he stopped. Friends were fine, too, though he never had hobbies. Intense interests outside of work, yes—but they were always pointed at the sky, the solar system, the stars.

First came the sails. Entrepreneurs had already developed the fundamentals of solar sailing, a thrifty way to survey and prospect myriad asteroids. The sun's photons were free, but skimpy. Better to focus a microwave or laser beam on a sail and shoot it out of Low Earth Orbit, saving it years of climbing up Earth's gravity well. Better still, coat its inner face with a designer paint that, heated by the beam, would blow off—an induced rocket effect.

But the real kick came from diving deep.
Sundiver I
had already plunged to within a few radii of the sun, shed the asteroid that shielded it, and unfurled before the furnace star. Its gossamer disk carried an intricately designed burden that now warmed furiously. Painted on, this layer blew off under high temperatures, a momentary rocket exploiting a bit of Newtonian physics: change velocities when the craft has high speed, and the boost gets amplified. A blue-white jet arced for tens of minutes. Once gone, the painted fuel revealed a blazing white sail. That intense hour sent it shooting outward at speeds rocketeers only dreamed about.

Sundiver I
had entered the far reaches of the Kuiper Belt by the time Harold assembled the Inner Network System of microwave and laser beams. This INS made considerable profit by lowering commcosts among mining communities, asteroid habitats, bases on Mars, and even the new exploration teams around Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

Sail development accelerated, making quick exploration of the outer solar system efficient. Harold bought into several small sail start-ups. By the time they had found some ripe iceteroids ready for steering into the inner worlds to be harvested, he exercised his options and extracted profits on the expectations bounce tech stocks often get—for a while.

By the time
Sundiver XI
came speeding out from its searing solar encounter, the INS system was ready to pour radiance on its kilometer-wide sail whenever it passed nearby. Timing was exquisite, intricate, a marvel equated in the media to ballet.
THE
INS
GOES
OUT
one headline proclaimed. Headed for Redstar.

2073

Fusion nuke rockets had become the Conestoga wagons of the solar system, and the lunar poles were their frigid watering station. The reversed-magnetic-field configuration had finally made big-bore fusion rocket chambers practical, and they had higher thrust per kilogram than fission. Shipping got cheaper.

Harold had a piece of polar development, mostly because he wanted to drive toward ever-larger nukes. The Chinese and Arabs who threw in with them tried the same approach, but proved to be slower to respond to the myriad problems that arose. The poles were
cold
and gear refused to work unless warmed by the waste of big operating and distilling nuke plants. Harold had investments in breeder reactors and recycling reactor wastes, so he benefited from both ends of the enterprise.

Soon AI piloted nukes ran whole mining parties to asteroids. Complexes grew, which demanded humans to supervise the smart but limited AIs who had narrow intuition and common sense.

On carbon-restricted Earth, such work cut back on wasteful, inefficient, and polluting processes to mine and smelt. There was much less digging, grinding, and greenhouse gas emission. Social benefits rebounded, wealth spread through largesse, and the workweek fell. Workaholics immigrated into space, where opportunity and hundred-hour weeks abounded. All that fervor and wealth came from spinning habitats and solar mirrors melting rocks way out in space.

2074

Harold imposed strict rules on how supplies and parts for his asteroid habitats got delivered. The specs laid out exact sizes of the storage canisters, plus where the securing bolts went, how latches fitted, corner configurations, and thickness down to the millimeter. His suppliers grimaced but complied, wondering why he was so exact.

“Your competitors aren't so damn picky,” one said.

“But I pay more for it,” Harold said. “You want the contract?” He smiled at the grudging nod.

He told no one the reason. His work crews dutifully unloaded the supplies and parts in zero grav, handing them to the bots who did the assembly of borers and smelters. Only then did the next bot crew appear, taking the shipping canisters apart, clicking together the light carbon-fiber walls—and producing the actual outer walls of the habitats. Spun up, the tight joins held full atmospheric pressures. He had gotten them delivered at the suppliers' cost, not his.

2081

“We can hold them off for a while but not forever,” Lin said.

“You've done that for decades now,” Harold said, hands clasped in front of him at the conference table. Sara sat beside him, shaking her head.

“Decades?” Sara said. “I forget details . . . Writing all the development costs off—”

“As business investment, yes,” Lin finished for her. A 3-D lattice condensed in the air over their table. It mapped in axes of time, dollars, and legal spending avenues. A spaghetti of multicolored strands connected big orange dots.
Like a nightmare medusa,
Harold thought.

“All this was legal, deductible back when—”

“You started, yes.” Lin gave him a wan smile. “Not anymore.”

Sara looked startled as she followed the info-dense tangles. “These topo maps in cash and progress indices—there's a whole development line just in ion engines!”

Lin grimaced. “That doesn't get us off the hook anymore.”

Harold nodded. “Our poor old planet has seen a lot. Environ damage, the greenhouse not going away as fast as we thought, resource scarcity, big collective regimes. So they go after offworld cash.”

“And change the rules in the middle of the game,” Lin said. “You've been in the game a long time, so you have to change the most.”

“So . . .” Sara was still entranced by the luminous spaghetti and its projected territories. “ . . . you can pay some back taxes?”

“Sure, if I strip myself of most that I own,” Harold said. “Or—”

“You can fight,” Lin finished for him. She obviously knew her boss well, Harold saw, and was one jump ahead of him. “Legal dodges, evidence of sequestering funds offworld, not available for testimony—”

“The whole suite of dances every business learns the hard way,” Sara finished. “Let me guess—back taxes doubling every three years, retroactive penalties, a post facto nightmare.”

“Can I go back to Earth?” Harold asked, eyes veiled.

“I don't advise it.”

Sara jerked as though she had just come awake. “What?!”

“They can arrest you.” Lin gave them a
that's how it is
shrug. “Not likely maybe, but it depends on who's got the helm of the North American Community when you land. You have enemies in the Mexican faction.”

Harold remembered the friction surrounding the adoption of the Community Constitution. Yes, the Mexicans wanted a Right of Confiscation and he spent a lot to block them. The Mexican Constitution from over a century ago stopped foreigners from owning land in Mexico. Now there was a French-style tax on net worth, too. He sighed. “It doesn't take a very big person to carry a grudge.”

Lin said softly, “The sitting chairman called you out publicly for using corporate funds to further your ‘hobbies' yesterday.”

“I thought hobbies were supposed to broaden you,” Harold said. “Mine is R&D.”

Sara's mouth twisted into a cautious tilt. “Silence is sometimes the best answer.”

Lin said, “I started the legal defenses running.”

“How about my reserves—and Sara's—in Earthbound accounts?”

“I got them posted free to Lunar Holdings last night. It caused a drop in several markets this morning.”

Sara said, “No hiding when you're this big, I guess.”

Lin nodded. “I had to sacrifice some transactions in progress. Resource plays, a convertible debenture or two.”

Harold got to his feet in the 0.4 grav. “I smell Keegan over at Consolidated.”

Lin said, “I do too. Rumor says he hates you. He wants to weaken you, maybe create opposition on our board.”

“I'll work the board some.” Harold shrugged. “Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got. Let's go for a swim.”

Their new swim sphere was forty meters in diameter. For safety a black cable lanced through the middle, so swimmers too far from air could haul themselves out quickly. He made a point of never using it and lapped furiously around the perimeter, letting drops scatter everywhere. The blue-green water cohered, enhanced surface tensions gathering up the drops amid the air currents. Sara was not so proud; she swam subsurface most of the time, using an oxy enhancer. When she surfaced, he was there with a frown, and after her first gasp for air, she said, “Don't worry, you've faced troublemakers like this before.”

One of his signs of anxiety was a slight lapsing back into his southern accent. “The biggest troublemaker you'll prob'ly ever have to deal with watches you from the mirror every mornin'.”

2085

In principle it was simple: stay in orbit, use the centrifugal 0.4 grav advantage that the Mars Effect people had shown did indeed lessen damage to the general neuro and cardio systems. But some were shy of orbiting at all, so they lost old friends. Harold and Sara were too tired of orbital life, of running their far-flung businesses electronically—so they had battalions of lawyers fight the Community edicts. This allowed them some immunity to prosecution and seizure while on the ground. Still, they made visits short, mostly to see the latest work on robotics and catch up with the red dwarf star scientists. A hobby of sorts, he still maintained for the lawyers.

2093

A reporter accosted him and Sara in their home overlooking Kings Canyon. It was an “arranged surprise opportunity” as his media advisors called it, so he feigned being startled.

“You're certainly the man behind Dr. Amani's announcement of Redstar's discovery, Mr. Mann. Now you're launching a probe to look at it.” The reporter feigned astonishment, as required. “So you knew about it for years!”

“Decades, actually.” Deadpan.
Hold Sara close,
he thought.
And smile, dammit.
After all, it was their umpteenth five-year-contract anniversary. She smiled, also obligatory. He couldn't hold his smile for long. He focused on the view. The distant pines and elegant granite peaks weren't clear and sharp like the old days, since the warming gave a heat ripple everywhere.

“Why did you and your scientists not announce—”

“I wanted to get my ducks in a row. Now the whole world is training their 'scopes on Redstar, to tell us what they can. I'll give us all a close-up.”

“That's arrogant!”

“I suppose so. This isn't a hobby, it's a lifelong obsession. I wanted to do it my way.”

“The entire world scientific establishment—”

“Is just that, an establishment. Funded by governments—that is, by you citizens of so many nations. I wanted to move faster than that. And make a profit while I built the INS.”

“What will
Sundiver XI
find?” The reporter seemed to be getting desperate.

“I don't know. That's the point, yes?”

As they walked on Sara said, “Y'know, people are saying that, after all this, we'd decide to retire. We've finally accomplished everything we set out to do, so . . .” She gave him a raised-eyebrow glance.

“I don't think we're safe, just retired.”

“Oh—the Universal Rights rules?”

The inevitable collision between a stressed, overrun planet and lots of retired but vigorous well-to-do was looking like a train wreck. The central political message seemed to be,
You have that cash, see, and I have this gun . . . and these lawyers.

“So they'll come after us for more taxes,” Sara said. “We can live with that.”

“It's getting harder to stay Earthbound. There's no government space program anymore; can't afford to get it out from under their bureaucracies. That Exceptional Needs Tax alone—”

She jostled him, kissed him. “Enough worries! Don't let tomorrow use up too much of today. Let's go for a hike on the John Muir Trail.”

She was right. He went. They had friends to meet later, a good cabernet tasting—life was good. He should lap it up. Even so, in the back of his mind on the trail that afternoon he thought of
Sundiver XI
and mulled,
Even better to see it in person. No, that's silly. Not that I can. Too damn old.

2100

He and Sara arrived at the robo-control station in a high arc ship. The zero grav was a blessing to his joints.