Arkwright (19 page)

“I'm not blaming her for anything.” The joint was half-finished, and he was enjoying the high he already had; he shook his head when his father tried to pass it to him again and reached for his beer instead. “Grandma's … y'know, Grandma. The foundation is her life. But you and Mom … I mean, with you two, this whole thing is like some kind of religion. The Church of
Galactique.
Praise the holy starship, hallelujah.”

His father scowled at him. “Oh, c'mon, it's not that bad.”

“Yes, it is,” Matt insisted, “and you've had it for as long as I can remember. That's why I went away. I had to find something else to do with my life than follow this obsession of yours.”

Despite himself, he found that he was getting angry. Maybe it was just a headful of marijuana and beer, but it seemed as if a lot of pent-up frustration was boiling out of him whether he liked it or not. On impulse, he pushed himself off the lounger, nearly losing his balance as he stood up again on legs that suddenly felt numb. “Maybe I'd better take a walk,” he mumbled. “Get some fresh air or something.”

“Sure. Okay.” His father was hurt by the abrupt rejection, but he didn't try to stop him. “Whatever you want. But, Mattie?”

“Don't call me that. I'm not a kid anymore.”

“I know … sorry.” Ben shook his head. “Look, just a little advice, all right? You can knock this so-called obsession of mine all you want, but—” He lowered his voice as he cast a meaningful look across the pool to where Chandi and her friends were still seated. “If you want to get anywhere with her, you're going to have to learn to appreciate the things she's interested in. And she joined our religion a long time ago.”

 

6

Even if he didn't care to follow his father's advice, Matt had no choice in the matter. His mother found him in the dining room the following morning, nursing a hangover with black coffee and an unappealing plate of scrambled eggs. The party was over, and so was any hope he might have still had of making this trip into a tropical vacation. It was time for him to go to work as her new assistant.

Before he'd left college to pursue a half-baked fantasy of becoming a movie actor, Matt had been a journalism major. That hadn't worked out, either, but he'd learned enough to know a little about what it took to work in a media relations department. This was Jill Skinner's job at the Arkwright Foundation, and even before Matt had decided to come down to Ile Sombre, she'd been complaining about being shorthanded. So his arrival had been fortunate—for her, at least. She now had someone to do scut work for her, giving her a chance to take care of more important tasks.

Over the course of the next several days, Matt tagged along with his mother as she went from place to place in the Ile Sombre Space Launch Center. A large part of her job involved keeping up with daily events and writing press releases about them for the news media; since she wanted him to start doing some of this for her, it was important that he learn the Galactique Project from top to bottom, beginning with the preparations leading up to launch of
Nathan 3
, scheduled for six weeks from then.

It was more interesting than he'd thought it would be.
Nathan 3
was being checked out in a dust-free, temperature-controlled clean room in the Payload Integration Building next to the VAB. The clean room was the size of a basketball court, and everything in there was spotless and white, down to the one-piece isolation garments that made everyone wearing them look like surgeons. Matt couldn't go in there, but his mother showed him where to stand quietly in the observation gallery overlooking the floor.

From there, he could see
Nathan 3
. Resting within an elevated cradle, it was an enormous, tightly wrapped cylinder made of tissue-thin carbon-mesh graphite, dark gray with the thin silver stripes of its lateral struts running along its sides, resembling a giant furled umbrella.
Galactique
's microwave sail had been built and tested in the same Southern California facility that manufactured powersats, but it served a completely different purpose. Once
Galactique
was completed in orbit and ready to launch, the sail would gradually unfold to its operational diameter of a little more than sixty-two miles. It seemed unbelievable that something so big could be reduced to fit inside the Kubera's cargo bay, but it had a material density of only the tiniest fraction of an inch, and the sail itself had been designed on origami-like principles so that it would unfurl in concentric layers upon deployment. Still, it would take all the Kubera's thrust to successfully get it off the ground.

Three days after it carried
Nathan 2
into space, the cargo rocket returned to Earth. On Jill's insistence, Matt accompanied the recovery team when they set forth on an old freighter to the spot where the rocket splashed down in the Caribbean about a hundred miles east of Ile Sombre. There they found the Kubera floating upright on its inflated landing bags, looking very much like a giant fishing bob. He watched as divers in wet suits swam out to drag tow cables to the booster; once that was done, the ship slowly hauled the Kubera back to the island, where the freighter docked at Ste. Genevieve's commercial port. Over the next several days, the rocket would be lifted out of the water by derrick cranes, loaded onto a tandem tractor-trailer, and driven back to the space center, where it would be refitted for the
Nathan 3
mission.

Meanwhile, preparations for
Nathan 4
were under way. In another white room,
Galactique
's incubation module was being checked out for its primary purpose, carrying cryogenically preserved sperm and egg specimens from two hundred human donors to the ship's ultimate destination, the distant planet still officially known only as Gliese 667C-e.

When Matt's parents had explained the foundation's plan many years earlier, he'd had a hard time understanding it. Why send sperm and eggs when, with a bigger ship, you could send living people instead? But he was thinking in terms of the science fiction movies he'd seen as a kid, where huge starships carrying thousands of passengers easily leaped between the stars with the help of miraculous faster-than-light drives. Reality was another matter entirely. FTL drives didn't exist, and they never would. Furthermore, the larger the ship was, the more energy would be required for it to achieve even a fraction of light speed. If its passengers were to remain alive and conscious during the entire flight, such a vessel would have to be several miles long, a generation ship capable of sustaining these passengers and their descendents for a century or more. So even if a ship that large were built—such as from a hollowed-out asteroid, one early proposal—the amount of fuel it would have to carry would comprise at least half of its mass. It would be like trying to move a mountain by providing it with another mountain of fuel.

Making the issue even more complicated was the fact that no one knew how to build a closed-loop life support system that could keep people alive for such long periods of time. The sheer amount of consumables they'd need—air, water, and food—was daunting and could not be produced or recycled, without fail, for decades or even centuries on end. No one had successfully come up with a means of putting people into hibernation and reviving them again many years later, either. Perhaps one day, but now…?

The solution to all this was obvious: remove people from the ship entirely and instead build a smaller, lighter vessel that could carry human reproductive material to the new world, where it would be gestated and brought to term within the extrauterine fetal incubators. This process was better understood and more feasible and therefore made it more likely that a starship could be built if it didn't have to devote so much of its mass to keeping its passengers alive. And since
Galactique
wouldn't have its own engines but instead rely on the microwave beamer in Lagrange orbit to boost the ship to .5c cruise velocity, it would be able to make the voyage to Gliese 667C-e in a little less than half a century.

Even so, there was nothing simple about
Galactique
's EFI module. Just as large as
Nathan 2
and
3
, the cylinder was an AI-controlled, robotically serviced laboratory. From the observation gallery, Matt watched as clean-suited technicians worked on the module from the outside. This was the most heavily shielded part of the starship and the most complex; through the open inspection ports, Matt could see the tubes in which the fetuses would be gestated to infancy before being loaded aboard the lander. There was only a small crawlspace running down its central core, and that had been provided more for the spidery robots that would maintain the ship than for the humans who'd built it.

Galactique
's final module,
Nathan 5
, was still being assembled in Northern California. It contained two major segments: the ninety-foot landing craft that would transport the newborn infants to the planet surface, where they would be raised by what were affectionately being called “nannybots” until they were old enough to fend for themselves, and the biopods that would precede them, aeroshells containing first the bioengineered “genesis plants” capable of transforming Gliese 667C-e into a human-habitable planet and then later the fledgling flora and fauna that would populate the new world.

Next to the vessel itself, this was probably the most challenging aspect of the project, one that was pushing human technology to its furthest limits. It was hoped, though, that the Galactique Project would bootstrap a new era of space exploration. Aside from brief missions to Mars and the Moon and small-scale efforts to mine near-Earth asteroids, humankind was still largely confined to its native planet. The foundation believed that
Galactique
would demonstrate the viability of beamships and thus prompt private industry to use the project's beamer to send manned missions to the outer planets.

In any case, Matt liked visiting this place and often stole time from writing press releases or making travel arrangements for visiting journalists to view
Nathan 3
being prepared for its journey. But it wasn't just his growing interest in
Galactique
that brought him to the gallery. It was also being able to watch Chandi at work. Her outfit should have made her indistinguishable from the rest of her group, but nonetheless, he could always tell who she was; she seemed to move just a little differently from her colleagues. And although she acknowledged his presence with only a brief wave, that small gesture was enough.

They'd see each other in the evenings after dinner when the launch team would get together on the patio for drinks and perhaps a joint or two. By then, Matt had become better acquainted with some of the other people working on the project. They'd come to accept him as a nonscientist who had his own role to play, and he made an effort to keep his skepticism to himself in order to assure their friendship.

Yet one evening, something slipped out of his mouth that he hadn't meant to say. And that got him in trouble with Chandi.

Matt was sitting at a poolside table with her and a couple of other team members: Graham Royce and his husband, Rich Collins, both of them British space engineers who specialized in beam propulsion systems. The three men were sharing an after-dinner joint—Chandi didn't smoke but politely tolerated those who did—and watching the crescent moon come up over the palms. By then,
Nathan 3
was on the launchpad, with countdown scheduled to commence in just four days. The Brits were relaxed, knowing that their job was done for a little while; they wouldn't have to go back to work again until
Nathan 3
was docked with
Nathan 2
and the orbital assembly would attach the sail's rigging to the service module.

“You're hoping on a lot, aren't you?” Matt asked, passing the joint to Rich. “I mean, the way I understand it, the beamer has to fire constantly for … what is it, two and a half years?”

“Pretty much, yes,” Rich said.

“Nine hundred and twenty days.” Graham was the older of the two—although with retrotherapy, it was hard to guess his true age—and had a tendency to be annoyingly precise.

“Whatever. So for two and half years, the sail has to catch a microwave sent from Earth even as it's moving farther and farther away. Meanwhile, the ship's moving faster and faster—”

“Acceleration rate is 1.9 meters per second, squared.”

“—until the ship is about half a light-year from Earth.” Graham took a brief drag from the joint and gave it to his mate. “By then, it'll be well out of the solar system and traveling half the speed of light, so we can turn off the beamer and let the ship coast on its own. Any course adjustments will be accomplished by the onboard AI using maneuvering thrusters. When it reaches Gliese 667C-e—”

“Eos.” Chandi smiled. “I think everyone's pretty much settled on that name.”

“Until the International Astronomical Union approves,” Graham said, “it's officially Gliese 667C-e.”

Rich coughed out the hit he'd just taken. “You're such a prick, you know that?” Graham smirked, and Rich went on, “So what's your question—or did I miss something?” His eyes narrowed in stoned confusion.

“Well,” Matt said, “it's just that it seems like you're counting on everything going exactly the way you've planned. The beam not getting interrupted or missing the sail entirely—”

“That's why the sail is so bloody big,” Rich replied. “The beam spreads as it travels outward, so the sail has to be large enough to receive it.”

“But if something punches through it, like a meteorite or—”

“Meteoroid,” Graham said. “It's not a meteorite until it passes through Earth's atmosphere. The sail is large enough it can take a few punch-throughs without losing efficiency.”