Hieroglyph (52 page)

“It's not any of that,” I said.

“As I said, I'm not here officially, and we've got full privacy. You don't have to worry about anyone stealing your idea.”

That was all very well, but
he
was listening—and of course Micromegas was, too. And anyone with a “need to know.” For the good of the Community. I was just a visitor, after all.

My idea was a game changer, no question about it. Spaceships with an Alcubierre drive wouldn't have to worry about minimum-energy orbits or available propellant. It would give us the stars! Deimos wouldn't be the hub of all space travel anymore—just one more rock in one more star system.

Unless, of course, the Community controlled the drive. Then they'd own the universe.

“It's still just conceptual,” I said. “Not ready to publish yet.”

He finished his samosa and looked at me, and I looked back.
You want what's in the shiny box? You have to let me in. Otherwise I'll show my shiny box to someone else
.

“Here in Deimos we really are a community,” he said. “It's not just a name we call ourselves. All of us contribute.”

I said, “I think I have a lot to offer.”

Another long pause while he emptied the wine globe. “Well, thank you for this little talk,” he told me. He got up and shot off into the traffic stream, and the silence faded away around me.

I WENT BACK TO
my room and used my hotel credit to order a meal. But even after the bot set a table for me, I felt lonesome.

So I took my food across the hall and knocked on Sofia's door. “Would you like some dinner? I've got a big plate of fried fish and chips and it's too much for me,” I said.

“I'd been thinking of something more like a salad,” she said.

“Suit yourself.” I started to turn away.

“—But maybe I'll have a little,” she said, and stepped back to let me in.

Her room was nicer than mine. They were identical, of course, but she had done some cool stuff with the settings. The walls showed a city of white and gold towers in a green river delta under blazing sunlight, and we sat on a colorful carpet. Not smart matter but an actual carpet made of animal hair, which she had actually hauled all the way out of Earth's gravity well and across half an AU just to sit on.

The fish was okay—that is, it tasted better than most things I'd eaten in my life before that, but Sofia got out a little jar of hot pepper paste to dip it in. I wished for something stronger than tea to soothe my throat.

We ate in silence, even though she had the room on full privacy. Ever since my conversation with Piers Tyana that afternoon I figured everything I said and all my network traffic would be watched by someone.

“Who do you think will win?” she asked me when there was nothing but fried potatoes left.

“I've got no idea. You, maybe? The prediction markets have you in the lead.”

“The contest is still wide open,” she said. “If I do badly on the last round, it could be you, or maybe Reinette Luz.”

“Reinette? Not Rakesh?”

“Not him. All he does is food.”

We finished the potatoes, then I decided to bring up the subject we'd been avoiding. “When I met you, I think we were falling in love.”

“I noticed that too,” she said. “But you've got meds for that.”

I did something brave then. “When this is over, are you . . . ?”

“What?”

“Do you want to get together?”

“Will you allow yourself to love me?” she asked.

“Only one of us gets to join Deimos,” I pointed out.

“You are cruel,” she said. “Did you know that? Are you even capable of understanding? I love you already. I'm not all pumped full of chemicals to regulate me. I've been wrestling with this devil's choice since I saw you. If I win, I get to join Deimos, help my family back home—and lose you. If you win, I'll wind up in exile somewhere, or betray my family so I can stay in Africa, and I'll still lose you.”

“What if neither of us wins?”

“Then we're two bright people who've already lost our fondest hopes. I suppose we could be unhappy together.”

“Do you think they planned this?”

“Perhaps. I think the Community has goals of its own, which not even the members understand. A rock full of clever people who've cut themselves off from the rest of humanity may not be best for the members, but it's good for Deimos.”

I hoped someone was listening when she said that. “I'll see you tonight,” I told her, and went back to my own room.

THEY USED A MODEST
meeting room in the hotel to announce the final competition. We had assigned seats in color-coded pairs—two red, two green, two blue, and two gold. I was in one of the green chairs, and Sofia sat to my left in the other. Piers Tyana was at the head of the table. Although the entire Community was watching, it felt more private.

Tyana started off with a speech about how wonderful we all were and how the experience of the competition would enrich us no matter who won. Finally he got to the important part.

“This final round will test your ability to work with other people. The Deimos Community values creativity and initiative, but it is very important that all our members are able to cooperate.”

The eight of us were smart. The pairs in matching seats looked at each other.

“As you may have guessed, we have paired you up for this assignment. The pairing is not random—Micromegas has analyzed which pairs have the strongest emotional reactions to each other. We've chosen the most difficult people for you to work with.”

The bastards,
I thought. Match me up with a girl who is in love with me. Maximize the distraction for both of us.

“And now your task. Deimos is a wonderful place, the gem of the solar system, but no world is perfect. We want you to add something. Identify a need or a lack, and create something to fill it. You have one sol to complete it. Any questions before we start the clock?”

Sofia spoke up before anyone else. “Are there any restrictions on what we can do?”

He nodded, looking pleased. “Not many. You can't use any space or matter currently being used for some other purpose, and you can have a maximum of ten kilowatts sustained load. Otherwise, you have priority on fabricators, robots, and material processing for the next twenty-four hours. Be aware of the time limit: unfinished projects are failures.”

Nobody had anything else to ask. I could see the other pairs already starting to brainstorm. I set up a private link to Sofia.

“You're the artist,” I sent. “Pick something that will impress them.”

Her eyes were flicking around like crazy as she interacted with Micromegas, so I waited until she sent me a reply. “I think I've got something. Let's go someplace we can speak privately.”

We wound up back in the workspace area with full sound damping on. “I've been thinking about Deimos ever since I got off the Cycler,” she said. “Have you looked at the people here?”

“What about them?”

She opened a window showing Rue Arouet. “If you look, you can tell the Community members apart from the visitors. Do you see it?”

“You mean their pop-ups?”

“No, I mean the way they look, physically. It's not phenotypes—they're strong on genetic diversity here—and it's not just the gravity. Contract workers and travelers get plenty of microgravity experience, but they don't look like members.”

“The clothes,” I guessed.

“No.
Look.
That man's wearing disposable coveralls, but I can tell he's a member. Those two women over there are in very stylish outfits, but they're not from here. Probably Earth.”

“I see what you mean,” I said after a moment. “But I can't put my finger on what I'm seeing.”

“Confidence,” she said. “They don't hurry, they don't flinch. Whatever they're doing is the most interesting and important thing going on anywhere. They're all perfectly self-assured.”

I looked at the people and finally I saw what she meant. The members moved in straight lines at their own pace. Visitors and contractors flowed around the members, like wind around rocks.

“It's their moon—it's their whole solar system,” she said. “The rest of us are just visitors and hired help.” The idea seemed to bother her, much more than it bothered me.

“I still don't see how that gives us a project,” I pointed out.

“They look inward. Except for the lounge at the elevator terminal and the viewing area at the spaceport, there aren't any windows on Deimos. I want to give them eyes on the universe.”

“An observatory?”

“Exactly!”

“Well, that's . . . pretty easy,” I said. “A mirror, some stabilizing gear, off-the-shelf software. They must have scopes already. IR to spot hostiles, targeting devices for the defense systems, probably some eyes on Mars and Luna.”

“Yes, but that's all technical, inside-the-walls stuff. I mean a place where people can go to see the stars.”

“I like it. We can split up the job. You design a viewing area and interface. I'll build us a telescope.”

With twenty-two hours left, we got to work. She found a nonstructural volume of ice near the Rue Lagado and got permission from Micromegas to hollow it out. While she and some bots did that, I picked a ten-meter crater on the far side of Deimos and set to work transforming it.

It would have been simplest to just build a parabolic mirror and put it on a mounting, but I guess a little of Sofia's visual aesthetic had rubbed off on me, so I wanted something cooler. I graded the little crater as a simple spherical curve and lined it with vacuum-rated smart matter with an optical mirror surface. I put a high-quality camera on an arm and programmed the smart matter to form a parabolic mirror opposite the camera wherever it moved. The result was a silver pool that reshaped itself instead of moving around.

There were some trade-offs: it could only look at things within about sixty degrees of the zenith, but since Deimos circles Mars once a sol, you could look at most of the sky if you picked your time. The only blind spots were around Mars's celestial poles, and those aren't very interesting.

It sounds simple, but the actual work took a lot of time. I had to suit up and go supervise the bots because the job was so unlike their usual work. For instance: the first time they tried to grade the crater, they started on the outer edge and worked inward, which meant they screwed it all up as soon as they tried to crawl out again. I also had problems sticking the smart matter to the surface, until I finally just had them fuse the top ten centimeters into glass.

About sixteen hours into the project I was trying to write code for the mirror and supervise the bots building the camera arm at the same time, all in my sweaty suit with the capacity indicator blinking on the urine bag.

“How are you doing?” I asked Sofia.

“Have a look.” She sent me an image of the viewing space she'd created. It was fairly intimate—a dozen seats under a dome-shaped screen. The overall aesthetic was based on Mughal architecture, as a nod to Jai Singh's observatory at Jaipur, but with what I now know are art deco elements echoing North American planetariums.

“Can you come up here? There's some stuff I need you to do,” I told her.

About an hour later she came bounding across the surface toward me. She moved well in her suit, which was important.

“What do you need?” she asked as she made a soft landing a meter away from me.

“If you can take over the motion control coding, I can go fix that stupid actuator,” I told her.

“Sure,” she said, and then she looked up. “Ahh . . .”

“What?”

“The sky,” she said. We were in Mars's shadow right then, so we stood on a black surface looking out at the universe. The band of the Milky Way stretched across our vision, and the stars looked close enough to reach out and touch. We watched in silence for a couple of minutes.

Eventually she gave a regretful sigh. “I guess we need to get back to work.”

“Right, yeah.” I dosed up on more stimulants and tackled the actuator.

What happened next looked just like one of those complicated failure chains you see in most space accidents. Sofia didn't know that the camera arm wasn't at its default position when she loaded her code. I had allowed my safety line to get looped over the arm. And my anchor piton was in a crumbly bit of regolith. I'd set it all up very carefully.

So when I replaced the faulty actuator and connected the power, the arm immediately swung itself to the neutral position, with the camera at ninety degrees above the mirror. It snatched me off my feet and ripped the piton out of the ground in one smooth motion.

I felt the twang as the line went taut as it slung me into space, then a couple of seconds of free fall. When I reached the end of the line, I felt a slight jerk as the piton snagged on the arm. For a moment I thought it would hold, but then it slipped away and I was off to outer space, no strings attached.

“Wu Ying! Are you okay?” Sofia called over the link.

“How fast am I going?”

Pause. “Six meters per second.”

Escape velocity. I was now a moon of Mars. I'd have to call for rescue, unless someone helped me. “Sofia! I'll call this in myself! Finish the scope!” Then I waited.

Twenty seconds later something hit me. It was Sofia, of course. She'd used the arm to make a boosted leap after me, trailing her own safety line. She grabbed me around the knees, then pulled herself up until she could grab my safety harness.

“Clip on!” she said. I snapped onto her line and threw my arms around her for good measure. A second later we felt an almighty yank as the line hit maximum extension—and held. Both of us let out our breath.

© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU