Hieroglyph (53 page)

I didn't let go of her. “We're on direct link. Nobody can hear. How much money do you have?”

“What? I don't know. It's all in buildings and infrastructure.”

“Enough to fund a tech project? Ten, twenty megawatt-hours?”

“Why are you asking me now?”

The ground was rising up toward us. I'd never been so glad to fall. “My big idea. Starships! I can do it; I just need backing. Forget the competition, forget Deimos. Do you trust me?”

“Will you love me?” she asked.

“Yes!”

A second later we smacked down on the surface, bounced, and finally came to rest. I held on to her until we stopped tumbling. I could see the local network icon again at the corner of my vision. “Hello, Micromegas?” I said.

“Do you need help?” asked the AI.

“No, we're fine.” I took a breath and looked at Sofia through two faceplates. “We quit.”

REINETTE WON, BUT HARDLY
anyone noticed. We sold the drama rights to pay our way to Earth—hibernating in a slow freight payload. Your grandparents were ready to kill us both when we came down the elevator, until Sofia and I showed them what we'd been working on.

That's the whole story, really. You should sleep now. We've all got a big day tomorrow.

Alexokokok/Shutterstock, Inc. & Jupeart/Shutterstock, Inc. (stone asteroids & city)

STORY NOTES—
James L. Cambias

I started thinking about the implications of rapid prototyping via things like 3-D printing and more advanced forms of “matter fabricators” combined with the continuing advance of expert systems. I think that pairing will be a huge boost to all forms of creativity. We're approaching the point where the barriers between the mind and physical reality are vanishing: we have only to imagine something and we can build it.

Regarding the setting: Physics suggests that if humans ever build a civilization encompassing the solar system, the Martian moon Deimos is the natural hub for traffic. Stake your claim now!

RESPONSE TO “PERIAPSIS”
—Alex MacDonald

Alex MacDonald, an economist in the Civil and Commercial Space Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, responds to “Periapsis” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/deimos.

FORUM DISCUSSION—
Longer-Than-Lifetime Projects

Stewart Brand, Joel Garreau, and other Hieroglyph community members join James L. Cambias in a conversation about ambitious projects that take longer than a human lifetime to complete at hieroglyph.asu.edu/deimos.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE STARS

Gregory Benford

Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.

—Epicurus

2016

Harold Mann idled at a corner and watched an enormous guy come out of one of the adult movie houses and stride over to his Harley.

Harold was on his second job—at fifteen, using a fake ID—driving a cab on South Jefferson Street of St. Louis. Business late on a sweltering night was slow. The big bearded guy's bike was under a light post next to a Honda Hawk. The man in black leather pants and a black T-shirt shouted at the whole street, “Who parked this turd next to my bike?”

He then grabbed the Honda Hawk, grunted as he lifted it, and threw it all the way across the street. It hit another Japanese bike, a yellow Kawasaki. The clanging smashup echoed in the moist night.

Some gasoline dripped from the Kawasaki and the man walked over, puffing on a brown Sherman's cigarette, and—dropped it. The gasoline
whomped,
sending flames licking across the sidewalk. The biker glared at Harold and walked up to the cab window. He pulled out a big Bowie knife, grinning. Harold looked straight ahead and heard the tapping on the window.

“What ya think a dat?” He slurred the words and spat on the blacktop.

Harold rolled down the window and looked into the scowling sweaty face. “I don't think you threw that rice burner hard enough.”

Glowering: “Yeah?”

“Man's got to throw long in this life.”

The biker walked away laughing. The bikes burned. Harold finished his duty time, drove to the cab station, and quit.
Maybe not my best line of work,
he thought.

Five months later he had turned sixteen and had another fake ID saying he was twenty-one. He pitched a smartware app to a start-up company in St. Louis, by walking in cold and asking to see the vice president. The app assisted robots with finding their footing and orientation while working in Low Earth Orbit. They could then assemble parts for the first orbital hotel.

The key to the app was using the new composite carbon girders with holes punched every half meter. Robots could count on having a dual-pivot purchase no more than fifty centimeters away, to torque or support a mechanical advantage. This increased their mobility and mass-carrying capacity.

The vice president was intrigued. While his engineers looked over the app he asked Harold for his credentials. He gave them a certificate saying he had graduated from MIT with a degree in astronautics, remarking that it was the same program in which Buzz Aldrin had gotten his Ph.D. The e-certificate was authentic, though he had artfully hacked it to omit the detail that he had done the classes entirely online in three years without ever being in Boston.

The start-up bought his app and he got a job. Within two years he was their CEO, and they issued an initial public offering. His share was nearly a million, since he had worked mostly for stock options.

Driving home that night, he saw the same biker guy coming out of a bar. Harold pulled over and bought the guy a drink, never saying why.

HE RECALLED HIS FIRST
job as he watched the vids from the latest big satellite telescope. The deep resolution views were striking, and they brought back a moment when he was ten years old.

He had rented beach chairs to tourists down at Orange Beach, Alabama. All day long he let nobody get past him without a friendly, insistent, “A chair to make you more comfortable? The sand's hot. Just five bucks for the day.”

The usual brush-off he eased by with, “Keeps you away from the sand flies, sir”—and that usually did the trick, especially if he had a woman with him. She would usually wrinkle her nose and badger the man into it.

Decent money, and he was only ten. His father thought it was good training and Harold did, too—the Great Recession was not yet in the rearview mirror. The tourists officially had the chairs till sundown, but many stayed with their beer and got fried oysters from the stand down the way. He stayed late, reading used paperback science fiction novels under the fluorescents of the greasy burger stand. He was an addict; science fiction sold the sizzle of the science steak. Even when he got tired he remembered to be polite, smiling and using the
yes sir
a lot—and so he discovered tipping.

Some just left the chairs strewn around, so he had to drag them back, two in each hand, to the shed. He had just finished stacking chairs and was turning to plod down to the bus stop to ride home when he turned toward the surf and saw them.

Saw
them truly, for the first time. The whole grand sprawl of jewels across the blue-black carpet, hovering above the salty tang of gulf waters like a commandment. The Milky Way spanned the sky, vanishing into the horizon, glows shimmering of emerald, ruby, and hard diamond whites.

That's what we're part of,
he thought.
The real, ultimate way the universe is, not just this moist curtain above a sandy stretch. Reality, big and strange and wonderful.

2023

At twenty-two he decided to tint his black hair gray to appear on his first business panel, about resource extraction from asteroids. With dark glasses and long sideburns the tinting made him look older. The moderator was the famous Interplanetary Resources exec Peter Diamandis, who deftly kept the talk flowing without digressing.

A steely-looking woman in a stylish blue suit got into an argument with a panelist guy from NASA, saying, “Your main goal appears to be not to fail. In the bigger space companies and academia, the mission has to work. So you gold plate everything and your price soars.”

“And you're about profit, period,” the guy shot back.

“People give us money, their choice, we pay them with dividends. You take taxes with laws.”

He said slowly, “Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, the rest—they have great track records.”

“They're monuments, this is a movement.”

The audience murmured and people started arguing with each other. Harold surveyed the discontent with a bemused smile.

He'd seen their likes before. Merit-driven products of the test-prep industry, capable cogs. And yet they did their jobs while thinking they were countercultural rebels. Their generation loved the Standard Storyline: insurgents fighting the true establishment, that distant dull group that was always somebody else. They were sharp and from Ivy Leagues, Stanford, Caltech. That unconscious attitude prevailed in corporate boardrooms, so they could rail against the establishment over cabernet in the evenings.

As he watched this woman he reflected that in a way he had accomplished the life goals his parents had taught him, mostly by example. He had found a good way to make a living, had started a business, and enjoyed it all. He got up each morning eager to get to the office. But this woman made him realize he had other goals left to achieve.

The focused woman said, “If you're young and lean, things can
fail
. For the big space companies the whole competition is just getting the government contract, then it's all risk aversion. It's not at all about doing something cool, first to market, then making money so you can do more. That's what I like: not playing it safe. To shift gears, to follow your nose.”

She seemed startled when she got applause. Harold nodded and smiled at her. His talk was next. Fairly technical, about universal joints, AI linkages, and space applications—but she listened intently as he outlined a rock-prospector team of robots he had worked out and tried in the Arizona desert.

Moving on, Diamandis commented that for robots, deserts might be easier than space. Then on a concluding note, he asked where all this work would lead. “Prosperity!” the woman said. Someone in the large audience called, “To the stars!,” and another voice shouted, “The stars? Impossible! Why do it anyway?”

She glanced at the moderator and said, “Why go to the stars? Because we are the descendants of those primates who chose to look over the next hill. Because we won't survive on this rock indefinitely. Because they're
there
.”

The panel met in the bar with Diamandis for drinks after. He could not take his eyes off her, even when she was talking to Diamandis. He learned her name was Sara-no-h—Sara Ernsberg. As the group broke up he said impulsively, “Do you dance?”

They got back to the hotel at 3
A
.
M
. He slept in her arms till noon, and they missed the entire morning session, including his own talk.

2029

“You're going off the deep end,” Sara said. They were in his office with a big view of Pike's Peak. The slender mountain had snagged a looming purple thundercloud on its slopes. Lightning flashed in its belly.
Mine too,
Harold thought.

“I can make a billion in a year if we can repeat the old Air Force test trials, make 'em work,” Harold said. “It's a calculated risk.”

“Look, the public's against nuclear rocketry.”

“Has anybody really asked? The nuke flies up cold as a salmon. SpaceX can deliver it. We turn it on after we've flown a tank of hydrogen up and mated it to the nuclear thermal unit. That assembly flies my robot team to the candidate asteroid and runs a nuke power source for their exploration.”

She twisted her mouth in a skeptical red-lipsticked torque that he loved. “It never comes back into Low Earth Orbit?”

“Never. We use it for smelting in orbit beyond the moon.”

Sara said, “I prefer more conservative invest—”

“In five years this
will be
conservative. It'll be raining soup and we'll have a bucket.”

“So this is gambling on a certainty.”

“Launching a nuke rocket core, piggybacking on a two-stage to orbit, it makes economic sense.”

“Nukes. The UN can block you.”

“Elon says he can launch us from mid-Pacific. His platform's not a UN member—or subject to nation-state controls.” Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson—they had been like the Carnegies and Rockefellers of high vacuum, just a generation before, and were still big players.

“Any skeptical legal advisor will say”—she frowned, did a bass growl—“ ‘You could be sued for every double-yoked egg a hen lays after launch.' ”