Masked (2010) (26 page)

During my stay, the United Nations Hub was still little more than a torus, a tube of corridors and rooms, restaurants and fitness rooms, set slowly spinning about its midpoint to provide a small measure of apparent gravity. Its most spectacular features were big picture windows that looked down on the Earth far below, and on the ongoing construction all around the Hub, and a wheeling panorama of stars.

This was just the start. The Hub was set high above the world in a stationary orbit, turning with the Earth itself. One day it would be linked to the planet by a thread, a space elevator, the fulfilment of an old dream, at which time it would blossom into the most spectacular resort in cislunar space, and a key node for transportation beyond Earth orbit.

And that was why it was attacked by the Earth First League.

This North American terrorist cell publicly expresses fears about the elevator’s economic impact on more traditional space industries. This is mere political cover. In fact it opposes all human presence in space for ideological reasons, as an expression of the technocratic thinking that, they say, led to the dieback in the first place. So they tried to destroy the Hub—and they timed their attack for my presence aboard, so they could destroy me, an ultimate human expression of our future in space. It was in this incident that I learned I had a sworn enemy.

They targeted the windows, the beautiful windows. They were of a toughened, thick but very clear plastic, set in robust frames.
The designers believed that the Hub itself would have to fall apart before the windows failed. But the saboteurs had infiltrated the construction operation and set strips of explosive around the frames of several windows.

In a blowout you have to act fast. In vacuum, most people lose consciousness in ten seconds or so, and most will be dead in a minute and a half, two minutes. I had my jetpack strapped to my back. I hurled myself through a gaping, ripped-open window frame and for those two minutes retrieved the wriggling, convulsing bodies that had been hurled out into space, one after the other, and zipped them up in emergency pressurisation bags. I saved a dozen.

Then I spent the next several minutes retrieving the bodies of those who had been thrown too far for me to catch in time, a dozen or so more.

The incident cemented my fame. Demands for my services exploded, and my fees sky-rocketed. My life, already good, became better. I admit I felt as if I deserved this good fortune, this attention. Perhaps all nineteen-year-olds feel they are special.

Yet guilt nagged at me, for the dozen I had not saved. What’s the point of a hero who can’t rescue everybody?

And, in the sometimes lonely hours I spent in my luxury zero-gravity suites, waiting for emergencies that never came, I sometimes wondered if my abilities had been meant for more than this. Even Professor Stix, my one full confidante, could not answer such questions.

Oddly, it never occurred to me to wonder if I was unique. Not until I discovered that I wasn’t.

The contact came at Mumbai spaceport, as I waited to be shipped to an upper-crust L5 orbital hotel for a three-month residency.

And there, in the first-class lounge, I was approached.

“Excuse me. Is this seat free?” He sat down beside me before I had a chance to reply.

The man was older than me, or Professor Stix, perhaps fifty.
He was soberly dressed, if a little plainly for the exotic setting of that lounge; he did not look like a first-class passenger. Yet he carried a ticket folder. For my part, I didn’t recognize him. At first I thought he was a fan, and fretted vaguely if he was some threat. But from the moment I looked closely at him, I knew why he had approached me. For, under a dark Indian complexion, I could see how his skin was mottled.

He smiled. “You’ve been enjoying yourself,” he said, in clear but accented English. “But most of us prefer to keep a low profile.”

My heart beat faster. “You are like me.”

“Yes. Once I thought I was unique, too. Then another approached me, as I approach you now. It is not yet time for my ascension, of course. Or yours.”

“Ascension? I don’t know what you mean.”

“All your questions will be answered. Even those,” he said a bit sharply, “you have apparently not had the wit to ask. Don’t take your Nigeria flight up to the Hilton.” He handed me the ticket he was holding. “Take this one.”

I glanced at it. “Peru Space.” I wasn’t happy at the idea of switching. We were getting a kickback from the shuttle company.

“The flight is just as comfortable, and takes off not much later. You’ll have to change lounges, though.”

“Why this one?”

“Because of the route. This shuttle’s track takes you over the subsolar point. That is, you will cross the line between Earth and sun. And on that line, of course, lies the Stack.”

“The Stack? The mirrors? What’s the Stack got to do with it?”

He stood. “The Damocletian will tell you that.”

“What Damocletian?”

“It’s best you find out for yourself.” He bent down, prised up a corner of my mask, and laughed. “ ‘Vacuum Lad.’ I don’t want you to think I’m po-faced, that we all disapprove. Your life does seem rather fun. And useful. You’re saving lives; you’re not any sort of
criminal. But there are other choices. Have a good flight.”

Of course curiosity burned. I could hardly refuse to go on the Peruvian flight. Could you?

I cleared it with Professor Stix. I could give her only evasive reasons as to why I wanted to switch. I was uncomfortable lying to her. In my way, you see, I was hopelessly in love with her. And yet, even before I boarded the shuttle, I had the feeling that from now on Professor Stix would play an increasingly diminished role in my life.

And I was right. For it was on that flight, as I sipped champagne and signed autographs, that there came that extraordinary scratch on the window.

The woman in space gestured, indicating that I should move down the spaceplane to the airlock at the rear. Of course the flight crew were by now aware of the woman’s presence. It took me only a moment to persuade them to let me through the lock; their human longing to be present at a historic moment in the career of Vacuum Lad overrode the safety rules.

When the last of the air sighed away, I felt the usual hardening of my skin, the prickly cold around my eyes and mouth, the gush of air from my mouth and belly, the peculiar arrhythmic thumping of my heart. It was no longer painful to me, more a welcome thrill, like a bracing cold shower. I had gone through this experience more than twenty times, including Professor Stix’s experimental sessions in the vacuum tank in Munich.

But never before had I swum into vacuum to see another person waiting, like me dressed only in everyday clothes, in her case a tough-looking coverall with soft boots, gloves and tools tucked into her belt. Behind her, at the other end of a trailing tether, was a kind of craft—like a yacht, with a patchy, gossamer sail suspended from a mast. The sail was huge. A man, as naked to vacuum as the woman, clung to the yacht’s slim body—and there was a child, I saw, astonished, no more than seven or eight years old, a boy play
ing restlessly with the rigging attached to the single mast.

The woman smiled at me. I mouthed, as clearly as I could,
How are we to speak?

She reached for me. Her hands in mine were warm. She pulled me close, opened her mouth, and kissed me. It was an oddly polite, asexual gesture, but as our lips sealed I could feel her tongue, taste the faint spice of her trapped residual breath. And with that trace of trapped air she whispered to me. “If we touch—see, let your teeth touch mine—speech carries through the bone, the skin.” Her accent was light American. “My name is Mary Webb. I was born in Iowa. And you, Vacuum Lad?”

Suspended in orbit, my lips locked to this strange woman’s, it was not a time for anonymity. I told her my full name.

“I suppose you’re wondering why we sent for you.”

“You could say that.”

“Ask your questions.”

“Your yacht,” I said impulsively. “Is it a solar sail?”

“Yes. Slow but reliable. Ben loves it. My son, you see him playing there—”

“He was born in space.”

“Yes. Yes, he was born in space. But still, most of us are born on Earth and incubate there, as you have, before emerging.”

“‘Incubate’?”

“You wonder where we live. The yacht is actually part of our home. We inhabit the Stack.”

“The Stack. The mirrors?” My lips locked to hers, I rolled my eyes to look up. The Stack was a swarm of mirrors, individually invisible, yet their cumulative effect was a subtle darkening and blurring of the sun.

“Each mirror is about a meter across. They are sheets of a silicon nitride ceramic. There are millions of them, of course. You can see our sail is stitched together from several mirrors. My husband made the sail. He’s good with his hands.”

The man was grinning at me, across the gulf of space, grinning as I kissed his wife. Beneath me the Earth turned, and passengers
and crew goggled at us from the shuttle’s windows.

“You live on the Stack.”

“That’s right. On it, in it, around it. It is why we exist. Why you exist. And why, some day, you will join us.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“What,” she asked, “do you know of the Heroic Solution?”

It was all a relic of the very bad days of a hundred years past, when the collapse of the planet’s climate was acute. Some feared that the gathering extinction event might soon overwhelm mankind: the dieback. The governments and intergovernmental agencies at last reached for drastic measures.

“This was the Heroic Solution,” Mary Webb said. “Geoengineering.” Massive human intervention in the processes of nature, everything from seeding the sea with iron to make it flourish to building giant engines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air. “A company called AxysCorp was responsible for the Stack, mirrors at the Lagrange point intended to complement atmospheric systems: sulfur dioxide particles in the stratosphere, and mist thrown up to the troposphere by giant engines patrolling the sea, a multilevel system designed to reduce the sunlight falling on the Earth.”

“It worked,” I murmured into her mouth. “The Heroic Solution. Didn’t it? The climate was stabilized. Billions of lives were saved. The recovery began. That’s what I learned at school.”

“Yes, that’s so. But the Heroic Solution was always controversial, precisely because of all the engineering. What if the Stack, for example, were to fail? If so, the warming it has kept away would befall the planet in one fell swoop—worse than without the Stack in the first place. Can you see?”

“So it cannot be allowed to fail.”

“But every engineering system fails in the end. And so the Stack is not so much a shield as a sword of Damocles suspended over the world.”

“Ah. And you ‘Damocletians’—”

“Are AxysCorp’s backup solution.”

AxysCorp, I learned now, had seeded the air of Earth with a genetically engineered virus, a virus that created a whole new breed of space-tolerant humans specifically equipped to maintain their giant system. People would persist, the argument went, where machines would fail: people, self-motivating, self-repairing, self-reproducing, the ideal fail-safe system. But people of the right sort had to be engineered themselves.