It's the end of a bad week, and I decided to get one post in. Naturally, what that left me with is yet another installment of the Space Guys. Hey, this is actual space stuff. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.
The last and largest delivery was a 50-meter xenon tank straight from Jupiter, to be launched Europa, the next major moon inward from their holding orbit over Ganymede. “It’s so big, none of the tenders could handle it,” the captain explained. “They finally decided to attach it to another tank full of ice wired with thermite. The charges will vaporize the gases and blow it into a suitable orbit. The Pegasus will separate to pull into a matching trajectory, then two crewmen will descend from the main hold of the Pegasus to secure it with tethers. Moxon has volunteered. We need one more.”
Jax agreed to be the second person, without any objection. Jason and Alek were assigned to the Pegasus cockpit/ command center. Old Yuri was in charge of the communications, from the rear station. The ship’s course kept a blind side to Jupiter. It did offer a good view of the moon Io, still further in. Its surface made Jason think of a pear in a still life painting: Faded yellow, covered in pores and pockmarks that were in reality immense mountains and craters. From over 200,000 kilometers range, he could see the flare of an ongoing eruption. “There was a plan to put our main base on Io instead of Ganymede,” Yuri remarked. “It has the highest gravity of any satellite. The downside is, it has over 400 active volcanos. It’s a nice enough place to visit, not so much to stay.”
Europa came into view ahead. It was the gloomy gray of a weathered ball bearing. The surface was rock and ice, much of the latter actual solidified dihydrogen monoxide. That was novel enough to justify a base with a whole fifty crew, normally employed in carving out ice to supply ships and other settlements. A video feed showed the final preparations for the launch. Two tracked crawlers pulled the enormous tank assembly on what amounted to a trailer, on four balloon-like tires as big as the crawlers themselves. A third crawler was finishing scraping a flat surface for a launchpad. When the tank reached the center, a dozen crew raced out. They quickly attached cables that led to a titanic crane. The camera pulled back to show the improvised rocket pulled upright. In the near distance, the base could be seen, a single dome with two adjoining half-cylinders that looked just like Quonset huts from a war movie.
Yuri’s
voice cut in. “We have an audio feed from the hold,” he said. “It must be a
mike that turned on automatically when Moxon and Lightower came in. I can patch
it through or shut it down; what’s your call?”
Alek spoke up before Jason could decline. “Send it through,” she said.
The
feed began abruptly with Jax in mid-sentence: “-ing is okay. Jill will probably
have the baby in another week, maybe two.”
Moxon
spoke then: “How do you feel about that?”
“I’m
happy, of course. I’m glad everything is all right.”
“That’s happy for them, not you. How do you really feel about having a kid with her?”
Jason
cut back to Yuri. “Yuri, are you hearing any of this?” he said.
“No,”
the old spacer said, quite innocently. “The circuit goes directly to the
cockpit. Why do you ask?”
“Just
wondering,” Jason said. He switched back to the feed. Whatever Jax had said,
Moxon was talking again.
“-Course, you want to take care of the woman who gave you a son. Just remember, that doesn’t mean your options aren’t open. These are enlightened times, and that runs both ways.”
After
a moderately long silence, the officer changed subjects. “You know, I can see
why you and Jason are friends,” he said. “I do like him, really, even if he
doesn’t like me.”
Jason
turned to Alek. She glanced pointedly at the switch that would kill the feed,
then reached for it. “He has to know,” he said with a shake of his head. She
shrugged and withdrew her hand.
“You and me, I think we understand each other,” Moxon continued. “Between you and me, I think you could be a Jain one day. Maybe a Brahmin. The ones who do always know the way, even if they haven’t been taught.”
That
got a laugh from Jax. “Do all Brahmins quote their own TV show?” he said.
Moxon laughed in turn. “Trust me, the High Brahmin would have done the same thing,” he said. “He loved cartoons, Sparky, Mickey, Jasper and Jinx. He worked them into his sermons all the time. He said that wisdom was everywhere. You could say he was a grandstander, only grandstanding out the other end. He would preach in the streets in just a jockstrap; he only wore the jockstrap because he would have been arrested without it.”
There
was a pause. “You know what you and your friend Jason have in common?” Moxon resumed.
“Neither of you have asked about the scar.”
“Okay,”
Jax said. “Did you want to talk about it now?”
Moxon
laughed. It was his natural, braying laugh, which had long since become
unnerving to Jason. “You could say I’m used to it,” he said. “I can usually see
it coming. They almost always wait till things are private, like now. Now,
here’s the difference between you and your friend. Jason wouldn’t do it,
because he’s too honest. If he has a question, he will ask in the open, like
Donald tried to. You wouldn’t do it because you know when to ask questions and
when to just listen. I appreciate that. It’s usually a survival trait.”
“Okay,”
Jax said. “Maybe I heard about it from someone else. Maybe I heard about it
from a few people.”
That got another laugh, this time a short, sophisticated bark. “You are good at listening. You could call that an experiment. I tried telling the truth, at first. I still do, sometimes. Later, I tried coming up with different stories. I made sure it was never the same one twice; it started as a way to know if they ever talked. I have enough mates I let in on it to keep track; Harrison is one of them. Most of them don’t. Later on, I made it into fish stories, just to see what people would believe. The funny thing is, the stories I tell don’t account for half the ones that get back to me. I’ve overheard people I didn’t know from President Kennedy tell lies sillier than I ever thought to try that they insisted they heard it from me.”
“What
do the people you tell the truth say?”
“They’re the ones who never talk. Literally, not one, leastways that I ever heard of. Of course, I’ve gotten to be a pretty good judge of that beforehand. The thing about that is, they never react any differently than the rest. Ever notice how stories are always about why people are the way they are? That’s what people want when they ask about the scar. They see it, and they think the story is going to tell them who I am, why I am who I am. Once they hear it, they know there isn’t an answer, so they just kind of forget about it. I can tell, most of them still haven’t learned. They still treat people like questions with an answer, even if they couldn’t tell you why they had eggs instead of cereal for breakfast.”
Jax
laughed at that. “The stories weren’t always like that,” he said. “Nobody in a Solomon Kane adventure ever asks Solomon Kane why he’s Solomon Kane.”
“Exactly.”
There was silence. “You know, here’s something to think about. You know what it
costs Gaia to keep the Mars colonies going?”
“What do you mean?” Jax said. “It’s not expense, it’s investment. We’re close to all our goals for self-sufficiency. We’re even sending raw materials back to Gaia. That’s not even counting what the asteroid miners are bringing back.” As he spoke, Jason found himself nearly saying the same thing verbatim.
“I
know, I’ve seen the numbers,” Moxon said. “If you could triple them, our spending
would only be $1 million US dollars per colonist… per day.”
Jason
did speak out loud. “That… that can’t be,” he said. “We’re out here. We would
go it alone if we had to…” Even as he spoke, he looked to Alek. She only shook
her head.
“It is worse than he says,” she said in a flat tone. “Much worse. Worse than he could know. His numbers are for the Union only. I have seen the Federation’s spending.”
“So
what?” Jax said. That jarred Jason more than what Alek had said. “What else
were they going to do with the money? Build ballistic missiles again? Make a
bigger F Bomb? Send another intervention to Indochina?”
That made Moxon bray long and loud. “That is thinking like a Gaian,” he said. “If we didn't waste money on one thing, what else would we waste it on? Just don’t say it like that.”
Jason
looked at Alek. “You never told me,” he said. “We never talked about it.”
Alek
shrugged. “You never told me your father was in the Baton Rouge Intervention,”
she said.
He
shook his head. “That was different,” he said.
She looked back at him almost blankly. “Why?” she said.
They
both started at the sound of Moxon’s voice. “You know, I can tell you a story,”
he said. “About the time I was a firefighter.”
“Really.
What city?”
“Not
a city. We were the kind of firemen that fight forest fires. We were called the
Mogollon Smoke Jumpers.”
There was another silence. “I’ve heard of them. I thought they were all dead.”
“It was a close thing, believe me. Thing is, we were good at our job. We were just like the Corps, putting out little fires before they got big. We didn’t think about how there were more and more little fires every season. We didn’t think about the dead trees that weren’t cleared out, the underbrush that wasn’t thinned, the secondary growth that would go as dry as beef jerky at the first sign of a drought. When the big one came, there were places where it went faster than our helicopters. All told, a tenth of the state burned. We were dropped right in the middle of it.” As they listened, Jason looked at Alek. She nodded, wide-eyed.
“The real story, though, was what happened before. There was an old native who helped out, we called him the Shaman. You could say he was our chaplain. I suppose the way we treated him was more like a mascot. There was one day when the captain was showing us a map of all our stations, the observation posts, the fires we had put out, all the contingency plans for putting out the next one. In the middle of it, the Shaman stood up. That was enough for the captain to stop talking; we had that much respect for him. He only shook his head and said, `Sometimes, the forest just wants to burn.’ He walked out. He knew then what was coming. But when the day came, he still went out with us. He was the reason I made it back.
“So, here’s all you need to know about the Motherworld, farmboy. Gaia is a forest that just wants to burn. It’s been that way for a long, long time. In the Corps, we did just enough to stop the big one. The price was leaving the real problems unfixed. We propped up rulers who deserved to be overthrown. We kept people who hated each other under one government when they wanted to go their own way. We made dead institutions stand when they should have been cut down and carved up. We all did it because we knew, as bad as it was, what was coming would be worse. The fire is coming. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m telling you this now. We’re headed for the only place that’s far enough away not to get burned.”
Jason finally looked back to the feed from Europa. The spacers had withdrawn to a safe distance. The countdown was at 10 and dropping. Alek suddenly swore. She hastily unlimbered her microphone and said, “Hey everyone, all hands are go go go!” As she spoke, the camera tumbled and twisted as if in freefall, then went dead. Jason could make out the expanding cloud of vapor on the rapidly approaching moon.
“Opening bay doors,” he said. The payloader shook as the atmosphere departed in a rush. There was a noise like the snap of a sail from the microphone. For better or worse, there would be no more sound.
“Preparing
for a drop,” Moxon said over the radio.
“Ready,” Jax affirmed. A moment later, there was a howl as he jumped. From Moxon, there was only silence.
Jason
looked at Alek. “What do you think?” he said. “What do you really think?”
“I think,” she said in her flat voice, “that I know madness better than people think. It takes one kind of madman to make money building bombs to blow up the world, and them and their money along with it. It takes another kind, like your father, to drop it. They are the first ones that Gaia sent out here. Why not? We made a deal with the Devil, so what to do when you do not need the Devil anymore? Pay him even more, to go far, far, far away.”
She took his hand. “But it is not all bad,” she said. “Really not bad at all. Maybe you are mad, to them. It is because you can see things in a way they don’t. That is why I love you, farmboy. I think I love you even before you love me. I came out here, to be with you.”
As she spoke, she turned off the cabin lights. He
squeezed her hand tightly as they gazed at the stars.
Table of contents
Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!
Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!
Part 12: The inevitable geography lesson!
No comments:
Post a Comment