Hieroglyph (60 page)

Heinlein's Harriman sold the moon as a source of mining wealth, including gold. Arthur C. Clarke was closer to reality: he predicted geosynchronous satellites in 1945. I imagined repairing those geosats as a plausible industry, leading to asteroid mining—where, we now know, the true wealth awaits.

I suspect that space and science fiction tend to be cultural manifestations of rich, highly developed Western countries that can afford such pursuits. Now that other countries have come on board (China, India) as the global economy develops, people have enough free time to follow this dream. There will be global competition for the rewards of solar system industries, echoing the opening of North America centuries ago.

Companies are far better at this than governments. Russia has had Siberia for more than four centuries, yet still can't develop it well; there are about 30 million people in a land area comparable to the USA. (Historical analogy: California had 73,000 people in its first census, 1850, shortly after the USA took it from Mexico. Now it has more than 38 million and is a high-tech leader.) The principal directions for solar system development will entail technologies we can see now: 3-D printers in a variety of substances, for manufacture from materials found in space; advanced space-rated robotics, with artificial intelligences to control them; nuclear thermal rockets to carry large masses.

At first we'll see some space tourism (orbital hotels, etc.), then repair of high satellites, and on to asteroid mining. Beyond that, the frontier is open.

HERE ARE SNAPSHOTS OF
ingredients that shaped the story, and vice versa:

•
The symposium that kicked off the subject: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=9979.

• This carries discussions and links to speeches that amplify the prospects for an industrial solar system economics: http://www.starshipcentury.com/.

• A central reference point, the Centauri Dreams website. For example: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=18892; http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=13134.

• http://www.nasa.gov/wise.

• The second-nearest star to us is a brown dwarf double star system, which seems to have a planet as well: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.1303v2.pdf.

I didn't know this while writing the story, just imagined it plausible. We don't know if any brown dwarfs lurk closer still.

THE BASIC BOOK ABOUT
asteroid mining is John Lewis,
Mining the Sky
. Robert Zubrin's
Entering Space
has many ideas. He shows how rocket planes, solar and magnetic sails, controlled fusion, and other technologies stand untapped as unique resources that will allow us to be more mobile and to reach farther. His bestseller
The Case for Mars
is still the best presentation of colonizing ideas.

From that and discussions many pathways emerge.

I DID A LOT
of backgrounding for Harold Mann's business. Here are Notes in Summary of some key innovations needed for robot explorers and prospectors, which I never used:

1. Artificial intelligence for decades of operation without human intervention. Robotic governance of nonhuman exploration teams that can show originality, adapt to the unexpected, and bring forth new investigations. Space-ready robots will need autonomy for greater than one day on outer solar system missions in the next ten to twenty years.

2. General computational intelligence, with reactive decision making, real-time choices from incomplete information, fault-detection and response, replanning capability. Miniaturization and cold-blooded avionics and instruments are high priority for outer planets, icy moons, distant small bodies.

3. Conventional propulsion: chemical, solar electric, radioisotope electric, and nuclear thermal. All need propellants; the latter can use water. Need long-life electric thrusters, lightweight radioisotope and nuclear generators.

4. Prospecting, mining, refining of consumables like chemical and inert propellants. Radioisotopes more difficult to obtain in situ and may be better to process in breeder reactor, or take along large quantities of Am-241.

5. Solar and magnetic sails, to eliminate propellant near the star where energy is available. Beamed energy and laser-driven sails, undeveloped today. Beaming needs a free line of sight path and onboard batteries for energy storage. These exist on most geosats now.

ENTANGLEMENT

Vandana Singh

. . . FLAPPING ITS WINGS . . .

. . . and flying straight at her. She ducked, averting her eyes. The whole world had come loose: debris flying everywhere; the roar of the wind. Something soft and sharp cannoned into her belly—she looked up to see the monster rising into the clouds, a genie of destruction, yelled
—
Run! Run! Find lower ground! Lower ground!

She woke up. The boat rocked gently; instrument panels in the small cabin painted thin blue and red lines. Outside, the pale Arctic dawn suffused the sky with orange light. Everything was normal.

“Except I hadn't been asleep, not really,” she said aloud. Her morning coffee had grown cold. “What kind of dream was that?”

She rubbed the orange bracelet. One of the screens flickered. There was a fragmented image for a microsecond before the screen went blank: a gray sky, a spinning cloud, things falling. She sat up.

Her genie appeared in a corner of the screen.

“Irene, I just connected you to five people around the world,” it said cheerfully. “Carefully selected, an experiment. We don't want you to get too lonely.”

“Frigg,” she said, “I wish you wouldn't do things like that.”

There were two messages from Tom. She thought of him in the boat three hundred kilometers away, docked to the experimental iceberg, and hoped he and Mahmoud were getting along. Good, he had only routine stuff to report. She scrolled through messages from the Arctic Science Initiative, the Million Eyes project, and three of her colleagues working off the northern coast of Finland. Nothing from Lucie.

She let out a long, slow breath. Time to get up, make fresh coffee. Through the tiny window of the boat's kitchenette, the smooth expanse of ocean glittered in the morning light. The brolly floated above it like a conscientious ghost, not two hundred meters away. Its parachute-like top was bright in the low sun, its electronic eyes slowly swiveling as the intelligent unit in the box below drank in information from the world around it. Its community of intelligences roved the water below, making observations and sending them back to the unit, so that it could adjust its behavior accordingly. She felt a tiny thrill of pride. The brolly was her conception, a crazy biogeochemist's dream, brought to reality by engineers. The first prototype had been made by Tom himself, in his first year of graduate school. Thinking of his red thatch of hair framing a boyish face, she caught herself smiling. He was such a kid! The first time he'd seen a seal colony, he'd almost fallen off the boat in his enthusiasm. You'd think the kid had never even been to a zoo. He was so
Californian,
it was adorable. Her own upbringing in the frozen reaches of northern Canada meant she was a lot more cold-tolerant than him—he was always overdressed by her standards, buried under layers of thermal insulation and a parka on top of everything. Some of her colleagues had expressed doubts about taking an engineering graduate student to the Arctic, but she'd overruled them. The age of specialization was over; you had to mix disciplinary knowledge and skills if you wanted to deal intelligently with climate change, and who was better qualified to monitor the brollies deployed in the region? Plus Mahmoud would make a great babysitter for him. He was a sweet kid, Tom.

She pulled on her parka and went out on deck to have her coffee the way she liked it, scalding hot. Staring across the water, she thought of home. Baffin Island was not quite directly across the North Pole from her station in the East Siberian Sea, but this was the closest she had come to home in the last fifteen years. She shook her head. Home? What was she thinking? Home was a sunny apartment in a suburb of San Francisco, a few BART stops from the university, where she had spent ten years raising Lucie, now twenty-four, a screenwriter in Hollywood. It had been over a year since she and Lucie had had a real conversation. Her daughter's chatty e-mails and phone calls had given way to a near silence, a mysterious reserve. In her present solitude that other life, those years of closeness, seemed to have been no more than a dream.

Over the water the brolly moved. There was a disturbance not far from the brolly—an agitation in the water, then a tail. A whale maybe five meters in length swimming close to the surface popped its head out of the water—a beluga! Well, she probably wasn't far from their migration route. Irene imagined the scene from the whale's perspective: the brolly like an enormous, airborne jellyfish, the boat, the human-craft, a familiar sight.

The belugas were interested in the brolly. Irene wondered what they made of it. One worry the researchers had was that brollies and their roving family units would be attacked and eaten by marine creatures. The brolly could collapse itself into a compact unit and sink to the seabed or use solar power to rise a couple of meters above the ocean surface. At the moment it seemed only to be observing the whales as they cavorted around it. Probably someone, somewhere, was looking at the ocean through the brolly's electronic eyes and commenting on the Internet about a whale pod sighting. Million Eyes on the Arctic was the largest citizen science project in the world. Between the brollies, various observation stations, and satellite images, more than two million people could obtain and track information about sea ice melt, methane leaks, marine animal sightings, and ocean hot spots.

It occurred to Irene that these whales might know the seashore of her childhood, that they might even have come from the North Canadian archipelago. A sudden memory came to her: going out into the ocean north of Baffin Island with her grandfather in his boat. He was teaching her to use traditional tools to fish in an icy inlet. She must have been very small. She recalled the rose-colored Arctic dawn, her grandfather's weathered face. When they were on their way back with their catch, a pod of belugas had surfaced close enough to rock their boat. They clustered around the boat, popping their heads out of the water, looking at the humans with curious, intelligent eyes. One large female came close to the boat. “
Qilalugaq,
” her grandfather said gently, as though in greeting. The child Irene—no, she had been Enuusiq then—Enuusiq was entranced. The Inuit, her grandfather told her, wouldn't exist without the belugas, the caribou, and the seals. He had made sure she knew how to hunt seals and caribou before she was thirteen. Memories surfaced: the swish of the dog sled on the ice in the morning, the waiting at the breathing holes for the seals, the swift kill. The two of them saying words of apology over the carcass, their breath forming clouds in the frigid air.

Her grandfather died during her freshman year of high school. He was the one who had given her her Inuk name, Enuusiq, after his long-dead older brother, so that he would live again in her name. The name held her soul, her
atiq
. “Enuusiq,” she whispered now, trying it on. How many years since anyone had called her that? She remembered the gathering of the community each time the hunters brought in a big catch, the taste of raw meat with a dash of soy. How long had it been since those days? A visit home fifteen years ago when her father died (her mother had died when she was in college)—after that just a few telephone conversations and Internet chats with her cousin Maggie in Iqaluit.

The belugas moved out of sight. Her coffee was cold again. She was annoyed with herself. She had volunteered to come here partly because she wanted to get away—she loved solitude—but in the midst of it, old memories surfaced; long-dead voices spoke.

The rest of the morning she worked with a fierce concentration, sending data over to her collaborators on the Russian research ship
Kolmogorov,
holding a conference call with three other scientists, politely declining two conference invitations for keynote speaker. But in the afternoon her restlessness returned. She decided she would dive down to the shallow ocean bed and capture a clip for a video segment she had promised to the Million Eyes project. It was against protocol to go down alone without anyone on the boat to monitor her—but it was only twenty-two meters, and she hadn't got this far by keeping to protocol.

Some time later she stood on the deck in her drysuit, pulled the cap snugly over her head, checked the suit's computer, wiggled her shoulders so the oxygen tank rested more comfortably on her back, and dove in.

This
was why she was here. This falling through the water was like falling in love, only better. In the cloudy blue depths she dove through marine snow, glimpsing here and there the translucent fans of sea butterflies, a small swarm of krill, the occasional tiny jellyfish. A sea gooseberry with a glasslike two-lobed soft body winged past her face. Some of these creatures were so delicate a touch might kill them—no fisherman's net could catch them undamaged. You had to be here, in their world, to know they existed. Yet there was trouble in this marine paradise. Deeper and deeper she went, her drysuit's wrist display clocking time, temperature, pressure, oxygen. The sea was shallow enough at twenty-two meters that she could spend some time at the bottom without worrying about decompression on the way up. It was darker here on the seaweed-encrusted ocean floor; she turned on her lamp and the camera. Swimming along the seafloor toward the array of instruments, she startled a mottled white crab. It was sitting on top of one of the instrument panels, exploring the device with its claws. Curiosity . . . well, that was something she could relate to. The crab retreated as she swam above it, then returned to its scrutiny. Well, if her work entertained the local wildlife, that was something.