Lifeline (44 page)

“Where’s he going to hide, anyway?” Terachyk yelled.

Where indeed?
Brahms thought.

They would figure it out sooner or later.

***

Chapter 67

ORBITECH 1—Day 72

When the rescue crew hauled Ramis into the
Orbitech 1
shuttle bay, his low-air indicator on the heads-up display had been burning for some time. He didn’t care. He didn’t waste time or energy talking. His vision remained fuzzy; his skin felt flushed and overheated.

He was numb with shock at what he had seen.

The rescue team had hauled the remnants of the
Aguinaldo
expedition, some supplies, and four intact nymphs still packaged and dormant for the return journey. Dobo Daeng, flailing in his space suit, seemed not to know how he could best cooperate with the crew.

Ramis had arrived too late.

As he had approached the sail-creature mosaic, he had seen that it was severed in half, with one huge section cut off from its controls and drifting away on a new orbit. He had seen
Dr. Sandovaal’s body in the central sail-creature that had flown straight into the weavewire.

They had planned a beautiful maneuver, jettisoning the dead sail-creatures and slipping gracefully into position at the center of the Lagrange well. But now the mosaic was ruined.

The rescue crew from
Orbitech 1
had reached them while Ramis was still trying to contact a frantic Dobo in the other sail-creature cyst. Ramis had felt such a tremendous sense of loss that he could barely see to assist the team. He had found it impossible to talk on the radio. He didn’t even want to speak to Karen.

The rescue team assisted them into the shuttle bay. Dobo chattered over the suit radio, directing the salvage crew to hurry with the dormant sail-creature nymphs. Ramis moved without enthusiasm, feeling as if the world had fallen away from him.

As they floated across the threshold into the docking bay, he saw the hulk of a weird-looking vessel moored to one bulkhead. The yo-yo had arrived intact from
Clavius Base
. Anna Tripolk had tried to destroy this vessel. He had helped save it. He had protected all of
Orbitech I
with what he had done. Ramis stared at the
Phoenix
as the massive door to the bay closed behind them.

All the colonies had found ways to tie each other together, even without the safety net of Earth. Seeing the
Phoenix
gave him some freedom from his grief.

Sandovaal would have complained about how clunky it looked.

After the shuttle bay had filled with air, medics appeared, checking him and Dobo. Someone twisted Ramis’s helmet off. He felt detached, and let them do what they wanted. Several people came forward in greeting, but they moved in a haphazard group, without the formal control Ramis had expected. He recognized Allen Terachyk and a man who looked like Duncan McLaris from the ConComm broadcasts, but he did not see Director Brahms among them.

Before the men could say anything, the PA clicked and a voice came over. “We’ve located the director. I think someone official should come and deal with this. Mr. Terachyk?”

In the lab room, the black technician looked baffled. He shrugged, looking up at Terachyk and McLaris. “Seems like he did everything right.”

Nancy Winkowski stood huddled in a self-protective stance. Her wide eyes harbored an amazed expression, tinged with a bit of defiance. “He made me help him. I did the best I could.”

They stared down at Brahms in the sleepfreeze chamber.

The director lay motionless, with a serene and empty expression. Through the curved glass of the cubicle, he seemed to be deep in the sleep of exhaustion.

Terachyk looked upset. “That bastard!”

McLaris allowed himself a smile, which he covered before anyone else could see.

Terachyk glared at the motionless face behind the glass and slapped his hand on the surface. “He thinks we’ll forget about it if he hides his head under the covers!”

“Stop that, Allen!” McLaris spoke sharply. He picked up the d-cube left lying on the surface of the chamber. “Let’s listen to what he had to say.”

Nancy Winkowski turned away, as if she didn’t want to hear Brahms’s words again. McLaris stared at the d-cube, sighed, then walked to the reader in the lab room. He pushed the cube in and stood back, pursing his lips. They all turned toward the small holomonitor.

Brahms appeared, looking haggard, but with an odd inner peace behind his expression. Off to the edge of the image, McLaris could make out a blurry figure that must have been Winkowski.

“Duncan, Allen—and all of
Orbitech 1
—I place myself in your hands. Right now a long trial would be divisive and destructive to our fragile balance. It would sap our energy and our attention, which would best be directed elsewhere. And I am too tired to go through with it.”

The image of Winkowski mumbled something at the edge of the screen, but Brahms made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He continued.

“I leave the decision to you. You can take the easy way out and just disconnect me—throw my body out the airlock to join the hundred fifty-two people lost in the RIF. But do not allow yourselves to forget that I acted in what I thought was the best way to ensure our survival.

“Punish me or forgive me, as you see fit. We all do what we must do. Right now I want nothing more than to rest. I leave you to determine how long that rest will be.”

The holographic image dissolved into static, then nothing.

Winkowski had started to cry. McLaris took a deep breath and pulled his lips tight. “That’s it. We’ve got a new start.” He turned to walk away. “Let’s try not to screw it up this time.”

Terachyk slammed a hand against the chamber. Spinning, McLaris saw the man trembling with anger.

“I hope he’s having nightmares!”

In the depths of his cold sleep, Curtis Brahms dreamed of playing checkers.

***

Epilogue

ORBITECH 2—Year 3

Ramis watched as Clifford Clancy boosted his daughter up on his shoulders, letting the giggling girl survey the open spread of the newly completed
Orbitech 2.
The girl’s face had an Oriental appearance, muted and mercifully free of Clancy’s own craggy features. Wiay slipped an arm around Clancy’s waist and beckoned for Ramis to take in the view with them.

As Ramis drew close, Clancy nodded toward the girder webwork of the outer, larger torus still being assembled. “Another two years and we’ll be finished.
Orbitech 2
will give us enough growing room for fifty years.”

“A lot will change in that time,” Ramis said, watching the silvery figures moving around in space. Most of Clancy’s construction crew had left the Moon the first chance they could, though some had agreed to stay, apparently to Clancy’s chagrin.

Ramis knew he was being too quiet on his first tour of
Orbitech 2,
but other thoughts kept him distracted. He remarked on how the colony looked enormous—especially without any growing foliage. Bare steel decks gave the impression that the huge station was naked and cold. But that would change. Several species of Dobo Daeng’s modified wall-kelp would cover the decks in only a few months.

“I wish Father Magsaysay could have seen this,” Ramis said in a quiet voice.

“I thought he wasn’t all that interested in space construction,” Clancy said. “He seemed pretty wrapped up in the
Aguinaldo.”

“That is not what I meant,” Ramis said. “He was afraid that once the Americans and the other colonies got over their period of crisis and did not need us anymore, you would treat us as ‘little brown brothers’ all over again.”

Ramis took a deep breath. “But the last time I saw him, he took me to one of the viewing verandas on the
Aguinaldo
and pointed out to
Orbitech 2.
He told me his worries were wrong—that we had learned not to focus on the survival of the Filipino race, but on the human race. He was very proud of all of us. I think he felt fulfilled. He was happy to see us growing again.”

Wiay patted her swollen belly. “Cliffy and I are doing everything we can to help. We’ll have Lang Ti’s little brother running around soon.”

Ramis looked away from the viewport, blinking. “Huh? Excuse me, I did not hear you.”

Clancy frowned, rubbing his fingers against Wiay’s shoulder blade. “You’ve been absentminded lately, Ramis. I thought this tour of
Orbitech 2
would get you out of the doldrums.”

Ramis shrugged, pulling himself away from his thoughts. “I am sorry, but I am considering too many things at once. Director McLaris has offered me a very good position working with the sail-creatures if I wish to return to
Orbitech 1.
It is either that or join Mr. Terachyk and Dr. Tomkins on the radio-telescope project. But something makes me uneasy. It all seems so permanent.”

Clancy laughed. “I can’t imagine why a nineteen-year-old wouldn’t want to settle down and choose a course for the rest of his life! You’ve still got wanderlust. You’re looking for some grand challenge; otherwise, you’re not going to be happy.”

Clancy flipped his daughter off his shoulders and over his head. She shrieked as he caught her and held her upside down. Wiay spoke over the child’s laughter. “No one’s going to blame you if you join the
Kibalchich,
Ramis. That does seem more like your style.”

“I was afraid someone might point that out to me. I thought I was the only one crazy enough to consider the possibility,” Ramis said, looking away.

“I hope Brahms’s trial isn’t held until after I leave. I don’t want to testify.”

Clancy snorted. “I wish they’d get it over with. They’ve had a team of guards by his sleepfreeze chamber for the past three years.”

“Mars may be the best thing for all of us,” Wiay answered.

“Not me,” Clancy said. “I had enough dirt between my toes on
Clavius Base
. But if the Soviets can make a go of anything, it’ll be getting that colony established. Anna Tripolk seems to be fully recovered now, but a lot of people would still be happy to have her a bit farther away. Once she’s got her mind focused on something, I’m not going to get in her way.”

Wiay sounded wistful. “Cliffy, you can’t tell me you didn’t have any fun on the Moon.”

Clancy snorted. “Our daughter is not going to grow up speaking Russian—okay, so call me a throwback to pre-War patriotism. But I don’t want to miss a day of her life, not even in sleepfreeze. She’ll grow up and lead a normal life here on
Orbitech 2.”

Wiay stuck out her tongue. “Spoilsport.”

Ramis turned his thoughts back to the
Kibalchich.
Mars! If he could talk Karen into going …

He said quietly, “I must get back to the
Aguinaldo
and inform Dobo of my plans. Since Father Magsaysay died, Dobo is the last family I have there.”

Clancy shifted his daughter and placed a hand on Ramis’s shoulder. “You can always come here to visit us.”

“If I go to Mars, it might be fifteen years before I come back—or never.”

Wiay grinned at him and took her daughter from Clancy’s arms. “In fifteen years, Lang Ti will be old enough to make you settle down.”

Ramis blushed and pointedly looked out the viewport as Wiay and Clancy both laughed. Through the transparent sections of the huge enclosed greenhouse dome of
Orbitech 2,
he saw a tiny dot fluttering in the open volume. The dot grew larger, approaching one of the window sections. Stubby wings flapped gracefully as the sail-creature nymph soared in its zero-G environment.

The nymph flew free with a dozen or so other creatures, unhindered by people or structures in the core. It had no boundaries, room to do what it wanted. Ramis felt a kinship with it.

He had to go to Mars.

“Salamat po, Sarat,”
Ramis whispered to himself as he watched the sail-creature gracefully flap away. “Thank you, Timely One!”

***

Afterword: Lifeline Origins

Doug Beason

It must have been the second or third get-together after Kevin and I first met when we discussed collaborating on a short story. I was in California for the summer of ’85 on sabbatical and had looked up this energetic young writer who had a reputation for churning out short stories like normal people breathed. We hit it off, and as most writers did, we talked incessantly about our craft and what it took to make it big.

At the end of summer we’d hammered out the outline for a story that quickly sold to
Full Spectrum
, an ’80s version of
Dangerous Visions
. The story gave Kevin and me near-instant credibility as a writing team. Later that year, Kevin met David Brin, who was putting together an anthology called
Project Solar Sail
. The idea of using photon pressure from sunlight to accelerate spaceships captured the imagination of SF writers and readers alike. It was an efficient, environmentally-clean propulsion concept that struck a cultural chord.

Brin encouraged Kevin to submit a story to the anthology, and with characteristic excitement, Kevin called me, bubbling with energy over an idea he’d had about collaborating for Brin’s anthology. Our
Full Spectrum
story had dealt with an intelligent man-made plasma, a living entity that evolved the equivalent of millions of years in mere minutes. For Brin’s anthology, Kevin’s idea was to use a living entity, rather than lightweight, wispy metal sheets, for the sails.

Looking back on it, this was typically how Kevin and I decided to collaborate on a work: one of us would have the germ of an idea, and batting it back and forth, a synergistic result would mature, eventually cascading into a full-blown story.

In the “what if” stage that followed, we thought up reasons why people would use organic sails. We envisioned a not-too-distant future where humans had established a presence in space, living in large space stations that were dependent on Earth for supplies. Solar sails might be used to travel between the stations, but we couldn’t come up with a reason why people would do that. Solar sails are accelerated by light pressure, and it takes too long to get enough speed to make traveling that way practical in Earth’s orbit. (Solar sails are much better suited for interstellar travel, when the ever-increasing velocity from photon pressure would efficiently accelerate the sails to near light speed.) It would be much easier to use chemical propulsion—plain-old rockets—to travel between the space stations.

But what if normal transportation had been destroyed? What if there had been a global nuclear war, and Earth could no longer re-supply the space stations? Since the space stations could not survive on their own, the only way to endure would be for the space stations to join forces, and to use the organic solar sails as a last ditch, albeit slow, way to rescue civilization.

An important point to remember is that this short story was written in the 1980s: nuclear war with the Soviet Union was considered a possibility (with all of its associated paranoia); corporate greed was rearing its head; and echoes of peace, love, and the we’re-all-in-this-together ’60s mentality permeated the culture. Additional influences included Princeton professor Gerald O’Neill, who had just popularized the idea of establishing Lagrange colonies, using immense, rotating structures to achieve artificial gravity through centripetal acceleration. To top it off, I had attended early high school in the flora-rich Philippine Islands, which provided an exotic way to introduce the transgenetic research necessary to produce organic solar sails.

We mixed these influences together to come up with three large space stations located at two Lagrange points: a Filipino colony focused on making advances in biotechnology at L-4 (funded by the US government as a bribe to keep their military presence on the Philippine Islands, to counter the perceived Soviet threat); an American corporate colony located at L-5 to perform high-risk, space-related manufacturing; and a secretive Soviet “research” station also at L-5, ostensibly to perform manufacturing as well, but in reality put there to keep track of the sneaky Americans (remember, this was Reagan-era, Evil Empire time, and at the height of the anti-nuclear movement). We then posited a global nuclear war that cut the three Lagrange colonies off from Earth, with all American space shuttles and Soviet Soyuz supply-vessels fried in the nuclear exchange. With each station having only a finite amount of supplies, they were forced to depend on each other for survival—but they had no way to travel from station to station.

With that scenario, growing solar sails to create rescue vessels made sense.

All this background, nearly a hundred pages, provided the material for “Rescue at L-5,” the short story that appeared in
Project Solar Sail
, and also published in Amazing Stories magazine as “If I Fell, Would I Fall?” I’m not sure who came up with the idea of expanding the short story into a novel, but with our extensive background research for the short story, it was fairly easy to do.

We told our agent about the novel, and he urged us to write it, and write it fast. When we finished the first two-thirds of the novel, he convinced us it was good enough to sell.

Upon receiving the novel, Betsy Mitchell, the editor at Bantam Books who eventually bought
Lifeline
, called science fiction luminary Gregory Benford to ask “are these guys for real?” After all, we had come out of nowhere to pioneer the premise of using solar sails—and living solar sails at that—to travel between the Lagrange points.

Greg assured her that we were on solid ground.

And with that, we sold
Lifeline
as well as two additional books—the critically-acclaimed
Trinity Paradox
, and the Nebula-nominated
Assemblers of Infinity
.

***