Starfire (50 page)

"On Sky City? Then go. You remember what Saul Steinmetz said? Sometimes when you're President, you have to do something that nobody else in the whole damn country could get away with, just to prove that you can."

"It's too late. We have an embargo on outgoing spacecraft until the storm is over—issued on my instructions."

"A good decision, I think. We've just lifted off. Take a look from the plane here, and remember it's only just starting."

Nick's face on the screen was replaced by a close-up view over the great bay at New Rio. The overall landscape was peaceful, but the nearby waters showed widely spaced spurts of foam disturbing the calm surface. An occasional sun glint came from the silver-white bellies of dead fish.

Celine glanced at the other displays scattered around her office. An unfamiliar one caught her attention. She stared for a few seconds, then said, "Don't waste time sightseeing, Nick. Get out of there and head north. At once."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm not sure, but I'd like to show you something. Can you accept visual feeds?"

"For the moment. The radio link is supposed to get noisy, but we're cleaning it up pretty well using high signal redundancy."

"This is a fiber-optic lead that the ID says is coming from Kerguelen Island, fifty degrees south in the Indian Ocean."

"I know Kerguelen. I've even been served Kerguelen land cabbage at a French embassy dinner. Famous, and supposed to be nutritious; but it tastes disgusting."

"Well, you're ahead of me—I've hardly heard of the place. But at the moment the particle storm is hitting there from almost directly overhead. A reporter suite is planted near the summit of a peak called Mount Crozier, about a thousand meters up. The mobiles can go anywhere, but the main imager looks down and across the Morbihan Gulf to a peninsula on the other side. We're getting a high-data-rate feed via landline and submarine cable, and the reporter is mixing mobile high-resolution and fixed low-resolution sequences. Tell me what you make of these."

The first image came from the fixed imager. On the island, halfway around the world from Celine, it was already close to dusk and the illumination was poor. The scene showed the surface of the shallow gulf alive with white jets of steam. Now and then a deeper eruption brought a spouting geyser meters high into the air. The bodies of a diversity of sea creatures rolled and floated half submerged in the turbulent waters. Seals? Penguins? Black-backed sharks? Killer whales? Identification would have to wait for pictures from the mobile reporters.

Beyond the gulf, the peninsula looked to be on fire. Not just the dark green scrubby bushes, but the fat round bodies of cabbagelike plants and even the windswept ground itself flamed and sparked and quivered in angry dots of red and orange.

Nick watched in silence for a while, then said, "Pretty impressive, and we still have a long way to go before maximum flux. Believe it or not, this was anticipated. It was even requested."

"Not by me, it wasn't. How do you mean,
requested
?"

"All the U.S. is north of the Tropic of Cancer, so you're shielded by Earth's mass from direct bundle impact. The Southern Hemisphere isn't so lucky. The more advance information that we have about effects, the better. A consortium of countries near and below the equator asked Sky City to run a control experiment on Kerguelen Island. Particle bundles with trajectories that terminate in and around Kerguelen are not being diverted at all. They smack right on in. Every scientist with ground-based data feeds is getting a look at what could happen to a full hemisphere of an unprotected Earth. It's tough on the local wildlife and the vegetation, but the population of Kerguelen has been completely evacuated."

"Nick . . . I don't think so." Celine had been staring at an image from one of the mobiles. The flying imager was zooming steadily in toward a starfish splash of yellow that stood out against the somber beach of the peninsula. Soon she could make out arms and legs and the dark blob of a helmeted head sticking out of the bright jacket. It was the body of a man lying facedown.

"Damnation. That's a Media Guild logo on his back." Lopez sounded more angry than concerned.

"What did he think he was doing?" Celine wanted a close-up of the man's head, but she was not getting it. "The mobiles can go anywhere that the reporter tells them. Isn't the reporter smart enough to know what's worth imaging, or ask for studio guidance when it's not sure?"

"Of course it is. Celine, you're looking at human stupidity and arrogance. The reporter can handle the job; it was
designed
for it. But I've seen this over and over. No matter what the event—hurricane, riot, particle storm, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, you name it—and no matter how much you warn people, some idiot will decide he can ride it out and get a news exclusive by recognizing something that 'only a human can tell is important.' I bet this one's a freelance. He heard through the wires that Kerguelen had been picked out for special attention, and he went there deliberately."

Now that Nick had made the identification, Celine could recognize the small black video unit that sat a couple of feet away from the man's outstretched right hand.

She asked, more to say something than because she cared to know the answer, "How do you think he died?"

As she spoke the body's left arm jerked to one side, giving her the momentary impression that the man was still alive. Then she saw the puff of smoke close to the shoulder.

"He died like
that
," Lopez said. "See, another one just hit him."

Celine glanced at the data table accompanying the Kerguelen display. "It's surprising that he would be hit twice. The particle bundles on Kerguelen are arriving at a rate of three per minute per hundred square meters, and they're coming down close to vertical. An upright human provides a target less than half a square meter in area. You'd expect to be able to stand outside for an hour before you'd get hit. And he was hit
twice,
counting that last one."

"We don't know how long he stood around taking pictures. But let's say he was unlucky as well as stupid."

"
Extremely
stupid. See, he's wearing a hard hat—heaven knows what he thought that would do for him. The particle bundles are whipping in there at thirty thousand kilometers a second."

There was a five-second silence before Nick said, "Maybe none of us is too smart in situations like this. I should have known better, but I told my staff to put on hard hats until they could head for the deep shelters. And now you've got me wondering about the cross-sectional area of this suborbital, and the particle rate over the Caribbean."

It sounded like a rhetorical question, but Celine happened to be able to answer it. "Once you're north of Venezuela, you'll be safe if you keep below a couple of hundred kilometers altitude. Your path puts you behind Earth relative to Alpha C."

"Safe." Lopez laughed, but Celine would bet that he was not smiling. He went on, "I like that word,
safe.
Is anybody safe? Is the particle beam still converging?"

"Faster than ever, according to Sniffer reports."

"Then we better hope that our smart boys and girls on Sky City know what they're doing. Otherwise, we might as well all be on Kerguelen Island and finish up like
him
."

Lopez and Celine fell silent. The sea boiled and the land burned, while drifting black smoke intermittently hid the forlorn yellow-clad figure on the beach. The bodies of marine animals of all sizes darkened the lifeless shore of the gulf. Mobiles, most of them no bigger than a cicada, flew over and under the water, seeking targets. Their small size provided some immunity from particle bundle impact.

But you can't shrink a human down to cicada size,
Celine thought.
And humans are what this is all about. Am I looking at my own future on that screen, and the future of everybody on Earth? Will only the machines be left as observers in another month or two? Come on, Nature. Let's get this over with—one way or another.

In front of her, the Kerguelen Island data showed the bundles arriving more and more frequently. After a fifty-year journey through interstellar space, the particle storm from Alpha Centauri was ready to show its power.

34

Maddy had heard the official Sky City line: When the storm hit, you would be better off here than anywhere else on Earth or off it. The defense system would concentrate on protecting Sky City, Cusp Station, and the field generators, even if it was effective nowhere else. You should be especially safe if you stayed near the rear face of the disk, the one that pointed away from Alpha Centauri. The city was a hundred and ninety meters thick. Every centimeter of that thickness would help to slow or stop the flying particle bundles.

Maddy had listened to all that and been unpersuaded. She was not a specialist on the effects of high-speed particle bundles, but she knew a lot about human nature. You tried not to worry people by telling them things they could do nothing about. Sky City might be safe, or it might prove very unsafe. Now, as she left the information center and wandered toward the rear face, she was starting to tilt toward the second opinion.

She could see the marks left by the bundles that had made it through the defense system. The wall seals, designed to protect the city from micrometeorite impacts, had no trouble closing the holes. However, the seal marks sat not only in the forward walls of chambers. For every one of them, another matching mark could be found in the rear. The particle bundles could not be stopped by a wall. They came into a chamber, crossed it, and went right out the other side.

Her idea was confirmed as she approached the rear face of Sky City. There were no fewer holes here than in the information chamber, close to the front. What there were—because people had come to the rear-facing chambers, seeking safety—were more casualties.

The first one that Maddy saw was an old man with an injury to his right hand. The particle bundle had drilled a neat hole through his palm, removing flesh and bone with surgical precision. There was no blood, and you might easily have missed the wound if the man were not holding his hand out in front of him. He was suffering the triple effects of shock, painkillers, and sedatives. He sat on the floor, arm extended, jaw sagging, tears trickling down his cheeks. Whoever had provided the painkillers had moved on, leaving the man alone.

Maddy went over to where he leaned against the wall. "Are you all right?"

Stupid question. Of course he wasn't all right. He stared at her and mumbled something.

"What? Say that again."

Maddy bent close. She heard his faint words: "I came to Sky City because it's easy on your heart."

"Do you feel dizzy? Are you in pain?"

"Extend your life for fifty years, they told me. Safer than the telomod treatment, they said. No danger of cancer. I flew up to Sky City because my heart wasn't good."

"Is someone coming back for you?"

"Look what they did to me."

It was no good. She wasn't getting through. Maddy raised the old man to his feet, and he offered no resistance.

"Come on."

Taking most of his slight weight, she led him on a spiral course downhill toward the city perimeter, until she came to an open area filled with people. It had been converted to a makeshift emergency room.

Maddy set the old man on one of the beds and placed his wounded hand where it could easily be seen. As she was straightening up, a woman in a pink housecoat approached.

"You can't leave him here." The woman was perfectly made up and wore expensive jewelry, but she had suffered her own narrow escape. She had a swath cut through her red hair, a cylindrical furrow that missed her scalp by a fraction of an inch. "These are private quarters. We have no space for strangers."

Maddy said mildly, "If you can explain that to him, I'm sure he'll leave."

"This is disgraceful. We paid for the best location on Sky City, and we were promised safety and security. And do we have it? We do not."

"I'm sure that Sky City is the best possible place to be." Sometimes the official line had its uses. "The defense system will protect us better than anywhere else."

"That's not good enough. Do you see what happened to my hair? That particle thing might easily have hit me. I am going to file a formal complaint with Bruno Colombo."

"I think you ought to do that. I doubt if he's busy." Maddy turned before the woman could reply. She went on her way, heading toward the rear face.

She thought,
You might easily imagine, spending time with John Hyslop and his group, that everyone on Sky City is supercompetent and superdedicated. But even here you can find stupidity and selfishness.
She recalled Gordy Rolfe's words when he first hired her for the Argos Group: "You might say, well, if people weren't so dumb, we'd have no reason to exist, but I like to think of it differently. Sure, we take money from stupid people. But we also give service. We
protect
them from doing something even dumber with their money." Someone with Maddy's skills would make a living on Sky City with no difficulty.

If, that is, you and Sky City and Earth survive.
Maddy looked at her watch. Forty-seven minutes to the storm peak. How much of the chaos around her was the fault of Gordy Rolfe and the Argos Group, delivering defective materials to Sky City? If she lived, she was going to find out.

A sharp
ping
sounded, and Maddy saw a streak of blue light just a couple of feet in front of her face; another particle bundle through the defenses. All the evidence suggested that she was no safer here than up near the front of Sky City with John Hyslop. So why wasn't she with John, where she most wanted to be?

Not hurrying, Maddy began her return to the engineering information center.

35

From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

The RV jacket worn by Seth Parsigian was less than totally satisfying. It provided clear visual and auditory signals, but for me, attuned as I am to olfactory and tactile stimuli, Sky City remained no more than a hollow shadow of reality. Attempts to draw supplementary information from Seth proved a waste of time. "Smells of
what
?" I said.