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CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a small world—or worlds. Vicki had moved from Dione to Titan for a week of familiarization and briefings at Foundation before going up to join the orbiting Aztec, now back from its trials and taking on supplies and equipment in preparation for liftout. With her was a Kronian molecular biologist called Luthis, also from Kropotkin's Polysophic Academy, who would be going as the senior member among the Aztec's scientific complement. Aztec would be the first vessel to incorporate decks fitted with experimental Artificial Gravity "Yarbat arrays" on a long-range mission. In the course of their week with SOE's Training Division at Foundation, Vicki and Luthis met a former Terran petrological technician named Tanya, who had worked for a while on excavations at one of the construction sites at Omsk, on Rhea. After the meteorite strike there, Tanya had transferred to Essen on Titan to learn about the new AG-based methods being developed for cutting and shaping rock masses of large dimensions—termed "lithofracture" and "lithoforming"—developed from the technology that Lan had helped pioneer at the Tesla Center.

Aztec would be carrying heavy-duty prototype equipment to Earth to test its efficacy on Terran materials and under Terran conditions, and hopefully to exploit its unique potential as a way of building large-scale structures using the only form of material readily available there. Tanya would be traveling back as part of the engineering-construction team being sent to get the pilot scheme up and running. Two others, going with them as AG consultants, were Jansinick Wernstecki and Merlin Friet—both of them former Tesla Center colleagues of Lan's that Vicki had heard him talk about often in the earlier days, but never met before.

* * *

Vicki and Luthis stood watching Tanya in a workroom in a subsurface part of Foundation, where a small-scale demonstration had been installed some time ago for the benefit of government officials and others curious about the new technology. In fact, a couple of news journalists had been recording here that morning for a science-interest piece being made for general circulation.

"What it does is create a high-frequency shearing force across a surface that literally splits the grain structure all the way through," Tanya said, tracking a cursor across the screen to define a wire-frame plane passing through a graphical representation of a piece of Titan rock. The rock itself, about the size of a soccer ball, was clamped in a metal frame on top of the bench beside. Three thick disks maybe a couple of inches across, attached to narrower cylinders, painted red, looking like small top hats, were cemented to the rock at strategic points. Heavy cables from the top hats connected to a rack of equipment by the bench. Tanya continued, "Basically, we use a g-wave to agitate the molecular structure on one side of the plane, and generate an interference pattern to neutralize it on the other." She kept her eyes on the screen, making a few final adjustments as she spoke. "It's like holding one half rigid while you twist the other half off—except that it's not twisted free; it's vibrated free." She was somewhat pasty in complexion and pudgy—not uncommon for Terrans who had moved to Kronia. Tanya had been among those rescued from the Terran scientific bases on Mars, and had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after the incident on Rhea.

Luthis nodded toward the image that Tanya was manipulating on the screen. "The surface that you're showing there. Does it have to be a flat plane like that? Or can you make it different shapes?"

"In principle it could be shaped, yes. But that's still in the future."

"Is it good with any material?" Vicki asked.

"As of now, we're limited to brittle things like rock, glasses, ceramics. . . . Metals are too ductile. But we're working on it."

"Okay.

Tanya checked one last time over the readings. "And we should be all set." She brought up a button on the screen, with a query requesting confirmation to proceed. Tanya confirmed the instruction. . . . And nothing happened except that a faint crack sounded from somewhere seemingly inside the piece of rock. Vicki stared at it, waited a few seconds, then looked up.

"That's it?"

Tanya smiled, evidently expecting it, as she leaned over to loosen the securing clamps. "What did you expect? A nuclear explosion?" She removed the restraint, and one half of the rock fell away in her hand to reveal a cleaving plane as flat and smooth as cheese cut by a fine wire.

"I'm impressed," Luthis said.

Tanya gestured at a larger mural screen overlooking the bench, which she had been referring to earlier. It showed the proving area about fifty miles from Essen, where the full-scale equipment had been developed and tested. A series of unnatural gouges formed by straight cuts and variously angled surfaces had been cut into the sides of a rock ridge on the surface, with the slabs and forms that had been extracted from them scattered about and in some places piled like gigantic play blocks. "When you get up to that kind of size, the exciters need to be solidly bolted in, not glued. But it works the same way."

"So if we ever have to abandon Saturn and need big shelters back on Earth, is that how we build them?" Luthis asked.

"Yes. And all kinds of other things too," Tanya answered. "It beats having to ship lots of materials all the way from here."

Luthis traced a finger along one of the exciter power cables, then turned to Vicki. "Now I think I'm beginning to see why they were in such a hurry to get that power system there that Landen designed."

"You mean the Agni?"

"Yes. The generating plant to power something like this is already there. Did they really anticipate it that far back?"

"But of course," Vicki said loyally. But in fact, she was only just appreciating it herself.

* * *

That evening, Vicki sat alone in her room in the quarters the outbound personnel had been assigned while waiting to be taken up to the Aztec. It felt depressingly like the unit she had vacated on Dione. Even with Lan and Sariena working most of the time in other parts of Kronia, their visits had meant more than she'd realized. And after the Varuna mission departed, the steadily lengthening signal delay eventually made meaningful interaction with them electronically impossible too. Robin had become progressively more withdrawn before finally joining the Security Arm, and now he had been shipped off with the reconnaissance survey sent to Jupiter—which perhaps would be best for him. Leo Cavan still stayed in touch and tried to be reassuring, telling her that it was only to be expected that young people would go through a troubled time when the world they had thought they would grow up to was snatched away from them, and in the long run he was confident that Robin would be fine. Vicki was just a mother, being a mother. . . . But the way she saw it too, he was just Cavan being Cavan.

And so she had immersed herself in her work with Emil Farzhin's group and his account of how Earth and Mars had influenced each other's histories in recent times. In conjunction with other work that had been going on, it was shedding new light on the puzzle of how living forms managed to alter so abruptly in conditions of stress and change. This was the area that Luthis specialized in and what he and Vicki were going back to Earth to investigate further.

The principal mechanism for introducing new genetic information into a species and spreading it rapidly through an initial breeding group, they now suspected, was not the sexual mixing of genes and subsequent agonizingly slow propagation of any benefits through a population. Even before Athena, this had been recognized as a major problem with the orthodox ideas on evolution, but nobody had been able to suggest anything better. Yet a far more effective process had been there all the time, capable of manifesting its effects immediately among adults already at a procreative age, and capable of appearing almost literally overnight: infection. But it had been misidentified through being noticed only when the mechanism produced harmful results instead.

The room's wall screen, which had been showing a dance troupe with the sound turned down—low-g choreography could be quite captivating—switched to a head and shoulders view of Claud Valcroix talking. The caption aztec mission below interrupted Vicki's brooding. "House. Sound up," she instructed in a slightly raised voice.

The Pragmatists were making a bid for greater influence in the Congress by arguing that since the Directorates embodied concentrations of expertise and knowledge in certain vital areas, then by the Kronians' own system of values they represented the interests of entrenched "wealth," thus violating the principles of democracy and fairness. Therefore the Pragmatists, who claimed to speak for typically unrepresented elements of the population, should be involved in their decision-making processes too. It was an obvious attempt to gain greater access to policymaking without having the votes needed for seats in the Assembly, which constituted the democratically elected arm of the Congressional system. Officers of the Directorates were appointed from within, much in the way that senators had been placed by their state legislatures under the original American system. It was an ingenious ploy, Cavan had conceded when he and Vicki spoke a day or two previously. But he couldn't see Congress buying it.

This time, however, Valcroix was criticizing the decision to send the lithoforming technology to Earth. " . . . as we saw in the demonstration given at Foundation this morning. But where are the shelters for the people who are here, at Kronia? I ask you all, does it make sense to be sending this capability for cutting and constructing huge works in rock all the way to Earth, where we have just two ships? They tell us, 'Yes, but Kronia may become uninhabitable. We have to be prepared.' I say they have everything backward. Our population, our homes, our industries, and our future—for as far as it's possible to see it at the present time—are here! Not on the ruins of a distant cosmic battlefield that for all we know contains no other human life and will not be able to for a long time to come . . ."

"House, off," Vicki told the domestic manager wearily. She sat back in her chair and stared up at the cream-painted metal ceiling, the lamp, the extractor-fan grille. Just the thought of getting away from all of it . . .

In her mind, she was soaring out and away, back to a sphere of clouds, earth, and water, close to the warmth and light of the Sun. Even if the clouds were thick and murky, the earth shuddering, and the water thrown into convulsions, it meant being able to breathe without helmets or containment; to see a wind-sculpted sky, and life, however crude, clawing its way up out of the soil. To live from day to day only for her work, leaving politics and jealousies far behind. She thought about Lan, Sariena, Charlie Hu, and Gallian—all of them out there already, and the others who would be going with her on the Aztec. . . .

Strange though the word seemed in the circumstances, yes, it would be good to go home.

 

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