Chapter Twelve

NEW WORLDS AND OLD WAYS

That part, Villjae did not see. From where he stood, in less time than the blink of an eye, the universe simply turned utterly dark. The sky vanished, the stars vanished, Comfort vanished. The confinement field had come alive, drawing on the power that his team had captured.

The darkness was all but absolute. The only light remaining was the glow coming up from the stairway and the interior of the dome, and even that was so dim it took his eyes several seconds to adjust enough to detect it. But for that light from below, he would have had no vision at all. He was suddenly glad that he had closed the steel-mesh hatch. In darkness this complete, it would be easy to become disoriented. The fear of falling down the stairs could have been enough to paralyze him. Knowing that hehad closed it—or at least fairly sure he had closed it—he wasn’t afraid—or all that afraid—to shift his stance, or turn around.

He had expected the darkness, of course, but somehow, he had not expected it to be so complete. There should have been guide running lights around the Array, safety beacons here and there—but then he remembered. He himself had ordered them all shut down to save power.

There was something altogether unnerving about looking out into so open a blackness. There was nothing but a transparent dome between himself and the sky—but no light at all showed from that sky. Absolute darkness reigned.

Time stands still,Villjae thought.In the time it takes for me to think that thought, how many hours have passed? He knew enough that it was all but impossible for there to be a clear answer to that question. The confinement field was variable in intensity, and it would take a little time for it to be throttled up to full power. They would begin at a temporal compression of about a thousand to one, then move higher as fast as possible, toward a maximum compression of at least a hundred thousand to one, and far higher if the power was there. Between the first beat of his heart and the second since the confinement came on, a few tens of seconds might have passed. Between the second and the third, a minute or two. If all went well, it would take several minutes, a half hour, an hour or more of outside time for each subsequent beat of his heart.

By now, out there, the Ignition had begun—or not. The new sun was aborning, or had met with some terrible failure, or not worked at all. Strange. They were right next to the most powerful explosion ever touched off by humans in all history—and yet there was not the slightest clue that it had happened at all.

Villjae smiled. That was, after all, a good thing—and the very thing he had spent the last two years of his life ensuring.

But he would have liked to see it, all the same.

 

NovaSpot did not rival the local sun, Lodestar—it overwhelmed it, altogether. Everywhere that NovaSpot could be seen, it lit the sky in a new and brighter day—and yet, fortunately, precious few witnessed the spectacle directly.

The timing of Ignition had, of course, been chosen to keep as many as possible from seeing it. To see that star aborning was to die, roasted by the onslaught of hard radiation. Here and there in the wide expanse of the Solacian system were a few such luckless souls: those who heard all the warnings and ignored them, those who meant to get to shelter in time but failed to do so, those on urgent errands who took one risk too many, and even those who, incredibly, never got the word that Ignition was coming, despite the endless reporting, the endless broadcasts and alerts. These few did witness it, and died.

But all the rest were shielded by the mass of a planet or satellite, by Lodestar, by heavy radiation shielding. And nearly everyone watched through the remote cameras positioned everywhere that might afford a useful or interesting view. But the sight could be as fatal to lenses as to humans. The cameras were expendable, and a good number of the closer-in ones vaporized mere seconds after transmitting the first views of NovaSpot’s Ignition. It was the radiation-hardened long-range cameras that provided the best view.

Those cameras revealed NovaSpot as a featureless, incredibly bright point of light, hard by the utterly black and featureless void that was Greenhouse. The small world was doing a fine imitation of a black hole, though of course it was no such thing. The actinic blue-white pinpoint of light had no outward effect on Greenhouse or its shielding, but the gas giant planet Comfort was hit, and hit hard. Its upper atmosphere was bombarded with every form of hard radiation and heavy particle, setting off massive auroral effects, sheets of blue and red and green fire that flared and glowed on the nightside of the planet. The lower atmosphere was suddenly subjected to light and heat a thousand times more powerful than usual. The sudden influx of raw energy set the atmosphere roiling, churning with power that upset ancient wind patterns, and destabilized weather systems centuries old. Massive lightning strikes exploded in all directions, and the cloud layers boiled over, redrawing the entire face of the world. Those who had seen the planet up close every day of their lives would find it unrecognizably changed within a few hours.

The unspeakable power of the initial blast faded slightly after a few minutes, then subsided gradually over the course of the next few hours. NovaSpot was still a monster newly unleashed, but its initial fury faded rapidly.

The engineers of NovaSpot Ignition Control set to work, tapping the massive energy of the beast they had created and using it to tame the beast, tamp down the power output, and suppress the hard radiation and heavy particles. Slowly, patiently, they worked to bring their new sun under a semblance of control, steadying it down, making it safe to be near.

It was painstaking work, but they dared not be too slow about it. No one could know for sure how intense the Greenhouse temporal confinement was, or how long it would last. No one had ever created a confinement this large, this powerful—or exposed it to this hostile an environment. They took what readings they could, and took heart from the optimistic results, but dared not have faith in them.

But perhaps Groundside Power Reception had absorbed all of the Ignition Project’s bad luck, as well as all the power of the SunSpot. Everything in the post-Ignition Control Sequence went according to plan, or even a little better. Well before time, NovaSpot was, if not completely tamed, at least brought to heel, its power, radiation, and heavy particle outputs well inside safety limits, though still above the final target levels. NovaSpot had been born, and come to life as a seething and violent star.

By the time it had completed three-quarters of an orbit around Greenhouse, NovaSpot was close to being the sort of calm and gently warming sun that would suit the purposes of any greenhouse, of whatever size.

 

Villjae stood there in the darkness, darkness as thick as velvet, as absolute as the inside of a cave, and waited to see what he had come to see.

He was getting to the point where he would be eager to see anything at all. The darkness, the blackness, was more complete, and having a more profound effect, than he would have expected. His eyes strained to make something, anything, of the darkness. He held one hand, the other hand, both hands in front of his face, and wiggled his fingers vigorously. His senses strained harder still to know something of the universe around him. He found himself becoming disoriented, unsure of where he was standing or which way he was facing—or even exactly which way was up. He found himself convinced that he was standing right by the edge of the steel-mesh hatch—and not at all convinced that he had in fact closed it.

He knew perfectly well he was a good meter and a half from the hatch, and he could remember quite clearly that he had swung it shut. But the all-enveloping darkness was the breeder of fear and doubt. It whispered that things could move in the dark, that he could have shifted his stance without noticing it, that the whole room could be moving about.

He felt as if he were standing on an angle somehow, about to fall over. He put his two hands out in front of him and shuffled forward as carefully as he could, until his left hand touched the dome. He reached forward with his right and discovered that the dome was out of reach. Somehow, he had gotten turned at an angle to it in the dark. He swung the right side of his body around and was greatly relieved to touch the dome with his right hand as well. He slid both hands down, until they came in contact with the top of the solid cylindrical wall upon which the dome sat. The join was made so that a narrow ledge, about ten centimeters wide, sat between the edge of the wall and the dome itself. He laid his hands flat on the ledge and found that his left hand felt as if it were five or eight centimeters higher than his right, though of course that could not be. The ledge between wall and dome was perfectly flat and level.

He leaned his head forward until it thumped gently against the dome. He pressed his forehead against it and felt the solidity of the cool hard plastic. He braced his feet, a bit apart from each other. He closed his eyes. By all logic, that shouldn’t have made any difference, but it made him feel better, somehow. The world wassupposed to be invisible when your eyes were shut. He forced himself to concentrate, to reorient himself, to make himself know for sure where down was, where up was, where he was.

It seemed to help. The sense that he was about to topple over, that the world was half on its side, seemed to fade away. With the world now steadier under his feet, Villjae felt calmer, better able to think about what came next, and when it would come.

But how long, in his own subjective time,had it been since the lights went out, since the temporal confinement was activated? The featureless darkness, and the all-but-absolute silence as well, gave him no way to judge. Three such meaningless minutes? Ten? Twenty? A half hour, or more?

In theory, a temporal confinement could be made self-sustaining, self-powering, drawing energy from the temporal distortion itself, though no one had ever managed it. Suppose that had happened, somehow, and Greenhouse was to be trapped forever inside this pinched-off bit of frozen time?

Absurd ideas. But in the midst of such silence, such darkness, on a day when so much physical power was set to so many remarkable purposes, what was truly impossible?

Villjae opened his eyes and pulled his head back from the coolness of the dome. Still he kept his hands on the narrow ledge, and still he kept his feet well apart and firmly braced. He knew where up and down were now, and that was at least a start, something at least that he could build on.

And he was, after all, there tosee something. Something that had not happened yet. He could wait there—would wait there—unmoving, in the silent darkness, in the strange long moment outside time, until that something came to be.

So he stood, staring out at the darkness.

 

In the space between heartbeats, the temporal confinement ceased to be, and Greenhouse rejoined the outside universe. The sea of utter darkness gave way all at once, and light was upon the face of the world—

Dazzling, brilliant, eye-stabbing light that was too much to see. Villjae had of course known how bright it would be, but he had chosen not to do anything about it. What was the point in being the first to see the world of Greenhouse lit by its new star if one saw it through filters or glare glasses or attenuators? He wanted the sensation of the honest, real, raw light of a new sun, a new day.

And now he had it, blinding bright, painfully bright. But then, at last, his dazzled eyes adjusted. There was the land before him, lit with a brilliance it had not known for generations. Still a land of greys and browns, still lifeless—but the light was a promise, and an opportunity, and life was never long in arriving once there was the chance for life. With eyes still dazzled, with patches of haze and color still sparkling in his vision, he could see new habitat domes springing up, old domes, long abandoned, but newly reborn, cool blues and greens to come, replacing the burned-out, frozen-over wastes of the Greenhouse that was.

He looked up into a black sky that seemed far less dark than the one he had seen not so long before. There it was. NovaSpot, shining down upon its world. Judging by its position in the sky, high in the east, something like eighteen hours had passed. When the confinement cut off, NovaSpot had appeared, full-blown, well into the first morning of a new day for Greenhouse.

It hurt too much to look at it for more than a moment, but a moment was all that Villjae needed. He had seen it. There it was, and if he was not the first to see it from the surface of Greenhouse, then certainly he was among the first. He dropped his eyes from the skies and again surveyed the landscape around him. He stood there a long time, imagining what would be, through eyes no longer dazzled.

After a while, he heard some small sound down below, footsteps crossing the ops room garage, coming closer. He paid them no mind, but instead looked upward to the roiling turmoil that was the surface of Comfort. The face of a world remade—there was proof of the power humanity had set to work that day. It seemed an appropriate image. After all, the remaking of worlds was what this was all about.

The footsteps came closer, and he heard the sound of someone on the stairs below. The steel-mesh hatch swung open and banged down onto the floor of the dome. There in the hatchway was Beseda Mahrlin, peering up at him.

“I thought you might be here,” she said, and came up through the hatch. She knelt, lifted the hatch, and swung it back down into place. She stood up, dusted off her hands, and joined Villjae in his contemplation of the new-made world.

“So there it is,” she said.

“There it is,” Villjae agreed. “We did it. We lit a new sun and saved Greenhouse.”

“No,” said Beseda. She was silent long enough that Villjae thought she had finished, but then she spoke again. “All we’ve done is bought some time. Time we needed, yes—but that’s all.”

“What are you talking about?” Villjae said.

She gestured out into the bright-lit landscape. “It’s necessary,” she said. “But not sufficient. We needed to do this, yes—but it doesn’t solve the core problems. The ecosystem on Solace is still in very bad condition. There are still refugees, and floods, and bandits and schemers.”

“Well, yes—but still, thiswas necessary, and important. We needed to fix Greenhouse so it can help rebuild Solace. And we did it.”

“Just barely,” she said. “You know that much, better than anyone. When they pin a medal on you for saving the day—and they will, and they should, because you did—consider why the day needed to be saved.”

Villjae was almost speechless in his confusion. The day marked what would likely be the greatest accomplishment of his life, and here was Beseda, talking in more and longer sentences than he had ever heard before, saying that it wasn’t good enough! “It needed saving because Rufdrop got himself killed before he could complete his design.”

“If Rufdrop had lived, they’d have had to wave off,” Beseda said flatly. “No Ignition. His designs were all wrong for the job—fancy, not strong. Pretty, not robust. But he was a symptom, not a cause.”

“What are you talking about?”

Beseda gestured again toward the landscape, then at NovaSpot, and then waved her hand dismissively. “This is small,” she said. “The smallest part of what we have to do to save Solace and all the people who depend on Solace—such as us. And we barely got through it. Rush, improvise, go before we’re ready, hold it all together with hacked-out ArtInts and spare cables, trust to luck. Wecan’t trust luck anymore. Never should have. Not when we’ve lucked into the mess we have. Barely made it, and getting here wore us out, used us up. We’ll need to rest, all of us. Used up treasure, too.” She gestured out toward the Reception Array, and down at the building, and the massive bunker complex, below them. “Look at all the fancy hardware we needed, that we can’t use again. Think what wecould have built, if we hadn’t had to build all this instead. Can’t afford to do that anymore.”

“We had to rush! The planetary alignments—”

“We knew when the alignments would be right way back when DeSilvo was in diapers,” Beseda said snappishly. “We just didn’t worry about it until it was nearly too late. Then we rushed too fast, spent too much, tried too hard.That’s the Solacian way.”

“What is?”

“Look in the history books. Always the same. Big delays, then the quick fix, the rush job. That’s how we started. DeSilvo spent forever telling everyone he’d found a way to terraform fast, lost time getting ready—then cut enough corners to say he got done on time.”

She shook her head and looked out on a landscape that seemed to hold far less promise than it had before. “We can’t go on this way,” she said. “Have to change. But I don’t know. Might be too late. Maybe the way things are, the waywe are—maybe we find out that we just plain can’t go on atall .”

She was silent for a while and stood with him at the railing, looking outward. “Mmmph,” she said at last. “Well, there it is. See you downstairs.”

Beseda turned, knelt, opened the hatch, and started down the stairs, carefully closing the hatch behind her, leaving Villjae wondering what the hell she had come up for in the first place.

After she was gone, he stayed there a long time, looking out on a new world that suddenly seemed a very different place than he had thought.