Chapter Eleven
TO LIGHT A SINGLE CANDLE
“Once we clear the three-minute hold, there’s nothing that can stop Ignition,” said NovaSpot Control. “You understand that, TC, right?”
Drayax sighed as she listened to this latest debate. She was weary to her bones—andnow they had to come up with something new to hash over.
“We copy, NovaSpot,” Temporal Confinement replied. “But our power projections tell us we can’t afford to run three spare minutes of confinement just to be sure we’re covered. Safer for us just to start our power-up sequence at minus thirty seconds, just before NovaSpot Ignition. It should take no more than twenty seconds to go from a cold start to establishing the field. That gives us a solid ten seconds of full coverage before Ignition.”
“But if your fielddoesn’t form, Greenhouse will be incinerated.”
“We show 99.99 plus certainty the fieldwill form properly, NovaSpot. But with the power available, we show only 90 percent certainty that we’ll have sufficient power to provide full shielding during the danger period. If we burn up three or four extra minutes of shielding on the front end, certainty drops to 75 percent. That’s one in four that the shield will fail while you’re still pumping hard radiation at us.”
“But if itdoes fail to form—”
At long last, Drayax lost her patience. There was letting your subordinates talk through issues and there was pointless bickering. And it was easy to see the heavy hand of Chief Engineer Haress Bevard pushing everyone into this latest spat. “This is Project Director Drayax,” she said, deliberately adding her name to the title, in hopes of adding that little bit more authority. “NovaSpot Control, TC Control. This is Project Director. We have to move on. Each of you has reported to me on what you believe is the best way for your section to proceed to Ignition. I don’t think I need remind either of you that we don’t have the luxury of unlimited time for discussion.”Or would that be a curse? she asked herself. “I have to make the decision, and I have to make itnow . So we’re going to run NovaSpot the way NovaSpot wants it run—and we’re going to do the same for Temporal Confinement.” In other words, she was letting Temporal Confinement win—but she had phrased the ruling so it sounded like a tie. She could do that much to keep Bevard more or less happy. “Please confirm on that point.”
“We copy,” said the cheerful voice of Temporal Confinement.They knew they had won the point.
After a slightly too-long pause, NovaSpot Control checked in, in far-less-happy tones. “Received and understood, PD.”
“Good.” Perhaps it had dawned on Bevard that, short of refusing to start NovaSpot’s Final Ignition Sequence, there was nothing he could do, anyway. And this close to time, it was hard to imagine his refusing to play with the biggest, loudest toy he had ever had, or ever would have.
“It’s now 16:35:00,mark . We go in eight minutes. NovaSpot, commence Final Sequence at 16:40:05, for Ignition at 16:43:05. Temporal Confinement, initiate temporal field at 16:42:35—and we’ll see you on the other side.”
“And we’ll be looking younger than all of you, PD. Temporal Confinement out.”
Drayax had to smile at that. TC Control was literally correct: During the eighteen or so hours of external time it would take to get NovaSpot’s radiation output under control, time would all but stopinside the confinement. Only a few minutes would pass. Temporal Confinement was also eager to play with its new toy.
The eagerness was in her, as well. They were close, so very close. “Very well, TC Control. But just remember, those of us out here will get a chance to catch up on our sleep.” She switched her comm to the all-points link, and spoke more formally. “This is Project Director Drayax. We are go for Ignition at 16:43:05. All stations reporting go for Ignition in approximately seven minutes. All stations, recheck all radiation protection procedures and secure for Ignition.”
Villjae had promised himself something a long time ago, and now he was going to make it come true. He was going to see it—and see it by himself. Curthaus and Beseda and Bosley and the others were nice enough folk, but Curthaus was too flip, Bosley too shy and awkward, and Beseda just too damned weird to make a suitable companion at such a time. None of the other members of the team seemed any more suitable. Nothing wrong with any of them, but they weren’t what he needed just then. He had had enough of being the levelheaded leader, of dealing with personalities, of being forced to be the reasonable one because everyone else was so strange. He wanted to experience the event itself, by itself—not experience the event while feeling the need to make conversation, not be distracted from it by the need to handle someone’s delicate ego.
A quick trip to the refresher, a brisk wash-up in lieu of the shower that could come later, and a few stretching exercises, and he felt remarkably better. His arms, hands, and neck were still all sore, but not painful.
He was tempted to grab some sort of hand meal out of the dispensing machines, but he wasn’t absolutely sure there was even time for that. Not with everyone else likely to be hungry and heading for the dispensers at the same time. He wasn’t going to risk missing a spectacle his grandchildren would likely want to hear about—andwould hear about, from him, whether they liked it or not—just because there was a line at the extruder.
No. Best to get to where he needed to be, fast. In aid of that, days before, he had written a quick little systems command for the base-control ArtInt and stored it in his datapad. He pulled it and ran it. Then he headed, not for the main lift, but the auxiliary service lift, farther on down the corridor. The lift car was waiting for him, naturally. He punched in the special access code that made sure it wouldn’t leave without him, just in case someone else had the same bright idea.
The doors closed, and he rode the car up. There was something oddly pleasant about that ascent to the surface. It was private, it was quiet—and itwasn’t special. Nothing about it would decide the fate of worlds or form a lifelong memory. It was his first ordinary moment in a long time. He rode up, massaging his left hand with his right, then his right arm with his left, trying to work the knots out, not worried about anything.
The door opened, and Villjae stepped out into the north construction operations center—a grand name for what had been built as a place to store and patch up the robots that had built the Array. The building system detected his presence, and dim yellow lights in the ceiling bloomed into halfhearted life. The ops center was a windowless, bunkerlike structure. Four cargo-sized airlocks lined the south side of the building. Broken-down machines hulked in the far corners. Roller-bots, built for the sole purpose of installing the receptors into the Array, were parked in neatly lined-up rows facing the airlocks. They were a little worn and scraped here and there, but otherwise perfectly serviceable. Except, of course, the job for which they had been made was over. Perhaps some use for them would be found. Or perhaps they were as useless as their bent and broken brethren in the corner.
Villjae crossed the room, threading his way through the bots, his feet crunching on the grit and gravel the bots had carried in on their wheel treads from the dead surface of Greenhouse. He reached a rickety metal staircase on the south side of the building and climbed three flights up. It felt good to use leg muscles that hadn’t been exercised much in recent days. The stairway ended in the ceiling of the top floor. A steel-mesh hatch was set into the ceiling, and Villjae swung it open and climbed out to stand in the ops center’s observation dome. He was careful to close the hatch after him. He hadn’t come this far just to fall down a stairway.
The dome itself sat on a cylindrical base a bit over waist high. The dome that sat on the wall was hemispheric, a perfectly transparent clear plastic bubble about five meters across. Villjae looked south out over the strange and silent landscape. The huge bulk of Comfort loomed up over the western horizon, as it always did from this spot. Greenhouse’s rotation was tidally locked relative to Comfort. Everything else in the sky might change, but Comfort would always be where it was.
It was cold, deathly cold, in the dome. Slightly warmer air was starting to bloom up through the mesh openings in the hatch, and the vent system had kicked in, drawing the cooler air down through smaller grilled openings around the edge of the dome, but it would be a long time indeed before the domeseemed warm. Outside the dome the land was airless, lifeless, cold, and forlorn, lit only by the gloomy long-shadowed light of Comfort.
The Array itself was about two kilometers away, affording some sort of safety margin between the ops center and the burning heat of the SunSpot’s power beam. As the ops center had not been melted down to slag, apparently the safety margin was sufficient.
Villjae knew that the ferocious amount of power beamed down onto the Array surface had raised the surface temperature by at least several hundred degrees in the immediate vicinity of the Array. From where he stood, there was no visible sign of that heating. It stilllooked cold.
It was strange to see the Array at all. For all the endless hours he had spent working on it, Villjae had spent precious little timelooking at it. There had been a sort of orientation hike, when Rufdrop had ordered the team into their pressure suits, walked the construction site, and watched the roller-bots bolting the receptor panels into position. Villjae had been fascinated by the tour and had always meant to go out again. But he had never again gotten closer than he was at that moment.
The blue-and-silver hexagonal panels that made up the Array were still angled over toward the west, as if still reaching for the last watts of power the SunSpot might offer, or perhaps seeking in vain after power to be drawn from Comfort. But the SunSpot had set, and Comfort offered virtually no power at the proper wavelengths. The Array had done its job and sat as useless as the roller-bots down below. Perhaps the panels could be salvaged and reused somehow, but they had been designed to draw energy from highly concentrated light beams. It seemed unlikely anyone would ever need their specialized capability again.Not until NovaSpot dies a few hundred years from now, and we have to do all this again, Villjae thought. He hoped they would manage to archive all the notes and procedures from this time out, so maybe those in the future could learn from present mistakes.
All of it over with, all of it no longer needed, all of it cooling down, shedding the last of the heat of the SunSpot’s last powered pass.All of it about as useful as me, right now. Villjae knew he could find other work, that he would go on to other things—but it was hard to avoid a letdown after such an intense period of work came to such a sudden end.
But none of that was what he had come to see. Villjae pulled a pair of high-powered binoculars out of his pocket, turned them on, and hung the strap around his neck. It was going to be in the west, moving straight down, almost exactly through the centerline of Comfort’s disk. It would be very dim, very hard to see—
There! He had spotted it. A tiny grey disk, just barely above the western horizon, trailing the SunSpot in the same orbit. The SunSpot had set for the last time as it had been. The NovaSpot was about to set—and would next be seen as it had never been.
It was very close to the horizon. On a world with any appreciable atmosphere, it would have been lost in the ground haze. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, centered the grey disk in the view, and set the binocs to maximum tracking, stabilization, enlargement, and enhancement. Suddenly the little grey disk filled the view of the field glasses, standing out bright and clear against the dim bulk of Comfort. The image broke up just a trifle, and the enhancement routine put a little bit of fuzz and hash into the background, but that didn’t matter. He wasseeing it. Perhaps he would be the last man to see NovaSpot this way, as a dim grey dot floating quiet in the sky. Soon, very soon, it would look quite different indeed.
He watched through the binoculars until the NovaSpot touched the horizon, and kept watching as it slid quietly out of sight.
Villjae stood where he was, looked to the sky, and waited.
Neshobe Kalzant accepted instantly when Drayax conveyed an invitation to view the next phase from the command deck. She made her way down from the observation platform, followed by the aide who had brought the invitation. It was a very different Berana Drayax who welcomed her, compared to the poised, perfectly coiffed woman she had seen all those hours before.
“We’re nearly there, Madame Executive,” said Drayax with a weary smile. “I think we’re going to make it. For a while, I was just about convinced we wouldn’t.”
“I was starting to worry myself,” said Neshobe. “Your face was getting so unreadable that I almost didn’t want to know why. Then Icould read it—and I didn’t want to.”
“It’s nearly time, Project Director,” the aide said in a quiet, almost apologetic tone of voice.
“Good,” said Drayax. “Let’s get things started—then let the next shift take over. They’ve had a hell of a long rest. I don’t know why I assigned my shift team to take the whole pre-Ignition Sequence.”
“I do,” said Neshobe, and nodded toward the big red button in the center of Drayax’s terminal. The one button, the only button, that could start everything.
The smile faded away from Drayax’s face. “You’ve seen through me, then.”
“Why did you wire it that way?” Neshobe asked, although she thought she knew the answer.
“So no one will ever be able to wonder who did it,” Drayax said. “For good or ill, no one will ever be able to say that it was miscommunications, or a software error, or some murky system failure like the ones that almost did us in at Groundside Power. Everyone needs to know that a human being had to push the button in order for Ignition to happen. The final choice has to be adecision —not the result of some algorithm that a committee of ArtInts has chewed over.”
Neshobe nodded. She understood, better than most people would. It was important for people to know, reallyknow, where responsibility lay. But Neshobe knew something else as well—that Drayax’s ability to choose whether or not to push that button was in large part illusory. She had already made too many choices. Too much had been invested for it to be realistically possible to turn back.
If news came, that instant, that Ignition would certainly fail, then Drayax would have the courage to keep her finger off that button. But there was next to no chance of absolute knowledge about anything. It was far more likely Drayax would be confronted by some terrifying last-minutemaybe —not new knowledge, but new doubt. Would she have the wisdom to choose quickly and correctly, and, if need be, the courage not to go?
Let’s hope we don’t have to find out,Neshobe thought. She looked Drayax in the eye. Drayax nodded, and it was hard for Neshobe to avoid thinking she had read the same thought in the other’s mind.
“How close are we?” Neshobe asked, not quite knowing where to look on Drayax’s display for the main countdown.
Drayax smiled. “Quite close. I’d estimate we’ll be ready to try for Ignition in about six months.” Then she pointed to one of a half dozen countdown displays running on her board. “But we’ve got just about three minutes and twenty seconds until that goes to zero, and I have to push that button. That will send the final command to start the Ignition Sequence. And precisely three minutes afterthat, all hell breaks loose. Nothing will be able to stop it.”
Neshobe nodded, and her throat suddenly felt very dry. Her stomach knotted up. If they had made a mistake, if there was something they had missed—suppose the NovaSpot somehow consumed all its fusion mass at once, a three-hundred-year supply going up in a flash? Would even the sheltering bulk of Comfort be enough to protect them? Suppose nothing at all happened? Suppose the NovaSpot justsat there in orbit, an unexploded bomb that didn’t go off as planned—but still might?
“This is the voice of Ignition Control. We are coming upmark two minutes and counting until start of the final three-minute activation sequence. Now coming up on one minute and forty-five seconds in the count to—”
“Turn that damn thing off,”Drayax said to her aide. “This is supposed to be the one place in the Solace system youcan’t hear that man.”
The sound shield masking sound from the upper level came back on, and the voice of the Voice cut out in midword. Somehow, the tension in the control center seemed to ease as well. Neshobe smiled. Maybe that was the whole idea. If the voice of Ignition Control was irritating enough, it would keep your mind off everything else.
Now there was silence, and nothing to do but watch the clock. Two minutes. Ninety seconds. Neshobe Kalzant had been present at countdowns beyond counting. Spacecraft launches, docking sequences, demolitions, and all sorts of other highly important technical events. Always the chant began, everyone counting down together, as time drew to a close, and everyone watched the clock.
But somehow, this one was different. Maybe it was that someone should have started the chant days ago, years ago. A minute or two was not long enough. They stood in silence and watched the numbers fade away.
Berana Drayax stepped closer to her control panel, flexed her right hand, and flipped open the safety cover on the big red button. Then she pulled her hand back, unwilling to have any part of her close to that button before time.
But it nearlywas time. Neshobe resisted the urge to count down, to say the numbers. Somehow it was important that it all happen in silence.
The moment came. Drayax’s finger reached out and stabbed down hard on the button, holding it down for what seemed a long time, but must have been only a second or two. A green light came on over the button, and she lifted her finger off it. Drayax looked at Neshobe, then turned to look at the roomful of people watching her.
“Very well,” she said in a quiet voice that carried to every corner of the compartment. “Let’s see what happens next.”
Now she is where I have been,Neshobe thought.Between the order and execution, between choice and consequence. Neshobe had spent years in between saying yes to NovaSpot and the explosion that was about to happen. Now, at last, Drayax was there too. There was that strange old word—schadenfreude—“pleasure in the misfortune of others.”What sort of people would need to invent that word? Neshobe wondered. But it didn’t matter. She took no pleasure in the moment—only empathy. She knew, better than anyone else, what this time must be like for Berana Drayax.
“Coming up on ninety seconds,” someone said, breaking the silence at last. “They start forming the temporal confinement in one minute.”
“Or trying to,” said another voice, speaking in much lower tones.
And suppose the confinementdidn’t form, and NovaSpotdid ignite?“Nothing will be able to stop it.” It was hard not to hear those words again. Without the confinement to protect it, “nothing” was what would be left of the surface of Greenhouse. Everything would be incinerated.
The next sixty seconds seemed to rocket past. “NovaSpot Control reports nominal Final Ignition Sequence so far,” said one of the voices behind her.
“Coming up on Temporal Confinement Initiation,” said the other. “Make it work, dammit.”
Neshobe turned her attention to the big display screen, showing Greenhouse as seen fromLodestar VII . It hung in darkness, eclipsed for the sun by Comfort, and lit only by the dim, watery light reflected off the nightside of the gas giant. Probably even the murky view they had required image enhancement. A small, pockmarked world, thinly peopled, lightly dotted with habitat domes. And carrying all of their futures.
“Thirty seconds to Ignition. Temporal Confinement Initiation—now!”
But nothing happened. A thick, hard boot of fear kicked Neshobe in the gut, and her fists clenched tight.We are all going to die.
“It takes twenty seconds!” Drayax said. “Not yet. The confinement field should cut in about ten seconds before—”
But suddenly Greenhouse wasn’t there anymore. A perfect black disk, a hole neatly punched out of the sky, was there instead. It happened too quickly to see, all at once, with no intermediate phase. Neshobe knew that it was a sphere of black, and not a disk, but her eyes told her differently. All the visual cues said it was a perfectly flat disk. There was no limb-darkening, no highlighting or shading, to give the utter darkness any sense of three-dimensionality. It was only the absence of stars that defined the hole, the dot, the disk, the sphere, where Greenhouse had been.
Where Greenhouse still is,Neshobe reminded herself.Still there, and safe inside that time-blocking, redshifting sphere.
There were muffled shouts of surprise, and a hesitant cheer or two, but there was hardly time to react. The main screen switched to another view, from the farside of Greenhouse, centered on two dim dots of light. The closer one was SunSpot, guttering down to nothing, the last of its energies spent, its tight power beam defocused, casting hardly any light at all. But next to it, just starting to glow, just starting to flare up into light and power—there was NovaSpot, seconds, mere seconds away from its grand destiny—or the doom of them all.
They watched, and waited, for those final seconds to die. And then—
A flare of light, and Fire and Glory shone out upon the face of the deep.