It was bright.
Not hydrogen bomb bright, but atomic bomb bright, which was norminal. The log-brightness from the cameras confirmed that at least. It looked pretty damned bright on the monitor, too. The visible light camera had a mechanical iris, and she could see from the live capture that the iris was stopping down, half a tenth a second to the stop, preserving the tiny and sensitive light gathering chip at the bottom of the camera.
The new star faded, almost as quickly as it had erupted, swallowed by an expanding shell of grey dust. The boxcar sampling spectrometer beeped in mathy satisfaction a tenth of a second later.
“114 terajoules,” Bender murmured, then again, loud enough to trigger the vox. “’Spec says 113.9 TJ, confirmed!”
“Sir Isaac Newton said 113.8. Our grandkids can fight over whether the spread was from the instrument or the prediction,” Krys.
The headset crackled again. Sandi’s voice.
“Microsats are good to track the spall, we’re back Nearside in about four minutes. What’re ya gonna say, Cap?”
“Ha, ‘in work’,” said MaryLiz. “If I tell you now, I’ll be a mess when I tell Earth.”
No one knew a lot about Nome.
Nome was a surfer, that was for sure, one of the many sun-bleached blondes who landed at South Padre for the waves, and stayed for the scenery. Nome could repair small gasoline engines, a niche market to be sure in an age of graphene-electric farm tractors. MaryLiz had been astonished when Nome managed to arrange an emissions-scrubbing add-on to the Ranch’s one tiny petroleum cracking plant and commemorative Texas oil well, its output destined for camp lanterns and the fuel tank of Jes’s beloved 1991 Toyota Camry. Platinum wires in the emissions stream produced a tiny amount of electricity, which Nome had demonstrated triumphantly by powering the cracking shed’s LED block from it. Of particular pride was that Nome’s solution had been engineered using largely found objects. Nome had even, on the heels of the triumph, made a joke: “You had an extra sink strainer basket, an electroplating bath, AND a platinum plated souvenir! What was stopping you ‘clever engineers’?”
MaryLiz smiled to remember the non-petroleum solvents spilled that night to celebrate one less mole per hour of carbon going up the chimney. Five months later, when Hurricane Henrietta washed Sustainaville out to sea, MaryLiz had looked to the surfers as natural navigators of wind and rain. Some of them had invaluable sailing experience. Nome didn’t, though gamely executing every instruction given by the experts.
Becalmed in the eye of Henrietta, on the vast pontoon craft lashed together from the buoyant remains of Sustainaville’s dwellings and outbuildings, there was suddenly, for the first time in four days, nothing to do.
MaryLiz came from below to find Nome at the rail on the port side of the prow, staring at the eyewall, fifteen miles away. It was a hard thing not to stare at.
To her surprise, Nome spoke first. “It’ll be twelve hours and then we’re going to be back in it again. Tops.”
“And you told us that you’re not a sailor, just a surfer. Not a bad meteorologist, though?”
“I grew up in Tornado Alley. Me and storms are a thing. When I was a kid I built my own weather station. Balloon barometer, sling psychrometer made from alcohol thermometers to measure relative humidity, the whole nine yards.
MaryLiz stepped up to the rail. “And this storm?”
“It’ll be okay. Or it won’t. Want to know what someone told me once?”, Nome said.
“Yeah, of course I do.”
“I discovered something once. In a field I’d never formally studied in school. It was waiting to be discovered, obvious when you looked at it right. Not Einstein level, but I’m the person who happened to do it, out of a thousand people who could have done it.”
MaryLiz smiled. “Sounds like a special place to be!”
Nome laughed. “You’re damned right it is! I was so stoked. But I’d been guided in that field by experts who took me under their wing from the start. They petted and praised me. But it hurt, in a way, because I knew that so many of them had been working in the field much longer and harder than I had. Before I was born, even, and I was still very young. It was only because of their mentorship that I was there, on the day. It’s only because of them that I was there to see it.”
MaryLiz thought Nome would choke up, but it didn’t happen. She lowered her voice to just what could be heard over the light wind in the improvised rigging.
“And you felt guilty, because your teachers deserved it more?”
“Yes, after a time. At first, I myself didn’t realize that what I’d found would turn into a big scientific deal-e-o,” Nome said, and took a breath. “It was that night, after we were all home. The lead researcher, Jamie, sent me a private email. The first thing Jamie said was, don’t tell anyone. There were reasons that what I’d found needed a managed media treatment, which indeed happened just ten days later.
Jamie even said, don’t tell friends and family who you think are so outside the field that they won’t care, because information can leak, very, very fast.”
“The other thing Jamie told me to do was this, ‘Write about it now, before you lose perspective.’ He himself was a published author (I had been around while he was writing his major book). I did like Jamie asked. I wrote it all down, what happened on the day, what I was feeling, my best knowledge about how what I found fitted into the overall history of the field.”
The wind changed direction subtly, and they both felt the torque on HMS Starbase through the plywood lashed to the deck. The eyewall seemed neither closer, nor farther away.
MaryLiz asked, “Can I read it?”
“Sure,” Nome said, “It’s published, I’m not ashamed of it, even though I’m older now. I was told to do it by someone who at the time was even younger than I am now. I am proud of it, but it does seem a million years ago, when I do read it again from time to time, it doesn’t even seem like it was me.”
MaryLiz said, “I’d like to read it.”
Sandi’s voice came over headset. “Nearside, one minute. Telemetry good from Moonsat-V. High gain and live voice back in about 50 secs. Data looks great from here, they’re getting that and a bag of chips more, Earthside.”
MaryLiz smiled inwardly. Sandi normally never wasted a syllable, not even one, not on comms. What wasn’t said: “Cap, announce this thing to the world and then it’s just freeze-dried ice cream all the way home.”
True to form, Sandi had simply thrown the high gain antenna ping rate onto Cap’s console so MaryLiz could monitor it personally. When time ran out, and the signal came back, MaryLiz’s overrode vox and keyed up her mic to speak.
“Madrid, Inanna-7 actual, comm check.”
The signal raced across the aether. 2.5 seconds later came the reply. “Inanna-7, Madrid.”
“Madrid, and to our friends all over the solar system, this is Inanna-7. I’m watching earth rise over the limb of the Moon as we speed back to Earth, and our friends and families. Everyone here is in good spirits. We had to tell Krys not to drink our surplus hydrazine in celebration…. That’s not fair, Krys is as ready as any of us are to be back home. As our joke specialist it’s hard not to give as good as we’re nearly always happy to get from Krys.
“The six of us just witnessed an event that has implications beyond the imagination of all our novelists, and I’m sure you’re seeing the hi-res as I speak. With the guided impact of Asteroid Tiamat, humankind’s centuries imagined dream of a radio telescope on the lunar far side is now all but complete. Even if the deployment of the reflector net and antenna structure in Abzu Crater takes not just another ten years, but a thousand, to complete, this paraboloid, already achieves one purpose, in itself.” MaryLiz took a breath. “It ensures that humankind’s legacy of dedication to scientific exploration will outlast humanity itself.”
MaryLiz shut everyone’s mics back over to internal vox. It was a while before anyone said anything.
The wind wasn’t blowing anymore. Ta climbed the pile of plastic bins up to the chicken coop, lashed to the deck of “HMS Starbase” as someone had dubbed the floating remnants of Sustainaville. Perky Sledge, the Gray Momma, and Florence clucked and sniffed Ta’s hand. They were all okay! But the nests were a mess.
Ta remembered Arjuna said an equal and “opposite” storm was coming, opposite meaning from the opposite direction. Ta fumed, and stared at the veil of cloud so far away, “Opposite direction.” Could the stupid wind not make up its mind?
Tap, tap, tap.
The computer is still alive, Krys. It has nothing new to report, Krys. You’ve tapped it five times a second for the last three minutes, which is 600 times, Krys. No. 900.
Cap’s switched comms back to vox, Krys. Give it a sec, Joke Specialist. OK, go.
“So… how y’all feelin’?”
The headphones lit up with relieved laughter. Cap snorted, happily, “You all!!!” Someone clapped noisily.
Krys dialed up the hi-res camera view of earthrise for everyone to enjoy, and the crew fell happily silent again.
Krys stretched, and was asleep by the time the engine lit for TEI.
Nome squinted at the tablet. The sea was calm, but MaryLiz noticed that one of Nome’s hands still firmly clasped the railing.
“I’m not sure I like it,” Nome said, and handed the tablet back.
“Human hubris?”, asked MaryLiz.
“No, the moon’s a dead object, and there’d be no significant effects that the moon hasn’t experienced a million times before, I get that. Rocket people are good.”
Nome gestured towards the spaceport on the horizon, without looking. Even in their impossible situation, there it was, their ever-present metaphor for the world of cosmic engineering. “It’s just… how it’s supposed to look when it’s done. Like a big eyeball staring out into space.”
MaryLiz laughed. “That’s exactly what it is! Oh, that’s good. We can totes start a campaign to nickname it the Big Eyeball.”
“I’d really rather we didn’t!” The eye of Henrietta was too warm to justify shuddering but Nome seemed to, anyway.
“At least you won’t ever be able to see it from here,” said MaryLiz.
“Yes, that would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if the side we see were ever defaced, like some old cartoon. Where did you get this proposal?”
“It’s old news, Nome. This was in Scientific American before I was born.”
Nome had stopped listening. “The Death Star pew-pew dish.”
“From Star Wars? Not even. The paraboloid is a few kilometers across, it’s tiny compared to the moon. Plus, it’s dead center on the equator, the Death Star had it up one side of the ball.”
Nome feigned indignation. “Not in the scene with the stolen plans, it wasn’t! It was smack dead center.”
“The rebels stole an early draft. Remember, the empire had that committee? No wonder the design changed.”
A slow swell rippled through the structure of HMS Starbase. Ropes creaked. There was a breeze again.
“Think we should check on some things?” Nome asked, meaning the integrity of the floating hab.
“Mos’def,” said MaryLiz. “I’ll go with you.”
“Cap, Imaging.” It was Sandi.
“Go Sandi,” said MaryLiz.
“The media’s got their fill of boring earth B-roll. Scope’s yours if you want it. The Americas are in view. Weather’s good in the Gulf.”
“Thank you, Imaging.” MaryLiz hadn’t explained her request for scope time at this point in the schedule, and Sandi was the kind of friend who didn’t need to ask.
MaryLiz traced the familiar coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula, osculated by the remnant of the Chicxulub impactor. So strange, she thought. I just helped to commit the first act of cosmic vandalism to upstage the event that killed the dinosaurs.
What would a civilization think of Abzu Crater, 65 million years from now? For it would remain, even if only a precisely shaped empty hole in the lunar regolith, shocked quartzes dusted with a fine coating of micrometeorites, while on earth, continents would still be waxing and waning, every place familiar to her buried under a thousand feet of fresh coral, or subducted back into the mantle. A new earth, as alien as the present one would appear to the dinosaurs who lived to see that last great day. MaryLiz swiped the view northwest along the coast and zoomed. There was a tiny delay while the inchworm drive in the telescope obeyed. The telephoto lens was near the end of its limit. Hopefully Krys wouldn’t wake up and decide to test the RCS.
There was the familiar bow of South Padre Island, now protected from hurricanes, in the aftermath of Henrietta, by an artificial reef. Twelve years later, some of the older slab foundations still lay bare, unrebuilt, but there was New Sustainaville, anchored to the island by steel cables and concrete blocks, purpose built to weather the worst that nature could do.
A couple on jet skis traced graceful curves of spray through the surf, their wakes intertwining a fleeting caduceus in the waves. “I could send them the ultimate honeymoon photo,” MaryLiz thought. Then her eye caught, behind the breakwater, Starbase Park. There was the spray pad, the jungle gym, and the public sculpture made of the remains of the intrepid HMS Starbase. And there was the picnic shelter, with its unusual roof….
Nome and MaryLiz found the sailor surfers stretching tarps and cargo netting over one of the more vulnerable sections of the hab.
“Spraycrete.”
“What?”, asked MaryLiz.
“There’s three bags of spraycrete in the ballast pile, under the jonboat. I helped load them. Spray concrete mix. No sprayer, though.”
“And this is helpful how?”
“It’s got a drying accelerator in it. Fast cure. Even in this humidity, we could smear it on the netting and it’d solidify by the time the eyewall hits us.”
MaryLiz wrinkled her nose. “It’d be a mess to make. It looks pretty strong as it is. Doesn’t have to be solid, just secure.”
“It was Scientific American.”
“What?”
“You mentioned Scientific American. I used to read old issues of it. Print ones, on paper. They were in my grandparents’ attic. There was an column once on analog computation. Using real world physics to solve numerical problems, instead of digital algorithms. Like sorting numbers from a list by using a bundle of individually measured pieces of spaghetti. Once you have them all measured you just stand the bundle up on a flat surface, and the piece that sticks out the highest corresponds to the highest number on the list, and so on. The setup takes a while, you have to cut all those pieces of spaghetti, and it’s a pain to measure them once they’re sorted, but the actual computation is almost instantaneous, and spaghetti bundles scale much better than lots of digital sorting methods. Linear time versus quadratic time, that sort of thing.”
“Neat, but spraycrete?” MaryLiz wondered how this person ever became a surfer.
“Oh. It’s a method in designing load bearing structures with curved surfaces, using gravity to calculate the optimal shape. You build the model upside down, and gravity pulls it into the best shape for rightside up. In the article it said you could dip the flexible model in glue and let it dry in place before you flip it. So suspend the net by its edges and let it sag in the middle however it does. Spraycrete it, it hardens, we skin it with tarps, flip it over, done. Optimizes volume and strength. Probably more aerodynamic, too. It’s gonna get windy again.”
MaryLiz stepped forward. “Jude, Nome has an idea.”
Once the idea was explained, Jude had only one question: “Where is all this spraycrete?”
Del went off to find more people. Three more, which would be enough. One of the rocket people even (miraculously!) brought a garden trowel. Nome split the first of the bags open with it. Drinking water was scarce, so they used seawater, mixing it into the open bags.
Stretched into a square, the center of the net sagged almost to the deck, about six feet lower than the edges, the maximum height the volunteers could lift them.
No one knew any sea shanties. An elderly chemical engineer, silver hair streaked with grey concrete, exclaimed “We’re gluing tiles on the Space Shuttle!”
Standing on the deck holding the net while the spraycrete cured for four hours was too much to ask of anyone, so shifts were devised. Those relieved of net duty relashed hab sections and bailed seawater from the bilges of the boats at the core of HMS Starbase.
By the time the first gusts arrived from the impending eyewall, it was the easiest thing in the world to let the wind catch the underside of the completed shelter to flip it “bottom side upwards,” as Nome said.
Carried and lashed into place, the shell measured ten meters on a side, with room enough for the castaways to shelter underneath. The sailor surfers instantly moved to reinforce the shell’s interior with improvised struts cabbaged from the rest of the hab, including a particularly expensive surfboard gracefully relinquished by its mournful owner under earnest assurances of recompense.
The eyewall was less than two miles away when someone tugged on MaryLiz’s sleeve. MaryLiz looked down at the child. “What is it, Ta?”
“MaryLiz, can my chickens go in the shell?”
Krys woke up to a panel of all green status lights but one.
Inanna’s standard broadband Internet connection was routinely switched off for mission critical moments, by way of conserving bandwidth on the high-gain, and had remained that way since fifteen minutes before LOS prior to the impact of Tiamat on the lunar farside.
Personal Internet access for the crew was by definition non mission critical, and the engineers back on earth had rather pointedly omitted any mention in the checklists of turning it back on again. Krys turned it back on again. Tap.
The Wifi router woke up, shook hands with Goldstone, and Krys’s own notifier beeped. It was a text from Sandi. Sent over the normal Internet. From someone who was strapped in right there. “Krys, Cap asked for the scope. She’s looking at home. Don’t use the RCS.” Krys pulled up settings and added a mollyguard to the RCS control, so as not to forget. Tap. ACK Sandi’s message, Krys.
Sandi worshiped Cap. Joke? No. Simple thumbs up emoji.
No, a heart. Tap.
MaryLiz heard the message chimes from the mid-deck before her own notifier chimed. It was a video, with sound. The social media account it originated from bore only the name “Nemo”, but there was something about the avatar icon. A low res photo of a tattered bit of cargo net, crusted over with spraycrete. MaryLiz hit the play button.
“Hey, ‘Cap’, as I’m sure everyone must call you now. I was just in the ‘ville, heard y’all are headed home. I guess you got your eyeball put right where you wanted it. There’s gonna be a dust halo tonight, but they say you need binoculars to even have a chance of seeing it. Rocket people are good.
“I walked out to Starbase Park about an hour ago, thought of you. We got a decent voyage onboard that wreck, and I’m glad that some of it survives. Sailor surfers and rocket people make good teamwork. In my case, just a surfer, but… HEY! I am sort of a surfer sailor now!
“I’m hanging out underneath the shell until it gets dark and I can see the stars. I know you’ll be on the other side of the earth by then. 100,000 miles of distance, and 8 thousand of them solid rock. If the
South Padre constabulary question me, I’ll say I’m offering my free services as a historical interpreter and volunteer tour guide.
“I’m glad the shell survives. I think there’s lizards living up inside the armature now. Something’s moving up in there, anyway. Who knew that gravity could be such a useful computer?
“They say 40 hours till you do your screamin’ reentry. See you when you get back if you’re not a crispy critter. Oh, and you should meet the new couple, they showed up with fancy jetskis, and now they’re over taking the tour from the rocket people.”
Nome swung his camera around. Over the jungle gym and the splash pad, MaryLiz could see the low and efficient bungalows of New Sustainaville, their aeroshell roofs turned against the wind, and, across the water, the shining metal halide lamps of the spaceport.
The picture froze. End of the video.
MaryLiz keyed the mic. “Krys, thanks for the WiFi. Heard your beeps on mid-deck. There’s a lot of people that will be glad to see us. Sandi, break out the freeze dried ice cream.” Sandi said, “I lied, I already ate it all up on the trip out. But I have 750 milligrams of cocktail sauce with everyone’s name on it except Rony’s, and I’m eating theirs!” It was a hackneyed but unavoidable joke: no spacefarer had eaten freeze dried ice cream on a voluntary basis on orbit for more than three weeks after it was developed, more than a hundred years ago.
Krys, Joke Specialist, said nothing, but chuckled happily over the feed.
A few seconds later, MaryLiz felt the RCS fire up for the first time since TEI. Krys just has to tap controls. Krys is om the mid-deck living a best life, tapping controls and “Testing stuff, Cap, it’s why you brought me!” MaryLiz smiled.
Yes, Krys, the RCS still works. You’re a good pilot, Krys, you follow the checklist, including the discretionary backlist of “nice to haves”, including pre-insertion RCS testing, Krys. Krys, that’s why we brought you, you were born to tap controls. Thanks for waiting until after my scope session, Krys. She’d say all that to Krys’s face when they were back on Earth, and it was safe to spill solvents.
The scope session.
The Net. The roof and the net. And gravity. And computation. And Abzu Crater. The paraboloid antenna.
A thousand years, or ten.
MaryLiz felt the RCS fire up a second time, to cancel the brief spin of Inanna induced by the first burn. Sensation in the inner ear told her that the spacecraft was now settled into a fresh attitude.
On impulse, Bender raised the window shade, to see the Earth centered, dead square, in the window, the plane of the window itself dead normal to the view. A present from the pilot, addressed specifically to her: at this attitude, she alone could see the Earth in this way, framed in a perfect surround of metal and plastic.
Headset audio went active. Had to be Krys. Who else audibly smiled over comms before even saying a word?
“About three arc seconds off true dead-nuts South Padre, Cap. Had to waste some more of that surplus hydrazine you told Earth about. RCS good to go.”
From: MaryLiz Bender, Rocket Patrol, Boca Chica, TX To: Carlen Standish, Director of EASA. Washington DC Via: EASA DSN Canberra High-Gain Subj: Primary reflector deployment, Project Eyeball
“Carlen,
“I have reviewed the figures you sent me. They presuppose funding an astronaut legion expected to build the reflector into the Abzu like the workers who hacked Arecibo out of Puerto Rico had to do, except on the far side of the Moon. I note that it’s reasonably argued in the press that Earth has other things to spend money on than a trillion bucks’ worth of lunch and oxygen for a hundred Neil Armstrongs for three years and a half.
“There’s another way.
“A colleague of mine once drew my attention to the efficacy of analog computation. The ordinary forces of nature may be pressed into service to compute the solution to a physical problem which otherwise defies easy numerical analysis by traditional procedural methods of computation.
“In our case, the force of gravity lends itself to the purpose of analog computation.
“Could the entire Eyeball reflector, a paraboloid latticework of insulated wires and panels, be deployed as a single package, from lunar orbit? If so, the number of Neil Armstrongs could be greatly reduced.
“Ejected into Lunar free fall, the package would stay as deployed, a tangled mess, like a net draped haphazardly over precious cargo at sea. Probably worse: imagine Galileo dropping not a cannonball and a feather, but a cargo net full of random junk.
“We can do better. Imagine that only the center of the antenna lattice package is in free fall: the edges are held up, delayed in their acceleration, by low thrust rockets at the net’s edges: cheap, and, by design, not even strong enough to overcome the Moon’s gravity.
“The middle of the net, then, accelerates faster than the edges. The package distends into a paraboloid, and the whole affair settles into Abzu Crater in perfect shape, as neat and gently as we like, at a fraction of the cost of manual installation, with nothing but payload assist modules we’ve been using for 75 years.
“That’s my Karman line view of the situation, at least I can’t think of anything else right now to add (gravity sickness, I hate this planet). Cost analysis spreadoc attached. Sheet 1 is budget savings and workflow comparison, Sheet 2 is all partial differential equations to demonstrate the point, originating with Archimedes’ work on conic sections. Krys, our pilot, assures me that the astrodynamics section is “verified by peer review and footnoted.” I trust someone under you will probably agree, considering the source.
“In the cost analysis section, you will see yourself that the major cost savings is catastrophic only to the idea that Eyeball will be hard to build….” MaryLiz hit send, and nestled her micro-G atrophied neck back into the gel pillow, embraced by the pull of Texan gravity.
The landfall of Henrietta had been annoying to Perky Sledge, alpha hen – by a quarter of a kilogram, where it counted – of Sustainaville.
Unsettled weather, Perky could deal with. Perky liked it. Seeing scudding south clouds, horizon to horizon was part of Perky’s birthright. Near as Perky could remember, there was no one who had seen such sights longer.
A couple of Doodlebugs poked up from the ground. Nothing had really changed. They submerged again. Percy enjoyed the aftertaste of last night’s mealworm treat from the Imprinted. The taste had been, still was, delicious. There had been plenty of it.
It was hard to imagine a more hospitable place in which to conduct one’s business. Indeed: it was hard to imagine anything at all.
Perky’s brain had first been provoked not by the weather, but by the sqawking of the taller bipeds outside the mesh over not one, but (last she could remember) three sleep cycles. Then there were unfamiliar sounds. Stable structures being uprooted, things banging together like a water dish tumped over onto a concrete floor.
More squawking, pitched higher. Perky’s two deputies were now also on alert, judging their leader’s alert stance and craning their necks to follow her gaze: first to the source of the noise being made around them on the island, then, with increasing alarm, on Perky’s part and those of her tribe, to the rising push and flow of the wind. If that weren’t enough, soon the immutable floor of the coop was rising and falling as if according to some sick chickeny dance.
Then spinning. And darkness. And water. Perky closed her eyes against the spray. More squawking, sometimes growing fainter or louder. This time, she and her sisters were joining in.
The Imprinted was coming up to the wreckage of her home, climbing on the brightly colored bins. The Imprinted placed a hand between the slats, and Perky promptly bent her head against it, soaking in the smell of the Imprinted, and whatever scentful news might be along for the ride.
“You’re alive, you’re okay.” The words of the Imprinted meant nothing of substance to Perky, but sounded reassuring. Perky fell asleep, and woke up in a perfectly arranged nest, just like she liked it. There was also feed corn, at least a little. Percy ate some, and fell back to sleep.
It was sleep cycles later. The same squawking from the tall ones. Then silence. Then the awful sound of the wind came again. The coop began a slow, elliptical rock, side to side, up and down. The wind rose to a howl. Perky felt her eardrums pop, first one way, then the other. It was pretty hard to stay on ones own eight claws.
Then, faint squawking. “The hab’s gone, the moorings broke. Nome’s shell willl hold them. Grab the bins, get one hand on the coop if you got one. There go the bins! — They’re full of air! Keep track where they go!”
Squawk. Perky may have chimed in. It was hard to tell whose voice was whose, with the sound of the wind.
More water, more wind and squawking, on all sides.
Perky’s brain settled down after four sleep cycles. She was back on South Padre Island, and a warm rising sun shone unobstructed warmth into the coop. Percy felt slightly annoyed, but couldn’t quite remember why. Falling asleep in the sun again seemed the better option, overall.