Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“Sorry. Just playing around with stupid names for this place. Everything still looks good, so I’m going to take a look outside. Here goes.”

Bony took a deep breath, added, “I hereby name this planet — Limbo ,” and stepped into the pale green unknown beyond the open hatch.

Ten days. Ten days, to find and recruit five people.

That was only one every two days. It didn’t sound bad — until you realized that when last heard from the men and women you needed had been scattered all over the solar system, everywhere from the sun-skimming Hades of the Vulcan Nexus all the way to the Oort Harvester, rolling along in its multimillennial orbit half a lightyear from Sol.

So you might as well tackle an “easy” one first. Chan cleared the final Link exit point, sited conveniently on an island close to the geometrical center of Marslake, and stood for a couple of minutes adjusting to the changed air and gravity. He reflected that before the Link system, even this undemanding destination would have been a challenge. During the first centuries of space exploration, travel times and access to moons or planets were decided less by distance than by relative orbital velocities and the strength of gravity wells. Earth was a major challenge. The old space traveller’s complaint, “If you wanted to explore the Universe, you wouldn’t start from here,” had been coined for Earth. Venus, almost as massive, was little better. While as for Jupiter, you might fly down into the roiling clouds and eternal hurricane winds, but it would be a one-way trip. The planet’s vast gravitational pull would prevent you ever getting out.

Even now, fast journeys around the solar system or beyond it were not cheap. The Link would never be cheap. The power for a single trip between points of widely different gravity potential could eat up the savings of a lifetime. Linkage of materials from the Oort Cloud to the Inner System consumed the full energy of three kernels aboard the Oort Harvester. It was a measure of the importance of Chan’s mission to the Geyser Swirl that no one had mentioned a budget when he said he needed to travel by Link in order to recruit.

Actually, he needed a good deal more than a budget . He needed an argument powerful enough to convince some of humanity’s most talented but skeptical individuals that they would like to be on board the Hero’s Return when it linked out to the Swirl.

What was the local time of day? Chan looked toward the Sun. Much of what you saw at Marslake was misleading. That blue sky above his head was an illusion, an artefact of the same anosmotic thermal field that held a hundred-meter layer of breathable air like a comfort blanket over the whole of Marslake and for forty kilometers beyond. That air was at a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius, while two hundred meters above Chan’s head the near-vacuum hovered at a hundred below zero. The island on which he stood was real Mars soil, but it had been mined from ancient sedimentary layers far beneath the surface, where hid the once-and-future Martian life-forms. The serene blue lake itself was fifty kilometers across and listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Solar System (low on the list, to be sure), but it was nowhere more than ten meters deep, and it held only a thousandth of the water of even the smallest of Earth’s Great Lakes.

However, that bright Sun was no illusion. It stood high in the sky, as high as it would ever get at Mars latitude thirty degrees. That meant it was close to noon, much too early for Danny Casement to be in his office and fully awake. Dapper Dan, unless he had changed beyond recognition, put most nocturnal animals to shame.

Even a man in a hurry had to eat, and now was as good a time as any. Chan decided to have a meal before he went the rest of the way to Danny’s office. He left Center Island and walked out along one of the many causeways that led in the right direction. The surface of Marslake was dotted with thousands of small islands, laid out on a regular grid and connected by roads wide enough for foot traffic or small wheeled vehicles.

The walking people were few and far between, and the only cars that Chan saw were slow and creaking. They, like the outside cafe that he came to at the end of the causeway, had seen better days. The cafe, Inn Paradise, could not even afford robot servers. Chan, the only customer, ordered his simple meal of bread and fruit jellies from a human. While he ate — Chan was not picky, but the food was dreadful — he heard the familiar tale of woe from the owner/waiter.

Marslake had been poised to take off as the solar system’s greatest tourist attraction, ready to host multitudes of humans and Pipe-Rillas and Tinkers. Even the taciturn and mysterious Angels possessed plenty of negotiable materials, and they would be welcomed.

The quarantine had ended everything. Aliens had ceased to arrive. Humans from all around the solar system were affected by the general economic collapse and could not afford to come. And now … The owner waved his hand gloomily around. Old holo-images, with their advertisement of wondrous coming attractions, hung dim and translucent in the air, predictors of a false future that would never be. The only cheerful thing in sight was the Sun, which apparently knew no better.

“Where are you from?” The owner ended his mournful discourse and asked his first question as he gave Chan the credit slip.

“Earth.”

“Ah. You’re lucky. Not like here, I bet.”

“No.” Chan touched the payer ID unit and rose to leave. “Everything there is much, much worse.”

Except, possibly, the food and waiters and restaurant owners. But Chan was already on the way out and he did not bother to say it.

He was able to pick out Danny’s place long before he reached it. Unlike most other businesses scattered over the surface islands of Marslake, Danny felt a need for actual walls and a ceiling. Most enterprises found those to be unnecessary. With no wind and no weather, why waste time on structures? Only an occasional need for privacy demanded the use of enclosed space, and space for that could easily be rented.

Chan halted when he was still a couple of hundred meters away. He had come prepared. Dag Korin had made the portable Remote Observer available to Chan without question. Apparently the General found it quite natural that Chan would wish to spy on his own friends, which was something to bear in mind on the trip to the Geyser Swirl. Chan didn’t think of the use of the R/O as spying or intrusive in this case. It was a way to save everyone’s time if things were obviously not going to work out.

He took the R/O unit from his pocket and rested it on a railing at the side of the causeway. He adjusted the focus and inserted the tiny earphones. If this didn’t produce the right result he would gain a working day but lose a team member.

Visual information was a more demanding technical problem than aural. The sound from inside a building was usually sharp and clear, while the image tended to be variable and slightly grainy. Chan also had the feeling that today the colors were a little off. It didn’t matter. That, surely, was Danny Casement with his back to the viewing unit.

You could pick Danny out from his clothes alone. Today he was dressed, as in the old days, in a favorite combination of a high-necked shirt with fine green-and-white check and an ultraconservative business suit with a herringbone pattern of mixed brown and gray. As he turned, Chan made a confirmation. The R/O unit showed a small, neatly built man, with the brown face, wizened features, and wide mouth of a trustworthy ape. It was Danny all right, debonair as ever. He had a tall, elegant woman in his office with him, and he was shaking his head at her with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression on his face.