Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

“Which is why,” Bud said a bit mysteriously, “I’ve chosen the name I have for her—the shield’s AI, I mean.”

Her? But he would say no more.

He pulsed the attitude control thrusters again and tipped the platform backward, so its windows swiveled to face the Earth. The home planet was a perfect blue marble hanging in space. The Moon, white-brown, sailed beside its parent, some thirty Earth diameters away. L1 was far beyond the orbit of the Moon; from here, there was no doubt this was a twin world.

“Home,” Bud said simply. “Stuck out here it’s good to be reminded of what we’re working our butts off for.” He leaned close to her, and pointed so she could sight along his arm. “See there? And there? …”

Against the velvety darkness of space she saw sparks drifting, two, three, four of them in a rough line, like fireflies in the night, passing from Earth to shield.

Bud tapped the window. “Magnification please.”

The image in the window before Siobhan exploded in rapid jumps. Now she could see perhaps a dozen ships. Some were just large enough to show detail, hull markings, solar-cell arrays, antenna booms. The convoy looked like toys, models suspended against velvet.

“A caravan from Earth, bringing up the smartskin.” Bud was grinning. “Crawling its way up the gravity hill to L1. Isn’t that a fantastic sight? And it’s been going on, day and night, for years. If you turn a scope on the dark side of Earth, you can see the sparks of all those launches, over and over.”

On the ground, Siobhan had inspected the collection processes. Smartskin blankets, grown out of household windows like Bisesa Dutt’s in London, were gathered at neighborhood collation points, and then shipped to big storage centers at the airports and spaceports, and finally bundled up and sent to one of the great launch centers at Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Kourou, or Woomera. Just the ground operation was a stupendous enterprise, a mighty international flow across the face of the Earth. And it culminated in these sparks bravely crossing the night.

Bud said, “You know the picture. We’re throwing everything we’ve got into the launches, just like every other aspect of the project. They even dug the space shuttles out of their museums at the Smithsonian and Huntsville, and got those beautiful birds flying again. Worn-out shuttle main engines, too beat-up to be human-rated anymore, are being recycled: you can make a pretty useful throwaway booster out of a shuttle tailplane and a cargo pallet. The Russians have brushed off their old plans for Energia and have got those big old rockets flying again too.

“But even that isn’t enough. So Boeing and McDonnell and the other big contractors are churning out boosters like sausages. Why, some of those new birds aren’t much more sophisticated than a Fourth of July firecracker, and all you can do is point and shoot. But they work, with nearly a hundred percent reliability. And we’re getting the job done …”

To Bud, Siobhan supposed, this mighty space project was a boyhood dream come true—space engineering fast and brutal and efficient and on a massive scale, the way it used to be, before cost and politics and risk aversion got in the way.

“You know,” he said, “I think this will change everything.” He waved a hand at the shield. “Surely there will be no going back to the old timid ways after this; surely we’ve broken the bonds. This has set our new direction. And it’s outward.”

“If we all live through the sunstorm.”

He looked faintly resentful. “If that, yes.” There was a subtext: I might be a space buff but I know my duty.

She felt a pang of regret, and wished she could take the words back. Was a barrier forming between them, even before she got to the meat of her mission here?

Bud pushed at the control stick, and the platform swiveled and scooted forward.

Now Siobhan was looking across the shield, as if she were flying over a shining ground. Her eye was drawn out to the shield’s “horizon”—but unlike the Earth’s surface the shield was utterly flat, right to its limits, and the straight-line horizon was sharp as a razor in the vacuum. It was oddly bewildering, the perspective all wrong, as if she were flying over the surface of some monstrous planet a thousand times bigger than the Earth.

Bud said, “Sometimes it fools you. You’ll think you see the horizon curve, like from a low-flying plane. Or you’ll make out a group working and imagine they’re a few hundred meters away—but they’re kilometers off.” He shook his head. “Even now I have trouble grasping the scale of what we’ve done, that two of my guys, working on opposite edges of the shield, can be separated by the whole width of the Earth. And we built it all.”

The platform dipped, and Siobhan flew low over shimmering prisms and glass struts, littered by small structures like shacks, and vehicles like tractors that toiled patiently. One astronaut made her cautious way across the surface bearing a huge strut of gossamer-light lunar glass; she looked like an ant bearing a leaf many times its own size.

And Siobhan made out what looked like flags, held out stiffly by wire in the absence of any breeze. “What are those?”

Bud said bluntly, “We don’t have graves up here. We just push you away, off into interplanetary space. But we give you a marker: a flag of your country or your creed, or whatever you want. As we build the shield we’re working in a spiral, around and around the center, moving farther out all the time. We just plant your flag at the position of the leading edge, wherever it happens to be when you die.”

Now that she looked for them, she could see flags, dozens of them within a single glance. “Hundreds have died up here.” She hadn’t known the numbers.

“These are good people, Siobhan. Even without the direct risks of the construction work, some of them have worked in zero G without a break for two years or more. The medics say we are all storing up problems with our bone structure and cardiovascular systems and lymph systems and the rest. You know what the most common surgery procedure is up here? For kidney stones, nodules of calcium leached from your bones. And not to mention radiation exposure. Everyone knows about the damage to DNA, the cancer risks. But how about the brain? Your noggin is particularly vulnerable to cosmic radiation, and has a limited ability to repair itself. Space makes you dumb, Siobhan.”

“I didn’t know that—”

“I bet you didn’t,” he said, a hardness under his even tone. “Medical studies on shield workers themselves have proved this. Every year up here you shave ten years off your life. And yet these people stay, and work themselves to death.”

“Oh, Bud—” Impulsively she grabbed his hands. “I’m not here to attack your people; you know that. And I don’t want us to fall out.”

He said heavily, “But—“

“But you know why I’m here.”

It was a question of corruption.

*********

______

Earthbound accountants, poring over their voluminous electronic books, had found that a fraction of the funds and materials flowing up into space had gone astray—and that the decision making behind that siphoning-off had to lie up here, on the shield itself.

“Bud, the administration couldn’t ignore it if they wanted to. After all, if this goes on the whole project could be put at risk—”

He cut her short. “Siobhan, get real. I’m not going to deny the skimming-off. But, Jesus, look out the window. This project is soaking up a significant proportion of the GDP of the entire planet. Croesus himself couldn’t peel off enough to make a dent in that. You’ve got to get this in perspective. In percentage terms—”