Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

Hadn’t he done enough already? Didn’t he have his own needs and wants? Indeed, far from helping Xmary help the kids, he tried to seduce her away.

“This so-called Basic Assistance is pretty hefty,” he said. “We can go places, do things. You’ve spent your life on spaceships, dear, and on worlds that might as well be spaceships. But here’s a place that offers wonders beyond the dreams of Barnard.”

They were sitting side-by-side on the steps outside the park dome, enjoying the night breeze off the ocean while the crowds chattered and shouted behind them.

“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look he could just barely read in Sealillia ’s night-light glow, “but the rest of us are already broke. We retraced our old footsteps in Denver and Tongatapu. Went to the moon, took a submarine ride. We’ve been here two weeks; we blew through our monthly allotment in one.”

“So get some money from your parents.”

She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “They won’t see me, Conrad. They’re still livid about the Revolt.”

“Really? A thousand-year grudge?”

“You don’t know my parents.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, I think we can make a difference here. We should get back inside.”

“I’m sick of making a difference,” Conrad said, scanning the night sky for some sign of the moon, which he still hadn’t seen. “When I built the Orbital Tower, I felt like I was making a real contribution to Sorrow’s future. Not like a stadium or an apartment building; this was something that really helped . But it wasn’t enough; it didn’t save the colony. And everything else I try just ends up… I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad on the ship, but we’re among human beings again. And the thing about human beings… I just… It seems like wherever I go, people are fighting. And I can’t help them, and I can’t make them stop. Can’t I be tired of that? Is that okay?”

“Sure,” she said, hugging his arm. “For a while. But every now and then you poke your head up at just the right time, and it does help. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do. We can get by without you here, so yes, go on ahead. Spend your allowance; have some fun. Just don’t turn your back when you are needed. There’s no point living forever if you don’t use yourself as a positive force.”

He made a smile she couldn’t see. “Aye, Captain.”

“I mean it, Conrad.”

“So do I.” But then he scratched an eyebrow, cleared his throat and said, “If we all did that, all across the Queendom and throughout the colonies, a hundred and sixty billion people using their lives as a positive force… That seems so overwhelming. How can everybody help everybody, when we’re crammed together like this, or dying out among the stars? I don’t know how to use my life.”

“Well, not by throwing people in the ocean.”

And that, at least, they could both agree on.

He had been to every corner of Barnard system, had crossed every millimeter of the space between Barnard and Sol. Twice! He knew the land and seas of Sorrow from pole to pole, and he had radioed personality snapshots to a dozen other worlds, and gathered back scores of self-aware replies which he’d folded back into himself. He was quite possibly the best-traveled person in history. But Saturn’s rings were a sight unequaled in the colonies, and Conrad had never seen them with his own eyes. So that was where he went first.

And God damn if it wasn’t the most stunning sight his eyes had beheld since the first time he’d seen Xmary naked. From a hundred thousand kilometers above the seething cloudtops, at a latitude of twenty degrees south, he found himself looking “up” at a ring structure that filled the center of his view, leaving only the edges black.

The planet itself was more striking than either of Barnard’s gas giants, Gatewood and Vandekamp. Unlike those blank turquoise spheres, Saturn’s blonde atmosphere was broken into subtle bands of light and dark whose edges blended together in little swirls and ripples that were probably the size of Earthly continents. Some of the lighter bands were split by very thin ribbons of dark, snaking north to south and back again, and a few of the dark bands were home to brunette specks and ovals that were darker still: storms, shearing and growing out of the boundary ripples. In his sailing days, Conrad had been a student of Sorrow’s weather, and had seen patterns like this in the thermal maps of her currents and trade winds. But not right there in the sky, all at once.

Even the limb of the atmosphere was interesting; against the blackness of space he could easily pick out three separate cloud layers—call them blonde, brunette, and redhead—floating above the general murk. You saw nothing like that when you were this close to Vandekamp, and at Gatewood it was too damned dark to see anything at all.

Conrad had seen—not personally but through the eyes of a holographic avatar—tidally locked planets like Gammon and Wolf, whose surfaces were as banded and stratified as any gas giant’s atmosphere. The sun never rose or set; the melting point of water was a geographic location. That was kind of pretty, if inconvenient for the inhabitants. But for sheer visual impact it was nothing compared to the Eridanian world of Mulciber, where clouds of tin spilled as rain into quicksilver oceans, in countless craters smashed down by cometary impact. From its dusty moon—the only safe place to view it—the planet looked like an iron ball decorated with hundreds of circular mirrors.

Conrad had seen his share of ring systems, too, but here was the true majesty of Saturn; its rings were young , still nursing their original complexity. He could barely take his eyes off them. According to the hollie windows in the dome of the observation platform, each of the three main rings was wider than the Earth, and the innermost one began almost exactly one Earth diameter away from Saturn’s visible edge. These were nice amaze-the-tourist facts, but from this vantage point Conrad couldn’t really tell where the “three” rings were supposed to be; he counted at least a hundred, of so many different colors and thicknesses and brightnesses that they each, like mountains or oceans or cities, seemed to have a distinct character all their own.

The observation platform itself was interesting, too. He shared it with five other gawkers who’d come through the fax at the same time. And to keep them all from barfing in surprise as they sailed out through the print plate, there was gravity; not from a finicky graser but from actual Newtonian mass. Within its soap-bubble dome the platform was a flat triangle of diamond sitting atop another flat triangle, with a neuble’s worth of neutronium squashed between them. A billion tons of matter: a fifty-fifty mix of protons and neutrons, with a haze of electrons shimmering around them, giving the substance a pearly appearance. The heart of the structure was, in essence, a single gigantic atom, pressed flat and oozing superfluidly into the corners of its prison.

Conrad had come to see the planet, but as the minutes stretched on, he found his attention drawn more and more to the floor beneath his feet. He’d learned a fair bit about neutronium during his brief tenure as a gravitic engineer, and had been fascinated by its liquid qualities. The theory of it all was far beyond him, but he’d gotten surprisingly far by thinking of neutronium as a kind of oil, impossibly slippery and impossibly dense.

There were whole worlds of this stuff out there in the wider universe: neutron stars. Atoms the size of Earth, with the mass of two or three suns, held together not by nuclear forces but by their own enormous gravity. In his more romantic moments, he sometimes dreamed of seeing one up close. What would it look like? What color would it be? If immorbidity meant anything at all, surely he must someday have the chance to find out?