Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 5

I want to capture the very essence of ephemerality," he told his sister as they walked to dinner that evening. They lived side by side in apartments only a few doors down from their parents, as did most young singles in the colony.

"Ephemerality? That's easy: clone up a vat of mayflies." Her laughter echoed in the corridor.

"Do wehave mayflies?" he asked. "Never mind; of course we must. The gene banks are supposed to contain everything. But n.o.body has seen a mayfly in what, six generations? People wouldn't know what they were. And besides, DNA isn't my medium."

"Well, that kills my next suggestion."

She grinned and looked at him with eyebrows raised until he said, "What?"

"A steak dinner. Force-grow a cow, butcher it, and let everybody eat it."

"Yuck!"

"That's what we're going to be doing once we move outside. Why not give people a little taste of what'sin store for them?"

"No pun intended."

"What? Oh. No, actually, it wasn't." She laughed again, turning heads in the cafeteria as they entered.

People smiled, and Talan felt a twinge of envy. Everyone liked Nendy. Him they tolerated because they liked his work-several pieces of which adorned the cafeteria walls-but she was popular for herself.

Shewas the work of art, and all the more so for being unconscious of it.

They picked up trays and went through the line. Dinner was some kind of stringy pasta with white sauce.

Lumps in the sauce might have been synthetic meat or just lumps from not being stirred well enough.

"Maybe steak isn't such a bad idea," he said.

"How about flowers?" asked Nendy. "Made out of gla.s.s or something," she amended quickly when he opened his mouth to protest that they, too, were organic.

Now there was an idea. Hand out gla.s.s roses at the door, and let everyone smash their own individual blossom.

And cut their feet on the gla.s.s shards, and accidentally stab one another with the stems. "No," he said, "broken gla.s.s and crowds didn't mix." Besides, anyone could make a gla.s.s flower. He wanted something uniquelyhis . Something appropriately grandiose, that people would talk about for years to come.

As they ate, he studied the colonists around him. They dressed in soft synthetic fabrics dyed in equally soft colors, wore lightweight slippers with flat non-skid soles, and spoke in soft voices so they wouldn't disturb the people around them. Everything about them was adapted to life inside a sealed environment.

Even Nendy, with her infectious laugh and sparkling eyes, was a dome dweller. She was in many ways the most perfectly adapted of anyone to life in a bubble. She didn't merely tolerate it; she thrived on it.

She loved the close quarters and the nonstop personal contact, loved the sense of community and camaraderie in pursuit of humanity's common goal.

"How does it feel," he suddenly asked, "to know that the lifestyle you grew up with is about to end?"

She paused with a forkful of noodles halfway to her mouth. "Is it?"

"How many people do you suppose will stay in the domes when there's an entire planet to spread out onto? Even if half of them stay, this place will feel deserted."

"For a while." She chewed and swallowed, then said, "We'll drop the birth control laws. In a few years, the population will go right back up."

"You want to live in a nursery?"

She smiled. "Babies are fun."

He wasn't so sure of that. He'd held one once, and it was heavy, squirmy, and wet. And noisy. If people started having more babies, he might wind up homesteading some acreage himself.

Funny to think that birth could spell the end of something else, but he supposed any change practically by definition killed the status quo. Sound killed silence, light killed darkness, food killed hunger. When you thought of it that way, everything was ephemeral. He could sculpt practically anything, and it would be appropriate.

* * *After dinner he bundled up in his survival suit and went outside. He left the helmet unsealed, and his first few breaths felt like he was pouring liquid nitrogen into his lungs, but the pain slowly subsided as he grew used to the thinner, colder air. It took longer to get over the smell: the dusty, chalky smell of bare dirt and an antiseptic, metallic bite that he eventually realized was ozone.

Injection towers rose like tree trunks from the polar plateau, spewing a sooty mix of ultraviolet-blocking ga.s.ses along with oxygen from dissociated permafrost. They wouldn't stop for decades to come, but they were past the critical point. Humanity had a second planet it could live on unprotected; he stood there as living, breathing proof of that.

A lifepod drifted past, its spiky antennae listening for an S.O.S. that might never come again. Like the injection towers, the lifepods had been genetically engineered to self-propagate until they covered the planet, blanketing the entire world with safe havens for the explorers and engineers who monitored the progress of the terraforming project. They would need a new mission now. Perhaps they could serve as taxis between villages, or trucks for hauling crops in from the fields.

Altair was in the southeast, a fierce blue-white disk that burned a whole quadrant of sky to white around it. There were no seasons on Nivala; Altair circled the horizon at the same height year 'round. Here at the pole, days weren't measured by cycles of light and dark, but by direction of the compa.s.s. Today was East. In a few more hours it would be South.

The ash-gray ground was peppered with craters, some as small as his footprints, others stretching over the horizon. Rain had already filled some of them, and tiny rivulets were busy eroding the walls of the rest. Farmers would have to sh.o.r.e up the ones they wanted to keep as reservoirs, or they would lose them to their new atmosphere.

Talan trudged across the plain to a full one and stood at its edge, looking at the stars reflected in its still surface. The starry sky was ephemeral, too, or so the scientists said. A thick enough atmosphere scattered so much light that even the brightest stars would only be visible during eclipse. Already they were dimmer than when Talan was a boy.

He turned to look at Satipur, low on the horizon to his left. The gas giant was three-quarters full and bright as an open flame, too large to cover with his outstretched hand. Its rings stretched across a quarter of the sky, a sharp line etched across the roiling cloudscape and the dark violet starscape beyond.

Eclipse came every four days and seven minutes, regular as clockwork. The colonists wouldn't lose the stars completely, even when their air was thick as Earth's.

Talan picked up an eroded rock the size of his fist and tossed it into the flooded crater, watching the planet's reflection s.h.i.+mmer as ripples slowly spread outward from the splash.

Change. Motion. Fluidity. What could he sculpt that would ill.u.s.trate it all?

He threw another rock and watched it splash.

"You want to design the meeting hall itself?" asked the president of the Terragen Council. He leaned forward over his desk, his eyebrows narrowed and his mouth curved into a deep frown. "We asked for something we could symbolically sacrifice. You can't destroy an entire building."

"Why not?" Talan asked, leaning forward just as aggressively.

"Because we'll be holding our dedication ceremony in it," the president reminded him.

"Yes, we will. And afterward, we'll all troop outside and watch it collapse.""Outside."

"Right. Involving each one of us dynamically in what we're celebrating."

The president's scowl intensified. "I hardly think the celebrants will appreciate gasping like fish in the cold. The atmosphere is breathable, but n.o.body said it was comfortable yet."

"I was outside for two hours yesterday," Talan said. "It's surprising how quickly you get used to it."

"People will be wearing formal clothing."

"I'll supply overcoats."

"And transportation home? The city's air cars can't handle everyone at once."

"There are thousands of lifepods drifting around out there with nothing to do. Hardly anyone has ever ridden in one. It'll be a great opportunity to find out what it's like."

The president's chair squeaked as he leaned back and steepled his fingers on the bridge of his nose.

"Hmm," he said. "Hmm. Outside."

"Outside. That's what it's all about."

"Yes, it is, isn't it?"

Talan poured everything he had into it. He had built interactive sculpture before, but never anything big enough to house an entire crowd. He wanted his monument to look like a droplet caught in the act of rebounding from its impact with a pool of water, but even if he exaggerated the bulbous tip of the rising droplet, the structure would be taller than it was wide. And from inside, where everyone would be gathered until the last moment, it would just look like another habitat.

He considered using antigravity to make the interior one big weightless chamber, but people wouldn't like drinking out of zeegee flasks and talking to one another's feet. He would have to divide the s.p.a.ce into floors, but he could make each level grander than the last, until the top of the droplet became a huge dome, symbolic of the sealed city they were leaving behind.

Actually, he could have it all. In his stop-motion studies, he had seen how the top of a droplet often separated into several spheres; he could make the topmost one perfectly spherical and put the antigravity generators there. Anyone who liked to party in zero gee could rise up through a smaller spherical elevator to the top.

And down at the bottom, the rays of ejecta radiating outward from the impact could serve as both docking ports and observation decks. They could have clear domes so people could look up at the frozen droplet overhead as well as at Satipur and its roiling cloudscape.

Every step of the project brought complications. The structure had to splash when he triggered its fall, not just topple or explode, yet it had to be strong enough to support thousands of people while they were inside. It needed sufficient elevators and glideways to move everyone where they wanted to go without delay, yet everything needed to squeeze through the narrow neck. There had to be s.p.a.ce for kitchens and serveries, storerooms, restrooms, cloakrooms, a.s.signation rooms-he sometimes felt that he was designing an entire city. Yet each day he awoke invigorated, and each time he overcame a setback, he savored the rush of creation anew. It felt as if he were pouring all his anxiety and frustrations into the project, and the closer it came to reality the more he looked forward to watching it destroyed. It wouldsymbolize more than just the emergence of humanity onto the surface; it would symbolize his personal rebirth.

Nendy joined him outside one evening after construction began, finding him at the crater rim where he watched fabribots scurry up and down the central stalk with their modular building blocks. He heard her footsteps crunching through the crusty ground as she came up behind him.

"Gah!" she said theatrically when she drew close enough to be heard. "n.o.body told me it was going to stink out here."

He turned and smiled at her. "That stink is what keeps us from getting sunburn."

"I thought ozone was supposed to acc.u.mulate in the upper atmosphere."

"It will, once wehave an upper atmosphere. Right now it's still too thin to separate into layers."

"And you're going to make everyone breathe it the night of the ceremony."

"I am."

"You're nuts." She stepped up beside him and looked out at the tower under construction. "You build a pretty sculpture, though."

"It's looking good, isn't it?" He couldn't stop smiling. All his frustration, all his fear, all the tension in his life had gone into the droplet. If he felt so free now, he could only imagine how good it would feel to watch it collapse.

"You going to have it done in time?" Nendy asked. "The ceremony is only two weeks away."

He felt a brief moment of anxiety at the thought that something could yet go wrong, but he banished it to the tower with a casual wave of his hand. "The hard part's over. It's ahead of schedule."

Just then a fabribot fumbled its payload, a silvery rectangle which bounced off the 'bot just below it and spun end over end as it fell to the dry crater floor and stuck there, quivering.

"Half a percent entropic loss," Talan said calmly. "It's in the budget."

The day of the big celebration saw the tower gleaming in the low-angled light of Altair, its antigravity sphere hovering like a captured moon overhead. The crater had been refilled, and the silvered walls of the droplet reflected its s.h.i.+mmering blue surface in all directions. Windows glowed brightly along the tower's length as interior decorators made last-minute preparations and waitstaff stocked the kitchens and bars.

The whole domed city was abuzz with speculation; Talan had carefully spread rumor of what he intended, but had refused to confirm it. He had to spend the night with his sister to avoid the media, and he slipped into the tower disguised as a food delivery driver.

The last few hours before the guests arrived seemed to drag on forever. What if n.o.body came? What if everybody came? What if the tower collapsed prematurely? What if the food ran out? What if the alcohol ran out? He paced the grand ballroom, mentally banis.h.i.+ng demon after demon into the fabric of his creation, but more rose up to replace them.

From inside, the walls had a checkerboard look. He had settled on blocks for his building material, ferro-ceramic blocks just a few handspans across, magnetically bonded with superconducting coilsembedded within. They would grip one another like glue until he switched them off, whereupon they would all become free-falling particles, as independent as individual raindrops. His creation would splash when it fell, and it would be a most impressive splash indeed.

Using superconductors solved the safety issue, too. With no resistance in the coils, the magnetic fields that held everything together would persist indefinitely. Only when he reversed the polarity and actively killed the fields would the blocks release one another. The command was coded and keyed to video monitors in every floor; nothing would happen until he made it happen, and fail-safes would prevent even his own control code from working if anyone remained inside.

The plain surrounding the tower was dotted with lifepods. He had broadcast intermittent distress calls until hundreds of them congregated, sniffing about for the source of the signal. Ushers would use handheld beacons to call them in when people were ready to go home.

Talan walked to one of the immense windows that ringed the ballroom and looked down. The docking ports were busy with arrivals and departures, and as he watched, a flurry of media vans glided out from the city, leading a long procession of pa.s.senger vehicles behind it.

The reporters erupted into the ballroom from the elevator, sweeping their forehead cams left and right while they spoke in a babble of descriptive adjectives for the stay-at-home audience. They descended on Talan like newlyweds on fresh cubic, and this time he welcomed them warmly into his latest creation. He gave them a quick tour, soaking in the moment of notoriety and answering their constant barrage of questions-except for the most persistent one. He neither confirmed nor denied the rumor that this would all be destroyed at party's end, but he did show them the cloakroom filled with heavy parkas.

He broke away when the president and his wife arrived, greeting them warmly and mugging for the cameras. The president took a look around, hands on hips, then slowly smiled. It clearly wasn't an expression his face was used to wearing, but it made him look ten years younger. "Well, my boy, you've certainly outdone yourself this time," he said.

"Thank you," Talan replied. "Wait until you see it in action."

"Hmm. Yes." The president's smile lost a few watts of charm. "Yes indeed. But we've got a lot of celebrating to do between now and then, eh? Excuse me." The elevator door opened again and the president turned to greet the new arrivals: his fellow councilors and several of the city's upper crust.

It was the president's party now. Talan slipped into the role of captive celebrity, mingling with the revelers and accepting their praise with as much humility as he could muster.

Humility became harder and harder to hang onto as the party wore on. Shuttles kept bringing guests until they numbered in the thousands, and the sheer volume of compliments threatened to swell his head. He kept reminding himself that fame, like the object of everyone's admiration, was ephemeral, but he couldn't shake the conviction that this was a pivotal moment in his career. A pivotal moment in his life.

He sought out Nendy, herself the center of a swarm of admirers, and the two of them retreated to one of the observation pods. With the party in full swing overhead, it wasn't hard to find an empty one, although two lovers were groping one another in the next pod over. Talan blushed and looked away, but Nendy watched with unabashed interest.

"Quite the little microcosm of life you've created here," she said softly.

"Isn't it?" he said. He flopped down on an oversized ha.s.sock, happy to get the weight off his feet for a moment. "I can't wait to destroy it.""Really? After all this acclaim?"

"Especially so." He took a deep breath. "I'm vibrating like a violin string that's tuned too tight. Every little compliment stretches it another notch. If I don't loosen the tension soon, I'm going to snap."

"The price of fame," she said.

"I just want to see it through. I've got this horrible feeling that something's going to go wrong at the last moment. Expose me as a fraud in front of everybody."

"Nothing will go wrong."

"Famous last words."

He watched his sister watching the lovers next door. Now her cheeks were growing red and her nostrils were flaring. Talan felt a brief moment of l.u.s.t, instinctively shoved it away with all his other unwanted mental baggage, and said, "If you go back to the party in that state, there's going to be a riot."

She grinned, then turned around and leaned back against the gla.s.s. "Spoilsport."

"I didn't say that would be a bad thing."