Rich Man's Sky Read online

  GLASS: Good to know. We’ll follow up on that in a future show. However, right now most of our viewer questions center around what happens when you all get there. Tell me about this crater you’re going to spend the rest of your lives in.

  BESEMAN: Whoa, probably not our whole lives in one crater, Howard. If we’re successful, there will be other settlements, and regular commerce between them. But okay, imagine a valley twenty-eight kilometers across, ringed by mountains averaging about nine hundred meters in height above the valley floor. Looks a lot like the area around Phoenix or Mexico City, except it’s an impact crater, not a caldera or a dry lake bed, which means the center of it is raised a bit, in a ring-shaped mesa that erosion forces have flattened over time. It’s on that mesa that the township rests. If you’re interested, you can download the view into your glasses and see for yourself. There’s a static-view camera slowly rotating on the east side of the township, and for a small subscription fee you can also see directly through the eyes of most of the robots on site. Those feeds are very popular; we’ve got about a hundred thousand subscribers, more than half of whom view for an hour or more every day.

  GLASS: It sounds breathtaking, if you’ll forgive the pun, but of course Mars is a big planet. Why that spot in particular?

  BESEMAN: Well, it simply has the most Earthlike conditions. With an atmospheric pressure of thirteen millibars, it’s still the equivalent of Earth’s stratosphere, about twice the height of Mount Everest, but that’s quite substantial by Martian standards. It means we get wind and clouds and frost and even occasional snowfall, from a sky that’s sometimes actually blue, especially around sunrise and sunset. It’s also warmer than Earth’s stratosphere—enough so that on the hottest summer afternoons, we actually expect the valley floor to be muddy. Muddy! We’re thirty-five degrees south of the equator, about the same latitude as Cape Town or Sydney, which means good sunlight and nice, long days. That’s why we’re there. And of course unlike the Moon, we can pull breathing gases and even water vapor directly from the atmosphere. Thin as it is, it’s still enough to support human needs.

  GLASS: From the safety of a pressurized dome.

  BESEMAN: [Laughs] That dome gets a lot of attention! As you know, most of the township doesn’t look like that; it’s either buried or opaque, with the kind of small, rounded windows you typically find in spacecraft. We’ve all seen them: specially adapted modules from Harvest Moon and Renz Ventures, with bits and pieces from Lockheed Martin and General Spacesuit. But there are a few spacious, highly transparent common areas, like that dome, that were scratch-built by Enterprise City, on Earth, and shipped in flat-pack kits using some of the same techniques we used to construct the Marriott Stars. We feel these features are very important psychologically, but they do force some design compromises. To minimize the risk of explosive decompression in these areas, we’ll be running the interior of the entire township at an atmospheric pressure of just three hundred millibars. That’s fifty percent oxygen and fifty percent nitro-argon-CO2 mix, which is a proven recipe for good lung tissue hydration at these low pressures. Now, that’s some pretty thin air! It’s breathable, but it takes acclimation, which we’ll get during the four-month transit from Earth. But it lets us have our big, clear, geodesic dome.

  GLASS: This has been fascinating, Dan, but we’re almost out of time. Until we have you back, is there anything else you’d like to say to our viewers?

  BESEMAN: Just that we still need your pledges. Please, seriously, log on and review the candidate bios. Find someone you really like, and sponsor them. Columbus crossed the Atlantic on Queen Isabella’s hocked jewelry, and it changed the world forever. Now an even bigger change is coming, and you, personally, can play the part of Her Majesty, and shape the future you personally want to see. So I urge you not to miss out on the opportunity.

  GLASS: Right! Okay, thanks for joining us again here on Mars Today.

  BESEMAN: It really is my pleasure, Howard. Thanks for having me.

  1.7

  19 April

  ✧

  L.S.F. Dandelion

  En Route to Earth-Sun

  Lagrange Point 1

  Cislunar Space

  The times when Alice and Derek were both awake were necessarily brief, but she craved them more and more as the journey wore on. “Tell me about your childhood,” she would say. “Did you go to college? Have you ever been married?”

  His answers: Normal, yes, and no. When he was trying to wake up or trying to wake her up, he had a set schedule of things to get through, and was not much in the mood for chitchat. It was only during the times when he was putting her into hibernation, that he seemed to want to talk at all, and of course at those times she was self-conscious about her state of undress, and his hands close to her body, strapping her to the wall. And of course the procedure itself made her nervous, because what if she never woke up? But always, before she knew it, she was drugged and slurring and gone. So meaningful conversation never really quite came together for them until three days before the end of the trip, when he woke her ahead of schedule.

  “Get up,” he said, holding one of her eyelids open.

  “Nnngh!” she protested, trying to twist away from him and feeling her wrists and ankles come up against their Velcro restraints. She was cold, and groggy, and absolutely hated this part.

  “Come on, get up, you’re going to miss it.”

  “Nnngh,” she replied.

  He did something to one of her hibernation controls, and she began to feel warmer, and more awake.

  “Are you up?”

  “Ugh. Yeah, I guess.” She took slow stock of herself and then said, “I have to use the, you know. I have to do stuff.”

  “Okay, yeah. Meet me in the cockpit. You’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

  When she finally got dressed and opened up the cockpit hatches with nearly numb fingers, she sipped from a squeeze bulb of coffee and settled into her copilot’s chair.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Look.”

  He was pointing out the right-side cockpit window, at one of the enormous rearview mirrors that projected out from the sides of Dandelion’s hull. He was pointing at the reflection of the Sun.

  “What?” she demanded again.

  “Watch.”

  She squinted against the glare. The cockpit windows were dialed so dark she could barely see the nose of the ship or the outlines of the mirrors, and yet the Sun was still too bright to stare at.

  But.

  “What’s happening?” she asked. The Sun was getting brighter along one edge somehow. Or dimmer in the center?

  “It’s the Shade,” he told her. “It’s big enough to cover the Sun, now, and we’re moving into eclipse position.”

  Ah! She could see it now: the Shade barely bigger than the Sun itself. The Sun a crescent peeking out from behind it. And yet, it wasn’t like watching a solar eclipse from Earth. Alice had seen two of these in her life, and they looked different, because the Moon was opaque, whereas the ESL1 Shade wasn’t. Not completely; the light coming through it was not nearly as bright as the light leaking around it, but still it was much brighter than empty space. It was very clear that she was looking at something artificial.

  “I thought you’d want to see this,” Derek said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, taking her eyes away from the glare for a moment. She looked at him, watching the Sun through his outstretched hand, a look of wonder on his face. She realized all at once that this tough guy really loved his job, that the grungy boring realities of it had not soured him on the wonder. Huh. When she looked back at the Sun again, she thought perhaps the Shade had moved a little, or grown a little, or both.

  “We’re about five minutes from totality.”

  “Okay.”

  She glanced at the instrument panel, and felt a shudder of something like superstitious dread, because they were still three days out. The Shade was 24,745 kilometers away! The whole of planet Earth could easily fit betw
een Dandelion and the Shade, with plenty of room to spare. Two Earths could almost fit in between! It was a large distance, and yet, the Shade was already more than big enough to cover the Sun.

  “It’s the size of Colorado,” she said, quoting something she’d read in one of the briefings, or something President Tompkins had told her, or maybe one of the space marines at the Marriott Stars. “It could cover half the island of Britain.”

  “Five years ago, it was the size of Connecticut.”

  “Jesus. How did it get that big, that fast? Seriously! How is that even possible?”

  Still looking out through his hand, he said, “You have to remember, it’s thinner than a sheet of paper. The whole thing weighs less than an aircraft carrier.”

  “Still,” she said.

  Slowly, slowly, the ESL1 Shade covered the light and warmth. Alice could actually feel the cockpit growing colder. Because yes, even though the Shade as seen from Earth was just a black speck in the middle of the Sun, it was still capable of measurably affecting the planet’s climate. From here, it was capable of a lot more than that. She tried to picture Dandelion moving into a cone of shadow.

  “Seriously,” she said, “how did they get it that big?”

  He considered the question for a moment, not saying anything.

  “Hello?” she tried.

  “If you want, I can show you. I’ve got an inspection pod trip scheduled a few days from now, out to the rim and back to look at some damage sites.”

  “You and me alone, eh?” She tried to sound jocular, but it came out bitchy instead.

  “We’re alone right now,” he reminded her.

  Finally, the Sun was down to just a fingernail, and then nothing at all.

  And then something odd happened; her eyes adjusted. Although the light of the Sun was now only one percent as bright—like a really dark pair of sunglasses, further filtered through the tinting of the cockpit windows—it was still too bright to look at without squinting.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  “Just watch.”

  “For what?”

  “Look past the edges of the Shade.”

  The edge of the Shade was barely visible now, a circle slightly bigger than the Sun, a little off-center from it, the edges ever so slightly brighter than the black of space behind them. No stars were visible, of course. Not with all that light and all that tint.

  But.

  Outside the edges of the Shade, the Sun’s corona was faintly visible, like a blue-white crown of thorns. Like a too-dim photograph of a gas stove’s burner, if the flames shooting out of it were ropy tendrils of special effects magic. It looked nothing like an Earthly eclipse. It was bigger, fainter, more complicated.

  “Whoa,” she said again.

  And then the Sun flickered! It brightened in some places, dimmed in others—a ripple of light and darkness passing across its face.

  “What was that?” she asked, startled.

  “Shade steering,” he answered. “The middle third of the Shade—the older part—is just a translucent semiconductor weave, but the outer two thirds are variable transparency, like these windows. Changes in the distribution of light pressure affects the Shade’s orientation and position. If you look at a trace of the orbit over time, it wanders all around the Lagrange point, sometimes by thousands of kilometers.”

  That almost made sense to Alice. She knew the Shade “hovered” above the Sun, held up somehow by the pressure of photons striking it. And she knew that it could controllably affect the Earth’s climate, giving more sunlight to some areas and less to others. That was why the President of the United States had sent her up here.

  She knew that, and yet. With the Sun’s corona flaring around it, the rippling Shade was like something out of a dream.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Alice, the coldhearted spy.

  “Indeed. Where else are you going to see that? You’re one of, like, six people who’ve ever seen this.”

  When she didn’t say anything, he added, “You’re welcome.”

  And suddenly she was angry with him: “Oh, wow, did I forget to show proper gratitude to the gallant flyboy? Give me a break.”

  He didn’t immediately reply to that, so she pressed onward: “You want to take little old me out in an inspection pod? Show me the sights? Get me all worked up? Jesus fucking Christ.”

  And just what the hell was she doing, there? Derek was trying to be nice to her, and doing a pretty good job of it. He hadn’t done anything or said anything even remotely out of line, except talk about his dick when the drugs were kicking in. And he was a pretty good-looking dude, all things considered, and Alice had not enjoyed human intimacy for, like, nine months at least. Unless you counted that shy Marriott Stars porter with the pencil mustache, but that had only been hand stuff, and only one time, so yeah, Alice was about due for some male attention.

  And doing a really fine job of it.

  Derek made a scoffing noise. “Okay, Colonist. Have it your way.”

  Alice didn’t say anything at first, but finally screwed up her courage and her charm and said, “Sorry. I’m out of practice.”

  “At what? Being super entitled and difficult?”

  “Dating.”

  He looked at her, almost glaring. “Who said anything about dating?”

  She thought about that for a moment, and answered, “You won’t be my superior officer. After we dock, I don’t report to you.”

  “Yeah, so? That means we’re dating?”

  She sighed, tucking loose hairs back behind her ear. They drifted immediately back in front of her face again.

  “Look, it’s not you. You’re a good guy. I’m just really bad at this.”

  “At what?”

  She sighed again. Sighed a third time. Tucked her hair behind her ear again. “You know, stuff. Relationship stuff.”

  He scoffed again. “Oh, so now we’re in a relationship?”

  His voice and expression were so stern, so humorless, so thoroughly out of character that she suddenly realized he was fucking with her. He was typical flyboy after all; he just knew he was catnip to women, just knew she wanted to be with him (because why wouldn’t she?), just knew that all he had to do was sit back and wait for her to pounce. And in the meantime, poke fun at her. And he was right, goddammit.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re such an asshole.”

  And then they were both laughing.

  And then somehow they were kissing, and fussing with each other’s coverall zippers in the weird light of the Esley Shade.

  And then they were naked, in a drifting cloud of socks and shoes and coveralls and space underwear, ever so slowly falling aftward in the ten-thousandth-of-a-gee acceleration of this low-speed ferry, and fuck the regulations anyway, if there even were regulations, because who exactly was going to find out?

  Afterward, Alice felt a little embarrassed, as she generally tended to in situations like this. So many situations like this! It was just like her, to sleep with a coworker she then had to work with.

  Derek seemed a bit edgy as well, though also amused and refreshed and a tad smug, for having bagged a tough customer like Alice. Well fine. He was better with his hands than a lot of smug flyboys, that was for sure.

  As they smoothed their clothes and hair back into place, Derek said, “I’m glad you got to see the eclipse.”

  “That’s not all I got to see.”

  “Right. Yeah, well, for better or worse you’re going to have to go back into hibernation. We’re only three days out, but we really haven’t got the resources for it. If you look, the oxygen reserves are already declining.”

  “Convenient,” she said, half teasing and half . . . well, embarrassed. Uncertain where she stood, or where she wanted to. She could see the oxygen gauge as well as he could; the atmospheric level was totally normal, and for all their exertions the tank reserve had declined by less than one percent. She technically could stay awake with him for the next three days and use up only maybe a third
of their reserve, leaving more than enough margin to wake up the colonists during final approach. But at best that would be bad form, and at worst it could jeopardize lives, if any kind of off-nominal situation occurred. Whereas if she were safely tucked away in bear hibernation, the recycling system would be able to keep up, and they’d hang onto a hundred percent of their oxygen reserve.

  And also avoid a lot of awkwardness.

  So yeah, she let him Velcro her to the wall and pump her full of drugs.

  “You do have a normal-sized dick,” she told him as she started to drift off. “At least normal sized. Do I have good birthing hips?”

  “What?”

  “Good birthing hips. Good birthing hips.”

  And then, with seemingly no delay whatsoever, he was propping one of her eyes open and patting her a little too firmly on the cheek.

  “Wake up.”

  “Nnngh.”

  “Not kidding. I need you to get up.”

  “Nnngh! I haven’t even gone to sleep yet!”

  “We’re on approach, Alice. I need you to wake up the colonists.”

  “Oh. Oh. That was weird.”

  “Yeah, sometimes it’s like that. Now come on, I need you.”

  When the formalities and grumbling were out of the way, she woke and peed and dressed and entered the bridge by the zero-gravity equivalent of stumbling blearily. Yes, she had work to do back in the passenger cabin, but first she wanted a quick look outside.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered without looking.

  The gauges showed them still ninety-nine kilometers and 4.3 hours out from the station, but the Shade was the size of a dinner platter sitting right in front of you at the dinner table. And where it had seemed way too big from two Earths away, now it seemed too small. Was this what Colorado or half of Britain would look like, if you were a hundred kilometers above?