Rich Man's Sky Read online

  “In the 1990s, the Beings were reported by about fifty percent of DMT users at dosages above sixty milligrams. By 2030, that proportion was up to seventy percent, and today it stands at seventy-eight. Why the increase? Why the thing itself, at all? About eight years ago, when I was living in San Francisco and everybody was vaping DMT, I got sick of hearing the same damn story from everyone I talked to. The Beings! The Beings! I reached a point in my life where that just sounded so improbable. Social trends are one thing, but a shared hallucination that lasts thousands of years, getting more and more specific the harder we look at it? Come on. Come on. So I asked myself, what if these Beings are real? What if they’re fucking real, Alice, and they’re in some neighboring dimension or some other part of the universe, and they’re trying to contact us over some entangled channel that’s flooded with decoherence noise? Wouldn’t that be something?”

  In zero gravity, the hairs on your arms are always standing up, so goose bumps don’t really feel like anything except a vague sense of cold air brushing over the skin. So that’s what Alice felt.

  “Wouldn’t that be worth investigating?” he asked her. “If we could find ways to quiet the environment, to keep the signal photons entangled long enough for our sensory neurons to interpret the . . . you know, meaning.”

  “By moving to outer space?”

  “Bingo.”

  She digested that for a moment and then said, “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I?” he waited, then waited some more, then said, “What’s crazy? What does that even mean?” He barked out a strange little laugh. “The Beings aren’t the only reason I’m here. They’re not even the fourth biggest reason, as one quick look around will tell you. Can a crazy person do all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice said, brusquely, because she felt like she had to say something.

  He looked at her, then said, “Alpha Centauri is three stars. Proxima and Toliman, which we’re going to colonize, and Rigil Kent, which we’re going to shrink wrap. We’ll build a Shade around the whole thing.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Won’t that take a thousand years?”

  “Probably. A few hundred, at least.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To build a really big battery. You reflect the star’s heat back in on itself. The star expands. It expands enough, the fusion reactions shut down and it’s just a really hot ball of gas. You extract energy from that—photovoltaic energy, just like here—and the energy is replaced because the star undergoes a little bit of fusion when it shrinks by that amount. It’s ten to the forty-fourth joules of energy, wrapped up for our own personal use. We could, you know, send signals across the whole universe, or punch holes in spacetime straight through wherever the Beings are waiting. Or whatever. Whatever we want. Whatever we want, Alice.”

  She said nothing.

  She said nothing again.

  Holy fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fuck.

  President Tompkins was worried about this guy changing the weather? Alice was half tempted to murder him right here and now. Jesus!

  And then another thought occurred to her. “You said ‘we,’ not ‘they.’”

  He laughed. “Now who’s the grammar cartel?”

  “You’re going to live to see it, aren’t you? You’re going to freeze yourself for a thousand years.”

  “Um . . . Well, not exactly. That wouldn’t work. Bodies absorb too much radiation damage in the crystalline state, and the cells aren’t awake to repair it. No, I figure I can spend a year awake for every ten years frozen. Live to a hundred and fifty, biologically. That seems reasonable, right?”

  Alice couldn’t deny that. Life expectancy in rich countries was now close to a hundred, with fresh progress being made every year. When she stopped to think about it—which was rarely, but not never—she realized that when she got too old to jump out of airplanes, she’d need to find some other way to make a living for, oh, another five decades or so.

  She said, “You’re either crazy or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  Alice didn’t have an answer.

  “You let me worry about the drugs,” he told her. “Let me worry about the starships and all that. Can you do that? You worry about being a medic, and an astronaut, and a security person, or sheriff or whatever. What should I be doing right now, securitywise?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. Then, noncommittally, “It’s a lot of new information.”

  Which was true. Her head was spinning with it, and she needed to sort out what it meant for her and Bethy and their mission.

  “Well, maybe you could get back to me on that,” he said, now snide again.

  “Am I dismissed?”

  “Yeah, get out of here. And close the hatch on your way out. I broke my damn diode board; I need some quiet.”

  3.4

  25 April

  ✧

  St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

  Shoemaker-Faustini Plateau

  Lunar South Polar Mineral Territories

  My Dearest Father Bertram,

  I dreamed the Earth was seven peaches, and they were the protons and neutrons of a lithium atom whose S-orbitals spread all the way to Saturn. I awoke with tears in my eyes, my soul humming with an emotion for which I fear no name exists.

  This morning a sudden and unpredicted spike in solar electron flux managed to blow a fuse in our radiation-blocking tower coil. Not the circuit breaker down here at the power transformer, mind you, but the actual fuse at the tower’s pinnacle. In order to blow the fuse rather than the breaker, the surge must have exceeded four amperes for about ten seconds, or, more likely, more than forty amperes for less than one second.

  I had to get up there and fix it, with Geo hovering nervously on the ground, and someone from Shackleton came by to take the damaged part and some archived voltage data and figure out just what the boggle happened, because obviously that ain’t how a tower magnet ought to die. The theory of Eldad Barzeley, Harvest Moon’s chief solar radiation scientist, is that we were hit by a plasma toroid—basically an invisible smoke ring ejected by the sun and tumbling end over end to form a sphere—that was less than thirty meters across and moving at only about ten meters per second, but carrying so large a concentration of charge that were it to strike atmosphere it would manifest as a ball lightning the size of a house.

  “Such events should be rare,” he says, “but apparently not so rare that we don’t need to account for them.” Untangling the negatives, he means that they can probably upgrade the electromagnet’s controller, either with a firmware update or else a whole replacement board, to account for at least this particular scenario, and perhaps a more general protection, so they said to expect someone to come by again in a few days to grade us up. We are, I remind you, beta testing every aspect of everything, and if the Sun is rolled across the sky by a dung beetle, as thought the Egyptians, or if it be a flaming chariot pulled by sky horses as thought the Greeks, and more than capable of melting a set of waxen wings in either case, it hardly matters, for even after all this time Ra retains his power to surprise us. Perhaps yon scarab isn’t above punting us a little micro-sun every now and again, and perhaps the Moon is made of green cheese after all.

  You have asked about rumors, and it’s interesting, for I haven’t heard the one that’s piqued your curiosity, and I have heard another that apparently hasn’t. To be more specific, no, an African woman in a stolen shuttle hasn’t crash-landed here at the monastery, nor would I expect her to survive such an impact if she’d somehow managed it. Nor has any unscheduled landing taken place at Moonbase Larry, for we’d’ve heard on the radio a call to guard our flank against rocket-kicked projectiles. Further and more to the point, Larry’s Boys are a chattering bunch, and if they’d seen this woman or knew of her whereabouts, I would not expect them long to keep the secret.

  I can, of course, make use of the gray matter God hath given me and hea
ve forth a speculation: she’s with Grigory Orlov. Perhaps “with” in more sense than one, although here I admittedly let my more prurient interests in the world shine forth, without evidence, as celibate people are often wont to do. Surely everyone is copulating except me! At any rate, if she did not reenter Earth’s atmosphere nor leave behind an expanding cloud of fuel and shuttle parts, then methinks she must still be in space, and the list of places to hide so large an accoutrement is not a long one. She could mayhap be among the Chinese, but this tickles me unlikely, for they make a great deal of their independence from all other nations and commerces. What gain would be seen by them in hosting a purloined ship and its purloiner? No, I think they’d throw her publicly in a Chinese jail for wasting e’en a moment of their time and a gram of their oxygen.

  On the other hand, what’s Orlov Petrochemical’s interest? It depends why and from whom this woman fled, for Clementine to seem a refuge, but if she departed Transit Point as you say, then that would be a frying-pan-to-fire maneuver of the highest order for a woman on the run. Baron Grigory has less sense of humor than even le Chinois! But if she were one of his, then it makes more sense to this reporter, although I can’t guess it any farther. One of his what? Doing what?

  There is an idiom in Russian that translates perfectly into English: “The world is divided into the who and the whom.” Grigory is definitely a who, so the question to my mind is whom he’s whoming, and for what gain. And that’s a question that rightly shudders my bones, for the Dark Horseman seems so capable of nefary that His Holy would do well to keep an eye, lest some of his hoped-for faithful be snatched instead into mortal sins of greed and wrath and pride and envy, and I think even a touch of gluttony, if still other rumors are believed.

  So there. You have your girl, and grist for the mill of rumors in which you appear ensconced.

  All the more surprising, then, that you haven’t heard this next one, for the good people of Moonbase Larry let slip today that the largest of His Holy’s secret benefactors funding this here Valley of Saint Joe is none other than Sir Larry his own self. Which, after but a moment’s reflection, makes sense, for he’s of Irish stock and therefore Catholic in his bones, if not always in his heart. He needs a high-backed customer far more than he needs a billion dollars, and so he slips his petty cash roll from one pocket to another, and His Holy Himself stoops to kiss it along the way! What better validation for an off-world business than Heaven itself smiling down? Or up; I confess I’m not quite sure of the geometry from this vaunted vantage, for if God is in the clouds as we’ve long imagined, then we’re seeing not up His robe but down the part of His hair, and that’s a thought that takes some getting used to. Mayhap I’ll imagine him in the clouds of Jupiter, and let my itchy soul rest a bit.

  Now, repeating gossip is no monastic trait, and it’s a sin I’ll confess and atone right enough, but I have one more for your ear, and it’s a doozy: Before arriving here, Brother Eggs somehow managed to get his hands on a set of space underwear with red and white stripes, like some oldey timey swimsuit one might see photographed beneath a straw barbershop hat and stood beside a giant-wheeled bicycle. As this violates both the letter and the spirit of our asceticism, both locally and in general, and present as well as past, I gratefully refer the matter to you for adjudication, and will abide by whatever instructions or counsel you see fit to bestow.

  My love, I understand you (and seven additional Brothers, aye) will not be with us in another month, but owing to a general state of disorder in cislunar space will be delayed by time unknown. I miss speaking with you one person to another, and also confessing my sins, for I confess here in writing that this place is too small for me to voice my most meaningful sins aloud. How private is the confessional video conference, albeit encrypted, if one’s Brothers are always so close at hand? And while you may perform masses for us, for which we gratefully accept the switchboard connection to the divine, can the Eucharist truly be consecrated over radio waves? If God is merciful (which I do not doubt, for he sent his only son to intercede for our souls), he surely must accept these, our best efforts, as close enough for Heaven. And yet, one does not give up everything to be closer to Him and then feel one’s soul aright with a distance in fact so great it takes one’s prayers a second and a half to make the trip, or 2.7 seconds to bounce back refused.

  I think you know that the word “abbot” derives from the Aramaic “abbā” and means, literally, “father,” and in descent from the original Proto-Indo, where that word is “pater” or “paba,” appears to have deleted its first plosive. Children and their mangling of words, am I wrong? This of course gives His Holy—our Latin Papa—a title older than yours, which I reckon fitting all in all, but also easier to hear over a noisy channel, which may say something about both the Protos and the Aram. In any case, this fatherlessness, or rather father-remoteness, is a real and distinct sensation for those of us who’ve tried to snuggle closer to the father of us all.

  And so, ascetic even in our religiosity, we sip grape-flavored CHON drink tinctured with drug-printed ethanol, and nibble radio-blessed CHON starch wafers, and await the day, one hopes not too far in the future, when the Abba of St. Joe resides here among his wayward sons.

  I remain, very yours and very truly,

  Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune

  1.1

  25 April

  ✧

  ESL1 Shade Station

  Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1

  Extracislunar Space

  Back in her apartment, Alice saw she’d finally received a reply from President Tompkins:

  Reqst apprvd 2 recruit local assist. Your rank breveted to Major (O4) for chain of cmd., duration of assignment. Authorized involuntary reactivation of Capt’s commission, on pain of court-martial charge desrtn. Pls. inform name / serial no.?

  Huh. Somehow, Alice had apparently jumped from Sergeant to Major in one giant leap. Was that all it took to make officer these days? Just travel a million kilometers from anywhere, and run out of ideas?

  She replied:

  Capt. Derek Hakkens USAF. That’s all info I have at moment.

  This time, the reply came back within thirty seconds:

  Roger that, Major. Bring him in.

  Well. Was that a direct order from the President of the United States? It certainly looked like one. She’d been only half thinking when she made the request, but she felt a vague sense of guilt and foreboding about it now. Whatever was about to happen—whatever stupid thing was about to befall these people—Derek was now fully implicated.

  Fuck. She really needed to be smarter about this. Maybe . . . maybe Derek could help her be smarter? With his smarmy flyboy precision, he was the exact opposite of impulsive. And he had survived the June Massacre over Coffee Patch, somehow ducking and evading through a sky filled with EMP drones. Clearly, he really did know how to improvise under duress. Either that or he was simply lucky, and did not happen to get painted by a Chinese drone radar on that fateful morning, but in any case he was a good and careful pilot, and caretaker of hibernating passengers. And he knew ESL1 Shade Station far better than she did.

  But she’d be asking him to betray his friends and colleagues. Actually, she’d be ordering him to do that, and if he refused, well, he might never set foot on Earth again. Not in a Coalition country, anyway, not without being thrown into military prison for the rest of his life. That hardly seemed fair. And that was a strange thought all by itself, because “fairness” wasn’t a concept that entered Alice’s thinking very often. In war, some people were killed or maimed or disfigured, while others walked away without a blemish. Some came in as coddled officers who never saw gunfire up close, because they had good supportive parents who sent them to college and medical school. Hell, most people never went to war at all. Most people never shot anyone, or held a dying eighteen-year-old as he shuddered out his last breath, or watched their friends get blown out of the sky all around them.

  Fuck.

  President T
ompkins had wanted an icy operative, and Alice was doing a poor job of being one, perhaps because she had no actual instructions to execute. Or targets. Not instructions or targets that were specific or made any sense. And yet, she was also unequipped for any sort of touchy-feely self-actualization-type crap. If there was a bloodless solution, she was the last person she would pick to identify it and carry it out. She felt like she was missing something here—maybe something really obvious—but knowing that did nothing to help her solve it.

  Fuck!

  And to top it all off, she was horny, because she’d walked out into the world this morning expecting to get laid and clear her head, and instead she’d been smooshed up against Jeanette Schmidt for four hours. And it occurred to her now, that if (or when) she did reactivate Derek’s commission, he’d be in her chain of command, off-limits to her again and for real this time, on pain of court-martial for the both of them.

  The obvious solution was to bone him one last time and then reactivate his commission, which seemed unethical on multiple levels, so the next most obvious solution was to keep her pants on until this job was complete.

  Which did, actually, finally, give her an incentive to get the operation complete, and move it into the past.

  Well, then. For the moment, all roads seemed to lead to Derek Hakkens.

  “Lurch,” she said, bracing herself on a grab bar and leaning on the comm button beside the hatch.

  “Yes?” the machine voice answered from its little speaker.

  “Where is Captain Hakkens?”

  “Location blinded,” Lurch replied. Meaning, Derek had asked the system not to report his whereabouts.

  “Can you connect me to him, please?”