Wil McCarthy - Boundary Condition

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2024-11-23 2 0 84.25KB 32 页 5.9玖币
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Boundary Condition by Wil Mccarthy
* * * *
* * * *
Illustration by Vincent DiFate
Very old and very new ideas can come together in unexpected ways....
* * * *
We saw in the vale below us a whirlwind beginning in the road, and shewing itself by the dust it
raised. Riding close by its side, I tried to break this whirlwind by striking my whip frequently
through it, but without any effect. The circular motion was amazingly rapid. I accompanied it
about three quarters of a mile, till some limbs of dead trees, flying about and falling near me,
made me more apprehensive of danger; and then I stopped, looking at the top of it as it went on,
which was visible for a very great height above the trees.
--Benjamin Franklin, 1755: "To Peter Collins"
* * * *
0.
Space, Near Future
Death comes upon us in surprising ways. If it didn't, we'd arrange to be somewhere else, right? And in
the wake of death we find an obsession with time. When did this happen? When did it start? How long
have I got left? But whose time should answer these questions? Whose calendar and clock?
On a space station in low-Earth orbit, there are no easy answers. The Sun comes out every 90 minutes
and stays for 47 before sinking back behind the limb of the blue-green planet below, and the station
passes through 25 different time zones along the way. For sanity's sake, Russian stations set their clocks
to Moscow's "Charlie" time, three hours fast of Greenwich, England. The Chinese are synched to
Jiuquan's "Foxtrot" zone, and the handful of truly international stations are on Universal or "Zulu" or
Greenwich Mean Time. London, in other words.
Where death comes upon Americans in space the situation is more complex. If you work for NASA, you
log absolute time in two zones at once: Zulu and Romeo, which might stand either for Cocoa Beach
where the rockets actually launch, or possibly Washington, D.C. where the checks are written. It hardly
matters, because the routing of voice and telecom through Building 30 at Johnson Space Center makes
these outposts a mobile extension of Houston, Texas.
The Air Force stations, on the other hand, like to keep it simple. It's Zulu time and metric units, never
mind where you came from or where you think you're headed. And for some reason, the two fledgling
space hotels--little more than boxcar-sized inflatable hot dogs--follow the military paradigm.
On the other other hand, should you be lucky enough to work for the National Weather Service--a.k.a.
"Not Wet, Sir" if you like them or "Nitwit Circus" if you don't--you live on Sierra time. That's Omaha,
Nebraska, son, and don't you forget it. The spaceplanes take off and land on the runways at Eppley
Field, and the tracking network is headquartered just seventeen kilometers south at Offutt Air Force
Base. Even the checks are written locally; between its subscription-only news network and its weather
control services, its multimedia archives and its growing tourism business, NWS is officially
self-sustaining, and may soon be handing a surplus back to Uncle Sam.
In olden times it was glamorous hereabouts to be an aviator, or to work for the railroads, or even
(strange to imagine it!) to be a humble letter carrier for the Pony Express. For now it's the men and
women of the Weather Service--most especially the Stormbreakers--to whom these envies accrue.
Thousands of hopefuls move here every year with the dream of signing up, though fewer than twenty are
accepted.
So, never mind that in low-earth orbit the Sun rises and sets 16 times a day; on an NWS station your
morning is the Nebraska Cornhuskers' morning, and your evening occurs as the Sun slips down behind
the lone tower called "Prick of the Prairie" and settles into an ocean of Tango-zone corn and buckwheat.
Wave to Headquarters as you soar high above; the city is instantly recognizable even from orbit.
Surrounded by that grassy ocean, Omaha's southwestern edge has, in recent years, finally blurred into the
outer fringes of Lincoln. Its eastern frontier encompasses the city of Council Bluffs, Iowa. But sail a little
farther and you're in the open sea, where the cornstalks outnumber the human beings twenty million to
one. Where the nearest civilization is 225 kilometers away, and it's only Des Moines. So if the Gate to
God isn't exactly the most cosmopolitan city in the world, you should understand in all fairness that it
doesn't need to be.
Oh-MA-ha, the locals call it, when they're in a mood to chuckle. The Big Island.
It was with great secrecy--disguised as dull routine--that a particular spaceplane lifted off from this site,
this place in the middle of no place, and lit an Orbital Insertion Motor that flung it hard toward an NWS
station speeding 500 kilometers overhead.
"Relief vehicle away," said a bored-sounding flight controller. "Tell Dewey Park their replacements are en
route." It was a half-truth at best, but a half-lie at worst. The National Weather Service is nothing if not
pragmatic.
But this young man was in on more secrets than his managers supposed, and while he spoke there was a
dead body cooling under his desk--the first of many who would lose their lives in the coming spasm of
transformation and realignment. The why of this is difficult to explain even now, though the where and
when and how are little in doubt. But in some sense the motive for murder--even mass murder--is always
the same: to control the future by removing people from it.
1.
Shuttlerise
Catskin. Iceland Spar, medium. Hand and Bladder Glass. Magdeburg Hemispheres. Lodestone.
Tantalus Cup.
--"Apparatus and Material for Experiments in Physics", CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics,
Cleveland, Ohio, 1913.
* * * *
"Onigiri," said Tomohiro Sato, holding up one of the sticky rice balls he and Chip had been whipping up
in the galley these past few weeks. They were the size of small peaches, and with a bit of salty fish paste
in the center, they were good. They also held together in zero-g, making them the only decent way to eat
rice up here without a godawful mess.
"Rice ball," answered Jiminy Gomez, wondering what the zinger was this time. Tomo--a famous
weatherman in his own country--was here on Dewey Park Station to learn the delicate art of the Free
Will Index forecast, and he seemed determined to teach something of comparable value in return: the art
of the bilingual pun.
"Nigiri means ‘squeeze,'" Tomo explained, as they drifted through the gray-white pressurized tunnel
connecting the trailing sensor arm to the station core. "With your hand, right? To form the rice into a ball."
His accent wasn't perfect, but it was good; only the pacing really betrayed him.
"Okay, so what's the ‘O'?"
Tomo waved the question away. "Unimportant. Means ‘elegant.' You stick that on a lot of words.
Shiri means ‘ass,' right? ‘Oshiri' means derriere. Much nicer."
With that, Tomo tossed the rice ball to Jiminy, who'd had six long months in zero-g and caught it easily.
He eyed it uneasily, though. Where was the gag?
"You like?" said Tomo. "Go ahead, eat it. Exercise your free will."
Hmm. Jiminy could feel the ghost of a punchline out there somewhere, but he didn't have enough
information yet. He was going to get zinged. Again.
"Please tell me this has nothing to do with your ass."
Tomo laughed. "Not this time. But you eat that thing, it means you owe me a debt. The word for that is
giri, and if you take that off you're left with oni, which means ‘goblin.' Oni giri, the debt owed to a
goblin."
Jiminy made sure Tomo could see him rolling his eyes. "They call you the Weather Wit? Really?"
"Ah," said Tomo, waving that away, too. "You spoiled my rhythm. You know how you say ‘Jim
knows a little Japanese?' Jim wa nihongo hanashimasu."
As Tomo said this, he turned in mid-air and touched his finger to Jiminy's nose at the word "knows," and
again at ‘hana,' which was the Japanese word for nose. A double-entendre? A triple? A bilingual triple
entendre?
"Hmm," he said, thinking that one over. Clever was not quite the same thing as funny.
They passed through the final hatchway--about as wide as a standard doorway back home--and into the
station core. It wasn't much; just a bus-sized fiberglass habitat module--the Hab--serviced by a
spiderweb of rollout carbon trusses and inflatable Kevlar tube tents. Dewey Park covered as much
footprint as an aircraft carrier, but inside it had the volume of a midsize submarine, and only weighed as
much as a Lear Jet.
If the two NASA stations were Cadillacs--classy, rugged, and safe as houses--then the three NWS ones
were more along the lines of an Indian Tata. That is to say: flimsy, maintenance-hungry, and cheaper than
their own weight in gasoline. If Jim really wanted to, he could puncture the Hab wall with a ballpoint pen.
But hey, that was life in the Service. With a big job and a small budget, they simply couldn't afford to be
too cautious.
"You want to hear an actual joke?" he asked Tomo. "I'll tell you a joke. You know the Pope?"
"Personally? Okay, okay, yes, I know who he is. You just got a new one, right?"
"The Catholics got him, yeah. Not me personally. Anyway, he was just crowned: Dave the First, the
American pope. And he's supposed to go to New York City to catch a plane to Rome, so they pack him
in this bulletproof Popemobile, and he's surrounded by bodyguards. One of them's driving, two are in the
back seat, one's on the roof.... And it suddenly dawns on old Dave that these guys will be on him like
glue for the rest of his life. Never a moment alone.
"Buuut ... just as quickly he realizes he's the boss here. These guards have to do what he says. So he
says to the one who's driving, he says, ‘Slide over. I'm taking the wheel.' And what can the guy do?
He slides over, and Pope Dave starts driving."
"Uh-huh," said Tomohiro, crossing his arms like this was already the worst joke he'd ever heard. He was
slowly tilting, too, which in zero gravity was a subtle way of dissing someone. If you were interested, you
didn't drift; you kept yourself aligned with the person you were listening to.
But Jim pressed on. "So anyway, it's not built like a normal car, and he's not used to the controls. He's
wandering in and out of his lane, can't hold a constant speed. Pretty soon the cops pull him over, so he
rolls down the window like a good citizen and hands over his driver's license. And the one cop says to
the other cop, ‘Holy shit, we've got to let this guy go. He's really important.'"
"'What makes you say that?' says the other cop. He's not looking, right? He's filling out paperwork. And
the first cop turns to him and says, ‘I don't know who he is, but he's got Pope Dave for a fucking
chauffeur!'"
Tomo processed that for a few seconds, then spent another few trying not to laugh. But it was a good
joke, and it broke out a decent chuckle.
"See?" said Jiminy. "That's a joke. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to find my headset in time for dock
ops."
"Oh. You should hurry," Tomo said. "We don't really have that long."
Jim slid open the fanfold of his cabin, which was about the size of three coffins stacked vertically. (How
much space did one person really need? Especially in microgravity?) He drifted to the back and
commenced rummaging, finally locating his headset in the webbing of his top desk drawer. Safety and
command protocols aside, he didn't normally wear the thing indoors. It chafed and squeezed, and after
enough hours it would turn his whole ear red. This one was dead, of course--he was always forgetting to
turn it off--so he swapped in the battery waiting fresh on the charger, then slid the whole thing down over
his head and right ear, carefully adjusting the microphone to the proper angle and distance from his
mouth. The headsets had literally come from Radio Shack, and were damned flaky about things like that.
Finally he switched it on, and was greeted by the chatter of Bob Cass and Lisa Goho in the control
cupola at the "top" of the Hab, i.e., the part facing away from Earth. Opposite the docking module, so
they could guide the shuttle in with minimal risk of being personally crushed by it. Bob was the station
commander, Lisa was the X.O., and both of them were pilots. Indeed, they would be flying that same
shuttle back to Earth tomorrow afternoon.
"Aaah, closing rate 3.6 meters per second," Lisa informed the channel flatly. "Recommend another
deceleration toot."
"Aaah, roger that," said an unfamiliar voice--the shuttle's own current pilot. "Be advised, we are still lining
up the final approach. Expect a burn in approximately fifteen seconds."
It went on like that for some time. The "Aaah" was to trigger the mics in voice-activated mode. Without it
they would step on the first second or two of actual speech, with sometimes-calamitous results. It was an
old and effective method for talking hands-free on a half-duplex channel, but it did pretty much make
them sound like retards. "Better radios" were always high on the NWS Astronautics wish list, but you
know, good radios were way more expensive than the ones that could just barely get the job done. The
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