Lifeline

Prologue

L-4: AGUINALDO—5 Years Before Day 1

He thought the experiment would work, but even if it failed, he knew he could bluff his way through. The Filipinos held their Dr. Luis Sandovaal too much in awe for them to doubt anything he did.

Sandovaal ignored the crowd around him. President Magsaysay stood quietly by the airlock, along with the rest of the Council of Twenty. Sandovaal stared past the group, past the habitats and experimental fields, and gazed instead upon the sweeping curve of the cylindrical colony’s far side, where Filipino children played floater-tag in the zero-G core.

Sandovaal’s whole life revolved around success: taking outrageous chances, working long hours until he felt absolutely sure his experiments would prove out. Admitting to being only “second best” seemed as bad as conceding defeat. The field of applied genetics evolved too fast for stragglers.

That had always made it necessary for Sandovaal to take certain … chances … with his bioengineering research so he could remain the best, the most innovative. He had come to carry on his researches at L-4, the gravitational stable point 60 degrees ahead of the Moon in its orbit, four hundred thousand kilometers away from Earth—where the rest of the planet would be safe in case anything went wrong.

That self-imposed exile had proven a blessing, giving him unlimited academic freedom and free reign to direct his own research laboratory on board the Filipino colony Aguinaldo, the largest of the three human stations at L-4 and L-5. The Filipinos were proud of his presence there, to the point of designating him the colony’s chief scientist.

Sandovaal drew himself up to his full five-foot stature and spoke to the crowd in front of the airlock. With his blue eyes and shock of white hair, he didn’t look much like the other Aguinaldo inhabitants.

“President Magsaysay, distinguished senators. Today the Aguinaldo is a mere shell of what is to come. Generations from now the empty fields behind you will be filled with our children’s children, and because of the design of our colony, living space will still be plentiful.

“But adequate living space does not imply that there will always be room for growing our food. Plants need open area to grow—area that will be at a premium several years from now. People will not be willing to live in crowded conditions so that their food may flourish. But I have discovered a solution. Although the Aguinaldo may be limited in its area, there is a way to tap an infinite amount of space in which to grow the crops that can sustain us.”

President Magsaysay gave the hint of a smile. “Good, Luis. The Council of Twenty are all proud of you and your accomplishments.” He swung an arm around the airlock bay. “But why did you bring us out here, away from your laboratory?”

Sandovaal nodded to his assistant. “Dobo, prepare to eject the organism.” It was a hybrid that combined the nervous system and motor capabilities of a Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish with the cellular structure of a plant—a transgenetic organism that extended Sandovaal’s research beyond the simple wall-kelp that was even now supplementing the feed for their small population of animals.

Sandovaal turned his attention back to the Council. “This problem concerned me for some time. I tried several ways of genetically forcing plants to become denser, use less light, so that they would not take up so much room. Then I realized that we have all the space and light we need outside the Aguinaldo.”

Dobo Daeng ran his fingers over the control panel. A green lightcell changed to red. Sandovaal motioned the Council of Twenty to the viewport. The Filipinos murmured questions in low voices and crowded next to Sandovaal as they peered out the large crystal port. Sandovaal gave a smug smile.

“I have genetically altered this animal to have a dominant survival characteristic that takes advantage of its plant attributes. When it is exposed to a vacuum, the organism will increase its surface area. This allows it to capture more light and increase its ability to photosynthesize. Implanted mineral packets will allow the creature to grow—”

“In a vacuum?” interrupted Magsaysay.

“Yes. That is the point, Yoli. If this proves successful, our next step will be to have this organism grow outside. Outside! Think of the food source we could harvest.”

Sandovaal pushed through the Council of Twenty and moved right up to the viewport. The organism’s cigar-shaped body floated out of the airlock attached to a long tether. Stubby “wings” extended from either side of the meter-long body; lights outside the airlock illuminated the creature. It spun slowly as the line played out.

“By tomorrow the creature’s wings will have grown several centimeters. And in two weeks, they will extend for meters. If it survives that long.”

Sandovaal pressed his lips together and waited for the accolades. Magsaysay clasped his shoulder as the Council of Twenty nodded among themselves.

Sandovaal did not stay to participate in the political small talk. He had much more important tasks to attend to. He strolled back to the bioengineering lab modules, muttering to himself.

Sandovaal ignored the regular day/night schedule imposed by rotating shutters on the lightaxis. He worked until he had exhausted himself, realizing after several hours that it was Sunday and he could not expect his assistant Dobo to arrive, since Dobo’s wife would insist on attending Mass and relaxing with him. Sometimes Sandovaal didn’t understand other people’s priorities.

He returned to his own quarters and slept for little more than an hour before the insistent ringing of the door chime brought him awake again. He slid open the door, rubbing his eyes and automatically snapping at the short, florid-faced man waiting for him.

“Dobo, why can’t you—”

But Dobo seemed agitated and cut off Sandovaal’s words. The mere fact that his assistant would dare to interrupt brought Sandovaal to silence. “Dr. Sandovaal, you must come to the viewport end! Quickly! Something strange and wonderful has happened. Perhaps you can tell us what it is. The others are gathering there.”

Dobo turned and hurried back to his waiting jeepney before Sandovaal could say anything. His curiosity piqued, Sandovaal joined him. As they drove, he could see other Filipinos jetting or pedaling their way across the core to the cap on the cylinder. After parking the jeepney with the other vehicles at the wall, Dobo cleared a way through the crowd for Sandovaal.

Pressing his face against the hexagonal quartz sections, Sandovaal stared in astounded silence. He saw the familiar sea of stars, the glints of nearby debris at L-4, where the first superstructure for the new station Orbitech 2 was under construction, the great glare of the gibbous Moon.

But he also saw a giant, translucent wisp of material covering part of the viewport. It seemed extraordinarily thin, yet extended for kilometers. Fragments hundreds of meters across tore away due to the colony’s rotation and hovered in the L-4 gravity well, where they would drift under pressure from the solar wind.

Many other people watched the flimsy material, fascinated, possibly frightened. Some looked toward Sandovaal, as if expecting him to produce a comprehensive answer after only a simple glance. He saw President Magsaysay alighting from a jeepney.

Sandovaal turned to Dobo. “Well, has anyone thought to have a piece brought inside for analysis?”

When Sandovaal did complete his inspection in the laboratory—with Magsaysay and some of the senators from the Council of Twenty breathing down his neck—he discovered that the transgenetic organism had grown far beyond even his wildest estimate.

Months later, in a simultaneous announcement to Nature and the New York Times, Dr. Luis Sandovaal presented his discovery. The original creature looked not unlike a manta ray. It puttered around, swimming in the zero-G core, eating small amounts of wall-kelp and photosynthesizing, completely innocuous. But when ejected into the hard vacuum of space, it underwent a drastic survival measure—a transformation in which its volume expanded to maximize surface area. The tiny flippers in the body core crushed down and smeared out into a layer only a few cells thick. This let it absorb as many solar photons as possible for photosynthesis. The end result was a beautiful, but thoroughly impractical wing-like body spanning scores of kilometers: a giant organic solar sail that could live on its metabolic reserves for perhaps weeks.

Sandovaal did not admit that he had failed to produce a radical new food source—the tissue proved too thin to be of use—but instead played up the basic discovery in the field of transgenetic biology.

The Earth press and intercolony communications dubbed the life-forms “sail-creatures.” Sandovaal would have preferred something more elegant, but the name stuck.

CENTER FOR HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MATERIALS ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

Colors rippled as Karen Langelier tuned the laser to a different wavelength. The color jumped as it locked onto the new material’s resonance structure, glowing a deep red. A long, thin liquid strand of phenolic began to crawl up the beam. She pressed the laser goggles against her high cheekbones to lean over the vacuum vessel. Afraid to breathe, she watched as the phenolic drew out, thinner and thinner, approaching the limit of visibility.

Just as she began to adjust the probe, the delicate strand broke. Globules of pulsating bubbles crashed into each other throughout the vessel, striking the walls.

“Damn!” Karen turned from the vacuum vessel. “Three strikes and I’m out today!”

The new article in the Online Review of Scientific Instruments seemed clear enough—laser filamentation was a well-documented process, known for decades. She had arranged the experiment to duplicate the test conditions. It wasn’t like she was new at this, either. Maybe there was some problem with the phenolic she had used.

Karen knew she would be a grouch tonight when she got home, and Ray would probably spend the evening talking about the cases in his law office. He wouldn’t even notice she’d had a bad day.

“Well, then,” Karen said out loud, “I’ll just have to make it a good day for myself.”

Expelling a breath, she turned back to the three-dimensional holotank. “Let’s walk through this one last time.” She slapped at the library control panel and called up the article again. “And I’ve got to stop talking to myself.”

As the manuscript popped into the tank, she saw that her fingers had transposed two digits on the recall memory, pulling up instead the backlog of papers from Physical Review Letters she still intended to read. Karen leaned forward to correct her mistake, but scanned down the list of contents. Her personal screener program had highlighted everything that matched its preprogrammed subset of Karen Langelier’s interests. And near the top of the list appeared the title, “Filamentation in One and a Half Dimensions.”

She pursed her lips, then smiled. “Serendipity, I suppose.”

The author list surprised her. Not content to publish innovative works in only Russian-language journals, Soviet researchers increasingly submitted their most promising work to the prestigious Letters. Karen pointed at the article listing and a window flashed open, displaying the contents.

She raised her eyebrows. Published only weeks ago, the Soviet paper presented an elegant yet practical method of constructing one-and-a-half-dimensional strands.

Forgetting her own polymer fiber problem for the moment, she burrowed into the paper and started reading at her “scientific” speed. Lips moving, forehead creased with concentration, Karen began to digest every syllable and equation in the file.

One-and-a-half dimensions.… The concept made her mind reel, but with fascination, like wrestling with a paradox.

Karen allowed her mind to wander. Infinity, possibilities. She knew an embryonic answer floated somewhere at the back of her mind. She could access it with careful stroking, off-center concentration.…

When she had been a young undergraduate, back when the outside world seemed unattached to her reality, Karen would spend hours contemplating irrational numbers. She felt that her understanding gave her some form of control over them. They weren’t infinite where they started—she held one end of the irrational number, the part she could see. A number like pi, simply the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, starting with 3.14159.… But the rest of the number rolled away from her, an ever-changing sequence infinitely long.

And she could control that number by knowing what it was. She could hold one end of a magical, mystical sequence that lasted forever.

Back then Karen had realized she was different. Not strange, just different—and content to be. She couldn’t relate to the conversations of her dorm mates, the giggling stories, the meaningless concerns. She had a communication problem with them, and she didn’t want to take the time to learn their dialect. Instead, she grew to master her own language, a way of communicating with the precise sciences. Mathematics.

One-and-a-half dimensions …

She closed her eyes now, imagining that she was part of the filament, floating just outside its structure, like an irrational number. The Soviet paper had elegantly shown the full solution in closed form—and now, as Karen drifted there, it all made perfect sense. The answer was inside herself, inside her capabilities, if only she knew how to bring it to the light of day.

The imaginary strand of molecules extended away from her in an endless line. But instead of being a jumbled sequence of nonrepeating numbers, these molecules were ordered, well-posed in a razor sharp line that had no beginning or end. That was the one-dimensional aspect she recognized.

As she imagined herself moving closer to the filament, she wondered what kept the structure from falling apart, from stretching out and collapsing under its own gravitational weight as it hung in front of her. She considered why it wasn’t rigid.

Karen moved around the strand. The molecules stretched down and above, as far as she could see. She approached to touch the apparition and drew suddenly back, her mouth agape.

She wondered if others would call this a mystical experience. It didn’t matter if her colleagues laughed at her technique—they couldn’t argue with the solutions she found.

Extending radially from every molecule coursed a potential, a force she couldn’t see, perpendicular to the strand. The answer tickled the back of her mind, growing stronger, more insistent. Karen didn’t push herself, but kept her thoughts flowing, visualizing the strand, imagining herself moving along its length. The potential force remained. The same potential. And hurling herself in the opposite direction, jabbing at every molecular twist, she continued to encounter the identical binding force.

And suddenly she realized. The tickling solution burst into the front of her mind.

When she had first discovered how to master irrational numbers, Karen had wept from the revelation. Now her eyes stung with tears from the knowledge of how a one-and-a-half-dimensional strand—a weave—could grow stronger as it got longer, yet could remain completely flexible. The potential bound every molecule, and grew with the number of molecules. The distance between each molecule didn’t matter, she realized, because the potential was radial.

The implications overwhelmed her. She blinked and found herself kneeling on the floor. She stood up and closed the door, anxious not to have anyone interrupt her train of thought.

With the laser filamentation technique, she could make a strand that was, for all practical purposes, an infinite line of infinite strength and infinite thinness.

Karen Langelier hugged her knees and began to laugh to herself. No matter what, Ray’s caseload tonight could never compare with this!

Eventually, the single-molecular fiber, woven in one and a half dimensions with its own potential, became known as weave wire. Karen would have preferred something more elegant, but the name stuck.

L-4: AGUINALDO—Day 1 Minus 3 Years

Being at the Aguinaldo’s Jumpoff was like standing at the bottom of a gargantuan well. Ramis floated at one end of the zero-G core; he squinted along the lightaxis to the other end, ten kilometers away. Clusters of children played in the core, punctuated by sail-creature nymphs darting in and out, genetically programmed to keep the youngsters away from the central column of fiberoptic threads. Adults navigated the rim, leaping from bouncer to bouncer in a race around the circumferential Sibuyan Sea.

Living areas curled around the cylindrical side, snaking through the fields of taro and abaca, rice paddies, stadiums, and streams. Experimental sectors of wall-kelp covered most of the remainder of the Aguinaldo’s metallic structure.

As Ramis revolved around the lightaxis, it seemed as though his whole world might collapse and fall to the center. The sight always made him dizzy. But he smiled.

Ramis Barrera was thirteen, though smaller than others his age, and he fiercely fought against the perception that he was younger. He tried to keep aloof, avoiding others to make himself seem more independent.

Even three years before, back on Earth in the Baguio resort on the Philippines, Ramis had tried to be tough and snub his mother when she came to see him and his brother in the Sari-Sari store. Ramis’s parents owned the store, but they spent most of their time at the Scripps Institute with Dr. Sandovaal. Ramis and his older brother Salita often minded the store, and occasionally their mother dropped in to check on them. Salita would hide his newly opened bottle of San Miguel and the blue-seal cigarettes he had been sneaking; Ramis would jump down from the counter and pretend to be businesslike, to impress his mother with how mature he could act. The room would grow quiet, and they would be able to hear the sounds from outside. With only a stern look, his mother would send them back to work …

But now, up in the Aguinaldo and floating at Jumpoff, he wished she were here. The exciting but frightening vertigo waited for him above.

Ramis leaped straight up. His momentum bore him high into the zero-G core. Below, Jumpoff grew farther away as he drifted parallel to the lightaxis.

One of the sail-creature nymphs flapped gracefully by as it traversed the core. Ramis fumbled with his pouch and withdrew a hand-sized canister of compressed air. Sending out a quick jet, he changed his direction slightly.

Though it was early in the subjective day, other children had been playing for hours already. As he drifted away from a congregation of them, Ramis twisted himself around and gave a shot of air from the container, slowing his motion. Another burst ensured that he drifted back. The cluster of children showed no sign of noticing him, but he knew he was implicitly included in their game.

Half a dozen sail-creature nymphs moved around the vast core, looking like brownish-green balloons with stubby, finlike “wings.” The creatures swam through the air with an eerie and seemingly effortless grace, their flowing wing-strokes calling to mind Earth’s giant manta rays. The younger ones frolicked about, some playing with the children and being treated as pets, but most of them were content just to nudge stray children back toward the core.

Ramis played floater-tag with some of the other children. After one breathless chase, he managed to escape being caught by shooting a massive burst of air from his container and flying faster than the girl pursuing him could catch up.

He let himself fly unguided, feeling the breeze rippling his hair as he traveled across the core. Here, his small size didn’t hinder him—he was the equal of any of the other children.

He watched the rimbouncing race around the Sibuyan Sea, wishing he had been picked for one of the adult teams. His friend Dobo Daeng had tried out, too, but had withdrawn his application when his work with Dr. Sandovaal had taken a sudden new direction.

Ramis heard faint, distant cheering as the rimbouncing match became more heated. He watched the children playing; bored, he turned to the rimbouncing again, and then looked down.

His heart froze. The rotating wall of the Aguinaldo seemed to pull at him as it rushed past. Though it was still meters away, he had drifted much too close to the rim. The Coriolis winds buffeted him.

He pushed down on the compressed-air container. It hissed, then went silent. He had exhausted the air in his rush to win in floater-tag.

One of the colony buildings was rotating toward him. The squat building contained some of the electronics-maintenance equipment. It was only two levels high, but Ramis drifted helpless, unable to get out of the way as the wall swept toward him like a giant flyswatter moving at fifty kilometers per hour.

Ramis tossed the can away, hoping for even a little momentum transfer, and frantically fumbled through his pouch for another container.

Nothing.

He went through his pockets—again, nothing.

He shouted, waving his hands wildly. It would do nothing to change his direction, but he desperately hoped the other players might be able to do something—if he could attract their attention. He had hardly any time. If only he had worn his sandals, he could have hurled them away and caused himself to drift to the side, perhaps enough to let the building slash by without crushing him. But his feet were bare and he wore only loose shorts, a light shirt—not enough mass for any kind of maneuvering.

The sharp corners came closer. Ramis seemed to be falling toward the building. His heart pounded. He felt giddy, helpless. The other children had noticed now. Some pointed at him, some began to move; a scream reached his ears. But it was too late—

Suddenly something firm rammed him from below. He let out a gasp, and then he was struck again, moving away. Ramis whirled in the air, twisting his body. It was a young sail-creature, one with a dark Z-shaped mark on its back. The creature held itself rigid as the broad expanse of the building swept by silently beneath them. Through one of the skylights, Ramis caught a glimpse of several techs working at a table. They didn’t even notice him rushing by.

The sail-creature nymph butted him one last time and knocked him toward the center of the core.

Still terrified and shuddering, Ramis drifted as some of the excited children moved in his direction. Only when one of them tossed him an extra container did he fully relax. Twisting, Ramis looked to see the young sail-creature frolicking nearby as if pleased with itself. As it spun in the air, the “Z” marking became visible again.

“Salamat po, Sarat,” Ramis whispered in the Filipino dialect of Tagalog: “Thank you, Timely One!”