The Last Theorem

31 SKYHOOK DAYS

For Myra de Soyza Subramanian, caring for her second infant was even more of a breeze than caring for her first. Her husband, for example, did not now come home depressed from a job he thought irrelevant; his students liked him, he liked his students, and Dr. Davoodbhoy was unfailingly pleased. The outside world was easier to take now, too. Oh, a few nations could not seem to break the habit of making threatening noises at their neighbors. Hardly anyone was actually getting killed, though.

And, over Beatrix Vorhulst’s protest, they had finally moved into their own little house—“little” only by comparison with the Vorhulst mansion—just steps from one of the island’s beautiful broad beaches, where the water was as warm and welcoming as ever. By the time they were settled in their new house, the world outside no longer seemed as threatening. Little Robert splashed in the shallowest part of the pool, while Natasha found deeper water to demonstrate her considerable (and, Ranjit maintained, clearly inherited) skill at swimming—or any other way—when she wasn’t taking sailing lessons from a neighbor who owned a little Sunfish. What made being in their own home particularly pleasant was that Mevrouw Vorhulst had parted with her favorite cook and Natasha’s favorite maid to save Myra the trouble of housework.

Another way in which Myra’s second pregnancy was unlike the first went by the name of Natasha—well, more often it was Tashy. Tashy wasn’t a problem. When she wasn’t winning ribbons for swimming—only in children’s events so far, but she was seen to watch adult races with narrowed eyes and obvious intentions—she was busy at being her mother’s assistant, deputy, and sous-chef. Thus aided, Myra had a gratifying number of hours each day to spend catching up on what was going on in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous prostheses.

That was quite a lot. By the time Myra had begun to evaluate each muscle twinge in the hope that it might be the beginnings of labor, she was pretty nearly up to speed again.

Of course, that wouldn’t last. By the time the new baby was birthed, weaned, toilet trained, and off to school, Myra would have slipped behind her cohort again. That was inevitable.

Was Myra angry at this tyrannical law of childbearing? It was clearly unjust. It dictated that any woman who wanted a baby had to accept Mother Nature’s inflexible decree that, for a period of time, the cognitive functions of her mind would have to take second place to mothering. It would have to be a fairly significant period, too. Ten years was the accepted minimum before a female AI nerd (or medical doctor or politician or, for that matter, pastry chef) could get back to her career.

Obviously that was unfair. But the world was chronically unfair in so many ways that Myra de Soyza Subramanian had no patience for wasting time in resentment. That was the unchangeable way the world was. What was the point in complaining? There would be a time when both her children were in college. Then she would be as free as any human could ever get, and then she would have twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years of productive life in which to unravel the riddles of her chosen profession.

Deferred gratification was the name of that game. You didn’t have to like its rules to play by them. And, one way or another, you might even win.

Both Myra and Ranjit considered themselves big winners when Robert Ganesh Subramanian was born. His parents thought they had hit the jackpot with two fine offspring. Robert was a vociferously healthy newborn who gained weight and strength as rapidly as Ranjit and Myra could have hoped for. He tried to turn himself over in his crib even earlier than Natasha had, and was toilet trained almost as early. All of their friends declared that he was the handsomest child they had ever seen, and they weren’t really lying, either. Robert was the kind of infant for whose picture baby-food manufacturers would have paid handsomely to put on their labels.

Interestingly, if there was anyone who loved Baby Robert more than his parents did, that person was little Natasha, who wasn’t all that little anymore and was already beginning to demonstrate a considerable aptitude for athletics, education, and getting her parents to do just about everything she might require of them.

Which, in this case, was to let her take care of Baby Robert.

Well, not quite all of his care. Not the part that involved situations that smelled really bad. But dressing Robert, pushing Robert around in his stroller, playing with Robert—Natasha demanded the privilege of taking care of those things, and after some early worried hesitation, Myra gave her daughter what she asked.

Actually, Natasha was good at the job. When Robert screamed or roared, it was Natasha who could usually fit words to his outcries. And when his mother took him away, Natasha had her own life to live, school or her daily swim sessions or just spending time with her friends…or most likely combining her interests, with her friends joining her at the pool, or Robert slumbering beside her as she studied English verbs or the history of India and its satellite nations.

All this, of course, was a good thing for Myra. With Natasha relieving her of so much of the work of raising Robert, Myra was not falling behind as rapidly as she might have feared in AI nerding. And what was good for Myra was certainly good for Ranjit, for whom his wife was as dear—and as unpredictably exciting—as she had been on the day they were wed.

All in all, things were going well for Ranjit Subramanian. One seminar per semester was all he needed to do, Dr. Davoodbhoy had decreed, but as long as he was going to do the one, they might as well make it a big one. So Ranjit’s classroom had become the exact supersize theater in which he had thrilled to Joris Vorhulst’s stories of the worlds of the solar system. Ranjit didn’t have twenty students at a time anymore, either. Now he had a hundred. Which, Dr. Davoodbhoy assured him, entitled him to the luxury of a teaching assistant—that eager young woman, Ramya Salgado, now possessed of a master’s degree of her own, who had so enriched his second seminar—and freedom to do his own “research” for the rest of each semester. Davoodbhoy intimated that that was so he could get a head start on whatever proof he was going to assign his next class.

Or, Ranjit realized, it was a good time to do some of that exploration of his native country that he had been intending to get around to ever since Myra had first chided him as overparochial.

That was a more attractive idea than it might have been some years earlier, for even tourist travel was looking more attractive in this post–Silent Thunder world. They could, for example, cruise the Nile River, as Myra had longed to do since she was ten; both Egypt and Kenya had furloughed large fractions of their militaries while the ecologists for all the countries involved worked out water-saving ways of containing their thirsts for Nile water. The Subramanians could have taken the children to London—or to Paris, or New York, or Rome—to get an idea of what a great city was like. They could have settled for Norwegian fjords or Swiss mountains or the jungles of Amazonia; they could indeed have gone almost anywhere, but what in fact happened was that, while they were still studying travel brochures, they got a text from Joris Vorhulst. It said:

“Actually,” Myra said, “that would be fun.” And Natasha said, “You bet!” And even Robert, hanging on to Natasha’s chair and listening to every word, bellowed something that Natasha explained was a yes. And so the family of four prepared for its first long trip together.

It wasn’t just Vorhulst’s invitation that made Ranjit look forward to visiting the Skyhook terminal. There were actually two reasons, and the first was the advisory board that Vorhulst had talked him into joining a number of years ago. It had been as undemanding as Vorhulst had promised—no meetings to go to, not even any voting on any issues, because if there were any issues troublesome enough to require a decision, that decision was made for them by the real controllers of the enterprise, the governments of China, Russia, and the United States. Ranjit had, however, been the recipient of a monthly progress report. There too the heavy hand of the big three was felt, because most of each report’s content was sternly secret, and even more of it was simply dismissed as what was cryptically called “development.” He had only been to the site a handful of times, and those visits had been quite cursory. Whether he would learn more by being at the scene Ranjit could not say, but he was anxious to find out.

The other reason was a surprise to Ranjit himself. The Subramanians didn’t have a car of their own—Ranjit and Myra biked to most places, sometimes with Natasha riding happily in front of them and Robert strapped into a child’s seat behind his father, and when they needed more in the way of transport, there were always cabs. But the university had promised the loan of a car for the trip, and Ranjit picked it up from the grinning Dr. Davoodbhoy. “It’s special for you,” he said. “Pax per Fidem sent it. It’s a new design from transparent Korea—with all those geniuses who used to build weapons now free for new civilian ideas, they’ve got a lot of stuff.” And when he’d explained what the perky little four-seater could do, it sent Ranjit back to Myra grinning with pleasure.

“Get me a pitcher of water,” he commanded as he pulled up at their house. Mystified, she obeyed. She was even more mystified when he ceremoniously opened the fuel tank and poured the water in, and when he then started the motor and listened pleasurably to its purr, she was totally baffled.

He gave her the explanation Davoodbhoy had given him. “Boron,” he said. “It’s called the Abu-Hamed drive, after I don’t know who, maybe the person who invented it. You know the element boron is so hungry for oxygen that it’ll pull it right out of compounds like water? And when you take the oxygen out of the water molecule, what do you have left?”

Myra frowned at him. “Hydrogen, but—”

Grinning, he touched a finger to her lips. “But boron’s terribly expensive, and burning a carbon fuel’s so much cheaper that nobody ever bothered with it. But here it is! They’ve found out how to regenerate the boron so they can use it over and over. And so we’re driving a car that not only is low-emission, it doesn’t emit anything at all!”

“But—” Myra began again. This time he stopped his wife’s lips with his own.

“Get Natasha and Robert, will you?” he coaxed. “And our baggage? And let’s see how this hydrogen burner works.”

Which turned out to be very well. They did have to stop twice to add water to the fuel tank, under the scandalized stares of the people running the filling stations they stopped at, but the little car performed as well as any fossil-fuel burner.

They were still ten kilometers from the terminal when Robert emitted one of his heart-stopping shrieks. Myra jammed on the brakes, but it wasn’t a sudden danger. It was simply an exciting sight. What Robert was waving at (as he said “Spider!” and “Climb fast!” and “Many, many, many!”) was the cable of the Skyhook itself, barely visible as something that glinted from the sun. But what it carried, once you knew what to look for, was visible enough. There were the cargo-carrying pods, one after another, marching up into the sky and disappearing into the first layer of clouds.

“Huh,” Ranjit said. “Looks like they’ve really got it going, doesn’t it?”

So they had.

The road to the terminal was paired up with a railroad track, and as they were approaching, a train—forty-two freight cars, Natasha counted excitedly—overtook them and disappeared into one of the terminal’s giant sheds. There were guards at the car entrance, but they passed the Subramanian family with a friendly salute, and a wave in the direction of the VIP parking lot.

Where they were met by a handsome Asian woman who introduced herself as Joris Vorhulst’s assistant. “Engineer Vorhulst was looking forward to seeing you very much,” she informed them, “but he didn’t expect you until tomorrow. He’s on his way, though. Would you like something to eat?”

Ranjit opened his mouth to say what a good idea that was, but was overruled by his wife’s faster response. “Not just yet. If we could just look around for a bit—”

They could. They were warned to stay out of the loading sheds and, of course, to beware of the trucks and tractors that were lugging around unidentifiable bits and pieces of no doubt excitingly interesting objects.

Ranjit contemplated all the activity with benign incomprehension. “I’d give a lot to know what some of these things are,” he informed his family in general.

Young Natasha pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “that lumpy package there is the thruster for an ion rocket. I think the bale next to it is carbon nanotubes in sheet form—I’d say probably part of a solar sail—”

Ranjit gazed at his daughter, openmouthed. “What makes you so sure?” he demanded.

She grinned at him. “While you were talking to that lady, Robert and I poked around, and I read the bills of lading. I think they’re building spaceships up there!”

“And,” called a familiar voice from the unloading shed, “you’re exactly right, Tashy! We’ve got a couple of them working already.”

Joris Vorhulst wouldn’t listen to any objections; he wanted food, decent Sri Lankan food, and if they didn’t want to eat, they could just watch him doing so. Because, it turned out, he had been five weeks on the Skyhook himself, and was just now coming back from supervising the work of those very spacecraft whose existence Natasha had deduced.

“Skyhook is really beginning to pull its weight,” he informed them happily. The two robot rocket ships that were already commissioned were working as scavengers, dedicated to combing LEO for abandoned spacecraft or even abandoned fuel tanks of ancient Russian and American ones. Once found, computer-controlled solar sails were mounted on them and they were programmed to sail themselves to Grand Central. There they were transformed. They were no longer dangerous free-flying spaceship killers. Now they were simply the raw materials for anything that needed to be built. “It’s all very well to ship stuff up from the surface,” Vorhulst declared, mouth full of what even Myra had to admit was a really good curry, “but why should we waste what’s up there already?”

“And that’s what you were doing up in LEO? Collecting scrap to build new things?”

Vorhulst looked embarrassed. “Actually,” he said, “I was making sure the third ship was ready to go. That’s the one that’s headed for the moon. You know that the robot explorers have been busy there for a few years now? And they’ve found plenty of those lava tubes I used to talk about in my astronomy class?”

“Actually,” Ranjit complained, “I didn’t. The progress reports they sent the advisory council were pretty sketchy.”

“Yes,” Vorhulst conceded, “I know they were. We’re hoping the big three will loosen up a little now, because those tubes are going to change everything. One of them is right under the Sinus Iridium—the ‘Bay of Rainbows.’ It’s a beaut. It’s eighteen hundred meters long, and ship three will be carrying the machinery to seal it up because Lunar Development has a plan for it. The big three want tourists, you see.”

Myra looked skeptical. “Tourists? Last I heard there were about eleven people living in the lunar colony and it was costing a fortune just to keep them fed and supplied with air to breathe.”

Vorhulst grinned. “In the old days, yes. That was when they had to be supported from Earth’s surface, by rockets. But now we’ve got the Skyhook! Oh, there’ll be tourists, all right. And to give them a good reason to go there, the big three pulled a few strings, and now the Olympics association has made a deal.”

Natasha, previously uncharacteristically silent, perked up. “What kind of a deal?”

“To hold the kind of events they can’t do on Earth, Tashy. You see, lunar gravity’s only 1.622 meters per second squared, so—”

Natasha held up her hands. “Please, Dr. Vorhulst!”

“Well, it’s just about one sixth as much as Earth’s at the surface. That means that the minute anybody does competitive sports on the moon, all the old records that involve running or jumping are just out the window. I’m not sure that even the Sinus Iridium tube is tall enough to let the high jumpers strut their stuff.”

Ranjit was looking skeptical. “You think people are going to travel a couple of hundred thousand kilometers just to watch some athletes jump high?”

“I do,” Vorhulst insisted. “So does Lunar Development. But that’s not the star turn. What would you say to a contest that hasn’t been possible on Earth? Like a race between humans in muscle-powered flight?”

If he expected Ranjit to answer, he was disappointed. There was a crash of dishes as Natasha jumped to her feet. “I would say I’m ready!” she cried. “I want to go! And, you’ll see, I’ll win!”