The Second Angel (Philip Kerr) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. notes)

Notes

1

Accidents are common on the Moon. With one-sixth Earth gravity, bodily movements are much slower than machinery and there is less time to rectify any mistakes, fust about the only physical activity enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly, perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times in which we live.

2

Following the failure of the Chinese rice harvest in 2005, insects came to be regarded as a major source of nutrition. Naturally there were many countries that always regarded entomophagy as perfectly acceptable; it was only in the West that people were more squeamish about such things. Quite apart from crickets, ants, grasshoppers, grubs, and caterpillars, all containing an abundance of vitamins and proteins, the Chinese developed several new breeds of worms: One of these, a highly nutritious variant of the mealworm, when treated with artificial flavorings such as beef, chicken, or fish, forms the staple diet of many Westerners. However, the Chinese scientists did not stop there: One particular breed of worm, a cross between a silkworm and a mealworm that fed on coca leaves, was found to contain a new kind of protein that had a dramatically stimulant effect. Further research on this particular worm, the breedworm, was taken over by the Chinese military. Consumed in small quantities, the breedworm resulted in an immediate and massive increase in a human being’s physical power (especially useful for a physically small people like the Chinese). In the short term, the breedworm was used by Chinese athletes seeking to increase their performance. And the results were astonishing. In the 2016 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese won 80 percent of all the track and field medals. Since the protein occurred naturally, there was no way of screening athletes for breedworm consumption. It was another ten years before the Chinese government made breedworms available to the world at large. Since then, the World Health Organization’s resulting entomophagy program has been highly successful in reducing starvation levels in third world countries by almost half. An entomophagic diet has proven to be suitable for Moon colonists, being a cheap, highly nutritious, and abundant source of food in this difficult environment.

3

Named after Florence Nightingale.

4

The immune system of humans consists of a number of organs and different cell types that have evolved to recognize non-self-antigens. The most ubiquitous immunologic cell, tissue, and organ system is called the reticuloendothelial system (RES).

5

In the early part of the twenty-first century, advances made in the field of genetic manipulation produced recombinant technology. The successful manufacture of recombinant DNA was followed by the development of recombinant human hemoglobin. RHH is a polymorphic or universal red-cell blood substitute — a synthetic blood that could be infused into a patient regardless of his or her blood type. Pioneered by the U.S. military for use in the field, RHH involved the creation of completely novel red cells by the combination of unrelated red cells. Red cells were able to replicate independently of a host organism by means of a vector, or cloning vehicle. The vehicle chosen was an apparently harmless form of the parvovirus. No one could have foreseen that the virus chosen would, through a combination of factors, mutate into the much more deadly form of the virus P2 and that RHH would become one of P2’s main reservoirs of infection.

6

The latest World Association of Blood Ranks (WABB) has priced one liter of RES Class One whole blood, containing a standard 25 X 10¹² healthy red cells, at $1.48 million. Cavor, an average-sized male, would have a total blood volume of about five liters. This means that if all the blood in his body could have been transfused, it would have been worth $7.4 million.

7

In compliance with regulations laid down by the World Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (WCAHO), the World Center for Applied Microbiology and Research (WCAMR), and the International Institute for Virology (IIV), there are two kinds of hospitals in the modern world. The public health-care system is largely made up of permanent deferral (PD) hospitals, catering to patients considered to be at high risk for infectious disease transmission, and whose blood products disqualify them from ever becoming part of any predeposit autologous donation program. The private health-care system, on the other hand, is based exclusively on so-called crossover hospitals, for patients whose blood products meet all theoretical criteria for use in allogenic (homologous) donation programs: Today, in practice there is only autologous donation, involving the donation by the intended recipient of his or her own blood or component for a possible subsequent transfusion; any other transactions involving quality-assured blood are purely commercial.

8

Human fibrous membrane.

9

Medical nanomachine. Molecule-sized machines designed for use in the bloodstream or digestive tract. Controlled by a tiny computer, each MN is programmed with a set of objectives that mimic the action of a drug, or a combination of drugs, at a molecular level. Currently these can survive in the body for periods up to seventy-two hours.

10

The phrase ‘crime of the century’ is frequently employed by the more sensationalist sections of the multimedia and has become something of a cliché. What does it really mean? Describing crime in superlatives is ethically problematic. It smacks of celebration, as if the perpetrators are worthy of our approbation and are to be congratulated. That is not my intention with the crime described in this account. Rather I wish to focus on this crime as something uniquely representative of the twenty-first century.

11

Moon colonies are pressurized to normal atmospheric levels using an admixture of oxygen and helium, the most plentiful element in the universe, except for hydrogen. Helium’s isotopes are especially plentiful in Moon rock, the result of billions of years of exposure to solar wind. Cavern-based colonies, like Artemis Seven, are divided into sealed sections, and, occasionally, the seals leak. Usually this is not serious enough to cause respiratory problems. But for those in whom the P2 virus is far advanced, even the smallest change in available oxygen levels can cause a condition akin to hyperventilation in which the subject’s blood pressure falls, thereby causing him or her to hallucinate.

12

Much less energy is required in escaping from the Moon’s gravity than from Earth’s. Rockets are used only by wealthy tourists. Everyone else uses the Tranquillity Base’s Space Superconductor, a magnetic-field monorail that gently rises some fifty feet from the surface of the Moon for some fifteen miles before the escape velocity of 1.4 miles per second is finally achieved. The Moon has proved to be the ideal environment for transportation that utilizes high-temperature superconductors. On Earth a major problem in the development of anisotropic technology had proved to be the instability of the chemical environment due to moist air, which is, of course, not a problem on the Moon.

13

Self-contained gravity pod, capable of withstanding 15 g’s, for the transportation of sick and injured people aboard a Superconductor.

14

Tranquillity Base.

15

Kelvin. The SI unit of thermodynamic temperature.

16

The temperature below which the monorail becomes superconducting is called the transition, or critical, temperature.

17

See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I, Book VII. Cf. Herodotus in his account of how a Greek mercenary army in the pay of the Egyptians took the blood of the sons of their enemy Palmes, mixed it with grape juice, and then drank the mixture to give them strength and courage.

18

Blood transfusion was also a subject of satire. For example, see Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, 7711: ‘Many are spoil’d by that pedantic throng, / Who with great pains teach youth to reason wrong. / Tutors, like Virtuoso’s, oft inclin’d / By strange transfusion to improve the mind, / Draw off the sense we have, to pour in new; / Which yet, with all their skill, they ne’er could do.’

19

‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842.

20

When B19 was first discovered in the serum of asymptomatic blood donors as a cause of false-positive results in CIE tests for the detection of hepatitis B virus surface antigen, it was one of only two known human parvoviruses. B19 takes its name from the code number given to one of the serum samples in which the virus was initially found.

21

The word ‘influenza’ is of mid-eighteenth-century Italian origin. It meant ‘influence of a miasma,’ or ‘of the stars.’

22

The Shevchenko nuclear reactor complex on the Mangyshlak Peninsula in Kazakhstan was the world’s worst nuclear accident; as a result of the explosion, an area of some two hundred square miles between the Caspian and Aral Seas was rendered uninhabitable.

23

Oxygen is carried in the body from the lungs to the tissues by the specialized protein hemoglobin. This is a complex structure, carried around in the blood by the red cells in high concentration. It has the special property of binding oxygen in the lungs but releasing it in the low-oxygen environment of the tissues, whereupon its function changes to enable the uptake of large amounts of carbon dioxide, which is transported to the lungs, and the reverse process takes place. That this can happen is due to the unique structure of hemoglobin, which is a complex of two pairs of protein molecules that are known as alpha and beta chains. These are arranged in close juxtaposition and provide the supporting structure for the active part of hemoglobin, the heme molecule, a porphyrin structure containing iron. It is within this component that oxygen is bound. A remarkable physical change occurs during the cycle of uptake and release of oxygen, which has been likened to the hemoglobin molecule breathing.

24

Similarly the particularly virulent form of syphilis that struck Europe during the late fifteenth century may have mutated to a less immediately severe form that subsequently existed, with fewer ugly pustules and less pain. The dramatist Oscar Wilde lived with syphilis for many years longer than would have seemed possible in 1495, when King Charles VIII of France sacked Naples, and his syphilis-ridden troops set in motion a new venereal plague.

25

‘Utopia’ was a word coined by Sir Thomas More with his book of the same name (1516); it is derived from two Greek words: eutopia, meaning ‘good place,’ and outopia, meaning ‘no place.’ From this, the real ironic sense of the book may be derived, i.e., that an ideal society can exist nowhere, and to seek such a thing is no more than human folly. However, the term is commonly taken to mean an ideal society. Dystopian literature refers to societies that are just the opposite of ideal. They arc nightmare societies. That works of dystopian literature greatly outnumber works of utopian literature may simply be a function of the fact that the creation of a universally unappealing society presents the author with a much more challenging task than the creation of an ideal one about which everyone might agree.

26

Intelligent.

27

The Marcus DNA Comparator, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), who once said: ‘Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part’ (Meditations, Book II, Chapter 2). The device works thus: carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by the lungs; during the pulmonary circulation process, small quantities of hemoglobin bind to the CO₂; when expirated this CO₂ shows minute traces of the hemoglobin protein, and the DNA molecule, unique to every individual, can then be matched with a computer record in less than a second.

28

Digital thought recording. The DTR technique relies on the principle of magneto-encephalography, or MEG, first demonstrated as long ago as 1968 by David Cohen at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, it was another seventy years before Yosuke Konoye and the Sony Corporation of Greater Japan perfected the world’s first DTR machine.

29

Basis fringe. An elemental fringe pattern computed to diffract light in a specific manner. The phrase ‘basis fringe’ is an analogy to mathematical basis functions. Linear summations of basis fringes are used as Motion Parallax or holographic patterns.

30

Multicursal route. Also known as a labyrinth, although strictly speaking, labyrinths can also be unicursal routes. The MR suggests a series of choices between paths. The UR contains only a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no dead ends or choices between paths.

31

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, genetic engineers labored to produce scarce medicines from transgenic animal bioreactors, or TABs. This involved the injection of human DNA into the embryos of dairy animals such as sheep, goats, and cows. Mammary tissue from genetically engineered livestock contained cells that produced a therapeutic human protein that flowed through the animal’s secretory channels along with other components in the animal’s milk. What was not known at the time was how human genes in certain genetic manipidations are also able to produce foreign protein in a way that alters surrounding tissue. This was how mutating human/animal genes were able to enter the food chain. Neither was it properly understood how genetically engineered proteins actually functioned in people. After the first TABs were engineered, a whole generation was to pass before these two fundamental misunderstandings were perceived to have resulted in hundreds of human/animal genetic birth defects — transgenic creatures that were half animal and half human. Also known as genetors.

32

The vomeronasal organ, or VNO, consists of a tiny pair of dents on either side of the nasal septum. For centuries this organ was thought to have no important function. Today, 90 percent of all prophylactic medicines are administered in this way.

33

‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life, and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.’ Deuteronomy 12:23. Cf. Deuteronomy 12:16, Genesis 9:4, and Leviticus 17:11.

34

Under a ruling of the Supreme Court (Directive 35/56a. Proper Means of Carrying Out Executions) mutilation and bloodshed are considered necessary in all cases involving blood felony, not least to demonstrate the state’s power over the offending individual. The greater the mutilation and bloodshed, the greater the demonstration of the state’s power. Breaking on the wheel was a method of public execution in France until the invention of the guillotine, toward the end of the eighteenth century. The past few years have seen its reintroduction throughout the commonwealth.

35

Spermatid is a form of presperm. The treatment, known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, is based on a technique in which a single sperm is selected and injected into the egg in laboratory conditions.

36

With adequate fluid replacement, total fluid volume is restored to a blood donor within seventy hours. It is normally eight weeks, however, before the donor’s iron stores can be completely replenished and before the donor is legally eligible to make another deposit. This safeguards against people building up deposits of blood in their accounts at the expense of their own health.

37

While latex condoms have proved to be an effective barrier to the transmission of viruses such as HIV, they have dismally failed to prevent the spread of P2. The virus is a very small molecule, much smaller than HIV, and typically less than a micron in diameter; even double-dipped latex compounds contain microscopic holes averaging one micron. Recently condoms were tested in an in vitro system simulating key physical conditions that can influence viral particle leakage through condoms during oral sex. A suspension of fluorescent-labeled microspheres modeled P2 in semen, and condom leakage was tested spectrofluorometrically. Leakage of P2-sized particles through latex condoms was detectable in 65 percent of all condoms tested.

38

Synthetic Melanophore is different from photochromic or morphing materials. Melanophore disperses or concentrates color in molecules containing smart pigment granules. Color change is determined by ambient light and the wearer’s body temperature. Melanophore can actually change color to match whatever background it comes into contact with. That the chameleon can do the same is a commonly held misconception.

39

At the beginning of the twenty-first century there were an estimated 500,000 tons of gold in the sea, ten times the amount of bullion held on reserve. The price of gold was around four hundred U.S. dollars per troy ounce. Today the sea contains less than 50,000 tons, and the price of gold is just over two hundred dollars. What happened to the gold market in the twenty-first century was exactly what happened to the amethyst market in the nineteenth century. A glut in supply effectively killed the price.

40

Hyperbaric oxygen is of value when blood transfusion cannot be carried out. Hyperbaric hotels have multiple luxury-grade chambers that are normally compressed with oilless medical-grade oxygen at 6 ATA (165 feet of seawater) or greater. These were originally pioneered by Jehovah’s Witnesses whose religious beliefs prevented them from accepting transfusions or any form of blood product. But with the advent of P2, such establishments arc now widespread. Guests at hyperbaric hotels breathe normally or through an oral/nasal mask. There have been anecdotal reports showing dramatic, if temporary, relief of P2 crises with hyperbaric oxygen, and the effect of the virus does appear to be markedly reduced under hyperbaric conditions. However, as yet, there has been no large-scale study to confirm its overall usefulness clinically.

41

Just as microtethnology aimed to produce ever-smaller devices, so chemistry aimed to produce ever-larger molecules. This is the essence of nanotechnology: It is really an extension of chemistry, and a bottom-up technology in which building is done from a molecular scale up. But even today, when nanotechnologies affect all of our lives, people still find the concept hard to understand, and part of the problem has to do with language. A novel like The Incredible Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson (1957), provides an excellent illustration of how alien the small world is to huge creatures like human beings. We have no experience of the molecular world and this makes it hard to comprehend. But the bottom line is that all matter is made of molecules, and these can be manipulated. And when that happens, matter can be changed. As the visionary of nanotechnologies, Richard Feynman, said as early as 1959, ‘Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.’

42

The October Revolution of 1905; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; the August Revolution of 1991; the Trogatyeluay Revolution of 2007; the Pyatay Revolution of 2017; the Second October Revolution of 2026; the Fascist Revolution of 2027; the Easter Revolution of 2036; and the Kravapooskanye Revolution of 2040.

43

Talisman is a time-capsule pharmacological nanomachine from Bayer. Principally it contains the hormone vasopressin to replace what is lost from the pituitary gland during the consumption of alcohol. The nanomachine also attacks acetaldehyde, a toxic product produced by the liver, and quickly breaks it down into acetic acid and carbon dioxide. Other slow-release ingredients include vitamin C, vitamin B, milk thistle, and evening primrose oil. Other time-capsule-pharmacological-nanomachine (TCPN) products, such as Pussyfoot and Soberas, prevent any alcohol from entering the bloodstream.

44

During the past century, the effect of global warming has not been to increase temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, as scientists once predicted, but, as a result of its impact on the Gulf Stream, to cool it. During the early years of this century, a massive flow of melt-water from the Greenland Ice Sheet put an end to the Gulf Stream, triggering a near calamitous cooling throughout northwestern Europe.

45

What is Neo-Modernism in architecture? This is not the surrealist phase of Modernism once suggested by the twentieth-century critic Frank Kermode, but something else. The essence of the movement is that we live in a world in which everything is subject to rapid change. So rapid that for a designer to try and make sense of change, or even to keep up with it, is impossible. Thus the hallmark of Neo-Modernism is impermanence: Since fashion quickly reduces all design to stylistic desuetude, it is only the transient and the unfinished that have any real meaning and significance. Perhaps the most famous example of a Neo-Modernist building is the new European Parliament building in Berlin.

46

William Henry Gates III. Born Seattle, Washington, 1955. Founded Microsoft, today the world’s largest computer hardware and software company, in 1975, with Paul Allen. Still CEO of the company at the age of 114, although there are persistent rumors that he is being kept alive on a life-support system at the Paul Allen Memorial Hospital in Seattle.

47

The Pathetic Fallacy: Ascribing Human Psychology to Silicon Minds, by Professor Noam Freud, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2056.

48

The park is open only to those whose apartment buildings surround it.

49

The preeminence of the city in civilization may be seen from the fact that the word ‘civilization’ stems from the Latin word civis, meaning ‘citizen’ or ‘dweller in a city.’

50

Download.

51

In supposed analogy to metaphysics (often misapprehended as meaning the science of that which transcends the physical), ‘meta’ (from the Greek, meaning ‘after’) has often been prefixed to the name of a science, to form a designation for a higher science of the same nature, but dealing with more remote problems. Examples include metachemistry, metalogistics, metamathematics, metaphysiology, metagenetics, and metaquantums. Metacomputing or metaprogramming involves a computer or a program treating itself as data. In other words, the programmer asks the computer at one level to set in motion another program at a higher level, in order to analyze the lover-level program. Since a Motion Parallax program already exists on a very high level, the metaprogram requested would be a Mission Package program functioning at the highest of all levels within the Altemann Űbermaschine’s operating system. The power of the metaprogram comes from the leverage produced by its recursive character, in which a sequence may be computed from one or more of the preceding terms. M-programs tend to be used very sparingly, not least because of the risk of destruction to the subprogram. This kind of recursive analysis would be like one human being asking another a question of the following order: What is it that leads you to credit that you can suppose that you believe that you think that you assume that you know that something is true?

52

The Masai used to drink a mixture of cow’s blood and cow’s milk. While the practice is no longer observed in East Africa, blood drinking in Europe has become quite fashionable with young people from rich and privileged backgrounds, except that it is human RES Class One blood that is consumed and not cow’s blood. (TSE — transmissible spongiform encephalitis — has made the consumption of all beef and dairy cattle products illegal.) Mixed with synthetic cream, brandy, sugar, and the yolk of an egg, the cocktail is called a Kali Brandy, after the blood-drinking mother-goddess in Hinduism. (Kali is said to have developed a taste for blood when she fought and killed the demon Raktavija, who produced a thousand more like himself each time a drop of his blood fell upon the ground. So Kali stabbed him, held him in the air, and drank his blood before any of it could fall on the ground.) The major attraction for these rich young decadents is the drink’s sheer expense, not to mention the titillating connection with Dracula and the cult of the vampire.

53

Phlebotomy. The practice of collecting blood from a living donor.

54

A forefinger making a circle in the air, in honor of the circulation of the blood, as discovered by William Harvey (1578–1657), an English physician, and described in his book Exercitatio anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628).

55

The word ‘plumber’ is derived from the Latin word for ‘lead,’ plumbum.

56

The practice of quarantine was first introduced by Italian sailors. It comes from the Italian word quarantina, meaning ‘forty,’ and refers to the number of days for which a disease-infected ship was required to remain isolated.

57

Habakkuk, Chapter 2, verse 12.

58

Ostiary. Originally an ecclesiastical term, meaning a ‘door-keeper,’ especially of a church. From the Latin ostiarius, meaning an ‘opening,’ ‘river-mouth,’ or a ‘door.’

59

All of these are alternative blood therapies. Ayurvedic maintains that there are four essential humors that cause disease if they become imbalanced: wind, bile, phlegm, and blood; diet is the primary method for returning the blood to a state of equipoise. Letting is the surgical practice of drawing or letting blood, as pioneered by Herophilus, the grandson of Aristotle. Reiki is an ancient Japanese healing method based on a system of keys that act as a catalyst for releasing and channeling natural energy. Therapeutic humor bases itself on the physiological benefits that accrue from laughter; laughter reduces the heart rate and arterial blood pressure, and provides relief from stress; laughter also induces the brain to release catecholamine hormones, which facilitate the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

60

The life span of red cells is one hundred and twenty days, or three moons.

61

This technique was originally practiced by Indian yogis in order to preserve their life spirits. Vasectomy doesn’t really do the job, as it only stops the sperm, which makes up but 5 percent of ejaculate. Seminal plasma contains oxygen in order to ensure sperm motility. For anyone with P2, even such microscopic amounts of oxygen can mean the difference between life and death.

62

The prostate gland contributes as much as 30 percent of the seminal plasma; the constituents of its secretions include fibrolysin, an enzyme that reduces the blood and tissue fibers in the ejaculate.

63

Lithium hydroxide.

64

He is said to have refused to take an infusion of the ‘Jesuit bark’ of the cinchona tree, in the mistaken assumption that there was a Popish plot to poison him. The medically active ingredient in the bark is quinine.

65

The word was originally used to signify any disfiguring skin disease, including eczema and syphilis. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, tsaar’at became lepra, which had a similar usage and had nothing to do with Mycobacterium leprae, which only became widespread under the Romans, long after Old Testament times.

66

A human blood corpuscle is one three-thousandth of an inch in diameter.

67

Palladium, atomic number 46, the lightest and lowest-melting of the platinum metals and used as a catalyst and as an alloy, is especially valuable to the nanoelectrical industry as a hydrogenator (palladium absorbs more than nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen). Extremely ductile and easily worked, it is one of the rarest metals on Earth. First isolated in 1803 by the English chemist William Wallaston, it was originally named in honor of the then newly discovered asteroid Pallas. Ironically enough, asteroids are now the major source of palladium, and one of the main sources of profit for the Asteroid Recovery Program.

68

The establishment of a latent infection is central to the success of P2 as a human pathogen. Latency permits persistence of the virus in the presence of a fully developed immune response, although no incidence of lifelong immunity has ever been recorded. Reactivation of latent virus results in the Three Moon phase, as has already been described; however, the molecular mechanisms for such triggering are not understood. It is during the latent period that the virus is passed on — usually through the exchange of bodily fluids. Worryingly there have even been cases involving airborne infection.

69

For example, witness the temple of Heracles in Cadiz. Even those ancient heroes who did not become gods were often worshipped by their descendants — for example, Theseus in Athens. Descent is the key element here. Who and how they are survived. That is what matters if a memory is to be worshipped and a name venerated. Descent. All such mysteries shall presently be revealed.

70

Connex. A cognition-enhancing drug that works by making the synapses that connect neurons more responsive to natural chemical signals triggering concentration and learning mechanisms in the brain. Connex stimulates neurons to receive more of the glutenate molecules that carry electrical signals across brain synapses. In clinical tests, eight out of ten people who took Connex doubled their scores in tests of short-term memory recall and learning.

71

Kleenex nanotissue. Tissue that is designed to have a second life soaking up toxic chemicals in ground and water.

72

Clean Bill of Health Zone.

73

Erythrocytic Personality Trait Rating. The pseudo-science of blood temperaments, based on a taxonomy of personality based on blood types. EPTR draws upon Buddhist beliefs, as well as the work of Theophrastus, Hippocrates, Karl Landsteiner, Leon Bourdel, and Hans Eysenck, and was ‘discovered’ by J. Will Mott (1987–2041). EPTR has been challenged by a number of hematologists and psychologists as having no empiric basis.

74

In transfusion therapy, group AB recipients can receive all other ABO group red-cell components, because anti-A and anti-B antibodies are absent. Group AB red-cell components are infused only into group AB recipients. Group O recipients, on the other hand, can receive only Group O red cells, but can donate to any other group. Group O donors are known as Universal Donors.

75

Antoine Furetière (1619–1688), French poet and novelist.

76

Osteonecrosis. A disease characterized by dead bone tissue.

77

From the Greek paradeisos, meaning ‘paradise,’ and tropein, meaning ‘toward.’

78

Published 2042; cf. The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley (1954), in which that author describes his experiments with mescaline and LSD.

79

Quantum theory accounts for a very wide range of physical phenomena and replaces classical Newtonian mechanics for all microscopic phenomena. A ‘quantum’ is a general term for the indivisible unit of any form of physical energy. The difficulty with quantum things and what makes them hard to understand — even now, a hundred years after Niels Bohr led the way in their explanation — is that their motion cannot easily be visualized. Or even imagined. Of course, one of the pleasures of authorship is to be found in making difficult concepts seem simple. One of the aims of this book has been to include my own experience of quantum things and to enable the general reader to appreciate not just the molecular wisdom of the human body but, at a more fundamental level, the matter of existence itself I make no excuse for this. As Montaigne says, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’

80

Elstein’s work was based entirely on the work of the seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal. ‘The incomprehension of the perplexed,’ Elstein wrote, ‘is to be overcome by means of the wager; if the theory cannot be proved then those who remain bewildered lose nothing by believing that the meaning of life, and the fabric of reality, has been explained, and in devoting themselves to living life for the present — to making heaven on earth; for if the theory is proved, then no one will have wasted any time in acting as if there was still something to be explained.’

81

The dimensions of the airship are as follows: one kilometer wide and five hundred meters high.

82

The resulting explosion would have rendered the whole country, an area of over a million square miles, uninhabitable for an estimated fifty thousand years.

83

Enteric bacteria strains resistant to antibiotics that killed several thousand Spanish citizens during the late 2050s.

84

See Makkoth 23b; attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Yehuda ha-Nasi.

85

Blood quantum. A quasi-genetical idea governing race qualification.

86

Acts 17:26.

87

The Mygalomorph 8, designed by General Dynamics.

88

2013–2015.

89

Mihrab.

90

Imam.

91

Khatib.

92

Galen of Pergamum, born A.D. 129, died circa 199. Distinguished Turkish Anatolian physician whose influence dominated European medical thought throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

93

Breccia. An impact rock made of a mixture of rock fragments and soil particles welded together by the energy of a meteor impact. Descartes is an area rich in these breccias, which lunar building engineers have traditionally used to make concrete. Carbonation hardening is achieved in zero atmospheric conditions with the addition of super-critical carbon dioxide, which makes the concrete very hard and dense — about 75 percent denser than ordinary concrete, and hence more resistant to meteorite showers. Concrete is painted gold to reflect the sun and is filled with nanographite and steel fibers to conduct electricity.

94

Extra-vehicular activity.

95

Assuming man could travel at the speed of light, it mould take one hundred thousand years to visit the center of our own galaxy and then return to Earth.

96

Highly unlikely in the Moon’s zero atmosphere. This mas one of the reasons why most blood banks mere located in space in the first place. It wasn’t just for reasons of high security.

97

In one-sixth of the gravity existing on Earth, just about the only physical activity that is enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly. Perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times. However, the Moon’s one-sixth gravity means that most of the types of gambling available on Earth cannot be played here. Playing cards are almost impossible to deal, craps dice won’t roll properly, and roulette wheel balls never drop down from the rim. Today the only legalized form of gambling on the Moon is pachinko. Pachinko is a machine game, for one player, in which you snap an eleven-millimeter steel ball on an upright nail-driven panel and try to put the ball into certain holes. Putting the ball in certain holes gains the player several balls in return. These can later be exchanged for money. Pachinko was developed in Chicago but became particularly popular in japan, which now supplies most of the current pachinko technology. The Moon’s largest pachinko parlor — larger than any parlor on Earth — generates over two hundred fifty million dollars’ worth of income per annum.

98

The astronomical world’s largest reflector telescope, the three-hundred-inch Hawking telescope, is located at the Censorinus Space Observatory, just a few miles from TB.

99

The Moon has the largest solar-generating power plant: The Theophihis Crater, close to the Moon’s equator, contains over ten thousand photovoltaic cells, each of which is ten square meters in size.

100

The Moon has the largest sunspot study facility on either world. This is of key importance to predictions of Earth’s weather.

101

At the time of writing, there are over five thousand prostitutes licensed to work on the Moon.

102

Sadly, the famous campanile, built in 1185, collapsed in 2047, causing the death of ninety-three Pisan tourists.

103

After Charles Boyle, the 4th Earl of Orrery, for whom the first such object was made, in 1790.

104

The sole of each shoe contains as much as twenty-five pounds of lead, which occurs in considerable quantity on the Moon. Up to fifty pounds in weight can be added to a person in this way.

105

From ‘Auguries of Innocence,’ by William Blake. The quotation has been adapted by the authors of the Galileo Guide to Good Hotel Keeping. ‘Build our Nation’s fate’ should read ‘Build that nation’s fate.’ No doubt the people at the Galileo felt justified in this small alteration by virtue of the fact that the Moon exists as an independent nation-state, by the terms of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Colonization of the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies within Our Solar System, 2025.

106

Quantum theory. A theory in physics which refutes relativity by stating that an observer can influence reality and that events do occur randomly — an argument with which Einstein disagreed.

107

In other words, are the laws governing the behavior of the simulated system the same for an observer looking at the system from the outside as they are for the observer who is inside the system?

108

Holovision.

109

Named after Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon.

110

It makes no difference, for time is a quantum concept, and other times are merely special cases of other universes.

111

Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, 1969–1974.

112

Painted 1508–1512.

113

Indeed, as depicted by Michelangelo, God and Adam seem almost to be equal, for their bodies are quite complementary. Frankly, this particular detail has about it something more of the pagan than the truly Christian.

114

There are three hierarchies of angels, each of three orders in descending ranks. These are (1) seraphim, (2) cherubim, (3) thrones, (4) dominions, (5) virtues, (6) powers, (7) principalities, (8) archangels, and (9) angels.

115

For example, the Church of Sammael, the Sandalphonists, and the New Witnesses of Raguel.

116

Keeping things cool in space can be a problem, especially during Earth reentry, when outside temperatures can reach seven hundred four degrees Celsius. The answer is the space fridge, a combination of technologies that are several hundred years apart. Partly it is based on a mechanical cooler known as a Stirling cycle fridge, a device conceived in 1816 by Robert Stirling, a Scottish clergyman. This technology cools the contents to only 20 kelvins, still well above absolute zero. The final cooling stage, in which the temperature inside the fridge drops to 0.1 kelvins, operates using helium dilution, and was developed by Alain Benoit, in 1991. Without the space fridge, the transport of perishable materials in bulk, to and from the Earth, would be impossible.

117

Electron-beam welding was perfected in the Ukraine, during the late twentieth century and used on the Russian space program. Electrons are boiled off from a heated filament, accelerated, and then focused onto the target metal or rock. When the electrons collide with the atoms in the subject material, their kinetic energy is converted to heat energy. However, any gas will disrupt the beam, causing dangerous arcing between tool and surface. This makes the tool ideal for work in the vacuum of space.

118

The Prisoner of Chillon, i. (1816).

119

Rocket Control System.

120

Manufactured to withstand only eight hundred and sixty degrees Celsius.

121

Thermoluminescent dosimeter. This device measures cumulative radiation exposure through radiation-induced changes in a piece of crystal.

122

Aitken Basin is a giant impact crater — fifteen hundred miles in diameter and seven and a half miles deep — at the Moon’s South Pole. Here the temperature never rises above two hundred and eighty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ice has existed here for billions of years, likely the result of a huge frozen asteroid. Ice is mined by the Selenice & Methane Company.

123

A famous thought-experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger, in 1935, describing the difficulties that are inherent in the field of quantum mechanics. A box contains a radioactive source, a gun (in some cases describing the paradox, a bottle of poison is preferred to a gun), and a live cat. The equipment is so arranged that the radioactive source may decay and emit a neutron, and in doing so will trigger the gun to shoot the cat. But if the radioactive source does not decay, the cat lives. Being a quantum particle, however, the radioactive source doesn’t have to choose between these two possible states: It may combine both positions — what is known as a superposition. If the experiment lasts just long enough for a 50 percent chance of radioactive decay then the nature of quantum mechanics suggests that the cat is neither alive nor dead until the box is opened — indeed that the cat occupies a ghostly position in a limbo between life and death. Some of the greatest scientific minds have wrestled with this paradox and failed to make sense of it. As Einstein said, ‘If quantum physics is correct, then the world is crazy.’

124

The Doppler effect describes the way in which stationary objects return a transmitted signal at the same frequency. Objects moving toward the transmitter return the signal at a higher frequency, whereas objects moving away return it at a lower frequency.