Picnic on Nearside (30 page)

All the ropes had rotted so badly that even gentle wave action would have quickly pulled it apart. They had to be replaced, a new mast erected, and a new sailcloth installed. Neither of them knew anything about sailing, but Piri knew that the winds blew toward the edge at night and away from it during the day. It was a simple matter of putting up the sail and letting the wind do the navigating.

He checked the schedule to be sure they got there at low tide. It was a moonless night, and he chuckled to himself when he thought of her reaction to the edge of the world. They would sneak up on it in the dark, and the impact would be all the more powerful at sunrise.

But he knew as soon as they were an hour out of Rarotonga that he had made a mistake. There was not much to do there in the night but talk.

“Piri, I’ve sensed that you don’t want to talk about certain things.”

“Who? Me?”

She laughed into the empty night. He could barely see her face. The stars were shining brightly, but there were only about a hundred of them installed so far, and all in one part of the sky.

“Yeah, you. You won’t talk about yourself. It’s like you grew here, sprang up from the ground like a palm tree. And you’ve got no mother in evidence. You’re old enough to have divorced her, but you’d have a guardian somewhere. Someone would be looking after your moral upbringing. The only conclusion is that you don’t need an education in moral principles. So you’ve got a co-pilot.”

“Um.” She had seen through him. Of course she would have. Why hadn’t he realized it?

“So you’re a clone. You’ve had your memories transplanted into a new body, grown from one of your own cells. How old are you? Do you mind my asking?”

“I guess not. Uh . . . what’s the date?”

She told him.

“And the year?”

She laughed, but told him that, too.

“Damn. I missed my one-hundredth birthday. Well, so what? It’s not important. Lee, does this change anything?”

“Of course not. Listen, I could tell the first time, that first night together. You had that puppy-dog eagerness, all right, but you knew how to handle yourself. Tell me: what’s it like?”

“The second childhood, you mean?” He reclined on the gently rocking raft and looked at the little clot of stars. “It’s pretty damn great. It’s like living in a dream. What kid hasn’t wanted to live alone on a tropic isle? I can, because there’s an adult in me who’ll keep me out of trouble. But for the last seven years I’ve been a kid. It’s you that finally made me grow up a little, maybe sort of late, at that.”

“I’m sorry. But it felt like the right time.”

“It was. I was afraid of it at first. Listen, I
know
that I’m really a hundred years old, see? I know that all the memories are ready for me when I get to adulthood again. If I think about it, I can remember it all as plain as anything. But I haven’t wanted to, and in a way, I still don’t want to. The memories are suppressed when
you opt for a second childhood instead of being transplanted into another full-grown body.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Oh, yeah. Intellectually. So did I, but I didn’t understand what it meant. It’s a nine- or ten-year holiday, not only from your work, but from yourself. When you get into your nineties, you might find that you need it.”

She was quiet for a while, lying beside him without touching.

“What about the reintegration? Is that started?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard it’s a little rough. I’ve been having dreams about something chasing me. That’s probably my former self, right?”

“Could be. What did your older self do?”

He had to think for a moment, but there it was. He’d not thought of it for eight years.

“I was an economic strategist.”

Before he knew it, he found himself launching into an explanation of offensive economic policy.

“Did you know that Pluto is in danger of being gutted by currency transfers from the Inner Planets? And you know why? The speed of light, that’s why. Time lag. It’s killing us. Since the time of the Invasion of Earth it’s been humanity’s idea—and a good one, I think—that we should stand together. Our whole cultural thrust in that time has been toward a total economic community. But it won’t work at Pluto. Independence is in the cards.”

She listened as he tried to explain things that only moments before he would have had trouble understanding himself. But it poured out of him like a breached dam, things like inflation multipliers, futures buying on the oxygen and hydrogen exchanges, phantom dollars and their manipulation by central banking interests, and the invisible drain.

“Invisible drain? What’s that?”

“It’s hard to explain, but it’s tied up in the speed of light. It’s an economic drain on Pluto that has nothing to do with real goods and services, or labor, or any of the other traditional forces. It has to do with the fact that any information we get from the Inner Planets is already at least nine hours old. In an economy with a stable currency—pegged to gold, for instance, like the classical
economies on Earth—it wouldn’t matter much, but it would still have an effect. Nine hours can make a difference in prices, in futures, in outlook on the markets. With a floating exchange medium, one where you need the hourly updates on your credit meter to know what your labor input will give you in terms of material output—your personal financial equation, in other words—and the inflation multiplier is something you simply
must
have if the equation is going to balance and you’re not going to be wiped out, then time is really of the essence. We operate at a perpetual disadvantage on Pluto in relation to the Inner Planet money markets. For a long time it ran on the order of point three percent leakage due to outdated information. But the inflation multiplier has been accelerating over the years. Some of it’s been absorbed by the fact that we’ve been moving closer to the I.P.; the time lag has been getting shorter as we move into summer. But it can’t last. We’ll reach the inner point of our orbit and the effects will really start to accelerate. Then it’s war.”

“War?” She seemed horrified, as well she might be.

“War, in the economic sense. It’s a hostile act to renounce a trade agreement, even if it’s bleeding you white. It hits every citizen of the Inner Planets in the pocketbook, and we can expect retaliation. We’d be introducing instability by pulling out of the Common Market.”

“How bad will it be? Shooting?”

“Not likely. But devastating enough. A depression’s no fun. And they’ll be planning one for us.”

“Isn’t there any other course?”

“Someone suggested moving our entire government and all our corporate headquarters to the Inner Planets. It could happen, I guess. But who’d feel like it was ours? We’d be a colony, and that’s a worse answer than independence, in the long run.”

She was silent for a time, chewing it over. She nodded her head once; he could barely see the movement in the darkness.

“How long until the war?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been out of touch. I don’t know how things have been going. But we can probably take it for another ten years or so. Then we’ll have to get out. I’d stock up on real wealth if I were you. Canned goods, air, water, so forth. I don’t think it’ll get so bad that you’ll need those things to stay alive by consuming
them. But we may get to a semibarter situation where they’ll be the only valuable things. Your credit meter’ll laugh at you when you punch a purchase order, no matter how much work you’ve put into it.”

The raft bumped. They had arrived at the edge of the world.

*   *   *

They moored the raft to one of the rocks on the wall that rose from the open ocean. They were five kilometers out of Rarotonga. They waited for some light as the sun began to rise, then started up the rock face.

It was rough: blasted out with explosives on this face of the dam. It went up at a thirty-degree angle for fifty meters, then was suddenly level and smooth as glass. The top of the dam at the edge of the world had been smoothed by cutting lasers into a vast table top, three hundred kilometers long and four kilometers wide. They left wet footprints on it as they began the long walk to the edge.

They soon lost any meaningful perspective on the thing. They lost sight of the sea-edge, and couldn’t see the dropoff until they began to near it. By then, it was full light. Timed just right, they would reach the edge when the sun came up and they’d really have something to see.

A hundred meters from the edge when she could see over it a little, Lee began to unconsciously hang back. Piri didn’t prod her. It was not something he could force someone to see. He’d reached this point with others, and had to turn back. Already, the fear of falling was building up. But she came on, to stand beside him at the very lip of the canyon.

Pacifica was being built and filled in three sections. Two were complete, but the third was still being hollowed out and was not yet filled with water except in the deepest trenches. The water was kept out of this section by the dam they were standing on. When it was completed, when all the underwater trenches and mountain ranges and guyots and slopes had been built to specifications, the bottom would be covered with sludge and ooze and the whole wedge-shaped section flooded. The water came from liquid hydrogen and oxygen on the surface, combined with the limitless electricity of fusion powerplants.

“We’re doing what the Dutch did on Old Earth, but in reverse,”
Piri pointed out, but he got no reaction from Lee. She was staring, spellbound, down the sheer face of the dam to the apparently bottomless trench below. It was shrouded in mist, but seemed to fall off forever.

“It’s eight kilometers deep,” Piri told her. “It’s not going to be a regular trench when it’s finished. It’s there to be filled up with the remains of this dam after the place has been flooded.” He looked at her face, and didn’t bother with more statistics. He let her experience it in her own way.

The only comparable vista on a human-inhabited planet was the Great Rift Valley on Mars. Neither of them had seen it, but it suffered in comparison to this because not all of it could be seen at once. Here, one could see from one side to the other, and from sea level to a distance equivalent to the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. It simply fell away beneath them and went straight down to nothing. There was a rainbow beneath their feet. Off to the left was a huge waterfall that arced away from the wall in a solid stream. Tons of overflow water went through the wall, to twist, fragment, vaporize and blow away long before it reached the bottom of the trench.

Straight ahead of them and about ten kilometers away was the mountain that would become the Okinawa biome when the pit was filled. Only the tiny, blackened tip of the mountain would show above the water.

Lee stayed and looked at it as long as she could. It became easier the longer one stood there, and yet something about it drove her away. The scale was too big, there was no room for humans in that shattered world. Long before noon, they turned and started the long walk back to the raft.

*   *   *

She was silent as they boarded, and set sail for the return trip. The winds were blowing fitfully, barely billowing the sail. It would be another hour before they blew very strongly. They were still in sight of the dam wall.

They sat on the raft, not looking at each other.

“Piri, thanks for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“All right. But there’s something else I have to talk about. I . . . I don’t know where to begin, really.”

Piri stirred uneasily. The earlier discussion about economics had disturbed him. It was part of his past life, a part that he had not been ready to return to. He was full of confusion. Thoughts that had no place out here in the concrete world of wind and water were roiling through his brain. Someone was calling to him, someone he knew but didn’t want to see right then.

“Yeah? What is it you want to talk about?”

“It’s about—” she stopped, seemed to think it over. “Never mind. It’s not time yet.” She moved close and touched him. But he was not interested. He made it known in a few minutes, and she moved to the other side of the raft.

He lay back, essentially alone with his troubled thoughts. The wind gusted, then settled down. He saw a flying fish leap, almost passing over the raft. There was a piece of the sky falling through the air. It twisted and turned like a feather, a tiny speck of sky that was blue on one side and brown on the other. He could see the hole in the sky where it had been knocked loose.

It must be two or three kilometers away. No, wait, that wasn’t right. The top of the sky was twenty kilometers up, and it looked like it was falling from the center. How far away were they from the center of Pacifica? A hundred kilometers?

A piece of the sky?

He got to his feet, nearly capsizing the raft.

“What’s the matter?”

It was
big
. It looked large even from this far away. It was the dreamy tumbling motion that had deceived him.

“The sky is . . .” he choked on it, and almost laughed. But this was no time to feel silly about it. “The sky is falling, Lee.” How long? He watched it, his mind full of numbers. Terminal velocity from that high up, assuming it was heavy enough to punch right through the atmosphere . . . over six hundred meters per second. Time to fall, seventy seconds. Thirty of those must already have gone by.

Lee was shading her eyes as she followed his gaze. She still thought it was a joke. The chunk of sky began to glow red as the atmosphere got thicker.

“Hey, it really is falling,” she said. “Look at that.”

“It’s big. Maybe one or two kilometers across. It’s going to make quite a splash, I’ll bet.”

They watched it descend. Soon it disappeared over the horizon, picking up speed. They waited, but the show seemed to be over. Why was he still uneasy?

“How many tons in a two-kilometer chunk of rock, I wonder?” Lee mused. She didn’t look too happy, either. But they sat back down on the raft, still looking in the direction where the thing had sunk into the sea.

Then they were surrounded by flying fish, and the water looked crazy. The fish were panicked. As soon as they hit they leaped from the water again. Piri felt rather than saw something pass beneath them. And then, very gradually, a roar built up, a deep bass rumble that soon threatened to turn his bones to powder. It picked him up and shook him, and left him limp on his knees. He was stunned, unable to think clearly. His eyes were still fixed on the horizon, and he saw a white fan rising in the distance in silent majesty. It was the spray from the impact, and it was still going up.