empty desert.
>From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things.
Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft: Athena
Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases. All the settlements had
learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and
hoarding. Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow
and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked
out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke. And though
water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported
into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained
richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of
crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.
#
Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made
his farewell calls. His mother's message tape on the phone screen
said, 'Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll
have to call back in a few days. I'm in treatment now. I'll be
looking good the next time you call.'
'End of call,' Gonzales said. He pulled his card from the
slot.
#
Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow
luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH
35:00 when a voice said, 'Please board. There will be one
additional notice in five minutes. Board now.'
Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together,
down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights.
Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining. Faces
hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange
stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh
and directed final pre-launch activities.
The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a
spider's web of blackened metal. The saucer presented a smooth
surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry.
Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with
steam.
A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway. He verified
each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their
badges, then passed them on through the search scanner. The
glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.
#
The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff. Its fifty meter
wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had
a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.
'One minute to launch,' a loudspeaker said. The hundred or
so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of
saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.
The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals
that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both
sentimental and ironic:
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-
ZERO!!! And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the
center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of
floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of
it, trembling into night sky.
Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash,
and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered
the entire cliff and them with it.
#
'I've got orbital lock,' the primary onboard computer said.
Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences.
Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight
Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and
control took place within milli-second or less windows of
possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to
all occasions.
Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced
even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely
scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, 'acts of god' in
which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel,
hurricane, blizzard. Each computer believed itself best, but
there was little to choose among them.
'Confirm go state,' Athena Station said. 'You are past abort
or bail.'
'We are ready, Athena,' the computer said.
'So come to me, then,' Athena Station said, and the ship
began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty
thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.
PART II. of V.
Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the
priest. In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more
I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit
and flesh are separate entities.'
'They aren't,' replied the priest.'
Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot
6. Halo City, Aleph
Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and
Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to
be slipped on a stupendous finger. Six spokes mark Halo's
segments. Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial
sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer,
just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth
normal. There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur: air and
water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used
again. Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected: a
simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city.
