"Old Man's War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Scalzi John)

TWO

Nairobi was launched from underneath us, and dropped away; we walked over to the side as if on a fast elevator (which is of course exactly what the beanstalk is) and watched the Earth begin its slide.

"They look like ants from up here!" Leon Deak cackled as he stood next to me. "Black ants!"

I had the strong urge to crack open a window and hurl Leon out of it. Alas, there was no window to crack; the beanstalk's "window" was the same diamond composite materials as the rest of the platform, made transparent so travelers could sightsee below them. The platform was airtight, which would be a handy thing in just a few minutes, when we were high enough up that cracking a window would lead to explosive decompression, hypoxia and death.

So Leon would not find himself making a sudden and entirely unexpected return to the Earth's embrace. More's the pity. Leon had attached himself to me in Chicago like a fat, brat-and-beer-filled tick; I was amazed that someone whose blood was clearly half pork grease had made it to age seventy-five. I spent part of the flight to Nairobi listening to him fart and expound darkly on his theory of the racial composition of the colonies. The farts were the most pleasant part of that monologue; never had I been so eager to purchase headphones for the in-flight entertainment.

I'd hoped to ditch him by opting to take the first 'stalk out of Nairobi. He seemed like the kind of guy who'd need a rest after busily passing gas all day. No such luck. The idea of spending another six hours with Leon and his farts was more than I could take; if the beanstalk platform had windows and I couldn't hurl Leon out of one, I might have jumped myself. Instead, I excused myself from Leon's presence by telling him the only thing that seemed to hold him at bay, which was by saying I had to go relieve myself. Leon grunted his permission. I wandered off counterclockwise, in the general direction of the rest rooms but more specifically to see if I could find a place where Leon might not find me.

This was not going to be easy to do. The 'stalk platform was donut-shaped, with a diameter of about one hundred feet. The "hole" of the donut, where the platform slid up the 'stalk, was about twenty feet wide. The cable's diameter was obviously slightly less than that; perhaps about eighteen feet, which if you thought about it hardly seemed thick enough for a cable several thousand miles long. The rest of the space was filled with comfortable booths and couches where people could sit and chat, and small areas where travelers could watch entertainment, play games or eat. And of course there were lots of window areas to look out of, either down to the Earth, across to other 'stalk cables and platforms, or up toward Colonial Station.

Overall the platform gave the impression of being the lobby of a pleasant economy hotel, suddenly launched toward geostationary orbit. The only problem was that the open design made it difficult to hide. The launch was not heavily subscribed; there weren't enough other passengers to hide by blending in. I finally decided to get something to drink at a kiosk near the center of the platform, roughly opposite of where Leon was standing. Sight lines being what they were, that's where I stood the best chance of avoiding him the longest.

Leaving Earth physically had been an irritating thing, thanks to Leon's obnoxiousness, but leaving it emotionally had been surprisingly easy. I had decided a year before my departure that, yes, I would join the CDF; from there it was simply a matter of making arrangements and saying good-byes. When Kathy and I had originally decided to join up a decade earlier, we put the house in our son Charlie's name as well as our own, so that he could take possession of it without having to go through probate. Kathy and I otherwise owned nothing of any real value, just the bric-a-brac that you pile up in a life. Most of the really nice stuff was dispersed to friends and family over the last year; Charlie would deal with the rest of it later.

Leaving people was not that much harder. People reacted to the news with varying levels of surprise and sadness, since everyone knows that once you join the Colonial Defense Forces, you don't come back. But it's not entirely like dying. They know that somewhere out there, you're still alive; heck, maybe after a while, they might even come and join you. It's a little what I imagine people felt hundreds of years ago when someone they knew hitched up a wagon and headed west. They cried, they missed them, they got back to what they were doing.

Anyway, I told people a whole year before I left that I was going. That's a lot of time to say what you have to say, to settle matters and to make your peace with someone. Over the course of the year, I had had a few sit-downs with old friends and family and did a final poking of old wounds and ashes; in nearly every case it ended well. A couple of times I asked forgiveness for things I didn't particularly feel sorry about, and in one case I found myself in bed with someone who otherwise I'd rather I hadn't. But you do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn't cost you much to do it. I'd rather apologize for something I didn't really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.

Charlie had been my major concern. Like many fathers and sons, we'd had our go-rounds; I wasn't the most attentive father, and he wasn't the most self-directed son, wandering through life well into his thirties. When he originally found out that Kathy and I intended to join, he'd exploded at us. He reminded us that we'd protested against the Subcontinental War. He reminded us that we'd always taught him violence wasn't the answer. He reminded us that we'd once grounded him for a month when he'd gone out target shooting with Bill Young, which we both thought was a little odd for a man of thirty-five to bring up.

Kathy's death ended most of our battles, because both he and I realized that most of the things we argued about simply didn't matter; I was a widower and he a bachelor, and for a while he and I were all we had left. Not long thereafter he met and married Lisa, and about a year after that he became a father and was re-elected mayor all in one very hectic night. Charlie had been a late bloomer, but it was a fine bloom. He and I had our own sit-down where I apologized for some things (sincerely), and also told him equally sincerely how proud I was of the man he'd become. Then we sat on the porch with our beers, watched my grandson Adam swat a t-ball in the front yard, and talked about nothing of any importance for a nice long time. When we parted, we parted well and with love, which is what you want between fathers and sons.

I stood there by the kiosk, nursing my Coke and thinking about Charlie and his family, when I heard Leon's voice grumbling, followed by another voice, low, sharp and female, saying something in response. In spite of myself, I peered over past the kiosk. Leon had apparently managed to corner some poor woman and was no doubt sharing whatever dumb-ass theory his beef-witted brain stem was promulgating at the moment. My sense of chivalry overcame my desire to hide; I went to intervene.

"All I'm saying," Leon was saying, "is that it's not exactly fair that you and I and every American has to wait until we're older than shit to get our chance to go, while all those little Hindis get carted off to brand-new worlds as fast as they can breed. Which is pretty damn quick. That's just not fair. Does it seem fair to you?"

"No, it doesn't seem particularly fair," the woman said back. "But I suppose they wouldn't see it as fair that we wiped New Delhi and Mumbai off the face of the planet, either."

"That's exactly my point!" Leon exclaimed. "We nuked the dot heads! We won that war! Winning should count for something. And now look what happens. They lost, but they get to go colonize the universe, and the only way we get to go is if we sign up to protect them! Excuse me for saying so, but doesn't the Bible say, 'The meek shall inherit the earth'? I'd say losing a goddamn war makes you pretty damn meek."

"I don't think that phrase means what you think it does, Leon," I said, approaching the two of them.

"John! See, here's a man who knows what I'm talking about," Leon said, grinning my way.

The woman turned to face me. "You know this gentleman?" she asked me, with an undercurrent in her voice that implied that if I did, there was clearly something wrong with me.

"We met on the trip to Nairobi," I said, gently raising an eyebrow to indicate that he wasn't my companion of choice. "I'm John Perry," I said.

"Jesse Gonzales," she said.

"Charmed," I replied, and then turned to Leon. "Leon," I said, "you've got the saying wrong. The actual saying is from the Sermon on the Mount, and it says, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' Inheriting the earth is meant to be a reward, not a punishment."

Leon blinked, then snorted. "Even so, we beat them. We kicked their little brown asses. We should be colonizing the universe, not them."

I opened my mouth to respond, but Jesse beat me to the punch. "'Blessed are they which are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,'" she said, speaking to Leon but looking sidelong at me.

Leon gaped for a minute at the both of us. "You can't be serious," he said, after a minute. "There's nothing in the Bible that says we should be stuck on Earth while a bunch of brownies, which don't even believe in Jesus, thank you very much, fill up the galaxy. And it certainly doesn't say anything about us protecting the little bastards while they do it. Christ, I had a son in that war. Some dot head shot off one of his balls! His balls! They deserved what they got, the sons of bitches. Don't ask me to be happy that now I'll have to save their sorry asses up there in the colonies."

Jesse winked at me. "Would you like to field this one?"

"If you don't mind," I said.

"Oh, not at all," she replied.

"'But I say unto you, Love your enemies,'" I quoted. "'Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.'"

Leon turned lobster red. "You're both out of your fucking gourds," he said, and stomped off as fast as his fat would carry him.

"Thank you, Jesus," I said. "And this time I mean it literally."

"You're pretty handy with a Bible quotation," Jesse said. "Were you a minister in your past life?"

"No," I said. "But I lived in a town of two thousand people and fifteen churches. It helped to be able to speak the language. And you don't have to be religious to appreciate the Sermon on the Mount. What's your excuse?"

"Catholic school religion class," she said. "I won a ribbon for memorization in the tenth grade. It's amazing what your brain can keep in storage for sixty years, even if these days I can't remember where I parked when I go to the store."

"Well, in any event, let me apologize for Leon," I said. "I barely know him, but I know enough to know he's an idiot."

"'Judge not, that ye be not judged,'" Jesse said, and shrugged. "Anyway, he's only saying what a lot of people believe. I think it's stupid and wrong, but that doesn't mean I don't understand it. I wish that there had been a different way for me to see the colonies than to wait an entire life and have to join the military for it. If I could have been a colonist when I was younger, I would have."

"You're not joining for a life of military adventure, then," I said.

"Of course not," Jesse said, a little scornfully. "Did you join because you have a great desire to fight a war?"

"No," I said.

She nodded. "Neither did I. Neither did most of us. Your friend Leon certainly didn't join to be in the military—he can't stand the people we will protect. People join because they're not ready to die and they don't want to be old. They join because life on Earth isn't interesting past a certain age. Or they join to see someplace new before they die. That's why I joined, you know. I'm not joining to fight or be young again. I just want to see what it's like to be somewhere else."

She turned to look out the window. "Of course, it's funny to hear me say that. Do you know that until yesterday, I'd never been out of the state of Texas my entire life?"

"Don't feel bad about it," I said. "Texas is a big state."

She smiled. "Thank you. I don't really feel bad about it. It's just funny. When I was a child, I used to read all the 'Young Colonist' novels and watch the shows, and dreamed about raising Arcturian cattle and battling vicious land worms on colony Gamma Prime. Then I got older and realized that colonists came from India and Kazakhstan and Norway, where they can't support the population they have, and the fact I was born in America meant that I wouldn't get to go. And that there weren't actually Arcturian cattle or land worms! I was very disappointed to learn that when I was twelve."

She shrugged again. "I grew up in San Antonio, went 'away' to college at the University of Texas, and then took a job back in San Antonio. I got married eventually, and we took our vacations on the Gulf Coast. For our thirtieth anniversary, my husband and I planned to go to Italy, but we never went."

"What happened?"

She laughed. "His secretary is what happened. They ended up going to Italy on their honeymoon. I stayed home. On the other hand, they both ended up getting shellfish poisoning in Venice, so it's just as well I never went. But I didn't worry much about traveling after that. I knew I was going to join up as soon as I could, and I did, and here I am. Although now I wish I had traveled more. I took the delta from Dallas to Nairobi. That was fun. I wish I had done it more than once in my life. Not to mention this"—she waved her hand at the window, toward the beanstalk cables—"which I never thought I would ever want to ride in my life. I mean, what's keeping this cable up?"

"Belief," I said. "You believe that it won't fall and it won't. Try not to think about it too much or we're all in trouble."

"What I believe," Jesse said, "is that I want to get something to eat. Care to join me?"

"Belief," Harry Wilson said, and laughed. "Well, maybe belief is holding up this cable. Because it sure as hell isn't fundamental physics."

Harry Wilson had joined Jesse and me at a booth where we were eating. "You two look like you know each other, and that's one up on everyone else here," he said to us as he came up. We invited him to join us and he accepted gratefully. He had taught physics at a Bloomington, Indiana, high school for twenty years, he said, and the beanstalk had been intriguing him the entire time we had been riding it.

"What do you mean physics isn't holding it up?" Jesse said. "Believe me, this is not what I want to hear right at this moment."

Harry smiled. "Sorry. Let me rephrase. Physics is involved in holding up this beanstalk, certainly. But the physics involved aren't of the garden variety. There's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense on the surface."

"I feel a physics lecture coming on," I said.

"I taught physics to teenagers for years," Harry said, and dug out a small notepad and a pen. "It'll be painless, trust me. Okay, now look." Harry began drawing a circle at the bottom of the page. "This is the Earth. And this"—he drew a smaller circle halfway up the page—"is Colonial Station. It's in geosynchronous orbit, which means it stays put relative to the Earth's rotation. It's always hanging above Nairobi. With me so far?"

We nodded.

"Okay. Now, the idea behind the beanstalk is that you connect Colonial Station with the Earth through a 'beanstalk'—a bunch of cables, like those out the window—and a bunch of elevator platforms, like the one we're on now, that can travel back and forth." Harry drew a line signifying the cable, and a small square, signifying our platform. "The idea here is that elevators on these cables don't have to reach escape velocity to get to Earth orbit, like a rocket payload would. This is good for us, because we don't have to go to Colonial Station feeling like an elephant had its foot on our chests. Simple enough.

"The thing is, this beanstalk doesn't conform to the basic physical requirements of a classic Earth-to-space beanstalk. For one thing"—Harry drew an additional line past Colonial Station to the end of the page—"Colonial Station shouldn't be at the end of the beanstalk. For reasons that have to do with mass balance and orbital dynamics, there should be additional cable extending tens of thousands of miles past Colonial Station. Without this counterbalance, any beanstalk should be inherently unstable and dangerous."

"And you're saying this one isn't," I said.

"Not only is not unstable, it's probably the safest way to travel that's ever been devised," Harry said. "The beanstalk has been in continuous operation for over a century. It's the only point of departure for colonists. There's never been an accident due to instability or matériel failure, which would be related to instability. There was the famous beanstalk bombing forty years ago, but that was sabotage, unrelated to the physical structure of the beanstalk itself. The beanstalk itself is admirably stable and has been since it was built. But according to basic physics, it shouldn't be."

"So what is keeping it up?" Jesse said.

Harry smiled again. "Well, that's the question, isn't it."

"You mean you don't know?" Jesse asked.

"I don't know," Harry admitted. "But that in itself should be no cause for alarm, since I am—or was—merely a high school physics teacher. However, as far as I know, no one else has much of a clue how it works, either. On Earth, I mean. Obviously the Colonial Union knows."

"Well, how can that be?" I asked. "It's been here for a century, for God's sake. No one's bothered to figure out how it actually works?"

"I didn't say that," Harry said. "Of course they've been trying. And it's not like it's been a secret all these years. When the beanstalk was being built, there were demands by governments and the press to know how it worked. The CU essentially said 'figure it out,' and that was that. In physics circles, people have been trying to solve it ever since. It's called 'The Beanstalk Problem.'"

"Not a very original title," I said.

"Well, physicists save their imagination for other things." Harry chuckled. "The point is, it hasn't been solved, primarily for two reasons. The first is that it's incredibly complicated—I've pointed out the mass issues, but then there are other issues like cable strength, beanstalk oscillations brought on by storms and other atmospheric phenomena, and even an issue about how cables are supposed to taper. Any of these is massively difficult to solve in the real world; trying to figure them all out at once is impossible."

"What's the second reason?" Jesse asked.

"The second reason is that there's no reason to. Even if we did figure out how to build one of these things, we couldn't afford to build it." Harry leaned back. "Just before I was a teacher, I worked for General Electric's civil engineering department. We were working on the SubAtlantic rail line at the time, and one of my jobs was to go through old projects and project proposals to see if any of the technology or practices had application to the SubAtlantic project. Sort of a hail-Mary attempt to see if we could do anything to bring down costs."

"General Electric bankrupted itself on that, didn't they?" I asked.

"Now you know why they wanted to bring down costs," Harry said. "And why I became a teacher. General Electric couldn't afford me, or much of anyone else, right after that. Anyway, I'm going through old proposals and reports and I get into some classified stuff, and one of the reports is for a beanstalk. General Electric had been hired by the U.S. Government for a third-party feasibility study on building a beanstalk in the Western Hemisphere; they wanted to clear out a hole in the Amazon the size of Delaware and stick it right on the equator.

"General Electric told them to forget it. The proposal said that even assuming some major technological breakthroughs—most of which still haven't happened, and none of which approach the technology that has to be involved with this beanstalk—the budget for the beanstalk would be three times the annual gross national product of the United States economy. That's assuming that the project did not run over budget, which of course it almost certainly would have. Now, this was twenty years ago, and the report I saw was a decade old even then. But I don't expect that the costs have gone down very much since then. So no new beanstalks—there are cheaper ways of getting people and material into orbit. Much cheaper."

Harry leaned forward again. "Which leads to two obvious questions: How did the Colonial Union manage to create this technological monstrosity, and why did they bother with it at all?"

"Well, obviously, the Colonial Union is more technologically advanced than we are here on Earth," Jesse said.

"Obviously," Harry said. "But why? Colonists are human, after all. Not only that, but since the colonies specifically recruit from impoverished countries with population problems, colonists tend to be poorly educated. Once they get to their new homes, you have to assume they're spending more time staying alive than they are thinking up creative ways to build beanstalks. And the primary technology that allowed interstellar colonization is the skip drive, which was developed right here on Earth, and which has been substantially unimproved for more than a century. So on the face of it, there's no reason why the colonists should be any more technologically advanced than we are."

Something suddenly clicked in my head. "Unless they cheat," I said.

Harry grinned. "Exactly. That's what I think, too."

Jesse looked at me, and then Harry. "I'm not following you two," she said.

"They cheat," I said. "Look, on Earth, we're bottled up. We only learn from ourselves—we make discoveries and refine technology all the time, but it's slow, because we do all the work ourselves. But up there—"

"Up there humans meet other intelligent species," Harry said. "Some of which almost certainly have technology more advanced than ours. We either take it in trade or reverse engineer it and find out how it works. It's much easier to figure out how something works when you've got something to work from than it is to figure it out on your own."

"That's what makes it cheating," I said. "The CU is reading off someone else's notes."

"Well, why doesn't the Colonial Union share what it's discovered with us?" Jesse asked. "What's the point of keeping it to themselves?"

"Maybe they think that what we don't know can't hurt us," I said.

"Or it's something else entirely," Harry said, and waved toward the window, where the beanstalk cables slid by. "This beanstalk isn't here because it's the easiest way to get people to Colonial Station, you know. It's here because it's one of the most difficult—in fact, the most expensive, most technologically complex and most politically intimidating way to do it. Its very presence is a reminder that the CU is literally light-years ahead of anything humans can do here."

"I've never found it intimidating," Jesse said. "I really never thought about it much at all."

"The message isn't aimed at you," Harry said. "If you were President of the United States, however, you'd think of it differently. After all, the CU keeps us all here on Earth. There's no space travel except what the CU allows through colonization or enlistment. Political leaders are always under pressure to buck the CU and get their people to the stars. But the beanstalk is a constant reminder. It says, 'Until you can make one of these, don't even think of challenging us.' And the beanstalk is the only technology the CU has decided to show us. Think about what they haven't let us know about. I can guarantee you the U.S. President has. And that it keeps him and every other leader on the planet in line."

"None of this is making me feel friendly toward the Colonial Union," Jesse said.

"It doesn't have to be sinister," Harry said. "It could be that the CU is trying to protect Earth. The universe is a big place. Maybe we're not in the best neighborhood."

"Harry, were you always this paranoid," I asked, "or was this something that crept up on you as you got older?"

"How do you think I made it to seventy-five?" Harry said, and grinned. "Anyway, I don't have any problems with the CU being much more technologically advanced. It's about to work to my advantage." He held up an arm. "Look at this thing," he said. "It's flabby and old and not in very good shape. Somehow, the Colonial Defense Forces are going to take this arm—and the rest of me—and whip it into fighting shape. And do you know how?"

"No," I said. Jesse shook her head.

"Neither do I," Harry said, and let his arm down with a plop onto the table. "I have no idea how they'll make it work. What's more, it's likely that I can't even imagine how they'll do it—if we assume that we've been held in a state of technological infancy by the CU, trying to explain it to me now would be like trying to explain this beanstalk platform to someone who's never seen a mode of transportation more complex than a horse and buggy. But they've obviously made it work. Otherwise, why would they recruit seventy-five-year-olds? The universe isn't going to be conquered by legions of geriatrics. No offense," he added quickly.

"None taken," Jesse said, and smiled.

"Lady and gentleman," Harry said, looking at the both of us, "we may think we have some idea of what we're getting into, but I don't think we have the first clue. This beanstalk exists to tell us that much. It's bigger and stranger than we can imagine—and it's just the first part of this journey. What comes next is going to be even bigger and stranger. Prepare yourself as best you can."

"How dramatic," Jesse said dryly. "I don't know how to prepare myself after a statement like that."

"I do," I said, and scooted over to get out of the booth. "I'm going to go pee. If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it's best to meet it with an empty bladder."

"Spoken like a true Boy Scout," Harry said.

"A Boy Scout wouldn't need to pee as much as I do," I said.

"Sure he would," Harry said. "Just give him sixty years."