“We jus’ flake off tiles by the handful when we re-enter, and then we jus’ stick `em back on again before liftoff,” one of the astronaut-pilots explained to her.
Beyond general good health, there were no special physical requirements for the flight. Commercial launches tended to go up full and come back empty. By contrast, the shuttle flights were crowded both on the way up and on the way down. Before Intrepid’s latest landing the previous week, it had rendezvoused and docked with Methuselah to return two passengers to Earth. She recognized their names; one was a designer of propulsion systems, the other a cryobiologist. Ellie wondered what they had been doing on Methuselah.
“You’ll see,” the pilot continued, “it’ll be like fallin’ off a log. Hardly anybody hates it, and most folks jus’ love it.”
She did. Crowded in with the pilot, two mission specialists, a tight-lipped military officer, and an employee of the Internal Revenue Service, she experienced a flawless liftoff and the exhilaration of her first experience in zero gravity longer than the ride in the high-deceleration elevator at the World Trade Center in New York. One and a half orbits later, they rendezvoused with Methuselah. In two days the commercial transport Narnia would bring Ellie down.
The Chateau–Hadden insisted on calling it that–was slowly spinning, one revolution about every ninety minutes, so that the same side of it was always facing the Earth. Hadden’s study featured a magnificent panorama on the Earthward bulkhead–not a television screen but a real transparent window. The photons she was seeing had been reflected off the snowy Andes just a fraction of a. second ago. Except toward the periphery of the window, where the slant path through the thick polymer was longer, hardly any distortion was evident.
There were many people she knew, even people who considered themselves religious, for whom the feeling of awe was an embarrassment. But you would have to be made of wood, she thought, to stand before this window and not feel it. They should be sending up young poets and composers, artists, filmmakers, and deeply religious people not wholly in thrall to the sectarian bureaucracies. This experience could easily be conveyed, she thought, to the average person on Earth. What a pity it had not yet been attempted seriously. The feeling was…numinous.
“You get used to it,” Hadden told her, “but you don’t get tired of it. From time to time it’s still inspiring.”
Abstemiously he was nursing a diet cola. She had refused the offer of something stronger. The premium on ethanol in orbit must be high, she thought.
“Of course, you miss things–long walks, swimming in the ocean, old friends dropping in unannounced. But I was never much into those things anyway. And as you see, friends can come by for a visit.”
“At huge expense,” she replied.
“A woman comes up to visit Yamagishi, my neighbor in the next wing. Second Tuesday of every month, rain or shine. I’ll introduce you to him later. He’s quite a guy. Class A war criminal–but only indicted, you understand, never convicted.”
“What’s the attraction?” she asked. “You don’t think the world is about to end. What are you doing up here?”
“I like the view. And there are certain legal niceties.” She looked at him querulously.
“You know, someone in my position–new inventions, new industries–is always on the thin edge of breaking some law or other. Usually it’s because the old laws haven’t caught up with the new technology. You can spend a lot of your time in litigation. It cuts down your effectiveness. While all this”–he gestured expansively, taking in both the Chateau and the Earth–“doesn’t belong to any nation. This Chateau belongs to me, my friend Yamagishi, and a few others. There could never be anything illegal about supplying me with food and material needs. Just to be on the safe side, though, we’re working on closed ecological systems. There’s no extradition treaty between this Chateau and any of the nations down there. It’s more… efficient for me to be up here.
“I don’t want you to think that I’ve done anything really illegal. But we’re doing so many new things, it’s smart to be on the safe side. For instance, there are people who actually believe I sabotaged the Machine, when I spent a ridiculous amount of my own money trying to build it. And you know what they did to Babylon. My insurance investigators think it might have been the same people in Babylon and Terre Haute. I seem to have a lot of enemies. I don’t understand why. I think I’ve done a lot of good for people. Anyway, all in all, it’s better for me to be up here….
“Now, it’s the Machine I wanted to talk to you about. That was awful–that erbium-dowel catastrophe in Wyoming. I’m really sorry about Drumlin. He was a tough old pisser. And it must have been a big shock for you. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
But she was content to look out at the Earth and listen. “If I’m not disheartened about the Machine,” he went on, “I don’t see why you should be. You’re probably worried that there never will be an American Machine, that there are too many people who want it to fail. The President’s worried about the same thing. And those factories we built, those aren’t assembly lines. We’ve been making custom-made products. It’s gonna be expensive to replace all the broken parts. But mainly you’re thinking, maybe it was a bad idea in the first place. Maybe we’ve been foolish to go so fast. So let’s take a long, careful look at the whole thing. Even if you’re not thinidng like that, the President is.
“But if we don’t do it soon. I’m worried we’ll never do it. And there’s another thing: I don’t think this invitation is open forever.”
“Funny you should say that. That’s just what Valerian, Drumlin, and I were talking about before the accident. The sabotage,” she corrected herself. “Please go on.”
“You see, the religious people–most of them–really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would’ve listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.
“That’s why I don’t believe we’re an experiment. There might be lots of experimental planets in the universe, places where apprentice gods get to test out their skills. What a shame Rankin and Joss weren’t born on one of those planets. But on this planet”–again he waved at the window–“there isn’t any microintervention. The gods don’t drop in on us to fix things up when we’ve botched it. You look at human history and it’s clear we’ve been on our own.”
“Until now,” she said. “Deus ex machina? That’s what you think? You think the gods finally took pity on us and sent the Machine?”
“More like Machina ex deo, or whatever the right Latin is. No, I don’t think we’re the experiment. I think we’re the control, the planet that nobody was interested in, the place where nobody intervened at all. A calibration world gone to seed. This is what happens if they don’t intervene. The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods. If you really screw up,’ they get told, `you’ll make something like Earth.’ But of course it’d be a waste to destroy a perfectly good world. So they look in on us from time to time, just in case. Maybe each time they bring by the gods who screwed up. Last time they looked we’re frolicking in the savannas, trying to outrace the antelopes. `Okay, that’s fine,’ they say. These guys aren’t gonna give us any trouble. Look in on `em in another ten million years. But just to be on the safe side, monitor `em at radio frequencies.’
“Then one day there’s an alarm. A message from Earth. `What? They have television already? Let’s see what they’re into.’ Olympic stadium. National flags. Bird of prey. Adolf Hitler. Thousands of cheering people. `Uh-oh,’ they say. They know the warning signs. Quick as a flash they tell us, `Cut it out, you guys. That’s a perfectly good planet you have there. Disorganized, but serviceable. Here, build this Machine instead.’ They’re worried about us. They see we’re on a downward slope. They think we should be in a hurry to get repaired. So I think so, too. We have to build the Machine.”