Firstborn Read online

  Alexei walked alongside the spider. He dug a plastic disc the size of a hockey puck out of his pocket, and slapped it to the spider’s hull. “Just give it a moment to break through the protocols and establish its interface—” He briskly leapt up onto the spider’s roof, and stuck another hockey puck to the pulley mechanism up there. By the time he was down on the ground again a transparent door had slid back, and he grinned. “We’re in. Myra, can you give me a hand?” He jumped easily inside the hull, and began to bundle the cargo carelessly out of the door. Myra helped by shoving it aside.

  “Just so I’m clear,” Bisesa said uncertainly, “we shouldn’t be doing this, should we? In fact we’re stowing away in a cargo truck.”

  “It’s human-rated,” Alexei said confidently. “Pressurized. Good radiation shielding, and we’ll need it; we’ll be spending rather a long time in the van Allen belts. We’ll be fine with the gear I brought along. It was thought best to get you off the planet as fast as possible, Bisesa.”

  “Why? Myra, are you on the run? Am I?”

  “Sort of,” Myra said.

  Alexei said, “Let’s move it. We’re nearly at the ribbon.”

  Once the cargo was cleared, Alexei summoned his suitcase. It extended little hydraulic legs to jump without difficulty into the spider’s hull. Myra followed, and then only Bisesa was walking alongside the trundling spider.

  Mura held out her hand. “Mum? Come on. It’s an easy step.”

  Bisesa looked around, beyond the jungle of spiders, to the blue sky of Canaveral, the distant gantries. She had an odd premonition that she might never come this way again. Might never set foot on Earth again. She took a deep breath; even among the scents of oil and electricity, she could smell the salt of the ocean.

  Then she stepped deliberately off the crawler platform and into the hull, one step, two. Myra gave her a hug, welcoming her aboard.

  The hull’s interior was bare, but it was meant for at least occasional human use. There was a handrail at waist height, and little fold-down seats embedded in the walls. The view through the transparent hull was obscured by those big folded-away solar panel wings.

  Alexei was all business. He spread a softscreen over the inner hull, tapped it, and the door slid shut. “Gotcha.” He took a deep breath. “Canned air,” he said. “Nothing like it.” He seemed relieved to be shut up in the pod.

  Bisesa asked, “You’re a Spacer?”

  “Not strictly. Born on Earth, but I’ve lived most of my life off the planet. I guess I’m used to environments you can control. Out there in the raw, it’s a little—clamoring.” He reached up and peeled his tattoo off his face.

  Bisesa touched her cheek, and found her own tattoo came away like a layer of wax. She tucked it in a pocket of her suit.

  Alexei advised them to sit down. Bisesa pulled down a seat, and found a narrow pull-out plastic belt that she clipped around her waist. Myra followed suit, looking apprehensive.

  The spiders before them in the line were clearing away now, revealing the ribbon, a vertical line of silver, dead straight.

  Alexei said, “What’s going to happen is that our spider will grab onto the ribbon with the roller assembly above our heads. Okay? As soon as it has traction it will start to climb. You’ll feel some acceleration.”

  “How much?” Bisesa asked.

  “Only half a G or so. And only for about ten seconds. After that, once we hit our top speed, we’ll climb smoothly.”

  “And what’s the top speed?”

  “Oh, two hundred klicks an hour. The ribbon’s actually rated for twice that. I’ve disabled the speed inhibitor, if we need it.”

  “Let’s hope that’s not necessary,” Bisesa said dryly.

  Myra reached over and slipped her hand into her mother’s. “Do you remember how we went to see the opening of the Aussievator? It was just after the sunstorm. I was eighteen, I think. That was where I got to know Eugene again. Now there are elevators all over the world.”

  “It was quite a day. And so is this.”

  Myra squeezed her hand. “Glad I woke you up yet?”

  “I’m reserving judgment.” But her grin was fierce. Who could resist this?

  Alexei watched this interplay uncertainly.

  They were rolling toward the ribbon. Over their heads, with a clumsy clunk, the pulley assembly unfolded itself. The ribbon really was narrow, no more than four or five centimeters across. It seemed impossible that it could support the weight of this car, let alone hundreds—thousands?—of others. But the spider trundled forward without hesitation.

  The roller assembly tipped up, closed itself up around the ribbon, and, with a surge like a punch in the belly, the spider leapt skyward.

  11: RIBBON

  In that first moment they left the spider farm behind, and were up and out in the bright sunlight. Glancing up, Bisesa saw the ribbon arrowing off into invisibility in a cloudless sky, with the bright pearls of other spiders going ahead of her, up into the unknown.

  And when she looked down, peering around the obstruction of the solar panels, she saw the world falling away from her, and a tremendous view of the Cape opening up. She shielded her eyes from the sun. There were the gantries and blockhouses, and the straight-line roads traveled by generations of astronauts. A spaceplane of some kind rested on a runway, a black-and-white moth. And a bit further on a white needle stood tall beside a rusted gantry. It had to be a Saturn V, perhaps bearing a recreation of Apollo 10, the next precursor of the century-old Moon landings. But she had already risen higher than the Saturn’s needle nose, already higher than the astronauts climbing their gantries to their Moon ships.

  The ascent was rapid, and just kept going. Soon she seemed able to see down the beach for kilometers. Canaveral looked more water than land, a skim of earth on the silver hide of the great ocean that opened up to the east. And she saw cars and trucks parked up on the roads and beside the beach, with tiny American flags fluttering from their aerials.

  “People still come to see,” Alexei said, grinning. “Quite a spectacle when the Saturns go up, I’m told. But the Ladder is more impressive, in its way—”

  There was a jolt.

  “Sorry about that,” Alexei said. “End of the acceleration.” He tapped his softscreen, and a simple display lit up, showing altitude, speed, air pressure, time. “Three hundred meters high, speed maxed out, and from now on it’s a smooth ride all the way up.”

  The ground fell away, the historic clutter of Canaveral already diminishing to a map.

  A minute into the journey, four kilometers high, and the world was starting to curve, the eastern ocean horizon an immense arc. And with a snap the big solar-cell wings folded down flat.

  “I don’t get it,” Bisesa said. “This is for power? The solar cells seem to be on the underside.”

  “That’s the idea,” Alexei said. “The spider’s power comes from ground-based lasers.”

  “You saw them, Mum,” Myra said.

  “You leave your power supply on the ground. Okay. So how long is the ride?”

  “To beyond geosynch? All the way out to our drop-off point? Around twelve days,” Alexei said.

  “Twelve days in this box?” And Bisesa didn’t like the sound of that phrase, drop-off.

  “This is a big structure, Mum,” Myra said, but she was evidently a novice herself and didn’t sound convinced.

  A few more minutes and they were eight kilometers high, already higher than most aircraft would fly, and there was a clunk, the mildest of shudders. Over their heads the pulley mechanism alarmingly reconfigured itself, bringing a different set of wheels and tracks into play.

  And then, suddenly, the ribbon itself changed, from a narrow strip the width of Bisesa’s hand to a sheet as wide as an opened-out newspaper. It was sharply curved, she saw. Their spider now clung to one outer edge of the ribbon.

  Alexei said, “This is the standard width of the ribbon, most of the way to orbit. It’s kept narrower in the lower atmosphere because
of the threat regime down there. Of course most of the bad weather is kept away nowadays. The ribbon’s worst problems actually come when they launch one of those Saturns; the whole damn earth shakes, and I can tell you there’s a lot of grumbling about that.”

  Ten kilometers, twelve, fifteen; the distance simply peeled away. Earth’s curve became more pronounced, and the sky above Bisesa’s head started to fade down to a deeper blue. She was above the bulk of the atmosphere already, she realized.

  Another abrupt transition came when the ribbon turned gold: a plating to protect it from the corrosive effects of high-altitude atomic oxygen, Alexei said, ionized gas in Earth’s wispy upper air.

  And still they rose and rose.

  “So let’s get comfortable.” Alexei ordered his suitcase to open. “The pressure will drop to its spaceside mix—low pressure, a third atmospheric, but high on oxygen. In the meantime I brought oxygen masks.” He showed them, and a rack of bottles. “And it’s going to get cold. Your jumpsuits ought to keep you warm. I have heated blankets too.” He rummaged about in his suitcase. “We’re going to be in here a while. I have fold-out camp beds and chairs. A bubble tent in case you don’t want to sleep under the stars, so to speak. I have heaters for food and drink. We’re going to have to recycle our water, I’m afraid, but I have a good treatment system.”

  “No spacesuits,” Bisesa said.

  “Shouldn’t need them, unless anything goes wrong.”

  “And if it does?”

  He looked at her, as if assessing her nerve. “Second worst case is, we get stuck on the cable. There are a whole slew of fail-safe mechanisms to save us until rescue comes, via another spider. Even if we were to lose pressure, we have survival bubbles. Hamster balls. Not comfortable, but practical.”

  Hamster balls? Bisesa hoped fervently that it wouldn’t come to that. “And the worst case?”

  “We become detached from the ribbon altogether. You understand that a certain point on the elevator is in geosynch—geosynchronous orbit, turning around the Earth in exactly twenty-four hours. That’s the only altitude that is actually in orbit, strictly speaking. Below that point we are moving too slowly for orbit, and above too fast.”

  “So if the spider were to lose its grip—”

  “Below geosynch, we fall back to Earth.” He rapped the transparent hull. “Might not look like it, but it is designed to survive a low-speed reentry.”

  “And after geosynch? We’d fall away from Earth, right?”

  He winked. “Actually that’s the idea. Don’t worry about it.” He held up a flask. “Coffee, anybody?”

  Myra grunted. “Maybe we ought to get your fancy toilet set up first.”

  “Good thinking.”

  While they fiddled with the toilet, Bisesa gazed out of the window.

  Riding silently into the sky, soon she was a hundred kilometers high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X-15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, a point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight mass that she knew had to be at the ribbon’s end, nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.

  By an hour and a half in, the fast pace of the events of the early moments of the climb was over. Somewhere above three hundred kilometers high, she could already see the horizon all the way around the face of the Earth, with the ribbon arrowing straight down to the familiar shapes of the American continents far beneath her. Though the stars would wheel around her during this extraordinary ascent, she realized, the Earth would stay locked in place below. It was as if she had been transported to a medieval universe, the cosmos of Dante, with a fixed Earth surrounded by spinning stars.

  When she stood she felt oddly light on her feet. One of Alexei’s softscreen displays mapped the weakening of gravity as they clambered away from Earth’s huge mass. It was already down several percent on its sea-level value.

  The silent, straight-line ascent, the receding Earth, the shaft of ribbon-light that guided her, the subtle reduction of weight: it was a magical experience, utterly disconcerting, like an ascent into heaven.

  Two hours after “launch” the ribbon changed again, spreading out to a curved sheet twice the width of its standard size—still only about two meters across, and gently curved.

  Bisesa asked, “Why the extra thickness?”

  “Space debris,” Alexei said. “I mean, bits of old spacecraft. Lumps of frozen astronaut urine. That sort of stuff. Between five and seventeen hundred kilometers, we’re at the critical risk altitude for that. So we have a bit of extra width to cope with any impact.”

  “And if we are hit by something—”

  “Anything so big it would slice the ribbon right through is tracked, and we just move the whole shebang out of the way using the crawler on the ground. Anything smaller will puncture the ribbon, but it’s smart enough to mend itself. The only problem is if we’re unlucky enough to be hit by something small coming sideways in, across the face of the ribbon.”

  “Which is why the ribbon is curved,” Bisesa guessed.

  “Yes. So it can’t be cut through. Don’t worry about it.”

  Myra, peering up, said, “I think I see another spider. On the other side of the ribbon from us. I think—oh, wow.”

  The second spider came screaming down out of the sky, passing just half a meter away. They all flinched. Bisesa had a brief reminder of their huge speed.

  “A builder,” Alexei said, a bit too quickly for his studied calm to be convincing. “Traveling down the ribbon, weaving an extra couple of centimeters onto the edge.”

  Bisesa asked, “What’s the substance of the ribbon?”

  “Fullerenes. Carbon nanotubes. Little cylinders of carbon atoms, spun into a thread. Immensely strong. The whole ribbon is under tension; the Earth’s spin is trying to fling the counterweight away, like a kid swinging a rock on a rope. No conventional substance would be strong enough. So the spiders go up and down, weaving on extra strips, and binding it all with adhesive tape.”

  Mechanical spiders, endlessly weaving a web in the sky.

  They rose largely in silence, for the others wouldn’t talk.

  “Come on. We’re off the Earth. Now you can tell me what’s going on. Why am I here, Myra?”

  The others hesitated. Then Myra said, “Mum, it’s difficult. For one thing the whole world is listening in.”

  “The hull is smart.” Alexei spun a finger. “All ’round surveillance.”

  “Oh.”

  “And for another,” Myra said, “you already know.”

  Alexei said, “Believe me, we’ll have plenty of time to talk, Bisesa. Even when we get to the drop-off, it’s only the start of the journey.”

  “A journey to where? No, don’t answer that.”

  Myra said, “I think you’ll be surprised by the answer, Mum.”

  Bisesa would have welcomed the chance to talk to Myra, not about high-security issues and the fate of the solar system, but simply of each other. Myra had told her hardly anything of her life since Bisesa had gone into the tank. But, it seemed, that wasn’t going to happen. Myra seemed oddly inhibited. And now the presence of Alexei sharing this little capsule with them inhibited her even further.

  Bisesa started to feel tired, her face and hands cold, her stomach warmed by coffee, her mind dulled by the relentless climb. She pulled on the hat and gloves she found in her pockets. She piled up blankets from the suitcase onto the floor, pulled one over herself, and lay down. There was no sound, no sense of motion; she might have been stationary, suspended above the slowly receding Earth. She gazed up at the ribbon, seeing how far she could follow its line.

  There was another transition when the ribbon reverted from gold to its customary silver. And la
ter the width narrowed. More than seventeen hundred kilometers high, eight hours since leaving Earth, they were higher than almost all mankind’s satellites had ever flown.

  Bisesa was vaguely, peripherally aware of all this. Mostly she dozed.

  She was woken with a jolt, a brief surge of acceleration that pressed her down into her blankets.

  She sat up. Alexei and Myra sat on their fold-down seats. Myra was wide-eyed, but Alexei seemed composed. Alexei’s softscreen on the wall flashed red.

  They were thirteen hours into the journey, more than twenty-six hundred kilometers up. When Bisesa moved she felt as if she was going to float into the air. Gravity was down to about half sea level. Earth seemed trivial, a ball dangling at the end of a silver rope.

  Other spiders flashed past them, overtaken by their own rapid climb.

  “We sped up, right? So what’s wrong?”

  “We’re being pursued,” Alexei said. “We had to expect it. I mean, they know we’re in here.”

  “Pursued?” Bisesa had a nasty vision of a missile clambering up from a derelict Canaveral launch pad. But that made no sense. “They wouldn’t risk damaging their ribbon.”

  “You’re right,” Alexei said. “The ribbon is a lot more precious than we are. Likewise they won’t want to spoil the flow of spiders. They could do that, block us off. But there is cargo worth billions being carried up this line.”

  “Then what?”

  “They have super-spiders. Capable of greater speeds. It would take a few days, but the super-spider would catch us up.”

  Myra thought that over. “How does it get past all the other spiders in the way?”

  “The same way we do. The others just have to get out of the way. We’re matching the super-spider’s ascent rate, twice our nominal. In fact I slaved us to the super-spider, so we’ll mirror its ascent. It can’t possibly catch us. As soon as the ground authorities realize that, they’ll give up.”

  “Twice nominal. Is that safe?”