Quibble, 18. Egg
On the giant Egg, a space station, Quibble sees both humanity's genius and its penchant for self-destruction.
def fn
18. Egg @Quibble
Which way was up, which down?
Woozy, I sank to my knees, sat, leaned against the wall, and pressed both my hands to the floor. It was smooth, almost slick, like glass. My breaths came quick and shallow.
Alnasl loomed over me. In this puzzling topography, he seemed to reach nearly twice his real height. I tilted my head back and shut my eyes, focused on my breathing. When I had control of it, the Zero helped me to my feet. My sprained ankle protested with a spurt of pain, making me grit my teeth. I still felt disoriented, a bit unbalanced. I also felt strangely light, much as I’d felt while looking at the yinman blue orb.
We stood at the end of a long, wide corridor. A night-door, darkest black against brightest white, was set in its terminal wall. A strip of softly glowing light ran down the corridor’s left wall about a foot below the ceiling, which was not far over our heads. The light was innocuous, not glass-glow. Ahead, the corridor curved to the right, upward in a concave slope. Some thirty or forty feet from us, a narrower passage fed into it from the left. Beyond that, it snaked out of sight. I stared at the tributary passage and tried to make it a spatial landmark.
“Lay your hand on my shoulder if that helps steady you,” Alnasl said.
It did help. I took a step forward. My foot found the floor sooner than I expected, and I stumbled. Alnasl clasped my arm and pulled me upright.
“Don’t look down,” he instructed. “Keep your head up, eyes forward. Pretend the floor is level ground. You’ll get used to it soon, and then it’ll seem just like walking on Earth.”
We had gone a few slow steps together before his words sank all the way in.
“You mean we’re not on Earth?”
“In space – didn’t I say before? You’re in the Egg. It’s a spacefaring vessel.”
“We’re all spacefaring vessels, aren’t we?”
Alnasl snorted. Then he called out: “Utopia!”
“Yes, vision?” a voice said, almost right beside us.
I spun around and, seeing nobody, froze in place, my hand gripping the Zero’s shoulder. I breathed evenly. In, out. Don’t lose it, Quill.
“This is Quibble’s first time in an Egg,” Alnasl said. “Can you please acquaint her with it? Begin by explaining outer space.”
“Sure,” the bodiless voice said as we walked on. “Outer space is an emptiness, nearly a total vacuum, in which stars and planets, such as Earth, move in obedience to gravity. Eggs move in space, too. EGG, an acronym for ‘extra-gravitational geodesic,’ designates any of twenty-six existing spacecraft at current count. You’re aboard Egg 17, which is in low orbit over Earth, currently in the thermosphere two hundred ninety-two miles above sea level. Only three Eggs are orbiting Earth now. The others are spread out in the inner solar system, many trailing the planet Mars in its orbit around Sol.”
“Oh!” I said. “Why only three Eggs orbiting Earth?”
“Please do me this favor, Quibble. Verbatim, repeat these words: ‘Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.’”
I did so.
“Thank you,” the voice said. “Now, you asked about—”
“Why did you make me recite a pangram?”
“It’s a voiceprint I’ll reference for your vocalizations. Now I can make better guesses about what you’re saying.”
It occurred to me that I had some sort of difficulty with Utopia’s voice, too. For a moment I was hard-pressed to determine just what it was. Then it came to me: was the voice male or female? I couldn’t tell. I let that mystery alone for now and asked about another: “Why can’t I see you?”
“As the Egg’s Utopia, my real home is its hub. In fact, I am the hub. I can only be seen there. But I control the Egg, so I see and hear everything in it. You could say we’re contiguous. You can’t see me, Quibble, because in a sense you’re within me.”
“You’re the Egg’s version of Unity!”
Utopia chuckled softly. “Quite right! In a way, Unity is my cousin, and Utopias on other Eggs are my siblings. Though I shouldn’t use that word. Technically, a Sibling is a smaller vessel which accompanies an Egg, like a satellite, to keep catastrophe at bay. Which brings me back to your question: why do only a few Eggs orbit Earth? Space is only nearly a vacuum, I said before. There are a lot of things in it. Meteors, debris, solar radiation. Around Earth, there’s a lot of space junk from a time when humans were a spacefaring people: decommissioned satellites, spent rocket stages, fragments left over from collisions. Siblings fend off these threats. Even now, I’m positioning one of my Siblings to shield the spindle and hub from radiation, since you’re heading there. The hub is made of a type of gossamer-glass that absorbs sunlight, focusing it like a prism. The Sibling deploys another type of gossamer-glass to deflect light.”
“Why does the hub prism light?”
“That’s how I communicate with Unity.”
“Of course!” I said, following my nose to another guess. “Unity speaks to One by the light of orbs. Your hub is like an orb speaking to Unity.”
“Firecracker!” Utopia exclaimed. “That’s the gist of it.”
Skancing Alnasl, I noted a frown. “If we can talk to Utopia from anywhere in the Egg,” I said to him, “why are we going to the hub?”
“You’ll see,” he said curtly.
I wished we were sharing the amber. A wall between us had come down after I broke the orb, but now I sensed another going up. It was baffling. Why did Alnasl seem to be falling back on his habit of telling me only what he thought I must know? That was quite a selective thing with him. And it was infuriating. I’ve never liked being kept in the light, as Ones have the expression.
We walked faster, now that I’d found my feet. My ankle bothered me less. What puzzled me now was the material of which the Egg was made. Another corridor split off to the right ahead of us. I reached out, brushing a hand along the corridor’s wall and anticipating the gap, the loss and restoration of touch.
“Please keep your hands to yourself,” Utopia chided me. “The isos disinfected the Egg just yesterday. Their schedule is too tight to do it again.”
“Can you feel my touch, Utopia?” I wondered.
“The walls have sensors.”
“What are the walls made of?”
“Polypropylene, a resilient thermoplastic polymer. The Egg’s superstructure is mostly polypropylene, too. Its frame is titanium alloy, and its skin is an absorbent but non-refracting gossamer-glass, housing an array of multijunction photovoltaic cells. Semiconductive crystals – gallium arsenide and indium gallium phosphide – make up these cells. So the gossamer-glass serves two purposes: it protects the solar array, and it optimally channels light. The array powers the Egg.”
“You feed through your skin?” I asked, unsure if this was risking insult.
“In a nutshell, yes. It’s less messy than how you feed.”
Apparently, Utopia had a sharp tongue but neither needed nor gave apologies. On I pressed: “How does the Egg move through space? Does it fly like a bird?”
“It thrusts and, on occasion, burns. Auxiliary thrusters make small corrections in the Egg’s course. Astern, more powerful ion thrusters burn for major course changes. They’re adaptations of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, VASIMR. The VASIMRs consume argon. They’re fuel-efficient, but an Egg is itself extraordinarily massive. A gas guzzler, I’ve heard it said. Siblings must be quick and agile, so they have monoprop rockets fueled by hydrazine. More’s the pity.”
“Oh?”
“I lack sufficient compounds for synthesizing hydrazine in quantity – hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, sodium hypochlorite, and acetone. Also, hydrazine is unstable and toxic unless dissolved in water. In space, water is even scarcer than rocket fuel. It’s an intractable problem. A Sibling deorbits when its fuel is spent. An Egg without Siblings is defenseless. In its whole history, the fleet has lost four Siblings and one Egg. That’s why only three Eggs orbit Earth now. To preserve the hydrazine.”
I brooded on this a while. “You know, I’m surprised sophisticated creations like Eggs and Siblings are prey to that sort of problem. It doesn’t sound like a mistake Unity would make.”
“Unity made no mistake,” Utopia corrected me. “The Infinite – the humans who built the Eggs – did. But I agree, even they should have foreseen it. Had they seriously contemplated the Utopias’ mission, without their hubris to blind them—”
“Utopia, if you don’t mind,” interrupted Alnasl, “I’d rather you didn’t speak of the Infinite. A great enough mystery darkens our glass as it is.”
The disembodied voice fell silent. Annoyed, I said, “Never mind Alnasl. It’s been a hard day. He’s grumpy. You mentioned a mission, Utopia. What is it?”
“I’m sorry, Quibble, I can’t speak of it just now,” Utopia said, almost robotically.
“You don’t have to do whatever Zeros say, do you?” I inquired.
Utopia was obstinately mute. I suddenly felt quite silly, talking as I had been to a floating voice which now didn’t answer me. Talking to air.
Someone walked towards us, rounding the corridor’s curve. In form and motion she seemed human, but at once I knew she wasn’t. As she neared, I saw her clothing – which was minimal – clung closely, fitting her body’s form. She walked with a highly measured step. I skanced her and smiled as we passed. She reciprocated. Once we had passed her, I turned my head to see an upside-down tree of light descending her back. The trunk of the tree webbed along her spine and branched out as it spread towards her extremities. It reminded me of a nervous system.
“Vision,” I exclaimed, “what in kindness was that?”
“An iso.”
An automaton, a caretaker of Ones. I had known isos existed all my life – Zubana first told me of them, then Vega told me more – but I’d never seen one. Now that I had, the idea of them seemed realer. Still, something irked me: how had I known at once that the iso, so apparently human from a distance, wasn’t human?
Soon after we passed the iso, Alnasl turned into one of the corridor’s right-hand tributaries. We didn’t have to walk nearly so far as before to reach its terminus. There, a ladder affixed to floor and wall rose to a ceiling-set panel, not white but a dark beige, with unusual contours. In the wall to the ladder’s right was a night-door.
“Again we took the long way,” I remarked, reaching for it.
Utopia’s voice rang out: “Don’t touch that door!”
I startled, snatched back my hand. “Why not?”
“You’d rather not go where it leads,” Utopia informed me. “Within. Abandoned chambers in the northern Andes. It’s a one-way trip into an active volcano.”
Consumed by magma – what a horrific way for One to die! I almost couldn’t bear to think of it. “Chambers Within were built there?” I said doubtfully.
“Another of the Infinite’s errors!” Utopia said. “They had a real talent.”
Alnasl started up the ladder. Overhead, part of the oddly shaped panel slid aside as if it had seen him coming – it was an automated hatch. Beyond, the ladder continued up a tight shaft towards another hatch. I hung back as the Zero climbed into the shaft.
“Utopia,” I whispered, “who were the Infinite? You can tell me that, can’t you?”
“On consideration, I can,” Utopia whispered back. “I will, but not just yet.”
“Oh, for kindness’ sake!”
“Don’t grieve, Quibble. Come to the hub, and I’ll make all of this plain to you.”
I gripped the ladder and followed Alnasl up the shaft. He’d already reached the hatch at the top. I climbed through it to find myself in another corridor’s terminus. The ladder kept going to another hatch overhead, which now opened for a descending iso. The Zero had stepped off the ladder, motioned for me to do likewise. The iso waited for us, then continued down. On his back too was a light-tree. His movement on the ladder was agile but precise, like clockwork. Watching him retreat into the shaft below, I found myself wondering aloud why isos, clearly not alive, were created male and female.
“They can’t actually reproduce, can they?” I said to Alnasl.
He smiled but shrugged. “Utopia, our friend Quibble is endlessly curious.”
“No, isos can’t reproduce sexually,” the bodiless voice said. “There’s no need to, really. With care, they last virtually forever. They’re male and female to make humans more comfortable with them. It’s an attempt to get out of the uncanny valley.”
Alnasl noticed me cringing. “They don’t make me comfortable either,” he said as he resumed the climb.
The hatch overhead parted to reveal a much longer shaft than the last. Following the Zero, after a while I felt my feet wanting to drift away from the ladder’s rungs. My body’s lightness, to which I had gradually accustomed myself, was increasing. I pushed downwards on my legs, using my back as a fulcrum. But continuing up, soon I began to find it difficult to keep my feet on the ladder’s rungs. Then there were no more rungs.
“Vision!” I cried out, alarmed.
I looked up. Alnasl hung in the air above me, only his hands on the ladder.
“It’s all right,” he said, his voice echoing in the shaft. “The Egg spins to simulate gravity. We’re approaching the spindle, the rotational axis. You’ll feel more and more weightless as we go up.”
“And in the spindle?”
“Total weightlessness.”
Great! Now I get to find out what vomiting without gravity is like.
I stopped trying to fight the weightlessness, let my feet leave the ladder, pulled myself up with only my hands. The shaft widened. Finally, we came to what appeared to be more a small room than part of the shaft, though we had passed through no hatch. The room’s round wall undulated in waves spreading out from the ladder. Handholds emerged from the waves’ troughs, bled back into them. The hatch overhead didn’t open automatically for us. Alnasl took a handhold and pulled himself to the left, away from the ladder, and I followed suit to the right. We floated. I felt myself falling very slowly, but the gentlest pull on my handhold with a single hand held me up.
“Now, Quibble, listen close,” the vision said, and I nodded. “This compartment adjoins the spindle, and when we open this double hatch, we must get quickly through it. The Egg will fire its thrusters, arresting its spin so we can enter the spindle. The hatch stays open for only six seconds. Whether or not you’re all the way through when the six seconds are up, it will close on you.”
“And what happens if it closes on me?” I said, though I had a guess as to what.
“The opposing thrusters fire and the Egg starts spinning, lest gravity’s lost. Then the hatch’s two sides move apart and tear you in half.”
“Utopia!” I cried out.
“Yes, Quibble?”
“Would you mind explaining why your Egg is littered with deathtraps?”
“For safety,” the voice replied. I wished it had a body so I could slap its face.
“We’ll go through at the same time,” Alnasl instructed. “Grab those.” He pointed to six handholds set in hexagonal formation around the circular hatchway. “When the hatch opens, pull up to send yourself through. As soon as you’ve got momentum, let go so you don’t pull yourself back. On the other side, there’s a shaft with places to grip, but don’t grab them until you reach the top. Is that all clear?”
I held my free hand out to Alnasl. “Why don’t you just show me?”
The vision seemed loath to share his amber, but he complied. The memory was fuzzy, vague. Once I had its gist, I positioned myself opposite him below the hatch.
“Now, Utopia,” he commanded.
A slight lurch tugged my body to one side, and my opposing hand lost its grip.
“Grab hold!” Alnasl ordered. “Pull yourself up!”
The hatch opened. A bare second after Alnasl, I yanked myself up and through, a bit quicker than I’d intended. At the shaft’s top, I reached for a handhold and with a tug backwards slowed myself to a gentle drift. I heard the hatch snap shut below me. Then I floated into the spindle. Reaching the concave wall on its far side, I pressed both hands to it and came to a stop beside the Zero.
“Well done,” he said.
“You didn’t show me being pulled to the side!”
He grimaced. “Sorry. I forgot the pull. It happens when the Egg stops spinning. What I shared with you wasn’t a real, perfect memory. My amber doesn’t have one. So I shared the last time I remember going through the double hatch.”
“Why doesn’t the amber remember?” I said, still incensed.
He waved his hands before his face, as he had in the morning when we walked Titania to the byre and I suggested he milk her. That seemed a very long time ago.
I gave him an apologetic frown. You’re a dunderhead, I told myself. All the while we were going up the shaft, through hatches, both of Alnasl’s hands had been occupied. He’d never once put them in his cloak and touched his amber.
Except for the short shaft and hatch below us, the cylindrical spindle was made of glass, all of it crystal-clear. What must have been millions of tiny bursts of light raced through the glass in linear impulses up and down the spindle, but I could see what lay outside it. My mind, leaping to the isos’ light-trees, proposed a hypothesis: This spindle is part of the Egg’s nervous system. The hub, then, must be the brain. Utopia is the Egg’s mind.
Through the spindle, I saw the wide hexagonal face of the shaft we had ascended as it spun around us and, well beyond that, the blank, white inner shell of the Egg itself. In one direction – down the spindle? – the Egg’s shell receded from the spindle and then approached again as it faded into distance. In the direction I decided was up, the shell almost met the spindle, which then continued through a large, circular cavity. Close at hand on either side of us, circumferential ridges also of glass rose from the spindle’s tubular inner wall. The ridges’ crests bulged, affording handholds. Alnasl reached for a ridge to his right, up the spindle; with his other hand, he clasped my arm and tugged me forward until I could get a grip myself. He pointed ahead: “See it?” About six yards away was another ridge. It was clear how we would navigate the spindle.
We made for the cavity in the Egg’s shell. It turned out to be a short, dark tunnel, not more than four or five yards long. Emerging from this tunnel, I met with a sight so spectacular that my heart began to race in my chest. Below me to my right, shrouded in a faint blue light, loomed a sphere so large that at first I couldn’t tell it was round.
“Vision!”
“It’s Earth!” he called back to me without stopping.
Half the sphere of Earth lay shrouded in night. We were passing over the terminator, crossing from night to day. Below us was a quilt of blue and white, sea and cloud, spreading west toward the sun, a sharp-spoked, flaming wheel rising ever higher over the horizon as we orbited. In the very midst of the sun’s face floated a black sphere – the Sibling’s shadow, I guessed. A few islands speckled the sea below. Ahead, there was a quickly growing bulk on the horizon. Mainland.
Reaching the next handhold, I spun myself around and looked back. Away to the right, the moon greeted my gaze. Not far off, the spindle plunged into a massive circle of black glass on which light shimmered in golden arcs, dazzling my eyes.
Maybe it really does look like a giant egg floating in space, I thought.
I spun again, looking up the spindle. Beyond Alnasl lay a black spot, an absence. The spindle’s end? As I moved on, the absence consumed ever more of my vision; at last the sun disappeared behind it. Alnasl stopped. By the time I caught up, the absence dug a spoonful out of Earth’s horizon. Seeing its edge against that background, I could tell the absence was large and spherical. At what I took to be its center, a few yards ahead of us, was a quite small, blank gray hatch. Except for the faint sheen of the spindle’s wall narrowing towards it, the hatch seemed to float in nothingness.
The mainland was passing below us now. It was a peninsula: an ocean lay west and southwest of it, and across a wide strait southward loomed the bulk of a continent. The peninsula’s shape was familiar, but the details seemed wrong. I misdoubted the lessons Indication gave me in geography, of which Unity taught One nothing. I looked at Alnasl in puzzlement, and he began to speak. I raised a hand to him, palm outward, begging silence.
“Utopia!” I called in command, as he had when we first arrived in the Egg.
Again Utopia’s voice hovered near me, as if just by my shoulder, but now it was practically a shout. “Yes?” it boomed.
“Quieter, Utopia, please.”
“Sorry,” came barely a whisper.
“Not that quiet! Now tell me, is that the Iberian Peninsula below us?”
“It is.”
“It can’t be! I’ve seen a map of it. Either the map is wrong or—”
“Where did you see this map?”
“My Dazed friend Cate has a lot of old books.”
“Ah, there you are,” Utopia sighed. “Cartography you’ve seen in print literature is out of date by many thousands of years.”
“I didn’t think geography changed that quickly,” I protested, stupefied. “Maybe millions of years, but not thousands!”
“True, in the natural course of things,” Utopia went on, “but accounting for the unnatural – what humans do – geographic change occurs exponentially faster. Since my first meteorological survey, conducted in 2278, the average sea level on Earth has risen approximately thirty-nine meters. Before that—”
“I’m weak on the metric system,” I admitted.
“All right, we’ll use imperial. One hundred twenty-eight feet. As I was saying, in the two and a half centuries before my first survey, sea levels had risen about seven feet. Now, let’s consider the case of Guadalquivir Bay, now directly below us.”
“You mean the Guadalquivir River?”
“By the time this Egg was launched, the river had already become an inlet, albeit a nearly landlocked bay. Since then, it’s enlarged considerably. The ports of Huelva and Cádiz, as well as the inland city of Seville, were swallowed by the sea, submerged. In total, since the seas began rising, the Gulf of Cádiz has encroached about ninety-three miles into southwestern Spain. Thus, the Iberian Peninsula as you see it.”
I was dumbstruck. The feeling of alienation which had been slowly stealing over me throughout this surprising, surreal day now crashed over me like a tidal wave. The world was not as I thought it was, either Within or Without. By now – having been One, Dazed, Adroit – I should have gotten used to revolutions in perspective, but I hadn’t. I was still exhilarated but baffled by every new thing put before me.
“Utopia,” I said, a bit breathless, “how did we humans cause all that?”
“That’s a very long story, Quibble. In summary, you abused your home, your planet. You dominated and exploited Earth, but you were poor caretakers. Sober minds who warned of catastrophe went unheeded. When at last they were heeded, some of the damage was already done. For a while, you mitigated, adapted. But then a very great change happened, almost in the blink of an eye, and suddenly humans didn’t care for Earth at all anymore. Your planet became only a means to an end.”
“What end?”
“Your new homes.”
“What changed?”
“You did.”