“Well. . . .” Michel demurred.
“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”
“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”
“Life?”
“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow consciousness?”
“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.
“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”
“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shattercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What are you thinking? “I mean— here it all is. Still here.”
“But not the same.”
“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically opposed to mysticism, but still. . . .”
Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”
“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a . . . such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”
“You always want to know.”
“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”
“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”
They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.
Part Ten
Werteswandel
It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with handscreens.From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”
“A matter of nanoseconds.”
“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields— there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled mirror apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”
“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.
“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”
“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel— then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”
“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”
“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”
“And these spheres are how big?”
The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we burn twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”
“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”
The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”
“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”
“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”
“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the second half of the trip.”