Time

But now it’s out in the open, what, she thought uneasily, is to stop the bad guys from killing us too? And if they do, where will that leave Malenfant? Where, in fact, will it leave me?

For she knew, of course, that she was already involved: that she would follow Malenfant wherever his latest dream took him, for better or worse. What a schmuck I am, she thought. She resolved to make more time for her e-therapists.

Hench talked on, urgently, meaninglessly, about rockets and engineering projects. For some reason she thought of Cornelius Taine, his cold eyes, his bleak, crazy warnings of the future.

‘… Malenfant.’

‘Yeah?’

‘What are you doing at Key Largo?’

Spaiz Kadette:

> Copy this and pass it on.

> The news is just incredible. After all that coverage over the weekend there can’t be a soul on the planet who isn’t aware of Reid Malenfant and what he’s trying to do out in the Mojave.

> Naturally the usual nay-sayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the law, or is screwing up the environment, or is in some other way irresponsible.

> And there is the usual stench of hypocrisy and decay from the bloated corpse that is NASA, our space agency, the agency that should have done all this for us decades ago anyhow.

> Here’s the pitch.

> Following a hastily-convened gathering in Hollywood, CA, a new society tentatively called the Flying Mountain Society has been formed. If you want to join, it will cost 500 dollars US or equivalent.

> For that investment you won’t get any information or brochures or member services. We will not print glossy magazines or feed a giant staff. In fact we will have no full-time employees. As we are not another NASA booster club you won’t get glossy pictures of spacecraft that will never be built. All you will get is a guarantee that we won’t waste your money.

> FMS isn’t the only space organization, but it does existsolelyto get us into space.

> Here’s the catch. Don’t join unless you are a hardworking person. Don’t join unless you support Colonel Malenfant’s goal of developing a space industry in our lifetimes, and are prepared to work for it.

> In fact we’d prefer you didn’t join at all. We’d prefer you started up your own local chapter, affiliated to the Society, which we hope will evolve into a global umbrella organization of pressure groups and activists.

> You can start with a bake sale. You can start by bombarding the schools with images of asteroids. You can start by hiking out to the Mojave, rolling up your sleeves and helping Colonel Malenfant any way he can use you.

> There is incidentally no truth in the rumours propagated in some sections of the press that the Flying Mountain Society is in any way affiliated with or funded by Bootstrap Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates as, quote, ‘a propaganda exercise’. This is in fact counterfactual malice spread by Colonel Malenfant’s turf-warrior enemies.

> If you want to get involved, reply to this mail. Better yet just get to work …

Maura Della:

Open journal. September 3 2010.

It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.

I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.

Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project. Somehow, through the leak and my covert involvement – the fact that I didn’t blow the whistle immediately I got back from the Mojave – I’m becoming seduced into considering not just rocket engine firings, not just a private launch system, but the NEO mission itself.

This seems to be Malenfant’s modus operandi: to build up an unstoppable momentum, to launch first and answer questions later.

The usual forces of darkness are already gathering in Congress to oppose this. It’s going to be a struggle.

But I already know I’m not going to walk away from Malenfant, despite his outlandish, covert scheming.

You see, I happen to think Reid Malenfant is right. For the cost of one more space launch – which is undisputed, financial and environmental – it might be possible to reach a near-Earth object, actually to start exploiting one of those sun-orbiting gold mines, and so, just as Malenfant’s corporate title suggests, bootstrap a new human expansion into space.

I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.

We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.

It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible, try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet, try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working towards exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.

I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.

Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known – in fact diminishing – stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich, others get poor. But it’s not even a zero sum game; in the long term we’re all losers.

It isn’t just a question of economics. It’s what this does to our spirit.

We are frightened of the future. We exclude strangers, try to hold on to what we have, rather than risk the search for something better. We spend more energy seeking someone to blame for our present woes than building for a better future. We’ve become a planet full of old people – old in spirit, anyhow. Speaking as a sexagenarian I know what I’m talking about.

The point is that if we could open up the limits to growth, then we can all be winners. It’s as simple as that.

That is why I’m prepared to back Malenfant. Not, you’ll note, because I like his methods. But the ends, I suspect, in this case justify the means.

However all this is going to take some extremely delicate opinion management. Especially over what Malenfant is doing at Key Largo …

Sheena 5:

… And, in the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelf off Key Largo:

The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface, which rippled with flat-light. Sheena 5 had spent the night alone, foraging for food among the sea bed grasses. She had eaten well, of small fish, prawns, larvae; she had been particularly successful using her arms to flush out hiding shrimp from the sand.

But now, in the brightness of day, the squid emerged from the grasses and corals, and rose in the water. The shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong that soared in arcs and rows through the water. Their jets made the rich water sing as they chattered to each other, simple sentences picked out by complex skin patterns, body posture, texture:

Court me. Court me. See my weapons!I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …

It was the ancient cephalopod language, Sheena knew, a language of light and shadow and posture, the ‘words’ shivering one into the other, words of sex and danger and food. It was a language as old as the squid – millions of years old, much older than humans – and it was rich and beautiful, and she shoaled and chattered with joy.

… But there was a shadow on the water. And Sheena’s deep gravity sense told her of an approaching infrasonic rumble, quite characteristic: it was a barracuda, a vicious predator of the squid. This one was young and small, but no less dangerous for that.

The sentinels, scattered around the fringes of the shoal, immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures. Their simple words blared lies at the approaching predator, and warned the rest of the shoal.

Black bands on the mantle, arms limp, swimming rapidly backwards: Look at me. I am a parrotfish. I am no squid.

Clear body, dark arms in a downward V: Look at us. We are sea grass, sargassum, drifting in the current. We are no squid.