Progress!
1473 words today, and good words too, not just words written at random like James Joyce. In this scene my hero and heroine are ascending a car up an Arthur C. Clarke style space elevator. Dear readers, do you like seeing little random snippets like this? Or should I hold back and wait till the hold thing is written, and (God willing) sold?
Rania was speaking softly. "The Tower is a living thing. It breathes, pumping air up to the station; its heart pumps hydraulics and coolants; it sweats, after a fashion, to distribute heat across its skin; it has nerves to carry energy and sensations of stress and wind-sheer from one part of its structure to another; and it moves, shifting weight, flexing, maintaining balance. I have always felt its sorrow, rooted to this spot of rock, its upper head in space."
"It is just standing there?"
"Standing, no. It sways like a dancer: these inhabited sections at the bottom, the malls and parking warehouses are an anchor point."
Montrose looked up. “I saw a flare.”
“It is a correction burn. There is a tourist aerodrome at the spot twelve miles up where the compressive structure turns into a carbon nanotube tether proper. The cable swells from a one-centimeter diameter at the top of the anchor tower, to almost a hundred meters wide at the geostationary point, and an airport for suborbital launches was built attached to the widest diameter. One push, and gravity and aerobraking do the rest. The vehicles can glide all the way to Florida. They are modular, and can be shipped back in storage boxes, and cabled back up the side. To counter balance, on the opposite side of the diameter, there was also a club called The Burning Shield, exclusively for reentry-suit parachutists."
His thoughts were dark as he craned his head back, looking up and up. "Right tall, your place. Anyone ever use it for suicide?"
"Always. It was called the Hotel of Sorrow. The fees are reasonable, considering that the jumpers have no more need of worldly wealth. Del Azarchel suppressed the trade."
Menelaus shivered. "Why did he have to do anything? You’d think the city fathers of Quito would object to corpses splashing all over their nice old buildings yonder."
"The cable is bent to the west whenever a payload rides up, due to the differences in angular momentum of the spider car versus the various sections of cable—the horizontal increment of speed increases with altitude. The Hotel of Sorrow is not overhead, but hangs above the Pacific Ocean. The suicide suits were equipped with a radio, so that a recording could be made of the screams of those who had changed their mind and were pleading for some sort of rescue—impossible, of course—and this was played back to discourage prospective jumpers. It takes an abnormally long time to fall."
“Why Del Azarchel?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did he stop it? Aren’t the Hermeticists planning to eliminate the whole human race to make way for the Nexts?”
“I heard that his father-confessor commanded him to do it, as penance. The owners hissed with anger, and almost broke from the Concordat, deeming it inadmissible to make laws on religious grounds. You see, they were Australians, who hold as matter of principle that a man owns his own life, and may dispose of it as he sees fit, and therefore accepting a fee to provide an entertaining format of self-murder is not murder. Also, there were lucrative royalty payments from selling the visuals—“
"I am not sure I am ever going to like these people, this day and age. Pestilential savages, for all their fine toys."
"Ah. So says a man who shot people for a living, back in the good old days." Her eyes twinkled with mirth.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
