With Hope Dhoni on his arm, Falcon strolled through the gondola of the great airship. Strolled: he was a clanking half-cyborg, she a wispy relic of obviously great age. But in this expensive environment nobody was rude enough to stare.
“Even the corridors are plush,” Dhoni murmured. “The carpets, the paintings, the busts on their pedestals—who were those people anyhow? I suppose they’re all images of the terrible old Nazis who paid for the original tub.”
Falcon smiled. “And no doubt the detail is accurate down to the cut of their toothbrush moustaches.”
“Well, it would be,” Dhoni said, with a sigh. “The Martians and the Medes would probably say this is all Terrans have done for the last century or so, clung to the past, to the most irrelevant detail . . . A psychologist, which I’m not, would say this whole ship is a symptom of a mass psychosis.”
“And the Mnemosynes might have agreed with you,” Falcon said grimly. “But what would you have people do, Hope? We’re losing our home to the fire. Isn’t it rational to save as much of the family treasure as we can? Anyhow there’s only ten more days left now. For better or worse it will all soon be over, the Ultimatum fulfilled—”
“What’s that, for instance?” Hope pointed to a gadget on the wall.
A young officer, smartly uniformed, approached them. She had a small, intricate tattoo on her right cheek, of a leaping animal. “That’s a cigarette lighter, ma’am,” she said, smiling. “Yes, the original designers really did allow smoking aboard an airship filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen—but they insisted on the use of these safety gadgets. However I think the placement is wrong. On the LZ 129—the original Hindenburg—smoking was only allowed on the B Deck, the lower deck . . .”
They walked on, and the officer politely accompanied them.
Falcon knew that much of the traffic between the great laputas of Saturn was conveyed in vehicles much more basic than this. Why not travel in style, however? Mankind was doomed to exile, it seemed, but was nothing if not rich in energy and materials; a re-creation of the most famous airship in history, nearly eight and a half centuries after its spectacular destruction, was a trivial cost. Falcon however had refused to endorse a proposed project to re-create Earth’s second most famous crashed airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, a ship now buried almost as deeply in time.
“Those busts, though,” Dhoni said, musing. “All of forgotten monsters. Whereas—”
“Hope.” Falcon thought he knew where this conversation was going.
But Dhoni always had been unstoppable once she was set in motion. “Whereas if our glorious leader had her way, all the statues and paintings would no doubt be of Amanda Springer-Soames IV, Life President of what’s left of Earth—”
“Hope. You’re making the Lieutenant here blush. Didn’t you spot the springbok tattoo?”
Dhoni peered down at the officer’s name-tag. Her face, itself an antique some centuries old, was still capable of showing shock and embarrassment. “Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames. Oh, my. I do apologise.”
“It’s not a problem,” said the young officer graciously. “To tell the truth I’m used to people quizzing me about my grandmother.”
Falcon was interested. “How do you respond?”
Jane shrugged. “I say that she believes she’s doing the right thing for Earth and humanity, the best way she knows how.”
Falcon nodded. “That seems a fair assessment, whatever your politics.”
She responded with a frown. “It’s probably a good thing you feel that way, sir. Because, I’m afraid, I need to talk to you about my grandmother. First, please, let me show you to the lounge. We’ll soon be arriving at New Sigiriya, and it’s quite a view . . .”
As they followed her, Falcon felt a spark of concern. So much for the holiday.
* * * *
Of the two great passenger chambers of the gondola’s A Deck, Falcon actually preferred the dining room, with its stylish red-leather furniture and walls panelled with images of the great zeppelin in flight over 1930s Earth cities. But the lounge was impressive too, with one wall dominated by a large stylised map of the world—of the world, Falcon reminded himself, the old world, Earth. Today the lounge was crowded with people in a variety of garbs sitting or standing close to the downward-slanting windows. Children ran and wriggled and played too, in the golden, misty light that seeped into the room.
The light of the clouds of Saturn.
To Falcon, whose first venture to a gas giant had been to mighty Jupiter, Saturn had always been something of a disappointment. Though not much smaller than Jupiter in diameter, Saturn was significantly less massive, and twice as far from the sun. So the upper atmosphere, where the Hindenburg sailed and which humanity was now colonising in numbers, was a realm with significantly less free energy than its equivalent on Jupiter: less solar radiation, less inner heat. And with a scarcity of energy, life was sparse too. There was a scattered native biota, but it only amounted to what would have been counted as mere aerial plankton on Jupiter; there was none of the great higher food chain of mantas and medusae that Falcon had first encountered on Jupiter.
If Saturn was a relative disappointment as a spectacle, it had given mankind a comparatively gentle welcome. The Jupiter Ultimatum had brought an immediate need to ramp up Saturn’s production of helium-3 for mankind’s energy-hungry civilisation. And, unlike Jupiter, Saturn’s gravity in the clouds was no higher than Earth’s. Thus, with the slow but relentless approach of Ultimatum Day, the human colonisation of the clouds of Saturn in large numbers had begun. Whatever the willingness or otherwise of the surviving colony worlds, Mars, Titan and Triton, none of them had the capacity to cope with a refugee exodus from Earth. But Saturn was roomy enough to make the refugees welcome, many times over.
Nobody knew how safe this new refuge would prove. But all those people had to be put somewhere.
And now the Hindenburg floated over one of the great laputas, an island in the sky of mankind’s new home.
New Sigiriya was supported by sacs of heated hydrogen-helium air, like the medusae of Jupiter, like every human vessel that had ventured into the gas giants’ atmospheres since Falcon’s own Kon-Tiki. But this laputa, a flying raft more than ten kilometres in diameter, would have dwarfed even the greatest of Jupiter’s medusae. And despite the strangeness of its setting—despite the fact that it rested not on a solid surface but over thousands of kilometres of air, despite its clusters of domes brilliantly illuminated by artificial light—as seen from above this was a very human city, of roads, buildings, parkland, even what looked like nature reserves on the periphery.
“It’s beautiful,” Dhoni said. “Strange—out of place here—but beautiful. And a laputa like this will be my home from now on, I guess.”
Falcon said, “But this is only the beginning of Project Silenus. Look further . . .” He took her hand and led her closer to the window.
Beyond New Sigiriya, the sky was full of flying islands. They drifted at all altitudes, from the thick lower cloud decks to the sparse stratosphere. Some were dark shadows, some brilliantly illuminated; while some stood still in the air under their immense flotation bags, others surged purposefully forward, like ocean liners. Lesser craft too threaded their way between the laputas. Lights shone bright everywhere, the smeared city glow of the islands, the sparking buoys and pilot lamps of the ships. The vision was like one of Falcon’s own childhood fantasies of ballooning.
“All this is very recent, ma’am,” Jane Springer-Soames said to Dhoni. “Most of the refugees from Earth have come up here only in the last few decades. In fact most people here at Saturn right now are sleepers, stacked up in the big orbiting hibernacula vessels, and there are more still waiting to be shipped from Earth. They will be restored as soon as possible.”
“That was always expected,” Falcon put in. “The late rush.”
Hope smiled. “For me it was the calendar. When the date finally clicked around to 2700, and I realised that for Earth there would be no 2800—that somehow made it real. ‘Project Silenus,’ though?”
“The laputa construction projects are run out of Oasis City on Titan, but for the resources they’re mining one of the inner moons, Enceladus. And, according to Euripides, Silenus was a drunken companion of the gods who boasted of killing Enceladus with a spear.”
“How apt.”
“I did have to look it up.”
Springer-Soames said, “More laputas are coming into service as fast as they can be built. And that’s only the beginning,” she went on with enthusiasm. “There are grand plans to link up individual laputas to make flying continents, enormous structures—well, there’s room on Saturn. And beyond that we may be able to join it all up into one vast shell enclosing the whole of Saturn, all at one gravity, with a thick layer of breathable air above. Like a planet with a hundred times Earth’s surface area . . .” She seemed to remember herself, and stalled.
Falcon smiled at her. “I like your dreams.”
“You would,” Dhoni said. “The enthusiasm of the young. That’s what will save us in the end, Howard.”
Falcon said, “Maybe. But we have to get through Ultimatum Day first.” He faced Springer-Soames. “You said there is a problem?”
“Yes, sir.” Jane glanced uneasily at Dhoni, then turned back to Falcon. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to come back to Earth. Have you heard of the ‘Peace Hostages’?”
“No, but I don’t like the sound of it.”
“It’s my grandmother’s last-ditch effort to save the planet—so she says. But to do it she’s put twelve thousand lives at risk.”
Falcon frowned. “Twelve thousand? Who asked for my help? The President herself?”
“No, sir,” Springer-Soames said simply. “Adam.”
The name took Falcon aback.
Dhoni, too, seemed shocked. “It’s so peaceful here. As if we’re drifting in a bubble of the past. But there’s always trouble. Oh—” She grabbed Falcon’s arm. “Don’t go. Not again. You’ve done your job, Howard. You—we are too old. Have some iced tea! Oh, Howard, stay with me, and let me look after you.”
But, of course, he had no choice.
He bent stiffly, and with great care kissed Dhoni on the cheek. Her ancient flesh was surprisingly warm. “Wait for me.”
“I will,” she said softly.
He straightened with a whir and turned away.
But Springer-Soames called sharply, “Commander—careful.”
He froze, and looked down. At his feet was a toy, a ball, which had rolled across the carpet to bump, unnoticed, against his undercarriage. It was a simple inflatable thing, like a grounded balloon—but it was a globe of Earth, battered, scuffed, evidently much cherished. Falcon imagined this thing deflated and tucked into a pocket, a souvenir of a lost home. He had nearly run it over.
A little girl approached him. Perhaps five years old, she had short blonde hair, and a face that would one day look strong rather than beautiful, he thought, with a good chin and cheekbones. But right now she was staring at the toy uncertainly.
“Can I help you?”
“Please,” the kid said shyly. “Can I get my globe?”
“Allow me.” Falcon bent, servomotors whirring, and with infinite care picked up the fragile toy with one hand, and held it out to the girl.
She watched the toy, not Falcon; she reached out and grabbed it from him.
A woman behind her murmured, “Be polite, Lorna.”
Hugging the toy, she said, formally, “I’m Lorna Tem. Thank you very much.” And then she looked up at the gleaming pillar of Falcon’s body—he had the feeling she had thought he was some robot, a servomechanism, a mechanical steward serving drinks, perhaps—but then she looked into the leathery remnant of his face, peering out from the machinery, and her eyes widened.
The woman put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s enough. Come away now . . .”
Falcon grunted. “And that’s how the children of the human race react to me.”
Dhoni was here. She rested her head on his upper arm. “Go save mankind once again, Howard.”
Outside the windows of the Hindenburg II, a ferocious ammonia blizzard began to lash at the drifting laputas.