‘You can get away,’ Herzberg finds himself explaining, ‘with a lot more in a situation that’s unfamiliar than in one that’s familiar. A spaceship is not – to most people, most other people – familiar.’
Ben Briar, his addressee, holds fire, contrarian impulse overridden by the qualifiers most and other. Herzberg, sensing a few more seconds of indulgence unfolding in front of him, continues:
‘Now, you might think that this lack of a comparator, of an experiential reference point or authority, would whip the rug out from beneath the possibility of empathic identification. On the part of the audience, I mean. But, paradoxically, it doesn’t. Or rather, it creates an opening, the chance for a swift one-two. What I mean is, that you counteract the defamiliarisation by introducing, however incongruous they may seem, the most familiar, mundane objects of all, to make the whole scenario credible. So, here, we’ve thrown a simple fork in …’
On the BenQ PV3200PT 32-inch 4K IPS Post-Production Monitor at which the two men, and a host of others grouped around them, stare, the fork, CGI rendering of your basic IKEA Livnära (chosen, for its generic tine spread and wood handle, over the more narrowly Scandi-connoting Förnuft), drifts languidly in mid-air down the Sidereal’s engine-room corridor, rotating as it passes the POV.
‘This object, though,’ Herzberg cautions in a stern tone, ‘has to be convincing. You must really go to town in terms of detail: where it shines, the metal’s granularity, how aged it looks …’
The fork continues its slow passage down its gravityless vector, emitting, like an isotopic sheen, the memory of every castaplane and stoumpot mouthful it has borne from plate to mouth – and not just those of surly and unmannered stokers, nor even the refined crockery and lips of such as Tild and Tszvetan, but also of each of its viewers here in this room and, beyond that, in the world at large, the universe outside these walls to which it seems to slowly inch, awaiting its launch through some hatch as yet unseen.
‘The best lies,’ Herzberg commentates as soon as he feels the allure of the fork’s lustre fading, ‘are ninety per cent truth.’
He teaches a design course at St Martins; it’s a line he feeds his students. Here, though, the dynamic’s different, the authority reversed. It’s like a viva, or tenure-track meeting, or even disciplinary hearing. It’s as though he were pleading for Briar’s approval – framing everything in the man’s terms, his Aristotelian metrics. Realism Tsar. He gets more nervous about, sleeps less each night before, having to interface with the adviser than he does when making presentations to people with actual executive power over him, the power of contract-termination, fingers resting on the levers of professional life and death: they treat him with the reverence due to a craftsman, defer to his artisanal expertise, whereas this guy … The Two Cultures man is like a gruff version of Yoda. He may not be the Emperor, nor even a Sith Lord or Darth, but he’s the keeper of the Force – and in this universe the Force, like charge in Argeral, is everything. Now Yoda’s gearing up to speak, rolling his shoulders, grunting, as though inconveniently roused from a deep sleep.
‘Before we start with forks,’ he croaks, ‘perhaps we could establish where this “wind” is coming from.’
It’s a fair question. Herzberg has an answer, though:
‘It’s coming from the Sidereal’s prow, and rushing down towards its stern.’
‘But how’s it moving down it? Wouldn’t it just sweep the Sidereal along with it, like a piece of chaff?’
‘That isn’t the effect we …’ Herzberg starts – then, self-censoring, tries again: ‘Tszvetan is driving against the wind, head-on, engines full blast. He’s also using the C-Anchors, which lock on to a coordinate and set the ship’s position to that, rather than just relative to …’
‘Do you even know what solar wind is?’ Briar witheringly interrupts.
‘Well, sure. It’s a … it’s a discharge,’ Herzberg desperately tries to reconstruct the Wikipedia entry he glanced at a month ago, ‘a stream of electrons, particles, and so on, discharged by a star when it … when it, you know …’
Briar cruelly lets the silence ring for a few seconds, before stating, in a casual, almost bored voice:
‘It’s a plasma-stream released by a sun’s upper atmosphere. Its corona. As you say – correctly, if incompletely – a discharge of electrons, protons, alpha particles and other agents that have managed to amass escape velocity. It travels supersonically across the heliosphere until it runs into the termination shock – hitting which, and despite dropping to subsonic speeds, it propagates in front of it a bow wave that wreaks havoc with magnetic fields and gravitational configuration and incoming cosmic rays of any planetary atmospheres unlucky enough to find themselves in its path – indeed, that subjects planets without strong magnetospheres to complete atmospheric stripping.’
‘That,’ Herzberg jumps back in eagerly, ‘is kind of what we’re going for: stripping. We want the solar wind from Fidelus to strip the Sidereal, take it apart. That’s why it needs to stay in place: so that the wind can unpick it, right down to its skeleton – and beyond, to nothing.’
Briar ponders this statement for a moment, then, surprisingly and to Herzberg’s enormous relief, pronounces:
‘That can work. Your ship would have to approach Fidelius …’
‘Fidelus.’
‘… would travel through Fidelus’s heliosphere, inwards from the heliopause towards the heliosheath, until it nears the termination shock. That’s when the wind will hit it. But you have to understand: it isn’t just a wind. As I’ve just intimated, it’s a general cosmic fucking with all terms and values: gravity, polarity, attraction, radio-wave intensity, light …’
‘That’s even better.’ Herzberg’s really happy now. ‘Exactly what we want.’ His hand moves across the desktop to Incarnation’s leather-bound, Post-it marker-swollen treatment and rests for a while atop it. It’s not there for consultation or for prompting – the whole team know it by now almost by rote – but rather as a prop, a crook, a totem whose mere presence can gird and stabilise all realms, even the ones in which disastrous destabilisations are to play out …
Tszvetan is indeed driving against the wind, in every sense. At the end of a string of plot-twists no less acrobatic than the MU acrobats performing in them – leaping, still shackled, from the flames licking at his feet from the lit pyre in Kern’s piazzo on to the pirogue on which his friend and sidekick Govnal, gatecrashing the execution, whisks him away to safety; scything his rapier through scores of horny leperosi as he clears a path for, and then plucks from free-fall, Tild; fleeing with her to the Marais wildlands where, befriended by the hermit O. G. Rin, they live, royal clothes worn down to Tarzan-and-Jane strips, as hunter-foragers; then, as Louis Q’s DF drones close in on them, making a bid for lasting freedom, re-entering Kern’s citadel disguised as (what else?) leperosi, breaking into the docking-bay in which the Sidereal has been impounded, rapier-scything a few pound guards in the process (Govnal, meanwhile, has spread word among Tszvetan’s loyal stokers, who are standing by to reman the vessel – after, naturally, doing a little scything of their own); and, finally, blasting their way (the harbour’s tractor beams having been sabotaged by these same stokers) free of Kern’s atmosphere, back up past Acephalus, beyond Ardis Minor, out into deep space.
Or, more precisely, towards Fidelus. The crew, preparing to set course for Patagon or maybe Nova Z once they’ve passed through the Sirin belt, are caught off-guard by Tszvetan’s orders to keep bearing straight ahead. Tild, too – but neither she nor they say anything. With each passing diurnal a tacit understanding grows; and with it a complicity, a fatalist conviction, sets in. There’s no habitable planet out there: only more asteroid belts, then empty interstellar medium, then, at the end of this, the heliosphere around the massive star. To enter that, to drive on through depletion and stagnation regions to the termination shock, can only be a one-way ticket – no one on the Sidereal’s in any doubt about that. If they go along with it, if they decline to mutiny or even comment on the starship’s ill-boding trajectory, it’s because their minds all seem to have coalesced around, been drawn into alignment by, a single intuition – unarticulated, perhaps inarticulable, but nonetheless as forceful and attractive as the monstrous conflagration towards which they’re hurtling. It’s tied in with the whole set-up of their tryst: its history, its circumstances and condition. For Tild, coupling with Tszvetan wasn’t simply an alternative to being faithful to Louis Q, one possibility or option among others; it was a rejection of all options, of all possibilities, the very category – a plunge into the impossible. For Tszvetan, reciprocally, Tild was never just a quarry, Argeralan radjar to be hunted down, new entry to be jotted in his amorous kill list. Nor would it be correct to say that his desire for her was simply ‘bigger’ or ‘stronger’ than his sense of duty towards Louis Q, than his adherence to convention, his respect for codes of honour and the like. No: it, too, involved a bound beyond all binds and codes and underpinnings; it required the crossing of a threshold past which there exists no stable ground – just void. The void called them, and they came. What new ground, then, what planetary terrain, what minerality of soil and subsoil, could sustain this shadow-coupling, feed this love birthed through, of and into groundlessness? None: only the void might host it. If, on the voyage from Argeral to Kern, they found a habitus in light’s delay, amidst the ultraviolet and the infrared of its obstruction, now, once more, it’s to the spectrum’s break-up, to the ravaging and disentanglement of light itself, of photons separated and expelled, transformed into a material force, to wind, that they will turn to find the non-place of their dwelling, found their kingdom of non-being. After the tenth diurnal they can spy, from the Observatory, diffracted through the viewfinders of astrolabe and spectrohelioscope, the strange flickerings of Fidelus’s current sheet, rippling like a ballerina’s skirt; then, with naked eye two diurnals later, aurora, swirling ghostly in the star’s magnetosphere, celestial will-o’-the-wisps, beckoning …
The modelling here’s complex – even more than for the first seduction scene. Light-waves will need to be not only bounced around but also separated, broken down, unthreaded. That will come later. For now, the DZ crew just need to figure out how the Sidereal’s to be stripped. They’ve started with a gross model – with three, in fact: one digital, CAD, low-spec, the basic form and outline of the vessel; the other two physical, if equally basic, iterations, duplicates each of which has been immersed in its own fluid-mechanical environment. NW have allowed use of their wind tunnel for flow tracing and yaw/roll/pitching-moment measurement, but they flat refused to submit the thing to wind speeds that would actually break it up, since flying parts of a spaceship, even a scaled-down one, would have dented, gnarled and lacerated delicate, expensive honeycombs and vanes (van Boezem’s indignant email, sent via Phocan, informed them that they’d ‘have to meet all costs for the destruction of not just your spaceship but also our livelihood!’). So, for the full, catastrophic sequence, or at least its gross, undetailed version (analogue), they’ve stuck with the Germans, who dunked into the Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau’s Berlin cavitation tank a month or two ago a 1:96 Sidereal, VWS being less squeamish about such propositions due to a long history of simulating nautical mishaps, their UT2 containing strong, debris-catching nets affixed downstream of measurement section but up-flow of pump and filter parts. (‘The irony,’ Eldridge told Herzberg, who tells Briar now, passing the quip off as his own, ‘is that, to simulate wind, even when wind’s itself a simulation – or, let’s say, approximation – you need water.’) Eldridge has got sequences from all three of these first, tentative modellings up on the BenQ now, running in multi-screen. In the left-hand-side video, the tank one, broken water-flecks dance furiously round the ship’s hull, rising to form lips and wedges as they run across its winglets, landing struts, disruptor banks and stabilisers. The watery medium in which the camera also sits, in tandem with the unabbreviated proprietorial label, Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau, overlaid across the film’s upper-right section, makes Herzberg, every time he watches it, think of U-boats chugging through the depths of the Atlantic. The right-hand-side video, the CAD one, shows an analogous, or rather non-analogue, version of the process taking place in the cavitation tank, pixel-flecks and lips and wedges forming and dispersing, flaring and contracting round the Sidereal as they pass it in a stuttered virtual flux from which fury, this time, seems quite absent. In the middle video, the NW one, the wind tunnel’s smoke tracer wraps the ship in a fine-mesh cocoon while bubbles bounce and ricochet about its slipstream.
‘We’ve established,’ Eldridge says, ‘the movement round the vessel’s hull. In both the CAD and the water tank we ran the sequence on until it starts to break up, as you’ll see. But in a way, that’s a red herring. It might give us prompts, suggestions; but our task here’s not so much to record the way an actual or simmed vessel broke apart on such-and-such a day, as to decide how we want our one to do this, in a way that maxes the event’s spectacular potentiality and is consistent with the flow-parameters enveloping the object – and, of course,’ he finds it politic to round off with this small gesture of tribute, ‘all the laws of physics that, in turn, envelop those.’
The gesture works. Briar slowly nods assent, but asks:
‘How will you decide, when you haven’t got all the details there yet? It could be that it’s the tiniest piece of a truss segment, EVA rail or radiator panel that gives first – which fragment then tears a small rip in down-hull cowling, which causes depressurisation in the avionics or the storage bays, which …’
‘Ken Pilkington,’ says Herzberg, ‘thought – he’s at the MOD, in aeronautics – that it would most likely be …’
‘Ken Pilkington?’ Briar repeats, incredulous. ‘How in heaven’s …?’
‘He slipped us some advice, through Pantarey …’
Briar’s gaze, for a brief moment, seems to disengage – from them, the screens, the room, the task at hand – and to transfer itself on to some other figure that, like a ghost at a private feast he’s hosting, only he can see. Eventually he murmurs:
‘If anyone knows about dematerialising aircraft …’
He doesn’t complete the sentence. Herzberg, cautiously, continues:
‘He suggested having something towards the front give first: a payload bay door or forward bulkhead …’
‘Pilkington!’ Briar whispers – then, realising that the others are all staring at him now, shakes off whatever phantom he’s confronting and, authoritative voice restored, informs them:
‘Yes: bay door or bulkhead are both possible. But it could equally be near the back, if there’s more drag there: say, an aft body flap or stabiliser could pull a whole segment of fuselage off with it as it …’
‘We like front best,’ Herzberg tells him. ‘That way, you can see the event-chain progressing down the vessel, both structurally and dramatically: people racing around as the damage spreads, trying to batten down communicating hatches, seal the airlock modules and so on …’
‘Yes – but for that, surely, you need details.’
‘To a degree. You just have to be Jesuit about it. What happens if we start by making this communication mast snap off and plough on through the solar sail, then having sections of the engine blow? You start the run that takes the ship apart from there, or there, or there – just “peel” a bit back, let the computer do the rest. But you do this in gross, not fine. You don’t need every ventilator duct and odour-filter canister factored into the model at this point. That would take months to work out, even with the procs we’ve got. You only need to fake a bit of detail – which is where our fork comes in. So, here, we’ve primed up three scenarios …’
Charlie, who like a faithful stoker has been waiting for this moment, pulls up now on the BenQ the first of these. It depicts, as intimated, a front-to-rear event-chain of destruction: nose sensor, gyrodynes, elevons, correction engines, thrusters peeling off the simulated model one by one, colliding with each other and the hull.
‘We’ve put seams through the structure,’ Eldridge explains, ‘and assigned each surface properties: tensile strength, brittleness, elasticity, and so forth. Just to get an idea …’
‘Doesn’t look very realistic,’ Briar says.
‘Well, not yet. There’s no part-sim in it at this stage, and …’
‘Part-sim?’
‘No particle simulation: smoke, metal confetti, things that go pow and pouf, like dust from beaten rugs. And, of course, no light. Those come in at the render stage. Now, here’s Scenario Two …’
This one, not wildly different, starts by unpicking a thin telemetry, or perhaps approach and rendezvous, antenna from the Sidereal’s upper fuselage; the antenna then embeds itself, like a knife thrower’s decorated blade, in the ship’s starboard solar panel, which begins to shred, decompositing itself as its shards rush on downwind. The third scenario begins with the same initial detachment, only this time the antenna, like a twig being fed into a shredder, finds its way into the port-side engine, which explodes, not only ripping out whole segments of the cargo bay and armoury but also sending what’s left of the ship careening sideways, fishtailing as it tries to right itself.
‘The great thing with Houdini,’ the screenward-facing Charlie tells them, ‘is that it knows the wind’s not constant: you can factor in the gyre and gimble. And the spaceship will correct as it gets buffetted – which, in turn, informs what part it exposes and, by extension, what might go wrong next.’
Briar nods more, acquiescent if not humbled.
‘Of course,’ Herzberg jumps back in, ‘we won’t show the whole thing. Just some moments from its progression, to narrate its timeline – the best bits. With wide-shots, you don’t need to get all details right – on close-ups, though, you do. That’s where physical modelling’s useful: showing how a screw works its way loose, or how cracks spread across a heat-tile …’
‘There we can take cues,’ Eldridge adds, ‘from the cavitation tank, and feed them into the simulation.’
‘Where’s this extra sail appearing from?’ asks Briar as, on Charlie’s screen, a new wing flickers into view out of abyssal darkness and adapts itself spectrally to the span of the first one which is listing down to meet it.
‘Glitches,’ Charlie answers.
‘We’ll catch them all in rendering too,’ says Eldridge. ‘We’ll have wranglers round the clock, twenty-four/seven.’
Now the scenario’s gone interior: we’ve got fire extinguishers, pneumatic panels, contents of medicine chests all drifting loose inside the module – plus, again, the fork. Herzberg, sensing a kind of truce with Briar, starts telling him a story.
‘There was once, a few years back – not here at Degree Zero but at one of our competitors, in London perhaps, or perhaps it was in the US, I can’t remember – a man named Decebal Călugăreanu.’
Eldridge, Charlie and all the others smile; they know the story. Briar nods again, awaiting the next part.
‘Călugăreanu,’ Herzberg continues, ‘was Romanian, a whizz-kid coder, brought in by this post-prod company for a specific purpose: plotting the passage of an object (a royal sceptre or magic crystal or Moses basket or something along those lines) down a stream, a strait of quick-flowing water in a scene in some big-budget fantasy or other …’
The day (so the story goes) Călugăreanu arrived in London/LA/Wherever, the FX department’s head – Herzberg’s counterpart – introduced him by rolling his eyes and saying ‘I’m not even going to try to pronounce this guy’s name …’ The staffers looked at their feet awkwardly, embarrassed by their boss’s xenophobic boorishness; over the next day or two, they learnt to pronounce the name without much problem. It’s not that hard: Decebal, like decibel; Călugăreanu, like the Sardinian city. The dept head never learnt it, though – for the next few weeks he kept the eye-roll up, called Călugăreanu D.C. each time he addressed him, and so on. Călugăreanu, meanwhile, set about plotting the sceptre/crystal/Moses basket’s passage downstream. Let’s imagine that the sequence was to run for about twenty seconds: it’s a matter of defining a trajectory that’s both dramatic and consistent with the givens – water flows at such-and-such a pace, rocks here and here, object dropped here …
‘Like Poohsticks,’ Briar says.
‘Exactly,’ Herzberg concurs. ‘Same as what we’re doing: fluid simulation. With rapids, or with wind, a thousand micro-factors come into effect with every frame. The better the simulator, the better you can calculate where the thing is in twenty seconds; and the better you can do that, the better your water will look. So Călugăreanu gets to work. He works alone. He’s a hard worker: always at his desk, first in, last out. In fact, he’s never out. They find him in the office every morning, punching the keys, clearly not having slept all night. The weird thing is …’
The weird thing was, he never invoiced for his overtime. The FX dept head would prompt him, ungraciously, calling across the floor Hey, D.C., don’t you guys want to be paid? ‘You guys’ perhaps being coders, or Romanians, or just people with non-waspy names. Călugăreanu would just smile back quietly. He knew why he wasn’t invoicing for the night-time labour. A day or so into his coding, the thought had struck him that, if he could work out where a sceptre/staff/Moses basket will be in twenty seconds in a river, he could also work out where pork-belly futures will be in the morning on the Chinese Stock Exchange, and spent his nights building an algo to do just that. On the day before he signed off on his Poohstick task, he sold his algo to Salomon Smith Barney for 500,000,000 dollars. It was all over the feeds; the staffers cheered him to the door. But Călugăreanu wasn’t quite done: on his way out, he paid a quick last call on the dept head, and made him an offer: if he, the head, could say his, Călugăreanu’s, name, right now, then he, Călugăreanu again, would pay him, head, ten million pounds/dollars/euros – instant transfer, on the spot.
‘The guy actually tried,’ Herzberg rounds off the anecdote. ‘Cala-gear-something … no, Kalloogerena … Calarea …’
‘Supercalifragilistic …’ Charlie joins in.
Even Briar is smiling. There’s a coda to the story, though.
‘The really interesting bit about it all,’ Herzberg in full-on lecturer mode, authority restored now, adds reflectively, ‘is that Salomon Smith Barney only got three or so months’ use out of Călugăreanu’s algorithm. Which was fine – they made their 500,000,000 back several times over. But it turned out to be so good that it influenced the entire pork-belly future-trading system. It became part of the system, its macro-machinery – like a lock, a weir …’
His gaze, and Briar’s, turn back to the BenQ. The model videos are playing again now, snips from further down the files. In the Berlin cavitation-tank one, angry lips and wedges have now prised struts loose, caused stabilisers to hang off like broken wings, the hull to flap autocorrectively from side to side – which, in turn, hastens its destruction. Below this, the CAD simulation runs through the same scene disinterestedly, flecks moving without rancour or intent around the shredding ship. The wind-tunnel footage, as before, shows a smoke-swaddled Sidereal, cradled by the flows that hold destruction, and it, in abeyance. Inside the vessel, similarly passive, Tild and Tszvetan stand amidst untethered medicine boxes, fire extinguishers and fork tines, awaiting their consumption, their apotheosis.