2312

Then directly overhead the sunshield was suddenly marked by a perfectly circular thread of diamond light, blazing near the edge of the black disk. Though this annular ring was a mere wire of brilliant yellow, a delicate hoop of fire, it still lit up the white hills and the scalloped town, and the silver sea to the south, and the plumes of frost pouring from their cheering throats, all glowing now with a bronze light that brought back memories of all the sunniness they had ever known or dreamed of. The burnished tinge was like the light of life itself, a light they had almost forgot, all brought back now by the yellow air.

After a frigid hour the ring of fire grew thinner and thinner, eclipsing from its inside out, until the disk of the sun became completely black again. The circular venetian blind had closed its opened slat. The snowy land darkened to its usual pale luminosity; the stars grew big again. Full night was back, in all its grim familiarity. Just above the black disk of the sun a bright white planet gleamed, small but steady: Mercury, Kiran was told. They were seeing Mercury from Venus, and it gleamed like a pearl made of diamond. And there over the western horizon hung Earth and Luna too, a double star with a blue tinge. “Wow,” Kiran said; something in him seemed to be blowing up like a balloon. Had to breathe deep or he might pop.

But his teammates were tugging at his arm. “Earth boy! Earth boy! Bye-bye miss America pie! We must get back in town fast, there’s a rover broken down, Lakshmi want us right now!”

“Lead on!” Kiran cried, and followed them back down the hillside to the open gates of Vinmara.

Just inside the city gate they followed phone instructions to the rover that was in distress. It looked exactly like their own. The driver and a trio of security people were standing by it, very unhappy; the rover had lost all power, and some packages needed to be run over to the office in the town center as quickly and discreetly as possible. Kiran stood in a short line with his teammates and took a big flat box passed down from one of the security people, thinking that this might be his opportunity to find out what was being transported. Then they were off across town in a little line, like porters.

The town was almost empty, its residents still out on the hill celebrating. The box Kiran was carrying weighed about five kilos; it was not exceptionally heavy for its size. There was a keypad lock on it, near the hasp, that made it look like a reinforced briefcase. They were not far from the office. The actual hinges of the case looked little and flimsy, and he wondered what would happen if he accidentally dropped it on its hinge side.

But then the security trio from the disabled rover appeared, crying, “Run! Run! Get to the office now!” looking over their shoulders fearfully with their guns drawn. Everyone bolted, and Kiran, following the others, seeing they were rattled, shifted the briefcase in his hands so that its hinges were out to his side. When his mates turned a corner to run down a narrow alley, he pretended to trip, and slammed the case hard into the corner of a wall, right against the hinges.

The case held solid.

“Oh shit! Did you break them?” someone exclaimed from behind him-one of the security guards-a Chinese tall, standing over him now, looking horrified.

“What, are they eggs?” Kiran asked as he got up.

“Like eggs,” the guard said, taking the box up and punching away at its keypad. “And if they’re broken, we better leave town.” The top of the box lifted, and there in individual clear containers lay a dozen human eyeballs-all of them, by coincidence, Kiran assumed, staring right at him.

Extracts (14)

The space project accelerated as it was becoming clear that Earth was in for a terrible time because of the climate change and general despoliation of the biosphere. Going into space looked like an attempt to escape all that, and there was enough truth in this that defenders of the space project always had to emphasize its humanitarian and environmental value, the ways in which the resources available in the solar system might help Earth limp through its stupendous overshoot. Inhabiting the other bodies of the solar system could be said to conform to the Leopoldian land ethic, “what’s good is what’s good for the land,” because it was going to take stuff from space to save Earth first settlements on Luna, Mars, and the asteroids were so expensive that they were made as international or national projects, using public money. This made them pitifully weak through the years of dithering, but following the construction of the first space elevators, they blossomed, and by the time of the Accelerando they were ready to take center stage-ready to be the landscape of the Accelerando