The Arkitect

The Arkitect

  a short fiction by

  Barry Burnett, MD

  o:o:o:o:o

  The Fool Press

  Copyright 2011 Barry Burnett, MD

  ISBN 978-0-9796043-8-6

  Dear Reader:

  As will soon be more than obvious, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously—especially the characters, whose resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is entirely accidental.

  The Arkitect

  Of all the State’s nanoengineering triumphs—the Spacethread, the coming Spacecable, etc.—few would be possible without the revolutionary Buckyloids (see: Mid-Capitalist Visionaries; Buckminster Fuller; Geodesic Domes; Derivative Molecules). With tools such as these, how can we not change the world!

  The Cyrillic Dream: Superscience and the Second Soviet Empire (trans.)

  Gnarled beyond belief.

  She twisted her hand before the bulging membrane, a species of buckyglass that separated the washed air of the bridge from the near-vacuum outside. Wondering at lax veins and swollen joints, the fragile papyrus between. There had not been time to wonder before, only time to sketch and point, to manipulate in every way, to do what must be done. It must be the contrast, she decided, imperfect flesh against the distant precision of the stars. Or the memory of a younger hand, when the vast chamber in which they stood had been nothing but a desperate plan.

  Flowers had still grown then, and now they bloomed again—especially for her, the first to be cultivated from newly recombinant stock. Sweet rose, remembered. The scent drifted from the spray of buds placed on a rare unburned plank of knotty pine that, carefully planed and polished, topped the captain’s flight station behind her. Their fragrance almost covered the outgassing nanosynthetics from every other surface, a faint petrochemical sting that had perfumed the long and intervening years.

  The flowers were fine, but no more meaningful than the rest of this unnecessary ceremony—the beast was built, ready to sail off toward those stars without her. She wanted it over, now, wanted to bury her remaining days in a life without pomp or plan or pretense.

  The Captain turned away, rocking slightly on his heels, hands clasped at the small of his back. Giving the old girl the moment she clearly needed, he studied the carpet of cloud that baked in sunlight miles beneath his feet. Featureless, gray, and steeply curved from this altitude, it was no more interesting to him than usual. Although today it seemed a little lighter, a shade brighter than the dull flat glare he’d grown accustomed to.

  He frowned, a frown she noticed, unseen at his side. But then, with captainly decisiveness, he sped to the obvious answer: launch day—today!—had been scheduled for the equinox, when the equatorial sun’s tidal pull was greatest... and when it shone its brightest, beaming down from directly overhead.

  The frown eased, and she did as well.

  Of greater interest to the Captain was the hull of the slingship, his slingship, that dropped precipitously away beyond the bulging windows of the bridge. From his perspective, he stood at the apex of a streamlined vessel over sixty miles in height, but he knew it was a titanic cloud-piercing column to those unlucky souls still stuck on the planet’s surface. Just another planet, and broken to boot.

  Squinting down the silver buckalloy, he picked out the huge, inverted letters of the prow’s black hull number, GR-100. The Arkitect still insisted on calling it that, in conversation and at the highest-level meetings. The rest of the world, onboard and off, had its own name for the slingship—the Ark.

  It was as inexplicable a quirk as her unquestioning adherence to the Century Law, the age restriction that she herself had authored, back when this day must have seemed impossibly far off. Though he had to admit that, at nearly fifteen decades, she was living proof of its wisdom. Better the slingship be for the young and strong. Or those stronger than the young, he added to himself, flexing his hormone-pumped arms, as substantial as the bucklybdenum handrail in his grip.

  She’d had more than enough time. Carefully, he said, “You can still sail with us, you know. An exception could be made.”

  She glanced again—eyes sharp, deep within their wrinkled nests—at his profile. Strong of jaw, it both inspired confidence and spoke to a certain shallowness of curiosity, the reason she had once slipped his file to the top of the candidate list. “An exception?”

  “You’ve done so much.” Pretending to examine the faceless sphere below.

  “You’re too kind.” She let a slight, geriatric tremor enter her voice. “But it simply... wouldn’t be right.” The man was a idiot. Had he forgotten that this ‘private’ moment was being broadcast? The Arkitect’s—she winced—Final Visit. Could he possibly think she was unaware of the lucrative exceptions he had already made, the birth documents so conveniently overlooked? No, there had to be a reason; a bargain, perhaps, boldly if foolishly proposed in public.

  She considered the line of junior officers standing at attention behind that ridiculous vase of flowers. The Captain was nearly a Centarian himself, despite the photon-tightened skin, the neatly excised waddle, and the springy forelock that, to her amazement, he’d been vain enough to dye without a touch of gray. How long before his lieutenants used his accumulating years against him? Aboard, she’d be a useful buffer—Now, she’s old—kept alive for the frail and fading decades he must believe she treasured, a bedbound puppet to his needs.

  “For all of us,” he pleaded manfully, keeping his best profile to the ShipNet camera hovering discretely nearby.

  Her lips pursed. Or puckered, really, the bristling white hairs a less than pretty sight. A diminutive figure that looked up to the bridge’s geodesic ceiling, through its transparent buckyplastic tetrahedrons to the thick nanoweave Spacecable that soared and, with attenuating distance, disappeared into the interlunar space above. Slowly, reluctantly, she shook her head. “So many, many years... More than a century... a century to live, a century to lead.” A rheumy cough, to underscore her point. “Earth’s law is clear: one century, and no more. One century, and one’s time is done.”

  He stared at her, suddenly pale, then turned stiffly back to the clouds. As she paused, letting him twist, his calculated risk rejected.

  Until, leisurely, she added, “But not yours, my good Captain. Some must serve far longer, as long as they are needed. This ship is a new world, and, once launched, will make its own laws. Your time, Captain, is just beginning.”

  She was rewarded by a shuddering gasp and exhalation, even the gleam of a spontaneous tear before he enfolded her, his absurd steroidal musclebreasts—hers were dugs, dry and forgotten—threatening to suffocate her frail form.

  “Let... me... go,” she hissed into the star-emblazoned spandex. And when he continued to cling long enough for his tears to register with their countless watchers, lifted a prickly chin towards his pink ear and whispered, “This instant, or I swear you’ll die on the dirt beside me.”

  Too much a pro to miss a beat, the Captain released her to smiles all around—most calculating, some relieved, and a single well-known grimace as spare and reserved as always. Released her and, before the hour had passed, ushered her though a historic farewell to the bridge, with its tracking cameras, its watching public, and its wrenchingly blank view of an obliterated world.

  Freedom.

  She’d miss the downtube most of all, a buckywalled capsule that plunged from the GR-100’s bridge to the high ash plains outside the bone-picked ruins of Quito.

  Long, glorious minutes of freefall, free of the pains of her unfortunate age. Minutes easily worth the coming agony of deceleration—to be managed, as always, by the capsule’s buckygel-padded couch and the continence plug she never left behind.

&n
bsp; Until then they floated, roughly upright, she and the Captain who inserted himself into every possible photo opportunity, especially the last farewell waiting below. The passing levels were merely a blur, as the empty tube punched through prototowns and farms and unlit life-support layers, quick-stuttering shades of florescent white and green and black. A billion lives in exodus—a number from a long-ago drawing board, another of the inordinately round numbers she was known to be fond of. But a number that nonetheless, though famine, infertility, and two well-lobbied boarding restrictions, had turned out to be just about right.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For laying it on for me up there. At the end, where it counts. Thin, then thick, right?” He waited. “Anyway, thanks.”

  She nodded and, weightless, closed her eyes.

  “Just one question.”

  “Please let me enjoy this.” Arms lifting