Three Moments of an Explosion Read online

  “He was crammed in there,” the man soldier told Koning. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with Zubaydah.

  “That’s what it was.”

  A small room, a soiled and wet-legged man hauled away without care. The confines of the chamber seeming still to vibrate with his recent screams. Koning imagined the man who was now gathering his money-stuffed and reconfigured book then reaching into the box past piss-pools, reaching for the bewildered, peristalsising, miraculously uncrushed little government weapon in the war against terror.

  “The little motherfucker cocooned up a couple of days after I got it out,” the man said. He was standing, pulling on his jacket. He made no effort to lower his voice. A couple of the other customers glanced at him. Koning waited for her magic pusher to continue. When he did not, she said, “It isn’t dead.” She looked closely at what she had bought.

  “I know,” he said. “No.” He held up a finger. “I don’t care what you want it for. I can see it about to come out of your mouth.” He smiled. He winked in friendly fashion and walked out, leaving Koning gazing at the chrysalis, to leave when she was sure he had gone.

  Koning was a self-made expert. She snuggled what she’d bought in the nest she had made of shredded grimoire and scrunched-up rules of engagement. She watched it. It did nothing.

  She tended it insofar as anyone could tend a carapace, hard outlines, inert edges. It did not have the look of something spun: it seemed accreted. From bits of things organic and not, a scab of metal and soil leavings. She strove for patience during the thing’s slow becoming.

  Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.

  Saturated with the specifics of Zubaydah’s moment the caterpillar, or whatever it was now, was bloated with more than physical calories. Nurse that right, how could it not on its intricate and extruded emergence unfold not only new limbs, not only many-hinged jaws and paper wings burring with stiff motion, but time too. It shared its matter backward. Insects are echoes: that’s always the secret. They are translations of screaming hinges into bug-body form, sound for chitin-point manifestation. Push a big door right, it opens in all its iterations.

  The flea, the ghost of which Blake celebrated and traduced. The killer of Alexander. The jiggers that infected the Santa Maria’s crew, exiling them on their ruinously invaded feet. How to reach through history to such as them, to all the insect bodies like holes drilled in time? How to yank at them and make changes?

  Koning had a plan. Who doesn’t have a plan? As if the power of insect time-tinkering in general was not enough of a draw. For her there was a scheme of lunatic and grandiose scale. It had for years had her spending family money on sideshow nonsense and impossibilities. A mention of the para-economy of war-wrought artifacts and a long chain of connections later, and here at last she sat, in her room, watching the chrysalis of Zubaydah’s tormenting unstinging insect, waiting for it to hatch, to open into the insect road.

  It barely matters what she wanted, though it mattered vastly to her. Something had gone wrong: something had got us here. Something had been—this was her wager—truncated. Insect-fouled, interrupted, deflected to this insect telos. That she had bought, a first step to a fix. She wanted to reach down the opening it would hatch. She had a vampire to swat. A complicated long-gone politics to finesse. How, but down the insect road, could she tussle with the mosquito hungry for Lord-Protector blood, the parasites of which had spittle-ridden into the body of Cromwell, at last in his sweats to kill him? A complex ambition to reshape history, to tweak the development of the Mother of Parliaments, by nudging the date of a regicide’s malarial death.

  Koning stared for many hours at what she had. She would bend over the bottle, stroke its glass with her nail, lift it up occasionally, shake it very gently. She tried to resist the urge, to let it be.

  She slept in her study where she would wake abruptly and repeatedly throughout the night and go to where she had left the specimen, beside the powered-down monitors and unused equipment to which she had originally intended to attach it. When she sat up in the small hours of the third or fourth morning of her ownership, she felt something very faint move across her face. When she turned on the light it was swaying as if something had pulled it back on its flex, and just released it. She stood underneath and, though she could see nothing that might cause them, with every swing of the shade she felt more thread-like touches. She picked up the bottle and pens, paper, bits and pieces that had been scattered around it on the table slid a few inches closer together underneath her hand, as if the glass dragged them a moment, as if they had been attached to it.

  Was the nub within grown larger? She stared until she wondered if it was twitching. She held the bottle in her left hand rubbing imagined fibers from it with her thumb.

  She scanned her books of history and wrote in the margins of her many notes—equations, intentions, toxic algorithms. She went over all the mechanisms she had prepared. She had, over many years, carefully worked out the Byzantine ramifications, a cascade of causes and effects intended to extend the life of one long dead.

  When she stood in the morning and walked she tugged her feet through resistance and small things rattled on the shelves as if everything was knotted together, as if silk spread out, right through the bottle, its glass made porous, and tangled everything. The chrysalis was bigger. It almost filled the container.

  It was impossible for her not to become excited, not to feel her heart speed up and her breath come faster, but she strove to keep control. When she returned to the room later in the day and saw after a moment of scanning that things were no longer where they had been, that the stuff that had surrounded the chrysalis was now not moved but gone, she held her breath completely, to let it out in a slow gasp when she saw the bottle itself.

  Its glass seemed to bulge, it was pressed so hard from within by the expanding matter of the insect’s case. It was hard to tell, the pupa that stuffed the bottle was so compacted and matte and dark, but what flecked it might include the plastic of a pen now gone from the table, brittle chewed-up wads of lost paper. Koning bent over it again, for a long time, and when she sat back she gave a little cry and clapped her hand to her scalp. She lifted the bottle—it was much heavier than it had been—and looked for and thought she saw a knot of hair in it, in the stuff, a new knot, the color of her own.

  Can you do it? she thought. What I want?

  Things kept going missing. The bottle grew heavier. The glass did not break and it did not bow or bend or inflate grotesquely as if heated and made soft, but it was harder and harder to lift, denser and denser with shadow. It filled and then was more full, more and more full and with that repletion came more invisible fibers on Koning’s face every time she looked.

  She prepared. Is it? It’s now. It’s happening. She made her tools ready. She sat trembling at her desk watching the glass, strangely formal, into the night, pulling closer, watching, breathing shallowly and ready for the insect. Carefully she considered what she wanted, and what she wanted to do with it.

  She reeled. Far-reaching as her aspirations were, Koning’s skills were adequate, her calculations plausible enough, that the plans were hubristic but not quite mad.

  But the bottle remained. The chrysalis would not crack. The caterpillar would not hatch, would not become whatever it was supposed to.

  Days passed, remained unholed, her plan undone. The pupa was a thousand pounds, coiled in glass that should give. Koning stared and shook, her eyes failing to focus.

  She must have eaten and drunk sometimes. Time. Weeks. The light in the room changed: the tree outs
ide the window was gone but that could have been autumn shedding its leaves, a windstorm tipping it over and workers in a truck hauling it away. She blinked. The bottle showed her its dark.

  There were no gauges to check. Her books and machines were gone, and all that was left was the room, the bottle and Koning herself. Once when it was very cold Koning turned, slowly, to look out of the window. Her eyes were burning. It was winter, and everything outside had disappeared.

  Maybe that was snow. All the pupa would do, endlessly, was grow.

  THE ROPE IS THE WORLD

  What do you want to see?

  What is the nature of your enterprise?

  When did you become aware of what the rope is? Well.

  The Earth is a thin-spoked wheel. Its spokes are irregularly spaced: we must look like the plucked remnants of some bicycle ridden by a ragged girl or boy, if only to God.

  For a long time in pre-pre-history these elevator shafts, these guy-ropes, spacewires, these towers, were impossible. They were a joke, an academic wheeze. A recherché thought-experiment. But one day, and abruptly—whether it was due to the explosive advance of carbon nanotube science, the augmented energies of the slippage engine, the de- and revaluation of American industry and the rise of the parabuck economy, or whatever—they looked possible. They were possible.

  During the years of it’s-all-in-fun what had been stressed were the savings the economics of lift would, theoretically, if-we-really-meant-it, allow. Initial outlays were clearly gigavast, but lifting one ton of cargo out beyond everyday gravity to orbit by elevator was this or that many times cheaper—some absurd margin—than doing so by rocket, by shuttle, by alien indulgence. Now that the space elevators, the skyhooks, the geostationary tethered-dock haulage columns, were shockingly feasible, research projects were all human-spirit this and because-it’s-there that. As if, faced with them, the mere savings were as vulgar as they in fact were.

  Equatorial nations, with real estate on that precise vector where geosynchronicity could occur, were bullied, cajoled, annexed, and wooed. The economies of Gabon, Indonesia, the several Congos, Brazil, Ecuador, and Nuganda went behemoth with parabucks and renminbis toxic with intricate conditionalities and obligations. Twenty-seven years of UN-backed Ecuadorian martial law after preparing the first orbital platform with all kinds of fanfare (years which in retrospect really flew by) Freedom Tower, the first space elevator humanity ever started, that had descended splendidly and slowly over years, to Isabela Island in the Galapagos, opened.

  It was redundant, of course. The technology at its center of gravity, its farthest end and first part built, the base station in the Clarke Belt, was antique compared to that at the Earth, the last, when the extruded tower finally reached it. The shaft ascended in skyhook archaeology.

  In any case, this, Freedom or Isabela Tower, the Rope, was the first to be started, but the third to open. It had been overtaken during its growth by towers built by a Chinese and U.S. consortium respectively. Freedom Tower was born a freight museum.

  It tried to scratch an income by reconfiguring itself, adding elements of a holiday block and folly. It was favored by perpetrators of spectacular suicides. Depending on the level chosen a person could jump to and burn up in their death simultaneously. Launch from over twenty-three thousand kilometers, the most flamboyant suicides could aim their bodies in eccentric orbit. Theoretically, they would continue their lifeless circumnavigation forever, though much of the corpse-litter was cleaned out of orbit.

  There were three, then seven, then eleven space elevators. Terrestrial bases, counterweights in space, moonlets or junk masses quickly known as conkers. And stretched between them, more than thirty-six thousand kilometers of columnar carbon and neosteel, to where geostationary orbit occurred, so the towers jutted straight up. From their conker bases little voidcraft pootled back and forth to the colonies, carrying payloads brought up on the huge elevators like vertical trains.

  Ranging from the size of city blocks to the silkiest skyscraper thin, the tracks and reinforced columns, the unspeakable tons of matter, studded with windows, extrusions of opaque purpose, satellite dishes, cables, and air locks, rose and kept going. Up through the measly few kilometers of breathable air; past where planes flew; through the strato- and mesospheres; past the Kármán line where space is; past the space stations orbiting at their paltry three, four hundred kilometers; into the permanent night, adding the glimmers from their speck-windows to the light pollution.

  Defenses kept them safe from meteorites, radiation, the ripples from earthfarts. The Earth itself sat, sits, a fat wheel-hub with its spokes.

  It’s unclear what the watching extraterran emissaries made of all this. The Sab, the Posin, the Hush had arrived with various norms of etiquette in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood over the preceding decades, and proposed interaction of varyingly comprehensible kinds. Earth’s trade representatives would point out the features of our space elevators, and by all accounts the visitors uttered alien equivalents of polite, uninterested Hmmms, like a queen visiting a biscuit factory. It’s completely unknown how or if their own vessels exited their own planet’s pulls.

  The towers were—and are—named, sometimes, for their most notorious sponsors: The Real Thing; iTower; I Can’t Believe it’s a Space Elevator. Mostly, though, what stuck was more generic. One was called The Beanstalk, one The Skyhook, one the Skytower, and so on. One was the Rope.

  Between one and one and a half million stories each, and each with a workforce the size of a huge city. Thousands of kilometers of vertical track in those pressurized tubes; viewing stations; zones for education and recreation; guard and/or police stations; waste disposal engines and rubbish chutes longer than Russia; workers’ hostels; engineering labs; toolsheds; little gardens. The overarching purpose was always to haul things up and haul them down.

  The towers were freight elevators, and they had crews. Crews, very far from home, farther from home than anyone had ever worked before, had their families join them. Their families demanded amenities, and so on.

  That first, remember, Freedom Tower—Isabela Tower, the Rope—had been going bad since before it was born.

  As useless as an Olympic village the day after. Crews kept the impossible white elephant up. A few romantics, sightseers, death-wishers, and lost ascended. What freight traveled up it was that of owners who could not afford more salubrious towers, or who wished to avoid their more stringent security.

  Isabela Tower became a gray operation, complicit with vertical criminality, pirate payloads, tax evasion, theft. Stretches of shaft broke down, so cargo had to be unloaded and shifted from one lift to another, at celestial junctions, throwing up an economy of stevedores and porters in the corridors and staircases, and the brigands who preyed on them.

  Power failed on certain floors way above the troposphere, killing those within and marooning workers to either side between many rooms full of void. It was those advanced ends, at ground level, and on the orbital station, that needed each other. And section by section, over years, the intervening tower was—not decommissioned, but left to its own devices.

  It is always startling how fast a generation passes, then another, and so on. And when more and more of the spacebound stories failed, and went out, the lights, the heat, the oxygen? So long as the pressurized elevators could still travel through them, no matter how dark, or cold, or mummy-littered they were, those floors did not so much matter.

  It was hard to relate to the fourth-generation welder, or cook, or whatever on level one and a bit million as a citizen of whatever state the tubes below her feet eventually tethered to, and on which she had never set foot. She was many times farther from that country’s capital than was the farthest spot from it on Earth. It’s sad when anyone dies, of course, but to whom they belong is not always an urgent question. And there has to be security in place to protect the base at one end and satellite at the other from attack or invasion—or exvasion, too. The elevators must be armed when they pass through
those needy layered lands.

  Other towers failed. Some molder, deserted, more energetically emptied than was the Rope. One fell. Two were decoupled from their base-stations in audacious terrorist acts, a little carefully placed thermite that saw the vertical thread-cities suddenly and awfully yanked centripetal up from the Earth, trailing cables and spilling elevators and people, receding spaceward into dreadful orbit at speeds vastly too great for things so big.

  Some continued in some capacity. The Earth is still an irregularly spoked wheel.

  You do not know how they live, those on the levels where people still live, those of the 1.2 million floors of the Rope. These were isolated communities before you or your parents were born. We have only travelers’ stories. You don’t know what languages they speak, what they make or learn, to what they pray, what stories they tell their children as they look out of the portholes or call up external camfeeds and stare up at space, or down the perspective line of their shaft toward Earth as lifts full of foreign cargo rise and fall through their territories; how they mark it when those they love die; or if they are there at all, those people for whom the Rope is the world.

  The Rope is the world.

  THE BUZZARD’S EGG

  Good morning.

  No? Are you still sulking?

  Fine. Be sullen. It makes very little odds to me. I get my food either way.

  Speaking of which. See how I light this? See how I put the right wood on it? How delicious is that smoke? I could turn my back and throw the embers over my shoulder at you and some people might say you deserve it, but I don’t, do I?

  You can see the day. I can feel your golden stare.

  You don’t intimidate me, looking at me like that. Keep looking over my shoulder, too, through the windows. Don’t you think our hills are beautiful?