hard future cared nothing for him and his memories of a better past.
And nor did they care much for what was about to happen here. All their gossip was of events far away: of Hiram Patterson and his wormholes, his promise to make the Earth itself as transparent as glass.
It was very obvious to Vitaly that he was the oldest person here. The last survivor of the old days, perhaps. That thought gave him a certain sour pleasure.
It was, in fact, almost exactly seventy years since the launch of the first Molniya – ‘lightning’ – in 1965. It might have been seventy days, so vivid were the events in Vitaly's mind, when the young army of scientists, rocket engineers, technicians, labourers, cooks, carpenters and masons had come to this unpromising steppe and – living in huts and tents, alternately baking and freezing, armed with little but their dedication and Korolev's genius – had built and launched mankind's first spaceships.
The design of the Molniya satellites had been utterly ingenious. Korolev's great boosters were incapable of launching a satellite to geosynchronous orbit, that high radius where the station would hover above a fixed point on Earth's surface. So Korolev launched his satellites on elliptical eight-hour trajectories. With such orbits, carefully chosen, three Molniyas could provide coverage for most of the Soviet Union. For decades the USSR, and later Russia, had maintained constellations of Molniyas in their eccentric orbits, providing the great, sprawling country with essential social and economic unity.
Vitaly regarded the Molniya comsats as Korolev's greatest achievement, outshining even the Designer's accomplishments in launching robots and humans into space, touching Mars and Venus, even – so nearly – beating the Americans to the Moon.
But now, perhaps, the need for those marvellous birds was dying at last.
The great launch tower rolled back, and the last power umbilicals fell away, writhing slowly like fat black snakes. The slim form of the booster itself was revealed, a needle shape with the baroque fluting typical of Korolev's antique, marvellous, utterly reliable designs. Although the sun was now high in the sky, the rocket was bathed in brilliant artificial light, wreathed in vapour breathed by the mass of cryogenic fuels in its tanks.
Tri. Dva. Odin. Zashiganiye!
Ignition…
As Kate Manzoni approached the OurWorld campus, she wondered if she had contrived to be a little more than fashionably just-late-enough for this spectacular event, so brightly was the Washington State sky painted by Hiram Patterson's light show.
Small planes criss-crossed the sky, maintaining a layer of (no doubt environmentally friendly) dust on which the lasers painted virtual images of a turning Earth. Every few seconds the globe turned transparent, to reveal the familiar OurWorld corporate logo embedded in its core. It was all utterly tacky, of course, and it only served to obscure the real beauty of the tall, clear night sky.
She opaqued the car's roof, and found after-images drifting across her vision.
A drone hovered outside the car. It was another Earth globe, slowly spinning, and when it spoke its voice was smooth, utterly synthetic, devoid of emotion. ‘This way, Ms Manzoni.’
‘Just a moment.’ She whispered, ‘Search Engine. Mirror.’
An image of herself crystallized in the middle of her field of vision, disconcertingly overlaying the spinning drone. She checked her dress front and back, turned on the programmable tattoos that adorned her shoulders, and tucked stray wisps of hair back where they should be. The self-image, synthesized from feeds from the car's cameras and relayed to her retinal implants, was a little grainy and prone to break up into blocky pixels if she moved too quickly, but that was a limitation of her old-fashioned sense organ implant technology she was prepared to accept. Better she suffer a little fuzziness than let some cack-handed CNS-augment surgeon open up her skull.
When she was ready she dismissed the image and clambered out of the car, as gracefully as she could manage in her ludicrously tight and impractical dress.
OurWorld's campus turned out to be a carpet of neat grass quadrangles separating three-storey office buildings, fat, top-heavy boxes of blue glass held up by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete. It was ugly and quaint, 1990s corporate chic. The bottom storey of each building was an open car lot, in one of which her car had parked itself.
She joined a river of people that flowed into the campus cafeteria, drones bobbing over their heads.
The cafeteria was a showpiece, a spectacular multilevel glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide graffiti-laden Berlin Wall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it. Tonight perhaps a thousand guests milled across the glassy floor, groups of them coalescing and dispersing, a cloud of conversation bubbling around them.
Heads turned towards her, some in recognition, and some – male and female alike – with frankly lustful calculation.
She picked out face after face, repeated shocks of recognition startling her. There were presidents, dictators, royalty, powers in industry and finance, and the usual scattering of celebrities from movies and music and the other arts. She didn't spot President Juarez herself, but several of her cabinet were here. Hiram had gathered quite a crowd for his latest spectacle, she conceded.
Of course she knew she wasn't here herself solely for her glittering journalistic talent or conversational skills, but for her own combination of beauty and the minor celebrity that had followed her exposure of the Wormwood discovery. But that was an angle she'd been happy to exploit herself ever since her big break.
Drones floated overhead bearing canapes and drinks. She accepted a cocktail. Some of the drones carried images from one or other of Hiram's channels. The images were mostly ignored in the excitement, even the most spectacular – here was one, for example, bearing the image of a space rocket on the point of being launched, evidently from some dusty steppe in Asia – but she couldn't deny that the cumulative effect of all this technology was impressive, as if reinforcing Hiram's famous boast that OurWorld's mission was to inform a planet.
She gravitated towards one of the larger knots of people nearby, trying to see who, or what, was the centre of attention. She made out a slim young man with dark hair, a walrus moustache and round glasses, wearing a rather absurd pantomime-soldier uniform of bright lime green with scarlet piping. He seemed to be holding a brass musical instrument, perhaps a euphonium. She recognized him, of course, and as soon as she did so she lost interest. Just a virtual. She began to survey the crowd around him, observing their child-like fascination with this simulacrum of a long-dead, saintly celebrity.
One older man was regarding her a little too closely. His eyes were odd, an unnaturally pale grey. She wondered if he had possession of the new breed of retinal implants which were rumoured – by operating at millimetre wavelengths, at which textiles were transparent, and with a little subtle image enhancement – to enable the wearer to see through clothes. He took a tentative step towards her, and orthotic aids, his invisible walking machine, whirred stiffly.
Kate turned away.
‘…He's only a virtual, I'm afraid. Our young sergeant over there, that is. Like his three companions, who are likewise scattered around the room. Even my father's grasp doesn't yet extend to resurrecting the dead. But of course you knew that.’
The voice in her ear had made her jump. She turned, and found herself looking into the face of a young man: perhaps twenty-five,
