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blocked out by the Dome, telescopes were of little use, unless you
wanted to spy on the gangs of workers who crawled over the inside
of the Dome s roof day and night. But what Bisesa wanted to look
at was the sun.
When Bisesa told it what she wanted to see, the telescope s
nanny software immediately started bleating warnings about safe
usage. Bisesa already knew all about the dangers. You couldn t look
directly at the sun through a telescope, unless you wanted your eye
burned out, but you could project an image. So Bisesa brought up a
folding chair and set up a broad sheet of white cartridge paper be-
hind the telescope s eyepiece. The final positioning of the paper in
the telescope s shadow, and the focusing of the instrument, was a
little tricky. But at last, in the middle of the telescope s complicated
shadow, a disk of milky white appeared.
Bisesa was surprised by the clarity of the image, and its size,
maybe a third of a meter across. Toward the rim of the disk the
brightness faded a little, so she had a clear sense that she was look-
ing at a sphere, a three-dimensional object. Sunspot groups were
speckled around the sun s midlatitudes, easily visible, looking like
motes of dust in a shining bowl. It was galling to think that each of
those dwarfed dust-speck anomalies was larger than the whole
Earth, and, glowing at temperatures of thousands of degrees, they
showed as shadows only because they were cooler than the rest of
the sun s surface.
But it was not sunspots that Bisesa had bought her telescope to
see.
A line crossed the face of the sun, a stripe of watery gray that
traversed from northeast to southwest. It was, of course, the shield.
Hanging up there at its station at L1, it was still turned almost
edge-on to the sun. But already it cast a shadow on the Earth.
Bisesa hugged Myra. You see? There it is. It s real. Now do
you believe?
Myra stared at the shadow. Now thirteen years old, she was a
bit too quiet for her age. Bisesa had meant this display to comfort
Myra, who was not alone in having trouble believing in the reality
of the great project in space.
2 0 6 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
But her reaction wasn t what Bisesa had anticipated. She
seemed afraid. This was a human-made object, four times as re-
mote as the Moon, and yet visible from Earth. Standing here in the
watery sunlight of a London morning, the cosmic vision was aston-
ishing, awe inspiring crushing.
This is why the Greeks coined the word hubris, Bisesa thought.
31: Perspectives
For lovers, zero G was a lot trickier than the low gravity of the
Moon.
That was despite decades of experience, Siobhan had learned.
In the days of low Earth orbit flights there had been something
called the Dolphin Club, so named because in the analogous con-
ditions of floating in the ocean, a dolphin couple would sometimes
be helped in their intimacy by the bracing support of a third . . .
Siobhan was the Astronomer Royal; she wasn t about to put up with
any of that.
So Bud had improvised equipment to enable her to retain her
privacy. With its cuffs, ropes, and restraints his cabin now looked
like a bondage parlor, but in giving you something to grip and push
against, this stuff supported the ancient arts surprisingly well. But
in the isolated little zero-G township of the shield Bud had clearly
had help figuring all this out. She made him take down the little
plaque above his bed:
courtesy of
U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS
enjoy!
Still, the sex was as deep and rich and satisfying and, damn it,
comforting as ever; she was old enough to admit she needed consola-
tion as much as passion.
2 0 8 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
Afterward, though, as they lay under a thick blanket, with Bud
a silent warm mass beside her, her thoughts turned to the reasons
she had come here.
This cabin had once been a storeroom; you could still see the
marks where shelving and cupboards had been ripped off the walls.
Over the years Aurora had been cannibalized, and now it was a
husk containing nothing but life support systems, comms centers,
and hastily improvised living quarters. But to Bud, she knew, this
battered old ship was home. Even when the project was over, no
doubt he would always miss it.
It was going to break his heart if she had to bring him home be-
fore the job was done. But that was one possible outcome of her
visit, and they both knew it.
Bud said at last, You know, at times like this I still miss a ciga-
rette.
At heart you re just an unreconstructed high school jock,
aren t you?
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