Out of curiosity, I backtracked to the outskirts of the Decagon and stepped off its edge—for the surface was several inches higher than the adjoining pavement. I squatted down and lifted up one of Jad’s white tiles to expose a small patch of brown tiling underneath. Jad’s was, as I’d expected, a wholly different solution of the Teglon—the positions of the older brown tiles didn’t match up with those of the new ones, proving that Fraa Jad had not merely copied the older solution.
“It is the fourth,” said a gentle voice. I looked up to find Magnath Foral watching me. He nodded at the tile in my hand. Looking more closely at the edge of the Decagon, I perceived, now, that underneath the brown tiles was a layer of green ones, and below that, one of terra-cotta.
“Well,” I said, “I guess you need to bake up a new set of tiles.”
Foral nodded, and said, deadpan: “I don’t think there is any great hurry.”
I set the white tile back into its place, stood up, and took a step up to the Decagon. It was open to the sky. I craned my neck and looked straight up. “Think they noticed?” I asked. Magnath Foral got a bemused look and said nothing.
Cell 317 moved on to convene in a courtyard we’d not visited yesterday. This one was circular, and roofed by a living bower. They had somehow trained half a dozen enormous flowering vines to arch across the top of the space and grapple with one another to form a stable dome of interlocked branches, fifty feet above the ground. Dappled light shone through it to illuminate the cool space below, but seen from above it would look like a hemisphere of solid green, freckled with color. Pallets of mysterious but expensive-looking stuff had been stationed around the edge of the yard. We devoted the remainder of the morning to breaking these open, getting rid of packaging materials, and drawing up an inventory: mindless labor that everyone badly needed.
That we’d be going into space was obvious from the nature of this stuff. By weight, it was ninety-nine percent containers. We were opening beautiful twenty-pound lockers to find pieces of equipment that weighed as much as dried flowers. We shed our bolts and chords in favor of nearly weightless charcoal-grey coveralls. “It’s all for the best,” Jesry said, eyeing me. “In zero gravity, the bolt doesn’t hang, if you get my meaning. Things would get ugly fast.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Anything else I need to know?”
“If you get sick—which you will—it’ll last for three days. After that, you get better or you get used to it. I’m not sure which.”
“Do you think we’ll even have three days?”
“If they were only sending us up as a diversion—”
“Just to get killed, you mean?”
“Yeah—then they could just send Procians.”
Our conversation had begun to draw in others, such as the Valers, who did not understand Jesry’s sense of humor. He cleared his throat and called out, “What is happening, my fraa?” to Lio.
Lio sprang to the top of a tarp-covered pallet, and everyone went silent.
“We’re not allowed to know yet what the mission is,” he began, “or why we’re doing it. We just have to get there.”
“Get where?” Yul demanded.
“That Daban Urnud,” Lio said.
Not that we hadn’t been paying attention, but: we were really paying attention now. Everyone seemed brighter. Especially Jules. “Food, here I come.”
“How are we going to get aboard a heavily armed—” Arsibalt began to ask.
“We haven’t been told that yet,” Lio said. “Which is just fine, because simply getting off the ground is difficult enough. We can’t use the normal launch sites. I would presume that the Pedestal have threatened to rod them if they notice launch preparations. That means we can’t use the usual rockets, because those are tailor-made to be launched only from those sites. And that, in turn, means we can’t use the usual space vehicles—such as the one you rode on, Jesry—because those can only be launched by said rockets. But there is an alternative. During the last big war, a family of ballistic missiles was developed. They use storable propellants and they launch from the backs of vehicles that ramble around the countryside on treads.”
“That can’t work,” Jesry protested. “A ballistic missile doesn’t get its payload to orbit. It merely throws a warhead at the other side of the world.”
“But suppose you take off that warhead and replace it with something like this,” Lio said. He jumped down, got a grip on the tarp, collected himself, and snapped it away with a forceful movement of the hips and the arms. Revealed was a piece of equipment not a great deal larger than a major household appliance. “A gazebo on top of a welding rig” was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here. The “gazebo” was a very small one—though, as Lio demonstrated, it was large enough to house one person in a fetal position. Its roof was a lens of pressed sheet metal with some sort of hard coating. It was supported by four legs: spindly-looking, triangulated struts, like miniature radio towers.
So the gazebo had a roof and pillars, but it lacked a floor. In lieu of that were only three lugs projecting inward from a structural ring. At the moment, these were spanned by a sheet of plywood, which supported Lio’s back as he curled up on top of it. Once he rolled out, though, he took the plywood away to reveal nothing below except for structural members and plumbing. There were two big tanks—a torus encircling a sphere—and several smaller ones, all spherical, and none larger than what you’d see on the shelves of a sporting goods store. These were profoundly ensnared in plumbing and cable-harnesses. Sticking out the bottom, like an insect’s stinger, was a rocket nozzle, dismayingly small. “The real one will have a nozzle skirt bolted onto it,” Lio informed us, “as big again as this whole stage.”
“Stage!?” Sammann exclaimed. “You mean, as in—”
“Yes!” said Lio. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. This is the upper stage of a rocket. There’s one for each of us.” Then, so that we could get a better view of the nozzle, he grabbed a strut with one hand and hauled up. The entire stage rocked back, exposing the underside.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaimed, and put my hand next to his and shouldered him out of the way. He let it drop into my hand. The entire stage weighed considerably less than I did. Then everyone else had to try it.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Jesry asked.
There was an awkward silence.
“This is the whole thing,” proclaimed Jules Verne Durand, understanding it perfectly, even though he was seeing it for the first time. “The conception is monyafeek!”
“Well, since you appear to be an expert on monyafeeks,” Jesry said, “maybe you could tell us how four legs and a roof are going to contain a pressurized atmosphere!”
“It’s not called a monyafeek,” Lio protested mildly. “It’s a—oh, never mind.”
“We will have only space suits, am I right?” Jules asked, looking to Lio.
Lio nodded. “Jules gets it. Since we need space suits anyway, complete with life support and sanitation and all the rest, it’d be redundant to send up a pressurized capsule comprising extra copies of the same systems.”
I was expecting Jesry to lodge further protests but he underwent a sudden conversion, and held up both hands to silence murmurs. “I have been there,” he reminded us, “and I can tell you there is no part of the shared space capsule experience I’m eager to relive. You don’t know the meaning of nasty until you’ve been blindsided by a drifting blob of someone else’s vomit. Don’t even get me started on what passes for toilets. How hard it is to see out those tiny windows. I think this is a great idea: each of us sealed up in our own personal spaceship, keeping our farts to ourselves, enjoying the panoramic view out the facemask.”