The Rape of The Sun Read online

“I suggest,” Hugo barked, “that 130,000 is no trifle! That is three Saturn boosters! Are you prepared to loft off Earth carrying that kind of a load?”

  Suave Sven responded, “No, Hugo, I am not. But luckily, Helen and I have you—and I am persuaded that you will be able to come up with some sort of compact substitute for three Satums in time to build it, which means that you have about a week to dream it up. Helen, there are some other things that you and I really ought to be getting into—”

  And as horrified Graben, recognizing dismissal, began to rise, I stood and went to him and lapeled him and whispered: “I know we can count on you, Hugo.”

  2

  Sven had always perturbed me, and I was not the only one. Now he was perturbing me again, having sold himself and his proposal solidly to J.C.—so it was a going thing, J.C. having most of the directors in his pocket. Oh, sure, Sven was a magnificent sex-man, but it was more than that; it was— what? some inward dynamism, some mystic melding of attack and allure, no pose but rather the essence of his soul. The damnable part about it was that in him I could pick on nothing to criticize adversely; he never play-acted, never dramatized himself—he was a quiet drama. That, perhaps, is why he appealed to my husband, Wei, so profoundly, Wei being a professional amateur of the bard of Avon.

  I had first met Sven Jensen and Welland Carr at the Houston NASA base in 1984 (a tolerably good year, Brother Orwell, if you don’t count the energy crunch and Russian finoodling and intercontentious Arab discontent and a flock of pollution crud). Southeastern Power had enrolled me in a NASA space intern program; being heavily into communications satellites, Southeastern had detached me from my job as Assistant Director of Computer Research and had sent me here for a year because it considered the course great executive training.

  There were eleven of us in the class, and Commander Jensen was our instructor, and he frequently drew on Dr. Welland Carr for .telemetry theory and training. At the age of thirty then, Sven had a hell of a lot of superbly successful space experience, having flown a Venus-orbiting mission dong with a covey of minor spacing; I came to learn that he was slated to command the 1986 manned Mars expedition. His five years at NASA had followed six years as a naval air combat officer. Although he had seen no actual combat, some of his missions had been hairy; he had regularly flown hot stuff, and his reputation for cool intelligent daring was widespread. Joining NASA as a lieutenant at twenty-six, he had subsequently moved up two notches. I found him instantly electrical; he found me.

  God only knows exactly why Wei had joined up with NASA, abandoning an assistant professorship at Sylvania University in Sylvanopolis. Having an omnivorous mind, he had been looking for his own most rewarding way. He had taken a bachelor’s in English lit, with a minor in the physical sciences, then had shifted to astrophysics for his master’s; whereafter, subsiding into his old passion, he had won the doctorate in English while teaching Shakespeare and Elizabethan lit. He did have some Air Force experience, copiloting cargo planes; this made him barely eligible for NASA, and in 1981 his old buddy Sven seduced him there. Wel’s three NASA years weren’t great in his space missions, but on the ground he had demonstrated unusual aptitude at telemetry control; he was regularly doing that when I came, and he handled one of my two space missions. He was then thirty-seven; I was thirty-four.

  I’ve given you an image of Sven; take a look at Wei, now. He is dark, thin, and small—only when our feet are bare are we eye to eye. His energy is boundlessly unhurried. His face is forever crinkling: into a dazzling smile, or into a meditative frown, or into some other sort of crinkle. He is a gentle man. We love each other.

  We three became thief-thick in Houston. Our interplay was miraculous. Typically, Sven and I jousted on any topic at all, while Wei slumped in his chair, absorbed in the pleasant listening; then Wel would inject a lazy comment which would break up the Sven-Hel fencing and lead into engrossed and prolonged trialogue. Any evening during that year might be Sven and Hel together, or Sven and Wei, or Wel and Hel, or all three of us; the qualitative variety was delicious. Frequently Sven would seduce Wel and me into flying with him in his private and heavily mortgaged surplus Air Force star-jet; sometimes Wel drove it with care, sometimes I managed it with timidity; but Sven was a calmly audacious pilot who handled every run as a limit-testing shake-out.

  Somewhere in there, I fell successively to Sven and to Wei. A decade earlier, I had parted from my first husband in a divorce that was particularly vicious, and thereafter I had made a point of sublimating my sex-drive into career-thrust. Houston changed all that; I was a pushover for both of them, although for nobody else. My God, how marvelous both of them were!

  Wel was infinitely tender; a night in bed with him was a memory for adoration.

  Ah, but Sven, Sven! To him I abandoned myself, and departed him tingling for more. His fascination transcended the arousing overt sexuality; in or out of bed, it was Rasputin charisma even though Sven was no evil mesmerist but a wonderful sympathetic gentleman until the moment came for wild body-love. The thing that finally alarmed me to the point of counter-action was that Sven, whether or not he wanted to do so, was absorbing my self. It must not happen; I would not permit it to happen.

  The break came finally one night in bed with Wel while I was luxuriating after another miracle of sensuous tenderness. Bending over me, Wel suggested with a sort of diffident eagerness: “Hey, Hel—what would you think about marrying me?” Oh yes; omigod, yes—this refuge!

  Sven took it well, complimenting and praising his old friend and abandoning me for good. He stayed on at NASA, and I missed him, but what could one do? Wel and I married, and I went back to Southeastern while Wel returned with me to Sylvanopolis as assistant (and later chief) science editor for the Herald-Trib, with time allowed to teach a few late afternoon and evening classes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan lit at Sylvania U. Wel saw Sven occasionally during intervening years: NASA, and sometimes particularly Captain Jensen, were on Wel’s beat. I never got to see Sven at all. When I caught myself remembering, I closed him out; my marriage to Wel was a gem that radically improved all my old ideas about marriage.

  And when, on January 10, 1995, I learned from my husband that I would be seeing Sven tomorrow, I generated a high-grade case of goose-bumps. I think Wel saw it. At the time, I didn’t think he minded.

  Ducking work on the afternoon of January 11—two days before Sven’s conquest of J.C.—Wel and I drove over in Wel’s three-wheel four-cylinder diesel to meet Sven’s one-ten plane. During two hours of our lunch together, I’d have sworn that no time had intervened, certainly not a decade since Houston.

  Toward the end of it, we happened to mention the solar house that we were building in our semi-plush suburb of Sylvanopolis. Sven said he simply had to see it—right now, no delay. Hey, great! The three of us fitted ourselves into Wel’s infra-compact, and we torqued through winding hilly ways for a distance of twenty kilometers from the airport, monkey-chattering all the way.

  Our house-a-building was sited in an immoderately hill-rugged location at the high narrows of the broad Sylvanopolis valley amid the mountains of mid-Sylvania. This house had .already been written up in an architectural magazine, and would eventually appear in a couple of others—not because it was particularly voluptuous, but because it was half-underground in a hillside (the 1977 Remington Hobbitat motif) with an ambitious battery of solar receptors at hilltop south of the house. Early on, I had remarked to Wel that as an executive perk I could tap in to Southeastern Power’s limited distribution of solar from our big satellite field; Wel had nodded, but I had sensed an unexpressed demurral, and I had dropped the idea: as a matter of pride, Wel wanted no part of my corporation influence. So we had gone the individual power way. Wel and I had compiled a sardonical guest list for the house-warming which we anticipated some time in April: five percent company colleagues and board members, ten percent company little guys, fifteen percent national competitors, seventy percent other people.

  Winters are u
sually mild in the southern clime of Sylvania, but today was May in January: nearly 16 degrees Celsius in the shade and a good 21 degrees in the sun—of which there was a great deal, the sky being deep blue cross-streaked by an occasional contrail, and the scattered clouds puffy white cumulus. Parking in the driveway at the east end of our house beside the in-house garage doors, we took Sven around to the front lawn-area (still unsodded dirt) and let him peer at our broad north facade with its high full-width deck and then outward into the pine forest which dipped steeply downhill from the house to the headwaters of the Sylvania River. At this stage, our house was raw-walled and roofed and the deck was covered; nothing was painted, and the inside wasn’t much more than skeletal studding.

  We led him scrambling up the west-side slope to hilltop— the long foliageous hill which completely walled and partially buried our south and west facades. There we showed Sven the already-installed hilltop frames for our long triple bank of ' solar panels. Taking Sven along the array, Wel pointed out the advantages of the position, discoursing learnedly about the advanced receptor-cell compound developed by Hugo Graben (that far with Southeastern Wel had been willing to go). He indicated a pit below us, just above the house: “That’s a compost pit containing a coil of water pipes leading to the house. We will keep the pit filled with biochemically treated compost, using our own scrap vegetation and adding the chemicals. Once the stuff is cooking, at optimum level, organic decomposition will heat water from the main before it is ever delivered to our solar heating unit. That way we use a minimum fraction of the solar effect for heating, and we can divert the balance to electric power. Bye-bye bills from Southeastern!”

  “Except phone bills,” I amended, “and that exception is burning Wel to angry ashes.”

  Sven was enthusiastic. ‘The only way I can imagine to get better results on solar power would be to tap right into the sun itself!”

  “Good thought,” Wel commented; “I’ll work on it. Want to see the inside?”

  We patrolled the interior, imagining that studs were walls. Doorways we could see, and the windows were in—broad picture windows and glass deck-doors in front, blank insulation on the walls that the hill buried. Sven wondered aloud why this house for two childless forty-people had to have three large bedrooms, in addition to study, parlor, rumpus room, dining room, kitchen, and four baths; were we at this late age planning family? It bothered my conscience that the notion tended to exhilarate me. But, no; we just wanted a hell of a good house—not for status, which neither of us needed to prove, but partly for entertaining, and mostly because a hell of a good house is aesthetically a hell of a good thing to have.

  On the deck (warmed by the ceiling of fiberglass which would be covered in summer by roll-down insulation, but otherwise a wide-open deck), we took balmy ease in folding chaises longues, drinking Irish coffee which Wel had hotted-up on a battery hotplate.

  And that was when Sven lighted us up with his fully conceived idea about tapping directly into the sun.

  “This is why I came,” he said. “It would be useless to pump an idea like this directly into NASA, they could only feed it into the bureaucratic angleworm-tangle. Some great corporation has to take this under its wing. Helen, if I have sold you, the two of us can sell Southeastern Power. Have I sold you?”

  Reeling with the Promethean impact, I decided I needed objective help; Sven’s personal force was reentering me, I doubted my competency to judge. I turned to Wei: “What do you think?”

  Wel said gravely, “Hel, it holds sunlight, it is good. If it seems good to you, then that’s two of us, and I’d say you’d be practical if you should decide to take it forward.”

  Having pondered, I agreed.

  The arresting spectacle came next: a total surprise without lead-in, an astonishing non sequitur of nature—if it was nature. ...

  Wel, absorbing Sven’s proposal, had arisen and gone to the front rail of our high deck to brood over the conifers descending into the far-below ravine of the river, then ascending a hill beyond until the hill reached crest and broke, revealing ply upon ply of green mountains, some still capped with gleaming white rime from last night’s heavy frost. Sven and I had arisen also and stood semi-flanking Wel somewhat behind. The sun was low, but it had not dropped beneath out southwestern hill. The winter solstice had passed; days were growing perceptibly longer. The white clouds had gained weight since our arrival. They were majestic now, and some of them were threateningly gray-bellied; they sagged in the sky-blue. In an intersection of two mountains, a nebulous grayness languidly fell out of the sky and trickled down the draw.

  Full indeed was Wel-with the beauty of the landscape, with the warmth of his two friendships, with the grandeur of the solar satellite concept, with the pizzazz of the Sunday features that he was envisioning. He wanted to talk about it to the pines and the sky and the mountains. He wanted to say something like, “Go to, now! What a noble piece of business, that we should leave this Earth, this good green Earth, and spiral round and round her Father Sun, stealing his fire—” But he was silent, while we hung behind him, all gazing at forest and sky....

  In a rush, all the white clouds turned gray and spread blackening to blot out the sky-blue, glooming-out daylight as they lowered; they let loose, drenching the forest, splatting on the deck-roof and the flood ceased, and rain-washed sunrays lanced clouds to hit ground-targets, cutting through the all-around darkness without diffusing into it. Startle-galvanized,

  we deck-watchers felt aroused, part of the unforeseen spectacle; we were living a nature-high.

  “Look there!” I cried, pointing eastward beyond the deck end. In that quarter, the obscurity was transmuted into a pervasive blue-purple; the rank grass in a meadow below our house was purple-magnified, we could count blades and read markings on each blade.

  We strode to the deck’s east end and bent over the rail. A sunray struck obliquely through, blazing a spotlight-circle upon a three-meter patch of meadow; eddies of purple mist lazy-boiled upward from grassroots and merged into the general purple semi-obscurity. And. all the atmosphere was pungent-sweet with the perfume of new-mown alfalfa.

  I was uttering small arrhythmic gasps. Sven murmured:' “My good God in Heaven, this is sublime—” Frowning Wel, equally filled by it but also enormously threatened by it, reflected that it was also diabolical—and unprecedented.

  Part Two

  THREE OTHER-WORDLYLOVES AND ANOTHER SORT OF MISSION

  3

  His agent billed Collins as “A Window on the Cosmos.” Collins himself was shy about that. He was an honest highland Scot, recently self-transplanted to the United States. Two decades ago, in his twenties, Collins had come to decisive terms with recognition that indeed he did have The Sight. If the spatio-temporal scope of his Sight happened to be a bit broader than the Sights of others who had The Sight, that was merely his good or bad luck, not something to crow about. He tried to keep his profile lower than his agent wanted it to be: crouching low, one can see high. He hated even to employ an agent; but one has to live, and Collins had learned by experience that other full-time occupations interfered with his Vision; whereas the lectures that his agent could arrange, enlivened by exhibitions of telepathy and clairvoyance (in his case, all genuine), left his Vision fairly free.

  His visions were like dreams; and always he was within them, a passive part of them. Sometimes they were colorful-musical contextless phantasmagoria; sometimes clear consecutive dramas convincingly real in all the dimensions, performed by people who were not acting but rather were feelingly living; sometimes merely a clear or confused intellectual context without images. They might be current or temporally remote, nearby or galactically distant, commonly

  unlocatable, frequently inscrutable. Collins was patient, biding his time: bit by bit, connections would fill themselves in.

  He was an odd sort of mystic, in that he could look with intellectual detachment upon his own visions when they were not possessing him. He even had a theory about their m
echanics, namely, that spatio-temporal filaments from everywhere were continually intersecting all minds and were scrutable to those like Collins who had the sensitivity; for others, they were apprehended only in dreams and were dismissed as such. However, Collins avoided trying to make applied use of his theory, sensing that such use would interfere with the freedom of his vision.

  His agent tried to get him to write a syndicated column of prophecy. Collins would have none of it. He believed in his visions; he refused the phony activity of filling in contrived connections; he felt that whoring after money and notoriety could cost him his Sight.

  In the course of semi-vision after semi-vision, Collins was coming closer to conviction that there was in progress a cosmic distortion. But he did not know this yet—it was a feeling that he had. It came, and came again* in visions of darkness pervaded by shimmering lights. The visions would surprise him in bed on the verge of slumber, or else in his armchair while he mediated over after-dinner wine. They would be like this:

  Darkness total . . . darkness becoming pregnant . . . darkness now enlivened by lights interweaving in esoteric pattern like the monitor lights on a blurred computer console . . . growing hope that a vision was about to open out . . . terminal kinetic light-patterns that were almost but not quite scrutable . . . darkness total, filled with semi-meaning that fell frustratingly short of full meaning. ...

  And Collins, habituated by years of this, remained patient. Vision and meaning would come fully clear in their own good time.

  Fragmentary vision, partial fulfillment, came to Collins in January 1995. There was one dim light in his room, beside his easy chair, and it dimmed further and died into