The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [86]
After a sumptuous meal, while his gut was stuffed, his head was logy, and his temples were thudding with coffee, they returned to the Facility. Dottie took an electric cart up the mountain. It was icy, windy, and the air was impossibly thin, but there was a fantastic view. It was the basic business of observatories to have a fantastic view. This one was colossal.
Sex, food, and coffee had whipped his altitude sickness. With a sidelong grin at Dottie, Van left her and hauled himself hand-over-heel up the broken slope of a granite crag.
He needed to get up there in order to soak it all in. That massive sky. The upended bones of the Rockies were laced with racing clouds and their slope-sliding shadows. Wrinkled peaks dusted with white ice. The long run of green pines. Ancient brown landslides, with old miners’ roads crumbled and vanishing. The blackened scars of small forest fires. From the Observatory, the Facility was entirely lost inside its trees: just an aerial, the crisp white rim of a satellite dish.
Hovering above the postcard scene was an airborne silver blob. It was an aerostat, on a long striped mooring line.
Van had noticed the airship at once, and Dottie had told him about it. This shiny ship was NORAD-surplus, some experimental barrage-balloon radar scheme that the military had never successfully put into operation. DeFanti had reworked the blimp scheme, trying to commercialize it, to repurpose satellite communications, just for local neighborhoods.
This wild notion had never caught on in the bigger world outside, but around here in the mountains, a little blimp with telecom aboard did make sense.
Pinecrest Ranch, the Facility, and all the smaller local ranches nearby were isolated. They were in a land of dark skies, in a federal area zoned for radio research since the 1940s. Antennas and cable TV were forbidden. So, if the weather permitted, then they could get some connectivity off a floating baby satellite, a cute little Mylar airship. It was technically sweet. A silvery floating jewel for the twenty-first century. A bold proof-of-concept. It was just the touch that this landscape needed.
Van’s shame and despair had left him. In this huge American sky and these mountains, he found himself light-headed with a golden sense of the world’s possibilities. He did like it up here, being with Dottie. It was great. If the stupid war would only end, and if he blew off a few personal bad habits, yeah, he could make a go of it, living up here. The mountains of the West would become his home. He could go native. He’d get barrel-chested, and tanned, with boot calluses on his soft hacker feet.
His son would grow up as a mountain boy. Ted would be a skier and a climber. He and Ted would be mountain rockhounds together. He’d get a rifle and a fly-fishing rod. He and Ted would hunt and hike and fish every weekend. Tents and campfires at night, maps and compasses. He would look the kid right in the face and tell him wise, fatherly things about the world. He would make up for everything he was failing to do, failing to give.
Dottie waved at him from below the crag, her words to him lost in the keen wind. Van climbed down to rejoin her. Dottie looked strange to him after his reverie. This dainty woman with straight brown hair and unplucked eyebrows, those lips that never wore lipstick. A thick denim shirt and jeans. She was the most precious thing in the world to him.
The telescope’s round barn was big, but smaller than it looked in its publicity. The dome featured clamshell doors that opened to the zenith. The observatory rotated neatly on gimbals to track the moving sky. The structure had a strangely sleek, sporting-shoe look. It was like a gigantic shopping-mall kiosk.
Inside it was still and warm, for the walls were very thick, protecting their precious instrument like a foam cooler full of premium beer.
As an astrophysicist’s husband, Van had visited more observatories than any man should ever have to. Van was used to the look of serious scientific instruments. He had never seen a telescope half