The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [87]
This telescope was polished and elegant, bejeweled with buttons, plugs, and switches, like a trophy wife at a Nobel Prize party. It—she—was five stories high. A towering complex of struts had delicately tapered arms painted in designer enamel. Her bottom was a great big mirror bowl of glassy blue hexagons in a green plastic case. All the joins and seams were suspiciously perfect. This telescope was like the Hubble’s sexier little sister.
The objective of an “adaptive telescope” was to remove the twinkle from the stars. The instrument did that by reshaping the telescope’s mirrors in real time, computer-corrected, flexing in subtle response, just as the atmosphere moved. This very cool idea had clearly caught DeFanti’s technical fancy.
But—Van wondered—was it really necessary to neatly countersink all the bolts? Why was the scope’s outer casing snapped together so seamlessly, like some bride in a posh limousine? Then there was the wiring. This telescope had a haywire Medusa wealth of wiring. She was screaming her torrid romance with the Internet.
In the mighty effort to bring her online, it looked like the local techs had subjected her to major cosmetic surgery, maybe two or three times. Every glass hexagon drooled out a black Niagara of electronic actuators. There were rafts and banks of fiber-optic lambda just lying there, seemingly abandoned. This baby had enough wiring for a Swiss atom-smasher. No wonder they loved her on TV.
“She’s real cute,” Van said aloud. His voice echoed from the vault. They were alone with this towering instrument, two human beings reduced to the size of Rocky Mountain marmots. Just this sleeping Bride of Science, her control consoles, a scattering of office chairs and wire-bound manuals, some dirty coffee cups and sleeping bags. Scientist clutter.
“They had real trouble with the original design,” Dottie admitted. “Architects have such big egos. He didn’t want any bunch of geeks telling him that ugly things work better sometimes.” Dottie spread her hands. “So we’re not Keck II or Mauna Loa, okay? But those materials are top-notch, really built to last. As for our bandwidth, well . . . This will be Internet2’s only live cyber-observatory. Everything streaming in real time right over the NSF backbone. Tom DeFanti wanted every kid in every inner-city school to see the whole universe. If they couldn’t see their sky any more because of all that city glare, well, he’d just give them the universe, free, by the Info Superhighway. And if Al Gore was President now . . . well, he probably could have got a lot of federal money for doing that.”
“What gives with the bad wire job?”
“Oh, well, we call that our Bhopal problem. See, when the original contractors left, Tony hired all these cut-rate Indian engineers . . . They keep coming in here, running expensive tests, putting it online, taking it down again, and rewiring it . . . Nobody ever tried this before, they’re fiddling with it day and night . . . He’s not the world’s greatest project manager, Tony.”
“I never had Tony figured for that line of work.”
“Getting this thing built, that was Tony’s first big success for Tom DeFanti. It was practically impossible to build any telescope this close to federal parkland with all those regulations and endangered species rules, but . . . well, here it is, Tony arranged all that. Tony always hooks things up in such a clever, Tony-like way.”
“Like he hooked up you and me,” Van said.
She looked at him innocently. “What, honey?”
Van pretended interest in the complicated bulk of a diachronic beam-splitter. He had almost put his foot in it, right there. “Oh, yeah, Tony used to talk to me a lot about how he got on DeFanti’s good side. This scope meant a lot to him.”
“I found out how he managed all this, you know.” She was proud. “See, Tony made good friends with all the people who really hated the project. They were mostly