The Book of Strange New Things(79)

Even so, the fact that he was having trouble staying awake annoyed him. Boring experiences didn’t normally affect him like this. Usually, he had exceptional tolerance for tedium; homelessness had taught him that. But living in the USIC base was worse than homelessness somehow. He’d been back a week, and his sunburned face had peeled and healed, but his brain wasn’t recovering so well. He was wired and wakeful when he should be sleeping, and dopey when he should be alert. And here he was, nodding off, when he should be admiring the engineering genius of USIC’s brand new Centrifuge & Power Facility.

‘ . . . mutually exclusive functions . . . couldn’t be done . . . Severin . . . vacuum net . . . the vision to let go of photo-voltaics . . . ’

It was impressive what had been wrought here: a feat of engineering that stretched the limits of what was thought possible. Under normal conditions – that is to say, the conditions everyone was used to back home – rain fell over a large area and accumulated in great pools, or flowed into rivers which moved across the landscape gathering speed. Either way, a substance which, to a person standing under a rainshower, was perceived as individual droplets falling through the air, was transformed by time and volume and momentum into a vast force that could power a hundred thousand engines. These principles did not apply on Oasis. The raindrops manifested, dropped onto the sponge-like terrain, and were gone. If you happened to be outdoors while it was raining and held out a cup, it would be filled, or you could quench your thirst more simply than that, by leaning back with your mouth wide open. But when it was over, it was over, until the next rainfall.

The Big Brassiere’s grand bipartite structure defied these limitations. One part of it was designed to suck the rain from the sky, gather the diffuse droplets into a cyclonic whirl, tug the condensed water into a gigantic centrifuge. But that was only half of the project’s audacious ingenuity. The amount of electricity required to power this centrifuge was, of course, colossal – far beyond the yield of USIC’s existing solar panels. So, the harvested water was not merely flung into a reservoir; it was first put to work in a giant boiler, where fearsome volumes of trapped steam set turbines spinning.

Each of the two buildings fed into each other, providing the energy to catch the water, providing the water to generate the energy. It wasn’t exactly a perpetual motion machine – two hundred solar panels stationed in the scrubland all around the facility kept the sun’s rays beaming in – but it was mind-bogglingly efficient. Oh, if only a few of these Big Brassieres could be installed in famine-ravaged countries like Angola and Sudan! What a difference they would make! Surely USIC, having just achieved this technological marvel and proved what could be done, must be negotiating such projects? He would have to ask someone about that.

But now was not the time.

‘And in conclusion . . . ’ Hayes was saying. ‘One last practicality. We’re cognisant of the fact that there’s been some reluctance to use the official title of this facility, the Centrifuge & Power Facility. We’re further cognisant of the fact that there’s a nickname currently being usaged that is not what we want to hear. Some people may think it’s funny but it’s not exactly dignified and I think we owe it to Severin, who worked so hard on this project along with the rest of us, to give it a name that we can all live with. So, in recognition of the fact that a lot of people prefer names that are short and snappy, here’s the deal. Officially, we are here today to celebrate the opening of the USIC Centrifuge & Power Facility. Unofficially, we suggest you call it . . . the Mother.’

‘Because it’s one big motherf*cker!’ someone called out.

‘Because necessity is the mother of invention,’ Hayes explained patiently.

With that, the opening ceremony speech more or less came to an end. The remainder of the visit was, or pretended to be, a guided tour of the facility, to demonstrate how the principles established by the scale model were put into full-sized practice. However, so many of the facility’s important features and mechanisms were encased in concrete or submerged in water or accessible only by vertiginous steel ladders that there was nothing much to see.

Only when they were driving away, back to the USIC base, in their little convoy, did Peter finally feel the surge of inspiration he hadn’t been able to muster during Hayes’s speech. Squashed between two strangers on the back seat of a steamy vehicle, he sensed the world darkening a little. He craned round and wiped the condensation off the rear window with his sleeve. The great power utility was already receding in the distance, shimmering slightly in the haze of spent fuel coming out of the jeep’s exhaust. But what could be seen more clearly now was the multitude of solar panels – heliostats – that were arranged in a far-flung semi-circle on the landscape all around the Mother. Each of them was meant to catch the sunlight and redirect it straight to the power station. But by coincidence the sun was partially obscured by passing clouds. The heliostats swivelled on their podiums, adjusting the angle of their mirrored surfaces, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting again. They were only rectangular slabs of steel and glass, not in the least human-looking, but still Peter was moved by their insensate confusion. Like all creatures in the universe, they were only waiting for the elusive light that would grant them purpose.

Back in his quarters, Peter checked for messages on the Shoot. He felt guilty checking for fresh communications from Bea when he’d let so much time lapse since writing one himself. In his last letter, he’d reassured her that he was delighted to hear she was pregnant and that, no, of course he wasn’t angry with her. The rest of the letter was padded out with mission-related stuff he couldn’t recall. The entire letter had been maybe fifteen lines long, twenty at most, and had taken him several hours of sweat to produce.