George

Melody Clinkenbeard took her sleeping father's right hand into her own and rubbed it in the manner of her mother, Patricia. George C. stirred, mumbled "Trish" and settled again. Melody looked up into that great round face; George was a good man of fulsome, wholesome appetites and his face waxed year by year like a moon come closer and closer to its primary... she turned the purloined hand over and traced the good, working man's scars. Her father bossed a ranch and led by his cheerful example. If he was so tired after dinner, it was because he had been going hard since before dawn.

He was smiling in his dreams.

Melody laid the hand back with its' fellow on her father's belly as he set in to snore. She pulled crude sweet-grass paper and charcoal to her and began to draw that great hand and then the face, losing herself for a time in two dimensional space-

"You okay, sweetie?"

Melody looked up over her shoulder at her sister Hannah, who had come up behind her at the kitchen table.

"Yeah. Daddy's taking a nap-"

She was interrupted yet again, this time by a thunderous snore. The sleeper woke himself and owlishly peered at half his brood of girl-chicks, absently swiping a curly lock out of his eyes.

"Hello?" He said tentatively, just come over the border between the land of sleep and full wakefulness.

"Oh, Dad, you need a haircut," Hannah said. She and her little sister shared a look. George had curls to die for, in the unanimous opinion of his womenfolk. Their mother said that she used to tease him unmercifully for his errant locks, his deep blue eyes and his strength, the strength of two North Country Men and three or four from down by the sea in Shanghai-town. He was their 'Samson'- "And I made sure to scratch out Delilah's eyes, oh yes, my kittens, in a fair and epic cat-fight!"

George looked from one to the other and shrugged as he was wont to do. He was outnumbered and had been for years; had admitted defeat long since... and it was a fine captivity. It suited him.

"Well then, I'm your lamb, girls; shear me!"

They giggled and Melody said somewhat redundantly, "Daddy's silly!" Before scampering off for the scissors and such. George stood creakily, running a hand through the not-quite filthy and still warm, soapy dishwater of the new sink, wiping his face with his dripping hand, for it was sweaty and maybe a little greasy from dinner, and drying off with a towel. He returned to the table and sat admiring his youngest daughter's little scratches. The Sergeant had been one for drawing, developed from sketching out battle-maps and such, but it turned out that he had a real talent. This drawing echoed his not-father in a way that made his heart ache a little. The old warrior and second to his mother, Captain Cee, had loved her boys and taught them many things, including light and shadow, perspective and line... here, Melody had suggested laughter with the fine lines at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. A laughing face set off by an enormous rough and open hand. George glanced down at the model, really looking at it for the first time in years.

"A mind to imagine what might be, two strong hands to make it so, and a heart to love and feel full well this strange new world you were born into..." It was his mother's odd litany, and it made much more sense now than it had as a boy. Patricia had scribbled it down from him when they had been courting and had pronounced the old woman a better poetess than she knew. George had thought that that was great praise from a good writer like his Trish.

His girls finally came back with their mother in tow.

"Did you get lost?" George asked, smiling. His wife ran her hand through his hair and kissed his forehead. She sat at the table by his right hand and glanced at the drawing while she answered him.

"They raided my sewing room for my good cloth scissors, and I decided to watch over the work, lest they get carried away or forget to put things back." She lay her own weary head down on her outstretched arm, head turned to him, wry smile and a sparkle before she shut her eyes briefly. George took her left hand in his hands and found them cold, so very cold. He lifted her hand to his lips and blew on it, kissed her knuckles and then the palm, blew on it... she giggled and pulled her hand away.

"That tickles!"

Melody giggled, his little giggle-puss, but Hannah smiled a little ways off, it seemed to George. The girls started in on the 'shearing' and he asked Hannah, "Who're you smiling about, Huckleberry?"

That won him a smile of his own. She hadn't insisted on that nickname so much lately, but it was her own bit of identity, priceless in a small mob four sisters. And he knew, as well as she and her mother or sister, which boy she was thinking of.

"A father bird wants the best for his girl-chicks, you know..."

"Dad!" Hannah combed out his hair carefully and started cutting; George decided not to distract her from her work. Trish asked the little one a few questions about the sketch, and Hannah said quietly by his ear, "Heibai looks at me like that; like he sees me and is amazed, maybe..."

"No 'maybe' about it, I'm sure..." he thought about how the eldest two were on the 'wild-husband hunt' and didn't think Hannah was liable to be joining them, which was a thought both comforting and alarming at the same time. He cleared his throat. "Ah, you two-"

"Not to worry Dad," Hannah interrupted, sounding a little sad.

"Now I definitely am. Tell me?"

"There's a lot more to it than just the two of us... I don't want to be this great lady down in the city, and Heibai isn't going to marry me some day, it's just a ridiculous idea."

"What are we going to do with you, kid?"

"That's not your problem-"

"It is; it's my job and my pleasure, anyway. Worrying about my strange little girl-chick comes with the territory. Hey! I know you can take care of yourself, but you don't have to do it alone, y'see? Let your Dad help, please?"

Working Title: This Old Starship

"Mother puss-bucket!"

Captain Tobias Jump was experiencing extreme distress, going from sweet dreams to wide awake in an instant. The warm squishiness which had wriggled between his toes while he slept, feeding on dead skin layers and athletes foot, departed for safer territory at high speed, which, for the barely sentient slime mold, was perilously slow. It glowed brightly in bioluminescent green and flowed through a ventilation vent to relative safety.

"Wilson!" Cap'n Toby, captain owner of Lucille, a slightly younger light interstellar transport, Osprey Class, surplus from the Jingkillii War, bellowed and then regretted it. The hangover was pedestrian compared to one or two much more memorable benders, such as after Jayda and Max bought it, or after the 'Longest Night' of the war, but Toby was pushing seventy standard. He really had to give up the cheap back-alley startown booze...

Sotto voce, he went on complaining. "Why can't we have a decent ship's mascot, a cat or a dog? How about a rat or a monkey? Something mammal, hmm? But no! We gotta have us a jumped-up jellyfish, coz it's six kinds of fun having it nibble on my toes-"

"And it's much more hygienic than you'd think, Cap'n," Wilson butted in. Jared Wilson was their lifesystems tech and medic. His hobby, no, his religion, was xenobiology, which he pursued every chance he could get. After landings he was always the first of their little crew to pop a hatch and taste the air, even on worlds that were well-known stops in Lucille's wanderings.

"Wilson, I don't care... I want unmolested toes!"

Toby realized that they now had an audience, spilling out of the mess at the end of the passage. Jack was standing, head ducked slightly to avoid banging it, just under three meters of strapping young Martian. Kristin was hiding behind him, mouse-eyed and nervous. That was some improvement over six-months back, when Toby had mentioned spacing her after Jack had sneaked her onboard, and she'd spent the entire night in tears. She'd made herself useful and had stopped crying every time you said 'boo!', but he just had to stop collecting strays like this. Behind them, the paying fares poked their heads out of the Mess.

"Problem, Captain?"

Toby ground his teeth and made himself smile.

"Just a little minor ship's business, Mr. Green; ma'am." Toby nodded at Dawson Greens and his 'personal assistant', Priscilla Lovelace. She smiled in her warm, polite, but somehow distant way. Those grey eyes of hers gave her away if you paid attention; in unguarded moments they went cold and took her light-years away.

"Well, if that's all, I'll get back to breakfast, Captain. Miss Kristin has made something like an omelet, although I don't suppose it has any eggs in it." Dawson smiled to take the poison out of the sly dig, or maybe, just maybe, there had been no insult intended at all. Toby was constantly on the defensive, always expecting the rich man too look down on his little kingdom, 'this old starship', as the Captain had overheard Dawson call it.

In point of fact, Dawson Green wasn't 'the wealthiest man in Human Space' anymore, and hadn't been in some time. Certain slight reversals of fortune had rippled through the interstellar economy and taken the Green business empire down a couple of pegs; that and a divorce. Still, it was strange but fortunate that Dawson had stooped to charter Lucille for a few weeks and with a nice fat retainer, too. It just had left Toby out of sorts; more out of sorts than usual, anyway.

The little 'jumped-up jellyfish' had poked light-sensitive stalks out through the vent and the tips fanned out like a spray of fiber-optic cable. Cap'n Toby found himself smiling at the damned thing, for at least his life was interesting, full of surprises and a bit of an adventure. The critter glowed brightly in happiness and went off down the vent, patrolling. The man chuckled to himself and went into the mess in search of these 'not-omelets'.

***

The Sea People knew what it was to fly under the waves and they had always dreamed of flying over them as well. Long after they conquered the interiors of their islands and island continents, they sought after air-flight, to join the joyous, piping, screeching flyers. They wove seaweed and other fibers into nets and bags and then sails, carved wood and built rafts, then ships, mastered fire and then pottery, copper, bronze, iron and finally steel. They had built gliders for a thousand years, discovered hot air balloons, and steam power. Heavier than air-flight eluded them until long after they discovered fire-ice and began to capture and distribute it.

Internal combustion engines eluded them, but not jet propulsion, not stuttering, buzzing jets...

The sled-mounted jet engine slid down the rails as serial explosions of fuel and air popped off in the round, reinforced steel box of a combustion chamber. First the pop, then a little hop and the flapper valve opened to let in air which mixed with methane gas piped into the chamber, then another pop which slammed the flapper valve shut and propelled the sled on its cable down to the surf, where it floated and accelerated for more than a dozen breaths out into the little bay-

Bang!

The sputter-jet propulsion engine mark seven blew out and a flaming jet of methane sent the raft sideways before the safety valve cut in. The cable played out a little more before Little White Spot hit the brake and engaged the wind-powered crank to wind the remnants of No. 7 back in for a post-mortem.

"That'll be a five hundred star fine for scaring the fish, and I had twenty to thirty breaths, so I win the pool," Village Headman Meewinnikka observed, then belched. "Good pickled eggs, by the way."

"Two hundred stars; just the engine, not the tank. And it pains me to say this, but it was seventeen breaths, so I pay Spot," Blue Sky Tail countered. The Headman grumbled, but left with the money and a cheek-bump, 'All-is-well'.

Tail's mate, Joyful Morning Sky, padded down to the beach and bumped cheeks with him and with Spot, then again with her mate, with interest. "Mmm, I smell pickled eggs... did that old thief leave any for me?"

"A few," Tai said and pushed the little barrel of pickled Thunderfoot eggs over. The bottom of the short barrel was still covered, even after she helped herself to a double paw-full and lay on her back in the sand to nibble contentedly, snapping playfully when Tail stole one and whistling a nursery rhyme about dancing Thunderfeet and their drovers. Tail wrapped his lithe, furry body around hers and laid an ear against her ample belly.

"My, they're active this morning!"

"Wonder why? They've gotten used to explosions, but when my hearts skipped and then took off, so did theirs." Her eyes closed and she added, "I told you we needed to reinforce the flapper valve..."

"We don't even-" Tail stopped as Spot pointed to the blown-out front end of the sputter-jet. "Wind and wave... you're a witch."

"You say the nicest things, dear."

***

Paulo looked up from his game as three people came into the lobby of the flop-house. The usual lurkers-on disappeared fast as they got a good look at the three, and Paulo felt his stomach take a slow roll. He belched and put the bottle in his hand back under the counter.

"Can I help you?"

"In fairy tales, it's always once upon a time," the intense dark man said. He smiled, showing perfect teeth. There was a false humor in his eyes that made Paulo even more uncomfortable. "Once upon a time, a prince and his maid went on a strange quest find a lost treasure, or convince the genie to go back in his bottle..."

"Huh?"

"But those fairy tales were pretty grim, you know. Grimm, even, as in the brothers' Grimm who first collected them-"

"Look, I don't have any money here, and I don't want any trouble..."

"Shh, of course you don't. I just have a few questions-"

"I don't-"

"Stop interrupting! Speak when I give you leave to, and be honest and concise. Be the soul of brevity and wit, even."

Paulo was nodding.

"Good. Now, let me begin with a picture; did these two stay in your establishment? I will know if you're lying, so please, don't."

The woman was wearing a revealing formal gown and had her hair up in some confection of lace and floral accents, nothing like the short hair and thread-bare coveralls she'd been wearing during the week she and the man, a tall handsome fellow with salt and pepper hair and a pleasant, easy smile, had been here. But Paulo had remembered those eyes, not unlike the cold eyes of these three, maybe with a little more real warmth to them...

"Y-yes."

"Interesting. Where did they go?"

***

The corpse would tell no tales and the flop-house was a burning shell, with no survivors, no witnesses. The man sat in the back of the aircar, making notes as they flew back to the cruiser. He looked up at the bodyguard who sat across from him.

"You don't approve?"

The hulking naval infantry rating in plain clothes shook her head, 'no'.

"Not afraid of me?"

"Sir, you're just a man, sir. I am afraid of what's behind you, sir."

"Reason and purpose; Duty. Trust in me and do your duty, rating. You can do no more than that and you should strive never to do less."

"Lee."

"Hmm?"

"General Robert E. Lee, sir."

"Yes, I suppose," the dark man muttered. He looked up, a question plainly on his face.

"His side lost, sir. A good man, all in all, who fought for the wrong side. Probably got more people killed than ever needed to die-"

The dark man smiled. "Don't worry about me being a good man, doing the wrong thing, rating."

Strange New Worlds, Aliens, Starships and Blasters, Oh My!

So I guess that I'm going to go ahead and design a campaign and try to attract a handful of players after all... Since this is something I need to want to run, it's going to be Sci Fi, Space Adventure with strange new worlds, aliens, starships and blasters, oh my!

Working from the outside in is the classic mistake; I will, however, do an overview, a 'State of the Galaxy', but otherwise my motto is "Go Small or Don't Go!" 8-P

Let me begin by saying that there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence for spacefaring Alien civilizations in the Galaxy at this time or in recent history. There are three good explanations for this-

1) Life and Intelligence (of which there's bugger off down here! 8-) are vanishingly rare- We may be alone in a sterile, empty Milky Way... and that thought makes me very sad.

2) The Galaxy is a very dangerous place and we got lucky in being overlooked and passed by. The Powers That Be routinely wipe out younger species to eliminate competition, but mostly keep quiet and to themselves. This is both heart-stoppingly exciting and depressing!

3) The Milky Way is in fact well-kept real estate, with parks and gardens. The Elder Species live quietly within their means and leave fallow worlds on which The Younger Species can be born, develop and mature.

No. 1 means, AFAIC, that we need to get busy and fill up the Milky Way, terraforming and speciating until we have plenty of strange new worlds to play in and we *are* the aliens!

No. 2 means that we must be a force for good and bring about No. 3! (although No. 3 is boring, it would be a good place to live in 8-) In the 'Rot and Ruin' of worlds there would be plenty of call for terraforming murdered worlds and for speciating to fill every niche...

Or the worlds could be a mix, No. 3 falling apart into No. 2 and No. 2 leading to No. 1... our own small arm could be 1/2 and we could be bordering No. 3! In some ways, this is the story of Traveller RPG, the 1st and 2nd Imperiums leading to the 3rd, and the Spinward Marches being a dangerous periphery of a peaceful interstellar state.

The State of Our Spiral Arm- Locally, patchy with war-wrecked stars and persistent genocide; there is a small chance of life and technical civilization. One association of kind and gentle souls, stern and powerful,
 has started to roll up this wilderness, somewhere far away, but Humanity has come onto the scene as the new-kid on the Block and it's a dangerous, run-down neighborhood where we live.

In the 2020s we found and reverse-engineered an alien space-craft which had crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 73 centuries ago during a battle in LEO between two factions in a terminal interstellar war which destroyed the previous local Powers That Were/Big Bads. The USG took the lead in space and beyond our solar system, using the tech advantage as well to arrest a half-century of reversals for the Once Again Superpower.

I owe something about the reverse engineered tech, but it's not super-important; there are a hundred worlds, an active 'grave-digging' industry licensed by the USG but prone to cheats and smugglers. The world strangely doesn't like Uncle Sugar hoarding all the goodies, so that's very much still an issue, and even within the US things aren't that great... the 'Two Cultures' problem is festering in the Southwest and corporations are still people; maybe this is the Corporate States of America (the South, or rather southern Planter-style entitled elites, will rise again!) and an undeclared civil war has been brewing up for a generation and change? 

2053?

I have the bare bones of a setting, need to 'Go Small' now and design the starting point, a colony and world with people and places, local color, problems and possibilities, plus try to 'lay off the politics' or else peeps won't want to play... this should be fantastic escape from the horrible realities of our time and place.

(OB+! 8-)

Re-posting my Everyday Weirdness-ness...

Origami Love-Letter Duck

By Vincent L. Cleaver

You folded it into the origami bird, because you were never going to send it... Not a crane, but a duck, and set it at the corner of the desk, where it could paddle around the open, uncluttered margin. You started to write on the back of some hard-copy, hard at work on finishing that half-finished story that’s been half-finished for a month, and getting bigger all the time, when you saw that it was gone.

It must have fallen of the edge, and you looked around, vowing for the nth time to ‘clean this place up,’ but didn't see it. Then you heard the quack.

You were sure you must have been hearing things, when you heard another quack, and this time it wasn't in your head. That was a real, ‘why are you ignoring me’ type quack, with a rude squirt for emphasis. You looked over by the door, and there it was, the origami love-letter duck, a little nervous roll of paper crapped out behind it, the holey edge of some old dot-matrix paper, tore off and rolled up, like you do. The origami duck is a much more complicated fold now, with feet and wings, and it flaps and waggles its neck at you, then turns and waddles off.

Not sure if you’re really seeing what you think that you’re seeing, you follow, down the hallway, and out the door, and down the walk to the street. The origami duck looks over it’s angular shoulder and razzes you with a blat of quick quacks, more Donald Duck than the real deal, and it happily lays on the flap-pity flap paper soles of its webbed feet, run-waddling away from you.

Now you know where its going, and you've got a decision to make, or revisit, rather; one you've been putting off for a long time, until this little bastard forced your hand.

***

Slowly Thinks The Tree

By Vincent L. Cleaver

A seed unzips and happiness is found.
The Sun that I seek, warms the ground.
Up, up, up I grew, so many seasons.
Of why I did this, so many reasons.
I thought of several, as time the Earth kept.
But I forgot when winter came and I slept.
I added rings to my trunk and grew.
Tall I was- to be tree was all that I knew.
I felt the Earth and Sky, felt the rain,
From my roots to my crown, and then felt pain.
Down I fell, and machines my limbs took.
Today I am changed; today I am book.

***

Bubble In The Clouds

By Vincent L. Cleaver

It was like a jungle in a bubble, floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Hannah could hear her sister Melody singing some song she’d learned from the crew of Columbia, about a bird of peace looking for a place to rest. It was pretty, but even though Melody sang very well, she did not fill it with the same longing that Chief Petty Officer Logan had brought to his performance, three nights ago. Huck wondered who or what the man had been thinking of while he sang.

Huck found a likely place in the fern-like undergrowth and let herself fall over backwards, her arms outstretched. She moved her arms and legs in a fit of vandalism, making a green snow-angel. The minty and green smell was glorious after long weeks of being cooped up in the Good Old Girl, who sometimes smelled like a wet dog, or an outhouse.

Heibai wandered over to her.

“You’re getting dirty-” He yelped as she sat up, grabbed his hand, and pulled him down. From a ways off Jules called out, “We’ve got to work on your stance, Little Master!”

Heibai fell on top of her. Huckleberry, Hannah, Ming Mu, ‘Bright Eyes’; she had many names to him. He relaxed and breathed in deep. Her smell, and the green scents. Heibai found that he had closed his eyes. He opened them again, to look down into hers.

“You know, people are going to talk...” His lips brushed hers, and she opened them to him. She tasted like honeysuckle, or maybe whatever Huckleberries tasted like. They broke off, and she smiled up at him.

“I kinda wanted to do that for a while...”

“Me, too.”

“But I thought that the whole tomboy sharpshooter thing put you off?”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely, it did,” he breathed, eyes wide and hamming it up to gently mock her. She gave him a knuckle in the ribs. But it was a ghost of the one she’d given him for the last stupid thing he’d done, and he only pretended to be hurt.

“Do you want me to kiss it, and make it better?”

“That would be good,” he whispered. “But I know a secret.” She leaned closer to whisper back.

“You do? Wanna share it with me?”

“You’re ticklish...”

“The little rodent told you!”

“No, but you did, just now,” he said, and fell to tickling.

He had her shrieking with laughter in no time at all, and a little later they lay side by side, out of breath. Heibai sat up and saw that he had a good view of the setting sun. It was in the East, of course. He took her hand, pulling her up beside him, and pointed without saying a word. He was holding his breath. All of his nerve endings seemed to be in his arm... She snuggled up next to him, and life was good. Mankind was not in danger of being wiped out by petty disputes or by genocidal aliens, one of whom was a childhood friend. No, not just at this moment.

'Bending Rules' for Cortex

-Bending is a type of magic from the world of 'Avatar: the Last Airbender' not to be confused with James Cameroon's 'Avatar' (which, for the record, horrible as it seems, I liked; 'the man who learns better' is my favorite plot). Last Airbender is about Avatar Aang, a sort of planetary defense mechanism, a living being who is the reincarnation of all previous Avatars and whose purpose is to protect the world and keep things in balance. It's also about his friends, especially the water tribe girl he falls in immediate puppy-love with, Katara, a water-bender and the last waterbender in the Southern Water Tribe at the south pole.

Katara's waterbending gives her the ability to move water around and change its state, solid, liquid and vapor so that she can throw ice daggers when she's mad (actually when she's really mad and terrifying!), bind hooligans in ice, or form appendages of water, a la 'The Abyss' to fight, block, and defend. The actual results are a special effect, but in roleplaying game terms you need to buy the abilities and the skills.

There are four bendings in LA, excluding energy-bending, which is reserved for the Avatar and certain ancient nature spirits. The aforementioned waterbending, earthbending, which is used by most of the peoples of the world, firebending, which is used by the 'bad guys' (and girls!), and airbending, used by Aangs' people, the Air Nomads who are extinct at the time of the series, wiped early in a hundred years of war perpetrated by the firebending Fire Nation. (For a children's cartoon, LA has some dark content, of which genocide and loss is merely one example. Orphan Avatar Aang is basically adopted by Katara and her brother Sokka, a water tribe warrior without waterbending who is constant comic relief throughout the series.)

For Cortex, my former player-group and I have run at least three campaigns featuring Bending (and Alchemy), and treated them as Assets which must be bought to power the ability and serve as the base attribute, like athletics is agility + athletics, waterbending is the asset plus the skill. And just like you can specialize athletics: 6  to dodge: d8, you can specialize waterbending: d6 to healing watergloves: d8 or, nastily, bloodbend: d12... Toph Bai Fong, Aang's Earthbending teacher, invents metalbending in the course of the series, but I'm sure some creative players can always come up with a lot of interesting and some truly disgusting ideas, approaching mud-bending from earth or water, perhaps shadowbending as an extreme form of firebending, or plantbending a la the swamp tribe. We've seen earthsurfing and airscooters, earthsliding trains and delivery systems, and firebending to lift airships.

A Little Moon Dust

The world needs cheap, clean energy. We don't need to put more frakking poisons into the ground, we don't need heavy shale oil, brought to us by incompetents who keep having spills in our water-sheds, from Wyoming to Michigan and coming soon to the Mississippi. What we really need is point-of-use power generation, which is wind-turbines in our glass and steel canyons, solar roofs on our homes and garbage turned into energy. This wouldn't solve our energy problem; we're addicted to cheap hydrocarbons, our economy is based on them (I build food service equipment, some of which is fueled by natural gas or LP, and some of it uses electricity by the half kilowatt and on up; the 36" Electric Griddle has 3 240 Volt, 4,000 Watt elements, for 12 KW!). But it would help, a lot, with our switch over to some other way of powering our vehicles, and providing electricity for the grid. How do we do that? Drop rocks from the Moon, of course! 8-P

11 km/s skimming atmo less 2 km/s to get it off the Moon in the first place, is 121 Megajoules, less 4 MJ, or 117 MJ per kg, some 32.5 KW-hr/kg, about $3.25 worth of electricity. If a million people need 30 KW-hr/day (Wild-Ass-Guess, one kilo of moon dust), that's 10^6 kg/day and 30 GW-hr. Three hundred million Americans need 300,000 tonnes of Moon dust a day; 7 billion people need 7 million tonnes/day, about 80 tonnes/second. 210 billion KW-hr is $21 Billion per day, 210 TW-hrs/day. 7 billion people need 11 MW-hr/year, $1100 worth of electricity (which is more than most of the world can afford), 77 Petawatt-hours worth $7.7 Trillion.

Real demand is probably closer to 30 Billion KW-hr a day, $3 Billion, 30 million tonnes of Moon dust per day, and 35 tonnes per second. If peak demand was 400 tonnes per second, we need a launch capacity on the Moon of 400 tonnes/s, call it 4 million kg worth of mass-driver @ $1100/kg, $4.4 Billion worth, which could only happen if it gets built out of lunar materials.

We need a catcher in low Earth orbit to grab that moon dust and harvest that energy, about 33 times what we need on the Moon, over 132 million kilograms; again, it'll mostly have to come form the Moon, and still cost in the neighborhood of $150 Billion. That supplies 11 trillion KW-hr of electricity, worth about a Trillion dollars at 10 cents a KW-hr. A couple of pennies on the KW-hr would pay for the system in a year... so my numbers must be so much moon dust.

BTW, if we want to stockpile building material in LEO, just slow the moon dust down by 3 km/s, and still get nearly half of the energy... and since we're designing an order of magnitude of extra capacity into the system, we could do it, make money, provide energy for a world thirsty for clean power and maybe build Vinnies' private space program at the same time? 8-P

Rings and Things

There were bright oval rings in the night sky and hysteria on the air-waves. Bernard Arden McKenzie had turned his radio off hours ago, preferring listen to Marion Call, some old Filk, science fiction folk music, or  the man in black, Johnny Cash, and finally he had dug up the entire audio version of 'Team of Rivals'. Listening to how the Illinois lawyer, born in Kentucky and plagued with misfortune and misadventure, had put together his ship of state, was all somehow soothing.

He had taken the long way home. It seemed somehow like he had been driving away, for years, and now that he had decided to come home that he'd driven down long, ancient valleys, into midnight hollows, past Indian ghosts of that first great American apocalypse which had made room for the pilgrims and others, had left a garden tended by one hundred million dead souls...

Bernard shook himself. "Morbid, much?" He said to himself, glancing in the rear-view mirror and catching a glimpse of his own ice-cold pale blue eyes, the brown and grey hair, the deep lines, worry and laughter. He chuckled. He had always been able to make fun of himself, which was good, considering most of his work.

He turned into his sister-in-laws' lane just as the night as giving way to day; daybreak. The last morning of the old world? He wondered, not joking, and not morbidly. He was anticipating something wonderful, come what may.

There was his brother's old car, and his nieces' graduation present, his old jeep. There was a big dark green rental SUV and a contractors' truck, plumbing and HVAC, Jack Knight's 'Sir Fix-A-Lot'. Bernard had a chuckle at that too, and paused, looking through the back of it. Plenty of kultch, but no junk; a place for everything and everything in it's place... He nodded with approval and turned to walk up to the door, which was just opening.

"Uncle Bernie!"

Bernard watched his niece come out of the house, running to him, and he felt unaccustomed emotion; a fierce pride, in his brother and his family. The kidlet had turned out alright... She hit him like a linebacker and he let out an 'oomph'. He braced for the bear-hug, for she was a hugger who put all of her strength into it. She'd done that at her Dad's funeral and almost bought him to his knees.

"Uncle Bernie," she whispered in his ear, and he felt her damp cheeks brush his neck.

"Why so sad, Beautiful? Busy Bee? Been breaking hearts?"

"You're horrible!" She said, laughing.

"You know I am; and you're Beatrice."

Her mom was on the porch now, with two men, one of whom Bernard knew well, and he sighed. The other was a young man with eyes only for his niece.

"Oh-ho, you have been taking hearts!"

"Horrible..."

"If I'd known so many people would land on my front step this morning, I'd have gone to the supermarket," Stella Mckenzie commented wryly. She indicated Special Agent Bruce Granger, of the FBI. "This is one of yours, I take it?"

"He's looking for me, is what he is, aren't you Bruce?" Bernard said, turning to Granger.

"I'm sorry as hell, Bear, but you really weren't that hard to find. I talked my boss into sending me, y'know..."

The young man said nothing, just stood clear. Granger and Bernard both noted how he moved and Granger stepped off of the porch, putting a few more yards between them, and moving a few yards closer to his charge.

"Would truly be a shame if things were to get any more complicated than they are, Bear," Granger said. Not a threat, exactly. Just voicing an opinion, or at least that was the way Bear chose to take it.

"I understand, but... can I at least have a little while?"

Granger blinked, and then he nodded. "Sure thing..." he said slowly. Both men turned to Stella, who saw that everyone was now looking to her.

"Well... breakfast, anyone?"

***

Mother and daughter, and boyfriend, headed into the kitchen, but not before Beatrice introduced Axel Knight. Bernard looked pointedly at the truck. "Who's Jack?"

"I work for my older brother, who owns the business. I've been working for him since high school."

Beatrice rolled her eyes. "Uncle Bernie..."

Bernard waggled his hand like a stage magician. "Look, no shotgun. Not pulling the male relative thing, sweetness. Not at all..." and he smiled at Axel, showing all of his teeth.


Axel coolly offered his hand to shake; firm, direct, and no bull-shit. "Beatrice thinks the world of you, sir."

"'Sir'?" Bernard winked at Beatrice. "You got a little something on your nose there, son."

Axel shrugged, a slight grin on his face. Bernard nodded to himself. The boy- man, the man just might do.

Granger brought in a little bag of oranges from the government issue sedan, and conceded to eating a few pieces of bacon, but otherwise acted like a man condemned to a death sentence by his doctor, sadlywatching them consume a magnificent country meal, home-fries and sausage links, a mountain of steaming scrambled eggs, pancakes piled high- Axel and Beatrice took over from Stella halfway through and she sat down with a sigh. "Such good appetites, except for you, Mr. Granger."

Granger shrugged.

"Go ahead and eat, man! It may be the last good feed you'll get for a while..." Bernard shut up as Granger leaned forward and he also saw that the Fed was not the only one looking at him expectantly.


"Would you care to elaborate?" The FBI agent asked with a grin.

"Yes, Uncle bernie, I know you know all about what's going on!" Beatrice was nodding vigorously. Bernard though about idols with feet of clay.

"I'd say that there is a need to know, but you wouldn't want me to disclose national secrets, would you, Special Agent Ganger?"

Granger shrgged again. "I've got NDA's in the car for them to sign, and a scary lecture prepped..." he looked Bernard pointedly in the eye. "And, yes, I think it's high time you briefed me on what I need to know to do my job."

***

Write about puppies and kittens...

I want to create gardens in space... habitats up there. Roll up a strip of the planet, a few tonnes of stuff/m^2.

For the truly massive abduction scenario, I assumed 10 tonnes/m^2, millions of tonnes strip-mined from the Earth's surface replaced by millions of tonnes of asteroid water... make it rain! 8-P

Final Rotoavator Ring design is 1/3 the circumference of the Earth, there are pi^3 or 31 of them, the strip is 1/3 divided by pi^12 or 14 1/2 meter, 47 feet wide, which rolls up into a cylinder just under 14 km wide and 14 km across (strip times pi^6, about 1K).

The Rings ease into position, dumping momentum simply by dumping or grabbing mass. The ring drifts back out by letting go of mass, water and structural cable. The 10 tonnes/m^2 is released at the top of the ride and goes into interplanetary space at just under 6 km/s. The strip is roofed over with a simple tall A-frame, all as part of the grabbing maneuver. Now that serves as a simple free-floating habitat, a long volume which is in free-fall, falling away from the planet. The next step, not the final step, is to roll this up into a cylinder. That is just a matter of shortening the edges of the strip, so that it starts to curl. Two edges slide past each other and 'zip' together, lapping itself every 45 km or so. Either a squat cylinder, or a long one about 10 times as long as it is wide, 4.5 by 45 km (1/3CotE/pi^7 by 1/3CotE/pi^5).

(much later 8-)

The sky opened up, with thousands of filaments coming down to Earth at great speed, spearing the ground inches apart. Bernard saw his niece and her beau running towards himself and the house, shouting as they came on. The filaments parted around Beatrice, fluffed out somehow, and wrapped her in a shroud. A curtain of filaments fell between them and Axel struggled through it to get to her. That was all the more he saw before the sky fell upon him.

But he could hear, muffled like a snowfall, the panicked yapping of the neighbors' dog, a horse whinnying in fear, Granger softly cursing and speaking with Stella inside the house. His obscured vision seemed to clear and Bernard had the distinct impression that the filaments themselves were emitting light like some sort of cloth display. He saw the filaments wrenching the two young lovers apart very clearly, as if he was only few feet away instead of across the yard, some forty feet from them. And then their fingers touched, brushed against each other and Axel lunged, grabbing her hand. The filaments seemed alive, self-aware, sentient or perhaps sapient, that is to say 'wise', and they ceased attempting to pull the two apart.

There was a groaning and the house behind Bernard lurched, pulled up into the sky, and then he went along with it, pulled softly but inexorably to the 'ground' by his own weight, now more than doubled, and Bernard would have nodded, if he could have.

"We're on our way..."

Things were quiet for a little while, perhaps a full minute, except for the yapping dog and a distant, whistling wind, and then Bernard heard a grunting coming his way from the house. "Granger, you damned fool," Bernard shouted as best he could, and the effort winded him. Finally he added, "Stay where you are!"

"I love you too, man," Granger said, adding, "But I'll manage, somehow. It seems to be getting easier. To move, I mean."

Bernard thought about that and then tried to lift his hand. It seemed almost as if- "They don't want the dumb animals to hurt themselves, so maybe they're assisting, like a soft exoskeleton?"

"Speak for yourself; I'm no dumb animal. I got me a degree from Shipp and everything..." Granger stopped to take a break. "Whew, this is too much like work!"

"Uncle Bernie!"

Bernard stared as Beatrice and Axel came crawling towards them at triple-time, the filaments not just parting but pulling them along until they were lying on the grass at the front porch.

"Alright, everybody just calm down... Stella?"

"I'll be with you shortly... the 'magic fingers' seem to be sending me out there to you," Stella said matter-a-factly, merely raising her voice a little, and presently she came into view.

"Anybody hurt?"

"I fell down on my ass..."

"I sympathize greatly with your ass, Granger, because it has to put up with you just like I do," Bernard said between clenched teeth. "I meant, no broken bones, anyone?"

It seemed that they all were in remarkably good shape and spirits, considering the mass abduction and all... The wind beyond the filament curtain had died away, and when Bernard looked over towards the edge of the lawn, about where Axel had been standing, it seemed like the land just stopped. Which it had. Beyond, falling away, was the edge of the Earth, the sky a pale band and black above that, the edge of space. They were already soaring up above it all, turning on the inside of a wheel which was pulling them to the outside with maybe a gee and a half of force, all the while the Earth's gravity was still dragging them back down a 'hill' that was growing steeper as the minutes passed. Bernard found that something, the filaments probably, was holding them in place as the hill went to thirty or forty degrees and then seemed to get less and less steep, all while the force pulling them to the 'ground' fell steadily away, and the bowl of the Earth changed into an enormous ball that grew ever smaller.

"Wow," Axel breathed.

"I agree," Bernard said. "Wow."

Then the bottom seemed to fall out from under them and they were free-falling into the sky. Bernard saw that his niece was looking at him and smiling.

"'Second star from the right, and straight on till morning!'"

"Love you, kidlet."

"Love you more, Uncle Bernie."

"Love you most."

***

Bernard felt a sideways tug, a very slight acceleration that went on for several tens of seconds and then died away. Where the filament curtain-wall that hemmed in their long and narrow world came together far above them that line brightened until it was sunlight strong. The starry black to either side turned. The Earth lay beyond them, almost beyond view, obscured as it was by the rest of the strip of the Earth's surface with which they'd been carried aloft. The crescent moon lay off to the side and ahead of them. It rose and set about once a minute and a very mild force now tugged him ever so gently to the grass again.

"I feel so light," Beatrice said to Axel, and then sprang up and up, shrieking and laughing, easily clearing the roof of house where she had been born and raised, and drifting back down lazily, light as a feather, like a leaf on the wind... She landed softly by the chimney and waved down at them.

"Come on up here," she called down to them. "The view is pretty-"

There was a bright, actinic flash and the filament curtain went dark off to one side, back behind them where the Earth lay; that way had been more or less South and so Bernard thought of it as 'South'. The dark patch in the sky moved as the strip habitat turned so slowly on its long, long axis; protecting precious cargo, stolen treasure, Bernard thought.

Beatrice came back down, clambering along by her finger-tips as the force pulling her down was not fast enough for her need to be with them.

"Was that what I think it was?" Stella asked in the general silence. Bernard only then realized that the hoarsely yapping neighbor-dog had shut up.

"If you think it was a nuke, then yes, it was," Bernard whispered. Granger futilely cursed the general stupidity of mankind. Thinking how a lot of people had probably just died, Bernard could not disagree.

"Who was it? Where was it?" Bea's voice had an edge to it which hurt Bernard's heart.

"It kind of looked like we were over Europe, maybe the Middle East," Granger said. "The French? Israel? Russia? Maybe it was Uncle Sugar," he added gruffly. Bernard reached around, grabbed his friend's shoulder and squeezed. Then Stella and her daughter caught him between the two of them and pulled Bernard and Axel into a group hug. Granger protested feebly and wiped surreptitiously at his eyes. He looked out at the lawn and saw the neighbor-dog looking looking hopefully.

"Oh great, we've been adopted..."

***

A place too far from here; a place too strange for human hearts...
There is, even yet, an alien compassion for us poor humans.
Perhaps they see something of themselves in us?
Do they hope for us, are they waxing nostalgic,
Perhaps, for a second childhood by proxy?
Or do we stand ready to redeem them in some way,
So like they were and fated to do them one better?

(even later on 8-)

"'I'm smiling because I'- I can't see the rest of his tee-shirt to read it all," Beatrice was saying to her mother. The little boy in the red tee was looking about tiredly, lost. There were dried tears on his cheeks. He looked to be about five.

"Honey, leave it be, things are- Beatrice!"

Bernard watched, bemused, as his niece marched right over. Axel fell in step with her, and their hands met, fingers interwove... He filed that sight away for some dark moment, some future need. There was bound to be something else, what with the mass abduction, the alien war between parties unknown, plenty of potential, always. He took the good with the bad, and knew to appreciate ever erg of good that came his way.

"What were you thinking?!"

"Hmm?" Bernard said helpfully.

"Why didn't you try to stop her?" Her mother wailed. The dismantling, piece by piece, of her home had been too much for Stella. Bernard pulled her over and hugged her.

"Stop her? Stop our goodwill ambassador to the worlds? Perish the thought. I might as well hold back the tide, or command the bee to not seek out the flower, the flower to grow, the sun to shine, the rain to fall; in fact, she is a force of nature. Human nature, and a force for goodness and light."

The little boy was smiling. Beatrice had knelt down and was wiping his face with a wet cloth. Axel stood by, taking a sip of water from their makeshift canteen, a one gallon plastic tea-jug. He slung it over his shoulder, adjusting the cloth sash Stella had come up with and considered the young woman and the child, a slight smile on his face growing. He nodded to himself. When Bea picked the boy up, he made horsy whinnies and the laughing child was transferred to Axel's shoulders. They galloped back over, Beatrice hurrying to catch up with them.

"I see we've picked up another stray," Granger commented quietly, for Bernard's ears alone.

"It seems like we have..." Bernard said, turning to his friend. "Are you going to tell her 'No'?"

Granger snorted and dug through his backpack, found an apple from the abandoned house they had raided. "Not gonna happen. Here, pass this along."

"Not brave enough to give it to her, yourself?" The two men laughed. Bernard reflected that they were an upbeat little band.

"In this little army, she ranks me."

'I'm smiling because I know I'm saved', the tee-shirt read. Bernard felt the pit of his stomach drop away, considering all the ways you could take that. It had been a bad couple of days, back on the third rock from the sun, back in the solar system.