Tau

2038 October 13:15 UT
Test Year 10, Day 231, 02:00 CST/10:00 MST
Tau, MIT, Launch Site

The remnants of the missile silos had long since been paved over. To the west, there was a memorial to the fallen oligarchs. But here there was now an above surface launch tower, supporting a two-stage solid fuel rocket. Above that was packed a small hydrazine stage and one of the one kilogram microsats that Will had brought from California, packed in insulted crates aboard the Hokule’a. Karen and Z had enjoyed the sea voyage without becoming bored, thanks in no small part to the crew taking it in turns to find jobs for them and the other three children on board. The rest of the time, Mina had breaked from her seismic data taking to teach them oceanography and in the evenings, Will had told the story of the first Hokule’a and showed them the stars and the planets. Skana had passed through opposition and he’d shown them the giant’s three main moons. Z had gotten quite excited when he realized that he could write down the mathematics that explained how the telescope worked.

The only sour note happened when Karen realized that her supposedly secret Techer creole code with her friends back at campus wasn’t secret. Will could parse the second generation’s slang like he could parse anything else. It took her a few days to realize that her father hadn’t been deliberately eavesdropping on her when he suddenly mentioned that they would manage to get her a birthday present. Then came landing, and she was distracted by the size of the campus: it was a town of eight thousand now, over twice the size of Caltech, and by her reckoning it was the big city. Mina’s descriptions of a city of ten million and shopping malls and crowds ten times larger than the entire Techer population were still beyond her daughter’s understanding. They were like constantly accelerating computer speed, chocolate, or adults drinking coffee more than once a month.

At MIT, Pat and Kathryn had met them at the docks and Will had handed over the microsats to the launch crew. They had put an Explorer 1 clone into orbit two months before, and now were ready to try something a little more valuable than a bunch of circuits that had barely heard the word ‘transistor’. The microsat was considerably more sophisticated than anything the re-opened clean rooms would be able to spit out, even if they weren’t running at capacity making solar cells. With such a valuable package, the launch crew took another week to prepare for the launch.

While they waited, Mina visited the monolith grove. Karen did enjoy meeting crowds of new people, but Z was very shy at first. He was eventually teased into socializing by Kathryn asking him for help in computing shots in bocce. The twins got to ride in one of the new homemade ultralights; the choppers had been mostly grounded because of a shortage of spare parts. Will sat with Julian and read over the opera. It was good. All Will could think of was to trim some of the arena metal from the score. Then he went off to show the kids how MIT-henge had worked along the Infinite Corrdior when it had been in Cambridge.

Now, from four kilometers away, they all watched the rocket. The children all knew about the project: from those who understood the orbit and purpose of a communications satellite to those who only knew that there would be a faint new star in the sky as a result of that tower in the distance. The countdown ran through and the rocket formed a pillar of smoke and flame as it burned into the sky. The launch was successful and a half-day later, after two trips around the world, the microsat settled into a stationary orbit over equator at the mid-point between Caltech and MIT. It had become a com-relay and weather satellite.

The highspeed communications link wasn’t really needed. After ten years of getting by with the slower connection, all it would do was stop the proas from risking precious Flash drives on sea voyages and maybe give the Tech a global video service. The main purpose was the weather monitoring of the entire hemisphere that contained the Big Wet and both campuses and the data obtained in those first twelve hours. As it had flown around the planet, the satellite had taken a massive sequence of pictures, which were down linked slowly. There was now a map of all of Tau, which was duly transmitted in the Screamer message. They saw the structure of the ice caps, where no human had yet been, and the islands scattered over the second half of the global ocean.

And as they saw the comsat fly through the sky, never moving and never falling, the children who had begun to think that the story their parents had told them about how they had come to the world was a lie began to re-think. The Easter Bunny and Santa and the tooth fairy had never made signs appear in the heavens. A few tried to apply this argument to religion, but found that their parents had anticipated that. At least they did not deny that the satellite had been launched and that it functioned. But some started to have doubts about the Test actually having an end.

Graffiti appeared at the MIT track, showing a cartoon Examiner holding flaming swords in six pede-like claws, blocking the Techers from ever coming to Earth again. In retaliation, it was followed by a portrayal of Tau as paradise compared to Earth. The only consistent feeling of the second generation as they started to grow up was that almost all of them were more attached to the world of Tau than to the stories of Earth. Even their parents had this feeling now, which surprised many of them when they became aware of it. But nonetheless, after a decade of life, a war, and many years of peace and developing an even tighter community, Tau had become home.