Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (58 page)

I hugged her. “Nonsense. Go for it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely! Is the satphone rig we have up here good enough?”

“They want to use the satellite they lease capacity on but they said they would provide all the equipment we needed. We just have to schedule the show for when we’re not on the wrong side of the earth from that satellite.”

“I had to calculate that when we were looking at geosynchronous-based satphone providers. We’re blocked from any particular geosync point for about seventeen minutes every six-hour orbit. Surely they can find a good slot in the other almost-twenty-three hours.”

Everyone knows the opening credits of the show: Cue catchy music, title over station exterior, tracking shot to the view port with Grandmother gesturing the viewer in, and the jump cut to the interior with her floating forward to say the show’s catchphrase, “Welcome to my world.”

It rapidly became the channel’s most-watched show, drawing viewers from outside its target demographic. When they took the format to an hour after five weeks, there was pressure from corporate to move it away from the “old folks” channel, but Grandmother refused.

After it went to an hour, I made one five-minute appearance, for her sake, but mostly I kept a low profile.

The damn list was not getting any smaller.

We got the framework and the panels and the charge controllers installed. We didn’t do active pointing but distributed them uniformly across the perimeter of the sphere. This meant that a large percentage of them were pointing away from the sun at all times, but enough were in sunlight that I got to stop running batteries up and down.

Wanda’s people, working with Misha and Stanford, came up with a zeolite swing-bed CO
2
-absorbent system that also absorbed moisture, keeping me from having to haul soda lime or swap out the desiccant.

Still on the list was a system that would electrolyze oxygen from water, a system for automatically reactivating our charcoal filters, a food freezer, a food heater, and, always, an improved microgravity toilet.

The list is a bitch. No matter how many things you take off of it, it grows and grows.

Still, one day I jumped down to the relatively new offices of Matoska Counter-Pressure Spacesuits, Inc., and walked into Cory’s office.

He looked up from his computer, an annoyed you-have-disturbed-important-work look on his face, but it vanished when I set the plastic-bagged jar on the desk with a
clunk
.

His hand’s darted out and I said, “Don’t open it! I promised it would arrive uncontaminated.”

“I
know
.” He held the package up and tilted it, watching through two layers of plastic and the thick glass as the fine, dark gray sand slid and shifted.

He looked back at me, his mouth parted. “You
said
you could,” he said finally. “How did the Tyvek work?”

“Good. A little dust made it onto the surface of the radiation layer and the tiniest bit onto the Nomex coveralls, but I didn’t see anything on the MCP suit, and I used a magnifier.”

“You were warm enough?”

“Mostly. We’re going to need better boots—my toes were getting numb by the time I left. The overgloves were good, though.”

He looked back at the jar. “I was expecting reddish brown.”

“Basaltic sands from the dunes in the Melas Chasma. I’ve got pictures. The bluffs north of there are
astonishing
.”

He set the jar down carefully. “So,” he said. “Mars.”

I nodded, “Mars.”

So that’s
one
thing off the list.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Cory Matoska of Lubbock, Texas, whose generous contribution to the Con-or-Bust charity (
http://con-or-bust.org/
) won him the right to be a named character in this book. That this character’s first name also matches my good friend Cory Doctorow’s, that part is only a fortuitous coincidence. Really.

More thanks are due to my family. I have Frankensteined my daughters for parts of Cent, and Millie owes a great deal to my loving wife, Laura J. Mixon.

Tor Books by Steven Gould

Jumper

Wildside

Helm

Blind Waves

Reflex

Jumper: Griffin’s Story

Impulse

Exo

About the Author

S
TEVEN
G
OULD
is the author of
Jumper, Wildside, Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex,
and
Impulse,
as well as many short stories. He is the recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science Fiction and has been on the Hugo ballot twice and the Nebula ballot once for his short fiction, but his favorite distinction was being on the American Library Association’s Top 100 Banned Books list 1900–1999. “
Jumper
was right there at number 94, between Stephen King’s
Christine
and a nonfiction book on sex education.” Steve lives in New Mexico with writer Laura J. Mixon and their two daughters. As he is somewhere between birth and death, he considers himself to be middle-aged.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

EXO

Copyright © 2014 by Steven Gould

All rights reserved.

Cover photographs by Getty Images

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Gould, Steven.

Exo / Steven Gould. — 1st ed.

        p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates Book”

ISBN 978-0-7653-3654-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-2848-3 (e-book)

  1.  Teleportation—Fiction.   2.  Science fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3557.O8947 E96 2014

813'.54—dc23

2014015849                                           

e-ISBN 9781466828483

First Edition: September 2014