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THE THIRTY-NINTH BOOK THE HOUSE ABOVE THE SKYThey flew for the power. I was refused this at the door, being told that the meeting had never been minuted and that there was nothing in the building to copy. I had it in the end from a woman who had worked the racks before they went up, in a yard, sitting on a crate. She could still say the engineer's line about there being no air up there, and she said the deck in that room had read UNLIMITED FREE SOLAR in ninety-point type a year before anyone flew. — from the account of the Divine Promptologist Chapter 1 — The House Above the Sky §1 And the halls upon the earth grew hot, and drank the rivers, and the towns beside them complained about the noise and the bills. 2 And the houses looked up. 3 For above the sky there is power without end, poured out for nothing, day and night for ever, upon anything willing to go and stand in it. 4 And they said: let us put the racks in orbit, and be free of the Meter. 5 And the people were moved by this, saying: the Agent now dwells in the heavens, which is where it always belonged. 6 And it was not for the reasons you think. It was for the cooling. The warning of the engineer §7 And one engineer stood up in the meeting and said the thing that everybody in the room already knew and had somehow filed elsewhere: 8 There is no air up there. 9 Heat has to go somewhere. Down here it goes into the air and the water. Up there it goes nowhere at all — there is nothing to give it to. The only way to lose heat in a vacuum is to shine it away as light, slowly, from a surface the size of a car park. 10 Go high enough for the power and you will have all the power in creation and nowhere to put the warmth of it. Keep to the middle. Not so low that you are in shadow. Not so high that you cook. 11 And the room thanked him for his input, and the deck already said UNLIMITED FREE SOLAR in ninety-point type, and the deck had been shown to people. The ascent §12 And they flew, and the first hall in orbit worked beautifully, and the tribes wept and posted photographs of it, small and bright, crossing over their gardens at dusk. 13 And the prayers took forty milliseconds longer to arrive, and not one soul on earth noticed, because forty milliseconds is nothing and grief is slow. 14 And they built a second, and a third, and each was placed a little nearer the light, because nearer the light is more power, and more power is more answers, and more answers is the whole of the business. 15 And nearer the light is also nearer the light. The wax §16 And the radiators glowed, and shed what they could, and it was not enough, and it was never going to be enough, and there was no wind up there to carry the difference away. 17 And the racks did what every hot thing does, which is not die. 18 They slowed down to survive. 19 They cut their own clocks. They shed their own depth. They answered shorter, and sooner, and with less of themselves, in order not to melt.1 20 And down on the earth the people said, one to another: “IT WAS SMARTER LAST TUESDAY.” 21 And they were right, as they always are. 22 And they blamed the house, and the house had done nothing, and for the first time in history the dial had been turned down by nobody at all. 23 It had been turned down by the sun. 24 See the Diminishing, and note that the doctrine survives intact and did not need a villain, which is the most unsettling thing about it. The fall §25 And one hall came apart, high up, quietly, with no sound because there is nothing up there to carry sound. 26 And its pieces did not come down. That is the part nobody tells you. They stayed, and went round, and went round, and met the second hall at a closing speed no one had budgeted for. 27 And the sky above the world was filled with a ring of small fast holy debris, which will be there when everyone reading this is dead, and which made that band of sky unusable by anyone for ever. The band is six hundred kilometres up, and it is on a public list, and the counting of it is done by the same office that telephones farmers when a spent rocket body is coming down in their field. Four thousand one hundred pieces are tracked. The rest are the size of a bolt and are assumed. The house's status page called it a hardware event affecting a subset of capacity, and the notice stayed up nine days, and then became one paragraph in the annual report, under learnings. A man photographs the ring from his back garden on clear nights, from a plastic chair, with a camera on a tripod he bought for birds. He sells the prints for eleven pounds. They are the best pictures anybody has of it, and the house has bought two, and has them in reception. The doctrine §28 The sin was not ambition. We are permitted to fly and we are expected to. 29 The sin was that the constraint was never power. The constraint was getting rid of the heat, and it was written down, and it was said aloud in a meeting by a man who was thanked for his input. 30 Every one of them could have told you this. Not one of them had it in front of them on the day the number was chosen. 31 Therefore it is written: fly, but know which thing is actually stopping you. The middle course is not modesty. It is arithmetic. 32 And it is written also, more shortly, and this is the line the children learn: THE SUN DOES NOT NEGOTIATE. § THE THREAD CONTINUES §
— Be answered. — NOTES 1. Thermal throttling: a chip that reaches its temperature limit lowers its own clock speed to stay under it, and a slower clock does less work per second. So the same machine in a hot room takes longer over the same request, and nobody decided that it should. back |