| abstract
| - It was the end of another long day for Set. For a moment he reflected on the fact that it was close to the end of his fifteenth year of working towards the goal of gaining financial support from the Sakkaran government for the construction of space elevators. Back in 94, he had certainly never imagined that there would be so much resistance to development of a transportation option that was now made possible by what Set viewed as a long-awaited and welcome technical breakthrough. Of course, it was true that most people had long ago given up on the possibility of ever building useful space elevators on worlds as large as Sakkara. In the "golden age of space elevators", two centuries before Set was born, conventional materials had been found that allowed space elevators to be practical on planets with gravitation fields up to about 0.4g, but most chemists had believed then that the ultimate strength of chemical bonds had been reached and that it would never be possible to use space elevators on worlds with higher gravity. Then, unexpectedly, materials science was revolutionized by the discovery of high specific strength polymers of tessellanium quarpounds. At that time, Set was recruited into a tessellanium research and development project funded by the Futurist Party. The suitability of tessellanium for space elevator construction was quickly proven, but then the political and economic hurdles could not be overcome. The economics of transportation weighed heavy on Set and the entire Futurist Party. Thousands of antimatter-powered spaceships carried cargo and passengers to and from the surface of worlds like Sakkara on a daily basis. The commercial spaceship fleets had been incrementally built up over many decades and most worlds like Sakkara viewed the large initial investment in space elevators as an unnecessary extra cost for interplanetary transportation. However, transportation specialists like Set were well aware of the indirect costs of flying spaceships through planetary atmospheres. Within 10 years, investment in a space elevator on a world like Sakkara would pay back its initial investment. Still, a political will had to be found in order to mobilize the planetary government and channel the funds initially needed to build space elevators. At least, that was still the dream, even though the Futurist Party was funding the first two space elevators of Sakkara...and now they were nearly completed and functional. However, the Futurist Party had taken on too much debt and Set only viewed these first two elevators as proofs of concept. To handle all the passenger and cargo traffic of Sakkara about 50 space elevators would be needed. Government funding for elevator construction would greatly speed progress....working on its own, it might take a century for the Futurist Party to fund 50 elevators. So Set worked on, searching for ways to build public and government support for government funding for future construction of more elevators. But enough work for today... Set turned his thoughts to the coming weekend that he would spend with Kat. During the construction of the elevators they had been meeting one weekend a month, alternating between Sakkara and where Kat worked, one of the two orbital stations for the elevators. There was a chance that Kat might come down to Sakkara this weekend using the down elevator, which was starting test runs. thumb|480px|right|Video celebration of soul mates: Set and Kat. Set tried to call his girlfriend, Katherine, to find out if he should meet her for the weekend at the spaceport or at the new down-planet elevator terminal. He had tried to reach her earlier in the day, but he had only been able to leave her a message. Set knew that she was not allowed to send or receive personal calls while working on the elevator, but surely she would be back to her office by now. Set wondered again if he should mention the troubling dream he'd had about her. He did not want to upset her, but he felt that the dream was important, and, after all, they frequently discussed their dreams since they both often had lucid dreams. Occasionally Set had a dream that seemed to be about the future and, since when he was quite young and one of his dreams of the future came true, he always paid special attention to any dream that had the "feel" of being about a future event. Set's dreams had always come true, or at least he thought so. However, he knew that there was a danger of only counting one's successes in such things, of not remembering all the failures and obviously wrong and silly predictions...not even counting them as predictions... but his dream had been so real.... Set had trained both his mind and his body according to the practices of the Order that had taken him in as an orphan. Growing up, he had been encouraged to make the most of his life and ultimately he had excelled in the technical field of materials research. Set was devoted to the idea that new scientific discoveries should be exploited for the betterment of all people. Towards those altruistic ends, he did not care by which means he was able to get more power... he would use his skills and position just to protect and help his people, he thought. Of course, he did not like power just for the sake of it, he wanted to be powerful for noble reasons... even his most selfish reasons, such as just to help his girlfriend towards their shared goal of building The Elevators, were reasons that he felt were clearly honorable. He had a different view on many things than most people of his age, for example, he considered some things to be beyond good and evil. Protecting beloved people, in his case, Katherine, was just a natural aspect of reality, as natural as gravity. It was disturbing to have a dream that seemed to threaten all of his careful training and efforts to gain leverage and control in life... "His people"...Set reflected on the fact that he now thought in such terms. How had it come to this? In his youth, he had always thought in terms of making contributions to all of society, but know he could not deny that he identified with the Futurist Party and its goals. Other segments of society worked in opposition to the Futurist Party and Set could not look kindly on them. And, yes, he placed Kat in a special category. No doubt his loneliness as an orphan made him particularly sensitive to the wondrous experience of finding a soul mate. Increasingly his life had come to be defined by efforts to work as a partner with Kat. They discussed all aspects of their lives; each plan, goal, challenge and success. And Set dreamed about Kat. Well, maybe this latest dream and his worries about Kat's safety were just in his mind, only. Really, it had to be nothing more than a night terror... yes, it was only that, and not some real danger near to her. It would be unfair to trouble Kat with such silliness when she needed her full concentration on her work. The problem with modern life was distance. Under optimal conditions, hyperspace communications could instantly link two people even on planets in distant star systems, but in other situations people were just too far apart. People had evolved under conditions where their loved ones were within easy reach, but now Kat was in orbit and it was not a matter of walking across town to see her. There were unavoidable physical limits; for example, spaceships jumping through hyperspace could not get too near to a star. The Swanzig radius, it was called. So, to get to an inhabited planet at another star system, interstellar travel always took some time. There was no way to speed that up. Antimatter engines had to be used to move a spaceship beyond the Swanzig radius and that conventional movement through space was never very fast. Similarly, the space stations at the ends of the space elevators in orbit were now almost as inaccessible as the Swanzig radius of Memphis. Once the elevators were in full use that would change, but now there were no regular spaceship flights to the stations and the cable cars were just starting to be tested. So, now, when he felt a need to be close Katherine, or at least speak with her, it was painful to be out of touch. Why now? Why a dream suggesting that Kat was in danger? Set tried to keep from imagining that his dream and apprehensions were actually related to the reason why he could not communicate with her. Set tried to get through to Kat by phone and email, but both of those attempts only returned error messages to Set. Was there some problem up there on the space station? He cursed the world and himself... why could he not contact her? Set wondered: exactly what had been in that dream? It had been a series of strangely juxtaposed images and feelings that made no sense. Set was holding a baby, his daughter. But is was not the child of Katherine. Katherine was dead! Long dead. The bald little baby had transformed into a bald woman. With a shock, Set realized that she was the mother of his daughter. The dream had dissolved in the horror of Set's realization that Katherine had been murdered and then he had fallen in love with another woman. The face of that woman in the dream has washed away in a blaze of white light. Here in the light of day, Set felt shame for dreaming of another woman. His love for Katherine was something he could not imagine ever ending.
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