by Jack Dann
You can ask me, I’ve tried it.
But to a moderate extent, we were trusted; at least, trusted up to as far as we could push it.
All of which is a roundabout way to explain how it was that me and Kibbie came to be floating in vac, spinning lazily around each other (we were connected to each other by a tether, of course—freedom doesn’t extend as far as ignoring safety rules), not doing anything but gazing out at the immensity of it all, the Earth and the habitat and the black velvet sky, with the moon a crescent way off in the distance, clear and cold and gray.
Me and Kibbie, whenever we could steal some free time, would always use it to go vac, even if there was no reason for it, just because we could. That day we had a couple of hours free from chores, and since the rest of the gang wasn’t free, I grabbed Kibbie aside, and said, “Hey, Kib man, nobody will miss us, let’s go vac a while, spend some time with the stars.”
“I’m with ya, Dylan.”
So we did, because we could.
I loved to go vac. I don’t think Kibbie or Barb really did, at least, not like I did. It was a way to get away from the others, and just stare at the universe.
Our cluster was Kibbie and Barb and me, Dylan. The two Teniman kids, Nipper and Gray, tagged along with us as well most days, although they were a year younger, but the real cluster was the three of us, me and Kibbie and Barb. We were a constellation of three, and we tramped around and poked into every corner of the habitat, and, as a general rule, got into about as much trouble as we could get, without actually getting locked away or kicked off the habitat.
Have I told you about our habitat yet?
Malina habitat was circular, more or less, an immense ring of irregular bubbles strung out along a hexagonal aluminum truss that formed its external skeleton. Each bubble along the circular spine was a different size and shape, forty-seven of them, some neat spheres, some elongated like sausages, some complicated bulging shapes like half-melted glass beads. Each double-walled bubble interconnected with two on either side. Two long tubes, like hoses, circling the habitat. One was on the inside— “above”—which we called the infinite corridor. The infinite corridor threaded through the center of the structural truss like a spinal cord through vertebrae. That one was for humans. The second one was on the outside—below. It was a backup corridor for mechanical transport, in case of a problem, but was mostly unused, except for storage of minor equipment, and maintenance.
All that, and I haven’t yet mentioned the solar arrays, sticking out like dark purple blades in all directions, or that in the middle, the exact center of the ring, is a fuzzy white puffball, to all appearances like an Earth cloud (not that I’ve ever seen an Earth cloud—not from below, anyway), so white as to be almost too dazzling to look at. The puffball collected and diffused and reflected the sun, so that no matter what the orientation of the habitat, light gets evenly reflected to the habitats and greenhouses, so the people and the plants alike had sunlight to enjoy.
It all sounds tiny and claustrophobic when I describe it, but if it does, that’s only because I haven’t described it very well. If you’re from down below, I don’t think you’ve ever quite caught on just how huge the habitats are. Malina was three kilometers in diameter; that makes the circumference just over ten kilometers— six miles. You can walk the whole way around, on the infinite corridor, but it would take hours, and the largest of the individual bubbles were each nearly a kilometer in diameter themselves. You may not be able to comprehend just how big a one-kilometer bubble is, but it is amazingly huge; well over a hundred thousand people lived in it, and it wasn’t crowded at all.
Malina has parks and open space too; it wasn’t just people packed in warrens like the cages we use to raise rabbits or cuy for protein. But on the outside, it looked like a lumpy necklace of glass beads.
We had hooked a tether onto the station and swung it around until we could get enough of a swing to let go with exactly enough speed to kill Malina’s spin.
That might need some explaining. Malina colony spins to give us the feeling of gravity. Not very fast—one revolution in a hundred seconds exactly, you can use it for a chronometer if you like—but that gives us enough gravity to keep our bones from dissolving away from lack of gee. So if we just dropped off into vac, we’d still be moving at a hundred meters a second, right? So to just float, we have to kill that speed.
After coasting away, we killed our spinward momentum with a quick burst from our suit-thrusters, and then just drifted slowly away.
The Earth is ever changing, and fascinating in its way, with its brilliant blues and browns and greens and its swirling spirals of clouds, but Malina was mostly what we were looking at, Kibbie and me, when we floated vac. A trillion trillion miles of infinite space in all directions, and yet we always look first toward our home. Malina was a thrown-together string of mismatched parts, and yet, in its complexity and unexpected details, Malina habitat was a staggering work of sculpture, a human artifact of stunning beauty.
As Malina rotates, it constantly shifts its aspect, always showing a new face, something new to see. The sunward side was dazzlingly brilliant, with bits of metal and facets and windows intermittently catching the sun and glinting sparks. The shadowed side, illuminated only by Earthlight, was lit a spooky, ghostly blue, so dim that it was almost just the memory of color. Crossing from rim to rim were the tension wires, so thin as to be invisible, but strung with strobe lights and radar reflectors to keep them from having a taxi or a transport accidentally try to cross the gap. As it slowly rotated, the perspective would constantly shift, the shadows moving around the habitat bubbles and revealing and then concealing details, conduits, airlocks, antennas, transport tubes, radiator§.
So we stared, Kibbie and I, just staring at the ever-altering aspects of the miniature world we lived in.
I had the earphones in my helmet playing me some background music. I like something deep and mysterious while I float, and I’d messed around with the settings that the computer used to construct music for me until I found something that made deep and mysterious rumbles, like voices chanting a language nobody had ever heard before. It flowed around and through my brain, in a tone so low you could feel it more than you heard it.
The computer making my music isn’t an artificial intelligence, only a routine just smart enough to compose tunes in realtime. We don’t trust AIs here, not very much, not since the disaster of 2093. Never allow a machine to make a life-or-death decision for you, that’s what Mr. Cubertou says.
In the distance, we could see other orbital habitats, mostly just points of light that moved quickly across the sky, with occasional bright flashes as the sunlight catches on a mirrored facet or a solar array. Space traffic control kept them all carefully choreographed. One degree behind us in orbit, von Karman habitat was stationary, a point of light; Tsien habitat, a degree ahead of us was invisible. Tsien and von Karman habitats were always there, in the same place, but it was a game to spot the others, and guess which ones they were. “Ankara and Adara,” I said, pointing cross-orbit at two speckles of slowly drifting light.
“Ah, those are easy,” Kibbie said. The Turkish habitats were nearly co-orbital with us, at a slightly different eccentricity to keep them away from a collision. He pointed toward the limb of the Earth. “New Trenton. That’s one you don’t see very often.”
The speck of light was small, but moving fast. I checked the time in my heads-up display and quickly calculated to myself. Yes, New Trenton indeed. The computer could have identified it for me, of course, but that would be cheating. I was silent for a few minutes, looking intently for something to top him with, and caught a lucky glimpse of a speck of dark against a cloud, directly between us and the Earth. I had to look twice to make sure I’d really seen it.
“Look. Devi Station. There, see it?”
“No, where?” Kibbie said, then, “Shoot, yes, got it. Wow, how’d you spot that one? Can’t be Devi, though. Devi’s over the horizon by now.”
“The hell you say. If it’s not Devi, who do you say it is?” I’d said Devi too quickly; not thinking—it was almost in the right place—but Kibbie was right, curse him. Devi wouldn’t be visible now. Exactly 1,123 functioning habitats orbited the Earth in hundreds of different orbits, each one with ten thousand or more inhabitants, and I ran through the list in my mind, trying to think of which this one could be, if it wasn’t Devi colony.
Kibbie was silent for a minute, and we watched the little dark speck move across the globe. It was only visible when it was in front of clouds. It was just slightly lower than us, and hence moving a little bit faster. In a minute of traverse it moved across the full width of the Earth, and then, entering the shadow, suddenly winked out.
We both stared, trying to spot the docking strobes, staring until darkness floated in front of darkness in our eyes, but we saw nothing.
“Gotcha,” Kibbie said. “Hercules. It has to be Hercules.”
Hercules. The ghost colony. Of course it was. No wonder I hadn’t thought of it; I’d been running through the list of functioning colonies, and nobody lived on Hercules colony. Nobody had lived there for a very long time.
Without thinking, I said. “We’re going there, you know.”
“Yeah?” Kibbie said. “We are?”
And, right then, I knew it. It would take some planning, but we were going. Oh yes, oh yes, of course we were. “We are,” I said.
“Absolutely we’re going,” Barb said, when Kibbie and I got back. She got that blank look for a moment. “Best time will be in six weeks.”
You could never beat Barn in the game of spotting habitats; she always knew exactly where to look. Kibbie was my best friend—we’d been almost like brothers when we were kids—but Barb was more than a friend; she was the orbital calculation goddess.
We were sitting in the crow’s nest. This was the place we met, a spot in the big bubble that Kibbie and I had found back when we were kids; an inside corner where two odd-shaped buildings came together. It was completely hidden out of view and yet right next to anywhere you wanted to go.
It was a little awkward that Barb wanted to go. One of the reasons I wanted to go to an abandoned habitat was one I didn’t quite want to share with a girl. But, hell! I never thought of Barb as a girl anyway; she was just in my cluster. We hovered around everywhere together. Of course she’d be going, how could it be any way else?
And anyway, she was the orbital mechanics goddess.
So Barb drew orbits on a plan for us, to show us what she’d already worked out in her head. “Orbits precess,” Barb said. “An orbit is a living thing, varying slowly with time.” It was all review material. We’d plotted orbits in class a year ago, and I already knew about precession. The orbital plane of a habitat precesses around the Earth s pole in a slow cycle, like the spin axis of an electron precessing in a magnetic field. So the orbit is always changing.
But I knew I had to let Barb explain it her way, to get to the part where we planned trajectories, so I decided not to daydream too much, and tried to pay attention.
The Malina colony maintenance crew corrects our orbit from time to time, of course—space traffic control makes sure of that—but the Hercules orbit is unmaintained, so it’s been drifting for a long time. As Barb explained, the eccentricity and even the orbital inclination mutate slowly, distorted by the gravitational perturbations of the sun and moon.
“In a very slow cycle—four years, more or less—the apogee of the Hercules orbit stretches out enough that the Hercules orbit nearly touches the orbit of Malina habitat,” Barb said, drawing the orbit. “So, for a period of a few weeks, it would be easy to transfer from the one habitat’s orbit to the other. Not much delta-V needed.”
“You could do it by just jumping?” I said.
Barb looked at me, smiled, and nodded.
“Man,” Kibbie said, “what do you think’s gonna happen to us if we get caught?”
Barb and I looked at each other.
“We’ll lose vac privilege,” I said. “Grounded for sure.”
“Lose vac privileges?” Barb said. “That’ll be the least of it. We won’t even be allowed to look at a suit for, like, a thousand years.”
“Look at a suit?” I said. “We won’t be allowed in the same room as a suit for like, at least a million years.”
“Decommissioned,” Barb said.
“The big D,” I said. “We’ll be iced.”
“Lucky if we’re not dropped right down to Earth,” she said.
We looked at each other, and then said, in perfect chorus, “So we’re not going to get caught.”
And then we laughed like idiots. After a while, Kibbie joined in.
Me and Barb and Kibbie worked at putting the plan together over the next few weeks. We had to keep it secret from the adults, of course. They’d never explicitly told us that we couldn’t go explore an abandoned colony, but there are some things that you just already know the answer would be no. And we didn’t want the whole cohort going along as a field trip, with proctors and lectures and one kid in every five designated to be the safetywarden. This was going to be just us. There was one thing I wanted to collect that the adults would definitely just have an embolism if mentioned; something that had to do with some future plans of mine I wasn’t quite ready to share yet. A little sample of something we called weed.
It was Barb who did the calculations, mostly. She only used the computer to confirm what she’d already worked out in her head.
Six weeks. We would have plenty of time for planning. But, in the meantime, we had school.
***
Kibbie and Barb and I were all in the same cohort, a group of four hundred kids all about the same age, who did schooling and work assignments as a group. Whenever we could, we tried to arrange it so that when the cohort broke up into teams for projects, we were on the same team, but the teachers were on to us, and it was getting to be almost impossible to do that. We were in the middle of a project to build a robotic inspection drone (which may sound easy to you, but we had to do it from scratch), and I’d been assigned to the vision team, while Barb and Kibbie were together on the propulsion team.
I was building the little imaging array, programming a micro-manipulator to paint dots of phosphorus onto a silicon wafer, when a teacher came up to watch. I was swaying to some music while I worked. The computer system aimed the music in a narrow beam directly to my ears, so only I could hear it.
It was old man Cubertou. I liked him. He was cool, as teachers go, but it made me nervous to have him looking at me. “Why do we have to build these by hand, anyway?” I asked him.
The routine automatically fades down the music whenever somebody talks, sliding the music into background so that the voice is clear, and it’s like the music is a perfectly natural accompaniment to the voice.
“They mass-produce focal-plane arrays, like, a million at a time,” I said. “And billion-pixel arrays too, not a lousy two hundred like the ones you’re having me make.”
“You are going to spend your next hundred years, if you are lucky and cautious, trusting your life to technology,” Cubertou said. “I’d think you would want to know how it works.”
“Well, yeah, but I can read up on how it works, if I want to know. I don’t have to build one.”
Cubertou shook his head. “You learn with your hands, not with your head.” He rubbed my hair. “Certainly, not with a thick skull like yours.” '
I was intensely annoyed at his treating me like a child, but didn’t want to admit it. “Well, since when am I going to trust my life to a focal plane array?”
He didn’t answer the question, just said, “Have you thought about your selection yet?”
“Not yet.” Which was a lie, of course, since I was thinking about it all the time. We all were. Next year our cohort would be done with the general knowledge, and we each had to pick three specialties to study. It was possible to change specialties, if you decided you didn’t like what you’d pic
ked—but it would be pretty unusual. Our lives were about to be narrowed down from a million million possibilities to just three, and I wasn’t sure I liked that.
“If you need to talk ...” Cubertou said, and then, after a moment, he wandered off.
Kibbie came up and watched Cubertou’s back. “What was he on about?” he asked.
“Pushing on me about my selection.”
“Oh.” Kibbie said. “You have any good ideas yet?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.” He squeezed his eye shut. “One thing I know; I’m not going to be a fish nanny.” Kibbie’s mother and father both were fish farmers—aquaculturalists, as the official word was. Real life, that meant they worked in dirty water, raising carp and tilapia that lived in waste water and turned refuse into protein. It was a slimy job. There were always openings in aquaculture, but I could see that he might want anything else but.
I’d better think of something, or else somebody else would decide for me, and I could end up in aquaculture myself.
“But forget about that,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it for a while. How about our other project? Hercules?”
We agreed to meet at the library after classes, do some more work on the Hercules venture.
Kibbie was the crazy one. He was the one who’d figured that if you ran down the infinite corridor counter-spinwise, as fast as you could go, you would get noticeably lighter. If you could run fast enough, you ought to actually float, we thought, but for all that we tried, we never managed. Much later, I figured that we would have had to run about two hundred miles an hour to cancel out the habitat’s rotation and the centrifugal gravity, but Kibbie and me certainly raced ourselves dizzy trying.
Before we went to the library, I saw Leeila talking with a couple of her friends, and I wandered away from Kibbie to go bother her for a while. I walked up behind her and put a hand lightly on her shoulder.