by Henry Gee
Chapter 6. Rookie
Xandarga Station, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago
Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty
William Worsdworth—Upon Westminster Bridge
Xandarga Station!
What more can be said about this most Imperial of ports, this hub, this hubbub, this stew of a million stars? This ancient of days, this eternal now, this gateway to riches, this chasm of despair? Yet there is something about Xandarga Station that eludes expression. Tourist guides do not capture it, no more than the memories of that uncle who went there on business and returned with more than just a sale; the sister, from a school trip, inarticulate with excitement; the silences of that elder brother, crackling with anger and shame.
Clearly, one’s first impressions of Xandarga Station would be as imperfectly recalled as a first kiss. Not that naval cadet Ruxhana Fengen Kraa, from the insignificant East-Gondwana prairie town of Green River, had had any experience of these things. Any more than his best friend, Ko Handor Raelle, who claimed he was ‘at it,’ with all the most luscious girls in their class.
“Will ya look at the dugs on that!” he’d exclaim, from their after-school perch at Ma Belle’s Bar and Grill on Riversleigh and Main, whenever one of their classmates hove into view, amid a giggling coop of similarly lush-pelted beauties. Ruxie thought every one of them was just lovely, but said nothing. The thought of facing one alone made his mouth dry. That the girls simply smiled and prinked away, if they reacted in any way at all, convinced Ruxie that Ko was full of it, and probably as clueless about girls, sex, and life in general, as he was. But Ruxie knew better than challenge Ko himself. Full of it he may have been, but Ko was a lot bigger than he was.
Deficient in such life-affirming experiences—though adept at roping dogies on his mother’s indrico ranch on the outskirts of Green River—Ruxie decided that whereas experience was invaluable, the only way to acquire it was to live it. In the meantime, though, knowledge was power. He decided to find out as much about Xandarga Station has he could.
Or, rather, his mother decided for him. Morzin Kraa Tzalaké found that the best way to fight the powerlessness she felt at the departure of her youngest kit was to arm him against the future, not to cower from it. So at their good-byes at Green River airport she thrust a slate into his hands.
“Aw, Ma—what’s this? You shouldn’t have!”
“It’s a long journey, Ruxie. Lots of change-overs.” She glanced towards Ko, eyes sharp with disapproval. He was trying to eye up some porn on the top shelf of a nearby newsstand. “You’ll want something good to read, at least.” A peck on the cheek, and then she turned and walked away down the concourse.
The slate was loaded with an autodidact that told him everything he could want to know about the Imperial Capital, in the form of a story blended from a range of sources. The four long flights and interminable hangings-around between were eased by his mother’s parting gift. He was so enthralled that he’d tried to read some of it to Ko, but after a while his friend didn’t even try to fake his enthusiasm, so Ruxie was left alone.
He learned under Thrilling Tales of Tethyan Thunder that as recently as two hundred and eighteen thousand years ago, Xandarga Station had been a sleepy fishing port on the southern Tethys shoreline, a remote outpost between ocean and jungle, home to a small fleet of brave sea-dragon slayers. These legendary heroes would ride out, in open canoes, into the open Tethys, and chase down basilosaurs—each one thirty meters of coiling hatred—on their migrations. Actually, Ko had been quite interested in that part, having torn his eyes away from Thrust magazine for ten whole seconds to gaze at Ruxie in wonder.
“You don’t say?” he exclaimed. ”That’s seriously amazing!” And, just then, he’d meant it.
Further down, Tethyan Thunder graded into the terser Xandarga Chronicles, which told how engineers first came to the Xandarga Coast and decided that it would be the ideal location for the Earth’s first space elevator. Three more had since been built on Earth and on countless moons and planets, yet as the Xandarga Station elevator was the first, it was known simply as the Elevator, or just the El.
The effect of the El on the local economy was practically instantaneous. A mere three hundred years later, what had been a gaggle of brushwood hovels on the edge of nowhere had been transformed into the center of the known Universe.
Simply as a city, Xandarga Station was vast. In The Dzunghar Heren Vú Xandarga Backgrounder Ruxie read of the miles of naval dockyards, regular dockyards, trading go-downs, meat-packers and stockyards. Indeed, Ruxie already knew, from parental conversations he’d overheard when he was meant to have been asleep, that Xandarga Station was the trailhead for several large indrico drives, much more profitable than anything that distant East Gondwana could offer. His mother’s father, when he was alive, would recount tales of those great drives to Ruxie and his sisters. Grandpa had been an indrico driver in the Southern Tethys in his youth, and enthralled the kits with tales of campfires, and comradeship, battles with giant mesonychian land-sharks, and, most of all, the thrill of riding a lambda alongside a ten-mile-long herd of the indricos themselves: those snorting meat-mountains, fifty tons apiece, stretching back into a smoky haze.
The first traders and ranchers brought their families to join them. So Ruxie read (in extracts from Rags and Riches, Runagates and Refugees in the Imperial City) of the barrios; the vistas of suburban dullness; the kitch palaces of the merchant princes. And of the various quartiers that were homes-from-home to a bewildering variety of exotics. Two of many stuck in Ruxie’s mind. One was Bedrock, where what looked like the buildings were in fact the residents, the silicon- and germanium-based Flintsiders, who lived on rocky planets very much larger than the Earth. The other was Sulfaville, a domed, black hemisphere whose residents were ultra-extremophile collectives which, when they came out, did so only in exquisite little carriages, each no bigger than a canteloupe. The spherical cabs matched the shiny blackness of the suburb whence they came, but their wheels and exterior furnishings were made of magnesium-titanium alloy, and they were drawn by outsized clockwork praying mantids. What the carriages—and Sulfaville itself—looked like on the inside was harder to imagine, given that the residents evolved in the super-heated, pressurized atmospheres of star-grazing gas giants.
Wherever traders turn a profit, the taxman is sure to follow, so perhaps inevitably (according to selections from Honeytrap: The Reign of Raedwald XIX ‘Star-Slayer’ and The Making of the Imperium), Xandarga Station became the administrative and financial capital of the Earth, and, by extension, the Galaxy. Ruxie read about the calculating spires of the financial district and, at the city’s heart, the cluster of museums housing treasures from a million planets. Ruxie thrilled at the thought of visiting the Institute of Galactic History with its displays of artefacts from of the earliest known civilization in the Universe, discovered just fifty years earlier in the Fomalhaut Sector by the great archeologist Thrangona Mir Gharaan, and believed to be more than eleven billion years old.
And Ruxie simply slavered at the thought of the Natural History Museum, the only place in the Galaxy (apart from Taniquetil itself) large enough to display a life-sized Taniquetilian tesseractrix. That was almost the last time he’d tried to interest Ko, whose eyes had grown to the size of saucers at the centerfold of Raunch magazine. Ruxie caught a harshly lit confusion of bare arms and legs and tried not to look.
Second in the league table of Interesting Facts about Xandarga Station with which Ruxie tried to interest Ko was the House of the Imperial Assembly. Designed as an echo and a mirror to the Galaxy it ruled, the building was an oblate spheroid, eight kilometers in diameter, whose mirror-smooth surface was spun of magnetically suspended metallic hydrogen beneath a nanocarbon monolayer. The pressures generated by this extremely thin but rel
entlessly dynamic surface supported the entire building from collapse with a minimum of internal spars, as well as generating much of its power by induction. There could be neither doors nor windows. Delegates arrived and left by trans-spatial gateways from all over the Galaxy, as well as in the City itself. The structure floated in mid-air, five hundred meters above water of the harbor, reflecting the great city in on itself. But the most remarkable reflection came from the source of Xandarga Station’s being, its raison d’être, the El itself.
The El rose just outside the City, to landward. The stately pyramid at its root, itself the size of a large town, sprouted at its summit a city-block-sized bundle of hyperfilament columns. The structure was, indeed, square in section, and running up each one of its sides were sixteen tracks—eight internally, eight on the outer surface, sixty-four in total—along which pods of various sizes were constantly running up and down. Those descending were swallowed up by the pyramid. Those ascending were the ones that really caught the eye, and visitors who witnessed the spectacle for the first time could not help but try to follow the cars as they slid skywards to the zenith point. Ruxie’s autodidact recounted those apocryphal tales of people gazing upwards and so enthralled that they just kept on gazing, even after they’d fallen over backwards.
Ruxie and Ko had seen the El all their lives as a white line that coursed along the sky to the westward by day, a thin necklace of jewelled lights at night. But nothing matched seeing it close-up. The plane that ferried Ruxie and Ko on their final hop was small and flew low over the city, and it was night. Ruxie, worn from reading and wonderment, had put away his slate, and dozed off. He woke an hour later, sore and cramped. Ko was sprawled next to him, snoring, tongue lolling. Ruxie unbuckled his seatbelt and rose to stretch as best he could. That’s when he caught a glimpse of the view through the porthole.
“Hey, Ko...” he nudged his neighbor. “Come look!” Through the porthole, Ruxie’s first impression was that they were at the bottom of an enormous, shallow bowl, with lights stretching as far as his eyes could see. The El, when it came into view, was so vast it seemed to distort perspective itself. The plane banked as it turned for the airport, and they saw the shining curvature of the Assembly Building, the curving streak of the El reflected in its surface. The boys, poised like storks to peer outwards and upwards to drink in as much of the view as they could through the needle’s-eye of the porthole, were jolted, off-balance.
A bell pinged: a stewardess told them to resume their seats for landing. The undercarriage ground its way outwards. In the minds of both boys was that, if they passed their basic training, they would be doing more than gazing at the El. They would be riding it—to the stars.