by Paul Melko
“Put us to work!” Meda said. “I’m ready.”
“Overeager groundhogs,” he said to the other trio, then extended a hand to Meda. “Welcome to Columbus Station. I’m Aldo, this year’s orientation lead. This is Flora, my second.” They were dressed in dark grey jumpsuits. All of them had silver pips in an odd design at the collar. “Flora, take Apollo to his room.” He grimaced at McCorkle. “I’ll clean this one up and get him oriented. There can’t be much left.”
“Can’t I go with them?” McCorkle managed to say before heaving again.
“You’re inside duty. They’re outside,” Aldo said.
“Right,” Flora said. “Come on. I’ll get you settled in.”
I thought McCorkle was empty already, I sent to Manuel, who shot me a smile.
“Based on what he spit up in the barge, I can’t understand why he’s still heaving,” Meda said.
“You’d be surprised,” Flora said. “I knew one guy who was sick for seven days straight, and at the end he was upchucking marbles he’d swallowed as a child.”
“I find that highly unlikely,” Meda said before someone could let her know she was using hyperbole.
She’s joking, Strom sent.
Oh, right, Meda replied.
Flora gave us a look that said more about our status in her eyes than any words like “groundhog” and “gravity hugger.” Flora was all female, three brunettes, thick-shouldered young women with arms like steel and legs like spaghetti. It was the look of all the space dogs. Strom admired her back muscles as she, hand over hand, hauled herself down into the station. Tubing and wires were tied into the walls, hiding hand grips that she seemed to grasp instinctively. We were slowed from fear of reaching out and taking a handful of system critical wiring, causing the station to plummet to Earth.
That won’t happen, I sent. We’re in geostationary orbit. There’s no way we could fall to Earth …
I stopped. Manuel had turned to look at me. We know.
I grinned. I know we know, but … I shrugged. The delicate balance of force, neither pulled out into space, nor drawn back to Earth, was awe-inspiring for me. I tried to draw the picture and pass it to the pod, but Manuel waved me away. Flora had disappeared around a corner.
Where are we?
Our thoughts were disjointed, echoing along the length of our line. Usually we thought in a circle, hand in hand, a dual token-ring of biological thought. Strung out along the corridor as we were, thoughts were slow to percolate, consensus was weak, and half-formed ideas collided with decisions coming the other way. At the end, I nibbled at the group mind, but I was elsewhere. My brain wasn’t like the others’; it drifted toward minutiae when we weren’t looking, getting caught in the details. Sometimes I feared being alone, afraid that I’d never come back from where I go.
My mind was unraveling the maze of corridors, where we had been, half-glimpsed rooms, piecing bits into the three-dimensional map of the station we had from the tug. Columbus Station looked like an upside-down turnip, hanging forty-two thousand kilometers above the Earth, on its half-finished tether above Ecuador. It sat perfectly balanced in zero-gee with a cable lowering to Earth and another counterbalancing one rising into space.
In months, when the Earth-side tether hooked up with the ground anchor, Columbus Station would be the second of the OG’s space stations, doubling the rate of material and personnel egress to GEO. From there to L4 was a trivial maneuver. The arc flickered in my brain, the forces it required, the effect of mass.
“Quant!”
Hand over hand, I sprinted down the hall, joining the pod just as they arrived in front of a grey door. Stenciled at the left was our name.
I felt the excitement course through us. Our quarters, in space.
“We were expecting another quint,” Flora said. She touched our name, as if expecting it to be wet. “Had to paint over it.”
Paint over it? Strom wondered.
They weren’t expecting us, Moira sent coldly. They weren’t expecting to send us up.
Because of Meda? I sent, checking myself too late. There was no response from my pod, though I saw the red rise on Meda’s cheeks.
Flora opened the door with a flourish. “Your home for ten weeks.”
Brightness flushed away the neon light of the corridor. A panorama of the Earth hung below us the size of a basketball at arm’s length. Half of it was in shadow, the rest in full sunlight and cast in blues, greens, and whites.
“It’s—” Meda started.
“Yeah,” Flora finished. “I love this part of the tour.”
“Why is our room so nice? So special?”
“It’s not,” Flora said. “Everyone gets a window view of Earth. Tradition.”
“Everyone gets a room like this?”
“Well, yours is bigger. Most everyone on Columbus is a trio.” She stood in the doorway while we piled in, pressing our faces to the diamond glass. “Someone will bring your gear along in a while. Relax for a while, then we start safety training.”
She paused. “Some advice: you’re here for ten weeks, the rest of us for years and lifetimes. The commander is pushing us like hell, and Aldo and I have two other jobs to do besides babysitting you.”
“We’ll try staying out of your way,” Meda offered.
“Staying out of the way still means you’re breathing air and using water that someone more productive could be using. This isn’t Earth where we have infinite resources and time enough. I have no illusions you’ll be useful, but I hope you’ll do more than eat twice as much as I do.”
“We’ll try …” But Flora was already pulling herself down the corridor. After she had disappeared, Strom shut the door. That went well, he sent.
At least we didn’t barf on her.
The day isn’t over yet.
Much to our disappointment, “training” had nothing to do with going outside the space station. It meant safety drills and equipment checks, followed by endless repetition of facts about those same drills and equipment. The closest we got to the outside was the cafeteria where one entire wall was meter-square windows facing Earth.
We tried to explain to Aldo we’d been checked out on EVA suits before.
“Not on an industrial construction site in zero-gee. Two weeks ago, a guy tossed a screwdriver to himself, wasn’t ready for it, and punctured his suit to his skin.”
“And?”
“Er, frostbite,” Aldo replied. “Nasty case of it.”
When do we get to work on a sled? I asked, speaking for all of us.
“We’ll keep that in mind, Aldo,” Meda said. “When do we start external work? We’ve been here two weeks already.” After two weeks of drills and basic biology work in the labs, we could scramble into our suits in fifty-three seconds and extemporize on the life cycle of the anchor spiders for an hour.
“Well …” he said. “It should have been last week—”
“You’re holding us back,” Meda interrupted.
“—but we had to build you a modified sled.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, in case you didn’t notice, all the sleds are built for trios. We need one that will accommodate your fiveness.”
Pods did outside work by waldo whenever possible, then by sled if the distance was too great for a waldo. The third choice was remote in suits, but maintaining autonomous action while separated from your pod was nearly impossible. It was only done in an emergency. The way to communicate when in a space suit was via hand gesture and voice, and that was no way to reach consensus.
“So when will ours be ready?”
“Real soon, today maybe. We modified the commander’s pinnace,” Aldo said. “It’s for official guests, so it could seat two pods in a pinch, or one of you quints.” Suddenly all three of him grinned. “Wanna see it?”
Yes!
“Yes!”
We were in the cafeteria, the largest open area on station, working on free fall maneuvering with no handholds. It was the most interesting prob
lem he’d given us, one that suited me: one, two, three, four, then five of us trapped in free fall with no momentum. A problem of forces, even when five of us were floating helplessly. Balanced feet against feet, timed perfectly, a kickoff could put us anywhere. Once any one of us had a firm wall, we could rescue the rest in no time.
From the cafeteria, we clambered zenithally upstation to the docks, just aft of the zenith tether anchor. We passed the biology wing where we’d spent long hours with Dr. Buchanan working with the arachnids. We passed the hydroponics bay, too small to feed even the half-populated, half-built station. Mother Redd’s farm had little of the hard tech the station did and yet we managed to feed eight human bodies and countless animals with little work. Sustainability apparently was not a requirement of this project.
Inside the hydroponics bay I spied our vomiting friend from the barge—Anderson McCorkle. He was picking tomatoes, one of him plucking, the other catching with a bag. It looked like his regurgitation was under control now. I couldn’t understand why someone with zero-gee sickness would apply for a space-based position with the OG. He caught sight of me, waved in greeting.
I waved back, turned to go, then he called me over. “How are things going?”
My pod was just ahead, almost to the sled bay, so I figured I could spend a moment with McCorkle. I swam over, using the rings on the floor as handholds. Huge suction fans were mounted near the doors to prevent water from leaving the hydroponics bay. Even though the plants were growing in sealed bags of mineral-rich water, accidents happened, and water in zero-gee was at least an irritant, sliding up nostrils and causing coughing fits, and at worst a deadly danger, shorting equipment or in large amounts comprising a drowning hazard. In zero-gee the primary forces that water observed was van der Waals forces. A skull-shaped sphere of water could surround a person’s head in seconds and be impossible to remove without suction. Emergency vacs were along every row of plants.
“Hey, McCorkle,” I said. Though Meda was our voice, I sometimes spoke, a requirement during those times when I was rarely by myself, which usually happened when I zoned out, and the pod went on without me.
“You’re Quant,” he said.
I didn’t notice how odd it was for him to know that, at least I didn’t notice then. I just nodded, my eyes caught by the spreading roots of the tomato plant. Above it was a thickness of yellow flowers, green leaves, and tiny orange fruit, chaotic, a mess. Below, the roots grew in a pattern of thickness to tendrils that rested against the water bulb and gently swished back and forth. I pressed my hand against the bulb.
“Pretty neat, huh?”
I nodded, mesmerized. I was tracing the pattern of roots with my eyes, following it like a fractal.
“When is your pod going outside?” he asked.
“Soon,” I said. “Tomorrow. Our sled is in the sled bay.”
“Oh, really.”
“We’re going to see it right now.”
“It’s in the bay now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the autistic one, aren’t you?”
“Quant!”
Manuel stood at the door of the hydroponics bay. I turned, smiled, and pulled over to him, casting a quick, “Bye” at McCorkle.
Don’t you want to see the sled?
Yes!
Then come on and stop zoning out over tomatoes.
I tried to show him the beauty of the fractal tomato roots, but he was ahead of me already.
We rounded a corner and came into the sled bay. Inside were the sleds that were in maintenance, two of them. The rest were lashed to the outside of the station and brought to a docking port when needed. The two sleds in maintenance were a large one, a modified Hulasledge, and a second normal-sized one.
I don’t have specs on the Hulasledge, I sent, wanting to climb behind the yoke and figure it out.
I thought you had specs on everything in your brain, Strom replied.
My mind was already counting the changes, the big one being a welded section just aft of the front cockpit. Someone had taken two sleds and merged them into a monstrosity. Additional fuel tanks had been added to compensate for the mass. A second set of thrusters dangled from the welded section. At first glance it looked cumbersome, but as I dissected the forces, it seemed to make fundamental sense. It would be a wonder to fly.
I found myself drifting toward it, unchecked in my momentum. I caught myself on the nadir airlock, flashing a look at Meda.
Can we?
Aldo must have guessed what I asked. He nodded, saying, “Go ahead.”
I scrambled in the lock, both irises open, my pod behind me. The sled smelled of rubber. Handholds guided me to the cockpit; the sled inside was two spheres, the smaller one the cockpit and claw controls, the larger for additional crew. Manuel swam in and placed his hands on the controls to the right of the pilot’s. I pulled myself in front of the yoke.
We’d simmed it a hundred times, but never actually touched real controls.
Cool, he sent.
I reached out for the yoke. I knew intuitively how my hands would create reaction with each touch. I couldn’t wait. Behind me, my pod shared my joy.
“Feel good?” It was Aldo’s voice from the airlock.
“Yes,” Meda said. “Fits perfectly.”
“Good, because we’re going out tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah, someone has to pick up the spider heads. It might as well be the newbie.”
Tomorrow, I sent. Tomorrow we fly.
We climbed out, and watched as the maintenance crew pushed our sled into the huge airlock and took it outside, leaving the single one behind.
For a moment the sled was in free fall, a forceless cradle, no rotation, no gravity, and then the cable slid into view from the right, thin monowire spun by spiders, marked by flashing lights every hundred meters along its twenty-kilometer length. Behind us the skeleton of Columbus Station hung, below us the Ring.
“Where’s the Consensus?” Strom asked. He glanced around the sled bubble, looking for the moon. Our starship, Consensus, was parked at the shipyard at Earth-Moon L4. Manuel and I sat in the cockpit, while Strom, Meda, and Moira sat directly behind us in the larger equipment and personnel bay. The redesigned sled was actually roomy for a quintet, since it had been built to hold two trios or a trio and a quartet at most.
It’s not ours yet, Moira sent, correcting my thought.
I spelled out p-e-n-d-a-n-t in Pod-C sign language with my left hand. My right I kept firmly on the yoke. Manuel laughed.
It will be, I replied, and then I took a moment from my tableau of forces and my argument with Moira to send, It’s on the far side of the Earth.
“Oh. Where’s the Ring?” Strom asked.
He turned his head to look for the Ring instead. On my left, Meda flinched. Before she could slam her mind shut, I saw an image of the interface jack embedded in her neck, superimposed with the face of Malcolm Leto. I took a hand off the controls to touch her shoulder.
Strom burst with embarrassment pheromone, but Meda shook it off. We couldn’t ignore the Ring and all that it was to us. It had been on our minds since that morning. As we had suited up in the sled bay, four pods—fourteen humans—crammed in together, doing safety checks, pulling straps, and cleaning visors, Flora had reached over and touched the interface jack on Meda’s neck.
“What’s that?”
The shock of the touch, the casual act more intimate than Flora could know, had stirred the muddy bottoms of our consciousness, and we had frozen, remembering how Malcolm Leto had seduced, raped, and nearly kidnapped Meda. We all remembered the violation, the rebellion of her body, as if it had happened to each of us. It might as well have. We all had the memory. We all had the nightmares.
Meda, our voice, had floated there in the bay, unable to react to Flora’s words, caught in the memory, and drawing attention to the jack by not replying. We did not want that attention, another thing to separate us from the space hounds.
I’d spoken up then, taking the voice, something I rarely did, and asked Aldo, “How do we stabilize a port-zenith spin again?”
He’d look surprised. Then he’d said, “You should know that—” and started lecturing me on things I knew by heart.
But that was enough to divert attention from Meda, and she’d smiled at Flora and said, “An old scar.”
The interface jack was Community technology, just as the Ring was. An artifact, Moira had said. One that was embedded in Meda’s skull.
The Ring’s below us, I sent, tarballing up an image of where we were, just above Columbus Station, marking L4 where Consensus was docked, the Ring thirty-two thousand kilometers below us, and the Earth ten thousand kilometers lower than the Ring.
I added Columbus and Sabah Ground Stations to my image, pinpointed the spot on the moon where Elliott O’Toole was working. I can easily paint a picture for them to see, but they didn’t feel my joy in the world I saw. It was like a painted picture of the real world. I could only estimate and approximate and trick their eyes into seeing what I saw.
I touched a control and spun the sled on its X axis, and there was the Earth. With a counterburst that I knew was the perfect force, the sled stopped, angular momentum checked.
“Oh, my.”
The Earth was a blue plate painted with swirls. I studied the image through my podmates’ eyes, not looking directly at it, the beautiful formation of white clouds over blue ocean and green land. Strom painted the best mental images. He always caught the right hue and tint, shared it so we all could see it. Perhaps it was some deficiency of mine that I couldn’t show them exactly what I saw.
And there was the Ring, a band of silver girding the world. Close, relatively speaking, within clear sight from Earth and space day and night, though impossible to reach. The Ring was open only to members of the Community, of which there was one: Malcolm Leto.
Over Strom’s image, I saw the Earth as I always did, a sinkhole, a gravity well, a restriction to be accounted for first in any calculation. The biggest delta. Always the biggest delta.