Changa

by Ian McDonald

  They say it’s worse going back down.

  You’d think that at however many billion these things are apiece, it wouldn’t burn the budget to put in a few windows.

  Got to go now. Next soul due for video-confession. I love you, Gaby. I miss you and Aaron like hell and it’s only nineteen hours. It’s a real temptation to touch the screen and ask you to touch it back and pathetic saccharine stuff like that. More tomorrow. See ya.

  ~ * ~

  Space, Day Two.

  Ernst Stavro Blofeld here.

  The beautiful spiral of cloud above my left shoulder is Tropical Storm Hilary, spinning off across the Atlantic in the general direction of Ireland. It’s rapidly filling, so our weather watchers say; the far south-west should get a couple of inches of rain and a few tiles off the roof. You’re from the north-east, isn’t that right?

  Space, I am discovering, is like camp. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t eat right, you don’t wash, you feel tired and puffy and constantly wondering where the hell you are. The cocoon bag they give you to sleep in is comfortable enough -weird, weird dreams, Gaby, I didn’t know I had them in me -and would be positively cosy for two, but two minutes after you tumble out, someone else tumbles in. We’re so overcrowded we’re running a hot-bagging system. Three shifts of eight hours in the sack. I hope the woman before me doesn’t have any nasty little habits for me to discover. Likewise, I hope I don’t leave any for the guy who comes after me.

  It’s bad enough that everything looks stupid in freefall - eating, sleeping, talking, excreting, exercising with those dumb rubber bands, but in Unity it’s stupidity at close range. Intimacy is a necessity, privacy an inconvenient aberration. Going to the bath room; not only can you hear every grunt and groan and ah! but everyone has his or her own personal coloured nozzle for the cock-sucker, as we guys call it, and God help you if you use someone else’s. This is much worse than using another person’s toothbrush. There have been serious fights, I hear. Everything and everyone is in your face all the time. I’m surprised there are any faces left uneaten.

  There’s a guy, he’s been here about a month longer than me, a Team Red boy; he has a Grateful Dead disc he just has to play at full volume at every possible occasion. Winning converts to the One True Music, he says. One True Music up his ass, if I get the chance. I’ll have to wait in line, there are fifty others want to throw him out the airlock, no questions asked, or, if they can’t get him, his disc will do. In space, no one can hear the Dead.

  The Japanese team members cope with this best. I suppose all their lives are lived so close to others they want to bite faces off, but etiquette forbids.

  Unity is strange, in that it’s a place with an inside but no outside. You don’t see anything as you go through the pressure link from the HORUS; it’s just a big tube after a tiny tube after a middling size tube. We could as easily be at the bottom of the sea, or the centre of the earth, as eight hundred miles up in space. It’s a hard place to envision whole - you get a much better idea from the television, where it looks mightily impressive, this mile-and-a-half tangle of construction beams, solar panels, tanks, environment modules. From the inside it’s the odd boom, or a bit of a solar array, or a manufacturing core glimpsed from a tiny window. It’s very easy to get lost in; the passages seem to move around and reconnect while you’re not looking. There is a grain of truth in this, every shift you wake up to find the engineers have bolted on a new section or opened a lock into a pressure body you never knew existed. Ironic, that it takes the advent of the BDO to push space exploration into a renaissance. This place, the HORUS shuttles, High Steel, the intra-orbit tugs; these would have been intolerable budget leeches fifteen years ago. We could go to Mars right now, if we didn’t have more interesting places to go. The BDO giveth us our reason to go into space, and it taketh away.

  Someone’s coughing politely outside. One last impression, which was actually a first impression. On arriving at Unity, the first thing that hits you. It smells of fart. Three hundred people in a space designed to take one hundred and seventy-five at a pinch, an overstrained air-conditioning system and all that high-protein, high-carbohydrate food? Someone’s dropping one every second of the day - you are not going to believe this, but over in Hydroponics One they hold see-who-can-fart-themselves-the-furthest contests. Fart, feet and piss. They never tell you this on the television.

  More tomorrow. Love you.

  ~ * ~

  It’s me again, Gaby. It’s Unity. Day Three.

  I’m just back from a BDO-watching party down in Remote Sensing. Direct feed from Hubble and our own, smaller, observatory. The orbital telescopes can achieve such fine detail you can see Gaia’s shadow passing over the bright end, like a flea on Mount Rushmore. It brings home what a big mother that thing out there really is. We can see the mountains on the outer skin, watch the shadows lengthen and shrink as the object spins away from the sun. What’s most amazing is the sense of colour. This thing makes Jupiter look dowdy. Bright as a beer can thrown into space.

  I’m not afraid of it. It won’t send plagues of destroying angels across the earth, or open its vial of plagues, or smash the planet apart into crumbs. It’s come here for us. For humans. And while this gift from the powers in the sky draws ever closer, we cling to the walls of our little cocoon, hairless apes squabbling about the Grateful Dead and who’s doing it with whom, and when, and where, and in what position, and who’s using whose pissing-tube. I find this tremendously reassuring. The Evolvers have come eight hundred light years to learn the concept of irony. It only took us Americans two and a half centuries.

  There’s a cunning caste system in operation up here. It’s based on the length of your stubble. The smoother your pate, the lower down the order you peck. Top of the tree are the Swedes, with about three or four weeks of growth all over. It’s pernicious; I found myself acting like an old sea-dog, handing out unhelpful tips and scornful looks to the virgins up off the Jules Verne and the ESA HOTOL that docked yesterday, keeping to myself anything that might be useful or important. It’ll end in hazing rituals. I hope not to be around for that. Herd instinct and team-bonding are survival tactics in as extreme an environment as this. Space stations and jails. Even within groups, it’s shape up or ship out. I get waves of hostility from the rest of Team Green because I refuse to adopt the same spatial orientation as them in group exercises. My ‘up there’ is their ‘down here’ and vice versa. Unity Thought Police. This beef will get back to them, and I’ll be in real grief. The grapevine up here violates Special and General relativity.

  There’s another kind of caste division, more deeply rooted, and that’s between Spacers and Passengers. Spacers are the crew of Unity, its construction workers, system engineers, tug and shuttle pilots, anyone who works with space as their raw material. The rest of us are Passengers. Grunts. Breathing their hard-worked-for air, pissing out their expensively recycled water, leaving our skin flakes floating in their pods and passages. They swing through the tubes like you’re not there, push in front of you when you’re in the line for the food dispenser or the John, talk over you when you are trying to record a private letter, pull you up on any one of a hundred imaginary violations of space routine that of course threaten the lives of every soul aboard, and are complete militarist Nazis who are jealous because all they do is drive the taxi, we’re the ones who get to see the show.

  There’s a place I’ve discovered - I won’t call it private, because nothing is in this shell of fools - but it’s undercrowded, and it has a window on the docking area. There is a lot of free time when you’re a Passenger. With mine, I like to watch spaceships. Didn’t your friend Oksana once tell you that time spent watching airplanes is time exceedingly well spent? That goes double for space craft. There is seldom an hour that you don’t find something moored to the docking unit. Mostly they’re those brutal little SSTO robot freighters - our lifeline to the mother world, without which we really would be eating each other’s faces. I watch for the HORUSes
and HOTOLs as they come out of the atmosphere blur at the edge of the world. They’re beautiful things. They seem to fly on space, surf on it, like the old Silver Surfer; that it happens in absolute silence and the slowness of Zen drama makes it all the more beautiful. To me, the tugs are the most interesting. Nothing to look at, except, I suppose, a certain fitness-for-purpose aesthetic in the ungainly agglomerations of engines, tanks, construction beams and heavy grappling arms. What fascinates me is that they’re deep space creatures. The space planes, the freighters, they’re Earth things, their job is purely to get through that layer of air. The tugs could never exist in gravity and atmosphere; they are absolutely designed for space. They interest me primarily because in a very short time I’m going to know one - or rather, the environment pods they pick up - a whole lot more intimately. They’re moving us out. Teams Yellow and Green are being rotated up to High Steel. We leave tomorrow at twenty-thirty, in two pods. I’m in the second ship. I may not have time to talk to you tomorrow - there’s quite a lot of prepping needs to be done before the flight, you spend the fifteen hours muffled up in an air bag and they reckon it’s best to knock you out for it. So it’s likely the next time I’m talking to you will be from High Steel.

  By the way, I’ve been using your name as a blunt instrument to ward off undesired advances - I’ve had several, with a lot of spare time and free fall to experiment with, what do you expect? - and it seems opinion is divided whether you’re Christ or anti-Christ over the Ellen Prochnow thing. Paranoia breeds like thrush bacteria up here, no one believes her denials, but at the same time, no one wants to be checking their neighbours’ scalps for 666s or McDonnel Douglas Aviation. So we are a pretty congeries of mistrusts. Don’t worry, I’m not going accept any of the offers I’ve been given.

  Shit. Well over time. Love. Bye.

  ~ * ~

  Hi Gaby. It’s Day Five and this is High Steel.

  Another white plastic interior, with a rectangle of stars over the left shoulder. Space travel is very disappointing. You go from one white plastic tube to another, where you get gently pushed and shoved around a little, and then a timeless time later you are taken out of this tube and put into one exactly identical. Absolutely no sense of going any place. Thank God they knock you out. K-Mart Economy space-suits, air-bags. They’ll keep you alive in case the pod depressurizes or the tug lets go of it, and if the end gets torn off and you spill into space, they’ll broadcast distress calls so, theoretically, someone can come and pick you up. Though what they pick up after days in an inflatable mummy floating through space is one for the psychiatrists. If you die in space, where do you go? Nasty, nasty little thoughts like this creep into your head and will not creep out again.

  It’s a bad sign that after Unity, the first thing you notice about High Steel is the stink. Twelve accommodation modules, a mile of solar panelling arrays, an engineering plant and an APR on a boom, half-way to the moon. The Earth is frighteningly small and distant. It looks like a planet now, and that is not comfortable. The Moon is frighteningly big and close. It looks like a planet too. Biggest, closest and most frightening of all is the BDO. It looks like the fucking end of the world.

  BDO before me, Chaga below me. I can see Africa from here. Clouds cover much of the equatorial regions, I can see the path of the monsoon, curling up from Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, beyond the horizon. Through breaks in the cloud I can see the outlines of the Chagas scattered across the continent; circles and clusters of circles, merging together. I can see you, Gaby. How are you, down there in Tanzania? Up here in my bubble of air and stink and plastic, I feel old, fragile, and scared.

  The main frame is shaking again. The tug engines must be firing. High Steel is being moved into a station-keeping orbit, ten miles above the bright end of the Big Dumb Object. From that distance it will look bigger than the Earth does from Unity. I am going to have to get my spatial orientation sorted out by AEO: hovering above, or floating in front of a three-hundred-kilometre-long cylinder should be psychologically survivable. What is not is to imagine that it is poised over you like the hammer of God.

  There is another link between you and me, Gaby, apart from visions of Africa. There are Changed up here: the freefall adaptations with four hands. They are incredible; I feel like a brick in an aquarium next to them. This is how the future is going to look? That’s scary too. There are four of them, three are South Americans, but one is the boy you found in Unit 12; Juma. I knew about him, Gaby. I knew about all of them; Peter Werther, the Moon woman. I lied to you. I’m sorry, I had no other choice. And you were right - funny how you can remember every word and nuance of the worst days of your life - I did give you that diary to get you into bed, and I regretted it the moment I had done it, because I knew you would pry into the mystery of the disappeared pages. It wasn’t until long after you left that I realized that I had done the right thing for the wrong reasons. The diary had led you to bust Unit 12 wide open, and reveal all its paranoid little secrets that I wanted to but could never disclose. Rather late for self-justification, you would say.

  I’m sorry I sound a little melancholy on this instalment; everyone is a bit down, nervous, tense, expectant. The BDO is sixteen hours from AEO and here we are, sitting in our tin can far above the Earth, realizing how pitifully unprepared we are. And I feel far from home. I miss gravity. I miss water. I miss air, and wind. I miss you. I miss Aaron. I’m not sure the BDO compensates for all this missing, but the next time I talk to you, it’ll be here.

  ~ * ~

  Day Six, Gaby. It’s here.

  AEO was two hours fifty minutes ago. You’ve seen the pictures. Everyone on the planet has seen the pictures. This is how it felt to be there.

  When you sized me up and seduced me with your question-and-answer that time in the Mara, you told me I was a thing of earth and plains and big skies and empty lands with not a lot of room left for God. Pretty astute, Gaby. Religion has never played a great part in my life. But the BDO was the closest I have ever come to a genuine religious experience. I told you I wouldn’t get mystical on you. I’m not. It was genuine awe of a God with real muscle and a hell of an FX budget.

  That tense, depressed feeling I told you about last time deepened as ETTEO decreased. High Steel hit its orbit first; we had seven hours of looking out at that thing coming down our throats. Half an hour before AEO we just quit whatever job we were meant to be doing and found someone to be with. You need someone to hold you when the sky falls. What little apes we are, clinging to each other in our tin can. I was with a woman called Clarissa from Team Yellow. We found a window, wedged ourselves into it, and just held each other and watched the thing keep coming. That’s what the pictures can’t convey, Gaby. It kept coming, and coming, and fucking coming, and you think, that’s got to be all of it, but it still kept coming. Floating there in twelve accommodation modules, a couple of solar sails, an air plant and three tugs, you felt like it was going to swat High Steel like a mosquito. What I said about the launch from Kennedy, that was nothing, Gaby. That was fear of something; that you are going to die. This was existential terror, the fear of you don’t know what could happen. People were praying, Gab. Some were crying, in fear, awe, love. Tears float in zero gee. I gripped Clarissa so hard I left bruises.

  And then I felt High Steel move. You’ve heard the theorists, that it got caught in a gravitational eddy from the mass-momentum drive as the BDO stabilized its orbit. What it felt like, Gaby, was every part of everything around you, and every part of yourself, down to the atoms, held by something and gently but firmly pulled. Like falling, with nothing to hold on to, except the human body next to you.

  I’m not asking your forgiveness for this, Gaby. You would do the same with the first human body that floated by.

  I thought we were coming apart; all that was happening was High Steel was being dragged into an orbit in line with the BDO’s axis and spun up to match its rotation. We’re turning in time with the BDO.

  So: the arrival of the BDO.
What did it feel like? It felt like God had come. In every sense of the word, polite and impolite. The fearful depression that gripped us during the orbital approach has been burned away by a sense of quasi-spiritual euphoria and activity. We’re here, we’re alive, we’ve got holy work to do. It’s almost as if the BDO approves of us. We’re learning to live with the thing ten miles off the starboard bow. The way to look at it is that it’s a new moon for Earth. Isn’t that a gorgeous thought? Two moons rising. From High Steel you can’t see that it’s a cylinder, and by a trick of spatial perspective you can push it away from you so that it becomes a world far below you, and the mottlings and patterns on the facing end are continents and oceans.

  What they really are is Chaga. Vacuum-adapted Chaga, carpeting the hills and valleys of the forward end and cylinder sides. This close, you can make out individual details; some of the formations are thousand of feet high. They diminish in size toward the edge. In a way, I find this riot of alien life almost homely: I’ve spent much of my professional life looking out from high windows across vast discs of Chaga. It’s actually smaller than many of the longer-established terrestrial symbs -certainly much smaller than the Nyandarua-Kilimanjaro-Mount Elgon Chaga. That puts it into perspective.

  Our three tugs are out mapping the exterior. Two are working the cylinder body - one has a specific mission to move along the windows and photograph as much information about the interior as possible but its view is largely obscured by clouds - and the third is hovering over the forward end, running full spectrum scans of the surface, probing for possible means of ingress. God, I am starting to sound like them. Good joke, though: it comes all this way and forgets to build a front door. I don’t think so, somehow. First Wave Team Red are out there in the tug pod, ready to go in if they find an entrance. Team Yellow is down in the airlock, preparing to en-pod for tug pick-up. We’re on Orange Alert, the call could come at any time. Horribly seductive, this style of talking.