Martin Greenberg - Space Stations

Only by shrinking down to the narrow chasms of the single view can you know the intricate slick fineness, the reek and tingle and chime of this silky symphony of self.

But bigness blunders, thumb-fingered.

Smallness can enchant. So let us to go to an oddment of him, and me, and you. He saw:

A long thin hard room, fluorescent white, without shadows.

Metal on ceramo-glass on fake wood on woven nylon rug.

A granite desk. A man whose name he could not recall.

A neat uniform, so familiar he looked beyond it by reflex.

He felt: light gravity (Mars? the Moon?); rough cloth at a cuff of his work shirt; a chill dry air-conditioned breeze along his neck. A red flash of anger.

Benjan smiled slightly. He had just seen what he must do.

“Gray was free when we began work, centuries ago,” Benjan said, his black eyes fixed steadily on the man across the desk. Katonji, that was the man’s name. His commander, once, a very long time ago.

“It had been planned that way, yes,” his superior said haltingly, begrudging the words.

“That was the only reason I took the assignment,” Benjan said.

“I know. Unfortunately—”

“I have spent many decades on it.”

“Fleet Control certainly appreciates—”

“World-scaping isn’t just a job, damn it! It’s an art, a discipline, a craft that saps a man’s energies.”

“And you have done quite well. Personally, I—”

“When you asked me to do this I wanted to know what Fleet Control planned for Gray.”

“You can recall an ancient conversation?”

A verbal maneuver, no more. Katonji was an amplified human and already well over two centuries old, but the Earthside social convention was to pretend that the past faded away, leaving a young psyche. “A ’grand experiment in human society,’ I remember your words.”

“True, that was the original plan—”

“But now you tell me a single faction needs it? The whole Moon?”

“The Council has reconsidered.”

“Reconsidered, hell.” Benjan’s bronze face crinkled with disdain. “Somebody pressured them and they gave in. Who was it?”

“I would not put it that way,” Katonji said coldly.

“I know you wouldn’t. Far easier to hide behind words.” He smiled wryly and compressed his thin lips. The viewscreen near him looked out on a cold silver landscape and he studied it, smoldering inside. An artificial viewscape from Gray itself. Earth, a crescent concerto in blue and white, hung in a creamy sky over the insect working of robotractors and men. Gray’s air was unusually clear today, the normal haze swept away by a front blowing in from the equator near Mare Chrisum.

The milling minions were hollowing out another cavern for Fleet Control to fill with cubicles and screens and memos. Great Gray above, mere gray below. Earth swam above high fleecy cirrus and for a moment Benjan dreamed of the day when birds, easily adapted to the light gravity and high atmospheric density, would flap lazily across such views.

“Officer Tozenji—”

“I am no longer an officer. I resigned before you were born.”

“By your leave, I meant it solely as an honorific. Surely you still have some loyalty to the Fleet.”

Benjan laughed. The deep bass notes echoed from the office walls with a curious emptiness. “So it’s an appeal to the honor of the crest, is it? I see I spent too long on Gray. Back here you have forgotten what I am like,” Benjan said. But where is ‘here’? I could not take Earth’s full gravity any more, so this must be an orbiting Fleet cylinder, spinning gravity.

A frown. “I had hoped that working once more with Fleet officers would change you, even though you remained a civilian on Gray. A man isn’t—”

“A man is what he is,” Benjan said.

Katonji leaned back in his shiftchair and made a tent of his fingers. “You… played the Sabal Game during those years?” he asked slowly.

Benjan’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I did.” The Game was ancient, revered, simplicity itself. It taught that the greater gain lay in working with others, rather than in self-seeking. He had always enjoyed it, but only a fool believed that such moral lessons extended to the cut and thrust of Fleet matters.

“It did not… bring you to community?”

“I got on well enough with the members of my team,” Benjan said evenly.

“I hoped such isolation with a small group would calm your… spirit. Fleet is a community of men and women seeking enlightenment in the missions, just as you do.

You are an exceptional person, anchored as you are in the Station, using linkages we have not used—”

“Permitted, you mean.”

“Those old techniques were deemed… too risky.”

Benjan felt his many links like a background hum, in concert and warm. What could this man know of such methods time-savored by those who lived them? “And not easy to direct from above.”

The man fastidiously raised a finger and persisted: “We still sit at the Game, and, while you are here, would welcome your—”

“Can we leave my spiritual progress aside?”

“Of course, if you desire.”

“Fine. Now tell me who is getting my planet.”

“Gray is not your planet.”

“I speak for the Station and all the intelligences who link with it. We made Gray.

Through many decades, we hammered the crust, released the gases, planted the spores, damped the winds.”

“With help.”

“Three hundred of us at the start, and eleven heavy spacecraft. A puny beginning that blossomed into millions.”

“Helped by the entire staff of Earthside—”

“They were Fleet men. They take orders, I don’t. I work by contract.”

“A contract spanning centuries?”

“It is still valid, though those who wrote it are dust.”

“Let us treat this in a gentlemanly fashion, sir. Any contract can be renegotiated.”

“The paper I—we, but I am here to speak for all—signed for Gray said it was to be an open colony. That’s the only reason I worked on it,” he said sharply.

“I would not advise you to pursue that point,” Katonji said. He turned and studied the viewscreen, his broad, southern Chinese nose flaring at the nostrils. But the rest of his face remained an impassive mask. For a long moment there was only the thin whine of air circulation in the room.

“Sir,” the other man said abruptly, “I can only tell you what the Council has granted.

Men of your talents are rare. We know that, had you undertaken the formation of Gray for a, uh, private interest, you would have demanded more payment.”

“Wrong. I wouldn’t have done it at all.”

“Nonetheless, the Council is willing to pay you a double fee. The Majiken Clan, who have been invested with Primacy Rights to Gray—”

“What!”

“—have seen fit to contribute the amount necessary to reimburse you—”

“So that’s who—”

“—and all others of the Station, to whom I have been authorized to release funds immediately.”

Benjan stared blankly ahead for a short moment. “I believe I’ll do a bit of releasing myself,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Information?”

“Infor—Oh.”

“The Clans have a stranglehold on the Council, but not the 3D. People might be interested to know how it came about that a new planet—a rich one, too—was handed over—”

“Officer Tozenji—”

Best to pause. Think. He shrugged, tried on a thin smile. “I was only jesting. Even idealists are not always stupid.

“Um. I am glad of that.”

“Lodge the Majiken draft in my account. I want to wash my hands of this.”

The other man said something, but Benjan was not listening. He made the ritual of leaving. They exchanged only perfunctory hand gestures. He turned to go, and wondered at the naked, flat room this man had chosen to work in. It carried no soft tones, no humanity, none of the feel of a room that is used, a place where men do work that interests them, so that they embody it with something of themselves. This office was empty in the most profound sense. It was a room for men who lived by taking orders. He hoped never to see such a place again.