Martin Greenberg - Space Stations

Benjan grimaced. “The Majiken fight well, they are the backbone of the Fleet, yes. Still, to give them a world—”

“Surely in time there will be others,” the man said reasonably.

“Oh? Why should there be? We can’t possibly make Venus work, and Mars will take thousands of years more—”

“No, I meant built worlds—stations.”

He snorted. “Live inside a can?”

“That’s what you do,” the man shot back.

“I’m… different.”

“Ah yes.” The interviewer bore in, lips compressed to a white line, and the 3-Ds followed him, snouts peering. Benjan felt hopelessly outmatched. “And just how so?”

“I’m… a man chosen to represent…”

“The Shaping Station, correct?”

“I’m of the breed who have always lived in and for the Station.”

“Now, that’s what I’m sure our audience really wants to get into. After all, the Moon won’t be ready for a long time. But you—an ancient artifact, practically—are more interesting.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” Stony, frozen.

“Why not.” Not really a question.

“It’s personal.”

“You’re here as a public figure!”

“Only because you require it. Nobody wants to talk to the Station directly.”

“We do not converse with such strange machines.”

“It’s not just a machine.”

“Then what is it?”

“An… idea,” he finished lamely. “An… ancient one.” How to tell them? Suddenly, he longed to be back doing a solid, worthy job—flying a jet in Gray’s skies, pushing along the organic chemistry—

The interviewer looked uneasy. “Well, since you won’t go there… Our time’s almost up and—”

Again, I am falling over Gray.

Misty auburn clouds, so thin they might be only illusion, spread below the ship. They caught red as dusk fell. The thick air refracted six times more than Earth’s, so sunsets had a slow-motion grandeur, the full pallet of pinks and crimsons and rouge-reds.

I am in a ramjet—the throttled growl is unmistakable—lancing cleanly into the upper atmosphere. Straps tug and pinch me as the craft banks and sweeps, the smoothly wrenching way I like it, the stubby snout sipping precisely enough for the air’s growing oxygen fraction to keep the engine thrusting forward.

I probably should not have come on this flight; it is an uncharacteristic self-indulgence.

But I could not sit forever in the Station to plot and plan and calculate and check. I had to see my handiwork, get the feel of it. To use my body in the way it longed for.

I make the ramjet arc toward Gray’s night side. The horizon curves away, clean hard blue-white, and—chung!—I take a jolt as the first canister blows off the underbelly below my feet. Through a rearview camera I watch it tumble away into ruddy oblivion.

The canister carries more organic cultures, a new matrix I selected carefully back on Station, in my expanded mode. I watch the shiny morsel explode below, yellow flash. It showers intricate, tailored algae through the clouds.

Gray is at a crucial stage. Since the centuries-ago slamming by the air-giving comets, the conspiracy of spin, water, and heat (great gifts of astro-engineering) had done their deep work. Volcanoes now simmered, percolating more moisture from deep within, kindling, kindling. Some heat climbed to the high cloud decks and froze into thin crystals.

There, I conjure fresh life—tinkering endlessly.

Life, yes. Carefully engineered cells, to breathe carbon dioxide and live off the traces of other gases this high from the surface. In time. Photosynthesis in the buoyant forms—gas-bag trees, spindly but graceful in the top layer of Gray’s dense air—conjure carbon dioxide into oxygen.

I glance up, encased in the tight flight jacket, yet feeling utterly free, naked. Incoming meteors. Brown clouds of dust I had summoned to orbit about Gray were cutting off some sunlight.

Added spice, these—ingredients sent from the asteroids to pepper the soil, prick the air, speed chemical matters along. The surface was cooling, the Gray greenhouse winding down. Losing the heat from the atmosphere’s birth took centuries. Patience, prudence.

Now chemical concerts in the rocks slowed. I felt those, too, as a distant sampler hailed me with its accountant’s chattering details. Part of the song. Other chem chores, more subtle, would soon become energetically possible. Fluids could seep and run. In the clotted air below, crystals and cells would make their slow work. All in time…

In time, the first puddle had become a lake. How I had rejoiced then!

What joy, to fertilize those still waters with minutely programmed bacteria, stir and season their primordial soup—and wait.

What sweet mother Earth did in a billion years I did to Gray in fifty. Joyfully! Singing the song of the molecules, in concert with them.

My steps were many, the methods subtle. To shape the mountain ranges I needed further infalls from small asteroids, taking a century—ferrying rough-cut stone to polish a jewel-world. Many died, of course, caught in the great grinding gears that bored ’roids, made the rock-flinging tunnels, did the hard brute labors in cold and vacuum.

Memories… of a man, and more. Fashioned from the tick of time, ironed out by the swift passage of mere puny years, of decades, of the ringing centuries. Worlds take time.

My ramjet leaps into night, smelling of hot iron and—chung!—discharging its burden.

I glance down at wisps of yellow-pearl. Sulfuric and carbolic acid streamers, drifting far below. There algae feed and prosper. Murky mists below pale, darken, vanish. Go!

Yet I felt a sudden sadness as the jet took me up again. I had watched every small change in the atmosphere, played shepherd to newborn cloud banks, raised fresh chains of volcanoes with fusion triggers that burrowed like moles—and all this might come to naught, if it became another private preserve for some Earthside power games.

Not that Earthers were all vermin, I allow that. Many of them, through the stretched centuries, sent their own bodies to a final obliterating rest. Their funeral pyre was a bright spark as they hit the still-forming atmosphere’s upper edge, adding a tad of carbon and water to the burgeoning chemistry. Still…

I could not shake off the depression. Should I have that worry pruned away? It could hamper my work, and I could easily be rid of it for a while, when I returned to the sleeping vaults. Most in the Station spent about one month per year working. Their other days passed in dreamless chilled sleep, waiting for the slow metabolism of Gray to quicken and change.

Not I. I slept seldom, and did not want the stacks of years washed away.

I run my tongue over fuzzy teeth. I am getting stale, worn. Even a ramjet ride did not revive my spirit.

And the Station did not want slackers. Not only memories could be pruned.

Ancient urges arise, needs…

A warm shower and rest await me above, in orbit, inside the mother-skin. Time to go.

I touch the controls, cutting in extra ballastic computer capacity and—

—suddenly I am there again, with her.

She is around me and beneath me, slick with ruby sweat.

And the power of it soars up through me. I reach out and her breast blossoms in my eager hand, her soft cries unfurl in puffs of green steam. Aye!

She is a splash of purple across the cool lunar stones, her breath ringing in me—as she licks my rasping ear with a tiny jagged fork of puckered laughter, most joyful and triumpant, yea verity.

The Station knows you need this now.

Yes, and the Station is right. I need to be consumed, digested, spat back out a new and fresh man, so that I may work well again.

—so she coils and swirls like a fine tinkling gas around me, her mouth wraps me like a vortex. I slide my shaft into her gratefully as she sobs great racking orange gaudiness through me, her, again, her, gift of the strumming vast blue Station that guides us all down centuries of dense, oily time.