John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

They had been decelerating for three weeks.

Javelin had been right; there was something out there. It showed up on the radar screen as an object the size of a large asteroid. It was impossible as yet to look at it directly because the light of the ship's drive interfered with the telescope. Javelin had carefully aimed for a point a hundred kilometers away from the object, so that her drive would not be seen as a weapon.

But no one had yet seen Javelin. Cathay, Lilo, and Vaffa had been awake four weeks, exercising every day to get back in shape from the long sleep, but Javelin had stayed in her room. They could talk to her, but only over the audio circuits. Lilo assumed the woman was by now even more acutely aware of their presence on her ship, and even more unhappy about it.

When she did make an appearance, it was after first cutting a door from the inside of her room. She now had two arms and legs, and could no longer fit through the tiny entrance she had used. It was not the sort of surgery she could have accomplished by herself; Lilo assumed she had mechanical aids in her room.

Javelin seemed self-conscious about it. Lilo was going to make a comment, but when she saw how awkwardly Javelin moved in the one-gee acceleration—tending to forget about her left leg and right arm—she said nothing. There had been some neural rewiring done, Lilo felt sure. It was as if Javelin had suddenly donned glasses that inverted everything she saw; it would take a while for her brain to accept the change.

At first Lilo wondered why Javelin had done it. In the past she had accepted the brief periods of immobility enforced by the boost of the ship; they never lasted more than a month, and were a small price to pay for ten years of easy movement in free-fall.

But now every day brought them closer to the Ophiuchite outpost, and Javelin's reason became obvious. There was no way of knowing what they would find. It could be anything from weightlessness to many gravities, and Javelin had thought it best to be prepared.

The Hotline station was a torus, a thick, dark doughnut with an outer diameter of seventy kilometers, spinning slowly.

"It looks like a tire," Cathay said, staring over Javelin's tiny shoulder at the telescope screen. "See how it's flattened?"

"That would give them more flat surface on the inside," Javelin pointed out. "Flat on the bottom, and an arched roof overhead." She hit a few switches on her console. "They're pulling three quarters of a gravity on the inside. You know, it's pretty big for that kind of rotation. And the density fooled us. It's about twice as dense as water, which isn't much. There's not much metal in it."

"What do you think it's made of?" Vaffa asked. Nobody answered.

There was a tower growing from the inner edge of the wheel. It was massive at the base, but tapered quickly into a needle as it rose toward the center. There was a module at the hub of rotation. Javelin did some more computations.

"There must be something heavy inside, just opposite the base of the tower," she announced. "Otherwise the mass of the tower would throw the rotation off balance."

"And that's where we have to go, right?" Cathay asked. "To the top of the tower?"

"I don't know where else we could go," Javelin said. "Everything else is moving too fast. You'd better all strap in. I'm going to have to do some maneuvering."

"Shouldn't we try to contact them first?" Lilo asked. "They must know what frequencies we use. I imagine they've been listening to us for centuries."

"You're right. But what should we say?" Javelin looked uncertain for the first time since Lilo had known her. They all looked at each other, and no one seemed anxious to make the first contact. Javelin turned the dials on her screen and made the scope zoom in on the docking module in the center of the wheel. They had all noticed a faint light on one side of it; now Javelin brought it into focus.

No one said anything for a while. The light was actually several lights, and looked like nothing so much as tubes of ionized neon gas. They spelled out a word: WELCOME.

"We've been waiting," said a voice over the radio. "If you'll come in to about five hundred meters, we'll throw you a line. See you in about twenty minutes?"

How can I summarize our life on Poseidon?

The news programs we monitored during the first days called us "The Runaway Moon." There was great consternation from Mercury to Pluto. The departure of Poseidon was seen as the precursor of some disastrous turn of events in connection with the Invaders. There were calls for armament of all human peoples in the system to prepare for the coming fight.

It didn't come, of course, and gradually all the fuss died away. Much later we heard someone suggest that Poseidon could have been moved by technologies known to humans, and that indeed it might have been human outlaws who had done it. The idea did not seem to go over well, and in any case we were by then too far away and moving too fast for anything to be done about it.

We worked frantically for a year. The impact of Vengeance had caused a lot of damage to the tunnels and rooms. A power overload had caused failures in the heating system which powered the hydroponic farms; all the plants died. For a while we lived on stored food, in the darkness. There was not enough air to pressurize the corridors — many of which would have leaked badly if we did — so we lived in our suits and observed strict oxygen rationing.

There had been no way for me and Cathay to know if the impact of Vengeance would cause irreparable damage to a vital installation on Poseidon, one that we would need to survive after taking control. Cathay said Vejay was certain everything was already there to make the planetoid self-sufficient. In the end, we had to gamble with the lives of everyone on Poseidon.

In the first flush of victory, everyone was glad we did. Cathay was swept into office as our first president. Even I was admired. It didn't last. In six months Cathay was out of office and we were both avoiding the faces of people we met in the dark, airless corridors.

But it worked. For many years Tweed had been sending equipment to make the base less dependent on supplies brought in by ship. The most hazardous part of his operation had always been sending ships to Jupiter, and the fewer he sent, the better he felt about it. One by one, the needs of Poseidon were taken over by small, mostly hand-operated, fabricating machines. The energy was there, more than the machines could ever use. Raw materials could be mined or transmuted by the limitless power. There were machines for making light tubes, integrated circuits, and pumps. The machines which had built the base were still there, and could be used to clear rubble or dig new tunnels. There was equipment to make new parts for things that wore out.

In three years we were a stable ecology, if not yet much of a community. The days of oxygen rationing were just a memory, and the inhabited base was actually larger than it had been in fifteen years. The population had grown by twenty children, and four more were on the way. I could hold up my head and be a respected member of society now that I was Chief Hydroponicist and Grand Panjandrum of Mutagenic Foodstuffs. Every time I developed a new plant that was better than the things we had been eating for three years, my prestige rose a little higher.

By the time five years had passed, things were settled down. We had an old-style school with the students outnumbering the teachers. It turned out to be not so bad, after all.

We were all surprised at how much time and effort it took to keep things running. Our world would not have allowed us survival if we hadn't maintained it constantly. That's true of all human societies since the Invasion, but it's usually behind the scenes, unnoticed. Only three percent of the population of Luna, for instance, is directly involved in an environmental industry. On Poseidon, we all were, and we often held two or even three jobs. Most of us were farmers in addition to our other functions. We worked ten-hour days.