The Sunspacers Trilogy (7 page)

A tall, thin boy with short black hair stood up three seats to my right. “Does this include talking to other students or teachers? About work, I mean.”

Turnbull sighed. “No, but we feel that people are worth talking to personally. It’s a Sunspacer value. People are unique presences in the universe, to be held dear.”

I liked what Turnbull was saying.

“Anthropocentric prejudice,” the boy said with contempt.

“Maybe—but we don’t use it for harm. Out here we believe that human life must be at the center of things. Call personal contact our little ceremony, our prayer before a hostile universe, our way of being a community.”

Turnbull’s words made me feel good, needed. The boy shook his head in amusement and sat down.

“Other questions?”

After a moment of silence, the black-haired boy spoke up again, obviously unable to restrain himself. “Are we here to learn religious dogmas or science? I’m here to study physics, and I don’t care about much else, and it’s not up to you or anyone to make me care or tell me how to live.”

“No one will stop you from doing your work. Don’t you have any customs where you come from?”

A short, auburn-haired girl stood up in front of me.

“I think he’s just shy and wants to be left alone, but he’ll change.” I liked her voice and hoped she would turn around.

“What complete nonsense!” the black-haired boy shouted, crossing his legs and leaning back. “Next you’ll tell us we have to join the marches for those miners on Merk.”

“What’s your name?” Turnbull asked.

“Christopher Van Cott. Does it go on a list of baddies?”

“Where you from, Chris?”

“Chicago Arc One. And it’s Christopher.”

“You know, Christopher, there are few real loners in science. It’s a cumulative, cooperative venture, even for those who won’t admit it.”

“For the pure in heart,” Van Cott said.

“Aw, shut up!” someone shouted.

Van Cott sounded dedicated and independent. A part of me liked him, despite the blind spots.

“The place for extreme individual visions is in literature and art,” Turnbull said.

Turnbull did seem a bit prissy. Wear a smile and have friends; scowl and have wrinkles. But people wanted to get along out here; cooperation had been absolutely necessary to build and operate worlds from scratch. Traditions were newer out here. You could be more of a wolf among sheep on Earth, but even there it was getting harder. As for the part about science, it seemed to me that it got done any way it could, cooperation and good manners aside.

The session left me wondering a bit about what kind of person I was. As we stood up to leave, the auburn-haired girl turned around and looked at me with large brown eyes. She smiled, as if commenting on what had been said, then walked away.

Lunch was in Cole Hall, a few hundred yards from our dorm. Most everyone had gone ahead by the time Morey and I came outside. It was still strange, seeing no horizon and the land curving gently upward, overhead, beyond the wispy clouds.

“That Van Cott character, what did you think of him?” I asked.

“I kind of liked him,” Morey replied.

“Why?”

“He’ll work harder, do more.”

“But he’s no smarter than us, just wound up more inside.”

“Guys like him get the prizes, because they won’t let anything distract them.”

“Not always,” I said loudly. What Morey was saying was true but not likeable, I thought as the large transparent doors slid open and we went inside and got on line. Morey was more like Van Cott. We waited in silence as the long line moved up the ramp from the lounge, and I remembered Marisa telling me that I was not like Morey. Then what was I like? Somebody who worried a lot about himself, she would have said.

The second-floor dining area was all windows, bright with daylight, and the land was all around us, in place of sky.

I scanned the tables. Linda was sitting with Van Cott at the far end. She seemed younger today. I stared, but she was too far away to notice.

“Come on,” Morey said impatiently, and we went in to get our food. I didn’t like the tone of his voice. I knew that he would consider Linda a distraction, and seeing her with Van Cott had irritated him. As far as I was concerned, Van Cott could use all the distractions he could get.

We walked around the campus after lunch. It was easy to picture where everything was, because the student center and dorms were all within the inner circle of the university. Head outward from the center to get to classes; move toward the outer circle to get to labs. Walks cut across the greens between the rings. These were actually small parks, with benches and play areas for children, tennis courts, and pools.

The student center was a huge three-floor oval with a ribbon of window circling each floor. Morey and I walked into the giant lounge area. A giant holo image stood in the center of the polished red floor, offering newscasts from Earth.

Students sprawled on the floor, walked through the 3-D picture, sat in chairs and hassocks, and leaned against the walls. Multicolored sheen shorts and collarless shirts were everywhere. Haircuts were close among the boys, longer and curly among the girls.

Morey and I didn’t fit, with our collared shirts, creased slacks, and longer hair.

“News,” I said, crossing my arms and trying to look as if we had come here for that.

“A quake on Mercury,” said a woman’s giant face, “has taken three more lives among the miners. But the production of metals is not likely to be affected, Earth Authority has announced in New York. There was no public statement from the Mercury community.”

Boos and hisses exploded among the students. I felt a wave of sympathy for the dead miners. How could this still be going on? People were dying, and yet there seemed to be no urgency in doing anything about it. I looked at Morey, but he shrugged.

“The Russian Commonwealth,” the reporter continued, “has again claimed to be able to stalemate the Western Alliance space cyber-force, but the Far Eastern Alliance claims that this is just another bluff, despite the fact that China has given up six disputed border zones in the last six months without one return threat claim. The UN Sec-General describes the affair as just another routine probe in the give and take of peaceful
process politik
, and not a prelude to the return of armed conflict. If they had a real check threat on Western Alliance peacekeeping forces, he says, then the call committees would already be meeting to determine the move’s technical credibility with a view to reaching a new accommodation of gains and concessions. But no such meeting has been asked for by either side in over a decade …”

Most of the students were paying no attention to this part. Morey and I headed for the snack bar.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Is anyone hiding anything?”

“Who cares? I don’t have time for politics.” We walked through an arch and found a table near the window.

“What do you think would happen if someone were to threaten Earth directly instead of just off-planet forces?”

“Can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because the panic of even a war scare would hurt business more than real wars have done in the past. Even if someone wiped out some bloc’s space-borne force, the result would still be some accommodation. No one wants to attack Earth directly. Couldn’t even if they wanted to. The beam weapons are nearly perfect. War has been impractical for some time now, but no one wants to admit it. So they go through the moves, but it’s just a way of making agreements. That’s why I don’t care. It’s a waste of time.”

He stood up just as I was about to bring up the Mercury situation again.

“What do you want?” he asked. “I’ll get it.”

“Tall carob shake,” I said, realizing that he wasn’t going to give me a chance to bring it up just then.

He went to get on line, and I tried to seem as if I’d been sitting there since the year one. It was all unreal, I thought as I gazed out the tall band of windows at the sunsplashed greenery, my feet set firmly against the spinning world that humankind had set in motion out here in the blackness. We had enclosed a bit of space and filled it with dreams; but close in around the Sun, on little Mercury, people were still suffering, paying the price of providing the rest of us with raw materials to keep the dreams running.…

“Over there, center of the room,” Morey said as he put the shakes on the table and sat down.

I looked and saw Kik ten Eyck sitting with Jake LeStrange.

“I don’t think they like us,” I said.

Morey shrugged. “Who cares? Not my problem. I’m here to become a physicist.”

I was still unsure about wanting to do the same, not if it meant I had to close my eyes to everything else.

We chugged our shakes and pushed the cartons into the drop at the center of the table. I glanced at Jake. He was watching me, so I nodded to him. He smiled and wiggled his fingers at me. I looked at Kik and got a blank stare.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said, standing up.

“Want company?”

“Not really,” I said without thinking.

He looked at me, and I felt that he didn’t care; he knew what he wanted, and nothing else mattered.

“See you later,” he said as I walked away.

I felt restless.

At first I wandered back along the walk to the dorm, but then I cut across the grass; any direction would do.

The air was sweet, with a touch of ozone, as if there had been a storm. Everywhere the greenery showed the skilled hand of a gardener. Even wooded areas were given so much land and no more.

I went around the dorm, climbed over the guard rail, and started down the hill toward the gym. My mind seemed blank, refusing to think about anything; seeing, breathing, and feeling would be enough. My shoes glistened from the moisture in the thick, tall grass, and I wondered about humidity adjustments inside Bernal One. Later I learned that they could make it rain or snow, just for fun.

It was a small world in some ways. No New York City crowds, more like a town. I had already seen some faces more than once.

But to the eye Bernal One was spacious. A sphere of 5 kilometers radius has an inner surface of 314 square kilometers, and a volume of nearly 523 cubic kilometers. I would have to walk 31 kilometers to circle the world at the equator. A population of fifty thousand was small in comparison with Earth’s urban areas. New York City is about a thousand square kilometers, Los Angeles thirteen hundred, but both have inhabitants by the millions.

The sunlight was warm on my face as I stared up at the landscape in the sky. Suddenly I tripped and rolled down the hill, tumbling a bit slower than I would have on Earth, because Bernal’s rotation produces less than one gravity. I grabbed at the tall grass and stopped myself.

I felt a vibration in my feet as I got up, then the sound of escaping air. A piece of hillside lifted up ahead of me. The ground cracked, and clumps of grassy dirt flew into the air as a large hatch opened on power hinges.

I approached slowly and looked into the opening. Blue-white light flickered in the darkness below; a man was climbing up a ladder. I stepped back as his head cleared the rim.

“Hello there, son,” he said in a piping voice, and smiled as he climbed out. I saw a stocky, graying man in green coveralls. “Didn’t think this lock was still operational,” he said, looking around with youthful, blue eyes. “Faulty memory.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Routine maintenance checks.”

“Where does it lead?”

“Everywhere—on the engineering level.” He looked around at the dislodged dirt. “Strange—this lock shouldn’t have been covered up.” He squinted at me, as if I would know something about it.

“I’m Joe Sorby, from the dorm up there.”

“Bernie.” He put out his and and I shook it. “Bernie J. Kristol,” he added. “At my age you grow into your first name. The rest feels left over from another time. I was just under your dorm, checking the water feeds.”

“How long have you been on Bernal?”

He smiled. “I was here when the place was bare, before they put in the land and greenery. The lake was a big hole, the river a muddy ditch.” I pictured what he was saying, and a great sense of excitement went through me. “They said we were crazy to build a habitat so big.”

“Why did they think that?”

“Accidents, maintenance problems. More people are in danger if something goes wrong. But it’s still the biggest and going strong. Where you from?”

“New York City.”

“I have a son and grandson there. My house is over in North Low-G. Those of us who built Bernal got a chance to stay. They still seem to need me, even though I’ve trained quite a few replacements.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Only trouble is they assign my trainees elsewhere as soon as I get them ready.”

“You must do a good job.” I found myself liking him a lot.

“You know what’s what when you train with me on the service level,” he boasted, but it didn’t bother me. He was obviously telling the exact truth.

“How many people work with you?”

“Oh, maybe a few hundred. But when they get stuck on some problem, it’s easier to call me than to work it out from scratch.”

“Is it everywhere under the surface, the service level?”

“Come to my office and I’ll arrange a tour. Need a job?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll take a tour.”

“Fine.” He was looking at me closely, as if I were a special person. “Well, I have to go. Take care of yourself.”

He climbed down into the opening. I guessed that he had to be at least seventy to have been here when Bernal was being built, but I couldn’t imagine him slowing up until he was at least a hundred.

The round hatch jerked on its hinges and closed with a hiss, leaving a shiny cover where the grass had grown. I imagined Bernie’s stocky shape loping through the tunnels, his face blasted by flickering blue light as he moved through a world of water pumps, power conduits, air shafts, and waste pipes, which functioned invisibly between the inner garden and the vacuum of space. I was looking forward to seeing it.

After a moment I noticed movement on the gym field below. A group of young women in shorts were shooting arrows at targets on the gym wall, and it occurred to me that Bernal’s spin should create a coriolis effect, curving the paths of the arrows slightly right or left. Coriolis acceleration is the variation in speed as you move inward or outward from the axis of a rotating object. Hurricanes swirl eastward in Earth’s northern hemisphere, westward in the southern; tubs drain in a right-handed swirl in the north, left-handed in the south. I recalled the graffiti about peeing on Bernal that I had seen on the shuttle, but I could see no curves in the flight of the arrows. Bernal was too big, its rotation too slow to create a noticeable coriolis effect.