Space Stations

For we are like you and him and I, a life-form that evolution could not produce on the rich loam of Earth. The blunt edge of selection could birth forth and then burst forth, yes. But to conjure a Station thing—a great, sprawling metallo-biocyberthing such as we and you—takes grander musics, such as I know.

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.”