The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Despite Bharat trumpeting the largest IT skill pool on the planet, Ashwin knows that he and every other body on its live-skin couch only got there because of strong body mapping. It still took him many shifts to feel his way into a new, weightless body to which modules could be added or swapped. His hands and arms are obviously the wiry little manipulators-though no human arm ever experienced the sensation of detaching itself and swinging, hand-over-hand to a new attachment point elsewhere on the body. His legs he regards as the fan-pods, his lungs the lift bags and the curved silver shell his body, the center of his being. The slave units, hooked up according to work schedule, were more difficult, but he has learned a way; he expands his sense of self to incorporate them. I am vast, I contain multitudes. It still takes some minutes after the computers flick him home at light-speed to snap out of three-hundred-sixty-degree vision. The rabbit-eye sight of his hundreds of optical sensors has taught Ashwin truths about how body shapes consciousness. The universe of meat is divided rigidly into front and back, visible and invisible. Objects are sought out, selected, made part of the view. Morphology begets psychology. Ashwin, like a divinity, sees everywhere at once. There is no forward or backward, up or down, just movement toward a destination or away from it.

It is this aspect of his job that he finds hardest to tell others. His parents nod and say how good it is that he has employment and good steady money but they do not comprehend what he is doing up there, let alone how he feels doing it. They are one generation away from believing that gods live in the sky. He does not want to tell them that, in a sense, they do. The girls are a little more sophisticated; they know about other planets and terraforming. Mars! How exciting! How romantic! Is it really really dangerous? Do you face sandstorms and explosions and volcanoes? Telling them that Mars is a quiet, placid sort of place, where what action there ever was happened billions of years ago, is not what they want to hear but they have passed on anyway, for these women also know what kind of work the corporadas hire for, and how little it pays.

He feels locked. The cable grippers bind molecule to molecule with the lift points. Ready, Ashwin says. Coprates control whispers clearance in his inner ear: the site foreman waves her hand. Take her up. Fans swivel to full lift. Winches wind in the strain. Flicker-lasers torch up: these loads require every gram of lift. Ashwin feels motor/muscles tense, strut-bones strain. He mentally grits his teeth. You are a weight lifter, going for the clean lift.

The rosette of twelve linked LTAs pulls the five-hundred-meter diameter glass hexagon clear from the sand. Ashwin lifts straight for a hundred meters, then tilts the whole array from side to side to clear it of lingering dust and dead glass-weavers. Gently, gently. The glass is engineered to tolerances far beyond terrestrial norms, and the gravity slight, but one crack, three kilometers up… Tiny crystal shells cascade from the edges of the roof pane like iridescent snow. The great glass light heliographs in the sun. The forewoman raises an arm in salute as Ashwin gains cruising altitude. It is a sight he never tires of, this resurrection of glass from the earth. Two kilometers up, bearing 5.3 pi rad, Pier 112, 328. Pane 662, 259.

Telephone number engineering.

Beneath him graders are leveling billion-year-old outwash hills for new glass fields. Ahead, the buried panes are stains in the sand, a mesh of linked hexagons. Tiny machines, working, working. Ashwin reflects a moment on the incomplete dome of Kharar railway station, then a proximity alert gently chides him: Heavy Lift Array 2238 is on approach to pick up. Day and night the LTAs carry and set, busy and sterile as drone bees.