20

THE HABITAT

By the time I got up to the asteroid in mid-July, the rocky inner surface of the hollow was dotted with the lights of work camps, creating an atmosphere of underground gloom within the ten-kilometer-long space. A gentle spin had been put on the big potato, a tenth-g to start, to make it easier to move around. Teams of specialists were hard at work, even as the rest of the workers and equipment continued to arrive.

Bob and I came in through the big locks at one end of the hollow world. As we passed inside and looked out across the open space, I thought of all the work that still had to be done. It was hard to imagine that these hundreds of square kilometers of rock and mud would ever begin to look like the out of doors I had come to know on Bernal.

But it would; I knew it would—as surely as Bernal’s inner surface had been changed from a curving plane of metal. When the rock crunchers finished their work, carefully balanced humus would be mixed in to create a layer of rich soil over the bedrock; ground water would run into the lakes and streams cut for it; nitrogen-fixing trees would be put in, along with plants and shrubs that did not need fertilizer, along with a select number of insects, snails, and small animals; finally, human beings would invade the landscape and make it their own.

It sounds easy when you leave out all the detailed steps, but it’s hard to make an ecology work; everything is related to everything else, and you can get unexpected results if you don’t do the measurements right. Strip mining during the last century on Earth had taught us the difficulties of restoring damaged ecosystems, but imagine building one from scratch.

Fortunately, our specialists had done it all before, mistakes and all.

“This seems like work for a god,” I said, surveying the barrenness, “not for human beings. Can’t even imagine starting on the towns. A year or two won’t be enough.”

“Just do the land,” Bob replied, “and leave the houses to us. It’ll be much easier than what we had to build on Mercury.”

I sniffed. “Air isn’t very tasty.” It had been put in out in the Asteroids, using oxygen cracked from an ice asteroid. Industrial recyclers were cleaning up the CO2, but the strain on the machines was becoming more noticeable as more workers arrived.

“Better than suits,” Bob said. “We’ll last until the trees and plants take over.”

“I suppose.”

“Mom always wanted an open-air patio and garden.”

“She’ll have it all.”

“Is it time?” I asked.

“Any moment now,” he said.

We gazed across the hollow, waiting. There was a distant sound from the other end, like soft thunder or something opening. I strained to see by the starlight of the work camps.

Slowly, the far end of the asteroid began to glow a dull red, brightening suddenly as the optical systems flooded the hollow with the tamed yellow-white glare of the Sun. The feeling of being deep underground was gone. A desert of rock and varicolored sands presented us with its first sunrise.

Seeing the lights go on in this drafty, dusty hollow moved me deeply, lighting me up inside, making me feel at last that I was going to be myself, and that I had found my way to what I needed.

And I realized that the Sunspace Settlements were everything that the New World had tried to be—a place where humankind could begin the world all over again, free of the Old World’s conflicts. America had failed, as Earth had failed, until the sky had been opened, making available the riches of Sunspace, giving humanity its first chance at a genuine high-energy, high-technology society, in which scarcity would no longer be the measure of economic value; that evil, at least, would die.

The problem of Mercury was a shameful throwback to the twentieth century, maybe even to the nineteenth, but it would soon be a thing of the past. Thirty people had died in the last quake; over a hundred had been injured. Bernie had been crushed in our room. His ashes were here now, mixed with the soil materials of the habitat. There was nothing special about that; most organic materials were recycled in some way, but I thought it was fitting anyway. For me he would always be here, alive in the land we were about to shape, as active in my mind as he was in the mind of Bernal.

“Good morning,” I said finally.

“It’s really late afternoon,” Bob replied with a straight face. “We’ll have to adjust that on the clocks.”

We laughed, and a great sense of relief came over me. I had brooded over Bernie’s death for some weeks, remembering that last moment in the tunnel when we had said good night so casually. It was so wrong for him to be killed right after he had regained his health. I remembered our first meeting, when he had emerged from Bernal’s depths, and I knew what he would say about his death. What did we expect? That we could come here to right a great wrong and not be touched by it? I could almost hear the sound of his piping voice, and I knew that he was right.

But did it have to be you, Bernie?

* * *

I learned to run one of the crunchers, mind-linking with the machine for six hours a day. We had regular days now, with vitamin-D sunlight, which helped our biorhythms. I bit into the asteroid and ripped out huge chunks of rock, swallowing and digesting each mouthful. A fine powder spilled out the back and was mixed with organics. Dark squares of fertile land were laid over the bedrock desert, all around the curve of the world.

I also linked with the beam diggers, helping to cut the groove for the equatorial river. The lake basin was by far the prettiest piece of work we did in the first six months.

During the Christmas holidays, the engineers set up large screens throughout the hollow and fed us transmissions from Earth while we worked; it was the only way of doing something festive for five thousand people. Relatives appeared and recited sappy wishes in a dozen languages. I almost didn’t recognize Mom when she came on: confident, beautiful, and adventurous-looking in her plain work clothes; an entirely new person, which she was, in a sense. Ro saw my father, but I was not at the right screen at that moment. I did get a message from him, telling me how much more gift credit had been added to my account.

The miners had a pretty homey Christmas down on bouncy old Merk, but there was no way they could have invited five thousand guests. Ro and I had to turn down the invitation from the Svobodas; we didn’t want to seem like privileged characters, even if there had been enough shuttles in good working order. Besides, I was a bit wary of putting myself in Merk’s clutches again.

Bob came up with a basket of goodies and spent some time with us in our tent. The ship from Earth arrived with a better class of food that week, so we did pretty well. Still, I was glad when the holidays were over. It was nice the way Earth kept us company via the screen relay casts, but the giant figures were at times irritating.

At the start of 2058, Rosalie and I were living in makeshift barracks; depending on where the day’s work took us, that’s where we would find a bunk. It was a big improvement over tents. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for weeks at a time. She was part of the group bringing up waste materials from Mercury. I worried about her a lot.

As the crunchers finished munching, large waste tanks went up in each sector, and slowly the treated organics were turned into the soil. The amalgam smelled a bit, but after a time it began to give off the odor of rich, black earth. I was surprised at how much waste human beings could produce.

Think of a huge shallow pot made of rock and fill it with soil; that’s what the inside of the asteroid was, basically. There was always the chance that the organic fill would die or dry out before we put in the growing things; a few sectors failed once or twice, which depressed many of us, but the bio-ecologs just shrugged and started again. When you listened to them, they sounded like a bunch of gardeners.

We laid the land deep, more than five meters in some places; you could dig down into the rock if you needed deeper basements. It was still a few hundred meters to the outer surface of the big potato, more than enough shielding from solar radiation—more, in fact, than you get from Earth’s atmosphere. One of the advantages in building inside a hollow asteroid is that you don’t have to provide sunstorm shelters for your workers. Building a habitat on the Bernal or O’Neill cylinder model requires a large number of solar radiation shelters until the main shielding is in place. Shelters are small and cramped, limiting the size of the work force; the asteroid provides immediate safety for a large number of workers, as well as serving as a base for future construction projects nearby, which can then follow any desired model.

There were some disagreements about landscaping. The miners had their ideas, and we had ours; but since we were doing so much of the work, many of our planners felt we should decide. The ecologs insisted that they knew best what would work in the long run. They didn’t care what else the miners did inside the hollow, as long as they left the biocomponents alone; the mother-nature crew got its own way in the end. Mostly.

They started losing interest by the time the job was half done and most of the serious problems were under control; new challenges were waiting—like the Ceres project, which was just beginning out in the Asteroids.

The quick-grow trees, plants, and bushes, insect eggs, snails, fish, and small animals began to arrive long before we were actually ready for them, so we piled them in large dumps on the empty land—crates and cages, big pots, bags of special food and spot fertilizers, and mysterious sealed containers with printed notices warning you to play the enclosed instructions. At first we couldn’t get enough stuff shipped from Earth, and we had to wait around for things we needed; later we couldn’t stop the flow. I was astonished at how much human beings could produce when they wanted to. Eventually we used up everything, and it turned out to be just enough; someone had done a neat job of planning.

The hills of the hollow sloped gently. Three shallow valleys hugged the river, whose banks were steep to allow for gradual wear; the lake was deep and cool, just right for a nearby vineyard or two. The ecologs got the air movements right—a gentle breeze between periods of stillness. The oppressive Sun of Mercury’s lifeless landscape was merely warm here, its intensity trapped within an image of itself, varying to drive the weather and nourish the greenery and people, dimming into moonlight at night; it was a dutiful Sun.

There were no extreme seasons. The thermometer might fall to ten degrees centigrade, but only because the population wanted it. Well, almost everyone wanted it that way when the meeting to decide such matters had been called.

As we completed the heavy work, half the population of Mercury was already building houses, while the other half continued hurling tribute at Earth; a surplus of metal slugs had been achieved because of the high morale, and production did not suffer. Earth was getting more consideration than it deserved. Luckily, the next year and a half saw only a few minor quakes.

House building went quickly, but the codes required that each dwelling or town unit fit into the habitat’s water, electrical, and communications system, as well as into the carrying capacity of the ecological measurements; this meant a lot of inspection and correction work.

The habitat’s spin was increased to simulate fifty percent of Earth’s gravity, and the orbit was made synchronous, high over the mining territories, so that the Sun’s energy could be pumped constantly. Power could now be beamed down to Mercury’s surface during the night by the habitat’s outrider beam units.

About half the workers were rotated in the first two years; as the load lightened, specialists left for new jobs in other parts of Sunspace. Ro and I had no plans. Our credit in the bank was growing, so we decided to stay as long as we were needed. We were free to go, but we felt reluctant to do so.

Almost everyone I had known from school had gone home by 2060—to another job, or back to school. Rosalie, Linda, Jake, and I were the only ones left. About ten percent of the original work force were staying on as trial settlers.

There was a new spirit among the miners, who could now be sure that their families were safe while the shifts went down to Merk. All dangers could not be banished; quakes and accidents could not be controlled completely, but at least it was possible to get away from danger on a regular basis.

One day, when it seemed that there was nothing to do, Ro and I accepted an invitation to the new Svoboda house just outside the town in Valley One. Rosalie and I were living in the new hotel, where we were on call for small jobs. There were still some kinks in the water and electrical systems. I couldn’t do much in recycling, for example, but Bernie had trained me well in electricity, wet and dry plumbing, ceramic carpentry, and in checking a variety of safety and sensing devices. That was my real specialty—troubleshooting safety sensors, knowing when they were giving reasonable feedback to the brain cores. I earned a certificate in this line of work. The closer we got to being done, the more it seemed that there were still a million things left to do. It was hard to say at what point the work ended and became maintenance.

As Ro and I approached the two-floor ceramic module house—it was shaped to suggest a small Swiss castle of the nineteenth century—I realized how much the people were becoming an actual part of our handiwork. The land was green, in part, because of organic waste recycling, and the chain of interdependence reached all the way back to Earth, into human history, and the evolution of life. Human imagination, shaking itself free of past restraints, had created space habitats. Human needs had built the mining community on Mercury. And now we had transplanted and enriched the energy systems of that community, made its use of the Sun and Mercury more humane. Formed when the solar system had been young, this asteroid was no longer a lump of rock and minerals; it had been infected with life, with mind.

At the top of the hill, a few yards from the house, Ro and I turned and saw spring blossoms floating in the river. Clouds drifted in the bright central space. The sun stood guard at the far end of the world. Overhead, the lake was a sparkling mirror. The stars were beneath our feet, just beyond the rocky crust. It was the newness of this world that impressed me daily. Earth’s natural history did not apply here, yet a bit of old Earth was beginning anew.

“Well, hello!” Eleanor said behind us. We turned and saw her standing on her elaborate porch. “The rest are here, you’re very late.”

I looked at her shyly.

“I know, I know,” she said smiling.

Ro looked a bit embarrassed. I took her hand, and we followed Eleanor inside, passing into the dining area just off the large living room.

Robert Svoboda sat at the head of the rectangular table. Bob was next to him. Linda and Jake sat at Robert’s left. Eleanor seated us at Bob’s left, then sat down next to me.

We all smiled. I looked at the handsomely set ceramic table, wondering at how much we had actually changed.

I didn’t say much at dinner, but as I listened to Robert, I came to understand something more about the people of Mercury, and about what was happening in this sector of Sunspace.

“We won’t be miners forever,” he said, “but we’ve given humankind a better hold on this close-in space around the communal furnace. One day the resources of Mercury may run out, or become unnecessary. Materials synthesis from simpler raw materials is not far off, but when that happens we’ll still have world habitats here, an economy, our own way of life. That’s what will be important. Human beings are spreading throughout Sunspace. They’ll be living in a thousand ways, changing physically, readying themselves for the stars. This diversity will help us if we run into an alien species. We’ll need poets and storytellers to depict these different ways, just to keep Sunspacer humanity together—in its imaginative self-image, if in no other way.” He was looking at me, as if he expected me to do all these things. It was right that the town in Valley One was going to be named after him.

“What will you and Ro do when you’re finished?” Eleanor asked.

“Probably go back to school,” I said. “We have more than enough to take care of ourselves for a few years.”

“Maybe we’ll go out to the Ceres Project,” Ro added. “I’d like to see an asteroid eight hundred kilometers across.”

I still wasn’t certain about anything, but I wasn’t worrying about it as much.

Later, I left Ro at the hotel and climbed into the grassy hills above the town. I felt a bit amused at myself. What had I proven? I still couldn’t see beyond one problem following another, orbiting the biggest one, myself—the one I would always have with me. You push back at the universe and come out ahead. Sometimes. Problems would never stop coming at me, and I would have to do something about each and every one. They want you to solve them, and there is nothing else. I wondered if it was different for Morey. Maybe he had escaped all this, by giving himself to so much ambitious understanding. It was a way out of himself, and I still admired him for it; but I had to find my own way out of my own maze.

I lay down in the grass and flowers, and gazed up into the hollow. Sunlight was a watercolor yellow-white at this late hour, and would stay that way until morning. I closed my eyes and breathed the cool, sweet air. I wondered about my parents. There had been only a half dozen letters in the last year, but that didn’t bother me; they were long letters, even if they didn’t settle old problems. . . .

I opened my eyes and saw Bernie standing over me.

“Bernie,” I whispered, “you’re alive. . . .”

“They stopped looking for me, but I dug myself out,” he said, smiling, looking the same as when he had come out of the hatch on Bernal.

But then my eyes opened again and I was alone, missing him.

I recalled the faces around the table, remembering the way Robert Svoboda had looked at me. If I left them, it seemed that I would lose myself again. Why is it that your sense of self is so often bound up with people you knew well or grew up with? Does the ego put a headlock on uncertainty by making everything part of itself?

Suddenly I felt that I didn’t want to be anything for long. You’re never really one thing anyway—except in those moments when you freeze up. Some people do it early and stay that way, unable to change. My messy face of oatmeal was nothing to fear; I was determined to grow as long as the mush held out, as long as I didn’t give up. Whole cultures on Earth had died rather than change, believing that Earth was all there could be; they had grabbed bits of it and locked them away behind borders. They didn’t know that the stars are suns that burn almost forever, that the universe is rich in all that we will ever need, and we can reach out if we’re rich enough inside to see, to think, to imagine—more than anything to imagine what can be, to keep it in a store of imaginings and pass it on to our future.

Few people my age in human history had seen what I had seen—but in my time I am not very special in that. Alexander had conquered what he could see of the world at my age—and had complained that there were no others. If he could have left Earth, he would have been humbled by the planet’s smallness and the true size of the cosmos; but in his time only cruelty and death could humble the rulers of Earth.

Out here there was no one to steal the land from, as the settlers had from the Indians of the Americas. Space and energy around suns were abundant, but you had to buy these resources with work and caring.

Robert Svoboda cared. Like Bernie, he loved the place where he lived because he had helped create it, becoming part of it, even though he had been born elsewhere; it was as if Mercury had been waiting for him. The miners had taken the Sun’s strength into their minds and bodies, and one day that energy would flow out across sunspace not only as resources and physical power, but as art, music, and science. All the conditions for a human society were here, the makings of a culture.

I had been wrong to feel sorry for those trapped here by a lifetime of low gravity. This sector of space was their home, not Earth, however hard living here had been on their parents. I exercised, so I could go back, but they didn’t care, even though the habitat’s gravity increase would make it easier for their children to travel elsewhere. More habitats would be built, and for future generations of Mercurians the big Sun’s light would sing eternal and be part of what they meant by home, until that faraway day when their habitats might choose to become mobile and head out to the stars.

Much of the prejudice against Sunspacers, I learned, had come from the deeply rooted notion that expansion into space meant the settling of other Earthlike planets, not building new worlds from scratch in free space or terraforming hostile planets like Venus and Mars. Free space habitats, I came to believe, were the way to go; you might be stealing nursery environments from unborn intelligences if you settled Earthlike planets, even if a particular world might seem deserted when you arrived. Your coming might actually abort a whole line of evolution.

I got up and looked at the night Sun. Something in me needed to look out at the stars, so I walked back into town and borrowed one of the bikes from in front of the hotel.

I pedaled off, away from the Sun, toward the rocky, opposite end of the world, wondering if everyone has a special home somewhere, other than the place he grew up in. I thought of my room in New York. Someone else lived there now.

Home may be where you were born, or it may be elsewhere, even in more than one place; it may be nowhere, for some people. I was still looking around. Maybe it would be back on Earth, out in the Asteroids, or even here.

The road branched and climbed before me. I pumped up the left turn toward the lock tunnel. Above me loomed the unfinished, rocky narrows of the world. I cycled to the large metal door and dismounted. Laying down the bike, I turned and gazed across the length of the hollow.

The night Sun stood guard over the sleeping valleys. Lake and river were pale silver, hills blue-green in the soft light. There was a chill in the air, and I noticed something. There was very little sense here of a mysterious nature which had been here before we appeared. Like Bernal, this world was younger than humanity; only the Sun and rock were ancient. The rest was up front, with no hidden depths. Here nature could not kill human beings as it still did on natural planets.

I turned to face the door and pressed my palm on the lock. The massive panel slid open and I went inside. As the outer door closed, the inner one slid open. I triggered a long string of lights as I came out into the low-ceilinged corridor.

I walked to the observatory at the end of the passage, where I pressed my palm again and stepped into a large circular chamber covered with screens.

Brain-core terminal work desks stood like mushrooms in the central area. I had helped build parts of the modest observatory. From here, the Sun would be monitored and space scanned for debris and meteors; specialists would come from all over to study our star. The research station on Mercury was finally being closed down, to the relief of the staff.

I stepped up to the master controls and turned on the 3-D screens. Half were visual displays; the rest revealed the universe in narrow ranges—the radio universe, the neutrino universe, gravitational images of various sectors—all in color enhancements.

The stars turned, circling like some gigantic clockwork around the axis of the rotating hollow.

As I stood there, seemingly at the center of all immensity, I played an old game with myself, the same one I had played as a child—talking to my future self when I felt down, making him promise to remember me, to think back along the time lines of possibility to where I was in bed that night, thinking ahead to him. . . .

And here I was, that future self, thinking back to that lonely boy who was still with me. Futures cast shadows back into the present. You move ahead as long as you can see the shadows of promises, but when you lose sight of what may be, you bog down in a hopeless present; there is nothing to pull you ahead—the self that looks back is no longer waiting for you up in the future; your future becomes the present, and soon it becomes the past. If I could keep a balance between what I had been, what I was now, and what I might become, then I would be okay for a long time.

I had come to Mercury to gain a sense of doing, of having done something that wasn’t only worthy in itself, as Morey was doing, but to see the good of doing it. Morey would see the result of what he was doing later; I hadn’t been willing to wait. Maybe one day I would become more patient, more willing to look for hidden values.

I didn’t know what lay ahead, and down deep I was glad of it. Life had not closed itself up around me, as it had for so many people of the late twentieth century. I didn’t know where home would be, and that seemed best.

Ro found me as I was cycling back in the morning.

“How is my beautiful boy?” she asked, smiling. I kissed her deeply, shivering in the morning chill.

We went into the hills and stayed in the tall grass until we were very tired.

“So you think you’ve figured me out,” I said later. Ro was looking at me knowingly as we relaxed.

“I think so.”

“We’ve had this conversation before, but go ahead, I’m curious.”

“You were an overprotected kid. You had it easy, but you left home and found out things were very tough for a lot of people, and you felt guilty. You needed to find out—to test yourself, to do something that would give you a sense of responsibility and control. As an only child you needed other people to draw you out of yourself, and you found them. I know—I wanted the same thing.”

“I know all that. What else did we find out?”

“That we can do, and learn, win out over doubts.”

“Is that all? I would have thought it would be more.” I was being deliberately perverse.

“Well—there was the fear of failure to overcome . . .”

“What else? Come on.”

“Well—you started out wanting to be like Morey but decided to be yourself.”

“And is that any good?”

“Different—but just as good.”

“And that’s what you think of me?”

She laughed. “Don’t ask too much. You’re just beginning to be yourself.”

I made a funny face. “How did you find all this out?”

“Oh—Linda told me.”

“What?”

“And Bernie, Jake, Morey, you, and everything around you.”

“Spy!” I bit her bare stomach—gently, of course.

“By the way,” she said after a while, “what are we going to do? Do you want to go out to Ceres, or Saturn? We’ve got to make plans.”

“What do you think?”

“I like going where new things are being done,” she said firmly.

“Same here,” I replied.

The Sun lost its watercolor paleness as it brightened toward noon, and we walked back with its warmth on our faces.