21

SUNSPACER

Sometimes I look toward Earth and see myself sitting in my high school cafeteria, gazing out through the 3-D motion mural at the parade of planets, imagining that I’m falling toward Saturn, into the rings of ice and debris—

—and I have to remind myself that I am out here, in the Rings of Saturn, helping to build a cluster of habitats; major centers are growing in orbit around the largest moons, which together with the rings are a plentiful source of raw materials. There are even plans for a tourist hotel.

If the Sun should suddenly expand into a red giant and gobble up the inner worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, civilization out here would merely be warmed, we’re so far away.

Bit by bit, humankind is shaping the resources of Sunspace into places for life. Millions of inner spaces will one day circle the Sun, forming at first a series of spaced rings, and finally a shell of life enclosing the Sun. The planets will be gone by then, used up for raw materials, but the place names and scenic locales will endure inside the habitats.

I have worked my way to the edge of a new life, but I will have to go the rest of the way to see it whole. Mistakes—my own and those of others—wait for me; but there is room for mistakes out here, where they can no longer cost the life of humanity’s only home. Frontiers can absorb errors on a grand scale, you see; that was what was wrong with the rise of technical civilization on the surface of Earth. The vulnerability of an over-crowded, over-industrialized natural planet made human failure count for too much in the last century. Out here, we don’t have to depend on people being perfect; our industrial and human wastes disappear into an ocean of night that can never be polluted. As it happens, we don’t throw much of anything away; most of it goes into our fusion recyclers. Anyway, the point is that humanity is too widespread, too constructive, to ever be in danger of killing itself off again.

“Are you sure you want to go?” I asked Ro at the end of our Mercury contract.

“I want to work in strange places,” she said with a straight face.

By the time we left, the habitat was working smoothly. There were a few problems with shielding, and a small fire in one of the hotel rooms gave us a scare on my birthday. The town lights had been a sprinkle of starlight on the lake that night, when a meteor had knocked out the external optics, throwing the hollow into darkness—but the towns simply kept their lights going until the Sun winked on again. Extra shielding on the outside rig was all that had been needed.

But the most important thing happened just as we were leaving. The big robots arrived and were sent down to Mercury. They would do all the heavy mining, refining, repairs, and launching of slugs. These were the most advanced machines, a thousand times better than the previous ones. Working through computer links, the miners would program these titans to go anywhere on the planet; human eyes would look over their shoulders, going where no human flesh, or previous robots, could survive. Fewer miners would be needed on the surface as time went on; fewer lives would be risked. I thought of the empty underground towns where we had almost lost our lives. Old Merk would finally get its way, and one day the warrens would be destroyed.

Bob Svoboda became a programmer-operator, working with the robot titans and the Brain-Core intelligences. He married Helen Wodka a year after we left.

We ran into quite a few people from the Mercury project around Saturn, Jake and Linda among them. Both are interested in the same project Ro and I have applied for—as hands on the expedition to Titan’s north pole. A large amphibious crawler-submarine will be placed on the surface, if possible, and it will try to reach the pole, by submerging if necessary. The training will be invaluable, and the experience might help us get on one of the big habitat starships now under construction around Titan.

It’s awesome here in the Rings. The big planet’s beauty creeps up on you, no matter how long you’ve been here. The planet seems nearby, floating casually, except something that big can’t really be casual. In my sleep I sink through its mysterious ocean of gas and liquid, feeling with my feet for a bottom which may or may not be there, thousands of miles below . . .

A dozen habitats are nearing completion around Titan alone. Ro and I learned today that the Centauri Starship’s crew will be chosen from those of us who go on the polar jaunt. It’s the only way of having a chance at the starship.

Where is home?

All of Sunspace is home. Those of us who work outside Earth’s planetary womb are the eyes, ears, and hands of humanity, reaching out to the stars. Our Sun is only a common star, but the starlight sings eternal across the Milky Way, which is only one of the countless galaxies fleeing toward the edge of space-time. To go out among them, you have to keep changing; you have to burn inside, to hold back the dark; you have to want the vastness that is so full of possibilities, and know that it is a place of infinite beauty in which to test human courage and intelligence; you must feel deep space opening up in your heart, drink the strange light that flows into your eyes from far stars, and love the singing silence in your ears.

You have to care a lot.