solid, worthy job-flying a jet in Gray’s skies, pushing along the organic chemistry-
The interviewer looked uneasy. “Well, since you won’t go there… our time’s almost up and-”
Again, I am falling over Gray.
Misty auburn clouds, so thin they might be only illusion, spread below the ship. They caught red as dusk fell. The thick air refracted six times more than Earth’s, so sunsets had a slow-motion grandeur, the full palette of pinks and crimsons and rouge-reds.
I am in a ramjet-the throttled growl is unmistakable-lancing cleanly into the upper atmosphere. Straps tug and pinch me as the craft banks and sweeps, the smoothly wrenching way I like it, the stubby snout sipping precisely enough for the air’s growing oxygen fraction to keep the engine thrusting forward.
I probably should not have come on this flight; it is an uncharacteristic self-indulgence. But I could not sit forever in the station to plot and plan and calculate and check. I had to see my handiwork, get the feel of it. To use my body in the way it longed for.
I make the ramjet arc toward Gray’s night side. The horizon curves away, clean hard blue-white, and- chungl-I take a jolt as the first canister blows off the underbelly below my feet. Through a rearview camera I watch it tumble away into ruddy oblivion. The canister carries more organic cultures, a new matrix I selected carefully back on the station, in my expanded mode. I watch the shiny morsel explode below, yellow flash. It showers intricate, tailored algae through the clouds.
Gray is at a crucial stage. Since the centuries-ago slamming by the air-giving comets, the conspiracy of spin, water, and heat (great gifts of astro-engineering) had done their deep work. Volcanoes now simmered, percolating more moisture from deep within, kindling, kindling. Some heat climbed to the high cloud decks and froze into thin crystals.
There, I conjure fresh life-tinkering, endlessly.
Life, yes. Carefully engineered cells, to breathe carbon dioxide and live off the traces of other gases this high from the surface. In time. Photosynthesis in the buoyant forms-gas-bag trees, spindly but graceful in the top layer of Gray’s dense air-conjure carbon dioxide into oxygen.
I glance up, encased in the tight flight jacket, yet feeling utterly free, naked. Incoming meteors. Brown clouds of dust I had summoned to orbit about Gray were cutting off some sunlight.
Added spice, these-ingredients sent from the asteroids to pepper the soil, prick the air, speed chemical matters along. The surface was cooling, the Gray greenhouse winding down. Losing the heat from the atmosphere’s birth took centuries. Patience, prudence.
Now chemical concerts in the rocks slowed. I felt those, too, as a distant sampler hailed me with its accountant’s chattering details. Part of the song. Other chem chores, more subtle, would soon become energetically possible. Fluids could seep and run. In the clotted air below, crystals and cells would make their slow work. All in time…
In time, the first puddle had become a lake. How I had rejoiced then!
Centuries ago, I wanted to go swimming in the clear blue seas of Luna, I remember. Tropical waters at the equator, under Earthshine…
What joy it had been, to fertilize those early, still waters with minutely programmed bacteria, stir and season their primordial soup-and wait.
What sweet mother Earth did in a billion years, I did to Gray in fifty. Joyfully! Singing the song of the molecules, in concert with them.
My steps were many, the methods subtle. To shape the mountain ranges, I needed further infalls from small asteroids, taking a century-ferrying rough-cut stone to polish a jewel.
Memories… of a man and more. Fashioned from the tick of time, ironed out by the swift passage of mere puny years, of decades, of the ringing centuries. Worlds take time.
My ramjet leaps into night, smelling of hot iron and- chung!- discharging its burden.
I glance down at wisps of yellow-pearl. Sulphuric and carbolic acid streamers, drifting far below. There algae feed and prosper. Murky mists below pale, darken, vanish. Go!
Yet I felt a sudden sadness as the jet took me up again. I had watched every small change in the atmosphere, played shepherd to newborn cloud banks, raised fresh chains of volcanoes with fusion triggers that burrowed like moles-and all this might come to naught, if it became another private preserve for some Earth-side power games.
I could not shake off the depression. Should I have that worry pruned away? It could hamper my work, and I could easily be rid of it for a while, when I returned to the sleeping vaults. Most in the station spent about one month per year working. Their other days passed in dreamless chilled sleep, waiting for the slow metabolism of Gray to quicken and change.
Not I. I slept seldom, and did not want the stacks of years washed away.
I run my tongue over fuzzy teeth. I am getting stale, worn. Even a ramjet ride did not revive my spirit.
And the station did not want slackers. Not only memories could be pruned.
Ancient urges arise, needs…
A warm shower and rest await me above, in orbit, inside the mother-skin. Time to go.
I touch the controls, cutting in extra ballistic computer capacity and-
- suddenly I am there again, with her.
She is around me and beneath me, slick with ruby sweat.
And the power of it soars up through me. I reach out and her breast blossoms in my eager hand, her soft cries unfurl in puffs of green steam. Aye!
She is a splash of purple across the cool lunar stones, her breath ringing in me- as she licks my rasping ear with a tiny jagged fork of puckered laughter, most joyful and triumphant, yea verily.
The station knows you need this now.
Yes, and the station is right. I need to be consumed, digested, spat back out a new and fresh man, so that I may work well again.
- so she coils and swirls like a fine tinkling gas around me, her mouth wraps me like a vortex. I slide my shaft into her gratefully as she sobs great wracking orange gaudiness through me, her, again, her, gift of the strumming vast blue station that guides us all down centuries of dense, oily time.
You need this, take, eat, this is the body and blood of the station, eat, savor, take fully.
I had known her once-redly, sweet, and loud-and now I know her again, my senses all piling up and waiting to be eaten from her.
I glide back and forth, moisture chimes between us, she is coiled tight, too.
We all are, we creatures of the station.
It knows this, releases us when we must be gone.
I slam myself into her because she is both that woman-known so long ago delicious in her whirlwind passions, supple in colors of the mind, singing in rubs and heats
I knew across the centuries. So the station came to know her, too, and duly recorded her- so that I can now bury my coal-black, sweaty troubles in her, aye! and thus in the Shaping Station, as was and ever shall be, Grayworld without end, amen.
Resting. Compiling himself again, letting the rivulets of self knit up into remembrance.
Of course the station had to be more vast and able than anything humanity had yet known.
At the time the Great Shaping began, it was colossal. By then, humanity had gone on to grander projects.
Mars brimmed nicely with vapors and lichen, but would take millennia more before anyone could walk its surface with only a compressor to take and thicken oxygen from the swirling airs.
Mammoth works now cruised at the outer rim of the solar system, vast ice castles inhabited by beings only dimly related to the humans of Earth.
He did not know those constructions. But he had been there, in inherited memory, when the station was born. For part of him and you and me and us had voyaged forth at the very beginning…
The numbers were simple, their implications known to schoolchildren.
(Let’s remember that the future belongs to the engineers.)
Take an asteroid, say, and slice it sidewise, allowing four meters of headroom for each level-about what a human takes to live in. This dwelling, then, has floor space that expands as the cube of the asteroid size. How big an asteroid could provide the living room equal to the entire surface of the Earth? Simple: about two hundred
