bruises.
And then I felt High Steel move. You’ve heard the theorists, that it got caught in a gravitational eddy from the mass-momentum drive as the BDO stabilized its orbit. What it felt like, Gaby, was every part of everything around you, and every part of yourself, down to the atoms, held by something and gently but firmly pulled. Like falling, with nothing to hold on to, except the human body next to you.
I’m not asking your forgiveness for this, Gaby. You would do the same with the first human body that floated by.
I thought we were coming apart; all that was happening was High Steel was being dragged into an orbit in line with the BDO’s axis and spun up to match its rotation. We’re turning in time with the BDO.
So: the arrival of the BDO. What did it feel like? It felt like God had come. In every sense of the word, polite and impolite. The fearful depression that gripped us during the orbital approach has been burned away by a sense of quasi-spiritual euphoria and activity. We’re here, we’re alive, we’ve got holy work to do. It’s almost as if the BDO
What they really are is Chaga. Vacuum-adapted Chaga, carpeting the hills and valleys of the forward end and cylinder sides. This close, you can make out individual details; some of the formations are thousand of feet high. They diminish in size toward the edge. In a way, I find this riot of alien life almost homely: I’ve spent much of my professional life looking out from high windows across vast discs of Chaga. It’s actually smaller than many of the longer-established terrestrial symbs -certainly much smaller than the Nyandarua-Kilimanjaro-Mount Elgon Chaga. That puts it into perspective.
Our three tugs are out mapping the exterior. Two are working the cylinder body – one has a specific mission to move along the windows and photograph as much information about the interior as possible but its view is largely obscured by clouds – and the third is hovering over the forward end, running full spectrum scans of the surface, probing for possible means of ingress. God, I am starting to sound like them. Good joke, though: it comes all this way and forgets to build a front door. I don’t think so, somehow. First Wave Team Red are out there in the tug pod, ready to go in if they find an entrance. Team Yellow is down in the airlock, preparing to en-pod for tug pick-up. We’re on Orange Alert, the call could come at any time. Horribly seductive, this style of talking.
Hold on. What? Shit. Jesus Christ. All right. Sorry Gab. Got to go. Team Red just lucked out.
No, Gaby. Your eyes deceive you not. Take a good look, Gaby, because nobody on the planet ever got a videogram like this. I could look at it all day, and day here lasts a week. Why didn’t they pack poets or writers or musicians on Operation Final Frontier, folk who could do justice to this place and not just measure it and analyse it and record it. I’ll put the camera up here so you can see the cylindrical land behind me. I really haven’t an awful lot of time; now we’re on the ground, there’s always something needs doing or reporting or observing. From Zen indolence to karoshi. But the Passengers are paying their fares now.
The story so far. I got abruptly called away from my last note to you because Team Red out there over the forward end suddenly found a mile-wide section of spin axis opening up in front of them. It was the classic sci-fi cliche: ‘The door dilated.’ Like the aperture of a camera. After half an hour obtaining permission from Earth, they moved the tug into the opening. What they found inside, as you’ve doubtless seen on the television, was an airlock about three miles long – that’s what the cavities in the partitions are – and at the other end of it; is this. A cylindrical buckyball jungle, sixty kilometres deep, four hundred and fifty round.
It’s a good thing, I suppose, that a lot of these Right Stuff astronauts have had imagination bypasses. If it had been me, coming through with the tug into freefall atmosphere, I’d still be there, turning with the world, blissfully out of my head. What they did do was dump Team Red’s pod down in the micro-gravity on the lip of the inner airlock door, and cycle out back to High Steel.
We came through this morning. Just in time; High Steel was getting mighty stinky with Unity moving its troops up to the front as fast as it can get tugs turned around. I could have killed the stupid accountant who decided it was not economically viable to put windows in tug pods. You cannot see it on the television monitors. Did I say that to you once, back in the Mara? You used to video things all the time. I bet you never watched any of them.
There’s an unexplored land down there, bigger and wilder than all the game reserves of Kenya.
When you step outside and touch it with your eyes, that’s when you see it. You can do this, here. It violates every sensibility of space exploration: zero gravity, but atmosphere. Too thin to be breathable, but sufficiently warmed by the light through the five slit windows to allow an almost shirt-sleeves environment. Three layers, a breather mask, and a tether so that you don’t get taken away on the funny winds that get spun up by the Coriolis force. The pseudo-gravity well steepens quickly; seventy miles straight down gives you time to do a lot of screaming.
What did I feel when I stepped out of the pod airlock? Unreality. Sheer human disbelief. A valley one hundred and fifty kilometres wide you can visualize – complete with rivers and couple of land-locked small seas – but the mind will not permit a
So, here we are. Now, what do we do?
They’ve brought new accommodation modules up from Unity – much bigger than the standard tug pods – and they’ve got
Tomorrow, I will follow them. Team Green is going down to the curving land. Love to you, Gaby. Wish me well, wish me a thousand things. Funny, I’m not scared any more. I’ve got land under my feet, I can draw strength from that. I’ve got to go now; as I said, there’s always something to do here, and there’s a tug going back to High Steel in ten minutes that can take this disc -there, can you see it? Holding station up there in the spin axis. Hope this letter finds you, wherever you are. Love to you, Gaby Mc Asian.
I’ve just heard. Message from Team Red. They say there are
Gaby McAslan ejected the disc from the PDU and rested her chin on her arms on the Landcruiser’s steering