The lack of gravity around the central docking bay didn’t surprise me. The Estrella Rom had been constructed (so to speak; “agglomerated” or “amassed” would be more accurate) using the oldest and cheapest design capable of simulating something like gravity: a wheel.
Okay, that was the basic design of the Burroughs, too, but there the similarity ended. The Estrella Rom spun like crazy on its axis to generate enough centrifugal force to keep all the calcium in its inhabitants’ bones from leaching out. No cutting-edge alien tech here. No gravity generators, no variable acceleration zones to facilitate coupling with arriving ships. There’s no way to know whether the designer intended to add those things later on to his gypsy paradise but ran out of funds, or whether he simply didn’t give a damn that the residents of his little world would have to choose between weightlessness and being dizzy all the time.
We passed through an airlock that Yuri Gagarin would have found old-fashioned. The Estrella Rom looked even more makeshift on the inside than it did on the outside. Now hanging on by a metal ring that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bronze Age museum exhibit, now pushing off with one foot from a tin plate on which I could still read the faded letters of an antediluvian earthling soda pop ad, Vasily floated and rebounded with simian agility. If I hadn’t known he’d been locked in an anti-Psi cell for the past three years, I would have assumed he’d spent his whole life leaping like a mountain goat. Jump, rebound, push off—until, as we moved farther from the center, his feet began to be attracted, only weakly at first, by one of the bulkheads.
I imitated him, silently startled to find seams joined with rivets, superglue, solder. I had read of such things only in history surveys. In the Burroughs, as in all the ships that docked there, they only used universal joints and molecular diffusion seams. When I noticed a pair of ancient plates joined with staples and waterproofed with something that looked exactly like a wad of used chewing gum, I decided to stop getting astonished, to avoid short-circuiting my positronic net.
I couldn’t help it, though. The farther Vasily and I went into the labyrinth of passageways and forking paths in the station (it turned out to be much larger on the inside than seemed possible), the looks of the people we passed made the improvised architecture appear almost normal by comparison.
When I first heard this was an independent Romani orbital I may have had the naïve impression that I’d find it full of campfires, mustachioed fiddlers with polka-dotted bandannas around their heads and daggers in their belts, barefoot dancers, knife fights, trained bears—who knows what I was expecting. Anything but this outlandish exhibition of space suits, each more worn-out and patched-up than the last (even the best of them would never have passed muster on the Burroughs; some EVA suits didn’t even appear to have oxygen tanks), and almost without exception virtually coated in monograms, stickers, and buttons from every imaginable source, from ancient Russian stamps celebrating the prehistoric Interkosmos program to logos for the ephemeral Asteroidal Republic of Ceres, not to mention flags and national emblems for every country past and present, from New Botswana to the Valles Marineris Federation on Mars.
Everybody carried their helmets dangling carelessly from their belts, or at best in place but with the faceplates raised. All the same, they seemed ready and able to respond in a matter of seconds if the aging and over-patched station hull suffered a loss of structural integrity.
Some casually nodded at Vasily in passing. A pair of guys, one shaved bald and one with dreadlocks floating like a halo around his head, even exchanged a couple of words with him. It sounded like Standard Anglo-Hispano but with an exotic syntax and substandard pronunciation, and half the words weren’t even in my vocabulary. At least, not with the meanings they seemed to give them.
“Hey, gachó, fresh from the tank?”
“Me likes tu tail, Vas, buratino palsie now?”
“Salve, Jor, what kinda cachorros?”
“Tough monga, Vas, take care tu greenshell. The Old Man te espera.”
During a pause I asked him about this curious language and about the second-rate space suits I saw everywhere, almost all of which looked incapable of doing their job.
He shrugged. “Oh, that. I forget you’re a greenshell. A novato, I mean. A newbie, a newcomer. That’s the old Rom jargon mixed with prison slang. Every subculture creates its own language, and these guys are real good at it. But luckily I speak a little of their dialect, and there’s always a sub-lingua franca that all the sabandijas in the system speak, like Anglo-Hispano for misfits. They’re on top of what’s happening. News spreads faster than light here—not only because of the illegal Web. They already knew I got sprung, and they can see you ain’t just a greenshell, you’re a pozzie—what they call a buratino. And the space suits? Of course they work, believe it or not. Good thing, too. Everything you see here has been holding up to micrometeorites for nearly a century, and they’ve never given it a good maintenance check or overhauled it como Dios manda. Plates are always failing, joints lose their seal, solder splits,” Vasily muttered with another shrug. “Oh, space isn’t what it used to be. But if Magellan could cross the old oceans of Earth in a leaky boat, why should these guys worry? If the hull springs a leak they hold their breath, plug it, and celebrate with home brew. Till it’s time to plug the next leak. At least they’re free here; they don’t pay taxes or serve in any army but their own.”
I didn’t think freedom could make up for some sorts of deprivation, but I didn’t say so. We continued making our way through chambers and
