“They can’t take it tonight.”
Garrett stopped after a while and stood on the topdeck, squeezing Val’s hand. The water rippled in fascinating patterns, and the power-generating sheets glinted in big squares nearby, absorbing energy from chaos. He’d made this place, but what good was all the hardware?
“Don’t let Leda do this to you!” said Val.
He gave her a smile and excused himself, needing to think. He took the exterior stairs down. People were dancing on an improvised stage wreathed in something like boxing-ring ropes, with some scarily hacked stereo speakers actually floating and lighting the water with strobe flashes as they thumped. He clutched the rail, queasy from seeing the rickety, bobbing dance floor.
“Hey, the man of the hour!” The voice boomed from below, but the emcee was Noah, gecko-gloved and hanging on the station’s outer wall like it was a perfectly normal pose. Noah carefully pulled one of his hands off the wall, waved, and looked down at the crowd. He pointed at Garrett, drawing people’s eyes to him. “Captain Fox here took me in when I thought I’d die. Now the Lord hasn’t called me home, and I’m not gonna remind Him! Let’s hear it for the Captain!”
The applause rattled off Castor itself and turned to thunder in his ears. A bunch of Pilgrims, drifters, scientists, gamblers, misfits and tourists were partying here like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“I also want to thank him for — for Leda. She’s behind a lot of the planning for tonight, but if not for Fox, I wouldn’t be here to say so. I think you all know it, but… I love you, Leda.”
A whoop from the audience drowned out anything else he said, and then the music came up again and even Garrett could see how relieved Noah was. Garrett smiled and descended the rest of the way, happy for them and glad to be back out of the limelight.
Still, wasn’t the whole gang here doomed? Leda might be a good administrator for her own group. But if Castor ended up with taxes and a thicket of laws and central control like she seemed to want, then Castor would return to being an impractical pipe dream. Too far outside the norm to be allowed to exist. Whether through giving into one too many outside demands or just bleeding money slowly, her rule would lead to all this stuff getting dismantled. All of the people here would have to leave, and give up on whatever had brought them here.
“Thank you,” said a robot. It was that version of Mana, or Zephyr, whatever it — he — was now. The body looked cruder than Zephyr’s, improbably draped in a suncloth cape and a belt pouch that held a knife.
“What are you, anyway?” said Garrett.
“I don’t know yet, sir.” The Mana robot had literally not yet made a name or a unique voice for himself. “Now I can find out. Here I don’t need a license to exist.”
Garrett looked the robot in the eyes, seeing its no-frills, expressionless face. He was wondering, as he had with Zephyr, what was behind it. He supposed that if this Mana could survive here, it — he — deserved to stay, and to grow however he could. Garrett clapped the robot on one shoulder and said, “Good luck to you.”
“Sir, there’s more. I’m sharing with the others. I don’t really understand yet. They’re going to keep getting better.”
“Good! I look forward to it.”
If it all lasted. Garrett was soon alone again in the crowd, trying to balance as people danced by. There were Security men on standby to make it less likely that someone would drown, but it might still happen and he’d be blamed. He sighed, feeling powerless again. Overwhelmed. He retreated to his office and shut the door. He didn’t understand why staring at the station tonight felt like falling into infinity, or how it was possible for so many people to have come here because of an idea.
The wooden box with his father’s things comforted him. Garrett had brought it all the way out here, and the spyglass may have saved his life. Now he looked into the box and on a whim lifted out the compass, a connection to the past. He wondered if his ancestors had felt the same way about it, leaving it there as irrelevant while they went off and did other things. Leda and Phillip certainly wouldn’t have let them ignore such a trinket, had they known about it. It was important in its own way, wasn’t it?
Garrett found a length of cord and ran it through the loop at the compass’ edge, then slipped the cord around his neck. The little weight settled coldly against his chest, hidden under his shirt. He didn’t know what to make of it. He shook his head and stepped outside again, where lights speared the sky and music shook the ocean.
So many people! They couldn’t really be out here partying and make it completely safe. If keeping everything under control was his job, he’d have no choice but to confine people to an indoor room like it was a high school prom. Drugs and liquor flowed and dolphins watched curiously from a distance, like dogs eyeing a caveman’s fire. Everything would have to change soon, under Leda, and then there’d be no room for nights like this.
Nights like this…
Garrett staggered and found that his eyes were full of tears. Hundreds of voices, hundreds of lives intertwined here, flowing from every corner of the world to live together in peace. Everything that he’d done had led to this night, and for the moment he didn’t care about the machines or the money or anything else, so long as people could be here doing this. When had he ever dreamed of profit figures or production ratios? This was his ambition. This was the dream made real, beyond anything he’d thought possible. Now he was heading back to the dance floor and calling up to Noah, trying to get his attention without knowing quite what he was doing.
Noah talked and someone pushed an old microphone into Garrett’s hands. The music faded out and people gave him room, glancing curiously at him. No, he thought. They shouldn’t be looking at me.
“Look!” said Garrett, making his voice boom out over the sea. It didn’t sound like his own voice. His thoughts whirled and he didn’t know how to process them in a nice logical form, so they tumbled from him. “Look at Castor! Everybody together made this place possible, but it wasn’t because I pushed you around. You all are individuals who came here for your own reasons, and we trusted you to live your own lives. I trusted you, and look what you’ve achieved! We’re here with a colony, and if we let it, it’s going to grow and grow.
“This is why I came here! I don’t give a damn about the money, the politics or even the tech if we can be out here together, living our lives in peace without anyone trying to order us around. That’s what freedom is!”
Garrett was terrified, white-knuckled on the microphone and feeling the weight of their attention, the heat of all the frustration and sense of being trapped, tied down, hemmed in — bursting away from him. “This isn’t a perfect place and it’s never going to be. But we can make it different than what people are used to — not another grey bureaucracy, but maybe the one place in the world where you get nothing for free and for the best of your effort — everything. Anything you can imagine and manage to create. No one can take it from you. Castor can be the place where you can live without limits.”
His voice faltered. Who was he to say all this, when he was practically copying --
A long line of heroes. He was a ridiculous, insignificant sham, but he was also part of a very long battle for the soul of the human race. The thought made him shiver, suddenly calm and able to speak with a voice that again seemed not his own, too deep and strong.