‘Yeah,’ agreed Lina. ‘That’s right.’ She suddenly wondered what they would do if the lift broke now. It occurred to her that nobody knew they were here. And as far as she knew, nobody ever came here. Would it sound some sort of alarm automatically, maybe in maintenance or the offices? She hoped so — supposed so — but in truth she didn’t know.
They ascended through a forest of ceramicarbide trees, the gears of the lift grinding and whirring along the toothed track, accelerating smoothly as they went. The lift’s pace steadied and Lina began to feel noticeably lighter as they neared the hub. Soon the floor below them sank into shadow and was gone. And out of the blackness above them, a vague shape began to congeal.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Marco frankly, turning to look up at Lina. He was stretching up on his toes, trying little hops within the cramped confines of the cage, playing with the diminishing artificial gravity. Lina wasn’t sure exactly, but she supposed they were experiencing about a tenth of one gee now, maybe a bit more with the lift’s own acceleration.
She smiled back at him. ‘The best is still to come,’ she said.
The lift began to slow down, shedding its own manufactured gees and revealing the full effect of their near-weightlessness. They grabbed onto the mesh of the cage to prevent themselves floating upwards into its ceiling. Above them, the convex floor of the hub was becoming clear. The cage rushed towards that grey surface, still slowing, and popped through a hatchway in it, emerging into total darkness. Lina felt Marco’s body tense against her and she reached down to squeeze his shoulder reassuringly. Still the cage was rising, but it was clear, despite the lack of visibility, that it had almost slowed to a stop now. The whining note of the gears on the track had become a muted grumble.
‘Look up,’ said Lina.
She felt Marco’s head move against her as he craned to see. A patch of light was visible up above and they were climbing slowly towards it. That light seemed to descend on them, godlike in the darkness, covering them and flooding them until they emerged into a bright area of shining steel walls and bare architecture. The lift sighed to a stop in the middle of the floor and they drifted gently into the ceiling of the cage, laughing and entangling. They heard the magnetic clamp crash into place.
‘Let us out,’ said Lina, pushing herself back towards the floor and trying to stretch her cramping shoulders.
Marco managed to jimmy the latch undone and push the door open. He practically fell out of the cage, onto a floor with a very pronounced concavity to it. He looked around, eyes wide, then attempted to stand. But he pushed off too hard and drifted up into the air, limbs flailing, crying out in surprise.
‘Whoa! Mum! This is crazy!’ he yelled, bumping gently into the ceiling of the room. The walls were bare, the floor was bare. Apart from the cage, and one door, the room was in fact entirely empty, which was just as well for Marco as he used almost the full space to set himself right.
Lina crammed her body through the door of the cage and stood stretching for a moment, relishing her body’s lightness, feeling the aches flowing out of her muscles.
‘You like it?’ she asked, aware that this was his first brush with micro-gee, at least that he would remember.
Marco laughed, bouncing gingerly several feet into the air then landing with such care that he might have been doing this all his life. ‘I think so. . .’ he said cautiously, ‘yeah.’
‘Well, we’re going further,’ Lina said. ‘Come on.’
There were no handlines here — no handholds of any kind, in fact — and they moved in slow-motion, pushing themselves from wall to floor to ceiling, swimming through the air.
She led Marco through the door into a series of cramped passages with tight crawlspaces leading off into total darkness on either side. They passed a doorless room where some huge and dirty machine lay in disuse, partially covered by a faded green tarpaulin that was tied across its body with nylon rope. Dust lay thickly on all surfaces. The LED lights were far-spaced and weak — the minimum required to actually see. The ceiling was low enough to make Lina bend her neck. Little clanks and groans could be heard, thrumming faintly in the air as if reverberated through the station’s structure to be concentrated on this central space.
They came to a ladder and Lina flew up it, propelling herself easily with little touches from her hands. She called Marco after her.
The hub of Macao Station, at its core, was basically a metal cylinder about five metres across and almost fifty metres long. There were two ropes strung between sturdy hooks embedded in the curved wall, crossing each other in the centre of the space. The flat ends of the cylinder, far to Lina’s left and right, were large circular windows framed by concentric steel bands — real windows, not the electronic viewscreens that the rest of the station was equipped with. The belt shimmered and shuffled on one side, dark jewels on black velvet. On the other, a host of far-away stars.
Marco emerged carefully from the hatch to float next to her, the very tip of one shoe just touching the curved floor.
‘Mum. . .’ he said quietly. ‘It’s awesome. . .’
‘Regard!’ said Lina grandly. She spread her arms to the sides like a woman about to dive into water, and jumped. She floated slowly into the centre of the cylinder, poised equidistant between those two round windows. For a moment, she hung there impossibly above Marco’s head, arms and legs swimming, feeling light-headed and unreal, caught in perfect equilibrium at the centre of Macao’s great wheel, effectively weightless. Marco uttered a wordless cry of surprise and amazement, then Lina grabbed onto one of the ropes and pulled. She fell, upwards and away from Marco, twisting her body and laughing aloud. She landed with a grace that surprised even her, knees bent and looking upwards at him, grinning foolishly and still gripping the rope in one hand.
Her hair was floating around her head as if caught by a strong wind and she tried to smooth it back into place, then said with a casual sniff, ‘And that’s how it’s done.’ She jumped into the air and turned a perfect slow-motion somersault.
‘Whoa!’ cried Marco. ‘Let me try!’
He launched himself, but too hard, and flew right across the cylinder to land beside Lina, bounce, then ricochet off again to land clockwise from her, a few metres away. The surface of the floor gripped him and applied the requisite dab of rotational velocity, pinning him very gently in place. He lay there laughing and barely daring to move, clearly aware that the slightest touch would send him flying again.
‘Gently!’ said Lina. ‘More gently than you think, even. You need to give a little push counter-spinwards and up, shedding the last bit of rotation as you fly. It’s a knack. On the floor of this room you have an effective weight of less than one-hundredth what you’re used to. In your case I guess that means maybe four hundred grams.’
‘Wow,’ he gasped again, looking down at her. Outside the windows, the view rotated slowly, asteroid belt on one side, star-speckled space on the other. ‘It feels weird. How come we never came here before?’
‘I guess I just forgot about it,’ Lina admitted with a shrug. She pushed off again, into the centre of the drum, where she grabbed onto the rope and allowed herself to turn with it. Marco, just above her, was attempting to right himself. ‘I used to come here when I was sad, I suppose. I always found it a good place to think. Most people seem to have forgotten that it’s here, or they never knew. Occasionally someone goes up the other spoke to service the mass drivers or the receiver, but I don’t think anyone comes this far. I always kept it to myself.’
Marco pushed off and drifted into the air, snaring the rope next to her and holding on. ‘Are you sad now?’ he asked her frankly, face to face with her. His T-shirt billowed around his body, too big for him, really. He’d inherited it off Ella’s son Clay, who was slightly larger-built than Marco. ‘Is that why you remembered about it?’