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 ballastic 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 triumpant, yea verity.
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 racking 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 kilometers.
Nothing, in other words. For Ceres, the largest asteroid in the inner belt, was 380 kilometers across, before humans began to work her.
But room was not the essence of the Station. For after all, he had made the Station, yes?
Information was her essence, the truth of that blossomed in him, the past as prologue—
He ambled along a corridor a hundred meters below Gray’s slag and muds, gazing down on the frothy air-fountains in the foyer. Day’s work done.
Even manifestations need a rest, and the interview with the smug Earther had put him off, sapping his resolve. Inhaling the crisp, cold air (a bit high on the oxy, he thought; have to check that) he let himself concentrate wholly on the clear scent of the splashing.
The blue water was the very best, fresh from the growing poles, not the recycled stuff he endured on flights. He breathed in the tingling spray and a man grabbed him.
“I present formal secure-lock,” the man growled, his third knuckle biting into Benjan’s elbow port.
A cold, brittle thunk. His systems froze. Before he could move, whole command linkages went dead in her inboards. The Station’s hovering presence, always humming in the distance, telescoped away. It felt like a wrenching fall that never ends, head over heels—
He got a grip. Focus. Regain your links. The loss! —It was like having fingers chopped away, whole pieces of himself amputated. Bloody neural stumps—
He sent quick, darting questions down his lines, and met… dark. Silent. Dead.
His entire aura of presence was gone. He sucked in the cold air, letting a fresh anger bubble up but keeping it tightly bound.
His attacker was the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for this job. A nobody out of nowhere, complete surprise. Clipping on a hand-restraint, the mousy man stepped back. “They ordered me to do it fast.” A mousy voice, too.
Benjan resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. One of the Earther families who had come to deal with the Station a century ago? Maybe with more kilos than Benjan, but a fair match. And it would feel good.
But that would just bring more of them, in the end. “Damn it, I have immunity from casual arrest. I—”
“No matter now, they said.” The cop shrugged apologetically, but his jaw was set, hands ready, body in fight posture. He was used to this. “I command your compliance,” he finished formally.
Arrest was a ritual Earthside, as stylized as a classical drama. Very well, use it to throw off his guard… “I submit to the ordained order.”
Benjan vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex of the crater’s dome.
There weren’t more than a thousand people on Gray, mostly like him, manifestations of the Station. But not all. More of the others all the time… “And you, sir, you’re Majiken.”
“Yeah. So?”
“At least you people do your own work.”
“There’re plenty of us on the inside here. You don’t think Gray’s gonna be neglected, eh?”
In his elbow he felt injected programs spread, clunk, consolidating their blocks. A seeping ache. Benjan fought it all through his neuro-musculars, but the disease was strong.
Keep your voice level, wait for a chance. Only one of them—my God, they’re sure of themselves! Okay, make yourself seem like a doormat.
“I don’t suppose I can get a few things from my office?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Mighty decent.”
The man shrugged, letting the sarcasm pass. “They want you locked down good before they…”
“They what?”
“Make their next move, I’d guess.”
“I’m just a step.”
“Sure, chop off the hands and feet first.”
A smirking thug with a gift for metaphor. So much for the formal graces of the arrest ritual.
Well, these hands and feet can still work. Benjan began walking toward his apartment.
“I’ll stay in your lockdown, but I’ll stay home.”
“Hey, nobody said—”
“But what’s the harm? I’m deadened now.” He kept walking.
“Uh, uh—” The man paused, obviously consulting with his superiors on an in-link.
He should have known this was coming. The Majikens were ferret-eyed, canny,
unoriginal, and always dangerous. He had forgotten that. In the rush to get ores sifted, grayscapes planed right to control the constant rains, a system of streams and rivers snaking through the fresh-cut valleys… a man could get distracted, yes. Forget how people were. Careless.