The Long Tube, which the Long Station existed to shuttle people to and from and generally to maintain, was one hundred and eighty Astronomical Units long. Twenty‑seven thousand million kilometres, or, to put it in perspective, one light‑day. From the shuttle, it looked like a hairline crack in infinity, but it didn't add up to a mouse's whisker in the Oort. It was aimed straight at Sirius, which I could see as a bright star with a fuzzy green haze of habitats. I shivered. I was about to be frozen, placed with the rest of the passengers on the next needle ship out, electromagnetically accelerated for months at 30 g to relativistic velocities in the Long Tube, hurtled across 6.4 light‑years, decelerated in Sirius's matching tube, accelerated again to Procyon, then to Lalande 21185, and finally sent on a fast clipper to Lalande's next‑door neighbour and fellow red dwarf, Wolf 359. It had to be a fast clipper because Wolf 359's Long Tubes were no longer being calibrated — and when you're aiming one Long Tube across light‑years at the mouth of another, calibration matters.
A fast clipper — in fact, painfully slow, the name a legacy of pre‑Tube times, when 0.1 c was a fast clip — also has calibration issues. Pushed by laser, decelerated by laser reflection from a mirror shell deployed on nearing the target system, it was usually only used for seedships. This clipper was an adapted seedship, but I was going in bulk because it was actually cheaper to thaw me out on arrival than to grow me from a bean. If the calibration wasn't quite right, I'd never know.
The shuttle made minor course corrections to dock at the Long Tube.
“Please pass promptly to the cryogenic area,” it told us.
I shivered again.
Cryogenic travel has improved since then: subjectively, it's pretty much instantaneous. In those days, it was called cold sleep, and that's exactly what it felt like: being very cold and having slow, bad, dreams. Even with relativistic time‑dilation and a glacial metabolism, it lasted for months.
I woke screaming in a translucent box.
“There, there,” said the box. “Everything will be all right. Have some coffee.”
The lid of the box extruded a nipple towards my mouth. I screamed again.
“Well, if you're going to be like that…” said the box.
“It reminded me of a nightmare,” I said. My mouth was parched. “Please.”
“Oh, all right.”
I sucked on the coffee and felt warmth spread from my belly.
“Update me,” I said, around the nipple.
My translucent surroundings became transparent, with explanatory text and diagrams floating like after‑images. A view, with footnotes. This helped, but not enough. An enormous blue‑and‑white sphere loomed right in front of me. I recoiled so hard that I hurt my head on the back of the box.
“What the fuck is that?”
“A terraformed terrestrial,” said the box. “Please do try to read before reacting.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought we were falling towards it.”
“We are,” said the box.
I must have yelled again.
“Read before reacting,” said the box. “Please.”
I turned my head as if to look over my shoulder. I couldn't actually turn it that far, but the box obligingly swivelled the view. The red dwarf lurked at my back, apparently closer than the blue planet. I felt almost relieved. At least Wolf 359 was where I expected it. According to the view's footnotes, nothing else was, except the inactive Long Tubes in the wispy remnant of the cometary cloud, twelve light‑hours out. No solar- orbit microwave stations. Not even the hulks of habitats. No asteroids. No large cometary masses. And a planet, something that shouldn't have been there, was. I didn't need the explanatory text to make the connection. Every scrap of accessible mass in the system had been thrown into this gaudy reconstruction. The planet reminded me of pictures I'd seen of the Moon's primary, back when it had liquid water.
The most recent information, inevitably a decade or so out of date, came from Lalande 21185. Watching what was going on around Wolf 359 was a tiny minority interest, but in a population of a hundred billion, that can add up to a lot. Likewise, the diameter of Lalande's habitat cloud was a good deal smaller than an Astronomical Unit, but that still adds up to a very large virtual telescope. Large enough to resolve the weather patterns on the planet below me, never mind the continents. The planet's accretion had begun before I set off, apparently under deliberate control, and the terraforming had been completed about fifty years earlier, while I was on route. It remained raw — lots of volcanoes and earthquakes — but habitable. There was life, obviously, but no one knew what kind. No radio signals had been detected, nor any evidence of intelligence, beyond some disputably artificial clusters of lights on the night side.
“Well, that's it,” I said. “Problem solved. The system's pretty much uninhabitable now, with all the mass and organics locked up in a planet, but it may have tourist potential. No threat to anyone. Call in a seedship, they can make something of what's left of the local Kuiper Belt, and get the Long Tubes back on stream. Wake me up when it's over.”
“That is very much not it,” said the box. “Not until we know why this happened. Not until we know what's down there.”
“Well, send down some probes.”
“I do not have the facilities to make firewalled snoop robots,” said the box, “and other probes could be corrupted. My instructions are to deliver you to any remnant of the Wolf 359 civilization, and that is what I shall do.”
It must have been an illusion, given what I could read of our velocity, but the planet seemed to come closer.
“You're proposing to dock — to land on that object?”
“Yes.”
“It has an atmosphere! We'll burn up! And then crash!”
“The remains of our propulsion system can be adapted for aerobraking,” said the box.
“That would have to be ridiculously finely calculated.”
“It would,” said the box. “Please do not distract me.”
Call me sentimental, but when the box's Turing functionality shut down to free up processing power for these ridiculously fine calculations, I felt lonely. The orbital insertion took fourteen hours. I drank hot coffee and sucked, from another nipple, some tepid but nutritious and palatable glop. I even slept, in my first real sleep for more than half a century. I was awakened by the jolt as the box spent the last of its fuel and reaction mass on the clipper's final course correction. The planet was a blue arc of atmosphere beneath me, the interstellar propulsion plate a heat shield in front, and the deceleration shell a still‑folded drogue behind. The locations were illusory — relative to the clipper I was flat on my back. The first buffeting from our passage through the upper atmosphere coincided with an increasing sense of weight. The heat shield flared. Red‑hot air rushed past. The weight became crushing. The improvised heat shield abraded, then exploded, its parts flicked away behind. The drogue deployed with a bang and a jolt that almost blacked me out. The surface became a landscape, then a land, then a wall of trees. The clipper sliced and shuddered through them, for seconds on end of crashes and shaking. It ploughed a long furrow across green‑covered soil and halted in a cloud of smoke and steam.
“That was a landing,” said the box.
“Yes,” I said. “You might have tried to avoid the trees.”
“I could not,” said the box. “Phytobraking was integral to my projected landing schedule.”
“Phytobraking,” I said.
“Yes. Also, the impacted cellulose can be used to spin you a garment.”
That took a few minutes. Sticky stuff oozed from the box and hardened around me. When the uncomfortable process finished, I had a one‑piece coverall and boots.