The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  “Thanks—how’s the work going?”

  “Can’t go on without you,” he said cheerfully, putting the sealed fax-letter copies on my table. “Half the workers are on the asteroid, building temporary quarters on the inner surface. The engineers took all the livable space in the construction sphere.” He smiled. “Don’t lie around here too long.”

  I stared at the letters after he left, afraid to open them; if you don’t feed old problems, they fade away.

  I picked up one and tore it open:

  25 MAY 2057, BERNAL HALL, BERNAL ONE

  DEAR JOE,

  I DON’T KNOW IF YOU WANT TO HEAR FROM ME OR NOT OUT THERE WHERE YOU’RE PIONEERING. I HEARD YOUR NAME ON THE NEWS, AMONG THOSE WHO WERE INJURED, SO I DECIDED YOU SHOULD HEAR FROM ME.

  I GUESS YOU WERE ALWAYS A PRACTICAL SORT, LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO SHINE. I KNOW I SAID NOT MUCH COULD BE DONE ABOUT THE MERCURY PROBLEM, AND I’M STILL SKEPTICAL, BUT I DIDN’T EXPECT YOU TO GO AND MAKE YOURSELF PART OF THE SOLUTION, SUCH AS IT IS—HATS OFF!

  I STILL HOPE THAT YOU’LL COME BACK TO SCHOOL SOONER OR LATER. YOU MIGHT MAKE A GOODEXPERIMENTAL PHYSICIST, WITH YOUR PRACTICAL TURN OF MIND. YOU ALWAYS SEEMED TO NEED PEOPLE AROUND TO DO THINGS WITH. ME, I STILL THINK LIFE IS FOR THE PRIVATE STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE, THE WAY EINSTEIN OR HAWKING TO CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN OF KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR MINDS—JUST TO SEE IF THEY COULD SEE NATURE WHOLE.

  Morey still sounded a million years old, but I would have been disappointed if he had changed.

  MAYBE I HAVE TO SHUT OUT EVERYTHING ELSE, JUST TO BE ABLE TO DO WHAT I WANT? SOMETIMES I CAN’T BEAR TO THINK THAT THERE ARE OTHER ROADS IN LIFE, OR THAT I MIGHT WANT TO TAKE THEM AND FORGET THE SLOW CLIMB TOWARD THE WALL OF MYSTERY THAT IS PHYSICS. IF THERE IS ANYTHING THAT YOU WANT VERY MUCH, THEN YOUMUST KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

  THERE’S NO RUSH, YOU KNOW. THE BIOLOGISTS SAY PEOPLE OUR AGE MAY MAKE IT TO 200, IF NOT MORE. I THINK YOU’LL FEEL THE PULL OF STUDY AGAIN WHEN YOU’RE OLDER. SOME PEOPLE APPRECIATE KNOWING THINGS MORE WHEN LIFE GETS CHANCY.

  NOW THAT I’M WELL INTO THE BIG MATH AND TALKING SMOOTHLY TO THE ARTIFICIAL BRAIN CORES, I FIND THAT I’M DEVELOPING ALL SORTS OF NEAT SUSPICIONS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE—AS IF IT WERE SOME SORT OF STAGE SCENERY. TELL YOU MORE IN THE NEXT LETTER.

  SO—EVEN THOUGH I THINK STRIVING FOR ACHIEVEMENT IS EVERYTHING, ACCOMPLISHMENTS MAY VARY, EVEN GO UNSEEN. I DIDN’T SEE WHAT YOU WANTED, BUT NOW THAT I FEEL I’M GETTING CLOSER TO WHAT I WANT, AND DON’T FEEL SO DESPERATE ABOUT MOVING ALONG, I SEE WHAT I MIGHT BE MISSING ALONG THE WAY. YOU PAY FOR EVERYTHING SOMEWHERE. IF I DON’T CONCENTRATE STUBBORNLY, I WON’T GET WHAT I WANT. ONLY LUCK, THAT SUDDEN, UNEARNED INPUT OF ENERGY FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, ENABLES US TO SOMETIMES COME OUT AHEAD. I GUESS I THINK MOST PEOPLE ARE PRETTY HOPELESS—THEY LIVE AND DON’T DO MUCH THAT I CAN SEE, EXCEPT TO SECURE THEIR LIVES AND THE LIVES OF THEIR CHILDREN. MAYBE MOST HUMANITY ISN’T READY FOR MORE YET.

  WRITE WHEN YOU CAN, OR LEAVE MESSAGES. DAVID, MARCO, AND NARITA SAY HELLO.

  YOUR FRIEND, MOREY

  Good old Morey, I thought as I put the letter on my night table. For once he made me feel that it didn’t have to be an either/or choice. Distant moments of achievement were worth working for, if you could see that far. I hadn’t been able to do it on Bernal, but his letter made me feel good—not so threatened about making another choice. Scratch that problem. I would have called him immediately, but the delays between answers would have been frustrating, even if Merk had been in position to avoid static interference from the Sun.

  I glanced uneasily at the envelopes from my parents; it seemed that their words were waiting to drag me back into my childhood. I scooped up the letters and opened one.

  It was from Dad:

  23 May 2057, NEW YORK CITY

  DEAR JOE,

  WE HEARD THAT YOU WERE INJURED, BUT THE SVOBODAS ASSURED US THAT IT WAS NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH FOR US TO COME OUT, BUT IF YOU WANT US THERE WE’LL TAKE THE NEXT SHIP OUT. I’M TOLD THAT THERE ARE QUITE A FEW GOING BACK AND FORTH THESE DAYS, TWICE A MONTH, IN FACT. I HEAR IT’S PRETTY RUGGED THERE.

  WRITE OR LEAVE A MESSAGE WHEN YOU GET THIS. CALL IF YOU WANT AND SOLAR CONDITIONS PERMIT. I’LL SIT THROUGH THE DELAYS.

  LOVE, DAD

  P.S. YOU MIGHT LIKE TO HEAR THAT MARISA HAS GONE RIGHT INTO COMMERCIAL ART. HER LOOP SEQUENCES, MOSTLY LANDSCAPES, ARE REPLACING QUITE A FEW PICTURE WINDOWS IN THE LARGE CITIES.

  I looked at the “We heard” part of the letter. Of course, they weren’t together. Old habits die hard. Was he trying to lure me back home with news of Marisa? Probably not; he just thought I’d be interested. I was—mildly.

  I opened the last letter.

  16 MAY 2057, BRASILIA

  DEAREST JOE,

  I WAS WORRIED SICK ABOUT YOUR BEING HURT. I PASSED THE NEWS THAT IT WAS NOTHING SERIOUS TO YOUR FATHER AND GRANDPARENTS, BUT I WON’T REALLY FEEL RIGHT UNTIL YOU WRITE OR CALL WITH DETAILS. PLEASE DON’T KEEP ME IN SUSPENSE!

  I’VE BEEN STUDYING AND READING A LOT. JIM AND I LIVE OUT HERE ON HIS RANCH. HE’S AN AUSTRALIAN, BUT HE SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON LUNA. HE’S VERY IMPRESSED WITH YOUR DECISION TO WORK ON MERCURY. SAYS HE UNDERSTANDS YOU, AND HE’S BEEN EXPLAINING TO ME.

  I SOMETIMES THINK THAT IF I WERE YOUR AGE I WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING. YOUR FATHER AND I ARE ON AMIABLE TERMS, SO PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT, MY SON.

  WRITE SOON.

  LOVE, MOM

  Scratch another problem. I was completely on my own, and it felt good.

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  20

  The Habitat

  By the time I got up to the asteroid in mid-July, the rocky inner surface of the hollow was dotted with the lights of work camps, creating an atmosphere of underground gloom within the ten-kilometer-long space. A gentle spin had been put on the big potato, a tenth-g to start, to make it easier to move around. Teams of specialists were hard at work, even as the rest of the workers and equipment continued to arrive.

  Bob and I came in through the big locks at one end of the hollow world. As we passed inside and looked out across the open space, I thought of all the work that still had to be done. It was hard to imagine that these hundreds of square kilometers of rock and mud would ever begin to look like the out of doors I had come to know on Bernal.

  But it would; I knew it would—as surely as Bernal’s inner surface had been changed from a curving plane of metal. When the rock crunchers finished their work, carefully balanced humus would be mixed in to create a layer of rich soil over the bedrock; ground water would run into the lakes and streams cut for it; nitrogen-fixing trees would be put in, along with plants and shrubs that did not need fertilizer, along with a select number of insects, snails, and small animals; finally, human beings would invade the landscape and make it their own.

  It sounds easy when you leave out all the detailed steps, but it’s hard to make an ecology work; everything is related to everything else, and you can get unexpected results if you don’t do the measurements right. Strip mining during the last century on Earth had taught us the difficulties of restoring damaged ecosystems, but imagine building one from scratch.

  Fortunately, our specialists had done it all before, mistakes and all.

  “This seems like work for a god,” I said, surveying the barrenness, “not for human beings. Can’t even imagine starting on the towns. A year or two won’t be enough.”

  “Just do the land,” Bob replied, “and leave the houses to us. It’ll be much easier than what we had to build on Mercury.”

  I sniffed. “Air isn’t very tasty.” It had been put in out in the Asteroids, using oxygen cracked from an ice asteroid. Industrial recyclers were cleaning up the CO2, but the strain on the machines was becoming more noticeable as more workers arrived.

  “Better than suits,” Bob said. “We’ll last until the trees and plants take over.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Mom always wanted an open-air patio and garden.”

  “She’ll have it all.”
/>   “Is it time?” I asked.

  “Any moment now,” he said.

  We gazed across the hollow, waiting. There was a distant sound from the other end, like soft thunder or something opening. I strained to see by the starlight of the work camps.

  Slowly, the far end of the asteroid began to glow a dull red, brightening suddenly as the optical systems flooded the hollow with the tamed yellow-white glare of the Sun. The feeling of being deep underground was gone. A desert of rock and varicolored sands presented us with its first sunrise.

  Seeing the lights go on in this drafty, dusty hollow moved me deeply, lighting me up inside, making me feel at last that I was going to be myself, and that I had found my way to what I needed.

  And I realized that the Sunspace Settlements were everything that the New World had tried to be—a place where humankind could begin the world all over again, free of the Old World’s conflicts. America had failed, as Earth had failed, until the sky had been opened, making available the riches of Sunspace, giving humanity its first chance at a genuine high-energy, high-technology society, in which scarcity would no longer be the measure of economic value;that evil, at least, would die.

  The problem of Mercury was a shameful throwback to the twentieth century, maybe even to the nineteenth, but it would soon be a thing of the past. Thirty people had died in the last quake; over a hundred had been injured. Bernie had been crushed in our room. His ashes were here now, mixed with the soil materials of the habitat. There was nothing special about that; most organic materials were recycled in some way, but I thought it was fitting anyway. For me he would always be here, alive in the land we were about to shape, as active in my mind as he was in the mind of Bernal.

  “Good morning,” I said finally.

  “It’s really late afternoon,” Bob replied with a straight face. “We’ll have to adjust that on the clocks.”

  We laughed, and a great sense of relief came over me. I had brooded over Bernie’s death for some weeks, remembering that last moment in the tunnel when we had said good night so casually. It was so wrong for him to be killed right after he had regained his health. I remembered our first meeting, when he had emerged from Bernal’s depths, and I knew what he would say about his death. What did we expect? That we could come here to right a great wrong and not be touched by it? I could almost hear the sound of his piping voice, and I knew that he was right.

  But did it have to be you, Bernie?

  I learned to run one of the crunchers, mind-linking with the machine for six hours a day. We had regular days now, with vitamin-D sunlight, which helped our biorhythms. I bit into the asteroid and ripped out huge chunks of rock, swallowing and digesting each mouthful. A fine powder spilled out the back and was mixed with organics. Dark squares of fertile land were laid over the bedrock desert, all around the curve of the world.

  I also linked with the beam diggers, helping to cut the groove for the equatorial river. The lake basin was by far the prettiest piece of work we did in the first six months.

  During the Christmas holidays, the engineers set up large screens throughout the hollow and fed us transmissions from Earth while we worked; it was the only way of doing something festive for five thousand people. Relatives appeared and recited sappy wishes in a dozen languages. I almost didn’t recognize Mom when she came on: confident, beautiful, and adventurous-looking in her plain work clothes; an entirely new person, which she was, in a sense. Ro saw my father, but I was not at the right screen at that moment. I did get a message from him, telling me how much more gift credit had been added to my account.

  The miners had a pretty homey Christmas down on bouncy old Merk, but there was no way they could have invited five thousand guests. Ro and I had to turn down the invitation from the Svobodas; we didn’t want to seem like privileged characters, even if there had been enough shuttles in good working order. Besides, I was a bit wary of putting myself in Merk’s clutches again.

  Bob came up with a basket of goodies and spent some time with us in our tent. The ship from Earth arrived with a better class of food that week, so we did pretty well. Still, I was glad when the holidays were over. It was nice the way Earth kept us company via the screen relay casts, but the giant figures were at times irritating.

  At the start of 2058, Rosalie and I were living in makeshift barracks; depending on where the day’s work took us, that’s where we would find a bunk. It was a big improvement over tents. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for weeks at a time. She was part of the group bringing up waste materials from Mercury. I worried about her a lot.

  As the crunchers finished munching, large waste tanks went up in each sector, and slowly the treated organics were turned into the soil. The amalgam smelled a bit, but after a time it began to give off the odor of rich, black earth. I was surprised at how much waste human beings could produce.

  Think of a huge shallow pot made of rock and fill it with soil; that’s what the inside of the asteroid was, basically. There was always the chance that the organic fill would die or dry out before we put in the growing things; a few sectors failed once or twice, which depressed many of us, but the bio-ecologs just shrugged and started again. When you listened to them, they sounded like a bunch of gardeners.

  We laid the land deep, more than five meters in some places; you could dig down into the rock if you needed deeper basements. It was still a few hundred meters to the outer surface of the big potato, more than enough shielding from solar radiation—more, in fact, than you get from Earth’s atmosphere. One of the advantages in building inside a hollow asteroid is that you don’t have to provide sunstorm shelters for your workers. Building a habitat on the Bernal or O’Neill cylinder model requires a large number of solar radiation shelters until the main shielding is in place. Shelters are small and cramped, limiting the size of the work force; the asteroid provides immediate safety for a large number of workers, as well as serving as a base for future construction projects nearby, which can then follow any desired model.

  There were some disagreements about landscaping. The miners had their ideas, and we had ours; but since we were doing so much of the work, many of our planners felt we should decide. The ecologs insisted that they knew best what would work in the long run. They didn’t care what else the miners did inside the hollow, as long as they left the biocomponents alone; the mother-nature crew got its own way in the end. Mostly.

  They started losing interest by the time the job was half done and most of the serious problems were under control; new challenges were waiting—like the Ceres project, which was just beginning out in the Asteroids.

  The quick-grow trees, plants, and bushes, insect eggs, snails, fish, and small animals began to arrive long before we were actually ready for them, so we piled them in large dumps on the empty land—crates and cages, big pots, bags of special food and spot fertilizers, and mysterious sealed containers with printed notices warning you to play the enclosed instructions. At first we couldn’t get enough stuff shipped from Earth, and we had to wait around for things we needed; later we couldn’t stop the flow. I was astonished at how much human beings could produce when they wanted to. Eventually we used up everything, and it turned out to be just enough; someone had done a neat job of planning.

  The hills of the hollow sloped gently. Three shallow valleys hugged the river, whose banks were steep to allow for gradual wear; the lake was deep and cool, just right for a nearby vineyard or two. The ecologs got the air movements right—a gentle breeze between periods of stillness. The oppressive Sun of Mercury’s lifeless landscape was merely warm here, its intensity trapped within an image of itself, varying to drive the weather and nourish the greenery and people, dimming into moonlight at night; it was a dutiful Sun.

  There were no extreme seasons. The thermometer might fall to ten degrees centigrade, but only because the population wanted it. Well, almost everyone wanted it that way when the meeting to decide such matters had been called.

  As we completed the heavy work, half the
population of Mercury was already building houses, while the other half continued hurling tribute at Earth; a surplus of metal slugs had been achieved because of the high morale, and production did not suffer. Earth was getting more consideration than it deserved. Luckily, the next year and a half saw only a few minor quakes.

  House building went quickly, but the codes required that each dwelling or town unit fit into the habitat’s water, electrical, and communications system, as well as into the carrying capacity of the ecological measurements; this meant a lot of inspection and correction work.

  The habitat’s spin was increased to simulate fifty percent of Earth’s gravity, and the orbit was made synchronous, high over the mining territories, so that the Sun’s energy could be pumped constantly. Power could now be beamed down to Mercury’s surface during the night by the habitat’s outrider beam units.

  About half the workers were rotated in the first two years; as the load lightened, specialists left for new jobs in other parts of Sunspace. Ro and I had no plans. Our credit in the bank was growing, so we decided to stay as long as we were needed. We were free to go, but we felt reluctant to do so.

  Almost everyone I had known from school had gone home by 2060—to another job, or back to school. Rosalie, Linda, Jake, and I were the only ones left. About ten percent of the original work force were staying on as trial settlers.

  There was a new spirit among the miners, who could now be sure that their families were safe while the shifts went down to Merk. All dangers could not be banished; quakes and accidents could not be controlled completely, but at least it was possible to get away from danger on a regular basis.

  One day, when it seemed that there was nothing to do, Ro and I accepted an invitation to the new Svoboda house just outside the town in Valley One. Rosalie and I were living in the new hotel, where we were on call for small jobs. There were still some kinks in the water and electrical systems. I couldn’t do much in recycling, for example, but Bernie had trained me well in electricity, wet and dry plumbing, ceramic carpentry, and in checking a variety of safety and sensing devices. That was my real specialty—troubleshooting safety sensors, knowing when they were giving reasonable feedback to the brain cores. I earned a certificate in this line of work. The closer we got to being done, the more it seemed that there were still a million things left to do. It was hard to say at what point the work ended and became maintenance.