The main frame is shaking again. The tug engines must be firing. High Steel is being moved into a station-keeping orbit, ten miles above the bright end of the Big Dumb Object. From that distance it will look bigger than the Earth does from Unity. I am going to have to get my spatial orientation sorted out by AEO: hovering above, or floating in front of a three-hundred-kilometre-long cylinder should be psychologically survivable. What is not is to imagine that it is poised over you like the hammer of God.
There is another link between you and me, Gaby, apart from visions of Africa. There are Changed up here: the freefall adaptations with four hands. They are incredible; I feel like a brick in an aquarium next to them. This is how the future is going to look? That’s scary too. There are four of them, three are South Americans, but one is the boy you found in Unit 12; Juma. I knew about him, Gaby. I knew about all of them; Peter Werther, the Moon woman. I lied to you. I’m sorry, I had no other choice. And you were right – funny how you can remember every word and nuance of the worst days of your life – I did give you that diary to get you into bed, and I regretted it the moment I had done it, because I knew you would pry into the mystery of the disappeared pages. It wasn’t until long after you left that I realized that I had done the right thing for the wrong reasons. The diary had led you to bust Unit 12 wide open, and reveal all its paranoid little secrets that I wanted to but could never disclose. Rather late for self-justification, you would say.
I’m sorry I sound a little melancholy on this instalment; everyone is a bit down, nervous, tense, expectant. The BDO is sixteen hours from AEO and here we are, sitting in our tin can far above the Earth, realizing how pitifully unprepared we are. And I feel far from home. I miss gravity. I miss water. I miss air, and wind. I miss you. I miss Aaron. I’m not sure the BDO compensates for all this missing, but the next time I talk to you, it’ll be here.
Day Six, Gaby. It’s here.
AEO was two hours fifty minutes ago. You’ve seen the pictures. Everyone on the planet has seen the pictures. This is how it felt to be there.
When you sized me up and seduced me with your question-and-answer that time in the Mara, you told me I was a thing of earth and plains and big skies and empty lands with not a lot of room left for God. Pretty astute, Gaby. Religion has never played a great part in my life. But the BDO was the closest I have ever come to a genuine religious experience. I told you I wouldn’t get mystical on you. I’m not. It was genuine awe of a God with real muscle and a hell of an FX budget.
That tense, depressed feeling I told you about last time deepened as ETTEO decreased. High Steel hit its orbit first; we had seven hours of looking out at that thing coming down our throats. Half an hour before AEO we just quit whatever job we were meant to be doing and found someone to be with. You need someone to hold you when the sky falls. What little apes we are, clinging to each other in our tin can. I was with a woman called Clarissa from Team Yellow. We found a window, wedged ourselves into it, and just held each other and watched the thing keep coming. That’s what the pictures can’t convey, Gaby. It kept coming, and coming, and fucking coming, and you think, that’s got to be all of it, but it still kept coming. Floating there in twelve accommodation modules, a couple of solar sails, an air plant and three tugs, you felt like it was going to swat High Steel like a mosquito. What I said about the launch from Kennedy, that was nothing, Gaby. That was fear of something; that you are going to die. This was existential terror, the fear of you don’t know what could happen. People were praying, Gab. Some were crying, in fear, awe, love. Tears float in zero gee. I gripped Clarissa so hard I left bruises.
And then I felt High Steel move. You’ve heard the theorists, that it got caught in a gravitational eddy from the mass-momentum drive as the BDO stabilized its orbit. What it felt like, Gaby, was every part of everything around you, and every part of yourself, down to the atoms, held by something and gently but firmly pulled. Like falling, with nothing to hold on to, except the human body next to you.
I’m not asking your forgiveness for this, Gaby. You would do the same with the first human body that floated by.
I thought we were coming apart; all that was happening was High Steel was being dragged into an orbit in line with the BDO’s axis and spun up to match its rotation. We’re turning in time with the BDO.
So: the arrival of the BDO. What did it feel like? It felt like God had come. In every sense of the word, polite and impolite. The fearful depression that gripped us during the orbital approach has been burned away by a sense of quasi-spiritual euphoria and activity. We’re here, we’re alive, we’ve got holy work to do. It’s almost as if the BDO approves of us. We’re learning to live with the thing ten miles off the starboard bow. The way to look at it is that it’s a new moon for Earth. Isn’t that a gorgeous thought? Two moons rising. From High Steel you can’t see that it’s a cylinder, and by a trick of spatial perspective you can push it away from you so that it becomes a world far below you, and the mottlings and patterns on the facing end are continents and oceans.
What they really are is Chaga. Vacuum-adapted Chaga, carpeting the hills and valleys of the forward end and cylinder sides. This close, you can make out individual details; some of the formations are thousand of feet high. They diminish in size toward the edge. In a way, I find this riot of alien life almost homely: I’ve spent much of my professional life looking out from high windows across vast discs of Chaga. It’s actually smaller than many of the longer-established terrestrial symbs -certainly much smaller than the Nyandarua-Kilimanjaro-Mount Elgon Chaga. That puts it into perspective.
Our three tugs are out mapping the exterior. Two are working the cylinder body – one has a specific mission to move along the windows and photograph as much information about the interior as possible but its view is largely obscured by clouds – and the third is hovering over the forward end, running full spectrum scans of the surface, probing for possible means of ingress. God, I am starting to sound like them. Good joke, though: it comes all this way and forgets to build a front door. I don’t think so, somehow. First Wave Team Red are out there in the tug pod, ready to go in if they find an entrance. Team Yellow is down in the airlock, preparing to en-pod for tug pick-up. We’re on Orange Alert, the call could come at any time. Horribly seductive, this style of talking.
Hold on. What? Shit. Jesus Christ. All right. Sorry Gab. Got to go. Team Red just lucked out.
No, Gaby. Your eyes deceive you not. Take a good look, Gaby, because nobody on the planet ever got a videogram like this. I could look at it all day, and day here lasts a week. Why didn’t they pack poets or writers or musicians on Operation Final Frontier, folk who could do justice to this place and not just measure it and analyse it and record it. I’ll put the camera up here so you can see the cylindrical land behind me. I really haven’t an awful lot of time; now we’re on the ground, there’s always something needs doing or reporting or observing. From Zen indolence to karoshi. But the Passengers are paying their fares now.
The story so far. I got abruptly called away from my last note to you because Team Red out there over the forward end suddenly found a mile-wide section of spin axis opening up in front of them. It was the classic sci-fi cliche: ‘The door dilated.’ Like the aperture of a camera. After half an hour obtaining permission from Earth, they moved the tug into the opening. What they found inside, as you’ve doubtless seen on the television, was an airlock about three miles long – that’s what the cavities in the partitions are – and at the other end of it; is this. A cylindrical buckyball jungle, sixty kilometres deep, four hundred and fifty round.