The claustrophobia was total and crushing, but it was also reassuring. Beyond the hard, rocklike volume in which we were caged was an absolute void from which my thoughts flinched. That emptiness was worse than the claustrophobia, and what made it worse still was the fact that it was not truly empty; that the void held terrible, silent, infinitely patient enemies.
Who were coming closer.
I felt a convulsion of fear so absolute that I screamed and removed the helmet. For a moment I floated in Vadim’s cabin, breathing hard, wondering just what I’d experienced. The feeling of immense claustrophobia, combined with even worse agoraphobia, took long seconds to abate, like the after-chime of an awful bell.
My hands trembling — although I was beginning to regain some control — I removed the experiential and examined it more closely, this time paying proper attention to the little motif near the top of the stick.
It looked a lot like a maggot.
I watched our approach to the Rust Belt through the observation window in Vadim’s cabin.
I knew something of what lay ahead now. Shortly after I’d tried the disturbing experiential — while I was still reeling from its effects, in fact — the console had chimed, announcing the arrival of a response to my earlier query. I was surprised; in my experience such things usually happened instantaneously or not at all, and the delay served only to emphasise how disrupted the system’s data networks must have been.
The message, it turned out, was a standard-issue document, rather than a personally composed reply. An automated mechanism must have decided that it would answer most of my questions; an assumption that turned out to be reasonably accurate.
I started reading.
Dear Newcomer,
Welcome to the Epsilon Eridani system.
Despite all that has happened, we hope your stay here will be a pleasant one. For your information we have compiled this note to explain some of the key events in our recent history. It is intended that this information will ease your transition into a culture which may be markedly different from the one you were expecting to find when you embarked at your point of origin. It is important that you realise that others have come before you…
The document was long, but I quickly read the thing in its entirety, then reread it carefully, picking out the salient points which might assist me in the hunt for Reivich. I’d already been forewarned about the scale of the plague’s effects, so the document’s revelations were perhaps not as shocking to me as they would have been to someone freshly defrosted. But it was still chilling to see it anatomised in such a coolly detached manner, and it was easy to imagine how unsettling it must have been to someone who had come to Yellowstone in search of riches rather than blood. The Mendicants had clearly elected not to spring this news on their slush puppies too quickly, and doubtless if I’d stayed in Idlewild a little longer they would have begun to break it to me gently. But perhaps the document was right: there were some truths it was best to deal with as quickly as possible, no matter how repugnant that truth might have been.
I wondered how long it would take me to adjust to it, or if I’d be one of the unfortunate few who never quite made the transition.
Perhaps, I thought, they were actually the sane ones.
Through the window the larger Rust Belt habitats had begun to assume definite shapes, rather than just being indistinct orbiting flecks. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like seven years ago, in the last days before the plague.
There’d been ten thousand habitats in the Glitter Band, each as opulent and faceted as a chandelier, each distinguished from its neighbours by some wild architectural flourish that had far less to do with the practicalities of structural design than it had with aesthetics and prestige. They’d circled Yellowstone in low orbit, almost nose-to-tail, each vast and stately construct maintaining polite distance from those ahead and behind it with tiny puffs of correcting thrust. A constant flow of commerce had shuffled between the habitats along narrow traffic lanes, so that from a distance the habitats themselves looked as if they were entwined in tinsel-like filaments of light. Depending on the ever-shifting spectrum of allegiances and feuds, the habitats either communicated with each other via looms of quantum-encrypted laser light, or maintained sullen silences. Such silences were not at all unusual, for there were profound rivalries even amongst the constituents of what was technically the very model of a unified Demarchist society.
Amongst ten thousand habitats, there was every human specialisation imaginable: every expertise, every ideology, every perversion. The Demarchists permitted everything, even experimentation in political models which chafed against their underlying paradigm of absolute non-hierarchical democracy. Provided those experiments remained experiments, they were tolerated; even actively encouraged. Only the development and stockpiling of armaments was forbidden, unless they were to be used artistically. And it was here in the Glitter Band that the system’s most illustrious clan, the Sylveste family, had performed much of the work that had brought them eventual fame. Calvin Sylveste had attempted the first neural downloads since the Transenlightenment in the Band. Dan Sylveste had collated all known information on the Shrouders here; work that eventually led to his own fateful expedition to Lascaille’s Shroud.
But that was the deep past now. History had turned the glory of the Glitter Band into… this.
When the Melding Plague had hit, the Glitter Band had stayed intact for far longer than Chasm City, for most of the Band’s habitats already had effective quarantine protocols. Some were so secretive and self-sufficient that no one had entered them in decades anyway.
But they were not, ultimately, immune.
It took only one habitat to fall to the plague. Within days most of the people aboard died, and most of their habitat’s self-replicating systems began to go haywire in ways that seemed nastily purposeful. The habitat’s ecosystem collapsed fatally. Uncontrolled, the habitat drifted out of its orbital slot like a chunk of carved iceberg. Ordinarily the chances of a collision would have been small… but the Glitter Band was already congested to within a hairsbreadth of disaster.
The first rule of collisions between two orbital bodies was that they were very rare indeed… until one happened. Then the shards of the destroyed bodies would splinter off in different directions, significantly increasing the likelihood of another impact. It would not be such a long wait until the next collision. And when it happened again, the number of shards increased once more… such that the next collision was a practical certainty…
Within weeks, most of the habitats in the Glitter Band had been fatally holed by collisional debris… and even when those impact fragments were not in themselves sufficient to kill all aboard, they also tended to be contaminated by traces of the plague originating from the first habitat to fall. They became orbiting hulks, as dark and dead as driftwood. By the end of the year, barely two hundred habitats had remained intact: principally the oldest and sturdiest structures, sheathed in rock and ice against radiation storms. With batteries of anti-collision lasers emplaced around their skins, they had managed to fend off most of the large chunks.
That was six years ago. In the intervening time, Quirrenbach told me, the Rust Belt had been stabilised, with most of the debris mopped up and conglomerated into hazardous lumps which had been sent spinning into the boiling face of Epsilon Eridani. Now at least the Belt was not growing any more fragmented. The hulks, for the most part, were kept in check by periodic nudges from robot tugs. Only a handful had been successfully repressurised and settled, although there were predictable rumours of all manner of sinister factions squatting furtively amongst the ruins.