Learning the World

The Yellow Wall held a surprise. It had changed in a different direction. Most of the tables were occupied by two or three people, but it was as quiet as a library. A lot of reading and writing was going on. Some heads were even bent over physical books: pages printed out and bound in codices. Horrocks had come across this before, as a work-around for certain access restrictions. He couldn’t see it as anything but bad for the eyesight.

Atomic sat alone near the window. She stared in front of her, fingers tapping, a neglected coffee cooling. Her hair was tied up by a complex braid of threads, her makeup colours clashed, and she wore a thin vest and long shorts. A bulky crew-surplus jacket hung on the seatback.

Her eyes blinked and refocused as he sat down. He had two fresh coffees; he pushed one across the table.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said before she could say anything, and before he had thought of what to say. Her smile surprised him, but it conveyed detached amusement more than welcome.

“I knew you’d be back,” she said. “What brings you here this time? Another message from Synchronic?”

“No, no, nothing to do with her. And no message. Just an idea.”

Eyes narrow, seen through a wisp of steam. “What kind of idea?”

“One that’s been kicked about in the crew quarters for a while,” he said. “You know I got a lot of stick for supporting the embargo, though what I did on the jury kind of offsets that.”

Atomic snorted. “Not as far as I’m concerned!”

“I know,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all hurting from the embargo. I am, for sure. By this stage we should be raking in asteroid organics, and construction consultancies and training fees. Some of us were grumbling about all this when somebody pointed out that we can get hold of massive chunks of asteroids and chondrites and cometary dirty ice and so forth, in vacuum and free fall, without going outside the ship.”

“Where?”

“In the reaction-mass tanks in the cones. They’re not exactly a reserve, but they’re a bit extra over and above what was in the cylinder. They were full at the start, and now they’re much depleted, but there’s a good bit of rock and ice still in there.”

She gave him a sceptical smile. “Oh, come on, what does that add up to — a few boulders?”

He pulled over the cold cup, dipped his finger in, and drew a triangle on the table, about ten centimetres to a side, and dropped a perpendicular from the apex. “That has the proportions about right,” he said. “The sides represent the space that’s used around the surface and rear of the cone, for living space and machinery and so on. The perpendicular contains the engine, and more living quarters and amenities. The empty spaces stand for the tank. So we’re looking at a conical volume sixty-odd kilometres across the base, less the spaces I mentioned.” He looked up. “You do the math.” He noticed her gaze go blank. “I didn’t mean literally.”

“How much rock is in there?”

He shrugged. “Millions of tons. The tanks aren’t full up. Maybe a tenth of the volume is solid, the rest vacuum — well, very thin gases. The rocks are kind of piled up against the surfaces the deceleration pressed them against — the top of the forward cone at the front, the base at the rear.”

“You’re thinking of us working on them?”

“Yes,” he said. “Colonize them, if you like. Stake claims. You could build whole habitats, mines, fabrication units, fusion plants…”

She breathed in sharply. “Wow — I can see that, but I can’t imagine working or settling on rocks all bumping about—”

“They wouldn’t be,” he assured her. “The first job would be to stabilise them. Move them out a little — you’d get that as a by-product of working them, or we could fire off a tiny acceleration burn on the drive, move the ship in relation to them — then tether them in place with massive buckyropes.” He shrugged. “Or use attitude jets. It’s an engineering detail.”

“But what would be the point? I mean, OK, we could mine them, but what’s the point of settling them? Inside the ship? It would be just playing at colonization.”

“Even if it was, it would be good practice,” Horrocks said, “but they needn’t be inside the ship forever. The cone surface is segmented. Whole sections of it can swing open. That’s how the rocks get loaded in the first place.”

“So we could settle and someday… move out?”

“You got it.”

She leaned back, gazing above his head. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “So what do we have to do to get this going?”

“Well,” he said, “like I was saying, it’s just an idea that a few of the crew have come up with. I’d want to see it discussed a bit more widely, among the old hands especially. Thrash out the feasibility. And I suppose you’d have to get the Council’s blessing, though technically I’m not quite sure if it has standing in regard to the rocks. Raise funding from founder capital, maybe by swapping for other stakes that are… at a discount right now. Oh, and I guess you’d have to see if any of the ship generation were interested.”

“You must be joking! They’d jump at it!”

“I’ve seen a few today who wouldn’t.”

She waved an airy hand. “The slackers? They’ll join in too, you’ll see, but who cares if they don’t? You’ll get enough of us going for it, that’s for sure.”

“Great!” he said. “Ah—”

“What?”

“There is one drawback. The legal situation.”

“How’s that?”

“When we first came up with the idea we checked the Contract.”

“You’re telling me it has no provision?”

“Oh, it has a provision all right. Not for this situation, exactly, but it’s very specific about who can vote and who can’t. About who is in the Complement. Crew, of course. Founders and ship generation over sixteen, as long as they live in the habitat. The habitat, not the ship. It definitely has provision for people moving to nearby celestial bodies in the same orbit. Which applies to the rocks in the tanks.”

“You’re saying we’d lose our votes?”

“Possibly. Very likely.”

He expected her to balk or bridle at this, but she just stared off into space for a moment. “Hmm,” she said at last. “How many of us could move out in six months?”

“Oh, a few thousand, I should imagine.”

“Ah!” Her face cleared. “That’s all right. There’ll still be plenty behind who can vote.”

“You know how they’ll vote?”

“Once this gets going — oh yes.”

“Well, I’m sure you know how to spread the word.”

Her face fell a little. “Yeah. It’s just a lot more difficult these days.”

“There’s a rumour going around,” he said, “that the Council is thinking of lifting the comms restrictions.”

“I haven’t heard it”

“It’s bandied in the cones.” He drained his cup and rose to leave.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yes,” he said. “To be honest, this isn’t the only place I want to visit. Spread the word in person.”

Her nod was firm, her look a little disappointed. “Good idea. Come back sometime, OK?”

“Sure.”

When he looked back from the doorway she was already writing.

14 366:02:12 00:17

Haven’t written much recently. Nor received many comments. Is anybody still reading this? Is anybody else still biologging?

Oh yes. I see you are. Those of you who haven’t come out here yet, and are still just talking and pla

Well, this is for you. I haven’t written much because I’ve been doing things. And because it’s exhausting out here. It’s exhausting but it’s fun. It’s pioneering. It’s what we were born for.

Out here… Let me just pause for a moment and clarify a point of terminology. Words are important. I see from a quick search through the biologs that most of you refer to us in the cones as “in there.” We’re not “in there.” You are: you’re in there in the habitat. We’re out here.

It’s not outer space. But it’s hard vacuum (well, hard-ish), it’s free fall (well, microgravity), and it’s black all around. An aperture on the sunline burns in the sky like a nearby sun. The rocks we’re working on are hundreds of metres across. Most of them are less than a kilometre apart from each other, so it all looks like a child’s cartoon illustration of an asteroid belt rather than the real thing, with millions of klicks between one and the other. It’s a bit like being in a Ring, but without the collisions and the ablation and the micrometeorites going like sandblasters and the dying full of holes in a cloud of blood and stuff.