Hamilton, Peter F – Mindstar Rising

The Merlin was deployed a hundred and thirty minutes after take off, on the second orbit. The Sanger was five-hundred-and-fifty kilometres above Mexico. Greg had spent the whole time staring out of the windscreen, mesmerized by the globe below, the dazzle of daylit oceans, sprinkle of light from Eui~ope’s night-time cities, green and brown land that seemed to be in pristine condition, the muddy stain in the sea which marred every coastline. There were none of the physical symptoms he’d been told to look out for, just the strangeness of arms that waved about like seaweed; a whirling sensation, like a fairground ride, if he turned his head too fast. MINDSTAR RISING 85 A small screen on Jeff Graham’s console showed the Sang-er’s payload doors hinging open. The little probe nosed out of its cradle, umbilical lines winding back on to their spools, loose ends flapping about. It seemed to hover above the Sanger as its communication dishes unfolded. ‘We stick with it until Cambridge finishes the systems check,’ Jeff Graham told his passengers. ‘Never know, we might wind up taking it back.’ But the babbling background voices confirmed the Merlin’s integrity somewhere over the Mediterranean, and Jeff Graham fired the orbital manoeuvring rockets, raising the Sanger’s orbit. The last Greg saw of the Merlin was a dwindling grey outline over pale moonwashed water.

They caught up with Zanthus over Fiji, an orbit ten kilometres lower, closing fast. The terminator was a brilliant blue and white crescent six-hundred kilometres below, expanding rapidly as they raced towards the dawn. Zanthus rose out of the penumbra into direct sunlight. Greg saw a globular cluster of diamonds materialize out of nowhere. Occasional silent lightning flares stabbed out from it as the sun bounced off flat silvered ~urfaces. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’ Jeff Graham asked. ‘No messing,’ Greg said hoarsely. It was the biggest of the eight space-industry parks in Earth orbit. The sun lifted above the Pacific, shining straight into the Sanger’s cabin. Electrochromic filters cut in, turning down the glare. Greg watched in silent respect as the Sanger slowly slid underneath Zanthus. Jeff Graham began to fire the Sanger’s orbital manoeuvring rockets, raising altitude, their trajectory a slow arc up to the space industry park which would end in Synchro~zed orbits. Zanthus began to resolve, individual light-points growing, assuming definite silhouettes. The largest was the dormitory, right at the heart. Ten cans, habitation cylinders fifty metres long, eight wide, locked together at one end of a five-hundred- 86 PETER F. HAMILTON

metre boom; at the other end a vast array of solar panel tracked the sun. The whole arrangement was gravity-gradient• stabilized, the cans pointing permanently Earthwards. Floating around the dormitory were the microgee modules, one hundred and fifty-six materials-processing factories srranged in five concentric spheres. The formation was a loose one, a shoal of strange geometric insects guarding their metallic ~ueen. There was no standardization to the modules; they ranged from small boxy vapour-deposition mesh-moulds brought up by the Sangers up to the fifty-metre-long, twohundred-tonne cylinders launched by Energia-5. All of them, flaunted a collection of solar panels, thermal-dump radiators,. and communication dishes, and some had large collector mit-.. rors, silver flowers faithfully following the sun. Red and green navigation lights twinkled from every surface. Abstruse company logos bloomed across thermal blankets, as if a fastidious graffiti artist had been let loose; Greg hadn’t known so many different companies used Zanthus. Three assembly platforms hung on the outer edge of the cluster, rectangles of cross truss-beams, with geostationary antenna farms taking shape below long spidery robot-arms., Greg saw the Globecast logo on the side of one gossamer dish. Personnel commuters, manipulator pods, and cargo tugs wove around the modules, slow-gliding three-dimensional streams that curled and twisted round each other, white and orange strobes pulsing, marking out their progress. There were spaceplanes moving in the traffic flows, rendezvousing with the five servicing docks, big triple-keel structures that acted as fuel depots, maintenance stations, and cargo-storage centres. The spaceplanes unloaded their pods of raw materials, receiv-~ ing the finished products from the microgee modules in I exchange. Greg counted nine Sangers attached to one dock, staggered by how much their cargos would be worth. Philip Evans had mentioned how much Zanthus’s daily output came to, but the figures hadn’t registered at the time, silly money. Greg watched Zanthus expand around them as Jeff Graham eased the Sanger into one of the traffic lines. An errant image of his gland discharging milky fluids. Neurohormones chased. MINOSTAR RISING 87 around his brain, and he deliberately focused inwards, on himself, letting his mind wander where it would. It was a different state from the one he used to tease apart the strands of other people’s emotions. Introspective. He was isolated from the security team’s thoughts, alone and strangely serene. If that peak of intuition he’d experienced hadn’t concerned the Sanger, then, he. reasoned, Zanthus itself must be the cause. He reached right down to the bottom of his mind, and found the sense of wrongness again. It was too small, too flimsy to represent any danger, but it remained. Obstinate, and ultimately unyielding. Frustrated, he let it go. Something wrong, but not life-threatening. The situation irked him. He knew he must be overlooking something, some part of the spoiler that wasn’t what it seemed. Yet the operation was so clear-cut. As if shamed by its failure, his gland dried up. The Sanger was creeping up to the dormitory, its big cans dominating the view through the windscreen. Event Horizon used three of them for its hundred-and-twenty-strong work-force, a third of Zanthus’s total population. Greg saw a Swearingen commuter back away from one of the Event Horizon cans, a windowless cylinder with spherical tanks strapped around both ends. Tiny stabs of white fire flickered from its thruster clusters. Jeff Graham rolled the Sanger with a dru.mflre burst from the RCS thrusters. A huge Event Horizon logo slid past the windscreen; the peak of the flying V was missing, patched over with a rough square of hoary thermal foam. The RCS was firing almost continually. A screen on the flight console showed an image of the payload bay, with the airlock tube extended. A matching tube jutted out of the dormitory can, the two barely half a metre apart. Contact was a small tremble, the whirring of electrohydrostatic actuators clamping the two airlock tubes together. Jerry Masefield released his belt, and drifted up out of his seat, using the ceiling handholds to crawl down to the rear bulkhead. Greg pressed his belt’s release, and cautiously pushed down with his palms. Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis 88 PETER F. HAMILTON

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