“You needn’t have. I’d be a spacer myself if I’d had a chance when I was young. The future is here.”
Rydberg wondered. How much of humankind would ever live off Earth? Aside from science and industry, how much would it ever mean?
He reached Tychopolis in ample time to get lodging and lunch. Appetite was lacking, though. He prowled the city. Everywhere he found activity, growth, ongoing improvement. It wasn’t all government’s or Fireball’s. Three arcaded levels of businesses lined Tsiolkovsky Prospect. A doorscreen advertised that King Lear would be performed within, live. The ballet had acquired a theater of its own. Apartments in residential sections were being remodeled to suit their tenants, who often held title. Other units had evidently become places of worship, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Gaian. A Cinco de Mayo picnic filled the bamboo grove of Kaifungfu Park with music and merriment.
Among the crowds passed the Lunarians, the new generation, in their late teens or younger, comely, graceful, and apart.
Rydberg’s hour drew nigh. He entered city hall.
Those three or four rented rooms in the Fireball Complex hardly rated the name. Municipal government had no more authority than the nations had jointly chosen to allow it, essentially the overseeing ofservices. That thought raised a brief smile on his lips. What had been delegated was most of what touched the lives of the Moon’s inhabitants.
Human workers were few. They went about their duties informally. The assistor in the mayor’s office scanned Rydberg, heard his name, and opened the inner door for him. He passed through. The chamber beyond was uncluttered. A large desk held a phone, a computer terminal, and some personal items—a picture, a chunk of deep-blue mineral, a notepad bescribbled and bedoodled. Background music lilted soft from a speaker, Rydberg recognized “Appalachian Spring.”
The woman behind the desk met his gaze steadily. He had seen her before on newscasts, her image in articles and books. The person had the force that he had awaited, but also a balance, a quie.t alertness that somehow slowed his heartbeat for him.
Dagny Beynac in her forties had put a little more flesh on the big bones, but only a little. The face, broad, curve-nosed, high in the cheeks, remained fair-skinned, slightly creased at the blue eyes and full mouth. White threads were like highlights in the red-bronze hair that fell to her shoulders. She wore a plain gray tunic and slacks, a silver-and-opal pin at her throat.
“Pilot Rydberg?” Her voice was more low than when she spoke in public, the burr more evident. “Salud. What can I do for you?”
Unconsciously, he came to attention. “I don’t know,” he said.
The ruddy brows lifted. “What do you mean by that?”
He was faintly astonished at how levelly he too spoke. “I am your son, madame.”
The elevator to the centrifuge was for the disabled or lazy. He and she used the staircase that wound around its shaft. Most of the numerous people they encountered knew and greeted her. She gave back a smile, a wave, perhaps a word, while moving onward. Rydberg didn’t see how she managed it. He’d have used up his stock of affability in the first hundred meters.
In form as well as in size, this machine was as unlike the devices in a spacecraft or on the surface of a low-g body as those two kinds were unlike one another. At the bottom of the shaft, you stepped onto a narrow band, then more in series, each rotating more rapidly than the last. Cuddlers were available to cushion acceleration shock, but an accustomed person of normal agility didn’t need them. However, when you reached the primary disc, you must get onto a pathway as it went by, and then you did well to lay hold of its right or left rail.
Silent on maglev, the great wheel endlessly turned, burnished, majestic, beneath a ceiling that was a single screen and simulated an Earth sky, clouds blowing white across blue, birds on the wing. Given such a mass, precise balancing was unnecessary. As you walked outward, centrifugal weight changed in force and direction. Spiraling, the path canted to stay under your feet, until at last you got to the flange and Earth weight. Almost perpendicular to the Lunar horizontal, it bore a wide circular roadway, payed with yielding duramoss. Folk crowded the walking lane, spaced themselves more carefully in the running lane, did stationary aerobics or weight lifting in the frequent bays. On the opposite side of the path, compartments ringed the disc. From the center you saw their continuous roof, here you saw their doors. Anybody could use the open circle at any time, but one of these you must reserve and pay for.