We all smiled. I looked at the handsomely set ceramic table, wondering at how much we had actually changed.
I didn’t say much at dinner, but as I listened to Robert, I came to understand something more about the people of Mercury, and about what was happening in this sector of Sunspace.
“We won’t be miners forever,” he said, “but we’ve given humankind a better hold on this close-in space around the communal furnace. One day the resources of Mercury may run out, or become unnecessary. Materials synthesis from simpler raw materials is not far off, but when that happens we’ll still have world habitats here, an economy, our own way of life. That’s what will be important. Human beings are spreading throughout Sunspace. They’ll be living in a thousand ways, changing physically, readying themselves for the stars. This diversity will help us if we run into an alien species. We’ll need poets and storytellers to depict these different ways, just to keep Sunspacer humanity together—in its imaginative self-image, if in no other way.” He was looking at me, as if he expected me to do all these things. It was right that the town in Valley One was going to be named after him.
“What will you and Ro do when you’re finished?” Eleanor asked.
“Probably go back to school,” I said. “We have more than enough to take care of ourselves for a few years.”
“Maybe we’ll go out to the Ceres Project,” Ro added. “I’d like to see an asteroid eight hundred kilometers across.”
I still wasn’t certain about anything, but I wasn’t worrying about it as much.
Later, I left Ro at the hotel and climbed into the grassy hills above the town. I felt a bit amused at myself. What had I proven? I still couldn’t see beyond one problem following another, orbiting the biggest one, myself—the one I would always have with me. You push back at the universe and come out ahead. Sometimes. Problems would never stop coming at me, and I would have to do something about each and every one. They want you to solve them, and there is nothing else. I wondered if it was different for Morey. Maybe he had escaped all this, by giving himself to so much ambitious understanding. It was a way out of himself, and I still admired him for it; but I had to find my own way out of my own maze.
I lay down in the grass and flowers, and gazed up into the hollow. Sunlight was a watercolor yellow-white at this late hour, and would stay that way until morning. I closed my eyes and breathed the cool, sweet air. I wondered about my parents. There had been only a half dozen letters in the last year, but that didn’t bother me; they were long letters, even if they didn’t settle old problems.…
I opened my eyes and saw Bernie standing over me.
“Bernie,” I whispered, “you’re alive.…”
“They stopped looking for me, but I dug myself out,” he said, smiling, looking the same as when he had come out of the hatch on Bernal.
But then my eyes opened again and I was alone, missing him.
I recalled the faces around the table, remembering the way Robert Svoboda had looked at me. If I left them, it seemed that I would lose myself again. Why is it that your sense of self is so often bound up with people you knew well or grew up with? Does the ego put a headlock on uncertainty by making everything part of itself?
Suddenly I felt that I didn’t want to be anything for long. You’re never really one thing anyway—except in those moments when you freeze up. Some people do it early and stay that way, unable to change. My messy face of oatmeal was nothing to fear; I was determined to grow as long as the mush held out, as long as I didn’t give up. Whole cultures on Earth had died rather than change, believing that Earth was all there could be; they had grabbed bits of it and locked them away behind borders. They didn’t know that the stars are suns that burn almost forever, that the universe is rich in all that we will ever need, and we can reach out if we’re rich enough inside to see, to think, to imagine—more than anything to
imagine
what can be, to keep it in a store of imaginings and pass it on to our future.
Few people my age in human history had seen what I had seen—but in my time I am not very special in that. Alexander had conquered what he could see of the world at my age—and had complained that there were no others. If he could have left Earth, he would have been humbled by the planet’s smallness and the true size of the cosmos; but in his time only cruelty and death could humble the rulers of Earth.
Out here there was no one to steal the land from, as the settlers had from the Indians of the Americas. Space and energy around suns were abundant, but you had to buy these resources with work and caring.
Robert Svoboda cared. Like Bernie, he loved the place where he lived because he had helped create it, becoming part of it, even though he had been born elsewhere; it was as if Mercury had been waiting for him. The miners had taken the Sun’s strength into their minds and bodies, and one day that energy would flow out across sunspace not only as resources and physical power, but as art, music, and science. All the conditions for a human society were here, the makings of a culture.
I had been wrong to feel sorry for those trapped here by a lifetime of low gravity. This sector of space was their home, not Earth, however hard living here had been on their parents. I exercised, so I could go back, but they didn’t care, even though the habitat’s gravity increase would make it easier for their children to travel elsewhere. More habitats would be built, and for future generations of Mercurians the big Sun’s light would sing eternal and be part of what they meant by home, until that faraway day when their habitats might choose to become mobile and head out to the stars.
Much of the prejudice against Sunspacers, I learned, had come from the deeply rooted notion that expansion into space meant the settling of other Earthlike planets, not building new worlds from scratch in free space or terraforming hostile planets like Venus and Mars. Free space habitats, I came to believe, were the way to go; you might be stealing nursery environments from unborn intelligences if you settled Earthlike planets, even if a particular world might seem deserted when you arrived. Your coming might actually abort a whole line of evolution.
I got up and looked at the night Sun. Something in me needed to look out at the stars, so I walked back into town and borrowed one of the bikes from in front of the hotel.
I pedaled off, away from the Sun, toward the rocky, opposite end of the world, wondering if everyone has a special home somewhere, other than the place he grew up in. I thought of my room in New York. Someone else lived there now.
Home may be where you were born, or it may be elsewhere, even in more than one place; it may be nowhere, for some people. I was still looking around. Maybe it would be back on Earth, out in the Asteroids, or even here.
The road branched and climbed before me. I pumped up the left turn toward the lock tunnel. Above me loomed the unfinished, rocky narrows of the world. I cycled to the large metal door and dismounted. Laying down the bike, I turned and gazed across the length of the hollow.
The night Sun stood guard over the sleeping valleys. Lake and river were pale silver, hills blue-green in the soft light. There was a chill in the air, and I noticed something. There was very little sense here of a mysterious nature which had been here before we appeared. Like Bernal, this world was younger than humanity; only the Sun and rock were ancient. The rest was up front, with no hidden depths. Here nature could not kill human beings as it still did on natural planets.
I turned to face the door and pressed my palm on the lock. The massive panel slid open and I went inside. As the outer door closed, the inner one slid open. I triggered a long string of lights as I came out into the low-ceilinged corridor.
I walked to the observatory at the end of the passage, where I pressed my palm again and stepped into a large circular chamber covered with screens.
Brain-core terminal work desks stood like mushrooms in the central area. I had helped build parts of the modest observatory. From here, the Sun would be monitored and space scanned for debris and meteors; specialists would come from all over to study our star. The research station on Mercury was finally being closed down, to the relief of the staff.
I stepped up to the master controls and turned on the 3-D screens. Half were visual displays; the rest revealed the universe in narrow ranges—the radio universe, the neutrino universe, gravitational images of various sectors—all in color enhancements.
The stars turned, circling like some gigantic clockwork around the axis of the rotating hollow.
As I stood there, seemingly at the center of all immensity, I played an old game with myself, the same one I had played as a child—talking to my future self when I felt down, making him promise to remember me, to think back along the time lines of possibility to where I was in bed that night, thinking ahead to him.…
And here I was, that future self, thinking back to that lonely boy who was still with me. Futures cast shadows back into the present. You move ahead as long as you can see the shadows of promises, but when you lose sight of what may be, you bog down in a hopeless present; there is nothing to pull you ahead—the self that looks back is no longer waiting for you up in the future; your future becomes the present, and soon it becomes the past. If I could keep a balance between what I had been, what I was now, and what I might become, then I would be okay for a long time.
I had come to Mercury to gain a sense of doing, of having done something that wasn’t only worthy in itself, as Morey was doing, but to see the good of doing it. Morey would see the result of what he was doing later; I hadn’t been willing to wait. Maybe one day I would become more patient, more willing to look for hidden values.
I didn’t know what lay ahead, and down deep I was glad of it. Life had not closed itself up around me, as it had for so many people of the late twentieth century. I didn’t know where home would be, and that seemed best.
Ro found me as I was cycling back in the morning.
“How is my beautiful boy?” she asked, smiling. I kissed her deeply, shivering in the morning chill.
We went into the hills and stayed in the tall grass until we were very tired.
“So you think you’ve figured me out,” I said later. Ro was looking at me knowingly as we relaxed.
“I think so.”
“We’ve had this conversation before, but go ahead, I’m curious.”
“You were an overprotected kid. You had it easy, but you left home and found out things were very tough for a lot of people, and you felt guilty. You needed to find out—to test yourself, to do something that would give you a sense of responsibility and control. As an only child you needed other people to draw you out of yourself, and you found them. I know—I wanted the same thing.”
“I know all that. What else did we find out?”
“That we can do, and learn, win out over doubts.”
“Is that all? I would have thought it would be more.” I was being deliberately perverse.
“Well—there was the fear of failure to overcome …”
“What else? Come on.”
“Well—you started out wanting to be like Morey but decided to be yourself.”
“And is that any good?”
“Different—but just as good.”
“And that’s what you think of me?”
She laughed. “Don’t ask too much. You’re just beginning to be yourself.”
I made a funny face. “How did you find all this out?”
“Oh—Linda told me.”
“What?”
“And Bernie, Jake, Morey, you, and everything around you.”
“Spy!” I bit her bare stomach—gently, of course.
“By the way,” she said after a while, “what are we going to do? Do you want to go out to Ceres, or Saturn? We’ve got to make plans.”
“What do you think?”
“I like going where new things are being done,” she said firmly.
“Same here,” I replied.
The Sun lost its watercolor paleness as it brightened toward noon, and we walked back with its warmth on our faces.
Sunspacer
Sometimes I look toward Earth and see myself sitting in my high school cafeteria, gazing out through the 3-D motion mural at the parade of planets, imagining that I’m falling toward Saturn, into the rings of ice and debris—
—and I have to remind myself that I am out here, in the Rings of Saturn, helping to build a cluster of habitats; major centers are growing in orbit around the largest moons, which together with the rings are a plentiful source of raw materials. There are even plans for a tourist hotel.
If the Sun should suddenly expand into a red giant and gobble up the inner worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, civilization out here would merely be warmed, we’re so far away.
Bit by bit, humankind is shaping the resources of Sunspace into places for life. Millions of inner spaces will one day circle the Sun, forming at first a series of spaced rings, and finally a shell of life enclosing the Sun. The planets will be gone by then, used up for raw materials, but the place names and scenic locales will endure inside the habitats.
I have worked my way to the edge of a new life, but I will have to go the rest of the way to see it whole. Mistakes—my own and those of others—wait for me; but there is room for mistakes out here, where they can no longer cost the life of humanity’s only home. Frontiers can absorb errors on a grand scale, you see; that was what was wrong with the rise of technical civilization on the surface of Earth. The vulnerability of an overcrowded, over-industrialized natural planet made human failure count for too much in the last century. Out here, we don’t have to depend on people being perfect; our industrial and human wastes disappear into an ocean of night that can never be polluted. As it happens, we don’t throw much of anything away; most of it goes into our fusion recyclers. Anyway, the point is that humanity is too widespread, too constructive, to ever be in danger of killing itself off again.
“Are you sure you want to go?” I asked Ro at the end of our Mercury contract.
“I want to work in strange places,” she said with a straight face.