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66.
Eons ago, this must have been an impressive city in space, Alex thought as he stood with his arm around Maryan, as they stared at the approaching starscape of broken marvels.
Now the great station was a gray ruin, illumined mainly by reflected light from the Earth’s atmosphere and basking beside Luna’s bluish-green stencil rays. Everywhere Alex looked, debris hung frozen in the thin atmosphere. On the outside, the silvery metallic skin of the station was peeling off in huge squares and rectangles, exposing shadowy girders and tangles of cable underneath. One could see into the station at various impact points, where small objects had slammed through, and the interior was an absolute shambles of suspended debris and dust.
“Greetings,” a male voice said behind Alex and Maryan, and they whirled. Alex tightened his arms around Maryan, who stiffened in his embrace.
On the wall behind them had appeared the image of a genial man with white hair, of indeterminate race and age. He wore dark, comfortable clothing and appeared to be in a comfortably gloomy study. “Sorry if I startled you. My name is Spector, and I am a librarian with added functions as a host. I can book rooms for you, hire a rental car, suggest a good podiatrist, whatever you need.”
“Are you a real person?” Maryan said, separating herself from him and advancing toward him with curiosity. “Were you?” she amended.
“Oh no,” Spector said in a mixture of kindness and condescension that Alex found irritating. “I am a composite of numerous people, but primarily I am an avatar of the chief librarian of our time, Dr. Grant Genovese. Have you met him yet?”
Alex said: “I think he’s been dead and gone for a while.” Ages, Alex thought. Eons.
Spector’s image flickered an instant, and a brief look of bafflement fleeted across his features as the entire scenario refreshed itself via a warm boot. “My name is Spector,” he said, which was when Alex realized Spector was broken, like most everything in this gigantic orbiting tomb.
“Try to understand this,” Alex said. “The station is in ruins. We need help. Will there be breathable air where we are going?”
“Let me check for you,” Spector said. “Where are you going?”
Maryan said: “Wherever it is possible for us to survive.” She added: “We’d prefer to go back to the surface of the planet.”
Spector looked puzzled. “This station has every amenity. Would you like me to book you a hotel room, a massage, a swim party at one of our themed pools? Do you prefer Polynesian, Icelandic, or Arizona Desert?”
“Spector,” Alex said, gesticulating with frustration, “please be a good host and listen. Listen carefully.”
“I am listening,” Spector said, inclining his head with warmth where he sat behind his desk.
“A million years have passed. The station is a wreck. There are no more human beings. We are extinct.”
Spector rose, putting his hands in his pockets. He looked rumpled and academic in a gray sweater, white shirt, and beige linen trousers. “Logic tells me that I am speaking with two human beings.” He smiled cozily, as if enjoying a joke they’d made.
“We need air, water, food,” Maryan said. “Spector, the station is a wreck.”
Alex told her: “My guess is we’re overwhelming his functional database, what’s left of it.”
“Maybe he’s just a librarian as he says,” she said.
“I am a librarian,” Spector said. His image flickered and he appeared once again to reboot. “My name is Spector. Can I be of service?”
The boat shuddered, and Alex and Maryan hung on to objects around them as the floor rose up as the boat ran aground. They turned away from the streaked, fuzzy screen where Spector had been, and faced the large view screen.
“Look, oh dear God,” Maryan said, pointing. Alex could only stare numbly at the overwhelming scene that played out before them. They were in a vast space full of frozen debris. Some of the objects still twirled slowly, and had perhaps been twirling thus for eons. Radio lifts were everywhere, as were silvery skin squares and glassy wall tiles. The boat had run up on the ledge of a huge curving platform forming a ring miles long inside the main structure of the station. From a thousand feet up, indirect sunlight streamed in, a smoky pillar of light that cut through torn structural elements and stabbed downward. Where the light entered, torn metal gleamed like worn copper and brass, almost a dark golden color. The beam itself was filled with a dust of microscopic debris that glowed bluish in places, light yellow in others, and in a few rare spots as though it contained miniature rainbows. The space around it was almost entirely dark, except light glittered on slowly twirling broken surfaces and loose objects. Light bounced off distant curving walls that were still intact, whose portholes and railings were dimly visible. The beam of light drenched a section of the ledge near the ship with near daylight intensity, seemingly dripping off the edge and plunging another thousand feet into unfathomable depths full of ancient architectures and geometries that steeped in a somber olive-drab and coppery-brown gloom. Paper had gone out of vogue in the early 21st Century, replaced by very similar looking sheets of an environmentally friendly bioplast called radio lifts. These were biodegradable sheets containing pixons whose color could be remotely programmed, so that they could “say” whatever one wanted them to, and each sheet had enough intrinsic memory for a library of older tree-books. The drained atmosphere inside the station held a jumble of drowned debris that looked holographic and disembodied, illumined from behind by brownish-green fingers of light.
Maryan gripped Alex’s side, painfully, getting his attention. She pointed silently to a form lying suspended in midspace as though asleep. It was the frozen body of a long-dead young woman. Her skin looked bluish in the light, as if she had been a denizen of some watery world created out of rainwater and cigarette smoke. Her hair, what was left of it from eons of bumping about, was of a dark and indeterminate color but might once have been blonde or even reddish. Hard to say. Even the corpse’s expression was hard to read—was it peaceful, or was there some slowly dawning horror that had never had a chance to fully burst on her features? Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open as if she were uttering some words, and was stuck on one long syllable that just wouldn’t come out.
One by one, they counted at least a half dozen bodies of young men and women, or parts of them, looking like broken statuary. Aside from a few shreds of ancient clothing, all were naked.
The mere presence of the boat had created infinitely slow ripples of nudging among the drifting objects, which ultimately began to affect the nearest corpse, the young woman’s, which turned slightly and in so doing revealed the dessicated texture of the chalk-white skin. But her eyeballs still glittered from under partially open lids, and her arms lay relaxed by her sides. Her legs were intact and also relaxed, slightly bent at the knees.
As the boat drifted at a glacial pace, they passed a row of dead, dark openings that loomed above dust-blurred walking platforms. High up, still dimly visible in dark blue on light gray, were the letters L5 Port of Entry & Dep. The rest of the sign had been torn off by some long-ago disaster, and the entry point of a missile or fist-sized meteorite through the station’s had collapsed somehow, sealing itself off. Alex frowned in puzzlement at the airtight pucker of ripped metal, spattered glass, and melted materials far overhead in what must once have been a lovely dome with stained glass-like effects.
A sudden jarring of the floor made Alex and Maryan cry out and reach for their balance, forgetting the view outside.
The boat ran slowly aground, bow first, a bit sideways, and sat firmly on the metallic ledge. The boat had bent a handrail down and now hung frozen on that ledge, looking across a wide walk space toward a series of doors and shop windows. “Like a huge mall,” Alex said.
“A shopping mall,” Maryan said wonderingly, from some ancient memory of her Shurey ancestor.
Alex noticed that it was getting hot in the boat, and the air seemed to be leaden. He touched his throat, which was slick with sweat. “Oxygen is running low.”
“Maybe it only did a quick replenish in the atmosphere,” she said, “and there is little or no backup in its tanks.”
“We’ll suffocate.” He walked in a panic up to the opposite screen and banged on it with both fists. “Spector!” He said again: “Spector!” But the screen kept flickering, and only shadowy hints of the librarian’s form appeared in short takes.
Maryan held her throat, coughed, and sat down abruptly on a steel bench from which dust flew up.
Alex pressed his fingertips against the Spector screen and moved his hands about as if he could force the elusive advisor to step out. Then he noticed a red sign to one side and brushed his wrist over it. The faded white letters “Emergency Screen” became visible. He touched the sign, and a fractured blue enveloped the screen. Only partially legible, it portrayed a map of the space station. As Alex touched various parts with his fingertips, they popped up in detailed 3-D relief, holographically, inches outside the screen surface. When he ran his hands over the models, they turned at his bidding. “Spector!” he cried. “Help us! We need air!”
Maryan rose and stumbled toward the screen pointing. “Look, there is a green area in the center of the station.” She pressed her hands against it, and the area rose in relief. They saw a forest at the heart of the station. The display did not seem to be aware of the ship’s wrecked state. The station was a cylinder about twenty miles long and five miles in diameter. Their boat had entered a larger end-cap section filled with tier upon tier of shops, streets, hotels, a whole city—empty of life. The external skin of the cylinder, ruined and airless, encompassed several decks of living and working space on a vast scale—each deck several hundred square miles in area. The innermost deck, facing into the open cylinder, apparently had been designed as a series of parks and farms but was now a jungle of forests and swamps under a glowing internal sky. It was a dark-green wilderness with reddish sunlight looming behind huge trees; so the interior had become a huge forest, a jungle, and therefore must contain some breathable air as it reprocessed carbon. It was a rash guess, but they were running out of breathable air by the minute.
Alex took a look at Maryan, who had slumped with her back against the screen and was holding her face in her hands. Could they get there in time? Desperately, Alex strode to the front of the boat. There, he waved his arms, cutting through layers of hanging cloth and dusty cobwebs. Coughing, he cleared his way to a forward view screen, under which he saw a panel that looked as if it might be a cover over manual steering controls. He tried to pry it open with his hands, but the cover stuck. He picked up a loose bar of composite steel, like a crow bar, and pried at the panel until it snapped and fell off. Inside was a small bank of lights—all burned out, dull amber and red with a few greens mixed in—and control buttons. A few of the buttons shattered under his touch, and the plastic-like material dribbled away under his fingertips. But the underlying steel shafts were intact—apparently made of a corrosion-resistant alloy or composite—and he boldly pressed them, testing their function.
At first he felt nothing and was afraid that the boat’s controls were dead. After all, how many eons had she lain silent and unmoving in frozen sleep, her materials weakening from the sheer passage of time?
Then, a sudden lurch—and the boat slammed against the deck, worsening its injuries. No telling if the new structural damage was letting air out faster—but this boat would never fly in space again. Alex worked the controls feverishly. “Hang on, Maryan. I’m going to try and get us to that forested area.”
Suddenly the boat lifted smoothly, and for a moment he thought he had its controls in hand. The next moment she lurched, left with her stern, then slammed down on the steel deck again. Alex groaned. He could just imagine slamming this thing down until it broke open and they lay dying like gaping fish on the inhospitable steel walkway. With both hands, he continued pressing buttons as he learned their functioning. He was beginning to feel short of breath, and his arteries were pounding in his throat. How much longer? Maybe just minutes. God, something had to happen, and quick!
As if reading his mind, the boat floated up a finger’s breath, so it was free of friction, and accelerated in a leftward sideways motion.
“Alex!” Maryan cried, watching the wall of shop windows approaching.
“I’m trying—“ he started to say, pumping the buttons, but he couldn’t control the boat.
The windows and walls approached in a blur of speed.
Alex and Maryan felt the shudder, but did not hear the slam of shattered glass, as the boat spun through department store windows. Still spinning—in fact, accelerating—the boat bashed through great empty halls in which decayed signs hung overhead and dusty counters vanished in puffs of dust. Effigies—mannequins male and female, some near naked in faded pink, some holding a pensive finger to a lip or touching what had once been a hat or a hairdo, or holding a hand near a hip where once had been a trouser pocket, toppled out of the way as the boat crashed wildly and careened about. Ancient lights flickered on, then winked out just as quickly as their circuits smoked under the load. Some vanished in showers of sparks as their wiring was torn out of the ceiling. The boat rocketed on like a carnival ride gone wild. She crashed like a ballistic cigar immersed in a bow wake of flickering blue lights and reddish flames, then slammed through a rear wall, across a silently frozen street in a night scene without neons, and into another level of stores. From there, she changed direction, spinning counter-clockwise, and down through a mezzanine, partially weightless, down multiple balcony levels, and through a gloomy courtyard, down an alley framed in faux brick, through a plate window—and into a mass of trees.
There, the ride came to an end as the boat couldn’t navigate through the dense trunks, turned upward but couldn’t mount the traction to climb into the interior central sky, then burrowed nose down until she came to a stop in the ground. At that, the engine died. Breakers slammed, the lights went out, and fire sparked. The boat would never fly anywhere again.
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