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75.
“Astounding,” Maryan said as they neared the other end of the long cylinder.
Alex had to agree, and they walked in amazement the last mile toward the windows overlooking space.
What windows these were! Except for a mile-wide lens in the center, the other pieces were not even, manmade geometries of clear glass, but a jumble of polygons in all sizes and shapes. A few of the smaller windows looked clear, and might date to the original human-made structure, but most were translucent beeswax colors ranging from dark brown to vibrant orange and amber. The material was silicate, quartz, Alex thought, just melted beach sand full of inclusions. Here and there in the hard glass, one could see embedded rocks, dead trees, and even the broken limbs of spider robots that had gotten stuck in their own goo. In the very center was a nearly round disk of clear glass through which much of the cylinder’s daylight poured, like blue light through smoke.
The surrounding shards cast a beer-yellow light over the nearby forests. The forest was at its thickest here—no surprise, since this area received the most light. The ground also seemed to slope uphill.
Alex stood on top of the first of a series of rises, mopping his brow and looking around. Maryan was a few minutes behind, still clambering up a winding slope covered with thick grass and brush. The lowlands behind here were darkly carpeted with tree crowns, and beyond them shimmered several small hidden lakes. Several ridges ran around the inside of the cylinder like collars of earth. Bluish haze shrouded the lakes and more distant mountain ranges.
Alex and Maryan drew closer to the far end of the cylinder. They climbed down into swampy lowlands and back up onto high, dry grassy ridges that afforded good views all the way back to the distantly glowing disk of the city wall.
The light deepened in intensity. The amber shards swam in gloomy light, while the lighter shards emitted clear views of space. The air grew warmer, then hot. The ground seemed to become increasingly rocky and dry, almost like clambering out onto a rocky beach, only there was not a sea of water here but a sea of space. It was a black night smeared with stars. The olivine disk of the moon with its powdery rays and pockmark craters dominated the foreground. At the moment, the moon filled the upper half of the view, to the right, so that the curving edge ran from upper left to lower right. The windows up close looked stranger and more alien than ever, and Alex longed to study their angles and surfaces more closely. The closer he got, the hotter it became. “All that sunlight,” Maryan said, huffing along behind him.
“Even the reflected moonlight is really sunlight,” he said. “It’s almost as if these windows are behaving a bit like lenses, magnifying the light, capturing more of it, bringing in more heat.”
Alex and Maryan stood together on a jumble of boulders, holding hands. As light and heat streamed down on them, they sweated profusely and the air seemed too dry to breathe. “Any closer and we fry,” he said.
“How strange,” she said. “This rock we’re standing on looks almost like lava, some of it.” She shifted about uneasily. “It’s warm...”
He shifted as she did, suddenly afraid to burn his feet, but it wasn’t that hot. The hard, thickly slathered blackish stone was no warmer than the steamy air around them. While they stood there, they noticed a salty-sulfurous cooking-smell, as of some elemental soup not meant for human consumption. Maryan rumpled her nose. “What is that smell?”
He shook his head. “Someone is boiling stones?” He grinned.
She shrugged. Her eyes were filled with uncertainty, then wonder as she looked over their surroundings. “Look at that! Thousands of windows overlooking space.”
“Every one of them a different size and shape,” he said. Cautiously, still holding hands, they walked closer on the barren black rocks that were strewn with hot sand. No life was evident around them at first—not even insects—until Maryan cried out and pointed upward. “Look, more spiders!”
Alex craned his neck upward, feeling sweat pooling in the crease under the back of his skull. Oven-like heat blazed on his cheeks, and his lungs felt dry. Sure enough, a mile or so high in the bowl of windows, were the distantly tiny shapes of the large spiders they’d encountered on the opposite end of the cylinder, repairing the wall after their boat had crashed through. “They seem to be working busily away,” he said. He tugged on Maryan’s hand. “Come on, let’s back away. This heat is getting unbearable. Must be cumulative sunlight, maybe mirrored and lensed by thousands of tons of glass in these windows.”
“Looks like glass made by bees over long periods of time,” she said, pointing to haphazardly interlacing sections.
He looked out over the lunar surface sprawling majestically in blindingly reflected solar light, and black space full of sprayed light beyond the curving lunar horizon. Something caught his eye—a bluish-white point of light just two or three few miles away in space, with concentric rings of orange and greenish light around it. It appeared to be at the tip of a large dull object barely visible, clutched among larger dark objects. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “that’s a piece of stone being held between several large machines focusing sunlight to melt part of the rock.”
“You’re right,” she said. “The sun provides all the energy you’d ever need to melt metal, stone, anything you can think of. That would explain the heat here. Maybe the station keeps adding on, expanding itself. Slowly, with robots running on solar energy. Maybe it adds a mile every hundred thousand years. After all, there’s all the time in the world.”
He picked up: “With humans extinct, there is no reason to either stop or continue, so the station keeps functioning.”
“Alex, the station has plenty of life in it—just not the original humans.”
“Now we are back,” he said with more weariness than joy, looking at the frozen tableau outside. “We’ll find out what we need to know.” Nothing had moved, and the rock, if that it was, just kept glowing. “Probably melting slowly before those machines push it in here inches at a time.”
“Yes,” she said, “Then maybe...the line on the moon...could it be a mass driver?”
Alex searched Kirk’s memories for the concept: “Yes, it could be a mass driver. That’s like a frictionless sled powered by sunlight and magnetic tricks. The contents—maybe a block of stone—accelerate until they reach escape velocity, which isn’t quite so high on the Moon, and fly out toward the station here, where those machines melt them to add more material to the cylinder.”
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