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Page 49.

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.”

The forest was at its thickest and deepest a mile or two from the crazy-quilt of windows at the far end of the cylinder.

The prodigious beard of dark green vegetation stretched around the inside surfaces of the cylinder. In some places the fog seemed to couch in the tree tops night and day. Alex and Maryan saw a greater variety of birds and animals than ever before. The animal life they saw was smaller than its earthly analogues. They saw miniature wild pigs, some dog-like creatures, cats, a small horse prancing over a ridge like a three-foot tall but fully formed adult pipe dream. They thought, at times, that a small blue or orange human-like face might be hovering amid the leaves, regarding them with serious eyes before melting away. At times, their backs crawled with uncomfortable sensations that they were being watched.

“So far, there is nothing special here for us. We should get back toward the middle or even the wall-end,” Maryan suggested as they sat together on a grassy ridge at night, roasting two squirrel-like animals and a bird they had managed to capture. Beside the tiny fire they’d made in a circle of stones sat a fire bowl Alex had made from river mud. It was a dried ball, about the size of a large fist, hollow inside and containing smoldering embers in a bed of charcoal. It had a tiny opening on top to vent, and a larger opening a quarter of the way down big enough to insert a finger or a twig to stir things around inside. Nearby lay a supply of charcoal (made from dry, burned wood) and kindling straw. This was their supply of fire, designed to be carried from campsite to campsite, avoiding the need to start a new flame.

The great wall of fragmented amber glass glowed with moonlight. Waxy leaves gleamed with dull polish. Now and then, an owl hooted. Insects, rustling leaves, and distant bubbling forest streams kept up a steady low murmur.

“We can dry these hides,” Maryan said as she scraped the rodent skins with a sharp stone in near darkness, “and make belt pouches. That way we can carry seeds to chew, and we won’t go hungry.”

He sat back against a tree trunk, using his fingertips to feel the flint blade of his knife as he chipped idly with another flint to sharpen it. “We can’t stay here forever, Maryan.” Secretly he thought: how often do we have to start over from nothing?

“I know, love. I’m getting antsy myself. This place is too quiet, somehow, too calm. Things are lurking out there someplace, watching us. I just somehow don’t think they mean us harm.”

Alex put aside his moment of despair. “Maybe they caught Nizin and had him for lunch.”

“Hah! Who’d want to eat that strutting rack of scales and white hair?”

“Something that might not consider us good food.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Turtle and iguana are delicacies in some quarters. I’m trying to keep hope alive.”

She rested her head against his shoulder, while keeping her gory hands away. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “Thanks.”

“My job.”