Death Match - Diane Duane [55]
“No use in having a back-door key,” he said, “if you can’t use it occasionally.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold-colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.
The whole Cartesian “landscape” shimmered, wavered…and vanished. For a moment the two of them stood alone in total darkness. Then slowly starlight began to fade in around them, and from off to one side, a great bloom of cool blue light became apparent.
Catie looked that way and took a deep, sharp breath. Under them, in darkness, the Earth was turning. They were standing in emptiness about five thousand miles out, on the “dark side” at the moment. The spatters of light that were the great cities of the North American continent were glowing beneath them. In the Pacific they could see another faint glow of light, silvery and diffuse, and Catie looked over her shoulder to see the full moon looking down at its own reflection, setting, as away over at the other side of the world, another light grew.
Slowly the sun began to climb in growing glory through the atmosphere, the light of it burning red at first as it shone through the air’s greatest thickness, then burning paler, orange, golden, white, and then utterly blinding as it came up over the terminator, and the fire and light of day swept across the Atlantic toward New York.
“Catie?”
“Yeah?” she said, not much wanting to be distracted from this gorgeous view. Whether it was based on real-time imaging or was someone’s reconstruction, it was beautiful.
“Catie!”
“Yeah, what?”
“Duck!”
She looked at Mark and wondered what his problem was…then, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, caught something, another bloom of light from behind them, the wrong direction. Something was falling at her, fast. Out of reflex, she ducked, turning—
Blazing in the new sun, silent as a feather falling through air, it came plunging at them seemingly right above their heads, immense, unstoppable, massive, but still graceful in its motion: a space station, a nonexistent one—for no one had ever actually built a space station along the “traditional” lines that were first mooted in the middle of the last century, a wagon wheel with spars out-reaching from a central hub. The silvery-white-skinned bulk of it passed so close over their heads that it seemed impossible to Catie that it wouldn’t stir up wind and ruffle their hair. But they were in “vacuum,” and there was no wind, and no sound, just the vast mass of the station passing over, passing by, gone—silhouetted now against the steady, unbearable fire of the sun, and receding from them as it plunged on past at thousands of miles per hour, rotating gracefully around its hub as it went.
“Nice, huh?” Mark said, getting up and dusting himself off.
“Yeah, nice,” Catie said, getting up, too. “You might have warned me a little sooner.”
“What, and spoil the effect? Someone here went to a lot of trouble to write that routine. It’s the server-maintenance people’s intro to the space…I thought you might like to see it.”
There was no question that it had been worth seeing, but Catie wasn’t going to admit that to Mark right this minute. She looked after the space station as it receded, noting the structure of the hub. Rather than having a docking facility there, it was just a blind sphere. “Is that spat volume?” she said.
“Yup,” Mark said. “It’s the external ‘restatement’ of the shell that holds the rules for the behavior of the internal volume. The volume’s been instructed to act like the ‘classic venue,’ the original Selective Spin module that they hooked up to the International Space Station. But the designers prefer this for the outside. It’s prettier, and doesn’t look like it was built by