Engineman - Eric Brown [27]
She opened her eyes and stared through the sheer crystal viewscreen that fronted the terminal complex. She certainly was, she thought, a long way from home. So far she had made three jumps out towards the Rim - from Earth to Addenbrooke, to Rousseau, and then to the Swedish colony world. Each step she had taken through the interfaces had carried her approximately three thousand light years through space, though, of course, the concept was just too much to grasp. She told herself that the journey so far, nine thousand light years across the spiral arm to the threshold of the Rim, which had taken just six hours with medical examinations and identity checks, would in the old days of the bigships have taken the better part of a standard month. The advent of interface technology, invented and developed on Mars twenty years ago and installed in stages throughout the Expansion over the following ten years, had had the effect of shrinking the human-populated quadrant galaxy to the size of a single planet. In the time it took a traveller to get from London to Sydney by sub-orbital jet - ten hours - the interstellar traveller could pass from Earth, via the junction planets, to the outermost colony on the Rim. Far-flung outposts settled in the Galactic Core, which had been lucky to see a 'ship from Earth once a year, now enjoyed a monthly influx of goods and tourists. Among the hundred densely-populated worlds in the vicinity of Earth, the portals were often opened on a daily basis. The Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation ran the interfaces in the more populated sectors of the Expansion, but in the Core and out on the Rim the operation was conducted by smaller companies.
Ella appreciated the obvious benefits of interface transportation, but at the same time she mourned the passing of the bigship Lines, the tragedy and suffering of the Enginemen, and the simple lack of romance of the portals compared to the gut-wrenching, heart-warming sight of the bigships which had dominated the spaceports like magnificent leviathans.
And, of course, portal travel was painful.
She looked out across the 'port to the interface a kilometre away, a high blue membrane set against the only slightly paler blue midday sky. Beyond the 'face was the city of New Stockholm, looking impossibly clean and prosperous: a panorama of glass towers, forests and parks. A greater contrast to Paris she could not imagine. The staff working in the terminal building, and the citizens come to see off friends and family, were all well-built, blonde and bronzed, descendants of the Scandinavians who had made the planet their home more than fifty years ago. She compared these people with the travellers who had left Paris with her, harried and beset individuals, either leaving Earth for good or glad to be getting away from a fragmenting Europe if only for a short time.
She considered the teeming crowds of travellers she had seen over the past few hours. The multitude of citizens in the Expansion, and the multiplicity of events, made her realise the insignificance of her attempt at communicating her thoughts and feelings through the medium of her art. Hell, even in a culture which understood the type of work she did, there were people like Vasquez and her father who shut their minds to what she was saying - and Eddie, too, she had to admit. In the years she had known him, he had made no effort to try to understand what she was doing: that he had appreciated the degree of difficulty involved in producing a piece made the fact that he could not interpret her work all the more frustrating.