Flatlander - Larry Niven [85]
He was looking down through thick glass. Beyond and below, an assembly line was birthing acre-sized sheets of silvered fabric, rolling the fabric into tubes with the silvering on the inside, sealing the ends, and folding them into relatively tiny packets.
“City of mirrors,” Tom said reflectively.
“You know it,” said a woman’s voice. Belt accent, specifically Confinement Asteroid. I found her at my shoulder. Within the bubble helmet she was young and pretty and very black: Watusi genes, skin blackened further by the un-filtered sunlight of space. She was almost as tall as a lunie, but the style of her suit made her a Belter. I liked her torso painting. Against the pastel glow of the Veil Nebula, a slender woman’s silhouette showed in uttermost black, save for two glowing greenish-white eyes.
“City of mirrors. There are Hove City mirrors everywhere in space, everywhere you look,” she told us. “Not just telescopes. You know what they’re doing down there? Those are solar reflectors. They’re shipped out flat. We inflate them. Then we spray foam plastic struts on them. They don’t have to be strong. We cut them up and get cylindrical mirrors for solar power.”
“I’ve been a Belt miner,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “I’m Desiree Porter, newstaper for the Vesta Beam.”
“Tom Reinecke, BBC.”
“Gil Hamilton, ARM delegate, and we’re being abandoned.”
Her teeth flashed like lightning in a black sky. “Gil the Arm! I know about you!” She looked where I was pointing and added, “Yah, we’ll talk later. I want to interview you.”
We jumped to join the last of the line as it cycled through the air lock.
We crowded into different elevators and rejoined on the sixth level, the dining facility. Mayor Watson again took the lead. You couldn’t get lost following Mayor Watson. Eight feet two inches tall, topped with ash blond hair and a nose like the prow of a ship and a smile that showed a good many very white teeth.
By now we were talking away like old friends … some of us, anyway. Clay and Budrys and the other UN delegates still had to keep all their attention on their feet, and they still bounded too high. And I got my first look at the Garden, but I didn’t get a chance to study it till we were seated.
We were three delegates from the United Nations, three from the Belt, and four representing the moon itself, plus Porter and Reinecke, and Mayor Watson as our host.
The dining hall was crowded, and the noise level was high. Mayor Watson was out of earshot at the other end of the table. He’d tried to mix us up a little. The reporters seemed to be interviewing each other and liking what they learned. I found myself between Chris Penzler, Fourth Speaker for the Belt, and a Tycho Dome official named Bertha Carmody. She was intimidating: seven feet three with a spreading crown of tightly curled white hair, a strong jaw, and a penetrating voice.
The Garden ran vertically through Hovestraydt City: a great pit lined with ledges. A bedspring-shaped ramp ran up the center, and narrower ramps fed into it at all levels, including this one. The plants that covered the ledges were crops, but that didn’t keep them from being pretty. Melons hung along one ledge. A ledge of glossy green ground cover turned out to be raspberries and strawberries. There were ledges of ripe corn and unripe wheat and tomatoes. The orange and lemon trees lower down were blooming.
Chris Penzler caught me gaping. “Tomorrow,” he said. “You’re seeing it by sunlamps now. By daylight it’s quite beautiful.”
I was surprised. “Didn’t you just get here? Like the rest of us?”
“No, I’ve been here a week. And I was here at the first conference twenty years ago. They’ve dug the city deeper since. The Garden, too.” Penzler was a burly Belter nearing fifty. His immense, sloping shoulders made his otherwise acceptable legs look spindly. He must have spent much of his life in free fall. His Belter crest was still black, but it had thinned on top to leave an isolated tuft on his forehead. His brows formed a single furry black ridge across