The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [72]
2021
THE STELLA MARIS:
2021-2022, EARTH-RELATIVE
"ANNIE, IT IS so cool! Wait until you see it. The rock looks like this giant potato. And all I could think of when I saw it was the Muppet Show. Spuds in spa-a-a-ce!"
Anne laughed, amused by the image and relieved to have George home, if only for a few days while he and D.W. collected additional equipment. The past four weeks had been an anxious time for a woman whose faith in technology was more by practical default than informed conviction, but George had come back to her ebullient and confident, burying her misgivings in an avalanche of enthusiasm as she drove him home from the San Juan airport.
"The engines are on one end and the remote cameras and so forth are on the other end, but recessed and kind of cross-eyed, so they don’t point directly in the line of travel—"
"Why’s that?"
"To keep them from getting abraded by ’interstellar shit’ as you so delicately put it, my dear. The cameras focus on a set of mirrors—the mirrors are exposed but we can sort of peel layers off as the images degrade, the way you peel a layered face shield off a motorcycle helmet in a dirt race. God, you look fabulous!" She kept her gaze on the road but the delicate fan of lines around her eyes deepened with pleasure. Her hair was piled in some kind of style George could only identify as "up" and she was wearing pearls and cream silk. "So anyway," he said, "if you think of the potato, we dock on the long side, like where you’d put the butter—"
"Or the soy-based butteroid nonfat substance, with the taste of real margarine," Anne muttered, eyes on the traffic.
"You fly into this tube and then there’s an airlock, but you have to suit up to go from the docker to the airlock. Then you go down this little rock corridor with the wall surfaces all sealed up and there’s another airlock just in case—"
"Just in case what?" Anne wanted to know, but he hardly heard her.
"Then you get to the living quarters, which are right in the center where the shielding is best and Annie, it’s beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don’t go nuts from the dark. They’re sort of like shoji screens." She nodded. "So. There’re four concentric cylinders inside, okay? The bedrooms and the toilets are around the outer cylinder. The rooms are pie-shaped—"
"Did you set aside one for the exercise and medical equipment?"
"Yes, Doctor. I put the stuff in there, but you’ll have to set it up the way you want it when you get there." George closed his eyes, picturing the rest, then stared straight ahead, not seeing the traffic or San Juan, but the unique and wonderful vessel that would be their home soon, which felt cozy and nautical to him, everything in its place, neat and organized and surprisingly comfortable. "The next inner cylinder has a big common room with built-in tables and benches and the kitchen, which is good, you’ll like it. Did you know Marc Robichaux can cook? French stuff. Lot of sauces, he says—"
"I know. Marc’s a honey. We’ve been in touch on the net a lot."
"—but we’re eating out of tubes until we’ve got gravity. Oh! And I had the robots hollow out an extra room with a stone tub, like a Japanese bathroom, where you soap up and rinse off in a little water and then soak."
"Oooh, now that sounds seriously okay," Anne purred. "How big is it?"
He leaned over and planted a kiss on her neck. "Big enough. Now. In the center, there are two more concentric cylinders for the Wolverton tube, right? Column of plants stuck in holes all around the outer cylinder. Leaves coming out into the living area, roots converging toward the center, right? All the air and almost all the wastes get filtered through the plant cylinder. I’ve seen them before but God, this one is beautiful! Marc has been working on the plant mix for months—"
There was more about the plants and then George went on to tell her about the bridge and how the mining robots fed the mass-drivers. And Anne gathered that he and Sofia and Jimmy would be working on AI programs that would make the