Free Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko Page B

can’t understand why he’s still heaving,” Meda said.
    “You’d be surprised,” Flora said. “I knew one guy who was sick for seven days straight, and at the end he was upchucking marbles he’d swallowed as a child.”
    “I find that highly unlikely,” Meda said before someone could let her know she was using hyperbole.
    She’s joking, Strom sent.
    Oh, right, Meda replied.
    Flora gave us a look that said more about our status in her eyes than any words like “groundhog” and “gravity hugger.” Flora was all female, three brunettes, thick-shouldered young women with arms like steel and legs like spaghetti. It was the look of all the space dogs. Strom admired her back muscles as she, hand over hand, hauled herself down into the station. Tubing and wires were tied into the walls, hiding hand grips that she seemed to grasp instinctively. We were slowed from fear of reaching out and taking a handful of system critical wiring, causing the station to plummet to Earth.
    That won’t happen, I sent. We’re in geostationary orbit. There’s no way we could fall to Earth …
    I stopped. Manuel had turned to look at me. We know.
    I grinned. I know we know, but … I shrugged. The delicate balance of force, neither pulled out into space, nor drawn back to Earth, was awe-inspiring for me. I tried to draw the picture and pass it to the pod, but Manuel waved me away. Flora had disappeared around a corner.
    Where are we?
    Our thoughts were disjointed, echoing along the length of our line. Usually we thought in a circle, hand in hand, a dual token-ring of biological thought. Strung out along the corridor as we were, thoughts were slow to percolate, consensus was weak, and half-formed ideas collided with decisions coming the other way. At the end, I nibbled at the
group mind, but I was elsewhere. My brain wasn’t like the others’; it drifted toward minutiae when we weren’t looking, getting caught in the details. Sometimes I feared being alone, afraid that I’d never come back from where I go.
    My mind was unraveling the maze of corridors, where we had been, half-glimpsed rooms, piecing bits into the three-dimensional map of the station we had from the tug. Columbus Station looked like an upside-down turnip, hanging forty-two thousand kilometers above the Earth, on its half-finished tether above Ecuador. It sat perfectly balanced in zero-gee with a cable lowering to Earth and another counterbalancing one rising into space.
    In months, when the Earth-side tether hooked up with the ground anchor, Columbus Station would be the second of the OG’s space stations, doubling the rate of material and personnel egress to GEO. From there to L4 was a trivial maneuver. The arc flickered in my brain, the forces it required, the effect of mass.
    “Quant!”
    Hand over hand, I sprinted down the hall, joining the pod just as they arrived in front of a grey door. Stenciled at the left was our name.
    I felt the excitement course through us. Our quarters, in space.
    “We were expecting another quint,” Flora said. She touched our name, as if expecting it to be wet. “Had to paint over it.”
    Paint over it? Strom wondered.
    They weren’t expecting us, Moira sent coldly. They weren’t expecting to send us up.
    Because of Meda? I sent, checking myself too late. There was no response from my pod, though I saw the red rise on Meda’s cheeks.
    Flora opened the door with a flourish. “Your home for ten weeks.”

    Brightness flushed away the neon light of the corridor. A panorama of the Earth hung below us the size of a basketball at arm’s length. Half of it was in shadow, the rest in full sunlight and cast in blues, greens, and whites.
    “It’s—” Meda started.
    “Yeah,” Flora finished. “I love this part of the tour.”
    “Why is our room so nice? So special?”
    “It’s not,” Flora said. “Everyone gets a window view of Earth. Tradition.”
    “Everyone gets a room like this?”
    “Well, yours is bigger. Most