Free The Sunspacers Trilogy by George Zebrowski Page B

said, opening her slightly tilted eyes wide. “Got a good look?”
    “What?”
    She laughed, and I swallowed hard. “You’ve probably seen every film they have,” I said.
    She hooked her arm in mine again. “Lets go for a walk instead.” I felt her warmth and wanted to put my arm around her. I had not gone out since breaking up with Marisa. It seemed very long ago, and I was a bit nervous as well as excited.
    “Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asked.
    “There’s just me.”
    “Not even one?” She made me feel that I should have double-checked, just to be sure.
    “Families are smaller on Earth.” I looked up, and again it seemed strange not to see a sky. I kept seeing all the lights as stars. “Where can you see the stars?” I asked. “I mean directly.”
    “Why? We’d have to wear safety suits on the maintenance level, and the view would be spinning anyway. Let’s go to your room. I’ll show you how to punch up views from the observatory.”
    “I know how to do that,” I said, missing the point that she wanted to be alone with me.
    “You’ve seen stars,” she said.
    “Not the way I’d like to—outside, in a spacesuit,” I replied, turning us down the path to my dorm. “Do you have any large birds here?” I asked.
    “Sure—ducks and geese.”
    “What happens when they fly into the center?”
    “Well, they don’t get stuck. They sort of swim out.”
    I laughed, feeling that she was interested in me but didn’t know what to make of me. I knew I was being moody, picking up on things late. Morey had upset me more than I had realized.
    The ceiling flowed with light as we entered the room.
    “Here, Joe, look at this,” Linda said, sitting down at my desk.
    I leaned over her shoulder. “There’s the twenty-kilometer O’Neill colony cylinder,” she said, touching the screen, “and assorted factories nearby.” The view changed, but remained within the L-5 area of space. “Here’s the asteroid hollow.” It looked like a giant potato, cratered and ridged, but was growing green on the inside of the hollow rock, as natural as planting flowers in clay pots.
    “I’d like to visit that one,” I said.
    “They’re pretty stuck up over there. Many of the people are the original asteroid miners who brought the rock into L-5, and they’ve never gotten over slapping each other on the back about it.”
    “Well—why not? The Asteroid Belt is a long way from here. You sound like someone from Earth.”
    “We have a right to be critical of ourselves. It’s been over twenty years since the hollow was brought in, and many of us feel it wasn’t all that necessary, since we can build anything we want out here, without using old rocks.”
    “I read that the metals mined to make the hollow gave Earth quite a boost at the time.”
    “Right—Earth, not us. We still had to get our materials from the Moon. It slowed up development of L-5 for a decade, but it made us more self-reliant. Sure, we have a lot of rivalry among ourselves, but it’s friendly.”
    “Tell me about the bad feelings toward Earth.”
    She turned around and looked at me. “I guess you really do want to ruin our evening.”
    I retreated and sat down on my bed. “Sorry.”
    “I’ve never met anyone from Earth,” she went on, “who really understood. Don’t they teach you anything there? Look—Earth gets everything from us. Power, minerals, drugs, manufactured products of all kinds. Power for the lofting lasers at the spaceports comes from our orbital Sun rigs, and so will the increased power loads for the new gravity catapults. We handle all communications throughout the solar system. Believe me, the antigrav corridors from Earth will use a lot of power—”
    “But who would want to deny all this?” I said, feeling a bit defensive.
    “Don’t you see?” she said. “A political struggle has been going on for some time. Power is shifting to the Sunspacers.”
    “Well, it happens,” I said, “but we’re all the