Between the Strokes of Night

“There’s one good thing about humans: we forget. Despair can’t last forever. We pulled ourselves together, little by little, and began to think again. On Salter Station we finally arranged for a radio conference of all the space groups. It was difficult to handle, because one arcology had been out near Mars, and we had long radio lags. But we pulled everyone into the circuits — all the arcologies, the mining groups that had been smelting from the Amor asteroids, and the scientists who had been building the Farside station up on Earth’s moon. Everything in space had always been controlled from Salter Station, so it seemed natural that we would still be the organizers.

“Natural to us, on Salter Station. But others didn’t see it that way. “The arcologies had been set up to be as self-sufficient as possible, with independent power plants and six-nines recycling systems. The other space facilities were different. They were dependent on supplies provided from Earth, or on spaceborne resources provided by the mining and extractive industries. “The first planning session to discuss pooling of resources went smoothly. Everyone participated. But when the time came to act, three of the arcologies backed out. I believe that they each operated independently, without even discussing it among themselves. They were afraid, you see — scared that the total group might not be stably self-sustaining, even though they had no doubt about their own ability to survive. There were other reasons, too. From the very beginning the arcologies had been developing their own social and political preferences and differences. Like called to like — colonists tended to apply to the same place as their friends, and to avoid a colony where their views would be ridiculed or in the minority. The last thing that Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora wanted was a merger with Salter Station and the other arcologies. They didn’t ever admit that they were not going to cooperate; they simply cut off radio contact and moved farther out, away from Earth.

“The rest of us were angry with them, but we didn’t take as much notice as you might think. We had our own hands full without them for the first few years. We had to establish our own system, self-sufficient and as foolproof as we could make it. That took ninety-nine percent of our energies. And the rest went into the work on reduced metabolic survival — what we finally called S-space existence. As a doctor I was naturally interested in that, and after a while I began to work on it exclusively. Within a couple of months of the first experiments with human subjects on Salter Station it was clear that we had something absolutely revolutionary, something that changed all our ideas about perception and human consciousness. But it took several years more before we saw the other implications. With our work, humanity had found the easy way to the stars. “There was no need for multi-generation arcologies, or for faster-than-light drives — “

“ — which seem to be impossible,” murmured Sy softly.

“Which may be impossible,” said Ferranti. “Keep an open mind. Anyway, we didn’t need them. The drive system research on Salter Station would allow us to accelerate a ship up to better than a tenth of light-speed, and that was enough. In Mode Two consciousness — S-space — a human being could remain fully aware, live an extended subjective life, and travel across the whole Galaxy in a single lifetime.

“That led to a new crisis. Everyone loved the idea of an extended subjective life span — if it were safe. But everyone was terrified of possible side effects. “We split into two groups. Some of us said, let’s move to S-space, and wait there at least until Earth is habitable again. No one knew how long that would be, but in S-space we could afford to wait centuries and perceive them as only a few weeks. Others were afraid. They argued that there were too many unknowns and too many risks in S-space living; until those were pinned down it was better to stay with our normal perception.”

Olivia Ferranti smiled ruefully. “As it turned out, both groups were right. Earth recovered slowly. It took more than a thousand years to develop new and stable plant and animal communities. None of us had ever dreamed it would be so long. And at the same time, we were discovering serious physical consequences of S-space living.