The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett Page B

K, with an oddly organic look – like a clump of frogspawn, perhaps. This was the Brick Moon, GapSpace’s first reception station here in the Gap, tracking the orbits of the Earths to either stepwise side. Further out, brilliant in the unfiltered sunlight, Dev could see the O’Neill , a new and much larger facility, like a glass bottle filled with glowing green light and surrounded by big, fragile constructions, paddles and bowls and net-like antennas. The whole affair rotated languidly on the bottle’s long axis. It was only the smaller craft swarming around the docking ports at the structure’s circular ends that gave a sense of its scale: that ‘bottle’ was twenty miles long, four miles wide.
    And behind all this, dwarfing even the O’Neill , hovered a lump of ice and rock. From here Dev could see work going on across its surface: the gleam of mass drivers, the spark of craft landing and taking off. Called only the Lump, this was an immense asteroid that had been nudged, over decades, into a position close to the Brick Moon, and steadily mined for its resources to build such structures as the O’Neill and the Cyclops telescope.
    â€˜So that’s the Brick Moon,’ Roberta murmured. ‘Concrete mixed by trolls. Ha! What a start to humanity’s conquest of space.’
    Lee just glared.
    Dev began to unbuckle. ‘We need not stay long here; this is just a transit point. We’ve a ferry waiting to transfer us to the Gerard K. O’Neill . It’s a much more comfortable environment. With gravity, for one thing, provided by the spin. We’d be pleased to show you the projects we’re developing out here—’
    â€˜Irrelevant,’ Roberta said simply. ‘Does this Brick Moon, this concrete box, have viewing facilities sufficient to view the progress on Cyclops? Also computational support, some kind of AI?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜I have no desire to extend this visit beyond what is necessary. After all, we have to regard the situation as urgent; we have no idea how long we have before the Invitation ceases to transmit, and we must ensure we extract all the information it contains. The Clarke proposal is the one and only reason I am here.’ She laughed softly. ‘Not to sightsee your new toys.’
    Lee was fuming, and Dev tried to suppress his own irritation. He said, ‘Well, let’s hope you people are just as happy with your new toy, when we’ve built it for you.’
    Roberta and Stella exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance. The man-ape was being defiant.
    No more was said until the shuttle closed in on the Brick Moon, and docking latches rattled shut.

9
    T HERE WAS NO gravity in the Brick Moon. You moved by pulling yourself along ropes slung around the walls, and poles that criss-crossed the spherical chambers.
    The big spheres were connected by circular orifices, and as they moved deeper into the interior it was as if they were swimming into the centre of some vast honeycomb – or maybe, as one visitor from the Datum Earth had remarked, it was like a huge old Roman-era drainage system, all concrete vaults and cylindrical passages. And after decades of occupation the Brick Moon smelled that way too, despite periodic flushings of the entire volatile content, the water and all the air: a sour stink of people, of stale food and sweat and blood and piss, seemed to seep out of the very walls.
    It wasn’t a quiet place; there was an endless clatter of pumps and fans. And the walls, where they weren’t hidden by cabling and ducts and pipes, were crusted with decades’ worth of junk, from antiquated tablets and comms stations, to the relics of abandoned science experiments, to tokens left by those who had lived and worked here: faded photographs, children’s paintings, scribbled notes, graffiti on the concrete. Even the residential area, at the centre of the cluster, with bunk beds and galleys and a medical