Visits like this reminded Ozzie why he so rarely came back to the world of his birth these days. When he looked up, there was a jagged strip of cool-steel sky a long way above him, pushed away by the grand towers. Even in midsummer, the sun was a near stranger to the ground in this part of town, while today the trees and shrubs planted in the expensive plazas all had artificial lighting to help them grow.
Glancing down the impressive vertical canyon at one of the intersections, he saw the ancient Chrysler Building secure inside its glass cage, protected from the elements. “And which of us is going to outlast the other?” he asked it quietly.
The cars and cabs and trucks were sliding past him on the road, their axle motors making almost no noise at all. People in thick coats or black-tinted organic filament ponchos hurried past, not even looking at him. They were almost all adults. As far as he could see up and down Fifth Avenue, there were no more than three or four kids under ten years old. That was what he missed most of all; and Earth’s birth rate was still declining year after year as the rich sophisticates who populated the planet found other things to spend their time and money on.
There was nothing for him here anymore, he decided morosely, nothing of interest, nothing of value. He stepped back toward the base of the nearest tower and told his e-butler to give him a link to his home’s RI. Once the RI was on-line he gave it his exact coordinates. A circular wormhole opened behind him, expanding out to two meters in diameter, and he took a step backward through the neutral gray curtain of the force field. The wormhole closed.
Ozzie didn’t have a whole network of private secret wormholes linking the Commonwealth planets. He had precisely two wormholes; one standard CST micro-width connector to give his home a hyper-bandwidth link to the unisphere via Augusta’s cybersphere; and one highly modified version of the wormhole generator that CST’s exploratory division used, which provided him with independent transport around a good section of the Commonwealth. Nor did he live by himself on an H-congruous planet. His home was a hollowed-out asteroid that drifted along its long elliptical orbit around the Leo Twins.
As he walked through the gateway he was immediately enveloped by bright, warm light. The gateway mechanism had been built into a broad granite cliff with a wide awning of white canvas overhead, like a yacht sail that had been commandeered as a marquee roof. He stepped out from underneath it, and his domain stretched out before him.
The cavity that automated diggers, CST civil engineering crews, and an army of various bots had excavated was close to eighty miles long, and fifteen in diameter; the greatest enclosed space the human race had ever constructed. Its geography was a rugged undulation of hills and dales, broken by the silver veins of streams. A single range of huge rock-blade mountains spiraled down the entire length, the tallest pinnacles a mile and a half high, raw purple and gray rock capped with dazzling white snow. Nearly every hill had a waterfall of some kind, from magnificent torrents gushing over sharp-edged mantles, to foaming cascades that tumbled down long stony gullies. On the mountains, wide dark caves had been bored out below the ragged snowline. Water gushed out from the shadows within, sending massive jets to plummet down sheer granite sides, flinging off swirling clouds of platinum spray as they fell and fell. All of them curved gracefully as they sliced through the air, distorted by the asteroid’s ponderous gravity-inducing rotation before plunging into lakes and pools.
All the streams and rivers fed by the waterfalls wound away to empty themselves into the huge reservoirs that were hidden away in caverns behind the central cavity’s endwalls. From there the water could be pumped back into the intricate underground network of tunnels and pipes that led back to the waterfall outlets. Its pumps consumed the output from three of the fifteen fusion generators that powered the asteroid.
Away from the waterfalls, long dark lakes filled the floors of the deeper valleys, fringed by bulrush reeds, and surrounded by overhanging trees that trailed lush branches across the shallows. Great patches of water lilies bloomed across the surface, bringing the intense primary colors of their tissue-flowers to enliven the cool blankness of the water. Bracken and rhododendrons crowned most of the hills, while grass meadows besieged the lower slopes, their unkempt emerald carpets dappled by vivid speckles of scarlet, topaz, azure, violet, and tangerine wildflowers. Marble boulders were scattered on every incline, white as snow. Trees grew wild, singularly or in clumps; spinnys and small forests of oak, silver birch, beech, laburnum, ginkgos, and maple meandered along the lower contours of most valleys. It was a vision of high summer in a temperate land, one that had now lasted for two and a half centuries. The deciduous plants had all been genetically modified into evergreens, forever throwing their leaves wide to the perpetual season. Far, far above them, a silicanium gantry was stretched down the axis, supporting rings of solarlights too bright to look at with unprotected human eyes.
Ozzie hurriedly unbuttoned his woolen coat and carried it over his arm. He made his way down the winding gravel path out of the sheltered lee of rock and into the wide valley, heading toward the only surface structure in the asteroid. His bungalow was barely that, five rooms of plain white drycoral walls, with hardwood floors and a gray slate roof that overhung to provide cover for the encircling veranda. Belowground he’d constructed a big vault for his library of real books. Not that he ever ventured down there; modified maidbots brought up whatever he needed so that the cool dry atmosphere was disturbed as little as possible.
He did use the rest of the modest building, its living room, kitchen, study, bedroom, and bathroom. There was nothing else he wanted, not to take care of his body’s requirements. While he was here he spent most of his time outside anyway. A comfy deckchair in the garden, shaded by a big copper beech; the swimming pool was constantly refreshed by a brook that gurgled over broad flat stones as it ran through the middle of the lawn.
A big maidbot took his coat from him as he arrived, and rolled away to store it in the cloakroom. There were over a hundred thousand bots in the asteroid, all of them directed by the RI. The little artificial worldlet was self-sufficient, and self-maintaining thanks to the very large array that ran it. With its comprehensive manufacturing facilities belowground producing the majority of components used by the environmental support machinery, very little had to be imported. What did come in tended to be upgrades rather than replacements. The designers had spent years on refining the systems to the ultimate in low-maintenance sustainability. Even Ozzie had worried about the cost while the blueprints were being drawn up, but in the end he’d persevered. Now, total freedom was his reward. Engineers from CST still visited once every couple of years (under horrendously strict nondisclosure contracts) to inspect and occasionally modify the gateway machinery, but that was all. And if he withdrew from the human race entirely, the RI could conceivably keep it all going if he really wanted; it was the most powerful program composite the SI had ever written.
“Any messages?” he asked out loud as he went into the kitchen.
“Several hundred thousand,” the RI replied. “Only eight came through the filters.”
Ozzie opened the fridge and rummaged through the containers and hand-wrapped packages. His food was supplied by the same London greengrocer that held the warrant from the king of England. The shop’s snob value and prices were phenomenal, but he had to admit their delicatessen counter couldn’t be bettered anywhere in the Commonwealth. He found a bottle of mineral water and popped the top; despite the coffee he’d drunk at the Council meeting he could still feel his hangover—product of a too-long stay at the Silvertopia Club on StLincoln the night before. “Give them to me.” His virtual vision showed the messages and their clusters; they were from CST, his finance lawyers, two from his newest children, one from an antiquarian book dealer who thought he might have a first edition copy of Raft signed by the author, the results of datasearches through superluminal cosmology theory papers. By the time he’d skimmed through them all he was out at the garden chair and kicking his shoes off. As usual he picked one message at random from the perennial mass that the filter had blocked. He laughed delightedly as he read the weird and wondrous proposal for cooling stars that came above G in the spectral classification, a paper called “Solarforming the Galaxy” by the nutter who’d sent it.