Phase Space Read Online Free PDF Page B

He was at the top of one of Shaft Two, one of the earliest they’d dug out, with those first clumsy drill-blast-muck miners. It was a rough cylinder ten metres across, lined with regolith glass and hung with lamps and tethers; it descended beneath him, branching and curving.
    He grabbed hold of a wall spider, told it his destination, and let it haul him on down into the tunnel along its stay wires.
    Thus, clinging to his metal companion, he descended into the heart of Ra-Shalom.
    His legs dangled uselessly, and so he set his suit to tuck them up to his chest. He was thinking of taking the surgeons’ advice, and opting for amputation. What the hell. He was a hundred and fifty years old, give or take; he wasn’t going to start complaining.
    Anyhow, apart from that, the surgeons were preserving him pretty well. They were treating him to a whole cocktail of growth hormones and DHEA and melatonin treatments and beta-carotene supplements, not to mention telomere therapy and the glop those little nano-machines had painted on the surface of his shrivelled-up brain to keep him sharp.
    These guys were good at keeping you alive.
    This asteroid was small. A stable population was important, and a heavy investment in training needed a long payback period to be effective. So the birth rate was low, and a lot of research was directed to human longevity.
    He understood the logic. But still, he missed the sound of children playing, every now and again. The youngsters here didn’t seem to mind that, which made them a little less than human, in his view. But maybe that was part of the adjustment humans were having to make, as they learned to live off-Earth.
    In fact he missed his own kids, his daughters, even though, astonishingly, they were now both old ladies themselves.
    The surgeons had even managed to repair some of the cumulative microgravity damage he’d suffered over the years. For instance, his skeletal and cardiac muscles were deeply atrophied. Until they found a way to stabilize it, his bone calcium had continued to wash out in his urine, at a half per cent a month. At last, the surgeons said, the inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, had vanished altogether, without hope of regeneration.
    He never had been too conscientious about his time in the treadmills. It had left him a cripple, on Earth.
    So, at age eighty, he’d left Earth.
    Even then they had been closing down the cans – the early stations starting with Mir and the Space Station, that had relied completely on materials brought up from Earth. In retrospect it just didn’t make sense to haul material up from Earth at great expense, when it was already here, just floating around in the sky, in rocks like Ra.
    So he’d come back to come out to Ra-Shalom, the place that had made him briefly famous.
    He suspected the surgeons liked to have him around, as a control experiment. The youngsters were heavily treated from birth, up here, to enable them to endure a lifetime of microgravity. Not a one of them could land on Earth, of course, or even Mars. But not too many of them showed a desire to do any such thing.
    The wall spider, scuttling busily, brought him to the mine face, the terminus of Shaft Seven. It was a black, dusty wall, like a coal face. There was dust everywhere, floating in the air.
    There were five or six people here, in their brightly coloured skinsuits, scraping their way around the stalled miner. Their suits were seamless and without folds, to guard against the dust. They were all tall, their limbs spindly as all hell, their skeletal structures pared down as far as they would go.
    The miner itself clung to the walls with a dozen fat legs, with the balky rock splitter itself held out on a boom before the face. It was a radial-axial design with a percussive drill, powered by hydraulics, with a drill feed, a radial splitter and a loader. But for now it was inert.
    One of the youngsters came up to him. It was Gita Weissman, Mike’s granddaughter. She grinned