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Page 40.

8. Space

Eons ago, this must have been an impressive city in space, Alex thought as he stood with his arm around Maryan, as they stared at the approaching starscape of broken marvels.

Now the great station was a gray ruin, illumined mainly by reflected light from the Earth’s atmosphere and basking beside Luna’s bluish-green stencil rays. Everywhere Alex looked, debris hung frozen in the thin atmosphere. On the outside, the silvery metallic skin of the station was peeling off in huge squares and rectangles, exposing shadowy girders and tangles of cable underneath. One could see into the station at various impact points, where small objects had slammed through, and the interior was an absolute shambles of suspended debris and dust.

“Greetings,” a male voice said behind Alex and Maryan, and they whirled. Alex tightened his arms around Maryan, who stiffened in his embrace.

On the wall behind them had appeared the image of a genial man with white hair, of indeterminate race and age. He wore dark, comfortable clothing and appeared to be in a comfortably gloomy study. “Sorry if I startled you. My name is Spector, and I am a librarian with added functions as a host. I can book rooms for you, hire a rental car, suggest a good podiatrist, whatever you need.”

“Are you a real person?” Maryan said, separating herself from him and advancing toward him with curiosity. “Were you?” she amended.

“Oh no,” Spector said in a mixture of kindness and condescension that Alex found irritating. “I am a composite of numerous people, but primarily I am an avatar of the chief librarian of our time, Dr. Grant Genovese. Have you met him yet?”

Alex said: “I think he’s been dead and gone for a while.” Ages, Alex thought. Eons.

Spector’s image flickered an instant, and a brief look of bafflement fleeted across his features as the entire scenario refreshed itself via a warm boot. “My name is Spector,” he said, which was when Alex realized Spector was broken, like most everything in this gigantic orbiting tomb.

“Try to understand this,” Alex said. “The station is in ruins. We need help. Will there be breathable air where we are going?”

“Let me check for you,” Spector said. “Where are you going?”

Maryan said: “Wherever it is possible for us to survive.” She added: “We’d prefer to go back to the surface of the planet.”

Spector looked puzzled. “This station has every amenity. Would you like me to book you a hotel room, a massage, a swim party at one of our themed pools? Do you prefer Polynesian, Icelandic, or Arizona Desert?”

“Spector,” Alex said, gesticulating with frustration, “please be a good host and listen. Listen carefully.”

“I am listening,” Spector said, inclining his head with warmth where he sat behind his desk.

“A million years have passed. The station is a wreck. There are no more human beings. We are extinct.”

Spector rose, putting his hands in his pockets. He looked rumpled and academic in a gray sweater, white shirt, and beige linen trousers. “Logic tells me that I am speaking with two human beings.” He smiled cozily, as if enjoying a joke they’d made.

“We need air, water, food,” Maryan said. “Spector, the station is a wreck.”

Alex told her: “My guess is we’re overwhelming his functional database, what’s left of it.”

“Maybe he’s just a librarian as he says,” she said.

“I am a librarian,” Spector said. His image flickered and he appeared once again to reboot. “My name is Spector. Can I be of service?”

The boat shuddered, and Alex and Maryan hung on to objects around them as the floor rose up as the boat ran aground. They turned away from the streaked, fuzzy screen where Spector had been, and faced the large view screen.

“Look, oh dear God,” Maryan said, pointing. Alex could only stare numbly at the overwhelming scene that played out before them. They were in a vast space full of frozen debris. Some of the objects still twirled slowly, and had perhaps been twirling thus for eons. Radio lifts were everywhere, as were silvery skin squares and glassy wall tiles. The boat had run up on the ledge of a huge curving platform forming a ring miles long inside the main structure of the station. From a thousand feet up, indirect sunlight streamed in, a smoky pillar of light that cut through torn structural elements and stabbed downward. Where the light entered, torn metal gleamed like worn copper and brass, almost a dark golden color. The beam itself was filled with a dust of microscopic debris that glowed bluish in places, light yellow in others, and in a few rare spots as though it contained miniature rainbows. The space around it was almost entirely dark, except light glittered on slowly twirling broken surfaces and loose objects. Light bounced off distant curving walls that were still intact, whose portholes and railings were dimly visible. The beam of light drenched a section of the ledge near the ship with near daylight intensity, seemingly dripping off the edge and plunging another thousand feet into unfathomable depths full of ancient architectures and geometries that steeped in a somber olive-drab and coppery-brown gloom. Paper had gone out of vogue in the early 21st Century, replaced by very similar looking sheets of an environmentally friendly bioplast called radio lifts. These were biodegradable sheets containing pixons whose color could be remotely programmed, so that they could “say” whatever one wanted them to, and each sheet had enough intrinsic memory for a library of older tree-books. The drained atmosphere inside the station held a jumble of drowned debris that looked holographic and disembodied, illumined from behind by brownish-green fingers of light.

Maryan gripped Alex’s side, painfully, getting his attention. She pointed silently to a form lying suspended in midspace as though asleep. It was the frozen body of a long-dead young woman. Her skin looked bluish in the light, as if she had been a denizen of some watery world created out of rainwater and cigarette smoke. Her hair, what was left of it from eons of bumping about, was of a dark and indeterminate color but might once have been blonde or even reddish. Hard to say. Even the corpse’s expression was hard to read—was it peaceful, or was there some slowly dawning horror that had never had a chance to fully burst on her features? Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open as if she were uttering some words, and was stuck on one long syllable that just wouldn’t come out.

One by one, they counted at least a half dozen bodies of young men and women, or parts of them, looking like broken statuary. Aside from a few shreds of ancient clothing, all were naked.

The mere presence of the boat had created infinitely slow ripples of nudging among the drifting objects, which ultimately began to affect the nearest corpse, the young woman’s, which turned slightly and in so doing revealed the desiccated texture of the chalk-white skin. But her eyeballs still glittered from under partially open lids, and her arms lay relaxed by her sides. Her legs were intact and also relaxed, slightly bent at the knees.

As the boat drifted at a glacial pace, they passed a row of dead, dark openings that loomed above dust-blurred walking platforms. High up, still dimly visible in dark blue on light gray, were the letters L5 Port of Entry & Dep. The rest of the sign had been torn off by some long-ago disaster, and the entry point of a missile or fist-sized meteorite through the station’s had collapsed somehow, sealing itself off. Alex frowned in puzzlement at the airtight pucker of ripped metal, spattered glass, and melted materials far overhead in what must once have been a lovely dome with stained glass-like effects.

A sudden jarring of the floor made Alex and Maryan cry out and reach for their balance, forgetting the view outside.