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A Warm Place
A Warm Place (stripped down version
once i was dumped off a dominion shuttle. on my way to the Fields of Hell on Copperla for the yearly AnarchArtist's reading of Gravity's Rainbow. the ship had been attacked by something (you'd be surprised how often that happens these days; i guess the Dominion isn't as all-powerful as they'd like us to think), the shuttle was damaged (i found out later that 'damaged' meant that one of the aft bruise plates was within six months of failing and the SubOrdinator wanted to replace it) and it took us to the nearest life-supporting structure, which was some kind of Dominion farm. it was a large tunnel carved out of an asteroid; a doughnut, the inside of an inner tube about a kilometre wide and about six kilometres across. buried inside a gigantic round rock floating in space. it was one of thousands of similar rocks orbiting a small red sun that had no other planets. i guess there were farms inside each rock. our rock had three farms with different environments, three tubular environments which intersected at one point, a complex series of impeller fields which kept the different atmospheres apart. our rock. it wasn't spinning very fast. the insides of the tube had been lined with buried impellers set to simulate the pull of about one-twentieth earth gravity. the inside of the tube was filled with damp but breathable air; the inner walls were covered with soil and plants and insects. every few minutes these brilliant blue-white lights would fly by, tiny suns keeping to the centre of the tube as if strung along an invisible rail, following in groups of two and three and four and five. the only entertainment in the place was trying to find patterns in the seemingly random arrangement of lights that passed. after a few hours they became fewer and less often, simulating nightfall, i supposed. the gravity was so slight that you could easily jump from one side of the tube to the other. there was lots of very soft and tame foliage to grab on to, growing around a framework of some kind of Banyan tree. there were two of these, each with slightly different leaves; each covered one inner side of the tube aside from several areas that had been fenced off (some theorised the one around the inner surface was male and the one around the outer surface was female). the light was very odd; something in the atmosphere gave everything a blue-green tinge. it was never fully dark; the shadows left by the lights that had just flown by were filled out by the shifting patterns left by trees and clouds of butterflies from the lights which were approaching. you could jump into the air and intercept the lights as they came by. they didn't give off much heat and they gently bumped you aside with low intensity impeller fields. if you climbed down to the ground it felt noticeably warmer than the air around. the soil smelled like earth soil. it had that unforgettable aroma of bacterial growth after fresh rain. it was a dream-like place, occasional wafts of fog spraying out of sprinkler systems and coalescing into gentle rain. it was possible to climb to the tops of the trees and balance on one foot on the uppermost branches. if you fell off, you drifted to the ground slowly and safely. the biggest animal around was a dragonfly with a four inch wingspan. after a few hours you realised that they were Dominion-engineered artifacts, programmed to avoid humans. nothing here would attack you. nothing here wanted to eat you. the station was staffed by a small clan of Tendeysharhi, the most polite and considerate carnivores in the galaxy. they looked up to us as older brothers and sisters, civilisation-wise. this particular clan had something of the persian cat to their physique, and more than a small part of traditional earth moggy slack. they slept a lot. it was a wonderful place to unwind. any threat you could think of was taken care of. meteor shower? the outside of this habitat was coated in a metre-thick layer of bruise-plates, each of which could absorb its own weight in mass moving at 90 percent of the speed of light. black holes? the Dominion would never be as untidy as to leave black holes floating around near farms. Besides, if there was a black hole in the vicinity a Narish would find it pretty quickly and eat it. Bythians never came here. there was always something nice to eat growing from a tree nearby. there was always cool water to drink. always somewhere warm and soft and quiet and dark to sleep. naturally enough, i stayed. |
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