Lightpaths Read Free

which, from the shuttle’s angle of approach, looked like a macroengineer’s dream of windmills. Girding the middle of the entire structure was a Ferris wheel of swiveled mirrors incorporated into a larger, darker ring.
    “Even if it does apparently work,” Jhana said, pointing toward the Orbital Complex’s middle, “that looks altogether a Rube Goldberg contraption. What’s its function?”
    “To let the good rays in and keep the bad rays out,” Roger responded confidently. “The mirrors are for gathering and focusing visible light. The dark ring provides shielding against solar flares and heavy primary nuclei.”
    “And that?” Jhana asked, trying to stump Roger, directing his attention to an X-shaped object—small but enlarging and unfolding—that swept by their shuttle at surprisingly close range.
    “I can’t really say,” Roger replied, puzzled. “Probably some new powersat prototype.”
    Marissa, however, was keeping her eyes on the big picture. As the shuttle moved closer to docking—along reflecting sightlines near the “poles” of the ball—she could see into the Park enclosed by the central sphere, could see the blue of waters, the green of grasslands and forests, even the brown of tilled soil in the greenhouse tori to the ‘north’ and ‘south’ of the central sphere. On still closer approach she began to realize as well just how big the central sphere (let alone the whole Complex) really was: almost as if someone had taken a county from Earth and blown it into the interior of one of the big soap bubbles she’d wished for as a child.
    * * * * * * *
    As the shuttle moved into final docking position Jhana saw other craft already docked or in the process: floaters, mass-driver barges and liners, transatmospheric orbiters and tetherships—some national, but many bearing the corporate logos of the companies that had joined the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise, the consortium of nations and trans-nationals footing the bill for the continuing construction of zero-gee industrial parks, greenhouse tori, and the human communities and biodiversity preserves inside their High Orbital Manufactured Environments—HOMEs, of which the Orbital Complex was the first but would not long be the only one.
    Oh, Jhana knew the broken-rhythm hype, all right. Home, home on Lagrange/ Where vanishing creatures still play/Where seldom is seen an unprofitable dream/And the sats beam clean power all day.... She should know it: her employer, Tao-Ponto Aktiengesellschaft, was a major member of the consortium, and among the craft hovering about the space colony now she recognized TPAG’s streamlined glyph-heraldics emblazoned across the tailfin of a tethership.
    From her rather skimpy training in preparation for this flight she knew a little about tetherships too—essentially high-altitude jets, as she recalled, with oddly angled attachments that enabled them to latch onto a skyhook dangled from a satellite platform, metal fish taking metal bait. She was glad the company tether had been all booked up, though. Even if the tetherships and mass-driver liners were cheaper and more efficient and less polluting, they were also, to Jhana’s mind, far less exciting than the old rocket-tailed shuttles.
    They had to return briefly to strap down in their seats for the final moments of the flight, but disembarking began almost the moment the shuttle was securely docked. As Jhana gathered her luggage, she bade Marissa Correa farewell and they assured each other they’d no doubt meet again soon. She also agreed to meet Dr. Cortland at his lab as soon as she got settled in—and before a week had passed.

Chapter Two
    When Seiji Yamaguchi had come out to Lakshmi Ngubo’s low-gravity residence among the industrial tori, he had presented her with an odd storage and retrieval request. Yamaguchi had brought with him the personal effects of his deceased brother, Jiro. Among a lot of legal records, sentimental junk, and odd