My ramjet leaps into night, smelling of hot iron and - chung!-discharging its burden.

I glance down at wisps of yellow-pearl. Sulfuric and carbolic acid streamers, drifting far below.

There algae feed and prosper. Murky mists below pale, darken, vanish. Go!

Yet I felt a sudden sadness as the jet took me up again. I had watched every small change in the atmosphere, played shepherd to newborn cloud banks, raised fresh chains of volcanoes with fusion triggers that burrowed like moles-and all this might come to naught, if it became another privatepreserve for some Earthside power games.

Not that Earthers were all vermin, I allow that.

Many of them, through the stretched centuries, sent their own bodies to a final obliterating rest. Their funeral pyre was a bright spark as they hit the still-forming atmosphere's upper edge, adding a tad of carbon and water to the burgeoning chemistry.

Still...

I could not shake off the depression. Should I have that worry pruned away? It could hamper my work, and I could easily be rid of it for a while, when I returned to the sleeping vaults. Most in the Station spent about one month per year working. Their other days pa.s.sed in dreamless chilled sleep, waiting for the slow metabolism of Gray to quicken and change.

Not I. I slept seldom, and did not want the stacks of years washed away.

I run my tongue over fuzzy teeth. I am getting stale, worn. Even a ramjet ride did not revive my spirit.

And the Station did not want slackers. Not only memories could be pruned.

Ancient urges arise, needs...

A warm shower and rest await me above, in orbit, inside the mother-skin. Time to go.

I touch the controls, cutting in extra ballastic computer capacity and- -suddenly I am there again, with her.

She is around me and beneath me, slick with rubysweat.

And the power of it soars up through me. I reach out and her breast blossoms in my eager hand, her soft cries unfurl in puffs of green steam. Aye!

She is a splash of purple across the cool lunar stones, her breath ringing in me- as she licks my rasping ear with a tiny jagged fork of puckered laughter, most joyful and triumpant, yea verity.

The Station knows you need this now.

Yes, and the Station is right. I need to be consumed, digested, spat back out a new and fresh man, so that I may work well again.

-so she coils and swirls like a fine tinkling gas around me, her mouth wraps me like a vortex. I slide my shaft into her gratefully as she sobs great racking orange gaudiness through me, her, again, her, gift of the strumming vast blue Station that guides us all down centuries of dense, oily time.

You need this, take, eat, this is the body and blood of the Station, eat, savor, take fully.

I had known her once-redly, sweet and loud-and now I know her again, my senses all piling up and waiting to be eaten from her.

I glide back and forth, moisture chimes between us, she is coiled tight, too.

We all are, we creatures of the Station.

It knows this, releases us when we must be gone.

I slam myself into her because she is both thatwoman-known so long ago, delicious in her whirlwind pa.s.sions, supple in colors of the mind, singing in rubs and heats I knew across the centuries. So the Station came to know her, too, and duly recorded her-so that I can now bury my coal-black, sweaty troubles in her, aye!

and thus in the Shaping Station, as was and ever shall be, Grayworld without end, amen.

Resting. Compiling himself again, letting the rivulets of self knit up into remembrance.

Of course the Station had to be more vast and able than anything Humanity had yet known. At the time the Great Shaping began, it was colossal. By then, humanity had gone on to grander projects.

Mars brimmed nicely with vapors and lichen, but would take millennia more before anyone could walk its surface with only a compressor to take and thicken oxygen from the swirling airs.

Mammoth works now cruised at the outer rim of the Solar System, vast ice castles inhabited by beings only dimly related to the humans of Earth.

He did not know those constructions. But he had been there, in inherited memory, when the Station was born. For part of him and you and me and us had voyaged forth at the very beginning...

The numbers were simple, their implications known to schoolchildren.

(Let's remember that the future belongs to the engineers.)Take an asteroid, say, and slice it sidewise, allowing four meters of headroom for each level-about what a human takes to live in. This dwelling, then, has floor s.p.a.ce that expands as the cube of the asteroid size. How big an asteroid could provide the living room equal to the entire surface of the Earth? Simple: about two hundred kilometers.

Nothing, in other words. For Ceres, the largest asteroid in the inner belt, was 380 kilometers across, before humans began to work her.

But room was not the essence of the Station. For after all, he had made the Station, yes? Information was her essence, the truth of that blossomed in him, the past as prologue- He ambled along a corridor a hundred meters below Gray's slag and muds, gazing down on the frothy air-fountains in the foyer. Day's work done.

Even manifestations need a rest, and the interview with the smug Earther had put him off, sapping his resolve. Inhaling the crisp, cold air (a bit high on the oxy, he thought; have to check that) he let himself concentrate wholly on the clear scent of the splashing. The blue water was the very best, fresh from the growing poles, not the recycled stuff he endured on flights. He breathed in the tingling spray and a man grabbed him.

"I present formal secure-lock," the man growled, his third knuckle biting into Benjan's elbow port.

A cold, brittle thunk. His systems froze. Before hecould move, whole command linkages went dead in her inboards. The Station's hovering presence, always humming in the distance, telescoped away. It felt like a wrenching fall that never ends, head over heels- He got a grip. Focus. Regain your links. The loss!

-It was like having fingers chopped away, whole pieces of himself amputated. b.l.o.o.d.y neural stumps- He sent quick, darting questions down his lines, and met... dark. Silent. Dead.

His entire aura of presence was gone. He sucked in the cold air, letting a fresh anger bubble up but keeping it tightly bound.

His attacker was the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for this job. A n.o.body out of nowhere, complete surprise. Clipping on a hand-restraint, the mousy man stepped back. "They ordered me to do it fast." A mousy voice, too.

Benjan resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. One of the Earther families who had come to deal with the Station a century ago? Maybe with more kilos than Benjan, but a fair match. And it would feel good.

But that would just bring more of them, in the end.

"d.a.m.n it, I have immunity from casual arrest. I-"

"No matter now, they said." The cop shrugged apologetically, but his jaw was set, hands ready, body in fight posture. He was used to this. "I command your compliance," he finished formally.Arrest was a ritual Earthside, as stylized as a cla.s.sical drama. Very well, use it to throw off his guard... "I submit to the ordained order."

Benjan vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex of the crater's dome. There weren't more than a thousand people on Gray, mostly like him, manifestations of the Station. But not all. More of the others all the time... "And you, sir, you're Majiken."

"Yeah. So?"

"At least you people do your own work."

"There're plenty of us on the inside here. You don't think Gray's gonna be neglected, eh?"

In his elbow he felt injected programs spread, clunk, consolidating their blocks. A seeping ache.

Benjan fought it all through his neuro-musculars, but the disease was strong.

Keep your voice level, wait for a chance. Only one of them-my G.o.d, they're sure of themselves! Okay, make yourself seem like a doormat.

"I don't suppose I can get a few things from my office?"

" 'Fraid not."

"Mighty decent."

The man shrugged, letting the sarcasm pa.s.s. "They want you locked down good before they..."

"They what?"

"Make their next move, I'd guess."

"I'm just a step.""Sure, chop off the hands and feet first."

A smirking thug with a gift for metaphor. So much for the formal graces of the arrest ritual.

Well, these hands and feet can still work. Benjan began walking toward his apartment. "I'll stay in your lockdown, but I'll stay home."

"Hey, n.o.body said-"

"But what's the harm? I'm deadened now." He kept walking.

"Uh, uh-" The man paused, obviously consulting with his superiors on an in-link.

He should have known this was coming. The Majikens were ferret-eyed, canny, unoriginal, and always dangerous. He had forgotten that. In the rush to get ores sifted, grayscapes planed right to control the constant rains, a system of streams and rivers snaking through the fresh-cut valleys... a man could get distracted, yes. Forget how people were. Careless.

Not completely, though. Agents like this usually nailed their prey at home, not in a hallway. Benjan kept a stunner in the apartment, right beside the door, convenient.

Distract him. "I want to file a protest."

"Take it to Kalespon." Clipped, efficient, probably had a dozen other slices of bad news to deliver today.

To other manifestations of the Station. Busy man.

"No, with your boss-direct."

"Mine?" His rock-steady jaw went slack.

"For-" he sharply turned the corner to hisapartment, using the time to reach for some mumbo jumbo,"-felonious interrogation of inboards."

"Hey, I didn't touch your-"

"I felt it. Slimy little gropes-yeccch!" Might as well ham it up a little, have some fun.

The Majiken looked offended. "I never violate protocols. The integrity of your nexus is intact. You can ask for a scope-through when we take you in-"

"I'll get my overnight kit." Only now did he hurry toward the apartment portal and popped it by an inboard command. As he stepped through he felt the cop, three steps behind.

Here goes. One foot over the lip, turn to the right, s.n.a.t.c.h the stunner out of its grip mount- -and it wasn't there. They'd laundered the place already. "d.a.m.n!"

"Thought it'd be waitin', huh?"

In the first second, when the Majiken was pretty sure of himself, act- Benjan took a step back and kicked. A satisfying soft thuuunk.

In the low gravity the man rose a meter and his uungh! was satisfying. The Majiken were warriors, after all, by heritage. Easier for them to take physical damage than life trauma.

The Majiken came up fast. He nailed Benjan with a hand feint and slam. Benjan fell back in the slow gravity-and at a 45-degree tilt, sprang backward, away, toward the wall-Which he hit, completing his turn in air, heels coming hard into the wall so that he could absorb the recoil- -and spring off, head-height- -into the Majiken's throat, hands knifing as the man rushed forward, his own cupped hands ready for the put-away blow. Benjan caught him with both hand-edges, slamming the throat from both sides.

The punch cut off blood to the head and the Majiken crumpled.

Benjan tied him with his own belt. Killed the link on the screen. Bound him further to the furniture.

Even on Gray, inertia was inertia. The Majiken would not find it easy to get out from under a couch he was firmly tied to.

The apartment would figure out that something was wrong about its occupant in a hour or two, and call for help. Time enough to run? Benjan was unsure, but part of him liked this, felt a surge of adrenaline joy arc redly through his systems.

Five minutes of work and he got the interlocks off.

His connections sprang back to life. Colors and images sang in his aura.

He found his arm panels in the back closet. With all the work, he hadn't used them for years, alas.

They strapped to his back comfortably, he took a cleansing breath, and- He was out the door, away- The cramped corridors seemed to shrink, droppingdown and away from him, weaving and collapsing.

Something came toward him-chalk-white hills, yawning craters.

A hurricane breath whipped by him as it swept down from the jutting, fresh-carved mountains. His body strained.

He was running, that much seeped through to him.

He breathed brown murk that seared but his lungs sucked it in eagerly. Plunging hard and heavy across the swampy flesh of Gray.

He moved easily, bouncing with each stride in the light gravity, down an infinite straight line between rows of enormous trees. Vegetable trees, these were, soft tubers and floppy leaves in the wan glow of a filtered sun. There should be no men here, only machines to tend the crops.

Then he noticed that he was not a man at all. A robo-hauler, yes-and his legs were, in fact, wheels, his arms the working grapplers. Yet he read all this as his running body. Somehow it was pleasant.

And she ran with him.

He saw beside him a miner-bot, speeding down the slope. Yet he knew it was she, Martine, and he loved her.

He whirred, clicked-and sent a hail.

You are fair, my sweet.