Iterations and other stories (collection)

Ever since reading Larry Niven’s essay “Bigger Than Worlds” in 1974, I’ve been fascinated by artificial habitats larger than the planet Earth—but I never wrote about one until a quarter-century later, when I penned this story for Marty Greenberg and Larry Segriff’s anthology Far Frontiers.

In 1997, I happened to run into WKRP in Cincinnati star Gordon Jump at a deli in Los Angeles; I introduced myself by saying I wanted to shake the hand of the man who had uttered the funniest line in sitcom history—a line that was echoing gently in my mind as I wrote this story.

* * *

“Daddy, what are those?” My young son, Dalt, was pointing up. We’d floated far away from the ancient buildings, almost to where the transparent dome over our community touches the surface of the great sphere.

Four white hens were flying across the sky, their little wings propelling them at a good clip. “Those are chickens, Dalt. You know—the birds we get eggs from.”

“Not the chickens,” said Dalt, as if I’d offended him greatly by suggesting he didn’t know what they were. “Those lights. Those points of light.”

I squinted a bit. “I don’t see any lights,” I replied. “Where are they?”

“Everywhere,” he said. He swung his head in an arc, taking in the whole sky. “Everywhere.”

“How many points do you see?”

“Hundreds. Thousands.”

I felt my back bumping gently against the surface; I pushed off with my palm, rising into the air again. The ancient texts I’d been translating said human beings were never really meant to live in such low gravity, but it was all I, and countless generations of my ancestors, had ever known. “There aren’t any points of light, Dalt.”

“Yes, there are,” he insisted. “There are thousands of them, and—look!—there’s a band of light across the sky there.”

I faced in the direction he was pointing. “I don’t see anything except another chicken.”

“No, Daddy,” insisted Dalt. “Look!”

Dalt was a good boy. He almost never lied to me—and I couldn’t see why he would lie to me about something like this. I maneuvered so that we were hovering lace to face, then extended my hand.

“Can you see my hand clearly?” I said.

“Sure.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Daddy…”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two.”

“And do you see lights on them, as well?”

“On your fingers?” asked Dalt incredulously.

I nodded.

“Of course not.”

“You don’t see any lights in front of my fingers? Do you see any on my face?”

“Daddy!”

“Do you?”

“Of course not. The lights aren’t down here. They’re up there!”

I touched my boy’s shoulder reassuringly. “Tomorrow, we’ll go see Doc Tadders about your eyes.”

We hadn’t built the protective dome—the clear blister on the outer surface of the Dyson sphere (to use the ancient name our ancestors had given to our home, a term we could transliterate but not translate). Rather, the dome was already here when we’d come outside. Adjacent to it was a large, black pyramidal structure that didn’t seem to be part of the sphere’s outer hull; instead, it appeared to be clamped into place. No one was exactly sure what the pyramid was for, although you could enter it from an access tube extending from the dome. The pyramid was filled with corridors and rooms, and lots of control consoles marked in the script of the ancients.

The transparent dome was much larger than the pyramid— plenty big enough to cover the thirty-odd buildings the ancients had built here, as well as the concentric circles of farming fields we’d created by importing soil from within the interior of the Dyson sphere. Still, if the dome hadn’t been transparent, I probably would have felt claustrophobic within it; it wasn’t even a pimple on the vastness of the sphere.

We’d been fortunate that the ancients had constructed all these buildings under the protective dome; they served as homes and work spaces for us. In many cases, we could only guess at the original purposes of the buildings, but the one that housed Dr. Tadders’s office had likely been a warehouse.

After sleeptime, I took Dalt to see Tadders. He seemed more fascinated by the wall diagram the doctor had of a human skeleton than he was by her eye chart, but we’d finally got him to spin around in midair to face it.

I was floating freely beside my son. For an instant, I found myself panicking because there was no anchor rope looped around my wrist; the habits of a lifetime were hard to break, even after being here, on the outside of the Dyson sphere, for all this time. I’d lived from birth to middle age on the inside of the sphere, where things tended to float up if they weren’t anchored. Of course, you couldn’t drift all the way up to the sun. You’d eventually bump against the glass roof that held the atmosphere in. But no one wanted to be stuck up there, waiting to be rescued; it was humiliating.

Out here, though, under our clear, protective dome, things floated down, not up; both Dalt and I would eventually settle to the padded floor.