The Ophiuchi Hotline

21

How can I summarize our life on Poseidon?

The news programs we monitored during the first days called us "The Runaway Moon." There was great consternation from Mercury to Pluto. The departure of Poseidon was seen as the precursor of some disastrous turn of events in connection with the Invaders. There were calls for armament of all human peoples in the system to prepare for the coming fight.

It didn't come, of course, and gradually all the fuss died away. Much later we heard someone suggest that Poseidon could have been moved by technologies known to humans, and that indeed it might have been human outlaws who had done it. The idea did not seem to go over well, and in any case we were by then too far away and moving too fast for anything to be done about it.

We worked frantically for a year. The impact of Vengeance had caused a lot of damage to the tunnels and rooms. A power overload had caused failures in the heating system which powered the hydroponic farms; all the plants died. For a while we lived on stored food, in the darkness. There was not enough air to pressurize the corridors—many of which would have leaked badly if we did—so we lived in our suits and observed strict oxygen rationing.

There had been no way for me and Cathay to know if the impact of Vengeance would cause irreparable damage to a vital installation on Poseidon, one that we would need to survive after taking control. Cathay said Vejay was certain everything was already there to make the planetoid self-sufficient. In the end, we had to gamble with the lives of everyone on Poseidon.

In the first flush of victory, everyone was glad we did. Cathay was swept into office as our first president. Even I was admired. It didn't last. In six months Cathay was out of office and we were both avoiding the faces of people we met in the dark, airless corridors.

But it worked. For many years Tweed had been sending equipment to make the base less dependent on supplies brought in by ship. The most hazardous part of his operation had always been sending ships to Jupiter, and the fewer he sent, the better he felt about it. One by one, the needs of Poseidon were taken over by small, mostly hand-operated, fabricating machines. The energy was there, more than the machines could ever use. Raw materials could be mined or transmuted by the limitless power. There were machines for making light tubes, integrated circuits, and pumps. The machines which had built the base were still there, and could be used to clear rubble or dig new tunnels. There was equipment to make new parts for things that wore out.

In three years we were a stable ecology, if not yet much of a community. The days of oxygen rationing were just a memory, and the inhabited base was actually larger than it had been in fifteen years. The population had grown by twenty children, and four more were on the way. I could hold up my head and be a respected member of society now that I was Chief Hydroponicist and Grand Panjandrum of Mutagenic Foodstuffs. Every time I developed a new plant that was better than the things we had been eating for three years, my prestige rose a little higher.

By the time five years had passed, things were settled down. We had an old-style school with the students outnumbering the teachers. It turned out to be not so bad, after all.

We were all surprised at how much time and effort it took to keep things running. Our world would not have allowed us survival if we hadn't maintained it constantly. That's true of all human societies since the Invasion, but it's usually behind the scenes, unnoticed. Only three percent of the population of Luna, for instance, is directly involved in an environmental industry. On Poseidon, we all were, and we often held two or even three jobs. Most of us were farmers in addition to our other functions. We worked ten-hour days.

The catch was that while we were a technological society, we lacked a lot of the base that should support it. We employed computers to map the gene changes on the plants we mutated to grow in the changed conditions, and then we cultivated those plants with shovels and hoes. The automated cybernetic and judgmental machines so common in Lunar society—the devices that do so much of the actual physical work—were in short supply. We didn't have the sophisticated industry needed to build such machines, or to provide replacement parts for our best computers when they broke down. We were reduced to the IC chip, the incandescent light bulb, helium-chilled superconductors, and other of the more basic, long-established technologies. It wasn't exactly the Neolithic Age, but sometimes it felt like it.

And after nine years, we were moving at half the speed of light.