Body smooth and brown, with straight blond hair that shone like a silvery cap in the sunshine, the five-year-old performed a twisting triple somersault from thirty feet and dived cleanly into the sparkling green waters of the lake. Spray lifted and hung and settled slowly like glittering gossamer in the low gravity.
Watching from the shade of a jacaranda tree and sipping cool drinks, Chase and the boy's parents applauded. On the other side of the placid water and beyond the terraced tiers of residential gardens they could see the cylindrical core, a polished shaft of fretted aluminum three hundred meters in diameter rising several thousand meters in the air.
Insects zoomed and ticked in the undergrowth; a butterfly wafted erratically by; somewhere a bird sang, claiming territory or looking for a mate.
"Did you teach him that?" Chase asked, watching the boy's bright head break the surface. His grandson leaped and twirled like a lithe brown seal.
"All the kids can dive like that," Dan said. "They don't need teaching. There's a kid in Nick's tutor group who can stay in the air so long you'd swear he was actually flying. I tried it once and went arse-over-tip and landed flat on my back. You need natural low-g coordination, which youngsters have and we don't. I'll stick to hang-gliding; at least there your earthbound conceptions and reflexes aren't violated."
"I don't know about that," Jo said archly, prodding him with her bare foot under the table. "Your other earthbound reflexes adapted quite well."
"Pure instinct," Dan grinned. "And of course the trampolinists' revised edition of the
Jo kicked him again, harder.
It was late afternoon and the mirrors were angled by computers to throw slanting rays that mimicked the setting sun. Three light planar mirrors, each ten kilometers by three, beamed the sunlight into the revolving island colony through huge transparent panels tinted blue to give the impression of a blue sky. As the day wore on the mirrors were tilted fractionally to give an approximation of the sun's path through a 180-degree arc and were then turned away for the eight-hour night. It seemed that human beings needed darkness.
Seen from a distance the colony had the appearance of a large silvery globe attached by tubular spokes to a doughnut. Here, inside the central globe, were the recreational areas, parklands, and, because of its reduced gravitational stress, the homes of the older residents. Its proper name was Globe City, though of course it was known to everyone as the Geriatric Gardens. Chase and Ruth had a five-room apartment here, just a few hundred yards from the lake. Being ten years younger than he, Ruth objected with a few well-chosen phrases to the popular description.
Five spokes, or thruways, connected the globe to the outlying torus: the encircling tube that housed the main population as well as the multilevel crop beds and animal farms.
At the topmost level in enclosed chambers, fishponds stocked with a wide variety of edible species filtered down and irrigated the lower levels, supplying waste effluent to the wheat, soybeans, vegetables, and forage below. Given the near-perfect conditions of sunlight, temperature, humidity, and nutrients--and a controlled supply of carbon dioxide--each of the seven-hundred-acre fields could produce seventeen hundred pounds of grain crops and forage a day, enough to feed a population of ninety-thousand people. The half-a-million fish stocks provided everyone with a ten-ounce fillet once a week.
Canton Island had originally comprised just the central globe, with living space for ten thousand people--the first settlers, who were scientists, technicians, engineers, and construction workers. The torus and connecting thruways had been added later, and indeed work was still going on to complete the external radiation shielding.
Nick ran up the shelving beach of white sand and jumped, wet and dripping, into Chase's lap.
"Take me to the flying fish. Take me, Grandad, please!"
"Nick, now stop that!" Jo reprimanded him sharply. She reached for her son and flashed a look at Dan, who gave a slight shrug.
"I think we're too late today, Nick," said Chase with a rueful smile. "They don't allow visitors after four o'clock. Some other time, okay?"
The experimental fish farms within the cylindrical core were a favorite and endlessly fascinating attraction for children and adults alike. There in zero-g, freed of gravity, which made their gills collapse, fish swam weightlessly through an atmosphere of 100 percent humidity, which kept them moist. To see them was almost dreamlike: fish "flying" through the air.
