[LI] Down, Indonesia

[Frank Liu, a retired space engineer]

Angel Wing Station

I live in the sky. I live on Angel.

But I don't live off Angel. I'm retired. I came here sixty years ago, before the space elevator touched the Earth. The solar array hanging from the station was gradually failing, flaking, and I was the Geosync Asteroid Administration resident expert on photoelectric materials. Found the fault in two days, spent the next month fixing every panel they had, nearly fell off the damn thing.

A day after the schedule said I went home, the station split, in two pieces, with me inside. Effective decompression doors or I'd be a satellite myself, and after that was fixed came the prospecting companies, and then the wire and pretty much one thing after another after that, and one way or another it never seemed to make sense to go home right then. After ten years it became more of a habit than anything.

It's a whole world here, here to Earth. Indonesia, we picked for the bottom end; who knows what it used to be called, the city is now democratically renamed: Down. Centre of the damn world. Paved with gold, that place is, and the streets are roofed over with heat shielding. Air-conditioned, all except for where the skyscrapers come through the roof, where it's pressure cooker with constant rain; nobody lives there if they can help it, they live underneath the skin. Sky is blue. Fake it with tints, half the time. Nobody cares.

They call it, the wire, The Wing. That's what they call it. The Wing from the Angel. Ha.

Then again, half the people I talk to on Earth think the stars are nothing less than heaven. They got one all-conquering mother-itch for the up. Where the cash is.

Now I'm up here, retired, somehow it's just 'here'.

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