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Excerpt. -¬ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

I, AMPHORUM

The universe had two great halves.
A hemisphere of glittering stars surrounded Gerald on the right.
Blue-brown Earth took up the other side. Home, after this job was done. Cleaning the mess left by another generation.
Like a fetus in its sac, Gerald floated in a crystal shell, perched at the end of a long boom, some distance from the space station Endurance. Buffered from its throbbing pulse, this bubble was more space than station.
Here, he could focus on signals coming from a satellite hundreds of kilometers away. A long, narrow ribbon of whirling fiber, far overhead.
The bola. His lariat. His tool in an ongoing chore.
The bola is my arm.
The grabber is my hand.
Magnetic is the lever that I turn.
A planet is my fulcrum.
Most days, the little chant helped Gerald to focus on his job'that of a glorified garbageman. There are still people who envy me. Millions, down in that film of sea and cloud and shore.
Some would be looking up right now, as nightfall rushed faster than sound across teeming Sumatra. Twilight was the best time to glimpse this big old station. It made him feel connected with humanity every time Endurance crossed the terminator'whether dawn or dusk'knowing a few people still looked up.
Focus, Gerald. On the job.
Reaching out, extending his right arm fully along the line of his body, he tried again to adjust tension in that far-off, whirling cable, two thousand kilometers overhead, as if it were a languid extension of his own self.
And the cable replied. Feedback signals pulsed along Gerald's neuro-sens suit ! but they felt wrong.
My fault, Gerald realized. The orders he sent to the slender satellite were too rapid, too impatient. Nearby, little Hachi complained with a screech. The other occupant of this inflated chamber wasn't happy.
'All right.' Gerald grimaced at the little figure, wearing its own neuro-sens outfit. 'Don't get your tail in a knot. I'll fix it.'
Sometimes a monkey has more sense than a man.
Especially a man who looks so raggedy, Gerald thought. A chance glimpse of his reflection revealed how stained his elastic garment had become'from spilled drinks and maintenance fluids. His grizzled cheeks looked gaunt. Infested, even haunted, by bushy, unkempt eyebrows.
If I go home to Houston like this, the family won't even let me in our house. Though, with all my accumulated flight pay !
Come on, focus!
Grimly, Gerald clicked down twice on his lower left premolar and three times on the right. His suit responded with another jolt of Slow Juice through a vein in his thigh. Coolness, a lassitude that should help clear thinking, spread through his body'
'and time seemed to crawl.
Feedback signals from the distant bola now had time to catch up. He felt more a part of the thirty kilometer strand, as it whirled ponderously in a higher orbit. Pulsing electric currents that throbbed up there were translated as a faint tingle down here, running from Gerald's wrist, along his arm and shoulder, slanting across his back and then down to his left big toe, where they seemed to dig for leverage. When he pushed, the faraway cable-satellite responded, applying force against the planet's magnetic field.
Tele-operation. In an era of ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence, some tasks still needed an old-fashioned human pilot. Even one who floated in a bubble, far below the real action.
Let's increase the current a bit. To notch down our rate of turn. A tingle in his toe represented several hundred amps of electricity, spewing from one end of the whirling tether, increasing magnetic drag. The great cable rotated across the s