Pink was hitching a ride on the Cloud.
No, she wasn't traveling along the information superhighway on someone else's computing hardware, she was riding the multi-kilometer long mobile gantry that orbited the interior of the Aevum ring. Everywhere around her were massive synthplastic tubes, a venomous rainbow of technicolour hazard stripes and the soft smell of moisture. The noise was deafening. An oceanic waterfall off the edge of the world, all that water falling up, away from the planet, and towards its celestial ring. Below her feet the mag-rails zipped in their branching lines like darting lizards. When they emerged from the Cloud's thunderhead they briefly dragged rainbow contrails behind them.
The Cloud was properly named the Macrocleaning and Hydration Platform, and it was a response to the economic realities of the Hecatoncheire Special Project: specifically, that large scale macroengineering was cheaper than precision microengineering. It might have been possible to rig Aevum with a network of carefully placed hydroponic irrigation pipes that delivered the exact ration of water to every sector on the station, but it was practical to build an enormous stormwater channel down the centre of the Ring, add a massive rail channel above the magrail layer, and place an enormous slow-moving macrotrain the width of the entire ring on top. The Cloud was a behemoth construction made of colossal water tanks, ice-asteroid harvesting and purification input spaceport docks, and with huge networks of downwards-facing hose pipes. When activated, it turned its hoses on full blast and began to slowly trundle forwards until it reached the next of its fifty two servicing stations. As it went it bought a torrential downpour with it, a week of solid rain to the ring section below which cleaned the streets, refreshed various macro-reservoirs, and bought joyful children and employees a week long holiday in the rain. When it reached its next stop it would spend a day being repaired and overhauled, new pumping tubes would be attached from the ring's lower levels, before launching into another clattering advance. It was intended to complete a full orbit of Aevum every year, bringing every district one week of total downpour.
Of course, the Cloud wasn't perfect. It lived in the realms of actual machinery and delays due to structural stresses, mechanical failure, delayed deliveries, government budget cuts and retaliatory union strikes. In practice its orbit was more like once every 47 weeks, and sometimes breakdowns resulted in districts being caught in the deluge for months at a time. It wasn't the Cloud's fault, per se: the system was remarkably straightforwards about the enormous amount of money it would take to keep running, but invariably some bright spark would want to upgrade the thing, or get clever about budget cuts, or make an impassioned speech about efficient government and the Cloud would patiently drown a (coincidentally poor) district until someone coughed up the difference it was owed. And then it would trundle forwards again.
It was beautiful in the way that earth dams are beautiful; the sheer sense of scale and the brutal, massive machinery it took to administer the basic substance of life. Its cascading, endless stormfront promised to cleanse the world of all the sin and rubbish and vice of its past year. The Rain was more of a holiday than New Year's, a solstice for a space station. In place of Earth's seasons, there was 'Damp', the months soon after the Cloud's passage, 'Dry', the middle of the year where everything looks and functions as it should, and 'Dust' when non-hydroponic plants start to wilt and the accumulated dust and debris of the world casts a drab layer over the chrome and neon.
You could also go up if you wanted. Most people on the station had gone up as kids on field trips, but it turned out you could just pay fifteen bucks and go on up whenever you wanted. There was a walkway dangling from below the Cloud, just ahead of the stormfront - an interior space with windows in either direction and hard backless plastic benches every two kilometers. It was a ten hour hike from end to end and so most people clustered around the entrances where the combination gift shop and mediocre sandwich cafe operated.
But to walk the five hours into the depths of the Cloud you reached a kind of spiritual quiet. Here you'd only see the joggers, the artists and the religious, people who'd come to be in this place in the void of the sky. There was nothing to do out here in the midpoint of the Cloud, just find one of the benches and sit down and look at the endless water curtain on one side or the endless sweep of the Ring on the other. Here you could hear the dull roar of the machines and the water through the reinforced glass.
And sometimes, just sometimes, someone left open a maintenance hatch. To stand beneath that rooftop hole was like to stand in the halo of a storm; kissed and caressed by a storm that was always about to start but never quite did. To stand in the corona of wet-tasting air and the unreserved roar of this divine engine.
She'd been here for hours. When the technician who'd left the hatch open came down he didn't close it. He looked at her, and past his stubble and weak cheekbones and flat nose, his eyes knew what she was seeing in this moment through his hole in the sky. He slouched across to the bench behind her, popped a tobacco chew in his mouth, and sat down to read the news on his phone. He had half an hour's break before he had to don wings of fire and cable again and return to the work of divinity. Water pooled around this industrial angel's gumboots as the moisture dripped off him. He didn't think of interrupting Pink in her reverie. Sky belonged to everything, after all, and besides - she was wearing non-slip shoes. Good on her.
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