Chapter 2 Building New Homes From Lava

Afternoon brought him some freshening after a meal and rest, so he began to explore his now home area. Outside, there were three more residential structures in process of construction on down toward the end of the pathway that marked the town limits, ever being pushed back by the construction process. The closest structure was being busily hand finished by a half dozen workers, who were adding the finer touches like window glass and basic bedding..

Next further down was a huge cylinder surrounding the construction site of the next home; climbing up to the edge of the cylinder, looking down, he watched the slow movement of the dual nozzle, which was scanning back and forth across the top layer, depositing either adhesive-laced black sand or plain black sand, millimeter by millimeter, computer controlled per the architectural instructions programmed into it, the nozzle arm deftly knowing how to avoid touching the pre-installed components such as plumbing and reinforcing rods. At specified sites, the process would pause; and instead of adhesive, the sun's rays would be finely focused down to heat a section of sand to molten form to fuse it in place. The process would continue until the cylinder was completely filled; then after the adhesive had time to fully set, the sections of the huge cylinder walls would be disconnected from each other and removed; the loose black sand swept out and saved for the next job, leaving only the structural areas which had contained adhesive in place. The technique was much like one created back on old Earth but using concrete instead of fused volcanic sand. Here on this world, there was little but volcanic lava and other residue, no life to have provided petrochemicals for the manufacture of cement in furnaces. Anything that had ever had a biological component, had to be provided by humans and their menagerie of other living critters, plants, animals, microbes.

The furthest structure under construction, at the very end of the fused sand pathway, was still only a skeleton, with a half dozen workers pre-installing the plumbing, communications and electrical systems, along with basic structural components for its part of the conveyor belt system linking all structures.

He returned back to his new home, perspiring now; the midday heat absorbed by the black colored world having heated up the frigid cold that had been left over from the previous nighttime radiation of heat into space, on this mostly cloudless world.

The communications terminal built into the house was far more capable than the basic one carried around as part of wearing apparel by people. He spent some time working on his new home's terminal, exploring what options he had for the coverings for the basic furniture shapes built into this home, even some colored panels with which to change the color of interior walls from the uniform black of the structural material. Paint was too hard to remove to fully recycle, so the colored fabric panels were the way to change a room's decor; yet easily changed later by oneself or by different occupants, sending the old panels back for recycling. He picked a sky blue for the sleeping area, orange and browns for the dining area, and yellow for the computer workstation and educational area. After checking to see how much his retirement supply of money went down after requesting the initial home setup supplies, he looked into the section on work tasks needing doing, as retirees were expected to maintain active productivity to the end of their days; but as retirees, they had much more leeway as to what they chose to do and how much effort they put into it. Since he was a workaholic, idle retirement was not for him; so he spent the evening exploring the simulations of what it would be like to do some of the volunteer jobs that initially sounded interesting. He was looking for something different from his career in physical modeling, the making of initial prototypes of technological devices that enabled the raw materials of this planet to become bio-productive.

Deciding that it would be quite different to explore the watery area that was the source of the irrigation water for the local farmlands, the next day he began the journey to the lake. Riding on an auxiliary set of swinging pods, trapeze synchronous transferring at the high points of each pylon's swinging arm, swinging up and down across the rugged frozen volcanic terrain below, accompanying the huge empty buckets that were headed back to the lake to get more water. A few hours later his swinging pod was delivered to the lake's personnel transfer station; and he headed down the elevator and emerged into a new kind of world he had never seen before, water extending out to the horizon, with only the ripples from the dipping of the water transport pods as they each got a drink of the lake and headed back with it along the swinging towers back to the farmland irrigation network.