Antariksha

Antariksha was not built to keep anything. It was built to make things, and the people who built it brought their languages with them because they were the people doing the work.

Antariksha is one of the five self-governing habitats of the Orbital Habitats Compact, in high Earth orbit. Its name is a Sanskrit word that several of its languages share in some form: the space between the earth and the sky, which is where the habitat is.

What It Was Built For

Its founders came largely from South Asia, and they came for work. Some things cannot be made well under gravity. Glass drawn into fibre crystallises less when nothing settles in the melt; a crystal grows more evenly when nothing pulls its solution into currents; a large lattice holds its shape while it forms if its own weight is not pulling it apart. Antariksha's non-rotating hub is a foundry for that kind of work, and the habitat around it was built to house the people who run it.

That origin is the plainest difference between Antariksha and New London, the other habitat in Earth orbit settled by people from one part of Earth. New London was a refuge, built to preserve a heritage against a catastrophe that did not come. Antariksha preserves nothing on purpose. Its culture is whatever its residents do, and they have been doing it in orbit long enough that the habitat no longer thinks of it as a heritage at all. New London stayed outside the Compact; Antariksha joined it, with a Commissioner, a Mayor and a civil detective bureau of its own like the other four. The Archive holds its charter as a Compact member and not the year it was commissioned.

Structure

Two cylinders, each about two kilometres long and twelve hundred metres across, turning in opposite directions on a common axis, joined at the non-rotating hub. Counter-rotation is the reason for two: the pair carries no net spin, so turning the whole habitat to face the sun costs almost nothing, where a single cylinder of that size would fight every turn like a gyroscope. Each cylinder turns about 1.2 times a minute for Earth-standard weight at the floor, with a floor speed of about 77 metres a second, slow enough that residents born there need no vestibular adaptation.

The two cylinders have about fifteen square kilometres of floor between them, and Antariksha's roughly 150,000 residents live at the density of a busy city, which by the habitat's own account is how they prefer it. The hub is weightless and works around the clock; the cylinders keep a day.

Many Languages, None Official

Antariksha has no official language and has never adopted one. At least eight are in daily use, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Kannada among them, and most residents speak two or three. Every public notice is posted in several scripts, and a resident reading the deck signage is reading the same sentence more than once.

The habitat's council works the same way. A member may speak in any of the habitat's languages, a motion is published in all of them before it is voted on, and no member is required to speak the language it was moved in. The interpreters who make this work are the habitat's oldest profession after the foundry's, and the most respected; the council has never sat without them. The council itself has a name in each of the languages and the habitat has never chosen one, so the Archive files it in translation as the council.

The arrangement is slower than a single working language would be, and Antariksha has always known it. The reason given when anyone proposes choosing one is practical rather than sentimental: whichever language was chosen, most of the habitat would be governed in a language other than their first, and a council that cannot be understood by the people it governs is not saving time.

In the Compact

Antariksha is inside the Compact's ordinary chain: its Commissioner answers to the Chief Commissioner's office and to the habitat's own elected Mayor, and its detective bureau has jurisdiction on its decks and nowhere else. Orbital Five-O's authority runs to it as to the other four. Who holds those offices, the record has not yet named.

See also: The Orbital Habitats Compact, New London Space Habitat, Eden Space Habitat, Ascent Javelins.