by Larry Niven
This isn’t real… this isn’t real…, he licked his lips, and found both tongue and lips to be dry. He had spent too long on the Moon to be able to take anything that looked and sounded like an airlock with anything save complete sobriety.
The outer door slid open.
Wayne took a deep sniff and said: “Good, there’s air here.” Angelique rammed a discreet elbow into his ribs, and stepped past him down the ramp. Scotty’s feet touched “lunar” soil for the first time.
And now the confusion was total. Scotty knew his eyes could be fooled, but not his proprioception. And every muscle in his body, and all of his joints, said that he was under one-sixth gravity. He was on the Moon. The general contour of the ground was lunar. He had seen it for himself. But plants? Grass? A whorl of leaves and blossoms, covering the slopes as far as his eyes could see?
Impossible.
His eyes said it couldn’t be the Moon. His body said differently. He fought to keep his equilibrium. He looked up. The sky was pale, filled with clouds. Thank God. If there had been a night sky up above him, blackness and stars, he might have dropped down a deep, dizzy hole.
But the impossible tableau both disoriented and steadied him.
He reached out to touch. Certainly, this was all visual field manipulation…?
No, it wasn’t. He touched a nearby plant, half thinking that his fingers would pass right through the leaf, and was pleased to feel the pebbled texture. He bent, and sniffed: a hint of mint. Marvelous.
Behind them, the Cavorite sphere was buried to its equator in greenery. The door opened again, and another clutch of gamers and NPCs exited. Asako Tabata rolled out last, although he supposed that she could have emerged first, considering that she had her own independent air supply.
Angelique Chan threw her shoulders back, posing for invisible cameras beneath the deep blue of a lunar sky. She planted her Union Jack into the ground. “I claim the Moon for Great Britain,” she said, to unanimous applause.
“All of this,” Ali said. “It has to grow, and feed, and mate-whatever it is going to do, in fourteen days.”
Wayne examined the soil, then stood and gazed out at the horizon. “I have a suspicion that our sense of time might be distorted here.”
Mickey and Maud Abernathy exchanged a brief glance. “Yes, that would make sense. We need to be careful not to let night fall before we return to the ship,” Maud said.
“And I can see just how an accident like that could happen,” Mickey said.
So could Scotty. If they couldn’t trust their subjective sense of time passage, they could end up breathing vacuum.
“What now?” Scotty asked.
Ali grinned at him. “What now?” he asked. “And now… this!”
And without another word, Ali crouched and exploded up into the air. He went up ten, fifteen… twenty feet, sailing in a stupendous arc before he glided back down once again.
Scotty stared. In all his time on the Moon, he had never really done that. He had been so worried about not looking like a stupid tourist or a greenhorn in front of his wife or their coworkers. Where was the simple joy!
How had he cheated himself?
When hyper-competitive, all-business Angelique Chan leaped into the air, sailing like a ballet dancer in slow motion, higher and farther than any Bolshoi prima ballerina had ever dreamed of…
Scotty threw caution to the wind, gathered himself and jumped.
The ground receded below him, a half-dozen gamers staring up at him in stunned surprise… and then suddenly the air was filled with bouncing, bounding gamers, sheer joy in stupendously magnified motion.
Lunies didn’t do this because there was never enough room. Somersaults, handsprings, flying kicks and jumps that made world-class martial artists out of neophytes, Olympic gymnasts from couch potatoes.
Even Asako was gunning her capsule around like a little go-cart, tearing up plants and dirt as she spun and raced about.
The redheaded guide was airborne, too.
And then Angelique screamed: “Where the hell is our sphere?”
In a moment, Scotty’s joy bled out through his fingers and toes, and a sick sinking feeling hit him like a fist in the belly.
It took him three bounces to slow himself down to a walk, and then stand still. All about him, up to his knees, were the red and pink flowers, covering a plain as far as the eye could see.
No sphere. The other gamers were bouncing to a halt as well, and now the nine of them stood in a rough circle, scratching their heads.
“Damn,” Wayne said. “I’d swear it was right over there, to the left. South?”
“I have no idea. What in the world…?”
Angelique closed her eyes, her expression tight with disgust. “We were so busy jumping for joy that we lost track of where we were,” she said. “We lost the sphere. Just like in the original story. Dammit!” She smacked her fist into her palm. “I should have known.”
“What do we do?” Ali asked. “Spread out? Search?”
She shook her head. “We won’t find it. They didn’t.”
Scotty searched his memory, trying to find a wisp of the Wells book, but couldn’t. He unearthed a vague memory of a BBC production, and one of an old herky-jerky stop-motion movie-not one of Harryhausen’s best-but those traces couldn’t be trusted. Could anything? Dammit, why hadn’t he kept up his reading more faithfully?
“What do we do?” Scotty asked.
Angelique held up her hand. “Wait. What’s that sound?”
For a moment he wasn’t sure what the Lore Master was talking about. Her slender, aristocratic Chinese face was intense, momentarily resembled a painting he once saw in the Louvre of a Buddhist nun in prayer.
The air was thin, and slightly cool. There, faintly, the sound of a weak wind fluttering its way through the flowers. What was that? The ground shook… not a single thump like something heavy tumbling down, but almost like a drum stroke.
What?
“I hear it,” Mickey said, and Maud nodded in synchrony.
And now there was more than that thump. A very distant insectile sound, like bees buzzing, or crickets chirping.
Growing closer by the moment. “It might be best,” Angelique said, “if we hide.”
That suggestion required no show of hands. They dove into the flowers, Scotty making sure that Ali got down safely before he hid himself. Chin in the lunar soil, he had to chuckle to himself: Whatever came next, they were in just about the safest place in the entire solar system. If ever he had been paid good money to take a vacation, this was it.
Whatever came next, he was determined to enjoy it.
16
The Mooncow
0827 hours
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The ground beneath Wayne shook as with the strokes of a giant hammer, as regularly as clockwork.
The sun was nearing the western horizon. How could they not have noticed that before? The sound seemed to originate not merely beneath them, but off to what Wayne took to be the north. There were jagged mountains in that direction, and he thought that they would be easy to recognize, and that was as good a reason to choose an orientation as any.
They’d already lost the sphere… he could imagine that Xavier had just waited until they were busy bounding, and then distorted the visual field to “disappear” the sphere, a simple magician’s trick aided by their dizziness and disorientation.
Damn. It had happened in the BBC version, as well as the Harryhausen film. Take it as part of the script.
Now the ground itself seemed to be protesting their presence.
Angelique Chan raised her arm, poking it up from under the tangled flowers to Wayne’s left. “Head toward the sound,” she said, and they started to crawl.
Mickey whispered, “I haven’t been able to get down on all fours like this for donkey’s years. This lunar gravity is great for my back!”
Maud chuckled, and then went back to serious crawling.
Mickey was right,
of course. Wayne barely felt any pressure on his palms or wrists at all. The slightest flexion of his wrist sent his hands and knees springing up off the ground, thumping back down so lightly it was a joke.
The plants were waxy to the touch. A closer inspection revealed that they had little or no scent, and rooted into some kind of web just beneath the dirt. Were they all part of one life-form, like the mycelial mass beneath a clutch of mushrooms?
Or were they perhaps just manufactured en masse and rolled out like an artificial lawn by the wizards of Dream Park?
He giggled to himself, and concentrated on what he was doing.
Boom… boom… boom…
The ground beneath them trembled. The gigantic circular plate beneath their feet first revolved, then began to slide away.
Gamers crawled backward away from the opening as fast as they could, as the lid retracted like the lens of a crocodile’s eye.
They could peer down into the depths, from which a deeper boom… boom… boom rang hollowly, like Mjollnir striking the anvil of heaven.
All right. Dammit, he should have read the original book. Were they supposed to go down? Was something coming up after them? In the movie the Moon was hollow, all caverns. Was it in the book? And if so, would Xavier confine himself to canon?
He crawled up to the edge and looked down. The tunnel dropped away shallowly, not sharply, a ramp leading up to the surface rather than a vertical mineshaft. The edge of the doorway was about three feet thick, with a series of dull glowing lights pulsing and moaning around the edge. Their low, bone-rattling intensity made his fillings ache.
“What is that sound?” Angelique asked. She was squinting, but seemed to be thinking hard. “Alarm? Alert?”
Before he could answer her, they both received an answer, in the form of a lowing groan behind them.
Something was coming. And whatever that something was, it wss groaning in sync with the sound coming from the rim of the flat circular door.
“It’s a homing call,” she said. “They’re telling the cows to come in.”
She raised herself up onto her elbows and called to the others. “Keep an alert! Something is coming. It’s big, and you don’t want to be seen, or stepped on. Look sharp!”
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The sound from below and the shaking ground behind them seemed to meld, and so suddenly that he felt adrenaline jolt up his spine, as the first sign of lunar animal life appeared.
It was enormous, like a segmented caterpillar half the length of a city block. Its flesh was white, and dappled, and with every laborious breath those sides rose and fell. Wayne could see no feet, and from the way it rose up and inched forward like the greatest worm that ever lived, it was more lizard than snake.
“Mooncow,” Maud said quietly. “That’s what it was called. A mooncow.”
All he knew was that he didn’t want to try to fight something this size. Its six eyes were relatively tiny, clustered around what he thought of as its nose. The caterpillar’s neck was fatter than the main section of its body. It opened its mouth and emitted a bleating noise that rolled over the crater rim and resounded from the clouds themselves.
Six, no seven man-sized creatures appeared around the mooncows. Their eyes were faceted, and their thin arms were covered with some kind of horny carapace, a substance that reflected the sharp light with a faint blue sheen.
One of the insectile creatures (Selenites? Was that the word?) looked in his direction, and Wayne ducked down. He felt something… a vague creeping sensation rippling up his back, at the same time that the earth itself seemed to tremble. The spit dried in Wayne’s mouth. Despite his best attempt to stay steady, a sour sensation that he recognized as fear began to boil in his stomach. He wiped his hands on his pants, and tried to slow his breathing.
Couldn’t let himself get spooked. Not so soon, anyway.
When he looked back up, the mooncows were halfway down the hole, humping along. At the right angles, their bodies were partially translucent. He thought he could see the contents of their stomachs, vast clots of vegetable matter churning their way through the beasts’ digestive systems.
Then finally the last of the mooncows was down the hole. The Selenites kept watch until the last minute, but he had the sense that they weren’t specifically looking for intruders, just keeping a mindful presence. Then they entered the hole, and a moment later the clanging sound began anew, and the lid slid shut.
Angelique held up her hand, palm flattened, and they rose from hiding.
Wayne jumped down onto the circular door with a thump. “Well,” he said slowly. “I suppose it would be too much to hope that they just left a door open for us.”
Asako Tabata’s pod speakers were normally indistinguishable from a human voice, but now they were amplified. “There may be a problem,” she said. “I note that the temperature is dropping.”
Wayne looked to the west, where the shadows were stretching toward them. To the east he saw something that made his skin creep: There where the sky was darkening, the clouds had blackened as well.
Even as he watched, the very first snowflake touched his upturned face.
“Oh, shit, ” Scotty Griffin said, and he looked not the slightest bit happy. “Nightfall. The air is freezing.”
“We’ve got minutes,” Angelique said. “We’ll freeze to death out here.”
Asako zipped her pod around the metal door’s circumference, stopping here and there to probe with little metal arms. Wayne got down on his hands and knees to inspect more closely. Arcane symbols, things that looked like dancing worms and burning leaves, were etched around the edge, but these might be just Moon-speak, and not necessarily gaming clues.
“How much time do we have?” Angelique whispered.
“Not much,” he said. The sky above them was scarred now, ripped by a silent storm. Pinpoint stars burned through the thinning air, bright enough to sear his eyes. What would happen as the night fell? First, the temperature would drop drastically. Then… the gases would start freezing. What would freeze first? Free oxygen? Nitrogen? CO 2? He didn’t know, but figured they’d be dead long before they knew.
It was snowing now, and the air was starting to feel like the middle of winter. He shivered, teeth clattering. The other gamers must be wishing they’d brought parkas. The plants around them were shriveling, browning and curling up. So… they were seasonal… if the Moon had twelve seasons a year. Or did every month have four seasons, which made a total of forty-eight seasons…
His mind was drifting. The cold was getting to him. Jesus! Was this Dream Park’s doing?
“I’ve got it!” Asako called out, and they ran to her side as her pod emitted an ear-shredding squeal, a higher-pitched version of…
“The mooncow sound,” Angelique said.
“Brilliant,” Wayne said, shivering.
The sound wavered then swooped low. The instant it hit the same tone that the mooncow had used, the door beneath them shivered and began to slide open. They had to scramble for safety, but the slab slid only a third of the way open, perhaps awaiting another mooncow call.
“Let’s get in there,” Angelique said.
And not a moment too soon. The sky above them was filled with snow, and blackening as they watched. Nothing would survive on the surface for more than another few minutes. The gamers jumped down into the darkness.
17
First Fen in the Moon
0837 hours
Angelique landed in a crouch, alert and silent. The ramp ran all the way to the lip, so she supposed she could have just walked down, but it was more satisfying, and certainly more theatrical, to jump.
The tunnel stretched down into the lunar depths for what looked like miles, with side tunnels branching off. Its brassy ridged sides reverberated with faint echoes. Selenites and mooncows, humping away into the distance? Possibly… but that implied that sounds carried well down here. Not necessarily a good thing. She held up a flat hand, signaling for silence.
&nbs
p; One at a time, the others gathered around her, and as they did, the circular lid slid shut. BOOM.
So. They were in the meat grinder again. No way back. They had two assignments now: To find their ship, and to find Cavor. One might lead to the other.
“Quietly,” she said. “I’ll take lead. Wayne, you take the rear. Asako… stay with me.”
The woman in the bubble nodded, and off they went. Angelique noticed that the bubble’s treads compensated for the terrain effortlessly, lurching up and then back down as they passed the first tunnel ridge. The tunnel looked as if it might have been constructed from preformed sections.
“What’s this?” Mickey Abernathy called from up ahead.
“You’re the psychic. You tell me,” Sharmela said, but when she squinted into the dark to see more clearly, her voice fell silent.
There in the middle of the tunnel was a pile of brownish muck half as tall as a human being. Broad coarse tufts of moon grass jutted out of it, and the consistency was a lot like peanut butter. Warm peanut butter. And it stank.
Wayne howled and wiped his hand on the tunnel floor. “It’s mooncow sh- dung!” he said, correcting his language for a family audience. That bald-headed son of a bitch! Some kind of joke? Hoping to bump them out of character?
If audiences back home were enjoying Wayne’s discomfort as much as his companions, this game was going through the roof.
Just as he finished wiping his hands on the ground, the walls around them began to hiss. Steam gouted forth, three streams from each side and the ceiling, focusing on the pile of mooncow excrement. The gamers scrambled away as the pile melted, shrank, finally sluiced away into grates in the floor.
The vapor hung in the air, dissipating so slowly that it might have been smoke. Ali, the skinny African magic user, backed up with one hand on his sword. “There’s something in the mist,” he said.
Angelique stopped laughing instantly, and dropped into a crouch. “Alert!” she called. “Ali. Sharmela. Can you dispel?”