“I don’t know,” he said languidly. “We’ve come an awfully long way. I’m such an old, old man, and I’m tired. Maybe I’ll take a little rest here before we head for the admission kiosks.”
Her second squawk was practically a moan. “No, Dad, no, Mom and Mum and the twins are already inside.” Her tone implied that they were having all the fun without her, using it up and leaving none for anyone else.
Michael laughed. Maybe it was cruel to find amusement in his youngest daughter’s pain, but it had been so long since the family had come together, and so long since he’d been able to anticipate seeing his wives with his actual eyes, and not through the intimate lens of a camera, that he couldn’t help it.
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess we have to go,” he said, and resumed walking.
All around them, he knew, people were arriving in their transports and shuttles: even a few privately owned planetary cruisers, although those were mostly anchored on the other side of Titan, in docking structures specially constructed to account for their bulky shapes and gravitational needs. Only the junkers would be pulling into a docking structure this far from the core enrichment centers of the moon, where the people who’d chosen the cheapest possible ticket options came to play.
“Cheap” was a relative term. In all the solar system, there was nothing else like Titan, nothing constructed with the single-mindedness and clear goal of the full enclosed, enriched, transformed moon. The May fortune had been enormous for its time, and Wendy May, untrained oligarch with no designs on leaving a penny of her father’s money for the non-existent next generation, had spent it with the open hands of an inspired artist. She had been chasing a dream, and had she still been alive to see it—had she not died, comfortable, at the age of two hundred and eighty-three, tucked into her bed in the Timeless Tower at the center of the Peach Orchards of Immortality—she would have been more than content with everything that dream had become.
In order to make it self-sustaining, to keep the vultures from swooping in and gutting her creation before her body was even cold, it had been necessary to incorporate, to invoke the arcane magic of shareholders and lawyers and profitability. Back then, in the beginning, people had laughed—oh, how they had laughed. Little Miss Wendy May, selling shares in a dream that everyone knew would never come true. Earth was home. Earth was the place where mankind belonged. Space, when it was claimed, would be exploited for the things it could supply to the homeworld, and then it would be left behind, another wrung-out resource with nothing to offer.
In her idealistic rush to make something beautiful, Wendy May had been one of the greatest visionaries of her age, because she had seen the potential, not in the stars, but in the territories so much closer to home. Her architects and scientists had spent the better part of a decade drawing up plans. Sometimes they demanded technology that didn’t exist, that hadn’t even been considered before it became necessary for them to move forward; when that happened, she sent out feelers, funded scientists, purchased labs, and got them what they needed. Over and over, she got them what they needed. The sky wasn’t the limit, not for a woman who had already pinned her heart to the distant, shimmering sphere of another planet’s moon.
Titan had taken shape one innovation at a time. Ferroglass struts, clear as crystal and stronger than any natural metal, driven into the shifting ground by rovers that sampled the unblemished ecosystem to assuage scientific guilt, even as they destroyed it forever. Gravity generators, bringing Titan’s lower gravity closer to Earth standard, while never quite getting it all the way there. This was meant to be a paradise, after all, and in paradise, tired bones could rest, children could tumble without fear of injury, and most of all, someday, fly using wings of plastic and aluminum and physics. Piece by piece, the skeleton had gone in, and the shareholders—many of whom had bought their shares anticipating the day Titan could be carved up and sold for its component parts, a beautiful corpse for them to divide—began paying closer attention.
“Terraforming is a myth” had been the rallying cry of her detractors. “Whatever she’s trying to do up there, it’s never going to happen.”
Ferroglass panels, each a mile or more in diameter, had been placed atop the struts, creating a greenhouse, scaling the world like a sleeping dragon. Beneath them, the artificial soil had rolled out across the world, and the atmosphere generators had begun to pump out their programmed mixture of gases, gradually forcing the natural gases of Titan away, up and out and into the space above the sphere. In less than twenty years, Titan had become a spinning crystal, shining like the star it had never aspired to be.
And then the real construction had begun.
Isla ran, and Michael followed, and even their “cheap” surroundings were spectacular beyond anything an asteroid farmer or a Plutonian colonist would have seen before. This had been one of the first docking structures on Titan, built for Wendy May herself; the ship that had carried her forth from Earth was still cradled near the transit corridors, a permanent attraction for selfie-hungry guests. There was a small queue waiting neatly off to one side, parents holding tight to the hands of children who were already anxious to move on to the real adventure on the other side of the gravity tunnel.
“Dad, no, Dad, come on,” babbled Isla, clearly seeing the risk of another delay.
“All right, comet, all right,” he said. The doors to the gravity tunnel were ahead. He stopped again, tugging her to a halt. She whirled to give him a petulant look, which faded when she saw how serious his face had become.
“What?” she asked.
“We have to go through those doors independently,” he said. “The admission kiosk is on the other side, along with all the security systems Titan has. When you land, I need you to stay right there, all right? Don’t move. Don’t go to look at anything, don’t ask anyone where the gates are, don’t follow a parade if there’s one passing by. I will be with you as quickly as I can. Do you understand?”
Isla nodded, eyes wide and fearful. That was good. That was important. Fear kept body and soul together.
“Here we go, baby girl,” he said, letting go of her hand and gently pushing her toward the doors. “I’ll see you on Titan.”
She gave him one last frightened look before walking toward the doors, which slid silently open to let her pass. Once she was through, they closed again, and she stood there for a single bewildered moment before the floor dropped out from under her feet and she fell, down into the depths of the gravity tunnel, down into the windy world below.
Michael caught his breath, struck—not for the first time—by how unnecessarily dramatic the descent was for families who chose this particular docking structure. Families with infants, travelers with physical disabilities that would be exacerbated by the descent, people who could afford a more costly berth—they all landed closer to the surface, in glimmering constructs of ferrosteel and glittering crystal, where sliding stairways could carry them through the shell and onto Titan. For the poor, for the nostalgic, for the thrifty, though, there was the separation, the plummet, the jaw-dropping moment of what felt like genuine freefall.
Sometimes he wondered whether Wendy May’s original design had called for the fall because she knew it would impress the investors who already believed she was going to fail. Go big or go to hell, that had been her motto by the time Titan had been ready to receive her first visitors, her first human suitors not already in love with the moon and its potential. By the time the gravity tunnels had been ready, the advertisements had been going out, opening day still ten years in the future and tickets already on sale, hoarded by those who thought they were a funny gag gift and those who recognized them as the treasure they were at the same time.
Michael stepped up to the doors, held his breath, and stepped through. They closed behind him, and the floor dropped out from under his feet, and for a moment—a terrifying, tantalizing moment—he was in genuine free fall, plummeting toward the crystal dome below, nothing to catch or keep him
but the air that rushed around his body, holding him square in the middle of the tube. Bodies flashed by on all sides, other pilgrims taking the plunge toward the solar system’s secular holy city, where the only thing people ever swore by was the moon, the constant, inconstant moon, land of dreams, paid for by a woman who had never needed to learn that “impossible” meant anything more than “try harder.”
The wind caught him, clutched him, bore him up, and his plummet became a gentle glide as the gravity reasserted itself, turning him into a snowflake drifting through the winter sky. It snowed on most planets with an atmosphere, and if the snows of Saturn or Uranus weren’t as kind to human life as the snows of Earth had been, it was still an image capable of invoking wonder.
The crystal shell shimmered with rainbows as he dropped closer and closer, until he could see glimpses of the satellite beneath it, a single moon divided into dozens upon dozens of distinct, impossible worlds.
The greatest theme park in the solar system.
The gravity tunnel dropped him into open air above the arrivals plaza, and jets of carefully conditioned microgravity lowered him the rest of the way, until his feet touched down on the brick, carefully crafted to look like something from a pre-Collapse picture book, homey and quaint and antiquated in a way that nothing built off-Earth had any business being. He caught his breath, tasting the sugary, cookie-flavored air of Titan for the first time. Somewhere in the distance, a brass band was playing. From another direction, he could hear a sitar belling through the air, sweet and sharp and syrupy.
The admission kiosks loomed, each within its own ferrosteel shell, each colored to look like a different gemstone, ruby and sapphire and emerald. Within them, bright-faced human attendants waited to check genomes against registered entries for the day, performing full medical scans at the same time to prevent any infectious diseases from making their way past the arrivals plaza. Behind them were glittering tunnels of light, each capable of performing security sweeps more thorough than any biological guard could dream. Wendy May had placed a great deal of importance on living staff, on keeping the bright, shining face of Titan front and center in her perfect world of the coming future, of the dreaming past, but even before her death, she had earnestly agreed that security should be automated and updated whenever possible, sparing no expense. People who entered her lunar wonderland should be able to put the real world behind them without concern of war or plague or anything else interfering.
And there was no Isla.
Michael spun in place, scanning the crowd for signs of his stubborn, Titan-loving daughter. There were children everywhere, from all worlds, all walks of life, children in grubby station jumpsuits with asteroid dust still on their feet, children in the glitter-graphic spun-silk taffeta of the Venusian elite, children of every kind and color, and none of them were his.
The security tunnels kept people from carrying weapons past the gates, making Titan a paradise for parents and children and people of all professions. But those tunnels didn’t scan people as they entered the plaza. And anyone who knew Titan knew that the gravity tunnels were configured for a single passenger at a time. That children of poorer families would arrive on the moon alone, if only for a matter of minutes, dropped into spectacle and chaos and so many strangers, so many people who had no idea who belonged with which child, who wouldn’t recognize an abduction if they saw one.
Michael dropped to his knees, barely even aware that the screams he was hearing were his own.
WENDY MAY’S ACQUISITION of Titan had seemed, at first, like a blow for corporate interests: after all, if people could own planetary bodies, what was to stop a sufficiently large coalition from purchasing Jupiter, from locking down the mineral rights on Mercury? Titan was seen as the bellwether for a universe in which everything would finally be in the hands of the people who deserved it. Wealth was a signifier of virtue, after all, and that meant that the richer a person was, the more they had earned the right to take and consume all the good things in the universe.
But Titan’s purchase came at the very end of the old era and the dawn of the new. It was, in many ways, the final extravagance of a dying aristocracy, and the world rose up to secure the solar system for all humanity, not for the few who could afford a natural satellite as a weekend home. Because the purchase had been legal when it was made, and because the populace wanted a reminder of what happened when the rich forgot they were people too, it was allowed to stand: Wendy May would keep her prize, even as her peers were forbidden to do the same for themselves.
Perhaps there was a small element of wistfulness at play in the decision to let her keep her moon. Her plans were becoming known, whispered about, discussed in amused tones over dinner tables, and no one could fault the idea of an amusement park large enough to span a world. Science fiction was filled with tales of “pleasure planets,” and the first tottering steps were being taken toward freedom from the green hills of Earth. Why not make one more imaginary thing real?
The first colony on Mars was founded the same year that Titan opened its first “world” to hopeful explorers who could afford the transport, who could pay their way past the gates. Rather than being tied to a media company, with stories that would inevitably age and sour in the mouths of consumers, whose mores and standards and ideals would continue to evolve year upon year, Wendy May had commissioned her architects to fill her private moon with all the things Earth’s dreamers had placed upon their own Moon.
Rabbits and peach orchards and kindly old men; aliens who bore more resemblance to friendly green Sea Monkeys than anything actually extraterrestrial; Grecian temples and Lunar goddesses in sparkling silver gowns; a childhood wonderland of buildings and entertainment experiences sculpted from “cheese,” where the restaurants grilled and melted and sliced a thousand preparations of the iconic foodstuff. Titan was a moon, with no real folklore attached to its orbit, but under the hands of Wendy May, it became the moon, radiant and rare and crystal-bright.
Michael sat in the small security office, head bowed, hands tucked between his knees, and wondered whether he would ever be able to look at a moon—any moon—again without seeing the shining face of his little girl, who had barely stepped through the portal into wonderland before being snatched away.
The door opened. Two women rushed inside, one tall and gangly in the way of those raised in zero gravity, the other short and compact, with the thick arms and muscled frame of an asteroid miner. Michael leapt to his feet, scanning the space behind them. His heart sank.
“Where are the boys?” he demanded. “Did you—”
“We dropped them off in Phoebe,” said Kim, walking quickly across the office to fold her arms around her husband. Ange followed more slowly, scowling at everything in sight. “They’re perfectly safe. They’re perfectly safe and perfectly happy and they don’t know that Isla is missing.”
The word “yet” hung in the air between them, unspoken.
It was Ange who broke the silence. “What happened?”
“We came in through the gravity tunnels. You know they require individual transits.” It had seemed like such a good idea when they were planning this trip. Take the gravity tunnels. Arrive on Titan the way Wendy had arrived, back when everything was shining and new and perfect. “I was right behind her, I swear. She said she’d wait for me. She was supposed to wait for me.”
“She’s seven.”
“She’s smart. She knows that when we give her an instruction, it’s for a reason.” The plaza, with all its hustle and bustle and oh, God, she was gone, she was gone, she’d never even made it past the gates.
The door opened again. All three of them turned to see a security officer in the glittering silver uniform of Titan’s permanent staff standing there, a frown on their long, seamless face. The gravity was low enough, and the ferrosteel dome blocked enough harmful radiation, that those who lived on Titan often looked decades younger than their actual ages, even before rejuvenation treatments. Some people joked that Wendy May
had found a way to get the actual peach trees of immortality from the Chinese heavens, and that the orchards planted in that “world” could keep people alive long past their appointed time.
“Mr. May, Mrs. May, Mrs. May-Xiang.” The officer nodded to each individual in turn with the utmost politeness, almost managing to conceal the awe in their eyes. “We had no idea you were coming to inspect the property.”
“It isn’t an inspection,” said Michael. “It’s a vacation. We’re taking our children on vacation.”
The youngest three. The elder three were off living their lives, Chi in a research lab orbiting Pluto, working on deep space biochemical sampling; Mara swimming the oceans of Jupiter, her body transformed through some of her sister’s techniques, until she could travel the length of a continent without surfacing for air; and John tucked in a minor role in the Titan Corporation, learning the family business from the ground up. All of them had made this same pilgrimage to Titan, had fallen through the gravity tunnels, had walked the worldlet their family owned with their hands in their pockets and their identity beacons falsified, allowing them to experience their great-great-great-grandmother’s dream the same way everyone else did.
The security officer inclined their head, but it was clear from their expression that they didn’t believe Michael’s claims. No one ever did. No one could ever believe that he, the last surviving heir of his generation, would walk away from the lunar wonderland crafted in his honor, his parents’ honor, the honor of every May descendant to walk the worlds with open hands and hungry eyes, looking for something new to carry home to their heart’s own home on Titan.
He could have tried to explain. He could have said that Wendy May had been very clear in her will, asking her children and their children and their children’s children to travel, to see things, to live their lives outside the literal manifestation of the bubble she had been raised in. She had been a wide-eyed rich girl who pinned all her hopes on a distant moon she had never seen, but whose surface, she had been assured, was geologically stable enough to carry the weight of her dreams. Everything she’d built, not designing but asking to have designed, had been inspired by the stories she’d read as a child. Those stories would change. The signs had already been out there in the world, for the people who knew how to see them. For Titan to speak to the future as it already spoke to the past, new dreams of the moon would have to be collected, cataloged, and brought home.
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