The monstrously tall casinos towered above her in the red sky, almost every inch of them covered in glowing neon. This was a quality of the Moon she appreciated — the presence of neon on just about every manmade structure. She was enthralled with the thousands of hummingbirds swarming high above in their shape-shifting masses. The sky was bathed in a perpetual glow of twilight, with odd wisps of green cloud-like forms drifting high above. It reminded her of festive summer evenings.
She walked on. To her left was a woman in a green-sequined dress, marching along with a pet gorilla on a leash. The gorilla had white fur, and it was tall and slim and walked very upright, like a man. She had heard there was a sizeable population of white-haired gorillas living on the Moon, but she had no idea there were some who were kept as pets — she had heard they lived in the mountains and in caves and on the far side of the Moon. She thought of her friend’s cousin Bik. When he was sent to prison on the far side of the Moon, did he ever see Lunar gorillas like this one?
She kept her eyes open. Where were they? Where were the One Hundred Percent Lunar People? She was looking.
She walked past a neon-covered vehicle consisting of a single giant wheel with a sphere within its circumference — the wheel had a colossal knobby tire on it, and the sphere was where the driver and the passengers sat — like a miniature planet Saturn on its side. This was typical of all cars on the Moon. She had seen thousands of them on the elevated highway earlier, just after landing. She was worried and repulsed by the tremendous number of drunk people among the crowds, and was alarmed to see how many of them climbed into those big Saturn-shaped cars. The police, all of them wearing their distinctive stovetop hats and capes, appeared not to give a hoot about the drunken drivers, or anything else for that matter. They didn’t even intervene when one man very casually smashed a half-empty bottle of beer in another man’s face. An arm’s length away from this scene, a woman pushed her young child in a stroller as a gigantic stray moose, incredibly tall and as white as the gorilla that had just passed, lifted his leg and urinated like a dog on the edge of a banister over the concrete steps leading into one of the casinos.
Suddenly, the girl from Earth felt slightly frightened. She heard her mother’s shrill voice in her memory’s ear, and wondered if her annoying parent was right about the Moon.
There was a loud disturbance at an outdoor café just meters away from her. A waiter served a sitting couple their dinner. As soon as the waiter left, and as soon as one of the customers turned to open her bag, three gigantic, dog-sized hummingbirds swooped down out of nowhere and grabbed the food right of their plates and took off. The following commotion was very loud, as everyone present exclaimed and yelled over who was responsible, the shocked patrons accused the management of allowing wild animals to steal their dinners, the managers shouted and insulted the waiters for being careless, the waiters fought back and demanded apologies because it was management’s fault, others customers at the next table demanded that they all keep it down, the police were called, glasses fell over and accusations flew in every direction as the atmosphere at the outdoor restaurant suddenly became heated and unpleasant.
As she squeezed herself away through the crowd, she thought about her mother. Safe and sequestered in the hotel room. She wouldn’t budge from there until they were ready to leave for the Chez Cracken San. Her father might venture out once or twice. But they would both remain fearful, and Windows Falling On Sparrows began to understand why.
She wondered if she was the only Earthling in the area, but that didn’t seem possible. Almost all the Mega Cruisers stopped on the Moon before heading out. And LEM Zone One was a truly historical spot, despite the mess and the confused human debauchery growing all around her the farther she wandered from her hotel. Certainly, there must have been tourists here — or did nobody give a damn anymore? She remembered only a third of her classmates in school even knew what the significance of LEM Zone One was. Most thought it was just a place on the Moon where a lot of casinos were all lumped together — which, indeed, it was.
In the distance, beyond the neon-covered casinos and hotels arching up into the red sky, was a long horizontal object, at least a kilometer in length, resting atop a skyscraper-sized tower of concrete and steel tubes all festooned with blinking red lights. Her Mega Cruiser. The Ragmagothic Chrysanthemum. Shaped like a colossal, god-sized sturgeon, it sat, filling its tanks with Ulzatallizine pumped up from the Moon’s interior. Only lunar Ulzatallizine could propel ships like the Mega Cruisers out to Pluto and back. Ulzatallizine was the only reason humanity emigrated to the Moon in the first place. The entire economy of the Moon revolved around it. No one really knew exactly what it was, but it was powerful. It created millions of jobs. It opened up the solar system. It was nectar. It was holy water. It was the wind in the sails of ten thousand ships all shaped like sturgeons, all moving forward at wondrous speeds never before imagined, humanity leaving behind the cradle it ruined with filth and detritus and waste and selfish stupidity.
There were endless arrays of fexible tubing and hoses running up from the concrete tower and into the belly of the Ragmagothic Chrysanthemum. Umbilical cords, feeding. Clouds of hummingbirds traveled through all these appendages, undeterred by such complicated arrangements in the sky. She wondered how much Ulzatallizine was pumped up into that monstrous vessel. All ships heading out to the far points had to do this. It was unavoidable. They were all obliged to stop on the Moon. The final gas station. Here was where they picked up their petrol.
And most likely where they also picked up their mysterious pilots. The One Hundred Percent Lunar kind.
She passed a man who had just fallen on his back. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose was bloody. The door of a noisy rundown bar was just swinging shut, where inside, she heard the sound of men laughing. Not far from this inebriated fellow was a middle-aged woman sitting on the edge of the road under the red light of the sky, crying so hard all the mascara from her eyes formed two long black rivers down her gray, wrinkled cheeks. A younger man sat next to her, dressed as a woman, with a blond wig and a mini skirt. He appeared to be trying to comfort her as she sobbed, mumbling incoherently about losing everything — EVERYTHING — at blackjack.
A woman — obviously a prostitute by her clothes, not to mention the official badge she had pinned above her breast indicating she was safe and legal as all Pixie Hades and state certified to be disease-free — ran up to the Earth girl.
“Honey, my watch broke — do you know what time it is?”
Windows Falling On Sparrows nervously glanced at her watch, but realized she was still on Earth-time.
“I, uh, it’s…my watch is…”
She was surprised at how frightened she was. After a moment, the prostitute grew impatient and asked someone else, a tall man in a tattered tuxedo, with his watch on the proper time.
The Earth girl’s head was buzzing. There were adults all around. Smelly, sleazy, drunken, bored, desperate adults. She hated it — she hated them. And suddenly, she lost interest in seeing the very first spaceship from Earth, the LEM or whatever the hell it was called. She simply wanted to go back to the safe hotel where her parents were waiting for her, and then go to sleep before continuing on her pointless vacation to Chez Cracken San, annoyed she was missing the excellent party her older brother and sister were no doubt currently having, a hundred friends crammed into their apartment. I hate my life, she seethed. I hate my parents and I hate the Moon and I hate this stupid vacation…
She walked another five meters and everything changed. She had come upon a clearing — a large city square at the feet of the skyscraping casinos. And there it was — like a beaten-up spider with three legs instead of eight, a dilapidated hexagonical structure. The first LEM, or at least the remains of it.
It sat tilted in the dirt.
It was over two thousand years old and the crowds of people shuffing past hardly noticed it. The poorly maintained pile of metal parts sat dwarfed amongst the metropolis of
blinking neon all around it. Hummingbirds picked at some of the garbage that was discarded under it and around it. It was obvious to Windows Falling On Sparrows that half the people who swarmed around it had no idea what it was.
As she approached the thing, she realized some people were climbing on it. They were all teenagers, about the same age as herself. They were not on holiday as she was.
She approached them.
That is when she came upon him. She couldn’t believe he was interacting with all the other kids as if there were nothing different about him, as if he were normal. But there he was — a little taller than most of the other kids, thin, almost wiry, wearing the white plastic jacket that was considered so cool and fashionable for teenagers on both the Earth and the Moon. He was without a doubt, to her eyes, handsome, with high cheekbones, a strong jaw and aquiline nose, and the disheveled thick hair on his head not in any way long enough to hide the purple lenses of the Schmilliazano goggles that hid his eyes. He was climbing up onto the ancient space vehicle and jumping of just like all the other kids, and she moved toward him as if he were a magnet and she a floating girl of iron.
Forget the ridiculous pilot with his hidden face, this was a real live One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy, and she was determined to meet him.
chapter five
Hieronymus was surrounded by kids he did not know. He knew their faces, but nothing more. Some of them stared at him.
They were on their way to LEM Zone One — a school field trip. He was crammed into a highway transport vehicle with about a hundred other students from Lunar Public 777. With only a couple of exceptions, they were all kids from the middle sections. The Loopie section, his science and math group, were supposed to go, but the substitute teacher assigned to that nightmare of a class could not prevent the vast majority of them from cutting as they all headed out to the transport vehicle. Only two other Loopies besides himself, Clellen and Bruegel, bothered to make the trip. They sat in the back of the transport. It was rare for Bruegel to be seen mixed in with "normal" students, and Hieronymus noticed outside his element, he was strangely quiet. Clellen was far more sociable — her hair was no longer in curlers, but on this day was all gelled up into a bizarre confguration of wet-looking circles — and she either went up to groups of kids sitting together on the transport and tried to join in on their conversations, or she sat next to Hieronymus and Bruegel, sulking and blurting out, "Hey! What are you looking at?” whenever someone’s glance would happen to pass in her general direction. Everyone steered clear of these three, and over the din of chatting, Hieronymus heard the occasional Loopies! I can’t believe they stuck those Loopies in here with us!
The journey from Lunar Public 777 to LEM Zone One normally took about an hour and a half on the national highway. The traffic was moderate, however, and at one point they did experience a serious back-up and were stuck for twenty minutes — further up, there had been an accident. The highway patrol and several ambulances showed up, and by the time the student transport vehicle passed the scene of the tragedy, the students were treated to a terrible sight. Three vehicles lay twisted beyond all recognition. Broken glass scattered all over the concrete. Huge burning puddles of spilled fuel tossed pillars of black smoke into the air. Five sinister mounds of blood-stained white sheets were lined up side by side next to the smashed cars. It was obvious what was under the sheets — they were not large enough to cover the feet of the victims they intended to hide.
One hummingbird hovered close to the transport window as they slowly passed. Bright white. Almost mechanical. The size of a dog. The medics at the accident scene were busy shooing the pestering creatures away from the awful scene.
The transport continued on its way once the traffic had cleared. For its passengers, it was a fairly tight fit, as most of the seats had been constructed close together. There was an aisle the students sat on either side of, and the windows provided excellent views of the outside world.
Hieronymus turned to Bruegel.
“You’re quiet today,” he said.
Bruegel grinned defensively as his eyes scanned the passing country- side.
“I’m quiet on the outside today, Hieronymus, just quiet on the outside. But here,” he knocked his knuckle against his shaggy-haired skull, "there is a storm brewing…right here…”
“I see.” Hieronymus laughed. “So your mouth and your brain decided to trade places?”
“His mouth and his brain,” added Clellen, "are two sides of the same hollow blow-horn we have to keep listening to over and over no matter which one he crates on the plumb side…”
“Clellen, if I wanted to hear your opinion I would not have flushed the toilet this morning.”
Hieronymus could see these two were about to start spinning at each other with the usual avalanche of infantile jokes turning into insults turning into violence when, suddenly, an outsider intruded on their little bubble of Loopie-World.
“Hey!” someone shouted in their direction. “Hey! Goggle guy!”
Hieronymus looked up into the mass of students sitting in their transport seats, only to see a moderately familiar face poke itself up — a large fellow, athletic, bigger than the rest of those around him. He stood up and, with an ear-to-ear smile on his face, began to walk toward the back where Hieronymus and his two comrades were sitting.
“Hey! My man! Goggle guy! Remember me?”
At first Hieronymus drew a complete blank — and then it returned. Of course. Pete. A Barrelhead. One of Slue’s friends, whom he met in the media-viewing rotunda just three weeks earlier. The one who wanted him to tap Slue on the shoulder. The one who had threatened to take his nose off. Hieronymus waved.
“Hi,” he said with zero enthusiasm.
As Pete got closer, Bruegel shrank a little, and Clellen instantly took an interest in the newcomer, instinctively adjusting her gel-clogged hair.
“Hey!” Pete smiled widely as he reached the rear of the transport where the three were sitting. “Mind if I sit with you guys?”
“Sure,” Hieronymus mumbled, moving over slightly so as to make more room for Pete, who was wearing a tellball jersey with the words Sputnik Spiders emblazoned across the top, a tarantula-like creature with bloody fangs printed in fiery colors just under it.
“I like your shirt!” Clellen said with extraordinary over-enthusiasm.
“Thanks!” Pete took his place next to Hieronymus. “I think the Spiders are going to really clamp down on the Jackson Craters next week. Don’t you think so?”
Hieronymus and Bruegel each gave an afirmative shrug, not knowing what Pete was talking about. Clellen commented with a gigantic and vivacious "OHHH YESSSSS!” while waving both her arms in a strange show of celebration. Clellen knew less about the tellball tournaments than anyone there, but she didn’t want Pete to know that. The newcomer smiled quite genuinely at her, and then he introduced himself, his eyes mostly on the bubbly Clellen, who was relieved the big bruise on her face had faded a long time ago.
“I’m Pete, by the way.”
“Very pleased to meet you, Pete.” Clellen giggled as she shook his hand. “I’m Clellen.”
“Clellen is a lovely name,” he replied.
“And this is Bruegel, and that guy over there with the goggles is Mus.”
“Mus?” Pete looked perplexed for a second. “I thought your name was Hiker-a-mous, or something like that. Slue always mentions your name, but I can never get it right…”
A burning, sad thought entered Hieronymus’ mind. Slue always mentions… said with such matter-of-fact familiarity. Slue wouldn’t speak to him now. And with that one single casual sentence, Hieronymus understood indeed, she was now spending time with this fellow right next to him.
“Hieronymus is actually how it’s pronounced.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, man. I’m not really good with names that have more than one syllable.”
“Don’t worry about it — it’s not exactly common, so a lot of people mispronounce it.”
&
nbsp; “That’s why we call him Mus,” Clellen added.
“Yes,” Hieronymus grinned a half smile. “A lot of people call me Mus. You can call me Mus if you’d like.”
“I don’t know.” Pete laughed in a friendly way. “I think I need the challenge — everyone I know has names like mine — Pete or Bud or Ken or even Slue, you know Slue, with only one syllable. You have a really cool name. I should just make the effort to remember it.”
Hieronymus was struck by how sincerely friendly this Pete was toward him — and toward the other two as well. They had only met once before, and the encounter had been less than sociable.
“Anyway,” Pete continued, looking down at his triple-sized V-RR100 shoes. “I Just wanted to come by and tell you I’m sorry I was such a rectumexit a few weeks back at the rotunda.”
This was out of the blue. It completely shocked Hieronymus.
“What are you talking about?” he replied. “You weren’t being a rectumexit at all,” he lied.
“Well, I was pretty rude to you, ordering you around like that to tap Slue on the shoulder. I didn’t even say please, and then I even suggested I was going to break your nose, or something like that.”
Hieronymus couldn’t remember the last time he had ever felt so embarrassed — and at the same time, redeemed — considering the minuscule amount of time he had even spent thinking of this guy since the last time they met. And in fact, the more he looked at him, the more he could not help but sort of like him. After all, if Slue hung out with this Pete fellow, he couldn’t have been all that bad. Modesty suggested he be gracious toward the apologizing oaf.
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 10