2020

by Robert Onopa

  “Like who?”

  “Like, I don’t know. Shirley Taylor. Lance Jason. Art Ball. Art Ball would have been perfect.”

  “Art Ball?” I snorted. “The talk show host? The one who’s part Artificial Intelligence?” I pretended disbelief, but the truth was I listened to Art Ball myself. I’d even brought his name up with Candace, but after the look she’d given me I’d been too embarrassed to take the idea further. “Art Ball’s over a hundred and fifty years old. The human parts of him, anyway.”

  “He’s got the largest single listening audience on Earth. Tops two billion.” She sniffled. “Oh, Earth. I miss Earth.”

  “There’s nothing I can do to fly you back,” I said. “But, look, you could have a good time while you’re here if you’d give it a chance. We’ve got a pool, bars, a gym. Golf.”

  “My therapist did tell me to start something new, to get some exercise.”

  “There’s a schedule downloaded to your softscreen. Banquet tonight. Moon range chicken.”

  She sniffled into the Kleenex. “I don’t think I feel like eating.”

  “How about tomorrow? I’ll show you some of our facilities.” I checked my softscreen; I was booked for lunch with two Italian PR men. “I’ll be free at two?”

  “Ough,” she said, sniffling. “Ough-kay.”

  * * *

  That night at midnight I sat on my bunk picking stringy chicken from my teeth, feeling sorry for myself—since Samantha’d left a year ago, my quarters just seemed empty. I was listening to web radio from Earthside, watching my autodialer strobe on my softscreen. To my surprise the faint flashing stopped, the speakerphone booted up, and a nasal voice said ‘Hello?’ ” A hot flash of self-consciousness shot through my body. I cleared my throat.

  “Uh, hello. Art?”

  “Yes.”

  “Art Ball?”

  “Well, who’d you expect?” the familiar voice of Art Ball groused over the speakerphone. “We don’t have screeners here, like some other shows.”

  “First-time caller, long-time listener,” I recited. “I can’t believe I got through. Great show, Art.”

  “I’m getting a delay. Are you up on one of the satellites? At L1?”

  “Calling from the moon, Art. This is Shack . . .”

  “WELL, TURN YOUR RADIO DOWN, SHACK,” Art Ball started bellowing. “BETTER YET, TURN IT OFF. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU LISTENERS TO TURN YOUR RADIOS OFF WHEN YOU GET IN?”

  I fumbled with my keypad to cut the speaker, my hand shaking. “Art? Still there?”

  “That’s better. What’s on your mind?”

  “Art, I know you’re interested in the great adventure of space. . . .”

  “And what’s your point?”

  “I’m just saying, have you heard about that webvote, NAME THAT MOON?”

  “Right.”

  “Art, it would be great to see the good people who are behind this incredible idea get a real show of interest. . . .”

  “Caller, are you one of our Helium 3 miners?”

  “Uh, no.”

  A long silence filled my quarters. “Let me guess,” Ball’s voice snaked out like a slo-mo whip. “You’re an employee of Hyatt Fiat. You know how we feel about the New Solar Order down here?”

  “The what?” I vaguely recalled an old U.N. proposal that claimed sovereignty over the moon, to which Hyatt had signed off. Some glitch in Ball’s AI software must have locked onto the Hyatt reference and his opposition to it. “Art,” I said emphatically, “This is not a political thing. . . .”

  “You people think you can use my airtime for propaganda? Listen to this, Shack.”

  The signal went dead with a thunk. My face flushed, and my eyes burned. My speakerphone hissed with the vastness of space.

  * * *

  I gave Claire Albricht the tour, starting with the ice rink. We saw spectacular jumps and the rapture of average skaters working out their first triple axels in one-sixth gravity. A couple from Minnesota took turns launching 360 overflights at center ice.

  After a night’s sleep Claire looked refreshed, looked better than she deserved to look. Her lipstick today was dark plum, an improvement. She told me she wasn’t much of an athlete.

  “It’s different here,” I told her. “Low gravity.”

  My point was demonstrated when, on the way to showing her our diving boards—diving is like flying here—we cut through a workout room with thick pads on its floor and filled with gymnastics equipment—parallel bars, rings, a pommel horse.

  She grimaced. “Here’s my torture chamber from high school.”

  “Try something.”

  “Aw . . .”

  “Just one thing.”

  She took one low grav step toward a pommel horse without much enthusiasm. And, astonished, she found herself sitting on the horse. “Hey,” she said, “that was . . . amazing.”

  She bounced down and tried it again.

  Next she tried the parallel bars—slipped off, didn’t hurt herself, bounced back up again. She was smiling like a kid. “I could never do anything like this on Earth.”

  We looked over the spa, the whirlpool, the climbing wall, the weight room, but we came back to the gymnastics equipment.

  “Can I use this gym?”

  “Right now, if you want to. The concierge will give you a locker, bring you the right clothes.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re pretty nice after all. Can I get a rain check on your invitation?”

  I thought of the Hubble Room, pricey even with the employee discount—though if the hotel was going to close in a week, it might be my last chance to eat there. “Lunch tomorrow,” I said, and she said, “It’s a date.”

  * * *

  Later I checked in with Barry Stewart at the Copernicus Room. He was alone, though a quartet of remote VR cameras servoed back and forth from stations along the side walls and made it seem like we were being watched. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

  “How’d our first day turn out?” I asked. Out of superstition, actually dread, I’d avoided looking at the website.

  “Could be better,” he mumbled. He was chewing his thumb.

  I finally looked. “A hundred and sixty thousand votes total from Earthside?”

  His expression was pained. “Actual hits less than projections,” he said. “That number’s a bit inflated.”

  I’d gotten close enough to where he sat hunched over a terminal to smell alcohol on his breath. He was wearing the same blazer he’d worn the previous night at the banquet—you could tell from the faux Bernaise sauce on his lapel. “It’ll pick up,” I said to cheer him. “Anyway, who’s ahead?” I read from the wallscreen. “Diana. In second place, there’s Artemis. All the old space junkies liked that name back in the last century, still do, I guess. I don’t find an entry listed in third place.”

  “I’m, uh, leaving it off the official results. You know how we assign each voter a password to make sure they vote only once a day? Apparently the line about ‘enter password’ is confusing.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said. “You mean third place is ‘password’?”

  He worked on his thumb. “A quarter of the votes.”

  “Cripes. The moon could be named ‘Password.’ ” I looked over his shoulder and saw a long list of what I took to be Native American names following “password” on his softscreen. “Some nice ideas,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said wryly. “I made those up.”

  * * *

  A knot of Helium 3 miners crowded the stainless steel bar Claire and I passed through on our way to the Hubble Room the next day. Even dressed in clean red jumpsuits, the miners, men and women both, looked grubby, skinny from long-time low grav work, squinty-eyed from living in low light.

  I steered Claire past. After a day working out in the spa and pool she looked vibrant and healthy, looked great, which didn’t escape one of the male miners, who clowned falling off his barstool.

  “I still don’t get it,” Claire
was saying. “What’s wrong with the word ‘moon’?”

  “It’s not a name,” I told her, pulling her chair back. The Hubble Room overlooked the southern end of the pool, just above the waterfall up in the atrium, just below the level at which clouds formed late in the lunar cycle. It was our grandest spot. “The word ‘moon’ comes from an Old Germanic base for the word ‘month,’ which itself comes from the IndoEuropean word for measure. A ‘moon’ is a device to measure time in the sky. It’s not a proper name.”

  “Luna, then. The ancient name is Luna.” She waved vaguely at our false sky, the inside of the dome, painted with fanciful stars and our blue crescent logo.

  “A second-rank Roman goddess. I looked her up. Not a single legend to her credit. And the name’s never stuck. You say to somebody in Manhattan, let’s go to Luna, they think you mean some town in upstate New York.”

  “Artemis?”

  “Another name that sounds like a town upstate, but otherwise an excellent candidate. Artemis was Apollo’s sister. Moon, sun. Still second in the voting.”

  “According to my sources, your contract with the Astronomical Union’s airtight, so I guess it’s going to be your call.” She scanned her menu. “Heavenly Fettucini and Moon Pie. Cute.”

  I noticed her nose was still a bit red.

  “And what are you going to do if the hotel closes?” she asked.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine leaving,” I told her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Believe it or not, I’m just having salad. I’m signed up for back-to-back aerobics classes.”

  * * *

  Claire skipped the evening’s banquet. I drank too much at the United party afterwards and wound up stopping at the Copernicus Room around midnight. Candace was there with a triple Cappuccino. Stewart’s tie was askew, his voice hollow. I could smell something different on his breath—he’d switched to Southern Comfort, a bad sign.

  “Look at this . . . ” he muttered. “How can the Lakota sue us over the name Hatara? We can’t be ‘appropriating’ that name. I made it up.”

  “They made it up first,” Candace pointed out.

  I looked at the other traffic. “What’s this ‘Moonbeam Laser’ product?” I asked. “Can they really sue us?”

  “Check out the message from ‘Wicken.org,’ ” Candace said. “When the lawyers have some free time, they should look into the legality of this curse.”

  “It’s awful,” Stewart said. “Even bookings are down. What did we do wrong?”

  I shrugged, staring dully at the holo moon on the front wall, cycling through its phases.

  “Shack?”

  “The only plausible explanation I’ve heard so far is that we need a celebrity spokesman.”

  “Like who?” he snorted. “Art Ball?”

  “Well,” I said as brightly as I could, “I think I heard somebody mention his name.”

  Candace laughed so hard she shot Cappuccino out her nose.

  * * *

  Claire Albricht had turned into a low-grav exercise junkie. She put in hours on the “big steps,” in aerobics classes, and on the gymnastics equipment, swam for countless laps, even started diving from the ten-meter board. I stopped by to watch her—by her invitation—as I took breaks from full buffet breakfasts, media briefings, cocktail parties, ten-course banquets.

  She was fun to watch. Moonies are skinny. She had some flesh.

  On day four she invited me to lunch at the juice bar next to the spa.

  “I hope I’m not being a pest,” I said. “Everybody else is lizarding out in the Jacuzzis, pigging out in the banquets.”

  “I used to do that,” she said. “Now I feel like a new person. Karl is so history. As if I hadn’t already made it on my own.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s true. I was Director of Marketing for The Four Seasons. Which has to do with my plan for when I get back.” The new Claire had stopped wearing lipstick altogether. She still had a little red around her nose, but otherwise looked great, her skin smooth and fresh, her eyes clear and bright.

  My eyes, on the other hand, felt like they had sand in them. “Wish I had your drive,” I said, “your resilience.”

  “You need a plan, too, for when this place folds. When I get back to New York I’m going to set up a consulting firm in resort marketing. You’re a sharp guy. That kind of job would work for you. Relocate and I’ll hire you.”

  “Like I say, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

  “What do you see in bare rocks?”

  “You haven’t gone outside yet, have you?”

  “Hands full right here, thanks. Get in shape before I go back, be ready for it.” She actually rubbed her hands together; she was wonderful, all energy and enthusiasm; you could see the rosin embedded in her palms. She smiled at me. “Though I could take a break.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “There’s a trip I have to take tomorrow,” I told her. “A long ride out in the transfer van to the Armstrong Site. How about coming along?”

  * * *

  That night, late, I lay on my bunk listening to Web audio again, that great throwback. Of course we run on a different “day” up here, with our light/dark cycle adjusted to Earth’s, so my atrium window was a soft blanket of darkness.

  “Thanks for taking my call, Art,” I heard a male voice say, a voice heavy with a tired slur, a familiar voice. The hair rose on the back of my neck and I sat up. “First-time caller, long-time listener, Art,” the voice said.

  I heard the clink of a silver flask. I could almost smell the thick sweetness of Southern Comfort.

  The call was brief, even by Art Ball standards. “We have a voiceprint on you, General Manager Stewart,” Art Ball snarled. “We’re not taking calls from you New Solar Order people.”

  You could hear Barry starting to protest as he was cut off, but only half his word came out, and his “Arrrr . . .” made him sound like a dog.

  “Wild card line, east of the Urals, you’re on the air,” Art said to someone else. “Can you imagine that guy?”

  * * *

  “A road?” Claire said. “A road on the moon?”

  “A track,” I corrected her. “Nobody’s allowed to build a road on the moon. This isn’t something you can see from Earth. We run semi-inflated treads and make a hundred kilometers per hour without leaving much impact—the embedded track guides us around boulders, crevasses, collapsed lava tubes.”

  She moved the picnic basket the hotel kitchen had packed for us back with the folding chairs and tables, the crates of bunting, the box of collector-quality flags, the EVA suits, the spare life-support stuff, the tools. My assignment was to scout a media event at Tranquility Base—Stewart was considering pulling out all the stops—and the rear of the transfer van was stuffed with equipment we’d want down there.

  Claire leaned against the thick lexan window, trying to get a better view. “It’s so different when you’re not spacesick,” she mused. “So clear. It’s like my eyesight’s better.”

  “No atmosphere,” I reminded her.

  In my mirror Blue Moon’s main dome was receding rapidly. Ahead lay boulders and craters sprinkled across the regolith stretching away to the horizon, a horizon on which you could see the very shape of the moon’s curvature.

  “Amazing,” Claire agreed.

  I accelerated and toggled in the object radar to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

  “This is really out there,” she said quietly.

  * * *

  The run to the ’69 landing site, Tranquility Base, takes you east along the shore of the Sea of Serenity to a break in its high bordering ridge near the Plinius Crater. From there what we now called Armstrong Site is a straight drive south across the center of the other major lowland in this quadrant of the moon, the Mare Tranquillitatis. To reach the site, you traverse the Sea of Tranquility until you reach a long feature called the Rima Hypotia, just north of the lunar equator, and then you turn east.

  Along the way, especially near P
linius, you encounter ridging, massive rimes and collapsed lava tubes, but those aside, you also see wonderful flat patches across the regolith. You see every kind of landscape the moon offers.

  We had a long talk, Claire and I, as we drove. I recalled how as a kid my dad had told me about watching the first moon landing when he was a kid and how, when I’d first set foot on the original landing site I’d felt connected to him in a way that had surprised me, connected with some dream of his in that Detroit suburb in whose backyard he watched the heavens. Maybe I was overdoing it, but even now, I told Claire, Tranquility Base seemed to me a sacred spot, a spiritual place, not unlike Machu Picchu, I suggested. “Or Haleakala, that enormous high caldera in Hawaii.”

  “That’s where I’ve seen this landscape before,” she mused. “It’s like being around the Hawaii volcanoes.”

  “Only up here it goes on forever. That’s what I like about the lunar surface,” I told her. “It’s raw planet, as primitive as it gets.”

  “You don’t want to see it become terraformed?”

  “Not me. I like it just the way it is. Full of promise. Old and tough and full of promise.”

  * * *

  She saw it first, a reflected blip of light from the replica lunar lander that had been installed at the site. “There it is,” she said.

  Sure enough, in the middle distance the spidery legs and drum-shaped body glinted in the sunlight. We closed in quickly.

  “There’s the American flag,” Claire said when she spotted the little Old Glory left by Armstrong, with its horizontal batten to make it wave. I started telling her how it had been knocked flat when the Apollo crew had taken off, and how NASA had reconstructed the site, when she wondered out loud about debris around the lander. I thought at first she was seeing the scientific instruments the crew had left behind, the ESAP equipment, the passive seismometer.

  Then I noticed the crude writing on the lander’s side.

  The childish yellow letters read, NOTHING COULD BE FINER THAN TO MAKE IT WITH A MINER.

  I brought the van to a stop, rubbed my eyes, and sighed. “I don’t suppose I should be surprised,” I said. “They tagged the starter’s pod on the golf course last year with the same color paint.”