Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And indeed the land around them was now that same color. When they finally looked down from the mesmerizing sight of the red ring in the sky, they saw that the land around them had turned both dark and distinctly red. It was somewhat like the color of a red sunset on Earth, but darker and more intense, a subtly shifting array of dim blackish reds, all coated by a dusty copper sheen. The previously pastel patches of rare earths were now shifted to purples and forest greens and rusty browns. But these were highlights in what was for the most part a dark red land, strong in both color and mood. It reminded Valerie of the last scene in a Parsifal she had seen in New York the year before, in which the chorus had waded across a stage knee-deep in blood. The Harbinger Mountains now reared like a bloody dragon spine out of an ocean of blood. Harbingers indeed! War—chaos—bloodshed—

  “Okay, here it comes,” someone said, and then a big gray blob shot over the horizon, a brilliant blaze of light pouring out of its forward end against the direction of its movement. Faster than Valerie could take in a breath it slammed into the moon, and a great gout of fire flew back up toward the stars, extra bright in the eclipse darkness, arcing down lazily like fireworks.

  The locals cheered. “Carbon!” the miner explained to Valerie and John. “They cut off a chunk of the asteroid we put into lunar orbit, and drop it to the surface with a mass driver that works like a retro-rocket. It doesn’t completely work, but it doesn’t have to—all you need is a collision that doesn’t vaporize the impactor, and leaves it mostly at the crash site. So it augers in at about the same speed as a jet on Earth, and boom. Carbon.”

  “KREEPy,” John Semple remarked. The miners laughed and popped champagne bottles, and wandered the room toasting the sight of the crimson metallic sheens out there around them. Valerie shuddered and kept her bloody thoughts to herself. She took a glass and drank with the rest, clinked her glass with John Semple’s when he offered.

  “Red moon!” he said. “Awesome!”

  “Yes,” Valerie agreed coolly.

  He grinned at her. He knew she disliked his uncultured shtick, so he was tweaking her by playing it even harder; she saw that, she saw that he saw that she saw it, and so on to infinity; and still he did it. It was very irritating.

  When the sun came back they flew on to the north pole.

  The north pole’s permanently sunlit area was slightly smaller than the corresponding district at the south pole, but its permanently shadowed craters held a bit more water than the south’s, so the two regions were about equivalent as suitable places to settle. The north pole was the United States’ home base on the moon, as it was for the Swiss, the European Union, Russia, South Africa, India, Iran, and Brazil. The Chinese staffed a consulate in the Brazilian station.

  As their shuttle descended, Valerie looked out a window and saw the usual overlapping gray craters, with several rims marked by a number of low settlements. Her view from above, showing as it did such a mix of design styles, reminded her of an architectural charrette. The American base was the biggest, naturally, but it had not managed to claim the highest ground on the rim of Peary, occupied by the Brazilians six months before the Americans had arrived. The Brazilian base enjoyed ninety-seven percent constant sunlight, the Americans eighty-nine percent; the rest of the bases ranged between those two, with the Iranians, slightly farther south on the near side, at eighty-three percent.

  As they descended, Valerie asked John Semple whom she should talk to in order to pursue her various inquiries.

  He shrugged. “NSA has good intel on this place, and I like their analysts on station. I’ll introduce you to them. And to some other friends of mine, because this town is the place where you can get a sense of how life on the moon can change your priorities.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hopefully you’ll find out. There’s a couple internationals you need to meet.”

  “Like who?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “How?”

  He smiled. He really was amused by her far too often. “It’s called intelligence for a reason.”

  The social life between the north pole stations resembled the embassy circuit in Washington, DC. Every station hosted a mixer for the rest to attend. On the moon that wasn’t so simple on the logistical level, because although the stations clustered fairly close around the pole to catch as much sunlight as possible, one still had to get in spacesuit or rover and then walk or drive to the other bases, then get through locks or jetways and get out of spacesuits, always a hassle. To avoid spacesuits most people drove, even if it was only to go a hundred meters. And after all that they had to assemble in rooms not quite big enough to hold the entire polar population. In truth, compared to the Chinese complex sprawling around the south pole, Valerie found the whole scene pretty unimpressive.

  John had suggested she attend the mixer at the Brazilian base, so she did. There all the tropical plants and colorful décor combined with the lunar gravity to create a little Carnaval thrill. The crush of people made everyone dance a little just to keep their balance. People collided, held each other upright, said hi to strangers who barged unintentionally into conversations, and in general acted like they were swimming around in chest-high water, slightly tipsy, drinks in hand.

  At a certain point in the evening Valerie turned to the only woman near her and introduced herself. This woman turned out to be Russian, her English accented but articulate. Anna Kanina. Not Karenina. Very likely some kind of equivalent role to Valerie’s, but no way to be sure.

  “Have you been here long?” Anna asked.

  “Not long,” Valerie said. “And you?”

  “Almost a year. I go home soon.”

  “Are you looking forward to that?”

  “No. I like it here.”

  “What’s your job up here?”

  “Spy.” Anna then laughed at Valerie’s expression. “Not really! I say that to see if you are spy. Which I see you are. Actually I do radio astronomy, over on the back side.”

  “Is that a Russian observatory?”

  “International. Mostly EU, in terms of who built it. But now it’s run by the IAU. You should come to visit.”

  “Is it interesting?”

  “No. But it’s always good to get to far side of moon, if you’re an astronomer anyway.”

  Valerie thought it over. “Are there Chinese bases on the far side?”

  “I don’t know. I’m neither sinologist nor selenologist.”

  “Just an astronomer.”

  “Right. If you want to learn more about selenology, the political kind, you should talk to Ginger Ellis, who runs the greenhouse in your building.”

  “Really?”

  “If she’ll talk, you will learn.”

  So she really was a spy.

  Women on the moon were a minority. Among the Americans they were said to constitute thirty-five percent of the population. On the moon, as elsewhere, that gender balance could feel somewhat like parity, and certainly normal for a situation like this one, with its strong element of construction and engineering. Using your hands to build things outdoors usually meant you were male. Make it an exotic outdoors and the percentage of women usually rose, true here as elsewhere. But it was still not fifty-fifty. That meant there was a certain solidarity among the women on hand, or so it seemed to Valerie. Everyone said hi and exchanged a little conversation in the course of doing business. People usually explained what they did on the moon, especially if they were meeting for the first time.

  So now Valerie went looking for Ginger Ellis, and found her in the base’s greenhouse. This was again a big glass-walled round room with a 360-degree view, as tight-horizoned and monotonous as those one saw from the Chinese greenhouses at the south pole. Valerie introduced herself as a presidential assistant, and Ginger nodded and said she knew that.

  “Do the plants grow taller here?” Valerie asked, looking around.

  “Taller and spindlier. We put the least happy crops in a centrifuge, but mostl
y we harvest early, or just plant low plants. It’s not a good place for corn.”

  “I can see how that would be.”

  Now Ginger Ellis was staring at her. “And what is it that you can’t see?”

  “I can’t see why people in the other stations think you’re the person who runs this one.”

  Ginger laughed. “I grow their food.”

  “But most of the food is shipped up, right? Even freshies?”

  “My tomatoes rule,” Ginger said. “Anyone will tell you that. Heirlooms, never refrigerated. People beg me for them. I don’t even wash them.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Of course. Vine-ripe organics? What, aren’t you a foodie?”

  “I am. But I do wash my veggies.”

  “Don’t. Especially here. It’s already too sterile here, people get sick from being too clean.”

  “So I should eat some dirt from time to time?”

  “I do that, yes. Just a little, but sure.”

  Valerie made a face. “Maybe in a pill.”

  Ginger shook her head. “Just eat dirt.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said. “Farm to fork, dirt included. But tell me what the hell is going on up here.”

  Ginger stared at her, unfazed. “What? We’re here. We’re doing the moon.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s there. As they say.”

  “Because the Chinese are there, you mean.”

  “Well, sure. They’ve got the south pole, we’ve got the north pole.”

  “Lots of countries have got the north pole.”

  “Which means we have friends and they don’t.”

  “Which means they don’t have to share.”

  “Share what? There’s nothing to share.”

  “I’ve heard that, but I was wondering if you thought it was true. Aren’t there things up here that are getting scarce on Earth? Like from those mines I saw on the way here?”

  “No.” Ginger laughed. “The moon isn’t good for anything. Except as a launchpad. That’s what I think the Chinese are really focused on.”

  “But a launchpad to where?”

  “To anywhere. It’s cheaper to launch stuff from here than from Earth, which makes it easier to go farther out.”

  “Are the Chinese already going farther out?”

  “Sure. Everyone is. The Chinese are focused on Venus and the asteroids.”

  “Isn’t Venus useless?”

  “Yes, but they’re building a floating station in its atmosphere, like a city inside a blimp. And they’re sending big chunks of aluminum from here to Venus orbit. Looks like they’re thinking of building a sunshade at Venus’s L2 point to shade Venus completely, to cool it down. It’s a very Chinese project, some kind of thousand-year plan or whatever. It’s crazy, but if you don’t include Venus in your thinking, you can’t really understand the Chinese presence here.”

  “So the Chinese are going to be the first ones to yet another place?”

  “Yes. But the solar system is big. We don’t have to worry about every crazy idea the Chinese choose to pursue.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not a zero-sum game.”

  “But what if there are people in Washington who think it is—wouldn’t they come up here and try to do something about it?”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t know. People may be doing that, trying to mess with them, but it would be stupid. I don’t think there’s anything we can or should do about other governments’ activities in space.”

  “You’re very unconcerned!”

  “It’s true. Maybe that’s because I grow such fine tomatoes.”

  “Can I have one?”

  “Let’s slice a couple and have a caprese salad. I grow the basil too.”

  She sliced the tomatoes on a big cutting block right next to her potting station. Ingredients were indeed unwashed. Valerie ate a delicious forkful or two and said, “Wow, they are good. The basil too.”

  “I grow ten kinds of basil, it’s wonderful.”

  “Where do you get the mozzarella?”

  “From Italy. Lots of food is shipped up, like you said. It’s like any other local food movement. If the local stuff reaches thirty percent, you’re totally eating off the land.”

  “So, but don’t you think there are some American agencies trying to mess with the Chinese up here?”

  “No doubt. And vice versa too. This cryptocurrency called virtual US Dollars, for instance. That’s turning out to be really destabilizing. Combine that with the householder protests, it’s crashing the economy pretty bad. But that hurts the Chinese too, so it’s hard to understand who’s doing it. Here on the moon, neither side is doing much that I can see.”

  “And you can see a lot.”

  Ginger Ellis stopped chewing, stared at her; swallowed. “Everyone can see a lot. It’s a very small town, the moon. There’s not a lot of places to hide, and people talk.”

  “Seems to me there’s tons of places to hide. I’m looking for an American citizen who went missing, for instance, and I’m having no luck finding him. I’m hearing about secret lava tubes and such where they might have hidden him.”

  “Oh yeah, John mentioned that. Well, you should come out and see the free crater. Your person might even be out there.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “South of here.” She grinned at Valerie’s expression. “Worth a visit. Not supervised by any particular department, shall we say.”

  “What about you, what department are you?”

  “I’m the greenhouse manager.” Her look got sharper. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

  “Tired of what?”

  “Of being so nosy and officious. You’re on the moon, dear. So lighten up! You only weigh about twenty pounds here. Tell you what, let’s go out there together and visit the freebies. You can look for your missing guy, and John seems to want you to see it.”

  “He wants the president to know about it?”

  “He wants you to know about it.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s a compliment. He must think you have some potential.”

  The free crater, apparently otherwise unnamed, turned out to be a small, high-rimmed, geometrically perfect circle marring the southernmost stretch of the rim of Rozhdestvenskiy Crater, one of the big ones that occupied the near side, to the south of Peary Crater of course, which lay almost exactly on the pole. Valerie joined Ginger at the American rocket facility and was surprised to find John Semple already there. He smiled at her expression. “You think I would miss this?”

  They lofted in a small rocket that the pilot called a hopper. Except for a sickeningly fast lift-off, it reminded Valerie of a helicopter. They flew in a helicopteristic way over the dark floor of Rozhdestvenskiy, which had a strange look to it, rumply and glistening. Valerie was told that this was a scrim of ice, that Rozhdestvenskiy was one of the biggest of the ice-floored craters; these craters’ interiors never saw the sunlight, and thus held most of the comet ice that had been deposited in them over the previous four billion years. Apparently their nameless crater, though much smaller, had higher walls and so was even deeper in ice than Rozhdestvenskiy. Like all the sunless polar craters, it was one of the coldest spots in the solar system, never deviating far from 410 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Its rim now featured a flat landing pad, and as they came down on it, they saw that the entire crater was domed with a transparent bubble of some sort.

  “Wow,” Valerie said. “Who made this?”

  No one answered. They landed vertically with a small bump. A tube snaked out to them and covered their hopper’s lock door, and after some clanking and hissing they walked through the tube into a building. Inside they were led by three guides through hallways toward the inner rim of the crater, emerging onto a platform that was set just under the crater-covering dome.

  Apparently the entire space of the c
rater was aerated and heated, and brightly lit by mirrors and floodlights set all around the rim. From the platform’s edge they could look down and see that the space between the dome and the crater floor was occupied by scores of hanging platforms, maybe hundreds of them; also tall plinths were holding up houses or bare floors, all connected by catwalks and rope ladders, trapezes, and loops of netting, also pod dwellings of various sizes suspended from the dome, or from networks of lines extending from high on the rim; also floating balloons, it seemed, from which hung open-sided rooms. Also floating balls of green bamboo, which grew in all directions, like some kind of Escher trees. The whole thing was Escheresque. An aerial town; and people, tiny in the distance, were jumping from one place to the next, swinging like apes or monkeys.

  Startled at the sight, Valerie laughed out loud.

  “Try it,” their guides offered, and then leaped off the platform into space. They caught some netting down below, swung gracefully farther on. Valerie, deeply surprised, looked at John Semple.

  “Whoa,” John said. She saw he was as surprised as she was, which meant that it had to be his first time here too. Suddenly she saw a chance to get a jump on him, so to speak, because they were going to jump eventually, that was clear, and by going first she might wipe that little smile off his face, make him stop thinking of her as a condescending stick-in-the-mud. Without further ado she ran off the platform into space, shooting far over the network of lines their guides had dropped to. After that she could only look below for something else to catch onto. A bolt of panic shot through her as she felt the one-sixth of a g curving her down and accelerating her; it was slow, but not that slow, and she was feeling quite desperate when she managed to grab a passing rope and redirect herself. This worked; she could do it, she was light and strong enough; and now her mother’s insistence that she do dance and gymnastics finally paid off, in that she was finding some reflexes rising abruptly out of her childhood. Grab and hold on, swing to the side! Tarzan!

  After that worked for her a couple more times, she started doing her best to follow their guides, who were proving to be as nimble as orangutans. It was hard to stay near them, because they knew what they were doing. She needed to be careful, but it was not a place for being too careful, because you needed some momentum to swing rather than just hang there. A succession of moves taught her that she could grab and pull herself one-handed if she had to, because she just didn’t weigh very much. It was uncanny. So she swung down net to net, looking for lines and nets ahead and below, following the guides as best she could. It would have helped to know where they were going, but since she didn’t, she didn’t even try to catch them. She just kept them in sight. Above her John was swinging down after her, whooping at each catch, a giant grin on his face. He was going to pass her soon, so she took off again.