by Ian McDonald
‘Our car will rendezvous with the Moonloop in thirty-three seconds,’ Kobe says. ‘We should exit before then.’
‘Team: let’s walk,’ I say, and one by one we drop to the regolith. My HUD shows me a cluster of old accommodation tubes and a lock. ‘With me.’ And it’s like the connection with the regolith grounds me, and I feel a shock run through me—not static—but the realisation, among these buildings and trains and towers with the Earth high above me, that I am a very, very long way from home.
‘Come on, Kobe, I’ll find you a banya,’ Jair says. He takes Kobe’s hand. ‘We’ll get you cleaned up.’
* * *
I don’t think it’s defensive. I don’t think it’s defensive at all.
Right, so: maybe that is, but telling it like a story, why should that be defensive? Understand: it’s my language. It’s how I tell things: stories. Narratives. No, narratives aren’t false. They’re just differently true. You have to be able to read them, read into them, read under them. If I tell this as a story, why should you think it’s any less of the truth than if I had some emotional breakdown and pissed everything out onto this kind of nice chair? I didn’t ask to be here. I certainly didn’t ask for an AI. There has to be a deal: there has to be a deal in everything. It’s how we live. You get the truth, but you get it my way. You haven’t got a right to it. You have to negotiate it.
So: you listen to my story. And anyway, what’s wrong with defending yourself?
* * *
Even I, Captain Cariad, am rocked back by Meridian. The inlock opens and we walk along a tunnel to an elevator down to a ramp that takes us onto a shelf at the top of a canyon half a kilometre wide, three kilometres high, and so long I can’t see the end of it, just dim dusty grey that hints at other canyons beyond my seeing. Shafts of light from a thousand lighting arrays stab through the dusty air; drones skip and buzz all around us. Cranes swing over our heads; cranes above cranes above cranes. My jaw is like, A-whuh? The noise is deafening: excavators, constructors, sealers, sinterers, and smelters. It’s like being inside God’s voice-box. This is real city-building.
Sidibe unseals her helmet, shakes out her fabulous hair. Her eyes are wide and full of wonder.
‘Imagine flying in here,’ she says. ‘You’d never come down.’
I remove my helmet and breathe in the dust and electric air.
‘Um, guys?’ Jair takes his helmet off and shouts over the racket. ‘Kobe says, sorry he hasn’t opened his helmet yet, but he’s ankle deep in vom?’
* * *
So Jair walks us past the Sultan Imperial, and the Rus and the Yellow Moon and even this construction-worker banya with no name only a silver tree lasered into the stone door until I remind him that he was the one who reminded us that Kobe was up to the ankles in three-hour-old stomach contents.
‘Not private enough,’ Jair says, hunching over to make himself look smaller, which he does when he feels self-conscious.
‘Oh, for gods’ sake,’ Sidibe says, holding her helmet up to her face to blink a few instructions to her HUD. ‘Your ceegee’s credit still good?’
Jair nods, frowning.
‘Then follow me.’
She leads us up along a half-made street excavated from the side of the canyon, down three ramps and two access gantries and half a kilometre along another, lower, wall-hugging street to a service bridge leaping half a kilometre across the gulf.
‘Well, come on, then.’
‘On that?’ Jair says. I’m glad he does. It means I don’t have to.
‘Bots use them all the time,’ Sidibe says. She steps onto the bridge. It’s an arch of construction beams with aluminium mesh spot-fused to the flat side. It’s the width of my suitpack. This is sweet for you, flying girl. You throw yourself off the tops of tall towers. Cariad Corcoran’s inner bits are still woozy from the train ride. Kobe steps after her; they march confidently across the bridge.
‘Hey!’ Jair darts in behind them. So what if heights don’t faze you, you with your high and broody neko-roosts all over Osman Tower? It’s the fact that you’re scared to get naked around strangers got us here in the first place. If I wait any longer they’ll be too far ahead of me. I step out onto the mesh. Don’t look down. I focus on the silver and orange helmet seal on Kobe’s suit. And yes, the bridge springs as we march in single file. One foot in front of the other, Cariad. Don’t look down. Silver and orange. Silver and orange.
I feel ready to risk a joke.
‘Hey Sidibe, what happens if we meet a . . .’
Bot. Turning off the roadway ahead of us, onto a bridge. A big bot, wide as a buddha, as many arms as a god.
‘Stop stop stop!’ I shout. The machine steps onto the bridge. It marches towards us, at the very centre of the span.
‘Back up!’ Sidibe yells.
‘I can’t!’ I shout. I can’t back up. Impossible, impossible, can’t you see that’s a stupid thing to say, Sidibe Sisay?
‘Then turn around!’ Sidibe yells, but I can’t do that either. I can’t do anything, can’t move a foot because if I make one move, however small, I will fall.
‘Make it go back!’ I shout, but the bot strides towards us, one step two step three step four. Boom boom boom and the bridge is really bouncing now and there is nothing to hold on to and the bot isn’t stopping and its four steps three steps two steps and Jair is shouting that Kobe is saying something and at the last moment the bot swings itself upside down to cling underneath the bridge and in a scurry of way too many legs passes beneath us. I hear, I feel its too-many feet click and tap on the metal.
I try to breathe. I fix on Kobe’s neck seal Kobe’s neck seal Kobe’s neck seal and I find myself exhaling a breath that I have held for, I think, a very long time.
‘Everyone all right?’ Sidibe says.
‘Kobe says the bots are coded to avoid humans,’ Jair says, and the big hulk-monster nods its helmet. ‘For safety.’
‘Let’s go,’ Sidibe says, and I say nothing and put one foot in front of another in front of another until I am off this bridge.
Three levels down we pile into the lobby of the Han Ying Hotel. I’m still shaking, but together enough to notice that I’m in a high-status establishment. It’s a new place, for managerial and executive and Lunar Development Corporation guanlis—anyone who doesn’t have or doesn’t want a berth in one of the workers’ hostels. Because it’s classy, there’s a human on the desk who smiles as he takes Jair’s bio-mom’s credit authorisation, whose smile freezes when he spies the dusty footprints we’ve left across his freshly carpeted lobby. Classy enough for him to say not one word, key our thumbs to the locks, and summon the cleaning bots as we head up the stairs to our suite. Classy indeed, but this is true class: every suite has a private banya.
Jair drags a sheet off the bed as we peel off sasuits. Kobe pops the shell-suit.
We leap back. We leap so far back we hit the bedroom wall. Not even death could smell that bad. My stomach lifts. Jair has wrapped his sheet across his face. I snatch up hand towels, one for me, one for Sidibe, and we follow Jair’s inspiration. Somehow we get Kobe into the shower. It takes three cycles before we let him join us in the hot pool.
We spread our arms out along the edge of the pool and very, very slowly start to feel like heroes. A quarter the way round the world clinging to a high-speed freighter. Facing down killer bots on the Bridge of Forever. There are dusters and jackaroos and VTO track queens who would salute anyone for that. Let alone us.
‘How do you feel, Kobe?’ Jair asks. Jair has somehow done something amazing with his hair so he can look out from under it again.
‘The smell is still up my nose,’ Kobe says.
‘Emer.’
For a moment I am so lapped and loved in neck-deep ooh-warm water I don’t recognise the name. Emer. Is me. Can only be Sidibe.
‘We kind of need to . . . clean out Kobe’s suit,’ she says.
My heart shrinks.
‘In good time, in good time,’ I say. Jes
us and Mary, I sound like Laine. ‘Can we not just stay here for a while longer?’
‘Um, Cari,’ Jair says, and his legs are pulled into his chest and he is resting his chin on his knees, which is not a good thing. ‘We probably shouldn’t stay here too long? Sooner or later Dolores is going to notice what’s been happening to her account.’
Shit. No, not shit. Shite.
‘Right, then, we clean out Kobe’s suit. In relays, one at a time. Jair, get the rover. Okay. Sidibe, you’re first.’
Sidibe bares her teeth at me—her teeth! Such insubordination!—and grabs a handful of paper towels as she scoots wet foot and bare ass across the stone to Kobe’s vom-crusted shell-suit. I sink into the warm water and let it flow up my arms, around my neck, feel my hair floating out in the bubbles, and for a few moments I am in love with everyone, my team, my jackaroos, even Sidibe. Vom will come, in time. Vom always comes. But for this moment I am Cariad Corcoran, explorer. In her pool in a hole in a suite in a hotel in the moon.
* * *
‘That’s the rover?’
This is one time I’m happy Sidibe is a syllable ahead of me. We are suited and booted and rosy-fresh scented and Jair has just worked his kitty-magic with Dolores’s authorisation. If Wu Lock in Queen was like being squeezed out of the birth canal, Meridian’s Great Eastern Lock is like the bio-mother of all handball arenas. Right, so, those metaphors don’t exactly work together, but they make their point. You can see them, right? That’s all you need. What I mean is, Wu was small; this one is so big we look like stones shaken off someone’s boots in all the polished rock. There are vehicle bays in the walls, protected by long strips of dust-netting. Kobe tells us one day they will put spaceships in here. Not spaceships. Moonships. What big really means is that we have a lot of space and time to study the machine that comes scurrying out from behind the dust sheeting and slides to a halt in front of us.
‘I was expecting windows,’ I say. Windows, environment pod, comfort. ‘Pressurisation.’
‘The VTO588 line has never been pressurised,’ Kobe says.
‘Jair, get us a pressurised rover,’ I said.
‘Dolores doesn’t have the access.’
‘She had access to a suite at the Han Ying Hotel,’ Sidibe says.
‘She had money for the suite at the Han Ying Hotel,’ Jair says, and for the first time do I hear a little edge of irritation with Sidibe? This is something I can use, an edge I can lift and tear back. Like that time Kobe fell asleep in the light-bath and he blistered and I peeled the bubbled skin off his back in big, stretchy, satisfying sheets. Understand: only because he couldn’t do it himself. Only because the itching was driving him insane. ‘This is an access thing. Her company isn’t contracted for full-environment rovers.’
‘We’ll take it,’ I say. We need to get out of this city, out to where no one can stop us. Off the network. Wild and free, my adventurers!
Jair circles a finger in the air and the rover runs up to us, cute as a baby ferret, and lifts its safety bars. Four seats, open to vacuum, facing outwards, on either side of a power and life-support truss. Big wheels, taller than Jair. Batteries and comms arrays. Cables and pipes and conduits and trucking and struts: everyone exposed and open. Bare naked.
‘Where does the driver sit?’ I ask.
‘The VTO588 doesn’t have a driver as such,’ Kobe says. ‘It’s a fully autonomous surface rover, though any passenger may assume control of the control HUD.’
‘It needs a . . . captain,’ I say.
‘The VTO588 is a fully autonomous surface rover,’ Kobe says again.
‘It needs a name,’ Sidibe cuts in.
‘The VTO588 does not require a name,’ Kobe announces. ‘That’s kind of anthropomorphist.’
‘Don’t care. I’m going to call it Redrover,’ Sidibe says and hop-spins up and round to slap her goldy-looking ass into the front right seat.
I am happy to respond to whatever form of address you decide, says a voice from nowhere on the common channel.
‘Redrover?’ Sidibe says, and the voice—like an eight-year-old—says yes and the rover flashes its lights. It has a lot of lights. Right, so: we’re in danger of dicking around in the lock until the ceegees shut off our credit or our air runs out. This is why there has to be a captain.
‘Everyone aboard,’ I order. I’m sure to get the front left seat. Jair slips in behind me. Sidibe has Mount Kobe to her right. We seal helmets and follow the on-HUD instructions to hook up our life-support and comms. Safety bars descend and lock.
‘Everyone ready?’
My display reads four greens.
‘Redrover, take us out,’ I order.
Redrover sits dead still on the long gentle ramp of Meridian Great Eastern outlock. Not a twitch, not even a hum of motor.
‘Redrover, take us out,’ I say again.
‘Um, the person giving the commands?’ Jair says. ‘It has to be the person on the contract. And that’s, um. Me.’
Shit on this. Have I somehow dicked-off Lady Luna? No, her irritation would be a lot more drawn out. And final.
‘Take us out, Mr Santa-ana,’ I say.
And still still still we sit.
‘Cariad,’ Jair says, ‘Redrover needs a destination.’
I flash the numbers to Jair.
‘Now can we go?’
And I feel Redrover come alive around me. Engines hum, comms dishes rise from sleep, all those lights flick to life. Information floods onto my HUD—maps, schematics, readouts. The acceleration is nowhere near as powerful as the big maglev transpolar express, but because I am connected to it physically, intimately, by every sense, it’s so so so thrilling. I can feel power in every joint and muscle, in my lungs, in my pee bladder, in my vag.
Redrover surges forward; the big wheels spin right by my head, I can feel every crack and pebble in the rock floor through the suspension and we are racing up the big long slope to the slowly widening slot of darkness—it’s too slow, it’s won’t be open wide enough, we’ll not get through. I hold my breath and Redrover hurtles out. We come off the edge of the ramp at ludicrous speed and we are flying. We hit regolith with a crack that loosens every tooth in my head, every vertebra in my spine; we bounce, hit again with a jolt that sends stars through my brain and we are still accelerating!
I hook my fingers around the crash bars, blink off the comms, and squeal, just squeal! as Redrover burns across the Sinus Medii. One hundred and fifty, one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour! Our dust plume must be visible from orbit. Sidibe blinks up on my HUD. I open a channel. She can barely push the words past the shaking and jolting as Redrover takes the smaller rocks and stones and dodges the big, wrecking ones.
‘This. Is. Fantastic!’
It is fantastic. This, this, is Adventure.
We ride the craters, the sudden lurch as we roll down over the rim—don’t lose your lunch, Kobe! (Kobe’s lunch was grazing through the snack dispenser at the Han Ying. Everyone’s lunch was grazing through the snack dispenser at the Han Ying: I haven’t given as much thought to logistics as I probably should—in fact, I haven’t given any thought.) Then we come up the far rim and fly up far and high and bang down in explosions of dust and clanging suspension.
I admit it: it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun in a pressurised rover.
Then I feel a sharp crack through the metal. In the side of my eye I see Jair’s head snap to one side. My HUD fills with red warnings.
‘Stop stop stop,’ I shout, but Redrover can’t hear me. Jair has the word for the rover, and in my helmet Jair’s suit integrity is dropping fast into the white.
Every kid on the moon knows what white means: death.
‘Make it stop!’ I shout. Then I hear Kobe’s voice on the common channel.
‘Redrover, medical emergency control.’
Medical emergency identified. You have control.
‘Stop and release, Redrover.’
And Redrover stops. And Redrover lifts the crash
bars and lowers the seat and I drop to the regolith but Sidibe is already kneeling in front of Jair. He isn’t speaking. He isn’t responding. And his visor is starred with cracks, and my HUD is insane with alerts and I don’t know what to do.
‘A stone must have flown up and hit his helmet,’ Sidibe says. ‘He’s leaking atmosphere. Not good. Not good.’
‘What can we do, what can we do?’ I say. I am dodging from one foot to another, my little panic dance. From adventure to Jesus and Mary. In the blinking of an eye.
‘Model 588s carry suit-repair kits at each seating station,’ Kobe says from around the rover. Redrover outlines a hatch next to Jair’s head. I reach for it, Sidibe slaps my hand away.
‘Don’t touch what you don’t understand.’
The panel pops out, Sidibe removes a spray tube the size of my suited-up thumb. She twists off the cap, shakes it, and carefully works over the cracks. The sealant is precise, Sidibe is slow and careful, and inside my helmet the white climbs to red to green.
‘Jair?’
Grunts and murmurs on the common channel.
‘You okay?’
Sidibe throws the empty can far out across the Sinus Medii.
‘I’m okay.’
‘That’ll hold it,’ Sidibe says. ‘That stuff is stronger than the thing it fixes. You might have a problem seeing out of the right side of your visor.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Emer, is he okay?’
There is too much Jair on my visor, but from what I can read, he is green green green.
‘He’s good to go.’
‘I’m okay.’
I must make a command decision.
‘Kobe, you have control of Redrover?’
‘Through the medical emergency override, yes.’
‘I think you should drive.’
‘I’ll only have it until Redrover identifies the medical emergency as over.’
‘Then it’ll go back to Jair?’
‘Yes.’
‘All good, then. Okay, team, seat up and move out.’
* * *
Why should it be interesting that I wanted to be captain? Someone needed to be.
Collective decisioning? With four folk like Kobe, Jair, Sidibe, and me? Do you want me to count off the neuro- and socio-atypicalities on my fingers? It would have been like one of those RPGs: everyone talks around and around for an hour before anyone can decide on doing anything. I prepare a Charm of Investigation. Or my Warding of Safekeeping? I summon my Mystic Armour of Total Hardness . . . hang on . . . no . . . maybe my Suit of Lithe Leaping. Oh, I don’t know. I ready a Casting of Level 12 Stinky-Fart—oh, I suppose a Level 28 Lighting Storm would be more sure-fire, but it’s not as much fun . . . Yadda yadda yadda.