by F P Adriani
Tan suddenly sighed, a disappointment-laced, deflated sound. “So we’ll be inside all the time.”
“Yep. Believe me, you don’t want to be outdoors there. Talk about hostile! It’s one of the worst places I’ve ever been. Right beside our evolutionary home, and yet so hostile to our anatomy when places farther away are much less hostile! It’s odd, for sure. And the colonies make it even odder—the partying in many of them. Actually, I’ve tried but I could never figure out if the Moon started out as a party planet or it became one partly because in early times no one could bear staying there for long unless she was stoned.”
The original colonies were the definition of rotten living partly because there was no d-regarm—a clear but superstrong, superradiation resistant composite of diamond, altered regolith, and armine, which composite was used to shield human-habitation both from the radiation from space and the radiation from Earth-Moon’s surface. The d-regarm basically filtered out the most dangerous wavelengths, while leaving the more useful wavelengths mostly intact.
Before diamond-glass had first been manufactured on Diamond and before armine had been discovered on the moon Calderon, the Earth-Moon’s regolith was the raw material of choice for the manufacture of quite a lot of the first Earth-Moon colonies. All those domed structures had also been regolith-bermed—mostly buried in piled-up regolith and even cut into the bedrock below, both to maintain more constant habitable temperatures and to resist the ever-harmful radiation and solar-particle influx from space. But that very protection made colony life a dark one, with only scant artificial light to brighten the spaces.
Back then, the inside of a colony supposedly looked very like the outside moonscape—shadowy. Yet you couldn’t readily tell this from inside because most of the walls to the exterior were darkly opaque. While living inside, you only rarely saw outside.
And there were almost no indoor plants, no trees, no nothing like home. You lived in a dark, buried enclosure, and hoped the technology at the time could withstand everything the Universe threw at the moonscape, including solar storms, cosmic rays, and the angriest meteorites. And then there was the seismic activity that could burst the colony shells and destroy the life within….
But that was mostly the old Moon-life. The new Moon-life with d-regarm and graviton-inducing strange-mass floors from Lobos and beamed power from advanced Space Power Stations, and all the other improvements humans had found or invented—the new Moon-life wasn’t significantly different from life on Earth…well, only if you didn’t look too closely at your life on Earth-Moon ….
“You don’t sound like you like it there,” Tan said when I’d suddenly stopped talking.
“Very perceptive of you.”
“It’s your fabulous training.”
“Ha-ha,” I said, tossing the guidebook onto the coffee table.
Tan yawned in a big way and sort of fell back against the couch cushion. “I think I’ve had it for now.”
“Well, there isn’t enough time to go over much more anyway, before we’ve gotta get out of here.”
His eyes turned to mine. “Maybe you could ask James for another day or two before the meet.”
I shook my head fast. “No. I want to get this over with already.”
*
Shortly after, we went downstairs to the dining room to have another meal, and then we basically went right back upstairs to get into our pajamas and hit the bed.
It had been a long day filled with so much, including so much confusion. And in the morning, we’d have to look at the ring files….
…That didn’t exactly go well.
We weren’t sitting there for even fifteen minutes when a red-faced infuriated Tan flung his glasses and file across the coffee table, making me jump. “I can’t take this sickness anymore—I can’t read it!” he shouted. Then he flew off the couch and rushed over to the small refrigerator inside the kitchenette area.
“I wish I could not read it,” I said. “But I’ve got to.”
“Why? You don’t even know if the two things are related.”
I sighed, my eyes on my file again. Tan was right: it was sick, all of it, sick sick sick. The scumbags used kids because their bodies could fit better down the narrow boreholes drilled for collecting the localized, very pure stores of precious metals on the planet Agare. Wider holes supposedly meant too many intrusions of dangerous contaminants, which were expensive to remove from the precious metals once both had combined. But it was apparently okay if the kids were contaminated with what the file said were “minor amounts” of carcinogens and mutative chemicals….
Tan was still angry and shouting: “You read it all before years ago, didn’t you? Why do you have to again!”
“Stop shouting,” I said in a loud voice, because I had the radio on. I stood up and moved closer to him. “There’s more in the file now. Whoever’s still behind this—they’ve changed the way they do things.”
“Better or worse?”
I didn’t respond. I just looked at him.
“Why the fuck don’t they use robots?” he asked now.
“Most of the drillers do—that’s the rules there, the Agare law. But crooks don’t listen to laws.”
“Well, if the fucking Agare government knows the sick crap is going on, why the fuck don’t THEY do something about it?”
“They do. But they can’t do enough. Agare’s enormous, and people who aren’t supposed to be there come and go in areas they aren’t supposed to come and go. And once the metals have been mined and mixed with metals from other planets, who knows what came from where? People unknowingly buy slave-products, and that coupled with the lower production costs when regulations are illegally side-stepped—those things keep the slavery financially profitable…. I hate to say that, but to some people, the money’s all that matters. They only think in selfish short-term bites of time.
“And there’s just no way to easily trace anything from Agare because the mixture gets too homogeneous…. I mean, did you get that far in your file? This is what they do: they hide the slavery metal in with the non-slavery metal. They keep a space barge of legal non-Agare metal, then turn that over with the Agare metal right after they illegally mine it. Once the metals mix, the Agare geological and chemical fingerprints disappear.”
“Then how did you find who was behind it the first time?”
“When bodies start turning up, so does further evidence.”
“And you really believe they had to wait that long? Maybe they just let a bunch of kids be kidnapped and killed—”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Humans! The galaxy! It’s still all so sick.” His hand smacked the side of the metal refrigerator. “This fucking thing could contain kids’ blood. What the fuck have we done? What the fuck do we still do?”
I didn’t know what to say to that; I’d asked myself the same thing about my species an uncountable number of times. And I could never give myself a satisfactory answer.
“Tan,” I said finally in a softer voice, “do you see now why I came back? Do you see why I’m still at this?”
He let out a loud breath and nodded as his eyes dropped toward the floor.
“Look,” I said, “I really do have to finish reading the file. But you really don’t. It’s just that maybe there’s something in here I can see—I don’t know. Just give me another hour to finish and then we’ll go out—take a tour here. Something positive. Something to escape this. You’ve barely seen this place, and then we’re off to another place tomorrow.”
“But you said we’ll be leaving a bunch of our clothes and things here—”
“Yeah, we’ll need to live and travel light there. We’ll come back for our things before we go back to Diamond. But, even if we didn’t come back, considering all the shit that goes on in the Universe, are clothes really that important?”
He nodded again, his head moving tiredly, and now he finally opened the fridge door while I sat back down on the couch with my file again.
<
br /> Reading it was so damn hard, and not just because of all the terrible things included in there from the first ring, when there was more specific information about the sick operation. The file was also hard reading because it made me relive the aspects I had been involved with, especially the one aspect.
And if I let myself, I could see it all before me, the trap I’d laid and then the actual killing…. Not that I cared that much when it was a sicko who’d done THIS spread out below me on the coffee table.
But just because you had to do something didn’t necessarily mean doing it was pleasant. Like getting a rotten infected tooth pulled: the tooth had to come out for the best of the rest of you, but having it removed was still an unpleasant experience….
I frowned down at one of the pages: something in the file kept bothering me—something about the poor kids. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. My finger was just too damn tired now, too damn tired and sick….
“Okay,” I said, quickly pulling off my glasses and standing up, “I’ve officially had enough. I’m going to call the cab company.” I moved over to the phone beside the bed.
Tan had been sitting at the small dining table, reading his personal undercover-identity file and drinking a glass of water. But now his eyebrows rose at me over the rim of his special eyeglasses. “For what?” he mumbled.
“We’re going out,” I said.
*
When the cab company’s dispatcher answered my call, I told him that I liked the driver from the day before. “He had a big mustache and I think the name on his cabbie license was Chico or something?”
“You must mean Chiso,” said the dispatcher. “We’ll send him out to you again.”
“Can I use him for a while—like for hours?”
Apparently, that wasn’t an unusual request because Chiso showed up less than an hour later, and this time his mustache had been trimmed a bit less lopsided, although I finally realized then that he had the type of wiry mustache that would just never be even because it was always growing and it was always growing uneven.
But the rest of him looked neater too; his shirt seemed freshly washed, and he must have just combed his thick dark hair. He smoothed a hand over it now as he bounded around the car and held a back door open for me and Tan.
Chiso grinned at me. “I’m your driver today, like you requested.”
“Great,” I said, smiling back before ducking my head into the car.
Driving slower than yesterday, Chiso took us through the countryside to beyond the town where the hotel was, but in the opposite direction to where The Headquarters was, which meant we were now traveling inland more. The roads were woodsier here, but a few crowded human settlements had been nestled inside the greenery.
Chiso’s head and brown eyes tilted toward his rear-view mirror. “Would you like to stop for something to eat here? Down this road there’s a market with some great fresh fruit—grown right near here. And there’s a park behind it where you can picnic.”
“Oh,” I said, “that sounds great.”
A few minutes later Chiso pulled the cab into a big dirt-covered parking lot in front of a dark-brown low building, and the three of us got out of the car. As we walked toward the market, I slipped my case onto my back and Tan began running his video-camera. And he kept it running even inside the market; the spacious place was full of color and light from all the produce on display and all the sunlight streaming into the open sides.
My hungry eyes were soon feasting on the many colorful flat stands of stacked produce and other goodies. And my eager fingers were soon choosing some deliciously wet-looking melon chunks, while Chiso stood nearby munching an apple—till his portable phone beeped. I watched him lower his apple and raise his phone to his head.
As I was paying the melon seller, Chiso clicked off his device and said to me, “Is it okay if I leave you here for about an hour? I must drive a relative somewhere. But I won’t abandon you—don’t worry!”
I just laughed in response because Tan and I could have easily gotten another cab back to the hotel.
Chiso walked away, and as he did so, I spotted Tan moving my way. He had a sandwich in his hand now, and when he reached me, he lifted the sandwich. “I’ve read about commercial nut cheese from Earth. This is a grilled almond-cheese sandwich.”
“Tan-babe, we’ve got nut cheeses on Diamond!”
“Yeah, but ready-made food’s so Earth. I’ve just never trusted it.”
I laughed. “Sometimes you’re just a silly man, you know?”
He grinned at me, a big evil grin. “That’s so I can disarm you.”
I was rolling my eyes now as we walked out from beneath the market’s hood and into happy sunshine.
And it really was happy in the back of the place: there were long, colorfully painted tables laid out on the grass and lots of animated people filling the seats and enjoying their food and their sunshine. Behind them a raised yellow tent had been set up, and from there a band played a really soft guitar-and-piano song.
“I thought I heard music before,” I said as I strolled past the tent and back to where there were more secluded tables. I found one under the cool, shady cover of a large oak.
I sat down and started in on my fruit chunks, and Tan sat across from me and started in on his sandwich. “Okay,” he said, after a few bites, “this is good.”
“I bet it pains you to say that.” I popped a deliciously sweet, deliciously cold piece of watermelon into my mouth, and it seemed to cool down my whole body. I sighed inside….
“I have to admit: it’s really nice here,” Tan said, his head traveling around the scenery, then stopping where there was a big pond. Then his eyes moved closer toward where we were sitting, and his head slowly rose up, following the direction of a nearby tree’s trunk. “I think I saw one of those at The Headquarters. What kind of tree is it?”
The tree was tall and narrow and had weird, pointy brown balls hanging off between the leaves. “I don’t know,” I said to Tan, because I didn’t know.
His eyes shifted to me and he lowered his voice. “Actually, I was really surprised at how weak the security seemed there. Only one guard at the gate and the guard posts were so far apart…what? What is it?” he finished as he watched me laughing under my breath.
“Not everything is what it seems. Remember we had to stay on the walkways? There’s a reason for that. Beneath all the buildings, there are a whole lot of structures underground. There’s an army down there too, waiting to break from the earth and strike like a bunch of hornets.”
Tan looked confused. “Hornets?”
“Yeah. Insects that sting—like yellow jackets. They come out of the ground sometimes when you disturb them and their stings hurt like hell. They make mosquitoes feel quaint.”
“Oh—no,” Tan said, and his hands began rubbing his bare forearms. “Mosquitoes would be bad enough. I’ve heard about them.”
“You might finally get to meet one.”
“I can’t wait,” Tan said in his version of a dry voice, complete with very-crooked-mouth.
“You’re making more out of them than there is; I didn’t mean to malign them. They’re just trying to survive, just like we are. We’re all entitled to live here. We’re all mortal animals, with too-little time.” Tan nodded, and I watched his fingers begin picking among my last fruit pieces. “Eh,” I said, “this conversation’s gotten depressing—no more depressing stuff, especially work stuff! How about we go for a walk? You can get in some more videotaping.”
My right hand in his left now, we strolled down toward the pond, which was very round and had a few patches of multicolored flowers growing along the edge.
“I do really like all the water around here,” Tan said, the camera in his other hand pointed at the subject of his discussion. “I know we’ve got water on Diamond, but it still seems drier there.”
“Actually, there are deserts here, really bad big ones. Right now we’re in a wetter area.”
“The
landscape seems more crowded with diversity here, though, compared to Diamond.”
“It is,” I said. “It really is.”
A cloud must have shifted above us, and now I watched the Sun’s misty golden fingers reach forward and spread out along the water till they highlighted the ripples of the wind along the water’s surface. I suddenly felt like those ripples, ever-moving, ever-changing….
“Tan, it’s so beautiful here. Why don’t you turn off the camera?”
“Yeah…I know what you mean.” He lowered the camera and his left hand pulled me closer till our sides were pressed together.
I shifted my case on my back so it was more toward my other side.
Then, on a contented sigh, I lowered my head to his shoulder.
*
That afternoon, Chiso took us to one more open-air hotspot. But this place was like a mall shopping hotspot for things-other-than-food. Inside the big long building, Tan and I bought some gifts for others and mementos for us that could only come from Earth, like little bits of fossilized Earth plants, which I had seen before but totally fascinated a new-to-this Tan.
After the mall, I had Chiso drive us to a storage place so I could rent a room-container there for the things Tan and I wouldn’t need on the Moon. Then I asked Chiso to take us back to the hotel.
Outside there I said to Chiso, “We’re flying out of the Earth early tomorrow. I’ve gotta drop some stuff at the storage room. Then could you drive us to New York Port?”
In reply, Chiso gave me a big-mustache grin.
*
Except for a break to go get some dinner, Tan and I remained in the room that night. We had to be up really early and we still had some things to do before then—or, more correctly, I had some things to do before then. Some I did in front of Tan; some I didn’t.