A thought occurred to me. "Won't the driver of that truck identify us?"
"He already has," said Alexei. "Look over there. There is HoboCo. Miller-Gibson ice-mine. Freelance station. They buy from invisibles. Is profitable sideline, for everybody. So why should they report anything? They would put themselves out of business. HoboCo is where big eighteen-wheeler comes from. Miller and Gibson are very successful. They have found layer of ice not cost-effective for Exxon or BabelCorp, but very profitable for freelance miners. Make their own water, air, grow their own crops. Very good people. They have very nice microbrewery." He waved his beer at us to illustrate. "But it's just a sideline. Mostly they grow cactuses—astringent bases for medicine. But also very nice for tequila too. Tequila has important medicinal uses. Good for drowning worms, one per bottle. Also good on barbecue chicken. But first you have to catch chicken. Are you good with chicken net?"
To my puzzled look, he said, "You have never had to catch flying chicken, have you? Ha!—you didn't know chickens could fly? On Luna, they do. Not very well, but well enough. Very funny to see look of surprise on chicken's face. Have you ever seen wings and breasts with dark meat or drumsticks with white? If you do, that is Lunar chicken. Is exercise of muscles that turns meat dark; chickens fly, wings get dark, legs don't carry as much weight as on Earth, drumsticks stay white. Very strange to see, but delicious, just the same. Oh, they also raise rabbits at HoboCo. They don't fly at all. But they are just as tasty."
HoboCo didn't look like much from the road, just a distant clump of pods and domes, with a few scattered lights here and there. The whole thing was in shadow, of course. This was the place where the sun never shines—and they meant it. There were solar panels on the nearby ridges.
While we watched, the two largest domes began to glow. Alexei explained that most farm domes were on an accelerated day-night schedule. Two hours of light, thirty minutes of darkness; this made everything grow faster. There was a lot to learn about Lunar farming.
We rolled on for a while, we passed two other mines, and then the road got rougher, winding its way up the side of a steep crater wall. It was kind of like the access roads carved into the hills north of El Paso—only steeper. The one-sixth gee of Luna made it possible for the truck to roll up hills that no Earth vehicle could have attempted. Coming down the other side was even more terrifying. The living pod of the Beagle was mounted on a leveling platform, so whenever the wheeled chassis started to angle too steeply, the platform tilted up at the lower end to keep us level inside. For some reason, that only made the ride scarier.
From the heights, especially when we crested a hill, we could see the scattered lights of individual settlements or monitor stations. It reminded me of the time when I was Stinky's age, the first time Dad took us on vacation, and we drove through the Southwest. There were places in New Mexico and Arizona, where there was nothing to see. And at night, when the faraway mountains loomed like walls around the edge of the world, there were distant lights huddled lonely under the vast starlit sky.
It was like that here. Only the stars were harder. They were bright and cold and merciless. And somehow that made them even more distant. The occasional clustered lights of humanity were desperate and desolate. No wind. No air. Back on Earth, the lights had felt like little havens against the night. I'd wanted to knock on the doors and rush into the warmth and hug the people, thank them for being alive. Here, the lights all seemed like signposts for claustrophobic little prisons. All shouting for attention. Here, I am. No, me. Over here. Me. Come see me. But why? Each one was like every other one. A couple of cargo pods and a cluster of inflatables, hiding in perpetual shadow.
There was no romance here. No glamour. Only endless gloom and imported despair, flavored with the perpetual hint of sunlight lurking everywhere. A blazing furnace circled like a hungry demon around and around the shadowed valleys. As the moon turned slowly on its axis, the hills were outlined with neon fire.
The house-truck reached the crest of the ridge, and it was like coming up out of a deep black sea. Suddenly, the world was blasted by a dazzling sideways glare. Instinctively, I turned my back to the light—I looked out the wide windows to the west. A layer of shadow fell across the bottom half of the landscape, cloaking everything in inky darkness. Down there was the ice. Up here was the fire. There was no in-between.
And then the truck rolled over the crest and dipped back down into shadow again. The roaring sun disappeared behind the rocky horizon, and we were safe in darkness again. "Is great view, da?" asked Alexei. "You will not have trip like this from travel agent. I show you sights no tourist ever sees from the safety of a tourist-mobile. I give you trip of a lifetime, da?"
I thought about how far we'd come in less than twenty-four hours. We'd crashed into the moon, bounced across the Lunar plain, climbed a crater wall, nearly baked to death in the endless sunlight … "The only thing we haven't done yet," I said, "is freeze to death."
"I am arranging that now," said Alexei, absolutely deadpan. "We go to my house carved in ice. My own private ice mine. You can freeze to death all you want. No problem."
The road etched its way down the steep side of a hill. I couldn't imagine how a construction crew had bulldozed it into place. Here, the road wasn't much more than a cut across an avalanche-shaped tumble of rock and rubble. The steep slope to the left loomed above us; it scared me almost as much as the dropaway cliff below us to the right. We were creeping along a narrow shelf of rock so light and powdery, we could feel it shifting skittishly beneath the wheels of the truck.
"Is not to worry," said Alexei. I really did want to hit him then, as hard as I could. "Remember angle of repose is steeper on Luna. We are perfectly safe. Besides, road and slope have both been sprayed with construction foam to hold everything in place. This road carries much traffic, it is still here, eh?"
"Um, Alexei … ?" That was Douglas. "The more traffic on a road, the heavier the load it carries, the sooner it wears out. You should see the pavement in front of the Babylon Hotel in Las Vegas. It's buckled so badly it has ruts. If this road gets as much traffic as you say—"
Alexei cut him off with a hand wave. "Is not to worry, I said. Remember, we are on Luna. If we build to one-half of Earth standards, we are still three times stronger than we need to be." I would have felt a lot more reassured by his words if the Beagle hadn't chosen that moment to slip uneasily across a patch of loose gravel. Almost like we were skidding on ice.
"Rocks here are sometimes greasy," Alexei explained. "Ice—not like you know it, but black ice in rocks. Makes them clammy and changes friction quotient." Alexei helped himself to another beer, waving it aloft. "I have earned this today. I have always wondered if escape plan would work. Now I know how well I plan. Only now I have to make up new plan. Except I do not think I will ever go back to Line. So maybe I will not need one after all. I do not think I will be much welcome there for a long time, will I, Mikhail?"
Mickey ignored the question. "Alexei, how come we weren't apprehended at Wonderland Jumble? Surely they must have been watching for us. And our disguises weren't that good. The old lady spotted us."
Alexei snorted. "The old lady works for me. She is invisible. I put her on train to watch you. She did lousy job of being invisible, didn't she? She watch you too hard. I am sorry if she unnerved you. She only wanted to protect. But people who should have spotted you weren't looking at all. I cannot understand why. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that all of you were apprehended at Clavius a couple of hours ago."
"Huh?"
"Oh, don't worry. The report will probably turn out to be false, I'm sure. But you will laugh very much anyway. Especially you, Charles. The little boy they thought was you turned out to be little girl named J'mee. I wonder how that happen, eh?" He waggled his eyebrows meaningfully. "Is very funny, da? Is family that Dingillians were supposed to decoy for on Line. You did not know that, did you? Now they decoy for you on Luna. Is only fair. Sauce for goose too."
/> No, we hadn't known who or what we were decoying for—and in all the rush and confusion up the Line and again at Geostationary, I hadn't given it much thought—but what Alexei said made sense. J'mee and her family were very rich. She had an implant and she was always online, peeking into other people's personal histories, even stuff there wasn't supposed to be any public access to. She knew who we were and when she got mad at me for finding out she wasn't really a boy, she turned us in to the marshals at Geostationary. They might have planned to do that anyway, so they could pass through customs unnoticed while we were the center of so much attention.
That J'mee and her family were now caught in the same kind of trap themselves was delicious irony. In fact, it would have been delicious revenge if we had done it ourselves, but we hadn't. Alexei had. Or someone he knew.
And of course … if he could do it to someone else, he could just as easily do it to us. If he wanted to.
The Beagle finally reached the bottom of Avalanche Hill—Alexei didn't tell us the name of it until we were safely off of it. Now the truck began winding its way through a very uneven rubble field; it looked like very soon, the road would give out completely.
Instead, we began seeing short bridges of industrial foam, paving the occasional gap in the way. Soon, the bulldozed course gave way entirely to a layer of foam. It sat on top of the jumbled rocks and rubble like a ribbon of fluffy icing. It wound around the larger outcrops like the scenic course in a Disneyland ride. Except here, there weren't any pirates or bears or ghosts to jump out at you.
The drive was a little smoother on the foam. From up on top of it, we looked like we were rolling on a road of whipped cream. Alexei explained how it had been poured and leveled and hardened. It wasn't all foam; there were bits of gravel and crushed rock throughout, so that over the years as the weight of the trucks compressed the foam, they'd make it even harder.
"Foam was greatest invention of twentieth century," Alexei said, launching into another of his interminable peripatetic monologues. "Very silly people. They think foam is weak. They use it for stuffing and toys. With a little bit of seasoning, foam makes houses, roads, domes, spaceships, anything you want. Pour it in molds or build it up in layers. If not for foam, we could not colonize Luna. Certainly not as fast." He pounded the bulkhead. "All these are foam. We order as much cargo as Line can deliver. Yes, we want cargo, but we want pods that cargo arrives in even more. Every pod is a house. We have built whole cities out of these pods—and everything else too. We do it in less than forty years. We have as much living space on Luna now as in all of Moscow—only winters are nicer on Luna. Not as much snow. Not a problem anyway, if we had as much snow on Luna as they do in Moscow, we would all be rich. We would sell it to each other and make water everywhere. We would fill great domes with water and air and everything else. We would have wheat fields to rival the grand steppes of Asia. Someday we will anyway, even without the snow. We will capture comets if we have to. And we will do it with foam. We will match orbit with comet, catch it in a net of foam, harden it into a solid ball, and bring it back to Luna. Or maybe we will build a Lunar beanstalk on far side of moon and just pipe the water down to great Lunar pipeline system. Or we will attach Palmer tubes all over and land it in Pogue Crater and create new Lunar city around it. Put a dome above it. A great adventure. You would be proud to be a part of it. We will build our own great outdoors on Luna. We will have trees as tall as mountains, flowers as big as your head, grass so high you can hide elephants in it. We will have bouncing hippos and leaping bears. We will have monstrous giant fish and butterflies the size of eagles. We will build best outdoors ever, better even than Earth."
"What a grand scheme," Douglas said, with almost no enthusiasm. It was the same voice he used when he was humoring Mom or Dad.
Alexei didn't notice. "I show you plans. We have crater, we have blueprints, we have much financing, we have eager community of people—even many invisibles. We will build Free Luna."
"It sounds like a very expensive Luna," Mickey said dryly.
Alexei ignored the jibe. "For you, Mikhail, we will give big family discount. All you need to do is bring big family." He finished his beer and pushed the empty plastic can into the litter bag. He started to reach for a third, then stopped himself. "No," he said. "I have had enough for now. I am driving soon." He pointed ahead. "Here comes turnoff."
We rolled onto a wide bare dome of rock that pushed its way up through the foam pavement like a breaching whale. The Beagle stopped at the top. On the other side, the road split off in two directions, one curling off toward the light, the other winding back down into blackness—in some places it was visible only by its orange-outlined edges and infrequent illuminated flags.
Alexei swiveled forward and busied himself with his controls, snapping switches, studying screens, flipping up plastic switch covers, unlocking and arming unknown controls. He reached overhead and snap-snap-snapped a row of switches. It was a very techno performance. The truck settled itself and made various switching and gurgling noises. Things clanked underneath as they locked themselves into position. Was Alexei actually planning to drive across this jumble?
"Hokay," he said finally. "Everybody please fasten safety harness. Is not to worry. Is not too bumpy, and is very short ride." He waited until we'd all buckled ourselves in, then punched the red button in front of him.
The truck shuddered—I recognized the feeling—Palmer tubes! We were boosting! Shaking like an earthquake, we shot up off the Lunar surface, into painful sunlight. Beyond the windows, the dark ground fell away alarmingly fast. It was a sea of shadow. Occasional islands of bright rocks thrust up out of the gloom.
We tilted slightly forward and began to move. The Beagle throbbed and shook across the Lunar night. I swiveled around and watched as the glimmering thread of the road disappeared behind us. If the booster tubes failed now—we'd never be found.
I swiveled back around. Alexei was watching his screens like money was pouring out of them. I noticed Mickey was watching our course too. A bright green line traced its way across an unreadable map. It zigzagged from one landmark to the next. A yellow dot crept along the line. We were halfway along, but I couldn't see any correlation between the display on the screen and the terrain outside. The glare of the sun was directly ahead and everything was either dazzled out of existence or lost in shadow.
Finally, we hooked around to put the sun behind us and started a steep descent into a broken arroyo. Coming in from the east, we saw a scattering of pods, as if discarded by a thoughtless tourist. They were connected by pipes and wires and lazy tubes that curled around the landscape in courses of convenience. We shuddered down toward a square of four bright orange lights. Here and there, I saw scattered towers with arrays of solar panels at the top. Most of them also had glimmering cables climbing up to huge lens arrays at the top—I recognized them as light-pipes; the lens arrays were called collimation engines.
We sank down into shadow—the glare behind us switched off as suddenly as a power failure. Flurries of dust rose up around us like history. A moment later, we bumped softly down onto the Lunar surface. The vehicle stopped shaking and we were down. The Beagle had landed.
THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
"Welcome to Invisible Luna," Alexei said. He began shutting down the flight controls, switching off all the things he'd switched on before, switching on all the things he'd switched off. "We are now off the map."
He waved at the junk and detritus beyond the window. "This is abandoned test site Brickner 43-AX92. Not cost-effective for industrial production. Shut down seven years ago. Leased to Lunar Homestead Sites for one dollar a year, paid up one hundred years in advance, with option to purchase. All ice mined from this site must be sold to leasing company. Part of proceeds goes to company store for credit for supplies, part goes toward purchase price, last part you get to keep—only no place to spend it, nothing to do but melt more ice. Is no big deal. The more you melt, faster you earn out, sooner you work for
yourself, sooner you make profit. Lunar sharecropping, da? Does that not sound like good deal? It is if you are lunatic. Even better, water prices stay high."
He peered forward through the window, squinting against the gloom, then began easing the Beagle gently forward. He didn't stop talking for a moment. "More people come to moon every day. All of them need water. Two liters a day for drinking, depending how active person is. Another twelve for washing and flushing. Another fifty liters for breathing, or more for watering plants so they can make oxygen for you to breathe—plus humidity, that uses water too. Another thirty liters for crops to eat. And more if you want to eat meat, because meat has to eat and drink and breathe too before it is meat. Lunar Authority mandates at least one hundred liters of clean water per day per person. That's hard water use, of course. Not soft. Soft includes safety margin, hard doesn't."
"Huh?" That was me. "Soft water?"
"Not like on Earth. Soft water means different on moon. I explain. Everything on Luna is measured in water. We have water-based economy. We buy and sell with water-dollars—or ice-dollars, which are not worth as much because you have to dig them out of ground first. After you dig them up, they become water-dollars, worth more. Is our own value-added tax, ha ha."
Alexei kept talking as he drove. The ground was rougher off the landing pad, but not so rough that the truck couldn't negotiate it. The wheels were three meters in diameter, as tall as a full-grown Loonie, so they just rolled over all but the largest obstacles. They were treaded for off-road use, which was kind of a joke when you thought about it. Everything on Luna was off-road. Alexei steered us toward a cluster of three pods, lying side by side. That didn't look so bad, until he explained they weren't our destination. They were for water-processing.
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