by Wil McCarthy
One awakens with the shift clock, which is set to Vatican time, in case His Holy deems it prudent to raise us on the horn and shoot breezes. This hasn’t yet transpired, but you never can be too careful with God’s own right-hand fellow, I’m thinking.
One sits upright, and like as not bangs one’s head on the ceiling, for the bunks (with their desks and storage spaces beneath) are too high, and the gravity too light, and the muscle of a human buttocks too strong, for this event to be in the slightest unlikely. This is why the new modules are a full meter taller than the old, and it’s better the skull of a monk get bashed than that Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian’s actual customers find the flaw in his first design, for we are beta testers to what he dreams will soon be great Lunar cities of loyal subscribers.
One grabs a roller of tacky rubber, and patiently rolls the dust off one’s bedding and bedclothes, for it gathers there all day shift and all night shift. You asked why the modules are so much bare metal inside, and the reason is static electricity, of which conducting surfaces carry none. Even the painted parts are high-metal-content powder coat, baked into place in Sir Larry’s robotic manufactories. And each module has at its floor an electrostatic precipitator, to pull dust from the air, and a humidifier, so that a monolayer of water molecules adsorbs to the surface of every mote and speck, rendering them more prone and liable to precipitate out and stick to surfaces. And yet, there’s always more dust—a whole planet’s worth— waiting to be a problem for God’s servants.
The bane of us is cloth, which, no matter how treated, catches moondust as a six-pack holder catches wildlife, which is to say, decisively. And so we tacky-roll the dust away, and rinse it into the sink, of which each module has at least one, and we spray all the bedding down with antistatic fabric softener, which is a conductive diester of phosphoric acid and stearyl alcohol, solvated in ninety percent water and ten percent ethanol. Drinkable, you ask? Well, what doesn’t kill you tastes like it ought to.
A word about this, for the chemical synthesizer that produces our soap and softeners and whatlike is not the same machine as the atom-precise drug printer. It tolerates parts per thousand of impurity, and so the antistatic, which we spray liberally on everything but foodstuffs, whiffs faintly of formaldehyde. Should this be corrected it would invert some frowns round here, though it cost His Holy a dainty dollar.
(Also not the same machine is the CHON chow printer, which consumes only water and nitrogen and methane, and is capable of manufacturing the very basics of sustenance: starch, glucose, oil, and a protein with the broke-tongue moniker HILLPTTAGGPT, which incorporates eight of nine essential and five of six conditionally essential amino acids. The contraption’s patties and noodles and pastes are edible in the strictest sense, but diresome bland without copious amounts of salt and pepper—two exceedingly costly commodities, as well you know. Too, anyone subsisting entirely on CHON chow will die a slow, fat, degenerative death of sulfur deficiency, so we treat it as a backup to a backup and try to limit reliance thereupon to half our total caloric intake. And yet, it has crossed my mind more than once that if a CHON printer didn’t cost as much as a house, these machines could eradicate poverty worldwide, or at least change the face of it extremely. In this way, as in others, life in space points the way toward better lives on Earth. But I digress.)
One then brushes teeth and hair, and bathes with a washcloth that is then immediately placed in the laundry. We do a lot of laundry, Bert! One drinks one’s snot loosener with a big glass of water, for we’ve all got the dust sneezes something awful, and it turns quickly to a cough if not attended.
(This, I’m assured, will be the death of us in the long run, as chronic lung inflammation tick-tocks away the moments of our lives, but if not that then something else to bring us whole with our maker, so it’s quite literally all the same in the end, except whether a new world has been won.)
One dresses in the traditional habit if attending indoors, and in space underwear if venturing EVA, which is astronaut for “extravehicular activity” or simply “going outside.” The abbreviation applies even if the portal of egress is from a fixed location, nonvehicular, which goes to show the power of acronym to shape our thoughts. Imagine, were they all spelled out for one whole day, how wide the mark we’d find ’em!
Now together with one’s brothers, we break our night’s fast, perhaps with CHON egg-white-and-toast recipe and some hydroponic carrots, or instead perhaps starch puffs and printmeat patties fried in oil, on a tall bed of cabbage or spinach leaves. And in either case, yes, a mug of glucose-sweetened, caffeine-doped chicory brew, which, though irresemblant of coffee or tea, is at least a renewable resource.
From there the days are marvelously different, for there is much to do in preparing a world for peopling, and unlike Our Father Who Art, we’ve thankfully more than six days to accomplish it.
(And doesn’t that, if you think about it, make Pope Dave a kind of Fifth Horseman? Danny Beseman the game show host, Iggy the Rake, Sir Lawrence the Adventurer, and Baron Grigory the Black . . . Do we add to the list Davey the Piocrat? No capitalist ambitions there, but he is the most absolute monarch the Old World has left, and he does hope to bring all the New Worlds under his sway. These are the humans who, at present, steer humanity, and a strange and potbellied assortment it be. Mayhap we’d do well to have more women in that mix, but since Sir Larry be a widower, that leaveth Carol Beseman as the only Horsewoman, although one could sadly argue she is more of a Horsewife than an entity unto herself. There are, too, some horse girlfriends kicking around, but how much power is that really, to shape the future of the future? God cannot want so narrow a sample determining so wide an outcome, but He seems also not inclined to intervene, so I shall just live out my own little role and shape what I can, and let the angels weep.)
Anyhoo, to pick an example day at random, yesterday after breakfast this guy spent an hour in the greenhouse tending to his own little corner of the future of worlds, and then joined Brers Geo and Puke in the gowning area, for today was a day for EVA, and we were all in finest Underoo.
Donning a spacesuit resembles in some wise making love to a bin full of rubber bands and plumbing conduits, and easier done with help than without, for Lunar gravity is enough to thwart weightless grace and weighted certainty both. The suits themselves I think you’ve seen; there’s nothing monastic about them, aside from the necessary ascetic virtue of carrying one’s own atmosphere on one’s back.
Once fully clad for vacuum, we passed through the shower, which gave a momentary spritz of fabric softener, which subdues static electricity a bit even in the absence of air.
Thence to the airlock, which provided as always a righteous fifteen minutes for meditation and prayer, and thence to the front yard.
Making fresh footfall in Lunar powder is an awe-dropping experience the first few times you do it, for it has lain there unmolested for half the age of the universe and more. But the thrill wears off, and there’s something to be said for stepping again and again in the same spots, for this does bit by bit grind the sharp edges off the dust. I wonder, Bertie, whether Harvest Moon will lend us a steamroller for a Lunar day, that we might grind down the grit of this entire valley, and save ourselves a bit of sneezery. About which, by the way, stands the least glamorous aspect of astronautics, for one cannot blow in a hankie whilst space-suited up, and we sniffled and snuffled our way down the wheel ruts left by Larry’s delivery van, passing my forlorn heap of silicon bricks on the way.
These turn out to be harder to use than I’d daydreamed, as the vacuum welding of silly to silly is a chancy business. One atom seated next to another of its kind has no way of knowing they’re in two separate objects, and so they join hands easily enough. Aye, but one fleck of dust will keep them acres apart, and the static-electric fountains kicked up by the Sun from Luna’s dusty surface (and all the more insidious for being invisible!) come and go like will-o’-the-wisps prowling for an unwary traveler, spraying at least a few such motes all ov
er everything nonconductive. And will a monolayer of fabric softener help us out? God laughs, for that also keeps silicon from silicon and thwarts the weld. There’s more to be learned here, but scarce the time, and so the bricks pile up to mock me.
The sun was behind us, fierce and unblinking, and long crisp shadows bounded out ahead as we walked, making good time with the absurd, but absurdly efficient, bunny-hop stride. This takes some getting used to in a General Spacesuit Heavy Rebreather; the first few steps are just a flick of the ankles and a forty-five-degree parabolic bounce, all well and good, but to keep it up for any amount of time requires strong, patient calf muscles and a willingness to lean forward as though running through a chest-deep swimming pool. One feels more a cartoon character than a servant of the Creator, so it’s a strange sort of workout, but also a break from being indoors. No ceiling to bang one’s head out here!
Craters Shoemaker and Faustini are 176 kilometers apart, lip to lip, and the Ernest Shackleton Center for Misnamed Moonbases sits midway on the road between them, about ten klicks closer to Faustini. Saint Jay is three klicks away as the crow can’t fly, and a klick off the main road, but actually closer to four kilometers from Moonbase Larry as an actual walk. Some exercise, then!
Among ourselves we tend to hop in silence, reserving vocalizations for necessary warnings, instructions, or calls to attend some detail of particular use or interest. Monastic and also conservative of oxygen! However, upon reaching the road we swapped our radios into the Harvest Moon Industries voice network, and were met at once with exuberant chatter, for only the most effusive of extroverts can stand long in Sir Larry’s corporate culture without melting into puddles of sad, colorless wax.
I call them Larry’s Boys, for though the station commander is a woman, and a good one from what I can glean from the chatter, I have never met her, for she does not often venture outdoors, and certainly not for such activities as would draw a monk from cloister. Other women are hard to hire, I hear, as the ones with appropriate skills and psych profiles tend to find their way instead to the Convent of Igbal Renz, where the pay is better and the future more mysterious and grand. What do you suppose they are scheming up there in their sun-blotting fortress? Surely not the mere fabrication and sale of gear and tack that others might use to colonize the void! No, there’s more to Iggy the Rake than the eye readily meets. Of Killian I’m not sure the same can be said, for he wears his plans right out on his sleeve, and approaches them timid and slow. Of all the Horsemen, isn’t it odd that Sir Larry is the one who lives not in space? Should he take a break from ballooning across Hyperaustralis in his personal air yacht, well, he’ll spend that break in dreams of simple commercial plenitude. No conqueror he? Or perhaps I misjudge, and he simply loves the Earth too well to part ties with it, or is finally too old to survive intact the rigors of launch, or both, and this is why he ain’t up here with the spacemen.
This day we were to receive our newest crew hab module (which my Trailer Trash origins cannot help labeling a single-wide, but which Harvest Moon calls a Rack Vault), and it were beneath God’s dignity to let Larry’s Boys deliver and install it unassisted. Indeed, one imagines a future when there are monks enough and equipment enough to take delivery straight from the high-roofed, airless dome of the factory itself, and trouble Harvest Moon for naught but the hardware alone. But that day is not yet upon us, nor shall it be afore you yourself are here among us to order it so. And thus, we arrived to help foreman Huntley Millar and his crew of four to load our module onto the bed of a truck with cranes at either end.
Lunar gravity or no, these modules are heavy. Designed to sit aboveground and provide adequate protection against cosmic radiation and mild solar flares, the arched hemicylindrical ceilings are hollow vaults of thick iron plate, and the windows are ten centimeters of solid monocrystalline quartz. For shielding against major flares, or for namby-pamby cumulative dose limits that equal the surface of Terra, one must of course burrow, and that is why the oldest originalest outpost of St. Joe, where yours sincerely first put his feet up and slept a Vatican night shift, is a dug-in bunker, and still where we cower when Apollo is angry and spits his wrath upon fair Luna. We sworn Conquistadores, being neither namby nor pamby, suffice a dose of three millirads on an average day, and trust the drug printer to hold our cancers at bay when time arises, as it shall.
But Larry finds such burial-alive unphotogenic, and gives a hefty discount for surface modules whose photos he can paste in his brochures. And yes, even proud vainglorious spacemen need some shielding o’er our heads, about which you also seem confused. May I explain? The solar wind contains helium nuclei, hydrogen nuclei, and the electrons stripped therefrom, otherwise known as alpha, proton, and beta radiation, respectively. These can to large extent be deflected by the electromagnets topping the aforementioned solar panels ringing the Valley of Saint Jaycoop, even up to the strength of a minor flare. Cosmic gamma rays are more problematic and can really only be shielded against by lots of mass, and so are solar neutrons, which are a gift that keeps on giving, for like Satan they can corrupt the innocent, turning the atoms of our bodies radioactive. Ironically, these are only effectively blocked by low-mass shielding, preferably rich in hydrogen, which is an atom that can absorb Satan’s touch once (though not twice) without turning vile.
Cumulatively speaking, the realest danger is cosmic radiation, for the death screams of collided neutron stars, flung into the void at fantastic speed, consist of nuclei from all over the periodic table, stripped of electrons and fiercely charged. The lightest and slowest of these are turned aside by the superconducting tower coil that looms above the monastery, but the heaviest and fastest are bare iron and gold and even uranium nuclei, traveling at ninety percent of lightspeed and with a million light-years of running start. These angstrom-scale machine gun bullets will tear straight through a human body without pausing, which is bad enough, for it leaves a line of broken and ionized biologicals where’er it hath traveled (whether through the brain or liver or gonads or what have), and there is only so much that antioxidants and DNA repair enzymes can do about that. But what really gets you is not so much the bullets as the shrapnel, for when God’s ancient wrath strikes the skin of a space habitat, it’s like to strike a stationary iron or aluminium or titanium nucleus and smash it to subatomic flinders, which explode relativistically in all directions but mostly forward, and may strike still other nuclei, kicking forth a heterogeneous mix of every noxious particle and wave in God’s menagerie.
As for the electrons these atoms have lost, these also travel through space, and what gets through our magnets strikes the armor of the Rack Vault and slows the Hell down, creating fierce transient electromagnetics that kick loose a shower of what Germans and physicists call Bremsstrahlung radiation—mostly X-rays, which also need mass to halt them.
And so, the shielding is, from outside in, plastic upon aluminium upon iron, and then a gap that is eventually filled with liquid water (though not this day, or the next), and then graphite, and then more iron, weighing in total some two hundred kilograms per square meter, about half of which is the aforementioned water and not lifted by us this day, and the other half that isn’t, and was.
Now, even with prompt and vigorous treatment, a dose of a thousand rads is universally lethal, whereas two hundred rads is a therapeutic for tumor eradication, and can be repeated daily for a week, so long as it’s focused mainly on the tumor site itself. A mere twenty-five rads in a single shot will agitate your blood cells, and is the threshold where serious increases begin to the risk of eventual cancer. Were the Moon not here to block out half the sky, and the hills and Earth shadow another percent or two, this location would receive about a hundred rads in a good year, or a thousand in a particularly bad day. And yet, with all countermeasures in place these values are knocked back to a mere ten and one hundred, respectively, even if we ne’er sleep in the bunker, which when a bad coronal mass ejection passes through, we certain do. Dosewise it’s no worse than li
ving on airplanes, which some Earthmen do. So the only really real problem is venturing away from all that, to walk unprotected upon the surface of Lune. This (and thermal management) is why the General Spacesuit Heavy Rebreather has water tubes all through it, and weighs near as much as the man who wears it. And even so, one’s eye doth occasionally see a flash of light that means another retinal cone or rod cell has just bitten the radioactive dust. Alas!
But yes, the Rack Vault is exceeding heavy, and must needs be craned onto the truck bed one end at a time, slowly and carefully and with many a monk and friend of Killian monitoring stresses and pressures and tensions and tilts. It took two hours and change, after which the truck was driven also very slowly back to Saint Joe, with God’s loyal clinging to the sides, and mooching complimentary oxygen through a device artfully known as a rape hose, which one unrolls and jams into an umbilical port at the approximate height of one’s navel.
With equal slowness the trailer was then unloaded, and the module connected as you see in the attached photo. There being no time left in the day shift to hook up consumables, we left it like that, vacuum-empty with hatches closed, and bid our goodbyes to Larry’s Boys, who rolled their empty truck considerably faster in the direction they had come.
Returning to the monastery’s interior, Giancarlo and Purcell and I stepped one by one through the airlock hatch, which I closed behind me and seated myself down on the bench beside them for fifteen of silent meditation, broken only by a statement by Purcell, to the effect that future module deliveries (of which there will ultimately be three, and probably no more after that) will have a wider variety of Brothers to oversee them, and this could well be the last time the three of us were in the lock together simultaneous. We’ll see how Brothers Ferris, Bryant, Hughart, Durm, Duppler, Groppel, Hamblin, and Ovid feel about that; Eggs at least is no outdoorsman, no athlete and no heavy laborer, and likely to stay in with his telescope monitors most of the time, and perhaps Geo with him, for it truly is a lot of work just getting in and out the door!
