by F P Adriani
I laughed then, really hard. And then I remembered his shirt. “Oh—I almost forgot your shirt! I’ll go pick it up. I’ll be back in a little bit. Don’t go far.”
I went to the port office closest to where the first ship had dropped us off, and five-minutes later, the attendant there was handing me a fine linen bag that smelled even finer; Tan’s clean black shirt had been neatly folded inside.
I walked back to where I’d left Tan, but he was no longer around. My eyes scanned and scanned and scanned through the port traffic, through the bodies and the shops and the suitcases and the moving carts, but I just couldn’t find him.
My hand shook on the bag…then I heard a loud, “Hey—hey!” My head spun in that direction now and, over a bush, I saw Tan’s bobbing dark head as his hand wildly waved at me.
He was in that big courtyard, where the trees and the bushes and the benches for relaxing had been laid out among the green grass and earth below.
As I moved closer to him, I watched him bend over—to pet little Lanie.
Tan had human company this time though: a kid, who was feeding Lanie the port’s doggie-treats. In his other hand the kid held a red ball, and now he put it in front of Lanie. She must have recognized the toy because her tail wagged excitedly. Then suddenly the kid’s right arm rolled the ball down the courtyard, and he laughed as Lanie bounded after it.
I moved over to Tan, who was standing and watching as the kid and dog continued playing their throw-and-chase-the-ball game together.
“I see Lanie’s got friends here,” I said. I turned back to Tan—to find that he didn’t look happy; in fact, he looked pretty sad.
“Soon, I probably won’t ever see her again,” he said then.
He was right. And, clearly, he was hurt by this.
“You think she’ll remember me?” he asked me now, a tiny tremor moving along his lips.
“For a little while at least. She’ll miss you,” I said. But I didn’t want to think about that; I didn’t want to think about any animal possibly feeling hurt or upset or anything bad. So I pushed my thoughts into a positive direction. “But look at her—she’s got lots of love here.”
Tan’s head moved in a slow nod, his eyes still on the dog and the kid. Then he said, “It’s going to feel weird going back to Diamond—there’s just us humans there.”
“That’s a good thing—for them,” I said.
“Oh I know, I know. But I don’t think we’re meant to be a lone species. I can’t help it: now that I’ve experienced this, I’m going to miss it.”
“But what about the mosquitoes?”
He sighed. “I’m afraid I’m going to miss them too.”
“Well, babe, if you want the companionship of other animals, there are some planets with animals impervious to anything we could do. We could vacation there—or, shit, even move there or get a second home! There are options, and we’re lucky we’ve got some.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” But he still looked so damn sad, and his mouth was still so damn shaky.
Quickly now, I pulled him to me. Then I tenderly kissed his soft mouth till the shaking there would hopefully only be a memory for both of us.
*
The trip to Earth-Moon would be quite a short one, but I decided to sleep through most of it. I didn’t want to risk getting space-sickness again.
So, as soon as Tan and I got on board the ship, I went to the ship’s doctor and got sleeping pills.
Then I went back to our cabin and hit the bed.
I watched Tan remove his camera from one of the suitcases; while I would be sleeping, he would be replaying his videos. He would also use his alone-time to study the ring-file, his undercover identity file, and the various issues that being on Earth-Moon itself represented.
I was sorry I couldn’t keep my eyes open and comfort him or instruct him if he needed any of that. But this was crunch time and it might also be the last bit of sleep I’d get for a while….
When I woke up about an hour and a half before Moon-landing time, Tan came over to me and kissed me, and his breath had that weird, chemical-metallic smell that too much worrying caused.
I said through a still-sleepy voice, “What’s wrong?”
He straightened up more, and at first it seemed like he wouldn’t respond. But then he finally said in a low voice, “Going there sounds scary.”
I nodded and threw my arms around his bare waist, pressing my head to his warm body.
“We’ve really gotta get suited up soon,” he said then.
“I know,” I replied.
“I don’t know why doing that scares me when it should comfort me.”
“It’s a new environment and all, but we’re still living in the same-old bodies.”
*
When the ship finally docked at the Space Power Station nearest to the Moon to pick up a few passengers, Tan and I began slipping on the suits.
I was standing near the bed as I attached a magnetic glue pad to my tiny round locator and then attached my locator to beneath one of my suit’s snaps.
Tan stood by the round porthole viewer as he unfolded his suit and attached his own locator onto the inside belly of the garment. “I hope these frigging things work there. Paulie said they’d work anywhere—we’ve just got to recalibrate them. But I don’t trust it.”
“Well, we could get something else on the Moon—maybe. I’m not sure, to be honest….”
“I guess these will have to do,” he said on a sigh. His head turned back to the porthole, and his dark eyes seemed to become absorbed in the space-view. “Now that I’ve been to Earth, I see that the power-shuttles look like giant Earth-bugs.”
I stepped closer to the viewer and saw what he meant: one of the power-shuttles had just disengaged its back end from the space station’s gray-pronged power-hookup. And the shuttle did indeed look like a bug’s carapace, like a shiny green-black one with spiky wings along the sides and a rounded long nose that would eventually slip into a power-port somewhere and share its electron-juice.
Where widespread surface-generated power wasn’t very feasible, such as on Earth-Moon, humans had to import most of their electrical energy. And they often did this via the Space Power Stations scattered throughout the galaxy. The stations collected energy from the closest suns and then stored and transmitted the energy to elsewhere, usually via the robot-driven power-shuttles.
The shuttle outside the porthole beside me was probably headed for the Moon. But whenever excess power was generated from a sun’s perpetual shine, the shuttles typically banked that excess at battery sites—human-made electricity-stations. They were asteroid-shaped, free-floating ships for electrical use if someone got stranded in space with a loss of power and couldn’t get help fast enough. That was certainly a situation I hoped I’d never experience….
I was sighing now as my fingers adjusted my underwear beneath the suit then began slowly closing the snap-buttons up the front. Suddenly I remembered making similar adjustments on Hera, where I’d felt the need to wear a suit, though that one hadn’t required the extent of enclosure this one required….
Now that I had been to both places, I could see a bunch of similarities between them, yet a bunch of differences.
There were dozens of domed colonies on the Moon, and they were connected by a railway system, just like the domed cities on Hera were. But though Hera’s air contained toxins, it also contained significant oxygen and could be breathed for at least a little while. That just wasn’t the case on Earth-Moon.
The Moon railway system was very sturdy and its containment tubing was very strong, just like the dome casings that housed the colonies there. However, riding the high-speed Moon rail system was even scarier than the rail on Hera; a moon-crash that breached the dome tubing was likely to lead to death in a number of ways.
I’d never stayed indoors on the Moon without being fully suited almost the whole time. But having to do that was still an annoyance….
I moved around the c
abin in my new suit, but, surprisingly, I found it quite comfortable. Well, after I’d been in the thing for days on end on the Moon, maybe my opinion would change.
“This is a real fucking drag,” Tan suddenly said as he looked down at his fingers working on his own suit. Apparently, he didn’t need the days-on-end to hate the suits.
“There’s no choice, Tan. I’ve been to a lot of places, but there’s nothing I’d call air or an atmosphere on the Moon. Maybe you could call the particles that come off the surface and get suspended an ‘atmosphere’. But I can’t breathe it, so it seems practically useless. Life’s hard enough when you’re living in a breathable atmosphere….”
I eyed him more closely as he did up his suit; his face seemed a little too pale, which made me frown. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m trying to hang in there.”
“We need to get our undercover gear together, and then we need to get strapped in for landing,” I said, and I was really hoping we wouldn’t have a repeat of Tan’s stomach contents decorating the cabin….
We didn’t have a repeat, probably because this landing wasn’t a very bumpy process; the ship quickly went into a long series of careful braking motions as it approached the Moonscape.
Strapped in opposite the porthole viewer, Tan and I watched the ship finally hover over the ground and the regolith below suddenly rise up into a swirling mini-storm of silver-gray flecked with smaller eddies of red-gray, probably an exhaust-induced flash iron storm, or maybe a storm of whatever deposits of whatever elements humans had since released from mining here or had brought here from somewhere else.
But if you didn’t examine the turbulence too closely, it almost looked like atmospheric weather on Diamond and on Earth—until the ship flew up again and the view cleared some, revealing the bizarre light-darkness, the Sunlight that fell here and gave the Moonscape its shadowy glow, like an eerie iridescence painted over an old black-and-white image….
Now Tan suddenly exclaimed, “Ooo—look at that! The landscape’s just incredible.”
“Yeah, the Universe is incredible everywhere. …It’s also pretty dangerous. At the port we’ll have to go through vacuum cleaning. None of the connections and airlocks are a-hundred-percent perfect when they’re manipulated, so some suspended regolith usually sneaks in….”
Tan’s confused eyes were on me.
“It’s all in the Moon-guide,” I said then.
“I mustn’t have got to that part.”
“Well, it’s important. Life’s definitely more time-consuming here if you step outside the domes, which we won’t be doing, I hope. Still, a couple of times a week, people should get a vacuuming.”
“I hope we’re not here long enough to need that.”
“But, like I said, we’ll need it after we disembark from here.”
“Great,” said Tan in a voice that also said, This sucks!
And when we finally reached that vacuuming stage inside the port, I thought Tan was going to be sick again.
I made sure I got into the square, airtight, white compartment with him, which meant there were about five of us passengers inside a ten-by-ten-by-ten foot box. We hadn’t pressurized our suits; we weren’t supposed to pressurize, in case there were any contaminants inside.
So when the magnetic- and vacuum-washers were finally turned on, it felt a little like the air was instantly sucked from our bodies, including right around the outside of our bodies, between us and the suits, as if we’d suddenly been vacuum-packed into the suits. At least that was the way it felt to me. I wasn’t sure how it felt to Tan, but his face didn’t exactly look happy.
“Is it your stomach?” I asked him, at least I thought I had because though the weird-feeling air seemed to be going back to normal, I couldn’t quite discern if my voice had been normal, had been more than a squeak….
“It’s not my stomach. It’s my nuts. Like a wedgie between there.”
I didn’t want to make him feel worse, so I sucked in the laugh forming inside me. And then the next thing I knew, the vacuuming attendant said we were done.
As Tan and I stepped through the airlock doorway into the port’s stark white hallway, Tan said, “At least that was short.”
We walked down the hall toward where we’d have to pass through the port’s scanner system. Because of the flexitanks along my back, I couldn’t carry my special case there. I held that via a long strap over my right shoulder, which I’d rigged to be lockable to one of the suit’s exterior tabs; in my other hand I carried a big suitcase. Tan had two smaller cases with him and a shoulder bag.
When we stepped onto the fairly long line of people waiting for a scanning, there were two attendants running the scanners. One of the attendants kept yawning, and watching his mouth rhythmically opening and closing began putting me into a kind of stupor…maybe the sleeping pills hadn’t worn off enough yet….
Our turn finally came and I went through the whole-body scanner first. I pushed my big brown suitcase ahead of me, and it went through the overhead white arch just fine. But then when I walked to beneath the scanner, the shrill alarm sounded.
What the fuck—!?! My head immediately fell sideways, my eyes dropping down to my silver case against my hip.
Tan flashed me worried eyes—at least to me they looked worried, and I hoped it was only to me. Appearing guilty was the last thing we needed right now….
The port attendant told me stop and asked to see the inside of my case.
Crap.
I maintained my cool exterior and wouldn’t look at Tan because I was afraid that would make him even more nervous and his anti-poker face would make an appearance.
I laid my case onto the table before the attendant. I did this nonchalantly, as if everything was fine, while inside my mind I went over what the fuck could be wrong: this was the second time I’d made a scanner go off. But the first time at The Headquarters, I’d assumed it was my boob only. Could I have been wrong there? But then I hadn’t made anything go off in New York Port, so if there were some problem with my case’s mirage-security function, it was intermittent. And, on the Moon, I could probably do nothing tech-wise to fix whatever the fuck the problem might have been….
Under the cover of my other hand and my body, I punched the code into my case’s lock. Then I pulled open the cover, and, on a big yawn again, his brown eyes closing almost all the way, the attendant automatically stuck his hand in my case—and pulled up a lacy black bra.
I heard a laugh from somewhere along the line. And then even more laughs when the attendant’s other hand pulled out a dildo box.
His narrow face turned really red and he dropped both items back in as if they were burning-hot coals. My hand was still on the edge of my case, and now I quickly shoved the moon-phone I’d stashed below to up over the bra.
“It must be your phone,” said the attendant through his embarrassed-bright face. “Move on.” He waved me forward, but then he flashed me lewd eyes as I finally walked past, the kind of eyes that said, I’m going to look at your ass as soon as you’re not facing me.
I never learned if he actually had checked out my ass because, the next thing I knew, the fucking scanner alarm went off again—only this time Tan had made it go off, Tan and his shoulder bag.
My eyes shot over to him and his face was agitated enough to make not only him have a heart attack but me too.
“What—what?” he said, looking and sounding confused.
And now the attendant told Tan he wanted to look in his shoulder bag. I knew it contained nothing bad, but my heart was racing anyway. I still had “bad” stuff in my case and, thankfully, the attendant had been tired and lazy enough to not really feel around in there because then he might have noticed the inside depth was a lot shallower than the outside depth. And that was because there were extra compartments inside that he’d never accessed.
But no matter—now here was Tan having to endure this extra search.
I moved back toward him, but I couldn’t
actually reach him because the scanner machine blocked people from going backwards if someone else was still inside it.
Not knowing what else to do, I flashed Tan two kinds of eyes: sympathetic ones and please-be-cool ones.
He seemed to understand me. “What’s the problem?” he asked the attendant now, but in a steadier, all-business voice.
The attendant opened the top of Tan’s bag and glanced down, but, this time, he appeared to not want to stick his hand in; he gingerly kept his fingers on the bag’s soft edge. “It might be the metal on that musical horn in there,” he said. And then he pushed the bag through a side tray along with Tan’s two cases and told Tan to go ahead.
He came up to me; we continued walking away.
And then he said in a low voice, “Was it your tit again?”
“No. But—shhh, we’ll talk later.”
“What’s with the sex toy? Since when are you into that….”
“I’m not. Nothing’s a substitute for real hands and pricks—”
An instant later, the alarm sounded again, making both Tan and I jump—guiltily. We had been distracted by the conversation and I’d lost my bearing in the hall.
But once I’d turned my head and realized there was no scanner near us, I then looked back down the hall and saw that someone else had made the same fucking scanner go off.
Now the tired attendant didn’t even bother with his search. He just announced to the corridor in a loud voice: “We’re sorry for this inconvenience, but I believe we’re having electrical issues with the equipment. We’ll have to reroute the rest of you through another hall’s scanner.”
There were loud groans from some of the passengers, but I felt pleased: my case probably hadn’t been compromised. For all I knew, something about it had compromised the scanner….
“What the hell is that?” Tan suddenly asked, and my head spun to my right, to the wall beside us, to the wall his eyes were fixed on.
On that wall sat a WARNING electronic text-feed from the nearest Space Weather Station on Earth-Moon:
