by F P Adriani
Solar-particle storms ahead. Intermittent power outages are possible and likely in some areas. Please remain alert and review all emergency shelter procedures.
“What the fuck is going on?” Tan asked, through a paling face.
I began walking again. “Don’t worry too much about it. It’s just another danger here.”
“‘Just another danger’!”
I glanced at him. “What do you want me to say? There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Storms from space happen quite often here—small meteorites are a problem….” I eyed his face again and, going on his newly shaking mouth, I realized I hadn’t exactly been making things better. “Look, we’ve got the suits—”
“I’m thinking of pressurizing mine right now! What the hell else can go wrong?”
“Don’t even ask that,” I said, half-groaning. “You might tempt the Universe.”
*
“My new name is embarrassing,” Tan said later on when we were finally on the street where our motel was.
The street was artificially lit into a yellowy-gray glow, and, as I stood before one of the buildings, my eyes drifted high up to the imported air-filter trees. Humans had long ago planted them throughout the Moon colonies: the trees helped clean the air and gave off oxygen, as Earth-trees tended to do too. But the weird, twisted brown trunks of the filter ones were really incongruous-looking against the smoothness of the gray building. At the moment, all the pale yellow leaves of the specimens in front of me were tightly curled, but they would periodically unfurl all at once to release large amounts of oxygen, pulling it up even from the ground far below, where the root tips gave off an acid that “digested” rock….
My eyes now traveled to behind the trees, toward the bronze-colored dome supports. The frame braces were widely spaced and very solid looking. And a little lower down, beyond the relatively clear d-regarm encasement, I could see the Moonscape, the highlighted rise of a rounded ridge along a soft gray slope.
I finally looked at Tan as I began walking. “What’s embarrassing about Frank Wolfgang?”
“Who has a name like that?”
“You do now. So get used to it.”
I finally pulled open the dark-blue front door to the dark-blue motel, and then I walked up to the black front desk. James had made a reservation for us, but I wouldn’t take the same room.
When I asked the concierge if my reservation was in the motel’s front, she nodded.
And then I said, “The front is facing the street—that’s too noisy. You got anything in the back?”
“Oh—yes,” she replied. “We do have a few rooms available there.”
“Then give me one of them.”
A few minutes later Tan and I were walking down a hall toward our new room.
“Why do you keep switching the rooms?” he asked me then.
“Just in case anybody has pre-laid plans for us in them.”
“I’m surprised James got us one room.”
My eyes touched his face, and his eyes just stared back at mine. “We do have separate bubble beds inside it—or we did. And you saw I got separate beds again. We’re not supposed to be a couple, just members of the same band.”
“Yes, Stacy Lacy,” he said sarcastically.
My right hand snapped forward and pinched him gently in his side. “Cut it out or I’ll call you Wolfgang the whole time instead of Frank.”
*
The motel room was pretty spacious and was decorated in the same deep-blue hue and material as the motel’s outside, which inside-outside matching was common among Earth-Moon buildings: it saved money, it made construction easier and more streamlined. Basically, everything-Moon was kept, well, as basic as possible….
I dropped my bags onto one of the blue dressers as Tan examined one of the square lemon-yellow bubble beds.
The mattresses on bubble beds were encased in clear d-regarm shields, but having the casings all the way up over the bed frames while sleeping wasn’t necessary: they were fitted with an alarm. If the alarm’s sensors detected outside depressurization had begun, then the shields would automatically rise and close and inside pressurization would start—that way the person inside wouldn’t die while asleep….
I explained all this to Tan as I manipulated the controls and tested both beds.
“You know,” he said then, “according to that Moon-guide, they do atmosphere-seeding here—they release oxygen from the mining. And there are very slights pockets of denser atmosphere because we’ve changed the land here, like between big domes.”
“Tan, ‘very slight’ and ‘pockets’ are the operative words. As far as I know, the pockets aren’t near here. They also aren’t very breathable yet, and even if you could breathe it, there’s only enough breathable oxygen for moments at a time. Not exactly human-life sustaining. Then there’s the radioactive ground! Plus the suspended sharp regolith particles everywhere—they can cut your lungs and cause regolosis if you breathe them long enough….”
“Damn, I’m trying to be positive and you’re shooting down all my positive shit!”
His face drooped so earnestly, but I couldn’t help laughing a bit. “I’m sorry, babe! You just need to be realistic too. It stinks here—lots of extra work and worry. I don’t know what else to tell you. There are no short cuts, no silver linings, even though the Moonscape sometimes looks so damn silvery.”
*
After we had unpacked our stuff, I took off my suit in the bathroom and gave the insides a sniff; my nose registered nothing but the slight rubbery-bitter smell of the fabric itself.
I stripped off my underwear, used the toilet, then jumped into the narrow yellow shower stall.
Earth-Moon showers generally had to be quick because you had to conserve the recycled water. But even if I didn’t have to conserve, I would still only take quick showers: washing and excreting were among the few times you had to be unsuited, and I wanted to spend as little time unsuited as possible.
I turned on the faucet and the water came out in a slow but wide stream from the yellow shower head above. I thought of how much humans had taken for granted before they’d left the Earth, had taken things like water and gravity for granted.
That wasn’t so easy to do on the Moon, where there were only a few sources of water: the scattered ground spots where water naturally occurred because of ionization processes induced by the solar wind, and the large water-ice pockets in supercold areas both above and below ground. To supplement that when necessary, water was occasionally shipped in on water barges from space. An indirect recycling system had also been set up via various indoor hydrologic cycles. And many plants had been specifically positioned in dome interiors so water transpiration would cause a natural raining of water, which was then collected through numerous ground drains, which water was then filtered and used.
Gravity was yet another important consideration for leading as normal a physical life as possible anywhere. But there just wasn’t enough natural gravity on the Moon for human physiology, so humans had built the bottoms of the colony interiors with the Lobos gravity-generating mass. Before people had access to this Lobos-mass, they had to mostly live and work in the normal low Moon gravity, and could only do so for short periods of time because of deleterious health effects….
Since the early days, humans had come up with a solution to pretty much everything on Earth-Moon to make it as comfortable as possible. But that “as possible” part was why I’d normally avoided coming here in the past.
I sighed as I dried myself off with a towel.
When I stepped out into the bedroom again, I glanced at the Earth-time digital wall clock and told Tan to wash up if he needed to. “We’ll get something to eat afterward,” I said, “and then we’ve got to get to work.”
He was sighing as he walked across the room and into the bathroom.
*
Both of us dressed in our suits again, we moved along the street outside the motel. The road was busier now, courtesy of the two-
seater little black boxes that passed for cars here. Though they were light, when they were moving, they couldn’t go fast because that would be too dangerous if they crashed into the dome casings.
But even if they wanted to go fast, traffic-jams would have prevented that, like the jam before Tan and I now; long lines of cars black-dotted the blue pavement.
Tan seemed surprised about this. “Where did they all come from? When we were on the port-bus before, I barely saw any cars.”
“It’s almost Earth-evening now,” I said, “and everyone comes out to play more.”
“Including us?” he said, and he was looking at me.
I just shrugged as we crossed the street in between members of the traffic-jam, which wasn’t easy because the street was wide, the cars were stopped too close together, and the people driving them seemed impatient and inclined to just suddenly jerk forward….
“Argh,” said Tan, “I’m getting a headache just looking at this. I hope we don’t have to get inside one of those.”
“No. We’ll probably have to get inside two. I can’t drive them and neither can you. Most only fit two adults—one in the front, one in the back—so we’d have to take separate ones.”
“Remind me why we’re here again?”
I responded by flashing him ironic eyes.
Eventually we made it down the street to where there was supposed to be a restaurant…but the restaurant wound up being a little shack that had seen better days—and nights for that matter. The outside looked dirty with dome-mold, and the people standing around seemed really teenager-young, which Tan and I no longer were.
I stared up at the sign over the front door and said, “Well, this seems more like a club.”
“So?”
“We do need to go to one—later. Right now I’m starving for a real restaurant’s food, aren’t you?”
*
After walking for over twenty minutes through the common street-maze of black cars and gray and blue buildings and endless crowds of people in all states of dress and inebriation, we finally found a decent restaurant.
When Tan’s ass hit one of the restaurant’s blue seats, I imagined I heard his ass sigh in long-awaited satisfaction.
I slid in beside him along the booth seat, and we ordered our food.
When it came, Tan asked me in a low voice, “So, what’s next?”
“I like to check things out beforehand. We’ll go to the same place where I’m supposed to make the drop-off tomorrow night.”
“And then?”
I could feel his eyes probing my profile. I laid down my glass and swallowed a mouthful of too-bitter-because-it-had-been-canned orange juice. Then I finally said, “I’m not sure.”
A loud group of people were sitting at the table beside us, and Tan frowned over at them. “I couldn’t figure out what the hell the waitress was saying before. That’s why I just let you order. Sometimes it sounds like they’re speaking another language here.”
“Some of them are, kind of. I should have told you more, but when have I had enough time? Anyway, there’s quite a lot of slang here, slangy metaphors, but they’re altered from English. Everything’s about regolith around here. Like where you’d use glass or ice or stone or earth—you use reg. ‘Hit the reg’, ‘Scotch on the reg’,—like I asked for my juice with reg before.”
“Yeah, I heard that.”
I pushed my empty glass away across the tabletop, and I watched Tan use his fork to play with his food. He usually ate fast, but he still had quite a bit of noodles left on his plate. Now I asked him, “How’s your stomach doing?”
“It’s still there…somewhere. Somewhere beneath this sort of whoozy feeling, like I’m drunk without having taken a drink. Like I’m just high on life in this lovely place.”
I laughed. “It’s the domes, the indoors, the strange lighting, and there’s too much dome-mold sometimes. In places where the air circulation isn’t the best, the combination can actually make you hallucinate.”
“Well, that sounds just great.”
I was still laughing. “We’re not going anywhere like that, so don’t worry.” I pointed down at his dish. “Why don’t you ask for a container to take that back to the room for later?”
“You mean we’ve got to walk all the way back there before the other place?”
“The other place is on the other side of the motel. And we’ve got to stop there anyway for the band get-ups.”
“Can we please find a taxi or something?”
“We’d have to take separate ones—”
“Why? Just sit on my lap.”
He was right, and that was exactly what we wound up doing.
Outside in the street again, I hailed a taxi, and when it stopped, Tan got into the backseat, I pushed my case inside, then I slid on top of Tan.
It was quite a tight fit, with my head almost hitting the car’s roof. But he wrapped his arms around me, pulling my back into his front more.
The car moved and slowed and stopped and moved and slowed and stopped…bad traffic again.
I could feel something happening below me, something growing beneath my ass, a soft-hard length that persistently pressed at the flexible fabric that covered my bottom.
Tan’s right arm suddenly tightened against me. I leaned my head back and said, “You pervert.”
“What do you expect?” he whispered hotly near my ear. “Every time the car moves, your bottom rubs me….”
“Mmm,” I said now, feeling a sudden urge to cut a hole in my suit’s crotch so he could slip inside my hole….
But we didn’t have the time, the driver wasn’t far enough away from us that we could fuck without his knowing, and, I really couldn’t cut a hole in the damn suit; it was very tough, very tear-resistant. Fucking would have to wait….
More traffic. The car got hotter, the air staler; the driver blasted weird music with bells.
My head started hurting, and Tan lost his erection.
“Are we almost there?” he griped from below me. “We would have been by now if we walked!”
“But you didn’t want to walk,” I pointed out.
The car finally began moving again, in earnest this time, and, thankfully, we were soon back at the room.
Unfortunately, my head was still hurting, and Tan seemed to have forgotten about his earlier aroused state.
He took a piss in the bathroom and when he came back out, he said, “Let’s just go do what we’ve got to, get it over with.”
I tossed him his hat-disguise…well, it wasn’t much of a disguise and neither was my get-up. What we now wore over our moon-suits were more like adornments.
The black hat on my head had Stacy Is Lacy embroidered in silver across the front, and a black lace cape covered the shoulders of my red jacket. I slid the strap of my case over my right shoulder and locked the strap onto my suit’s side; then I undid a few of the top snaps on my torso so I’d look more laid-back.
Tan had opened his top snaps too, and now I watched as he tied a silver headband across his forehead, then pulled on thin silver gloves, which were the same color as the small horn he carried in a holder on his back above his tanks.
“What if someone asks me to play it?” he said as we left the room.
“Remember: keep the mystery going. Just say you never play unless you’re on a stage. And then hope no one asks you to go on a stage. Me too, because when I try to sing, I sound like a burping infant.”
He laughed, hard.
*
The bar where I had to make the drop off was part of a chain of Earth-Moon bars called Nightlights. They usually had entertainment, and they served simple (and usually stale) bar food. No one really came there for food, though; they came for drinks and to hook up. Only adults were allowed inside, as was the case for plenty of Moon hangouts. Earth-Moon was no place for children.
Tan and I walked into the bar’s strong orangey lighting, and I carefully shifted my eyes toward all sides. The place was crowded, but no more
or less than usual at this time of night. It was a normal bar night, in other words. Random people, random lives. And that meant if there were something abnormal, either related to the drop-off or to the threat against me—I probably wouldn’t be able to spot anything among the randomness.
I also didn’t spot anyone who looked like what my contact should look like. As my eyes continued scanning the place, I saw no one or no scenario that looked familiar. I finally gave Tan’s back a gentle push toward the only free table.
But before we got there, three other people did: a gal and two guys. I was going to walk away, but as the woman sat down on the bench there, she raised an arm and waved at us eagerly. Tan’s head had been turned away from the table, but my head jerked back from the table—did the woman know me?
I hesitated and was about to grab Tan’s wrist to pull him to a stop—when I remembered that we weren’t supposed to be a couple.
I didn’t grab his wrist, I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t fully stop moving. We continued walking to near the table, and I sat down before Tan could ask why we were sitting at a table with people we didn’t know. And I didn’t know them, or at least I couldn’t remember having known them.
I quickly realized that the woman was already half-wasted on who-knew-what. Maybe she hadn’t been waving at me….
Yeah, she probably hadn’t; she’d been waving at Tan: the moment he sat down beside her, she was both metaphorically and literally all over him.
I would have preferred that he hadn’t sat there, but when I’d grabbed the chair across from the woman, the second guy moved to beside me and quickly fell into the chair there, leaving the spot beside the woman the only free seat for Tan.
The guy beside me began staring at me now. Apparently, he was one of those strong-silent-deaf types: he needed you to scream in his ear with a megaphone before he would engage in a conversation with you. And I really wasn’t in that much of a talkative mood; I decided to just ignore him.
“Hi!” said the woman, to Tan. “Are you new to Nightlights?”
