Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Their balance sheet from the month of October was still a little unbalanced, but the trend was in the right direction now. The Consortium had made good on the first of its asteroid material shipments to Low-Gee, and with revenues coming in it seemed to be in no danger of missing any payments to Lunar Life Engineering. Jim had managed to put some money into retiring their company’s debt and still make small deposits into their respective bank accounts, so the month ended on a good note.

  He scooted over to the door in his new powered wheelchair when the delivery girl brought his lunch from Athena’s, a little hole-in-the-wall Greek place that just opened up about a month before his stroke. Ariadna was a lovely girl, dark-haired and dark-eyed, just like her mother, who was not actually named Athena. He made a little small talk as he paid her. He could almost smell the tzatziki sauce as he maneuvered back to the dining room. The phone rang as he put the bag on the table.

  Something told Jim not to answer the phone, but he had come to the point that whenever he had feelings like that he ignored them. If something was telling him not to do it, he considered that an indication of fear rather than fate—and he believed in facing his fears. When the voice on the other end of the phone spoke, however, he wished he had gone with his first instinct.

  Huang Wenbin, the AC accountant, was, as always, unfailingly polite. He seemed to be the kind of person who would expect you to thank him, or maybe even tip him, as he explained to you that the sumptuous dinner he had just served you was not only dog meat, but actually made with your own dog. And then he would make you feel guilty because you didn’t own a black dog, since black-furred dogs tasted better.

  Jim lost his appetite as the accountant laid out his business. The AC had gotten to LLE’s most recent investor—Alberto Escarro, who manufactured special-purpose radiation-hardened microchips in a high-end facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico—and simply bought him out. Unlike Escarro, the Consortium had no interest in being a silent partner. Jim suspected that the Consortium had paid a premium for Escarro’s paper, and now they demanded that Lunar Life Engineering make good on it. They were willing to lose money on the deal in the attempt to make Stormie, Frank, and Jim’s company insolvent—so they could step in and buy the whole thing for a song.

  Jim left his souvlaki still wrapped on the table, and scooted into the office where he could think.

  The AC couldn’t change the terms on the paper they’d bought from Escarro, so far as Jim knew, so they were stuck with the terms that allowed LLE to pay back the investment over … Jim struggled to remember the repayment plan. He would have to look it up, and that was the sort of detail he should have at the ready. He hated having to look it up; it was another reminder of the multitude of little things that had gone wrong in his brain. They kept surfacing again and again, and drove him to distraction. He looked up in the corner of the office, where the model of Meredith’s Moon moved back and forth, softly scintillating in the midday sunlight coming through the window. He clenched his fist, and struggled to compose himself.

  By the time he got through to the colony communications center, and asked Ms. Needham to route the call to Stormie and Frank, Jim admitted to himself that, even though he was better, he didn’t quite feel fine.

  “James? I did not expect to hear from you today.”

  “Something’s come up, Frank. Something you to need to know about.”

  “What is it, Jim?” Stormie asked.

  Jim laid out the situation in as much detail as he could. He hadn’t bothered to try to contact Escarro and find out exactly what the consortium paid him. It didn’t seem important, since it wouldn’t make a difference.

  “If they’re going to pull this kind of stunt, Jim, why did they even go through with carrying us as contractors?”

  “I don’t know, Stormie. I do know that they’re trying to use as leverage the … fluctuations you had when the last batch of colonists arrived.” Fluctuation was putting it mildly, Jim knew. But he didn’t want to upset Stormie anymore than she already was. The new colonists had arrived the third week of October, and the old law attributed to Mr. Murphy had proven to still be in force. Stormie had taken it very hard that her predictions and calculations had not proven quite up to the task of integrating so many new people into the environment. It hadn’t been as bad as Huang made it sound—he called it an ecological disaster, which it certainly was not, just a few people with headaches from what was basically altitude sickness—but it had taken longer to balance the air and water systems than originally anticipated.

  Frank spoke up, and Jim imagined him putting a hand on Stormie’s knee or shoulder to calm her. “James, that is most unfair.”

  “They’re not playing fair. They’re playing for keeps, and they’re playing for the whole thing.”

  “They would not be able to achieve any better results. But what can we do? Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Not now,” Jim said, “but I’m working on it. I wanted you both to be thinking about it, too. It’s not like we have to cut them a check tomorrow. We have some time, I think about six months, and we can probably stretch it out a little further without getting into too much trouble. In the meantime, if there are ways you can think of to cut costs, then cut them. I’ll do what I can down here to pull some capital out of the air or out of the ground or out of the water or wherever I can get it from, and I’ll have some friends of mine take a look at our original agreement with the AC and see if we can charge them with breach of contract for trying to make this end run.”

  “Very well, James. We will do what we can.”

  “That’s all any of us can do, Frank.” He paused, and smiled as if they were on a video link in an attempt to make himself feel better. “I’ll tell you what, though. It would be really great if, while you’re waltzing around up there doing whatever it is you do, you were to stumble across a vein of gold or an oil field. Or even those diamonds you were supposed to send me.”

  Neither of his partners laughed. He wasn’t surprised, since it was a pretty pathetic joke. But hearing Frank’s reply made him feel a little better.

  “Yes, good idea, James. We will start looking right away.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  A Biological Imperative

  Saturday, 17 November 2035

  Barbara loved being outside. Maybe that had to do with growing up on the ranch, but it didn’t matter if it was lunar daylight or lunar dark, being outside under the open sky—even when she was encapsulated in her pressure suit—was far better than being in the prefabricated habitats.

  In that respect, she considered the subterranean phase of her training to be much worse than the reality of colony life. In the Cave, she had no opportunities to go outside and see the Sun or the Earth or much of anything. At least here, there were even places inside that allowed a view of the outside world. Like now, when the Sun was nearly overhead and ambient light flooded the inside of the Grand Central dome.

  In these existential moments of freedom, she felt most at home on this barren but starkly beautiful world, and closest to what she guessed her husband must feel all the time. It was a pity she didn’t have those moments as often as he did.

  Now that the new set of colonists had been in place long enough to know their way around and actually start contributing—was it three weeks, or four? it didn’t matter—Barbara was happy to turn her attention to a new work assignment. She had given over her part of the launch acceleration rail project to Al Mancuso, one of the new engineers, and today she would start scouting for the site of the first proof-of-concept dome.

  She checked in with Central Control—Bent Sondstrom had the duty at the moment—and got clearance to proceed with the nearby survey. She called up the map of candidate sites on her head-up display and verified which ones she would visit. Four of the ten-to-fifteen-meter-diameter craterlets were within range of the little electric carts, and she could survey them on her own. The additional five candidate craterlets were farther afield; to visit those, she
would have to check out one of the MPVs and probably enlist someone else to ride with her.

  The candidate sites had been chosen based on the available overhead imagery. She would examine each one up close to see which was the best site to cover over with a dome.

  This would be the closest thing to real engineering she had done since arriving at the colony. She shouldn’t have been surprised, since her experience in the service had been much the same, but on-site engineering did not amount to much. Everything big had already been designed and most things had already been built, so the little bit of engineering that was required usually only amounted to fitting things together when they might not want to. There were some small opportunities, like the work stand she designed for use in the garage: she and Van actually worked together on that one, and cut up several discarded hatch covers from the prefabs to bend into supports and hold-downs. But that was less engineering than just rough craftsmanship.

  The next closest full-blown on-site engineering effort was the tunneling project, since it required detailed surveys of the rim of Mercator Crater and specific adaptation to the rock formation. No terrestrial engineer would ever be able to predict ahead of time how the tunnels would have to be dug and supported. But Barbara preferred thinking about the foundations of domed structures than about digging tunnels—digging tunnels would be too much like being back in the Cave in Utah. She was happy to leave that to Rex.

  She was tired and hungry by the time she returned to Gateway and cycled through the airlock, but she was pleased with her results. She had definitely rejected three of the candidate sites and taken almost a hundred digital images of the fourth. It might work, if none of the others were better, and had the advantage of being close to the main colony. The idea was to find a site where the rim of the small crater was in good enough shape to hold the footings of a dome. Once they had built a dome about ten meters in diameter, they would progress to a twenty-meter dome, and then fifty, and on up in stages. The actual size might be plus or minus ten percent, depending on the prevailing conditions, but with each step they would get better and better at building domed-over structures that one day should eliminate the need for prefabricated and tunnel habitats.

  With the worst of the sweat toweled off, her pressure suit put away, and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Barbara moved through the junction from Gateway to Grand Central and found one of BD’s Bridge Club games in progress—even though BD was working a shift in the command center. Trish Springer and Stormie Pastorelli were playing against Maggie Stewart and Alice Lindsay.

  Barbara looked at the little snack table by the curved wall. She didn’t find anything she particularly liked, but she didn’t feel like walking farther back into the colony and rummaging through some of the food stores. She drew a mug of water from the tap, picked up a package of dried apple slices, and walked over to the Bridge table.

  “You know what I wish?” she asked. “I wish somebody would bring up some candy bars or something. Every office I ever worked in had some sort of a snack bar, and people who would go buy stuff and set it out and we’d buy it and the office would make some money. I wish somebody would order some stuff up here and sell it—I’d be happy to pay a premium for it.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” Trish asked.

  “I don’t want to be in charge of it,” Barbara said, “but I’d be happy to patronize it.”

  “I would, too,” said Maggie. “Know what I miss? Real cheese. I wish we had enough feed stock that we could get a family of goats up here.”

  Alice wrinkled her nose. “Goat cheese? Uh, no thank you.”

  They all chuckled as Barbara sat down behind Stormie and looked over her shoulder at the card display on Stormie’s datapad. “What are you up to?” Barbara asked.

  “Three diamonds,” said Stormie. “And I’m with you on the snack bar thing. Not for goat cheese—” she glared at Maggie, but it was a friendly glare, “but I would pay real money for some of those orange gel things with the dark chocolate on ’em. Oh, my goodness.”

  The bidding went around again and ended at four hearts. The datapad display was so small there was hardly room to show the cards as they were played, but they managed. Maggie and Alice made their bid, and Alice initiated the next deal with her datapad.

  Stormie turned to Barbara. “Want to take my place? I’ve got plenty of things I need to be doing.”

  “Sure, maybe in a little while.”

  Alice said, “Stormie was just telling us about the current water situation.”

  “What water situation?” Barbara asked.

  “We’re being wasteful,” Alice said.

  Stormie shook her head. “That’s not quite it.”

  Alice grinned. “Oh, that’s it in a nutshell. We’re wasting water and losing water because everything leaks.”

  Stormie fanned through her cards on the screen; she even turned a little so Barbara could see better. She didn’t have enough points to start bidding, but she was void in clubs and long in hearts with the jack and the king. She said, “Frank did some analysis of use rates, storage inventory, flow through the treatment system and the fish farm, that sort of thing. Took into account that we’re up to sixteen transient miners these days, with that programmed to go up to twenty next month.”

  “Are there that many?” Barbara asked. The miners mostly kept to themselves, so she rarely saw more than two or three at a time. The northwest corner of the colony, habitats One-Alpha and Alpha-One, were primarily transient quarters and had been dubbed “Cripple Creek” by one of the miners from Colorado.

  “Yes, there are,” Stormie said. “Anyway, Frank factored in the amount of ice the teams have been bringing up from the South Pole, which isn’t that much—”

  “I reminded her,” Trish said, “that there’s water to be had all over the place. Glaciers on Mars, all over Europa—”

  “The aliens told us not to go there,” Maggie said.

  “—and a whole ocean of water and ammonia under the crust of Titan,” Trish concluded, to a chorus of light laughter.

  “And I told her,” said Stormie, “that’s an awfully long way to go for water. Pulling water up from Mars doesn’t make any more sense than pulling it up from Earth.”

  Barbara nodded. That’s why the major supply missions were going to end soon, and why it was critical for the colony to be able to sustain itself.

  “I’ll grant you,” Stormie continued, “Titan would be excellent because you’d have water plus ammonia for fuel. But how many months would it take to get there and back? And there are other pockets of water here on the Moon, except the Consortium doesn’t have claim to them.

  “Anyway … we also looked at humidity fluctuations, everything we could think of, and if we don’t do something to make our reclamation more efficient and seal this station tighter, then it looks like we’re on the declining side of the curve right now. And as we bring in more people, it’s just going to get worse—we’re going to have to bring in more water, since we’re nowhere close to being a real closed system.”

  “So what’s the answer?” Barbara said.

  “There’s no one answer,” Stormie said. “Karl Capell is supposed to be installing an upgrade to the water treatment system, in preparation for opening the real tunnels, but I haven’t seen any plans cross my desk yet—and I don’t think Frank’s seen them, either. So for now we’re just trying to fix little leaks where we find them, and figure out how to strengthen the aquaculture regime so it’s more efficient at cleaning the water.”

  “Your hubby talked to me about that,” Maggie said. “I think we can make that system work better. Just have to be careful with all the tinkering and tampering.”

  “What do you mean?” Alice asked.

  “From what I’ve seen, every time we try to fix a problem we cause more problems in different places. I think that’s because every good deed has its own unintended consequences—and maybe that’s why ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’ But, we still try. And now tha
t Gabe Morera is here to take over the flora, I can work more on the fauna and the … what’s the water equivalent of fauna?”

  They looked at one another and shrugged, almost in unison. A cycle of laughter built around the table, and died out as the bidding began. Hearts was bid and Stormie ended up playing the hand.

  Trish, with the dummy hand, laid her datapad on the table and leaned over it to watch Stormie play. She said, “Speaking of water fauna, whatever you call it, I keep hearing people say we shouldn’t be trying to get at the water anywhere else in the Solar System because it might have life in it. But back me up on this, Stormie. I say it’s a biological imperative for us to use whatever water we can find, no matter what algae or microbes might be in it. Survival of the fittest, right? Like the killer bees, or the rabbits in Australia. Come on, you’re from down South—I don’t believe the kudzu ever worried about the other plants it choked out.”

  Stormie took another trick and said, “I can see your point, Trish, if you think the human race should be compared to a pernicious weed.”

  Maggie laughed. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen, if that’s the case,” she said.

  “Is that from the Bible?” Trish asked.

  “I believe I’ve read something like it in there,” Maggie said. “I can’t tell you chapter and verse.”

  Alice said, “I was surprised to find out you played cards, Maggie. I thought that wasn’t allowed.”

  Maggie laughed again. “A common misconception, dear. I don’t believe you’ll find any mention of ‘playing cards’ in the Bible. Now, if my playing cards offends you, I’ll stop—because I don’t want to be a stumbling block—but I don’t think trying to live right means giving up simple things that are fun and don’t hurt anybody.”