The Menace from Farside

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Helmets!’ Sidibe says. Beats me to it by a hair. I clap mine around my head, the helmet clams shut, I feel the seal link with the suit ring. The visor fills with symbols: the HUD booting up. I breathe deep on the powdery, scorched, spicy smell of moondust. I sneeze, inhale snot, start to choke . . . A golden face-plate fills my sight: Sidibe.

  ‘Easy easy easy . . .’ What’s she doing? A blast of cold air. I cough, hoik something warm and metallic and slimey up into my helmet. ‘Easy, Emer. I’ve hooked you into your LSU.’

  I got the helmet, I forgot the suitpack.

  The thing from inside me smells of moondust, iron and stone. The drool-filters suck it up. The HUD boots up and I can see through the dust. We are here.

  Wu Lock is real moon history; the original shaft drilled down into the big lava chamber of Queen of the South. I wonder what the explorers felt when they took their first step into the heart of the moon. They mapped it, measured it, hit it with radar and seismics so that they knew every rock and cranny, but mapping isn’t seeing. Suit lights won’t reach even a tenth of the way to the far side. Deep as space, without a single star, without the blue earth. Pure and perfect dark. Would they have thought: light has never touched this place, not even a single photon? Would they have thought: for three billion years, this place has waited in the pure and perfect dark, and once the light has touched it, it can never be the same? It’s like a stain, a pollution. Thinking about that long, waiting dark made me feel funny inside, like something clenching.

  Kobe waits for us in the lower lock as we cycle through out of the dust. His shell-suit’s helmet is open; his head looks stupid tiny on top of the huge pile of powered armour. But he’s in a shell-suit; that is the thing.

  Where do I get a shell-suit? he’d asked.

  There are suits at Wu Lock, I told him. Can you make your own way there?

  I’m Department of Transport, he’d answered. Give Kobe a mission and he will see it through, come moonquake or meteor strike.

  Beacons flash from shoulders, thighs, the small of Kobe’s back. Every joint is high-contrast silver and orange. Safety first, safety last, safety always.

  I run my finger through the layer of dust on one of the other shell-suits hooked into the racks. No one has used these in a long time. Maybe even since the days of the first explorers. They last forever, these things. Standing, gathering dust, waiting for someone to pop the code.

  I slap Kobe on the back. Stupid. Sore.

  ‘Helmet on, Kobe.’ It unfolds, closes around his head. Pressure seals lock. The names and faces of my team appear over their shoulders in my augmented vision. One armoured giant, one moon-cat, Golden Girl, and Commander Cariad: we look like a superhero squad. The Fearless Four. I take status checks. Air, water, power, comms; all at full bars.

  ‘Okay, Jair, depressurise.’

  Jair lifts a clawed hand: his fingers dance among the virtual dials hovering in my augmented vision.

  ‘Depressurising.’

  My suit HUD paints the depressurisation as if I am at the bottom of a slowly draining pool of a deep green that shifts to red as it lowers. I open a private channel to Kobe.

  ‘You all right?’

  If I find the graphics spooky, it could really scare Kobe.

  ‘This is exciting, Cariad,’ Kobe answers, and his flat, solid voice and his huge, solid bulk in the big suit seems so reasonable and right that I don’t even blink as the green drains across my face, down my body in yellow to orange to seep away in swirls of red around my boots.

  ‘Zero pressure, Cari,’ Jair says.

  ‘Open her up, Jair.’ Jair touches his left wrist. New charms and magics appear in front of my eyes. A flick of Jair’s claws throws them at the outer lock door. And the door splits down the middle and slides apart, like an old fairy story. Ahead of us the Wu tunnel slopes upward into a vanishing point of utter darkness. It’s two small steps onto the funicular, but the shaft is long and dark and at the other end is real, solid adventure. No running out. No handing this back and saying, No thank you not today.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘Team, let’s go.’

  * * *

  Up we go, me and Sidibe and Jair and Kobe, riding on a moving platform up the big, long tunnel. We have lights in the suits but we’re on internal power and Sidibe’s instructions are battery first, battery last, battery always, so we ride up to the surface by the funicular’s headlights. They only shine a little way up the tunnel, which is a smooth, gently sloping tube only slightly higher than the top of Kobe’s helmet with no features no details no anything to give us any clue about how fast we are moving, how far we have come or how far lies in front of us. We’re wedged in the sinuses of a stone giant the size of the whole moon.

  As if he has read my thoughts, Jair says, ‘How much longer . . .’ and before he finishes his words the red and white chevrons on the upper lock door appear in the headlights. The circular gate is ringed in flashing warning beacons. Beyond this door is the surface. Top of the world. Lady Luna. The funicular stops one short step from the lock gate.

  ‘Okay, Jair.’

  He summons his neko-magic. A ring of warning lights flash. The gate quivers, then slowly slowly parts. No one has been through the Wu Gate in a long, long time. A slot of light touches our feet, climbs our legs and bodies, shines full-bright in our faces. Our dazzle-visors cut in. The line of light widens until we are bathed in the hard glare of the floods. Beyond the light pylons the rim of Shackleton crater is a curve of hard black, deep as death. The sun rests on the upper lip of the absolute black. It rolls along that crater rim as we roll around the Earth, like it’s on rails, but it never lifts more than a finger-width across the line. Blinding light and darkest shadow, next to each other. There are valleys in the lower slopes of Shackleton rim where the sun has never shone. Billion-year-old ice lies there in the darkness. We built a city on that ice. Ice and darkness and lights, the mothers of Queen of the South. Or, if you want, water, ice, and almost constant solar power. Yay, Queen! Mount Malapert is so far south, so high, it’s in sunlight 340 days a year but even that’s not good enough for Taiyang. The Suns want to put a tower on top of the mountain, so tall it will be in forever-sunlight. The Pavilion of Eternal Light. Seems a piece of expensive frip to me, but Laine’s done work on their new big corporate headquarters at southeast Shackleton; they’re calling that the Palace of Eternal Light, so I suppose there’s always a clue in the name. Anyway, we are all shadows and light down at the south side of the moon. Which is my way of covering the fact that we’re all frozen in the Wu Gate, dazzled and spooked by the light and the darkness.

  I need to do something commanding here.

  ‘Line up,’ I say. Sidibe steps in front of me, I sense Jair and Kobe at my back. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  We step out of the lock, onto the surface, and walk in each other’s footsteps toward the lighting pylons of Shackleton yard.

  ‘There are sixty-four tracks in Shackleton yard,’ Kobe announces. ‘It’s the moon’s biggest rail marshaling yard. A fully robotic double hump-shunting system can compile and decompile two trains simultaneously. The northern hump sends cars of rare earths, aluminium, ores, and silicons to the big commercial airlocks. They can hold six railcars at once! The southern hump sends water, organics, renewables to the settlements along the transpolar line and the new build at Meridian.’

  ‘Kobe, thank you,’ I say. He was about to give us times and load-outs of every train between him and Rozhdestvenskiy.

  ‘This is not pleasing,’ Jair says. ‘It . . . curves.’

  While Kobe was info-dumping us, the rest of us were having our minds slowly stretched by the freaky bend in the world. All around my world curves away from me. The trains compiling and decompiling are so long their heads and tails are around the curve in the world. Railcars drift out of nowhere, past us, into nowhere. I had forgotten that there are things called horizons. Queen is a great bubble: from Osman Tower, dust permitting, you can see all the wa
y to the edge of the city in any direction. You see the whole of the world. On the surface, you are on the outside of a ball. And not a very big ball at that. I feel I’m about to fall over and slide away with every step. This is Queen turned inside out. There are no walls to the world.

  And then there is the Earth. The big blue. It sits where it always sits, where it sat when I was taken up to look at it: on the very edge of that crazy curved horizon, a ball balanced on another, never moving but always looking about to topple over. It is a sliver from full and I cannot take my eyes off it. None of us can.

  I’ve heard jackaroo stories of surface workers so in love with the earthshine that they take their helmets off to see it full and clear, with nothing between them and it. Laine says that’s not possible, an urban legend, but looking at the Earth, just looking at it, feeling drawn up and falling over at the same time, those legends are truer than true.

  You see the blue first. Endless blue. Blue, to me, is the most terrifying colour. It is unnatural, alien, staring. Death is endless pale blue. Then you see the white on the blue—clouds: I learned that in colloq, though I still don’t understand how they work. Next you see the green and brown beneath the blue—more brown than green, I’m told, and growing every year, every lune, every day. Last of all you see the lights along the night edge of the world, webs and knits and whirls of lights. I understand a terrible thing. My world, everything in it, all my friends and family, all my life, are just toys. Pretend. That is the real world: there.

  ‘We should move,’ Kobe says on the common channel. ‘We have eight minutes thirty-seven seconds to catch our train.’

  And I am back in my suit, my boots, on the dust. This little grey world is all the world we have, the only world we can have.

  Kobe and Sidibe are already running out across the tracks, Jair five footfalls behind them. I turn from the liar Earth and run after them.

  * * *

  They shouldn’t show you the Earth.

  Look up, they say. What do you see? The thing you can never have. Up there, all blue. All shining. Can’t have, can’t go. The guest-workers, they can go. They have to play it right, but they can go back to that world. Us moon-born, we can never go there. Earth gravity would melt us, mash us, stop our hearts, and shatter our bones. Look up, see that? Can’t have. Not yours. This is yours: rock and dust and a billion bootprints. We’re shut out of heaven.

  You shouldn’t show us.

  * * *

  We don’t have rules on the moon but we do have agreements. Some of these are contracts, some of them are more like understandings. So it’s understood that any surface worker can hitch a ride on any train anywhere any time. Laine’s done it hundreds of times. Gebre’s never done it. He’s always ridden inside, under pressure, with a seat.

  I really don’t know what Laine sees in him.

  Kobe has tagged our train and sent the image to our helmet HUDS, a northbound freight-hauling tech and returning guest-workers to the Moonloop, water and carbon compounds to the big dig at Meridian, then calling at Hadley to stock up on metals before heading on all the way to Rozhdestvenskiy at the top of the world. Five and a half thousand kilometres. We jump the wide tracks, waiting for the silent freight cars to glide past us. Freight 1107 is like a wall across the world. The passenger bay is half a kilometre north, just behind the traction unit. We jog along the trackside. Jair tries to jump up on to the outer rail of the neighbouring track. Kobe grabs and snatches him to the ground.

  ‘That’s the power track!’ Kobe yells on the common channel. ‘Fifty kay volts!’

  I was just about to put my boot on it.

  Jair’s purple and pink neko pattern is smudged black with moondust. We are all pretty dusty by now, boots and lower legs. It’s a good look.

  Kobe’s tag leads us to the passenger bay.

  ‘We’re riding two and a half thousand kay on that?’ Jair says. He’s still pissy after Kobe saved him from smoking death, but I see his point. Freight 1107’s passenger accommodation is an open mesh platform, five sets of safety harnesses and life-support plugs.

  ‘You want loungers and tea?’ Sidibe says. ‘This is an adventure.’

  ‘The train departs in fifty-four seconds,’ Kobe said. We swing up onto the platform and hook suitpacks and helmet comms into the sockets. Kobe counts us down from ten. The platform quivers as the maglev powers up. We are floating on magnetic fields.

  ‘We should stand by for . . .’ Kobe says. And whoa! Acceleration throws me across the platform. I’m looking down between cars at speed and death. Sidibe grabs one arm, Kobe the other; together they haul me back. Jair snaps the safety harness to me.

  ‘Okay, new directive: everyone straps in,’ I say, but I can hear the shake in my voice and we all know I almost died there. The train accelerates hard. We brace to keep ourselves upright. I feel the webbing of my safety harness strain.

  ‘Six gees,’ Kobe hisses. ‘One Earth gravity.’

  And the acceleration ends. We all lurch the opposite direction. My stomach stays where it was.

  ‘We are travelling at one thousand kilometres per hour,’ Kobe says. His voice changes. ‘Oh. My stomach doesn’t feel so good.’ His voice breaks into a bubbling choking gasping.

  ‘Shit, he’s thrown up in his helmet,’ Sidibe says.

  ‘What do we do, what do we do?’ Jair shrieks, which is the thing not to do because everyone has heard about how you can suffocate on your own vom inside a helmet.

  ‘He’s under gravity so he won’t choke,’ Sidibe says. ‘But he is lip deep in vom. Kobe, listen, you have to open your collar seal, then the seals all the way down and let it drain. It’s all right, you won’t depressurise.’

  Kobe burbles. Jair takes his big plastic hand in neko-paw.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Kobe.’

  ‘The control is HUD sector 2,’ Sidibe says. ‘Blink up the suit interior seals menu. Got it?’

  Kobe grunts. Jair squeezes his hand, as much as a tight-weave bodyskin can squeeze armoured plastic.

  ‘Make it so, Kobe.’

  A different grunt.

  ‘So, you’ll be walking around in chuck, but that’s better than being up to the chin in it,’ Sidibe says.

  ‘How do you know this?’ I asked.

  ‘My ex-iz was a VTO track queen,’ Sidibe says.

  ‘I’m not feeling great now either,’ Jair says. Truth, I feel kind of vommy too. It’s like kids in colloq, one starts, everyone follows. I try not to think about the vom trickling down Kobe’s body, pooling in his boots. Looking out at the surface-scape, that’s what makes the gut lurches. Out there is a blinding blur. Crater? Building? Machine? Mountain? Blink blink blink blink blink. A train passes in a blink of light. I think I screamed. If I did, I hope it wasn’t on the common channel.

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ I say. ‘Don’t look at anything. You’ll get motion sick. Shut down your visor and play a game or watch a telenovela.’

  ‘I like looking,’ Sidibe says. ‘It’s exciting.’ She’s right at the edge of the platform, clinging to the rail with one hand, peering ahead up the train. Just looking at her my stomach goes again.

  ‘Well, you enjoy it,’ I say and polarise my helmet. I play Run the Jewels until my mind is ragged. I try to talk to Jair, but comms show he’s on a private channel with Kobe so I switch to old runs of Lansberg Crater. Even at a thousand kilometres per hour, two and a half thousand kays is a lot of telenovela.

  VTO trains run to the millisecond, so Kobe can count us down to deceleration. It’s still pretty savage. We brace, we put out our arms to stop us slamming into the bulkhead, we grit our teeth and plant our feet and wrestle gravity as the big train comes to a halt.

  We open our eyes, we depolarise our helmets.

  Meridian. Centre of the world.

  * * *

  So, Earth has these things called icebergs. They float on oceans and they’re big, but the thing is, because of density, the really big is under the surface. Our cities are like that. You see a s
olar array, comms towers, locks and docking bays, lots and lots of old machinery and piled regolith, the BALTRAN, the railroad lines, maybe the Moonloop. And you think, that’s impressive, but the real city, the big city, is under the surface.

  When it’s finished, Meridian will be the largest city on the moon. They’re building for three million people. We’re not even a tenth of that right now, but we’re always future-facing. So Laine tells me. Meridian says, Humans are on the moon to stay.

  Kobe explains to me why the name ‘Meridian.’ It’s where the equator and the zero north-south lines meet. The closest point to Earth. Our major spaceport. Because there’s all this surface junk and then there is the Moonloop tower. Two kilometres of girders and elevators and if you crank up the magnification on your HUD, you can see the transfer platform at the top. Crank up another notch and you make out the capsules. Tether orbits are known down to the millisecond so you can watch the grapple-end of a tether spin down from orbit, latch with the capsule, and snatch it up and away. At any time, hundreds of cargo capsules are flying between moon and Earth. Trade between worlds, like a weird, lovely dance. The Moonloop has never failed to catch an incoming capsule. Never. The tethers are too thin to be seen, even under full HUD magnification, so it looks as if the capsule suddenly decides to shoot up and forwards into the big black. It’s one of those things you could watch all day: the railcars offloading capsules, the cargoes going up and down the elevator and vanishing up into space.

  But that’s not what I’m staring at. Oh no. That evil blue Earth? Down south, she sits on the edge of the Shackleton, like something waiting to eat you. Up here at the centre of the world she’s at the top of the sky, right overhead. That sure tells you that you’ve come halfway around the world in a couple of hours, and that makes you feel big and small at the same time.

  ‘You want to get thrown up into orbit?’ Sidibe says. I realise I’m staring.