Roger Allen: The Shattered Sphere

Today, a sophisticated system of four vertical-shuttle cars, each with twenty seats, handled the traffic.

A clock display by the car door reported that the car would descend in five minutes. The car had been empty when Marcia and Selby arrived, but two or three other people came in and sat down in the middle of the car. Good. It made it that much easier to avoid talking to Selby. In practical terms, yes, they could have set their comm systems to a private frequency and had a lovely chat. Normally Selby would have done just that, no matter if they were two meters or ten kilometers away. But for whatever reason, just now it seemed she actually did not want to speak.

Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton, Ph.D., was a Leftover, that being the rather unfortunate and semi-derogatory term for anyone from Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. Most of the Leftovers on the Moon had come to the Moon as tourists, and thus represented a more or less random cross-section of terrestrial affluence; well-to-do travelers from all walks of life. Most had adapted to their new circumstances reasonably well in the past few years.

Still, even the most stable and best-readjusted of them had been wounded pretty badly. To Marcia, and to most people who lived on the Moon, the Earth had been a pretty thing in the sky, a distant place that people and things came from and went to. Marcia had been to Earth, but she was not of the Earth. It was important to her, she mourned its passing as deeply as anyone, but it was not her home. To her, and for most folk on the Moon, it was more of an abstraction than a location, with the whole planet, all its myriad places and endless variety, lumped together under the name “Earth.”

But the Leftovers never spoke of themselves as being from Earth. They were from London, or Greenwich Village, or Cambridge or Fresno, from Kiev or Montevideo or Bangkok or Warsaw. Each of them had lost a different home, a different place, a different family. Everything they knew was gone, vanished. They had no way of knowing if their daughters or husbands or grandmothers lived. They knew that they themselves were lost to their loved ones. Their families might as well be dead, and, so far as their families were concerned, the Leftovers might as well be dead.

Marcia had only lost her husband, and she at least knew he had survived, where he had ended up. Her loss was trivial compared to Selby’s. How could she bear up under a loss of her world, of her everything?

Some Leftovers had remarried, started new lives, new families. Some lived their lives as if Earth was just about to return at any moment.

But all of them, all of them, had that look in their eyes. No matter how they dealt with it, or refused to deal with it, that pain, that wound, bright and clear, was just beneath the surface. Perhaps the only thing different about Selby was that she wore her wounds a bit more obviously—and pretended harder than most they weren’t there at all.

The departure clock counted down to zero, the door slid shut, and the car began its descent down the Rabbit Hole. It rolled downward, but only a few meters. Another airlock.

There was air pressure, if not air as such, on the other side of the lock. The Lunar Wheel was surrounded by a cloud of dismal green gas, a miasma of complex, foul-smelling compounds, residual gaseous waste products of the Wheel’s biochemistry. It had been a lot worse five years ago, when they had first drilled the shaft and punched through into the environment the Wheel had built for itself. But no airlock was perfect. A lot of the muck had leaked away into Dreyfuss Station since then, necessitating extra-heavy-duty air-scrubbers. Even they couldn’t get all of it. Dreyfuss Station would never smell good. Some further fraction of it seemed to have been reabsorbed by the Wheel, or else some undetected vent was allowing it to escape. In any event, the gas pressure inside the Wheel cavity had been dropping steadily for years.

The lock doors cycled, and the car moved downward again.

There were windows in the car, but not much outside the car to look at. The walls of the shaft and the support cables for the transit elevators were illuminated by the car’s running lights, turned a sickly green by the intervening gas. Usually you could spot a car headed toward the surface about halfway through the ride. A gleaming blob of light far below, moving upward at a most impressive speed, would rush past the downward car with a swoosh of noise and a noticeable jostling of the down car. It was disconcerting to a Conner like Marcia, quite unused to the effects of air pressure on vehicles. The other riders got up and went to the window to see the show.

But Marcia had seen it before. Right now, she was more interested in her traveling companion. Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton was an atypical Leftover. She had not come here as a tourist. She had come to the Moon to work. As an archaeologist. The only one on this world, though it might seem one more than was needed.

But archaeology was not as absurd as it sounded. Not quite, anyway. She was not, as some people assumed, some nut come to dig up the graves of imaginary ancient astronauts from Atlantis or from beyond the stars or something. People—regular, human people— had been on the Moon for centuries, and they had left more than a few interesting and important things behind. A good deal of her job was done just sitting at a comm panel, tooling through the historical data. She would dig through long-forgotten infobases, sift old records, go through long-forgotten datacubes and hardcopy records, finding the old details and key facts no one had seen in generations.

But she did fieldwork as well. Abandoned settlements, crashed vehicles, trash heaps and so on were scattered about the lunar surface. Selby had done some impressive digs under difficult circumstances, and had found enough evidence to rewrite a page or two of lunar history. Chancellor Daltry had talked about conversations with the dead at the memorial service. Selby had spent her working life talking with them.

From the archaeological point of view, the Lunar Wheel could be considered as one huge artifact—or one huge carcass, if you liked. Tyrone Vespasian, the director of Dreyfuss Station, had hired Selby his first day on the job—and, as he had told Marcia once or twice since, there had been few days since when he did not both congratulate himself on the choice and regret his decision. Selby was good at her job, there was no doubt about that. She had done any amount of first-class work. But she was also a royal pain in the neck.

The car began to slow as it came to the end of its journey. Smoothly, neatly, perfectly, it arrived at the base of the Rabbit Hole.

There was a slight pause as the car unsealed and matched air pressure with the outside. Marcia’s suit whirred and hummed, adjusting to the increase in pressure. The elevator door opened and a few tendrils of greenish smog drifted into the car. Marcia undid her seatbelt, sealed her helmet, and followed the other passengers out the door. She stepped out to stand on the corpse of the Lunar Wheel. The greenish tinge was not quite as noticeable down here. The techs had fooled with the lights to mask it somewhat. But no one was going be tricked into thinking there was normal air down here.

Selby was leading the way forward, down to the tunnel entrance, but Marcia hesitated for a moment. Beneath her feet was a continuous ribbon of material that wrapped clear around the Moon. She looked ahead, down a gaping tunnel that led off into the darkness. The surface she was standing on entered that tunnel like a road going though a mountain.

The tunnel itself was high and rounded, about twenty meters high at the center point, and about forty across. She turned around and looked the other way. There was the other end of the same damn tunnel, coming back to the same damn point, having wrapped clear around the Moon. She could set off down that tunnel and keep on walking until she was back where she started.