Филип Керр - The Second Angel

If man could do the same as one of these small creatures from whom, after all, he has evolved, think what might be achieved. With time seemingly suspended for an astronaut, space itself would grow smaller. Vast distances might easily be traveled. [95] Assuming man could travel at the speed of light, it mould take one hundred thousand years to visit the center of our own galaxy and then return to Earth. Why, even the remotest galaxies might be explored and new solar systems discovered, perhaps even colonized. Eventually, in some future diaspora, the seed of life, perhaps uniquely cultured on Earth, might be carried to every corner of the universe.

There are no miracles except the science that is not already known. And man is the measure of all things.

Moisture. It wasn’t just Mariner’s windows that were clouded with it. As well as sponging these, Ronica had to wipe the instruments free of great globs of water that shimmered in the zero gravity of the cabin like uncut diamonds. A university degree in blood banking, with a major in cryoprecipitation technology, and this was what she was reduced to doing: cleaning windows. Not that she really minded. Until they had gained entry to the vault in the First National and removed several thousand of the deep-frozen components held there, there would be little for her to do. Only after samples of the cryoprecipitate had been thawed could she inspect the condition of the blood, to check for possible bacterial contamination [96] Highly unlikely in the Moon’s zero atmosphere. This mas one of the reasons why most blood banks mere located in space in the first place. It wasn’t just for reasons of high security. that might produce abnormal color in the red cells, or plasma. Once she had ensured platelet viability she could undertake the phlebotomy of those crew members who were carrying the P2 virus, which effectively meant everyone except herself and Dallas. So she wiped the moisture from their collective exhalations feeling something close to satisfaction that she was making herself useful.

Prevezer pushed himself off the ceiling like a great bat and flew toward her, enjoying the sensation of weightlessness. Being weightless gave Prevezer a tremendous sense of liberation, such as an angel might have enjoyed back in heaven after a prolonged period on Earth. On Earth, Prevezer had always felt heavy, even a little overweight. But in space, soaring, hovering, levitating, he felt just a little like a god.

‘I think that’s the last time you’ll have to do that, Roni,’ he predicted.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘What I meant was that I fixed the environmental control system. On a ship as old as this one, the fluids that supply the ECS tend to become stratified in zero g. So you have to stir the contents now and again. Like a cake mix. That’s what the problem was.’ He paused, watching Ronica chase down a small floating sphere of water with the muzzle of her vacuum cleaner. ‘You just reverse the fans on the air purifiers a couple of times to stir up the liquid cylinders.’

‘Mmm-hmm?’

‘Hey, I’m sorry about what happened earlier on,’ he said. ‘I was kind of rude back there.’

‘Forget it, Prev,’ she said.

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When we get to our hotel at TB, are you planning to share a room with anyone?’

‘As a matter of fact, I’m sharing with Dallas.’

Prevezer nodded. ‘Is that just cover?’ he asked. ‘Or are you lovers?’

‘Lovers?’ Ronica’s smile broadened.

‘Because if everything works out, I’m going to be cured soon, and that’ll mean I’m just as healthy as you. If you know what I’m saying.’

It was true that she and Dallas were drawn to each other, and not just because they had in common their good health. Although she was looking forward to being alone with him, she would probably have shared a room with him in any case. Probably slept with him too. Like most women of her age and background, Ronica’s major concern was that the guy was healthy. Which would automatically have excluded Prevezer.

‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Prev. I guess you could say that Dallas and I are together, although I wouldn’t exactly say that love comes into it. I always think love is a little like cosmology. There’s a Big Bang, a lot of heat, followed by a gradual drifting apart, and a cooling off. Which means that a lover is pretty much the same as any cosmologist. Just some poor misguided individual looking to find some significance in the smallest of things and asking a lot of foolish questions that can never really be answered. There’s no utility in love, Prev. It’ll waste your life and keep you from all that’s profitable in the world. Love’s just part of the great cosmic joke. It’s ironic physics. Just like final theories. Just like God.’

Tourism was the biggest industry on the Moon. Over one hundred thousand people went there every year on vacations costing an average of two hundred thousand dollars per person. Mostly the tourists traveled to the Moon for sex or gambling, [97] In one-sixth of the gravity existing on Earth, just about the only physical activity that is enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly. Perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times. However, the Moon’s one-sixth gravity means that most of the types of gambling available on Earth cannot be played here. Playing cards are almost impossible to deal, craps dice won’t roll properly, and roulette wheel balls never drop down from the rim. Today the only legalized form of gambling on the Moon is pachinko. Pachinko is a machine game, for one player, in which you snap an eleven-millimeter steel ball on an upright nail-driven panel and try to put the ball into certain holes. Putting the ball in certain holes gains the player several balls in return. These can later be exchanged for money. Pachinko was developed in Chicago but became particularly popular in japan, which now supplies most of the current pachinko technology. The Moon’s largest pachinko parlor — larger than any parlor on Earth — generates over two hundred fifty million dollars’ worth of income per annum. although an increasing number of people went for outdoor activities such as hiking and mountaineering — backpacking through Schröter’s Valley or climbing Mount Doerfel. As well as the tourists there are the astronomers, [98] The astronomical world’s largest reflector telescope, the three-hundred-inch Hawking telescope, is located at the Censorinus Space Observatory, just a few miles from TB. the mining engineers, the ecosystems engineers, [99] The Moon has the largest solar-generating power plant: The Theophihis Crater, close to the Moon’s equator, contains over ten thousand photovoltaic cells, each of which is ten square meters in size. and meteorologists, [100] The Moon has the largest sunspot study facility on either world. This is of key importance to predictions of Earth’s weather. not to mention all the hotel workers, tour guides, charter pilots, pachinko engineers, and, of course, prostitutes. [101] At the time of writing, there are over five thousand prostitutes licensed to work on the Moon.

The largest of TB’s hotels, the Galileo, with over fifteen hundred rooms, was also the best and the most expensive. Designed by the celebrated architect Masumara Shokai — he of the Buckingham Palace Dome, among other twenty-first-century architectural icons — the Galileo consisted of two vertical wings. The wing that faced TB was made of armor-plated glass and, to complement the hotel’s location on the Sea of Tranquillity, was shaped like the billowing sail on an enormous oceangoing yacht. The rectangular mountain-facing wing served as a foil for this dramatic curve of glass. Between these two was a breathtaking, full-height atrium lobby finished in smart-nanomolecular materials — French limestone, Italian marble, Indian onyx, and acres of English sycamore — that had been created on the Moon before being fitted by human craftsmen. Indeed, it was the proud boast of the hotel’s owners that the builders had eschewed the use of any robotic workers in the Galileo’s construction. The impressive, earth-toned lobby was dominated by an enormous kinetic sculpture celebrating Galileo’s famous demonstration of the Law of Uniform Acceleration for falling bodies, which had disproved the Aristotelian contention that bodies of different weights fall at different speeds. Legend has it that in 1604, Galileo dropped lead weights of different sizes from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. [102] Sadly, the famous campanile, built in 1185, collapsed in 2047, causing the death of ninety-three Pisan tourists. More likely, though, the demonstration probably took place in Padua, where Galileo rolled weights down a smooth slope to make his demonstration. But sometimes people prefer a good story to a dull fact, and the builders of the hotel, and the German sculptor they commissioned, Jasper Fotze, were certainly no exception. So it was that every fifteen minutes a large ostrich feather, a lead weight, a paper ball, a shuttlecock, a balloon, and a basketball would be lifted automatically to the top of a series of plastic tubes, which were the height of the atrium, and released, all hitting the ground floor at exactly the same time.