Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“The Chinese Space Agency and the Scientific Research Steering Committee.”

“ Waa sai ! One servant two masters! No wonder it’s such a mess up there. Please create a new file for this incident. Also search for any recordings of this meeting between Chang and Fredericks, during or after its occurrence. Also search for the other phone, the one entangled with this one now on the Peaks of Eternal Light.”

“Will do.”

Fred followed his two minders to a narrow room like a subway station, where something like a subway car filled much of the space. They got on a car and the train soon left the spaceport. When it hissed to a stop fifteen minutes later, its occupants tiptoed out into a hall with a long window wall, through which sunlight blazed horizontally, pinning their black shadows to the side of the car. Low buildings studded the Peak of Eternal Light outside the window, but it was hard to see them through the glare. What Fred could see of the surrounding landscape was a harsh mix of black and white, a chiaroscuro that he was quickly coming to think of as lunar normal. The horizon was very uneven and strangely nearby—hard to be sure how near, given the intense light and the clarity, but it looked to be only a few miles. Before he could fully take it in, Fred was led around a corner and down a hall, to a set of windows that overlooked the crater’s interior.

This particular Peak of Eternal Light overlooked a corresponding pit of eternal darkness: this was the famous Shackleton Crater. The sun never shone on this crater floor, nor its interior wall. Once his eyes adjusted, he could see the steep interior wall of the crater curving away to left and right, just visible in a gloom of dark grays. Stacked horizontal lines of lit windows were inlaid into the dark curve below, looking as if an elongated ocean liner had been bent in a curve and then injected into the crater wall; these lit windows cast a faint glow across the crater floor, which gleamed a little, being covered with dusty water ice. The crater was big enough that its far wall was not visible; as the crater wall below him curved away to left and right, it soon disappeared under the horizon. Very murky, this gray-on-black world.

The Hotel Star, Fred was told by one of his guides, was behind one of the lines of windows down there, right next to the American consulate. “Lead on I follow,” he said gamely, and staggered behind the graceful pair to an escalator, where he was very happy to clutch the handrail and hold fast, yet still be making progress. Escalators were great. This one reminded him of the London Underground, moving downward endlessly. When they had descended to a level labeled Floor Six, he got off and fell, struggled to his feet and followed his minders gingerly around the broad curve of hallway to the glass hotel doors, feeling a little seasick, a little headachy, a little dizzy. Lunar g did not feel better than the weightlessness of space, in fact it seemed to him distinctly worse.

The Hotel Star entry was on the inside curve of a curving hallway. His room proved to be just bigger than his bed. His guides left him, promising he would get a wake-up call for breakfast.

He sat on the bed; it was like sitting on a trampoline. He could leap right into the ceiling if he wanted. Then, after a bell tinged three times, he felt vaguely that things were getting heavier. Indeed they were; his bedroom was on a floor of the hotel that was part of a centrifuge ring. After a minute or two, during which the room seemed to be tilting, he found himself being pressed down into the bed with a very familiar, homey pressure: one g. He had been told that it was best to sleep in Terran gravity whenever you could, to minimize the time spent in lunar g. For a trip as short as Fred’s this regime was not mandatory, but it was still recommended, and when the option had been described to him he had decided to take it. Now he snuggled down into the mattress thankfully, his dizziness receding. Things felt right; they felt like home. It was such a relief that he quickly fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke he didn’t know where he was, and jerked and found himself flying off his bed, at which point it came back to him: moon! The centrifuge had obviously been turned off, which was probably what had woken him. He was still lofting in the air over the bed as all this came to him; he twisted, landed on his face. Then he got up unsteadily and saw there was an hour to go before he was to meet his fellow passenger Ta Shu for breakfast. All was well.

As he went through his routine in the bathroom he looked up Ta Shu online, which meant not Earth’s data cloud but rather some kind of local internet. That was still more than enough to give him an introduction to the elderly Chinese man.

Ta Shu: poet, geomancer, feng shui expert, producer and host of a popular travel show on one of CCTV’s cloud platforms. He had written and published poetry from early childhood on, beginning with big painted calligraphic poster poems that included painting in the old styles, but from a child’s perspective. A torrent of poems had proceeded to pour out of him for most of his life after that, until suddenly stopping after a trip to Antarctica; accounts differed as to what had happened to him down there. Subsequently he had become a travel host and ex-poet. It was rumored that he still wrote as much poetry as ever, but not for publication. Through the decades of his travel show he had visited 230 different countries, all seven seas, the North and South Poles, and the top of Mount Everest, which he had reached by balloon, taking advantage of a nearly windless day to drift over the top and step off the gondola’s portico onto it. And now he was on the moon.

Fred wobbled down a broad staircase to the hotel’s dining hall. Ta Shu was there at a table, reading the screen embedded in it and nibbling from a plate piled with Fred didn’t know what. He looked up. “Good breakfast time.” Again his smile struck Fred as unusually sweet and friendly.

“Thanks,” Fred said, and lofted down onto his chair, hitting the mark pretty well. “How did you sleep?”

Ta Shu waggled a hand. “I don’t sleep much. Dreamed I was floating on a lake. When I woke, I wondered what it feels like to swim here. I wonder if they have swimming pools, I must look into that. How about you?”

“I slept well,” Fred said. He looked at the food buffet, which filled one short bar. “My room spun me to one g, but when the centrifuge stopped and I got up, I felt kind of dizzy.”

“Maybe some breakfast will help center you.”

Fred felt both hungry and repelled by food. He shot up and teetered to the food bar, grabbing it to stabilize himself. The usual foods, thank God, as well as a lot of bowls of unidentifiable fruits and mushes. Fred had very definite food preferences. He filled a tiny bowl with yoghurt—hopefully yoghurt—and sprinkled some seeds and grains and raisins on it, wondering if these foods had been grown on the moon or flown up from Earth. Most of it must have been flown up. Balancing his bowl and staggering back to Ta Shu was almost too much for him, but he drifted onto his chair without spilling anything.

“Are you here to do some feng shui?” he asked Ta Shu before starting to eat. Turned out he was hungry after all.

“Yes. Also to record some episodes for my travel show. A trip to the moon! It’s hard to believe we’re here.”

“True. Although it feels so weird, it has to be somewhere.”

Again the beautiful smile. “Yes, we are certainly somewhere. My feng shui can confirm that.”

“So, feng shui on the moon?”

“Yes. Feng shui means ‘wind and water,’ so it should be interesting!”