Элизабет Мун - Moon Flights

A resounding crash came from the kitchen passage; Krystal stormed back into the ballroom. “It’s not fair, ” she said. “Why should I have to do all the work? I killed two pirates.”

“Shut up, Krystal,” Mirabel said, in chorus with others.

Murray and Steve were down under the floor, digging out last year’s leftover flyers for the festival when the speaker clicked. I slammed my hand on the off button and continued what I was doing, calculating how many porta-potties we could afford to hire from Simmons Sewer Service. Our Ecosystems Chief Engineer insists that he can’t let the festival crap (the technical term in this colony) run through the usual pipes, just in case some idiot visitor eats lead or mercury or some other heavy metal that would poison the weedbeds. So every year we have this problem. You just can’t run a festival without porta-potties, and with the gravity gradient in LaPorte-Centro-501, that means three separate sets of them, sexed. We never have enough, and we always have complaints, chiefly from uptowners near the core, who go into jittering fits if some stranger in a hotsuit knocks on their door and wants to use the inside can. I will admit, low-grav mistakes are the hardest to clean up, but still you’d think they’d understand why the festival is so important. If LaPorte-Centro-501 continues to grow, we all benefit.

Murray crawled out with the dance flyers. All we had to do was change the year and the day; we were having the Jinnits again for lead band, and Dairy and the Creamers for backup. Some people complain about that, but Murray’s old buddy Conway is the keyboard man for Jinnits, and they’ll come here without a guarantee. We don’t get soaked if a solar flare keeps everyone home. So far that’s saved us a bit more than I’d like to confess, when we’re talking here about a successful annual festival that draws crowds from all over the Belt. And Dairy’s local; the Creamers play at Hotshaw’s all year ’round, and everyone likes them well enough. The flyers looked pretty good; I nodded and Murray racked them into the correction bracket and went to work. Steve was still out of sight, but I could hear him scrunching around in the insulation.

That’s when the speaker clicked on again, and I didn’t get my hand on the off button in time. “Radio relay message,” said the voice, and I sighed. Nobody I wanted to talk to was going to be calling me for another week. I punched for a hard copy, rather than voice, and watched the little strip of paper come zipping out the groove. It’s not really paper, of course—paper is precious—but it acts like paper. You can write on it. I tore it off and crammed it into a pocket without looking at it. That was a mistake.

The parade flyers Steve had gone after were all unusable; something had leaked and frozen into them. We had the old master, and we refilled the crawl space with insulation, then set up the master for a print run. I crossed my fingers, assumed five percent more attendance than last year, and ordered another set of porta-potties. Next up were the day’s parade and display entries.

I don’t want to overdo this about how hard it is to do things in the colonies—that’s not my point—but a simple little annual festival like you’d run with maybe fifteen or twenty volunteers back on a planet is not so simple on the inside of a hollow ball with a gravity gradient from zip to norm. Take parades. LaPorte-Centro-501 was built in two helices, like most of the cored colonies. The only way to route a parade all through town is rim to core to rim again in the other helix pattern, and that means everything has to go through all the gravity gradients twice. Ever try to design a float for variable gravity, not to mention spin? We keep the kiddy parades in near-normal gravity, all around the base of Alpha Helix one year, and Beta the next, and run the main parade from 0.25 to 0.25 through the core. That way the floats really float, but they don’t have to contend with heavy stress.

Right now the parade entries were looking a bit thin. Central Belt Mining & Exploration would have a float: they always did. Usually it was something “pioneering,” an adventure still-life. FARCOM would bring a communications satellite mounted on a robotic flying horse (they alternated that one and a float with two robots using tin cans and a string). Holey Bey, our nearest neighbor (and a nasty neighbor, for that matter), was sending two floats, they said. I scowled at that, and wondered if they were going to try to smuggle in another gang of ruffians. Four years ago they’d disrupted our parade with screaming youths in blood-red hotsuits who made off with parts of other people’s floats. Almost cost us the whole profit of the festival. (I know, you’ve seen Holey Bey’s brochures in the colonial offices: that fake beach, with luscious bathing beauties backed by handsome neo-Moorish arches. Forget it. Their chief engineer was a drunken incompetent who couldn’t hook one helix with another, their plumbing leaks, and they’re infested with mammalian vermin. Even dogs. I know; I took our float over there for “Back to Bey Days” and it was disgusting.)

Anyway, we had to have at least sixty entries to make the main parade work. Sixty full-size entries. No matter how you handle core, it’s big, and a parade can look pretty damn puny out there, drifting across the very-low-gee gap. Back on Earth you get horse freaks to fill in the gaps with horses (at least I suppose that’s why they’re in parades, to fill up the gaps: they have that advantage of turning sideways to take up less room, or lengthways to take up more). But of course we don’t have horses on LaPorte-Centro-501, and even Holey Bey wouldn’t harbor big dirty mammals like that. I called up the parade file, added today’s entries, and muttered. Thirty-nine, and five of those were small marching groups. I looked at the schedule for our float to see who might come.

That’s how it works, of course. We send our float (“Miss LaPorte-Centro-501 and her Court… Rolling Along to Wheel Days”) to other colonies’ festivals, and they send theirs to us. Back to Bey Days. Rockham Cherry Festival (they don’t have cherries, but it sounds good). Pioneer Days (two a year, one at each end of the settlement, and very different: Vladimir Korsygyn-233 is a Soviet colony). It’s about like you’d see on Earth: every colony has its festival, and everybody sends a float. There are differences, to be sure. We don’t actually send our float everywhere; the shipping fees would break us. We send a holo of the new design each year and hire a construct crew in whatever colony it is. Miss LaPorte-Centro-501 and her Court do travel to the nearer communities; beyond that we audition and pay standard rates to local talent.

You may wonder why our festival is “Wheel Days.” I don’t want to grab credit from anyone, but actually that was my idea. The whole Belt, it’s like a big wheel, and the Settlement like a smaller wheel riding its rim. Our conviction is that LaPorte-Centro-501 will grow into its motto: “The Hub of the Industrial Center of the Solar System.” You don’t need to laugh… it could happen. Something will be the hub, and it might as well be us. We have talent, room to grow, resources, skilled labor, willingness to work… and most of all, we have vision.

That’s how come we have Wheel Days, and nobody’s laughed for the last nine years. We have the most successful annual festival for a community our size in the Settlement. And that’s a big job. Everyone has two major assignments and half a dozen little ones, and of course we’re all still employed, though some of our employers cut us some slack now and then. As for me, being junior vice president of Mutual Savings & Loan, I could spend pretty much my whole time on it, which is good because it took that and more. If you aren’t a Chamber member, wherever you are, then you can’t understand just how frantic those last weeks are. No matter how you plan all year (and if you don’t plan all year, you don’t have a good festival) something always comes unglued. Several somethings.