Nilis sighed and pulled the hood of his robe over his head. “Oh, my eyes. Not another shower! I will never finish.”
Pirius looked up. One of those clouds hovered right over his head, its underside dark and threatening. And water was falling toward him, fat drops of it. By tracking back along their paths, Pirius could see the drops were falling out of the sky itself.
It was too much; the last of his courage failed him. He turned and ran for the controlled environment of the apartment.
Later that night Pirius was restless again.
The apartment was dark. But as he walked through the rooms, a soft light gathered at his feet and washed into the corners of the room. It didn’t dazzle his night-adapted eyes, but was bright enough for him to see where he was going.
A colder light came pouring in from outside, through the window: a silver light tinged with green.
He walked forward, not allowing himself to think about what he was doing. Maintenance bots followed him with silent, discreet efficiency.
The terrace door was closed. He pressed his hand to its surface, and it dilated.
There was no rain. It looked safe.
Pirius stepped forward. That cool light picked out the lines of the terrace, washed over Nilis’s tiny garden, and sparkled from the broad back of the river beyond. It was an eerie glow that seemed to transform an already strange world.
Deliberately, he looked up.
The source of the light was the Moon, of course, the famous Moon of Earth. It was a disc small enough to cover with his thumb. But it was a transformed Moon — and one of Earth’s legendary sights, whispered of even in the Barracks Ball of Arches Base.
The face of this patient companion had gazed down through all of man’s turbulent history. But the face was unchanged no more. Patches of gray-green were spreading across the pale highlands and the dusty maria, the green of Earth life rooting itself in the Moon’s ancient dust. That was why moonlight was no longer silver, but salted with a green photosynthetic glow.
And a great thread arced out of the center of the Moon’s face, and swept across the night sky toward the horizon. Pirius thought he could see a thickening in that graceful arc as it swept away from the Moon toward the Earth. The arc was the Bridge, an enclosed tunnel that joined the Moon to the Earth — or at least to an anchoring station a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. The Bridge had been built with alien technology captured millennia ago; now the important folk of the Interim Coalition of Governance could travel from Earth to Moon in security and Comfort, as easily as riding an elevator shaft.
The Bridge itself, defying orbital mechanics, was unstable, of course, constantly stressed by tides, and it had to be maintained with drive units and antigravity boxes studded along its length. The whole thing was utterly grandiose, hugely expensive, and quite without a practical purpose. Pirius laughed out loud at its folly and magnificence.
The next morning he tried to describe his feelings on first seeing the tethered Moon.
Nilis just smiled. “We travel to the stars, but we still must build our pyramids,” he said enigmatically.
Chapter 9
Two weeks after his return to Earth, Nilis set up a meeting with a man called the Minister of Economic Warfare.
As he prepared for this meeting, Nilis made no secret of his nervousness, nor how much was riding on the outcome. “I suppose you’d call Minister Gramm my champion. My nano-food innovation was fundamentally an economic benefit, you see, and so its deployment in the war effort came under the purview of Economic Warfare. Since then, Gramm has supported me in my various initiatives — hoping I will pull out another gem!” He sighed. “But it’s difficult, it’s always difficult. The Coalition is very ancient, and has its own way of doing things. Mavericks aren’t treated well. Without the shelter of Gramm’s patronage, I’m quite sure I would have been sidelined long ago…
And so on. Pirius and Torec listened patiently to all this, for Nilis in his blundering way seemed to appreciate having someone to talk to. But it was hard to be sympathetic. To Pirius Red the bureaucratic problems of working at the higher levels of the Interim Coalition of Governance were somewhat esoteric.
On the day of the meeting, to their dismay, Nilis suddenly decided to take both ensigns with him.
Before they set off, Nilis insisted on checking over their uniforms. It did Pirius no good to point out that the smart uniforms took care of themselves better than he or Torec ever could; Nilis nervously examined every seam, every centimeter of beading.
“Anyway,” said Pirius, “I don’t see what we can add to a meeting with a Minister.”
“Oh, you’re my secret weapon,” Nilis said, smiling edgily. “You are unruly defiance made flesh! Even when tangling with the Coalition, you must never underestimate the power of psychology, Ensign.”
Nilis insisted that they were going to walk to the Ministry building — walk across the Conurbation, an Earth city, in the open air. It was a dreadful prospect, but Pirius knew by now that it was no use arguing with the Commissary when he had made up his mind.
Still, Pirius and Torec hesitated on the doorstep of Nilis’s apartment. Pirius had acclimatized to the point where he could sit out in the garden with Nilis, even eat in the open air, but Torec was further behind. And after all, to venture out of doors without a sealed-up skinsuit violated every bit of conditioning drummed into them since before they could talk.
“But it has to be done,” Torec said grimly.
“It has to be done.” Hand in hand they took the first step, out into the light.
Nilis strode off along a road that arrowed between the hulking shoulders of blown-rock domes,
straight to the heart of the Conurbation. His robe flapped, the watery sun shone from his shaven head, and a small bot carrying his effects labored gamely to keep up. For all his insistence on checking the ensigns’ appearance, Nilis himself looked as if he had come straight from his rooftop garden; he wasn’t even wearing any shoes.
He didn’t look back. The ensigns had to hurry after him.
The surfaces of the domes were smooth, polished, some even worked with other kinds of stone. One massive dome, coated with a creamy rock, gleamed bright in the sunlight. “The Ministry of Supply,” Nilis called over his shoulder. “Supplied themselves with marble readily enough!”
There wasn’t much traffic, just a few smart cars. But there were pedestrians everywhere, even off the ground. Walkways connected the domes, snaking through the air at many levels, in casual defiance of gravity and logic. People hurried along the ways, chattering; others were accompanied by shells of glowing Virtual displays, as if they carried their own small worlds around with them. In some places the walkways would tip up steeply, or even run vertically, but the crowds bustled over them blithely. The people were so immersed in their own affairs they didn’t even notice the unfailing miracles of inertial engineering that enabled them to walk without effort straight up a wall.
Torec was muttering under her breath, some comforting nonsense. But she kept walking. She was doing well, and Pirius felt proud of her — not that he’d have dared to tell her so. You didn’t look up at the open sky, that was the key. You didn’t think about how exposed you were to the wild. You concentrated on the manufactured environment; you kept your gaze on the smooth surface of the road, or on the buildings around you.