Inside the station everyone was led up into a bubble dome that poked out of the ground. From here they had a magnificent view of the Harbingers, and after the sterile monochromatic grays of the rest of the moon, the pastel patchwork on the land struck Valerie’s eye as an intense relief: broad swathes of mauve, burgundy, olive, yellow. She hummed, she drank it in.
But this was not what the locals were now excited to see; they were all getting prepared to witness a solar eclipse, and not only that, but the landing of a chunk of carbonaceous chondritic asteroid during this eclipse as well. The latter had been timed to happen during the former, apparently just to see how it would look.
The sun overhead already had a big bite taken out of it, easy to see after they put eclipse glasses on. That black arc biting it was the Earth, getting between the sun and the moon. The colors on the land that Valerie was so enjoying were getting easier to see as the usual blaze of sunlight was reduced.
Through the course of the next couple of hours, the rest of the sun was eaten. As the process reached its apotheosis, the lunar landscape around them darkened. Then the moment came when they could look up without their eclipse glasses, and see overhead a thin red ring in the sky, a glowing red tracery of a band, pulsing and shimmering. This apparently was Earth’s atmosphere, lit up and glowing like a corona around the black circle that was the Earth. The black circle was duskier than the starry black of space, and through binoculars and other scopes one could see what seemed to be stars dotting it; these were cities on Earth’s night side.
Eclipses were fairly common on the moon, Valerie and John were told. The red annular band surrounding Earth was sunlight bending through the atmosphere; this phenomenon explained why people on Earth looking up at a lunar eclipse saw the moon turn a dusky red.
And indeed the land around them was now that same color. When they finally looked down from the mesmerizing sight of the red ring in the sky, they saw that the land around them had turned both dark and distinctly red. It was somewhat like the color of a red sunset on Earth, but darker and more intense, a subtly shifting array of dim blackish reds, all coated by a dusty copper sheen. The previously pastel patches of rare earths were now shifted to purples and forest greens and rusty browns. But these were highlights in what was for the most part a dark red land, strong in both color and mood. It reminded Valerie of the last scene in a Parsifal she had seen in New York the year before, in which the chorus had waded across a stage knee-deep in blood. The Harbinger Mountains now reared like a bloody dragon spine out of an ocean of blood. Harbingers indeed! War—chaos—bloodshed—
“Okay, here it comes,” someone said, and then a big gray blob shot over the horizon, a brilliant blaze of light pouring out of its forward end against the direction of its movement. Faster than Valerie could take in a breath it slammed into the moon, and a great gout of fire flew back up toward the stars, extra bright in the eclipse darkness, arcing down lazily like fireworks.
The locals cheered. “Carbon!” the miner explained to Valerie and John. “They cut off a chunk of the asteroid we put into lunar orbit, and drop it to the surface with a mass driver that works like a retro-rocket. It doesn’t completely work, but it doesn’t have to—all you need is a collision that doesn’t vaporize the impactor, and leaves it mostly at the crash site. So it augers in at about the same speed as a jet on Earth, and boom. Carbon.”
“KREEPy,” John Semple remarked. The miners laughed and popped champagne bottles, and wandered the room toasting the sight of the crimson metallic sheens out there around them. Valerie shuddered and kept her bloody thoughts to herself. She took a glass and drank with the rest, clinked her glass with John Semple’s when he offered.
“Red moon!” he said. “Awesome!”
“Yes,” Valerie agreed coolly.
He grinned at her. He knew she disliked his uncultured shtick, so he was tweaking her by playing it even harder; she saw that, she saw that he saw that she saw it, and so on to infinity; and still he did it. It was very irritating.
When the sun came back they flew on to the north pole.
The north pole’s permanently sunlit area was slightly smaller than the corresponding district at the south pole, but its permanently shadowed craters held a bit more water than the south’s, so the two regions were about equivalent as suitable places to settle. The north pole was the United States’ home base on the moon, as it was for the Swiss, the European Union, Russia, South Africa, India, Iran, and Brazil. The Chinese staffed a consulate in the Brazilian station.
As their shuttle descended, Valerie looked out a window and saw the usual overlapping gray craters, with several rims marked by a number of low settlements. Her view from above, showing as it did such a mix of design styles, reminded her of an architectural charrette. The American base was the biggest, naturally, but it had not managed to claim the highest ground on the rim of Peary, occupied by the Brazilians six months before the Americans had arrived. The Brazilian base enjoyed ninety-seven percent constant sunlight, the Americans eighty-nine percent; the rest of the bases ranged between those two, with the Iranians, slightly farther south on the near side, at eighty-three percent.
As they descended, Valerie asked John Semple whom she should talk to in order to pursue her various inquiries.
He shrugged. “NSA has good intel on this place, and I like their analysts on station. I’ll introduce you to them. And to some other friends of mine, because this town is the place where you can get a sense of how life on the moon can change your priorities.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hopefully you’ll find out. There’s a couple internationals you need to meet.”
“Like who?”
“You’ll find out.”
“How?”
He smiled. He really was amused by her far too often. “It’s called intelligence for a reason.”
The social life between the north pole stations resembled the embassy circuit in Washington, DC. Every station hosted a mixer for the rest to attend. On the moon that wasn’t so simple on the logistical level, because although the stations clustered fairly close around the pole to catch as much sunlight as possible, one still had to get in spacesuit or rover and then walk or drive to the other bases, then get through locks or jetways and get out of spacesuits, always a hassle. To avoid spacesuits most people drove, even if it was only to go a hundred meters. And after all that they had to assemble in rooms not quite big enough to hold the entire polar population. In truth, compared to the Chinese complex sprawling around the south pole, Valerie found the whole scene pretty unimpressive.
John had suggested she attend the mixer at the Brazilian base, so she did. There all the tropical plants and colorful décor combined with the lunar gravity to create a little Carnaval thrill. The crush of people made everyone dance a little just to keep their balance. People collided, held each other upright, said hi to strangers who barged unintentionally into conversations, and in general acted like they were swimming around in chest-high water, slightly tipsy, drinks in hand.
At a certain point in the evening Valerie turned to the only woman near her and introduced herself. This woman turned out to be Russian, her English accented but articulate. Anna Kanina. Not Karenina. Very likely some kind of equivalent role to Valerie’s, but no way to be sure.