“Oh yeah, John mentioned that. Well, you should come out and see the free crater. Your person might even be out there.”
“Where’s that?”
“South of here.” She grinned at Valerie’s expression. “Worth a visit. Not supervised by any particular department, shall we say.”
“What about you, what department are you?”
“I’m the greenhouse manager.” Her look got sharper. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“Tired of what?”
“Of being so nosy and officious. You’re on the moon, dear. So lighten up! You only weigh about twenty pounds here. Tell you what, let’s go out there together and visit the freebies. You can look for your missing guy, and John seems to want you to see it.”
“He wants the president to know about it?”
“He wants you to know about it.”
“Me?”
“It’s a compliment. He must think you have some potential.”
The free crater, apparently otherwise unnamed, turned out to be a small, high-rimmed, geometrically perfect circle marring the southernmost stretch of the rim of Rozhdestvenskiy Crater, one of the big ones that occupied the near side, to the south of Peary Crater of course, which lay almost exactly on the pole. Valerie joined Ginger at the American rocket facility and was surprised to find John Semple already there. He smiled at her expression. “You think I would miss this?”
They lofted in a small rocket that the pilot called a hopper. Except for a sickeningly fast lift-off, it reminded Valerie of a helicopter. They flew in a helicopteristic way over the dark floor of Rozhdestvenskiy, which had a strange look to it, rumply and glistening. Valerie was told that this was a scrim of ice, that Rozhdestvenskiy was one of the biggest of the ice-floored craters; these craters’ interiors never saw the sunlight, and thus held most of the comet ice that had been deposited in them over the previous four billion years. Apparently their nameless crater, though much smaller, had higher walls and so was even deeper in ice than Rozhdestvenskiy. Like all the sunless polar craters, it was one of the coldest spots in the solar system, never deviating far from 410 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Its rim now featured a flat landing pad, and as they came down on it, they saw that the entire crater was domed with a transparent bubble of some sort.
“Wow,” Valerie said. “Who made this?”
No one answered. They landed vertically with a small bump. A tube snaked out to them and covered their hopper’s lock door, and after some clanking and hissing they walked through the tube into a building. Inside they were led by three guides through hallways toward the inner rim of the crater, emerging onto a platform that was set just under the crater-covering dome.
Apparently the entire space of the crater was aerated and heated, and brightly lit by mirrors and floodlights set all around the rim. From the platform’s edge they could look down and see that the space between the dome and the crater floor was occupied by scores of hanging platforms, maybe hundreds of them; also tall plinths were holding up houses or bare floors, all connected by catwalks and rope ladders, trapezes, and loops of netting, also pod dwellings of various sizes suspended from the dome, or from networks of lines extending from high on the rim; also floating balloons, it seemed, from which hung open-sided rooms. Also floating balls of green bamboo, which grew in all directions, like some kind of Escher trees. The whole thing was Escheresque. An aerial town; and people, tiny in the distance, were jumping from one place to the next, swinging like apes or monkeys.
Startled at the sight, Valerie laughed out loud.
“Try it,” their guides offered, and then leaped off the platform into space. They caught some netting down below, swung gracefully farther on. Valerie, deeply surprised, looked at John Semple.
“Whoa,” John said. She saw he was as surprised as she was, which meant that it had to be his first time here too. Suddenly she saw a chance to get a jump on him, so to speak, because they were going to jump eventually, that was clear, and by going first she might wipe that little smile off his face, make him stop thinking of her as a condescending stick-in-the-mud. Without further ado she ran off the platform into space, shooting far over the network of lines their guides had dropped to. After that she could only look below for something else to catch onto. A bolt of panic shot through her as she felt the one-sixth of a g curving her down and accelerating her; it was slow, but not that slow, and she was feeling quite desperate when she managed to grab a passing rope and redirect herself. This worked; she could do it, she was light and strong enough; and now her mother’s insistence that she do dance and gymnastics finally paid off, in that she was finding some reflexes rising abruptly out of her childhood. Grab and hold on, swing to the side! Tarzan!
After that worked for her a couple more times, she started doing her best to follow their guides, who were proving to be as nimble as orangutans. It was hard to stay near them, because they knew what they were doing. She needed to be careful, but it was not a place for being too careful, because you needed some momentum to swing rather than just hang there. A succession of moves taught her that she could grab and pull herself one-handed if she had to, because she just didn’t weigh very much. It was uncanny. So she swung down net to net, looking for lines and nets ahead and below, following the guides as best she could. It would have helped to know where they were going, but since she didn’t, she didn’t even try to catch them. She just kept them in sight. Above her John was swinging down after her, whooping at each catch, a giant grin on his face. He was going to pass her soon, so she took off again.
They passed platforms displaying furniture that gave them a surreal look: dining rooms in space, an immense ping-pong table in space, a more-than-king-sized bed in space, and so on. Like a doll’s house, or a museum, or an IKEA store, or a dream. As they swung toward midcrater they descended into a particularly crowded aerial neighborhood, consisting mostly of pod rooms hanging from lines; this must be a residential district. Around her people flew like trapeze artists. A flock of vividly blue-and-red lories winged by. The crater floor itself looked like a bamboo forest or an arboretum. As Valerie continued to swing down, growing curious about their ultimate destination, she saw that the trees below were suspended in balls of soil hanging over the crater floor, which was covered by some kind of clear layer, under what looked like a layer of netting. Ah good: a town with a safety net!
That made her bold to finish in style, and she followed their guides toward an open platform hung just above the trees. People already on the platform were waving them in, and their guides were now grabbing some of the lines holding the platform in place and letting themselves down hand over hand. If Valerie had had an umbrella she could have glided down onto them like Mary Poppins. Instead she swung down as best she could, trying to beat John Semple to the post, also composing her appearance for her arrival; she wanted to look like this method of locomotion was no big deal to her. Unfortunately she miscalculated at the last moment and missed the platform entirely, floating down past it into the mesh below, where she trampolined down and up until coming to a rest. They dropped a chair like a porch swing to her, and she sat in it; then they hauled her up and greeted her cheerfully. Among the people already there was Anna Kanina. She smiled when she saw Valerie’s expression and gave her a brief hug. “Welcome to an interesting place,” she said.
On the platform it was unexpectedly peaceful. Introductions were made all around, using first names only. The air was humid and cool, carried on a faint breeze. Above them, near the crater wall, puffball clouds were gathering for what might later be a shower.