"You been waiting long?" I asked.
"Couple hours," Brenda said.
She was leaning on the side of her rental rover, which she'd driven all the way from a suburb of King City, the nearest place you could rent one. I apologized for being so late, told her of the nightmare in the train, how I wished I'd come with her instead of "saving time" by tubing out.
"Don't worry about it," she said. "I like it out here."
I could already tell that, mostly by looking at her suit. It was a good one, had no rental logo on it, and though in perfect shape, showed signs of use it couldn't have acquired unless she regularly spent time in it. Also by the easy way she stood and moved in it, something most Lunarians never get enough suit time to achieve.
The rover was a good one, too. It was a pick-up model, two seats side by side, a flat bed in back where I tossed my hamper along with her much bigger pile of things. They have a wide wheelbase to compensate for being so top-heavy with the big solar panel above, which swings to constantly present itself to the sun. The sun being almost at the horizon just then, the vehicle was at its most awkward, with the panel hanging out to the right side, perpendicular to the ground. I had to crawl over Brenda's seat to get to mine because the panel blocked the door.
"I forget," I said, as I settled myself in the open seat. "Will we be going into the sun to get there?"
"Nope. South for a while, then we'll have the sun at our backs."
"Good." I hated riding behind the panel. It's not that I didn't trust the autopilot; I just liked to see where I was going.
She told the rover to giddyup, and it did, right along the broad, smooth highway. Which is why we'd chosen Dionysius Station in the first place, because it's right on one of the scarce surface roads on Luna, which is not a place where the wheeled vehicle was ever a primary mode of transport. People move on elevators, escalators, beltways, maglev/tube trains, the occasional hoverbus. Goods go by the same ways, plus pneumomail tubes, linac free-trajectory, and rocket. Recently there'd been something of a fad in wheeled surface rovers, two- and four-wheeled, but they were all-terrain and quite rugged, no roads needed.
The road we were on was a relic from a mining operation abandoned before I was born. From time to time we passed the derelict hulks of ore carriers at the side of the road, mammoth things, not looking much different from the day they'd been stripped and left there. Some economic vagary of the time had made it a better idea to actually smooth out a road surface for them. Then the road had been used for another half century as the conduit between King City and its primary dumping ground. It was still glass-smooth, and quite a novel way to travel.
"This sucker moves right along, doesn't it?" I said.
"It'll reach three hundred kay on the straightaways," Brenda said. "But it's gotta slow way down for the curves, especially ones to the left." That was because the rover's center of gravity was at its worst at sunrise and sunset, with the big panel canted on its side, she explained. Also, the banking of the road was not great, and since we were going to be staying out after dark, she'd had to carry ten batteries, which added a lot to our inertia and could easily make us skid off the road, since the tire traction wasn't as much as she'd prefer. She told me all this with the air of someone who'd done this many times before, someone who knew her machine. I wondered if she could drive it.
I got my answer when we turned off the road, and she asked if I minded. Actually, I did-we're not used to putting our lives in other people's hands, only into the hands of machines-but I said I didn't. And I needn't have worried. She drove with a sure hand, never did anything stupid, never overcontrolled. We took off across the plains toward the rising rim of Delambre, just becoming visible over the horizon.
When we reached the bottom of the slope a Black Maria landed in front of us, blue lights flashing. A cop got out and came over to us. He must have been bored, since he could have used his radio, or simply interrogated our computer.
"You're entering a restricted area, ma'am," he said.
Brenda showed him the pass Liz had given her and he examined it, then her.
"Didn't I see you on the tube?" he asked, and she said he might have, and he said sure, you were on the such-and-such show, now how about that? He said he'd loved it and she said aw, shucks, and by the time he finally let us go he'd been flirting so outrageously I'm convinced we hadn't needed the pass at all. He actually asked for her autograph, and she actually gave it.
"I thought he was going to ask for your phone code," I said, when he'd finally lifted off.
"I thought I was going to give it to him," she said, and grinned at me. "I keep thinking I ought to give guys a try."
"You could do better than that."
"Not since you Changed." She jammed in the throttle and we sprayed dust behind us as we charged up the rounded rim of the crater.
Delambre isn't a huge crater like Clavius or Pythagoras or any number of celestial bullet holes on the farside, but it's big enough. When you're standing on the rim you can't see the other side. That's plenty big for me.
Still, it would look just like a hundred others except for one thing: the junkyard.
We re-cycle a lot of things on Luna. We have to; our own natural resources are fairly meager. But we're still a civilization driven by a market economy. Sometimes cheap and plentiful power and the low cost of boosting bulk raw materials in slow orbits combine to make it just too damn much trouble and not cost-effective to sort through and re-process a lot of things. Fortunes have been lost when a bulk carrier arrives with X million tonnes of Whoosisite from the mines on Io, having been in secret transit for thirty years disguised and listed as an Oort comet. Suddenly the bottom falls out of the market for Whoosisite, and before you know it you can't give the stuff away and it's being carted out to Delambre by the hundred-tonne bucketload. To that add the twenty-thousand-year half-life radioactives in drums guaranteed to last five centuries. Don't forget to throw in obsolete machines, some cannibalized for this or that, others still in working order but hopelessly slow and not worth taking apart. Abandon all that stuff out there, and salt in that ceramic horror you brought home to Mom from school when you were eight, that stack of holos you kept for seventy years and can't even remember who's in them, plus similar treasures from millions of other people. Top it with all the things you can't find a use for from every sewage outflow in Luna, mixed with just enough water so it'll flow through a pipe. Bake on high for fourteen days, freeze for fourteen more; continue doing that for two hundred years, adding more ingredients to taste, and you've created the vista that met us from the lip of Delambre.
The crater's not actually full, it just looks that way from the west rim.
"Over there," Brenda said. "That's where I said I'd meet Liz."
I saw a speck on the horizon, also sitting on the rim.
"How about letting me drive?" I asked.
"You can drive?" It wasn't an unreasonable question; most Lunarians can't.
"In my wild youth, I drove the Equatorial Race. Eleven thousand klicks, very little of it level." No point in adding I'd blown the transmission a quarter of the way through.
"And I was lecturing you on how to handle a rover. Why don't you ever shut me up, Hildy?"
"Then I'd lose half of my amusing stories."
I switched the controls over to the British side of the car and took off. It had been many years since I'd driven. It was lots of fun. The rover had a good suspension; I only left the ground two or three times, and the gyros kept us from turning over. When I saw her gripping the dash I throttled back.
"You'd never make a race driver. This is smooth."
"I never wanted to be a race driver. Or a corpse."