She decided to take him into her confidence. “I don’t know anything about the people here. How they live, the way they think. A tour might help me find my feet.”
He nodded, apparently approving. “A little recon before the battle never hurts.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that …” She begged fifteen minutes to unpack and freshen up.
***************
______
They walked briskly around the perimeter of the dome.
The air was laden with an odd smell, like gunpowder, or burning leaves. That was Moon dust, Bud said, making the most of its first chance in a billion years to burn in oxygen. The architecture was simple and functional, in places decorated by amateur artwork, much of it dominated by contrasts between lunar gray and the pink or green of Earth life.
Clavius’s three domes were called Artemis, Selene, and Hecate.
“Greek names?”
“To the Greeks the Moon was a trinity: Artemis for the waxing Moon, Selene for full, and Hecate for waning. This dome, which contains most of our living areas, is Hecate. Since it spends half its time in twilight that seemed an appropriate choice.”
As well as accommodation for two hundred people, Hecate contained life support and recycling systems, a small hospital, training and exercise rooms, and even a theater, an open arena sculpted from what Bud assured her was a natural lunar crater. “Just amateur dramatics. But very popular, as you can imagine. Ballet goes down well.”
She stared at his shaven head. “Ballet?”
“I know, I know. Not what you’d expect from the Air Force. But you really need to see an entrechat performed in lunar gravity.” He eyed her. “Siobhan, you might think we’re just living in a hole in the ground. But this is a different world, down to the very pull of it on your bones. People are changed by it. Especially the kids. You’ll see, if you have time.”
“I hope I will.”
They passed through a low, opaque-walled tunnel to the dome called Selene. This dome was much more open than Hecate, and most of its roof was transparent, so that sunlight streamed in. And here, in long beds, green things grew: Siobhan recognized cress, cabbages, carrots, peas, even potatoes. But these plants were growing in liquid. The beds were interconnected by tubing, and there was a steady hum of fans and pumps, a hiss of humidifiers. It was like a huge, low greenhouse, Siobhan thought, the illusion spoiled only by the blackness of the sky above, and the sheen of liquid where soil should have been. But many of the beds were empty, cleaned out.
“So you’re hydroponic farmers,” she said.
“Yeah. And we’re all vegetarians up here. It will be a long time before you’ll find a pig or cow or chicken on the Moon. Umm, I wouldn’t dip my finger into the beds.”
“You wouldn’t?”
He pointed to tomato plants. “Those are growing out of nearly pure urine. And those pea plants are floating in concentrated excrement. Pretty much all we do is scent it. Of course most of these crops are GMOs.” Genetically modified organisms. “The Russians have done a lot of work in this area, developing plants that can close the recycling loops as economically as possible. And the plants need to be adapted for the peculiar conditions here: the low gravity, pressure and temperature sensitivity, radiation levels.” As he spoke of agricultural matters his voice took on a stronger accent; she thought it sounded like Iowa, the voice of a farm boy a long way from home.
She gazed at the innocent-looking plants. “I imagine some people are squeamish.”
“You get over it,” Bud said. “If not, you ship out. And anyhow, it’s better than the early days when we grew nothing but algae. Even I had trouble chomping on a bright blue burger. Of course we’re vulnerable to solar events in here.”
On June 9, partly thanks to Eugene Mangle’s warnings, the lunar colonists had been able to dive into their storm shelters and ride out the worst of it. Spacecraft and other systems had taken a battering, but not a single human life had been lost away from planet Earth. These empty hydroponic beds, however, showed that the living things that had accompanied humans on their first hesitant steps away from Earth had not been so lucky.
They walked on.
The third dome, Artemis, was given over to industry.
Bud, with parental pride, showed her a bank of transformers. “Power from the sun,” he said. “Free, plentiful, and not a cloud in the sky.”
“I guess the downside is two weeks of darkness in every month.”
“Sure. Right now we depend on storage cells. But we’re looking to establish major power farms at the poles, where you get sunlight most of the month; then we’ll only need a fraction of our current storage capacity.”
He walked her around a plant of primitive, though lightweight-looking, chemical processing equipment. “Resources from the Moon,” he said. “We take oxygen from ilmenite, a mineral you find in mare basalts. Just scoop it up, crush it, and heat it. We’re learning to make glass from the same stuff. We can also extract aluminum from plagioclase, which is a kind of feldspar you find in the highlands.”
He outlined future plans. The plant she saw here was actually pilot gear, meant to establish industrial techniques in lunar conditions. The operational plants would be huge robot factories out in the hard vacuum of the surface. Aluminum was the big dream: the Sling, the big electromagnetic launching rail to be powered by sunlight, was being constructed almost entirely of lunar aluminum.
Bud dreamed of the day when lunar resources, suitably processed, would be slingshot to construction projects in Earth orbit, or even the home world itself. “I would hope to see the Moon start to punch its weight in trade, and become part of a unified and prosperous Earth—Moon economic system. And all the time, of course, we’re beginning to learn how to live off the land away from Earth, lessons we can apply to Mars, the asteroids—hell, anywhere else we choose to live.
“But we’ve a long way to go. Conditions are different here—the vacuum, the dust, the radiation, the low gravity that plays hell with convection processes and such. We’re having to reinvent centuries-old techniques from scratch.” But Bud sounded as if he relished the challenge. Siobhan saw Moon dirt crusted under his fingernails; this was a man who got stuck in.
He walked her back to Hecate, the accommodation dome.
Bud said, “Of the two-hundred-plus people on the Moon, about ten percent are support staff, including the likes of yours truly. The rest are technicians, technologists, biologists, with forty percent devoted to pure science, including your pals at the South Pole. Oh, and about a dozen kids, by the way. We’re multidisciplinary, multinational, multiethnic, multi-you-name-it.
“Of course the Moon has always been culturally complex, even before humans got here. Christopher Clavius was a contemporary of Galileo, but he was actually a Jesuit. He thought the Moon was a smooth sphere. Ironic that one of the Moon’s biggest craters was named for him! In my own tradition we are the guardians of the crescent Moon, as we say. Living on the Moon isn’t a problem for me—Mecca is easy to find—but Ramadan is timed to the phases of the Moon, and that’s a little more tricky …”
Siobhan did a double take. “Wait. Your tradition?”
He smiled, evidently used to the reaction. “Islam has reached Iowa, you know.”
In his thirties, as a serving soldier, Bud Tooke had been one of the first relief workers into what was left of the Dome of the Rock, after an extreme religious group called the One-Godders had lobbed a nuclear grenade into that site of unique significance. “That experience exposed me to Islam—and my body to a hard rain. Everything changed for me after that.”