Lying down in the pool letting the low gravity float my body on the water, I laid my head back on the rock edge.
Crazy, I thought. Jonah James Oliver, you are completely crazy. You deserve to be recycled for this idiocy. Thinking that a word a runner has said in an interview is a clue as to his whereabouts and somehow you are going to track him down? What were you thinking? It’s OK, I just won’t tell anyone exactly where I’ve been. I’ll tell them I just came to the Moon because I wanted to see what it was like to be in zero gravity. That’s it.
Directly opposite the space that I was lying in, a woman emerged from one of the spokes. She laid a towel down beside the spring and, sitting down on the edge, put her feet in the water. Even at thirty meters away I could see she was beautiful. She smiled and lifted a palm from the edge of the spring in greeting. I smiled back and raised my hand in return. She was tall, at least one hundred and seventy cents and slim but not skinny. The white outer she was wearing showed off her long legs and was clinging tightly enough to her body that I could tell she wasn’t wearing inners. Her long black hair reached down to her waist, spanning out in a solid black wave over her tanned shoulders. I guessed Polynesian extraction or perhaps Indian.
Despite the beautiful woman sitting across from me, somehow my mood just didn’t suit the pool and after just ten minutes, still with stuffed nasal passages and a sore back, I headed up the spoke tunnel of unfinished rock and back to my room.
Leaving wet footprints on the blue matting that covered the distance to the room I had credded for the night, I checked my Devstick. I hadn’t been able to use it when I arrived here from the Lev port, but it was back up now, with an explanation from the comms team at Peary that sun flares had knocked out the Satcom relays orbiting Shackleton. I did a find on ships leaving Shackleton or Peary for the Earth Orbiter. There was a ship leaving directly from Shackleton to the Orbiter in another twenty-five minutes — if I hurried I could make it. I noticed it was Friday the 13th.
I quickly threw the spare inners and outers and the ‘Life’s a Beach’ bag I had brought with me into the Virgin Galactic carry on and headed to out to the reception area. I thumbed my Devstick at the Dev on the reception counter and checked the cost had been deducted from my cred. They charged me full rate for the canceled night but I wasn’t going to stick around and argue with them.
I checked the map to the Lev on my Devstick and got the walkway lights going. I was short of time and I didn’t want to miss that ship back to Earth’s Orbiter. With luck I could be back in New Singapore by before 9pm. The tunnel from the Nineveh to the main walkway tube was quite empty, but traffic in the main tube was busy with people headed towards their contributions.
Most of the people around me were wearing mining suits with the logos of their respective Ents emblazoned over their right breasts and writ large on their backs. I threaded my way through the crowd, my Virgin Galactic carry on marking me for the tourist that I was, and got to the Lev. There was a queue. The Levs were moving pretty quickly but it was obviously a busy time. Standing in the queue waiting for my turn, I suddenly felt a tap on my shoulder and turned.
“Hi, it looks like you and I had the same idea,” said the beautiful woman from the pool.
I noticed the envious looks from the other men standing around waiting for Levs as this gorgeous woman spoke to me. She too had a Virgin carry on and I said, “Yes I’ve only been here for a few hours but the novelty’s worn off.”
That comment got me a few glares from the people around me, but I didn’t care.
Deal with it, I thought.
The woman too noticed the looks and, smiling at me, said, “You think you’ve been having a hard time — the ratio of women to men on the Moon is one to twenty and I’m getting zoned out by all these stares I’ve been getting.”
As she said this the Lev arrived and we bustled in. I took advantage of the shuffle to move to an area that was reasonably far away from the people that had been standing around us while we were chatting. The woman followed me.
“I think we upset some people,” I said to her as we stood waiting for the Lev door to close. It was standing room only and her face was only thirty cents from mine. Smiling, she had white even teeth in a full mouth set in a strong jaw. Her cheekbones flared up and out in a slash under her green eyes. The green eyes crinkling now at the corners in a smile.
“I don’t care what those freaks might think right now. I’ve been undressed in so many once-over looks this morning that I feel like I’m walking around naked.”
“Where on Earth are you going?” I asked, making a very sincere effort not to glance at the breasts that I had admired in my brief glance at her in the pool — instead looking directly into her eyes.
“I’m on my way to my new contribution in New Singapore. I’ve just finished acquiring a new range of knowledge and my transfer from Geneva came through. I thought I’d check out the Moon because I’ve never been here and I’m glad I did because now it is off my list of ‘Must Places to Visit’.” She tossed the Virgin carry on over her shoulder.
“That’s great. I live in New Singapore. I’ve been contributing there for about four years now. My name is Jonah, by the way,” I said, giving her a wai.
She waied me back and said, “My name’s Mariko. Pleased to connect with you,” and flashed me another dazzling smile that gave rise to two little dimples in her cheeks.
“Do you…?”
“Do you…?”
We broke into laughter as we had said exactly the same thing at the same time, “You go first,” she said.
“Do you want to travel together? I can brief you on New Singapore, or were you thinking of sleeping on the way back?”
“No, I mean yes, it would be great to travel with you, and no I wasn’t planning on sleeping. I feel like I’ve slept for a day, and I haven’t really talked with anyone since I left Earth three days ago.”
The Lev door opened onto the concourse of Shackleton Moonbase and right opposite the Lev doors was the cred deduct point for the JAS ship back to Earth’s Orbiter. We hurried over to the JAS point and the man behind the waist-high Devscreen, which was suggesting flights and tours, said, “Good morning, and how can we at JAS help you today?”
“We’d like two normals back to Earth’s Orbiter please,” I said, and smiled at him.
“I’m sorry sir, but all the normals are taken. We only have supers left.”
“We’ll take them,” I began to say but was interrupted by Mariko.
“Uhm, I’m sorry, Jonah, but my budget doesn’t stretch to the supers. It’s OK though — you go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you when we get to New Singapore.”
I turned back to the man. “How much is the upgrade from normal to super?”
“It’s four hundred and fifty-six units with tax, baggage, alkys and nourishment included,” he said and smiled a very smarmy kind of smile, that said, ‘Let’s see if you’ll cough up those creds mister’. I returned his smug smile and held up my Devstick, “Give me two Siteazys next to each other.”
It was a bit extravagant but there was no way I was going to let Mariko out of my sight until I had her complete profile in my Devstick. Turning to her I said, “OK that’s settled. This trip to the Moon has been pretty bad for me so far, but,” I paused for effect and giving her my best dazzling smile as I gazed deep into those wide green eyes, said, “things are definitely looking up from my point of view.”
She tilted her head to one side and studied my face.
“Are you flirting with me?” she said with a laugh hidden somewhere in her words.
“I most certainly am, Mariko.”
“Could you make your way over to the spaceport immediately please?” said the JAS staffer in a squirmy kind of a voice.