And so Isabel and Jin Tshei and little Valerié-France lived happily ever after—at least in the eyes of Psych Service—and Jonathan came by for occasional weekends and family dinners and was reasonably satisfied with the whole situation.
Except for the fact that Vally was soon discovered to be a victim of the rare Kesler’s Syndrome, which required her to live in Earth’s gravity at least through her teenage years, and which explained Jin Tshei’s presence on the Vesta Explorer—she was on her way to Earth to visit Vally at her home/school/clinic high in the Swiss Alps.
And why I was now experiencing one of my periodic pangs of passion for the bewitching but unobtainable Jin Tshei.
To cover my almost overwhelming desire to pull her into my arms and squeeze tightly, I concentrated on swirling the cognac around my glass. “The real reason I’m going to the Moon, however, has nothing to do with tunnel bonds. It’s another one of J. Davis Alexander’s brainstorms. This time he’s got intimations of mortality.”
“Immortality,” corrected Jin Tshei, who was the Assistant Curator at the Clarkeville Museum of Art and Human Achievement and the erudite one in our little triad.
“No, mortality. It’s just occurred to him that he might actually die one day—and he doesn’t want to. He’s decided that he wants to live forever. And that if he can do that, then compounding interest will eventually enable him to corner everything in the Belt.”
“And after that, I suppose, the entire Solar System,” snorted Jin Tshei with ladylike exasperation. “Has he finally lost his grip on reality?”
“Not entirely. Strange as it seems, there’s a tiny kernel of rationality in what he’s saying. You know about the Moon’s MedSys?”
“And their boxies? Sure. But they’re not allowed anywhere except on the Moon. Certainly not on Ceres, and I think nowhere else in the Belt either. So if your hairy boss with the sunny disposition wants to corner the wealth of the Universe, he’s going to have to do it from Kennedygrad or wherever it is you’re going. And anyway,” she added, pushing her glass into the recycling slot and rising gracefully to her feet, “even the box people don’t live forever.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You don’t hear of any of them dying of old age, do you? But anyway, that’s what he wants me to find out about.”
Jin Tshei shivered deliciously. “That awful man living forever, even inside a box—what a horrid notion! I hope it doesn’t give me nightmares.”
“If it does, just hop into my bunk and I’ll hold you tight.”
“I will.” She smiled at me fondly. “But nothing more.”
I managed an anemic smile of my own. “And nothing more.”
Twenty-four days later, right on schedule, the Vesta Explorer slipped into orbit 124 kilometers above the Moon. Belt-Earth packets are large and ungainly, designed for interplanetary space, not the gravity wells of even a body as small as Earth’s Moon; the .04 gravity of Ceres is the most they can handle without breaking apart. As far as the Moon and Earth were concerned, coming into port was strictly an orbital process. Shuttles awaited to take passengers and cargo down to the surface.
“You’re sure you want to come?” I asked Jin Tshei as our line shuffled forward through the packet’s loading dock and into the Liberty City shuttle.
“I’ve got eighteen hours here in orbit before going on to Earth—why not see a little bit of the Moon?”
“I don’t know how much sightseeing we can squeeze into eighteen hours but we’ll do what we can.”
A few minutes later the shutde eased away from the Vesta Explorer and began drifting silently down to the Lunar surface. Jin Tshei and I peered through her porthole as the Sun-baked Sea of Serenity gradually neared. A tiny black dot on the Moon’s far horizon grew larger as the shuttle dropped, eventually developed definition, finally revealed itself to be the celebrated three-kilometer-high reproduction of the Statue of Liberty holding her torch over a broad dome: Liberty City, home of 278,000 Loonies and the main Lunar spaceport.
The shuttle came to a barely perceptible touchdown a full kilometer from the edge of the city’s dome. Jin Tshei and I kept to our seats as a tractor pulled us rapidly toward the airlock in the wall of the spaceport. Just as our vantage point swung around to where we could see the stupendous statue, looming godlike against the star-studded sky, the airlock swallowed us up and Miss Liberty vanished. Now all we could see above us was the nondescript opacity of the polarized dome protecting us from the deadly morning Sun. Jin Tshei and I pushed ourselves cautiously to our feet in the .17 Lunar gravity. “We made it,” I said. “We’re on the Moon.”
The 180 passengers in the shuttle lurched forward in the clumsy bounces peculiar to the Moon. Jin Tshei and I were among the last to make our way through the ship’s broad hatch and into the bright daylight. For a moment I stood blinking. The dome thirty-some meters above our heads was opaqued against the Sun’s relentless rays but still glowed more brightly than the underground lighting standard throughout the Belt.
“Jonathan?” Jin Tshei was already half a dozen paces ahead of me on the ramp that led from the shuttle to the low concrete buildings that comprised the above-surface portion of the spaceport. On either side of the ramp, heavily laden ground effect machines moved purposefully about the port.
“Be right with y—” I called as, from the corner of my eye, I caught an instant’s glimpse of something large and shadowy rocketing toward me.
Then I was slammed violently from my feet and thrown into the air. From somewhere I heard what might have been shrill screams. The last thing I saw before I sailed back through the open hatch was Jin Tshei’s long, slim body being crushed against the side of the shuttle’s fuselage.
I awoke an indeterminate time later, saw two friendly looking faces peering down at me, and immediately went to sleep again.
The next time I awoke I muttered “Hurts,” because it did—all over. Another face drifted nearer, to my drug-numbed mind as if it were suspended in space above me, and a moment later the pain went away.
I slept.
The third time I awoke my head was clear and my vision steady. An unbearably lovely heart-shaped face hovered just above me, great almond eyes looking down into mine. “Jin Tshei,” I murmured with infinite relief. “I had the most horrible dream! You were being crushed against the side of the shuttle. You—” I broke off, my mind in sudden turmoil. That was all I remembered. Why was I lying here? Why was Jin Tshei and everyone else looking down at me so anxiously?
“That was no dream, Jonathan. The stabilizer on one of the port’s GEM’s suddenly broke. It flipped over on its side and went spinning across the spacefield. You and I are a couple of the lucky ones: forty-seven of the other passengers were killed outright and twenty-six more probably aren’t going to make it. You were knocked through the hatch and ended up smacking against the far wall of the cabin. You’ve got a fine assortment of broken bones but you’ll be up and about shortly.”
I nodded feebly. “Forty-seven dead: that’s awf—Jin Tshei! This must be a dream! All I can see of you is your head! Where’s the rest of you?”
Jin Tshei smiled wanly and moved back enough to let me see that her head seemed to be growing out of a soft white ring attached to the surface of a gleaming stainless steel box the size of a medium-sized packing carton.
“This is the rest of me, Jonathan. Everything else was crushed. You and Isabel and Valerié-France are just going to have to get used to me like this—I’m now a boxgirl.”