Which meant that maybe now, given the drastically altered circumstances, Psych Service would relent and let me marry Isabel after all.
Unfortunately Jin Tshei loved Isabel almost more than life itself.
I was glad that I wasn’t in her figurative shoes, knowing that in a sense she was totally at the mercy of Jonathan Welbrook White—and precisely how much he lusted to finally possess Isabel exclusively for himself.
I shook my head guiltily, ashamed to be harboring even the faintest suspicion of such thoughts. “Well,” I said finally, “it looks as if for once, strange as it seems, all of us are actually on J. Davis Alexander’s side. If we can figure out some way to make him immortal, as a lousy little byproduct we ought to be able to get you back to Ceres and Isabel.”
She nodded. “Let’s hope so. But right now I’ve got to report for work. You may not see me again for a while. I’ve been assigned to one of the farms on the surface.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “They need people to clear sludge from the irrigation lines that run from the sewage recycling plants—and I’ve still got my sense of smell.”
“And you’re still the most beautiful boxgirl I know. Come and give me a big fat kiss and then we’ll try to get our thinking caps on.”
Tears were streaming down both our faces as I awkwardly wrapped my one good arm around her box and kissed her tenderly.
In the next few days I learned a number of things from Tom Van Bastolaer of Peebles, Van Bastolaer & Mustapha as he showed me around far more of the Moon than I wanted to see.
The most interesting item, from J. Davis Alexander’s point of view, was that even if he bought himself a start on immortality by living on the Moon inside a glossy new artificial body, he still wouldn’t be able to eventually comer the wealth of first the Belt and then the entire Solar System.
“Believe me,” laughed Van Bastolaer when I broached the subject with as much subtlety as I could while we made our way through a hydroponic farm far beneath the Mare Serenitatis where a million brightly colored geraniums stretched as far as the eye could see, “you’re not the first person who’s been tempted by that vision.”
“No? Then why wouldn’t it work? Except for the fact that if you had a hundred old-timers all living for a thousand years, you couldn’t have all of them cornering all the system’s wealth.”
“Because the LPDA—the Lunar People’s Democratic Assembly—in its infinite wisdom long ago made it impossible. After thirty years in a newbie body, or having reached the chronological age of 130 standard Earth years, whichever comes first, all your personal wealth is taxed as if you had actually died. The tax is on a graduated scale so that no matter how much you have, even a couple of billion Lunar Florins, you can’t keep more than 4 million LF’s—that’s about 3 million Belter buckles. After that, they apply the same tax regularly every thirty years. So no matter how old you are, or how smart you are, you’re never going to accumulate more than 4 million IP’s—plenty to live on, but hardly enough to corner the Solar System’s market in titanium or cornflakes.”
“Oh.” J. Davis Alexander was not going to be pleased by the news. As we talked in the warm, wet air of the geranium farm, two box people with an assortment of devices attached to their shiny bodies were floating toward us in the narrow lane that ran between the flowers. I lowered my GEM chair by a meter to the same level as Van Bastolaer’s head. As the boxies passed overhead, I saw that trailing behind them were containers that sprayed the red and white blossoms on each side of the lane with what I supposed was water and nutrients.
“There’s really enough work to do on the Moon to absorb a couple of hundred thousand boxies a year?” I asked skeptically. “There can’t be that many flower farms to take care of.”
“You’d be surprised how many people want to buy flowers and plants to brighten up their homes when you live 200 meters beneath the surface. But that’s the point: we all live beneath the surface. And the real estate here on the Moon is free. All you have to do to have your own home is to cut a tunnel and start digging out rooms. Earth considers itself overcrowded with 12 billion people.” He waved his arm expansively. “We could take in 50 billion people and never notice them. They’d be scattered all over the Moon’s subsurface, some of their housing going down for five or six hundred meters. And we’d still be underpopulated!” He tapped me sharply on my right forearm, the one that was now working more or less normally. “Think how many stocks and bonds and mutual funds you could sell to 50 billion people! Not to mention all the other goods and services they’d need. I tell you, Jonathan, you’re wasting your time out there in the Belt. Come to the Moon, man, that’s where all the action is going to be!”
If the Loonies had enough highspeed tunnels to move his hypothetical 50 billion people from one city to another, I thought as we left the geraniums for the next stop on our itinerary, an apartment complex under construction for recently arrived immigrants from Earth. A few meters from the flower farm’s entrance, a broad ramp spiraled downward into an enormous atrium carved from the 4-billion-year-old Lunar rock.
“Hydrogen, oxygen, minerals, everything we need’s right here in this rock,” said Van Bastolaer, pointing at a hundred or so openings that led to new apartments being carved in the wall. “All we have to do is extract them. And with unlimited solar energy up there on the surface—”
“Hey,” I interrupted, “I’m a Cerean, remember? We live underground, too. Maybe we don’t have as much real estate as you Loonies do, but aside from that—”
“Sorry, but I really am enthusiastic about the prospects for the Moon—and for making money from them. Look,” he said, “at these new apartments. There’re 18,000 immigrants a month arriving. All of them need housing. Construction stocks are hot, Jonathan, a long-term blue chip, a solid growth industry. You couldn’t go wrong with half a dozen of them in your portfolio.”
I made a quick note in my wrist recorder of the names of a dozen companies: even if I couldn’t bring J. Davis Alexander life everlasting and a comer on the wealth of the Universe, at least I could bring him some tips to mull over.
“All of these 18,000 monthly immigrants are boxies?” I asked.
“Most of them, though we certainly don’t refuse those who aren’t. But the boxies are motivated, either they’re so old and feeble that on Earth they’re about to die—their bodies are literally giving out—or they’re young and crippled or young but with some incurable disease. What’s the alternative? A call to the Lunar Consulate, a free ticket to the Moon, a brief stop at one of the MedSys Centers, and they’re ready to start life all over again—a life with an unlimited future.”
“But first they’ve got to spend three years in a box.”
“Damn right.” Tom Van Bastolaer smiled grimly. “That’s the other great advantage of encouraging boxies as immigrants: they work for nothing, or next to it. Their boxes are free except for a little maintenance from time to time, and their nutros and medical costs are hardly anything. And for housing—well, how much housing does a box need? In return, they do all the dirty jobs and gut work no one else wants to do—and they’re glad to do it. I know damn well that I was. And the great thing about it is that the more boxies we have, the more we need in order to take care of the ones who’ve gone before and have gotten newbie bodies of their own.”