I shuddered. “I’ll pass that one on to J. Davis Alexander, thank you.” I turned away from the sight of two-dozen day-old boxies bouncing their shiny new bodies up and down on tiny bursts of compressed air and scrutinized Van Bastolaer’s unabashedly middle-aged face. “You say you’re 127?”
“Right.”
“And thirty years or so ago your body was thrown away—or turned into fertilizer—and your head was attached to a box for three years.”
“Right.”
“And then, having earned, or brought with you, enough money to pay for it, you got this fine young newbie body you’re still wearing.”
“Right again.”
“So how come this face I’m looking at doesn’t look like a 127-year-old face?”
Van Bastolaer laughed. “Simple-very good cosmetic surgery: another growth industry. After that, anti-senescent treatments, including bone regeneration, plus the fact that once the rest of your body’s been discarded with all the hormonal imbalances and problems inherent in it, the head itself hardly ages. And separating the brain from the body and nourishing it properly the way you do once you’re a boxie eliminates all sorts of mental illnesses and symptoms of traditional old age like forgetfulness and senility. It isn’t the head and the brain that grow old, Jonathan, it’s all the supporting infrastructure around it. Now then—” Van Bastolaer rubbed his hands together briskly “—let’s go take a look at the Liberty City-New Saigon tunnel extension that’s under construction. That’ll give you a pretty fair idea of the Kennedygrad-Dooley’s Downfall one we want to float those bonds for.”
Two days later I had become a semi-expert on the construction of nine-meter tubes running as much as eighty-nine kilometers beneath the surface of the Moon. Unlike Earth’s interior, that of the Moon was no longer molten, or even particularly warm except at the very center. If you wanted to dig a high-speed tunnel from Kennedygrad to Dooley’s Downfall 972 surface klicks away, it was just as easy to excavate a geometrically straight tunnel 883 klicks long that ran directly between the two points as it was to burrow a few dozen meters below the surface while adding 89 klicks to the cost of digging the tunnel.
I had also seen more boxies than I could count toiling at the construction of the Liberty City-New Saigon extension, as well as in manufacturing plants, water and oxygen extraction centers, nickel and titanium mines, potato farms, shrimp and oyster hatcheries, waste recycling plants, distribution centers, and schools, hospitals, and creches—anyplace, in short, where the work was long, tedious, or dangerous.
“All right,” I told my indefatigable mentor at last. “If there’s anything left to see on the Moon, I don’t want to know about it. The medical boxies tell me I’ll be out of this GEM chair tomorrow, and the packet back to Ceres leaves in three days. I’ve already beeped all the info about the bond issue he’ll ever need to J. Davis Alexander, so now I’ve got three days to try to find a way to get Jin Tshei back to Clarkeville with me.”
“Speaking of Ms. Jin Tshei,” said Van Bastolaer, “that reminds me of one more tip I wanted to give you—I think it could be a real money maker.”
“Great, but what’s it got to do with Jin Tshei?”
“You told me she’d been assigned to work on the surface for a couple of weeks, didn’t you? Let’s go up and take a look.”
The elevator that took us to the Mare Serenitatis came out right in the center of the patchwork additions of agricultural domes that were gradually spreading out to the east and south of Liberty City. All sorts of agricultural items, it seemed, from blueberries to bok choy to rutabagas, grew better in carefully filtered sunlight than they did in underground hydroponic farms. Either they were plants that didn’t mind the fourteen-day Lunar nights that were the inevitable companions of the fourteen-day Lunar days, or they had been genetically restructured to complete their growth cycle during a single two-week-long period of uninterrupted sunlight.
But it was too bad, I thought as my GEM chair hovered above a field of dark green cabbages that stretched for hundreds of meters in every direction in the Hop Chong Long Celestial Napa Cabbage Growers Cooperative, that here on the surface you really couldn’t see anything. Somewhere to the northwest, I knew, was the 3,000-meter height of the Statue of Liberty, and far to the west, on the other side of the city, the spaceport. But all during the half-month Lunar day the polarized domes of the hundreds of farms were carefully adjusted minute by minute to let through just enough sunlight to ensure maximum growing efficiency. With absolutely no Lunar atmosphere to filter the Sun’s intensity, inside a completely transparent dome both humans and plants would quickly be fried to a crisp.
“No, no, boiled,” corrected Tom Van Bastolaer from his own GEM chair that he had rented just before taking us to the surface, “or maybe steamed. All the water vapor in this atmosphere would be heated to the boiling point and we’d be cooked like lobsters.”
“Like lobsters—you have a wonderful way with words.” I tried to repress a shudder. I scanned the apparently endless field of napa cabbages, seeing a dozen boxies darting over the plants like strange silver honeybees. “But what’s this got to with Jin Tshei and your hot stock tip?”
“Nothing directly to do with her,” he said, leading me along a narrow roadway filled with agricultural equipment toward the edge of the opaque dome. “It’s just that she’s up here on the surface—and so is this.”
We passed through the large airlock that each of the domes used to isolate itself from its neighbor’s climatic zones. This new dome was smaller than the cabbage cooperative, and seemed both hotter and drier. A diffused brightness that I supposed had to be the Sun was directly overhead in the otherwise evenly glowing white sky. Half a dozen box people drifted slowly above the farm’s crop of tall, shaggy leaves.
“What’s all this?” I asked. “Taro or manioc or something weird like that?”
“Even weirder,” said Tom Van Bastolaer. “Tobacco.”
“Tobacco? But that’s a—”
“Poison, sure. On Earth. It’s been outlawed for over a century now, even in China. But what’s the name of this town?” His mouth twisted into a quirky smile. “Liberty City. And we take our liberties seriously. Which means that if someone wants to smoke—”
“But—”
“I know, I know, you’re going to say there’s a difference between liberty and actively permitting people to commit suicide, which, of course, is what smoking is. To a human body. But suppose you don’t have a human body: you’re just a head attached to a life-support system? Then what’s wrong with smoking?”
“But, but…” My voice trailed off. “There’s got to be something wrong with it!”
“Really? The pleasure a smoker derives from tobacco is when the nicotine enters his bloodstream and is almost instantly transmitted to the limbic section of his brain, which is where the so-called reward system is.”
“Reward system?”
“Where the brain rewards biologically useful behavior such as eating or reproducing, by stimulating the neurotransmitter flows, which makes you feel good. It seems there’s a neuro-transmitter chemical called glutamate which is what the nicotine actually works on, speeding it up and intensifying its flow. So that’s why smoking acts as a stimulant—and makes you feel so good—it’s all in the glutamate.”
“It sounds like you’ve studied this.”