Normally, the idea of an hour or two of pinwheeling athleticism appealed to Doug. His body was flexible and enduring, with a hunter’s coiled strength. He enjoyed taking Willis’ money. Not today. He could barely wrench his focus away from his private thoughts to make time for a polite answer. “Thank you, but no thank you. Job things.”
Willis nodded and wove off, huffing through the traffic, working the arm and leg pedals of his bike until sweat-blossoms darkened his armpits. Then he was gone around the rim’s gentle curve.
Workers lived in a variety of housing, some on the surface, some far beneath the regolith. Many craters were linked by subterranean shuttles. Give Heinlein another ten years and the dome would sit atop a thriving underground city.
But all the living spaces were resistant to the basic lunar problems: seismic instability, solar radiation, thermal fluctuation, and meteoroids.
Doug rode the elevator down and then Moonwalked the next stretch, bouncing through the halls on the balls of his feet. Excitement bubbled up inside him like jolly lava.
The door marked Suite Five slid open. Doug stepped into an antechamber just wide enough for three people to stand abreast. The door slid closed behind him. The inner door opened, and suddenly the air swirled with fecal dust and animal stench. Doug kerchewed! and swung his hand as a feathery football-sized projectile sailed toward his face. The Rhode Island Red flapped its coppery wings and looped through the air with an aplomb beyond Earthly poultry’s wildest dreams.
Suite Five was one of Heinlein’s seven farms. Dozens of dedicated farming pods were scattered across the lunar grid, but most large craters also had their own, smaller facilities, where residents could fatten their own meals in advance, like restaurant patrons selecting lobsters from the tank.
Rabbits bounced around like little helicopters, every furry leap a world record. Hornless goats grazed on hybrid lunar grass, hydroponically grown and bundled as hay. Their meat was a treasured delicacy, far more tender than their Earth-grown cousins.
All seemed supremely unaware of their cook-pot destinies. Even though raised from embryos here at Heinlein, they seemed to relish their lunar agility, as if consciously rebelling against genetic limits.
Fist-sized bots whisked chicken and rabbit droppings from the glossy floor.
Doug reared back as a dark red Buckeye flapped its wings clumsily, spiraling directly toward his chest as if it couldn’t control its flight path. He had frozen in place when a slender pair of pale arms yanked the bird out of the air. A smiling, densely freckled woman with shaggy blond hair stuffed the squawking poultry under her right arm.
“Getting slow, Dougie? Looking for Thomas?”
He didn’t recognize her, and glanced at her breast pocket. A very nice swelling there, beneath the name LINDA. “I’m sure you know Tommy?”
“Better all the time,” she winked, and jerked a thumb upward. “Up top.”
Doug looked up. A scaffold stretched across the domed ceiling, holding three workers. Sparks spiraled down, singeing the occasional high-flying chicken. Doug thanked the tech, selected the nearest ladder and began to climb.
He had reached the scaffold, and was heading across when the man closest to him killed his torch, turned, and slipped off his mask. The man could easily have been mistaken for a Senegalese or Jamaican, with the same lean cheeks, bright, inquisitive eyes and close-cropped tightly-curled hair that Doug saw in every mirror.
“Dougie,” Thomas said. “What’s up?”
“Take a dinner break,” Doug said, maintaining a tight, neutral smile. “I’ll make it worth your time.”
I’ll make it worth your time. Code words since childhood. Never misused, never ignored. Thomas raised his eyebrows, but nodded and turned to the other men. “I’m clocking out. See you tomorrow.”
They waved at him. All work hours and progress went into central processing. No slacker could hide in a community as small and regimented as Heinlein.
Thomas cooled his torch, doffed his hat, and the two slid down the ladder past the deliriously spiraling chickens. His heel squished in goat droppings. A whiskbot arrived the next instant, and Thomas held up his foot, so that its little vacuum could suck him clean while Doug tried not to let his smile bloom into open laughter.
Doug refused to talk as they bounced around the hub to the cafeteria nearest their sleep quarters, although twice Thomas attempted to initiate questions. Thomas was five minutes the younger of the two, but Doug often acted as if they were years apart.
So. “Big” brother had a secret, one capable of generating a bit of suspense. Well, Thomas enjoyed games as much as anyone…
The cafeteria’s hologram ceiling and walls were tuned to a Polynesian channel, something pleasing to their General Manager’s sensibilities. All about them blue skies framed tropical palms, blindingly white beach and crashing waves. Workers generally ate here, enjoying the happy cacophony, or carried their food off to their private quarters. The twins ordered tai fish and fresh hydroponic fruit (Thomas chose mango, while Doug selected a mixed salad) and walked it around to the worker quarters.
The hall door sealed behind them. Six doors down, the scanner read their eyes and biochips, and opened the door.
The cabin was narrow, spare, with two beds (nets with elastic sheets stretched over them) and a toilet and sink. Metered bathing facilities were just down the hall. They were too far below the surface for windows, but a vid wall would display any vista in the library. The current shimmering design was New York’s crowded, Christmas-parade skyline.
Thomas watched patiently as Doug sat on the bunk opposite, opened his container of food with meticulous, almost mechanical precision, and ate the first three sporkfuls in silence. He closed his eyes as if gathering thoughts, and then spoke.
“When was the last time you worked on Botanica?”
Thomas squinted, counting backward. “Maybe a month ago, blowing bubbles.” “Bubbles” were the pressurized globes blown from tanks labeled Liquid Walls. A hundred bubbles in varying sizes, arrayed in nine rows, A through I. Once dried, the plastic spheres made perfect foundations for storage, work, and living spaces. Some were the size of a broom closet, others the size of auditoriums. “Why?”
“Because the furnishings are starting to go in.” Doug began to enumerate the things that had most recently come to his attention.
Thomas listened, searching for the punch line. Yes, yes, he thought impatiently. Doug passed Thomas a flexible viewer the size of his hand. Thomas flipped through page after page of friezes featuring vast swollen grub-like creatures, insectoid herdsmen and odd aquatic creatures with many legs.
“I don’t understand,” Thomas said. “What’s this about?”
“Now look at this article from a gossipmonger in our capital,” Doug said. He touched the screen, and the image of a thin young black man in a Japanese samurai robe, standing at a podium appeared. In Central African Kikongo, the caption read: “The Prince Takes a Bow.” It dealt with rumor that the only son of the President of the Republic of Kikaya was, to the mortification of his father, a web-strip superhero artist. He had won a first-place finish for drawings of his Swahili Samurai, a webzine with thousands of fans.
Thomas’ brow wrinkled. Doug could almost read his mind: Disgraceful, of course, but…?
Before he could speak, Doug went on. “Our Prince, the future of our country, is obsessed with this mindless trash. He does this. He also attends ‘science fiction’ meetings for which he flies to America and appears under a false name, cloaked in asinine costumes. Few have any idea that the artist known as ‘Ali’ is our Prince. Now, look at this creature.” He called up the webzine, and the month’s adventure appeared. He did a quick search, and pulled up an image of a creature with the upper body of a man, and the lower body of a centipede.