Barbary

“It is,” Heather said. “It is a good radiation shield, though, and once they finished the mass-driver on the moon, it was cheap. The mass-driver throws moon rocks out here into orbit, you catch them and extract whatever you want that’s useful, then you put the leftovers here. This place is sort of a dump, to tell you the truth. But it makes the station safe to live in.”

The crushed moon rock felt like ordinary, fine, dry dirt. Barbary’s shoe left an impression just behind Mick’s first pawprint.

“I never stepped on dirt from the moon before,” Barbary said.

Heather grinned. “Maybe someday we’ll get a chance to step on moon dust when it’s still on the moon. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

Heather set off after Mickey. She walked more slowly than usual. Barbary remembered that her sister spent little time in full gravity. Barbary, too, felt the change in gravity even after such a short time of living on the middle level. She felt heavier than back on earth. She halted, but the heavy feeling remained. It was more than the effect of walking plus-spin. Then she realized that the lowest level really did have a greater acceleration than the one-gravity level just above. It might not be enough greater for her to feel it, but she thought she did.

The moon dirt filled the level with a long series of low hills. As far as Barbary could see, till the rising horizon disappeared beneath the roof, the ground rose and fell regularly.

“Why did they fill it with hills?” Barbary asked. The spooky, silent dimness made her whisper.

“They didn’t,” Heather said in a normal tone that sounded so loud Barbary almost jumped. “When I found it, a few years ago, the surface was flat. Kind of irregular, but mostly flat. Then — it changed. I don’t know what formed the hills and valleys. Resonance with the spin, I guess, but I haven’t figured out how to calculate it yet.”

“What does everybody else think?”

Heather reached the top of one of the hills and paused, trying to pretend her breathing came easily. Her forehead gleamed with sweat. Barbary wondered if she should try to persuade Heather to go back upstairs before they found Mick. But she decided she had better not, at least not yet.

“I don’t think anybody else knows about the hills,” Heather said. “They’re all so busy… I’ve only come down here five or six times. And… I never told anybody, because I figured they’d say I have to stay out. So I can’t very well ask.”

“I guess not,” Barbary said.

Here and there a fluorescent light had burned out, further dimming the low illumination. Barbary had to squint to see much at all. She walked down a hill, following Mickey’s tracks.

“How did you find out about this place?” she asked.

“I’ve explored everywhere,” Heather said. “I realized when I was pretty little that you couldn’t get to a lot of places without doing something special, so I started looking for the special ways.”

“Like the extra panel in the elevator.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are all the other places as spooky as this one?”

Heather laughed. The cheerful sound lightened the dim atmosphere.

“No. This is the spookiest. Most places aren’t exactly hidden, they’re just out of the way. Like the ventilators and the recyclers.”

Mick’s tracks led into the valley between two hillocks and up the side of a third rise. Barbary glanced back. Her footprints made clear indentations in the dirt, but the elevator island had nearly vanished between the low ceiling and the tops of the hills.

“How fast does the dirt change?” she asked. “I mean will our footprints disappear?”

“No,” Heather said. “In a couple months they’ll fade away. But we can’t get lost even if they did vanish. There’s more than one elevator, so even if you got turned around, you’d find your way out eventually.”

“Mick!” Barbary called, in a soft voice. “Kitty, kitty!”

“Won’t he come back to you?”

Abashed, Barbary stopped calling him. “He always has before,” she said. “Except, he does it when he wants to, not always when you want him to.” She had no good reason for feeling so uncertain about him.

“He’ll be okay,” Heather said. “He’s only been gone a few minutes.”

“I hope he doesn’t think he can stay out all night, like he did back on earth,” Barbary said. “If he does, we might be here for a while.”

Heather started to say something, but stopped. Before Barbary could ask what was the matter, Heather changed the topic.

“Come on,” she said. “We can follow Mick’s tracks so we’ll be close to him when he does decide to come back.”

“They ought to plant grass or something,” Barbary said. The bare hillocks extended as far as she could see. “Then you’d have a park. It might be kind of pretty.”

“That’s a good idea,” Heather said. “It really is! It would be sort of like being in one of the colonies. They’d have to change the lights…” She glanced around, as if imagining grass, flowers, trees.

She reached the top of a rise and stopped, breathing harder. Barbary felt as if she’d taken a slow walk around the block.