Evolution

“It’s OK, Mom. Promise. I just wanted a few things that are hard to find here on Luna.” They paused at the threshold. Roberta said, “OK, now be careful when you step across. It’s easy to fall.”

“So I gathered,” her father said sarcastically.

Roberta rolled her eyes and stepped across. She reached back over and took her mother’s left hand to help her keep her balance in the sudden gravity change.

“Oooh!” her mother breathed as she crossed over. She looked back over her shoulder at the threshold. “I haven’t felt like that since I rode a roller coaster back when I was a teenager.”

“Well, now you’re on Luna!” Roberta said unnecessarily. “How do you like it?”

Her father grunted. “I haven’t been here quite long enough to decide. Give me a few seconds longer, if you don’t mind.”

Roberta’s mother took her hand and patted it. “Don’t pay any attention to him, dear. Just give him time to get used to it.”

Roberta wished she could stop herself. She knew she was trying too hard; that she was overanxious. It was hard to feel as confident as she had when she’d been talking to them on the phone. This was the moment of truth, and she felt her courage deserting her.

The slidewalks out in the corridor gave her parents some trouble. Just by looking, it was easy to understand that stepping onto one of the moving belts would allow a person to move from one point to another in the city. Putting the idea into practice, however, required reflexes they did not have. Her mother stepped unsteadily onto the slowest belt, swayed, wind-milled her arms, then caught herself. Her father stayed stiff and immediately went down in a tangled heap.

Roberta expertly danced across the slow lane to a faster one, caught up with her parents, then stepped back over to the slower one. She took her father’s arm to help him up.

Angrily, he shook her off. “Damned Loonies,” he cursed under his breath.

When it became necessary to change slidewalks to get to her tunnel, Roberta had them walk the rest of the way. At the portal to her tunnel, she had to stifle the impulse to make a grand gesture. Matter-of-factly, she let them in. Although she already knew it intellectually, having her parents visit reminded her forcibly how small her tunnel really was.

Her mother peered into the tiny bedroom, then looked at the combination living and dining area. “Well,” she said diplomatically, “there’s not much to clean.”

“Mom, I know it’s small, but that’s the way things are here on Luna.”

Her mother took a deep breath before accepting the situation. “When you think about it, it’s not all that much smaller than the apartment where your father and I lived after we were married. It’ll do for a start.”

“I was thinking that maybe mirrors would help make it look bigger—” Roberta began.

“Oh heavens, child! Before we try mirrors, we need to lighten up the color of these walls. This place is as dark as a tomb…”

After half an hour, Roberta was able to coax her father out of his ill humor by asking him which software interface he thought she should use on her tunnel’s terminal. When he began to volunteer suggestions on his own she knew she had won the most important battle of her life. Her parents had accepted her as an adult with her own life to lead.

Like all cities, Crisium had neighborhoods which were deemed more desirable than others. A single principle governed the price of the individual tunnels that led off of the corridors: Age, or the aura of it, was everything.

In absolute terms, no man-made artifact on Luna could be much over a century old. Nothing habitable was more than about sixty or seventy years old, and even the oldest parts of the underground settlements were much younger than that.

The most valuable real estate in Crisium was that which had been dug when the city began its first wave of underground expansion. Originally called the core by the first settlers, the word had, by degrees, become capitalized. Now, tunnels in the Core went for prices as much as four or five times higher than equivalent tunnels elsewhere in the city.

There was also a distinct gradient from the top levels to the bottom, tunnels near the surface being more expensive than the deepest ones. This in spite of the fact that tunnels nearer the surface were more vulnerable to decompression in the event of a major municipal structural failure. Being near the surface carried the implication of having an older tunnel, even if it was not born out in fact.

Furthermore, the more distant a tunnel was from the geometric center of the city, the less it was worth. This, too, was based on the idea that older tunnels were more desirable, since the city had, over time, spread outwards from the Core.

When Alan Lister found himself seeking a small tunnel on the outskirts of the second lowest level, he knew without asking that it was about as inexpensive a place to live as Crisium had to offer. He pressed the annunciator button next to the portal and waited.