Luna: New Moon

One by one the Jo Moonbeams line up to touch Lady Luna. Deserts, jungles, Antarctica: those aren’t words Carlinhos has ever experienced, Marina thinks. They sound like a old mantra. The duster’s prayer. Marina brushes fingers across the icon of Lady Moon.

Through the soles of her boots Marina feels the outlock door grind up. A slot of grey between grey door and grey floor opens on to ugly machinery: laagers of surface rovers, service robots, coms towers, the upcurved horns of the BALTRAN. Dumped machinery, wrecked machinery, machinery under maintenance. An extractor, too tall for even this huge lock, roped off with chains of yellow service flashers: a Christmas tree of lights and beacons. Ranges of solar panels, slowly tracking the sun. Far distant hills. The surface of the moon is a scrapheap.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Carlinhos Corta says and leads his squad up the ramp. Marina steps out on to the surface. There is no transition, no crossing from indoor to great outdoors, not even a particular sense of bare surface and naked sky. The close horizon is visibly curved. Carlinhos leads the squad around a kilometre loop marked out by rope-lights. Hundreds of Jo Moonbeams have walked this way, bootprints overlay bootprints overlay bootprints. Bootprints everywhere, wheel tracks, the delicate toe-tips of stalking and climbing robots. The regolith is a palimpsest of every journey made across it. It is very ugly. Like every kid with access to binoculars, Marina had turned the magnification on King Dong; a giant spunking cock a hundred kilometres tall, boot-printed and tyre-tracked into the Mare Imbrium by infrastructure workers with too much time on their hands. Fifteen years back it was already blurred and scarred by criss-crossing tracks of subsequent missions. She doubts anything now remains of its gleeful frat-boy esprit.

Marina looks up. And stops leaving footprints.

A half Earth stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Marina has never see a thing bluer, truer. The Atlantic dominates the hemisphere. She makes out the western limb of Africa, the horn of Brazil. She can track the swirl of ocean storms, drawn in to the bowl of the Caribbean where they are stirred into beasts and monsters, sent spiralling out along the curve of the Gulf Stream towards unseen Europe. A hurricane blankets the eastern terminator. Marina can easily read its spiral structure, the dot of its eye. Blue and white. No trace of green but Marina has never seen anything look more alive. On the VTO cycler she had looked down at the Earth from the observation blister and wondered at the splendour unreeling before her. The streaming clouds, the turning planet, the line of sunrise along the edge of the world. For the first half of the orbit out she had watched Earth dwindle, for the second half she had watched the moon wax. Marina has never seen the Earth from the moon. It squats in the sky, Planet Earth; so much bigger than Marina had imagined, so terribly far away. Bright and brooding and forbidding, beyond reach and touch. Marina’s messages take one and a quarter seconds to fly down to her family. This is home and you are a long way from it, is the message of the full Earth.

‘You staying out here all day?’ Carlinhos’s voice crackles on Marina’s private channel and she realises, startled and embarrassed, that everyone is back at the outlock and she is standing like a fool, gazing up at the Earth.

That is another difference. From the cycler she had looked down on the Earth. On the moon, the Earth is always up.

‘How long was I standing there?’ she asks Carlinhos as the lock repressurises.

‘Ten minutes,’ Carlinhos says. Airblades blast dust from the sasuits. ‘When I first went up I did exactly the same thing. Stood staring until São Jorge gave me a low oxygen warning. I’d never seen anything like it. Heitor Pereira was with me: the first words I said were, “Who put that there?”’

Carlinhos unlocks his helmet. In the few seconds when conversations can still be private, Marina asks,

‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we have a drink.’

‘Did he touch you?’

The little rover bowls flat out across Oceanus Procellarum. It hits every bump and rock at full speed, bounds into the air, lands in soft detonations of dust. Speeds on, throwing great plumes of dust behind its wheels. Its two passengers are banged and bruised, jolted hard, snapped back and forth, to and fro in their safety harnesses. Rachel Mackenzie pushes the rover to the very limits of its operational envelope.

Mackenzie Metals is hunting her.

‘Did he do anything to you?’ Rachel Mackenzie asks again over the whine of the engines and the creak and thump of suspension. Robson shakes his head.

‘No. He was real nice. He made me dinner and we talked about his family. Then he taught me card tricks. I can show you. They’re real good.’ Robson reaches into a patch pocket of his sasuit.

‘When we get there,’ Rachel says.