6.2
30 October
Second Dawn Retirement Community
South Polar Mineral Territories
Lunar Surface
Raimy Vaught stood in the jetway, waiting for the flight vehicle’s door to open.
Except, not really, because the flight vehicle was not a jet, but a modified Earth Orbit to Lunar Surface (EOLS) capsule. So the tube he was standing in was, what, a rocketway? That didn’t sound right, either. Also, Raimy wasn’t really “standing,” except in the very loose sense that a person could stand, flat-footed, in chin-deep water. Lunar gravity took up only a sixth of his weight.
Raimy had spent the last five years shuttling back and forth between Earth and Luna. Living out his dreams: an astronaut at last! But on this particular rotation he’d only been here for a couple of days, and was still getting his moon legs back.
He peered out the window on the left side of the jetway, and saw the left side of the two-story-tall EOLS capsule. Nothing out of the ordinary. He did the same on the right side, and saw nothing there, either. No debris, no venting gas or leaking fluid. It was always sunny here on Sunset Ridge, in the South Polar Mineral Territories, but the Sun was always just above the horizon, so the left side of the ship was lit brightly enough to hurt his eyes a little. The right side was in deep shadow.
Raimy worried about the thermal stresses on the jetway seal, from being really hot on one side and really cold on the other. He gave it a thorough visual inspection, and then ran a wand microphone around its entire perimeter, listening for leaks. He could find nothing wrong, for now.
Raimy worried about a lot of things. Raimy was a paranoid motherfucker, or he’d’ve been dead by now, many times over. Raimy stayed on high alert even for routine shit like landing an EOLS crew on the landing pad and walking out of it in spacesuits. Because even that could kill you ten different ways.
But this was not routine. This was the first time, ever in Lunar history, that the people carried down by an EOLS were not wearing spacesuits at all. This was the first time that the EOLS had to come all the way down from orbit and set down at the exact roll angle that would line it up with the jetway, so that a perfect seal was even possible. It was the first time ordinary civilians in street clothes would egress from a lander directly into a lunar habitat, without going outside at all. All kinds of things could go wrong, and Raimy had thought long and hard about every one of them.
Which of course was why Raimy, the Director of Lunar Public Safety for Harvest Moon Industries, was the one standing here in the jetway. On one wall, just below the porthole, was an emergency locker stuffed with supplies for every possible contingency: goo suits, pressure tents, patch kit, tool kit, airlock wrench, a spray can of sealant foam, a collapsible rope ladder, a separate coil of rope, and of course a roll of duct tape. All neatly organized and clearly marked in thirty-six-point font that was—he knew firsthand!—readable even through the blur of eyes exposed directly to the vacuum of space.
When it came to safety, Raimy did not fuck around.
And yet, the lights above the EOLS’ hatch were green, indicating equal pressure on both sides of the seal. Nothing was leaking; nothing was making any noises it shouldn’t. Finally, he could think of no reason not to open the door.
Sighing inwardly, he rapped on the hatch and, leaning on the intercom button, said, “Raimy here. Clear to open.”
“Mayflower acknowledges, clear to open,” said the voice of Trish Spofford, the ship’s pilot. Spofford had been running EOLS missions for almost seven years now, and had racked up more flight hours than any other HMI pilot. Which is why, with Raimy’s approval, Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian had selected her for this particular mission.
Raimy heard a metallic click of safety locks disengaging, and tensed slightly.
If the jetway seal fails, there’s going to be no way to close that hatch again. The air will foomp right out of there. If that happens, I’m going to jam a goo suit down over my head, I’m going to grab two pressure tents, I’m going to run into the EOLS and set the tents up wherever I can. I’m going to stuff one tent full of people and seal it and pull the cord. And then I’m probably out of air, but if not, I’m going to stuff and inflate the other tent. And then I’m out of air and I die a heroic death. Fuck.
But none of that happened. Instead, without further ado, the outer handle on the hatch rotated upward, and with hardly a squeak, the hatch swung out toward Raimy, and Mayflower was standing there with a big, fat smile on her face. Like Raimy, she wore a close-fit jacket and trousers of HMI mustard yellow. It actually looked pretty good on her, which was more than Raimy could say for his own self.
“Raimy,” she said with a nod.
“Mayflower. Welcome back.”
“Thank you. Permission to board?”
“Granted.”
That was a bit of protocol that had never quite made sense to Raimy—you didn’t “board” a ground-based habitat—but it was long-established habit by the time he appeared on the scene, so there wasn’t much to be done.
Standing aside (i.e., lightly hopping on his slippered toes), Raimy let Mayflower into the jetway. Behind her stood her boss, and Raimy’s.
“Sir Lawrence,” Raimy said.
“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” said Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian, looking in fact rather haggard. At the age of eighty-four, the CEO and primary shareholder of HMI had never actually been to outer space before, much less endured a three-day, mostly-weightless journey to a whole other planetary body.
“I have barf bags,” Raimy offered.
“Thank you,” Killian said, “but I think everyone on board is grateful to have a bit of gravity back. Only a bit!”
Killian offered a wan smile, and bounced a little on his toes. “So this, at last, is Luna, eh? I made it. Ahead of the reaper, no less, and not in an urn!”
He bounced a little higher, his feet lifting a centimeter off the floor.
“Feels odd, doesn’t it? I suppose I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?”
Killian would never return to Earth. Likely, he wouldn’t survive the trip back there, and he certainly wouldn’t survive the gravity. Despite advances in medical science, something happened to the human body around the age of eighty that made adaptation exponentially more difficult. Even with bone and muscle loss prevention pills at the maximum safe dosage, Killian would most likely, after even just a few months of Lunar gravity, have become unable to breathe or pump blood properly at full Earth gravity, ever again. So Killian’s doctors had warned him, and Raimy saw no reason to believe otherwise.
“Welcome to your new life,” Raimy said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Killian said, shuffling awkwardly forward to make room for the people behind him to “board” the jetway.
There was a man, Johnny Zee Adams, former rock star and shoe entrepreneur, and his wife, former singer/supermodel Clazz. Johnny managed, in Lunar gravity, to swagger in like he owned the place. Which, in some small measure, he did.
There was a woman, Lydia Harris, whose career title was, politely, “philanthropist.”
Another woman, Ju Xue, who had been big in personal robotics right as it was really taking off, and her husband, Xiaoran Xue-Jones, who had once been her Chief Financial Officer. None of their products were still in use as far as Raimy knew, but everyone still knew what a Walkiebot used to be.
And another man, Egil Vitgås, whose family had, for generations, owned a world-famous liquor distillery. Vodka, mostly. Raimy had had it many times. Good stuff.
Raimy had of course read all of their dossiers, and had had his staff run an AI “red check” on each. None presented any serious risk of violence (not even Johnny Zee Adams, who had once cultivated a reputation for it). None presented a greater-than-average risk of walking out an airlock. All were in their mid-eighties or early nineties, but otherwise in good health, and in good mental and physical condition. None were wearing HMI yellow. All of them had left their luggage on the ship, apparently expecting someone to fetch it to their apartments for them.
What all of them had in common was a fuckpile of money. Which made sense, because this facility had cost almost a hundred billion dollars to construct. A ten-year lease on an apartment here cost a hundred times more than most people made in a lifetime.
Also: to get a rocket into orbit, without exceeding two-gee acceleration for more than sixty seconds, took a ridiculous amount of fuel. It had taken an HMI Heavy Lift Double to carry these frail people on the first leg of their journey, and that was not cheap, either.
But even so, there were hundreds of applicants for, at the moment, only forty-eight apartments. So, each of these people had also, in some way, managed to personally persuade Sir Lawrence to let them come at all, and then to let them be a part of the Pioneer Group.
“Welcome to Luna,” Raimy said to each of them as they shuffled or danced or hopped past him. “Welcome to your new life. Welcome to Luna.”
“Oi, I feel twenty years younger already,” said Johnny Zee Adams.
“You had better, for the price,” said Xiaoran Xue-Jones.
But that was the whole point, right? People were living longer, healthier lives these days—an average of ninety-one years for men, and ninety-six for women. Longer, if you took good care of yourself. Longer still if you were rich. But still, always, time and gravity had their way. A fit ninety-year-old on Earth might be technically capable of completing a 10K run, or in rare cases even a marathon, but they were never going to feel like they did when they were forty, or even seventy. Never again. Never on Earth.
But here on Luna, they could. In fact, if Killian’s AI models could be trusted, these people would live an average of nine years longer than they would have on Earth. If things went to plan, they would literally cheat death. They would literally buy time.
Whether this was fair or ethical was a question beyond Raimy’s pay grade. He was only here to keep them safe, no matter who they were. He was here to keep a whole, growing community of old people safe, in one of the least safe environments human beings had ever occupied.
He also had technical responsibility for Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station, eighteen kilometers from here. And Shoemaker Lunar Antenna Park Observatory, and the Aitken-Ingenii Metal Extraction Facility, and even to some extent Saint Joseph of Cupertino Monastery. It was getting downright crowded here in the South Polar Mineral Territories.
But those facilities were staffed mainly with professional astronauts, and Raimy had been working with them for years, refining and refining their safety protocols. They knew what they were doing, and didn’t need a hard-ass like him leaning over them anymore.
This place was different. This place was daunting, with ordinary civilians set to be in constant peril.
Over his shoulder, Killian said, “Do you have some words for us, Sheriff?”
That was a title Killian used jokingly, because Raimy used to be a cop, and because “public safety” included a wide range of duties, including the investigation of accidents and (rarely) crimes. But the nickname was actually kind of annoying, because most of Raimy’s job consisted of yelling at people to blow the dust out of their O-rings.
“Let’s wait until we’re inside,” Raimy said.
Then, hugging the white-painted metal wall along the left side of the jetway, he made his way past the EOLS passengers, and Mayflower, until he was at the station-side hatch. The lights were green, so he opened it, and waved everyone into the van-sized airlock on the other side. Once everyone was in, he closed and dogged the hatch, pushed his way through the crowd again, and opened the next hatch, and waved everyone through again.
“Full service,” remarked Lydia Harris with some amusement.
“Mmm,” Raimy responded noncommittally.
Next was a long, windowless, poorly lit hallway—twice as long as the jetway—sloping downward at precisely fifteen degrees. And then another hatch, and then finally the interior of the habitat itself.
Everyone gasped, one by one, as they entered the dome and looked up. They had all seen pictures. They had probably all seen VR renderings before shelling out their hard-won (or hard-inherited) money. But yeah, pictures didn’t really do the place justice.
Raimy entered behind them all, then closed and dogged the hatch. Huntley Millar, HMI’s extravehicular activity (EVA) crew chief, was here waiting for them. He smiled and nodded at Raimy.
“Welcome,” he said warmly.
The dome was a circular amphitheater, mostly buried, with the “beach” and pool area down at the center, and rings of apartments and gardens and orchards rising up until they met the blue-white “sky” of extremely thick, extremely heavy, beautifully translucent quartz panels. Outside, the skydome was ringed with twelve vertical mirrors that rotated (once per month to match the rotation of the Moon itself) to cast the full light of the Sun onto the glass. The actual sun hit the glass as well, lighting the whole thing up as bright as any Earthly sky.
Ignoring all of that, Raimy said, loudly, “Never open this door.” Once he was sure everyone was looking at him again, he pointed at the hatch handle for emphasis.
They all looked at him with some mixture of surprise and annoyance and disappointment. He had ruined their perfect little moment. Good. He needed their full attention.
“Some of you may never need to exit this facility ever again,” he said. “This is an all-inclusive tropical resort; all your needs will be met inside of this dome. But if you do need to go somewhere else, for any reason, a trained astronaut will open doors for you. If you feel suicidal, take some pills. Vacuum exposure is not a way you want to go. I’ve seen people die that way, and it’s awful. Is all of that clear to all of you?”
Everyone stared.
“Great bedside manner,” Mayflower said.
“I’m not here to play tour guide,” Raimy said gravely. “I’ll let this man, Huntley Millar, do that. He led the team that built this place. I am the Director of Public Safety, and my job is to remind you there is no oxygen on the other side of that dome. If you want to sneak around the tunnels underneath this place, don’t. If you want to rap your knuckles on the sky to see how solid it is, don’t. The glass gets very hot, as do the metal seams between the panels. If you want to mess with the plumbing or wiring in your apartment, don’t. This dome is like a submarine, or a carved-out salt mine deep underground. Or like an airplane, flying ten kilometers above the Earth. If you mess with anything you’re not supposed to, you might kill not only yourself, but also everyone else. I can’t emphasize that enough. Does everyone understand what I’m saying?”
Reluctantly, six heads nodded. Mayflower and Killian just stood there looking annoyed.
Weirdly, Raimy suffered from stage fright when addressing groups of people, so he had prepared and rehearsed these remarks over a period of weeks. Right now he was sticking pretty closely to that script, but looking at everyone’s faces now, he decided to skip the part about how he had authority to place anyone under house arrest if he felt they were in any way a danger to themselves or the community. They would find that out in due time. Or not. Maybe not.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry to start you off that way. Welcome to Second Morning Retirement Community. I hope each and every one of you finds a fresh start here, to a long and happy second lifetime.”
There was a tour, led by Huntley Millar, which led the new arrivals through the pool area, and into one of the vacant apartments on the cabana level.
“Most of this was constructed in vacuum,” Millar said, “at the facilities over at Shackleton, and trucked here in pieces. We only started filling the dome with air a few weeks ago.”
“Wow,” someone said, without apparent irony.
Millar continued, “There was a lot of digging and burying here on site, naturally, but inside a geological feature called a graben, which formed a natural amphitheater on three sides. Your wallets can thank God for that, because if we’d had to start on flat ground, this would have taken double the time and cost. The size and shape of the dome was dictated, though, by the hole we started with.”
“Will the next one be bigger, then?” asked Johnny Zee Adams.
“Perhaps,” Sir Lawrence answered for Millar. “We shall learn a lot from this one, certainly.”
“I won’t be involved in the next one,” Millar noted.
Sir Lawrence smiled at that. “Mr. Millar, here—one of our best people, I should note—is on his way to a well-earned retirement of his own, after eight years on and off the Moon.”
“Actually, I’ve got another year of ground duty down in Suriname,” Millar said. “Then, who knows?”
To that, Lydia Harris said, “So you’ve built a promised land you’re not allowed to enter?”
Killian held up a hand. “Now, now. Two of these units are reserved for an employee lottery, and two for low-income individuals or couples who meet the medical criteria. And of course, smaller ones for Raimy, here, and for Chef and all the other staffers who’ll be seeing to your needs. But this is academic; Mr. Millar has decades ahead of him before he needs to consider a place like this. What are you, son, fifty-five?”
“Exactly right, sir. I started with you at thirty-six.”
“Ah, so it’s almost pension time, then, yes?”
“Indeed, sir. Exactly right. But you’re making me blush in front of these very patient people. Shall we continue the tour?”
“By all means.”
The room they were all standing in was a “Parlour/Foyer” according to Millar, and it was larger than Raimy’s entire Second Dawn apartment. Which was fine; he’d lived in much worse places. Millar then led them through the kitchen, master suite, office/guest suite, and multipurpose room, each of which was large and well appointed, with locally manufactured furniture and decorations already in place. Each resident had a cargo shipment due tomorrow, but with rather severe restrictions on mass and volume. In terms of “stuff,” their new lives would not be mere extensions of their old ones.
Next, they toured the medical center, the communal gym, the dining hall, and rec room, and they took a quick glance at the row of offices where Raimy and a few other staffers were based. The “manager”—a woman named Tiki Beebee, whom Raimy had never seen or talked to—was supposed to be here already, but had been delayed by some kind of family thing. She had the office next to his.
And then . . . well, then the tour was complete.
“Bit small for the rest of our lives,” Johnny Zee Adams remarked.
“You get used to it,” said Raimy, who had spent three years aboard a very cramped nuclear submarine, and had spent most of the last five years in ships and rovers and habitat modules that could probably all, collectively, be piled up on the “beach” of this facility without reaching the second level of apartments. Also, medical science and lunar gravity notwithstanding, the rest of these people’s lives was ten, maybe twenty years, tops.
“It beats the alternative,” Sir Lawrence said, “which is rather the point, yes?” Then, with even greater annoyance: “This facility is, by a considerable margin, the largest and most lavish ever constructed off the surface of the Earth. The dome you’re standing in is fifteen times the volume of the gymnasium bubble at the Marriott Stars, which was itself the largest single habitat module in history. If this isn’t good enough for you—if you think you might like to return to Earth and sell your lease to someone on the waiting list—it’s a decision you’d best make quickly.”
“I think it’s lovely,” said Lydia Harris, after a long and uncomfortable pause. She delivered this with more than a trace of a southern U.S. accent, and in a tone she had probably used all her life to shut down any potential disagreement.
“Excellent,” said Sir Lawrence. “Now, you’ve all an hour to settle into your new accommodations, freshening up et cetera, after which I understand Chef has prepared a feast for our arrival.”
“What about our bags?” said Clazz. Not in any sort of haughty or demanding way—just tired.
To which Sir Lawrence said, “Has that been taken care of, Raimy?”
“I’ll look into it,” Raimy said, though he knew for a fact that it hadn’t. In fact, he knew there were only four staffers on site at this time, which was a lot for only seven residents.
Which meant that Raimy, his own self, was going to have to do it. Raimy had been a cop and a lawyer and a Navy diver and an astronaut. Never a baggage handler until now, but he supposed that was what he got for working with people like these. He was, in fact, probably the most expensive baggage handler who’d ever lived. So, fine—there were worse things.
The residents all seemed to revive a bit during dinner, and then decline a bit afterward, the boost of Lunar gravity overwhelmed by the weight of food and drink and exhaustion. And darkness; overhead, the electrochromic filters on the skydome had faded from blue-white to yellow to red-orange, and were now such a deep blue that pinhole “stars” in the filter—a rough match for the actual stars in the sky right now—were slowly becoming visible. Fake nighttime in fake paradise.
Still, as everyone was getting up to leave, Sir Lawrence found the energy to seize Raimy by the elbow, tightly.
“Walk with me, Sheriff.”
“What’s up?” Raimy asked, as he found himself, indeed, walking.
The dining hall had an indoor portion set off by closable hatches, and a patio area overlooking the pool, bordered with trellises around which vines had been planted—in genuine Earthly potting soil!—but had not yet had a chance to grow. Warm yellow lights were coming on at the corners of the hall, and along a spiral path heading down toward the beach and pool.
“I realize the position you’re in,” Killian said, now releasing Raimy’s elbow, “but I wonder if you realize mine.”
“I’m sorry?” Raimy said. He had no idea what Killian was getting at, here, and was feeling a bit impatient about it. The old man had a slow, circumspect way of speaking; he made you dig for it, and Raimy wasn’t currently in the mood. But now that Raimy and Killian lived in this dome together, he supposed he was going to have to build up a tolerance.
“How do you think these people are feeling right now?” Killian asked.
“Nervous?” Raimy tried. “First-day jitters?”
The path’s downward slope would have been gentle even on Earth; here, Raimy felt he would float right off it if they walked any faster than a gentle mosey. If he wanted to, he could vault over the railing and the newly planted bushes behind it, and land down there on the beach’s gray-white sand like an Olympic gymnast. Above, the twin porch lights of the apartments glowed warmly. A gentle “breeze,” along with the piped-in sound of crickets against the gentle crashing of waves—completed the effect.
“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” Sir Lawrence said. “It’s everything I could have hoped. I have lived on jets and airships, Raimy. I’ve crossed the ocean in a sailboat. This place is very roomy by comparison, and the Lunar gravity”—he hopped a bit, to demonstrate—“makes it feel, I think, even bigger somehow.”
“But . . . ?”
“Hmm. Not so much ‘but’ as ‘and.’ Retirement communities are the front porch of Heaven, you see. This is the last place I’ll ever live. Oh, I may pop over to Shackleton and rattle their cages a bit. I may visit the chapel at Saint Joe’s, to offer a prayer of thanks that my life has been such a fortunate one. I may poke my nose into the intrigues of cislunar space from time to time—one can’t help wondering what the devil Igbal is up to, after all. And all the others. But I’ll always come back here to lay my head down. I’ll never sleep anywhere else. And, I don’t know how else to say this, but one of those nights I’ll be laying it down for the very last time. Right here.
“We spend our lives wondering where and how it will end for us. Hit by a car? Felled by a workplace heart attack? Murdered? But for me, now, today, there’s no more mystery. Having survived a perilous journey, I’ve arrived at last in the place of my death. Which means, in a sense, I’m half dead already. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
That was a lot to take in. Carefully, Raimy said, “You want me to go easier on the residents?”
“Not easier, no. No one likes being condescended to, particularly by someone with, well, a lot less life experience. But . . . how shall I put this? You’re not their boss; they’re yours. Here they are, thinking about death, and here you are telling them to be careful. Careful. Can you see how ironic that is?”
“I . . . suppose.”
“Let this be the easiest job you’ve ever had, Raimy. Can you do that for me? Let people hang out in your office. Let people report their drippy faucets to you, and tell you their stories. Old people have lots and lots of stories, some quite amazing, and often no one to pass them down to. Can you be that brave for us?”
“Brave?”
“Soon there’ll be a hundred residents here, and statistically speaking, one or two of them will expire almost immediately. And the rest of us, one by one, in the years that follow, and each of us replaced with another soul preparing to fly.
“So, I ask: Can you set aside all your urgencies and simply comfort the dying? You’re a strong man, an accomplished man, the hero of Saint Joe’s, just forty-five years old. Can you see? You remind us all of how we used to be, or wish we’d been, and of how we see ourselves even now.”
They had reached the bottom of the path, where the concrete fanned out and then dropped away at the lip of the beach. Raimy jumped, and landed lightly in the sand.
“You want me to be their bartender,” he said, turning around to look at Killian, who was making a face.
“Again, I fail to make myself properly understood.”
Killian stepped forward gingerly, as though his bones might break, and put his slippered feet, one by one, into the sand of the beach he had dreamed and made real.
“Do you know, a decade ago I was still jumping out of aircraft? Still doing all sorts of things. But medical science can only do so much, eh?”
He bounced gently on his toes for a few seconds, and then said, “The actual bartender will arrive here in due time, along with the cleaning staff. I want . . . I’m hoping you can be something more than that. A friend? Is that . . . It’s a lot to ask, I realize. A lot for you, a lot for anyone. But you’ve raced motorcycles. You’ve battled enemy submarines. You’ve walked on the Lunar surface wearing nothing but a plastic hood.”
“I ran,” Raimy corrected. “For my life.”
“Precisely. You ran for your life. Everyone knows that story. Everyone who relocates here has heard it as part of the sales pitch, as if they didn’t already know it from the news. Can you make these people feel as interesting as that? Can you, Raimy fucking Vaught, be a peer to these colonists? To me?”
Raimy didn’t answer right away, and then found for a moment that he couldn’t answer. Was this man, this trillionaire, one of the Four Horsemen of cislunar space, really asking to . . . hang out? Killian was widely regarded as the kindest of the Horsemen, and he was certainly the one with whom Raimy had the most in common—motorcycles and such. And, truth be told, Raimy had never been very good at making friends. He could do a lot worse.
On the other hand, Raimy was not an extrovert, and he held a natural disdain for one-sided, transactional relationships. He was easily bored, and had been suckered into this job on, perhaps, false pretenses.
On the other other hand, what else did he have going on? The various habitats in the SPMT had already learned what he had to teach them. He was traveling less. And yes, sure, there were going to be a hundred residents here at Second Dawn by the end of March, and twenty full-time staffers. Inevitably, there’d be accidents and lapses of judgment. There’d be fights and grudges and pranks, and missing items that might or might not have been stolen. Routine cop work. But how much of it, really? Enough to fill every hour of every day, all year long?
On the other other other hand, could he effectively police a population if he got too close to them personally? And on yet another hand, wasn’t that the situation of every small-town cop, everywhere in the world?
He’d been silent for a long time. Too long.
“I’ve overstepped,” Sir Lawrence said, with a mix of apology and regret. “A hazard of my position, I’m afraid. I am sorry if I’ve made you in any way uncomfortable.”
“It isn’t that,” Raimy said. “Really, it’s not. I was thinking about it. I fully realize I’m the help around here, and it’s—”
“I retract the question, with apologies. Your job is hard enough without—”
“I’d be honored,” Raimy said, and mostly meant it. If people wanted his friendship, well, probably he should give that a try. Probably he should.
Killian seemed embarrassed. “This never does get easier, I’m afraid, this business of finding someone you can talk to. It doesn’t matter if you’re old and rich, or something else entirely. I find we’re all just beggars in the end.”