Sunday passed Geoffrey a translation earpiece. ‘Put this on,’ she said. ‘Chama doesn’t do Swahili.’
She had voked ahead and as the doors opened they were met by a big, intense-looking man. Geoffrey judged him to be about his own age, give or take a decade. Long black hair hung down the sides of his face in tousled curtains, his skin brown, his beard neat and black, trimmed with laser accuracy.
‘Chama,’ Sunday said, pushing in her own jewelled translator. ‘This is Geoffrey, my brother. Geoffrey: this is Chama Akbulut.’
Chama reached out and took Geoffrey’s hand. He said something in a language Geoffrey didn’t recognise, while the translation rang clear and near-simultaneous. ‘Heard quite a bit about you.’
‘Nothing bad, I hope.’
‘No. Although Sunday did say you wouldn’t come up here in a million years. What changed your mind?’
‘Family business,’ Sunday cut in.
‘I hope we’re not intruding,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Always glad of company here.’ Chama wore a loose-fitting smock with a drawstring neck under a long leather waistcoat with a great many pockets and pouches. ‘You up to speed on the menagerie, Geoffrey?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Oh, good. That’s always the best way.’
Chama led them deeper into the building, until they were passing along a corridor dug out of solid Moon rock, sprayed over with smoke-tinted plastic insulation. Pipes and power lines ran along the ceiling, stapled messily in place.
‘There are strict rules governing the transport and utilisation of genetic materials within the system,’ Chama said, looking back over his shoulder. ‘And I’m very proud to say that Gleb and I have broken most of them.’
‘Aren’t there good reasons for those rules?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘No one wants to see people dying because of some ancient virus escaping into the wild.’
‘We’re not interested in anything hazardous,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb and I have committed criminal acts only because we were obliged to break certain badly constructed laws. Legislation made by stupid, short-sighted governments.’
Geoffrey tensed. In his experience, governments were quite useful things: it was hard to see how the world could have come through the Resource and Relocation crises without them. But anti-centralist rhetoric came with the territory, here in the Descrutinised Zone.
‘Guess it depends on your intentions,’ he said.
‘Had a lot of time for your grandmother,’ Chama said. ‘You think dear old Eunice sat around analysing her every decision into the ground, looking at it from every possible ethical angle? Or did she just, you know, go for it?’
They’d arrived at a heavy door, the kind that might lead out onto the surface or into a non-pressurised tunnel system. Chama stood to one side and allowed the basketball hoop of an eidetic scanner to lower down over his skull. Chama closed his eyes while he visualised the sphinxware image sequence.
The door unlocked with the solid, reassuring clunk of a castle drawbridge and hinged slowly open.
‘Welcome to the menagerie,’ Chama said.
The room beyond the door was bigger than Geoffrey had been expecting – much larger than the vault in the Central African Bank – but still nowhere near capacious enough to contain a zoo. His eyes took a few moments to adjust to the very low ambient lighting, a soft red radiance bleeding from the edges of the floor. Rectangular panels, two high, divided the walls, but beyond that he couldn’t make out more than the sketchiest of details. There was another door at the far end, outlined in pale glowing pink.
‘Feel I’m missing something here,’ Geoffrey said.
Sunday smiled. ‘I think you’d better show him, Chama.’
‘Forgive the question, but you’re absolutely sure he can be trusted?’ Chama asked.
‘He’s my brother.’
Chama voked something. Polarising screens winked to transparency. The panelled rectangles in the walls were in fact glass screens. Behind the screens were enclosures rife with vegetation.
Geoffrey reeled. It was obvious, even from a moment’s glance, that the habitats differed in subtle and not so subtle ways. Some were flooded with bright equatorial sunlight – the blazing intensity of the noonday savannah. Others had the permanent gloom of the forest floor under a sun-sapping canopy of dense tree cover. Others were steamy or desert-arid.
He walked to the nearest pair of windows. They were stacked one above the other, with no sign that the habitats were in any way interdependent.
‘I don’t know as much botany as I should,’ Geoffrey said, peering at the amazing profusion of plants crammed into the upper window. Their olive leaves were diamonded with dewdrops or the remnants of a recent rain shower. Under Lunar gravity, surface tension shaped liquids into almost perfect hemispheres. ‘But if there’s as much biodiversity in this room as I think there is, this is a pretty amazing achievement.’
‘We’ve been growing plants in space since the first space stations,’ Chama said, ‘since the days of Salyut, Mir and the ISS. Some of the plant lines here go that far back: lines nurtured by the first thousand people to venture into space.
‘Ah,’ Geoffrey said, with a profound sinking feeling. ‘Right. Guess I should have seen that one coming.’
