He smiled. “You’ll never get to be an alpha female with that attitude, High-G. Mother would have invented this club, if she’d thought of it.” He got up and went over to talk to Thabo.
God, she was so stupid! It was the beginning of Founders’ Week, and she had hoped Carey would be her guide and companion through the carnival. She had worried all week what to wear. What a waste.
She’d blown it. She tugged on the green asymmetrically-sleeved shirt she had chosen so carefully to set off her red hair.
Roz hung around the edges as Carey joked with the others, trying to laugh in the right places, feeling miserably out of place. After they dressed, she left with Carey, Thabo, and Raisa for the festival. Yellow triangular signs surrounded the pressure lock in the hallway linking the ice cavern to the lava tube. Roz struggled to keep up with Carey who, like all of the kids born on the Moon, was taller than Roz. Raisa leaned on Thabo. Raisa had told Roz the day before that she was thinking about moving out and getting her own apartment. Raisa was thirteen, six months younger than Roz.
The lava tube was as much as forty meters wide, thirty tall, and it twisted and turned, rose and fell, revealing different vistas as they went along. Shops and apartments clung to the walls. Gardens grew along the nave beneath heliostats that transformed light transmitted from the surface during the lunar day into a twenty-four-hour cycle. Unless you went outside you could forget whether it was day or night out on the surface.
Now it was “night.” As they entered the crater from the lava tube, the full extent of the colony was spread out before them. The crater was nearly two kilometers in diameter. Even in one-sixth gee the dome was a triumph of engineering, supported by a five-hundred-meter-tall central steel-and-glass spire.
Roz could hardly believe it, but the school legend was that Carey had once climbed the spire in order to spray- paint the name of a girl he liked on the inside of the dome.
Above, the dome was covered with five meters of regolith to protect the inside from radiation, and beneath the ribbed struts that spread out from the spire like an umbrella’s, the interior surface was a screen on which could be projected a daytime sky or a nighttime starfield. Just now thousands of bright stars shone down. Mars and Jupiter hung in bright conjunction high overhead.
From the west and south sides of the crater many levels of balconied apartments overlooked the interior.
Most of the crater floor was given over to agriculture, but at the base of the spire was Sobieski Park, the main meeting ground for the colony’s 2,500 inhabitants. An elaborate fountain surrounded the tower.
There was an open-air theater. Trees and grass, luxuriantly irrigated in a display of conspicuous water consumption, spread out from the center.
Roz and the others climbed down the zigzag path from the lava tube and through the farmlands to the park. Beneath strings of colored lights hung in the trees, men and women danced to the music of a drum band. Naked revelers wove their way through the crowd. Both sexes wore bright, fragrant ribbons in their hair. A troupe performed low-gravity acrobatics on the amphitheater stage. Little children ran in and out of the fountains, while men and women in twos and threes and every combination of sexes leaned in each other’s arms.
On the shadowed grass, Roz watched an old man and a young girl lying together, not touching, leaning heads on elbows, speaking in low voices with their faces inches apart. What could they possibly have to say to each other? Thabo and Raisa faded off into the dancers around the band, and Roz was alone with Carey. Carey brought her a flavored ice and sat down on the grass beside her. The drum band was making a racket, and the people were dancing faster now.
“Sorry the coach is on your case so much,” Carey said. He touched her shoulder gently. The Cousins were always touching each other. With them, the dividing line between touching for sex and touching just to touch was erased.
God, she wished she could figure out what she wanted. Was he her brother or her boyfriend? It was hard enough back on Earth; among all these Cousins it was impossible.
When she didn’t answer right away, Carey said, “The invisible girl returns.”
“What?”
“You’re disappearing again. The girl from the planet nobody’s ever seen.”
Roz watched the girl with the man on the grass. The girl was no older than she. The distance between the two had disappeared; now the girl was climbing onto the man.
Carey ran his finger down Roz’s arm, then gently nudged her over. Roz pushed him away. “No thanks.”
Carey tried to kiss her cheek, and she turned away. “Not now, OK?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Does something have to be the matter? Any Cousins girl might tell you no, too. Don’t act like it’s just because I’m from Earth.”
“It is.”
“Is not.”
“I’m not going to rape you, High-G. Cousins don’t rape.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Absolutely nothing. But you know how screwed up it is down on Earth.”
“Lots of stuff people do here would be wrong on Earth.”
“Right. And people there shoot each other if anyone touches them.”
Cousins could be so arrogant it made her want to spit. “You’ve never even seen the Earth-let alone been there.”
“I’ve seen you, Roz.”
“You don’t own me.”
He smiled. “No. Your father does.” He nuzzled her neck.
Roz hit him. “Get off me, you pig!” She got up and ran away.
Festival Forty milligrams of serentol, a whiff or two of THC, and an ounce of grain alcohol: Jack Baldwin wobbled through the crowd of revelers in Sobieski Park. Beneath the somatic night, feeling just an edge of anxiety, he looked for Eva among the faces.
The park was full of young men and women, their perfect bodies in one another’s arms. Sex was their favorite pastime, and who could blame them? They went about it as if their lives depended on the next coupling. That was biology at work, he supposed-but if it was just genes having their way with the human body, then why all the emotional turmoil-does she love me who’s he sleeping with I can’t stand it when she looks at him like that how unfair to treat me like a toy who does he think he is I can’t stand it I’ll die if I can’t have her tonight…
Where was Eva? He smiled. Apparently genes did not let go of your mind just because you were pushing forty. Sex had been a problem back on Earth-always some screw-up with women coworkers, hassles with his live-ins, distractions. Here, sex was the common coin of interpersonal contact, unjudged as taste in ice cream (but some people made a religion of taste), easy as speech (but speech was not always easy), frequent as eating (but some people starved themselves in the midst of plenty). Where did that leave him? Was he simply a victim of the culture that had raised him? Or was his frustration purely personal?
Where was Eva?
Men and women, naked, oiled, and smiling, wove their way through the celebrants, offering themselves to whoever might wish to take them. It was the one day of the year that the Society of Cousins fit the cliched image of polymorphous orgy that outsiders had of it. One of them, a dark young woman-dark as Eva-brushed her fingers across Jack’s cheek, then swirled away on one luscious hip.
But Eva was taller, more slender. Eva’s breasts were small, her waist narrow despite the softness of the belly that had borne Carey, and when they made love her hipbones pressed against him. She was forty, and there was gray in her black hair. This girl dancing by could satisfy his lust, and perhaps if he knew her she would become a person as complex as Eva. But she would not be Eva: the combination of idealism and practicality, the temper that got her into trouble because she could not keep her mouth shut. Fierce when she fought for what mattered to her, but open-hearted to those who opposed her, with an inability to be successfully Machiavellian that was her saving grace.
He had met Eva a month after he and Roz had arrived at the colony. Jack was working on a new nematode that, combined with a gene-engineered composting process, would produce living soil from regolith more efficiently than the tedious chemical methods that had been used to create Fowler’s initial environment. His specialty in nematodes had been the passport for him and Roz into the guarded Cousins society, the last bridge after a succession of burned bridges he had left behind them. He certainly had not planned to end up on the Moon. The
