Erno tried to regain his cool. “Mr. Durden, I presume.”
“Switch your suit to Channel Six,” Tyler said. “Encrypted.” He pulled away and touched the pad on his arm, and pointed to Erno’s. When Erno did the same, his radio found Tyler’s wavelength, and he heard Tyler’s voice in his ear.
“I thought I might catch you out here.”
The other workers had all passed by; they were alone. “What are you doing here?”
“You want adventure? We got adventure.”
“What adventure?”
“Come along with me.”
Instead of heading in through the maze, Tyler led Erno back out to the surface. The fan of concrete was deserted, the shuttle bus already gone back to the lab and factories. From around a corner, Tyler hauled out a backpack, settled it over his shoulders, and struck off east, along the graded road that encircled Fowler. The mountainous rim rose to their right, topped by the beginnings of the dome; to their left was the rubble of the broken highlands. Tyler moved along at a quick pace, taking long strides in the low G with a minimum of effort.
After a while Tyler asked him, “So, how about the book? Have you read it?”
“Some. It’s a collection of stories, all about men.”
“Learning anything?”
“They seem so primitive. I guess it was a different world back then.”
“What’s so different?”
Erno told him the story about the prizefighter. “Did they really do that?”
“Yes. Men have always engaged in combat.”
“For money?”
“The money is just an excuse. They do it anyway.”
“But why did the writer tell that story? What’s the point?”
“It’s about elemental manhood. The fighters were men. The promoter was not.”
“Because he didn’t pay the boxer?”
“Because he knew the boxer had fought his heart out, but he pretended that the boxer was a coward in order to keep the audience from getting mad at him. The promoter preserved his own credibility by trashing the boxer’s. The author wants you to be like the boxer, not the promoter.”
“But the boxer dies-for twenty-five bucks.”
“He died a man. Nobody can take that away from him.”
“But nobody knows that. In fact, they all think he died a coward.”
“The promoter knows he wasn’t. The other fighter knows, probably. And thanks to the story, now you know, too.”
Erno still had trouble grasping exactly the metaphor Tyler intended when he used the term “man.” It had nothing to do with genetics. But before he could quiz Tyler, the older man stopped. By this time they had circled a quarter of the colony and were in the shadow of the crater wall. Tyler switched on his helmet light and Erno did likewise. Erno’s thermoregulator pumped heat along the mi-crofibers buried in his suit’s skin, compensating for the sudden shift from the brutal heat of lunar sunlight to the brutal cold of lunar darkness.
“Here we are,” Tyler said, looking up the crater wall. “See that path?”
It wasn’t much of a path, just a jumble of rocks leading up the side of the crater, but once they reached it Erno could see that, by following patches of luminescent paint on boulders, you could climb the rim mountain to the top. “Where are we going?” Erno asked.
“To the top of the world,” Tyler said. “From up there I’ll show you the empire I’ll give you if you follow me.”
“You’re kidding.”
Tyler said nothing.
It was a hard climb to the crater’s lip, where a concrete rim formed the foundation of the dome. From here, the dome looked like an unnaturally swollen stretch of mare, absurdly regular, covered in lunar regolith. Once the dome had been constructed over the crater, about six meters of lunar soil had been spread evenly over its surface to provide a radiation shield for the interior. Concentric rings every ten meters kept the soil from sliding down the pitch of the dome. It was easier climbing here, but surreal. The horizon of the dome moved ahead of them as they progressed, and it was hard to judge distances.
“There’s a solar storm warning,” Erno said. “Aren’t you worried?”
“We’re not going to be out long.”
“I was at the meeting,” Erno said.
“I saw you,” Tyler said. “Cute girl, the dark skinned one. Watch out. You know what they used to say on Earth?”
“What?”
“If women didn’t have control of all the pussy, they’d have bounties on their heads.”
Erno laughed. “How can you say that? They’re our sisters, our mothers.”
“And they still have control of all the pussy.”
They climbed the outside of the dome.
“What are you going to do to keep from being made invisible?” Erno asked.
“What makes you think they’re going to try?”
“I don’t think your speech changed anybody’s mind.”
“So? No matter what they teach you, my visibility is not socially constructed. That’s the lesson for today.”
“What are we doing out here?”
“We’re going to demonstrate this fact.”
Ahead of them a structure hove into sight. At the apex of the dome, just above the central spire, stood a maintenance airlock. Normally, this would be the way workers would exit to inspect or repair the dome’s exterior- not the way Erno and Tyler had come. This was not a public airlock, and the entrance code would be encrypted.
Tyler led them up to the door. From his belt pouch he took a key card and stuck it into the reader. Erno could hear him humming a song over his earphones. After a moment, the door slid open.
“In we go, Erno,” Tyler said.
They entered the airlock and waited for the air to recycle. “This could get us into trouble,” Erno said.
“Yes, it could.”
“If you can break into the airlock you can sabotage it. An airlock breach could kill hundreds of people.”
“You’re absolutely right, Erno. That’s why only completely responsible people like us should break into airlocks.”
The interior door opened into a small chamber facing an elevator. Tyler put down his backpack, cracked the seal on his helmet and began stripping off his garish suit. Underneath he wore only briefs. Rust-colored pubic hair curled from around the edges of the briefs. Tyler’s skin was pale, the muscles in his arms and chest well developed, but his belly soft. His skin was crisscrossed with a web of pink lines where the thermoregulator system of the suit had marked him.
Feeling self-conscious, Erno took off his own suit. They were the same height, but Tyler outweighed him by twenty kilos. “What’s in the backpack?” Erno asked.
“Rappelling equipment.” Tyler gathered up his suit and the pack and, ignoring the elevator, opened the door beside it to a stairwell. “Leave your suit here,” he said, ditching his own in a corner.
The stairwell was steep and the cold air tasted stale; it raised goose bumps on Erno’s skin. Clutching the pack to his chest, Tyler hopped down the stairs to the next level. The wall beside them was sprayed with gray insulation. The light from bioluminescents turned their skin greenish yellow.
Instead of continuing down the well all the way to the top of the spire, Tyler stopped at a door on the side of the stairwell. He punched in a code. The door opened into a vast darkness, the space between the exterior and interior shells of the dome. Tyler shone his light inside: Three meters high, broken by reinforcing struts, the cavity stretched out from them into the darkness, curving slightly as it fell away. Tyler closed the door behind them and, in the light of his flash, pulled a notebook from the pack and called up a map. He studied it for a minute, and then led Erno into the darkness.
