Chapter Twenty-five

A Biological Imperative

Saturday, 17 November 2035

Barbara loved being outside. Maybe that had to do with growing up on the ranch, but it didn’t matter if it was lunar daylight or lunar dark, being outside under the open sky—even when she was encapsulated in her pressure suit—was far better than being in the prefabricated habitats.

In that respect, she considered the subterranean phase of her training to be much worse than the reality of colony life. In the Cave, she had no opportunities to go outside and see the Sun or the Earth or much of anything. At least here, there were even places inside that allowed a view of the outside world. Like now, when the Sun was nearly overhead and ambient light flooded the inside of the Grand Central dome.

In these existential moments of freedom, she felt most at home on this barren but starkly beautiful world, and closest to what she guessed her husband must feel all the time. It was a pity she didn’t have those moments as often as he did.

Now that the new set of colonists had been in place long enough to know their way around and actually start contributing—was it three weeks, or four? it didn’t matter—Barbara was happy to turn her attention to a new work assignment. She had given over her part of the launch acceleration rail project to Al Mancuso, one of the new engineers, and today she would start scouting for the site of the first proof-of-concept dome.

She checked in with Central Control—Bent Sondstrom had the duty at the moment—and got clearance to proceed with the nearby survey. She called up the map of candidate sites on her head-up display and verified which ones she would visit. Four of the ten-to-fifteen-meter-diameter craterlets were within range of the little electric carts, and she could survey them on her own. The additional five candidate craterlets were farther afield; to visit those, she would have to check out one of the MPVs and probably enlist someone else to ride with her.

The candidate sites had been chosen based on the available overhead imagery. She would examine each one up close to see which was the best site to cover over with a dome.

This would be the closest thing to real engineering she had done since arriving at the colony. She shouldn’t have been surprised, since her experience in the service had been much the same, but on-site engineering did not amount to much. Everything big had already been designed and most things had already been built, so the little bit of engineering that was required usually only amounted to fitting things together when they might not want to. There were some small opportunities, like the work stand she designed for use in the garage: she and Van actually worked together on that one, and cut up several discarded hatch covers from the prefabs to bend into supports and hold-downs. But that was less engineering than just rough craftsmanship.

The next closest full-blown on-site engineering effort was the tunneling project, since it required detailed surveys of the rim of Mercator Crater and specific adaptation to the rock formation. No terrestrial engineer would ever be able to predict ahead of time how the tunnels would have to be dug and supported. But Barbara preferred thinking about the foundations of domed structures than about digging tunnels—digging tunnels would be too much like being back in the Cave in Utah. She was happy to leave that to Rex.

She was tired and hungry by the time she returned to Gateway and cycled through the airlock, but she was pleased with her results. She had definitely rejected three of the candidate sites and taken almost a hundred digital images of the fourth. It might work, if none of the others were better, and had the advantage of being close to the main colony. The idea was to find a site where the rim of the small crater was in good enough shape to hold the footings of a dome. Once they had built a dome about ten meters in diameter, they would progress to a twenty-meter dome, and then fifty, and on up in stages. The actual size might be plus or minus ten percent, depending on the prevailing conditions, but with each step they would get better and better at building domed-over structures that one day should eliminate the need for prefabricated and tunnel habitats.

With the worst of the sweat toweled off, her pressure suit put away, and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Barbara moved through the junction from Gateway to Grand Central and found one of BD’s Bridge Club games in progress—even though BD was working a shift in the command center. Trish Springer and Stormie Pastorelli were playing against Maggie Stewart and Alice Lindsay.

Barbara looked at the little snack table by the curved wall. She didn’t find anything she particularly liked, but she didn’t feel like walking farther back into the colony and rummaging through some of the food stores. She drew a mug of water from the tap, picked up a package of dried apple slices, and walked over to the Bridge table.

“You know what I wish?” she asked. “I wish somebody would bring up some candy bars or something. Every office I ever worked in had some sort of a snack bar, and people who would go buy stuff and set it out and we’d buy it and the office would make some money. I wish somebody would order some stuff up here and sell it—I’d be happy to pay a premium for it.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Trish asked.

“I don’t want to be in charge of it,” Barbara said, “but I’d be happy to patronize it.”

“I would, too,” said Maggie. “Know what I miss? Real cheese. I wish we had enough feed stock that we could get a family of goats up here.”

Alice wrinkled her nose. “Goat cheese? Uh, no thank you.”

They all chuckled as Barbara sat down behind Stormie and looked over her shoulder at the card display on Stormie’s datapad. “What are you up to?” Barbara asked.

“Three diamonds,” said Stormie. “And I’m with you on the snack bar thing. Not for goat cheese—” she glared at Maggie, but it was a friendly glare, “but I would pay real money for some of those orange gel things with the dark chocolate on ’em. Oh, my goodness.”

The bidding went around again and ended at four hearts. The datapad display was so small there was hardly room to show the cards as they were played, but they managed. Maggie and Alice made their bid, and Alice initiated the next deal with her datapad.

Stormie turned to Barbara. “Want to take my place? I’ve got plenty of things I need to be doing.”

“Sure, maybe in a little while.”

Alice said, “Stormie was just telling us about the current water situation.”

“What water situation?” Barbara asked.

“We’re being wasteful,” Alice said.

Stormie shook her head. “That’s not quite it.”

Alice grinned. “Oh, that’s it in a nutshell. We’re wasting water and losing water because everything leaks.”

Stormie fanned through her cards on the screen; she even turned a little so Barbara could see better. She didn’t have enough points to start bidding, but she was void in clubs and long in hearts with the jack and the king. She said, “Frank did some analysis of use rates, storage inventory, flow through the treatment system and the fish farm, that sort of thing. Took into account that we’re up to sixteen transient miners these days, with that programmed to go up to twenty next month.”

“Are there that many?” Barbara asked. The miners mostly kept to themselves, so she rarely saw more than two or three at a time. The northwest corner of the colony, habitats One-Alpha and Alpha-One, were primarily transient quarters and had been dubbed “Cripple Creek” by one of the miners from Colorado.

“Yes, there are,” Stormie said. “Anyway, Frank factored in the amount of ice the teams have been bringing up from the South Pole, which isn’t that much—”

“I reminded her,” Trish said, “that there’s water to be had all over the place. Glaciers on Mars, all over Europa—”

“The aliens told us not to go there,” Maggie said.

“—and a whole ocean of water and ammonia under the crust of Titan,” Trish concluded, to a chorus of light laughter.

“And I told her,” said Stormie, “that’s an awfully long way to go for water. Pulling water up from Mars doesn’t make any more sense than pulling it up from Earth.”

Barbara nodded. That’s why the major supply missions were going to end soon, and why it was critical for the colony to be able to sustain itself.

“I’ll grant you,” Stormie continued, “Titan would be excellent because you’d have water plus ammonia for fuel. But how many months would it take to get there and back? And there are other pockets of water here on the Moon, except the Consortium doesn’t have claim to them.

“Anyway … we also looked at humidity fluctuations, everything we could think of, and if we don’t do something to make our reclamation more efficient and seal this station tighter, then it looks like we’re on the declining side of the curve right now. And as we bring in more people, it’s just going to get worse—we’re going to have to bring in more water, since we’re nowhere close to being a real closed system.”

“So what’s the answer?” Barbara said.

“There’s no one answer,” Stormie said. “Karl Capell is supposed to be installing an upgrade to the water treatment system, in preparation for opening the real tunnels, but I haven’t seen any plans cross my desk yet—and I don’t think Frank’s seen them, either. So for now we’re just trying to fix little leaks where we find them, and figure out how to strengthen the aquaculture regime so it’s more efficient at cleaning the water.”

“Your hubby talked to me about that,” Maggie said. “I think we can make that system work better. Just have to be careful with all the tinkering and tampering.”

“What do you mean?” Alice asked.

“From what I’ve seen, every time we try to fix a problem we cause more problems in different places. I think that’s because every good deed has its own unintended consequences—and maybe that’s why ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’ But, we still try. And now that Gabe Morera is here to take over the flora, I can work more on the fauna and the … what’s the water equivalent of fauna?”

They looked at one another and shrugged, almost in unison. A cycle of laughter built around the table, and died out as the bidding began. Hearts was bid and Stormie ended up playing the hand.

Trish, with the dummy hand, laid her datapad on the table and leaned over it to watch Stormie play. She said, “Speaking of water fauna, whatever you call it, I keep hearing people say we shouldn’t be trying to get at the water anywhere else in the Solar System because it might have life in it. But back me up on this, Stormie. I say it’s a biological imperative for us to use whatever water we can find, no matter what algae or microbes might be in it. Survival of the fittest, right? Like the killer bees, or the rabbits in Australia. Come on, you’re from down South—I don’t believe the kudzu ever worried about the other plants it choked out.”

Stormie took another trick and said, “I can see your point, Trish, if you think the human race should be compared to a pernicious weed.”

Maggie laughed. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen, if that’s the case,” she said.

“Is that from the Bible?” Trish asked.

“I believe I’ve read something like it in there,” Maggie said. “I can’t tell you chapter and verse.”

Alice said, “I was surprised to find out you played cards, Maggie. I thought that wasn’t allowed.”

Maggie laughed again. “A common misconception, dear. I don’t believe you’ll find any mention of ‘playing cards’ in the Bible. Now, if my playing cards offends you, I’ll stop—because I don’t want to be a stumbling block—but I don’t think trying to live right means giving up simple things that are fun and don’t hurt anybody.”

Barbara noticed Stormie hesitate in making her next play; she took the trick, but seemed distracted. With each succeeding trick, she seemed more and more agitated. Watching her, Barbara missed some of the conversation.

“I don’t know,” Maggie was saying. “I think, when it comes to salvation, it’s not the hundreds of things I’ve done that made God unhappy. It’s the one thing I did that made him happy. It’s not all the thousands of things I do wrong every day. It’s the one thing I did right.”

Stormie took the last trick and turned to Barbara with a half-smile. “Ready to play a while?” she asked. Then, sotto voce, “I think I’ve had as much fun as I can handle in one day.”

Barbara leaned forward and gave her a friendly hug. “Thanks,” she said. “I’d love to. You go get some work done, and keep us all alive.”

Stormie transferred the game status to Barbara’s datapad, said farewell to the ladies, and they replied in kind. But Barbara noticed that Stormie frowned as she left.

* * *

Monday, 3 December 2035

Frank sat cross-legged with eyes closed on the floor of the Third Avenue farm tunnel. Just as he found solace in the aeroponics modules when he and Stormie were on the Clarke station, here in the farm tunnels he found the deepest peace. He breathed in the clean smell of productive soil, soothed by the bubbling aerators in the fish tanks at the other end of the habitat. If he concentrated hard enough, he could imagine he was in an open field, with a small brook trickling over rocks in the distance. He imagined it was night, since it was nearly midnight in the long lunar sense, but a cool and comfortable night such as he had enjoyed at his family’s home. As he imagined this faux night, he missed the wind: it should be rustling the leaves of the genetically engineered trees behind him. Of course, the trees should be many meters tall instead of the bush-like plants engineered for the colony. But he would still like to hear their leaves moving in a breeze.

He wished, as he thought about the rustling leaves, that he had a better sense of smell and could smell the apple blossoms. But there were limits to his perception.

He heard humming at the other end of the habitat—not the hum of machinery but a person humming a tune he did not recognize. He kept his eyes closed, though, preferring to keep this moment of respite to himself as long as he could.

After a few more minutes of quiet reflection, Frank opened his eyes and uncrossed his legs. He knelt, and started putting away the tools he had been using earlier when he was adjusting one of the air filters. The filters in the farm tunnels were similar to those in the main tunnels, but the microorganisms in these filters did not convert carbon dioxide to oxygen—the edible plants in the farms took care of that—instead, they were specially-tailored MACEFs that devoured some of the hydrocarbon byproducts of plant respiration. He saw now that Maggie Stewart was humming as she fed the rabbits in their cages at the other end of the tunnel. He waved, and she smiled and waved back.

Frank scrolled through the screens on his datapad and entered the results of his filter maintenance. He had three more farm tunnel filters to adjust before he would be through for the day. Stormie had agreed to take his place at the water treatment system design review this afternoon, which was just fine with him. He would much rather be among the plants and animals than stuck in a room looking at drawings on the big screen. It was not really anything new, and it was ridiculous to have so many meetings to discuss something for which the major engineering was already done. But, if it made people feel better to have talked about it more than they actually worked on it, he supposed he should not begrudge them their pleasure. At least they did not force him to participate.

He picked up his tool bag and glided along the length of the habitat toward Third and Bravo.

“Good afternoon,” he said as he approached her. “Thank you again for the Thanksgiving feast last week.”

She chuckled. “Good afternoon to you, Frank. You’re welcome, even if you do exaggerate.”

Frank smiled. Perhaps “feast” was a bit much to describe two small rabbits and a chicken served with the “first fruits” of the colony farms: a salad of lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes. They had about a spoonful of mashed, locally-grown potatoes each, augmented by reconstituted potatoes that Maggie made palatable by copious amounts of chives and parsley.

“Nevertheless, I enjoyed it,” Frank said. “And I look forward to the next feast you have planned. I assume you will continue to celebrate each new harvest?”

“Oh, yes. It looks like we’ll have some soybeans soon, and we’ve set up a darkroom to grow mushrooms. Gabe is worried about the wheat, though—he doesn’t think it’s going to produce the way the geneticists said it would. And then one of these days we’ll have corn. And apples and pears.”

“I am very glad it is going so well.”

“Thank you. I hope you’re having a good day.”

“Any day I get to spend among the plants is a good day.”

“I think so, too. And I appreciate all the help you gave me when I was trying to cultivate things on my own.”

“It was not very much,” Frank said, “but you are welcome. For me, working among the growing things is very therapeutic.”

“Have you been helping Gabe, then?”

“No,” Frank said. Gabriel Morera, the botanist who had arrived in mid-October, seemed very friendly but Frank had not wanted to intrude on his area of expertise. “It seems he has everything very well in hand, and does not need my assistance.”

“Needed or not, I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Want me to ask him for you?”

Frank shook his head. “Thank you very much, but that is not necessary. Perhaps if he needs help bringing in the first big harvest.” He smiled at her and gestured with his tool bag. “I hope you have a very good day.” He slid by her on his way to the tunnel junction.

“Just a minute, Frank.” She approached him, wiping her hands on the apron she wore. “I’ve got an idea for you.”

Maggie glided ahead of him toward the junction, and stepped into the small storage room just before the hatch. Frank stopped next to the bubbling fish tank; the catfish looked almost big enough to eat.

A few moments later, Maggie emerged from the storage room carrying a small tomato plant growing in what appeared to be a large can. “Here,” she said, “why don’t you take this and put it up in your lab, or even in your and Stormie’s room?”

Frank looked closely at the can-turned-planter. Maggie laughed.

“I think it was a can of peaches,” she said, “but this seems to be a good way to recycle it. And since you like plants so much, may as well let you have one.”

Frank took the plant and put his face close to it so its tiny leaves brushed his cheek. It smelled mildly acrid, a foretaste of the fruit it would produce. “What variety is it?” he asked.

“That’s a Roma. Would you rather have a different one? All we have are Romas and grape tomatoes right now.”

Frank smiled. “No, this will be fine. Are you certain I can have it?”

She shrugged. “I’m not certain, but I’ll make it okay. Gabe’s got the idea that he’ll germinate the plants and sell them to people, so they can grow whatever they want to grow. I think he expects people will be willing to grow little things like herbs, so we can have some variety. But I’ll convince him that giving you one is like advertising. If it works out well, we’ll start our own little farmers’ market in Grand Central.”

Frank thanked Maggie and took the plant. A farmers’ market on the Moon; he liked that idea.