That started a boisterous discussion about the Spanish language, which quickly evolved into an argument about the charms of Barcelona versus the attractions of Paris. Then someone brought up Rome.
“Cairo,” Muzorawa murmured dreamily. “None of you have been to Cairo, have you?”
“That pesthole?” Hideshi said. “It’s overcrowded and filthy.”
Resting his head against the wall, Muzorawa smilingly replied, “That overcrowded and filthy pesthole has the grandest monuments in the world sitting just across the river.”
“The pyramids,” said O’Hara.
“And the Sphinx. And farther upriver the Valley of the Kings.”
“And Hatshepsut’s tomb. One of the most beautiful buildings of all antiquity.”
“You’ve seen it?” Muzorawa asked.
O’Hara shook her head. “Only in virtual reality tours. But it’s truly grand and impressive.”
Without Grant’s seeing her do it, O’Hara had unpinned her hair. Now it flowed like a long chestnut cascade over one shoulder and down almost to her hip.
But she was deep in conversation with Muzorawa now. The others were all talking among themselves, as well. Karlstad and the two other women were head to head off by his bed in an intense three-way discussion of something or other. Grant was completely out of it. Some guest of honor, he thought. His mouth felt dry, so he got up from the chair and went to the refrigerator. Its shelves were bare, except for a small plastic case that held three more capsules and what looked like the last few slices of a loaf of bread, green with mold.
Grant suddenly felt tired. And bored. He thought parties should be more fun than this. I’ll go back to my quarters and send a message to Marjorie, he thought.
He crossed the room and reached the door without anyone paying any attention to him.
Clearing his throat loudly, he said to them, “Uh, thanks for the party. It was great.”
“You’re leaving?” Karlstad looked shocked.
Grant forced a smile. “I’ve got to start work with the fluid dynamics group tomorrow morning, bright and early. Director’s orders.”
Muzorawa gave him a wobbly wave. “Good man. See you at eight sharp.”
Grant nodded, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor. No one said another word to him. Karlstad barely looked up. As he shut the door, Grant recognized that he wasn’t the central focus of the party, he was merely the excuse for having it.
DESSERT
Grant was surprised to see so many people still roaming along the corridor. His wristwatch read 21:14. It’s early, he saw. For several moments he simply stood there as people passed by, staring at the quickly flicking numerals counting out the seconds. How many seconds until I can get back to Earth, back to Marjorie—if she still wants me? He didn’t dare try to calculate the number.
It was only a few meters to his own door. Better get to sleep, he told himself, and start tomorrow fresh and alert. But just as he started to tap out his security code, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
It was O’Hara. Tall and lithe, with her hair still tumbling down past one shoulder. She smiled at him.
“You never had dessert,” she said.
Grant had to think a moment. “That’s right,” he said. “I never did.”
“Come on.” She tugged gently at his arm. “I’ve got a cache of ice cream in my place. And some real Belgian chocolate.”
Grant allowed her to lead him to her quarters, only a few paces farther along the corridor.
“Has the party broken up already?” he asked.
“No, but it was going downhill, don’t you think? Egon and the colleens were getting pretty frisky with each other. I don’t like group scenes.”
“What about Zeb?”
“He’s retreated into his own private little mirage.
Lord knows what he dreams about, but it’s not fun watching him staring off into space.”
They had reached her door. She pecked out the security code and they stepped in.
O’Hara’s room was the same size and shape as the other quarters, but it was completely different from anything Grant had seen in the station. The wallscreens displayed underwater scenes from Earth’s oceans: myriads of colorful fish, octopi pulsing and waving their suction-cupped tentacles, sharks gliding past menacingly. The floor began to glow, too. Before Grant’s eyes a coral reef swarming with more fish took shape and fell steeply off into an endless, bottomless abyss. Grant flattened himself against the closed door, suddenly giddy with vertigo.
O’Hara noticed his near panic. “Now don’t be alarmed. The floor’s quite solid.” She tapped on it with one moccasined foot. “See? I forget that people are thrown off by the effect. I don’t have visitors in here very often.”
Taking a breath, Grant stepped out onto the floor. It felt firm enough, but it seemed he could stare down into the teeming crystal-clear sea for thousands of meters.
“Look up, why don’t you,” O’Hara suggested.
The stars! Instead of a ceiling, Grant saw the infinite bowl of black night, spangled with thousands of stars. The underwater scenes on the walls vanished, replaced by more stars. It was like being far out at sea on a clear moonless night.
“That’s what we’d see if we were outside the station,” she explained. “Minus Jupiter, of course. I could put Jupiter into the display but it would overpower the grand view of it all, don’t you think?”
He nodded dumbly, staring at the stars. They looked back at him, solemn, unblinking.
“That one’s Earth,” O’Hara said, standing close enough to touch shoulders and pointing to one bright bluish dot of light among the hosts of stars.
Earth, Grant thought. It looked awfully far away.
“It’s a regular planetarium,” he heard himself say in a hushed voice.
“My father ran the planetarium in Dublin,” O’Hara said. “He sent me the program.”
“But … where’s the projector? How do you get all those stars on the ceiling … and make it look, well, almost three-dimensional?”
“Microlasers,” she said, moving away from him. “I sprayed the ceiling and floor with ’em.”
“There must be thousands of them,” Grant conjectured.
“Oh, yes,” O’Hara replied, halfway across the room. “And more on the floor, of course.”
“How did you do it? Where did you get them?”
“Built them in the optics shop.” She popped open the door of the small refrigerator; its light spilling into the room broke the illusion of being out in the middle of the sea.
“I promised you ice cream and chocolate and that’s what you’re going to have,” O’Hara said, as if there had been some question about it.
But Grant’s mind was on more practical matters. Walking through the starlit darkness, across the softly glowing floor, he asked, “You built thousands of microlasers? All by yourself?”
“They’re only wee crystals, a hundredth of a cubic centimeter or so.” She was rummaging in a drawer by the light of the still-open fridge.
“And you built thousands of them?”
“I had some help.”
“Oh.”
She handed Grant a small plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, topped by a small dark piece of chocolate.
“I used nanomachines,” she said.
“Nanomachines?”
“Of course. How else?”
“But that’s against the law!” “On Earth.”
“The law applies here, too. Everywhere.”
“It doesn’t apply at Selene or the other Moon cities,” O’Hara pointed out.