They halted the quarrel as though slicing a tape, but ragged edges remained. He said, as gently as he could, “Don’t miss the view, Lona. You’ve never seen Earth from up here before, have you?”
The planet was far from them now. Its complete outline could be discerned. The Western Hemisphere faced them in a blaze of sunlight. Of Antarctica, where they had been only hours ago, nothing was visible except the long jutting finger of the Peninsula, thumbing itself at Cape Horn.
With an effort not to sound didactic, Burris showed her how the sunlight struck the planet athwart, warming the south at this time of year, barely brightening the north. He spoke of the ecliptic and its plane, of the rotation and the revolution of the planet, of the procession of the seasons. Lona listened gravely, nodding often, making polite sounds of agreement whenever he paused to await them. He suspected that she still did not understand. But at this point he was willing to settle for the shadow of comprehension, if he could not have the substance, and she gave him the shadow.
They left their cabin and toured the ship. They saw the Earth from various angles. They bought drinks. They were fed. Aoudad, from his seat in the tourist section, smiled at them. They were stared at considerably.
In the cabin once more, they dozed.
They slept through the mystic moment of turnover, when they passed from Earth’s grasp at last into Luna’s. Burris woke joltingly, staring across the sleeping girl and blinking at the blackness. It seemed to him that he saw the charred girders of the shattered Wheel drifting out there. No, no; impossible. But he had seen them, on a journey a decade ago. Some of the bodies that had spilled from the Wheel as it split open were said still to be in orbit, moving in vast parabolas about the sun. To Burris’s knowledge, no one had actually seen such a wanderer in years; most of the corpses, perhaps nearly all, had been decently collected by torch-ships and carried off, and the rest, he would like to believe, had by this time made their way to the sun for the finest of all funerals. It was an old private terror of his to see her contorted face come drifting up within view as she passed through this zone.
The ship heeled and pivoted gently, and the beloved white pocked countenance of the Moon came into view.
Burris touched Lona’s arm. She stirred, blinked, looked at him, then outward. Watching her, he detected the spreading wonder on her face even with her back to him.
Half a dozen shining domes now could be seen on Luna’s surface.
“Tivoli!” she cried.
Burris doubted that any of the domes really was the amusement park. Luna was infested with domed buildings, built over the decades for a variety of warlike, commercial, or scientific reasons, and none of these matched his own mental picture of Tivoli. He did not correct her, though. He was learning.
The ferry, decelerating, spiraled down to its landing pad.
This was an age of domes, many of them the work of Duncan Chalk. On Earth they tended to be trussed geodesic domes, but not always; here, under lessened gravity, they usually were the simpler, less rigid extruded domes of one-piece construction. Chalk’s empire of pleasure was bounded and delimited by domes, beginning with the one over his private pool, and then on to the cupola of the Galactic Room, the Antarctic hostelry, the Tivoli dome, and outward, outward to the stars.
The landing was smooth.
“Let’s have a good time here, Minner! I’ve always dreamed of coming here!”
“We’ll enjoy ourselves,” he promised.
Her eyes glittered. A child—no more than that—she was. Innocent, enthusiastic, simple—he ticked off her qualities. But she was warm. She cherished and nourished and mothered him, to a fault. He knew he was underestimating her. Her life had known so little pleasure that she had not grown jaded with small thrills. She could respond openly and wholeheartedly to Chalk’s parks. She was young. But not hollow, Burris tried to persuade himself. She had suffered. She bore scars, even as he did.
The ramp was down. She rushed from the ship into the waiting dome, and he followed her, having only a little trouble coordinating his legs.
TWENTY-FIVE: TEARS OF THE MOON
Lona watched breathlessly as the cannon recoiled and the cartridge of fireworks went sliding up, up the shaft, through the aperture in the dome, and out into the blackness. She held her breath. The cartridge exploded.
Color stained the night.
There was no air out there, nothing to cushion the particles of powder as they drifted down. They did not drift, even, but remained more or less where they were. The pattern was brilliant. They were doing animals now. The strange figures of extraterrestrial figures. Beside her, Burris stared upward as intently as anyone else.
“Have you ever seen one of those?” she asked.
It was a creature with ropy tendrils, an infinite neck, flattened paddles for feet. Some swampy world had spawned it.
“Never.”
A second cartridge shot aloft. But this was only the obliterator, cleansing away the paddle-footed one and leaving the heavenly blackboard blank for the next image.
Another shot.
Another.
Another.
“It’s so different from fireworks on Earth,” she said. “No boom. No blast. And then everything just stays there. If they didn’t blot it out, how long would it stay, Minner?”
“A few minutes. There’s gravity here, too. The particles would get pulled down. And disarranged by cosmic debris. All sorts of garbage comes peppering in from space.”
He was always ready for any question, always had an answer. At first that quality had awed her. Now it was an irritant. She wished she could stump him. She kept on trying. Her questions, she knew, annoyed him just about as much as his answers annoyed her.
A fine pair we are. Not even honeymooners yet, and already setting little traps for each other!
They watched the silent fireworks for half an hour. Then she grew restless, and they moved away.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Let’s just wander.”
He was tense and jittery. She felt it, sensed him ready to leap for her throat if she blundered. How he must hate being here in this silly amusement park! They were staring at him a lot. At her, too, but she was interesting for what had been done with her, not for the way she looked, and the eyes did not linger long.
They moved on, down one corridor of booths and up the next.
It was a carnival of the traditional sort, following a pattern set centuries ago. The technology had changed, but not the essence. Here were games of skill and Kewpie dolls; cheap restaurants selling dished-up dross; whirling rides to suit any dervish; sideshows of easy horror; dance halls; gambling pavilions; darkened theaters (adults only!) in which to reveal the sagging mysteries of the flesh; the flea circus and the talking dog; fireworks, however mutated; blaring music; blazing stanchions of light. A thousand acres of damp delight, done up in the latest trickery. The most significant difference between Chalk’s Luna Tivoli and a thousand tivolis of the past was its location, in the broad bosom of Copernicus Crater, looking toward the eastern arc of the ringwall. One breathed pure air here, but one danced in fractional gravity. This was Luna.
“Whirlpool?” a sinuous voice asked. “Take the Whirlpool, mister, miss?”
Lona pressed forward, smiling. Burris slapped coins onto the counter and they were admitted. A dozen aluminum shells gaped like the remains of giant clams, floating on a quicksilver lake. A squat, barechested man with coppery skin said, “Shell for two? This way, this way!”
Burris helped her into one of the shells. He sat beside her. The top was sealed in place. It was dark, warm, oppressively close inside. There was just room for the two of them.