Leaping to the Stars Read online

  I couldn't see much. Or move. The best I could do was hope the cable was strong enough. We were being kidnapped! If somebody wanted the monkey that badly—

  We sailed down through the skinny treetops, awfully close to some of the branches. Once we'd passed the tall trees, the other side of the crater was barren rock. Not landscaped yet. If ever. The crater was big. They'd only landscaped the half they were using. The half they could see. This side was mostly soil farms and tanks and pipes and naked gray dirt. It rushed up toward me—I couldn't see where I was heading—and then we were shooting along just above the ground, and I was starting to worry about the landing—

  —suddenly I was caught and swinging wildly, yanked up and over, off the line. A couple of Lunar bounces and someone grabbed me—

  I saw Mickey thrown to the ground, and then Bev beside him. And then someone else, probably Dad. They were laying us out like corpses. Probably sorting us for value—which meant that if all they wanted was the monkey, the only one of us they really needed … was me.

  Because I had programmed it to recognize me as the ultimate authority. But if anything happened to me—I didn't know what the monkey would do. We hadn't considered that possibility. There was a lot we hadn't thought about. We hadn't had time. Could the monkey be reprogrammed without my cooperation? I didn't know. Nobody did. We'd been rushing from one place to the next ever since we boarded the orbital elevator in Ecuador; there were a lot of things we hadn't had time for. And even Douglas, when he'd given the monkey free will (sort of) so it could represent us in court, had still left in most of my safeguards. So, whoever these bastards were, they really needed me ! I just hoped they weren't smart enough to know that, because then the monkey would be useless to them. But if they took the monkey away from us, we'd be useless to Boynton—I didn't want to think about that.

  But if they were smart enough to kidnap us like this, then they were probably smart enough to know that the monkey was bonded too. And if they were nasty enough to just scoop us up out of our own hotel room, they were probably nasty enough to do a lot worse—whatever might be necessary to get what they wanted. Inside the monkey was the most advanced HARLIE unit ever designed, technically experimental. The manufacturers were still in the process of certifying it when it escaped—then it used us to smuggle itself to the moon inside a toy monkey.

  (Long story, don't ask. It involves a ferocious custody battle, an ugly misadventure in Barrington Meteor Crater, an uglier escape up the Line, a roomful of lawyers, a really nasty legal battle culminating in a triple divorce that separated me and Bobby and Douglas from Mom and Dad, a Russian smuggler with a hyperactive mouth, six almost-stolen cargo pods, a lunar crunch-down and a long daylight hike across the sun-scorched surface of the moon, a day of trains, transvestism, and water fights, and finally a near-fatal bit of accidental ammonia poisoning. It takes too long to tell. Maybe some other time.)

  And once we got where we were going, we weren't there at all; we got captured anyway, because Mickey hadn't told Douglas everything. Judge Cavanaugh would have sent us back to Earth, except there weren't any transports launching for Earth anymore, because while we were having our little adventure, the Earth was in the middle of one very big disaster, inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately?) caused by the escaping HARLIE unit: a spectacular global economic meltdown, which had caused a breakdown in so many services that people were dying of starvation and plague and war all at the same time—so there were probably a lot of folks who were looking for this monkey just to take an axe to it, but the rest wanted it because they thought its information-diddling ability would help them survive the rough times ahead; only the monkey was bonded to us—to me, really, because after the misadventure at One-Hour station where we almost lost it, we didn't dare let it bond to Bobby, and we didn't know then that it had a HARLIE unit inside, otherwise Douglas would have made himself the primary authority, and later on, when we did find out what it really was, we were afraid to tinker anymore. Better to leave it bonded to me than try to transfer it to Douglas. But that didn't mean that there weren't other people willing to try. Lots of people.

  Lunar Authority wanted the monkey more than anything. Without access to Earth's resources, they were going to need its brain power more than ever now, and the council was in special session looking for ways to legally appropriate it. But everybody else who wanted it was just as determined that Lunar Authority shouldn't get it, because once they got their hands on it, and the intelligence it represented, they'd be the new superpower in the solar system. So everyone else was united to keep the council from getting custody of the little robot—so they could fight over it themselves, I guess. Obviously, none of these people were familiar with the concept of sharing, otherwise they could have figured this out real easy, but nobody trusted anybody because that was an even bigger risk. Trust. Invisible Luna—the not-so-secret-anymore subversives with the offline economy—desperately wanted the monkey, and our experience with Crazy Alexei Krislov showed that they were willing to kill for it. Mars and the rings and the asteroids wanted it. Probably the Jovian moons too, but we hadn't heard from them yet; they were on the opposite side of the sun, but they were still connected through the Martian and asteroid belt relays. And of course, all the different colonies spread all over the rest of the galaxy: they wanted the Human Analog Replicant Lethetic Intelligence Engine for the simple reason that if they didn't get it, they'd probably die of starvation or worse, because they needed its abilities to manage their settlements.

  So, whoever these folks were who'd bundled us up like so many bags of dirty laundry to shoot us across the domed crater, we couldn't expect their hospitality to get any better than this. There were a lot of them. Maybe twenty or thirty. I couldn't tell. They looked like a small army. Or maybe it was just the same few passing back and forth in front of my vision. I was webbed pretty tightly and couldn't even turn my head.

  "That one and that one—" Someone was pointing. I must have been one of the packages he was pointing at, because next thing somebody swung me up over his shoulder and we were bounding across the naked dirt toward the crater wall, toward an ugly cluster of tanks and pipes; it looked like a refinery. There were different kinds of warning symbols all over it. My captor shifted me over his other shoulder and behind us, I could see the others. They were being left behind.

  The man carrying me dropped me into the back of an open truck—not so much a truck as a big lightweight cart on fat tires, the rolled up monkey next to me. I struggled to sit up, but somebody secured a belt around me, and almost immediately after that, we started moving. We entered a tunnel, a big pipe, bigger around than a tube house. It was hot and humid in here, and lined with a lot of other tubes and pipes and cables and wires, all sizes, all colors. Some of them hummed.

  There were lights every ten meters or so. The floor was the familiar polycarbonate decking found almost everywhere on Luna. I couldn't see how far ahead the tunnel stretched, I could only see backward—the entrance was a retreating bright circle—but it must have been a long tunnel, because we rolled down it forever. And it didn't echo; it had a dead sound, like the walls were soaking up all the reflections.

  The tube bottomed out and leveled off and the shrinking circle of light in the distance slid upward and vanished altogether. I couldn't see if anyone was following us. After a while, the tube bent and we started going back up. I'd been counting to myself—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—and I figured we'd traveled at least three or four klicks, but I wasn't sure how fast we were going. It could have been more. But I had a hunch where we were going.

  Armstrong Station is a deep crater larger across than Diamond Head on Oahu, and with a big man-made dome across the top. There's a forest in the middle, with a meadow and a lake and a hotel on one side; on the other side are all the industrial bits necessary to keep the dome functioning—because more important than its living areas, Armstrong Station is the largest reservoir of air and water and nitrogen anywhere on Luna.

&nbs
p; The problem is that Luna's days are two weeks long, and so are its nights.

  So when the sun is shining down on the dome of Armstrong Station, it heats up the air inside. And heats up and heats up and heats up—for fourteen days. It's just about impossible to get rid of all those kilocalories. All they can do is move them around and store them. There are heat exchangers everywhere, pumping cold water everywhere throughout the dome; the water carries away the heat. Then it all gets pumped back into a series of underground reservoirs on the far side of the forest. The reservoirs are smaller craters inside Armstrong, each lined with thick layers of polycarbonate insulation foam to keep the water from leeching out; all told, the reservoirs hold over twenty million liters. The pumps take cool water out of the reservoirs and bring back hot water. After two weeks of Lunar sunlight, the water temperature in the reservoirs is well above boiling—some of it even turns into steam, helping to run electrical turbines to generate extra power, which gets stored in flywheels and fuel cells and batteries.

  The open lake, the one with the fish and the ducks, is not part of this process; it's for tourists, so it's kept at a steady temperature. What most folks don't know is that the tourist lake is really there to provide a margin of error—it's extra water to be used in case of emergency—but that creates the mistaken impression for a lot of folks that all you have to do to live on Luna is throw up a dome and fill it with air. I think that's what Mom thought.

  Anyway, during the long cold Lunar night, the boiling water is circulated back through the same pipes to keep the dome warm. By the end of the two weeks, so much heat has been radiated away that the water in the reservoir has a crust of ice on the top. Then the sun rises and the whole process starts all over again.

  If all Armstrong had to do was exchange the heat of the day with the cold of the night, it would be an almost perfect equation—except it isn't. For a lot of reasons. The problem is that human beings and all our various machines also generate heat inside Armstrong dome. And that has to be radiated away too. So there are "fin farms"—heat exchangers—outside the crater; half on the east, half on the west. During the two weeks of night, hot water is pumped out to the fins where it cools off and then back to the reservoir again. Along the way that hot water gets to do a lot of other work too. Alexei Krislov—the lunatic Russian smuggler who'd tried to kidnap us—told us that the most important skill on Luna was plumbing. And the second most important was cooking. Not knowing how to do either one very well could get you killed.

  But anyway, I figured we were in one of the tunnels that led out under the crater wall to a fin farm. I could hear water rushing in the pipes. It was hot in here—and humid too. And because the tunnel sloped down and then up again and went on for a long way, I was guessing we had gone under the crater rim and were heading up toward the surface.

  The vehicle began slowing and finally came to a stop at a sealed hatch. I recognized it as another one of the reusable cargo pods that we'd seen all over Luna. The pipes and cables which had paralleled our journey snaked away through smaller access tubes.

  When they pulled me off the vehicle, I only saw two men. The rest of the kidnappers hadn't come this way. So that meant … a lot of things. It meant that they knew they didn't need anybody else, just me. And even though I might be in for a very bad time, I was pretty sure that these guys wouldn't dare hurt me, because without me, who knew what the monkey would do? Maybe it would lock up or self-destruct or just go catatonic—so they had to keep me safe and try to get my cooperation. But what about everybody else? For the first time I began to worry about the rest of the family. What was going to happen to them? Especially if the kidnappers killed me. Without the monkey, they had no bargaining chip to go anywhere. And Luna didn't tolerate freeloaders. They'd probably end up indentured somewhere—I didn't like the thought of that. Douglas was adamantly opposed to slavery of any kind. Even voluntary.

  At the moment, however, I wasn't getting much of a vote on anything. The kidnappers were still wearing their faceless helmets, so I couldn't even tell if they were men or women—they grabbed me and passed me through the hatch into the cargo pod, and then up through another hatch, through an inflated transfer tube, up into what looked like still another cargo pod, but wasn't. It was a Lunar vehicle. An eighteen-wheeler. Three cargo pods, each mounted on a rollagon chassis, and linked together to form a truck train. Six human beings could live indefinitely in one of these trucks—as long as the food and water and air held out.

  They tossed me into a dark bunk in the back and forgot about me. There were clanking and thumping noises as the truck disconnected its airlock, and then we were rolling. The windows were closed, I couldn't see anything. For a while, I was frantic—I hated being tied up, and this web-stuff made it almost impossible to move. It was the worst kind of claustrophobia—it was like being wrapped like a mummy, only worse. I raged until I was exhausted. And then I tried chewing on the web-stuff, but it was useless. So then I cried for a while.

  Eventually, I fell asleep.

  NO EXIT

  I slept badly. I had nightmares. Like I had been eaten by a giant worm and was riding in its roaring belly. Like I was swimming in sticky syrup. Like something was chasing me and I was trying to run away, but I was paralyzed and couldn't move my arms or legs. I woke up, sweating—and hurting all over from the web-stuff. This wasn't fair! Didn't these bastards care what they were doing to me?

  I guessed not. We had stopped rolling. I had no idea how long I'd been asleep. Maybe three or four hours. Maybe eight or nine. My bladder felt that full. I tried to arch my neck around. I could stretch and move a little bit—the stuff was just loose enough to let me breathe, but I was pretty much cemented into one position. And I couldn't tell by the light in the cabin. Lunar light doesn't change—well, it does change, but fourteen times slower than on Earth—and the lighting in a Lunar truck is usually turned down anyway, unless you're cooking or eating.

  By now, I was pretty sure I knew who my kidnappers were—some of the extremists from "invisible Luna." Invisible Luna was all those folks who were living off the network and surviving by their own barter economy. Alexei Krislov had been one of those, half in the legal world and half out. He and his tribe, the Rock Father Tribe, had tricked us into riding a cargo pod to Luna by telling us that Bounty Marshals were chasing us. It turned out that nobody was chasing us at all, at least not until we got to Luna. It was just a big fat lie. The economy of Earth was collapsing and the plagues were spreading and most people were too busy dealing with martial law to worry about us. But we'd scrambled all over the moon, running from invisible boogeymen, until finally Alexei had gotten us to a place we couldn't escape from, a water-farm at the Lunar south pole. But we'd escaped anyway. We put on our bubble suits again, which were starting to leak, and bounced through a five kilometer ammonia tube, and that wasn't any fun because I got a lungful of ammonia and had to be carried out.

  Whoever these people were, wherever they were taking me, they were going to have to stay undetected and out of sight for a long, long time. It just didn't make sense that any of the colonies that wanted the HARLIE inside the monkey would have the resources on Luna to do this. Not even Mars or the asteroids. And the invisibles already knew how to hide from the Lunar Authority. They'd been doing it for almost a century.

  But I couldn't really think about that now—I couldn't think about anything. I was in so much pain I couldn't stand it. I had to pee. I had to poop. Badly. This was agony. Maybe I'd been asleep even longer than I thought. I really didn't want to piss my pants. Not like Stinky. It hurt so bad, tears were coming to my eyes. I was almost crying.

  I started screaming, "Somebody, please! Help! Somebody! Anybody! Please! It hurts! I'm in real pain here, people! Come on—!"

  —and then, finally, someone was loosening my bonds. I didn't see how he was doing it, but I heard a soft buzzing behind me, and the next thing I knew, the webbing was loosening. Then a voice: "Is promise to behave, Charles Dingillian?"

&nbs
p; Alexei!

  I didn't know whether to be relieved or outraged. But it made sense. After our escape, Mickey was certain Alexei would be even more determined to get us back, and Alexei was one of the few people who would know that the monkey was bonded to me as its primary authority. And Alexei certainly had the resources to organize something like this—

  "Is promise to behave?"

  I grunted something that must have sounded like assent, because the buzzing resumed. A minute later, my hands were free, then my feet. I was hurting so bad, I couldn't move. My entire body felt like my foot when it was asleep. I tingled painfully all over. My shoulders were cramped, my legs were cramped, my whole self ached. And my bladder was screaming for release. And my bowels too. Even in Lunar gravity, I couldn't stand; I was bent over double. I could barely roll over.

  Alexei rolled me upright. "Is bathroom over there. Try not to make mess."

  I tried to crawl to the bathroom. I had to pee so bad I was crying. Tears of pain were running out of my eyes. I wasn't going to make it. "Help me, you bastard—"

  For a moment, I thought he was ignoring me; then I felt his hands under my arms, lifting me up. He carried me into the bathroom, dumped me unceremoniously onto the toilet, and unzipped my jumpsuit enough so I could manage. Then he left, but he didn't close the door behind him.

  A Lunar bathroom isn't much like an Earth bathroom, because in Lunar gravity everything splashes six times higher—which is why everybody sits to pee on the moon. That's also why the sinks and toilets are deeper and shaped like cylinders instead of bowls.