The Next Continent (52 page)

For a moment Tae and Aaron were alone. “You're scared, aren't you? And not about being on the moon,” he said.

“Yes, I am scared. I haven't seen him since he took me to the hospital.”

“Don't worry. When you see each other again, you'll both know.”

The cathedral facade loomed over them. They could hear the boarding tube extending from the Great Hall, then the interlock and the door opening. There was a slight breeze as the pressure equalized. A recorded voice said, “You have arrived at Sixth Continent. Please be sure to take all your belongings.”

The pilot, Sumoto, and two women here to join the base staff exited the shuttle. Tae stood up, twitched her nose, and sniffed the air. She looked puzzled, then smiled. “It smells like a church. Stone and burning candles.”

“The base manual says that's concrete and the odor-neutralizing system.”

“Whatever it is, it doesn't smell like a ramen shop. He remembered…”

Aaron helped Tae through the hatch. They walked through an inflated tunnel and entered a space that could have been the lobby of a luxury hotel.

Structural colors—minute surface treatments that reflected light like butterfly wings—had been used on the walls instead of pigments, which would have off gassed as they dried. The shimmering surface texture was wholly unlike concrete. Shallow niches in the walls were skillfully lit to suggest depth. Ivy nurtured from seeds wound up toward the ceiling, framing a huge statue of a peaceful figure that could have been either a saint or a bodhisattva, carved from concrete. The floor was tiled with fused regolith particles; the surface was pitted, with a soft effect like dark cork.

Tae stared skeptically at the ivy and the sculpture.
That statue might have to go
, she thought, but Aaron and Sumoto stood looking at it with awe.

“Welcome to Sixth Continent, Ms. Toenji.” Lined up to greet her were the base crew in functional white jumpsuits and the bridal crew in dark blue formal wear.

“Greetings, everyone,” said Tae.

February 10, 2036. Six months before its grand opening, Sixth Continent was welcoming its creator.

“
WHOA! THAT's HOT!
”

The pot on the stove belched a geyser of boiling soup. Sohya ducked. The bearded chef rushed over and turned down the heat.

“What the hell are you doing? Don't come crying to me if you scald yourself!”

“Sorry. I didn't think it would boil up like that.”

“The low gravity keeps vapor from circulating. The bubbles build up in the bottom of the pot and blow all at once. How many times have you been here anyway?”

“This is my sixth trip. But we never had pots or a proper kitchen before. Anyway, how come you know all this? You just got here.”

“Dome Fuji was at thirty-eight hundred meters. If you don't watch out, a pot lid can blow off at that elevation.” Kashiwabara shook his head and began cleaning up. He had actually arrived three months before to begin developing the menus for Sixth Continent. His Antarctic experience had been invaluable; he had quickly factored in the effects of low gravity on the cooking process. In the kitchen, Kashiwabara's word was law.

Now he was adding generous amounts of salt to the potage. “If you can't even watch a pot for me, you're not going to be of much use here.”

Sohya's eyes widened as he saw how much salt the chef was using. “Um, isn't that going to be a little too sal—”

“Three days of weightlessness dulls the taste buds. Now get out of here. You have visitors to greet.”

“That's why I was hiding out here,” grumbled Sohya as he headed for the door.

He walked out of Kashiwabara's kingdom into the banquet hall just as a bow-tied maître d' was pouring champagne onto the floor. The man hurriedly set the bottle on one of the round tables. A two-meter fountain of champagne promptly shot into the air. “What's this?” said Sohya, surprised.

“I wish I knew,” said the maître d', sadly holding his trouser cuffs out of the pool on the floor. “I opened it as usual. But when I tried to pour, it overshot the glass.”

“I told you, it's because of the low—”

“I know, I know. But it's not second nature yet. What a waste. That was vintage Krug.”

“You were at Les Caves Taillevent, right? You've got a reputation to preserve, Mr. Kiwa.”

“True—but I'm no sommelier.”

Sosuke Kiwa had been maître d'hôtel at one of Tokyo's finest French restaurants. Rumor had it that on at least one occasion he had waited on the emperor himself. But the moon was giving him problems. Sohya was helping him wipe the floor when a wail came from the bridal room next door.

“Help! I can't move!”

Sohya rushed in and found Kanna Mikimoto, another member of the bridal crew, wearing a wedding dress and walking furiously in place, as if on a treadmill. Sohya rolled his eyes.

“Okay. What are you doing?”

“I'm not doing anything! I'm just trying to walk, but I'm not getting anywhere.”

Sohya went behind her and lifted the long hem of the dress. She immediately took a few stumbling steps forward. “Oh—what did you do?”

“That dress has a better grip on the floor than your shoes do. You don't weigh enough.”

“What should we do? We don't have a train bearer.”

“Maybe we can sew some dozer bearings into the hem to cut the friction. They might rattle on the floor though.” He looked askance at Mikimoto, who had come with stellar bona fides as an assistant Shinto priest of Usa Shrine, second only to Ise Grand Shrine in the Shinto hierarchy. “Why are you playing bride at a time like this anyway?”

She laughed nervously. “I've worn the Shinto-style white kimono before, but never the dress.” Sohya stared at her with incomprehension. “At least I found a problem before we used it.”

“Go ahead and make the alterations. Just don't wear it out, okay?”

“Yes, sir.” She left the room. Sohya sighed. Limited staffing was forcing everyone to wear multiple hats. Mikimoto would assist Aaron during Shinto weddings. Kiwa the maître d' would double as concierge and interpreter for English, French, and German. Yamagiwa was heading the base crew. He had also been approved by the Foreign Ministry to act as a one-man Japanese consulate.

Tae wanted her employees to have comfortable working conditions, but that was not realistic, especially before the base was even fully staffed. No one was getting enough sleep; it would have been unfair for Sohya to bear down too hard for the occasional mistake.

Sixth Continent had entered Phase Three. Structural work was nearly complete. Staff training and operational testing of the base's control systems were in full swing. During the past two years, Sohya had spent more time here than on Earth, overseeing construction and installation of interior fittings.

The amount of work still facing them was truly daunting. Sohya was either on the surface directing construction or back on Earth running from one Gotoba department to another till all hours of the morning. Gotoba's engineers had to rely on simulations—Sohya was the only one with a detailed sense of the actual operating conditions. He was solicited for advice on everything: bolt strength and odor-control design, the firmness of the chairs and the pressure in the washlet. A certain amount of discontent was sparked by his seemingly monopolizing all opportunities for travel to the moon. Then something happened to silence the criticism.

Sohya was at Gotoba headquarters when, due to a software glitch, an ice sprayer ended up sealing one of the lunar construction crew into a habitat work space. Dismantling the structure with multidozers would have taken far too long. The fastest option was to use carpenter robots to drill through to him, but that would still take three days. The astronaut was equipped with nothing more than a hand drill and a medical kit. There was just enough breathable air in the space where he was trapped, but the battery on his suit's CO
₂
scrubber would not hold out for long.

The flight surgeon's recommendation was to use the drill's battery to keep the CO
₂
scrubber working. The astronaut would also take enough morphine to slow his respiration while he waited for rescue. But Sohya intervened. A large dose of morphine without close medical monitoring would be dangerous. Instead, he proposed using all available battery power to keep the astronaut warm. Sohya waved off the flight surgeon's worries about CO
₂
and insisted that his plan be followed.

The astronaut was none the worse for wear when he was rescued seventy hours later. The space where he was trapped had been scored with fine lines to generate structural colors. This effectively increased the wall area by several times, and the concrete itself had CO
₂
absorption properties. Sohya had noticed during construction that CO
₂
concentrations seemed to rise only slowly in such spaces. He knew the astronaut had a margin of safety even without the scrubber.

This incident proved the wisdom of having at least one crew member with as many hours of on-site experience as possible. Sohya's knowledge was indispensable. Unfortunately, it also guaranteed that he never had any time off.

Sohya was tired. The theater dome was still under construction, so he made his way into the cathedral to find some quiet. He sat down in one of the pews. A few moments later Yamagiwa walked in.

“There you are, Aomine. Everything ready for the big dinner?”

“Can we push it back an hour? We've still got a skeleton crew.

It's total chaos in the dining room and the kitchen.”

“I've got to get over to SELS. The software thought all that extra body heat was a fire. Now the oxygen generator's shut down. I have to recalibrate the system.”

“I'll never laugh at Kunlun again. Did the guests notice anything?”

“I persuaded our journalist friend to check out his quarters. But our special guest—”

“Speak of the devil.” Sohya stood up. Tae was framed in the door behind Yamagiwa, clad in her usual monotone ensemble. She doffed her beret and bowed, hands crossed formally over her thighs.

“Hello, Sohya. It's been a long time.”

The way she leaned forward at the hips was as graceful as a narcissus. She straightened up and gave Sohya a slightly questioning up-from-under look. Her skirt billowed behind her as she walked slowly toward him in the one-sixth gravity. A gentle puff of some restrained floral fragrance reached him. Tae was twenty-four. She was no longer a girl.

He struggled to speak. “Um…yes, it's been a while.”

It was their first meeting in two years and eight months—and where it was happening left Sohya slightly flustered.

[2]

THE DISCOVERY IN
July 2033 of a technological phenomenon of nonhuman origin—an artificial radio signal emanating from Eden Crater—created an uproar on Earth, at least in certain quarters.

The most vocal were the self-styled “contactees.” For years, they'd maintained that the lunar south pole was a secret UFO base. Aliens had been using it for millennia as a jumping-off point for Earth, where they had disguised themselves as humans and were waiting for the right moment to launch a global coup. The CIA and the KGB (the latter had ceased to exist decades earlier, though the contactees refused to believe it) were working behind the scenes to hide the truth from the public. But a Japanese rogue agent had entered the crater and triggered the signal. The contactees demanded that the truth—which Sixth Continent and Liberty Island had obviously been constructed to conceal—be revealed.

All available information about the signal had been made public, but the fringe groups weren't listening. In a typical incident, TGT security had to detain a woman they found searching for a door in the first stage of an Adam rocket. She was planning to hitch a ride to the moon and return with proof that aliens were here.

The media always treated paranormal phenomena, including flying saucers, with humorous disdain. After their initial reports on the discovery, they went silent. Aliens were right up there with ghost stories and the Loch Ness monster. Treating the signal as news rather than variety show fodder went against their instincts, and the fact that it was unintelligible made it even harder for them to decide how to handle it.

An exchange between a veteran news anchor and a radio astronomer on one of the late-night talk shows highlighted this dilemma. The anchor opened with a blunt question. The anchor opened with

“Was this an alien signal?”

“Well, that's something we just don't know yet.”

“But it wasn't man-made, and it wasn't natural. Correct? Then it must be aliens signaling Earth—”

“The signal wasn't aimed at us. It was directed toward a point in the southern skies: minus twenty-two degrees galactic longitude, minus fifty degrees latitude.”

“What's in that direction?”

“In that
exact
direction? As far as we know, nothing.”