2020 (15 page)

The damp wad floated down and her eyes welled with tears. I heard a small voice.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She buried her head in her hands and sobbed. Then she composed herself and looked at me bleary-eyed. “I s . . . said, I’m
sorry
. I’m sorry I’m taking it out on you. I’ve been having such an awful time. I broke up with . . . Oh, you don’t know him. He and I, Karl and I . . .”

“Karl?”

“Three days ago, we’re at Kennedy. He’s booked to come here, I’m booked to go to Maui. I told him—and it’s really hard to tell somebody it’s over, you’re supposed to do it in a public place, right? And he didn’t get it. I mean,
I
broke up with him, gave him my rehearsed speech, and he doesn’t understand. It gets so bad I go, ‘Don’t you get it? You’re
dumped
. What part of ‘I’m moving out of the condo’ don’t you get?’ and the
next
thing I know . . .”

“Karl Pope? From
Condé Nast
?”

She sniffed, nodded. “I shouldn’t have used the word ‘dumped,’ right? The next thing I know he takes
my
ticket to Maui and he gives me
his
to
here
and he goes, ‘Good-bye, you bimbo.’ He called me a
bimbo
. I knew I never should have dated my boss.” She was burbling. “I feel so awful.”

I sighed. “Well, Claire, listen. How about keeping us out of your plans for revenge. We’re just trying to survive here. Maybe you’ve noticed?”

She sniffled. “That’s a fact. You hardly have any real guests. Sorry.”

“And you’re not even a travel writer.”

“Well, I
do
know about marketing,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying. You could be doing better.”

“Is that right? Tell me about it.”

“Would you be a little less pissed?”

“I could try.”

She took a breath, blinked to clear her eyes. “OK. To begin with, you don’t use your hotel manager to announce a campaign. That’s so minor league. If you want real publicity, you get a celebrity. You get somebody who brings an audience with them.”

“Like who?”

“Like, I don’t know. Shirley Taylor. Lance Jason. Art Ball. Art Ball would have been perfect.”

“Art Ball?” I snorted. “The talk show host? The one who’s part Artificial Intelligence?” I pretended disbelief, but the truth was I listened to Art Ball myself. I’d even brought his name up with Candace, but after the look she’d given me I’d been too embarrassed to take the idea further. “Art Ball’s over a hundred and fifty years old. The human parts of him, anyway.”

“He’s got the largest single listening audience on Earth. Tops two billion.” She sniffled. “Oh,
Earth
. I miss Earth.”

“There’s nothing I can do to fly you back,” I said. “But, look, you could have a good time while you’re here if you’d give it a chance. We’ve got a pool, bars, a gym. Golf.”

“My therapist did tell me to start something new, to get some exercise.”

“There’s a schedule downloaded to your softscreen. Banquet tonight. Moon range chicken.”

She sniffled into the Kleenex. “I don’t think I feel like eating.”

“How about tomorrow? I’ll show you some of our facilities.” I checked my softscreen; I was booked for lunch with two Italian PR men. “I’ll be free at two?”

“Ough,” she said, sniffling. “Ough-kay.”

* * *

That night at midnight I sat on my bunk picking stringy chicken from my teeth, feeling sorry for myself—since Samantha’d left a year ago, my quarters just seemed empty. I was listening to web radio from Earthside, watching my autodialer strobe on my softscreen. To my surprise the faint flashing stopped, the speakerphone booted up, and a nasal voice said ‘Hello?’ ” A hot flash of self-consciousness shot through my body. I cleared my throat.

“Uh, hello. Art?”

“Yes.”

“Art Ball?”

“Well, who’d you expect?” the familiar voice of Art Ball groused over the speakerphone. “We don’t have screeners here, like some other shows.”

“First-time caller, long-time listener,” I recited. “I can’t believe I got through. Great show, Art.”

“I’m getting a delay. Are you up on one of the satellites? At L1?”

“Calling from the moon, Art. This is Shack . . .”

“WELL, TURN YOUR RADIO DOWN, SHACK,” Art Ball started bellowing. “BETTER YET, TURN IT
OFF
. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU LISTENERS TO TURN YOUR RADIOS OFF WHEN YOU GET IN?”

I fumbled with my keypad to cut the speaker, my hand shaking. “Art? Still there?”

“That’s better. What’s on your mind?”

“Art, I know you’re interested in the great adventure of space. . . .”

“And what’s your point?”

“I’m just saying, have you heard about that webvote,
NAME THAT MOON
?”

“Right.”

“Art, it would be great to see the good people who are behind this incredible idea get a real show of interest. . . .”

“Caller, are you one of our Helium 3 miners?”

“Uh, no.”

A long silence filled my quarters. “Let me guess,” Ball’s voice snaked out like a slo-mo whip. “You’re an employee of Hyatt Fiat. You know how we feel about the New Solar Order down here?”

“The
what
?” I vaguely recalled an old U.N. proposal that claimed sovereignty over the moon, to which Hyatt had signed off. Some glitch in Ball’s AI software must have locked onto the Hyatt reference and his opposition to it. “Art,” I said emphatically, “This is not a political thing. . . .”

“You people think you can use my airtime for propaganda? Listen to this, Shack.”

The signal went dead with a thunk. My face flushed, and my eyes burned. My speakerphone hissed with the vastness of space.

* * *

I gave Claire Albricht the tour, starting with the ice rink. We saw spectacular jumps and the rapture of average skaters working out their first triple axels in one-sixth gravity. A couple from Minnesota took turns launching 360 overflights at center ice.

After a night’s sleep Claire looked refreshed, looked better than she deserved to look. Her lipstick today was dark plum, an improvement. She told me she wasn’t much of an athlete.

“It’s different here,” I told her. “Low gravity.”

My point was demonstrated when, on the way to showing her our diving boards—diving is like flying here—we cut through a workout room with thick pads on its floor and filled with gymnastics equipment—parallel bars, rings, a pommel horse.

She grimaced. “Here’s my torture chamber from high school.”

“Try something.”

“Aw . . .”

“Just one thing.”

She took one low grav step toward a pommel horse without much enthusiasm. And, astonished, she found herself sitting on the horse. “Hey,” she said, “that was . . . amazing.”

She bounced down and tried it again.

Next she tried the parallel bars—slipped off, didn’t hurt herself, bounced back up again. She was smiling like a kid. “I could never do anything like this on Earth.”

We looked over the spa, the whirlpool, the climbing wall, the weight room, but we came back to the gymnastics equipment.

“Can I use this gym?”

“Right now, if you want to. The concierge will give you a locker, bring you the right clothes.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re pretty nice after all. Can I get a rain check on your invitation?”

I thought of the Hubble Room, pricey even with the employee discount—though if the hotel was going to close in a week, it might be my last chance to eat there. “Lunch tomorrow,” I said, and she said, “It’s a date.”

* * *

Later I checked in with Barry Stewart at the Copernicus Room. He was alone, though a quartet of remote VR cameras servoed back and forth from stations along the side walls and made it seem like we were being watched. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

“How’d our first day turn out?” I asked. Out of superstition, actually dread, I’d avoided looking at the website.

“Could be better,” he mumbled. He was chewing his thumb.

I finally looked. “A hundred and sixty thousand votes total from Earthside?”

His expression was pained. “Actual hits less than projections,” he said. “That number’s a bit inflated.”

I’d gotten close enough to where he sat hunched over a terminal to smell alcohol on his breath. He was wearing the same blazer he’d worn the previous night at the banquet—you could tell from the faux Bernaise sauce on his lapel. “It’ll pick up,” I said to cheer him. “Anyway, who’s ahead?” I read from the wallscreen. “Diana. In second place, there’s Artemis. All the old space junkies liked that name back in the last century, still do, I guess. I don’t find an entry listed in third place.”

“I’m, uh, leaving it off the official results. You know how we assign each voter a password to make sure they vote only once a day? Apparently the line about ‘enter password’ is confusing.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “You mean third place is ‘password’?”

He worked on his thumb. “A quarter of the votes.”

“Cripes. The moon could be named ‘Password.’ ” I looked over his shoulder and saw a long list of what I took to be Native American names following “password” on his softscreen. “Some nice ideas,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said wryly. “I made those up.”

* * *

A knot of Helium 3 miners crowded the stainless steel bar Claire and I passed through on our way to the Hubble Room the next day. Even dressed in clean red jumpsuits, the miners, men and women both, looked grubby, skinny from long-time low grav work, squinty-eyed from living in low light.

I steered Claire past. After a day working out in the spa and pool she looked vibrant and healthy, looked great, which didn’t escape one of the male miners, who clowned falling off his barstool.

“I still don’t get it,” Claire was saying. “What’s wrong with the word ‘moon’?”

“It’s not a
name
,” I told her, pulling her chair back. The Hubble Room overlooked the southern end of the pool, just above the waterfall up in the atrium, just below the level at which clouds formed late in the lunar cycle. It was our grandest spot. “The word ‘moon’ comes from an Old Germanic base for the word ‘month,’ which itself comes from the IndoEuropean word for measure. A ‘moon’ is a device to measure time in the sky. It’s not a proper name.”

“Luna, then. The ancient name is Luna.” She waved vaguely at our false sky, the inside of the dome, painted with fanciful stars and our blue crescent logo.

“A second-rank Roman goddess. I looked her up. Not a single legend to her credit. And the name’s never stuck. You say to somebody in Manhattan, let’s go to Luna, they think you mean some town in upstate New York.”

“Artemis?”

“Another name that sounds like a town upstate, but otherwise an excellent candidate. Artemis was Apollo’s sister. Moon, sun. Still second in the voting.”

“According to my sources, your contract with the Astronomical Union’s airtight, so I guess it’s going to be your call.” She scanned her menu. “Heavenly Fettucini and Moon Pie. Cute.”

I noticed her nose was still a bit red.

“And what are you going to do if the hotel closes?” she asked.

“It’s hard for me to imagine leaving,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “Believe it or not, I’m just having salad. I’m signed up for back-to-back aerobics classes.”

* * *

Claire skipped the evening’s banquet. I drank too much at the United party afterwards and wound up stopping at the Copernicus Room around midnight. Candace was there with a triple Cappuccino. Stewart’s tie was askew, his voice hollow. I could smell something different on his breath—he’d switched to Southern Comfort, a bad sign.

“Look at this . . . ” he muttered. “How can the Lakota sue us over the name Hatara? We can’t be ‘appropriating’ that name. I made it up.”

“They made it up first,” Candace pointed out.

I looked at the other traffic. “What’s this ‘Moonbeam Laser’ product?” I asked. “Can
they
really sue us?”

“Check out the message from ‘Wicken.org,’ ” Candace said. “When the lawyers have some free time, they should look into the legality of this curse.”

“It’s awful,” Stewart said. “Even bookings are down. What did we do wrong?”

I shrugged, staring dully at the holo moon on the front wall, cycling through its phases.

“Shack?”

“The only plausible explanation I’ve heard so far is that we need a celebrity spokesman.”

“Like who?” he snorted. “Art Ball?”

“Well,” I said as brightly as I could, “I think I heard somebody mention his name.”

Candace laughed so hard she shot Cappuccino out her nose.

* * *

Claire Albricht had turned into a low-grav exercise junkie. She put in hours on the “big steps,” in aerobics classes, and on the gymnastics equipment, swam for countless laps, even started diving from the ten-meter board. I stopped by to watch her—by her invitation—as I took breaks from full buffet breakfasts, media briefings, cocktail parties, ten-course banquets.

She was fun to watch. Moonies are skinny. She had some flesh.

On day four she invited
me
to lunch at the juice bar next to the spa.

“I hope I’m not being a pest,” I said. “Everybody else is lizarding out in the Jacuzzis, pigging out in the banquets.”

“I used to do that,” she said. “Now I feel like a new person. Karl is so history. As if I hadn’t already made it on my own.”

“Ah.”

“It’s true. I was Director of Marketing for The Four Seasons. Which has to do with my plan for when I get back.” The new Claire had stopped wearing lipstick altogether. She still had a little red around her nose, but otherwise looked great, her skin smooth and fresh, her eyes clear and bright.

My eyes, on the other hand, felt like they had sand in them. “Wish I had your drive,” I said, “your resilience.”

“You need a plan, too, for when this place folds. When I get back to New York I’m going to set up a consulting firm in resort marketing. You’re a sharp guy. That kind of job would work for you. Relocate and I’ll hire you.”

“Like I say, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

“What do you see in bare rocks?”

“You haven’t gone outside yet, have you?”

“Hands full right here, thanks. Get in shape before I go back, be ready for it.” She actually rubbed her hands together; she was wonderful, all energy and enthusiasm; you could see the rosin embedded in her palms. She smiled at me. “Though I could take a break.”