In Perpetuity

IN PERPETUITY

Ellis Morning

IN PERPETUITY

Ellis Morning

“Don’t you love a hint of slag on the evening breeze?”

Ali Nazari raised an eyebrow at his colleague, Victor Talbot, even though his mirrored visor hid the gesture. The pair bounded along the dusty lunar surface toward their rover, carrying a loaded rectangular container between them. Gravity was more suggestion than imperative, which helped. On Earth, there was no way the lanky pair would have managed it.

“What breeze?” Nazari asked. “If you smell anything in there, I guarantee it’s not slag.”

Talbot cackled over Nazari’s transmitter. With his free hand, he pantomimed tugging at the collar of his environment suit. “You buffed my poetic streak right out of existence. Congrats. What’s the fate of this batch?”

“Probably nothing we haven’t already seen,” Nazari replied. “I can think of so many better things.”

“Like what?”

“Well… like building a fort.”

“Complete with slag-snowballs?”

“Seriously. Shape bricks, make a slag-based cement, see how it works. When pyrolysis takes off, slag will be cheap.” Nazari hefted his end of the container for emphasis. “It’s the building material of the future.”

“Lunar suburban sprawl. I can hardly wait,” Talbot grumbled.

They reached their skeletal vehicle, added their burden to the existing stack of containers in the rear, and secured it for the drive home. Each lock slid into place without a sound. Plastic panels beside the locks shifted from red to green to confirm they were fastened.

“Don’t want your own place to call home?” Nazari asked.

“Negative. Once one schmuck has a house, everyone’s gonna want one. That leads to neighborhoods and, worse, homeowners’ associations.” Talbot pounded a fist against a stubborn lock. “Then we’ll need roads, parking lots, traffic signals, enforcement… you might as well go back to Earth.”

“We might not have a choice on that count,” Nazari reminded him in a subdued tone. “The budget-axe drops any day now.”

Talbot pointed toward the rolling horizon. “Give me stark barren pioneer country any day!”

Nazari allowed the evasion, only to revert to a different sticking point with a teasing grin Talbot couldn’t see. “If you stay in colony dorms, how will you ever get time alone with that programmer you’re always ogling? Samantha?”

“Oh, can it,” Talbot snapped. “It’s not like I stand a chance.”

The men inspected their rigging one last time. Before climbing into the passenger seat, Nazari turned back the way they came. He faced a shallow depression in the mare, where suited chemists hovered like bees around a vacuum pyrolysis apparatus, the largest and most efficient to date. While Nazari and Talbot hauled away the byproducts of their experiment for analysis, the chemists harvested their end goal: pure oxygen.

Nazari raised an arm to wave farewell to whomever might be watching. That was when he noticed something unusual upon the ground, not far from his feet. To most, it would have been a mundane rock, one of millions littering Oceanus Procellarum. To Nazari, it stood out like obsidian in a riverbed. He drifted over for a closer look.

“Drop something, Ali?” Talbot asked.

Nazari knelt and retrieved the rock. He held the football-sized, pockmarked specimen close to his visor, trying to get a feel for its texture through his gloves. “I thought this whole area was titanium-poor… but this looks like pure ilmenite,” he mused.

Talbot was at Nazari’s side in an instant. “Hey, that’s something! Don’t tell the chemists, they’ll want to torch it. Mind if I look it over?”

“Negative, I insist.”

Talbot lifted the rock from Nazari’s hands, and returned to the rover to prepare it for the return trip and its eventual exposure to air. Meanwhile, Nazari knelt again. With the palm of his hand, he smoothed the patch of lunar dust where the rock had lain. He then used a finger to trace an X, along with his initials and the date. If left alone, the markings would last as long as the Moon did.

Nazari and Talbot huddled before the glow of a terminal monitor in the Lunar Science lab. Ambient lighting had shifted into night mode hours earlier, prompting the men to balance battery-operated lamps atop the clutter on their workbench. They were alone; the hum of power supplies and the ventilation system filled their ears. This was the only time during which one could pursue matters of personal curiosity without absorbing flak from one’s superiors.

Talbot squinted and fiddled with dials, his angular neck craned to its limit. Nazari sat behind him, occasionally remembering to sip from a thermos of tea that had cooled long ago. His gaze never deviated from the monitor, which displayed the fractured crystalline patterns of the sample they analyzed with a scanning electron microscope.

“You sure that’s a low-titanium region?” Talbot asked. “The chemists’ll be thrilled to hear otherwise.”

“No map I’ve seen shows that high a concentration at that spot,” Nazari replied. “Granted, the maps we have are pretty old.”

“No erosion, no water… no wind, quakes, microbes, volcanism, or continental drift,” Talbot rattled off. “Selenology: geology for the dead lazy.”

Nazari shrugged. “Maybe a meteor impact in a titanium-rich mare sent over some ejecta. I’ll show this to the boss. What are the odds he’ll put us on point for an investigation?”

“About as likely as shedding gofer detail for something dignified,” Talbot answered.

Nazari frowned. “Think if we do enough homework ahead of time, it might convince him otherwise?”

In a rare display of restraint, Talbot waited for him to continue the thought.

“When we go back out for slag, we can scout for more ilmenite, try to establish a pattern of distribution,” Nazari explained. “Meanwhile, we can hunt through old data for meteor impacts that might have thrown the ilmenite that far.”

“Think it would’ve been that recent— as in, recorded-history recent?” Talbot asked.

“Probably not, but there’s a recorded history on the Moon’s surface that’s a lot older,” Nazari said. “We can look for craters that indicate a collision with the requisite force, at least narrow it down to a specific region.”

“Big region, I’m guessing.”

“Information Science ought to have something to get us started. I’ll leave a note.” Nazari darted from his chair. The action lifted him off his feet for a moment, but he quickly regained his balance. His terminal rested on the opposite end of the same workbench. He tapped it awake, then flipped to a messaging client. Its readout made him blink in surprise. “The IS main desk is still online. At this hour?”

“You don’t think we’re the only night owls in the Luna-Bin, do you?” Talbot asked.

Nazari sent a brief message to the main desk. The response appeared in an instant:
By all means.

“Might as well head over now.” Nazari doubted he would get any sleep otherwise. He logged out of his terminal.

“That’s right, leave me to clean up,” Talbot grumbled.

“You mind?”

The false annoyance disappeared behind a smirk. “No, but when I finally get to work out why there’s so much thorium in Compton-Belkovich, you owe me.”

Exiting the lab deposited Nazari into a metallic corridor with a high ceiling and walls lined with labeled doors. This was the Lunar Science pod, in which he spent the majority of his days. At either end of the pod were openings to tunnels branching to other pods. He opted for one of these.

Unlike the pods, the tunnels connecting them were lengthy and transparent on all sides, offering a view of the colony, the mare in which it rested— and, often, a phase of Earth. During colony night, one could bound through these halls without fear of discovery or collision, challenging himself to leap ever higher and farther. Nazari supposed he hadn’t grown up yet, and never would. He arrived at the Information Science pod within minutes, but had to pause to catch his breath before proceeding to the door labeled MAIN DESK.

The still of colony night evaporated as soon as the door slid open. Nazari took one step inside before halting with confusion. Before him spread a maze of papers, books stacked ankle- to eye-height, half-packed storage containers, and torn posters left to spill wherever the meager gravity took them. He heard the faint, persistent whirring of a herd of printers, deep in the back of the room.

“Hello?” Nazari called.

A head of thinning ginger hair shot up from behind one of the shorter book piles. It belonged to Dr. Swain, the colony’s chief information scientist. “Ah, yes. Dr. Nazari.” Swain deposited a thermos atop the stack, and navigated the labyrinth toward his visitor.

The younger man knew everyone in the colony, but hadn’t had much chance to acquaint himself with Swain before. “Something keeping you up this evening?”

Even in reduced gravity, Dr. Swain barely reached Nazari’s shoulder in height. He offered Nazari a weather-worn hand and a genuine, if harrowed, smile. “Please, pardon the mess. I’m afraid my office is starting to look the way my brain must.” He tugged at his collar.

“It’s no problem,” Nazari dismissed, shaking firmly. He didn’t miss the dodge, but didn’t press either. “I’m sorry, I know it’s late.”

“Yes, well, good science rarely adheres to a schedule. Your, uh, your timing’s very good, actually. What can I help you find?”

“Information on meteor impacts near Oceanus Procellarum,” Nazari explained. “I know that’s not very specific, but I’ll be able to refine it soon.”

“Ah, yes, I’m sure. New project?”

“Side project.”

“How interesting. Well, even if I don’t have what you’re looking for, I can get it.” Swain retreated through the maze, reclaiming his thermos en route and running a hand over his scalp. “Want to wait here while I check? Not out there, I mean. Here, let me clear off a chair. Come on back— unless you were planning to be elsewhere, that is. This could be a long wait. Did you want any coffee?”