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An intern scooted past, sat herself down at the computer without a word and drew a curve. Everyone watched her, looked at it. Everyone liked what they saw. Boyish, but not androgynous. The curve united them all, and the point was settled.

The shoulders were feminine but not narrow, atop towers that swept down to the ground, narrowing as they went, with a slight bend halfway and the stylised representation of open palms placed flat on the ground below. A slender neck grew up from the torso and, above that, a head in perfect proportion with the body, hairless, faceless, nothing but the noble contour of a shapely domed cranium, tilted backward a little so that Gaia was looking towards the Earth. As the whole ensemble took shape on the computer, Lynn suffered stomach cramps and cold sweats, but she patiently took on the next challenge: how to use as much glass as possible while keeping the best possible protection against radiation. She declared that Gaia’s ‘face’ should be transparent, that she wanted to put the bars and restaurants in the head, while the back of the head could be clad and reinforced, where the chefs ruled their roost.
Glass all over the throat and the curve of the breasts, where the suites were, and the showpiece was to be a huge Gothic window in the belly, four levels housing reception, casino, tennis courts and sauna, then glassed-in shins, and viewing platforms on the outside of the arms. Julian complained that the great window reminded him of having to go to church, back when he couldn’t object or resist. Lynn replaced the Gothic point with a Romanesque arch, and the window stayed.

All the rest – back and shoulder, ribs and neck, the top of the thighs and the inside of the arms – was clad with armoured cast-concrete slabs made from regolith, reinforced with sheet-glass sandwiches that held water between the panes to absorb particles and minimise heat loss. If the Americans were agreeable, the concrete was to be manufactured in the existing production facilities at the North Pole, made without water just by heating up the moonrock and casting it into construction-ready components at an automated factory. Mooncrete was said to be ten times more robust than ordinary concrete, resisting erosion, cosmic rays and micro-meteorites, and it was also cheap.

Gaia’s skeleton took shape. The spine was a massive main column enclosing all the cables and ducts that the building would need, as well as three high-speed lifts. Steel ribs sprouted from the column to bear the individual floors and the outer skin, and the secondary supports were anchored deep in the rock of the plateau. There didn’t seem to be any need for cross-bracing until somebody realised that the structure would be subject to much greater stresses than initial sketches suggested, since it was surrounded by vacuum, with no atmospheric resistance to the pressure of the artificial atmosphere within. Several assumptions had to be rejected, all the parameters frantically recalculated, until the experts declared that the problem had been solved. Since when, Lynn had had a new nightmare scenario to add to her visions of the end: a hotel that would at some moment suddenly go pop.

But Gaia shone.

She glowed from within, and she glowed with the help of the powerful floodlights that bathed her flawless snow-white exterior in white light. After years of struggle, Lynn had managed it. She had finished building the woman of Julian’s dream, at least for the most part. Some of the lower-end rooms still lacked plumbing, the multi-religious chapel at the bend of Gaia’s knees needed redundant life-support systems if it was to comply with all safety standards, and as for the banal detail of a spaceport, perhaps they would build one later to allow direct connections between Gaia and the OSS. On the other hand, the Lunar Express beat any direct approach hands down. It was undeniably more fun to arrive by train, and apart from that, they had a launch field for point-to-point flights on the Moon itself. It was all fine.

Except inside Lynn’s skull.

Gaia had collapsed so often in her nightmares that she had come to long for the day when catastrophe would come. A whole office full of certificates and affidavits swore that it would never happen, but she knew better. The thought that there was something she had overlooked had driven her mad, and madness was destructive.

None of you is safe, she thought, and introduced the woman …

* * *

‘—who will be looking after your comfort and security round the clock, together with her team. My dear friends, I’m delighted to present to you our hotel director, or should I say the manager here at Gaia, Dana Lawrence.’

The Lunar Express had arrived at the hotel’s station on schedule. They had run along the edge of the canyon for a while, so that they could enjoy the astonishing view of the building opposite, then crossed over at the further end and approached Gaia in a long, wide curve. Just in front of the hotel the ground sloped upward, so the builders had chosen not to take the rails straight up but to bring them into a tunnel, with the station itself underground. The track ended 300 metres beyond the gigantic figure, in a bare hall. This time there was no vacuum as they disembarked. They walked along gangways and into a wide pressurised corridor, with conveyor bands on the floor which brought them directly under the hotel, then from there to the lifts and up to the lobby, where islands of seating and elegant writing-desks made up one organic landscape. Fish glided behind aquarium panes. Perky little trees bursting with foliage flanked a curving reception desk, and above it holographic projections of the planets circled a bright central star, a model of the solar system with a sun in the middle spewing plasma from its surface. When the guests looked upwards, they could see the great hall vanishing in a nest of criss-crossing glass bridges. Since the reception hall was here in Gaia’s glass-fronted belly, with the huge Romanesque window arching in front, there was something cathedral-like about it. They looked out across the canyon to the sunlight on the other side and the pillars of the maglev marching away into the distance. The Earth shone up in the sky, a vision of home.

Dana Lawrence nodded at the group of guests.

She had searching grey-green eyes, an oval face and copper-coloured hair worn shoulder-length. Her high cheekbones and perfectly arched brows gave her an air of British reserve, almost of unapproachability. Even the sensual curve of her lips did little to change that. Only when she took the trouble to smile was the impression dispelled, but Dana was not overly generous with her smiles. She knew exactly what impression she made, and she knew that she came across as brisk, efficient and serious – something that people flying all the way to the Moon appreciated.

‘Thank you, Lynn,’ she said, and took a step forward. ‘I hope you had a pleasant
journey. As perhaps you know, in future this hotel will have two hundred guests and a hundred staff. Since you’ll have the whole place to yourselves for the coming week, we’ve taken the liberty of cutting back on staff a little, though you won’t feel the lack. Our staff are quite experienced in being able to cater to a guest’s wishes before they’ve even been voiced. Sophie Thiel—’

She turned her head to a knot of young people who stood there wreathed in smiles, all dressed in Orley Group colours. A girlish woman with freckles stepped forward.

‘—is my right hand; she leads the housekeeping department and makes sure the life-support systems function without a hitch. Ashwini Anand’ – a delicate, Indian-looking woman with a proud gaze nodded her head – ‘is responsible for room service and, together with Sophie, takes care of technology and logistics. In the past, astronauts had to endure all sorts of discomforts, first and foremost in their diet. It’s been a long road from tube rations to the five-star meal, but you now have the choice between two excellent restaurants under the direction of our head chef, Axel Kokoschka.’ A thickset, bashful man with a baby face and bald head lifted his right hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘He’s assisted by our sous-chef, Michio Funaki, who will, among other things, be demonstrating how to make fresh-caught sushi on the Moon.’

Funaki, a wiry man with a buzz-cut, bowed with his whole upper body.

‘All four are highly qualified and have trained in some of the best hotels and kitchens in the world, on top of which they have had two years’ experience on the Orley Space Station, making each of them a seasoned astronaut, and they know Gaia’s systems just as thoroughly as they know all the transport options hereabouts. In future Sophie, Ashwini, Axel and Michio will be the middle management here in Gaia, but for the next few days they are exclusively at your service. The same is true of me. Please don’t hesitate to speak to me if you have any concerns. It’s an honour to have you here as our guests, and we are extremely pleased to see you.’

A smile, almost infinitely diluted.

‘If there are no further questions for the moment, I would like to show you the hotel. In one hour, we will expect you for dinner in the Selene.’

* * *

Under the lobby was the casino, a ballroom with a stage, a cocktail bar and gambling tables; one floor below began Gaia’s lower belly, and the female shape spread out wider at the hips, so that to everyone’s astonishment they found two tennis courts waiting for them.

‘There are two more outside,’ said Dana. ‘For hard-core players. It’s no problem
playing in spacesuits, but the trouble comes with the balls. Here on the Moon they can fly hundreds of metres at a time, so we’ve fenced those courts in.’

‘How about golf?’ Edwards asked.

‘Golf on the Moon,’ said Mimi, giggling. ‘You’d never find the ball.’

‘Oh but you do,’ said Lynn. ‘We’ve tried it with tracking beacons in the balls. Via LPCS. It works.’

‘LP which?’

‘Lunar Positioning and Communication System. There are ten satellites orbiting the Moon, letting us communicate and find our way about up here. The golf course is on the other side of the canyon, Shepard’s Green. We also call it the “satellite links”.’

‘And who’s it named after?’ asked Karla.

‘Dear old Alan Shepard,’ Julian laughed. ‘A real pioneer, he landed with Apollo 14 on the plateau south of Copernicus. The old rascal had actually brought a couple of golf balls along and a six iron head. He hit it and said it went for miles and miles and miles—’

‘I most certainly will
not
be playing golf up here,’ said Aileen Donoghue, emphatically.

‘It’s not as bad as all that. He never went looking for his ball, but it can hardly have travelled more than two hundred, four hundred metres. Lunar golf is fun, but the trick of it is not to put too much into your swing.’

‘Don’t they just sink down into the dust?’

‘Too light,’ said Dana. ‘Try it sometime. We also have holographic tees here in the hotel. Would you like to see the spa?’

The sauna stretched out below the tennis courts, but most impressive of all was the swimming-pool in Gaia’s buttocks. It took up almost all the available area. The walls and ceiling simulated the starry sky, a hologram of the Earth glowed with a soft light, while the bottom of the pool and the floor all around were built to look like the lunar regolith, with rugged mountain chains on the horizon. The pool itself was a double crater, as large as a lake and surrounded by recliners. The illusion of bathing on the very surface of the Moon was practically perfect.

Heidrun turned her white face to O’Keefe and smiled. ‘So, who’s a big hero? Ready for a race?’

‘Any time.’

‘Careful! You know that I’m better.’

‘Just wait and see how things work out in reduced gravity,’ Ögi chuckled. ‘Could be I’ll leave you both behind.’

‘All right then, you know we’ve just
got
to have a swimming race,’ Miranda announced, spreading her fingers. ‘I lo-o-o-o-ove being in the water.’

‘I got it. Huey and Dewey.’ O’Keefe lowered his eyes reverently. ‘Lord love a duck.’

They visited the floor with the conference rooms, the multi-religious chapel, a meditation centre and a sickbay that gleamed reassuringly like a new pin, then up to Gaia’s ribcage. The group all had rooms on floors fourteen to sixteen, in the outer curve of the breasts. The lobby lay almost fifty metres below them. To get to their suites from the lifts, they had to cross the glass bridges. More bridges on the lower floors were set at zigzag angles, obviously placed quite at random. None of them had a railing.

‘Anyone suffer from vertigo?’ asked Dana. Sushma Nair raised her hand hesitantly. Some of the others looked disconcerted. This time Dana’s smile was a little broader.

‘Please understand. When you jump from a two-metre-high wall on the Earth, you reach the ground 0.6 of a second later. During that time, your body has accelerated to twenty-two kilometres an hour. On the Moon, the same jump would take three times longer, and your final speed would be less than half. That’s to say that you would have to jump from a height of twelve metres to get the same effect as a two-metre jump on the Earth, or in other words, on the Moon you could happily jump from three floors up in an ordinary high-rise. This means that you really don’t need to take the lift every time you want to go downstairs. Just jump from bridge to bridge, they’re barely four metres apart, which is nothing. Anybody want to try?’

‘I will,’ said Carl Hanna.

She gave him an appraising look. Tall, muscly, deliberate in his movements.

‘The real experts can jump back up again,’ she added meaningfully.

Hanna grinned and walked onto the nearest bridge.

‘If it turns out she was lying,’ he called to the others, ‘just throw her after me, okay?’

He sprang from the bridge with Donoghue’s cackles of laughter following after. He fell, and landed four metres below without the slightest jar.

‘Like jumping down from the kerbstone,’ he called up.

In the next moment O’Keefe sailed out from the edge, then Heidrun. They both landed as though they had never moved any other way.

‘My goodness,’ said Aileen, ‘My goodness!’ and then looked at each of them in turn, with a ‘My goodness!’ for everyone.

‘C’mon, guys,’ Chucky boomed. ‘Show us what you’re made of! Up you come!’

‘You’ll have to make room.’ Hanna shooed them away with a flap of his hands. They scurried backwards. He looked thoughtfully up at the ledge. When he raised his arms, he was just about two metres fifty tall, so there was still a metre and a half to make up.