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1.10
21 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


Next to be interviewed was Brother Michael, who (along with another monk named Giancarlo) had been first on the scene after Etsub’s death.

“Do you mind if I record?” Raimy asked him.

“It’s not against the rules,” Michael responded, somewhat cryptically.

“All right, switching on.”

Although Raimy had taken hundreds of statements in his ten years as a cop, he didn’t feel entirely certain how to proceed with this one. He’d never met a monk before, much less in a monastery, much less on the goddamn Moon. He was a guest here, at the indulgence of the Catholic Church, and did not want to give offense to the people supplying his oxygen, or create some kind of interplanetary incident. Especially he did not want to do anything that might indirectly slow down the Antilympus Project. But he needed to do his job.

“Tell me what happened,” he said, more carefully than he ordinarily might.

Michael leaned back in his chair, looking suddenly deep in thought. He stayed that way for uncomfortably long—fifteen seconds at least—before answering, “When a novice takes his vows and joins a monastery, it’s not just poverty and charity he’s agreeing to. It’s a till-death-do-us-part type of situation, where he expects never to leave except briefly, for visits to his family and such. In the same vein, when the Church commissions a monastery—even a humble priory like this one—it’s to build a legacy that endures for centuries. Trust me, this isn’t lightly done. Saint Joseph’s is a place where death and life were always meant to intertwine, as a portion (however tiny) of God’s great tapestry. But murder is never part of the design; it cuts a thread mid-course, destroying the weave of every fiber that touches it. We’re not equipped for that. Here, as everywhere else, it comes as an awful shock.”

“So, you think Etsub Beyene was murdered?”

“I do. In a past life I was a worker bee in the Transportation Safety Board, which is the Canadian government agency that studies airplane crashes. I’m well familiar with the way small failures can stack up into big ones. Every plane crash is exceedingly improbable, did you know that?”

“No. I suppose that’s a relief.”

“It’s mostly pilot error,” Michael continued, “but it’s quite difficult to crash a plane these days unless you really want to, so a lot of cases wind up being ruled as suicides, or murder-suicides, where the pilot simply flies the plane into the ground. Sabotage is the next leading cause. The same general factors apply to spacesuits. General Spacesuit has a near monopoly on environment suits, for good reason, because they’ve made it harder and harder to have an accident. This is of grave concern to anyone whose life depends on it. That includes myself and everyone here, but it also includes GS, which is a kind of person, with a kind of mortality at stake. Their engineers tell me they can’t come up with a plausible sequence of events—however absurd—that could lead to this result, and I believe them. If there were a flaw in their design, they’d be quite motivated to recall and correct every suit in circulation, because another such failure would end them, as surely as the first one ended Etsub. So yes, I believe that suit was sabotaged, although even on that point GS admits to being stumped. How and when? It must have been cunning, to avoid detection by their quality assurance procedures, so their process needs correction in any case. I’m told you’ll be looking for tool marks tomorrow, and I’m quite happy to assist you with it, assuming I’m not myself a suspect.”

He spoke slowly and with a kind of restrained energy, like a dog who knows he’s on a leash. Or like a doctor who, with great care, dumbs down every thought and word to where he figures you can understand it. It made Raimy wonder how Brother Michael might speak in his truly unguarded moments. But of course, telling him to relax would be pointless. Nobody was ever relaxed when Raimy was grilling them, and he supposed this included every person he’d ever loved, or whoever loved him. “Lawyer mode,” his friends called it, although it worked just as well for policing. For daily life, not so much.

“No one’s been ruled out at this point,” Raimy told him. “Everyone here is a suspect. But for that reason, I guess I can’t be too choosy about who’s doing what. So yes, I’d appreciate the help, please and thank you. Now, back to my question: What happened that night? Where were you?”

To which Michael answered, “Like everyone except Etsub, I was in bed. We don’t keep a night watch here, and our schedule is such that any man who comes to us a night owl becomes, in short order, an early bird. I was quite asleep when Andrei started shouting on the emergency channel. Andrei, whom we didn’t know and weren’t expecting. We didn’t know we had a man outside, so my first thought was that something was happening over the hill at Moonbase Larry. Sorry, at Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station. I didn’t think it was our emergency at all, but I dutifully got up and went to my battle station in the radio room, where I saw the position estimate for Andrei’s transmission. Right here in the valley. So I got on the radio, still with no idea what was going on, and talked Andrei through a quick checklist. It was soon apparent that he was not dragging an injured man, but rather a corpse, so I judged it safer for myself and Giancarlo to cycle out through the airlock rather than trust Andrei, in his agitated state, to work the emergency ingress cycle by himself. I didn’t even know if he could read the labels.”

“Cycling out through the airlock, and then back in, takes quite a bit of time,” Raimy said. “You must have been confident Etsub was dead.”

“If that’s the word, yes. I considered blowing the explosive bolts on the outer hatch to get us out there fast, and then dragging Etsub around to the emergency airlock on the other side of the complex. But that would also be quite risky, and impossible to undo. At any rate, Andrei had described Etsub’s air leak and facial features in exquisite detail, and such things don’t occur halfway. In a statistical sense, it seemed unlikely we could save him. By then Andrei had read us Etsub’s name tag, and we confirmed that Etsub was not inside the monastery. I still had no idea what had happened, or why Andrei was there. I still assumed he’d come over from Shackleton, because where else could he have come from? But we know all the people over there, and they all have better English than Andrei. And Andrei kept saying he was from Clementine and that he was out of air, which I didn’t understand. So in my confusion, I was mainly concerned that we not compound whatever accident had befallen them out there. Once it was clear Andrei didn’t have a leak of his own, Geo and I did an emergency egress, two-minute decompression, and brought Andrei and Etsub in for an emergency recompression, also two minutes.”

“A bounce dive,” Raimy said—a term from his Navy days. With scuba gear running a normal air mix, you could avoid decompression sickness if you got deep fast, did your business fast, and then ascended before the pressure really had a chance to pack nitrogen into your bloodstream.

Michael nodded vigorously. “Exactly, yes! Albeit a reverse bounce, from high pressure to low and back, but I see you understand our intention. I begin to glimpse why the Horsemen have put this investigation in your hands.”

“So, you’re out and in in four minutes.”

“Call it four and a half, but yes. And by then, Andrei was getting rather frantic about his own air supply, so we let him remove his helmet right there in the airlock. Although it was exceedingly crowded in there, we took Etsub’s helmet off as well, and then we all went straight through into the habitat without showering. Covered in particulates.”

Raimy asked, “If you knew Etsub was dead, why did you bring him inside?”

Rather than answering immediately, Michael asked, “May I call you by your first name?”

“Sure. It’s Raimy.”

“Yes. Well, Raimy, try to understand. Etsub was a human being, and under our care. There was a slight chance we could do something for him, and we were certainly going to try. Once we’d laid him down on the chapel floor, Giancarlo hit the suit’s defibrillator and then immediately started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, until Hamblin showed up and took over. He’s our doctor—a foot-bone surgeon pressed into more general service—and he gave it a good twenty minutes before calling the time of death. Etsub was a friend to many of us here—a remarkable man, who’d’ve been very welcome to remain here on Luna, if his eyes weren’t so solidly locked on Mars. The idea of leaving him outside simply wouldn’t have occurred to us.”

“He’s outside now,” Raimy pointed out.

Michael spread his hands. “He was in here for days, Raimy. We became concerned about decomposition, and made an ugly choice to prevent an even uglier outcome. Look, I’m sure we’ll handle our next emergency more sensibly, with a script derived from this one, but there was a logic to our actions.”

“I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You haven’t.”

Changing directions, Raimy said, “I’d like to hear more about your time as a crash investigator.”

To which Michael said, “Not much to tell. At the time, it seemed a good use of my education, though a bit depressing. I wanted to help people, and indirectly the TSB does that, by reducing future accidents. But my third assignment involved, literally, piecing together smashed bodies—figuring out which foot belonged with which torso. A Cessna 206, carrying six people, hit the ground at a forty-degree angle and a speed of four hundred kph, strewing wreckage over an area much larger than you’d suppose. There was nothing on the black box; nobody knew they were about to die, and to my young self it just seemed so horrid. Lights out, just like that. No chance to make peace or contemplate one’s life. The experience drove me straight into the arms of divinity school.”

“Why were you selected to run Saint Joe’s?”

“I wasn’t. At best, I was second-in-command under Father Meagher, who until quite recently was expected to join us in the third batch of arrivals. But now he’s not coming, and the seven men who were supposed to come with him are delayed at least a year, while the Church figures out how much expansion and logistical burden it actually wants to shell out for.”

“You think they’re not coming?” Raimy asked.

Again, Michael spread his hands. “The monastery is already here, fully functional, and it’s training students exactly per its mandate. The Church is already taking a leading role in the settling of a Second New World. In that sense, the box is checked, and further growth may be seen as extravagant. We’ll see. As for why I’m second-in-command, it’s because this facility was partly my idea, and I’ve been involved in the planning at every stage.”

“You and this . . . Father Meagher?”

“That’s correct.”

“How were the other monks selected for service here?”

Michael laughed. “Are you picturing something like the Antilympus competition? Let me disabuse you; our pool of applicants was worryingly small. Compared with fifty years ago, only a sixth as many novices are even entering the monastic life, and only a tenth as many are actually taking solemn vows. On Earth, some ancient monasteries are actually closing, perhaps because their usefulness has been called into question. What can they offer, that’s worth the entirety of a young man’s life? When you start asking how many sworn monks, globally, are trained in the hard sciences, are under the age of fifty, and are willing to spend thousands of days sealed up in a can, under a black sky, never to return . . .  Well, it’s quite a short list, and roughly a third of us are already here.”

“I see. So it’s a big deal that you’re functional at all? That these students came here to study your methods?”

“A very big deal, yes, although they weren’t our first. The first three crew members of the Shoemaker Lunar Antenna Park stopped here for a week before moving on to their own little moonbase. It wasn’t long enough to teach them everything they needed to know, but it was infinitely more than they’d’ve gotten from Harvest Moon, who look at Luna the way coal miners look at a mountain: with avarice and cunning, but little warmth.”

“And do you have any more students scheduled to come?”

Michael smiled ruefully. “We’re playing the long game here, Raimy. Even if it’s years before anyone else needs us—even if it’s decades—the fact that people know where to find us is itself important. They know we’re out here on behalf of the future, and building it as we go. But I’ll also say, first, that Sir Larry—sorry, Sir Lawrence—is planning some sort of large habitation project quite close to here, and has asked us if we’d like to be someday connected to it by a pressurized tunnel, at his expense. I think that answer is no, at least for the time being, but it does speak to our perceived relevance. In a more immediate sense, Andrei Bykhovski came here, at quite some risk to himself, to plead for sanctuary, which he has received. This, perhaps more than anything, confirms our mandate, which no mere murder can corrupt. But please do solve it, Raimy. In the name of Heaven, please do.”


It was getting late in the day, and Raimy didn’t want to disrupt the monastery’s schedule any more than necessary. It had also been a very long day for him personally, but it was not yet dinnertime, and his scheduled time here on the Moon was worryingly short, so he figured he should squeeze in one more interview: this time (finally) with his top suspect, Anming Shui.

Like all of the others, Anming was someone whose Antilympus profile Raimy had studied, and whose videos he’d watched, to get a general sense of the man’s character.

Right away, though, Anming surprised him: knocking on the open door, he asked, in a rather meek voice, “Detective Vaught? May I come in?”

His Chinese accent was heavy. His body language was obsequious, too; he was literally bowing, and (Raimy thought) not just out of custom or habit. On video, he’d seemed more puffed up and confident, but either that was an act to boost his ratings, or else he’d figured out he was in real danger here, and it knocked some of the stuffing out of him.

And he was in danger, yeah. Guilty or innocent, he was clearly the person with the most to gain from Etsub’s death, and therefore the person most likely to go down for it. Even if he never went to prison, even if he never landed in court, the cloud of suspicion might well keep him from landing on Mars. It was already eroding his donations, or anyway something was.

“Come in, yes,” Raimy told him. “Close the door and have a seat. This interview is being recorded.”

Raimy tried to keep his mind and his voice neutral; he didn’t know that Anming had killed anyone. He didn’t even know for sure that Etsub had been murdered. Eight days after starting the case, Raimy was still in a loose information-gathering mode, with no solid theories. At best, he had a few testable hypotheses, which either would or wouldn’t stand up.

Taking a seat, Anming said, “Brother Michael found me. He said it was my turn to answer your questions, and of course it is. I’m surprised you didn’t ask me first.” His hand twisted nervously at the knee of his yellow coveralls. He had the main zipper pulled all the way down to his waist, exposing a flimsy space undershirt of dark gray 3D-printed fabric. The side vents and leg vents were also unzipped for better air flow. Despite the cool, dry air in here, Anming was sweating.

Leaning forward, rocking slightly, Anming frowned and said, “Does it help to tell you Etsub was my friend? We knew each other almost a year. Did a lot of things as a team. Sometimes with Katla and Bridget, and sometimes not. We were competitors, but we judged—correctly!—that we would get more exposure working together. I came to Luna with him, even knowing it would probably help him more than me. For a long time, I was competing for second place, which is first place for the second mission. Bridget, too; you can ask her. Realistically, she could not expect to pass Katla. But we all came here together, spending half our donations. In my case, half. A little less for Etsub. But we made that money back in the first week. It was a gamble, and it worked. I would get to Mars in four extra years. I can hold my lead that long. Why not? I am a good botanist, and good enough astronaut, and smart enough to know what game I’m playing.”

That was quite a data dump, considering Raimy hadn’t asked him any questions. His English was better than you’d think, given the accent. The fact that Anming was so nervous didn’t mean much; at this point, anyone but a pure psychopath would be. And pure psychopaths were rare even among murder suspects, and even if they could fake nervousness, they couldn’t fake sweat. So okay, Anming Shui probably wasn’t a psychopath.

Raimy asked, “You were asleep when Etsub died?”

“Yes,” Anming answered.

“When did you wake up?”

“I think when Michael and Geo were in the airlock. I could hear there was something happening, but I am a guest here. I didn’t think I needed to get up. But then a few minutes later I heard Bridget screaming.”

“Screaming what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You couldn’t understand her?”

“That’s right. But it got me up.”

“Because Bridget is your friend?”

“That’s right.”

“You were sharing a room with Etsub. Did you notice he wasn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Did he go to bed at a normal time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see him get up?”

“No. But he often got up at night. He’s a restless sleeper. He was.”

“And what did you see when you left your room?”

“Chaos.”

Sighing, Raimy said, “Can you be more specific?”

“There was a strange man here, in a blue-and-gray spacesuit I didn’t recognize. And someone was lying down on the floor of the chapel. Everyone was crowding around; I couldn’t see who it was. But Michael and Geo were in their spacesuits, and there were monks all over the place, in robes and pajamas and space underwear. Bridget was zipped into a coverall, but she was barefoot. Katla was in her underwear, too, which is not a lot of material, but she did not seem embarrassed. There was moondust everywhere, stinking like burnt matchsticks. It got in my eyes even from across the room. I said to Katla, ‘What’s going on?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. Etsub is dead.

Raimy made some notes. These details mostly seemed to line up with what he’d already heard, but even the slightest mismatch or inconsistency could trip up someone who was lying.

“Did Katla seem upset?”

Anming shrugged. “I think so, but it was pretty shocking. I mean, mostly she was confused.”

“Were you confused?”

“Yes.”

“Was Bridget Tobin confused?”

“Everyone was confused. It was just after 3:00 a.m. Most of the lights were still off, and curtains closed over the windows, which is what we do here to make it night, when the sun is not behind a hill. Even Brother Michael didn’t know what was going on. He kept asking Andrei where he came from, and Andrei kept saying, ‘Clementine. I come here from Clementine.’ Brother Hughart was trying to revive Etsub, but when I saw his face, I thought, no, that is not going to work.”

“Whose face? Etsub’s, or Hughart’s?”

“I guess both. Etsub was all swollen. His eyes were swollen shut, and it looked really weird inside his mouth, like lantern paper. Red and dry and crinkly. Hughart just looked grim. He got some monks to take off the top part of Etsub’s spacesuit and carry him to the infirmary, so he could do an IV, but he said he could not find a vein.”

“Was Bridget upset?”

“Yes.”

Raimy was starting to get annoyed. Anming either said too much or too little; he didn’t seem to have an in-between setting. Coupled with his thick accent, it made him a difficult witness.

“Can you elaborate on that?”

“She was crying. She said something to Michael, but I couldn’t hear what. I’m not sure even Michael could understand her. After Hughart said that Etsub was dead, Bridget went back to her room and closed the door. I did not see her again until breakfast.”

“And Bridget shares a room with Katla Koskinen?”

“Yes.”

“Did Katla go back to her room?”

“No. Katla stayed out with everybody, just in her underwear. When Etsub was out of his spacesuit, she hugged the body, and she went with them when they carried him back to my room.”

“Was she crying?”

“A little bit, yes, although everybody’s eyes were watering, and noses running, because of the dust. But she’s sobbing, too. Her friend is dead, very suddenly. At this point, I realize I’m sharing a room with a dead body of my friend, so I take out some of my things and I move to a different room, which is actually this room. And I go to sleep, because I am very tired.”

“You moved back into your old room after the body was moved outside?”

“Yes. They said you were coming, and you needed this room.”

Raimy sighed. This had all gone very badly from an evidence preservation standpoint; everything had been moved and moved again, everyone’s fingerprints were all over everything, and even the dust had been cleaned up. Other than the spacesuit itself, Raimy didn’t have a lot to look at.

Trying a different tack, he asked Anming, “What do you think happened to Etsub’s suit?”

At that, Anming looked Raimy in the eye and said, “I hope it was an accident. If somebody killed him, I am going to get blamed for that shit. Somebody will get away with a murder, and I will go to jail. I know how this looks. I know people will think I just wanted Etsub’s place on the rocket, but it’s not like that.”

“If you’re innocent, you’re not going to jail,” Raimy assured him.

Anming surprised him by laughing at that. “I’m Chinese, okay? I see people go to jail. People ask me, why do you want to go to this American Mars colony? We have our own Moon stuff, we will have our own Mars stuff too. You’re Chinese, you just wait, and go to Mars with us. But I’m not in the astronaut program. I was not accepted. I think I make some people embarrassed or mad when I enter Dan Beseman’s contest, and even madder when I say I’m coming to the south pole of the Moon. That’s the wrong pole for a Chinese man. Our stuff is north.”

“What are you suggesting?” Raimy asked, not liking the direction this was taking.

Anming said, “If someone wanted me out of the program, pinning a murder on me is a good way to do that.”

“Who?” Raimy pressed. “Who would kill an innocent person just to get to you?”

Anming looked nervously at the recording lights on Raimy’s glasses, and said, “China is a big place.”

“Are you saying . . . Chinese government?”

“I’m saying it’s a big place, and I piss off a lot of different people. It is pretty ironic, because there are also people saying I am a Chinese spy, and this happened so I can infiltrate Antilympus for China. That’s not true, either. I’m just a botanist who wants to go to space. I do not see why that desire should get people killed. Especially Etsub, who was the better man. He was a better man than me, and I wanted him to win.”


Dinner at the monastery was a surprisingly elaborate affair. The chapel doubled as a “refectory” or dining room, and its pews were cunningly designed to fold together into two large picnic tables. It took four people less than a minute to accomplish this. Only one table was necessary to hold all eleven of the monks, but it wasn’t quite big enough to also accommodate three students, plus Andrei Bykhovski and Raimy Vaught, and so Brothers Michael, Giancarlo, and Hamblin left their fellows to slum with the irreligious at what Raimy couldn’t help thinking of as “the kids’ table.”

The monks stayed mostly quiet as they passed around plates and utensils, but there was nothing particularly solemn about the ritual. In fact, these men seemed mostly to be having a good time. Raimy had been introduced to most of them by now, and though he was normally quite good at memorizing faces, truthfully he had a hard time telling them apart. They were all light-skinned and clean-shaven, for one thing, and they all wore their hair short, and wore nearly identical robes (or “habits,” as they seemed to be called). None were particularly skinny or fat, so it was really only hair color, eye color, and general face shape that set them apart from one another. But even this was of limited help; Michael’s hair was dusty blond, fading to gray at the temples, and his eyes were blue or hazel, and his jawline was strong. But Hamblin’s hair and eyes were only slightly darker, and his face only slightly rounder. As for the rest of them, they mostly had black or dark brown hair and heavy eyebrows. Back in his Navy days, Raimy had complained that everyone looked the same in a submariner’s uniform, but that was nothing compared to this.

“I wish you guys wore name tags,” Raimy said.

To which Michael replied, “We can do that, if it’ll aid your investigation. In fact, we certainly should. Our spacesuits have name tags, because even we can’t reliably recognize each other without them. Indoors it’s much easier, but yes. I see the problem. We should have thought of this before you came.”

“You should do it for the benefit of your students, too,” Bridget Tobin complained.

“Perhaps,” Michael said. “But that’s a different matter. You’re here to learn what it means to live under alien skies, and it’s not clear we can best accomplish that by making it easier.”

“Yes, Professor,” she snarked back good-naturedly, then added, “You guys just want to be interchangeable.”

“We don’t and we aren’t,” Michael replied, “but our service does require us to set vanity aside, and practicality does require us to cross-train. Now kindly shut your pie hole.”

Once the places were set, all but three of the monks seated themselves on their table’s two long benches. These three, with the aid of Katla (but not of Bridget or Anming or Andrei), shuttled back and forth to the kitchen with large serving bowls and platters, which they laid down gently along the centerline of each table, being careful not to tip them in the low gravity. It was quite a lot of food, and quite a lot of variety.

“Now this is not what I was expecting,” Raimy admitted.

Giancarlo chuckled at that. “It’s not exactly gruel, is it?”

Michael said, “Nor should it be. Although we’ve vowed a simple life, we’ve also sworn to do our best to make Luna a place for humans. Key elements of that research include how to grow things, and how to cook the things we’ve grown. Also how to program the CHON synthesizer to produce substances not only nutritious and tolerably palatable, but actually delish. When we first got here, we weren’t even eating real gruel, if you can believe it, but a pasty imitation blobbed out like syrup.”

At this, Brother Hamblin piped in with, “CHON stands for Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen. Those four elements are about ninety-nine percent of what your body needs to stay alive. The synthesizer can spin them into a limited number of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.”

“I think he knows that,” Bridget said on Raimy’s behalf.

Raimy grunted noncommittally. Most people these days knew what a CHON synthesizer was, and Raimy knew they cost a couple hundred thousand dollars and took a lot of power to run. They were not exactly something you could fuck around with in your spare time. But he didn’t know how they worked or what they could do, so he said, “I don’t mind a little education.”

“Meaning no disrespect,” Michael said, “one astronaut to another, but until you’ve relied on CHON to keep you alive, you really don’t know how important plants and animals and trace elements have been in your life. Our synthesizer is only the nineteenth unit off the line at Nutrilutions Corp., and they haven’t really had time to develop a lot of recipes yet. Here, it’s nearly a full-time job for Ferris and Durm, who I assure you are more motivated than any corporate employee could ever be. We give Nutrilutions back our best creations, with the right to freely distribute, so long as the titles and descriptions credit us appropriately. It’s another worldly thing we’d like to be known for. And we’re already getting pretty good, if I do say so myself. I’ll even challenge you to a friendly wager, to identify which elements of this meal are of hydroponic origin and which are entirely synthetic.”

“Well, the salad is obviously real,” Raimy said, “and the hot dogs are clearly fake.”

“You should try them first,” Katla warned.

“Do you culture meat cells here?”

Michael smiled. “We’ll give you a tour in the morning, if you’ll consent to suspend your investigation that long. Meanwhile, eat.”

“It’s all quite nutritious,” Brother Ovid assured him, from one table over.

“And better than anything we had a year ago,” Giancarlo added. His accent was Italian, his voice warm and slow. Ovid’s was higher and more energetic, with an accent Raimy guessed was Norwegian. Both contrasted sharply with Michael’s own voice, which was sonorously eastern Canadian. He seemed to be the only monk here, except maybe brother Hughart, who spoke English as a first language.

“So where are you from?” Raimy asked him, while accepting a shovelful of salad that Katla was dropping on his plate. Next followed hot dogs with what looked like whole wheat buns, and some cubes of off-white material that might be cheese or tofu. Brother Ovid handed him a gray plastic cup filled with something that looked like milk.

“No simple answer to that,” Michael said. “Diplomatic families go where the wind takes them. I spent some time in England and Germany growing up, but for your purposes I’ll say Cornwall, Ontario. I was born there, and I spent my last three years of high school there. I was on the debate team.”

“Huh,” said Raimy. “Me too. San Diego. It’s good training for law school.”

“And divinity school,” Michael agreed.

Then Katla and the remaining monks took their seats, and conversation dropped away as everyone was eating. The food tasted better than it looked, and Raimy surprised himself by asking for seconds.

“So, what’s your verdict?” Michael asked him, as he started round two.

“The meat is fake,” Raimy said. “It’s got a fatty, umami kind of flavor, but it’s a bit flat. It’s not vat-grown.”

“Correct,” Michael said. “It’s a CHON-printed mix of four different molecules. The proteins were designed right here, by the way, thanks to Hughart and Hamblin—a physician and a chef, respectively. The trick is to find something that tastes like animal protein but is easy to assemble, so it doesn’t take forever to print. This recipe’s got analogs of myoglobin, myosin, and collagen, along with a fat called oleic acid. That by itself is not very convincing, but we add heme and monosodium glutamate from the drug printer, sieve the mixture into a 3D-printed mold, and cook it in the microwave. But I’m stealing Huey’s glory, here; you can ask him about this yourself, if you’re interested.”

“I might be,” Raimy said. Hughart was over at the other table, but Raimy would not have any trouble finding him tomorrow.

“It’s actually my glory you’re stealing,” said Hamblin. “And Kurtis’.”

“Well,” Michael said, “You can explain it during the tour.”

Meanwhile, Raimy pointed his fork at the hot dog buns and said, “The bread is natural.”

“Correct. If you only knew how much labor went into a single bun! We have to grow and harvest the wheat, grind the flour, add water and yeast, knead the dough, and bake it in the convection oven. It’s a treat we can’t enjoy as often as we like.”

“Actually,” Hamblin said, “We’re cheating a bit on this latest batch, by adding oleic acid and Hill protein, to give it a bit of a buttery, eggy flavor, and also some raw CHON starch to fill out the dough.”

“Ah. So we’re both wrong, then,” Michael said.

“The milk is synthetic,” Raimy said.

“Right again. And what about the white cubes?”

“Also synthetic,” Raimy answered confidently.

“Nope,” Michael said, smiling. “The same milk you’re drinking can be blended with lupin beans and then fermented with the same yeast cultures we use to bake the bread. The result is not quite cheese, not quite tempeh, not quite tofu, and not quite hummus.”

“Huh. I’ll be darned.”

“Is it good?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is. You guys invented this?”

“Out of necessity, yes, as a way to both stretch our garden resources and get some trace elements into our CHON. This is something we eat every day, or nearly. We’re thinking of calling it ‘moon cheese.’ And while we don’t have the resources to pursue this right now, Huey has told me the same process, minus the milk, can be used to make a kind of beer.”

“Bean beer,” Giancarlo scoffed.

“Beans have starches and sugars in the right proportion,” Hamblin said. “We wouldn’t be the first. Well, maybe the first to use lupins.”

“Are monks even allowed to drink beer?” Raimy asked, surprised.

To which Michael said, “My friend, the best beers in the world were invented by monks. What do you think we’ve been doing these past two thousand years?”


When Raimy’s rollup announced an incoming live call, it was so unexpected that at first he didn’t recognize the SpaceNet ringtone, or realize it was coming from his own pocket.

“I think you’re getting a call,” said Bridget Tobin.

“What? Oh.”

He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and the rollup hadn’t been charged in days, so he had to answer by physically pulling the cylinder out of his pocket and holding it up to his ear. He had all the power settings minimized, so he didn’t even have caller ID info on exterior display. It was basically 1990.

“Hello?” he said into the cylinder.

“Hi. It’s Tracy. I just wanted to see how you were doing.” Her voice was way too loud. He tried to turn down the volume with his thumb, but couldn’t find the switch.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “I’m doing fine, thank you. Eating dinner right now.”

“Oh, that’s exciting. Moon food! Is it good?”

“It is,” he said. “Yes. Quite good, actually. Listen, can I call you later?”

“Sure, I don’t want to disturb you. I’ll cover the cost when you call back.”

“Oh. Okay, thanks.”

“Bye!”

“Bye,” he said, whereupon the cylinder went dead in his hand.

Clucking with amusement, Tobin singsonged, “Somebody’s got a girlfriend.”

Feeling unaccountably flustered, Raimy stuffed the rollup in his pocket and said, “I don’t . . .  She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Does she know that?” Tobin asked, then burst out laughing.

“She’s kind of my boss right now,” Raimy tried to explain, but Tobin and Katla were smirking, and even Anming Shui seemed amused.

“I thing she likes you,” he said.

“It does seem that way,” Brother Michael agreed.

Annoyed now, Raimy said, “How about you guys stay out of my business? I’m not here to fraternize.”

To which Tobin replied, “Yeah, it sounds like you can do that when you get back.” Then she burst out laughing again.

“All right,” Michael said, “let’s leave our guest alone. This is a solemn occasion in a solemn place.” Then he, too, snorted out a laugh. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It is funny.”

And Raimy, who had run-tackled murderers and testified in courtrooms and swum half-naked out of submarines, had nothing to say to that. Nothing he wanted to say in a chapel, at any rate.


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Framed