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1.18

24 November


St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface



Raimy sat across from Anming at dinner. There was nothing unusual about this; he’d done it the past two nights as well, not only to watch him but also perhaps hoping to get some sort of confession out of him. He was as laconic as the monks, but dinnertime was when they opened up, if they were going to. Perhaps the same for Anming? Perhaps he would let slip some sort of explanation or excuse? It always bothered Raimy, because most murder victims were killed by someone they knew—someone who was, at least theoretically, a friend or family member. But what would drive someone to kill a friend? Well, in this case it was Mars, obviously, but what actually went through Anming’s mind while he did it? This crime was meticulously planned; he’d’ve had a lot of time to contemplate his feelings. Some killers didn’t have any, of course, but Anming was no sociopath. Most murderers weren’t. Most murders were crimes of momentary passion, barely planned at all.

Anyway, as usual, Anming had nothing to say on the subject, and not much on any other subject except “pass the salt.” Anming seemed to have a bottomless appetite for the stuff, which the monastery seemed content to indulge, despite the exorbitant cost. Also as usual, Anming looked more frustrated and heartbroken than guilt-ridden. Which was also not unusual for a murder suspect—whether or not they regretted their crimes, murderers invariably regretted getting caught. A lot. Anming was no exception, but something about it seemed out of place on him. He often looked like a man who wanted to explain himself, but didn’t dare.

“You can talk, you know,” Raimy said to him in a low voice. “If there’s something you want to get off your chest.”

“I think I need a lawyer,” Anming murmured back.

“Oh,” Raimy said to him, “you definitely need a lawyer.”

“I’m voting for Folly Beach Folly,” Brother Hughart said, in a much louder voice, and apparently out of the blue. Doctor Callen Hughart, whose official title was Infirmer.

“Again?” said Zachary.

“Tomorrow night is movie night,” Giancarlo explained, mainly to Raimy. This made sense, because Folly Beach Folly was a TV dramedy series from the thirties, set in North Carolina or some such. About off-season life in a tourist-trap beach town, where everyone was sleeping with, stealing from, or selling drugs to everyone else. Raimy didn’t have much appetite for that particular kind of trash TV, but a lot of people seemed to watch “FBF” over and over again, not caring that the series had wrapped a decade and a half ago.

“Yes, again,” said Hughart. “I want to find out what happens to Sarah and Kate.”

“Look it up,” Zachary suggested.

Folly Beach is fine,” said Groppel. “Anyone opposed?”

No one spoke up or raised a hand, although a few looked less than pleased.

“We won’t be here for it,” Bridget remarked. “We’re going home tomorrow.”

“Yes. How do you feel about that?” Michael asked.

“Mixed,” Bridget said. “I’ll miss you fellers. I’ll miss the whole experience. And it’s very strange and sad that Etsub will be riding back in the cargo hold. I think . . . as long as we’re still here, it doesn’t quite . . .” She cleared her throat, her eyes suddenly full of tears, and said, “This place always felt a bit unreal to me, doubly so after the accident. As long as we’re here, his death . . . doesn’t count? But they’re going to bury him in a few days. In the ground.”

“I understand,” Michael said.

“But life goes on,” Bridget said, straightening. Wiping away the tears. “Isn’t that what they say? It’s time to get back home, and get back to our work.”

“Clowning for ratings?” one of the monks asked under his breath. Raimy thought it might have been Groppel, but he wasn’t sure. It was a shockingly unkind thing to say, under the circumstances.

But Bridget answered warmly enough, “Doing the research that makes me relevant to a Mars colony, and the publicity that brings in funding for it. If that’s what you mean, then yes.”

“Five of us crammed in that little spaceship,” Katla said, wrinkling her nose.

“With a killer,” Hughart said.

“Yes,” Katla agreed. The idea seemed to make her nervous, and a little angry. Raimy could understand that. Jeez, it was hard enough just riding in a taxi with your ex, or finding yourselves at the same party. How much worse, if the party were days long, and that ex had murdered a mutual friend?

“I would like to take a shower after dinner,” Anming said.

“You have the right to,” Raimy said. Showers seemed to be relatively uncommon here. Sometimes a module would heat up if the slanting sun hit it just right, but mostly (as on Transit Point Station), the air was kept a few degrees below room temperature. Mostly, a one-piece coverall or multilayered monk’s habit was comfortable to wear without sweating, and although the quarters were close here, they weren’t that close. People weren’t all up in each other’s armpits, the way they would be on a submarine. Consequently, the social pressure around hygiene seemed much less intense than in the Navy, or even normal civilian life. He was guessing the monks bathed maybe once or twice a week.

Also, except for the monks’ clean-shaven faces, there wasn’t much of a culture of personal appearance here. Even the students looked, for the most part, pretty relaxed about their grooming; Bridget held her hair back with elastic bands or plastic clips, and sometimes seemed to be wearing some kind of eyeliner that probably took about five seconds to put on. Raimy hadn’t noticed any other makeup. Katla’s hair was too short to pull back, and spiky in that way that barely seemed to need combing.

Raimy had sometimes seen someone headed toward the “balneary” with a towel and a 3D-printed squeeze bottle, but he’d never been there himself, except when Michael showed it to him. It was two whole modules out of his way, and he’d already fallen into a rhythm that kept certain parts of the monastery fresh in his mental map, and other parts remote. There really was a lot of space in here! But he did remember it had a closable hatch that could afford genuine privacy.

“It should be much easier than a submarine,” he said, somewhat incongruously.

“I can show you how to work the shower,” Katla said. “I was going to take one tonight, anyway.”

“I could actually use one myself,” Raimy said, thinking of that journey back to Earth, crammed into the Pony Express with Eduardo Halladay and Bridget and everyone else.

“I could take mine,” Katla said, “And then show you how to work the controls. Then I can watch Anming for you while you take yours.”

“No,” Raimy and Anming said simultaneously.

Raimy was going to say, “That would be a conflict of interest and a security risk. I can’t turn a prisoner over to the custody of his ex-girlfriend. No matter how innocent she seems.”

But since Anming had spoken, Raimy kept his yap shut just to see what happened next.

“I don’t want to be alone with you,” Anming said to Katla. Then, to Raimy, “I don’t want to be alone with her. Personal reasons.”

“Understood,” Raimy said.

Then Andrei volunteered to watch Anming, “To save you embarrassment of showering with your prisoner. That’s got to be problem, right?”

And several of the monks seemed to find that funny for some reason, and then the conversation turned to the ways in which this particular monastery afforded less privacy than the ones they’d each come from back on Earth, and then to the more esoteric tradeoffs between privacy and community, and between community service and self-reflection. It was actually pretty interesting, but Raimy didn’t have much to say about it, and neither (it seemed) did Bridget or Katla, who passed the rest of the meal in thoughtful silence.


“Unlike the airlock shower,” Katla was saying, “this one has both cold and hot. The control is . . . here . . . and . . .”

She tried to demonstrate by taking an actual shower right in front of them, but Raimy stopped her. There were several big things wrong here. First of all, she was naked, and now glistening with beads of water. Her short hair was wet and unkempt, and she had a towel with her, but instead of wrapping it around her body, she simply held it in her hand and gestured with it, like it was a floppy brown laser pointer. That seemed entirely unnecessary to Raimy, not least because she was carrying her coverall and space underwear under the other arm. Nudity might be necessary during ingress from the Lunar surface, but it certainly wasn’t necessary here.

Second, the shower controls were entirely self-explanatory to anyone over the age of twenty. Instead of a digital controller, this shower had a hot water knob (marked prominently with a big red flame icon) and a cold water knob (marked with a blue snowflake). Like most people, Raimy had grown up with faucets like these, and still occasionally encountered them in the older or cheaper hotels.

Thirdly, this very definitely was an airlock shower. The balneary sat on the opposite side of the complex from the main airlock, and the sign on its hatch said:


BALNEARY

EMERGENCY AIRLOCK

EXTREME CAUTION IS WARRANTED


Unlike the main airlock, this one didn’t have a separate locker room, shower room, and actual airlock. Instead, they were all together in one chamber, roughly half the size of the main airlock module. So, yeah. Every module in the monastery was snuggled up against the vacuum of space, but they didn’t all have a door that opened out directly to the Lunar surface. This one did. He supposed it was no more dangerous than the emergency exits on an airliner, but those got his attention, too, because any idiot could walk up and try to open one, decompressing the cabin and killing everyone on board.

So, as was his habit, Raimy was more interested in scoping out the emergency locker and the seals and levers of the outer hatch than he was in listening to Katla’s yammering.

In fact, there was something weirdly performative about her whole deal. Not just the faucets. She seemed to be upsetting Anming, who was understandably less than delighted about watching her prance around naked. That might actually be her intent, to upset him, but then again that would be an awfully petty act, given the gravity of recent events here.

“Please,” Raimy said to her. “Just go. We’ll figure it out.”

“I already know how it works,” Anming said, sounding just as puzzled as Raimy.

“See?” Raimy said, “He already knows how it works.”

“Okay, okay,” Katla said. “I’ll be outside if you need anything.”

“Great,” Raimy said. And then couldn’t help watching her leave. He wasn’t attracted to her, exactly, but she was a fit human being, very naked, and his eyes did not slide away from her smooth back and buttocks, pale as the veins in a block of Himalayan salt. She shut the hatch behind her, though, and latched it, and that was that.

“I need you to take off the handcuffs,” Anming said.

“I know how that works, too,” Raimy said, his voice testy and unnecessarily loud.

Which didn’t make sense, because Anming hadn’t done anything. Except murder, obviously.

Raimy took the cuffs off and then watched with casual suspicion as Anming got undressed, folded his clothes neatly on the metal bench, and started messing with the shower knobs.

Damn it, Raimy smelled a rat. Something wasn’t right here. Katla was acting weirder than usual, and that meant . . . something. She’d been intimate with Anming, obviously, not just here on the Moon but back on Earth as well. It was one of the loose ends he still needed to follow up: When had they started, and how serious were they? He’d planned on asking Katla these questions on the long trip back to Earth.

“The cold water doesn’t work,” Anming said.

“Then take a hot one,” Raimy snapped.

And then immediately felt bad about it, because Anming seemed so sad. Not angry or guilty or contrite, but genuinely heartbroken, and it had only gotten worse with Katla’s little stunt.

Why heartbroken? Did he miss her that much? She didn’t seem to miss him—at least, not in the same way—but she did seem angry. Angry and suspicious and strange and . . . selfish? Resentful? Did that make any sense?

“It’s too hot,” Anming complained.

Raimy ignored him, because it seemed suddenly important that Katla and Anming had been together on Earth. Suddenly important that they would both have known—known!—that Mars would tear them apart. Katla was going, and Anming wasn’t. But with Etsub out of the way . . .

It suddenly seemed important that Anming hadn’t confessed.

It occurred to Raimy, all at once, all in a hammer-baked moment, that if Katla committed that murder, she’d get to take her boy toy to Mars with her. And if her schemes failed but it was her boy who went down for the crime, she would simply let him take the fall. She was the type, yes, she definitely would. And if he loved her more than she loved him—which he clearly did—then he might indeed be willing to take that fall for her. Go to Mars, my love. Live for both of us. But oh, it would break his porcelain heart when she let him do it. Go to prison for me, yes! Show how much you love me! Jesus, that would break anyone’s heart.

And all at once, Raimy knew he’d gotten it wrong.

“It’s too hot!” Anming said again, in a much louder voice, and Raimy turned and saw steam, actual boiling steam shooting out of the shower head.

And then, instantly, he knew they were in danger—himself and this innocent plaything. He suddenly knew what all that heat was for: phase change.

“Turn it off,” he said. “Turn it off! Anming, turn it off!”

Raimy leaped for the knob, too late.

What happened next was recorded clearly by a maintenance camera mounted to the mast of the tower magnet, pointed down, eternally unblinking, at the back side of the little moonbase.

One sees a curious puff of vapor, like a sausage sighing on a hot grill. For a moment, that’s all, but then the outer hatch of the emergency airlock simply blows off its hinges, traveling twenty-six meters across the powdery regolith before finally skidding to a stop. Behind it spills a tangle of clothing and towels, along with two human beings: one naked as the day he was made, the other dressed rather neatly in two-piece Antilympus stretch-khakis. One sees them tumble and roll, flailing their arms in confusion and fear. The event happens fast, and you can see in their body language that it has caught them so completely off guard that they don’t even have time to protect their faces from impact.

They leave long skid trails in the gray dust before they, too, slide to a halt. One sees their sunken rib cages, empty of air. One sees their mouths gaping in horror, and one can very nearly make out their bulging eyes, unaccustomed to the kiss of vacuum. Rarely have two people ever looked deader.

And yet, clearly visible in the unblinking eye of the camera, they get back up again, both of them, and start crawling back toward the shredded-open space of the emergency airlock.



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