Chapter 24

The Moon - 3751 C.E.

"It's just not fair," said the overweight man who was hovering above the ground beside Paul. "I've lived on the Moon all my life. Every year for well over a century, I've applied for a visa to visit Earth. I've entered competitions. I've applied for special permits. I've offered an obscene amount of money. And then someone like you—who comes from the fucking Kuiper Belt, from an anarchist colony no one's ever heard of—gets to go to Earth after no more than a single month. It doesn't make sense."

Paul could see that his drinking companion was genuinely aggrieved, but he couldn't think of a suitable reply. He couldn't very well explain that the reason he was able to go to Earth was because he was on a secret mission. It would no longer be a secret if he told anyone.

"Er..." he began uncertainly.

"We're historians," said Beatrice who was standing at the bar next to Paul. "We're doing research on the Byzantine Empire."

"The fucking what?" asked the man with a sneer. "The bisons? What the fuck do you need to go to Earth to study bisons for? They've got bisons everywhere. And mammoths, dodos, passenger pigeons and elasmosaurs. Every once extinct animal you can think of that left a bit of DNA behind has been resurrected somewhere or other."

"The Byzantine Empire," said Beatrice. "The Eastern Roman Empire. The Greek Orthodox Church."

"Sounds like bollocks to me," said the man dismissively. "I was born here on the Moon. I've lived and worked here all my life. The only times I've been extralunar were holidays in Earth's orbit and once to Venus. And that was fucking expensive. All my life there's been this big blue ball in the sky and I've never once been able to go there. And you two—a scruff bag and a dolly bird—you call yourselves bison historians and you get there with no fucking trouble."

"What do you know about Byzantine history?" asked a tall woman who was sitting just to beside the irate lunar citizen.

"Um..." said Paul who wanted to confess that there wasn't a lot, but as always it was Beatrice who rescued the situation.

"What do you want to know?" she asked.

Paul had no doubt that whatever awkward question Beatrice was asked she'd have an answer. How did his wife get to be so knowledgeable? Mind you, it was she who'd chosen this cover story so he guessed she must know something about this ancient terrestrial empire.

"Well, for a start," asked the woman who was not only tall but at over two and a half metres excessively so, "what do you expect to find about the Byzantines by going to Earth that you couldn't research elsewhere?"

"If we knew that," said Beatrice, "we wouldn't need to go there."

Paul was getting increasingly frustrated by his having to vacation on the Moon despite having had many years to wonder what it would be like to look up in the sky and see the famous blue planet. But it was one thing to see the Earth. It would be another thing altogether to visit. All visitors to Earth had to endure a wait on the Moon whose length was determined by the visitor's status and the relative importance of the visit. It was obvious that it wasn't status or merit that had got Paul on the fast track. Not a single person he'd met on the Moon who'd discovered that he was imminently Earthbound failed to express surprise that it was someone like him who'd been given such preference.

Only a fixed number of people were permitted to enter or leave Earth on any one day and this was strictly determined by the environmental impact of space flight. The strict ration of people permitted on Earth entailed a wait whose duration was dependent on there being someone who was scheduled to leave the planet. Inevitably there were often unexpected delays when a visitor to Earth might try to prolong their stay by hiding. Sometimes such a fugitive might remain lost for years while they were being hunted down, but they were usually located fairly promptly and then penalised appropriately. The cost of such a recovery mission always had to be covered. The regulations regarding Earth's visitor quotas were so strict that even the President of Saturn had once been delayed entry for a day or so. However, Paul and Beatrice had a date and time of departure to Earth arranged for them and all they had to do was wait.

Everywhere the couple went they were accompanied by the relatively discreet presence of three or four security guards. Like many Lunar citizens they were above average height and often above average body mass. The Moon's low gravity was a big issue for anyone who lived on its surface. Health warnings were displayed everywhere either to encourage people to exercise or to advertise treatments for muscle waste, obesity and other low gravity ills. Paul continued to find that even the simplest activities could be peculiarly awkward. Even going to the toilet was an ordeal. It took forever for Paul's urine to leave his body and finally track a path through the air to the toilet bowl where it then slowly trickled away.

It was fortunate that there was so much to see on the Moon. It was as much a vertical world as it was horizontal. A journey through one the huge cities could be as far in a vertical direction to a different level as it was laterally across the surface. Every location was referenced by a set of three numbers that indicated not only its horizontal axis but also its depth below the surface. Paul and Beatrice dragged their unprotesting but clearly long-suffering security guards across the many cities of the Moon and once there to its many different levels.

They went to the zoo in Dziewulski City which housed a collection of genetically modified farm and domestic animals that had been designed and bred in the early days of lunar colonisation. It was accompanied by a museum that showed the somewhat distressing consequence of applying similar methods of genetic modification to humans. Descendants of these peculiar people could still be found on the Moon for whom space travel was more or less impossible. They were well adapted for living on the Moon but not for anywhere else.

The couple also attended cultural events such as opera, theatre and ballet in the capital of Mons Huygens where the various venues were unusually close to the lunar surface. It was even possible to stroll out of the Philip Glass Opera House and look directly up at the sky where Earth was in half-profile and various large space cruisers were hovering by. Ballet dancing in low gravity required especially ingenious choreography. When a ballerina was thrown across the stage it might take ten seconds or more for her to complete her flight by which time she was well able to adjust her graceful arrival to whatever motif was required by the music.

Paul and Beatrice travelled by shuttle to the Moon's core where the most remarkable feature was the affect of gravity at a location where all directions were both vertically up and down. There wasn't much to do when they got there and the actual journey was rather boring although Beatrice professed to be fascinated by the geological evidence of early volcanism.

The most relaxing aspect of the Moon as far as Paul was concerned, after his fraught voyage across the Solar System, was that there were no further assassination attempts while he was there. Or, at least, none that he was aware of. This was something he discussed with one of the security guards that accompanied the couple when he and Beatrice were visiting one of the Moon's many subterranean parks. Paul was watching a pair of horses prance about on the lawn with more agility than they ever could on Earth gravity, while Beatrice wandered into a botanic garden that was famous for its cultivation of low gravity plants. This didn't interest Paul, so he wandered idly over to where the security guards were sitting on a bench by the side of the lake and broke all conventions of discretion by directly addressing Juan, one of the guards, and remarked on how few assassination attempts there'd been.