The Miners’ Tail

Ok so today the limitations of the paper-and-ink level tech we’d decided to use began to show themselves. We missed the trail going out of the campsite, and very soon were wandering amongst the trees with no clear idea where we were.

The paper map we had showed the West Copernicus Forest as quite a big area – about 40 x 30 km – and the campsite right in the middle of it. Rick tried to use the map to track the path we’d made and, steering by the sun, navigate to where the Art Trail resumed, but after a couple of hours walking we ended up instead in a steep rocky valley that seemed to be climbing into mountains.

He and Carys peered at the map, muttering things like ‘We’ve got to be about here’ and ‘The sun’s over my left shoulder, so…’

Naomi and Darina paced around looking impatient.

‘I could just use my Link and ask the way,’ said Naomi after a while.

‘That would be cheating,’ said Ava. She was sitting on a rock by the side of the path, grinning. ‘We chose to do it this way; this sort of thing was bound to happen.’ She winked at me.

‘But we could miss out on some interesting stuff!’ Carys protested.

I was feeling hot and thirsty, and the bottle in my backpack was empty. ‘Is there any water round here?’ I asked.

Ava got up and started down the slope. ‘Let’s go and have a look. Water is usually downhill.’

I got up to follow, but Darina said, ‘Don’t get separated. That could be dodgy.’

So we all went, and Ava was right, a glint of water appeared between the trees within a few minutes. We scrambled down a rather overgrown slope and found ourselves looking at a small open pond.

The water was clear, but… ‘How do we know it’s safe to drink it?’ I asked.

Naomi frowned at me. ‘All open water on the Moon is good to drink, unless it’s salty.’ She scooped up a handful and slurped it. ‘This is OK.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ said a booming voice from the shadows.

I think we all jumped. my heart missed several beats and I felt pins and needles in my hands.

There was a crunching sound, and a large colourful reptile emerged from the shadows. ‘This is my pond,’ it said. ‘I keep it clean.’

He explained that he drank the water from this pond and several others, then returned it as filtered water. ‘In what you would normally call pee,’ he said, flicking his tongue out. ‘Anything dodgy I drop up in the Forest, or bury it. I’m basically a walking water filter. Name’s Simon by the way.’

Darina introduced us and explained our situation.

Simon made a knocking sound in his throat which may have been a chuckle. ‘Yes, there were a lot like you back around the Celebrations,’ he said. ‘It isn’t as easy as you think, navigation without Knowing. But don’t worry, you can go to the Mining Museum and join the Art Trail from there. It’s not far.’ He gestured with his tail, pointing to a rocky slope leading up from the pond. ‘Just go to the top of that, you’ll see a flight of steps down the other side. Bit steep, about a kilometre, but you can’t get lost if you stay on the steps and it comes out at the Museum.’

Darina thanked the reptile and she, Carys and Rick started around the pond, but Ava asked, ‘Do you like being a walking water filter, Simon?’

‘Ah, well.’ He flicked his tongue again. ‘It’s one of the few ways you can get a whole body licence on the Moon as just one person. You know about 240 trillion people came to the celebrations? We’re still getting rid of some of them now!’ Again the knocking sound. ‘But it was crowded before that. As soon as they put the sky on, really. Now I used to be a miner – well, mining engineer. First on Earth, then I got bored when I retired and went for the Moon. First remote, then up close. It was fantastic, I got all the memories stored up and I play them now and again. It was… different, back then. Still, I don’t mind this. I’ve got a tail!’ He thumped it on the ground. ‘I wanted one of those when I was a kid, something I saw on the telly I think.’

‘And you don’t use the Link or anything?’ Naomi seemed interested now.

‘Not really. Just for water reports. I keep the voicebox so I can have a chat, but I don’t do all that advanced mind sharing stuff. Never did. I just like being on my own. In the mines it was, then in the mountains, now it’s in the woods.’

‘You don’t get lonely?’ Ava asked.

‘You’re only lonely if you want to be. I like passing the same places every day, seeing the same things, seeing them grow and change, just a little bit at a time. It’s restful.’

The Mining Muesum was full of trains. Big, heavy trains covered in protective radiation shells to stop them from failing in the short time they spent on the surface, delivering their load to the launchers. There were some of the launchers too, and great big rock-shattering machines.

It all sounds a bit primitive, but our ancestors basically removed the whole surface of the Moon that way, down to a depth of several kilometres in places, for use building the Diaspora, the great cloud of human-habitable worlds created around the Sun.

So lot of the surface that we were walking on had been literally rebuilt, later, when people came to regret what they had done and had the means to fix it.

‘History’s full of that kind of thing,’ said Ava. ‘Landscapes ruined and poisoned, then recreated. But they’re always recreated in a slightly different way.’

Rick snorted. ‘You mean, not a hard vacuum with a three hundred degree temperature range and hard radiation? I don’t think anyone wanted that back.’

Ava shook her head. ‘I didn’t say it was always a bad thing. Just different. What they’ve built here is – beautiful. It’s the Moon the ancients dreamed of, before they could even go there. But it’s as artificial as the Diaspora or anything we’ve got back home.’

‘Everything is “artificial”,’ said Carys. ‘Intelligence, creativity, craft – they change everything they touch, and it can’t be just changed back, anymore than you can put a supernova back together and make a star. Look at this “train” here – that’s a work of art, but so are the others, the originals. Only difference is, they were designed by people like Simon back at the pond, and this was designed by someone trying to say something now about what they did then and…’ He looked again at the object in front of us, shook his head. ‘Not making a very good job of it.’