Something Made of Vacuum

There was a different Moon Man working at the passenger terminal, who set Helene up with a monorail chair. This time, Helene was able to see what the fare would have been to ride the passenger car, and was grateful to get in for free.

The monorail linked every settlement on the Moon. In the low gravity, even a fairly spindly rail was strong enough to carry passengers and freight, and a sunshade was all that was needed to keep the rail cold enough to be superconducting during the Day. Riding alone for an hour, swinging beneath the rail as it rose and fell over the cratered gray landscape, Helene learned all over again that the Night sky was endlessly fascinating and the ground was, mostly, not.

She soared over the edge of Mare Crisium Field, another busy passenger terminal. Her first call was a Moon Man distribution business called Chun How Wholesalers, although oddly enough the company seemed to be run entirely by Moon Men with Swedish names. They regularly bought steaks and sea food from her company.

Mare Crisium village looked exactly like Sinus Amoris village, down to the ranks of sleeping Moon Men whose families were not on shift, parties with dancing and a gathering of space-suited figures for some private purpose that her suit would not tell her. She flew over her customer’s warehouses near the field, some enclosed but most of them just sunshaded rows of storage racks loaded with containers of food. She came to ground at the terminal building and let her suit call for a taxi.

The taxi was made for Moon Men and did not have any seat, just an arrangement of pipes that she could sit on. It turned out to be perfectly comfortable and as it rolled away at no great speed, Helene rehearsed her sales pitch.

* * *

“You’re wearing a real suit!” Oscar Amundsen said when they met. “I thought you were from Earth … oh, wait, I see … you’ve been fired? Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate your company sending somebody out to talk to me in person, but how can you take orders if you don’t work there?”

“I was hoping I could bring back some orders and they’d re-hire me.”

“Ah. That’s a little under the table, isn’t it? Well, we may be able to work something out. I always need steaks, tuna, caviar and other stuff I can’t get on the Moon. I buy from several companies but I can give you the business if you can work with me on the price.” He named some sample prices.

“I have to make a profit!” Helene said. “I mean, the company has to make a profit. I can’t meet that.”

“We can wiggle a little on the price, maybe ten percent.”

“That’s not half of what you’ve been paying!”

“And you’re in a real poor position to bargain, aren’t you?”

* * *

Mare Crisium Ship Supply, another Moon Man-run company: “You guys sold us some bum meat last year. Beat it.”

* * *

The air town for Mare Crisium Field was Swift Crater City. Helene was carried up to the rim and checked through the airlock at the speed Moon Men expected – her suit was her complete identification. She barely wasted a glance at the town and took a taxi to Chandrashekar Caterers, to meet with Rajit Saran, the president. His offices were low on the crater rim, only about one story over the floor. He took her out to a patio and served coffee.

“I must say, you’re the only Moon Man I can ever recall who came to me as a salesman,” he said.

“I’m not really a Moon Man. I just have this suit. It’s kind of a long story, but I’m from Earth.”

“Now that I think about it, Moon Men ladies don’t have beautiful long hair like yours,” Rajit said. “When you come in here in that suit with the helmet off, it really emphasizes your face. In a very good way.”

“You’ve been buying meat and some other things from us,” Helene said. “What can I do for you to help your business?”

“You can do something to help me,” Rajit said. “Moon Men ladies are always so interesting, don’t you know? It’s like a woman in a burka, what is hidden is always fascinating. Why not take off that clumsy suit and let’s conduct business in nicer clothing.”

“It takes a technician to get the suit off,” Helene said, with a strained smile.

“I know a hotel here that does that,” Rajit said.

She rose and left.

* * *

Fat Jack’s Foods was run by a fat fellow named Maurice, who welcomed Helene into his messy office. “It’s nice to see somebody from Earth!” he said. “I’m an Earthman too. Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

“Chicago! I’m from Chicago! I mean, Hammond, close enough, right? Man, I wish I could go back. I’ve been on the Moon too long and my heart’s so soft by now I’d probably die the day I touched down, but I really miss it. Is Corey’s Pizza still downtown?”

“It is,” Helene said. “I went there with a girlfriend a couple of months ago.”

That set Maurice off on a long, rambling string of reminiscences about restaurants, good food, old friends and the long-ago failed romance that sent him off to the Moon to make his fortune.

Finally, Helene was able to break in to ask, “So, how about some good Earth food for the passengers? Food with a context, right? Food with soul? What can I provide for you?”

“Oh, business isn’t so good now. I can’t order any more than what I’m already getting.”

* * *

Bandarlog Ship Chandlers in air town: “They have a very distinctive cuisine on Prester John, and we get a lot of requests for that kind of food from ships going to or from there. Now, it’s too expensive to actually get food from any of the colony planets. For Earth, we have to pay to have the cargo shot up on the mass driver, but from any other planet we would have to pay that and also have to pay to have the food brought here on a ship. Now, I know a guy in the customs office. If we could get food from you and have it re-documented as coming from Prester John …”

* * *

Helene rode the monorail back over mountains to Lacus Somniorum, a cargo field not used for passengers. The field was thickly surrounded by factories and warehouses swarming with robot forklifts supervised by Moon Men. Her customer was Sunny Meadow Farms in Maury crater. She cycled through the air lock with the usual quickness, but then was nonplussed to have to wait, her arms up, while robot arms scrubbed her suit and rinsed her with germicides. Presently she was dried off, the inner airlock door opened and she looked out on the crater.

There was no city, just a little town built near the middle, surrounded by farm fields. The sky in Maury crater was dark, but the crater floor was brilliantly lit with crop lights. A taxi carried her along kilometers of farm lanes, past fields of soybeans, corn, spinach and other crops a city girl could not identify.

All of the agriculture she passed was “aeroponics,” with the plants suspended from racks. The plant roots were exposed to the air, and little squirting robots shuttled back and forth on rails, coating the roots with water and nutrients. Under identical conditions, every plant grew to exactly the same height as its neighbor.

The air smelled bad, with a barnyard odor coming from, her suit informed her, feedlots raising hogs, turkeys, goats and chickens.

As she neared her customer’s offices, however, the aeroponics racks ended suddenly and she was faced with a farm field of plain dirt, with something – maybe onions, she thought – growing in a normal way with only the greens showing above ground. Various robots worked the field. Her taxi rolled to a stop in front of a black man dressed in farmer’s overalls. Costumed, really, Helene thought: the overalls were spotlessly clean.

“Welcome to the only dirt firm on the Moon!” he said. “You must be Helene. I’m Don Henderson. Take a look, you won’t see anything like this again!”

“Hi,” Helene said. “Wow, where did you get all the dirt?”

“I started by importing two cubic meters of real Mississippi gumbo mud, to be a starter culture,” Henderson said. “I made a composter and broke down a few tons of food scrap, bought bones from the hog farm and made bone meal, and added hog and chicken manure. Then I plowed it all into the Moon dust that was here and let the bacteria spread and make it all into soil, Now, I’ve got a dirt farm!” He added confidentially, “The secret of good dirt is, it’s dirty. It’s full of manure and all kinds of smelly stuff. People expect it to be dirty. Did you know the word ‘dirt’ comes from the Old Norse drit, which meant shit? I’ve got the really drit-y dirt. It’s a selling point!”

“It’s nice, I think,” Helene said, stepping out of the taxi on the side away from Henderson.

“It’s a gold mine, or will be in a couple of months,” Henderson said. “People pay extra for Earth food. ‘Earth’ means ‘dirt,’ right? I can’t say my stuff was ‘grown on Earth’ but I can say it’s ‘grown in earth’ and I can sell to the fanciest ships’ stewards for a fraction of what you charge. No offense, I hope, but I’m not going to need to import any more vegetables from Earth.”

“Well, drit!” Helene said.

* * *

“Pineapples are basically weeds,” Parinya Hongam of Fruit Universe told Helene. She was a small, elegant woman in a slit dress, looking very out of place in a vast orchard of fruit trees and crops. “They grow fine here, or anywhere. I know we used to buy them from you, but we don’t need them anymore. We do get requests for some exotic Earth fruits, not really for any reason except that the ship chefs want to put fancy names on the menu. Can you supply canistels or horned melons or feihoas?”

“I don’t know what those are,” Helene said. “We could probably put in some crops.”

“Oh, no. I only need a box here and there.”

* * *

On the way back to Sinus Amoris the suit offered to play music or movies, but Helene rode in silence, looking up at the stars and the clouds moving over Africa. She trudged back to the village from the passenger terminal and met Tom.

“Ask me how my day went,” she said,

“I can see. Boy, that’s rough,” Tom said.

“I said, ask me how my day was,” Helene said in a low, dangerous voice.

“Oh. Um, how was your day?”

“If I could pack in it those little toilet cartridges and sell them to a broker, I’d be rich,” Helene said. She told him over supper (eighteen bites of The Bird Hops from Tree to Grassland). She told him later, when they were relaxing on the ground at home. She continued to tell him until they went to sleep.

Tom listened, looking at her face. His family, their voices restricted to each other, discussed that and nodded knowingly.