Sergio Guincho

Chapter 1: Descent

The first thing Max Calder noticed about the Moon was that it did not feel like falling.

He had braced for it. Eleven days in transit, and the shuttle’s final burn still pressed him into his seat for twenty minutes, but when the engines cut and the landing gear touched down, his stomach just drifted. A slow, wrong lightness, like the world had forgotten to pull on him.

“Welcome to Selene Station,” the pilot said over the intercom, in the bored voice of someone who said it every week. “Local gravity is one-sixth Earth standard. Take your time standing up. Everyone thinks they won’t need to, and everyone does.”

Max stood too fast. His boots left the floor by a full hand’s width, and he caught the overhead rail with a clumsy grab that earned him a snort from the woman across the aisle.

“First time?” she asked.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You’re holding the rail like it owes you money.”

He let go. He drifted down. He decided not to say anything else.

• • •

The arrival corridor was narrower than the brochures had suggested. The walls were bare metal panels, painted a pale institutional green that had gone grey under years of recycled light. Pipes ran along the ceiling, labeled in faded stencil: WATER, AIR, COOLANT. A line of amber lights led the way forward, and somewhere behind the walls something hummed, steady and low, the sound of a place that kept itself alive by constant effort.

Max shouldered his duffel and followed the other new hires. Twelve of them, all Earth-born, all carrying the same look: a little pale, a little sick, trying to act like they’d done this before.

He had signed the contract six weeks ago, in a rented room outside Duluth, with rent overdue and a sister’s hospital bill folded in his jacket pocket. Two years of asteroid mining. Triple his old salary. All he had to do was leave the planet.

Two years, he reminded himself. Then home.

At the end of the corridor, a heavy door slid open, and the colony’s air hit him: warm, faintly metallic, with something green underneath it.

Then he saw the people.

They were tall. That was the first thing, and it took him a moment to understand why it unsettled him. Nobody in the atrium stood under six feet. They moved with a long, unhurried economy, as if every step had been measured and found sufficient. They walked in a way that looked like drifting, and none of them looked at the newcomers for more than a second.

A woman in a grey station coat stood on a raised platform with a tablet. “Contract hires, line up by crew number. Orientation in ten minutes. Do not wander. Do not touch the green doors. Do not ask anyone about the Founders’ Wall unless you want a lecture.”

Someone in the line muttered, “Friendly place.”

“We’re not here to be friends,” the platform woman said, without looking up. “You’re here to dig. Try to stay alive while you do it.”

• • •

Orientation took two hours and made Max feel smaller with every slide.

The colony held four thousand people. It had been built into the wall of Shackleton Crater over sixty years, and most of it lay underground: living quarters in the lower rings, hydroponic farms in the middle, the long landing tunnels at the top. Roughly a third of the residents were Earth contractors on rotating deals. The rest, the instructor said carefully, were “Selenites.” People born here, raised here, and, she added, not required to like you.

“They will not be rude,” she said. “They will simply be... elsewhere. Respect that. This is their home. You are working in it.”

Max raised his hand. “Can they visit Earth? If they wanted to?”

A few of the other hires looked at him. The instructor’s face did something complicated.

“No,” she said. “Not safely. Moon-born bones and hearts develop for one-sixth gravity. A full Earth day would likely cause serious injury. Extended exposure, fatal.” She clicked to the next slide. “It’s in your packet. Read it.”

Max read it that night, in the narrow bunk they’d assigned him, lying flat with the lights low and the hum of the walls pressing at his ears.

Fatal.

He stared at the word until his eyes burned. Then he turned the packet face down on the floor, and it settled there slowly, as if it too had to think about falling.

• • •

Sleep wouldn’t come. Around midnight, ship time, he gave up and walked.

The lower rings were nearly empty. Lights dimmed to a soft evening glow, and the corridors curved away in long, quiet arcs. He wandered past sealed doors and a laundry room that smelled of warm cotton, and then through an archway into a space he hadn’t seen on the orientation map.

It was a garden.

Not a large one, maybe ten meters across, built into a bay with a low ceiling. Rows of pale leafy plants grew in trays under violet grow-lights, and in the center stood a single small tree, barely taller than he was. Its leaves were an impossible, shocking green.

Max stood very still. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed color until it was in front of him.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.”

The voice came from behind the tree. A woman stepped around it, and Max forgot, briefly, what he’d been about to say.

She was tall, like the others, and thin in the way the Moon-born were thin, with long wrists and a long neck and dark hair pulled back loosely. A station coat hung open over a grey work shirt. She had a soil sampler in one hand and a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and she looked at him not with hostility, exactly, but with the flat, assessing patience of someone who had already decided he was going to be a problem.

“The orientation said not to touch the green doors,” Max said. “It didn’t say anything about gardens.”

“That’s because most Earthers don’t find the garden.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “How did you?”

“I got lost.”

“Hm.”

She crouched beside a tray, pressed the sampler into the soil, and checked a small readout. He noticed how she moved: slow, deliberate, every motion complete. Her shoulders were relaxed. This was a place she knew in her body.

“Your first night?” she said, not looking up.

“Yeah.”

“And you came here instead of sleeping.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Now she did look at him. Something in his face seemed to change her answer to some question he hadn’t heard.

“It’s the quiet,” she said. “Earthers always say it’s too quiet. And too loud. You hear the walls for the first time. The pumps. The air.” She paused. “It gets easier.”

“How long does that take?”

“For most of you?” The corner of her mouth moved. “You’ll be gone before you find out.”

She stood, and for a moment she was just a shape against the violet light, her shadow stretching long across the floor. Then she walked past him toward the archway, and as she passed she said, quietly, without looking back:

“Don’t touch the tree.”

Max watched her go. When she was gone, he turned back to the little green tree, hands clenched at his sides, and he did not touch it.

He did not sleep that night either.