The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [104]
There are, of course, a few lunar workers who routinely go out on to the surface, in buggies or in suits, for whom looking up at the stars is almost an everyday experience, but the vast majority of the entities that trundle back and forth across the bare rock are machines animated by AIs, and most of those requiring human intelligence to guide them are remotely operated. The average citizen of Moscoviense, faber or footslogger, had to go to considerable trouble to see the stars. Newcomers made such efforts often enough, but anyone who had been resident long enough to consider himself a lunatic was likely to have lost the habit.
I was no exception.
In my early years in Moscoviense I carried everywhere the teasing consciousness that I was living on an airless world whose roof was set beneath a star-filled sky. Subject as I was to every psychosomatic disorder that was going, I really did feel a quasimagnetic pull, which those stars seemed to exert upon my spirit. I really did give serious consideration to the possibility of applying for somatic modification for low gee and shipping out with emigrants to some new microworld or to one or other of the satellites of Jupiter. All footsloggers living on the moon were subject to a constant flow of subtle propaganda urging them to take “the next step” by removing themselves to some more distant world where the sun’s bountiful radiance was of little consequence, where people lived entirely by the fruits of their own efforts and their own wisdom—but the very constancy of the propaganda eventually dulled its effect.
As time went by, I ceased to make the effort to go up to the observation ports and study the stars. Having no reason to go out on to the surface, once I had exhausted the excuse that it was there, I left it to its own devices. In brief, I settled in—the operative word being in. I adapted myself to life in the interior of the moon and became as claustrophilic as the great majority of its longtime residents. One-sixth gee became normal and no longer made me feel light-headed—with the result that the once-ever-present awareness of the universe of stars faded away, and the power of Papa Domenico’s Universe Without Limits gradually reclaimed the psychological territory it had briefly ceded.
Seen objectively, Mare Moscoviense was a sublunar labyrinth, more in tune with the vast virtual Labyrinth that existed in parallel with it than any city on Earth. There were, however, some significant differences between the view from the moon and the view from Earth, and the most significant of all was the news.
When I first went to the moon I fully intended to shun the TV news, not so much because I feared that news of Earth might make me feel homesick but because I felt that I had burned my fingers once by dipping into the world beyond the headlines, and that once was enough. I had not realized, though, how different the news on the moon would be. It was, I suppose, a foolish mistake for a historian to make, but I had always thought of the news as being the news, summarized but reasonably comprehensive. It had never occurred to me that Earthly TV was so preoccupied with Earthly affairs that the greater part of the information flowing in from the more distant reaches of the Oikumene was condensed to irrelevance. Nor had it occurred to me that on the moon, a mere 400,000 kilometers away, the Big Well would be considered so much more remote than the burgeoning ice palaces of faraway Titan that Earthly affairs would be relegated to the footnotes of the story stream. In fact, the Earthbound news I had long been used to was replaced on the moon by news that flatly refused to be confounded by astronomical distances.
Lunar news fascinated me, first as a phenomenon and then as a precious source of insight into the human adventure, and its fascination