The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [99]
FIFTY-ONE
Emily was, of course, highly delighted when I told her of my decision, and she sent a message back from Io that was overflowing with enthusiastic congratulations. I was slow to reply to it because I felt slightly guilty about concealing my true motives for making the move. She thought I was being bold, whereas I was actually going into hiding, and I dared not even try to explain that to Emily. I excused my tardiness by telling myself—and her, when I finally did get around to replying—that I had to concentrate on the business of adapting myself to a new world and a new society.
As I had expected, I found life on the moon very different from anything I’d experienced in my travels around the Earth’s surface. It wasn’t so much the change in gravity, although that certainly took a lot of getting used to, or the severe regime of daily exercise in the centrifuge that I had to adopt in order to make sure that I might one day return to the world of my birth without extravagant medical provision. Nor was it the fact that the environment was so comprehensively artificial or that it was impossible to venture outside without special equipment; in those respects it was much like Antarctica. The most significant difference was in the people.
Mare Moscoviense had few tourists—tourists mostly stayed Earth-side, making only brief trips farside—but most of its inhabitants were nevertheless just passing through. It was one of the main jumping-off points for emigrants, largely because it was an important industrial center. It was the site of one of the solar system’s largest factories for the manufacture of shuttles and other local-space vehicles, and it was host to hundreds of nanotech studios and shamir manufactories. It was one of the chief trading posts supplying materials to the microworlds in Earth orbit and beyond, so many of its visitors came in from the farther reaches of the solar system.
When I arrived in Moscoviense the majority of the city’s long-term residents were unmodified, like me, or lightly modified by reversible cyborgization. A substantial minority of the permanent population and a great many of those visiting were, however, fabers like Khan Mirafzal, genetically engineered for low-gee environments. Most of their adaptations were internal and subtle, but the one that had won them their name was the most conspicuous. Every faber possessed four hands, being equipped with an extra pair of “arms” instead of legs. All but a few of the public places in Moscoviense were designed to accommodate their kind as well as “walkers.” All the corridors were railed and all the ceilings ringed.
The sight of fabers swinging around the place like gibbons, getting everywhere at five or six times the pace of walkers, was one that I found subtly disturbing to begin with. Fabers couldn’t live, save with the utmost difficulty, in the gravity well that was Earth. They almost never descended to the planet’s surface. By the same token, it was difficult for men from Earth to work in zero-gee environments without extensive modification, surgical if not genetic. For this reason, the only “ordinary” men who tarried in highly specialized faber environments weren’t ordinary by any customary standard. The moon, with its one-sixth Earth gravity, was one of the few places in the inner solar system where fabers and unmodified men frequently met and mingled. Even the L-5 colonies were divided by their rates of spin into “footslogger territories” and “faberwebs.”
I had always known about fabers, of course, but like so much other “common knowledge” the information had lain unattended in some unheeded pigeonhole of my memory until direct acquaintance ignited it and gave it life. By the time I had lived in Moscoviense for a month that unused reserve of common knowledge had turned into a profound fascination.
It seemed to me that fabers lived their lives at a very rapid tempo, despite the fact that they were just as emortal as members of their parent species. For one thing, faber parents normally had