Lunarhampton
“Councils do not steal, Ms Sting. They confiscate. We had to ensure you remained with us for the whole week. Perhaps I should have been more open, but I am unused to dealing with females.” Dropping the tweezers in the whisky bottle, he sighed. “Especially not sassy redheads. I never engage in relationships, Ms Sting. I find you somewhat alarming. Emotion is noise in my brain: I am a councillor.”
“I’m just the same as everyone else.”
He shook a finger. “Oh no, Ms Sting! You won’t pull that particular shade of wool over my eyes.” In a more conciliatory tone, he added: “The car is a minor issue. We all make sacrifices, we all have fears. My dear mother was startled by a monkey. She was pregnant and the shock affected her womb. This world is an absurd place.”
“Enough nostalgia. I demand to see the colony map.”
Instead of protesting, as she thought he would, his fingers jumped to unbutton his shirt. Below, he wore a string vest: his chest was very hairy, trapped under the grubby net like a fur coat. A scroll was fixed by a ribbon to one of the vest’s interstices. Untying it, he gave it to her and cradled his skull in his hands.
Breaking the seal, spreading the parchment on the desk, she moaned. “This is a street map of Birmingham.”
He giggled. “Take a closer look, Ms Sting.” He allowed her a second perusal. “Did you read the names? The old suburbs have gone. The craters and plains have more suitable appellations.”
She traced the parchment with a finger. As if a moon chart had been superimposed on the urban map, exotic words stretched across the prosaic boroughs. She pronounced the names self-consciously, mindful of her poor aptitude for dead languages: “Aristarchus, Mare Nubium, Ptolemaeus, Mare Imbrium, Eratosthenes, Albategnius…”
The councillor interrupted her by clearing his throat and slotting three fingers into his largest pocks, as if preparing to bowl his head. Melissa felt she was not his target, but the skittish city beyond. “The Midlands. The final frontier, boldly gone.”
She removed her hands from the map and it snapped back into a tight cylinder. “But what is the point?”
“When I was a boy, Ms Sting, I regarded the future as a benefactor. I looked forward to the shining cities we were promised: gleaming towers connected by aerial walkways, frictionless monorails, a populace free of the degradation of hunger and poverty. We would all be wearing togas and discussing philosophy in spacious parks. I thought that by the beginning of the new millennium we would be living on the moon. A crystal dome for a sky, a purple sea, an alien forest.”
“You should have tried to make friends.”
“You don’t understand. The disappointment stayed with me. When the First Space Age ended, the real moon was derided. Instead, we seemed to want our inner cities to turn into substitute lunar landscapes. Was that a cheaper way of getting there? I believe it was. This subconscious need influenced councils more than you might imagine. I inherited the policy, but knew it for what it was. By that stage, it was irreversible, so when space was rediscovered, and the moon colony competition was announced, I chose to accelerate the whole process.”
“Hence the bulldozers and explosives. An amusing effort at twisting the rules, but to no avail. The Commission is very strict on this score. Birmingham is not an eligible moon.”
“Consider the similarities, Ms Sting! Both are unavoidable, lack an atmosphere and shine by reflected glory. To deny us the victory would be churlish. Our citizens are the perfect colonists, resigned to bleak and unforgiving environments. Did you know our junkies have started to cut their heroin with an oxygen compound?”
“You are insane. My report will recommend instant disqualification. You’ll be grounded for a century.”
“There’s no leaving us now. The project is too far gone. The limits of the city are finished. How will you get beyond Solihull? Your car is not pressurised. You’ll bleed to death through your nipples!” He thumbed his own chest, as if needing to convince himself of the possibility. “It will be a municipal stigmata.” He pondered this thought, which seemed to provide solace, like the dream of a ladder to a stylite. To puncture it, she delved into her pocket for her smirk.
“What will you call the colony? A new name is essential. Birmingham is inappropriate. How about Moonchester?”
He recoiled, confused and miserable. “Ms Sting! Such questions will be decided by committee. It is presumptuous…” He grinned unpleasantly, wagging a finger. “You must call it home from now on. There’s no running away. The cosmic radiation will kill you.”
She turned to leave. “You’ve confused semblance with reality, image with modus. A city sculpted to impersonate a moon does not automatically become that moon. You are a lunatic!”
He appreciated the joke. “But the way things feel is more important than how they actually are.” Again, he rotated his proboscis, tuning in to her recent thoughts. “If you felt our city was tugging at your elbow, then that is surely what it was doing.”
