The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

At the same time, licensing biotech discoveries was the colony’s major source of foreign exchange, so research was under tight security. Erno pressed his thumb against the gene scanner. He had to go through three levels of clearances to access the experiment he had been working on. Alicia was right-Erno was getting strokes for his rapid learning in gene techniques, and already had a rep. Even better, he liked it. He could spend hours brainstorming synergistic combinations of alterations in mice, adapting Earth genotypes for exploitation.

Right now he was assigned to the ecological design section under Lemmy Odillesson, the premiere agricultural genobotanist. Lemmy was working on giant plane trees. He had a vision of underground bioengineered forests, entire ecosystems introduced to newly opened lava tubes that would transform dead, airless immensities into habitable biospheres. He wanted to live in a city of underground lunar tree houses.

Too soon Erno’s six-hour shift was over. He suited up, climbed to the surface, and took the bus back to the north airlock. As the shift got off, a figure came up to Erno from the shadows of the radiation maze.

It was a big man in a tiger-striped skintight, his faceplate opaqued. Erno shied away from him, but the man held his hands, palms up, in front of him to indicate no threat. He came closer, leaned forward. Erno flinched. The man took Erno’s shoulder, gently, and pulled him forward until the black faceplate of his helmet kissed Erno’s own.

“Howdy, Erno.” Tyler Durden’s voice, carried by conduction from a face he could not see, echoed like Erno’s own thought.

Erno tried to regain his cool. “Mr. Durden, I presume.”

“Switch your suit to Channel Six,” Tyler said. “Encrypted.” He pulled away and touched the pad on his arm, and pointed to Erno’s. When Erno did the same, his radio found Tyler’s wavelength, and he heard Tyler’s voice in his ear.

“I thought I might catch you out here.”

The other workers had all passed by; they were alone. “What are you doing here?”

“You want adventure? We got adventure.”

“What adventure?”

“Come along with me.”

Instead of heading in through the maze, Tyler led Erno back out to the surface. The fan of concrete was deserted, the shuttle bus already gone back to the lab and factories. From around a corner, Tyler hauled out a backpack, settled it over his shoulders, and struck off east, along the graded road that encircled Fowler. The mountainous rim rose to their right, topped by the beginnings of the dome; to their left was the rubble of the broken highlands. Tyler moved along at a quick pace, taking long strides in the low G with a minimum of effort.

After a while Tyler asked him, “So, how about the book? Have you read it?”

“Some. It’s a collection of stories, all about men.”

“Learning anything?”

“They seem so primitive. I guess it was a different world back then.”

“What’s so different?”

Erno told him the story about the prizefighter. “Did they really do that?”

“Yes. Men have always engaged in combat.”

“For money?”

“The money is just an excuse. They do it anyway.”

“But why did the writer tell that story? What’s the point?”

“It’s about elemental manhood. The fighters were men. The promoter was not.”

“Because he didn’t pay the boxer?”

“Because he knew the boxer had fought his heart out, but he pretended that the boxer was a coward in order to keep the audience from getting mad at him. The promoter preserved his own credibility by trashing the boxer’s. The author wants you to be like the boxer, not the promoter.”

“But the boxer dies-for twenty-five bucks.”

“He died a man. Nobody can take that away from him.”

“But nobody knows that. In fact, they all think he died a coward.”

“The promoter knows he wasn’t. The other fighter knows, probably. And thanks to the story, now you know, too.”

Erno still had trouble grasping exactly the metaphor Tyler intended when he used the term “man.” It had nothing to do with genetics. But before he could quiz Tyler, the older man stopped. By this time they had circled a quarter of the colony and were in the shadow of the crater wall. Tyler switched on his helmet light and Erno did likewise. Erno’s thermoregulator pumped heat along the mi-crofibers buried in his suit’s skin, compensating for the sudden shift from the brutal heat of lunar sunlight to the brutal cold of lunar darkness.

“Here we are,” Tyler said, looking up the crater wall. “See that path?”

It wasn’t much of a path, just a jumble of rocks leading up the side of the crater, but once they reached it Erno could see that, by following patches of luminescent paint on boulders, you could climb the rim mountain to the top. “Where are we going?” Erno asked.

“To the top of the world,” Tyler said. “From up there I’ll show you the empire I’ll give you if you follow me.”

“You’re kidding.”

Tyler said nothing.