"Alexei … " Janos said warningly.

Alexei ignored him. "Gabri, this is my dear old friend Samm Brengle-Tucker, his wife Maura, her daughter Patty, and fellow with ugly scowl is brother, Janos."

"I'm happy to meet you." Gabri exchanged double handshakes with all of us, even with Patty. Loonies don't shake hands like terries. They shake both hands to both hands. Maybe that's to keep from bouncing each other up into the air, whatever. It was all right that Maura and Patty didn't know better, but husband Samm almost blew his cover when he offered only his right hand. But then again—as a famous hermit, he might not be expected to have all the social skills expected of the average Lunatic.

Gabri seemed friendly enough, even a little bit amused by Alexei's endless monologue. I got the feeling that she understood a lot more than she was saying. If she really was Alexei's fiancée, he probably trusted her enough to tell her who we really were. On the other hand, maybe he was just kidding around with her, and this was just a game they played. We didn't know enough to be sure. So we just nodded and stayed silent. Even Patty kept her mouth shut.

Alexei was about to explain something else, but Gabri held up her hand and cut him off in mid-phrase. "Enough, already! We have a schedule, Alexei, remember? Take your passengers upstairs and get them settled please?"

"Hokay, let us make trains run on time. I will not keep you from work any longer, Gabri." To us, he explained, "Gabri is Chief Engineer, Southern Luna Transport Agency. She drives train, she is Captain, her word is law. Aye, aye, sir."

TAKE THE A-TRAIN

I hadn't seen any tracks as we'd approached Prospector's Station—but then I'd had a lot of other stuff on my mind at the time, like the fifty degrees of Celsius inside my bubble suit. Possibly, that had distracted me.

Now that we were settling ourselves in on the upper deck, I saw why I hadn't noticed any tracks before. Lunar trains don't use them.

The "train" was another set of three cargo pods, linked together horizontally—identical to Prospector's Station. But it hung from a carriage riding on high overhead cables, like an aerial tramway. Whenever it reached a settlement or a station, it lowered itself from the lines and linked up its air hatches to transfer passengers and/or cargo. When the transfers were complete, it jacked itself back up to the cable-carriage and continued on its journey.

The top level of the train was lined with windows, front and back, overhead, and all along the sides. We had a dazzling view, the best look at Luna we'd had yet. Patty and Samm and Janos and I moved from one window to the next, whispering and pointing, ignoring the other few passengers in the cabin, we were so lost in the moment.

The train was gliding silently above a landscape that seemed both colorless and dazzling. It rolled away in waves, some places smooth, some places all broken and jumbled, blanketed with tumbles of rocks and everywhere pocked with desolate craters. But here and there, it sparkled with flashes of light—like sprites in a bizarre dream. They danced in the distance, tantalizing us with fantasies of Lunar revels just beyond the sharpening edge of the horizon.

Above the car, the cables were so thin they were invisible in the dark—until we rose into sunlight and they suddenly appeared overhead like rails in the sky, outlined in fire.

The lines were suspended across vast distances, looping from one immense pylon to the next. The pylons were spindly-looking A-frames—two triangles leaning against each other to make an outline of a pyramid, with the cable junctions hanging just beneath the apex. Once again, Lunar gravity changed the physics of construction. The support pylons were impossibly tall and slender and fragile-looking. The limitations of Earth didn't exist here. Some of the pylons were over a kilometer high. And they were spaced so far apart that they were invisible until you were almost up to them. So there was nothing to see but the overhead line hanging motionless in space.

Sometimes the cables were invisible, sometimes they stretched over the horizon and beyond. It seemed as if we went forever before the next pylon finally appeared in the distance. It was an illusion, of course, but a spooky one. The train seemed to fly through space, riding a rail of light that alternately flickered and dazzled, and sometimes disappeared entirely.

Brother Janos explained thoughtfully that this was another bit of technological fallout from the Line. The same kinds of cables that made up the orbital beanstalk, stretching from Whirlaway to Ecuador, were used in the construction of the Lunar railways. It was the most cost-effective transportation possible on the moon. Wherever you could put pylons, you could run a train—and you could put pylons almost anywhere on Luna. So there weren't many places on Luna where human beings couldn't go … if we chose to.

Wherever there were cables, we could send people, supplies, cargo, electricity, information, whatever we could hang from a wire. The cables circled airless Luna. Near every set of pylons sat a solar farm, silently generating electricity from the scorching sunlight. The Lunar "day" was two weeks long, so the panels would burn for fourteen days, then cool for fourteen more. Overhead, the cables would transmit their power to settlements huddling in the shadow, waiting to turn slowly into the light again.

Meanwhile, the trains slid gracefully along the same routes. Every train was a self-contained vehicle, it had to be; it could draw its power from batteries, from the wires overhead, or from the heartless sun whenever it flew through blazing day.

We sailed above the dazzling glare of moondust and felt safeagain. From here, we could look down at the distant floor of the moon, across the rock-studded plains into a world of silvery mystery and once again appreciate its beauty. It was hard to believe that only a few hours before, we'd been bouncing and staggering desperately through the furnace of day. Amazing what a little air-conditioning could do.

Considering the alternative—wearing a dress and a wig and some makeup wasn't so bad after all. I squeezed Patty's hand and whispered to her, "Mommy's here, sweetheart."

"I know," she whispered back, and squeezed my hand in return.

There weren't many others aboard the train, less than twenty perhaps, but the bottom levels were filled with cargo, and a lot of the overflow had been stacked here and there on the passenger levels; so most of the passengers had to be seated together. There were wide spaces outlined in orange and stacks of containers, of all sizes, sat on pallets inside the outlines; clusters of seats were spaced between the cargo areas. "Arranged for balance," Alexei explained. "Maybe someday, we will have one kind of train for passengers, another kind for freight, but I hope that day will not come soon. I like Luna as she is now. Wild and crazy."

Alexei led us forward to seats at the rear of the first car. They were set in a U-shape—like a tiny lounge or the living area of a tube-house. There were several other people there already, but they smiled and quickly made room for us. I guess pregnancy will get you a seat anywhere in the galaxy. Three of the men were natives; they had that same tall gangly look as Alexei. The sun-darkened man and woman looked like prospectors; they had Earth bodies, so they must have been immigrants, but not recent ones. The older couple were probably tourists.

The chairs were comfortable enough, but like everything else on Luna, they looked flimsy. They were little more than wire frames with inflatable foam cushions. They were strong enough to hold us, but I was beginning to figure it out; they didn't need to be anything more than what they were. That's all Luna was—that's all it ever could be. Just another place where people were stuffed in cans. Just like any other tube-town.