Alik went out of the park view room through an ordinary door into the hubhall. It was a long oak-paneled cloister with nine portals, which were actually inside the Central Park West block apartment. Some of the doors simply led into old rooms like the kitchen, games nest, and utilities where the servicez are stored, as well as the New York entrance. The rest of the Lorenzo family house was widespread—on a whole solar system scale.

Another pair of forensic agents were working the hubhall with a squadron of sensor-heavy drones, along with three ordinary cops. Salovitz was talking to his partner, Detective Bietzk. He turned back to Alik. “Okay, the precinct G7Turing went into City Hall records. The neighbor is Chen-tao Borrego. We called him, and he’s away in a Saskatchewan clinic undergoing telomere treatment. Been there ten days, due to remain for another two weeks. We’re getting confirmation from the clinic, but it seems legit.”

“So his place is unoccupied?” Alik asked.

“Yeah. A team’s going in now.”

“Okay. What’s next?”

The detective pointed at one of the portals. “The Moon.”

Alik always found it weird stepping directly into a lower gravity field. His body tensed up the way it did when he screwed up a pass at some babe at the end of a too-long night spent partying. It was the wrong thing to do. That involuntary reflex pushed his toes down hard on the black parquet floor, and forward momentum left him gliding farther into the room.

Lorenzo’s lunar room was a fifteen-meter dome in the Alphonsus Crater. Off to one side of him was a large, luxurious Jacuzzi, its bubbles fizzing away with low-gravity leisure. Various ficus plants were growing in Greek-style clay pots, their glossy leaves strangely bloated yet also elongated.

Alik looked up, and there was Earth’s crescent directly overhead, shining with blue-white splendor. It was utterly captivating. Crazy, too, that it was 384,000 kilometers or one footstep away. He always thought some little part of the human brain rebelled against quantum spatial entanglement. People needed to have distance in their lives; 200,000 years of evolutionary instinct couldn’t be junked overnight.

When he finally lowered his gaze, he saw dozens of identical domes scattered across the crater floor, just far enough apart so the interiors couldn’t be made out without magnification lenses. Half the resort facilities on the Moon were supposedly used for sex. Once Connexion started opening up the solar system, people soon found out that the so-called wonders of zero-gee sex, which overromantic futurology writers used to rave about, was a myth. They didn’t call the aircraft that early astronauts used for free-fall training flights the Vomit Comet for nothing. Low gee, however—that was a different matter.