Cat gave her face one look and applied a cotton absorber to erase the layers. “Not needed. Come on, we’ll go slumming. Sorta.”

“Uh, I doubt there are—”

Catkejen lowered her voice to a gravelly pitch. “To the other side of the traaacks.”

To Rachel’s surprise, there actually were tracks. The two of them ascended to the surface and headed toward the center of the whole complex, beyond the recreation dome, and there it was—a view to the long, broad railway tracks into the processing areas. They watched through thick glass a hauler bring mounds of processed regolith in from the big solar furnace dome that sat at the edge of the lava fields. Rachel could see the large mirror made of aluminized mylar that reflected and focused sunlight on the raw, ground-up lava powder. “That’s what we breathe,” Catkejen said, pointing to the huge transparent bubble. “Just heat regolith dirt to melting point and oxy bubbles off. That pipe”—another pointing—“brings it to us. The train ferries the rare earths into the e-mag flinger.”

They went under the tracks by way of a laser-carved tube and cut through another bamboo forest. The tall bamboo shoots had fat pandas slow-coasting among them, cute bears in low grav. This one also had cacti and shrubs, aflutter with gnatcatchers and cactus wrens, chirping and squeaking like tiny rusty doors. Catkejen said, “Pretty, huh? Birds love Loonie grav.” The tiny creatures did loops and swirls unlike anything seen Earthside. “They live solely here now, preserved from their Earthside extinctions.” Amid the groves were ponds where koi fish lurked, favorite ornaments among Loonies. They strolled through a wall of thorny scrub to find an immense tree swathed in bees—“Gengineered banyan to make honey for us, too”—then longstrode through some trees with fruit Rachel did not recognize; more gengineering. Their damp, flattened leaves covered the sidewalk with a brocaded richness.

“I thought this vegetation made our oxygen.”

“Not enough, alas. The story is, we primates get a rest from this metal and glass Loonie world if we move through places that appeal to our origins. Our unconscious relaxes, not all the time checking for artificial stuff.”

Too bad I can’t do working with alien smartware outside my pod, she thought. The Sagittarius would be less scary, for sure.

“Hey, here’s the Miner Village, to use the official term.”

Narrow corridors were filled with people carrying on their lives. It reminded Rachel of the Gulf coast where she grew up. Hawkers displayed homeware. Barbers cut hair a meter from the walkway. A five-seat grill fed sizzling fauxflesh steaks to customers with backs to the avenue, gossiping noisily. Laundry hung out to dry over their heads, flapping in the steady corridor wind.

“Let’s do a rockhopper club,” Catkejen said, leading her to a jazzy place called Grand Hotel Abyss. “Without, uh, doing a rockhopper.” Rachel knew that rock wranglers who harvested grimy wealth made good money. Mostly guys, they ran the heavies that managed a retinue of dumbass robo-harvesters. That meant long hours patrolling, and often fixing, the tricky axles and scoops that could clog with the fine-grained dust.