Most Lunans—the Earthside polite term, though Rachel soon learned that people here preferred to call themselves Loonies, with a bit of swagger—lived in lava tubes. Tubes were plentiful, since Luna had no plate tectonics and all the early volcanoes still stood above their maria plains.

Catkejen led her into a big one filled with bioteched bamboo forests, the grass of Luna. The slender rods ten meters high rustled with the warm breeze that made them wave like fields of giant grain. “You get hungry for live color here,” Catkejen said. “The white plains of Luna don’t cut it for us. So we have green and yellow and even pink bamboo. Better than old-style Earthy trees.”

Rachel was surprised to find giant agapanthus blooming in the looming tube cavern. The pioneer colonizers had left among the bamboo thickets sculptures of fat Asian wise men with stony basilisk stares. These lined the lava tube, two hundred meters down. The tube walls were dark reds and blacks and nearly airtight. Once lava had flowed here, before heavy impacts slowed and the restless young satellite began to cool, about four billion years back. Along the stretched-out town a stream tinkled and splashed. “An extravagance,” Catkejen said, doing a graceful dance on a skinny bridge crossing the stream. Above, skybridges carried purring motor traffic and ziplines let people crisscross above them.

“This is the Contemplation Garden,” Catkejen said. “Calming. Plus a shortcut to the clubs.”

They walked through long winding paths amid the rattling of bamboo. These thin, fast-growing rods made sturdy building strength—beams and slats, leaves pulped into paper and hard cardboard. Buzz saws whined in the distance as robo-carpenters harvested the latest. Ground-up bamboo oddments sloshed around in spinning tubs, making blended topsoil with regolith crushed rock. Bamboo dust tainted the air with a lively spice. Rachel took springy longsteps along the pathways, for exercise. The complex was a brutalist style with countering soaring arches, all gray but offset with bamboo greenery.

A green-skinned gardener kneeled beside the footpath, and Catkejen greeted her. The woman kept kneading the rugged regolith soil, saying, “Planted as seedlings, no taller than chives.” The slow chant continued as they walked away and Rachel murmured, “Impeccable dactylic tetrameter, too.”

Catkejen chuckled. “Forgot, roomie, your Trainee discipline showing, O Seeker After Patterns.”

They rounded a corner and suddenly it was all bright, airy, and overlit. Transparent walls, neon-bright, downright gaudy. Noisy, too.

“We’ve got plenty of silicon, so glassy stuff the robots make, right here straight from regolith,” Catkejen said, thumping a wall of ruby-colored stuff. “Plus Mooncrete, solid and firm but no water needed, just flash-gouts of electricity to do the binding.”

Floodlights glared from artful shrubbery and bathed a lattice-walk a hundred meters high. Crowd chatter rained down on them as they climbed a rope ladder out of the Contemplation Garden into its opposite cacophony. Brilliant white light emphasized black-trimmed, three-story windows rising in uninterrupted, eye-leading verticals toward a dominant, austere dome mimicked from some classic pile of ancient Rome. But beneath all this was five layers of shops and bars.