“You’re integrating it all.”

She rolled over onto him, gave him a good hard smack of a kiss. “You bet. Need distraction to do it, too….”

4.

Next morning, Rachel said to her bleary-eyed friend Catkejen, “I’m going crazy. Or maybe I’ve already arrived.”

“Brain-fried with work, maybe,” Cat said with a sardonic eye-roll, sipping a barely acceptable breakfast red wine, alky-free—but also the only one available, fresh from the fragrant farm domes deep underground. Plus coffee, of course, as chaser.

Rachel still wore the single white patch on her collar—“the mark of the least,” as it was known. She’d wanted to keep it that way, after the hydrogen wall events. One-patchers were greener than summer grass. More, they could not do any supervisor work—which Rachel disliked, avoided: her motto was The trouble with people is… people. Their problems never ended.

She wanted to stay close to the real work, explore, mingle with the puzzles. Nobody much noticed one-patchers—“monos,” some called them—so she slipped through crowds, with a broad dull hat and the occasional wig.

Catkejen had two patches, so was one leg up the ladder from Trainee to Librarian. Not that rank mattered in their fave brekky spot, which featured a rousing dish close to Rachel’s heart: shrimp with buttery grits, all fac’d food.

Amid the hub and bub of techtalk of the other Trainees, Cat was sporting a fine plum-colored wrap with a laced waistcoat in a deftly contrasting shade, crossed diagonally with a red ribbon. With leggings and heater shoes, current Lunar fashion stressed subtle resistance against the creeping cold of their world, despite the ferocious warmth shed by their reactors. Rachel just wore heavy pseud-wool dresses in severe gray, plus close-weave black tights—all free downloads and supple 3-D printouts, but yes, dull. Usefully so, for her desire to remain unnoticed. Thrifty was not nifty here, but she didn’t care. She wanted to escape attention, in person or in media, that unending animal appetite. To tend her own internal gardens, as Voltaire had sort-of said.

“So give. What’s up—with guys, I mean.”

Rachel wrinkled her nose. “Not in the mood for personal. I’m back-benching it for now.” She waved away all matters intimate. “Got aliens coming, baby! Plus been digging into my ancient data, gotten from old cobwebby Messages. I’ve added to my historical studies of the dwarf stars, too.”

She made herself say this in a whisper, though they had a silencing bubble over them, amid the babble of the open-air restaurant. It gazed down on the somber work expanses of the Lunar plain below. “Something odd going on there.”

“Great era, right? Our honkin’-big transport photon beams, boosting masses out to asteroid miners, driving disk expeditions, poking probes into fun solar systems,” Catkejen said, her voice running on although she was distracted by the vivid stellar displays that coursed across their social area ceilings.

Rachel thought the images odd, skies of whirling galaxies and erupting stars. The psychers said such spectacles fended off the boxed-in phobias that plagued many Loonies. But she preferred majestic Earthside views, especially relaxing seascapes of the Gulf coast where she grew up.