Moon Men lived on a twenty-four hour cycle, of course: the human body is adapted for nothing else. But they had an emotional relationship with the two-week-long Day and Night of the Moon. Day was hot, energetic, practical, masculine. Night was feminine, religious, passionate. The time of month was just sunset, a process that on the Moon takes a full terrestrial day, and the spherical spaceships on Mare Vaporum Field cast long shadows across the flat plain. The Earth was at half-phase. It was the best time, the traditional time of Day, to get married.

Alex and Lindy were standing together on a street on the edge of Mare Vaporum Town, at the front of a long line of people in space suits, waiting to kick off their wedding parade. They were naturally too jittery to talk to, or even look at, each other. Lindy was conferring earnestly with her mother about last-minute wedding details, and Alex faced the other way to chat with Hans Schmidt, the Earth agent, whom he knew only slightly. Men have an understanding about such things: they carefully mentioned nothing at all about the wedding.

“You’re thinking of that old bit about Eskimos, right? That they have fifty words or a hundred words or something that all mean ‘snow’? It’s not like that at all,” Alex said. He and Hans spoke privately, meaning that their signals were given a network address accessible only to each other.

“I just thought that living out here on the surface of the Moon, you’d have a lot of different words to describe the surface dust,” Hans said. “I mean, aren’t there are lot of different kinds of Moon dust?” His space suit, in comparison to the rest of the wedding party, was ridiculous and clunky. It had been made on Earth and hauled at great expense up from the ground, as though Moon Men could not be trusted to sell him a well-made suit. His suit was sewn of wrinkly cloth, with visible seams in which impossibly quaint hand stitching could be seen. His helmet was cluttered and cramped with gadgets.

Moon Men lived continually in their suits, except for occasional trips to “Air Town” for medical care, and, as they liked to say, to make babies or have babies. Otherwise, their Moon suits were their homes, and they lived in style. Their suits were rotund and large, made of a smooth hard composite with gasketed rings at the wrists, elbows, knees and ankles. The back of the suit expanded to a boxy “backpack” that held air, water, life-support machinery and compartments for such few personal items as a Moon Man would carry with him. The suit weighed more than its occupant, and would have been unwearable except for the mild lunar gravity.

Hans’ suit was white where it was not soiled with electrostatically-sticky Moon dust. All of the Moon Men, to whose suits dust would not cling, were decorated to their own taste. Alex’s suit sported a dashing pattern of red and yellow stripes, with an odd patch of dull brown paper on his chest. Lindy was dressed for her wedding with a design of rambling pink roses that twined over her ivory suit, and she also had the brown paper over her heart.

“Well, there’s ‘light gray’ dust,” Alex said to Hans. “Sometimes we say there is ‘dark gray’ dust. Down in the bottoms of some craters, you sometimes get this orangey stuff. That’s about it for language.”

“What do you call the orange dust?”

“I just said -- ‘orangey stuff’. The thing is, Hans, we don’t care. The only thing we do with Moon dust is walk on it. Sometimes we have to flush it out of machinery. Other than that, why would anybody talk about dust?” Alex asked. At the moment he spoke, there was an explosion in a crater outside of town, a couple of kilometers away. A fountain of dust and rocks spurted up from the crater and caught the sunset light, making a pretty contrast with the dark sky. The debris fell slowly back.

“My God! Was that a meteor strike?” Hans cried. “Are we safe? Do we need to get back into the dome?”

“We are safe,” Alex told him with irritating calm, “and if we actually were getting meteors, that silly dome of yours wouldn’t be any protection anyway. That was just the regular delivery of asteroid material. Happens all the time.”

“You guys could show a little more consideration for tourists,” Hans said. “You get enough of them, God knows.”

“Yeah, okay, I apologize,” Alex said. “Actually, we don’t see tourists very often at all. About the only Moon Men who see visitors are the guys who drive the bus that takes them from their ship into Air Town. Otherwise, we usually just talk to the working spacemen, and they know about the Moon. Anyway, we have a thingie out in the Apollo asteroids that cuts out chunks of carbonaceous chondrite rock and slings them down here into specially-reserved craters. Then we cook the asteroid rock and get water and nitrogen and carbon and a bunch of organic stuff. We keep what we need and sell the rest of it to your dome and the other domes. That’s where the water for your bath and your beer comes from.”

“Look at the Earth,” Hans said softly. The sunset line was just touching the west coast of North America. The center and east coast were already in darkness.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” Alex said politely.

“Not that. New York is dark. In fact, the whole eastern seaboard is dark. We ought to be seeing the lights.”

“You're right,” Alex said. “Must be a big power outage. You'll hear about it when you get back to your office, I'll bet.”

“It'll be on the news here, right?”

“Somewhere, I suppose. Nobody's all that interested in Earth except people like Lindy who do business there. Hey, there's the bus.”

The bus from Mare Vaporum Field pulled up. Because this bus was intended only to carry Moon Men, it was unmanned and looked like a rack of industrial piping with four fat springy tires. A dozen Moon Men unclipped themselves from the rack and jumped off as the bus came to stop, and the parade was complete. The bridesmaids and groomsmen, all college friends of Alex and Lindy, ran up and down the line pasting little red tissue poufs on one shoulder of each member of the parade. Alex called out to one of the newcomers. “Hey, Jamie,” he said. “Mikal got tied up at work and couldn’t make it. Can you be parade marshall?”

“Hot damn, can I!” Jamie said. “Where’s the flag?”

“The kids are playing with it over there.” Jamie bounded forward and retrieved the guidon from a boy who was swinging it around. He turned back to confer with the wedding band, then nodded to Alex and Lindy. “Is everybody here?” he asked. Alex nodded.

“Lindy,” Jamie said, turning toward her, “are you sure you don’t want to ditch this loser and marry me? Last chance.” Lindy just smiled -- she had dimples! -- and took Alex’s hand. “All righty, then,” Jamie said, and bounded to the front of the parade, just ahead of the band. He raised the guidon pole so that the yellow aluminum flag caught the sunlight, then whirled it around in front of him, over his head and back up between his legs. The children were awestruck with admiration. The rest of the party stopped chattering, at least on the public channels.

Jamie banged the butt of the pole on the ground so hard he was pitched upward himself. When he floated back down, the parade stepped off.

Streets in Mare Vaporum Town were not named, but the plazas at the intersections were. Jamie led the parade into “Fiddlers’ Square”, then down the street to “Green and Blue” and made a right turn toward “Old Benjamin”. The band marched behind him, playing their music with a network address that made it audible to everyone in the parade and also to the townspeople who stood by the side of the street, cheering.

Although wind instruments could not be used by Moon Men, the band made plenty of noise with an electric guitar, bass and violin, a keyboardist and a drummer. All of the musicians wore the special, very flexible (and rather expensive) music gloves on their suits. The string players were flamboyant, bobbing and bowing toward the crowds as they stepped along. The keyboardist had two banks of piano keys fastened to the front of his suit, and played them like a fat man fingering the buttons on his vest. The drummer had no visible instrument at all, but merely tapped and slapped at specially-instrumented patches on his Moon suit to generate electronic drumbeats.

They played “Rollicking Gentlemen”, “She's The One”, “The Bride’s Carouse”, the old “When the Saints Go Marching In” and even a waltz, which caused the paraders to step awkwardly. While the parents, relatives, friends and co-workers just tried to step in time to the music, Alex and Lindy danced the whole way. Lindy was as endearing and graceful as only a dancer in low gravity can be. Alex could not have danced well under any conditions but kept up gamely.

Jamie was hamming it up and enjoying himself tremendously. He pranced ahead with a high-kicking step, spinning the guidon and throwing it high into the sky. The kids, in smaller versions of the same Moon suits, clustered around him and imitated every move. Two toddlers, a boy and girl, rolled along inside transparent “baby balls” and managed to keep up by dint of a marvelously energetic mix of running, falling, crawling and scrambling back up. Their parents hovered anxiously next to them.

They entered the square which was formally called “Devotion” and popularly known as “Holy Rollers.” The parade circled the plaza past several churches and came to a cheerfully ragged stop at the Old Paper Gospel church just as the sun dipped below the horizon. With no atmosphere, there was no twilight, and it was Night in an instant. Mare Vaporum Town began to transform itself, starting with the church.

The buildings of Mare Vaporum Town were mostly white fabric structures designed to protect the occupants from the hot light of Day. The church was a tent depending from twenty angled poles, with the fabric pulled into catenary curves between them. Now the poles were telescoped down, the fabric folded and stored by machinery so that the glory of the Night sky shone above them. There was no paved floor to the church or most other buildings, but low-mounted lamps of green and gold revealed orderly rows of utility connections in the chapels. Moon suits were not well adapted to sit on chairs: the people chose a position next to a utility connection (with the parents and bridal party at the front near the pulpit) and extended a brace from the back of their suit, then uttered a command which stiffened the legs of the suit to form a comfortable sitting posture. They plugged into connectors for data, power, air and water, and settled back to watch the service.

Around them, the town folded away its panels and sails, tents and shades, and became a rippling field of lights in all rich colors, under the more subtle lights of the stars, the Milky Way and the half-full Earth. “Harbor tugs” cruised overhead, carrying spherical ships down to the landing field and up to orbit. Near the close lunar horizon, Yangel Crater Dome (which the Moon Men always referred to dismissively as “Air Town”) was a glowing cabochon emerald, its rounded dome filled with water and algae, and lit during the Night by lamps from inside the city.

Mare Vaporum Town had a few permanent, sealed buildings with air inside: medical clinics, cargo warehouses for goods that could not be exposed to vacuum, hotels for necessary business conferences with foreigners and occasional furtive assignations for Moon Men couples. These buildings were designed with a certain contempt: they were windowless gray boxes with an airlock stuck awkwardly to one side, aggressively ugly compared to the curves and floating fabrics of the houses.

The rest of the town did not have, and did not need, paving, walls, beds, chairs, bathrooms or permanent structures of any kind. A Moon Man house with the fabric shades pulled back was merely a patch of dusty ground with utility connections and a few small items of furniture, such as a knick-knack shelf, facing an equally unpaved street. But dim exquisite patterns of colored lights outlined everything, often re-arranged to suit each owner's self-expression during each Day. The wedding was framed by glory above and around.

Alex's helmet was lit by text projected on the inside of his faceplate: he was reviewing his instructions for the ceremony. Lindy turned to him and put one hand on each of his shoulders. She spoke a word of quickspeak that turned off the display in Alex's helmet: she, and only she, had permission to control his suit from the outside. “It's okay, honey,” she said, looking up. “You'll do fine. Stop worrying.”

“Yeah, okay,” Alex said. “The groom doesn't really have much to do anyway. This is your show.”

“I'll think of something for you to do later,” Lindy said, smiling. She stuck out her tongue at him for a moment, an act of startling intimacy for a Moon Man. Alex was entranced with her face. For her wedding, Lindy had outlined her brown eyes with mysterious dark kohl, and wore bright red lipstick. Alex suddenly realized that he did not know if her eyelashes were always as long as he saw them now, and reflected that no man really knows the woman he's about to marry. Lindy's smile was mesmerizing. Alex's father had to tap his helmet to tell him it was time to walk down the aisle. The band, standing to one side, played solemn music. The wedding congregation stood for them.

“Dearly beloved,” the pastor began, “we are met here to celebrate the wedding of Alex Dan-and-Carol's-Kid and Linda Gabriel-and-Maria's-Kid. From this day forward they will live their lives in love ...”

Hans Schmidt, who was standing at the back because he had nowhere to sit, suddenly jumped and yelled “Hey!” There was a small plume of steam coming from the seam on one leg of his spacesuit. The ceremony stopped instantly. The two guests on either side simultaneously reached back to open the compartments in their backpacks used for nothing except repair supplies. Acting like a well-drilled team, which they or any other two Moon Men were, one pulled out a roll of tape, bent down and wrapped it in a few quick loops around Hans' leg. The other ran an instrument up and down the other seams in Hans' suit, looking for weak spots. He found two other points where the seam was stressed, and they wrapped those with tape as well. The whole process did not take thirty seconds.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Hans said, while everyone looked at his fabric suit. “I must have tried to walk too fast in the parade.”

Alex and Lindy came back down the aisle. “Hans,” Alex said, speaking with a general address to everyone, “you're going to kill yourself with that cheapjack space suit.”

“Where did you even get a suit like that?” someone in the crowd asked.

“It was made on Earth,” Hans said.

“Well, of course,” the other said sarcastically. “If I were going shopping for a fine space suit, that's the first place I'd look, is underneath two hundred kilometers of atmosphere.”

Lindy spoke to the two men who had patched him up. “Is Hans going to be okay for a few more minutes? Can we finish up my ceremony?” she asked. The two agreed, and Hans said he was fine as long as he didn't move. Lindy took Alex by the arm and led the party back up the aisle.

“The nice thing about a suit accident,” Alex “whispered” to his fianceè, “is everybody knows what to do. Now I'm all nervous again.”

“Just say 'I do' when I kick your leg,” she told him privately, while the pastor resumed speaking.

Eventually, after a long blurry interval, Alex was able to say “I do” at the right time, without the kick. He and Lindy turned to each other and each peeled off the brown sticker where it was pasted over the other's heart. Both suits had a copy of the abstract pattern they had chosen together, never to be covered up again.

Both of their mothers and a number of other women in the audience were crying. Small manipulator arms unfolded inside their helmets and mopped the tears away.

The new couple walked hand-in-hand down the aisle, followed by their attendants. The people disconnected from their places in church and followed them. Out in the plaza, the band began setting up for dancing. But Alex and Lindy let the others go and stopped by Hans. “Hans, we'd better take care of you,” Lindy said. She raised her voice, which gave her signal a wider address. “Sanjay, are you here?”

“Over here,” Sanjay announced, from across the church.

“Sanjay's a friend of ours who runs a shop for Moon suits,” Alex said to Hans, then added, “Sanjay, I hate to ask you right now, but do you have a suit Hans could buy? He's not going to make it through the reception otherwise.”

“Yeah, I've got one. Hang on a second,” Sanjay said. Text ran up the inside of his helmet for a moment. “About 3000 sequins. Is that okay?”

“I don't have that much,” Hans said.

Sanjay came forward and looked at Hans. “You're the trade agent for the whole planet,” he said. “I know for a fact Lindy buys several hundred sequins worth of goods every month from Earth, and she's only one customer. Earth can't afford to buy you a decent suit? That's a really good price I'm giving you, ask anybody.”

“I don't have much of an expense budget,” Hans said. “Earth doesn't really make very much on trade any more.”

Lindy spoke up again on the general address. “Listen, everybody, can we get together and chip in for a suit for Hans? He's always been helpful to me and my business and I'd like to help him out now. I didn't know he had a suit like this, up to now I've only seen him in Air Town.”

One of their college friends spoke up. “This is Hu. I'll set up a donation account at the bank. Hang on a minute.” He issued quickspeak commands while studying the text on his display. “Ok, I just sent the information around to everybody.”

Lindy said privately, “Alex? How much can we give him?”

“After we pay for this wedding, not much,” Alex said, also privately although they had not moved. “Fifty, maybe.”

“That's good enough. Give him that,” Lindy said. “I feel sorry for him in that worthless suit. Why would anybody trust his life to something like that?”

“You know what?” Alex said. “Now that I look closer at that suit, I don't think it was even new when he got here. I think ol' Hans had to take a used space suit.”

“That's horrible!” Lindy said.

After a minute or two, Hu announced, “Okay, thanks everybody. Hans, can you cover another 400 sequins for this?”

“I think I've got that much,” Hans said.

“Then, congratulations, you just bought yourself a Moon suit. Alex, if you don't get your girlfriend out in the plaza somebody else is going to get the first dance with Lindy.”

“Thank you, everybody!” Alex said, and Lindy echoed him. “Let's go dance!” They continued out to the plaza, while Sanjay led Hans down the street to the air-room attached to his shop, two intersections away.

They happened to be facing the Earth. Lindy pointed to it. “Alex, look at the Earth. The whole east half of North America. There should be lights, and there aren't.”

“Hans pointed that out just when we started,” Alex said. “In fact, the power-failure area's gotten bigger. Something must have conked out the whole grid.”

A college friend walked toward them from the direction of the open bar, her suit decorated with a motif of skulls and stars in shades of blue. Information from her suit appeared on Alex's display as she came into proximity (Moon Men kept no secrets from each other) and he saw that she had already loaded her reservoir with liquor. “Annie,” Lindy said, “look at the Earth. Bad power failure. Look, a couple of dots went dark just now. It's spreading.”

“Ah, how bad can it get on Earth?” Annie said. “Everybody has free air, water falls out of the sky, food grows from the ground. They don't have real problems. Don't worry about them, let's party!”

“It could be bad,” Lindy said. “Poor Hans. He's already had a bad day.”

The first dance of the bride and groom had a traditional start. Neither the bridesmaids nor the groomsmen were willing to let Alex and Lindy get away with skipping it. The women picked up Lindy, the men grabbed Alex, and with a signal to the band, threw them simultaneously high into the sky on intersecting arcs. Alex yelled “Whoo!” and Lindy gave a small lady-like scream. They grabbed both hands as they met and immediately went into a spin as they settled slowly to the dust floor of the plaza. When their feet touched the ground, they leaned back, “gave weight” and spun faster, and the dance was on.

Adult Moon Men typically danced in circles, holding one hand or two hands. It was not physically possible to put one's arm around another's waist, but they sometimes linked elbows and danced that way. Footwork was intricate but involved no heavy stepping, to avoid launching the dancer upward. Crazy young Moon Men, on the other hand, delighted in stomps that would rocket themselves above the heads of the crowd, pitching each other up into the sky to turn somersaults and barrel rolls, doing jitterbug rolls over each other's backs and other moves fueled by youth, enthusiasm and alcohol.

Alex and Lindy swung and waltzed with each other, then led the crowd in a line dance like a Virginia Reel. Lindy danced a waltz with her father, and then Alex also danced with her father in a frenetic competitive jig that resulted in the old man retiring first, leaving Alex triumphant. The children danced with grown-ups and each other.

While the band played merry tunes, the caterers arrived at the plaza and set up their hot and cold tables at one side. Lindy ran a small business importing fancy spices from Earth, and so had the vocabulary and means to procure fancier food than what had been served at her friends' recent weddings, a point in which she took some pride. The hot tables had rounded clear domes with ports through which a cook could insert the sleeves of his suit and safely remove his gloves. Two women worked with show-off dexterity to grill meats and vegetables, shake exotic seasonings over them, and roll them neatly with tortillas into little cigar shapes which could fit into the pass-through valve of a Moon suit. They delivered the food out through small airlocks at each end of the table.

Young men came by individually, ostensibly to look over the food but also to catch a glimpse of the women's bare, moving hands.

They had meat rolls and vegetable rolls, sausages, breadsticks and other foods that could be shaped into small cylinders. There were wines from six different planets, raw vegetables from hydroponic farms on the Moon, sweetmeats from a bakery in Mare Vaporum Town, liqueurs from Earth. Moon Men avoided beer and all other carbonated beverages prone to unpredictable behavior under pressure changes, but liked their own vacuum-distilled vodka. A few of them liked it too much and had to be injected with sober-up by their suits.

Presently Hans Schmidt came back with Sanjay, wearing a refurbished Moon suit but walking with a careful gait that instantly, to any Moon Man, advertised his status as a foreigner. Sanjay was immediately peeled off by one of the women for dancing, and Hans stood uncertainly to one side, looking up at Earth. No lights at all were visible on the night side.

Alex was a good host. Lindy was the only person who knew Hans well, having relied on him as the agent of Earth in setting up her business, but as soon as Alex was willing to sit out a dance, she had a queue of disappointed young men lined up who wanted a last dance with her. Alex went over to rescue Hans from isolation.

“Thanks again for the suit,” Hans said. “Can you hear me? I'm not sure if I'm transmitting.”

“Yes, I can hear you,” Alex said genially. “I'm the closest person and you're looking at me, so the suit is smart enough to address your signal to me.”

“How do I talk to anybody else?” Hans asked. “Actually, how do I get the news from Earth? Is there a user's manual or something for this suit?”

“There's no manual,” Alex said. “We use quickspeak to give commands to the suit, but you don't need to learn that. Just start your sentence with 'Suit' and the suit will try to figure out what you want to do. It's always listening.”

“Suit, is that true?” Hans said.

“It is true,” the voice of the suit said to him, and also to Alex.

“Are you intelligent?” Hans demanded. There was no answer. Looking at Alex's smile, he corrected himself and asked, “Suit, are you intelligent?”

“No,” the suit said. “I can interpret simple commands but am not conscious.”

“Suit,” Hans said, “show me the news from Earth.” Text flowed up the display inside his helmet, and he read it avidly, but with growing consternation.

The parts of the Earth that had gone dark were not just off the air but completely empty. There were no radio-frequency signals, no cable or optical signals. Network “pings” did not return. “My God,” Hans said in a small voice. “Whole continents are dropping out. They can't get anybody in the Americas, in Europe or China. India is still on the air but they're hysterical. My God, my God.”

Alex looked up at the Earth but could think of nothing to say. The sunset line was in the Pacific and the whole of North America was as blank as the water. He scanned the news himself for any alarm about the Moon, but found nothing. He did not inquire about other human-settled planets: news traveled only by ship and a spaceship that arrived in orbit around the Moon today would have been sealed at its embarkation port a week or more ago.

Alex was a pilot of the harbor tugs and had access to shipping information most people did not have. He suddenly thought to check on shipping from Earth and turned back to Hans. “Hans,” he said, “there are two shuttles from Earth in transit to the Moon. They're both okay. They'll be here in a couple of days.”

“You're right, I remember that,” Hans said. “Now that I think of it, there's one on the way back that hasn't landed yet. They were going to some place in America. Hey, could I talk to them from here?”

“Not directly, but you're networked with Mare Vaporum control tower,” Alex said. “They're in contact with all ships in nearby space. Just tell the suit what you want.” Around them, the party was dwindling down to quiet as people began to realize, some of them after looking at the expression on Hans' face, that the situation on Earth was serious. The band presently stopped playing and people drifted together. Lindy came to stand beside Alex.

When a connection was established between Hans and the Earth shuttle, everyone listened in, and watched the video feed from the shuttle even though it showed nothing but empty dark ground. “Jack, this is Hans,” he said. “Can you talk?”

“Hans, this is Alicia,” a woman's voice said. “Jack's piloting, and he's kinda tense. We're over China, trying to make it to Mumbai Field. That's the only tower that's still transmitting. Do you know what's going on?”

“Not a damn thing. I'm so sorry. Do you have to land? Could you come back here?”

“Oh, no. Not nearly enough fuel. Hey, there's a light on the ground! No, wait a minute, that's a forest fire or something. Not a town.”

“Are you having any problems with the plane?” Hans asked. The shuttle was a winged single-stage-to-space craft, which took off and landed unassisted.

“No, not a thing, except that we can't talk to anybody except Mumbai. We're still getting our position from the satellites, so they're still working,” Alicia said. “We're pretty low now – we can see the Himalayas down there. Jack's taking us in for the landing. Still not seeing any city lights and we should be.”

Around Hans, the Moon Men held hands, nearly the only physical solidarity they could offer. The video from the shuttle showed the mountains faintly visible below, but nothing else for several minutes. Then abruptly there were city lights ahead. The shuttle was very low now.

“We're in India!” Alicia said. “Actually, we're way over the border, but man, it's good to see lights! It's ...” She was silent for a minute or more, until Hans called her name.

“The city lights are disappearing,” she finally said. “Fast. I mean, really fast. We're just about to touch down but the dark line is heading for us. There, we're on the ground. We're braking, still rolling ...”

The transmission ended. On each helmet, the display said, “No signal.”

Hans made apologies all around and trudged back through the plazas and streets to the edge of town, where he could catch the bus back to Yangel Crater Dome. Lindy and her mother tried energetically to get the wedding reception re-started, and Alex eventually forced a grin and joined them. They were able to inject a little false heartiness: the band played, some people danced, more food was eaten. But the life had gone out of the party, and before another hour had passed most of the people had made their goodbyes and walked away to their homes. The band and caterers packed up and left also.

Alex, Lindy, their immediate families and a few close friends unfolded the braces from the back of their suits and sat in a rough circle in the empty plaza, occasionally looking up at the stars and the enigmatic Earth. Lindy was crying. Her father held her glove, and her mother threw sharp glances at Alex as though the disaster was his fault. Alex looked down at the footprints in the gray dust.

Jamie was one of the friends who stayed. He looked up from the display in his helmet and said, “Port Control is sending a couple of ships to take a closer look. They have orders not to land or even touch the atmosphere. It'll take a day or two.”

Suraby was a friend of Lindy's. She said, after a long silence, “Lindy, it's okay. We know you're kind of boxed-in here. You can't complain because it's, you know, a tragic situation and you would sound childish, but your big day still got ruined. You can't say anything and you can't keep it in, either. Go ahead, girl. Cry it out.” Lindy tried to answer, then lost herself in more wails and sniffles.

“Did anybody here have relatives or anybody on Earth?” Jamie asked. No one answered, and he said, “Well, at least there's that.”

“Didn't you get your graduate degree on Earth?” somebody asked.

“I got my degree from the University of Michigan,” Jamie said, “but it was all remote. I've never been to Earth.”

Network news stories flickered over the insides of their helmets, with endless variations on “We don't know what happened.” The reporters remarked on the empty radio and TV channels, the missing cities and roads, the vanished billions of people. Pictures were still available from the manned and unmanned satellites around Earth: they showed untouched forests and fields. There were no signs of battle damage or anything else that might provide an explanation.

Finally Suraby said, “Alex, Lindy, do you want to just get out of here and start your honeymoon? We can walk with you over to the bus stop.”

Lindy looked up abruptly. “Yes. Let's do that,” she said in a shaky voice. “I'm sorry, everybody. I wanted everybody to have fun, but … Alex, honey, can we just go now?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Listen, you all understand we … I mean ...”

“It's all right, son,” Alex's father said. “These things happen.”

“Oh, come on now,” Alex said petulantly. He pointed to the Earth. “That's never happened.”

“You know what I mean. Weddings have problems, sometimes. You'll live. Why don't you and Lindy go ahead and have fun in Air Town? Whatever's going on with Earth, there's nothing you can do, and we'll clean up here.”

Jamie, Suraby and three other friends walked with them to the bus stop. Mare Vaporum Town was neither more nor less populated than at any other time of the day. The Port was in operation continuously and any Moon Man might be on any sleep/work/play schedule at all. With the fabric buildings folded for the Night, the taverns and restaurants they passed were open gatherings of suited Moon Men taking pleasure in the company of others under decorative lights. They passed one general store, a collection of racks and shelves on the dusty plain, selling such occasional notions and oddments as Moon Men might want to purchase.

The town spread around them in un-twinkling arrays of beaded lights on the ground and star light above. Mostly they walked in the streets, but sometimes cut corners through unoccupied houses.

They stopped for a moment at a vending machine in one corner of Old Benjamin plaza while all of them removed silicone pouches of waste from a slot in the side of their backpacks and deposited them, receiving in return a fresh pouch and a little money credited to their bank accounts for the organic materials. As they resumed walking, Lindy was suddenly bubbly with patently false enthusiasm. “We're going to the Caravansary!” she said. “They have a swimming pool. I'm going to try it, this time.”

“I've been there,” one of the girls said. “My Dad had a business conference there and my family got to go. I was scared to go in the swimming pool, though. Jamie, didn't you say you had been swimming?”

“No! I have never been swimming! When I was twelve I was pushed in by my fun-loving older brother and I got water up my nose and couldn't breathe,” Jamie said indignantly. “Lindy, if you go swimming you're braver than I am, I can tell you.”

“They have a zoo in Air Town that has animals in it,” Lindy said. “The last time I saw that, I was a little kid on a class trip from school and I was scared to death. This time I'm going to stand there and look.”

“You'll have fun,” Suraby said. “Out of the hotel room, I mean. If you ever get out of the hotel room.” Everybody laughed, Alex a little behind the others.

“Oh, they'll get out of the hotel room,” Jamie said loftily. “Just walking a little bow-legged.”

“Also walking into light poles because they're smiling so hard,” another chipped in.

“You two want to watch out for low blood sugar. You need to eat once a day or so.”

“All right, all right, already,” Alex said. “Yuk it up, you guys. Your turn will come.”

“There's the bus. We'd better run,” Suraby said. They all loped with low-gravity bounds to reach the bus stop just as it pulled up. Lindy and Alex jumped up to claim perches next to each other, strapped in and connected their data and power cables (the bus did not supply air or water), then turned to wave at their friends as the bus trundled off.

Alex raised an electronic “On Honeymoon” notice with the identification packet his suit and Lindy's exchanged with the other passengers. The others smiled, gave their congratulations and then politely did not try to initiate a conversation. But Lindy's mood had collapsed. Caught between the knowledge that she did not dare show unconcern for a disaster that might have killed billions, and the deep humiliation of having her wedding reception ruined, she could do nothing but make sporadic complaints.

“They didn't have to make all those snotty newlywed jokes. I didn't do that to any of my girlfriends when they got married.” Alex reflected that he had been there and in fact, she had made the same we-know-where-you're-going jokes everybody always did. But he mumbled his agreement.

“We should have gone to the bus stop of the other side of town. This bus is going to stop at every corner now.”

“The food was mostly good. Except for the chicken-and-beans thing, that could have been seasoned better. I don't know why they didn't taste it before they served it to guests. But most of the food was okay, other than the pastry. I guess it's all my fault, I should have picked a better bakery.”

“I wish this bus line didn't go past the quarry. It's ugly.” They were passing a pit on the outskirts of town where ordinary Moon soil was dug up and cooked by focused mirrors, during the Day, to liberate oxygen, aluminum, silicon and other useful materials. Mare Vaporum Town was over a hundred years old and the pit had become vast and deep, the bottom invisible in the Night.

Alex made some response such as “Yeah, you're right” to each statement.

The bus rolled through the factory district outside of town and turned back to follow the edge of Mare Vaporum Port. The Moon was the trading hub for sixty planets, and the flat plain of the Port was filled with spherical ships carrying exotic metals, wines, spices, fancy food, machines that were cheaper to import than to make as needed, and anything else that could be bought and sold in the dome cities. Starlight and half-Earth light limned the ships.

Moon Men were moving all over the field, on foot and in trucks. They were stevedores and mechanics, ships' chandlers and “water clerks”, inspectors and cleaning crews. The displays in Alex's and Lindy's helmets identified a dozen nearby friends who were at work and had not been able to take off time for the wedding. They did not open communications with any of them.

Presently the green roof of Yangel Crater Dome came into view, a bulge of water-filled plastic quilted with cables. Yangel Crater was six kilometers wide, enough to support a city of ten thousand residents and four times that many visitors each year, but the crater walls were only about as high as a five-story building. The bus rolled up the slope and stopped at the south visitor airlock.

Visitors from the planets had to go through an entry inspection. Since each Moon Man carried his identification and broadcast it to anyone in the area, and since every Moon Man's record was stored on the network, entrance to the Dome was much simpler for them. Alex and Lindy walked through the outer door of the airlock, waited for the others to enter, then pressed one button. The outer door sealed, air was pumped into the little room and the inner door opened. An entrance fee was automatically debited from their bank accounts, and they walked out to a balcony overlooking the crater city.

Lindy unfastened her helmet and clipped it to a carrying rack over her shoulder, then removed her gloves and attached them to holders on the thighs of her suit. After a moment of dithering, Alex did the same. They held the railing, looking out over the city. He sniffed the air. “Ugh. It sure smells in here,” he said.

Lindy turned toward him and said, “Having second thoughts about our honeymoon?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I'm just saying, there are a lot of odors in here. I don't come here very often. Of course I want to be here on our honeymoon. I love you.”

“Sorry, honey,” Lindy said after a moment. “I love you, too. I'm just crabby right now.”

“Hey, we're really married at last.”

“That's just it. I don't feel like we're really married. I feel like we're sort of half-married or something.”

“Babe, I'd rather be half-married to you than all-the-way-married to any other woman.”

“Don't make jokes, please.”

Lindy, with her helmet off, was smooth-shaven bald, as Alex and most other Moon Men were. Alex took her hand, reveling in the feeling of his skin touching hers, and stared frankly at her face. Her skin was pale and flawless. He had seen her cry her makeup into a mess at the reception, but during the trip her suit had cleaned her up and reapplied carefully arched brows, dark outlines to her eyes, and bright color to her lips. She was wearing tiny jeweled earrings, and he wondered if she had always had them and he was only noticing them now. Standing next to her, he could look into the open neck gasket of her suit and see a little bit of bare shoulder that would otherwise be hidden to him and all other men.

Lindy was still gazing at the city, but recovered herself and turned to face him. They both leaned forward, still holding hands, until the chests of their suits clicked together. By craning their necks, they were able to kiss, and did. And again, and again.

The Caravansary was a tall tower near the center of the dome, on the edge of the sprawling North Market Plaza. Presently they walked hand-in-hand down the ramp to the street level and headed toward it.

The streets were actually bridges, crowded with pedestrians. They could see electric delivery trucks on the paved ground level below them. All of the Moon Men who had arrived with them had dispersed, and they did not see a single other person wearing a familiar Moon suit.

There was an anxious energy in the people on the street. Although it was not possible to see Earth through the dome, and although the number of actual Earthmen in the city could not be more than a dozen, the news flashed through the population and made them edgy. It was not only that they wondered Will the Moon be next? It was also the knowledge that there was no faster way to communicate with the settled planets than by ship, which meant that any traveler wondered whether his world would still be there when he returned.

Every planet of the Ecumene was represented by traders and tourists on the streets of the dome. The ones who were not dressed in the exotic costume of their native planet, Alex thought, had taken a holiday opportunity to dress in some even more fantastic get-up. He reflected that it was just as well no alien races had ever been found, because the humans were weird enough. He was going to make this little joke to his wife, until he looked at her purse-lipped expression.

He didn't know where to point his eyes. The men were colorful enough, in turbans and berets, feather cloaks, bright-spangled uniforms, ostentatiously plain workman's coveralls, outrageous tights with codpieces. But the women were disturbing. Some wore prudish long dresses with stiff, embroidered bodices which still modeled their bodies in ways that excited him. There were women in clinging knits, women in slit skirts, women with bare bellies. Alex wound up staring so resolutely into the distance that he collided with a fat young woman showing very ample cleavage, which earned him a scolding from her and a searching look from Lindy. She pulled him along.

“Man, what a crowd. I sure hope my shots are up to date,” Alex muttered. “Lindy, you come here every month. You're used to this, right?”

“Actually,” she said grimly, “you never get used to it. I have to do it for the business. But this is our honeymoon and we're going to have a good time.”

The dome over them was lit brilliantly from below (because the sun was down) by lamps at the rim of the crater and the tops of the taller buildings. The space between the inner and outer layers was filled with water to provide protection against radiation, and the algae in it reflected a pale green glow on the city. This part of the city was filled with two- and three-story structures: shops on the street level, apartments below and sometimes above.

Some of the shops sold food, which Alex could understand. Everybody has to eat, after all, and they had grocers and restaurants in Mare Vaporum Town. But most of the stores sold things no Moon Man could use: clothing in a thousand unnecessary styles, shoes, furniture, books printed on paper, dishes, physical artwork. He began to understand why there was a popular stereotype that Moon Men were rich, even though most of them worked salaried jobs at the Port. Clearly, everybody else's money was spent to move goods from planets to spaceships, into the dome, out to other spaceships and back to other planets.

Just when Alex felt he couldn't stand the sensation of bare-faced people coming at him from both directions any more, they entered the main north-south street, which was divided into lanes. Lindy pulled him into the north-bound lane, where the people only crowded them from behind, and they could see the hotel tower clearly ahead, with North Market Plaza spread around it.

There were no pedestrian streets built over the market, which was on paved ground. When they arrived at the hotel, Lindy steered them to a cafe on a balcony overlooking the market. “Every other time I've been here, I've been down there in the middle sitting at a booth,” she said. “Just once, I want to sit up here and watch the show without being in it.” They stood at the railing for a moment, looking down a few feet at the crowd.

“You do your trading in the middle of that?” Alex asked, appalled. “There must be a thousand people there. More than a thousand. They're all ...”. He wanted to say “naked” but of course everyone in the milling throng was wearing some kind of clothes. “They're all exposed to the air,” he finally said.

“It's kind of uncomfortable,” Lindy said, “but I have to be here to make any sales. I only come here once a month or so.”

“We're all breathing the same air,” Alex said unhappily. “They breathe it inside their lungs where it's all wet and mucus, and then they breathe it out and we breathe it in.”

“Don't get sick on me, honey,” Lindy said. “We're going to be here for three days.”

Alex gulped twice, then took a shuddering deep breath. “Okay, I'll get over it,” he said. “Let's sit down. I could use some water, or something.”

In fact, there did not seem to be much trading going on in the market. North Market Plaza was set up to cater to any style of commerce merchants from sixty planets might want. There was an extensive electronic marketplace for any commodity that could be traded without personal contact. But there were also a hundred or more traders who sat cross-legged on mats and blankets and dickered with customers one at a time. There were brown tents, wooden booths with painted signs, and plastic and metal booths with bright nervous video signs. The plaza extended to the natural crater walls, which were thickly overbuilt buildings, streets and stairs. Staid corporate offices faced “outdoor” coffee and tea shops where traders sat talking business.

But they were not trading, most of them. Crowds threaded restlessly through the aisles. They talked and looked up, although Earth could not be seen through the dome. They spoke either too loud and too fast, or in fearful near-whispers. The anxiety rose from the plaza like steam.

“Let's get away from the railing,” Lindy said slowly. “It feels like … it feels bad.”

“You can't blame them for being twitchy,” Alex said. “Us, either. Nobody knows what to think.”

Lindy turned to him and took both of his hands in hers. “Alex, I'm sorry. This isn't what I wanted our honeymoon to be. I'm just trying to cope ...”

“You, and me, and all of them,” he said. He nodded toward the plaza, where there was some kind of loud argument developing near them. “Obviously, some of them aren't holding it together too well.”

Lindy looked out over balcony. “Isn't that Hans in the middle of that?” she said.

“You're right. I think we need to go rescue him.”

“Before somebody hits him?”

“No,” Alex said, peering. “I think we need to pull him away before he decks somebody himself. Helmet and gloves, I think.”

Both had their suits sealed up in a twinkling, giving them an apparent bulk twice the size of an unsuited man. They clattered down the little flight of stairs to the plaza floor and, shouldering the crowd aside, pushed through to where Hans was in the center of a ring of gesticulating men and women. Alex and Lindy bulled their way in to stand next to him. Out of his space suit, Hans was a paunchy middle-aged man with thinning hair.

Without radio, they could not talk to Hans or he to them, but he recognized them through their faceplates. He pointed back to the balcony and they escorted him out of the crowd, one on each side, over to the stairs and up to the cafe. The arguing men around him looked disgusted but let him go.

The hotel catered to Moon Men, among a hundred other planetary cultures, ethnicities and tribes. They found a table at the back with standard connections for water, air, data and power, and Alex and Lindy plugged themselves in and extended their suit braces to sit. Hans was obliged to drag over a chair from another table. He sat down as Alex and Lindy were removing their helmets and gloves.

“You okay, Hans?” Lindy asked.

“Just mad,” he said. “Thanks for breaking that up.”

“What were they yelling at you about?”

“Can you believe this?” Hans said. “The whole planet Earth goes dark, nobody knows where the people are, maybe they're all dead, and the first thing these guys want to do is complain because their shipments were interrupted. I'm ready to wring somebody's neck. I need a drink.”

“What do you drink, Hans?” Alex asked.

“Scotch, maybe?”

Alex studied the menu display for a moment. “Lots of Scotch,” he said. “They have it from Lenin World, New Earth, Nova Terra, Terra Nova and New Nova Terra.”

“Lord God, no. How about Scotch from Scotland?” Hans said.

“Huh,” Alex grunted after a moment. “Looks like Scotch from Earth is twenty times as much as Scotch from any other planet.”

Hans looked around. “It wasn't that way yesterday,” he said. “It's my job to keep track of prices like that. I mean, there was a premium for authentic Earth liquor but it was maybe fifty percent. The shipping costs are about the same.”

“I think,” Lindy said, “that some smart operator just realized there isn't going to be any more Earth Scotch.”

Alex ordered wine for himself and his wife, generic Scotch for Hans, and a plate of local, Moon Man-style meat and vegetable rolls.

Lindy put a hand on Hans' shoulder. He rubbed his face with his hands. “I'm so sorry, Hans,” she said. “I know you had family down there.” He nodded his thanks.

“We've had our helmets off,” Alex said. “Is there any news?”

“Nothing sensible. There was one manned satellite, I think for military stuff, and the Merchants' Council here is sending a ship to pick them up. The two shuttles that were in space are okay. They'll be here in a couple of days.” He looked up at Lindy. “Now that I think about it, you had a shipment on one of those, didn't you? I think you're going to be rich. I'll bet the price of Earth spices goes up, too.”

“How about the people?” Lindy asked.

“No sign of them. You look at the ground through telescopes and where New York City was, there's nothing except forests and fields. That city wasn't bombed out or anything. It looks like it was never there.”

Their food and drink was presently brought by a human waiter pushing a rolling cart. The waiter gave them their drinks and the plate of rolls, then opened a cabinet on the side of the cart and selected knives and forks from an array of different eating instruments. Hans looked at the food and immediately opened the menu display again.

“Are you going to get some Earth food?” Alex asked.

“Nobody on the Moon knows how to cook decent Earth food,” Hans said. “I've stopped trying to get it. Here, they have pretty good food on Golden New Promise.” He pointed to a picture of a plate piled with small, bright-colored pieces of something unidentifiable. “I'm going to get some of this,” he said. “You want some?”

[More to come – Chuck Ott]