Gunther discarded one. "Hit me. Man, you didn't see anything. You didn't feel the ground shake afterwards."
"Just what was Izmailova's connection with the Briefcase War?" Hiro asked. "Obviously not a courier. Was she in the supply end or strategic?"
Gunther shrugged.
"You do remember the Briefcase War?" Hiro said sarcastically. "Half of Earth's military elites taken out in a single day? The world pulled back from the brink of war by bold action? Suspected terrorists revealed as global heroes?"
Gunther remembered the Briefcase War quite well. He had been nineteen at the time, working on a Finlandia Geothermal project when the whole world had gone into spasm and very nearly destroyed itself. It had been a major factor in his decision to ship off the planet. "Can't we ever talk about anything but politics? I'm sick and tired of hearing about Armageddon."
"Hey, aren't you supposed to be meeting with Hamilton?" Anya asked suddenly.
He glanced up at the Earth. The east coast of South America was just crossing the dusk terminator. "Oh, hell, there's enough time to play out the hand."
Krishna won with three queens. The deal passed to Hiro. He shuffled quickly, and slapped the cards down with angry little punches of his arm. "Okay," Anya said, "what's eating you?"
He looked up angrily, then down again and in a muffled voice, as if he had abruptly gone bashful as Krishna, said, "I'm shipping home."
"Home?"
"You mean to Earth?"
"Are you crazy? With everything about to go up in flames? Why?"
"Because I am so fucking tired of the Moon. It has to be the ugliest place in the universe."
"Ugly?" Anya looked elaborately about at the terraced gardens, the streams that began at the top level and fell in eight misty waterfalls before reaching the central pond to be recirculated again, the gracefully winding pathways. People strolled through great looping rosebushes and past towers of forsythia with the dreamlike skimming stride that made moonwalking so like motion underwater. Others popped in and out of the office tunnels, paused to watch the finches loop and fly, tended to beds of cucumbers. At the midlevel straw market, the tents where offduty hobby capitalists sold factory systems, grass baskets, orange glass paperweights and courses in postinterpretive dance and the meme analysis of Elizabethan poetry, were a jumble of brave silks, turquoise, scarlet and aquamarine. "I think it looks nice. A little crowded, maybe, but that's the pioneer aesthetic."
"It looks like a shopping mall, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's--" He groped for words. "It's like--it's what we're doing to this world that bothers me. I mean, we're digging it up, scattering garbage about, ripping the mountains apart, and for what?"
"Money," Anya said. "Consumer goods, raw materials, a future for our children. What's wrong with that?"
"We're not building a future, we're building weapons."
"There's not so much as a handgun on the Moon. It's an intercorporate development zone. Weapons are illegal here."
"You know what I mean. All those bomber fuselages, detonation systems, and missile casings that get built here, and shipped to low earth orbit. Let's not pretend we don't know what they're for."
"So?" Anya said sweetly. "We live in the real world, we're none of us naive enough to believe you can have governments without armies. Why is it worse that these things are being built here rather than elsewhere?"
"It's the short-sighted, egocentric greed of what we're doing that gripes me! Have you peeked out on the surface lately and seen the way it's being ripped open, torn apart and scattered about? There are still places where you can gaze upon a harsh beauty unchanged since the days our ancestors were swinging in trees. But we're trashing them. In a generation, two at most, there will be no more beauty to the Moon than there is to any other garbage dump."
"You've seen what Earthbound manufacturing has done to the environment," Anya said. "Moving it off the planet is a good thing, right?"
"Yes, but the Moon--"
"Doesn't even have an ecosphere. There's nothing here to harm."
They glared at each other. Finally Hiro said, "I don't want to talk about it," and sullenly picked up his cards.
Five or six hands later, a woman wandered up and plumped to the grass by Krishna's feet. Her eye shadow was vivid electric purple, and a crazy smile burned on her face. "Oh hi," Krishna said. "Does everyone here know Sally Chang? She's a research component of the Center for Self-Replicating Technologies, like me."
The others nodded. Gunther said, "Gunther Weil. Blue collar component of Generation Five."
She giggled.
Gunther blinked. "You're certainly in a good mood." He rapped the deck with his knuckles. "I'll stand."
"I'm on psilly," she said.
"One card."
"Psilocybin?" Gunther said. "I might be interested in some of that. Did you grow it or microfacture it? I have a couple of factories back in my room, maybe I could divert one if you'd like to license the software?"
Sally Chang shook her head, laughing helplessly. Tears ran down her cheeks.
"Well, when you come down we can talk about it." Gunther squinted at his cards. "This would make a great hand for chess."
"Nobody plays chess," Hiro said scornfully. "It's a game for computers."
Gunther took the pot with two pair. He shuffled, Krishna declined the cut, and he began dealing out cards. "So anyway, this crazy Russian lady--"
Out of nowhere, Chang howled. Wild gusts of laughter knocked her back on her heels and bent her forward again. The delight of discovery dancing in her eyes, she pointed a finger straight at Gunther. "You're a robot!" she cried.
"Beg pardon?"
"You're nothing but a robot," she repeated. "You're a machine, an automaton. Look at yourself! Nothing but stimulus-response. You have no free will at all. There's nothing there. You couldn't perform an original act to save your life."
"Oh yeah?" Gunther glanced around, looking for inspiration. A little boy--it might be Pyotr Nahfees, though it was hard to tell from here--was by the edge of the water, feeding scraps of shrimp loaf to the carp. "Suppose I pitched you into the lake? That would be an original act."
Laughing, she shook her head. "Typical primate behavior. A perceived threat is met with a display of mock aggression."
Gunther laughed.
"Then, when that fails, the primate falls back to a display of submission. Appeasal. The monkey demonstrates his harmlessness--you see?"
"Hey, this really isn't funny," Gunther said warningly. "In fact, it's kind of insulting."
"And so back to a display of aggression."
Gunther sighed and threw up both his hands. "How am I supposed to react? According to you, anything I say or do is wrong."
"Submission again. Back and forth, back and forth from aggression to submission and back again." She pumped her arm as if it were a piston. "Just like a little machine--you see? It's all automatic behavior."
"Hey, Kreesh--you're the neurobiowhatever here, right? Put in a good word for me. Get me out of this conversation."
Krishna reddened. He would not meet Gunther's eyes. "Ms. Chang is very highly regarded at the Center, you see. Anything she thinks about thinking is worth thinking about." The woman watched him avidly, eyes glistening, pupils small. "I think maybe what she means, though, is that we're all basically cruising through life. Like we're on autopilot. Not just you specifically, but all of us." He appealed to her directly. "Yes?"