“Or maybe you could stay here, on the Moon. We’ll get married and . . . and. . .”
“And I’ll give up my career? Become a housewife? And what are you going to do, now that you’ve built Sam’s golf course? Do you think there are others who’d want you to build courses for them here on the Moon?”
I shook my head, crestfallen.
She touched my cheek with her fingertips.
“I love you, Mai,” I whispered.
“I love you, too,” she said. “But I don’t see how it could possibly work out.”
Neither could I.
“You’d better go,” she said.
I couldn’t move.
“The tournament starts tomorrow, Chou. You’re bad for my concentration.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
But then she smiled and took my hand and led me into her room and neither one of us gave a thought to her concentration or our future.
The tournament started the next morning. Mai hopped out of bed and headed for the shower. I thought about joining her there, but I decided it would be better if I just stole away. Which is what I did, feeling miserable every step of the way.
Love is strange. Powerful. But sometimes so painful it tears the heart out of your chest.
I had nothing to do. My work was finished. So I went to my quarters, cleaned up, got into fresh coveralls, and made my way to the spacious lobby of Dante’s Inferno, which Sam’s people had turned into a sort of auditorium, with comfortable seats filling the floor and enormous video screens hanging on every wall.
The place was already full of eager onlookers, while a team of Hell’s Belles (looking a little bleary this early in the morning) circulated through the crowd with trays of drinks and snacks.
To my surprise, Sam’s name was at the top of the list of entrants. Several of the spectators noticed it, too.
“That Sam,” a silver-haired, dark-skinned man chuckled, “he’ll do anything to put himself in the limelight.”
One of the better-looking women said, “Well, it’s his tournament, after all.”
Sam had detailed one of his publicity aides to go out to the first tee and introduce the competitors. And there was a flock of sports reporters there, too, waiting for the golfers to come out.
One by one they stepped through the airlock and out onto the barren, airless floor of Hell Crater. Most of them wore exoskeletons, which made them look like ponderous, clanking robots. As each one reached the first tee the reporters huddled around him or her and asked the same tired old questions:
“How do you feel about playing golf on the Moon?”
“Will your spacesuit hamper your playing?”
“What do you think your chances of winning are?”
And then Sam came waltzing through the airlock and out onto the floor of Hell Crater. We all gasped with surprise. He was wearing nothing more over his coveralls than what looked like a transparent plastic raincoat.
It had leggings and booties that covered his shoes, and gloves so thin I could see the veins on the backs of Sam’s hands. His head was encased in a transparent bubble of a helmet, his red thatch of buzz-cut hair clearly visible through it. The spacesuit looked impossibly flimsy.
The news team that was interviewing each golfer clustered around Sam like a pack of hounds surrounding a fox, firing questions about his spacesuit.
“Nanofabric,” Sam exclaimed, the crooked grin on his face spreading from ear to ear.
Before the news people could take a breath, Sam explained, “The suit was built by nanomachines, from the nanolab at Selene. Dr. Kristine Cardenas is the lab’s director, you know. She won the Nobel Prize for her work on nanotechnology.”
“But . . . but it’s so . . . light,” one of the newswomen gushed, from inside her standard hard-shell spacesuit. “How can it possibly protect you?”
“How come it doesn’t stiffen up, like regular suits?” asked another.
“How can it protect you against the radiation?”
“How can it be so flexible?”
Sam laughed and raised both his nanogloved hands to quiet their questions. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Cardenas about the technical details. All I can tell you is that the suit gives as much protection as a standard suit, but it’s a lot more flexible. And easier to put on and take off, lemme tell you. Like old-fashioned pajamas.”
The other golfers, in their standard suits or exoskeletons, hung around the edge of the crowd uneasily. None of them liked being upstaged.
Mai hadn’t appeared yet, and I began to wonder if something was wrong. Then she came through the airlock, wearing a nanosuit, just like Sam.
“No!” I bellowed, startling the tourists sitting around me. I bolted from my chair and ran to the airlock.
There was a team of beefy security guards at the airlock hatch, in dark gray uniforms. They wouldn’t let me take a suit and go outside.
“Only players and the reporters,” their leader told me. “Mr. Gunn’s orders.”
