Читать книгу Rabbit and Robot - William Hughes, Andrew Smith - Страница 9

“There was a time when people theorized the moon was made of cheese.

Up here on the Tennessee, though, I can see it is more likely made of ash. Probably all the ashes from all the fires of all our pasts, forever and ever.

And I can turn and, in one direction, see the surface of this enormous cratered ashball as it skims below us like a moving sidewalk; and, in the other, the smoke-shrouded Earth—our lost home—burning itself out, exhaling ash one last time.

Among the enterprises that made my father one of the five wealthiest people in America (and those ventures included a television program called Rabbit & Robot, as well as a line of lunar cruise ships like the one Billy and I were trapped on) is transporting deceased loved ones— not their ashes, but their actual bodies—to the surface of the moon, where they are laid out like vigilant sentinels, eternally gazing down, or up, or wherever, at the planet of their origin. They never decay, never change. Billy and I can see the bodies every time the Tennessee passes above Mare Fecunditatis, which oddly enough means “Sea of Fertility.”

There are more than thirteen thousand fertile and dead sentinels floating there atop that sea of ash, staring down at everything that had come before them, and everything that came after.

They just lie there, dressed in their outfit of unquestioned permanence—military uniforms or perfect white smocks, every last dead and fertile one of them.

Billy Hinman and I are trapped inside a moon to our moon called the Tennessee.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking lunar cruise ship that belongs to my dad.

Well, to be honest, it was kind of an accident. We didn’t mean to steal it, but it’s ours now, no question about it.

It kind of just fell into our hands, you could say.

And we are at the end of everything.

So, let me back up a bit.