NAME THAT MOON

THE LUNAR LANDER descended onto the dusty pad, the fading blue crescent on its side -- the Blue Moon Resort's logo -- lost in the rising dust, As the lander touched the pad, it yawed unsteadily before bumping gently back down.

Please, I prayed, no glitches. I looked at my watch: the media conference was scheduled to begin in two hours.

Finally the lunar dust, the regolith, settled in low-gray slo-mo and the small Menelaus Crater that defined the equatorial end of the Sea of Serenity reemerged behind the pad, bright with sunlight, crisp with detail. That was my personal signal that I could safely proceed. I licked my lips and pushed the unfamiliar joystick to propel the transfer vehicle Stewart had assigned me for the event, a kind of pressurized minivan, into a docking with the lander. By docking, we bring our guests to the resort without the hassle of an EVA.

The treads of the transfer vehicle crunched satisfyingly over the regolith and onto the pad. When the docking collars started to engage at a meter's distance, I checked my softscreen one last time. To my dismay, Karl Pope, the Chief Editor of Conde Nast Spacetravel, the man I'd come to pick up, was now listed as "scrubbed." I hurriedly called up the new data.

They'd sent his assistant, a woman named Claire Albricht.

Netsearch flashed a list of projects she'd been involved in -- for Linux/Hilton, for The Aston Mazda Group. She was apparently a marketing whiz, but it was Karl Pope himself, one of the travel media's heavy hitters, we'd been counting on to give credibility to our press conference.

His loss was another blow. If our new marketing campaign couldn't raise our occupancy rate, Blue Moon would have to close. I pictured myself being fitted for one of those yellow helmets they wore at the mining camp, breathing dusty air, shoveling ore to be fired for Helium 3.

I peered out across the landscape through the big van window and took a deep breath. Above the rocky plain that formed the Sea of Serenity, Earth hung in the black sky like a milk-swirled pearl, immense and bright. Yet it was the sight of Mare Serenitatis itself, its vast rolling face cupped by bright far cliffs, that brought me peace, that settled and centered me.

Then a wild mass of strawberry blonde hair pushed through the docking membrane. She was in her mid-thirties, a bit shaky. My heart skipped a beat -- Claire Albricht's bleary green eyes had a wounded quality, and her expression was unhappy, but none of that, not even her baggy radiation suit or her black lipstick, could hide the fact that she was an attractive woman.

"Welcome to Hyatt Regency Flat Blue Moon," I said, helping her stow her spacecase. "I'm Charley Shackleton. Hyatt PR. Call me Shack."

"Claire Albricht. Ough," she grunted, grabbing the armrest with one pale hand, bracing the other against the headliner.

"You're not going to float away," I reassured her. "There's gravity here."

"That was worse than flying to Australia."

"You'll feel better," I said. "Give it a day."

She glared out the big side window as I started up the transfer vehicle. "Where's the resort?" Claire Albricht asked.

She could keep the lipstick -- too New York -- but I liked her silver earrings, her long neck. "Ninety percent of the resort's below the surface," I explained, telling her something most guests know before they get here. "Protects everybody from impacts and temperature extremes -- nights here get down to 240 below."

She closed her eyes. "What do you mean, impacts?"

I wondered if she'd even glanced at her information packet. "Without an atmosphere to burn it up," I said, "space debris comes right in." I waved ahead at the pocked surface, the craters and scattered pits. "Which gives us our, um, moonscape."

"There's nothing here but rocks," she said flatly. "Nothing at all."

I bit my tongue. As we rounded the foot of the Menelaus Crater, the near folded cliffs of the Montes Haemus Range rose to form the equatorial border of the Sea. With Earth high behind us now, the shadowed curtains of rock were crowned by a sky brilliant with stars, all the colors of the rainbow shot through with white. "How about that?" I asked.

She frowned at the cliffs and blinked. "This has got to be the most desolate place I've ever seen."

"Well, there's lots to do," I said, feeling my jaw go tight. "Ice skating, swimming, golf. Three restaurants, a spa. We've got everything an Earthside resort's got."

The big dome sheltering our lobby swung into view, marked with the Blue Moon crescent. We passed a couple in pressurized suits riding a treaded golf cart toward the course inside the crater, a sign of life which only seemed to call attention to the twenty empty carts at the starter's pod. It was hard to hide our problem.

"I've been trying to imagine what would make it worthwhile for Hyatt to fly us all up. I mean, in these days of virtuality, a press conference?"

I docked at the canopied port without comment and let the valets take over. Truth to tell, it was United's extra-orbital division that was eating the expense of flying up the media. The new promotion was a last ditch effort to keep business going for them, too.

Once inside, as the desk clerk took a retinal scan for room entry, I noticed how red-rimmed her eyes were, how watery. Wads of Kleenex stuck out of her pockets. As much as she annoyed me, I felt a wave of pity and restrained my impulse to book her next to the rattling ice machine in the Kepler Wing.

At least she noticed the Waterfall of Diana in the lobby, the one you walk behind on the way to the Atrium. "You'd never guess this was even possible," she said above its soft thunder as we passed into the big atrium. "And there's so much light."

There was vegetation too, and I directed her to a meandering path among leggy ferns and palms. "All thanks to our fusion plant up at the pole --we've got a great supply of Helium 3."

She extracted a wad of Kleenex the size of a baseball from a pocket and buried her nose in it. "This is such an awful day for me," she sniffled. I stood there, waiting for her to say something else, but she just keptblowing her nose, and so I took her by the elbow and led her toward her room, telling her about our flock of pigeons.

At the brass-doored elevators down I looked over and she was glaring at me suspiciously. Head case, I decided. "Media presentation at two," I said brightly. "I'll bet you can't wait to get online and tell the world when you hear what this is about."

BARRY STEWART -- Blue Moon Resort's General Manager-- adjusted his blazer and glowered nervously, sweat beading just below his hairline. We had refitted our unused Copernicus Ballroom as a media center, complete with VR cameras for Earthside realtime holocast, full wall screens on three sides, net guides and browser pages windowed in. A full screen hi-D/3D moonmap hovered behind the dais, the resort keyed in with bright colors. The techs had done a wonderful job.

The media reps we'd shuttled up were augmented by an equal number of our own employees to flesh out the crowd. Still, it was a disappointing sight interns instead of editors (from Orbit/ExtraGeo), location scouts instead of producers (from The Virtual Travel Channel), small crews instead of live feeds (from Extreme Outside and Space), our fitness instructor instead of anybody from Offworld. At the side door I was trying to keep Stewart from taking another hit from the silver flask he'd started carrying.

"Barry," I said, "we're going to change history. Tell them that."

"This better goddamned work," he muttered. Claire Albricht walked unsteadily into the room, creases in her jumpsuit, wild strands rising from her blonde hair. I sat her beside a giggling couple whom I introduced as prizewinners from OsakaHoneyMoon and she bared her teeth.

As usual, when the crunch came, Stewart was great. He paced back and forth on the little stage, first warming up the audience with stories from the Apollo landings, a holographic full moon radiant behind him. He told us of the resort's conception and heyday, how in the ten years it had been in operation we employees had developed a special relationship with "this dear old rock." Over the past few years, he explained, like a kindly uncle relating how a family had drifted apart, the residents of Earth seemed to forget about the moon and the amazingly engineered resort and spa through which it can be experienced. "Nowadays the traffic goes to the orbiting hotels, right? Sheraton Geosync, Caesar's Sky Palace, Satellite 67 Well, I'm here to tell you it's time to think moon again."

He took a deep breath and said, "I've had a vision."

According to Stewart -- and this was the first time I'd heard this version of the story -- he'd been out on an extended EVA surveying the Apollo 11 site for a potential hotel excursion. Out there alone, he'd found himself thinking about the moon not just as a compelling landscape but as a presence, a spirit, though a spirit that lacked a face, some way to evoke it. He'd wanted to speak to it, he said, but there was no name to call it by.

It was a testament to his charm that a hush fell over the sixty cynical media people in that room.

"...leading me to the reason we've brought you here today. In cooperation with United Space, Hyatt Regency Fiat Blue Moon is proud to announce a marketing campaign that will change the way humans willsee the heavens -- the way lovers and sailors and astronauts and astronomers will see the night sky -- until the end of time."

Now he really had everyone's attention.

"Out there at Apollo Site, I realized that, unlike every other body in the solar system -- unlike every planet, unlike their moons, Titan, Phobos and Io, say -- or even unlike asteroids Chiron, Hermes and Neseus -Earth's moon -- now listen carefully -- Earth's moon does not have a name."

"Let me repeat: the only completely natural satellite o[ Earth has no proper, formal name." He let the information sink in -- it was one of those obvious arrangements that went unnoticed. "All through history, we haven't been using a 'name,' we've been using a 'term,' a generic term, 'moon'" -- Stewart made the word sound cowlike, repulsive-- "to signify a very unique place."

"It's time to correct this oversight. With the full compliance and authority of the International Astronomical Union, the official naming body for asteroids, comets and stars, Hyatt Regency Fiat has secured rights in perpetuity to a proper name for Earth's moon." Stewart smiled. "I see from the dataprompters that our audience is building Earthside," he observed.

The girl from The Space Channel, a chubby brunette with a battered headset, was scurrying around to check her live feed; all around the Copernicus Room equipment was being touched and tweaked.

"Of course, the choice of a name for the moon belongs to the human race as a whole. And so -- listen carefully again-- we've created a contest with a few simple rules. From the moment I initialize our dedicated netsite, NAME THAT MOON, we will take nominations and votes for a name for the moon. Individuals logging onto the site will be entitled to one vote per Earth day. The voting will continue around the clock for seven days. At the end of the week, the moon will have a new, official name."

Contest regs scrolled behind him as Stewart raised his right arm. "Please join us, citizens of Earth, as we NAME THAT MOON!"

When his arm came down the new Netsite washed over all the screens and the crowd in the Copernicus Room flitted around like carp at feeding time. Correspondents shouted questions, bumped one another, waved their arms to be recognized, shouldered their way to the center aisle. The Osaka couple stood on their chairs. It must have been too much for Claire Albricht, whom I saw with her head in her hands.

Candace Yuen, from our marketing department, joined Stewart, describing how random voters would be chosen to win trips, mylar excursion suits, even have their names assigned to darkside craters. Above the din she started touting VR tours of the resort for the Earthside audience.

On the wallscreen behind the dais a list of names started to grow: Artemis, Hoku, Luna, New America .... In the tally window, numbers were already starting to rise like the bounce from the audience. An excited crowd in low gray is distinctive: gestures are more expansive, heads bob, people move more. Stewart was taking questions, Candace was laughing, and I zeroed in on the tall Chinese editor from HyperWire, who'd promised a week-long feature in realtime holo in exchange for the golf pass I had in my pocket.

I saw Claire Albricht again on my way out. She was alone against the back wall, looking dazed, her wad of Kleenex in her fist. Her lipstick was faded.

"What do you think?" I asked, sitting beside her, trying to be friendly.

She looked at me sideways. "This is a really bizarre idea. Who does Hyatt Fiat think it is? All the names here are so ancient. Greek. Roman."

"As a matter of fact," I informed her, "farside names are modern --craters named Oppenheimer and Fermi, the Sea of Moscow."

"Well, it's still pretty amazing." She shook her head. "When's my flight back?"

"What?"

"I'm ready to leave. When's my flight back?"

I exhaled through my teeth. "The deal with Conde Nast is, you're supposed to be putting together a story based on live reports. A week's worth. You're up here for the duration. Didn't you even know that?"

A dark look crossed her face. The largest wad of Kleenex I'd ever seen came out of her pocket and floated to her eyes like one of the plump misty cumulus that condense up in the dome.

This time my sympathy ran out. "You don't know the first thing about us," I told her. "You don't know why you're here. You're with us three hours and you already want to leave. Couldn't Conde Nast have spared someone who was at least remotely interested?"

The damp wad floated down and her eyes welled with tears. I heard a small voice.

"What?"

"I'm sorry," she said.

She buried her head in her hands and sobbed. Then she composed herself and looked at me bleary-eyed. "I s...said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm taking it out on you. I've been having such an awful time. I broke up with .... Oh, you don't know him. He and I, Karl and I...."

"Karl?"

"Three days ago, we're at Kennedy. He's booked to come here, I'm booked to go to Maui. I told him -- and it's really hard to tell somebody it's over, you're supposed to do it in a public place, right." And he didn't get it. I mean, I broke up with him, gave him my rehearsed speech, and he doesn't understand. It gets so bad I go, 'Don't you get it? You're dumped. What part of "I'm moving out of the condo" don't you get?' and the next thing I know ...."

"Karl Pope? From Conde Nast?"

She sniffed, nodded. "I shouldn't have used the word 'dumped,' right? The next thing I know he takes my ticket to Maui and he gives me his to here and he goes, 'Good-bye, you bimbo.' He called me a bimbo. I knew I never should have dated my boss." She was burbling. "I feel so awful."

I sighed. "Well, Claire, listen. How about keeping us out of your plans for revenge. We're just trying to survive here. Maybe you've noticed?"

She sniffled. "That's a fact. You hardly have any real guests. Sorry."

"And you're not even a travel writer."

"Well, I do know about marketing," she said. "That's what I'm saying. You could be doing better."

"Is that right? Tell me about it."

"Would you be a little less pissed?"

"I could try."

She took a breath, blinked to clear her eyes. "Okay. To begin with, you don't use your hotel manager to announce a campaign. That's so minor league. If you want real publicity, you get a celebrity. You get somebody who brings an audience with them."

"Like who?"

"Like, I don't know. Shirley Taylor. Lance Jason. Art Ball. Art Ball would have been perfect."

"Art Ball?" I snorted. "The talk show host? The one who's part Artificial Intelligence?" I pretended disbelief, but the truth was I listened to Art Ball myself. I'd even brought his name up with Candace, but after the look she'd given me I'd been too embarrassed to take the idea further. "Art Ball's over a hundred and fifty years old. The human parts of him, anyway."

"He's got the largest single listening audience on Earth. Tops two billion." She sniffled. "Oh, Earth. I miss Earth."

"There's nothing I can do to fly you back," I said. "But, look, you could have a good time while you're here if you'd give it a chance. We've got a pool, bars, a gym. Golf."

"My therapist did tell me to start something new, to get some exercise."

"There's a schedule downloaded to your softscreen. Banquet tonight. Moon range chicken."

She sniffled into the Kleenex. "I don't think I feel like eating."

"How about tomorrow? I'll show you some of our facilities." I checked my softscreen; I was booked for lunch with two Italian PR men. "I'll be free at two?"

"Ough," she said, sniffling. "Ough-kay."

That night at midnight I sat on my bunk picking stringy chicken from my teeth, feeling sorry for myself-- since Samantha'd left a year ago, my quarters just seemed empty. I was listening to web radio from Earthside, watching my autodialer strobe on my softscreen. To my surprise the faint flashing stopped, the speakerphone booted up, and a nasal voice said, "Hello?" A hot flash of self-consciousness shot through my body. I cleared my throat.

"Uh, hello. Art?"

"Yes."

"Art Ball?"

"Well, who'd you expect?" the familiar voice of Art Ball groused over the speakerphone. "We don't have screeners here, like some other shows."

"First-time caller, long-time listener," I recited. "I can't believe I got through. Great show, Art." "I'm getting a delay. Are you up on one of the satellites? At L1?"

"Calling from the moon, Art. This is Shack .... "

"WELL, TURN YOUR RADIO DOWN, SHACK," Art Ball started bellowing. "BETTER YET, TURN IT OFF. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU LISTENERS TO TURN YOUR RADIOS OFF WHEN YOU GET IN?"

I fumbled with my keypad to cut the speaker, my hand shaking. "Art? Still there?"

"That's better. What's on your mind?"

"Art, I know you're interested in the great adventure of space .... "

"And what's your point?"

"I'm just saying, have you heard about that webvote, NAME THAT MOON?"

"Right."

"Art, it would be great to see the good people who are behind this incredible idea get a real show of interest .... "

"Caller, are you one of our Helium 3 miners?"

"Uh, no."

A long silence filled my quarters. "Let me guess," Ball's voice snaked out like a slo-mo whip. "You're an employee of Hyatt Fiat. You know how we feel about the New Solar Order down here?"

"The what?" I vaguely recalled an old U.N. proposal that claimed sovereignty over the moon, to which Hyatt had signed off. Some glitch in Bali's Al software must have locked onto the Hyatt reference and his opposition to it. "Art," I said emphatically, "This is not a political thing...."

"You people think you can use my airtime for propaganda? Listen to this, Shack."

The signal went dead with a thunk. My face flushed, and my eyes burned. My speakerphone hissed with the vastness of space.

I gave Claire Albricht the tour, starting with the ice rink. We saw spectacular jumps and the rapture of average skaters working out their first triple axels in one-sixth gravity. A couple from Minnesota took turns launching 360 overflights at center ice.

After a night's sleep Claire looked refreshed, looked better than she deserved to look. Her lipstick today was dark plum, an improvement. She told me she wasn't much of an athlete.

"It's different here," I told her. "Low gravity."

My point was demonstrated when, on the way to showing her our diving boards -- diving is like flying here -- we cut through a workout room with thick pads on its floor and filled with gymnastics equipment --parallel bars, rings, a pommel horse.

She grimaced. "Here's my torture chamber from high school."

"Try something."

"Aw ...."

"Just one thing."

She took one low grav step toward a pommel horse without much enthusiasm. And, astonished, she found herself sitting on the horse. "Hey," she said, "that was...amazing."

She bounced down and tried it again.

Next she tried the parallel bars -- slipped off, didn't hurt herself, bounced back up again. She was smiling like a kid. "I could never do anything like this on Earth."

We looked over the spa, the whirlpool, the climbing wall, the weight room, but we came back to the gymnastics equipment.

"Can I use this gym?"

"Right now, if you want to. The concierge will give you a locker, bring you the right clothes."

"Thanks," she said. "You're pretty nice after all. Can I get a rain check on your invitation?"

I thought of the Hubble Room, pricey even with the employee discount --though if the hotel was going to close in a week, it might be my last chance to eat there. "Lunch tomorrow," I said, and she said, "It's a date."

LATER I CHECKED in with Barry Stewart at the Copernicus Room. He was alone, though a quartet of remote VR cameras servoed back and forth from stations along the side walls and made it seem like we were being watched. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

"How'd our first day turn out?" I asked. Out of superstition, actually dread, I'd avoided looking at the website.

"Could be better," he mumbled. He was chewing his thumb.

I finally looked. "A hundred and sixty thousand votes total from Earthside?"

His expression was pained. "Actual hits less than projections," he said. "That number's a bit inflated."

I'd gotten close enough to where he sat hunched over a terminal to smell alcohol on his breath. He was wearing the same blazer he'd worn the previous night at the banquet -- you could tell from the faux Bernaise sauce on his lapel. "It'll pick up," I said to cheer him. "Anyway, who's ahead?" I read from the wallscreen. "Diana. In second place, there's Artemis. All the old space junkies liked that name back in the last century, still do, I guess. I don't find an entry listed in third place."

"I'm, uh, leaving it off the official results. You know how we assign each voter a password to make sure they vote only once a day? Apparently the line about 'enter password' is confusing."

"Oh, Christ," I said. "You mean third place is 'password'?" He worked on his thumb. "A quarter of the votes."

"Cripes. The moon could be named 'Password.'" I looked over his shoulder and saw a long list of what I took to be Native American names following "password" on his softscreen. "Some nice ideas," I said.

"Thanks," he said wryly. "I made those up."

A knot of Helium 3 miners crowded the stainless steel bar Claire and I passed through on our way to the Hubble Room the next day. Even dressed in clean red jumpsuits, the miners, men and women both, looked grubby, skinny from long-time low gray work, squinty-eyed from living in low light.

I steered Claire past. After a day working out in the spa and pool she looked vibrant and healthy, looked great, which didn't escape one of the male miners, who clowned failing off his barstool.

"I still don't get it," Claire was saying. "What's wrong with the word 'moon'?"

"It's not a name," I told her, pulling her chair back. The Hubble Room overlooked the southern end of the pool just above the waterfall up in the atrium, just below the level at which clouds formed late in the lunar cycle. It was our grandest spot. "The word 'moon' comes from an Old Germanic base for the word 'month,' which itself comes from the IndoEuropean word for measure. A 'moon' is a device to measure time in the sky. It's not a proper name."

"Luna, then. The ancient name is Luna." She waved vaguely at our false sky, the inside of the dome, painted with fanciful stars and our blue crescent logo.

"A second rank Roman goddess. I looked her up. Not a single legend to her credit. And the name's never stuck. You say to somebody in Manhattan, let's go to Luna, they think you mean some town in upstate New York."

"Artemis?"

"Another name that sounds like a town upstate, but otherwise an excellent candidate. Artemis was Apollo's sister. Moon, sun. Still second in the voting."

"According to my sources, your contract with the AstronomicalUnion's airtight, so I guess it's going to be your call." She scanned her menu. "Heavenly Fettucini and Moon Pie. Cute." I noticed her nose was still a bit red.

"And what are you going to do if the hotel closes?" she asked.

"It's hard for me to imagine leaving," I told her.

She rolled her eyes. "Believe it or not, I'm just having salad. I'm signed up for back to back aerobics classes."

Claire skipped the evening's banquet. I drank too much at the United party afterwards and wound up stopping at the Copernicus Room around midnight. Candace was there with a triple Cappuccino. Stewart's tie was askew, his voice hollow. I could smell something different on his breath -- he'd switched to Southern Comfort, a bad sign.

"Look at this...," he muttered. "How can the Lakota sue us over the name Hatara? We can't be 'appropriating' that name. I made it up."

"They made it up first," Candace pointed out.

I looked at the other traffic. "What's this 'Moonbeam Laser' product?" I asked. "Can they really sue us?"

"Check out the message from 'Wicken.org,'" Candace said. "When the lawyers have some free time, they should look into the legality of this curse."

"It's awful," Stewart said. "Even bookings are down. What did we do wrong?"

I shrugged, staring dully at the holo moon on the front wall, cycling through its phases.

"Shack?"

"The only plausible explanation I've heard so far is that we need a celebrity spokesman."

"Like who?" he snorted. "Art Ball?"

"Well," I said as brightly as I could, "I think I heard somebody mention his name."

Candace laughed so hard she shot Cappuccino out her nose.

Claire Albricht had turned into a low-grav exercise junkie. She put in hours on the "big steps" in aerobics classes, and on the gymnastics equipment, swam for countless laps, even started diving from the ten meter board. I stopped by to watch her -- by her invitation -- as I took breaks from full buffet breakfasts, media briefings, cocktail parties, ten-course banquets.

She was fun to watch. Moonies are skinny. She had some flesh.

On day four she invited me to lunch at the juice bar next to the spa.

"I hope I'm not being a pest," I said. "Everybody else is lizarding out in the Jacuzzis, pigging out in the banquets."

"I used to do that," she said. "Now I feel like a new person. Karl is so history. As if I hadn't already made it on my own."

"Ah."

"It's true. I was Director of Marketing for The Four Seasons. Which has to do with my plan for when I get back." The new Claire had stoppedwearing lipstick altogether. She still had a little red around her nose, but otherwise looked great, her skin smooth and fresh, her eyes clear and bright.

My eyes, on the other hand, felt like they had sand in them. "Wish I had your drive," I said, "your resilience."

"You need a plan, too, for when this place folds. When I get back to New York I'm going to set up a consulting firm in resort marketing. You're a sharp guy. That kind of job would work for you. Relocate and I'll hire you."

"Like I say, I can't imagine living anywhere else."

"What do you see in bare rocks?"

"You haven't gone outside yet, have you?"

"Hands full right here, thanks. Get in shape before I go back, be ready for it." She actually rubbed her hands together; she was wonderful, all energy and enthusiasm; you could see the rosin embedded in her palms. She smiled at me. "Though I could take a break."

My heart skipped a beat. "There's a trip I have to take tomorrow," I told her. "A long ride out in the transfer van to the Armstrong Site. How about coming along?"

That night, late, I lay on my bunk listening to Web audio again, that great throwback. Of course we run on a different "day" up here, with our light/dark cycle adjusted to Earth's, so my atrium window was a soft blanket of darkness.

"Thanks for taking my call, Art," I heard a male voice say, a voice heavy with a tired slur, a familiar voice. The hair rose on the back of my neck and I sat up. "First-time caller, long-time listener, Art," the voice said.

I heard the clink of a silver flask. I could almost smell the thick sweetness of Southern Comfort.

The call was brief, even by Art Ball standards. "We have a voiceprint on you, General Manager Stewart," Art Ball snarled. "We're not taking calls from you New Solar Order people."

You could hear Barry starting to protest as he was cut off, but only half his word came out, and his "Arrrr .... "made him sound like a dog.

"Wild card line, east of the Urals, you're on the air," Art said to someone else. "Can you imagine that guy?"

"A road?" Claire said. "A road on the moon?"

"A track," I corrected her. "Nobody's allowed to build a road on the moon. This isn't something you can see from Earth. We run semi-inflated treads and make a hundred kilometers per hour without leaving much impact -- the embedded track guides us around boulders, crevasses, collapsed lava tubes."

She moved the picnic basket the hotel kitchen had packed for us back with the folding chairs and tables, the crates of bunting, the box of collector quality flags, the EVA suits, the spare life support stuff, the tools. My assignment was to scout a media event at Tranquility Base -- Stewart was considering pulling out all the stops--and the rear of the transfer van was stuffed with equipment we'd want down there.

Claire leaned against the thick lexan window, trying to get a better view. "It's so different when you're not spacesick," she mused. "So clear. It's like my eyesight's better."

"No atmosphere," I reminded her.

In my mirror Blue Moon's main dome was receding rapidly. Ahead lay boulders and craters sprinkled across the regolith stretching away to the horizon, a horizon on which you could see the very shape of the moon's curvature.

"Amazing," Claire agreed.

I accelerated and toggled in the object radar to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

"This is really out there," she said quietly.

THE RUN TO the '69 landing site, Tranquility Base, takes you east along the shore of the Sea of Serenity to a break in its high bordering ridge near the Plinius Crater. From there what we now called Armstrong Site is a straight drive south across the center of the other major lowland in this quadrant of the moon, the Mare Tranquillitatis. To reach the site, you traverse the Sea of Tranquility until you reach a long feature called the Rima Hypotia, just north of the lunar equator, and then you turn east.

Along the way, especially near Plinius, you encounter ridging, massive rimes and collapsed lava tubes, but those aside, you also see wonderful flat patches across the regolith. You see every kind of landscape the moon offers.

We had a long talk, Claire and I, as we drove. I recalled how when I was a kid, my dad had told me about watching the first moon landing when he was a kid and how, when I'd first set foot on the original landing site I'd felt connected to him in a way that had surprised me, connected with some dream of his in that Detroit suburb in whose back yard he watched the heavens. Maybe I was overdoing it, but even now, I told Claire, Tranquility Base seemed to me a sacred spot, a spiritual place, not unlike Machu Picchu. "Or Haleakala, that enormous high caldera in Hawaii."

"That's where I've seen this landscape before," she mused. "It's like being around the Hawaii volcanoes."

"Only up here it goes on forever. That's what I like about the lunar surface," I told her. "It's raw planet, as primitive as it gets."

"You don't want to see it become terraformed?"

"Not me. I like it just the way it is. Full of promise. Old and tough and full of promise."

She saw it first, a reflected blip of light from the replica lunar lander that had been installed at the site. "There it is," she said.

Sure enough, in the middle distance the spidery legs and drum-shaped body glinted in the sunlight. We closed in quickly.

"There's the American flag," Claire said when she spotted the little Old Glory left by Armstrong, with its horizontal batten to make it wave. I started telling her how it had been knocked flat when the Apollo crew had taken off, and how NASA had reconstructed the site, when she wondered out loud about debris around the lander. I thought at first she was seeing the scientific instruments the crew had left behind, the ESAP equipment, the passive seismometer.

Then I noticed the crude writing on the lander's side.

The childish yellow letters read, NOTHING COULD BE FINER THAN TO MAKE IT WITH A MINER.

I brought the van to a stop, rubbed my eyes, and sighed. "I don't suppose I should be surprised," I said. "They tagged the starter's pod on the golf course last year with the same color paint."

Ration wrappers and beer tubes littered the site near a burst waste cylinder. The white bunting hanging from the ladder turned out to be toilet paper. "They've trashed the whole site." To my great dismay I saw dozens of fresh bootprints stomped at the foot of the lander's ladder.

"So rude," Claire said. "Those people from the bar?"

"Two years ago they put laundry soap in the Fails of Diana."

"So adolescent. That tag is obscene."

I unbuckled my harness and moved some cartons to fish out the toolbox and service supplies. After rooting around I turned up with a can of hydraulic fluid in the emergency kit. Then I started struggling into my EVA suit.

"Where are you going?"

"I think this'll get the paint off," I told her, waving the can. "I'm going to try to restore things as best I can and clean up out there. But hey," I added when I saw her pulling on the baggy leggings, "not you."

"I wouldn't miss this for the world."

Once on the surface, Claire bounced around in her silver EVA suit like a kid at soccer practice. "Look at Earth," she blurted when she caught her breath. "So bright and blue and white. Walking around out here, it's like heaven, like I'm in heaven."

As for me, I felt like hell until I saw how well the hydraulic fluid dissolved the yellow paint from the metal shell of the replica lunar lander. I used the bunting I'd brought along to rub it clean. It took a while. Eventually I improvised a rake out of the LEM ladder and started to systematically wipe miner footprints from the regolith near the lander. Claire walked ahead, picking up litter, stowing it, detrashing the site.

As I raked I realized that Armstrong's famous bootprint was in there somewhere, but I had no choice except to obliterate it along with the miners'. When Claire finished her sweep of the site, she came around behind me and scattered handfuls of regolith to obscure the little furrows from my rake. It sounds easy enough, but out there in the clumsy suits, it was slow going.

Two and a half hours later, Tranquility Base looked like a museum exhibit again, except for the missing Armstrong footprint.

As it was perhaps the most famous single footprint in human history, we needed to replace it somehow. First we downloaded archival images from NASA's website and studied them carefully. My plan was to step gingerly on the passive seismometer so as not to leave tracks, then to bounce up the ladder and position myself as Armstrong had. From there it would be a simple matter of a hard step down from the bottom rung.

"Wait," Claire said.

"Make it quick," I said. "We've got about twenty minutes before we get into reserve life support."

"What's your boot size?"

"Eleven 2E. Does it matter?"

"According to NASA archives, Armstrong had small feet. His boot size was nine and a half. Narrow."

"Where the hell are we going to such small feet?"

She pointed down to her boots. "Nine and half. Narrow."

So we traded places. "One small step for Claire," she said just before she jumped. "One large step for all Clairekind."

Because we'd lost so much time cleaning up the site, I radioed in a negative report on the scouting trip and we had to drive straight back. Still, the drive was breathtaking, the sun high and slow across the sky, the Earth slipping to our left and then setting. We were both a little giddy at what we'd done.

From the moment we docked at the main dome, you could sense that the atmosphere at the resort had turned hectic. Less than twenty-four hours remained until the contest's conclusion. More Hyatt people had come up to join the partygoing journalists and hotel guests in a kind of last day's frenzy of food and wine and excess.

The big table on the dais in the Copernicus Room was askew, crowded with half-empty glasses of wine, coffee cups and abandoned room service plates littered with stale food. I found Stewart stretched across three chairs in the corner, drunk and sullen. Candace, who had been conducting virtual press conferences Earthside since early morning, was desperate, her voice hoarse. I took over for her, worked for eight hours straight, fielding questions and calls, infusing false cheer into our dismal numbers, pretending surprise and pride that "Luna," ahead all week, looked like it was going to finish first.

Claire and I became separated once I started to work, but then she really disappeared, into the gym, I supposed, or to take a nap after our excursion. Then it was dinnertime and I'd been too busy to connect with her, and I frankly was relieved that she wasn't there for the humiliation of the final night's banquet -- half the chairs empty, Stewart incoherent and helped to his room. During the gazpacho I was passed a note from Claire telling me she'd gone out on another EVA, entirely on her own, a walk around the dome to collect some rocks to take home, that she would find me later.

But when I looked for her at midnight, she was nowhere to be found. I dragged myself off to my room, fatigued beyond belief after the long day, and threw myself on my bunk.

I couldn't sleep. An active solar flare sent a wave of broadband static across all the communications channels, and the web audio link I lay there listening to reminded me of radio in the old days, fading in and out, conversations washed by flurries of audio snow ....

"Loyal caller, long-time listener, Art," a female voice said, a voice velvet with seductive breathiness, a siren's voice, eerily familiar. "Call me 'Heavenly Ten.' I used to call you from Earth. Remember me? You were so my hero."

Art's voice changed. "My god, I do remember you. Is that you, 'California Ten'? It's been...years. What can I do for you?"

Art recognized it too, or at least the program of his Al did, some deeply enduring quality of that voice. I remembered hearing a voice like that while listening to Art Ball when I was a kid. Almost all of Art's callers, then as now, were men, but once in a while you'd hear that siren's voice and the whole conversation changed, moved as if a step to the side. The voice seemed to speak directly to an old subroutine in the Al, to open a secret trap door: Ball had always had a weak spot for women who did call, not for the tough ones or the airheads, but especially for women whose breathy voices promised some unseen sybaritic redemption -- as his audience had been mostly male, the old-fashioned attitudes had been part of his appeal. The trap door was apparently still programmed in the Al, and you could hear him responding.

"I'm so mad at you, Art," the voice pouted.

"Oh my god, why?" And you could hear it, the genuine nervousness in his voice, the uncertain edge that comes from loss of confidence.

"You betrayed all of us women who love you when you blew off that moon contest. If you'd only supported it, think how many of us would be looking up there right now. And next week and the week after that. Gazing at the moon because it meant something." I thought Candace? then remembered her hoarse voice. Still, something familiar. "But that's all right," the voice went on. "I understand, Art, why a romantic idea like NAME THAT MOON wouldn't appeal to you. You're too old to be romantic anymore. I'll bet you never sit with Ramona outside your trailer in Parump looking at the moon on a beautiful night .... "

"Awwwoh," Art moaned. "You know, Ten? You might be right. It would have been romantic." "Might be?"

"Ramona is going to be annoyed with me."

"As she ought to be. You're letting those liberals from the New Solar Order pick the name of the moon."

Art moaned again. "What name do you suggest? lust tell me. I'll log onto that website and vote myself."

"What really matters is that your listeners call." Now I heard something else in the voice, a kind of marketing savvy hiding behind the voice changing circuit.

A couple more sentences and I was sure. The voice belonged to Claire.

I looked at my watch. Two A.M., twelve hours until the end of the contest. It was too late now to change the result, I decided. Still, I was touched down to my toes and smiled as I shut down all the circuits in my cubicle and settled back on my pillow. I told myself: Claire had tried to help, and it would all be over soon.

I OVERSLEPT. When I woke I took a long, hot shower, and slowly got dressed without logging in. On the final day of the contest, at the final hour, I went directly to the Copernicus Room to see the wreckage.

Barry Stewart, I was surprised to see, was on his feet, wearing a fresh suit and clean shaven. He was gesturing with animation to a larger knot of media people than I'd seen all week. Judging from equipment logos, new techs had also flown up. I recognized four network heavy hitters in the restricted area behind the dais, covering the story in holo presence. There was a special electricity in the room. A middle-aged guy with a recent facelift waved cheerfully to me from another crowd, I waved back-- he looked very familiar, but I couldn't recall his name. Candace came striding by and I asked her who he was.

"That's Karl Pope, you dummy," she said in her hoarse voice, stopping, looking me in the eye, cocking her head. "Didn't you hear he'd flown up from Maul?" She smiled. "Though you of all people I shouldn't be calling dummy. I apologize."

"For...?"

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, turning away from me with her arms raised, leaving me to stare at the wallscreen. The fullmoon cycled in the repeated time-lapse pattern that had been pixelled in all week, overlaid with our numbers. I blinked, rubbed my eyes in disbelief.

Overnight we'd gone from eighty million hits on our netsite to three and a half billion Earthside voters.

And that's how the moon came to be named Art Ball.

It is a strange result, I agree, as loony as Art Ball himself, and six months later, as I write this story, the moon's new official name is still too improbable for most people to take seriously. But the attention the new name created nonetheless saved us. Our bookings immediately shot up six hundred percent and the reservations site clogged with traffic. As you probably know, we're booked solid to the end of the decade and we're planning to excavate a new wing. What with all the extra flights United's put on, the United/Hyatt consortium's already started work on another landing pad.

Yet for all its odd quality, you do hear the moon called Art Ball up here once in a while (particularly among the miners), and you certainly do hear the name used more and more Earthside. Good-natured people look to the night sky and turn to one another with smiles and say, "Art Ball." All over the world, I'm told, kids have started pointing up and telling their friends that you can see his eyes, his face. Claire and I sat through a movie just last night, a remake of Huck Finn set on a Mars mission, and midway back to Earth the Huck character turned to the Jim character and said, looking to Earth's moon, "There he is. There's Art Ball."

When you live on the moon for a while, you adjust to its rhythms. After we celebrated the end of the contest, after Claire explained how she'd used voiceprints from Art Bali's archives to identify the AI's weak spot, and after she got her chance to spurn Karl Pope one more time, most of the media people flew back to Earth. Claire stayed on and we watched Earth set earlier and earlier in the shadowy coming of the real end of a lunar day.

On our way back from Tranquility Base, Claire had promised to spend a night with me, and I talked her into a trip for the two of us over an entire lunar darkcycle, fourteen days. Barry got me the keys to the spacehab module at Aitken Basin, near the moon's south pole. We both took leaves and I drove the van down there.

At 1,350 miles in diameter and two miles deep, the Aitken Basin is one of the largest craters in the solar system. It's a grand sight, all right, but that's not why we went down there.

Inside the basin is a smaller crater, large enough by Earth standards, but tucked inside the basin with a group of two others. This crater is the Shackleton Crater (yes, named after my great-great-grandfather, Ernest, of Antarctic fame). The spacehab module we drove to is parked at the point where the west rim of the Shackleton Crater intersects with the rims of the two other craters, forming a peak about 4,000 feet above the basin floor and canted at just the right angle to escape Earth's shadow. Because the sun falls on this patch of ground day and night virtually year-round, the Dutch astronomer Ockels called this spot "the peak of eternal light." Solar panels placed on the peak generate continuous power to the module, keeping it warm and cozy, the love nest of preference for a quarter million miles. EVA walks are spectacular. It's as if you had the Grand Canyon, Haleakala Caldera, and Everest absolutely all to yourself.

After a couple of days, Claire found herself pointing out how small a dot New York made when you looked for it, squinted hard, tried to make out its lights at night. "Just a dot," I remember her saying that day, curled on a sheepskin by the big lexan window. "From here New York is so just a dot. I can't tell you how much I've gotten to like it here. This is the ultimate place to get away from it all."

The day we'd left Blue Moon I'd turned down an unsolicited job offer, the best that had turned up so far, to be the head of PR for the Moorea Beach Hotel. When I could turn my back on the best Tahiti had to offer, I knew my heart belonged on the moon. That Claire wanted to stay here as well meant my heart would be full.

She handled some of the rocks she'd picked up earlier in the day, rocks for a collection she'd started the day we'd gone to Tranquility Base. She'd noticed that not all the moon rocks were of a uniform charcoal cast. Seen up close, many had subtle hints of color in them, trace elements and their oxides, the building blocks of Earth, hints of ocher and umber and copper and gold, silver and white, deep reds and darker browns -- all the colors of life hidden in the raw rock.

"Like Barry said," I told her. "There's a job for you up here if you want it. A life."

"Count me in," she said, snuggling close.

I buried my face in her soft hair.

A half hour later, as we sat looking at the milk-swirled blue pearl in the sky, she asked, "What do you think Barry'll want me to do?

"Marketing," I shrugged. "Work with Candace."

She was looking at Earth through the big window. "Mmmm, Shack?" Claire finally said. "You know, I'm just thinking, well, for later? Like I say, I'm just thinking, and maybe you know?"

"Know what, Claire?"

"Technically speaking, is 'Earth' a proper name?"