Leaving Luna

1 - What We Argue About That Isn't Arguing About Martian Socks

"Don't forget to pack your socks," Elliot yells from the salon.

It's almost, but not quite, an absent-minded exhalation. Elliot yells at me from the salon regularly, all sorts of proclamations and demands.

"Remember to pick up that salmon from the butcher shop on your way home."

"Your sister called. She wants you to call her back."

"Make sure Lucas wears their magnetic boots."

Normal things. Like packing socks.

I'm leaving for five years. Packing socks doesn't seem like it would rise to the criteria of yelling from the salon, but then Elliot's bar for salon yelling is very low. Elliot yelling is background noise in our home, a quaint apartment we found in Blair when I returned from my previous trip, thankfully just to Mars and back, without the extended voyage to the outer solar system, it only took two years.

We always move when I return from whatever travels The Chorus has me dispatched to. Elliot likes working on a new place and The Chorus pays well for the prolonged disruption. I joked once that he only married me for the paycheck. In a rare break from whimsy and flamboyance he looked me dead in the eye, locked in like a poodle on a sausage and spoke very deeply in a voice I came to associate with 'Serious Elliot'.

"I have more than enough money, Harding. I do not need yours."

And then, just as quickly as Serious Elliot came out, he was gone again with a wave of his hand, onto thinking about crepes at the breakfast place in Blair, the swanky suburb dome of Collins that we spent a not insignificant part of our time in. We moved to Blair after a few of my trips. All of Elliot and Lucas' friends are here. Our previous apartment in Collins proper, just west of the space elevator anchor, was declining as cargo traffic from the elevator picked up.

I suppose you could accuse us of 'white flight', but Collins wasn't particularly white anymore, none of Luna was. We are a cornucopia of ethnicities and races; I suppose you'd call them races. You would on Earth, but Earth is so pedestrian about such things, still squabbling and fighting about what part of mud someone is born on. Luna has Lunans, tall and thin and spindly, a variety of colors that for all attempts to add melanin to our diet, end up looking pasty and gray and dry. Maybe 'affluent relocation'. I suppose that fits.

"I'll just buy some on Mars," I yell back from my chair in the den.

I like the den, dark and brown and cozy. We have bookshelves, with actual books, printed and bound, some of them worn, imported from Earth at great expense. Most are printed on Luna, perfectly serviceable. The paper is thin and drab, the stories funny and scandalous, but the presentation can't compare to the thick, chunky Earth books. It's like reading from a leather-bound brick. I love it.

The den smells like a bookshop, something Elliot worked out when we moved, a fragrance diffuser or some such that he makes buy refills for weekly from a shop at Longroad station on the tram line I take to and from the Chorus offices in Collins. It's out of the way, but Elliot demands it. I do like the den smelling like books. I suspect he also enjoys the croissant I inevitably pick up from the bakery next to the fragrance shop.

"Martian socks leave your feat cold," Elliot yells.

I haul myself out of the overly cushioned chair I'm sitting in and carefully set my book, a short treatise on Governor Wu and their dealings with the longshoreman's union ten years ago, down on the reading table next to my chair. The events of the book are terribly dull, but the author manages to inject enough levity to keep me reading. I was away during the strike that crippled Collins and most of Luna. Elliot was forced to eat crepes without jam. The horror. The horror. They still mention it on occasion when we're out for breakfast.