The Diamond Moon Read Online Free PDF

Students and old folk peered at real paper books through thick rimless glasses and read flimsy newspapers printed in what to most Euro-Americans were indecipherable squiggles. Everyone was talking, talking, talking in musical tones most North Continental visitors heard only as singsong and jabber.
    Usually auburn-haired—even handsome, in a fresh-faced, freckled way—Blake had disguised himself well, look-ing less like young Ghengis Khan than a Pearl River dock rat. He was in fact half Chinese on his mother’s side, the other half being Irish, and although he did not know more than a few useful phrases of Burmese or Thai or any of the dozens of other Indochinese languages common on Ganymede, he spoke eloquent Mandarin and expressively earthy Cantonese—the latter being the favorite trade language of most of the ethnic Chinese who made up a substantial proportion of the Shoreless Ocean’s non-Indian population.
    From the low overheads hung paper banners which flut-tered endlessly in the breeze of constantly turning ventilator fans; these did their inadequate best to clear the corridors of the smell of pork frying in rancid oil and other, less pal-atable odors. The stall owners had rigged up awnings against the flickering yellow glare of the permanent light-ing; the awnings billowed ceaselessly, waves in an unquiet sea of cloth. Blake pushed ahead, against the tide. His des-tination was the contracting firm of Lim and Sons, founded in Singapore in 1946. The Shoreless Ocean branch had opened in 2068, before there was a sizable settlement on Ganymede; a generation of Lims had helped build the place.
    The firm’s offices fronted on the chaotic intersection of two busy corridors near the center of the underground city. Behind a wall of plate glass bearing the gold-painted ideo-grams for health and prosperity, shirt-sleeved, bespectacled clerks bent studiously to their flatscreens.
    Blake stepped through the automatic door; abruptly the corridor sounds were sealed out, and there was quiet. No one paid him any attention. He leaned over the rail that separated the carpeted reception area from the nearest clerk and said in careful Mandarin, “My name is Redfield. I have a ten o’clock appointment with Luke Lim.”
    The clerk winced as if he’d had a gas attack. Without bothering to look at Blake he keyed his commlink and said, in rapid Cantonese, “A white guy dressed like a coolie is out here, talking like he just took Mandarin 101. Says he has an appointment with Luke.”
The commlink squawked back, loud enough for Blake to overhear. “See what happens if you tell him to wait.”
“You wait,” said the clerk in English, still not looking up.
    There were no chairs for visitors. Blake walked over to the wall and studied the gaudy color holos hanging there, some stiff family portraits and wideangle views of construc-tion projects. In one, pipes as tangled as a package of dry noodles sprawled over a kilometer of surface ice; it was a dissociation plant, converting water ice to hydrogen and oxygen. Other holos showed ice mines, distilleries, sewage plants, hydroponic farms.
    Blake wondered what role Lim and Sons had played in the construction of these impressive facilities; the holos were uncaptioned, allowing the viewer to assume anything he or she wished. Unlikely that Lim and Sons had been prin-cipal contractor in any of them. But one in particular cap-tured his attention: it depicted a big-toothed ice mole cutting through black ice, drilling what was presumably one of the original tunnels of the settlement that had become Shoreless Ocean.
For twenty minutes Blake patiently cooled his heels. Fi-nally the clerk keyed the link and muttered “Still standing here . . . no, seems happy as a clam.”
    Another five minutes passed. A man appeared at the back of the room and came to the railing, hand extended. “Luke Lim. So sorry, Mr. Redfield”— Ruke Rim. So solly, Missa Ledfeared —“Most unavoidable detained.” Lim was