In Perpetuity by Ellis Morning

IN PERPETUITY
    Ellis Morning
    “Don’t you love a hint of slag on the evening breeze?”
    Ali Nazari raised an eyebrow at his colleague, Victor Talbot, even though his mirrored visor hid the gesture. The pair bounded along the dusty lunar surface toward their rover, carrying a loaded rectangular container between them. Gravity was more suggestion than imperative, which helped. On Earth, there was no way the lanky pair would have managed it.
    “What breeze?” Nazari asked. “If you smell anything in there, I guarantee it’s not slag.”
    Talbot cackled over Nazari’s transmitter. With his free hand, he pantomimed tugging at the collar of his environment suit. “You buffed my poetic streak right out of existence. Congrats. What’s the fate of this batch?”
    “Probably nothing we haven’t already seen,” Nazari replied. “I can think of so many better things.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well… like building a fort.”
    “Complete with slag-snowballs?”
    “Seriously. Shape bricks, make a slag-based cement, see how it works. When pyrolysis takes off, slag will be cheap.” Nazari hefted his end of the container for emphasis. “It’s the building material of the future.”
    “Lunar suburban sprawl. I can hardly wait,” Talbot grumbled.
    They reached their skeletal vehicle, added their burden to the existing stack of containers in the rear, and secured it for the drive home. Each lock slid into place without a sound. Plastic panels beside the locks shifted from red to green to confirm they were fastened.
    “Don’t want your own place to call home?” Nazari asked.
    “Negative. Once one schmuck has a house, everyone’s gonna want one. That leads to neighborhoods and, worse, homeowners’ associations.” Talbot pounded a fist against a stubborn lock. “Then we’ll need roads, parking lots, traffic signals, enforcement… you might as well go back to Earth.”
    “We might not have a choice on that count,” Nazari reminded him in a subdued tone. “The budget-axe drops any day now.”
    Talbot pointed toward the rolling horizon. “Give me stark barren pioneer country any day!”
    Nazari allowed the evasion, only to revert to a different sticking point with a teasing grin Talbot couldn’t see. “If you stay in colony dorms, how will you ever get time alone with that programmer you’re always ogling? Samantha?”
    “Oh, can it,” Talbot snapped. “It’s not like I stand a chance.”
    The men inspected their rigging one last time. Before climbing into the passenger seat, Nazari turned back the way they came. He faced a shallow depression in the mare, where suited chemists hovered like bees around a vacuum pyrolysis apparatus, the largest and most efficient to date. While Nazari and Talbot hauled away the byproducts of their experiment for analysis, the chemists harvested their end goal: pure oxygen.
    Nazari raised an arm to wave farewell to whomever might be watching. That was when he noticed something unusual upon the ground, not far from his feet. To most, it would have been a mundane rock, one of millions littering Oceanus Procellarum. To Nazari, it stood out like obsidian in a riverbed. He drifted over for a closer look.
    “Drop something, Ali?” Talbot asked.
    Nazari knelt and retrieved the rock. He held the football-sized, pockmarked specimen close to his visor, trying to get a feel for its texture through his gloves. “I thought this whole area was titanium-poor… but this looks like pure ilmenite,” he mused.
    Talbot was at Nazari’s side in an instant. “Hey, that’s something! Don’t tell the chemists, they’ll want to torch it. Mind if I look it over?”
    “Negative, I insist.”
    Talbot lifted the rock from Nazari’s hands, and returned to the rover to prepare it for the return trip and its eventual exposure to air. Meanwhile, Nazari knelt again. With the palm of his hand, he smoothed the patch of lunar dust where the rock had lain. He then used a finger to trace an X, along with