Krishna won with three queens.  The deal passed to Hiro.  He shuffled quickly, and slapped the cards down with angry little punches of his arm.  "Okay," Anya said, "what's eating you?"

He looked up angrily, then down again and in a muffled voice, as if he had abruptly gone bashful as Krishna, said, "I'm shipping home."

"Home?"

"You mean to Earth?"

"Are you crazy?  With everything about to go up in flames? Why?"

"Because I am so fucking tired of the Moon.  It has to be the ugliest place in the universe."

"Ugly?"  Anya looked elaborately about at the terraced gardens, the streams that began at the top level and fell in eight misty waterfalls before reaching the central pond to be recirculated again, the gracefully winding pathways.  People strolled through great looping rosebushes and past towers of forsythia with the dreamlike skimming stride that made moonwalking so like motion underwater.   Others popped in and out of the office tunnels, paused to watch the finches loop and fly, tended to beds of cucumbers.  At  the midlevel straw market, the tents where offduty hobby capitalists sold factory systems, grass baskets, orange glass paperweights and courses in postinterpretive dance and the meme analysis of Elizabethan poetry, were a jumble of brave silks, turquoise, scarlet and aquamarine.  "I think it looks nice.  A little crowded, maybe, but that's the pioneer aesthetic."

"It looks like a shopping mall, but that's not what I'm talking about.  It's--"  He groped for words.  "It's like--it's what we're doing to this world that bothers me.  I mean, we're digging it up, scattering garbage about, ripping the mountains apart, and for what?"

"Money," Anya said.  "Consumer goods, raw materials, a future for our children.  What's wrong with that?"

"We're not building a future, we're building weapons."

"There's not so much as a handgun on the Moon.  It's an intercorporate development zone.  Weapons are illegal here."