Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 236
With her feathers back in place, Sani replied. “In time, perhaps. Some memories are, of course, forever lost, but that was true while you were alive as well; for instance, your species sleeps and never has everything when it wakes that it had going into sleep. Does your experience feel any different in that respect? Ellen and I have, perhaps, been through so many changes in form and so many long sleeps, that it seems very simple and natural to us.”
“Our memories are well backed up, of course,” Ellen added.
Dimitri shook his head. They would never understand. But perhaps there was a higher authority. Not that he, in his zombie form, could have much influence. Or could he? Did the Church still exist? There must be others like him. The only sure way to failure is not to try. “How long has this reclamation project been going on? Can it be stopped?”
While Ellen’s smile did not waver, Sani’s feathers fluffed momentarily. Was that a sign of the alien’s irritation?
“It is almost complete, Cardinal Osarian,” Ellen answered evenly. “We saved the hardest cases for last. We’ll enable the net for you shortly and you’ll be able to learn as much, or little as you feel you need to make your decision.”
“I already made it!” Dimitri shouted.
“Uh, your informed decision,” Ellen said in a way that tried to communicate the weight of hundreds of trillions of years’ worth of additional information.
A valid point, Dimitri conceded, to himself.
“But first,” Ellen continued. “I would like you to meet our mates and someone who has been asking to see you.”
Unholy curiosity got the better of him again, as well as a remembrance of the virtue of forbearance that was expected of his long-ago office.
“Very well.” It struck him that zombie him was a conscious being. Whether that being should be called Dimitri Cardinal Osarian was a matter of some question, but, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Then he thought about all those simulations that were run to “fit” to him. Would they not have been as conscious? And all simply turned off to try again? Where was the morality in that? Of course, he had turned himself off. He had fought against the technology that had prevented many natural deaths, and then ended up using it himself, after countless people had died believing that they had taken the moral course as a result of his teachings. Others had called him Cardinal Death. He asked forgiveness again.
The door slid open to reveal three beings — a man, another flightless parrot, and . . . an angel, whose wings brushed the top of the door. He recognized the latter immediately, though she was clothed in a white dress with a bib that tied behind her neck. Ellen kissed the man as the two aliens touched their beaks.
Ellen introduced them. “Dimitri Cardinal Osarian, this is my husband David, Sani’s mate, Modani, and someone I believe you know.”
He stood up, and immediately recognized that the room was in the gentle lunar gravity that he’d become used to. Fortunately, he caught the arms of the chair to make his rise somewhat less undignified.
“Sister Annette.”
“Just Annette now, Dimitri.”
“Have you just been . . . ah, reclaimed?”
She laughed musically. “No, I have been active the entire time, though most of that was in travel stasis.” She held out her arms to him and he went to her as though drawn by a force even his iron will could not resist.
“God forgive me,” he said, through tears.
She stroked his back, lightly. “God has. I have. Now, you must forgive yourself. You don’t want to feel guilty forever.”
“Forever?”
She laughed. “Dimitri, what part of ‘eternity’ do you not understand?”
2015
The Moon House
“When now?” Betsy McKay asked, looking up into the clear blue Appalachian evening sky. There’d been another delay.
“If you ask me, never!” old Ned Hochkins answered. “Damned nonsense, dropping houses from the Moon as if this were Oz or something.”
But the half moon, a day or two short of first quarter, smiled to Betsy. The Moon and the sky were Betsy’s friends, her solace when Ma and Dad would fight over the scraps of another bad day. She missed Dad, despite all that. He’d been gentle and huggable when he wasn’t mad but he was gone four years now; his last argument had been with a man who had a gun. Some days it seemed like a century, some days like last week.
“You’re out here, too, Ned,” Ma said, gentle humor in her voice. He looked away and adjusted the straps on his overalls.
“Well they’re late, Nellie, and I’m going,” he declared and started walking back to his tent. Almost everyone was in tents, after the fire. “It’s just as well; they’d likely miss the field and splatter the whole mess like a cow pie on what’s left of the town.”
“They’re late,” Dicky, said. Betsy’s eight-year-old brother pointed at his watch. “Three minutes.”
“Mr. Wu said the schedule wasn’t real tight,” Betsy said. “They sometimes have to move a little to avoid space junk. The Moon people are all still here.”
All five of them stood along the street side of Willie Jones’ fallow field, the one where they used to grow tobacco until it became illegal back in ‘27 when Betsy was eight. She remembered because she had just started to baby-sit Dicky that year after Ma gave up her writing and went to work down at the gas station after Daddy got himself killed. Jones’ field was the biggest clear spot around Gottville. It smelled of wet hay now; the rain had finally come in earnest, after the fire, of course.
Betsy spied a lanky, black-haired man in the gray lunar service uniform, “Hey! Mr. Wu!” Mr. Wu was her hero, everything that tall, dark and handsome was supposed to be. She wished she weren’t so skinny—after all, she was officially a woman now, so something ought to start changing outside as well as inside. It wasn’t quite fair.
He looked up and waved, but then hurried over to the truck with the antennas on it, talking to the little card in his hand.
On impulse, Betsy ran after him. He wouldn’t let her down. He couldn’t.
“Mr. Wu?”
He turned and sighed. “Betsy . . .”
“Is everything all right?” she asked, but a look at his face told her it wasn’t.
“No. There’s been another diversion.” His voice was tight, as if he were angry but trying not to show it.
Betsy didn’t like that word, “diversion.”
“The houses went somewhere else?”
Mr. Wu nodded slowly. “It was the U.N.’s decision, not ours.”
“Then we should go home?”
He looked very pained and put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe next time, okay?”
She flinched away, tears in her eyes, then turned and fled back to Dicky.
Instead of going back to their tents, Betsy and Dicky went home. James Street was gravel track winding into fire-scarred hills, barely wide enough for two cars to squeeze by. The last rain had taken most of the burnt smell away.
1238 was a few charred timbers and a fireplace—all that was left of the little frame house her great-great grandfather had built two hundred years ago. They’d saved his picture, though—the one that hung over the fireplace mantle.
“Not much left,” Dicky said for the thousandth time.
Betsy picked her way through the mud and ashes to what used to be her room and looked beyond the hump of rubble that marked the south wall to where the grove of maples used to rustle and her swing used to swing. Blackened stumps now. “I think we should rebuild the old house, just like it was, if we get the money.”
“Why use money for that? We gotta hire some bulldozers and scrape it flat. Sell the land, if it’s worth anything. Start fresh somewhere else. That’s what Dad would have done.”
“It was Mom’s house, Dicky, and grandpa’s.”
“Yeah. Well it’s gone now. And that lying Moon man hasn’t got us another like he said he would.”
Even the memory of a crush, she thought, deserved some loyalty. “Don’t call him that, it wasn’t his fault.”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s go, I’ll bet dinner’s ready. It’s getting chilly and I’m hungry.”
Betsy took one more look at the ashes, then said, “Okay.” She took her little brother’s hand and they started down the road.
“Sis.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If I close my eyes at night I can imagine there’d been no fire and I’m in my own bed and Dad’s reading a story to me. Do you think if we imagine hard enough, it will come true? Just like nothing happened?”
Betsy shook her head. “Imagination can makes things come true that never happened before, but it can’t make things happen again.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Betsy said. “Maybe that imagination gets all used up.”
They had a surprise when they got to their tent. Ma had managed to make some fresh bread in the microwave, and Mr. Wu had come to dinner. Betsy’s heart jumped to her throat for a moment, then she put it back down again. He had failed her, failed everyone.
“I thought you’d be gone,” Betsy said, coolly, when he greeted her.
He looked very serious. “We still have work to do. Someone decided that a plantation in Myanmar had a greater need for housing, and after them, a Chinese army base in Tibet. But we’ll keep trying. I made a promise.”
“You shouldn’t make promises someone else has to keep,” Dicky said.
“Dicky!” Ma said.
Mr. Wu raised a hand. “He’s got a point. In theory, we’re there under a U.N. charter, but we’re basically pioneers and business people. When we make a promise, that’s different than the U.N. making a promise. At least that’s how most of us feel. We make the houses, we make the re-entry shields, we run the launch track . . .”
“How does that work?” Dicky blurted, his hostility forgotten. “Tell me how it works!”
Mr. Wu smiled. “It’s just a railroad that rides on magnets instead of wheels. We send one car at a time. They just go faster and faster until they run out of track—but by then they’re going too fast for the Moon’s gravity to hold them down, so they just fly right on off.”
“But they have to use rockets to come back, right?”
“Nope. The maglev spaceships can land just like they take off; it’s like landing on an aircraft carrier.”
“Where do you get the wood for the houses?”
Mr. Wu laughed. “It’s a kind of artificial wood—more like fiberglass really. Robotic mining machines gather lunar basalt for a factory that melts it with concentrated sunlight, and draws the melt into fibers. The factories weave those into sheets and paste the sheets together with a synthetic resin. The robot factory does just about everything, though we have a couple people watch over it. Could I have another roll?”
Betsy’s hand got to the roll plate before her mother’s. She almost, but not quite, tipped a roll into Mr. Wu’s coffee, but he got the plate steadied in time. His eyes twinkled at her.
He was just another salesman, she told herself, getting everyone’s hopes up, selling the Moon.
Ma cleared her throat. “When they make stuff on the Moon, it doesn’t make a lot of pollution on the Earth, and doesn’t use energy here either,” Ma said. “And it doesn’t cost hardly anything to drop lunar stuff down to Earth wherever people want so I guess everyone wants it.” She sighed. “We’ll just have to wait until someone thinks we’re important enough.”
“That’ll be the day,” Dicky said with exaggerated sarcasm.
Mr. Wu shook his head. “I think you’re important enough.”
“But what can you do?” Betsy asked.
He looked her in the eyes, then. Seriously, the way adults look at each other and with a just enough of a hint of irritation that Betsy simultaneously realized he was taking her seriously and that she had maybe stepped over some kind of line a little.
There was a time she might have shrunk back and covered her face, but, heart pounding, she stared right back at him. In the silence, they could hear the tent flap in the evening breeze.
His face softened a bit and there was a hint of a smile. “Look, I have to keep quiet about this, so not a word out of this room, okay?”
Everyone nodded gravely.
“I had a little chat with Lisa Reynolds—she’s the Far Side administrator. Uh, what are you all doing in a couple of days, uh Saturday?”
In spite of herself, Betsy began to hope a little.
Ma gestured around the tent at the cots and the tables and the boxes. “Rearranging things a little. Getting ready for the memorial service Sunday. Why, are you rearranging things, too, Sam?”
Mr. Wu nodded then looked at Betsy with a hint of a smile. “But no promises this time.”
Betsy looked up into those dark eyes and toyed in her mind with the idea of daring to call Mr. Wu ‘Sam’—in front of Ma.
“Aren’t things real heavy for you here?” Dicky asked. “Six times as heavy? How can you even walk?”
Mr. Wu shrugged. “When we carry heavy things on the Moon, we carry six times as much. When we jump, we jump much higher. That way, our bones and our muscles are ready to come here if we have to—and we get more done up there. Exercise becomes a habit; on the Moon; I’ve played moonball three or four times a week for forty years, since I was two. But, yes, we work harder here just moving around, and get tired more quickly at first.” He grinned again. “And hungry.”
Betsy saw him look at Ma. She grinned back.
“Will you have some more chicken, Sam?” Ma asked, still smiling. This wasn’t fair, Betsy thought. Ma was at least three years older than Mr. Wu.
By Saturday night, word had gotten around that there would be another attempt, and everyone was at the field again, even Ned. The blackened stubble was floodlit and someone had brought a big yellow forklift over from Cartertown. Mr. Wu and his gray-uniformed lunar people were all around, shooing people away from the field.
The whine of a fan car broke the night, and everyone looked around, trying to spot it.
“There!” Dicky said, pointing across the field. But Betsy couldn’t see it for the spotlights.
Then it dropped into the light in the middle of the field and hovered as if it was going to set down just there. It had a big U.N. on its side, and it rotated around so everyone could see it. Then it skidded sideways to the edge of the field, as if its pilot had second thoughts about setting down ‘just there,’ and settled into the stubble.
Its door popped up and a man jumped from the door and strode toward Mr. Wu in the same angry way that Daddy used to walk when he was going to argue with someone.
“Mr. Wu has a gun,” Dicky said.
“No he doesn’t,” Betsy said. “That’s his telephone.”
They couldn’t hear what was being said, but the U.N. man was angry and waving his arms. Mr. Wu was impassive. Then he pointed up toward the sky.
As if on cue, the loudest noise Betsy had ever heard shook the valley. And then, right away again.
The U.N. man’s hands dropped. Spotlights rose to the sky, off to the east.
“Wind’s coming from the east,” someone said. “Right on target, I’d guess.”
“Damn,” Ned said. “I was kind of hoping it would land on the U.N. car.”
Everyone laughed—living in tents wasn’t fun, and the Moon’s offer of houses the day after the big fire had made everyone’s news service. But the U.N. headquarters had delayed and delayed.
The laughter faded as the spotlights found their target.
“Wow!” Dicky shouted.
It was the biggest parachute Betsy had ever seen, and hanging under it was a big cone on top of a huge curved dish, all black and gray, looking for all the world like the first Apollo spaceship to come back from the Moon, but this was much, much bigger. Mr. Wu said it was a hundred feet across.
It came in stately, like an old mare walking up to a water trough on a hot day. Every now and then, a flame would shoot off to the side from the top of the cone sending sparks in to the night sky, and the crowd would go “oooh” and “ahhh.” Rockets, Mr. Wu had told them, to keep it on target.
It got closer and closer and then just kind-of settled into the field with a barely audible thump that nevertheless shook the ground more than the sonic boom had shaken it.
Everything sat that way for a while.
“Betsy, I have something to show you.”
She spun around and there was Mr. Wu. Betsy looked up at him, wide-eyed.
“Well, come on,” he said.
He took her by the hand and they walked down together through the stubble and into the spotlights right in front of everyone. A U.N. man in a coat and tie joined them.
“If you would excuse me, uh, do you think this is wise? We need to make a few announcements, talk to the media, and try to recover as much as we can in light of the misunderstanding . . . Damn it Wu, listen to me. You work for us.”
Mr. Wu turned to the man, not looking to Betsy at all like the man was a boss of his. “I have something to do first. I’m sure you can think of something to say to the media, but I imagine the pictures will be quite sufficient.” Then he turned away without waiting for an answer and began marching toward the spacecraft, quickly enough that Betsy had to break into a run to keep up.
They reached the heat shield, which was a black, foamy kind of thing, and even warmer than the Indian summer air. It smelled like a blacktop road at noon in July.
Mr. Wu pressed a button. There was a sharp crack and the sides of the cone split right in front of Betsy and slowly fell away, wrinkling and billowing on the way down like a tissue in the breeze.
“Moonglass cloth—I’m sure you’ll find use for it. You can cut up the heat shield too, for sheds or walks or whatever, but be sure you anchor it—it’s reasonably rigid, but it’s about half the weight of balsa wood.
“There,” he said as the last curtain of moonglass cloth drifted to the stubble of the field, revealing several characters above the door that looked like Chinese to Betsy, but right beside the door was a sign in what looked like wood. And there was a name, in English, and an address.
