Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “And that is a truth I am painfully aware of right now. Raul, you have been very quiet. Have you done anything fun in your life?”

  I could just see Raul smile through the darkness. “Yes, all the time, mostly to do with exotic new toys and the nefarious efforts of competing corporations to either steal secrets or sabotage their rivals, all of which I am forbidden to talk about. For something fun that I can talk about, how many of you have spent time in the deep Moon? I do not mean in the top few levels of the lunar cities that officials and tourists see, but the lower levels where the local people live and raise children? It is like a completely different world when you get past the official Moon.”

  I had and Leilani had; the Moon was our back-up fantasy for retirement. It was more realistic than a house upslope in Hawaii, and offered a degree of anonymity that the Earth could never provide. At one time both the Spacers Guild and the Lunar Council had tried to recruit me, had offered to provide me with a beautiful suite, five levels down. I went to Mars instead, so now they would barely acknowledge my existence and mostly asked me to keep away. Regardless, until today I had believed I could slip past the officials to live a quiet life in the deepest levels. I had friends there, people too controversial to live anywhere else.

  No one else on the team had made it below the hotels, hospitals, and offices on the upper three levels, so Raul continued. He had found that there were rich neighbourhoods and poor ones in most cities on the Earth. The rich neighbourhoods were beautiful with splashy, gaudy, oversized homes that fairly boasted about their owner’s importance. The restaurants were fabulous, the night life exciting. But rich neighbourhoods tended to look the same everywhere.

  The poorer neighbourhoods often had better food, better friends, and better comfort. The Earth no longer had much real poverty or crime, so it was safe almost everywhere to go out at night, to party with strangers in a sidewalk cafe, and to dance till three in the morning. The poorer neighbourhoods were filled with local culture, local art and local songs, all the variety and colour that made the Earth a wonderful place to live. If you felt like meditation, you could go to a big, famous temple that would be teaming with tourists and priests from wealthy families, or you could seek out a temple in a corner lot of a quiet neighbourhood and achieve inner harmony alone for an afternoon. If you wanted to appreciate art, you could go to a regional art gallery to see collections of the best that the Earth had produced over the last five thousand years, or you could walk down almost any alley, where local businesses provided blank walls, whitewashed every few months, for the local art community to fill with new and original productions. You could go to a great theatre to watch professional dancers in the company of wealthy patrons, themselves more interesting than the dancers, or you could go to any public square and join in the evening dances with local musicians playing flutes, violins, or whatever made harmonious sounds to local ears.

  The Moon was like that, but was stratified vertically rather than by wealth. The top levels were all offices, stores and government services, but the real people lived below, and became more interesting as you went down.

  Most of the population of the Moon were descended from spacers who did not want to return to the Earth, so political issues were vigorously debated in every bar, park and library. So were literary issues, with poetry readings, impromptu theatre, and song festivals breaking out at every lunch and dinner throughout the city.

  Art covered the walls of every home, store and hallway, not just from would-be local artists, but even children’s art from school, the kind of pictures that proud parents everywhere put up in their kitchens. On the Moon, they posted them outside, next to the doors of their homes, where their friends and neighbours could enjoy them as well. Kids learned to be art critics and art teachers very young on the Moon. Older children would coach younger ones on how to draw stick figures that other kids would laugh at in delight instead of scorn. Raul added that he had had a few lessons himself and was now much better at drawing stick figures.

  The clothes that people wore on the Moon would never find markets on the Earth outside the tropics, but that was mostly because Lunatics did not have to deal with weather. The climate in most lunar cities was permanently set at subtropical with a zero-percent chance of rain. People wore whatever pleased them, and nothing if nothing pleased them better. Sarongs were popular, as were spacer pajamas, but their fashionability came and went. To a spacer’s eye, the skirts, dresses and gowns popular on the Moon seemed exotic, because such loose clothes would be unmanageable in zero-G. To an Earth-trained eye, the complete lack of distinction between male and female styles was astonishing. In any place and time, boys and girls could recognize the difference, but masculinity and femininity were displayed in different ways and only when it seemed important. About the only things people never wore were heavy sweaters and parkas.

  Body paint may be the oldest form of human decoration, preceding even the skins of wild animals, but had been taken to new levels on the Moon. Teenagers, always gluttons for attention, would spend hours in the body studios after school, painting fabulous designs on each other’s bodies, then cover them with diaphanous gowns to make them seem more mysterious. Sometimes they would wear a full chador to seem even more mysterious. Fashion sometimes dictated that the chador should include a slit cut all the way from top to bottom, loosely tied together with coloured strings, just to be sure that everyone knew there was something wonderfully mysterious inside.

  Many people used the same meds as spacers to control their hair length, just for convenience, but the short fur was often coloured with spectacular designs to match their clothes. Other people adjusted their meds to grow enormous hairdos that made Tang China seem tame. The low lunar gravity allowed intricate designs, held together with magnets and gel so the whole mass would sway and flounce as they strolled the corridors with a long, graceful glide.

  As Raul spoke, I became aware of a very quiet and quickly suppressed giggling. Peering through the gloom, I realized it came from Evgenia and Katerina, who were not even close together. They had not enjoyed the game of Fleet Maneuvers, but seemed to have mastered the comm interface well enough to hold a private conversation, probably at Raul’s expense.

  Raul ignored them and continued. Parents of teenage children spent those years in fear that their willful, foolish offspring were doing more than body painting and hair styles in those studios. Children past puberty remained fertile until they were sufficiently mature to make a full set of deposits in a genetic repository. The deposits could not start until they were old enough to understand and sign legal contracts at the age of eighteen.

  I forgot the giggles as a wave of nostalgia swept through me. I remembered my own parents’ anxiety while I passed through those rebellious, confusing years. I had choked up already from Raul’s discussion of children’s art and teenage clothing choices, and even in the darkness I saw that Leilani was almost as badly off.

  It was hard for anyone new to space to understand the longing and hope that lunar children raised in a spacer’s heart. Many spacers would not or could not return to the Earth at the end of their contract. Their only choices if they wanted a family were to emigrate to the Moon, Mars, or the Belt. Mars and the Belt were impossible for me. A standard spacer contract ran for five years, renewable for another five, but both of us were well beyond that. If we did not retire soon, we would be too old to have children of our own, and we had talked around the possibility for enough years to know that we both wanted them desperately.

  On the Earth, proper medical care and exercise would allow parents to bear children into their sixties, confident of still being healthy and vigorous when their offspring reached adulthood. In space, cosmic radiation sapped our health and cut short our lives even with the best meds that modern medicine could provide. If we really wanted children, our only realistic option was to retire to the Moon in the next few years, retrieve our genetic deposits from the Earth, and start a family in the deep levels that Raul was des
cribing.

  Our cases were not the same, of course. I knew that I was too broken to be a parent and that my dream was nothing more than that. Leilani, however, should have taken a ground-based job years ago in a place where children would have been a real possibility, any one of the promotions she had been offered. Instead, she had chosen to stay and work with me, against all my urging. She had kept the foolish dream alive, fluttering just beyond my reach until today. I had felt my last illusions of hope dying with every word that Molongo and Singh had said that morning, and I mourned the loss as Raul spoke of babies and pictures and parental concern.

  He finally got to the point of his story. On one tour of duty that had taken him for a month to the Moon, he had been invited by a friend to a birthday party that was being held far down in the deepest layers, and there he had for the first time met an actual Martian.

  People on the Moon still counted their age in Earth years, even though they rarely saw the sun and never felt the changing seasons. It was an act of nostalgia, almost an oath of fealty to the ancient rhythms of the Earth, to celebrate each passing year. Everyone made their own choice of calendar: Gregorian, Julian, Hijri, or one of the many lunisolar calendars developed in southern and eastern Asia. It did not matter which one you used, and a typical birthday invitation had the celebrant’s age in five or ten different systems on the back.

  Alcohol was forbidden in space, but not on Mars and not on the Moon, although it was ferociously expensive. Raul had brought as a gift a small bottle of 20-year-old scotch. The birthday girl was eighty years old and had been raised in Scotland. She declared was it was terrible, the worst thing she had ever put in her mouth, and brewed by a rival clan, as the tears ran down her face and she hugged Raul half to death. A handful of her closest and dearest friends were permitted small sips, all except one man who was allowed a small glass of his own. In silence, they raised their glasses in memory of old friends and times past.

  This man was dressed even more oddly than most, in what seemed to be an old uniform with rust red pants and shirt, pressed and beribboned, epaulettes on the shoulders, and belts around the waist and over the left shoulder. There were loops and clips for weapons, but of course no weapons would be permitted at a birthday party, or anywhere else on the Moon. He hardly spoke a word at the party, but it was clear that he and the birthday girl had been more than friends in their younger years.

  I personally wondered how he dared to wear such a uniform in public, because I recognized it immediately from Raul’s description. It was the dress uniform of the Spooks, Governor Ngomo’s secret police. He had somehow survived the Incursion and escaped to the Moon. I probably knew the man, probably worked with him during the worst of my years of service on Mars. He might even have remembered me as a friend.

  If the woman had a Scottish origin, there was a fair chance she had emigrated to the southern Tharsis region on Mars, possibly even worked in the Governor’s compound, which would have been a sensible place to have met a spook in the line of duty. I might have known her, although there were too many possibilities to be sure without meeting her in person.

  Raul had tried to engage the man in conversation, but found it impossible. He admitted to having lived on Mars and said that he had moved to the Moon to escape the rising intolerance and violence of Martian society. He refused to say anything more and left a short while later. Nor were his friends any more open.

  It might be that he had never told them the rest of his story, but I personally guessed that the spacer society of the Moon was simply drawing a curtain around him, giving him the privacy to live his life in peace. In my dreams, I hoped for the same tolerance and discretion, but the assassin in the back of my head wondered if he was a plant, an agent of the Imperium, whether he was a real refugee or a soldier still in service. Of course, if he had been a Spook, he had probably come from a faction hostile to the Imperium. The warm longing I had felt drained away, leaving me chilly, although the temperature had not changed.

  Raul was finishing up, concluding that there were Martians on the Moon. He asked me if I could guess at the significance of his presence, and whether I recognized his uniform. I opened my mouth but nothing came out, until I finally choked out that it was a story for a different day, not this afternoon. Then I waited for a few minutes for the stress to subside, while Leilani and Marin looked on with concern. Marin was surely monitoring my state, and Leilani knew me well enough to recognize the signs. No one else seemed to have noticed my distress in the darkness.

  Katerina spoke up as I tried to recover.

  “Chandrapati, you are the other odd one in this group. Do you feel well enough to tell us something lighthearted and uplifting? I do not think either I or Raul actually managed that.”

  He laughed, something I would have found difficult after a day on a diet of water.

  “This is not my first fast, and they are normally quite uplifting, a triumph of the soul over mere bodily demands. There was one incident that in retrospect was kind of funny. For obvious reasons, I usually try to avoid stressful activities while on a fast, but that time the stress came to me unexpectedly and seemed quite harmless at first.

  “My home temple is one of the big, gaudy Hindu ones like the temples that Raul was talking about, and I missed part of his story remembering the gopuras at the four cardinal points around the walls, with a big gate in the middle of each tower. It is a Vaishnavite temple, so the gopuras are covered with brightly coloured sculptures of the God and his avatars: many armed Vishnu reaching out with love, compassion, healing, and health; Rama and Hanuman leading the army of monkeys to rescue Sita from the demon Ravana; Krishna stealing the clothes of the gopikas. Many pilgrims and tourists come to see the temple, and it is every bit as noisy as Raul indicated. However, there are smaller satellite temples nearby, sheltered and obscure to permit meditation and yoga for those who need to draw nearer to God. My job takes me to many places where I must deal with terrible people filled with anger, hatred, corruption and lies. I fast and meditate in the smaller temples after nearly every case, sometimes for a week, once for nearly a year.”

  He settled back, stared at the image of the Milky Way for a few minutes, and quietly launched his tale. He had been recovering between jobs, fasting, meditating and assisting the priest in the temple. He had been so regular that the local priests accepted him as almost one of themselves, lacking mostly the dedication to quit all worldly activities. It was something he had seriously considered, but each time he entered the temple he reviewed the ten principle avatars of Vishnu. They were allegories, of course, but personified the disasters that constantly threatened the Earth. History provided many concrete examples of each avatar. He wondering that the world needed saving so often, and wondering also at the teaching that the avatars of Vishnu are innumerable. His work in Law Enforcement showed him so many gentle, innocent people who needed protection from the evil that still infested the Earth.

  Worse, he had lived through the terror of the Incursion when Mother India had lost another of her children. A year before, Bengaluru had been one of India’s ancient wonders, spared during the Final War when Kochi and Chennai had been devastated because of their naval bases. It had been incinerated in the bombing at the start of the Incursion because it hosted a spaceport. Nothing overtly terrible had happened since, but everyone was jumpy, overreacting to any unusual event.

  Worse, he had been watching the level of corruption increase steadily for years, building towards some new crisis of which the Incursion was surely just the opening act. Overhead, the TDF was building its new fleet, planning the Counterstrike. Evil was not an abstract concept, but a real part of the human condition that required constant vigilance to hold in check. Each year he felt more keenly the pain and compassion that had drawn Vishnu so often to the Earth, and felt a small kinship as he worked to bring justice to the poor and weak.

  He also remembered the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna had counselled the warrior Arjuna to fight honourably, righteous
ly, in the war against the Kauravas, who had chosen to become evil and were attempting to inflict their evil on the rest of the world. After long consideration, he had decided that the Terrestrial Council, with all its flaws, supported Dharma more effectively than any government in recorded history, and that his own nonviolent work for justice was itself a form of Dharma Yuddha, a righteous war against evil.

  Katerina reminded Chandrapati that this was supposed to be lighthearted and uplifting.

  He laughed and agreed, but justified his digression as necessary to understand his mental state at the time. On the day of the story he had been meditating already for a week between cases. The big temple was so busy that he preferred to meditate in a small temple on a side street that led off the plaza in front of the main temple. His little temple was quiet, enclosed within a high wall with a small but colourful gopura at the main gate and a door through the side wall that opened into an alley. The gopura was tiny compared to the four around the main temple, a pyramidal structure covered with sculptures of Vishnu and his avatars, especially Krishna, Rama and Narasimha, topped with the customary pair of stylized cow horns. The gate through the gopura opened directly onto a short flight of stairs up to the temple, but the side door opened to a small courtyard between the temple and a short row of shrines and meditation halls. Unlike the temple, the row of shrines had originally been a block of shops with storage rooms in their basements. The basements were primarily used to store cleaning equipment and supplies. Behind the shrines stood a row of trees and shrubs just in front of the back wall.

  The temple yard was home to a flock of pigeons who roosted overnight in the gopura. Local worshipers usually arrived in the morning with offerings, and pilgrims in the afternoon, feeding the birds and animals as an expression of their loving kindness. The flock flew off to scavenge for food in the plaza near noon, but otherwise spent their time in the gopura, on the walls or in the shrubbery. There was also a resident troop of macaque monkeys who came and went on the same schedule as the birds, and for mostly the same reasons, although they also pilfered from the food stalls and nearby restaurants. A few dogs and cats occasionally wandered in from the street, mostly pets of the local merchants and their families. Chandrapati knew them by name, loved them all.