Many Moons

by Scott Azmus

  “Marky! Pay attention. Some Earth people are coming here. The ones who paid for us, Marky. They’ll probably hit you first and then come here.”

  Marky felt smart. He already knew about the visitors. Friends, he thought. Doctor Pat said they were friends. “Probably friends,” he said. They wouldn’t hurt him if he kept his claws put away and answered their questions.

  In his head, Trisa’s voice took on a renewed urgency. “They are not friends, Marky. They are not ordinary people from Earth. People who might like you. These people are coming to hurt you. They cut your program a long time ago. Long before they forced Doctor Pattison and Doctor Harkness to make us.

  “You’ve got to warn Doctor Pattison. The Earth people are frightened by what these bad people have told them. This is their last chance to gain control. Tell Doctor Pattison not to—”

  Trisa’s voice cut out. A chaos of mixed perception swept Marky’s mind. Images of Jupiter, dark spacecraft, bright weapons, schematics, stars, moons ...

  He was still trying to sort it out when something awful happened.

  The day lights flared and failed and every surface shimmered in a luminous, auroral haze. The air smelled strange, almost burnt, and the shimmering sank right into everything. The gene sequencer’s tiny diagnostic lights flared. Small bulbs popped and sprayed. Threads of blue lights erupted from the big LASK computer where Marky’s tutor lived. The lights rolled from control panel to control panel. Then, for a fraction of a second, even the chirp and warble of Jupiter’s great voice fell from Marky’s thoughts.

  It was a quiet unlike any he had ever known. He stood at the center of his room, frozen in mid-panic, listening. Where was Jupiter? Where was Trisa?

  Sparks flew from a bank of computer displays. A column of spotlights burst. Bright shards scattered.

  Only when a string of brown and black bubbles rippled across his sealed keyboard, did Marky react. His cat was in trouble. He grabbed the Lego and screamed as it, too, shattered. His claws flashed in and out. His gill rakers pumped and pumped. His big tails sweeps slapped wildly until a familiar darkness caught his eye.

  His nails peeled curls of bright, foam steel from the floor as he forced himself under his bed.

  An oval flashed on Marky’s wall, brightened as it shrank to a circle, and disappeared as the light beam probed his room. Someone, a regular human like Doctor Pat, peered through the barrier. Marky’s heart throbbed anxiously. His tiny eyelids quickly nictitated. This was not Doctor Pat. Though suited for surface exposure, this person was smaller. More compact. Armed.

  The light flashed past Marky’s eyes, paused, returned. A red line briefly joined it, then veered farther under the bed. When Marky followed it, he found a small red dot. It was moving. Tracing the curve of his gill rakers. Marky tried to cover it, but every time he thought he had it, the red dot jumped to the back of his hand.

  Was it a new game? Like scissors, rock, paper? Or leap frog? What did Doctor Pat call the game where they slapped hands, one atop the other?

  Marky paused at an unfamiliar burst of modulation. A man’s voice came to him. Strange words rolled into his awareness. “Colonel Blaton? Greeley reporting, sir.”

  A brief chop of static, then: “Blaton.”

  “I am in lab five, sir. Crèche level on our maps. Orange zone. Got a live one here. A mode.”

  Marky blinked at the light. He could not hear Trisa. He could not hear Jupiter. Why could he hear this man talk?

  “You don’t say. A friggin’ mode? Specify.”

  Greeley’s light flickered over the walls. It stopped beside the outer lock door. “Io stock,” he read. “Mode 4, mark 1 humanoid. Sulfur dioxide breather. Sulfur trioxide slash sulfur metabolism.”

  Marky recognized the words “sulfur dioxide” and “sulfur trioxide.” Doctor Pat said them a lot. They meant eso-two and eso-three. Air and food. He didn’t know what the last word meant.

  “So flush the friggin’ thing,” Blaton said. “Toss him out on the surface with the rest of Pattison’s unauthorized freak show.”

  Marky pressed himself into the darkness. The light hurt his eyes. And calling him a “mode” wasn’t very nice, either. Doctor Pat said all humans were brothers. The people of Earth and his New Jovians. Didn’t they share the same genes? The same past? Part of the same future?

  As always, the thought made him feel all warm inside. He was the same as the people on Earth, her moon, and even Mars. Brothers and sisters, all. Just as he was with Trisa and Doctor Pat’s other made people on Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa.

  The light beam dropped to his gill rakers. Lingering crystals shot back a fine, monochromatic yellow. Greeley said, “Begging your pardon, Colonel, but this one’s different from all the holos the boys down in Intel showed us. Bigger for one thing.”

  “Dangerous? Threatening?”

  “Only through shear ugliness, I suppose. It’s hiding under some kind of nest.”

  “Freaking modes,” Colonel Blaton said. “Damnedest waste of Defense Department funds I’ve ever seen. But, shit, I suppose I’d best drop in for a look-see. Comm says the ionosphere’s a bit more frazzed than we anticipated, anyway. Something to do with Io’s Jupiter connection, I assume. So there’s plenty of time before lift. Stand by.”

  Colonel Blaton’s voice came back just a few seconds later. “Damn modes. All right, second squad has already taken Pattison into custody. Looks like you’ve found the only mode to survive our EMP. Leastwise, ‘round here. On my way.”

  Except for the picture on his chest, Colonel Blaton’s surface suit was the same as Doctor Pat’s. Instead of the tree and the snakes and the wings, though, there was a fist and shield. The shield had some kind of twisted ladder. And there were words, too. Three hard words and one easy word. “Earthforce Corps of Bioengineers.”

  Blaton pulled a sheet of warped Mylex from Doctor Harkness’s clipboard. He shook his head and crumpled the Mylex in his fist. When he got to the barrier, he pushed Greeley’s weapon aside and said, “Marky? Is that your name? Is that what Pattison called you?”

  Marky did not answer. Both men were staring right at him. They were not smiling. Doctor Pat always smiled when he talked. Almost always.

  “It is all right, Marky. We will not hurt you. I understand that you are a smart fellow. That you like to make things.”

  Marky smiled and edged closer. He thought hard and broadcast a hopeful, “I like games. Can we play the red light game some more? I almost caught the dot!”

  Greeley went rigid. He pivoted toward Colonel Blaton. “Did you hear that, sir?”

  “Of course I heard it. And it can hear us, too. Can’t you, Marky? What is your favorite game?”

  Marky swung his sweeps out from under the bed so he could hear better. “My most favorite is wrestling. Do you like to wrestle? Doctor Pat does. Where’s Doctor Pat?”

  “They did it,” Greeley said. “First Ganymede, then Callisto and Europa, and now here. Pattison really did it!”

  Marky was glad that Greeley liked Doctor Pat. Why did Trisa think these were bad men? That they were not his friends?

  “Yeah,” Blaton said. To Marky, it sounded like when Doctor Harkness was being “sarcastic.” “Who would have thunk it. Actually, Lieutenant, if this is the mode I’m thinking of, he used to be quite the junior genius. A hell of a lot more impressive. Heard he bought it in some kind of lab accident. A decompression.”

  Blaton shook his head. “What else can you do, Marky?”

  Marky held out what was left of his cat. One of its eyes gleamed in the light. “I made a cat.”

  “Yes, I see. That looks like a very fine cat. Ever handle any weapons?”

  Marky knew his cat wasn’t a very fine cat. Not like it was before all the bad lights came. He crawled out from under his bed and began gathering the loose pieces into a pile. “Trisa sometimes makes weapons. Only sometimes. She doesn’t like it. Weapons are com...comp—hard to make.”

  “Trisa?” said Greeley.

  �
��Third generation mode, most likely,” Blaton said. “Part of tomorrow’s catch. Pattison may once have housed all his modes together.”

  Marky flexed his hands. He looked at the pieces. He cocked his head to the side, as a tingle of raw anxiety ran through him. Where should he start? Which piece went first? There were so many. What size? What color?

  Blaton turned away from the barrier. “Useless. Worse than useless. Hard to believe he used to be Pattison’s top comm designer. Of all Pattison’s freaking modes, the most promising. Flush him out onto the surface.”

  “But he could live out there. Might actually survive.”

  “And I suppose you think it’s some kind of threat?”

  “No, sir. But the general’s going to have our heads if he learns we—”

  “Just do it, Lieutenant. If we bring this mockery of humanity home, word will eventually leak. And despite this guy’s nasty looks, nobody who talks to him or, God forbid, hears him on the freaking public service band or something as they tool through the morning traffic is going to stay scared for long. Frightened and on our side.

  “Right now nobody knows Pattison pulled this one out of the hat. If they did, they might think that Pattison was right about tailoring DNA to fit the ecology rather than the other way around. Giving the other side hope is just going to prolong the uprising.”

  “I don’t know, Colonel...”

  “The only way the general’s going to learn about this is if you or I spill our guts. Why make life so hard? We’ve already arrested Pattison and all his flunkies. After we pick up all the military modes, we take them home for exhibition. Believe me, they are ten times as scary looking as this poor mark 1, here. And from what Intel I’ve seen, they don’t have a friggin’ positive thought in their souls.

  “We run through what’s definitely going to be the circus trial of the millennium—and I do mean circus—and once the convictions are handed down, the uprising’s over. We release the conscripts and you non-career types and the solar system gets back to normal. We terraform Io and move on. Follow?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Flush him.”

  Marky ran. Although the gravity was similar, his gait barely resembled the bunny-hopping that Luna’s first explorers used to scout the shores of Mare Tranquillitatus or to scale the Apennine foothills. With each step, Marky’s webbed feet splayed out in front of him and gently cupped the Ionian surface. As he moved forward, each foot scissored until, altogether, sixteen toes bit into the soil. His tail sweeps rocked for balance. His rakers pumped with each push. At nearly 25 klicks per hour, he almost flew across the surface.

  He liked the way the eso-two hissed as he rushed through it. The way the loose Ionian soil rasped his pads, his toes.

  Doctor Pat sometimes played a tickle game with Marky’s toes. He grabbed each claw one by one and counted. “This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy ate frost and this little piggy had none. This little piggy took a nap and this little piggy stayed up. This little piggy had a sulfur bath and this little piggy...went wee-wee-wee, all the way home!”

  When he reached the “wee-wee-wee” part, he tickled Marky all over.

  That was so fun! He’d grab one of Doctor Pat’s legs and hug for all he was worth. Lately, he’d almost been able to lift Doctor Pat off the ground!

  “Yes, Marky,” Doctor Pat would sometimes say. “You’re very strong. You’re getting to be a very big boy. Soon you’ll be all grown up.”

  Marky liked showing Doctor Pat his muscles. The big ones on his legs. The even bigger ones at the base of his twin sweep tails.

  “Careful with those,” Doctor Pat would say. And then he would grab one of the sweeps and pretend it had whipped him across the chest. He would tumble over backward and the bright Ionian soil would fly!

  The first time Doctor Pat played that game, Marky cried because he thought he’d really hurt Doctor Pat. But it was just a game. Better than tickling. Better than running. Almost as good as wrestling.

  “Slow down, Marky,” Trisa said. “Tricky ground ahead.”

  Marky smiled as he skirted the east ridge of Kibero Patera’s irregular caldera. He was glad Trisa’s voice had come back in his head. Without her, he would not have known which direction to go. He would have been afraid. He would not have climbed the big volcano.

  He was still afraid. Like Loki to the northwest and Pele behind him, Kibero would one day send its plume jetting toward Jupiter. Resembling geysers more than volcanic eruptions, the plumes regularly spewed forth ejecta at nearly a klick per second. Faster than Marky could run. Way faster. And never stopping, not for months at a time.

  “It’s all right, Marky. Relax. Concentrate on your feet. Kibero’s sulfur chamber is still filling. The main feeder’s too busy pumping silicates. Watch your footing and you’ve nothing to worry about.”

  A flash of lurid red caught Marky’s eye. The silicate flows stayed way down in the cracks, red- or white-hot. Doctor Pat once told Marky that they came from somewhere way deep. That the other moons and Jupiter made the heat.

  Marky smiled. The glass flows were fun. He, Doctor Pat, and Doctor Harkness once spent an entire day learning to blow obsidian bubbles from the melt. They came out black and green and sometimes blue. Very pretty, but also delicate and hard for Marky to hold in his slender fingers.

  He rounded a recent flow and leaped a two-meter crevasse. The soil that met his landing was brittle with cold. The crust broke into perfect footprints with every stride.

  That reminded him of something else Doctor Pat did.

  Ochre dirt spewed into the sky and both his tails whipped around as Marky skidded to a halt. He dropped and, frowning so that he could think hard, scrawled his name in the sulfur sand. The R was backwards. And the Y was too small, but he liked the way the sun reflected off the edges of the big M. M for Marky.

  Doctor Pat said, in another life, he’d had a little boy named Marky. That’s where his name came from. Doctor Pat’s other life.

  “Hurry up, please, Marky. No time for games, dear. Doctor Pattison’s going to be long gone if you don’t get moving. So will I.”

  Marky carefully scrubbed his name from the ochre soil. How did Trisa know about Doctor Pat? Where he was? What was going to happen to him?

  “Listen carefully, Marky.”

  Something broke from the camouflage of Jupiter’s dekameter radio emission. Some faint tingling in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Listen, listen, listen, he told himself. He swung his sweeps at the western horizon.

  There. Very faint. The buzz of a regular human’s voice. The stuttering half-phase encryption of a secure military frequency.

  “That’s where Doctor Pattison is,” sent Trisa.

  Where? All around?

  “I will teach you something. Something Doctor Pattison never thought of. Is that all right, Marky?”

  Something Doctor Pat never thought of? Impossible.

  “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the signal strongest?’ Listen, Marky. Listen and point. Draw an arrow in the sand.”

  Keep talking, Marky thought at the signal, but not so loud as to interrupt it. He swung his sweeps at the horizon. The voices were the loudest almost in line with Ra Patera.

  “Good. Good. Draw an arrow to the west and run a little way to your left. Downhill, Marky.”

  Several hundred meters to the south, Marky could barely hear the signal. At Trisa’s direction, he faced west and rocked gently from side to side.

  There. Again, very faint. The word: “Tiercel.” A lot of numbers. The second arrow pointed more toward Loki’s towering, mushroom-shaped plume.

  “Very nicely done, Marky. That word precedes almost every new break in the carrier. It is the name of Colonel Blaton’s spaceship. That is where Doctor Pattison is. Inside Tiercel. Remember the angle of your first two lines and move farther south.”

  Marky trotted another thousand yards and scanned the sky. Good. There was the word “Tiercel” again.
And a garbled voice and more numbers. A lot of big numbers, but getting smaller. Falling by multiples of one hundred. Marky liked counting by eights. Tens and hundreds were harder.

  He studied the horizon. The last arrow pointed almost directly at Loki.

  “Cross all three lines of bearing in your head. Do you see where they come together, Marky? It won’t be a single point because Tiercel is moving.”

  Marky imagined a tiny triangle. In his head it looked like it was very far away.

  “You are very smart, big brother. That’s where Tiercel is. Where the bad men have Doctor Pattison. Now run. They’re only a few minutes from touching down. You must hurry.”

  Fear clenched Marky’s ribs. His rakers trembled. His sweeps followed Tiercel’s descent, but he still didn’t see where it was going to land. Where he could find Doctor Pat.

  “You already know where it is,” Trisa sent. “Do you remember your Io globe? How we used to look at it when we talked to one another? Tiercel is coming to the small supply station on the other side of Kibero Patera. That’s where I live, too.”

  How far?

  “Seventy klicks. Three hours, if you run hard. If you find food on the way, and avoid the cold.”

  Marky ran.

  Jupiter looked like it turned about three times an Ionian day. But that was a trick. Something Doctor Pat called an “illusion.” The gas giant really “rotated” a little more than four times for each of Io’s times around. And because Io spent part of the time behind Jupiter, and sometimes faced Jupiter’s light and not the sun’s, a lot of Doctor Pat’s assistants couldn’t get used to the “local clock.” Especially when part of the “night” was a heck of a lot brighter than the part of the “day” when the sun went behind Jupiter.

  But it wasn’t something Marky could easily forget. He’d been born with the rhythms of his home neatly wired into his reflexes and so it surprised him when the cold started to come early. But it did.