Many Moons

by Scott Azmus

  At Trisa’s bidding, he had stopped for a quick, surprisingly urgent meal on the shallow slope of Kibero’s west flank. Tiercel had landed and Colonel Blaton was busy putting Trisa and his other brothers and sisters “through their paces.” Doctor Pat was still inside Tiercel and because Colonel Blaton was having almost everything from the dome put inside with him, she figured Marky had enough time to eat. Or, as Trisa sent, “Gas up.”

  Marky munched one velvet frond while he scouted the slope for more. Doctor Pat called the eso-three plants “skunk cabbage,” but Marky didn’t think the plants looked like skunks. Not at all. Besides, they smelled good. Skunks smelled bad. His touchscreen tutor had told him so.

  His tutor also said the plants grew near Io’s rare oxygen seeps. That they used light from the sun to catch the oxygen.

  Maybe, Marky thought, it was like Lieutenant Greeley’s red dot game. He smiled. That was fun.

  He chewed the last frond. Somewhere inside, the plants used the oxygen to change eso-two to eso-three. Doctor Harkness said that when the eso-three mixed with the sulfur retained by Marky’s gill rakers, it gave him energy.

  Which seemed pretty neat, when he thought about it. After all, it was Doctor Pat’s idea, wasn’t it? Somewhere inside him—a place that growled when he was hungry—a solid meal was usually enough to get Marky through an entire day.

  But not this time. Not after all the excitement and not after the long run. Marky munched the last frond only to find his belly groaning for more. He could eat the roots, but Doctor Pat said that was bad. The roots were fragile and there wouldn’t be any more skunk cabbage if Marky ate the roots.

  He found more eso-three at the bottom of a high cliff. Doctor Pat called the encrusted pools there “hot springs” even though they were not very hot. One of the pools, perhaps heated from below, was large enough to attract Marky’s attention. Rafts of bright sulfur drifted over its surface. Interlocking sprays of finer crystals lined the shore.

  “Very good,” Trisa sent. “Somewhere in the melt, eso-two may have picked up the oxygen left behind as the pure sulfur crusts formed. If so, you’re sure to find eso-three.”

  Even though Marky felt good that Trisa thought he was smart, he tried not to show it. It wasn’t like he knew how the springs made food. It just felt right to him, somehow. It smelled good. It tasted better.

  “Throw in a few copper sulfides for flavor,” Trisa sent, “and voilà...a feast.”

  He was still drinking when he noticed that his pool was shrinking. It was getting shallower and shallower. Some of the others nearby were gone entirely!

  Was he drinking that much?

  He studied the surface and trembled as a portion congealed, grew glossy-bright, and sank.

  Ice, he thought. Bad ice. Dangerous.

  “Get out of there, Marky! You’re still pretty high up. The cold’s going to come on fast!”

  Trisa was right. Marky had been climbing most of the day. The air he needed to breathe was beginning to freeze out of the sky. It happened at the poles all the time and almost everywhere except the equator at night. Doctor Pat had once warned him to be afraid of such things. His tutors had even told him that it was the same near the Martian polar caps, except with carbon dioxide.

  Only hardly anyone breathed carbon dioxide. Did they?

  But, for now, Marky’s thoughts were not registering such things. Along with Trisa’s warning, he had caught several images. Tiercel had landed. His brothers and sisters were carrying crates and bins to her cargo bay. And a lot of Earth people were around Trisa. They were all suited up. Some Earth people pointed weapons.

  Was Trisa all right? They wouldn’t hurt her, would they? Would Doctor Pat let them hurt Trisa?

  “Doctor Pattison doesn’t have a lot of say in this, brother of mine. Not without a little help from his friends back on Earth. Now get out of there. Run if you can. Dig in, if you can’t. Look for somewhere to—”

  Trisa’s voice cut out, but not before Marky caught the image of a weapon’s butt jammed into her face. His fingers clenched into a tight ball. His claws sprang out. He rolled to his feet and looked upslope. Especially in the shadows, a new white frost was closing in on him.

  His heart raced. He was in trouble. He quickly checked the positions of Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. Jupiter itself was the size of Doctor Pat’s gloved fist held at arm’s length. The dark drew very near its edge. No matter how much he wanted to, he wasn’t going to make it to Tiercel. To Doctor Pat. To Trisa. Not that day. Maybe not any day. Without Trisa’s help, what would he do?

  Like finding the springs, the answer seemed to come from somewhere inside him. As if he had been through this all before, Marky suddenly knew just what to do. He needed a cave. A place to hibernate through the night. It would be like camping with Doctor Pat.

  His cutting claws were still out and, without thinking, he began carving the scarp wall. Undercut by the springs, the frozen sands gave easily. Marky pulled what debris he could in after him and settled in to wait out the cold.

  He rolled into a ball. He hoped Trisa would be all right. And Doctor Pat, too.

  He said his prayers, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my human soul to keep,” and he slept.

  He dreamed of wrestling. Blowing glass bubbles. And, most of all, hugging Doctor Pat.

  Tiercel stood alongside the supply depot’s big launch rails. White except for her orange-dusted landing cone, she reminded Marky of one of the soft-boiled eggs Doctor Harkness ate. Her cargo ramp door was closed. None of his brothers or sisters were out on the surface. A stream of vapor trailed from her plasma vents.

  The supply station was exactly the same size as Doctor Pat’s dome. It had the same triangle facets that made circles and diamonds, depending on how Marky looked at it, and the same three doors. Big doors, one every third of the way around.

  “Hide, Marky,” Trisa sent. “I think we’re about to lift, so don’t let anyone see you. They might try taking a shot or two as we pass. Head for the dome or the launch rails. Try to blend in.”

  Marky shook his head. Doctor Pat had once said that Marky had the most marvelous orange skin he had ever seen. It made it easy for him to hide. He always won at hide-and-go-seek. But not now. Now, he did not want to hide. He wanted to save Trisa. He wanted to stop Colonel Blaton. He wanted to find Doctor Pat and ask him why he was letting all this happen. Why he hadn’t stopped it before it all began.

  He wondered if Trisa was with Doctor Pat.

  “None of us saw him leave the ship,” Trisa sent. “They herded us in here pretty fast, though.”

  Marky stared at the white egg. When Trisa spoke, a sudden darkness cloaked his vision. The air smelled oddly metallic. Around him, he seemed to sense the heartbeats and mental signatures of all his siblings.

  “Yes, big brother. This is as close as we—you and I, you and we—have ever been. Now you see what the Earth people fear. Not our looks. Not our military capabilities. Not even our differences, but our closeness. Something they crave and fear at the same time. It may have been an undesired consequence of some other genetic modification, but somehow Doctor Pattison bonded us each to one another. Everything that happens to one of us is known to the others. Every time you and I have talked, the others have been with me.”

  That made Marky afraid, too. Did all of his brothers know he was a cheater? Did his sisters know he was secretly afraid of bed bugs? Of crocodiles? That, deep down, he knew that he used to be smart like they were? That he hurt himself just so he could touch Doctor Pat? Once, for real?

  A multitude of voices swelled into his personal carrier. Even though the other voices seemed equally earnest, Trisa’s voice was still the clearest, “We love you, Marky. You’ve been alone for a long time. We know why you’re afraid. We know that breaking the barrier wasn’t really your fault. We know you love Doctor Pat. We know you love us.”

  He crawled to the launch rail’s sunward side. When his sweeps rasped a patch of corrosion, Jupiter’s u
sual radio noise suddenly magnified. The background clicks and pops and whistles he’d heard and ignored all his life seemed suddenly foreboding. The looming planet, a danger.

  “Don’t be silly,” Trisa sent. “Being afraid of Jupiter would be like an Earth human being afraid of the sun. Without Jupiter, more than half the day would be dark. Why, without its magnetic field continually sweeping our ionosphere, we couldn’t even speak!”

  That was true. Doctor Pat had told him so. It used to make Marky feel good to be part of something so big. So strong. Now, though, it only made him feel helpless and small.

  The ground around Tiercel’s vents began to melt and steam.

  Trisa sent, “Good-bye, big brother. If you still want to try talking to Doctor Pattison, get into the dome. We left behind as many electronic modules as we could find. I’ll try to help you put things together, but I don’t know how long we can hold out. They’ll probably throw us into cryosleep once we’re in flight, but I’ll help as much as I can.”

  Like the tests, Marky thought. He felt horrible for being afraid. Hadn’t Trisa always helped him? With the tests? With his cat? By telling how to find Doctor Pat? He pumped his scales to full extension, pushed from the launch rail, and chased his shadow downslope.

  He was still more than a klick distant when the launch blast threw him to the ground. He rolled across a patch of eso-two frost and watched Tiercel rise.

  “Come back,” he broadcast at the ship. “Come back, Trisa! Doctor Pat! I need you, Doctor Pat!”

  Tiercel dwindled to a bright dot. After a while, she was just another pinpoint in the heavens, almost lost in Jupiter’s flushed face.

  “I love you, Doctor Pat. Please come back. Please?”

  No word, other than something resembling a chill, low groan, came from the darkness. Except for Jupiter’s background hiss—quieter now that he was away from the launch rail—he heard almost no sound. No sound beside his breathing and the few sobs he couldn’t quite hold back.

  Finally, when he lost Tiercel completely, he forced an urgent calmness upon himself. Doctor Pat didn’t like it when he cried. Neither did Trisa. Wasn’t he a special boy? Hadn’t Doctor Pat told him so almost every day of his life?

  Yes, he was. He was Doctor Pat’s best buddy. And while he felt a rough tightness in his throat and a sting along his eye ducts, he knew he was too old to cry. He would think of something. He would find a way to tell Doctor Pat that he loved him. To tell his brothers and sisters that he loved them back even though he’d forgotten to say so.

  He turned to the dome. He would think of something.

  Sometimes, Marky had to sit for a long time before he imagined Trisa’s voice coming to him. “Now for the last few components,” she might have said. He wasn’t sure. Her voice was hard to pick out of the background noise.

  He thought back to when she helped him make his cat. And his rat, before that. And his hat and his mat. “You’re doing very well,” she would say.

  And what else?

  He thought hard until her voice seemed to return. “Good, Marky. Now, can you find a silver rectifier module for Trisa?”

  Marky smiled. Still packaged for shipment, the spare circuit modules seemed to have survived Tiercel’s preemptive pulse. In addition to a handful of specialty modules, he still had ten green power blocks, four red resistor packs, several dozen optronic connectors and field modifiers, and another dozen blue capacitance transformers. The colors were pretty, but the labels were hard to read.

  He searched the pile. Where was that rectifier?

  His subconscious hopes of finding an intact transmitter had failed the instant he opened one of the circuit panels. The odor was horribly familiar. A condition one of Doctor Pat’s technicians had once described as “fried.”

  Not such a bad smell, Marky thought, but each new exposure recalled the sparks and the white currents that ran through Doctor Pat’s dome just before Tiercel set down. On top of that, the circuits, not expected to have to endure Io’s harsh atmosphere, were never hardened against corrosion. Every time he pulled a panel from its protective sheath, the bright paths connecting one chip to another glazed with darkness.

  No wonder the automated pods weren’t climbing the acceleration rail. No wonder Trisa’s dome was still cooling.

  His fingers closed on the silver module almost of their own accord. He slid it into place. “Good, good, very good,” he said, echoing distant Trisa.

  When her voice stopped coming from Tiercel, he’d had to make an imaginary Trisa in his head. She wasn’t as smart as the real Trisa, but she knew a lot that he didn’t. Or maybe she just remembered a lot that he had lost in the accident.

  “Almost there,” she seemed to say. “Now, be careful. The next stage has a lot of juice running through it. You’ll have to couple it directly to the broadcast channel….”

  Finally, with nearly all the parts used up, one last connection brought Jupiter’s faint hiss into the room. Though scaled on a different frequency, the gliding resonance of pops and tones were the same as those in Marky’s head.

  He moved the modules to the dome’s front door.

  It was getting late. Sulfur loess coated every bright surface. A growing rime of bright eso-two frost allowed no sharp angle. His gill rakers fluttered as they struggled to draw eso-two from the dome’s deepening chill. He had better hurry. It wouldn’t be long before there wasn’t enough pressure to breathe.

  When he pressed the transmit key and spoke, his own voice pushed Jupiter’s to the background. “Doctor Pat? Can you hear me? It’s me, Marky. If you can hear me, would you please answer?”

  Jupiter’s noise poured back through the speaker module. Only the faintest countermodulation seemed in any way different from what he heard outside the receiving circuit.

  “Doctor Pat? Where are the bad men taking you? I thought that maybe your other made people on Ganymede or Callisto or Europa might need you, but why didn’t you say good-bye? Why did you take Trisa and all the others? Are you taking them to show the Earth people? To stop the fighting?”

  Jupiter crackled. A pulsing tone climbed in frequency and died.

  “I’m tired of being alone, Doctor Pat. I miss you. I wish you would make the bad men bring you back. Doctor Pat, why won’t you answer? Where have you gone? I need you, Doctor Pat.”

  Marky listened to Jupiter for the next four hours.

  “Nothing,” Trisa finally seemed to say. “I’m sorry, Marky.”

  Marky nodded. He was sorry, too. Sorry he was not smart enough to build a better radio. Sorry he didn’t know what else to do. Sorry he was so stupid, stupid, stupid!

  “That’s not true, Marky, and you know it. You’re a lot smarter than you think.”

  Marky pulled the power blocks from the rest of the modules. He didn’t know what else to do. He felt sorry he had let Trisa down. Sorry he forgot to say he loved her.

  “That’s all right, Marky. I know. And I know something else, too.”

  Marky flexed his legs. He was cold. When he rubbed his face, eso-two crystals broke away. They dropped and shattered against the floor. Did Trisa know how to get warm?

  “Yes, Marky, and so do you. Same as you know what people used before chips and wafers and modules.”

  Earth people? Marky did not know what people used before they had chips and wafers and modules. What else could there have been?

  “Great big things called transistors, capacitors, resisters, and diodes. And wires, Marky. You know what wires are, don’t you?”

  Marky rubbed his chest. Doctor Harkness hooked him to lots of colored wires before some of her tests. Sometimes she used little glue globs to hold the pickups under his scales. The wires were pretty, but sometimes they hurt when they came off.

  “Well, we don’t have any of the right stuff to throw together any transistors, but before they came along, people used something even more primitive.”

  Wires, Marky thought hopefully. Did they use wires?

  “Sort of, big brot
her. They put wires in bottles of metal and glass. They called them grids and filaments and tubes. The more wires, the more powerful the tubes. We are going to make a tube.”

  With lots of wires?

  “Many, many wires, Marky.”

  Won’t the air eat the wires? Turn them black?

  “Many wires and many small chambers. Get moving. When we’re done, everyone will hear us. Everyone!”

  Marky blinked tears and pulled back from the rushing magma. The heat had dried his face and cracked his scales. White blisters marched along the tender inner joints of both arms. His fingers shook from remembered pain and his gill rakers, their scales puckered against the heat, rasped and stabbed with every taste of the vent’s harsh exhaust.

  Only two shells looked worth keeping. Two. Only two out of a dozen attempts. And in neither case had he managed to press the wires through in time. The wires had gone black and crumbled too quickly.

  He wrapped his arms around his legs, pressed his face to his knees, and rocked gently back and forth. What was he doing wrong? Doctor Pat never broke so many bubbles. Maybe Marky had made a mistake. Maybe this was the wrong way to build the parts he needed. Maybe he was on the wrong track, altogether?

  “Cheer up, Marky. If anything has a chance to work, this does. Why, even before Earth people started going into space, they listened to Jupiter. Even back then, Io modulated Jupiter’s long wavelength radio-noise storms. All we have to do is establish a working cross shear along the...”

  Marky stopped listening. He could barely hear Trisa. If it even was Trisa. He couldn’t tell if she was real. Maybe she lived in his head the way his tutors lived inside the big LASK computers. Not that it mattered. He didn’t understand what she was saying, anyway. Amidst the pain—the burns were deep and oh, how he missed Trisa and Doctor Pat!—words like “kilovolt drop across Io’s diameter” and “magnetic flux tube” and “synchronous modulation” were meaningless.

  Ignoring the voice in his head, Marky gathered his tools. The probe pipe and the air pack from the dome. The tongs and the rolls of gold tape. The carefully wrapped wires—with shapes like coiled snakes and kites—that he’d fought the cold and the air to bend. He made sure he wasn’t going to drop anything, and then climbed back into the vent.