Many Moons

by Scott Azmus

  “Which explains the repetitive nature of your work. The Trists must forget.”

  “Why,” she asks. “Why aren’t you frightened? Repulsed?”

  Smash!

  The window shatters. The dome wall shrieks and buckles. Eyelids fluttering, muscles twitching, Vasari tumbles through the gap. He staggers to Corina’s workbench and steadies himself against a pressure vice.

  “Get out, Saynes! Get away from her! She’s mine!'

  I press the punch bar into Corina’s hands. I rush her behind the tree.

  Vasari produces a large knife. Brandishing it, he says, “I suppose you figured I was too far gone to notice a double-cross. Isn’t that right, Saynes?” He attempts an accusatory frown. “But the moment I showed you that first portrait, I saw it in your eyes. The lust. The greed. Right from the beginning, I knew what you were really after!”

  I sidestep toward the door. Palm to the small of my back, Corina stays with me.

  Vasari’s legs twitch. His blade cuts an arc that barely clears my belly. “Far enough!”

  “Let him go, Julius.”

  Vasari’s lips twitch into a feeble smirk. “Ah, Corina! Still that sweet, sweet voice. Do you remember Mars?”

  Taking his question as a threat, I ask, “Is that why you’re here, Vasari? To finish what you started?”

  “Don’t be stupid. She knows why I am here. What I’m after.”

  Corina’s palm warms my spine. “What, Julius?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know!”

  The guy’s shoulders tremble. Arms writhe. He looks as though he’s trying to dredge up a memorized speech, but can’t quite jog the mental wheels into motion. Finally, haltingly, he says, “You took everything. My creativity. My reputation. I tried to track you down, but my life kept falling apart. I couldn’t find work. My health failed. The drugs help, but I knew from the outset there would be no postponing what I had coming. Every time I thought about what I’d done to you, I felt hollow and cold inside.”

  I spot an ice chisel. We maneuver toward it.

  Vasari heaves a dry cackle. A grin buckles to a lopsided grimace. “That’s when you saved me, Corina. Against all odds, you were alive. But what you planned as vengeance, tormenting me with your art, I took as solace. I knew where to find you the moment I got my hands on your last portrait. Jupiter. Europa. The ice. The red ice. While trying to drive me mad with guilt, you’ve rescued me.”

  Recalling Vasari’s desperate treks along the fissures of Pasiphaë Linea, I guess, “You really were looking for Trists, weren’t you?”

  He turns his blade in the light. “After today, I will return to painting. I’ll go back to work and, needs be, shape the art world until my work defines the pinnacle of creation. In more ways than one, I will be immortal!”

  My fist curls around the chisel. “Wrong.”

  Vasari snorts a wisp of laughter. He staggers at me. Our weapons meet in mid-arc. Sparks fly. My fingers tingle. As we retreat, Corina steadies the punch bar under my arm. I shift on my toes. The shaft bobs along my ribs.

  Backed up against Corina’s airlock, something occurs to me. Between parries, I blurt, “You can kill us, but Corina will still have the last laugh.”

  He humors me with, “How’s that?”

  Beginning a cautious advance, I say, “You told me you were dying. A variant of Paukner’s dyskinesia. Well, I’ve a bit of sad news for you. Trists can’t repair nerve damage.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He’s right, Julius,” says Corina. “If you wanted immortality, you should have looked for it in your work a long time ago.”

  He gives the suspended ice block a frail heave. “You lie!”

  Corina’s voice holds steady. “Have I ever lied to you? The day you asked what I’d done to your work, did I try to hide the truth? You might have wished I had, but I never deceived you. Not then. Not now.”

  The tic leaves Vasari’s cheek. His arms stop quivering. His face goes slack and he seems to gather renewed steadiness. But his gaze drops. He screams. Lunges.

  Sweeping in, the knife cuts deep and bloodies my sleeve. He jabs. I jump back in retreat, only then feeling the sting of his first strike race up my forearm.

  He leaps across the ice.

  I stagger back.

  And feel an odd impact.

  Something cold. Something sharp twinges my spine. Looking down, Corina’s punch bar emerges wetly from my sternum. The burnished tip shoot reflections across the dome.

  Eyes wide, Vasari puts on the brakes but not fast enough. When he slams into me, he silently stutters something, mouth opening and closing. Lodged solidly in my chest, the punching bar has pierced his heart. I can’t help but wrap the man in my arms.

  As gravity takes him, hot blood gushes. Clutching his chest, he grins. He offers a braying laugh, before retreating. The ice block barely sways as he steadies himself.

  Within my chest, major blood vessels roll and shear. Bones chip and crack. I can feel it. Connective tissue shreds. I sag and drop to my knees. Blood gushes and pools. Air whistles out and out.

  Vasari’s knees buckle. Clawing the block’s nylon support strap, errant fingers close on a release clasp. Which…separates.

  He tries to leap clear but slips in our commingled blood. Despite the low gravity, the falling ice crushes his upper torso. Ribs shatter. As his last breath hisses away, I catch: “I can’t move. Oh, thank God. I can’t—”

  Scarlet effluent floods his lips. I witness his last heartbeat. His face quirks oddly serene.

  Corina presses her hands to my chest.

  My flesh glows under the press of her bloodied hands. To this day, I am hostage to the ice.

  Oh, Europa, please trust and take me in!

  Preface: When the Morning Stars…

  I usually maintain two to four beehives each year. I get a kick out of watching the honeybees bring in different types of pollen and I enjoy learning more about them each time I enter the hive for inspection or collection. As I write, today is the first day of Fall and I will soon pull a bit of dark, goldenrod honey before wrapping the hives and preparing the honeybees for Winter.

  I like almost everything about being a beekeeper. I like honeybees in general, though I hate when the girls feel the need to sting. According to my apiary journal, I have been stung a total of 16 times in the last 8 years. No big deal. Especially considering that I’ve taken more than a thousand pounds of honey from them in that time.

  The funny thing is, I don’t much like honey. I recognize excellent, raw honey when I taste it, of course. And there’s nothing like taking a nibble right out at the hive while the bees are there to thank.

  That level of sweetness just isn’t my thing.

  This, the last major story in this anthology, was a “gift.” I wrote it almost as fast as I could type, just prior to retiring from teaching advanced-placement physics at Tremper High School, here in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The story pretty much wrote itself. Something that I wish would happen a lot more often!

  When the Morning Stars Sang Together

  Approaching her beehives, Noémie felt little current premonition concerning the fate and freeing of her world. Humming the odd little melody that seemed to be on everyone’s mind nowadays, she watched young honeybees creep from their hives. Wings polished of dew and dust, each flew a short distance before wheeling an erratic 180. With some natural harmony helping them share airspace, the bees hovered and twirled vertical figure-eights above their only home.

  Noémie scraped a hive tool free of sticky propolis. She gathered a wad of grass for her smoker. If not for noticing commander Dunaway bearing down on her, she might have taken a moment to better appreciate the beauty of the day. Some habitat-control technician, possibly as early as prelaunch, had structured the prevailing weather patterns to best simulate north-latitude April or May. In this gulf between stars, the days remained warm. The ambient brightness: mid-afternoon standard. All within the com
fort zones of plant and passenger.

  Above and winding all around, busy metropolitan sprawls bracketed the river Möbius, which, in turn, meandered the full circumference of the ship’s cylindrical volume. Along its banks, parks and clustered fruit trees allowed pockets of shadow and mystery. Terraced structures, ponds, and cascading waterways painted the full length of Stella Clara’s interior aquamarine and silver over the smoky-quartz sheen of radiation-shocked translucent steel.

  Monitoring Dunaway’s approach, bracing and trying to adopt a posture of nonchalance, Noémie wished she could be somewhere else. Anywhere, truly anywhere, other than that particular part of the ship and in that particular part of the galaxy.

  She held a wad of grass in one hand while positioning her smoker with the other. A groundskeeper’s bag draped one shoulder, while she thrust her hair—overlong and moonlight pale—from her eyes with a vigorous, sideways toss.

  Dammit! Who could have guessed that a transiting Ark could run aground in seemingly empty space? The normal rotation had assigned her the midnight to zero-four hundred watch. She had arrived early. She had thumb stamped the captain’s night orders and was right in the midst of announcing, “Attention on the Command Deck! This is Ensign Barnett. I have the conn,” when she felt the first, sick and slow gyration rasp the soles of her feet.

  Stella Clara lurched, bow down and hard to port. The duty quartermaster reflexively checked a young boatswain’s fall. Overhead fittings rattled, while electrical cabling parted and sparked. As the ship juddered, a century’s worth of hidden dust trickled toward the deck.

  Ordering a gut-feel evasion course, waking the captain and sending Stella Clara’s crew to emergency stations took mere seconds. And yet, against all hope, the ship again lurched hard before pirouetting and settling against an unseen shoal of…what? Dark matter? But if we’ve run aground on, I don’t know, something, how are we still maintaining axial rotation?

  The governing captain, with commander Dunaway in tow, arrived while she was still trying to bring the ship’s engines to neutral. The scan log showed little more than an odd abundance of carbon-dominant molecules that the bow shields should have easily cast aside. Additional measurements, taken into the record of her courts-martial, revealed “random swells” in the (hypothetical) “subspace transit layer” massing between 1.2 and 1.6 solar masses and with cross sections on the order of hundreds of solar radii. Given the depth and rigor of her navigation training, how could she have missed anything so large? How had she so desperately failed?

  Some many months later, her honeybees seemed not to care. Foragers swept in from above, only now—having departed the microgravity of the ship’s axis—needing to again work their wings for braking and control. After depositing their sacred provisions, each would again fight for elevation before streamlining and resting their wings. Unlike their keepers, and at least as long as the air pressure held, they could accelerate and maneuver at will.

  Meanwhile, the great Ark Stella Clara wasn’t going anywhere. And what had Dunaway said as he read those first scan returns? “You’re relieved. Go directly to your quarters. Open a computer file. Record everything from the moment you began preparing for this watch, right up until you single-handedly ruined all our lives.”

  One of her few remaining comrades had mentioned the recent discovery of low-frequency oscillations resonant within Stella Clara’s hull. Low-frequency waves that, when sped up some ten thousand times, delivered musical notes as well as an odd sense of individual stasis. Practically every “original” song spilling across the Ark’s airwaves carried the same trilled notes as at least partially integral to the tune.

  She brushed a honeybee from her forearm. In addition to pollen and nectar, incoming foragers delivered water, salt, and various minerals. Apple pollen carried a yellow-white tint. Plum: a subdued, rainwater-gray. Peach and pear: ruby over yellow. Where was the glassy, granular pollen that so surprised her? The nectar that had augured such fabulous honey?

  “Do they sting?”

  Barely turning, keeping her back to him, Noémie said, “Hello, Commander. How are you today?”

  “I asked if they sting.”

  Had she, Noémie wondered, also gone around looking all “superior and whatnot” as many of the passengers might have said? “So you did. And no, they’re not likely to. At least if you remember to stay out of their flight path.”

  “I am eternally surprised that our Planners allowed such aggressive creatures on board.”

  “Ah, you say that now, but you’ll be first in line once your taste buds need a bit of sweet teasing.”

  His uniform needed letting out. He had polished his decorations for diligence, honesty, and merit to the point where the time-honored badges had lost all surface detail. She tipped her smoker to the hive’s lower entrance and pumped the bellows to produce puffs of cool smoke.

  “This will calm them and allow inspection. While we wait for the smoke to take effect, whatever can I do for you?”

  “Your…insects have been ‘scouting,’ I suppose, as far upriver as senior officer’s housing. The captain’s grandchildren run and play there. So, consider this an order. A direct order, to be clear. If you can’t control your creatures, knowing precisely where and when they come and go, I will personally confiscate them and return them to biological stasis.”

  Noémie levered the hive’s top and inner covers. Automatically raking bridge comb, she carefully nudged a cluster of honeybees aside with her fingertips. The bees shared a dusky brown-grey color. Smaller than the usual planet-bound varieties, these had become favored aboard Arks for their sense of direction and ability to adjust worker population to nectar availability.

  “Do we,” asked Dunaway, “have an understanding?” He rocked a measured retreat as Noémie drew out her first frame of brood comb. “Aren’t you supposed to wear a veil? And gloves? I am quite sure that those things sting.”

  “Not if I maintain a smooth and steady pace. Sudden movements alarm them, but you will notice that I am doing all I can to prevent jolts and jostles.”

  Even against the odor of smoldering Timothy grass, the honeycomb was redolent with the soft odors of beeswax and new honey. The tan wax sealing each brood cell held the texture of fine velvet. Sealed honey stores lay behind caps of smooth, white wax. A ring of stored pollen separated brood cells from a rainbow swath of glistening nectar. Most of the pollen was an orange or yellow powder, depending on the source.

  And, yes, there it was: a spray of hexagonal cells containing the large, vitreous grains that seemed to go along with the special honey that the crew had recently begun to crave.

  She cut a trench through the honeycomb to reveal a slow, amber gush and let a warm dollop melt on the tip of her tongue. The new honey was full of jammy fruit flavors, apricot over mango while holding a prolonged, sweet finish.

  A returning worker delivered a stash of glittering pollen before waggling a figure-eight. Marking a precise angle, she reversed herself before waggling back to her starting point. Alternating turns, left right left, she thrust her abdomen in the air as though punctuating an executive communiqué.

  Squatting at one hive’s upper entrance, several guard bees buzzed. Then, as if in echo, a deep, groaning vibration ran through the colony ship. Daylight dimmed and returned before toggling rapidly between afternoon brilliance and deepest night. The on-again-off-again strobing made her bees seem to flicker in and out of existence.

  Dunaway flung his arms out for balance. When a deeper, shuddering vibration rattled Stella Clara’s keel, he dropped with deliberate purpose and took a knee.

  Tight whirls of lambent phosphorescence danced upon the waters of pond and lake. Odd reverberations answered the call of birds and small animals.

  Noémie steadied the hive on its stand. “I’ve been out of the loop for a while. Isn’t there any chance of breaking free?”

  “Even if there was,” Dunaway sneered, “do not so much as pray that our release could be of any aid to your repu
tation.”

  Harmonic vibrations crisscrossed the landscape. Hanging flowerpots swung above tree-lined pedestrian ways. Children and young adults sought shelter.

  Noémie replaced the frame she had been inspecting. Although capable of resisting atmospheric pressure and a range of centripetal forces, the ship’s outer shell was just a hair over two centimeters thick. What if the outer shell, or any of the buried thousands of kilometers of wires and piping, were to rupture?

  Dunaway consulted his data implant and departed without significant farewell. By the time steady daylight returned, Noémie had finished cleaning her equipment. When the command staff issued their, by now, usual statement concerning ship’s safety—they were working to remedy the situation; passengers were asked to report anything out of the ordinary—she was tired and ready to return to her low-rent bunk room.

  A worker bee landed atop one of her knuckles. Radiant grains decorated the creature’s pollen baskets and body hairs.

  “Hello, small friend.” The worker explored the back of her hand. “Where I wonder, are you finding such wondrous treasure?”

  She had studied the greater part of the ship’s flourishing vegetation. Though they did little to provide sustenance, brilliantly colored flowers bloomed in profusion. Dwarf apple and peach trees had become recent passenger favorites.

  Noémie conveyed the worker bee to the hive’s upper entrance. Watching her amble past the guard bees, Noémie found herself in position to witness the coordinated departure of a small foraging swarm. Mentally plotting their departure angle, she used the last of her savings to quickly requisition a service pod.

  Setting down upon the ship’s opposite quarter, she found her honeybees circling a vertical shimmer resembling nothing so much as a luminous crystal hanging vertically in the air. As bees zipped around her, Noémie found her thoughts carried into the past. When was the last time, she wondered, that she could have possibly watched an animated film?