I slept much of one day and was sick for a good part of another. My mother touched my forehead in search of my true temperature, recalling, for me, days I'd spent home with an ear infection in elementary school. She'd sat on my bed, her added weight on the cushion somehow a further comfort. The mattresses on the moon were too soft; she sank right in. It didn't have the same effect. I just wanted more than ever to return home.
I recovered enough by the fourth day, the day before my flight back, to join my father for a trip outside—outside, not “outdoors.” Outdoors was for Earth. Three others, all elderly, went with us. A team of four attendants swarmed each person in turn. I watched them lock the seals on my boots and gloves; my breathing quickened as four hands lowered the helmet. Sliding noises, sharp snaps, a sour taste in my mouth, and a thumbs-up from outside. I returned the gesture, but didn't believe I was safe.
You didn't simply walk from the complex. We climbed aboard two fat-wheeled rovers, a series of wide doors lifted into the ceiling, and we rolled out. Immediately around the facility, the landscape had been scoured flat, but a hundred yards farther on, you hit the real thing, and the vehicles bounced in overreaction at each irregularity.
“Just stay strapped in and enjoy!” shouted a voice in both my ears, one of the two drivers. Like any nervous passenger, I watched the path ahead. My father had to remind me what I'd come out here to see, hitting my arm with the back of his hand, pointing skyward, then flipping back my sun visor. I looked up, but gripped the seat as if nothing, really, could have held me. The unorganized and unfamiliar sprawl of stars, the denser band of the galaxy's horizon, pressed down and drew me in. I stared until we stopped moving.
I staggered from my seat, now looking too little at the ground.
“Watch your step,” said a voice, though I figured it was directed at everyone. Then my father was talking directly to me.
“Can you believe it?"
I touched the switch on my arm that let me speak directly back, and touched another that cut me off from everyone else. “Too many stars,” I said.
He laughed, a huge bark. He moved like an inflated penguin, bouncing side to side from one stiff leg to the other. I heard him breathing and humming; thinking of what my mother had told me, I tried to share his openness, his joy.
“Where's Earth?” I asked. I put down my visor when I faced toward the sun, back in the direction of the buildings and launch pads.
“Not up yet."
“Soon?"
“I dunno.” He touched switches on his arm, evidently to talk to a guide, then turned back to me, fiddling again. “A few minutes."
So I settled down into staring out at a sky without an Earth, uncertain how I felt about that. After a bit, my father called me, and I looked with everyone else as Earth came up over a far crater's rim, three-quarters lit by the sun. Momentarily, I panicked, thinking that I'd stopped breathing, but I found my breath had just become terribly shallow. My father must have turned off his link to me, because I did not hear him breathe at all.
Through whorls of cloud, I saw North America. I saw where I'd grown up and where I lived now. It all felt deeply wrong; I headed immediately for my seat when a guide announced it was time to turn back.
“Let me ask you about the radiation,” I said to my father on the rough return ride. I kept looking between my boots at the white floor of the rover.
“Are you going to ask me something or tell me something?” I turned to find him smiling impishly.
“Ask,” I said.
He leaned closer. “Am I going to tell you something you don't know or something you do know?"
I lost the energy to say more.
* * * *
They did see me off for the trip home, my mother's show of happiness so false I couldn't believe my father, even in his ecstatic state, didn't see it. But their relationship was their own, and it wasn't about what I perceived or even what I knew. They stood by the moving walkway, waving and waving, strings of green and blue light rolling on the walls behind them, while I slid backwards away. They stopped waving before I did, and then I watched them go.
I ended up with an empty seat beside me and two men, both ten years younger than I, across the aisle. One day out, when the one nearest woke briefly, I tried talking with him. He had several days’ worth of beard, a wide, fleshy face, and looked open to conversation. I explained the purpose of my trip. He turned out to be a construction worker; this was his second moon jaunt. It paid well.
“They recommend only a month at a time,” he said. “Any more, and you can't get insured, due to the radiation. Plus, you'd be stupid. I mean, you won't turn stupid, which is what one guy I know thinks, he won't come up here for anything, but you'd be stupid to do that to your genes."
“Too much damage."
“Yeah.” He faced forward as he talked, letting his head roll my way every sentence or so to catch my eyes, then rolling back. He didn't talk loudly, probably out of deference to his sleeping companion. “Now, I've had my kids, have three kids, so it's not like I'm damaging my genetic inheritance. But cancer's a risk. That'd take a longer exposure, and the safety regs are pretty conservative."
“But what about the people living there?"
“The shielding's not useless. But it's not like it really blocks much. Some rays pour right on through. Human exposure's never been tested, and now that you can't test animals, it's a bit of a crap shoot. That's why people don't spend more than a few months up there. It's a stepping-stone to better work back on the big blue marble. Even for the administrators. Though I'll tell you, they've got experimental shielding on the quarters of some bigwigs. The government people especially. I helped install some last year."
“My parents...” I said, but didn't know how to finish the thought. They'd been there half a year already.
“How old are they?"
I told him.
“See, again, it's not like they're going to have more kids. Nobody in the retirement facilities is. I mean, I suppose something bizarre could happen, but nobody's planning for kids. And people are pretty old, most of them older than your parents. The low grav feels good. The radiation ... again, I'm repeating myself, but it's a crap shoot.
“In any case,” he said, “they can't leave now."
I waited for him to turn my way again. When he did, he saw that I didn't follow his thinking.
“You know...."
“Maybe I don't,” I said.
“Their muscles. They couldn't handle Earth gravity now. It's been too long, or it's pretty near to too long. You lose muscle mass, I don't care how much you work out. And your bones get fragile, like bird bones. Your heart, that's the big one. It gets accustomed to pumping on the moon. You take it back to Earth...” He saw I hadn't thought about any of this; his eyes had trouble rising to mine. “Well, they'd probably not survive the trip anyway."
After that, I couldn't talk. I requested more “passage medication” to put me out. When I woke many hours later, terribly hungry, I remembered a dream of the moon's surface: people without spacesuits shoveled at the gray dust, hurling it skyward.
Were they burying people up there? With nothing organic to devour them, nothing to grow from their decay, the bodies would remain unchanged under the dust. Or perhaps they folded the bodies into the soil of the farms. When the time came, regardless of the cost, I'd have to see about bringing them home.
* * * *
My old hometown lay only two hours away by car, but I'd not visited since my parents’ departure for Arizona. One day, mid-February, I called my wife's office from work, told her where I was going, not to wait on me for dinner, and left calmly and urgently.
The landscape grew hillier as I traveled south; the hills rolled, never loomed. They lay under snow, a thin snow that let yellow grasses poke through in the rare fields that abutted the narrow road. Once, long ago now, there'd been farms here, but now the whole region was overrun with identical houses that obscured the landscape and threatened to cover the hil
ltops. For all the changes, the roads were still two-lanes with no shoulders. Every old stone house belonged to a law firm. Leaving on the heat, I wastefully cracked open the windows as well, letting in the smell of the cold, which did something at least to make me feel like I was in the country.
I wore boots. I planned to walk along my old town's main street, where the houses lay close to the sidewalk. I'd cut up through the blacktop lot of my old elementary school. From there I'd continue uphill, under tall trees, to the baseball lot, where my parents had watched me play Little League games, even then a nostalgic activity. I'd walk the bases. Above the baseball field stood Whitting Manor, a nursing home. Summer days, you could see through the wide bedroom windows old people propped up in their beds. Those who could venture outside were wheeled out to the porch that ran the length of the old main house. In winter, kids sledded from the main building down the sharp hill toward the ball field, bordered by a cedar hedgerow. I couldn't bring back the exact feeling of being on a sled, but I could see the other kids heading down the same hill or trudging back up, I could hear the screams of delight. The frigid air coming in the windows helped me remember.
Two deer leapt from behind a bush directly onto the road, not fifty feet away. Large and oblivious, they hesitated even as they landed. I jammed on the brakes. The car's computer made decisions about how to stop; sensing no other cars around, it cut briskly back and forth before leaving me to rest sideways. The deer stood just to my left, looking askance at me. The closer one flicked its ears, and I heard the flutter through the half-open window. I studied the fur where I would have struck the animal, the brown laced with black and white.
I backed up the car to straighten out, and the animals continued, unhurried, across the street, their enormous black eyes watching but unafraid. They hopped a bank and headed toward another housing development. I heard their hooves breaking the snow's icy crust.
My arms, locked in place on the steering wheel, shook. Unsteady, I left the car and took in air. The deer were gone.
Where could deer live now? Their woods were vanishing, what little bits of forest remained cut off by encroaching developments. And in winter, the landscape buried and frozen, they came out of their private places in search of food. But there were fewer fields, more cars to encounter, and their time was running out.
I remembered then that Whitting Manor had expanded when I was a kid, adding a retirement center that ate up most of the sledding hill. My elementary school had been shut down; condemned, though still beautiful on the outside, the school district couldn't even use it for offices. The traffic would be horrible in downtown. Were there even places to park?
I watched my hands shake and filled myself with a cold breath. I saw a car coming from a long way off under the bright winter sky. I thought to look: no moon.
Suddenly I didn't want to make the long trip to a place that no longer existed, or that existed perfectly only in my memory. I wanted to sit at home on my floor, playing a board game with the girls. I wanted to sit in that close living room with my wife warm nearby, her legs under a quilt. In the middle of all this cold emptiness, I felt my parents, weightless as moonlight, embrace me and let me go.
Copyright 2006 William Preston
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* * *
THE WORLD AND ALICE
by L. Timmel Duchamp
L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of a collection of short fiction—Love's Body, Dancing in Time—a collection of essays—The Grand Conversation—and three novels—Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, and The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding). She has been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards and been shortlisted for the Tiptree Award several times. A selection of her essays and fiction can be found at ltimmel.home.mindspring.com. Her latest tale for Asimov's tells the extraordinarily sad story of...
1.
She didn't belong in the world. Alice knew this as a fact by the time she reached middle age, but she had always felt it for as long as she could remember. Her being lacked some vital element, as though she were a shadow enjoying physical extension that could be touched and weighed and measured and yet did not add up to a solid body boasting independent existence. Others might see her, but few registered her presence. She thought of her lack as one not of soul, but of heft. Of gravity. Of placed-ness. Her self, simply, possessed no proper place in the world.
She belonged somewhere else. Or perhaps nowhere, nowhere at all. And so she thought of herself as the world's mistake. A century earlier, she believed, the mistake could not have been made.
In its use of its technologies, the world, she considered, had a lot to answer for.
2.
Alice realized early that most people took their belonging in the world for granted. Perhaps the world did not always take as much notice of them as they'd like, but it recognized the ontological rightness of their presence and never prompted so much as a fleeting doubt about that. A few people, though, exerted so much heft that they were nearly worlds in themselves, immense wells of gravity around which others orbited. Alice's grandmother, who cared for her from the time of her emergence from an incubator until she started kindergarten, seemed to Alice as much a place in the world as a person. A lap, after all, was a place, though it only existed in special conditions subject to swift and sudden change; and so, surely, the whole of a person could be a place, too.
Her grandmother would open a pint jar of beets she had pickled months before, and she and Alice would eat the smooth shiny flesh with homemade bread thickly buttered for lunch. They would sit at the kitchen table, spearing the slices of beet with their forks, and the energy of a powerful pull would vibrate through Alice's being, as though the fragile threads of her insubstantial self had been drawn into her grandmother's gravitational field, exerting a force nearly strong enough to keep her from drifting thinly away into air, a force that promised to ground her in love and blood and earth. Feeling in that moment as though she belonged, she would admire the way the beets shone like jewels and wonder how each slice could be so thrillingly smooth even as it revealed a pattern that reminded her of a tree trunk that had been cut close to the ground, like the rough-textured stump beside the garage, on which she often laid red, gold, and orange leaves and the glossy horse-chestnuts the squirrels would steal the minute she turned her back. Alice observed that her grandmother saw this and all other connections and resemblances; and she understood that her grandmother encompassed the totality of her world. And for all the time that world included only the two of them, Alice inhaled happiness with every breath and knew that the world was beautiful, however tenuous her place in it might be.
When Alice was thirty-four she decided that her grandmother had given her child's self heft not through noticing her and taking her seriously (which she did), but simply because someone who was in and of herself a place could create the illusion of belonging for anyone her field of gravity touched. She wondered how many people who didn't belong in the world soothed their suspicions that they didn't by finding people who are places and establishing orbits around them.
Someone, she thought, should do a study.
3.
Every family has its canon of stories, and in Alice's family, the story of her premature birth on the very border of viability ranked. Every time the story was told, her mother or father or uncle or aunt would say, “We were afraid we were going to lose you, Alice. We didn't know if you would make it. The doctor said you wouldn't.” At this point in the story's narration, when she was young, Alice would hide her head in her grandmother's lap, aware of everyone staring at her. And then she would think, They know I don't belong. Once she overheard her Aunt Nola commenting to her grandfather on Alice's shocking skinniness and abnormal bashfulness. “I bet it has something to do with her being so premature. She was always too thin. All those weeks in that incubator, Pa, and her hardly weighing so much as a pound. It's marked her, anybody can see that. It don't matter how much potato soup Ma gets her to eat, everything just runs through
her. She'll always be a skinny runt with arms and legs like toothpicks."
Nola had been eleven when Alice was born, and around the time Alice started kindergarten she'd been an Elvis Presley fan, always talking on the square black bakelite telephone and drinking Pepsi-Cola, which riddled her teeth with cavities. She wore bobby socks and loafers until she graduated from high school and orange lipstick and blue suede pumps with three-inch heels when she went to work for the phone company. Carefully closing and locking the bathroom door, Alice would examine and handle her aunt's special paraphernalia—eyelash curlers, auburn eyebrow pencils, and tweezers. Unlike her aunt's lipstick and compact, which she carried in her purse and often left out in open sight, these were kept hidden in a drawer, secret implements too private to be spoken of. And yet everyone in the family knew about Alice's spastic colon and what the doctor had said after she'd endured all the tests he'd ordered. Her aunt and others explained all that they didn't understand about her as something to do with her colon. Every time she heard them talking about it, she'd have to double over because her colon would start spazzing and twisting around in her belly like a snake tying itself up in knots.
She carried Nola's comment around with her, tucked away in one of the many mental pockets she used to reserve items needing thorough examination and handling. Eventually it provided her with the key to theorizing her out-of-placeness. In its essence, her theory was simple. She had not been meant to be born, to survive, to live in this world. There had been a mistake somewhere. She articulated it, of course, in the passive voice, to avoid implicating God. For although she attended church every Sunday and a parochial school with religious lessons every weekday, she could not manage to speak the thought, even to herself, that God had not intended her to be born, much less the idea that medical technology had thwarted God's intention. Her teachers did their best to instruct her that God knew who she was and everything about her, but Alice, with all her lack of heft, found the idea preposterous. From about the age of eight she had grasped that “God's Will” signified anything and everything that happened or, occasionally, a special interpretation of reality. Her teachers talked often about how God's Will determined everything that ever happened to sparrows. Once she raised her hand and said, “Mrs. Covington, does that go for ants and flies and worms, too? Does God care for them, also?” Mrs. Covington's mouth twitched into a sickly rictus of a smile. “God cares for all his creatures, Alice."
Asimov's SF, July 2006 Page 6