Vexation surfaced, but Hirsch was quick to stifle it. "Perhaps if we talk about this, Doctors, you'll be willing to explain it to anyone else caught up in gossip-mongering? Step inside, please."
Hirsch's entire office stood in tribute to Earth: wood and granite fixtures, potted plants, a poster of a photograph of a window, displaying a sunny spring day. Two leather chairs sat before her desk, which she gestured to with a wave of her hand as she returned to a third on the other side.
For the launch that had conveyed them to the Moon, the junior scientists had been allotted ten kilograms of personal items, no more; it was expensive to free matter from Earth's gravitational pull, after all. Nazari had never given it much thought. Now sensitive toward the subject, he had to wonder how many tens of thousands had been spent transporting Hirsch's furniture alone.
Once everyone was seated, Hirsch folded her hands in her lap, and appraised Nazari and Talbot with a long stare. "Dr. Swain has been away for several days, yes. He'll be back before he wants to be. If someone was pulling the plug on my work, I know I'd be keeping late nights."
"But wouldn't you at least let someone know what you're doing?" Nazari asked.
"I would, but Dr. Swain isn't known for the same courtesy. You haven't worked with the man for years. I have." Her steel gaze softened. "Doctors, if I had cause for concern, I'd act on it. As it is, I'm afraid I'd only be interrupting work there won't be time for later."
"Or you might be saving a man's life," Nazari said, failing to keep his voice level. Talbot squirmed in his chair.
Hirsch scowled. "What grounds do you have for presuming Dr. Swain is in danger? If that's what you've heard second-or third-hand, you ought to know it's sensationalist nonsense."
"Is it true he doesn't respond to anyone's calls?" Nazari pressed.
"He acknowledges our messages the same way he always does when caught up in something," Hirsch said, then sighed. "Dr. Nazari, Dr. Talbot—" she nodded to Talbot, although he hadn't spoken in her presence "—your concern is noted, but there's no issue here, aside from the lack of foresight back home."
After a sleepless night of deliberation, Nazari had decided upon two things: he wasn't interested in waiting for the month's end, and he could worry about his career later.
His pulse had raced double-time ever since he'd sneaked away to suit up and run outside, briefly tripling during the depressurization phase. Conducting seal checks on his environment suit without a partner inspecting his back made as much sound sense as diving into a pool naked holding an electrical appliance that may or may not have been plugged in. A day earlier, Nazari would never have dreamt of attempting it. That day, he sought to isolate any and all fallout to himself.
Bounding across the lunar surface did little to calm his nerves. He didn't have much ground to cover, at least not horizontally. The smooth, raised platform rested close beside the colony that had installed it there. In the middle of that platform yawned a vertical tunnel several meters wide, a lengthy drop into darkness. A lift had been planned, but had never materialized. The only way down was via the four sets of ladder rungs spaced out along the circumference.
As Nazari knelt at the mouth of the tunnel, he abruptly recalled his first spelunking excursion as a child, one downward climb in particular. A rope had snapped; rocks and dirt had given way under his boots. He'd screamed and driven his fingers into any available crevice, bloodying skin and cracking nails. In those awful seconds between danger and safety, the sun had dug into his eyes, while unfathomable blackness had lurked beneath his feet, waiting for the strain of his own weight to get the better of him. No pain had registered until after his father had hauled him up by the wrists, and his mother had pulled him against her and kissed his hands. Eh Khoda! Dast-ha-ye jahn-am! she'd wailed in their native Farsi. Nazari hadn't thought about that day in years, but the memory triggered a cold sweat.
He took a deep breath and glanced over his shoulder at the colony he'd left behind. The pods and tunnels glittered in the ever-present Sun, a string of diamonds amid piles of dust. The intervening mare bore the occasional boulder and a wide worn path of overlapping footprints that might have been made years earlier. Nazari couldn't banish a sense of dread. With nothing but the sound of his own breath to keep him company, his imagination raced unchecked.
"All you're doing is making things worse, you know that?" Talbot's harsh rebuke burst through the transmitter in his ear.
Nazari gave a start and nearly fell into the tunnel, but managed to catch himself in time. "Keeping tabs on me is the least any of you can do for the luxury of sitting on your hands." He wanted to sound angry, but his friend's voice brought a measure of reassurance.
"Ungrateful turd. If anyone finds me talking to you, I'm in for an epic reaming." Talbot tried to maintain a head of steam, but his concern botched it. "You're lucky you got as far as you did before Hirsch could order your backside stapled to a chair. Better hole up with Swain until the feds send the party-crashers. It's looking like the safe bet."
Nazari took another deep breath, resisted the useless urge to wipe his forehead with his sleeve, and started down one of the ladders. The cylindrical passage bore lighting that activated upon sensing his movement. He took the rungs two at a time, floating through the spaces between. The rhythm soothed his nerves further. "Is anyone following me?"
"Negative—not yet, I should say. Listen, Ali, how're you gonna get in there?"
Nazari glanced up at the circle of starry sky shrinking from view. "I'll use the magic words I eavesdropped from the forty thieves."
There was a pause. "You are the right person for the job." Talbot's voice told of the tension-breaking laugh he hadn't radioed. "I'd better get back to the lab before I'm missed, but I'll keep an ear to the rail as long as I can."
Nazari nodded, out of habit rather than necessity. "Thanks, Vic."
"Be careful. If you can't, don't leave me a mess."
Nazari smiled, but the mirth evaporated quickly. Anxious thoughts returned amid his isolation, reeling at what tragedy might lie in the depths. He hated to think he'd ever be afraid of this place, nestled within the rocks he knew better than nearly anyone on the Earth or Moon.
By the time Nazari reached the bottom of the tunnel, it felt like he was halfway to the Moon's core. A lit passage awaited him there, horizontal and stunted: a decontamination chamber. Microbes were not as much of a threat on the Moon, but dust was. He switched his transmitter to a different channel, that of the work-study area lying somewhere beyond.
"Dr. Swain?" he chanced, forcing a casual tone. "This is Dr. Nazari—Ali. Selenology. I've come to see how you're doing."
Nazari paused. No clicks, no static. No response at all.
Maybe Swain's not in the work-study right now, he thought to himself. It wasn't a reassuring prospect. If Swain never heard him, and Hirsch had time to rally, this excursion might prove a life-changing waste of time. They weren't booting him off the Moon before he gave his all, though.
"I'm not here to drag you out, I just want to make sure you're okay. I'm hoping we can talk before you have to leave." With a note of levity, Nazari added, "I could use some help with those maps. I'm no Magellan—ask Dr. Talbot. I needed a sextant to find my way out of Copernicus crater."
Nazari fell silent, mulling further words, but none were necessary. An indicator over the door ahead of him lit up green. Awash in relief and buoyant with triumph, he switched channels again. "Vic! Dr. Swain's letting me in. I'm entering the vault now."
Silence. Talbot was likely listening, but unable to respond.
The decontamination chamber was a white cube studded with vents. Once Nazari was sealed in, gas vented from the walls, which powerful fans pulled toward the floor. He rotated in place, shaking out his limbs. This wasn't a pressurization chamber; he would have to keep his suit on while visiting the airless vault.
The whirlwind ceased, and the wall ahead slid aside. Nazari sucked in a sharp breath. It wasn't a reaction of horror, quite the cont
rary. The utter vastness of the vault weakened his jaw and knees. It spanned several football fields in length and width, with a ceiling looming stories high. Ahead of him rose five massive shelves, stretching far into the distance. Each housed hundreds of metal cabinets labeled with decimal numbers. Ladder rungs lined their support struts for ease of access. To either side of the massive quintet sat the footprints and stunted framework of fledgling shelves, which should have been swarming with construction specialists. The vault could have hosted dozens more of those giants, but most of it lay empty. Those that did exist, whole or otherwise, abided like the lonely pillars of a forgotten ruin.
Standing a few meters from Nazari's entrance was a slab of black marble. He read the engraved bronze plaque mounted upon it.
BIBLIOTHEKA ALEXANDRINA SELENES
HUMANITY'S VOICE—IN PERPETUITY
DAVID R. SWAIN, PH.D., HEAD LIBRARIAN
A host of dedications appeared in smaller script beneath.
The vault's curator awaited him in the work-study area. Nazari didn't know where to find it, but a temporary map—hand-written, posted to the marble slab with masking tape—outlined the planned contents of the unfinished chamber. The work-study abutted the huge room's rear wall.
Nazari stepped past the dedication and entered the realm of monolithic shelving with tentative steps. He opened a random drawer at waist-height, an action that produced no sound. Inside was a neat stack of clipped printouts, with labeled dividers interspersed. He flipped through it with his clumsy gloved hand, glancing through the contents of books in scripts familiar and foreign. Shielded from air and the surface radiation from the Sun, they would endure for thousands of years. Millions, maybe.
Nazari glanced up, gazing over the multitude of drawers yet to be examined. His breath caught in his throat.
"Have you found him?" Talbot's voice returned in a furtive hush.
With a jolt, Nazari remembered his primary objective. "Not yet. I'm sorry you can't see this, Vic. Quite the treasure they're about to bury."
He launched into a practiced bounding jog that seemed to last an hour. At the end of the journey, Nazari paused to catch his breath. Much smaller shelves sat along the rear wall of the vault, reminiscent of the card catalogs libraries used to have when he was a child. There were several doors too, each with portholes cut out of them. Only one of the portholes was lit. Nazari approached this door, peeking in. Past a decontamination and pressurization chamber, he saw yet another porthole. Shadows danced in that meager view.
Nazari proceeded through the gauntlet. At the other end was a sight much like the one he'd stumbled upon in Information Science a week prior: towers of stacked papers, a horde of printers whirring full-tilt, and a highly caffeinated jumpsuit-clad librarian striving to make sense of it all.
Dr. Swain seemed in good health, if overwhelmed. He paused by the threshold to await Nazari, and summoned a wistful smile once the younger man had removed the helmet from his environment suit. "A dream in hiatus," he greeted.
Nazari blinked. "Excuse me?"
"That's what you just walked through." Swain glanced back the way Nazari came with a faraway look. "When the original Royal Library of Alexandria was destroyed—not by fire, as many claim, but by complacency and ignorance—human progress took a giant leap backward. Things well understood by the ancients, like the heliocentric model of the Solar System, had to wait a thousand years to be rediscovered. Countless great works of literature were lost forever—plays by Sophocles, for instance. We know he wrote over a hundred, but all we have are Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and five others. Just imagine where mankind might be today if that knowledge had been protected, cherished?
"That's why I fought so hard to make this place a reality, to archive everything— everything —that way." He pointed to one of the myriad printout stacks. "No digital copies, nothing that requires power sources or technology that might not be available thousands of years from now. Just paper and ink, available in Mandarin, Spanish, and English to start, with further translations printed over time."
Swain backed himself into a seat upon a cluttered desk. "We could have brought artifacts and historical documents here, too. The Rosetta Stone, Cleopatra's Needle, Constitutions defining dozens of nations—all spared further erosion. Earth is too volatile, nothing lasts there. Your discipline grants you an acute appreciation of this fact. On the Moon, time stands still. Hiatus."
He swigged at his thermos in lieu of a sigh. "Well, for another few weeks, at least. Before I gathered the smallest fraction of what I'd hoped to house here, people back on Earth looked at a spreadsheet and decided a handful of temporary numbers were more important than a permanent legacy for humanity. Where's that spreadsheet going to be a million years from now?" Swain looked toward just such a spreadsheet printout lying beside him on his desk, and let out a sad chuckle. "Maybe I should be glad they're only sealing it. No one's coming with torches and rope. Still, it feels like a victory for ignorance. I can't let it happen that way. I won't let Alexandria's library decay again. The night you came to see me, I had an idea. It's consumed my attention ever since."
Swain gestured to the computer terminal on his desk. "I went to the widest public forum ever devised. I wrote to the world about this place, about how it'll soon be sealed up like a time capsule. I asked for submissions, things that might tell future explorers something about us. The response?" He shrugged, this time with genuine amusement. "Anecdotes, fiction, poetry, jokes, letters, artwork, photographs, biographies, auto biographies... I won't possibly put a dent in it, but I'll leave a note with the unsorted material to explain the situation. Yes, for all the lovely submissions, there are plenty of things that may be considered offensive or just plain wrong, but it's not my aspiration to play censor. Everything I receive, I print."
Swain turned back to an awestruck Nazari. "I'm glad someone defied the rule-makers to see this. I'm going to miss you all dearly. Can you think of anything you'd like to contribute, on behalf of yourself and the colony?"
"Me?" Nazari asked once he'd found his tongue.
"Yes. Actually, now I insist. Your voice is every bit as important."
Nazari frowned, racking his brain. He pointed to a stack of blank paper on Swain's desk.
"May I?"
"By all means."
Nazari sat before the pile, removed his gloves, and corralled a pen. He did indeed have a crucial tale to write down. Before he got started, he messaged Talbot again. "I'll need a few hours to immortalize us. Should I use your real name, or would you rather remain anonymous to the future?"
* * *
Bodies in Water
Sarah Frost | 4955 words
Illustrated by Zelda Devon
Kay cast her line through a hole that some long-forgotten storm had punched in the bottom of the derelict starship's hull. The two strong fingers on her right hand held the old plastic fiber steady as her hook fell through the derelict's skin and into the sea. It sank down into the deep black currents, where fish with sweet meat could still be found. By noon, she would have something nice to take home to her father for supper. Kay leaned back on one of the starship's stainless metal ribs and let the wind whistling through the dead behemoth's portholes sing her to sleep.
She dreamed of flying through endless water lit by living stars, of reaching out and catching hold.
A tug on the line woke her. She leaned back, pulling with the pad of her left hand and guiding the line with her good fingers and her thumb. The line vibrated in her hands. She drew it in by scant degrees, imagining the sleek silver hunter fighting for its life with a hook lodged in its throat. She licked her lips, imagining white flesh and crackling, fire scorched fish skin.
Gold flashed in the black water. Anchoring her line against her left arm, she leaned down, feeling for trembling gills or a gaping mouth. She caught cold flesh and she pulled.
What flopped onto the behemoth's honeycomb skin was not a fish. Eyeless, it thrashed like a fish, but plates of yellow metal slid over i
ts sides, more like insect armor than a fish's scales. A knot of greenblack algae grew where its tail should have been. Mouthless, it had two ports in its head. Kay's hook had stuck in the mess of barnacles that choked one of them.
She pulled her hook free, coiled up her line, and pushed them into the plastic bag tied to her belt. She wrapped both arms around the struggling fish-thing and lifted. It thrashed and hummed, vibrating her bones, but it was lighter than it looked and Kay was strong. She would take it home. Her father would know what it was. He was always the first one on the beach after a storm, naming all the strange things that the ocean vomited up.
Chickens ran in the streets of Silvaplana, on the coast of what was left of Florida. A feral bird-of-paradise tree cast dappled shade over the porch where her father sat, sucking a bottle of homebrew beer. The sound of her mother's hammers rang from the workshop in back. Her father perked up when he saw what she was carrying.
"What's that you've got there?" he said, setting his bottle down on the scarred concrete patio. He took the fish from her delicately; he always handled her delicately, as though she were made of seashell and might shatter. Kay shrugged. She didn't know what it was. That was why she'd brought it home.
He steadied the thrashing thing against the palm of one hand and picked at the barnacles in its head-port. "I bet you've never seen anything like this," he said, not looking at her. "Where did you get it?"
Kay took a deep breath. Squared her shoulders. Time to speak. She said, "I caught it," forcing her mouth around the big round 'aw' in 'caught' and lifting her tongue for that so-difficult 't.' Still, what came out of her mouth sounded more like, "Ah caud ih."
Her father smiled and smiled but didn't look at her. "I haven't seen one of these in years. Wow. I can't believe it's still running."
Kay nodded. In her father's hands, she could imagine it: Hundreds of mechanical fish schooling in the deep water off the old spaceport, keeping an eye on the wild currents and rogue submarines. She blurted out, "What is it for?" Her father sat down, cradling her catch in his lap. Kay sat on the ground. She tucked the pad of her left hand against her belly out of habit, to keep it out of sight. Together, they considered the machine.
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