by Spider
This idea, for instance…
It had been born in that brief flash of recollection she’d had as she first walked into the bathroom, of the long-ago night when fifteen-year-old Rhea had made up her mind in the privacy of this very room that she wasn’t scared, dammit, Catholicism was bullshit, there was no God. As the adult Rhea had remembered that night, and thought of the Catholic Church for the first time in years, she’d been reminded of an artistically beautiful tragedy she knew about and had never exploited dramatically before.
Donny—Mr. Hansen—and Patty. She could no longer recall Patty’s last name. Mr. Hansen had been Rhea’s Sunday School teacher, twenty-three and gorgeous and devout in his faith, and every girl in the class had had a crush on him, but they all knew it was hopeless. Donny Handsome (as they called him, giggling, among themselves) was blatantly and terminally in love with Patty, who was also twenty-three, and just as gorgeous and devout, and just as clearly daffy about him. Together they were so beautiful—their love was so beautiful to see—that the girls in Mr. Hansen’s class actually forgave her for existing.
Then, a single week before they were to be married, Patty had announced that God had called her to be a nun.
Teenage Rhea had been transfixed by Mr. Hansen’s dilemma. He was a good Catholic to the soles of his feet. According to the rules he lived by, he was not even allowed to be sad. Not only could he not argue with Patty, try to change her mind…he was not allowed to want to. It was his spiritual duty to rejoice for his beloved, and the special grace she had been granted. He had, in the metaphorical terms of his church, been jilted for Christ, and was expected to smile as he gave away the bride.
That had been the beginning of the end of Rhea’s faith: seeing Donny Handsome stumble around P-Town like a zombie, smiling aimlessly. She had refused to believe that the universe and butterflies could have been made by so sadistic a God. Now, why hadn’t she ever thought to convert such a splendidly awful antinomy into a story before?
Her craft-mind went to work on the idea now. Just put it down, as it had happened? No, it was always best to change it in the telling, she found: the way it changed told you what was most important to keep. Besides, that made it art and not journalism. Did she need the Catholicism angle, for instance? Or could she change it to some other, equally inflexible faith? With celibate clergy…hmmmm, weren’t a lot of those left anymore these days. Weren’t a lot of Catholics left, for that matter. Maybe it didn’t even need to have religion in it at all. But if not, what else had that same implacable weight?
She tried an old trick. Refine it all down to a single sentence: the sentence that the suffering protagonist screams (even if only inside) at the moment that the point enters the belly. Then throw out everything that doesn’t lead inexorably to that scream. Okay, what was Donny Handsome’s scream?
My beloved, how can you want to go where I cannot follow?
In the instant of that crystallization, Rhea knew what the story was really about…and knew that she could not write it. No matter how she disguised it dramatically. Not yet. And maybe never.
She told the story idea to get lost. Until she knew what its ending was.
She went to the window—missing the sudden chill that used to come from December windows when she was a little girl—and pulled aside the ancient curtain to look out at the night. And was rewarded. In the distance, above the shadowy housetops of P-Town, the silhouette of the Pilgrim Monument showed clearly against the night sky, an eighty-five-meter tower of grey granite—and poised beside it, midway up its length, seeming to be only meters from its crenulated stone windows, was a brilliant crescent moon. The juxtaposition was weirdly beautiful, quintessential Provincetown magic. Rhea became conscious of her breath. It swept her mind clear—of the captive story idea and her ongoing concerns and the day’s cares and her self. She watched without thought for a timeless time, long enough for the moon to climb perceptibly higher up the Monument.
She became aware of herself then, and let the curtain fall closed. She felt a sudden close connection with the child she had once been in this room, in this house, in this town. More than that, deeper than that—a connection with the family that had raised her here, and with their forebears, fishermen and fishermen’s wives, back seven or eight generations to old Frank Henrique Paixao, who had gone over the side of a Portuguese whaler in a two-man dory off Newfoundland one cold day in 1904. He and his partner Louis Tomas had successfully gotten themselves lost in the fog, miraculously survived to reach Glace Bay in Cape Breton, landed there without formalities or paperwork, and somehow made their way overland across the border and down the coast to Massachusetts, eventually fetching up in P-Town. The cod fishing there was as good as they had heard. After five years or so, both men had sent for their families back in Portugal, and settled down to founding dynasties in the New World—just as the Pilgrim Monument was being raised.
Rhea felt that Frank’s wife Marion must have seen the Monument and moon looking just like this more than once, and could not help listening for the echo of her ancestor’s thoughts. She heard only the sighing of night winds outside.
She sighed in accompaniment, went to the mirror and ran a brush through her hair. She was ready to join Rand in bed. A month he’d been home already, and she was just getting used to having him around again. Every home should have a husband. She shut off the light with a wall switch and left the bathroom, walked down the short hallway to the bedroom. In her mind’s eye she was still seeing the slow dance of Monument and moon in the crisp cold starlight as she opened the bedroom door and stepped into New Mexico desert at high noon.
Rhea was so startled she closed the door by backing into it. The sudden sense of distance, of vast expanse, was as staggering as the sudden brightness. The horizon was unimaginably far away; she saw a distant dark smudge, bleeding purple from beneath onto the ground below, and realized it was a thunderstorm large enough to drench a county. Between her and the horizon were endless miles of painted desert, broken occasionally by foothills and jagged rock outcroppings; close at hand were scrub hills and cacti and a dry wash. Right before her was an oasis, a natural watering hole. Beside it was an old-fashioned wooden bedframe with a curved solid oak headboard and a thick mattress. On the bed reclined one of Rhea’s favorite holostars, dressed only in black silk briefs. He was nearly two meters tall, as dark as her, and glistening with perspiration or oil. He was holding out a canteen toward her, smiling invitingly.
She discovered she was thirsty. Hot in this desert. She stepped forward and accepted the canteen. The hand that offered it was warm. He was real, then. Icy cold water, sweet and pure. He looked even better up close. She handed back the canteen. He moved over to make room. She let the robe fall from her shoulders and drop to the sand. His eyes went up and down her slowly, as she took off the nightgown and dropped that too. She stepped out of her slippers; the sand felt strangely furry. She spun around once, taking in the vast silent desert that receded into infinity in all directions, and leaped into the bed. That started it bouncing, and it did not stop for some time.
She nearly drifted into sleep afterward, the desert sun warm on her back and buttocks and legs. But an inner voice caused her to rouse herself and nudge her celebrity companion. Might as well get it over with. “That was really wonderful, darling,” she said sleepily. “All of it. But really—purple rain?”
His famous features melted and ran, becoming the familiar face of her husband. His hair lightened to red and his complexion to fair. “No, honest—I’ve seen it, outside of Santa Fe. Near the pueblos. Just that color. I’ve wanted to show it to you.” Rand reached out a lazy arm, did something complicated to nothing at all in mid-air, and the desert sun diminished sharply in brightness without leaving the center of the sky. The effect was of a partial eclipse: twilight with the shadows in the wrong places. Power of suggestion made the temperature seem to drop, or perhaps he had dialed that, too; they slid under the covers together.
“I’m glad you did,�
�� she said, snuggling. “It’s lovely.” She looked around at the dusky desert, noting small excellences of detail. An eagle to the east, gliding majestically. Intricate cactus flowers, no two quite alike. Ripples on the surface of the water in the oasis, seeming to be wind-driven. Microfilaments of lightning, convincingly random, flickering in that distant purple rain. “This is the best one yet. Is the music this far along too?”
He shook his head. “Just some ideas, so far. But having the basic visual will help.”
“I’m sure it will. It was a beautiful gift, really. The set and the sex. Thank you.”
He grinned. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”
“Very much. So…what’s the catch?”
“Catch?” he asked innocently.
The reason she knew there was a catch was because it was not possible for her husband to conceal something important from her, not while making love. But she could not let him know that, so she made up a logic-chain. “It’s not our anniversary. It’s not my birthday. I don’t keep score, but I don’t think I’ve been unusually nice to you lately. You’re not having an affair; you haven’t had time. It was a wonderful present and I thank you for it, and”—she grinned and poked him in the ribs—“what is it going to cost me?”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, changed his mind, and reached out into the empty air beside the bed again, typing new commands onto his invisible keyboard. The desert went away. So did everything, except the bed and themselves. All at once they were in space, surrounded by blackness and blazing stars, tumbling slowly end over end. High Orbit: the Earth swam into their field of view, huge and blue and frosted with clouds. The illusion was so powerful that Rhea felt herself clutching at the bed to keep from drifting away from it, even though she knew better. All at once the rotating universe burst into song. Rand’s fourth symphony, of course, as familiar to her as her name. He muted the sound with a gesture after a few bars, left the visual running.
It was her heart plummeting; that was what made the illusion of free-fall seem so real. “But—but you’re not going up again for another eight months—”
“Things have changed, love,” he said. “I mean, really changed. Sit down.”
“Sit down? I’m lying down, what the hell do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
She lay back. “Okay, I’m ‘sitting down.’ Go on.”
“My brother called. While I was down at the shore a while ago.”
“Oh? How is Jay? Cancel that, I don’t give a damn how he is: what did he say?”
“Pribhara bombed. Big-time. She hates space, the customers hate her—even the company hates her new work. But most important of all, she says she just can’t adapt. She’s a born perpendicular. So she’s thrown in the towel…a few seconds before they would have yanked it out of her hand.”
Rhea was confused. She knew there was a booby-trap in this somewhere, but couldn’t find one big enough to justify all this buildup yet. “So that’s good news, right? Now there are only three of you competing—”
“It goes beyond that,” he said, looking uncomfortable. He dithered with his invisible controls until their shared rotation in space slowed and stopped. The starry universe stabilized around them.
She took a deep breath. “Tell me.”
“The competition is over,” he said. “I won.”
“What?” she cried in dismay. “You won?”
It was only that: a misplaced emphasis. Had she said, “You won?” there might not have been a quarrel at all. That night, at least.
Rand had been one of four competitors for a plum position: Co-Artistic Director and Resident Shaper/Composer at the legendary Shimizu Hotel, the first hotel in High Earth Orbit and still by far the grandest. The creator and first holder of that position had held it with great distinction for fifty years—then a year ago, both he and his heir apparent had been killed in the same freak blowout while vacationing off Luna. Replacing an artist of Willem Ngani’s stature overnight had been a daunting task: the management of the hotel had narrowed the field to four candidates, and then found itself unable to reach a final decision. It had elected instead to postpone the question for a three-year trial period. The first year of that period was nearly over: each of the four candidates in turn had gone to space for a three-month residency at the Shimizu. Rand had drawn the third shift, and had only returned from his own highly successful season a month earlier; the fourth and final composer, Chandra Pribhara, was supposed to be just now entering the second month of her own first residency.
But Pribhara had turned out to be a “perpendicular”—one of those rare unfortunates who simply cannot adapt to space, who cannot make the mental readjustment that allows a human being to retain her sanity in a sustained zero-gravity environment. She had abruptly canceled her contract after only a single month in free-fall, accepting the huge penalties and creative disgrace, and returned to Earth early.
This left the Shimizu’s management with a quick decision to make. A hotel must have entertainment. The show must go on. The Resident Choreographer—Rand’s half-brother Jay Sasaki—needed a Shaper to collaborate with. Someone had to replace Pribhara, fast. They might have simply advanced the rotation schedule, summoned Wolfgar Mazurski back to orbit two months earlier than he was expecting, and continued from there on a three-shift rotation while they pondered their final decision. But Mazurski had other commitments, and so did Choy Mu Sandra, the other contender.
Which left Rhea’s husband.
But Rand was only just back from orbit. Returning to space for another three-month shift this soon would raise his total free-fall time to six months in one calendar year: very likely enough time for his body to begin adapting—completely and permanently—to zero gravity. It would take fourteen months for the transition to be finished…but deleterious metabolic changes often began much sooner. If they asked him to replace Pribhara now, the competition was over: they would have to give him the permanent position to forestall a costly lawsuit.
The Shimizu management had little choice. And Rand’s first season had been the most well-received of the four so far. So they had sent word, through his half brother, Jay. The job was his if he wanted it—along with a scandalous salary, outrageous perks, immense cachet and luxury accommodations in-house for himself and his wife and daughter. For life—which was how long they would need them.
Rhea hated the very thought of moving.
And if she were going to move, space was the very last place she’d pick. The only one-way ticket there was. Fourteen months or more in space, and you had to stay there forever. You couldn’t even hope to go back home again someday…
Worse, Rand knew all this. Or at least, he should have known. A decade ago, he had solemnly promised Rhea—as a condition of marriage—that he would never ask her to move away from her beloved P-Town, from her home and family and roots.
When he had first mentioned the possibility of this job, she had been shocked and hurt. But she had not reminded him of his promise…partly because she loved her husband and knew how badly he wanted the job, and mostly because she knew in her heart that there was no way Rand would ever actually be offered it. That had been clear to her from the start. For one thing, his blood relationship with Jay would work against him—allowing disgruntled losers to cry nepotism. For another, he was the most talented of the four—traditionally a handicap. To nail it down, he was by far the least political—traditionally the kiss of death.
Ironically, it was that which had clinched the deal. Mazurski and Choy each had a powerful and influential clique of friends, skilled at vicious infighting: they canceled each other out. Rand was the only choice everybody could (barely) live with. And so it was the very same aspect of her husband’s character which had in fact won him the job that caused Rhea to say to him now so injudiciously, “You won?”
The ensuing quarrel was so satisfactory a diversion that it was a full hour before they got around to the actual argument they had
been avoiding for over a year now.
“God dammit, Rhea, just tell me: what’s so awful about space?”
“What’s so fucking good about it?”
“Are you kidding? Sterile environment, pure air, pure water, perfect weather all day every day, no crime, no dirt, longer lifespan—and weightlessness! You don’t know, honey, you haven’t been there long enough to get a feeling for it; everything is so easy and convenient and restful in space. Nothing is too heavy to lift, nobody’s a weakling, your back never hurts. And the freedom! Freedom from the boredom and tyranny of up and down, freedom to live in three dimensions for a change! To use all of a room instead of just the bottom half—to see things from different angles all the time—to let go of something and not be afraid gravity’s going to smash it against the wall by your feet. Put that all together, throw in a better class of neighbors and the best view God ever made, and it doesn’t sound half bad to me.”
“It sounds horrible to me! The same weather, every day? The first thing you said: ‘a sterile environment,’ that’s exactly what it sounds like. Living in a little sterile tin can surrounded by cold vacuum, breathing canned air and peeing into a vacuum cleaner. What about Colly? Where’s an eight-year-old going to find playmates in space? Think about never again going out for a walk, never getting rained on or snowed on or going to watch the sun rise—”
“—the sun rises fourteen times a day at the Shimizu—”