by Robert Onopa
Ration wrappers and beer tubes littered the site near a burst waste cylinder. The white bunting hanging from the ladder turned out to be toilet paper. “They’ve trashed the whole site.” To my great dismay I saw dozens of fresh bootprints stomped at the foot of the lander’s ladder.
“So rude,” Claire said. “Those people from the bar?”
“Two years ago they put laundry soap in the Falls of Diana.”
“So adolescent. That tag is obscene.”
I unbuckled my harness and moved some cartons to fish out the toolbox and service supplies. After rooting around I turned up with a can of hydraulic fluid in the emergency kit. Then I started struggling into my EVA suit.
“Where are you going?”
“I think this’ll get the paint off,” I told her, waving the can. “I’m going to try to restore things as best I can and clean up out there. But hey,” I added when I saw her pulling on the baggy leggings, “not you.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
* * *
Once on the surface, Claire bounced around in her silver EVA suit like a kid at soccer practice. “Look at Earth,” she blurted when she caught her breath. “So bright and blue and white. Walking around out here, it’s like heaven, like I’m in heaven.”
As for me, I felt like hell until I saw how well the hydraulic fluid dissolved the yellow paint from the metal shell of the replica lunar lander. I used the bunting I’d brought along to rub it clean. It took a while. Eventually I improvised a rake out of the LEM ladder and started to systematically wipe miner footprints from the regolith near the lander. Claire walked ahead, picking up litter, stowing it, detrashing the site.
As I raked I realized that Armstrong’s famous bootprint was in there somewhere, but I had no choice except to obliterate it along with the miners’. When Claire finished her sweep of the site, she came around behind me and scattered handfuls of regolith to obscure the little furrows from my rake. It sounds easy enough, but out there in the clumsy suits, it was slow going.
Two and a half hours later, Tranquility Base looked like a museum exhibit again, except for the missing Armstrong footprint.
As it was perhaps the most famous single footprint in human history, we needed to replace it somehow. First we downloaded archival images from NASA’s website and studied them carefully. My plan was to step gingerly on the passive seismometer so as not to leave tracks, then to bounce up the ladder and position myself as Armstrong had. From there it would be a simple matter of a hard step down from the bottom rung.
“Wait,” Claire said.
“Make it quick,” I said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before we get into reserve life support.”
“What’s your boot size?”
“Eleven 2E. Does it matter?”
“According to NASA archives, Armstrong had small feet. His boot size was nine and a half. Narrow.”
“Where the hell are we going to find such small feet?”
She pointed down to her boots. “Nine and half. Narrow.”
So we traded places. “One small step for Claire,” she said just before she jumped. “One large step for all Clairekind.”
* * *
Because we’d lost so much time cleaning up the site, I radioed in a negative report on the scouting trip and we had to drive straight back. Still, the drive was breathtaking, the sun high and slow across the sky, the Earth slipping to our left and then setting. We were both a little giddy at what we’d done.
From the moment we docked at the main dome, you could sense that the atmosphere at the resort had turned hectic. Less than twenty-four hours remained until the contest’s conclusion. More Hyatt people had come up to join the partygoing journalists and hotel guests in a kind of last day’s frenzy of food and wine and excess.
The big table on the dais in the Copernicus Room was askew, crowded with half-empty glasses of wine, coffee cups and abandoned room service plates littered with stale food. I found Stewart stretched across three chairs in the corner, drunk and sullen. Candace, who had been conducting virtual press conferences Earthside since early morning, was desperate, her voice hoarse. I took over for her, worked for eight hours straight, fielding questions and calls, infusing false cheer into our dismal numbers, pretending surprise and pride that “Luna,” ahead all week, looked like it was going to finish first.
Claire and I became separated once I started to work, but then she really disappeared, into the gym, I supposed, or to take a nap after our excursion. Then it was dinnertime and I’d been too busy to connect with her, and I frankly was relieved that she wasn’t there for the humiliation of the final night’s banquet—half the chairs empty, Stewart incoherent and helped to his room. During the gazpacho I was passed a note from Claire telling me she’d gone out on another EVA, entirely on her own, a walk around the dome to collect some rocks to take home, that she would find me later.
But when I looked for her at midnight, she was nowhere to be found. I dragged myself off to my room, fatigued beyond belief after the long day, and threw myself on my bunk.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep. An active solar flare sent a wave of broadband static across all the communications channels, and the web audio link I lay there listening to reminded me of radio in the old days, fading in and out, conversations washed by flurries of audio snow. . . .
“Loyal caller, long-time listener, Art,” a female voice said, a voice velvet with seductive breathiness, a siren’s voice, eerily familiar. “Call me ‘Heavenly Ten.’ I used to call you from Earth. Remember me? You were so my hero.”
Art’s voice changed. “My god, I do remember you. Is that you, ‘California Ten’? It’s been . . . years. What can I do for you?”
Art recognized it too, or at least the program of his AI did, some deeply enduring quality of that voice. I remembered hearing a voice like that while listening to Art Ball when I was a kid. Almost all of Art’s callers, then as now, were men, but once in a while you’d hear that siren’s voice and the whole conversation changed, moved as if a step to the side. The voice seemed to speak directly to an old subroutine in the AI, to open a secret trapdoor: Ball had always had a weak spot for women who did call, not for the tough ones or the airheads, but especially for women whose breathy voices promised some unseen sybaritic redemption—as his audience had been mostly male, the old-fashioned attitudes had been part of his appeal. The trap door was apparently still programmed in the AI, and you could hear him responding.
“I’m so mad at you, Art,” the voice pouted.
“Oh my god, why?” And you could hear it, the genuine nervousness in his voice, the uncertain edge that comes from loss of confidence.
“You betrayed all of us women who love you when you blew off that moon contest. If you’d only supported it, think how many of us would be looking up there right now. And next week and the week after that. Gazing at the moon because it meant something.” I thought Candace? then remembered her hoarse voice. Still, something familiar. “But that’s all right,” the voice went on. “I understand, Art, why a romantic idea like NAME THAT MOON wouldn’t appeal to you. You’re too old to be romantic anymore. I’ll bet you never sit with Ramona outside your trailer in Parump looking at the moon on a beautiful night. . . .”
“Awwwoh,” Art moaned. “You know, Ten? You might be right. It would have been romantic.”
“Might be?”
“Ramona is going to be annoyed with me.”
“As she ought to be. You’re letting those liberals from the New Solar Order pick the name of the moon.”
Art moaned again. “What name do you suggest? Just tell me. I’ll log onto that website and vote myself.”
“What really matters is that your listeners call.” Now I heard something else in the voice, a kind of marketing savvy hiding behind the voice changing circuit.
A couple more sentences and I was sure. The voice belonged to Claire.
I looked at my watch. Two A.M., twelve hours until the end
of the contest. It was too late now to change the result, I decided. Still, I was touched down to my toes and smiled as I shut down all the circuits in my cubicle and settled back on my pillow. I told myself: Claire had tried to help, and it would all be over soon.
* * *
I overslept. When I woke I took a long, hot shower, and slowly got dressed without logging in. On the final day of the contest, at the final hour, I went directly to the Copernicus Room to see the wreckage.
Barry Stewart, I was surprised to see, was on his feet, wearing a fresh suit and clean shaven. He was gesturing with animation to a larger knot of media people than I’d seen all week. Judging from equipment logos, new techs had also flown up. I recognized four network heavy hitters in the restricted area behind the dais, covering the story in holo presence. There was a special electricity in the room. A middle-aged guy with a recent face-lift waved cheerfully to me from another crowd, I waved back—he looked very familiar, but I couldn’t recall his name. Candace came striding by and I asked her who he was.
“That’s Karl Pope, you dummy,” she said in her hoarse voice, stopping, looking me in the eye, cocking her head. “Didn’t you hear he’d flown up from Maui?” She smiled. “Though you of all people I shouldn’t be calling dummy. I apologize.”
“For . . . ?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head, turning away from me with her arms raised, leaving me to stare at the wallscreen. The full moon cycled in the repeated time-lapse pattern that had been pixeled in all week, overlaid with our numbers. I blinked, rubbed my eyes in disbelief.
Overnight we’d gone from eighty million hits on our netsite to three and a half billion Earthside voters.
And that’s how the moon came to be named Art Ball.
It is a strange result, I agree, as loony as Art Ball himself, and six months later, as I write this story, the moon’s new official name is still too improbable for most people to take seriously. But the attention the new name created nonetheless saved us. Our bookings immediately shot up six hundred percent and the reservations site clogged with traffic. As you probably know, we’re booked solid to the end of the decade and we’re planning to excavate a new wing. What with all the extra flights United’s put on, the United/Hyatt consortium’s already started work on another landing pad.
Yet for all its odd quality, you do hear the moon called Art Ball up here once in a while (particularly among the miners), and you certainly do hear the name used more and more Earthside. Good-natured people look to the night sky and turn to one another with smiles and say, “Art Ball.” All over the world, I’m told, kids have started pointing up and telling their friends that you can see his eyes, his face. Claire and I sat through a movie just last night, a remake of Huck Finn set on a Mars mission, and midway back to Earth the Huck character turned to the Jim character and said, looking to Earth’s moon, “There he is. There’s Art Ball.”
* * *
When you live on the moon for a while, you adjust to its rhythms. After we celebrated the end of the contest, after Claire explained how she’d used voiceprints from Art Ball’s archives to identify the AI’s weak spot, and after she got her chance to spurn Karl Pope one more time, most of the media people flew back to Earth. Claire stayed on and we watched Earth set earlier and earlier in the shadowy coming of the real end of a lunar day.
On our way back from Tranquility Base, Claire had promised to spend a night with me, and I talked her into a trip for the two of us over an entire lunar darkcycle, fourteen days. Barry got me the keys to the spacehab module at Aitken Basin, near the moon’s south pole. We both took leaves and I drove the van down there.
At 1,350 miles in diameter and two miles deep, the Aitken Basin is one of the largest craters in the solar system. It’s a grand sight, all right, but that’s not why we went down there.
Inside the basin is a smaller crater, large enough by Earth standards, but tucked inside the basin with a group of two others. This crater is the Shackleton Crater (yes, named after my great great grandfather, Ernest, of Antarctic fame). The spacehab module we drove to is parked at the point where the west rim of the Shackleton crater intersects with the rims of the two other craters, forming a peak about 4,000 feet above the basin floor and canted at just the right angle to escape Earth’s shadow. Because the sun falls on this patch of ground day and night virtually year-round, the Dutch astronomer Ockels called this spot “the peak of eternal light.” Solar panels placed on the peak generate continuous power to the module, keeping it warm and cozy, the love nest of preference for a quarter million miles. EVA walks are spectacular. It’s as if you had the Grand Canyon, Haleakala Caldera, and Everest, absolutely all to yourself.
After a couple of days, Claire found herself pointing out how small a dot New York made when you looked for it, squinted hard, tried to make out its lights at night. “Just a dot,” I remember her saying that day, curled on a sheepskin by the big lexan window. “From here New York is so just a dot. I can’t tell you how much I’ve gotten to like it here. This is the ultimate place to get away from it all.”
The day we’d left Blue Moon I’d turned down an unsolicited job offer, the best that had turned up so far, to be the head of PR for the Moorea Beach Hotel. When I could turn my back on the best Tahiti had to offer, I knew my heart belonged on the moon. That Claire wanted to stay here as well meant my heart would be full.
She handled some of the rocks she’d picked up earlier in the day, rocks for a collection she’d started the day we’d gone to Tranquility Base. She’d noticed that not all the moon rocks were of a uniform charcoal cast. Seen up close, many had subtle hints of color in them, trace elements and their oxides, the building blocks of Earth, hints of ocher and umber and copper and gold, silver and white, deep reds and darker browns—all the colors of life hidden in the raw rock.
“Like Barry said,” I told her. “There’s a job for you up here if you want it. A life.”
“Count me in,” she said, snuggling close.
I buried my face in her soft hair.
A half hour later, as we sat looking at the milk-swirled blue pearl in the sky, she asked, “What do you think Barry’ll want me to do?”
“Marketing,” I shrugged. “Work with Candace.”
She was looking at Earth through the big window. “Mmmm, Shack?” Claire finally said. “You know, I’m just thinking, well, for later? Like I say, I’m just thinking, and maybe you know?”
“Know what, Claire?”
“Technically speaking, is ‘Earth’ a proper name?”
Geropods
Grow old along with me, the best of life is yet to be. . . .
—Browning
LIKE ME, MY TWO ELDERLY COMPANIONS had outlived their wives, but I was new to Arcadia. You know the sort of place I’m talking about, somewhere between a nursing home and a morgue: pastel walls with prints of rolling hills in “quality” antiqued frames, sturdy plastic furniture, a tiled, low-maintenance floor. That afternoon, the digital holo in the corner of the sunroom was tuned to THE YOUNG AND THE OLD, a trendy soap starring the ancient McCauley Culkin, his already pale colors so washed out by the late afternoon glare he looked transparent. The air was laced with the odors of antiseptic and urine. Distant rattling and the indistinct conversations of the old echoed through the chip-array hearing aid I wore like a baseball cap.
I’d come out of a long stay in the hospital—my total deafness aside, a Parkinson’s-like movement disorder was getting the best of me. Pinkie and I hadn’t had any kids. After a long career as a shrink, it looked like I’d moved into my final home.
“Bored?” Kaplan said from his wheelchair. “Are you kidding? I used to be a Hollywood agent. Bored? It’s so boring here it must be a new medical condition, right?”
“That evidence is accepted by this court,” Judge Ortiz said from the couch, waving his red and white striped cane. The dot from its laser guidance flew around the room like a bug.
“I had depressives who literally put me to sleep
,” I recalled from my practice. “But, OK, maybe we do break new ground here. The question is, what’s the alternative? We’re disabled and technically incompetent. The law says we can’t leave.”
“Not quite right,” Kaplan said. “Judge, tell him about Geropods.”
“Geropods?”
The Judge shushed me in a conspiratorial way as an orderly cruised in behind a trolley rattling with glass and plastic. I already knew him as Dennis, his hair the color of straw, his neck wider than his ears. He passed me my dopamine agonists in a little plastic cup and ticked his stylus on his palm chart. “DIDN’T SEE YOU AT THE LUAU LAST NIGHT, DOC,” Dennis shouted, as if my hat was out of order.
“That’s because I lived in Hawaii during the Aussie war,” I muttered, watching my hand shake and water splash out of the cup. “Luau Night here is pathetic. Hawaii without the beach.”
“Exactly,” Judge Ortiz agreed.
Kaplan swung his wheelchair around, just missing Dennis’ shin. “Casino Night without the money,” he chimed in. “Casting without the couch.”
Dennis, who’d gone a bit pink, tucked the palm chart into the trolley. “Valentine’s Day coming up,” he said ingenuously. “Let’s see. That would be sex without the . . .”
Kaplan pumped his arms and nailed him with quick reverse sweep of his chair.
“Re . . .strictions . . .” Dennis hissed when he could speak. “Going to talk to . . . Nurse Tucker. . . . Re . . .strict . . . you all from . . . recreation . . . room. . . .”
When we were alone again, Kaplan wheeled over to the Judge. “All right, tell him about Geropods. The Doc’s been in the hospital.”
“OK,” said Judge Ortiz. “Supreme Court decision last month. Civil rights case brought by the AARP. You’re correct; the law says we can’t leave as individuals—danger to ourselves, incompetent, all that crap. But the Court ruled that any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities constitute the powers of a single, competent individual, is collectively entitled to act as an individual, as a single, legally defined human being.”