Dark Benediction

by Walter M. Miller

  Blooie was too graphic to suit Madame; she sagged and began retching.

  "C'mon, Ma',am, less get you in yo hammock." They carried her into her quarters, eased her into bed, and stepped back out on the catwalk.

  Lije mopped his face, leaned against a tension member, and glanced at Joe. "Now how come you s'pose he had that bottle of fizzling giggle water up close to his helmet that way, Joe?"

  "I don't know. Reading the label, maybe."

  "He sho' muss have had something on his mine."

  "Well, it's gone now."

  "Yeah. BLOOIE. Man!"

  Relke had led the girl out through the lock in the reactor nacelle in order to evade Brodanovitch and a possible command to return to camp. They sat in Novotny's runabout and giggled cozily together at the fuzzy map of Earth that floated in the darkness above them. On the ship's fuselage, the warning light over the airlock hatch began winking, indicating that the lock was in use. The girl noticed it and nudged him. She pointed at the light.

  "Somebody coming out," Relke muttered. "Maybe Suds.

  We'd better get out of here." He flipped the main switch and started the motor. He was backing onto the road when Giselle caught his arm.

  "Beel! Look at the light!"

  He glanced around. It was flashing red.

  "Malfunction signal. Compressor trouble, probably. It's nothing. Let's take a ride. Joe won't care." He started backing again.

  "Poof!" she said suddenly.

  "What?"

  "Poof. It opened, and poof—" She puckered her lips and blew a little puff of steam in the cold air to show him. "So. Like smoke."

  He turned the car around in the road and looked back again. The hatch had closed. There was no one on the ladder. "Nobody came out."

  "Non. Just poof."

  He edged the car against the trolley rails, switched to autosteering, and let it gather speed.

  "Beel?"

  "Yeah, kid?"

  "Where you taking me?"

  He caught the note of alarm in her voice and slowed down again. She had come on a dare after several drinks, and the drinks were wearing off. The landscape was frighteningly alien, and the sense of falling into bottomlessness was ever-present.

  "You want to go back?" he asked gloomily.

  "I don't know. I don't like it out here."

  "You said you wanted some ground under your feet."

  "But it doesn't feel like ground when you walk on it."

  "Rather be inside a building?"

  She nodded eagerly.

  "That's where we're going."

  "To your camp?"

  "God, no! I'm planning to keep you to myself."

  She laughed and snuggled closer to him. "You can't. Madame d'Annecy will not permit—"

  "Let's talk about something else," he grunted quickly. "OK. Let's talk about Monday."

  "Which Monday?"

  "Next Monday. It's my birthday. When is it going to be Monday, Bill?"

  "You said Bill."

  "Beel? That's your name, isn't eet? Weeliam Q. Relke, who weel not tell me what ees the Q?"

  "But you said Bill."

  She was silent for a moment. "OK, I'm a phony," she muttered. "Does the inquisition start now?"

  He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. "When's it going to be Monday?" she murmured.

  "When's it going to be Monday where?"

  "Here, anywhere, silly!"

  He laughed. "When will it be Monday all over the universe?"

  She thought for a moment. "Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?"

  "It won't. We just have periods, hitches, .and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period's from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don't count days. So I don't know when it'll be Monday."

  It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. "Don't you even have hours?" She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.

  "Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour."

  She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. "When it's Monday on Earth, it'll be Monday here too," she announced flatly.

  Relke laughed. "OK, we'll call it that."

  "So when will it start being Monday on Earth?"

  "Well, it'll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It's August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer."

  She looked really worried.

  "You take birthdays pretty seriously?" he asked.

  "Only this one. I'll be—" She broke off and closed her mouth.

  "Pick a time zone," Relke offered, "and I'll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you'd be now, maybe?"

  She shook her head.

  "Where you were born?"

  "That would be—" She stopped again. "Never mind. Forget it." She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.

  Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.

  "That's a building?" she asked.

  "That's an entrance. The 'building's' underground. Come on, let's seal up."

  "What's down there?"

  "Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man."

  "Somebody lives down there?"

  "Not yet. The line's still being built. They'll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving."

  "What do we want to go down there for?"

  He looked at her forlornly. "You'd rather go back to the ship?"

  She seemed to pull herself together professionally. She laughed and put her arms around him and whispered something in French against his ear. She kissed him hard, pressed her forehead against his, and grinned. "C'mon, babee! Let's go downstairs."

  Relke felt suddenly cold inside. He had wanted to see what it felt like to be alone with a woman again in a quiet place, away from the shouting, howling revelry that had been going on aboard the ship. Now he knew what it was going to feel like. It was going to feel counterfeit. "Christ!" he grunted angrily. "Let's go back!" He reached roughly around her and cut on the switch again. She recoiled suddenly and gaped at him as he started the motor and turned the bug around.

  "Hey!" She was staring at him oddly, as if seeing him for 'the first time.

  Relke kept his face averted and his knuckles were white on the steering bar. She got up on her knees on the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. "Bill. Good Lord, you're crying!"

  He choked out a curse as the bug hit the side of the cut and careened around on the approach to the road. He lost control, and the runabout went off the approach and slid slowly sideways down a gentle slope of crushed-lava fill. A sharp clanking sound came from the floor plates.

  "Get your suit sealed!" he yelled. "Get it sealed!"

  The runabout lurched to a sudden stop. The cabin pressure stayed up. He sat panting for a moment, then started the motor. He let it inch ahead and tugged at the steering bar. It was locked. The bug crept in an arc, and the clanking resumed. He cut off the motor and sat cursing softly.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Broke a link and the tread's fouled. We'll have to get out."

  She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was glowering. She looked back toward the sentrybox entrance to the substation and smiled thoughtfully.

  It was chilly in the vault, and the only light came from the indicator lamps on the control board.' The pressure gauge inside the airlock indicated only eight pounds of air. The construction crew had pumped it up to keep some convection currents going around the big transformers, but they hadn't planned on anyone breathing it soon. He changed the mixture controls, turned the barostat up to twelve pounds, and listened to the compressors start up. When he turned around, Giselle was taking off her suit and beginning to pant.
r />   "Hey, stay in that thing!" he shouted.

  His helmet muffled his voice, and she looked at him blankly. "What?" she called. She was gasping and looking around in alarm.

  Relke sprinted a few steps to the emergency rack and grabbed a low pressure walk-around bottle. When he got back, she was getting blue and shaking her head drunkenly. He cracked the valve on the bottle and got the hose connection against her mouth. She nodded quickly and sucked on it. He went back to watch the gauges. He found the overhead lighting controls and turned them on. Giselle held her nose and anxiously sipped air from the bottle. He nodded reassuringly at her. The construction crews had left the substation filled with nitrogen-helium mixture, seeing no reason to add rust-producing moisture and oxygen until someone moved into the place; she had been breathing inert gases, nothing more.

  When the partial oxygen pressure was up to normal, he left the control panel and went to look for the communicator. He found the equipment, but it was not yet tied into the line. He went back to tell the girl. Still sipping at the bottle, she watched him with attentive brown eyes. It was the gaze of a child, and he wondered about her age. Aboard ship, she and the others had seemed impersonal automata of Eros; painted ornaments and sleekly functional decoys designed to perform stereotyped rituals of enticement and excarnation of desire, swiftly, lest a customer be kept waiting. But here in stronger light, against a neutral background, he noticed suddenly that she was a distinct individual. Her lipstick had smeared. Her dark hair kept spilling out in tangled wisps from beneath a leather cap with fleece ear flaps. She wore a pair of coveralls, several sizes too large and rolled up about the ankles. With too much rouge on her solemnly mischievous face, she looked ready for a role in a girls' school version of Chanticler.

  "You can stop breathing out of the can," he told her. "The oxygen pressure's okay now."

  She took the hose from her mouth and sniffed warily. "What was the matter? I was seeing spots."

  "It's all right now."

  "It's cold in this place. Are we stuck here?"

  "I tried to call Joe, but the set's not hooked up. He'll come looking for us."

  "Isn't there any heat in here? Can't you start a fire?"

  He glanced down at the big 5,000 kva transformers in the pit beyond the safety rail. The noise of corona discharge was very faint, and the purr of thirty-two cycle hum was scarcely audible. With no trucks drawing, power from the trolley, the big pots were cold. Normally, eddy current and hysteresis losses in the transformers would keep the station toast-warm. He glanced at a thermometer. It read slightly under freezing: the ambient temperature of the subsurface rock in that region.

  "Let's try the stationman's living quarters," he grunted. "They usually furnish them fancy, as bunk tanks go. Man has to stay by himself out here, they want to keep him sane."

  A door marked PRIVATE flipped open as they approached it. A cheery voice called out: "Hi, Bo. Rugged deal, ain't it?"

  Giselle started back in alarm. "Who's there?"

  Relke chuckled. "Just a recorded voice. Back up, I'll show you."

  They moved a few paces away. The door fell closed. They approached it again. This time a raucous female squawked at them: "Whaddaya mean coming home at this hour? Lemme smell your breath."

  Giselle caught on and grinned. "So he won't get lonesome?"

  "Partly, and partly to keep him a little sore. The stationmen hate it, but that's part of the idea. It gives them something to talk back to and throw things .at."

  They entered the apartment. The door closed itself, the lights went on. Someone belched, then announced: "I get just as sick of looking at you as you do looking at me, button head. Go take a bath."

  Relke flushed. "It can get pretty rough sometimes. The tapes weren't edited for mixed company. Better plug your ears if you go in the bathroom."

  Giselle giggled. "I think it's cute."

  He went into the kitchenette and turned on all the burners of the electric range to help warm the place. "Come stand next to the oven," he called, "until I see if the heat pumps are working." He opened the oven door. A libidinous purr came from within.

  "Dah-ling, now why bother with breakfast when you can have meee?"

  He glanced up at Giselle.

  "I didn't say it," she giggled, but posed invitingly. Relke grinned and accepted the invitation.

  "You're not crying now," she purred as he released her.

  He felt a surge of unaccountable fury, grunted, "Excuse me," and stalked out to the transformer vault. He looked around for the heat pumps, failed to find them, and went to lean on the handrail overlooking the pit. He stood there with his fists in his pockets, vaguely anguished and enraged, for no reason he understood. For a moment he had been too close to feeling at home, and that brought up the wrath somehow. After a couple of minutes he shook it off and went back inside.

  "Hey, I wasn't teasing you," Giselle told him.

  "What?"

  "About crying."

  "Listen," he said irritably, "did you ever see a looney or a spacer without leaky eyes? It's the glare, that's all."

  "Is that it? Huh—want to know something? I can't cry. That's funny. You're a man and you can cry, but I can't."

  Relke watched her grumpily while she warmed her behind at the oven. She's not more than fifteen, he decided suddenly. It made him a little queasy. Come on, Joe, hurry.

  "You know," she went on absently, "when I was a little girl, I got mad at . . . at somebody, and I decided I was never going to cry anymore. I never did, either. And you know what?—now I can't. Sometimes I try and I try, but I just can't." She spread her hands to the oven, tilted them back and forth, and watched the way the tendons worked as she stiffened her fingers. She seemed to be talking to her hands. "Once I used an onion. To cry, I mean. I cut an onion and rubbed some of it on a handkerchief and laid the handkerchief over my eyes. I cried that time, all right. That time I couldn't stop crying, and nobody could make me stop. They were petting me and scolding me and shaking me and trying to give me smelling salts, but I just couldn't quit. I blubbered for two days. Finally Mother Bernarde had to call the doctor to give me a sedative. Some of the sisters were taking cold towels and—"

  "Sisters?" Relke grunted.

  Giselle clapped a hand to her mouth and shook her head five or six times, very rapidly. She looked around at him. He shrugged.

  "So you were in a convent."

  She shook her head again.

  "So what if you were?" He sat down with his back to her and pretended to ignore her. She was dangerously close to that state of mind which precedes the telling of a life history. He didn't want to hear it; he already knew it. So she was in a nunnery; Relke was not surprised. Some people had to polarize themselves. If they broke free from one pole, they had to seek its opposite. People with no middle ground. Black, or if not black, then white, never gray. Law, or criminality. God, or Satan. The cloister, or a whorehouse. Eternally a choice of all or nothing-at-all, and they couldn't see that they made things that way for themselves. They set fire to every bridge they ever crossed—so that even a cow creek became a Rubicon, and every crossing was on a tightrope.

  You understand that too well, don't you, Relke? he asked himself bitterly. There was Fran and the baby, and there wasn't enough money, and so you had to go and burn a bridge—a 240,000-mile bridge, with Fran on the other side. And so, after six years on Luna, there would be enough money; but there wouldn't be Fran and the baby. And so, he had signed another extended contract, and the moon was going to be home for a long long time. Yeh, you know about burned bridges, all right, Relke.

  He glanced at Giselle. She was glaring at him.

  "If you're waiting for me to say something," she snapped, "you can stop waiting. I don't have to tell you anything."

  "I didn't ask you anything."

  "I was just a novice. I didn't take permanent vows."

  "All right."

  "They wouldn't let me. They said I was—unstable. They didn't think I had a cal
ling."

  "Well, you've got one now. Stop crawling all over me like I said anything. I didn't ask you any questions."

  "You gave me that pious look."

  "Oh, garbage!" He rolled out of the chair and loped off to the room. The stationman's quarters boasted its own music system and television (permanently tuned to the single channel that broadcast a fairly narrow beam aimed at the lunar stations). He tried the television first, but solar interference was heavy.

  "Maybe it'll tell us when it's going to be Monday," she said, coming to watch him from the doorway.

  He gave her a sharp look, then softened it. The stove had warmed the kitchen, and she had stepped out of the baggy coveralls. She was still wearing the yellow dress, and she had taken a moment to comb her hair. She leaned against the side of the doorway, looking very young but excessively female. She had that lost pixie look and a tropical climate tan too.

  "Why are you looking at me that way?" she asked. "Is this all we're going to do? I mean, just wait around until somebody comes? Can't we dance or something?" She did a couple of skippity steps away from the door jamb and rolled her hips experimentally. One hip was made of India rubber. "Say! Dancing ought to be fun in this crazy gravity." She smirked at him and posed alluringly.

  Relke swallowed, reddened, and turned to open the selector cabinet. She's only a kid, Relke. He paused, then dialed three selections suitable for dancing. She's only a kid, damn it! He paused again, then dialed a violin concerto. A kid—back home they'd call her "jail bait." He dialed ten minutes' worth of torrid Spanish guitar. You'll hate yourself for it, Relke. He shuddered involuntarily, dialed one called The Satyricon of Lily Brown, an orgy in New African Jazz (for adults only).

  He glanced up guiltily. She was already whirling around the room with an imaginary partner, dancing to the first selection.

  Relke dialed a tape of Palestrina and some plainchant, but left it for last. Maybe it would neutralize the rest.

  She snuggled close and they tried to keep time to the music—not an easy task, with the slow motion imposed by low gravity mismatched to the livelier rhythms of dancing on Earth. Two attempts were enough. Giselle flopped down on the bunk.