by John Kessel
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FOR THERESE
THAT’S WHAT HISTORY IS: THE STORY OF EVERYTHING THAT NEEDN’T HAVE BEEN LIKE THAT.
—CLIVE JAMES, Cultural Amnesia
CHAPTER
ONE
AS ERNO WORKED, HIS AIDE whispered Persian phrases into his ear.
Can you direct me to the immigration center?
He would repeat the words after the cultured voice, intent on his accent, while he did the mindless labor that, back in the Society of Cousins, would be managed by an AI. He’d been studying doggedly since he’d come to Persepolis. Each shift enlarged his hoard of workplace idioms, of terms necessary to carry on a political conversation, of pickup lines—even of ways to express his feelings.
His body lay elsewhere, strapped to a frame in a control cubicle, but he perceived himself to be deep in the cold of Faustini crater, linked to a Remote Operating Device that gave him the strength and reach of a giant. There, in perpetual night, he loaded carriers with heaps of billion-year-old ice. There he cut and scooped and carried, under the glare of the lights, in service of Persepolis Water and Cyrus Eskander, the Shah of Ice.
Would you speak more slowly, please? I can’t understand you.
He watched the other RODs spread across the floor of the crater. The flare of a plasma cutter dazzled his plugged-in eyes. When the ice-laden regolith calved and avalanched, tremors made him shift on his plugged-in legs. If he looked up and adjusted the gain on his eyes, he could see a brilliant star-strewn sky. He didn’t look up very often.
Sometimes he would take a break from language lessons and ask his Aide to read him Persian poetry. He still had that—he still, sometimes, could be swept away by words. When he was high, like the seventeen-year-old he had once been, he even fantasized writing some ghazals. Such verse was hard to master, hiding knotty psychology beneath a zigzag surface. The Persians were all about wit, ingenuity in concealing motives, and complex status games. He liked the old poems best, the works of Sa’di and Hafêz.
If that Shirazi Turk would take my heart in her hand
For the mole on her cheek I’d give Bukhara and Samarkand.
This metaphorical Turkish lover with a mole: Was Hafêz proclaiming the depth of his love for her, or his self-disgust at feeling desire for someone so low on the social ladder? Both at once? The story went that when Hafêz was hauled before the Emperor Tamerlane for failing to pay his taxes, Tamerlane upbraided him for saying he would give these great cities, the jewels of the empire, for the blemish on his lover’s cheek. Hafêz replied that such poor judgment was the reason he was indigent.
Erno knew something of indigence, and poor judgment. The back of his head still throbbed from last night’s brawl, and he had trouble focusing. They were working a notch in the depths of the basin. The RODs operated by Taher Neeley and Devi Singh were down the line from him. The cart that followed Erno was almost full, shy only a few hundred kilos of capacity. Here the percentage of frozen water was the highest in the basin, blocks and sheets, at depth, which was why they had followed this notch so far. Dark walls towered over them, a canyon where the only light came from the blue arcs and the cutters. When he touched the beam of his cutter to the rock and ice, steam rose immediately. Dark blue glints among the powder and stone. He had to widen the beam to a millimeter so the vapor would not refreeze as soon as he cut it.
The external temperatures here were among the coldest in the solar system, as low as forty degrees Kelvin. If you weren’t careful you could create a pocket of vapor and cause an explosion. Machines regularly malfunctioned in such cold. Metal crumbled, ceramics became conductors, and even the most hardened processors were prone to soft upsets: Some stray cosmic ray sets off a circuit in a CPU and there you are with a flaring jet, a dead communicator. In the days when people instead of RODs did this work, the fatality rate among ice miners was the highest on the moon.
That is lovely, but it costs too much. Do you have a less expensive one?
It was hard to concentrate. Lately Erno’s thoughts had been drifting back to his home in the Society. He wondered what his sister Celeste was doing. Or Alicia—the last time they had slept together, they had fought. He could hardly remember the details. More than ten years had gone by, and it seemed like it had happened to another person. He imagined himself sitting on the soccer field below the Men’s House, looking down on the floor of the domed crater. Now he worked in a society where men held the highest status, yet he had never felt more powerless.
In the years of his exile Erno had learned a lot about what his mother had called “the patriarchal world.” Places that Tyler had described as utopias. And Tyler was right: This outside world manufactured utopia, but it was only available if you could pay for it. There were many ingenious, lovely things to be found in Persepolis. Most of these things Erno would never have.
May I escort you home? Are you doing anything tomorrow?
Erno was twenty meters deep in the notch. The glare of his cutter threw broken reflections through the surface, flares of light that shot back at odd angles when it struck fracture planes deep within the walls. He moved the cutter a meter to his right.
A flash and concussion.
Slowly, the entire wall of ice-laden regolith towering above him collapsed. He heard Devi’s cry, doubled, in both his phones and from somewhere in the background of the control center where his body lay. He backed his ROD off a step, but already the ice was sliding around it in a slurry of black chunks, glinting with reflected light. It was at the ROD’s ankles, its knees. He struggled to wade through. Ahead of him, Devi’s ROD was riding the cart; Taher’s hesitated and came back for Erno. The avalanche knocked Erno down. Taher was ten meters away, three meters; he was standing over Erno, trying to pull aside the heaps of rubble. It was useless; in seconds Erno was buried completely, and his eyes went dark.
Then pearl gray nothingness as the system pulled him back. He blinked hard once, twice, and reoriented himself to the sweat and disinfectant stink of the operators’ cubicle. He released his wrist restraints, reached up and rolled the thinking cap to the back of his scalp. He started to disentangle himself from the rack.
Beside him, Taher was peeling off his own cap. “Avazi ashghale bishoore kesafat!” he said, and Erno knew exactly what he meant.
• • • • •
The population of the moon came to about 3.2 million people, most on the nearside, in twenty-seven self-contained colonies scattered over thirty-seven million square kilometers. The largest was Persepolis, at five hundred thousand people, and the smallest Linne, in the Mare Serentatis, at fifteen hundred. In addition there were scientific stations, industrial facilities,
and exploratory outposts. There were even hermits, extended families of antisocial loners dug into holes in the sides of rilles, or living in metal huts buried under three meters of regolith on desolate maria. The colonies were constructed in lava tubes, in networks of manmade structures buried in canyons, in multilevel underground cities carved out of billion-year-old rock, in vaults and corridors, in ancient volcanic bubbles, and in a few domed craters like the one that housed the Society of Cousins.
The earliest colonies were scientific research outposts established by nation states from Earth. Later came industrial and military facilities, investment opportunities, and get-rich-quick schemes. Then came the political and social experiments. Separatist groups, ethnic minorities. Political refugees. Religious factions seeking private utopias. Mixes of all of these.
Erno’s first stop after exile from the Society was Mayer colony in the Lunar Carpathians, dominated by hard money libertarian capitalists of the Austrian School. At eighteen he’d been fatally naive about the world outside of the Society. He’d made many mistakes, including taking a job with a fraudulent company that collapsed, leaving him on the street.
In the ten hard years that had taken Erno from Mayer to Persepolis, he had lived in eleven different colonies. His first stop after Mayer was Rupes Cauchy and eight months as a gardener. Then Aristarchus, where he wore out his days and his back as an aquaculture worker monitoring fish tanks, with a break now and then to shovel chicken shit. In Sabine, near the Apollo 11 landing site, he actually got to use a little of his biotech training, as an over-the-counter virus cook (Change your skin in three weeks!). That lasted nineteen months. In Tycho he worked in an environment plant. In Huygens he was a low level drone for a drug dealer.
Everywhere, everyone talked about Persepolis, the richest colony on the moon.
It was all about water. In Persepolis, they said, water was as cheap as titanium. In Persepolis, you could bathe in water. People in Persepolis learned to swim. One of the drug mules told Erno he knew of someone in Persepolis who had actually drowned at Tehran Beach.
Erno had never considered seeking his fortune there. Something about the prospect—maybe the fact that his mother had spoken of the colony as if it were the essence of patriarchal madness—kept him away. But when the network got busted and Erno had to flee with only the clothes on his back and a few possessions thrown into a satchel—ten years, ten years and he left Huygens no better off than when he’d left Mayer—the first cable train out of the colony was southbound, and the decision was made for him.
The evening before the accident, on his way to a night of heavy drinking, Erno had paused at the water sculpture in Anahita Square. The square rose, open, through the city’s many levels, a mammoth atrium with gleaming white balconies. High above, the faux sky of the clearest blue was now turning violet. Twilight fed shadows beneath the colonnade of the Zoroastrian temple, inside which the fire continually burned, and darkened the entry of the mosque where the muezzin would soon call the evening prayer. A hundred meters across the square stood the Majlis, the People’s Assembly.
The sculpture, a complex network of pools and waterfalls, filled the air with mist and white noise. Lights gleamed in the balconies above. Ticket scalpers hovered near the entrance of the Kazedi Concert Hall. Cafés were transitioning from afternoon tea drinkers to evening diners. At one of them, two waiters went among the tables shaking out wine-red tablecloths that billowed in the fragrant air and slowly settled over the tabletops. The men set places with white linen serviettes. Erno watched the beautiful women coming from the shopping district, a few lines of Yeats running through his head.
When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world . . .
Persepolis was a tribute to the human aspiration to bring the world under graceful rule. If you wanted to dress in style in Tycho or Aristarchus, then you dressed the way the rich in Anahita Square dressed. If you wanted to be an artist, you moved to Persepolis, drank coffee in the café of the New Museum, and sought to get your work hung in the Sikander Gallery. A young pop musician in Rima Asiadaeus aching to make it big knew that he had somehow to play the clubs in the Ahura-Mazda district. An actor seeking a career of any import schemed to appear on the stage of the Ajoudanieh Theater. Restaurants, museums, football clubs, and universities: Those of Persepolis might find rivals in other colonies, but never superiors.
None of these pursuits interested Erno. Erno lived in Pamenar, a neighborhood of immigrants and guest workers that lay just below the lunar surface in a city where status rose the deeper you went underground. He shared a room with Zdeno Bartoš from Rima Marius, who repaired construction bots, and Fabrizio Longo from Linne, who dreamed of becoming a great chef but meanwhile worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Manuchehr. Fabrizio was an ebullient dreamer, Zdeno a taciturn Christian Socialist who, between benders, volunteered at the shelter at the Orthodox church. Erno did little more in the apartment than sleep. Every night he prowled the restless concourses, listened to music in clubs, ate chelow kebab in cheap restaurants, dabbled in immigrant politics, and wondered when boredom or desperation would finally make him do something that he could not escape.
He was supposed to meet Taher and the others, but the tea shops were not open until eight in the evening. He left the fountain and crossed to the Majlis. Over the entrance the Persian inscription read, “Were it not for Iran, I myself could not exist.”
This late in the day, the assembly had adjourned, and the wide and high rotunda held only a few tourists and a couple of security officers, uplifted apes. In the center, on a pedestal inside a crystal case, rested the Cyrus Cylinder—the genuine, millennia-old relic. The twenty-two-centimeter-long clay antiquity covered with Akkadian cuneiform, repatriated from the British Museum a century earlier, symbolized the colony’s devotion to the liberal policies that the legendary Cyrus had proclaimed for his subject states.
A young mother and two children were examining the exhibit. The boy read the description from the display.
“Is it real?” the little girl asked.
“Yes,” the mother said. “It is over two thousand five hundred years old.”
“It’s just clay,” said the boy. “Anybody could break it.”
Founded by Iranian utopians tired of decades of theocracy and centuries of incursions from East and West, seeking a Persian future equal to its past, Persepolis was one of three colonies begun by different groups at the lunar south pole. With access to continuous solar power in the highlands and stores of ice in the Aitkin basin, it had grown and absorbed its neighbors.
The colony’s founders brought with them a desire to recapture the glories of ancient cosmopolitan Persia. Though committed to the religious wellsprings of Iranian culture, they established a secular government. Muslims made up forty percent of the population, with the rest divided among Zoroastrians, Sufis, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, and Hindus, and a significant percentage professing no religion. Sunnis were welcomed; even Baha’i were welcomed, as long as all acknowledged the sovereignty of the civil state.
Iranians on Earth called Persepolis a fatally westernized faux-Persia, apostate from the living Iran. The founders countered that they harkened back to the true Iran that existed before the imposition of Islam. In Persepolis Shi’ia fundamentalists yet sought to establish the Twelver school as the state religion, but the memory of the troubles suffered by the Islamic Republic kept them in check. At the other end of the political spectrum, anticapitalists wished to break the power of the great families and broaden social equality, but the wealth of the ruling class, and the general prosperity built on a foundation of ice, militated against change.
There were internal conflicts. Policies toward uplifted dogs, for instance, were a matter of contention between Muslims, who considered them unclean, and Zoroastrians, who believed a dog’s gaze drove away evil spirits and employed them in their sagdid funerary rite.
Among all of t
his, the status of guest workers like Erno was not something the Majlis spent much time debating.
Erno stepped back out of the building just as the muezzin began his evening call to prayer. Men streamed toward the mosque. Erno waited until the voice died, then walked out of the square and down a concourse until he came to Mosaddeq Way, spiraling up from the base to the top of the city.
Three levels up he came to Dorud, the city’s oldest and roughest neighborhood. Shiraz Concourse had once been a showplace, sadly fallen in the past thirty years. An elevated tramway shadowed a long colonnade of shops and clubs. Men young and old idled in the street, playing Nard on a small table near the tram station, talking politics near a genetic surgery, drinking tea in the cafés.
Competing music spilled out of clubs: a woman singing a song in Persian, the throb of Chinese dance music. A tram hummed by overhead as Erno stepped under the archway of The Spirit of Wisdom, a tavern catering to expats, into a room of small metal tables and the smell of tobacco. Serious Muslims and believing Sikhs might decry such taverns, but the place was crowded.
On the pixwall played the public affairs program Here’s the Point! Its host, the canine investigative reporter Sirius, shared the screen with a human colleague. People were consigned to the freezers here for lack of work, yet they gave media jobs to dogs. The Society of Cousins considered it cruel to uplift animals and imposed strict limits on manipulating the human genome, but the rest of the solar system did not observe such niceties, and Here’s the Point! was very popular. Sirius was an outspoken advocate for the rights of uplifted animals. His personal assistant, Gracie, was a capuchin monkey.
The volume was low, but Erno caught a reference to an “upcoming election in the notorious Society of Cousins.” He stopped to watch, but at that moment Taher called, “Erno! Over here.”