by John Kessel
Fabrizio, Zdeno, and Taher occupied a table in a corner. “Good evening,” Erno said.
“Greetings, Cousin,” said Zdeno, a big man with an impressive blond mustache.
“Wine!” Fabrizio said. He signaled toward the tavern owner, who came over with a glass. Erno thanked him.
They had a bottle in front of them, an inhaler, and the standard hookah that sat on every table. Smoking, so rare as to be remarkable back home, was common in the taverns. So they smoked, they inhaled, they drank mood teas. They slipped from Persian into their native languages. Fabrizio spoke English, and Taher’s parents had been refugees from England. Zdeno knew English well enough to carry on a conversation.
Fabrizio told about his working with a new chef who was so short that he could not reach the top shelves of the pantry. Taher eyed the next table over, where two young men sat watching, heads wreathed in smoke. “Watch your language,” he said. “Those guys are basiji.”
“They have no authority,” said Erno. “If they try anything we’ll get them arrested.”
Fabrizio studied them. “We’re guest workers. We take jobs meant for good Muslims, then spend our earnings on wine.”
“Yet here they are,” Erno said, “missing evening prayer. Fuck them.”
One of the men said a few words to his companion.
Zdeno, drunker than anyone, seized on the subject. “The purpose of society is to enable all of God’s people to prosper. But multiethnic societies are trouble.”
When Zdeno got going, the mix of high-flown political theory and personal resentment reminded Erno of the earnest debate among the masculinists back in the Society.
Taher took a hit from the inhaler, then passed it to Zdeno. “Difference means persecution. Always true, anywhere you go.”
“Some places are worse than others,” said Erno.
“You don’t like it here?” Zdeno said.
Erno already had a buzz on. “I’m tired of being on the bottom.”
Fabrizio said, “We could learn a lot from you Cousins.”
At one time Erno would have laughed at that. “Maybe,” he said grudgingly. “Fowler is no paradise.”
“You’re just pissed because they threw you out,” said Zdeno. “But trying to defuse violence through social practices suited to male and female biology—not police or drugs or neural engineering—it’s admirable.”
“Plus, I hear the sex is good,” Taher said.
“Are the women forced to say yes?” Fabrizio laughed. “Maybe Zdeno might stop talking.”
Erno needed to piss. He got up, knocking over his chair. Overcompensating, he tried to catch it and hit the knee of one of the two men at the nearby table. “My sincere apology,” he said.
“You are a drunkard,” the man said in English.
“You are correct,” Erno said, raising his index finger. “But I am a drunkard student of your great poets,” he added, practicing his Persian. The man looked at him stonily.
When he returned from the men’s room, Taher was telling Zdeno and Fabrizio, “The whole point of the hegira was not to escape our culture, but to recover it.”
“Cousins are the opposite,” Erno said. “The reason the Society moved to the moon was to create a new culture. New songs, new stories, new myths.” He took another hit on the inhaler.
“I have nothing against the Society of Cousins,” Zdeno said. “Except the idea of them causes trouble with women everywhere.”
Fabrizio groomed his mustache with his forefinger. “There’s that,” he said. “Plus, men there can’t vote.”
“Yes, I couldn’t vote there,” Erno said. He set down the inhaler. “And I can’t vote here. Most nearside men are just low-grade neural nets for rent. If they ever make an AI with common sense, they’ll turn people like us into fertilizer.”
Taher said, “I’m a citizen—”
Taher’s citizenship, which he never ceased talking about, was a joke. Taher’s real given name was George; his parents had escaped to the moon when the British Isles fought the Caliphate. He was no more Persian than Erno.
“Which shows what citizenship gets you,” Erno said. “Look over there.” At another table five men were smoking hashish. “They probably don’t make any more money than we do. That guy in the middle, doesn’t he work at the mine?”
Taher looked over, squinting. “That’s Kemal. He’s in the distillery. He makes twice what we make.”
“The thing is,” Fabrizio said, “is that we are all brothers and sisters. Everywhere. No matter what genetics, cultures, politics.”
Zdeno laughed. “When Fabrizio takes over the kitchen, everyone will eat for free.”
Erno bumped the table, rattling their cups, and the inhaler started to fall. Fabrizio caught it. “We’re the oppressed,” Erno said. “We’re like criminals. Half the people in the freezers are migrants like us.”
“They’re in the freezers because they broke the law.”
“Everyone breaks the law,” Erno said, “when they need to.”
“You too, Erno?”
They didn’t know that he’d gotten his mother killed; he wasn’t about to tell them. “In Mayer, ten years ago, I robbed a man that lived next door to me. I needed money, so I broke into his rooms. And I stole his hand.”
“You stole his hand?”
“It was artificial. It was stupid—I took it with me when I fled the colony. I still have it. Someday I will give it back.” Erno’s mood only got blacker. For all he knew, Alois was as dead as his mother.
“We all do bad things,” Fabrizio said. “Nobody is blaming you.”
Erno gestured at the next table. “You think those men wouldn’t like to put us out the nearest airlock?”
One of the men looked up.
“Keep your voice down,” Taher said.
Erno broke away from the man’s glare. “At least in the Society a man can do whatever he wants, and the polity supports him. He wants to be a poet, then he writes poetry. And people listen. They care about poetry. Not like here.”
“You hate it so much here,” Taher said, “then go back.”
Erno’s anger had run to its habitual dead end. He never spoke of home without longing—until faced with the prospect of return.
“I’ll never go back,” he said.
“Let me buy you something to eat,” said Fabrizio, touching Erno’s forearm. “The chelow-khoresh here is pretty good. And coffee—you have to admit Persepolis has the best coffee. Meanwhile, why don’t you recite us one of these poems you’re always talking about.”
“Yes,” Zdeno said. “Something in Persian. Make it sing.”
Erno looked at them bleary-eyed. Why not? He stood. “I’m sure our neighbors won’t mind. They’re no doubt poets themselves.” Turning his back on the other table, he declaimed, “Here is the wisdom of the great king Hushang, grandson of the very first king of all time, Kayumars—Persians do love their kings—and Hushang was a good one.
“In his time he struggled mightily
Planning and inventing innumerable schemes
But when his days were at an end,
For all his sagacity and dignity, he departed.
The world will not keep faith with you
Nor will she show you her true face.”
Erno found himself swept up in melancholy. Poetry was all he had.
“Shut up!” came a voice from behind him.
He turned. The man who had locked eyes with him was scowling.
“That’s right, I said quit your fool’s bumbling, you pallid eunuch. You have no right to those words. Go back to whatever godforsaken hole you came from.”
Erno touched his hand to his forehead, then to his breast, and made an elaborate bow. “I beg your pardon, brother. May I be your sacrifice?” The elegance of his gesture was marred when he had to catch his hand on the edge of the table to keep from falling.
He turned to Zdeno and Fabrizio and leaned in, shielding his mouth with the back of his hand. “There’s no music in that man’s sou
l.”
“Calm down, Erno,” Zdeno said.
He heard the men stir. “What did he say?”
“I am perfectly calm,” Erno told Zdeno, “because I do come from a godforsaken hole. Which reminds me of another poem”—he switched to English now—“by the great Celtic poet William Butler Yeats, spokesman for another abused minority. He said:
“The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced out thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole—”
He had gotten only this far when they hit him in the back of the head with a chair.
• • • • •
Devi was the last out of the rack in the ROD control cubicle. She came over to Erno. “What happened out there?”
Erno rubbed the back of his head where the neural fibers on the inside of his cap had not wanted to let loose. He could still feel the knot where the guy had hit him with the chair, and when he looked at his fingertips, despite the dim light from the telltales, he saw a gleam of blood. “I got buried, Devi. I think that’s obvious.”
“You shouldn’t have been so deep in the crease! And you”—she turned to Taher—“should have known better than to try to pull him out. Now we’ve lost two RODs instead of one.”
Taher towered over them, so tall that when strapped to the rack, his feet hung over the end. “I thought I could pull him out. Then we wouldn’t have lost any.”
“Explain that to Mr. Buyid.”
Erno couldn’t let that happen. If he lost this job, he would be expelled from Persepolis. He couldn’t take another flight, or worse, ten years in a freezer. “Buyid would have to shut down the operation for a shift in order to use the other RODs to dig ours out,” he said. “We’d be fired. Please, Devi. You keep things quiet here, while Taher and I suit up and go retrieve the RODs.”
“Exo? In person? You can’t do that.”
“I’m not going out there,” Taher said.
“I’ve logged extensive hours on the surface,” Erno said. “We did it all the time back in the Society.”
“At forty degrees Kelvin?”
“Do you want to get fired?” Erno asked.
Devi’s brow furrowed. She glanced around the other alcoves, where other three-person teams lay in their racks, still plugged into their RODs, oblivious to what had happened. “The shift will be over in three hours. I can’t keep Buyid from finding out for long.”
“He doesn’t care what goes on here,” Erno said, “as long as the quotas are filled.”
“Maybe. But if Eskander ever hears about it, we’ll all be in trouble.”
“We’re already in trouble. Give us two hours. If we’re not done by then, you turn us in.”
“I must be crazy,” Devi said. She reached for her cap. “Just get back quick, and don’t get hurt.”
“Come on,” Erno said to Taher, and they headed out of control and down the corridors to the airlock complex. Taher started cursing the minute they were away from the center. “I haven’t been exo in three years. Do you know how cold it is out there?”
Erno didn’t know what he was supposed to do about it. “Yes.”
The seldom-used personnel airlock was down an ancient industrial tube whose walls had been sealed with cement thirty years ago and not cleaned since. The concrete path that ran down the center of the tube was crusty with the grit of decades; if you kicked up a pebble it would racket off the wall and bounce for meters before coming to rest. The air tasted of ozone from the cutters and electric carts.
Taher opened the chamber that held the heavy-duty surface suits. He powered one up and walked it out of the closet. Unlike the light, flexible skinsuits Erno was used to from back at Fowler, this was a massive lozenge with two pillarlike legs that ended in triangular intelligent feet like some ungainly waterfowl, and massively insulated power-assist sleeves with articulated artificial hands for delicate work. Erno opened the suit at the waist and climbed in, fitted his legs into the suit’s servo legs, then leaned forward and dove arms first into the top. The suit’s top swung up and sealed him inside. Erno took a tentative step. He had trained on such a suit when he came to work at the ice works, but had logged only the minimum time, and never out in Faustini. His boasted surface experience had come in completely different circumstances.
Taher sealed himself into his own suit. His voice sounded in Erno’s helmet. “So, let’s get this over with.”
They walked the awkward suits through the archway at the end of the chamber to the secondary personnel airlock. The corridor was empty. Had Devi somehow managed to clear the place of witnesses?
The secondary airlock was full of trash. The ice works had been one of the first industries built at Persepolis, and the least modernized over the years. As long as profits could be made selling water, there was little immediate market incentive to improve efficiency or prevent waste. In practice this meant that machinery got neglected unless it broke down. The secondary airlock had not been used for a long time, and workers had come to take breaks in it. The floor was covered with food wrappers. Fines from the lunar surface were everywhere, caked on walls, switches, and valves.
Taher pressed the exit sequence and the old valves began cycling air out of the lock. When the pressure fell below thirty-six millibars they opened the outer hatch and walked out into the maze. Some of the lights were out, which made the corners darker than sleep. Erno switched on his helmet and shoulder lights. The floor rose as they reached the end of the baffles and came out onto the surface.
For three months he had been working out here by remote, but this was the first time he had seen the surface in physical presence. The basin fell a thousand meters below the lunar surface and never saw sunlight. The rail system for the carts exited from the processing facility and ran across the surface, beneath area lights, to the mining sites a kilometer distant. Taher and Erno moved over to the track and mounted a small car. Erno hit the controls in his suit and the car started up; through the seat he felt the low rumble. He drew his hands up out of the gloves to keep his fingers warm.
They rode out to the mining cleft. As they approached, the size of the deposits was impressed on Erno in a way he had never experienced by remote presence. The ice, which had been gathering here for billions of years, rose in a dark mass from the rugged floor of the crater. Faint starlight revealed heaped and humped shoulders and blocks and cliffs, starting small but, ahead of them, rising thirty meters or more. The mining that had gone on for sixty years had eaten away maybe ten percent of the estimated mass, but the rate of use had accelerated in the last decade. Some estimated that, at the current rate, the basin’s deposits would be exhausted in thirty years.
“I’m already cold,” Taher said. “What are we doing out here?”
Erno had enough with his whining. “Shut up, Taher,” he said. “Nobody made you come.”
“You asked me.”
“And you said yes. Take some responsibility for yourself.”
“Excellent talk from a guest worker.”
“Yeah, I’m a guest worker, and you were raised here. And both of us are working in this frozen shithole. What does that tell you about yourself?”
“I should have let those men dismantle you last night,” Taher said.
Devi’s voice came over the comm. “I can hear all this.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Erno said.
It came to Erno then how angry he was, angrier than he had ever been since he had left Fowler. Enraged, out here in an antiquated suit trying to cover up an accident that wasn’t his fault, in a job he hated, in a place where he was and always would be a stranger. Furious at the way everything inevitably went, at his loneliness and powerlessness and at the dumb brutishness of reality.
But there was more to it than that. He’d been furious the night before, too. With those other drunken men he’d acted out of dick measuring, trying to win a stupid contest of intimidation. It
wasn’t him, losing his sense of proportion like this—or at least not what he used to be. He had changed, been coarsened by living among men always looking down on him, asserting mastery, pushing him under so they could be up. He used to let this go, taking the properly detached Cousins’ attitude—most of his childhood had been about learning to avoid these testosterone-fueled games. But now it had come to matter to him. He was becoming the man that Tyler had wanted him to be. It had taken a decade.
So now I’m truly ruined, Erno thought. I’m one of them.
The cart ran down the long decline into the notch where they had been working. The sky retreated into the gap above them; the lights on their suits, and the area lights ahead, were the only illumination. He had to get out of here. He couldn’t live like this anymore. He hoped Taher would spread the story of his rage. He would rather be what Anadem had called him back in Mayer—The Deadly Señor P—than what he was: a refugee with no prospects, dependent on a culture he didn’t understand.
When they arrived at the notch, they spent the next hour cutting though the icy rubble to reach the RODs. Devi’s ROD was there with them, and she helped move what they cleared. They worked sloppily now, not worrying about wasting water through overheating and sublimation. When they cleared Taher’s ROD they found it functional and told it to return to the shed under its own power. But they couldn’t find Erno’s. Erno thought he knew where it should be, but the shape of the notch had been completely altered by the collapse. They wasted thirty minutes uncovering nothing.
It was ten minutes shy of the two hours Devi had granted them, and Taher was hinting they should go back and face Mr. Buyid, when Erno, balancing on a heap of jumbled avalanche ice, spotted a metal foot five meters below him. He clambered carefully down into the pit.
“Erno, we need to get back,” Taher insisted.
Devi’s voice chimed in. “There’s no time, Erno. The rest of the crews are coming out of link and already know something is up. Buyid is going to know regardless of whether you save the ROD.”
Erno ignored them. He tried to steady himself on the slurry of crushed fragments at the bottom, beside the partially exposed ROD. Eager to be done with it, he turned his plasma cutter on full and directed it at the surrounding ice.