by John Kessel
“You’re kidding, right?” Jesse said. He put his hands together and bowed; Carey returned the gesture.
“My turn,” Thabo said.
“Jesse’s right. Let’s take five,” said Carey. He went over to the bench where Dante sat, took up a bulb, and squirted some water into his mouth. Jesse lifted his shirt to look at his ribs. “Ouch,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Carey. Carey was sorry, but he had liked hitting Jesse. It felt good to get the better of another man in the ring.
Ruăn tā was a martial arts style developed for lunar conditions, where gravity was less than on Earth but force and mass were the same. While it had realized, to a degree, the fantasies of flying portrayed in countless kung fu films of the twenty-first century, the practice proved more complex than the dream. The human body did not move in slow motion. The genetic manipulation that increased bone density in low-G ensured that bodies could take the stresses of combat, but wushu practice had to be greatly modified.
Still, as on Earth the goal was to improvise, think under pressure, and control one’s emotions. Carey had earned the silver in Ruăn tā in the Lunar Olympics, the first Cousin ever to medal in the sport. The New Guangzhou masters said he might have won gold but for an inability to match his external skills with the inward mindfulness that bespoke true balance. The pure pleasure Carey took in winning was, he knew, a sign of his imbalance.
Two women took over the ring. Light on their feet, they circled each other.
Carey’s Thursday sessions with his friends were as much a chance to talk as anything else. He had known Thabo twenty years: He was the man Carey could talk to when he needed advice or just a sympathetic ear. Jesse and Dante were more recent additions.
Though Jesse hated talking about women, this was Thabo’s week to guide the conversation and they were up to their gills in woman talk.
“You can do better,” Thabo told Carey.
“You don’t know Mira,” Carey said.
“That’s because she alienates everybody who tries to know her.”
“Who are you talking about?” Jesse asked.
“One of Carey’s women. Mira Hannasdaughter.”
“Don’t know that one.”
One of the women fighters swept the feet out from under the other, taller one, who caught herself on her hands and flipped upright again. Her long brown braid whipped through the air. Dante, who had been watching closely, snapped his fingers in appreciation.
“Mira’s trouble,” Thabo said. “Always angry.”
“She has things to be angry about,” said Carey.
“She might get somewhere if she wasn’t so sarcastic,” said Dante. “She’s smart.”
“You know her?” Carey asked.
“Not carnally,” Dante said. “I was in seminar with her in materials science.”
Carey had a hard time explaining to them what was special about Mira. When she mocked him he had trouble explaining it to himself. She didn’t patronize. She respected his intelligence enough to criticize him the way she might a woman. She kept after him about Lune et l’autre: If he’d written something that critical of the Matrons as an adolescent, how could he as an adult fit himself so comfortably into the slot the Society had prepared for him?
Depends on how you define comfortable, he’d told her.
Yes, she was angry, but Carey did not feel that her anger, when it was aimed at him, was any different from the anger she directed at anyone else in the world who fell short of her peculiar standards.
The question of whether he loved her was one that he had only lately spent any time on. That, too, depended on your definition. He liked the sex, but sex for Carey had always been easy. He liked sleeping with Hypatia, too, and with lots of other women. But as his athletic career approached its inevitable decline, he wondered what he would choose to do for the next phase of his life. The fact that Mira expected him in some way to challenge the Society made her different enough to command his attention.
“So why do you like her?” Thabo asked.
“Well, for one, she doesn’t ever ask me about Ruăn tā.”
“Who’s her mother?” Jesse asked.
“She doesn’t have a mother. Her mother left the Society.”
“And Roz doesn’t have a mother. You got a thing about women without mothers?”
“That explains why she’s interested in you,” Thabo said. “She wants an alliance with your mother.”
“She already works for my mother. And Roz.”
“The plot thickens,” Jesse said. “The antisocial woman after the hottest man and the most powerful Matron in the Society.”
“How is Roz?” Thabo asked. Thabo had known both Carey and Roz since they were all playing hockey at age fifteen. Carey suspected Thabo was half in love with her.
“She’s fine. Val is apprenticing at the Glass Institute.” Carey watched the women spar. The brown-haired fighter was good. Flexible, strong, self-contained.
Dante didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off her. “Who’s Val?” he asked.
“My son.”
“You have a son?”
“Yes,” Carey said.
“I have two,” Jesse said. He swiveled on his bench, absently fingering the scar on his neck. He had almost died during a hockey game when, in a scramble for the puck in front of the net, the blade of a skate got under his mask and severed his carotid. He came close to bleeding out right there on the ice. “I see Eric when I visit his mother. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with him. Don’t see much of Charlie since his mother and I drifted apart. You never talk about any kids.”
Carey had known Jesse for three years now, and the subject of children had not come up. “Val’s fifteen,” Carey said. “Smart, funny. He makes me laugh.” He paused. “I told him something today I shouldn’t have.”
The conversation moved to post-athletic careers. They discussed Thabo’s plans to become a coach. Could he be a good enough one to warrant colony support, or would he end up in the aquaculture farm? Jesse was already resigned to taking up a job in the helium-3 mines. He’d been doing his mita there since he was a teenager; his mother was a manager at the fusion plant. She could get him a good job, something without too much drudgery. He liked getting out on the surface, seeing the real sky. He did not seem too concerned about losing whatever small attention came from sports.
“You’ll end up doing colony work,” Dante said. “Then you can entertain yourself voting.” The tall woman ducked a roundhouse kick by executing a neat side roll. “Nice!” Dante said.
“The Society is supposed to valorize the worker. Instead it wants us to be effete drones,” Jesse said. “Of course, I think even you drones deserve the vote. I know, it’s inexplicable, but that’s just the kind of man I am.”
Carey tolerated Jesse’s rants, though of late he had been getting more strident. Jesse considered Carey a lightweight. Carey imagined telling him that Mira was Looker, and he was helping her.
They were right about her abrasiveness. She had no politesse at all. There was some great hurt inside her. It made Carey want to protect her, though if he ever told her that she would laugh.
The two women ended their session. They bowed to each other and stepped out of the ring. The one with the braid glanced over at Carey and the others. A slight smile.
Carey asked Dante, “Who is that?”
“Don’t you know her?” Dante said. “That’s Abidemi Bethsdaughter. She’s a constable. Supposed to be a revelation in the saunas.”
“Never noticed her,” Carey said.
“You could do me a favor,” Dante said. “Hang around after we’re done tonight.”
“I’ve got a date,” Carey said.
“This could be your date,” Dante said. “Come on. You owe me this, Carey.”
“I don’t know,” Carey said.
Thabo got to his feet. “Our turn,” he said to Carey.
Carey and Thabo sparred a couple of five-minute dui da sets. Not real combat, more
a dance with improvisation—real combat would have been over in a minute or less. The women who had just finished stayed to watch, and another woman and man came over. Between rounds Carey observed Dante chatting with the brown-haired woman. She was quite attractive.
That distracted Carey, and Thabo caught him in a leg hook and got him off balance. For the rest of the session Carey felt out of synch. “Got you this time, son,” Thabo said. Carey nodded ruefully and they joined Dante and the women.
“Say, aren’t you Abidemi Bethsdaughter?” Carey said.
“I am.” She embraced him, kissed his cheek. He brushed his lips over her ear. She smelled of flowers and sweat.
Dante raised an eyebrow. Abidemi introduced him to her partner and friends. They chatted a bit about the practice. Carey toweled his face and hair, and offered her his most winning smile. “You’ve met my friend Thabo? And this is Jesse.”
Abidemi smiled back at Carey. “You gentlemen need a sauna,” she said.
Well, it was hours before he was due to meet Mira.
• • • • •
Mira had devoted two nights to getting her video into shape. She spent her off-work hours at her cluttered desk, sucking on the carb and protein mixes she lived on. On the shelf beside her stood her collection of horses, from ancient plastic models to fully animated miniatures. Among them the new one Val had made. Beside them a still photo of her and her brother Marco, ages thirteen and ten.
Love is just a feeling.
Her idea for this graffito was to intercut images she’d shot at the deserted club with video of men at work and play in the colony. A big man in a skinsuit, face invisible behind his black faceplate, holding a huge solar panel in place while another bolted it to the rack. A gray bearded man pruning trees on the inside slope of the crater. Three little boys playing in the Sobieski Park fountain. Erno Pamelasson on trial, stone faced as someone described how he had caused his mother’s death. Two middle-aged men in coveralls tending a room full of chickens. Just a couple of minutes, all irony, no statements. A simple title: Stories of Men.
She printed out a dozen copies. While the printer worked she changed into the stealthsuit and climbing shoes she wore when posting her videos. She stuck the hood, grip gloves, and a can of spray mastic into her belt. She went back to her tediously slow printer, still working on the last few copies, rolled up the one-by-two-meter sheets, slid them into a black, nonreflective quiver, and slipped it on. The tightly rolled videos stuck up over her shoulder, and she could easily reach them with her right hand. It was almost 0200. She drank a bulb of electrolyte and slipped out of the apartment.
The facade of the modular apartments was silent, most of the lights out, though she heard music coming from the end unit shared by two women who worked in agriculture and their male partner, a worthless poet.
Mira moved swiftly through the quiet concourses, her heart full of anticipation and something approaching glee. Why spend time with Tanya and her crew at the Diana Temple, women so alike they might have been produced by an object printer? Mira was Looker, outlaw social critic, radical artist, the one who told the truth. She avoided neighborhoods that were still active this late and emerged from her underground district into the crater, beneath the projected night sky.
From the rim road she descended the slope through a forest of aspen, bristlecone pine, and alder by way of one of the many winding pathways that descended toward the crater floor. It was 0220 when she reached the Men’s House. This late at night it was closed and the playing fields of the plateau were deserted. The Men’s House had been one of the early creations of the Society, a place where men could gather, free from the intrusion of women. In the wake of the Durden revolt and the vacuum blowout, it had been closed for two years, but social pressure and its almost institutionalized status had opened it again.
A slight breeze rustled the leaves of the aspens. Mira sat on a bench in a bower just off the path, where she could see who might be coming but they could not see her. She didn’t know why she cared so much that Carey should help her. It wasn’t right, she knew—not right by the standards of a mature Cousins woman, and definitely not right by the standards of her own heart. Yet here she was, at—she checked the time—0247, not ready to start without him, though the videos, and the idea of posting them, and the aspirations they represented, were entirely her creation. Hers, not his. She couldn’t tell what Carey’s aspirations were, except to have sex as often as possible with as many women as possible.
It was 0255, and her self-questioning was reaching its apogee, when a figure in black came quietly down the path. A vast relief flooded through her, washing all her anger away. She moved out of the shadows.
He stopped when he saw her. “Mira?”
It wasn’t Carey—it was Val. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I want to help you.”
“Where’s Carey?”
“I don’t know. He told me about your plans. I can’t believe that you’re Looker!”
Mira shook her head. “I can’t believe he told you.”
“Don’t be mad. I’m glad he did. It’s demented.”
She tried to collect her thoughts. Val’s hair was pulled back and he was dressed in nonreflective tights and shirt. He had on climbing shoes. He was just the age Marco had been when he died.
“All right,” she said. “But you have to be quiet, and you have to do just what I say.”
His smile was stunning. “Of course.”
She drew one of the rolled-up videos from her quiver. “Let’s start simple—on the side of the Men’s House.”
They found a good spot, visible not just from the path but to anybody down slope looking up, and pasted the video onto the wall. Unactivated, it was transparent, nonreflective, hardly visible. When they had posted all of them and were safely away, she would turn them on remotely.
They spent the next two hours posting Mira’s videos in a dozen places around the colony. Mira was surprised how much she enjoyed working with Val. He was so clearly delighted to be taken into her confidence. It turned out he was one of her biggest fans. “I loved the one with the Founders arguing about whether it was okay to punish the man who wanted to be punished,” he said. “The expression on the man’s face when she said no! We were all laughing so hard.”
“That was just a joke.” She tried to explain what she was trying to do. “The best part, Val, will be when you are in a crowd of people tomorrow, and they are talking about the video—it doesn’t even matter if they hate it—and you know that you did it, and they don’t.”
The last place Mira chose to post was the most difficult: twenty meters up on the reinforced concrete rim wall that formed the base of the dome, overlooking the road that circled the crater. She found a spot above a broad esplanade in Gilman, where an avalanche of apartments, refectories, and public buildings tumbled down the slope to the crater floor. Val swore so fervently that he was an experienced climber that she let him join her. The wall’s surface had grooves, each about ten centimeters wide, the facing pebbled with regolith. It was a decent surface for bouldering, and they climbed up to just below where one of the great cermet ribs that formed the substructure of the dome arched out of the wall. She planned to fix the video to the smooth inside surface of the support. Canted forward over the plaza, it would look down on every citizen who passed below, impossible to ignore.
She’d hoped to find a place with enough purchase for her feet that she could use both hands to affix the video, but there was nothing. Without ropes or pitons, they would have to work one-handed. She was glad to have Val with her. They clung to the wall, breathing hard; in the faint light from the stars and the road below, Val’s face was split in a grin.
“You spray the mastic,” she said, handing him the can.
But she let it go before he had grasped it; Val fumbled and it fell away. He attempted to grab it in midair, but instead batted it to the side. His foot slipped. She heard his gasp, saw for a second the dismay in his ey
es as he began to fall, before she snagged his arm with her free hand. She almost came off the wall herself, but he scrabbled against the masonry, his foot found purchase, and he was steady again. Her heart slammed in her chest. She felt the rough face of the concrete on her cheek.
“Thanks,” Val said.
Some seconds later, the tumbling can hit the tiles of the plaza with a metallic crack, then rolled. Mira looked down. Two women crossing the plaza had stopped; one was looking at the can at her feet, the other leaned back to look up at them.
“Climb,” Mira said.
They scaled the last few meters to the top of the rim wall. There was a ledge a meter or two wide between the face of the wall and the inside of the dome. “This way,” Mira said, and they hurried along the top of the wall. When they came to the next structural rib, they had to carefully slip down off the edge and crab-climb to the opposite side before they could again gain the top of the wall.
“I’m sorry, Mira,” Val said as they ran.
All Mira could think of was Marco falling, falling.
“My fault,” she said.
• • • • •
They found a place above the empty rim road and climbed down. If the people who had seen them had called the constables, so far no one had showed. Mira thanked Val for his help, made him promise to keep her secret, and told him to get home as inconspicuously as possible.
When she entered her apartment she found Carey sitting on her bed, which he had folded down from the wall. “Where have you been?” he asked.
She slung her gear into the corner. “Don’t be stupid; I’m not in the mood.” She got a bulb of water and squirted it into her parched mouth.
“I’m sorry. The Salon went long. I was there at the Men’s House, but you were already gone.”
She turned and just stared at him. “Val showed up instead.”
Carey looked surprised. “I should never have told him about it.”
“You think so?” Mira recalled the moment when Val’s foot had slipped—saw the spray can tumble as he swatted it, heard his sudden intake of breath. “Val’s not like other boys. You have to take better care of him.” She said the words calmly, no trace of sarcasm.