The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

  “Shit.” The custody hearing was coming up. No one looked over the shoulder of some woman with a child as much as they looked over Carey’s.

  He tried calling Val, but got only his Aide. Back in the bedroom he put on shorts, shoes, and a shirt.

  Hypatia stirred. “Where are you going?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse. Too much public speaking.

  “I’ll be back soon.” He leaned over and kissed her.

  He had an idea of where Val might have gone. He’d been hanging around with some Spartans. Carey didn’t like their desperate machismo and their wallowing in grievances, though on that second trait he’d be hard pressed to explain how he differed from them.

  He left his apartment and climbed the north slope of the crater, bounding eight at a time up flights of stairs, startling two women hand in hand coming down. For the most part the paths were deserted. At the bike share he checked one out and took off on the nearest switchback road down to the crater floor.

  When he was a kid they used to race around these same hairpins, oblivious to the chance of being blindsided by some vehicle coming up. The physical exertion made him forget his anxiety. Wind spiced with the scent of blooming yellowwood blew back his hair. The dome was a sky flooded with stars. Lights of the residences he passed winked on and off among the trees. At the bottom he sped down one of the radial roads through fields of soybeans, inhaling the smell of soil, pumping hard now, nanofiber tires gripping the pavement. The Diana Tower, growing more massive, rose impossibly high before him. A few of the offices were lit from within, but most of its surface gleamed black.

  The road curved through Sobieski Park, ran among the big oaks, past the playground, the amphitheater, the fountains. Carey skidded to a halt in the plaza at the tower’s entrance, abandoned the bike, and circled around the base.

  The black glass of the tower reflected the distant lights spread across the crater slopes, until the glass ended where the climbing routes ran up the tower’s flank. Carey found backpacks and gear stowed beneath some benches near the auto belayers. He leaned way back and scanned the side of the building.

  Two figures, unbelayed, climbed steadily up the wall. As he watched, he recognized his son’s particular grace, unique as a DNA print. He started to call out but thought better of it; he didn’t need to attract the attention of some constable. He started climbing after them.

  Carey didn’t have the right shoes for it, but he had been an expert climber once and he thought he could manage it. He ascended quickly, finding the hand and footholds, taking the easiest route—no traverses, no reaches. His upper body strength was beyond theirs, so he gradually gained on them. The breezes that self-generated in the atmosphere of the dome tickled the hair on his legs and forearms. Occasionally he tilted his head back to see them above him. They had stopped now. One of them pulled something from a backpack. At first Carey thought it might be one of Mira’s videos, but the shape was wrong—this was a squat, square object, not a rolled-up poster.

  When Carey got within five meters one of them spotted him and froze. “Look,” the person said, and gestured sharply to Val—who saw Carey now.

  In a few seconds Carey was beside them. They were at least two hundred meters above the ground. When he was Val’s age he had lived for this kind of risk.

  Up close he saw the device, about twenty centimeters on each side; Val had already spread mastic on the wall and they were fixing it to the surface.

  “Val, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” the other said. He had very short hair and a smooth face.

  “If it’s nothing then—” Carey reached past, got his fingers under the thing’s edge, and ripped it off the wall. He tossed it away and it fell, spinning, a long time until it hit the pavement at the base and shattered, splattering some kind of dark liquid in a starburst.

  “What is that?”

  “It was a smartpaint bomb,” the other boy said.

  “It would have gone off tomorrow morning just when the government workers were all arriving,” Val said. “It would have spelled out a slogan.”

  “Climb down. Now.”

  The two of them began descending.

  “One at a time,” Carey said. “Be careful.” He watched them slip below him, then began his own descent. Going down unbelayed was slower and riskier than climbing, but they made it safely to the bottom. The other boy jumped down the last few meters and took off as soon as he hit, bounding away, but Val waited until Carey got there. On the pavement the smartpaint squirmed, attempting to form letters, but its programming was broken.

  “Come on,” Carey said, stepping around the paint. They hurried away from the tower, taking one of the paths through the park.

  “Who was that?” Carey asked.

  “Art Friedasson. He’s Dora Aikosdaughter’s boyfriend.”

  Aikosdaughter was one of Hypatia’s grad students, ten years older than Val.

  “A bomb, Val? Please tell me this was his idea.”

  “It was my idea to put it on the tower.”

  “Do you know what would happen if you got caught?”

  “I guess they’d probably send me back to Roz.”

  “How about Invisibility? You can’t count on getting away with things like this.”

  “You did. You set off a manhunt. You hid out for months.”

  “And that was stupid. If you want anything to come of us being together, you have to be smarter. We’re too much in the public eye.”

  “You’ve lived in the public eye your whole life!”

  “And you haven’t. It’s not easy.”

  “You love it. You’re part of the effeminate culture. All the Spartans know it, though they don’t say it when I’m around. The only thing you stand for is whatever makes you feel good.”

  Val loped ahead of Carey. Shoulders hunched, taking the long strides of a surface walker, he refused to turn around all the way back to their apartment.

  Carey bit back his anger. Watching Val, he remembered a time when Roz and he had taken him to a party hosted by the Russets. Val was eight or nine, and there was a flock of four- or five-year-olds there. Rather than ignore the kids, Val had taken them all in hand and organized a game. Val was amused by them and genuinely liked them. It was a sensitivity Carey had never seen from a boy that age, a sensitivity that he’d never had himself. Where had this new Val, rigid with resentment, come from?

  It was easy to go flying with Val, to spar with him at the gym, and flirt with women as if Val were Carey’s younger brother. But Val took Carey’s restrictions as purely advisory. Reasoning didn’t work. Val listened good-naturedly, but he acted as if, since they had been taken up by the Reform Party, the cause justified anything. Val had never had any interest in politics, and now he was spouting Spartan crap. Carey could order him to stay away from them, but what if he wouldn’t listen? Short of physical force, how did you assert authority over someone you loved who wouldn’t listen?

  In other circumstances he might have gone to Eva or Roz, but that was out of the question. So was talking to anyone in social services. He really had a lack of support here. He’d asked Hypatia about it, but she told him Val was fine—his rebelliousness was simply the joie de vivre of any teenaged boy.

  He’d just as soon not have to explain to Hypatia what Val had been up to, but he needed to talk with her about Aikosdaughter. Maybe he could leave the Diana Tower part out. Maybe Hypatia could get Aikosdaughter to leave Val alone.

  When they entered the apartment, instead of Hypatia they found Mira, sitting in an armchair, her dark brows knit. Carey glanced at the bedroom door.

  “She left,” Mira said. “She said to tell you you’re her darling, and she’ll see you at the meeting.”

  “What are you doing here?” Val asked.

  “Go to bed,” Carey said. “Now.”

  Val stared at Carey, said nothing, and went to his room.

  Carey watched Mira standing in the middle of the apartment that Hypatia had gotten for him and saw
through her eyes its two bedrooms, private bath, a sitting room with a sofa and two chairs, even a kitchenette. He rubbed his face with his palm. He smelled of sweat and recent sex. He got a water bulb and sat down on the sofa. “What brings you out in the middle of the night?”

  “I could ask you the same. Your parenting skills are being monitored, you know.”

  “I know,” Carey said.

  “I talked to Roz about you today at the lab.”

  “I didn’t think she was speaking to you.”

  “Her attitude toward me keeps changing. Sometimes she blames me for everything and sometimes she acts like we’re sisters. She wants me to tell her how you and Val are doing—as if I know.”

  “We’re doing fine.”

  “You think Eva will side with you at the hearing?”

  “I’m still her son. Val’s still her grandson. We’re over there for dinner twice a week.”

  Mira wouldn’t look at him. “The more public appearances you make with Val,” she said, “the more likely Eva will decide you’re against her.”

  This was beautiful. “Gosh, I wonder whose idea all those public appearances were? I told you I wanted it to be just between me and Roz—the legal issue could come once Val and I were an established fact. It was you who insisted I owed it to all the other fathers and sons to go public. Why are you changing your tune?”

  Mira paced in front of him. “That line Hypatia’s been using—how protest is about objecting to injustice, but resistance is about taking action? Turns out it was originally said by a twentieth-century terrorist. A woman whose group set off bombs and killed over thirty people. She ended up committing suicide in prison. Juliette’s pissed.”

  Hypatia hadn’t told him any of this.

  Mira continued, “Hypatia’s preparing a statement pointing out this woman was a feminist, a mother, someone who in our time would have been one of us. How will it look to Eva that you’ve let Val stand on a platform with a woman who advocates terrorism?”

  “Hypatia’s not advocating terrorism.”

  “No she’s not. But the average Cousin doesn’t like bombs.”

  He decided not to suggest that Val’s admiration of Looker had put him on the side of a building tonight with a paint bomb.

  “To top it off, you’re sleeping with her,” Mira said.

  He flipped the water bulb at Mira; she ducked; it bounced off the wall and rolled to her feet. “I don’t think Eva’s the one worried about who I’m sleeping with.”

  Mira picked up the bulb. When she looked at him, her eyes were shining. Carey had seen sexual jealously before, but Mira was different. The spikiness of her personality barely concealed her vulnerability.

  She set the bulb on the table. “Do you have something to drink besides water?”

  He nodded toward the kitchenette. “Some tea.”

  She didn’t move. He could see her anger.

  She sat down in a chair across from him. “It was you who told Hypatia I’m Looker, wasn’t it?”

  She looked so small, sitting there. “You seem to be happy about the outcome. All your new friends. Why are you complaining?”

  “You betrayed my trust.”

  “I was doing you a favor. I knew you liked Hypatia and I knew Hypatia would take an interest in you. You would never have told her yourself.”

  Mira said nothing.

  “Mira, I’m sorry,” he said. “But this isn’t all my—”

  “‘Mira, I’m sorry.’ ” She got up again. “Who are you to feel sorry for me?”

  He held himself in check. Why did he let her mock him like this? He tried to keep his balance. “Let’s stop it, Mira. This isn’t going to make either of us feel better.” He stood. Her dark eyes followed him. “Just calm down. I’ll make some tea.”

  “I don’t want tea.” She took two steps toward him, seized his shoulders, and pulled his face to hers, so forcefully that her feet came off the floor. She kissed him. She had her arms around his neck. He took her weight; she didn’t weigh much of anything.

  “The bedroom,” she whispered.

  His territories: the bedroom and the Ruăn tā ring. He’d always been able to negotiate these places, deftly managing the politics of sleeping with three women at once, keeping everyone happy, or at least occupied. But he had too much on his mind; Hypatia’s and Mira’s needs were too complex, the issues of Roz and Eva and Val too distracting. Mira, Hypatia, Roz, Eva—they all had their own agendas. Even Val. He should make Mira go home.

  An hour later, lying beside her, Carey tried not to think about what any of this meant. It was wrong. It wasn’t even good sex; too many mixed emotions—yet he had gone along with it. Mira still lay awake. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “I have to ask you something,” she said.

  “Do you?” He rested on his back, his hand on his own belly, unable to put two thoughts together. He was due at the aquaculture plant in three hours.

  She propped herself up and looked into his face. “Do you know about the embargo the Board has put on scientific research?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Something’s not right about it.”

  “Of course it’s not right. The patriarchies are paranoid about weapons.”

  “What could they be after that Eva wouldn’t want them to have? I mean, your mother’s papers have been public for years.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I think maybe you do. I came across records of some big project twenty years ago. A lot of resources invested. It wasn’t just pure research, there was technology involved.” Mira rolled her leg over his, all intimacy now, her voice low. She drew a circle on his chest with her fingertip. It irritated him.

  “Why are you asking me? You said you were talking to Roz. Ask her.”

  “What I saw might be consistent with them building some sort of quantum scanner. Did she build a scanner?”

  Carey closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, held it, and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. Twenty years ago I was fifteen.”

  “One of these records, a security log for a so-called IQSA lab, had your name, Eva, and Roz.”

  “Roz did a practicum in Materials. I used to hang around.”

  “What’s an IQSA? Why doesn’t anybody know about it?”

  How had he let himself get into this? “Some fabricating machine. It didn’t work. The Matrons shut the project down and Eva moved on.”

  “So why would Eva worry about giving them a failed technology?”

  “Will you leave me alone, Mira? I really don’t know anything.” Carey levered himself out of the bed and stumbled into the bath to piss. He closed the door behind him. In the dimness he looked at himself in the mirror. Not the face of the dead man in his dream, just the face of the man that he was. He was changing, he could feel it, but that didn’t make the world easier. He couldn’t really blame Mira for tonight. She had power over him only as long as he cared. Did he care?

  Nothing but questions and brief pleasures. There must be some enduring life beyond this, a way of living that meant something. He might even love Mira, but that didn’t mean he could stand her. He loved his mother, too, and he loved Roz.

  Above everything else he loved Val, and Val was at risk of getting himself into a lot of trouble, and Carey couldn’t stop him any more than his mother could stop Carey back when he was fifteen.

  He had fucked up in half a dozen ways, telling Mira about the scanner only the latest. Whether he could do the things that would keep any of these people happy shouldn’t be the issue. But as long as he cared, he would have to deal with it.

  • • • • •

  Mira climbed the stairs from the metro station into the lobby of the Diana Tower and stepped outside. A cleaning bot was attempting to remove an amoeba of smartpaint from the pavement, but whenever the bot moved to suck up the paint, the paint moved to avoid it. Two mita workers stood by discussing the situation.

  “Maybe if we get a couple of other bots, we can surround
it.”

  “That won’t work. We need to sprinkle it with nano,” the other man said. He did not look too upset.

  The first worker noticed Mira watching. He smiled at her. “We’ve chased it halfway across the plaza.”

  “Looker probably did it,” Mira said, and headed past them into Sobieski Park.

  Mira generally avoided the park. Today the dome presented a bright blue, sunless sky, high cirrus clouds. With the thin air a visitor from Earth might think he was in some high valley in Western North America or Australia. Flyers were out in numbers. Had she bent her head back to see, Mira could have watched them launching themselves from the platform near the top of the tower, spreading their brightly colored wings to catch the air. In the distance others beat their wings slowly as they circled the perimeter. Mira tried not to pay attention to them.

  She passed through well-tended woods of white oak and box elder that had been planted upon the first pressurization of the dome. Eighty years later, the trees spread their thick boughs above the turf. A mockingbird ran through an aria of birdcalls. Two squirrels chased each other around the bole of one of the oaks. A dark-haired girl in bright yellow shirt and shorts came dodging through the trees, then crouched behind one of them. In the distance Mira heard another kid counting out numbers. The hiding girl looked up at Mira and held a finger to her lips.

  At the edge of the woods the park widened to include a soccer pitch, the aerofield, an ornamental flower garden, rolling hills covered with close-cropped grass running down to a pond, and the community amphitheater where colonywide meetings were held.

  Just as she stepped out into the sunlight, a flyer buzzed a flock of elementary school students kicking a ball around. She swooped low over a pair of lovers lying on the grass, then banked hard—Mira imagined the stress in her arms at the maneuver—just missing one of the big cottonwoods by the pond. The idiot woman zoomed toward the aerofield, three meters above the grass, pulled up into a stall, folded her wings, and came to a jogging stop. A couple of onlookers applauded.

  Two more flyers, a man and a woman, their wings and tail fins slung on their backs, passed Mira on their way to the tower and the elevator ride up to the launch platform. They were talking about thermals. Mira avoided looking into their faces.