The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

  “Come on,” Mira said, steering Cleo into a bedroom. Three people sat on the bed. “Hypatia wants you in the other room,” Mira told them. “The results are coming in.”

  When they left, Mira locked the door. Cleo flopped down onto the bed, arms spread, head hanging half off. “They’ll be back.”

  “I don’t care.” Mira kneeled beside her, took Cleo’s face in her hands, and kissed her. Her tongue played lightly with Cleo’s. She pulled back and watched Cleo’s pale eyes, the sheen of sweat on the faint down of her upper lip. She licked that lip. Cleo pulled her into an embrace and Mira pushed up Cleo’s skirt to stroke the inside of her leg.

  “Yes,” Cleo said. She dragged the wig from Mira’s head.

  Cleo’s body was exquisite; genetic replacement and hormonal therapy had transformed her into a long-legged, pale-skinned, Junoesque beauty with dark hair. But all the time they were making love, Mira could not keep her mind from slipping to Marco. The scolding voice she had used at the door was one she had invented for games with her brother.

  Angry, she tried to push these thoughts aside.

  It didn’t work. Mira could not focus, and their sex was fumbling and unsatisfying. Cleo acted like she was having a fine time, but Mira didn’t believe it. Another night it might have been funny, but instead Mira found herself with tears in her eyes.

  “Please, let’s stop,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” Cleo asked.

  Mira turned her face away. “Nothing,”

  “I haven’t been a woman too long. I’m sorry if I—”

  “It’s not you.”

  “What is it, then?” Cleo said, some exasperation in her voice.

  Mira thought of the cottonwood in the park. “My brother is dead.”

  “Your brother? When?”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Go away!” Cleo called out.

  Mira buried her head in Cleo’s breast; the music throbbed from the next room. “It was a long time ago. I was seventeen. He was fourteen. His name was Marco.” She kept her eyes closed.

  “What happened?”

  “Our mother emigrated to another colony. I don’t know where she is now.” Mira’s voice caught in her throat. Cleo held her. “I didn’t know how to take care of Marco; I was still a child myself.”

  “Didn’t anyone step in? Your aunts. Cousins?”

  “I don’t have any. You have to listen. Marco loved flying. He took risks. It was my fault. I could have stopped him.”

  “Boys take risks, they—”

  “Please don’t say that.” Mira rolled away. She opened her eyes, but she could still see it. “I’d landed on the aerofield; he was flying with one of his friends, circling each other—spin dancing. They climbed, then dove, pulling up at the last second. Marco was breaking a dozen rules. I could see him laughing. I was so mad at him; we didn’t need to attract any more trouble than we had already.

  “The air patroller flew in and Marco tried to get away. He swooped down toward the field—low over the trees. His wing clipped the top branches of a cottonwood.” Mira stopped talking, clenching her eyes, squeezing out the tears. Cleo touched her shoulder.

  “I can still hear the snap, the tree limb, his arm. He pinwheeled into the tree. The sound . . .

  “I ran, people ran from the field, the air patroller landed. I got there first. One of the wings was ripped off Marco’s arm. His neck was broken. His eyes were open. Seconds after I got there, he stopped breathing. I saw the light go out in his eyes, right there. I can see it now.”

  Mira broke into sobs. Cleo hugged her, naked flesh against Mira’s. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mira said, anger overwhelming her. “We were close but then we weren’t. He was harder and harder to handle, and I had other things I wanted to do. I was trying to ally with other women, and he was a drag on everything I did. I resented him. I was fed up. I wished he was gone—and then, then he was gone.”

  Cleo held her tightly. “It’s okay. It’s okay to cry.”

  Mira cried. Her chest heaved, emotion welling in her, and she couldn’t stop. This was what she needed. She hadn’t even known it.

  Abruptly the music in the next room stopped, and there was a long silence, a faint voice in the background, followed by slowly rising talk. Mira wiped away her tears, first one eye and then the other, with the palm of her hand.

  “They’ve got the results,” she said.

  “We don’t have to go out,” said Cleo, her low voice full of sympathy. “Stay here with me.”

  Mira considered lying with Cleo’s warm body next to hers. But she did not want to be naked with a stranger. She got up. She reached for her blouse. In Hypatia’s bathroom she washed her face.

  When they came out of the bedroom the first thing Mira saw was Carey, across the room, his hand steadying the leg of Hypatia as she stood on a chair. He briefly locked eyes with her.

  “This isn’t the end,” Hypatia said. “Daquani will represent us. Her voice is the beginning of the revolution. They know we are here and they know we are watching. Change can’t be held back!”

  Of the Reform Party, only Daquani had won. Among the other challengers Hypatia had garnered the lowest number of votes. And, though the margin was small, the proposition to extend the franchise to all men had failed. There was more, but Mira didn’t listen.

  Most of the people were deflated and some were angry. They insisted that the results were manipulated, but Mira suspected it was all because of Hypatia’s terrorist quote. It wasn’t fair that a few words could derail an entire movement, and she was swept by anger at both the idiot voters and at Hypatia for giving them something to be distracted by. But Hypatia did not seem upset, and Mira, to her surprise, did not care either. Fair? Only children expected fair.

  “I’ll get us some drinks,” Cleo said. She kissed Mira on the cheek.

  As soon she left Mira’s side, Mira slipped toward the door.

  “Mira?” Carey came toward her. She pushed away from him, past several people, and out.

  The crowd outside had grown, and as Mira passed through them two constables were trying to get them to disperse. “All right,” they said. “Time to go home.”

  Mira ran down the concourse. Corridors here and there produced knots of sullen young people. She was out of breath when she reached the university station. On the platform three boys argued with a constable, who had her baton out, twisting it nervously in her hands. Mira got on the train and went home.

  In her apartment she took one of her toy horses, Comet, down from the shelf and held him tightly in her palm. She sat on her bed and turned on the pixwall. From her archive she called up a video she had not looked at in years.

  She squeezed Comet in her hand and his hard little legs poked into her palm. On the screen the handheld camera looked over Mira’s shoulder as she strode along ahead of it.

  “Turn around, Mira!” came Marco’s insistent voice.

  The Mira in the video shook her head. Her black hair was long, and floated above her shoulders before coming to rest. She kept walking. They were in the West Concourse, passing some residences larger and more luxurious than the place where they lived. Ahead stood the statue of Tiresias.

  “C’mon Mira! Turn around! Let’s see that pop star smile!”

  She whirled on him and hissed, “Turn that thing off!”

  Mira was startled to see her own face, ten years younger. Round cheeks, intense dark eyes, furious brows.

  On the audio came Marco’s giggle. “That’s the look I want, that’s”—he laughed again, and zoomed in until her face filled the screen—“here it is, Cousins, exclusively, the face of the woman who’s going to change the Society forever, captured by our investigative correspondent Marco Hannasson. Care to say a few words for your fans, Ms. Hannasdaughter?”

  The expression on the face of the Mira on the screen cracked, the anger crumpling into what at first seemed like tears. But the
n she burst into laughter, and Marco’s laughter, so much like hers, doubled it.

  “You’re crazy!” Mira, sitting in her apartment ten years later, whispered, just a second before the laughing Mira on the screen said, “You’re crazy!” and put her hand over the lens.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  EITHER ERNO WAS DELUDED, OR his new hand had capacities he had never heard of before. For one thing, if he held it against an object for five or more seconds, he could tell its temperature within one degree Celsius.

  More remarkable, if he placed his hand flat against a wall, fingers spread, he could sense the size and configuration of the room beyond.

  Most disconcerting of all, if he took someone’s hand, or had firm contact anywhere else with someone’s skin, he could perceive their feelings and know if that person was telling the truth. He hadn’t been able to put this to any rigorous test because he didn’t want to reveal what he was sensing. The one person whose body he had the opportunity to touch for an extended length of time was Amestris.

  • • • • •

  Sometimes Erno woke in the middle of the night disoriented, expecting to find himself in the Hotel Gijon in Mayer. What was this bedroom? Who was this woman beside him? Gradually he’d calm his ragged thoughts. He would measure his breathing, roll onto his side toward Amestris and touch her thigh, feeling her warm, dreaming thought.

  The night before, they’d gone to the theater and dinner with Leila and Dariush. Not much like his nights with Zdeno and Fabrizio in Dorud: Leila talked incessantly about her pregnancy, Dariush was in training and finicky about what he ate, Amestris was bright and funny but somehow distant. Erno drank too much, a bourbon from Kentucky that cost as much as he had earned his first month on the job at Persepolis Water.

  In the morning, head throbbing, he retreated to his workroom and called up the models of the hornbeam genome. Scattered across his worktable were a tablet crammed with scientific papers, handwritten notes, bulbs of IQ enhancers. Across the room, under grow lights in an incubator, his most recent batch of feathery green seedlings sprouted.

  He worked for an hour and a half, then saved the incomplete analysis of adjustments to low-G, accelerated growth rates, and extrapolated density. He massaged the small of his back and called a letter onto his screen. He stared at it, breathing slowly.

  Amestris entered. “We’ve received the final payment from the Tycho Authority.”

  Erno blanked the screen and turned to her. “Good.”

  She leaned over his desk and kissed him. He got out of his chair. She yielded in his arms, and he touched his fingers to her cheek. “Lunch?” he said.

  “I’m going to meet Sima,” she said quietly.

  He could tell she was lying. “All right. This afternoon I’ll be out looking at the plantings.”

  “I’ll meet you there later, and we can come home together,” Amestris said.

  “I’d like that.”

  She kissed him again, smiled, then left. He went back to his desk and opened the letter again.

  My Dear Erno,

  I am pleased to hear that you are alive and well and still doing research. You were always a good student.

  It’s risky for me to respond to you, but I owe it to you based on our previous association (though you must know how much I disagreed with the ill-advised actions that led to your exile). Clearly you must see the way Persepolis slanders us every day. If it were to come out that I was communicating with Erno Pamelasson, living and working in the heart of the most powerful of the lunar patriarchies, I would not be able to continue my research.

  To be frank, since the election and subsequent troubles, men in the Society are suspect, even men who believe as I do in the fundamental justice of our social structure. I will not give you access to any of our work, let alone send you any samples of the species I have in development.

  I still have great fondness for you, Erno, but I cannot help but question the choices you’ve made.

  In memory of better times,

  Lemmy

  Months into the contract with Saman, Erno was in trouble. He had established a test planting of genetically modified maple seedlings. He had told Amestris and Sam that these seedlings would mature four times as fast as conventional maples. The truth was that signs of premature morbidity were already evident in the most advanced specimens. They would come nowhere near maturity, but he did not know why.

  Unfortunately, all Society of Cousins work in that area had been wiped from the public record. In fact, all of the most advanced SoC scientific papers—not just in genobotany, but in biotechnology, physics, and materials science—had been taken down from Cousins sites. And someone had set diligent computer worms to hunt down and destroy any records persisting in other journals and databases. The scientific nets were awash in rumors, the nearside governments were talking about cyber sabotage, and there were calls for the Secretary General of the Organization of Lunar States to mount an investigation.

  Half an hour after Amestris left, Erno took the tram out to the Kazedi project. The three dark red cars ran a few meters above the pedestrian concourses, turned down tunnels lined with interactive artwork, passed through neighborhoods and by warehouses. In the industrial center it stopped twice to let off workers for the fusion reactor and ice mines. He had run into Devi once on this train; when he tried to speak with her, hoping to give her a job in EED, she had turned away.

  After the industrial district the tram was sparsely occupied, passing through agricultural warrens. Persepolis had the largest aquaculture complex on the moon. Great tanks of cold water held rainbow trout; warmer tanks held tilapia. Engineered bacteria and algae converted waste water into a nutrient bath that was piped into rack farms of lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, strawberries, and vegetables. The plants cleaned the water, which was aerated and returned to the fish tanks to begin the process again. Other closed systems grew lobster and shrimp, prawns, perch, salmon, and catfish. The tram passed by livestock units raising poultry and sheep, past multilevel grain and potato farms until it reached the lava tube that had been prepared for Saman’s forest. Erno got off and went first to the nursery, where a half dozen employees were preparing seedlings. Gulal Barzani, his operations manager, was glad to see him.

  “Another three hundred maples are ready to transplant,” said Gulal, a taciturn Kurdish woman.

  “And the plantings?’

  “We’ve established another third of the first copse. But the oldest cohort does not look good.”

  “Let’s go look at them.”

  They walked out of the nursery and down a wide corridor to the tube. Filtered sunlight filled the cavernous space. The air smelled rich with organics—they had produced an agricultural soil using methods that Erno had learned among the Cousins, which differed in significant ways from Persepolis practice. A path of black volcanic gravel wound through the plantings. It was Saman’s intention to have his forest function as a park as well as a source of wood, and so they’d tried to produce a more natural setting.

  He and Gulal examined the maples, pinching the young leaves, smelling the crushed scent. They talked about the acid content of the soil and possible maladaptations to lunar gravity, the concentrations of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and nematodes in the latest soil batches. It was a relief for Erno to let himself fall deeply into a purely scientific problem.

  They walked back to the nursery. “You can stay here,” Erno told Gulal. “I want to do some work.”

  He changed into coveralls and drove a cart carrying several dozen of the latest seedlings away from the already planted sections, two hundred meters down the tube to the pond they had constructed. He wanted to work alone, with his hands.

  For the next two hours he amended the soil, hauled the pots from the cart, shook the seedlings from the loamy earth and planted them. His shoulders loosened. Sunlight streaming down from the cavern roof cast his shadow on the dark soil. He breathed deep the smell of geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol. The leaves of t
he seedlings were pale green on their tops, silvery beneath.

  He used Alois’s artificial hand as unconsciously as his own. Through it he read the temperature of the soil. Could he trust it? If Amestris had indeed lied about meeting Sima, where was she spending the afternoon? He had never been much affected by jealously. As for lies—well, their entire relationship had started with his lies.

  He kept his head down and worked. His problem wasn’t knowing whether Amestris had lied. His problem was how to create a forest. If he was sure of anything, he was sure that these seedlings he was planting would be dead in three months.

  He needed Lemmy’s help. He would have a better chance to persuade Lemmy if he could meet him in person. That would mean getting Lemmy out of the Society, or, despite Erno’s exile, getting himself back into it. If he could not persuade Lemmy to help, he would have to steal the samples.

  Erno was on his knees patting the earth around the base of one of the seedlings when a shadow fell over him. He looked up to find Amestris. As if she had caught him committing a crime, his heart was instantly in his throat. He brushed his hands on his coveralls and got up. “Hello,” he said.

  Amestris said, “I’ve just come from seeing Saman.”

  Erno took another seedling from the cart. “How is he?”

  “He’s very happy about his forest.” She paused. When Erno faced her, she was gazing at the dozen trees he’d planted. “Should he be?”

  Erno stood holding the pot in two hands. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is there going to be a forest? Your trees are dying.”

  “Those were the first varieties. These new ones—”

  “I’ve been reading your mail. I saw your correspondence.”

  Erno set the seedling down. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need that shovel.”

  When he bent over to pick it up, she put her foot on the blade. She forced him to look her in the eyes.

  Since Mayer, she was the only person who had trusted him. She had pulled him up from Dorud just when it seemed he had finally hit the absolute bottom. But she was rich and he was not, and all she really wanted from him was the chance to get back at her father. He was in the vulnerable position, just as much as in every relationship he’d had with women from the time he had been a boy.