by John Kessel
“Carey, are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. Look, do you know if Mira was behind this?”
“If she was, she set it up well in advance. She was at the station when it happened.”
“I know.”
“She was trying to make contact with Erno Pamelasson. Daquani says she was on the van from the station to the hotel, but I don’t know where she is now. Daquani is fine, though.”
“Did you have anything to do with it?”
“Don’t be absurd. This isn’t going to do the Reform movement any good. I’m already having to answer questions. Listen, don’t worry about Mira. Right now you should be with Val. You need to maintain your credibility.”
“Thanks,” Carey said, and hung up.
He hurried to the nearest metro stop. The first train that arrived was crowded; Carey wedged himself in and grabbed a stanchion. On the screen at the end of the car ran another replay of the events at the station, this time a more professional vid. People stared at it while talking to their Aides, voices low, a continuous background mumble beneath the conversations other passengers were having with one another.
He eavesdropped. The water supply was poisoned. There had been an explosion at the fusion plant. “Tyler Durden,” “Pamelasson,” and “Looker.” The prevailing tone was worry, but some of the voices held excitement. Carey tried to sort the responses out by gender and age.
A woman standing next to him, holding on to the same pole, met his eyes. “You’re Carey Evasson.”
“I am,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose, looking over his clothes. “Working the mita, are you now?”
“Yes.”
“They’d be crazy to let you keep that boy.” The woman’s eyes were steady.
“Thank you for your opinion, Cousin,” Carey said, and turned his back on her.
“You’re the cause of all this,” the woman said, louder now, and several passengers stopped talking. Two nine-year-old boys sitting on a corner bench seat, watching him, smirked. Carey felt the woman’s eyes on his back, breathed slowly, and said nothing.
Carey got off at the university and headed for the Glass Institute. The day was declining and the colony buzzed. People still gathered in streets and plazas, looking up at the words as the sky behind them went purple. Others stood around glued to various screens, talking. Lunanet access was up now, giving the outsiders’ view. Endless repetitive videos of the explosion, from half a dozen angles, of different quality. Talk about the OLS investigation being sabotaged.
The Glass Institute was deserted, no sign of Val. As Carey left, Roz’s name blinked in the corner of his eye. He let his Aide take it. There was no way he wanted to talk to her now.
By the time he stepped out of the Institute onto the university grounds, the dome had turned prematurely to night—probably to mask the writing. Carey stopped in a refectory, and over beans and rice listened to students at the next table debating. Maybe Val was just hanging out with friends, caught up in the excitement.
He called Val again and left another message.
He tried Juliette. “Carey, are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fucking fine. Listen, do you know where Dora Aikosdaughter lives?”
“She’s got a flat with a couple of other students at Sanger Place.”
“Send me the address.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just send it. Please.”
“All right.”
In a second it showed in the corner of his visual field. He called up a map with a purple dot for the location. “Thanks,” he told Juliette.
“Come see me. I need to talk to you about Hypatia. After twenty years I’ve finally reached my limit with her. I can’t—”
“Later, maybe.” He hung up.
Carey let his Aide guide him. Sanger was a rundown neighborhood a couple of levels beneath the university. In its shabby corridors more young people than you could find anywhere else in the colony sat out trading rumors. Shaven-headed couples sat in a noisy café sipping tea. Carey, fifteen years older, drew some glances.
Aikosdaughter’s apartment was one of a wall of identical cells in a cylindrical plaza. The window was opaqued. He tried the chime. No answer. He put his ear to the door—were there voices? Two young women walked by and looked at him sideways. When they were far enough away, Carey pounded his fist on the door, ringing the chime simultaneously. No answer. He turned around and kicked the panel with his heel.
At last the window beside the door lit, and the door opened a crack. The face of a young woman. “Who do you think—” She recognized him and stopped. “What do you want?”
“Is Val here?”
“No. Go away.”
“Let me in. I need to see him.”
“He’s not here.”
She started to close the door; Carey put his palm against it and pushed it open. Aikosdaughter, half his size, a decade his junior, moved to block him. Her hair was tousled, she wore a loose shirt, and was bare-legged and barefoot. She met his gaze. “What exactly do you think you are doing, Cousin?”
With difficulty, Carey restrained himself.
“I’m looking for my son.”
“And I told you he isn’t here.”
He couldn’t guess what she was hiding. “I caught your boyfriend putting a paint bomb on the tower. If I’d reported him, maybe nobody would have gotten hurt today.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said. They stared at each other. She stepped back and opened the door wide. “Come in, then. Look around. Val’s not here.”
By this time two others had come into the room, another woman, maybe twenty-five years old, and the young man Carey had caught on the tower with Val.
“Where is he?” Carey asked him.
“I don’t know.” Shirtless, he stood sullenly, hands in the back pockets of his pants.
Carey pushed past him. The apartment was tiny, and it didn’t take him any time to discover Val wasn’t there.
“Satisfied?” Aikosdaughter asked, arms crossed.
“Where is Val?”
“I have no idea.”
He could quiz her further, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere. Without a word, he left.
He was tired, and he smelled worse than he had when he’d rushed out of the aquaculture plant. Maybe Val had not been involved in the fake explosion. He wanted to believe it.
He had one more thing to check before he gave up and called Roz. Ten years earlier, when Marysson and Pamelasson had played the original prank that someone had copied today, they’d done it by going outside the colony and climbing the dome, entering through its apex, and attaching their smartpaint bomb to the interior.
Carey took the metro to the North Airlock. The sign above the complex’s doors announced, “Operations Suspended.” Carey went to the lockers and checked the bank that held the personal surface suits of the Green family. Val’s bright purple skinsuit hung next to Carey’s tiger-striped one. Its life support was fully charged.
Carey sat and stared at the suits. He might as well head home now, tell Roz and Eva that Val was missing, and face the consequences.
Instead, he stripped off his clothes and took down his suit. He rolled the skintight up his legs, the seams sealing themselves as he drew them together. When he powered up, the web of thermoregulators squirmed over his skin, adjusting itself to his body. He tugged on his boots, took down his helmet, and tucked it under his arm.
The night attendant was an old schoolmate, Ugo Urasson. Ugo was a member of the Leafs, a small family of no distinction. He was one of those guys who thought he was witty but never accomplished anything. He sat in his glass-walled booth, a glorified doorman. As Carey approached, Ugo looked up from a tablet in his lap. “Airlock’s closed, Cousin.”
Then he recognized Carey. He put aside the tablet. Carey saw it was playing, not colony news or status reports, but an erotic vid.
“Ugo,” Carey said, “I need t
o take a walk.”
“We’re locked down, Carey.”
“You know me. I’m no terrorist.”
“It’s not a good time for recreational hiking.”
“You know the grief I’ve been putting up with lately. I need to get away from this insanity.”
Ugo smiled. “Bro, that could just be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s the best I can come up with under the circumstances. Look, I’ll lock my suit’s LPS into your board. You can follow where I am every minute. Hell, come with me if you want, if you can tear yourself away from your work.” Carey gestured toward the tablet.
“Don’t mock me, Carey.”
“Don’t be a dick, Ugo. How many parties have I taken you to over the years? Remember Founders’ Week? Stella and Raisa?”
“We’re in a lockdown. You know that message you’re getting in your ear every five minutes telling you to go home? That includes members of the Green family, too.”
“I’m just a Cousin, like you. Are you going to let me out?”
Ugo sighed. “I don’t need any trouble.”
“No trouble. I’ll be back in an hour. Less.”
“Let me access your suit.”
Carey gave him the code.
Ugo said, “Will you wear a bracelet?”
“For you, Ugo, anything.”
Ugo retreated into his office and came back with a wristband. Carey held out his arm and Ugo locked the band around it. “One hour.”
“Thanks. Our little secret.”
Ugo stepped into the office and touched some controls on his panel. “Use number three,” he said.
Carey put on his helmet and walked down to the personnel airlocks. The inside lit up, the door slid open, and he stepped inside.
While he waited for the air to cycle out, Carey considered what privilege could and couldn’t do. Being Carey Evasson still worked on people like Ugo. Combine that with the lax security of a society that had no real experience of physical conflict, and it wasn’t hard for a man like Carey to pass through this particular locked door.
But at Aikosdaughter’s apartment, until she had relented Carey had been helpless. Roz could have shoved her out of the way: Roz was Val’s mother. But if Carey had forced his way into a woman’s apartment, he could kiss any chance of ever getting custody of Val good-bye.
Assuming he had a chance anyway.
He’d had a good run, a celebrity from a powerful family, over the last twenty years, but after he’d spent a few years in the fish farms working a job no more glamorous than Ugo Urasson’s—what then?
When the pressure indicator showed a vacuum, the exterior door slid open. Ugo’s voice sounded in Carey’s ear, “Don’t go getting lost—again.”
Sarcasm was the weapon men like Ugo used against men like Carey. Carey stepped out into the tunnel to the surface.
Beyond the radiation maze a plateau looked out over the interior of the real Fowler, the hundred-forty-kilometer-wide crater containing the craterlet that housed the Society. Big Fowler was old, layered with smaller impacts. It was lunar day out here. To the north the terrain was level; from this height the big crater’s north wall was so far away, it lay below the horizon. “Augment,” he told his Aide. Over the landscape it imposed the names of the selenographical details.
He descended to the floor and moved toward an ejecta field from Von Zeipel, bouncing along as fast as he could. It was good to feel his muscles working. The thermosystem kept him cool in the direct sun. The map in the lower right of his visual field told him where he was.
This was the place, back in his youth, the First Imprints club had chosen for their adventures. The game was simple. One: Find a place where nobody had ever been. Two: Empty your urine reservoir in the lunar dust, leaving a trail that would last for up to two million years.
Carey took long, low, loping skips, eight or nine meters per stride, kicking up powder, leaving a trail of scuff marks among the thousands of bootprints that had been laid down here over the last eighty years. Fewer the farther he moved from the colony. His suit adjusted its albedo to reflect the sunlight slanting in from the southeast, and did its best to repel the fines that clung to his legs. His breath sounded in his ears.
He came to the ejecta field and wove his way between boulders, maneuvering through impenetrable shadows until he located the big boulder he was looking for, three times as high as a man, shaped like a clenched fist. Using his fingertips and toes, he climbed up the trail of niches in its side that he’d used twenty years before.
On top lay a depression, between two of the fingers, filled with regolith. There, in dust pitted by a billion years of micrometeorite impacts, lay the mark he had pissed when he was thirteen, as distinct as if it had happened yesterday. A tiny canyon, shadowed side dark as the sky, sunlit side a white line. He knelt down and inspected it. He felt the air flowing in and out of his lungs, his heartbeat spooling away the seconds of his life. He sat, trusting his suit’s insulation to keep him from frying, turned off augmentation so he saw the landscape with no overlay, and looked back in the direction of the colony where he had lived his entire life.
Eva had told him that on the day he disappeared he had set out to join his friends in another of these games. He had no memory of it. He only remembered, afterward, holing up in the construction shelter for weeks while Eva and Roz figured out how they’d explain when he showed up again after disappearing for three months. While waiting, he had written his little book. He told the secrets of growing up male in the Society, aiming it at his mother, at all the mothers and aunts and sisters. Showing off. But no outright rebellion—no bombs on the dome, no threats to destroy or kill. He was just pissing in the dust, making marks on a screen.
Whenever he struck some opponent during a Ruăn tā match, Carey thrilled at the impact of his body hitting another’s. There was a pure joy to be had in smashing things, even if you broke yourself doing it. Even if you got cut or bruised or fractured a bone that would take time to heal—you’d made a mark.
Then there was getting Roz pregnant. Val was another mark Carey had made on the world, and it had taken him time to realize his son was not some achievement, but a person. A gift. And now Carey was losing him more with every day that passed.
The surface was dead. Gray powder, black sky, thousands of unblinking stars, the dust of the Milky Way. He wondered what had happened to him twenty years ago on that day of which he had no memory. He’d owned a ring, titanium with two inlaid vines circling around it. He would never see it again—or if he did, the outcome would not be happy, because his nightmare would have come true. He felt a hint of dread. He supposed that might even be the reason he was here, to test that dread by revisiting one of the places he might have gone on that day.
If they took Val away, what then? How to fill his next eighty years? It didn’t matter much. Truly, the most likely thing to survive his existence was this mark in the dust he sat beside.
He stood up and, quite deliberately, scuffed his foot through the little trough, obliterating it. He stepped off the edge of the boulder and floated down to the surface, his shadow racing up to meet his feet.
The one person he ought to have called long before now, the one he ought to have tried to locate, the one convinced there was more to him than anyone suspected, was Mira. Mira, always exasperated, his toughest critic, his most generous friend, whom he’d been avoiding since she asked about the scanner. He called her.
She answered immediately. “Hello, Carey.”
It was somehow surprising, in this bleak landscape, to hear her voice so intimate in his ear, as if they were lying in bed, her head on the pillow beside his.
“Mira. You’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s good. I saw you on the vids from the station.”
The silence stretched. He squinted into the low sun. He breathed steadily. “Mira, I need your help. I can’t find Val. I’m afraid he might have been mixed up in this thing
today. I thought you might know something.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“I know that. But even if Val doesn’t get himself in trouble before we get to the hearing, they’re going to take him away from me. If you’ve got any advice . . .” His voice trailed off.
A pause. The open airwaves hissed. Finally she said, “I did think of something.”
“What?”
“We could get married.”
“You’re kidding.”
He heard her indrawn breath. Her voice, defensive now. “With Cleo and me. It wouldn’t be anything other than what it seems. Pick a new family name. With three of us, we’d have a better chance in the custody fight.”
Right. Give them a woman parent, give them two women parents, no matter who, and they wouldn’t have to worry about Carey. He could go back to being everybody’s boyfriend. He could come out here once a week and piss in the dust.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“I wasn’t too successful with Marco, was I?”
Could she be so blind to her own motives? “That’s not it.”
“Forget I said anything. You shouldn’t take it on yourself, what Val does, Carey. By this point in his life, is there really much you can do to change what he’s going to be?”
“What I do has to make some difference. Why even be a parent—”
Val’s signal appeared, flashing, in the corner of his eye.
He turned away from the sun’s glare. “I’ve got to go.”
“Carey—”
He closed her call and took Val’s. “Yes?”
“Carey?”
Carey closed his eyes. “Where are you?”
“I’m home. Where are you?”
Wearing a space helmet, there was no way to wipe away tears. “I’ll be home in an hour,” he told Val. “Anyone asks you, we’ve been together all day.”
CHAPTER
NINE
IN THE SPEEDING VAN TO the hotel, Beason and Göttsch tried to contact the OLS Secretariat but could not get a link. A constable, hand over her ear, spoke with her headquarters, while another leaned over the driver.
Li mumbled to himself in rapid Chinese, submitting notes to his Aide. Sirius, handpaws perched on the ledge of a window, had donned spex to shoot video of everything they passed. Gracie plucked at his suit, trying to get him to wear a seatbelt.