The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

  Erno stood holding a seatback, swaying with each lurch of the van, torn between wonder at his first sight of the Society in a decade and dismay at the fact that in his first minutes home someone had chosen to reproduce one of the acts that had gotten him exiled.

  The van swerved along the base of the crater’s interior slope toward a tunnel to the hotel. Citizens clustered around buildings designed as pressure shelters. A woman, infant clutched to her breast, gave up on the nearby shelter and loped along the path toward the tower a couple of kilometers away. Others pointed upward at the writing on the dome, blocked by the roof of the van from Erno’s line of sight.

  In the back Mira Hannasdaughter sat looking out, lips pressed together. Erno fell into the seat next to her.

  “The driver needs to slow down,” she said. “There’s no pressure breach.”

  Before his exile they’d been in a few classes together. She had spent more time with her brother than she did with her cohort of women, and was disliked by many. Mira’s testimony at Erno’s hearing had not done him any good, but it was a minor factor compared to the real charges, and she hadn’t lied.

  “Who’s Looker?” Erno asked her.

  Mira turned toward the window. “Whoever it is, he’s in trouble.”

  “At the station I thought there was going to be a pitched battle between my fans and the ones who wanted to put me out an airlock.”

  “Well, at least Looker defused that, didn’t he?”

  Erno smiled, despite himself. “How in the world did you get put on the reception committee?

  “I work in Materials, for Eva Maggiesdaughter.” Mira finally looked him in the eyes. “The Matrons think because I knew you I can figure out what kind of report you’ll write.”

  “I’m not running this show,” Erno said. “All I can do is to try to make them tell the truth.”

  “When you figure out the truth, let us all in on it.”

  Her cynicism had not lessened over the years. Like most people, he’d never wanted to brave her sharp tongue enough to get close.

  The van driver braked and they were thrown forward. Up ahead, the tunnel entrance was blocked by people crowding into it.

  “These people are out of control,” Beason said.

  “Quite irrational,” Göttsch said. “The amount of air contained within this dome is enormous. Even in a real breach, it would take a long time to drop to a partial pressure that would cause death.”

  “This isn’t real,” the van driver said. “Just a copy of the fake Erno and Tyler did ten years ago.”

  Sirius was still shooting video. “If at first you don’t succeed, blow it up again.”

  “We’ll be visiting your lab,” Erno told Mira. “How well do you know Maggiesdaughter?”

  “Not well.”

  The van began to inch forward. Göttsch called back, “Erno, I need you up here.”

  Mira’s connection to Materials was a stroke of luck; she might be his access to the information Cyrus wanted. He needed to put her at ease, show her he held no grudge, and assert a connection. What was her brother’s name?

  “We’ll speak later,” he told Mira. “Give my regards to Marco.”

  Erno moved to the front. The panic had subsided, the road was clear, and the van cruised into the tunnel and down the vehicleway to the hotel without further incident. As they prepared to debark, Göttsch admonished the SCOCOM team to present a calm and professional demeanor.

  Erno tried to have another word with Mira, but the instant they stepped off the van she took off down the concourse.

  Four constables hustled the investigators inside. In twenty minutes the hotel staff had settled them into several adjoining suites. Göttsch retreated to a private room to contact the OLS. Sirius and his assistant claimed another room and started unpacking equipment.

  Erno turned on the pixwall and got the colony information feed showing video of the fake explosion and its aftermath. The administration repeated to distraction that there had been no breach of atmospheric containment anywhere in the colony.

  Erno tried calling Amestris, but got no access. He told his Aide to keep at it until it could get through.

  “I don’t understand who this is aimed at,” Li said, pacing the suite’s living room. “Is it a threat to the OLS member states? To us? Or to the ruling elite of the Society?”

  “It’s not a warning to anyone,” Beason said. “It’s likely staged by the Matrons themselves to discredit their opposition.”

  That wasn’t Erno’s take. The déjà vu of the jet of smoke coalescing into words felt like a reminder to anyone who might have sought Erno as an ally that he was a criminal, an exile, a terrorist. Bang! You’re dead!

  He had not expected that his return would hit him so hard. A flood of memories washed over him: bike races on the rim road, sex with girls in the park, the night Tyler had given him that old copy of Stories for Men. He thought of his family, who had disowned him without regret after his mother’s death. He had tried to contact them in advance of his arrival, with no reply.

  “It could have been staged by agents of one of the other colonies,” Erno said, “to convince the lunar public that the Society is on the brink of a civil war—justifying intervention.”

  Sirius, who had been back in his room with Gracie, arrived in time to reply. “It might have been a diversion, to distract attention while a second, more deadly attack was set up. That’s the way I would do it.”

  As usual, the dog’s expression was unreadable. Erno could not tell if this was one of Sirius’s sardonic jokes or some legitimate insane speculation.

  No one offered an answer. Beason gazed around the suite and sniffed at the most luxurious accommodations the Society had to offer. “This place smells. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Erno had to admit that the apartment he and Amestris shared was twice as well appointed as the Fowler visitors’ hotel. Certainly the Society was no tourist destination. Yet for some reason Beason’s casual dismissal offended Erno.

  “I’m going to make some tea,” he said.

  He retreated to the small kitchen and began brewing some anti-nausea tea, trying to get a grip on his emotions. Göttsch and Beason, though they had been on the moon for two months now, were still adjusting to lunar gravity. Göttsch was more bureaucrat than scientist. Beason, the cultural anthropologist, seemed already to know as much about the Society as he was willing to learn, with an arrogance out of place in someone who came from the political morass that was Earth.

  Lunar-bred Li, from New Guangzhou, might be expected to be prejudiced, but he seemed more willing to take the Society as he found it. He was a structural geneticist whose work Erno had studied when he was an apprentice. In their month of preparation at OLS headquarters he had already asked Erno many questions about Cousins’ biotech. When Erno insisted there were no bioweapons in the Society, Li told him, “Of course, you would never be trusted to know.”

  None of the others were particularly happy with the undue attention Erno had drawn prior to their arrival. At first Erno had bristled at the media reports about him and Amestris and Cyrus, with their distortions and outright fabrications. Then he realized that this celebrity gave him power, if he was willing to exploit it. That was why the others on the team were so uncomfortable with his notoriety, and why Beason and Erno had so quickly come to dislike each other. Still, the degree to which Erno would be able to affect the final report was an open question.

  The tea was almost done when Sirius came into the kitchen. “Our Earthling friend is suffering from nausea?” the dog asked.

  “Maybe I should just poison him.”

  “That would be rash,” Sirius said. The dog’s pose—was it all pose?—of continual denigration of human beings made it hard for Erno to tell what Sirius actually thought. Cyrus had made it clear that Sirius spoke for him. It was also clear, however, that the dog had his own opinions and did not trust any of the other members of the SCOCOM team.

  “Who was that wo
man on the van?” Sirius asked.

  “Her name is Miranda Hannasdaughter. She works in Materials. Her testimony helped get me exiled ten years ago.”

  Sirius sat on the floor, spread his legs, and nosed his groin. He was wearing casual trousers. Out of the side of his mouth he muttered, “Have you had sex with her?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “No. No, I haven’t.”

  Erno attached a bulb to the brewer and began to fill it. He found a package of biscuits in the cupboard and set them on a plate.

  “She was at the station, specifically, I think, to see me,” Erno said. “I think she feels guilty. If I can talk to her outside of SCOCOM’s presence, she might be able to tell us about Maggiesdaughter’s research.”

  Sirius got up on his hind legs, raised his handpaws to the counter of polished lunar basalt, and grabbed a biscuit. He fumbled it; it tumbled and he snatched it out of the air with his mouth. He crunched on it for a moment, then licked his black lips. He looked irritated.

  “Göttsch intends to start with Biotech,” Sirius said, “so you’ll have a little time. If you can turn her, you can acquire the information Mr. Eskander needs before they inspect Materials.”

  “She may not know anything.” And if Erno could get the tree genomes before then, maybe he wouldn’t have to find out anything for Cyrus.

  “Do you want some of this?” Erno asked, sealing the warm bulb.

  The dog dropped to all fours. “I don’t know how humans can drink that swill.”

  • • • • •

  Kneeling on the mat in her office, eyes closed, hands crossed over her breasts, Amestris bowed her head until her forehead touched the turbah. She inhaled deeply and let her breath out slowly, a long steady exhalation of the tension in her shoulders and spine. To a stranger she might seem to be praying, and what she did made a prayer of a sort. It was not precisely Allah she sought, but some sense of herself in the larger universe. That steadiness existed. A self complete and independent, not liable to distortion by her father, by Saman, by Erno—why, always, some list of men?—or by her mother, by her work, by any considerations of Persepolis religion or politics. She listened for the vibration of space-time, the hum of the quantum foam that underlay reality, the dark energy, the missing matter of existence.

  She heard it sometimes. It ran through her, as it did through everything, and when she felt it, all was right. No thing remained undone, no thing needed to be done.

  But not today.

  She lifted her head and opened her eyes. On the wall opposite her desk hung an eighteenth-century Morbier clock her father had given to her when she turned twenty. “Time is a gift,” he had told her. “Once gone, never reclaimed.”

  The mechanism had been altered to account for lunar gravity, yet it still kept execrable time. The face told her it was eleven in the morning; it was after twelve. Amestris was due at the hospital where Leila was lying in for the birth of her son.

  She rolled up her mat and put it into the cabinet, covered her hair, and left the office. While Erno was away at the OLS being run through the bureaucratic machine in preparation for the SCOCOM assignment, she had been able to keep EED operating in a superficial way, managing already existing contracts, forwarding any technical questions to Erno and passing his replies on to the clients. Publicity had brought them the opportunity for new business, but without Erno available they could not take it.

  The hospital was within walking distance of their offices, on the other side of the market. She passed a row of carpet shops. In the windows: lunar blue, the stellar pattern, Carpathian crimson and gray.

  Amestris had considered getting Erno onto the SCOCOM team a necessary risk, even if it put him into the hands of her father. She’d had time already to question her wisdom, and Erno’s.

  “I’ll get this over with and come back,” Erno had told her. “I’ll put us in a place where your father can never dictate to us.”

  By all means. Let’s go to that place where the richest man on the moon can’t interfere with the lives of his daughter and the man who married her.

  A line of uniformed schoolgirls, two by two, followed their teacher toward the Majlis. Surrounded by the scent of cooking kebabs and spices, by the dueling pop music from dozens of tiny speakers in rival shops, by the gabble of voices and the haze of piped-in sunlight, Amestris hurried through the market toward the Sudafi Hospital.

  Cyrus had wanted the birth to take place at home. But if Cyrus would not countenance an artificial womb—if no Eskander child would be gestated by other than the flesh of the family—then Afroza insisted that Leila bring forth Cyrus’s new heir in a place with the most advanced medical interventions at hand.

  At the entrance to the clinic, Amestris identified herself and was admitted to the cool, quiet lobby. A discreet human attendant accompanied her to the birth suite. She was surprised to find her mother, not by Leila’s side, but sitting in the lounge outside the birthing room.

  “You let enough time pass, I see,” Afroza said. “I wondered if you would remember.”

  “Please, mother. How is Leila?”

  “She is as always. She has bitterly complained about the effects of this pregnancy on her body, spent months planning the cosmetic treatments she will receive afterward, and howled through the first hour of labor. She’s now decided she wants the child delivered by cesarean. They have chased me from the room.”

  Afroza played both the sarcasm and martyrdom cards at once. There were few others a woman of her class and generation could acceptably use to get what she wanted. Her insisting Amestris be at the hospital for the delivery was another stratagem. Since Erno’s departure it had been hard for Amestris to avoid being drawn back into the family.

  Fatima and Kayvon were vacationing on Earth. They’d spent the last three months preparing—workouts and metabolic adjustments, antivirals and nanocleansers—so they could tolerate the mother planet’s disease and brutal gravity. The only reports they’d sent back from Hudson’s Bay were complaints about the barbarity of existence in a world subject to weather. Apparently the novelty of water falling out of the sky wore off quickly.

  “Where is Dariush?” Amestris asked.

  “He is with his cronies at the athletic club.”

  “Father?”

  “He’ll come by at the end of the day after his grandson has arrived.” Afroza picked at a thread in the embroidery of her skirt. “Has Erno spoken with you?”

  “We spoke yesterday before the cable train left Tsander.” Amestris turned on the pixwall and tried to find a report concerning the arrival of the team at Fowler. The public affairs feeds were running nothing but boilerplate. The text news offered countless variations on the same dull statements about the organization of the SCOCOM team, and long features with sidebars about the Society of Cousins. A search of Erno’s name turned up three familiar articles and two video interviews from a week earlier, one of them with Amestris.

  She lowered the volume but left the wall on. “Can you tell me what it was that made Father send Erno on this mission?”

  “I believe it was because you asked him to.”

  “I don’t.”

  Afroza ran a finger along the abstract pattern over her knee. “I don’t know how your father makes his business decisions.”

  “Is he testing Erno? Is there any chance he may be warming to him?”

  “You give me more credit for having his confidence than I deserve, my dear.”

  “Mother, half of his decisions are your decisions first. Don’t play the naive wife.”

  Afroza looked up. “You would do well to play the wise one. You put your husband into your father’s hands yet expect him not to be used for your father’s purposes? You use him for yours.”

  “I’m worried about him.”

  “I’m sure he’s safe.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Will Father help Erno get the information we need?”

  “Your father
is a man of his word. If he promised Erno the chance to retrieve what he needs, then he will keep his word.”

  “What does he expect Erno to do for him, then?”

  “Perhaps you should ask Erno that. He knows more than you.”

  “I doubt he knows more than you.”

  Afroza looked up at the wall, then back at Amestris. “Besides the political advantage in having Erno on the investigating team instead of Thomas Marysson, your father expects Erno will more reliably do his bidding.”

  Amestris laughed. “Why would Erno be more reliable than one of Father’s agents?”

  “Because your father knows that Erno loves you and doesn’t want to lose you.”

  Hearing those words from her mother made Amestris uncomfortable. “What is Father after?”

  “Your father often enters these situations without having every detail planned. Of course he would like to see a regime change in the Society of Cousins. What role Erno would play in that is not something that even your father is likely to have worked out completely.”

  Amestris leaned on the arm of her chair. Afroza turned to the pix, some archival clip about the founding of the Society of Cousins, footage from a century earlier of their community being burned down back in California.

  “How can you stay married?” Amestris said. “His secrets, his calculation. You’re no fool. What’s kept you so faithful to him?” she gestured at the screen. “Do you really not care that, if Father gets what he wants, all those women will lose control of their lives? What have they ever done to us?”

  “What have they ever done for us?”

  “Don’t you sometimes wish we lived there?”

  Afroza sighed. “Amestris, you spend too much time with men. Women are no more able to make a just society. They simply fail differently.”

  Did Afroza really believe that? “Even if that’s so, women should have the chance to fail in their own way. Can it be worse than the countless ways men have failed?”

  “Women have been there at every moment to help them fail.”