The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

Eva looked over her shoulder. “No. It’s just you, me, and Hector.” She brought two glasses of hot tea—actual hand-blown glasses, not bulbs—on a tray, set it on the table, then sat on the sofa opposite Mira. Hector jumped up and settled down beside her. Mira tried the tea. Eva waited, not offering Mira much guidance.

  Mira drove straight ahead. “I don’t know what you think about my testimony, or what part you took in my getting suspended. But you let me come here, so you must be at least willing to listen. I have some things that I have to tell you, and some advice.”

  “Advice? For me, personally?”

  “Yes.”

  Eva sipped her tea. “I have mixed emotions about your testimony. Did you lie about Carey?”

  “I am Looker. He did help me with some of my videos. The footage I showed was genuine. All that was true.”

  “And BYD?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that. Neither did Carey.”

  “You didn’t need to lie. The vids you showed would have done it. They were going to take Val back anyway.”

  “Somebody had to keep better watch on Val. Carey wasn’t doing that.”

  “You know there’s more to it than that.” Eva watched Mira for a moment. “But there’s no point arguing about it. We’ll do what we can to take care of Val. You can help with that, if you ever hear anything about him that we might need to know. But this can’t be why you asked to see me.”

  “It was, in part. I could use”—Mira searched for the words—“some help. I don’t want to be exiled. I was hoping that, if you do something for Carey, you might help me.”

  “I think Carey is in more trouble than you are.”

  “Carey’s more famous than ever. It would be suicidal for the Matrons to banish him. I’m the one at risk.”

  “I can put in a word for you with some people,” Eva said coolly. “It might do you some good.” She put down her glass. “I’m still waiting for this advice.”

  Mira put down her own glass. “Erno Pamelasson came to see me, the same night that this news came out about the GROSS virus. I don’t know why the Board never revealed that about him at his trial. Half of the Reform Party sees him as a martyr. Nobody would have felt that way if they’d known he was a bioterrorist.”

  “We didn’t want to publicize the virus. He was involved in an incident that got his mother killed. That was more than enough to get him exiled.”

  “Well, Erno came to see me at the lab. He wasn’t acting for SCOCOM. He’s working for Cyrus Eskander. He wants the IQSA.”

  Mira watched Eva, looking for some sign of recognition.

  “What is the IQSA?”

  “A machine in a walled-off lab behind the stacked-pinch reactor. He called it the Integrated Quantum Scanner Array. He thinks it’s in there. I don’t know what, if anything, he’s said to anyone else.”

  “He thinks it’s there?”

  “I took him down there. He was the one who figured out that there is a room behind the wall.”

  “So he never saw any device.”

  “He’s convinced it exists. He says keeping it a secret was the reason we’re under this information embargo.”

  Eva gazed at her unhappily. Mira took the ring out of her pocket and slid it onto her finger.

  “I asked you not to pursue this,” Eva said.

  “I told you the embargo was suspicious. Erno said if he got the details of its construction, schematics, data on operation, he’d keep it quiet. But it will go to Eskander, and then, I guess, it’s out.”

  “It won’t be out—Eskander will want to keep it a secret as much as I do. I want to suppress it. He wants to own it. You should have come to me as soon as Erno asked after it.”

  “If you’d trusted me enough to tell me what was going on when we talked after the lab meeting, I’d have had a reason to. Instead you tried to placate me. That invitation to your picnic. All that talk about my joining the Green family.”

  “That was genuine.”

  “So you say.” Mira had the ring on her little finger, turning it with her thumb as she spoke. “Here’s my advice, then: Reveal it all. It’s going to come out anyway. Use it as a bargaining chip with the OLS.”

  “The OLS will have to know regardless,” Eva said. “If it’s going to be out there—I always knew it would be, eventually—the OLS could at least try to control it.”

  “Is it a weapon?”

  “No,” Eva said. “It’s not a weapon.”

  “Erno said there was a scanner and some sort of instantiator, like an object printer.”

  “That rather underestimates the matter.” Eva bit her thumbnail, then sighed. “The IQSA can duplicate any material object.”

  Mira thought about that. “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “It works?”

  “It most certainly works.”

  Mira considered the possibilities. Clearly the thing, if it really worked, might have widespread industrial applications.

  “But why did you suppress it?” Mira leaned forward, forearms on her knees, hands clasped in front of her. “You’d be famous throughout the solar system. A patent would earn the colony a huge amount of foreign exchange.”

  “I have thought—” Eva stopped. She stared at Mira’s hand. “Where did you get that ring?”

  Mira pulled it off. “It’s nothing. I found it.”

  “You found it.” Eva’s voice had gone flat. “May I see it?”

  Reluctantly, Mira handed it to Eva. Eva held it between her thumb and forefinger; she turned it, examining the twined vines inlaid into its surface.

  After a moment, Eva released her breath, placed the ring on the low table beside the tea tray, and slid it toward Mira. “This ring has been missing for twenty years. How did you get it?”

  “I—I found it behind a desk.”

  Eva’s eyes darkened. “Don’t treat me like a fool.” She stood up and paced to the terrace, then back. “Did you find his body? Somewhere on the surface?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You come here asking about the IQSA, and you’ve got Carey’s ring, and you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “It’s Carey’s ring?”

  “As you well know.”

  “No, I don’t. I told you, I found it in the lab.”

  “Are you working for the OLS?”

  This was absurd. “All right, I lied. I didn’t find it. Carey gave it to me.”

  “Stop lying! Carey—the Carey who wore this ring, is dead! He was wearing it when he disappeared. Only somebody who found his body would have it.”

  “What are you talking about? Carey isn’t dead.”

  Eva sat down, leaned forward over the table, studying her. She picked up the ring again, got some control over her voice. “Carey’s alive, yes,” she said hoarsely. “But it’s not the Carey that got lost when he was fifteen. The IQSA can duplicate any material object, organic or inorganic, down to the atomic level. When Carey disappeared, I used it to recreate him.”

  Mira stared at Eva. Eva just looked back. “What?” Mira said. “Carey was hiding out, writing—”

  “Carey disappeared because he was lying dead somewhere on the surface. You know that or you wouldn’t have this ring. You or someone else must have found his body, after all these years.”

  “No. I found it behind the desk, like I said. It was Roz’s desk. Maybe Carey gave the ring to her.”

  Eva was nonplussed. “If Carey gave it to her, why would Roz hide it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eva watched her. She looked tired. When she spoke again her voice was distant.

  “Carey disappeared on the night of Founders’ Day. He and some friends planned to meet out on the lunar surface, but he never showed up. You know about the unsuccessful searches, how he was assumed lost. Well, that was the truth.

  “What nobody knew was that, in testing the IQSA a month earlier, I had scanned Carey. After he was gone, I still had an exact descriptio
n of his quantum state at the moment the scan was taken. In the months after, I redoubled the team’s efforts to produce an assembler capable of using a scan to create a duplicate. We succeeded. And so, without anyone knowing it, I reconstituted Carey from the earlier scan.”

  “Carey isn’t real? He’s a copy?”

  “He’s as real as anyone. He came back the exact person he was, with memories, abilities, expectations, experiences—exactly as he was the microsecond that he was scanned.”

  “Does he know he’s not—that he’s a copy?”

  “Yes—remember, the scan was made a month before he disappeared. His last memory was of being sealed into the scanner. We had to explain to him what had happened since then to get him to go along with the cover story. He hadn’t experienced any of the events that occurred between the moment he was scanned and the time he died. He had to pretend he’d forgotten, or depend on his charm to gloss it over. It shook him, the knowledge that he had died.”

  “Did anyone else find out?”

  “A few. Roz knew from the start—she helped me. A couple of people on the research team; some on the Board. The implications of such a power were enormous. We decided to keep the IQSA a secret.

  “For twenty years I’ve been waiting for somebody to invent it again. But apparently they couldn’t reproduce my work. So now they want to steal it.”

  “Has anyone else ever been duplicated?”

  “No one.”

  “Wait a minute—has anyone else ever been scanned?”

  Eva looked uneasy. “Yes—a few people. A handful. But nobody but Carey has ever been recreated.”

  Mira felt her mind ticking over the idea. Carey had died, and come back? The implications were huge.

  “You have to realize, Mira, what a mother goes through. From the moment her child is born she has a hostage to fortune. I couldn’t help myself. Given the kind of risk taker Carey was, I had to scan him. I thank the Goddess that I did.”

  A hostage to fortune.

  “Do you know about my brother, Marco?”

  Eva stopped. She closed her eyes. She opened them again. “Yes.”

  “You selfish bitch,” Mira said softly.

  “Mira, you don’t understand—”

  “How could you keep something like this a secret?”

  “It wasn’t my decision.”

  “So, are all the children of the Board of Matrons scanned? Their families, their lovers?”

  “We had to suppress it. An invention like this offers untold opportunities for abuse. In the hands of the patriarchies, it—”

  Mira picked up the ring and flipped it at Eva’s face. Eva flinched. It struck her on the cheek and bounced over her shoulder, tumbling end over end. Even at this distance Mira could see it, glinting in the ceiling lights, every detail visible as it landed and rolled on the tiles of the terrace, beneath the table there, coming to rest against the planter that marked the balcony’s edge. It made very little sound, but in the silence it was very loud.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  COUSINS!

  Seize the Future!

  Save the Society!

  Extend the Franchise!

  1200

  1 May

  Sobieski Park Amphitheater

  We urge men and women from every quarter of the Society to stop work on 1 May and attend the Rally for Justice and Equality. Show the Board that it cannot run roughshod over the rights of individuals! Demonstrate to the rest of the solar system that there is a vital and widespread opposition movement in the Society of Cousins!

  • • • • •

  Unpowered, the light-bending suit was designed to look like coveralls, with form-fitting ankle-high soft shoes. Erno could leave the hotel and pass through the colony without attracting attention.

  But to reduce the risk of contamination with biological agents, Biotech was located in a satellite complex three kilometers from the crater, accessible only through the vacuum. One had to suit up, leave by airlock, traverse the lunar surface, and pass through the facility’s own airlock. For the period that he was in the pressure suit he would be visible.

  When he reached the entrance to the North Airlock, Erno stepped behind a building opposite, unrolled the hood from his collar, pulled it over his head and down over his neck. It fit snugly and the bottom sealed with the collar. Built-in goggles covered his eyes. He turned on the suit and it instantly began bending any light that fell on him around his body, leaving him effectively invisible. The eyes were the only weak spot: The goggles needed to admit enough light for him to be able to see, but they had to transmit enough of what was visible behind him so that they could not be seen. In practice, they were visible only to someone looking at him face on, and then only as two ovals of dimness floating in the air.

  He crossed the plaza to the airlock complex and waited until someone exited, then slipped in before the sliding doors closed. Light-footed, he headed for the locker room. The display in the lobby indicated that out on the surface it was three days into night. On the screen, beyond the lights of the arrival pad, lay a moonscape lit by starlight.

  In the locker room Erno sat invisibly and watched a woman and man suit up, recalling as they changed into their skintights how aware, as a teenager, he had been of women’s bodies. When they were gone he stripped off the camo suit. From the emergency rack he chose a suit that approximated his size. He powered up the skintight and pulled it on, its thermoregulators adjusted themselves, and he found a pair of boots and a helmet.

  With the camo suit in the surface suit’s beltpack, he snuck to the utility airlock he had used back in the days when he was late for his apprenticeship and wanted to avoid being seen. As he was opening the lock’s interior door, the night attendant appeared in the corridor. “Just a moment,” he called.

  Erno stepped into the airlock and hit “close.”

  “Stop!” the man said, but the door slid shut before he could reach Erno.

  Erno saw the man’s face through the port in the airlock door, shouting. He turned his back. For a while he could still hear the man, but as the air cycled out it faded. This airlock was a lot cleaner than the maintenance airlock of Persepolis Water where he and Taher had walked out into darkness near absolute zero. He wondered what Taher and Devi were doing at that moment. He wondered what Amestris was doing.

  When the air, and with it the man’s voice, was gone, he opened the outer door.

  It would be an hour and a half before the next shift change, so the radiation maze, vehicle pad, and rover stop were deserted. The attendant was sure to sound an alert. Since Erno had come out of North instead of West, he would have a five-kilometer walk around the perimeter of the crater to reach Biotech; anyone looking might not expect him to be headed there. He loped along the surface of the graded road, five meters at a time, kicking up dust.

  After he had the genomes, he’d resign from SCOCOM—there was no chance at this point he could affect their final report—and return to Persepolis. There would be a reckoning with Cyrus. He and Amestris needed to get out, relocate to some other colony out of the shadow of her family.

  Exactly what Sirius predicted he would do.

  He still had some affection for the Society, but the Cousins experiment had failed under the weight of prejudice, egotism, self-indulgence, power games, and individual character flaws. Humans here were the apes that Sirius excoriated. The Society was doomed. It was not Erno’s problem.

  Occasionally he checked to see whether anyone was following. He used image augmentation to raise the visibility of the surface. To his left, the exterior crater wall rose at first gently, then steeply, softened by a billion years of dust that coated the slopes, except where disturbed by crews that had constructed the dome eighty years ago. He passed a gargantuan set of stairs—the risers were a meter or more—used for inspections. To his right lay the lunar surface and in the distance the southern ejecta field of Esnault-Pelterie, ghostly in the starlight.

  When the road fro
m the West Airlock came into view—a string of lights like a necklace—he struck off toward it through a field of dormant solar collectors. His visual augmentation lined the road with green borders. It was hard to judge distances, but a readout in the corner of his eye showed him how far he was from Fowler and how much farther he had to go.

  Above him the Pleiades shone fiercely in Taurus. The Milky Way, a billion stars unfurled like a flag from one end of the sky to the other, shrank his troubles to insignificance. He remembered fleeing across this dead black-and-white world with Tyler when their little revolution had come to its clumsy end. He’d realized that his mother was right to warn him that if he followed Tyler he would get somebody killed: At the moment he’d grasped this truth, unknown to him, she was already dead.

  Half an hour later, winded, he came to the Biotech bunker. In the shadows beside the entrance he found a spot that would be safely out of sight of the rover when it arrived with the next shift. He waited. It was cold, and his suit worked hard to compensate.

  Forty minutes later the bus from the West Airlock arrived. As a score or more workers got off and headed into the radiation maze, Erno, his faceplate opaqued, slipped into the rear and lagged behind until they reached the personnel airlock. The doors opened and the departing shift workers came out. Inside the big airlock he stood off to one side, facing the port in the door, while air flooded the chamber and the inner doors opened.

  In the locker room he was the last to strip off his surface suit. Once alone he shoved his gear into a locker, put on the camo suit, and turned it on. He headed for the complex’s main corridor.

  So as not to disturb anyone passing, he kept close to the wall. He turned a corner and had to dodge a woman coming the other way wheeling a rack of sealed mini-ecologies. She missed the sound of his step, the displacement of air.

  He went to a cubicle off the break room where as an apprentice he used to hang out. The workstation there was always vacant. His old login no longer worked. He tried a scalpel Sirius had obtained from some spooks in OLS Information Security. It was hard to type when he could not see his hands, but after a little fumbling he got into the archives.

  It didn’t take long to track down the records of tree manipulations. Erno was astonished at the volume of work Lemmy’s team had done. There were varieties of spruce, maple, ash. He didn’t take the time to figure out which would be most useful; he downloaded their codes, closed the station, and left.