The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

  The freezer containing the genomes was attached to the big lab, down one level. Through the window in the lab’s door he counted three people he would have to pass to get to the freezer. He waited. When a worker came out of the room, he slipped in before the door closed. He stood, back to the wall, just inside.

  The people at the other end of the room were not a problem. One of the two nearby techs sat before a tabletop studying a three-dimensional electron micrograph of what looked like some cellulose molecules, intent on the image in front of her. The other tech was Cluny—a man Erno had detested back when he worked here—ten years older and thicker. Erno waited until Cluny went to the far end of the room, then moved as smoothly as he could to the door to the samples freezer. When no one was looking, he opened the door and in no more than a second was inside.

  On the freezer’s terminal he called up the samples he wanted: hornbeam, spruce, ash. He threw in three varieties of oak for good measure. From a cabinet he took a cryocase, about as wide as his palm, twenty centimeters long and a couple thick, that would fit into the sealed pocket of his suit. In a minute or so the system had drawn the samples out of the liquid nitrogen slush and deposited them in the retrieval bin. Six cylindrical vials, each a centimeter long, kept at seventy degrees Kelvin.

  He was about to use tongs to transfer the vials to the case when he heard the door opening. He shoved the cryocase into the suit’s pocket, grabbed the vials in his left hand, and took two quick steps to the wall.

  Cluny backed into the room carrying a tray of samples. Erno held his breath. A meter from him Cluny set the tray down on a counter, noticed the freezer screen was lit, and went to examine it. The vials in Erno’s hand burned with fierce intensity. He ground his teeth and tried not to move. Gradually the pain subsided; in fifteen or twenty seconds, it was completely gone.

  Cluny scanned several pages on the touchscreen, then turned, a scowl on his face. Flat against the wall, Erno prayed Cluny would not notice the vials floating, unsupported, a meter above the floor.

  Cluny left the room. Erno caught the door before it closed and slipped out.

  While Cluny spoke with the woman at the design table, Erno crossed the lab. He opened the door and stepped out. Behind him Cluny’s voice stopped. Erno ran down the hall.

  He came to one of the cavern greenhouses. The permeable barrier that separated the greenhouse from the corridor was opaqued. Erno felt a slight change of pressure as he passed through. Safely out of the corridor, he finally opened his hand.

  The frozen vials had stuck to the fabric of his camo gloves and damaged the light-bending cells—though his arm was still invisible, he could see the palm and fingers of his hand. When he tried to roll the vials onto his fingers to put them in the case, he found they were stuck to his palm. He couldn’t grab them with his natural hand for fear of the intense cold, but he had to stash them quickly—he was amazed they hadn’t yet fractured from the heat of his hand, and then he realized that the artificial hand had gone cold to match them. His wrist ached.

  He crouched, shook the hand, and the vials fell to the floor. They took some of his skin with them, but it didn’t hurt. He picked up each vial and placed it in the cryocase, closed the case, slipped it into the camo suit’s pocket, and sealed it.

  He was sweating. The hard freeze had not done the suit any good—the fabric over his palm had torn away, and most of his left hand was visible. He examined the palm, floating before him unattached to anything. A little blood clung to the rags of the glove, and the flesh where the skin was torn away was bleached white. Still no pain. As he watched, the torn palm reknit itself, a skin formed, and within moments it looked completely healed.

  But it was still visible. Erno pulled the wrist of the sleeve down as far as he could over the hand and held the end closed with his curled fingers. The rags of the glove were slightly visible, and where his forearm was, the air seemed to shimmer a bit, as if he were seeing through rippled glass.

  He looked around. This was the biggest of the greenhouses, but even so it had been expanded since he had last worked here. The high roof ’s solar lights were barely visible through the canopy of trees.

  The trees. They crowded close. Foliage-laden boughs turned the pathway into a green tunnel. Erno was sweating. It was not just hot: The air was thick with moisture—no place he had ever been on the moon was this humid, this dense with life.

  Instead of leaving, he walked down one of the paths through the forest. That’s what it was: a forest. Trees from seedlings to full grown surrounded him, more varieties than he could identify, so dense that he could not see more than five meters in any direction. Light filtering through the leaves fell on the path in patches. The walls of the cavern were lost. From around him came bird sound. He identified the call of a cardinal—bright bright bright, cheer cheer cheer—and then farther away an answering call, then the first again.

  Organic smells flavored every breath. Rotting leaves blanketed the ground beneath the trees. He brushed aside the leaf litter and scooped soil into his naked left hand. The hand was back to normal, telling him the dirt was twenty-three degrees Centigrade. He held it, rich and dark, to his face and inhaled, rolled his fingers through its warmth, and a small worm pushed its blind head from the dirt. He watched the worm move, then gently tipped the soil back onto the ground. He brushed the dirt from his fingers, drew his hand up into the broken sleeve, and continued down the path, breathing slowly, listening, astonished and intimidated. Something moved in the underbrush. There were animals here, a complex and functioning ecology.

  Compared to Lemmy, Erno was a stumbling amateur. Erno’s planned wood farm was a monoculture, no more an ecology than the potted plants in Cyrus’s home. This was orders of magnitude more difficult.

  He heard voices and stepped between the trees. Around a bend in the path came two young women, graduate students talking about going to some theater performance that evening. They passed him, and Erno went on.

  As he moved deeper into the cavern, the trees became larger, until the path opened into a clearing. Sunlight poured down on a huge tree at its center. The trunk, perhaps five meters in diameter, rose from a mass of buttress roots that spread like low walls. In proportion to its huge bole it was relatively squat, its canopy perhaps ten meters above the floor. Foliage grew from a mass of tangled, thick branches. Every branch was laden with clusters of what looked like walnuts.

  In the base of the tree, set into the trunk, was a door, and at intervals around its circumference were oval windows fitted with glass. As Erno stood there, the door in the tree opened and out stepped Lemmy Odillesson.

  Lemmy carried an instrument caddy and had microscope goggles pushed up onto his forehead. He wore shabby pants and broken boots that Erno remembered from ten years before. He clambered over one of the roots, crouched at the foot of the tree, slipped the goggles over his eyes, and selected a syringe from the tray.

  Lemmy had been talking about developing these “home trees,” as he called them, for twenty-five years, pursuing an eccentric vision of people living in underground forests, the trees recycling their wastes, producing oxygen, bearing fruit, conforming themselves to human needs in complete symbiosis. It had seemed crazy to Erno, back before his exile—who wanted to live in a tree, like a character in some fairy tale?—but now that he saw Lemmy with his creation he could imagine at least some people reveling in the prospect.

  Whatever its practicality, the Society had backed this research, without expectation of payoff, for decades. Lemmy had taught biotech apprentices like Erno the fundamentals of gene manipulation while behind his back they mocked him. How ludicrously unserious they judged Lemmy, when there were major issues of fucking and freedom to be addressed. He was not much of a man by the standards of Thomas Marysson or Cyrus Eskander. Beason and Göttsch had intimidated him. If and when the OLS took over, Lemmy would be swept aside without a second thought.

  And yet, intent on his work, Lemmy moved with what could only be called grace.
Erno stepped closer, let his false hand free from his sleeve, and laid it against the tree. The fine-knit gray bark was cool.

  Lemmy turned and looked up, still wearing the goggles. Erno drew his hand into the sleeve again. The little man stared at him. With his weak chin, shock of unruly brown hair, and absurd goggles, he looked like a mole.

  “I can see you,” Lemmy said. “I can see the optical microfibers of the suit you’re wearing.”

  Erno let his hand slide out of the sleeve. “It’s me, Lemmy. Erno Pamelasson.”

  “Ah,” said Lemmy. He pushed the goggles back onto his forehead, exposing his dark brown eyes. He stood out of the crouch and rubbed his fist against the small of his back. “Persistent young man. Did you get what you needed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps you should leave before somebody who gives a damn about you shows up.”

  Erno wanted to make Lemmy understand that he was not responsible for how the world worked. Before he could figure out what to say, the two women students came hurrying out of the woods. “Dr. Odillesson!” one of them said. “Someone broke into the samples freezer.”

  Face burning, Erno stepped aside to let them pass. As they spoke with Lemmy, he abandoned any hope of justification and hurried out of the greenhouse.

  It was evening in the dome by the time Erno made his way to the hotel, retracing his steps, but he managed it without further incident. Bone tired, hungry, he turned off the camo suit in the public rest room off the lobby and rode up to the suite.

  Göttsch, Beason, and Li were back from the SCOCOM office, in a state of high excitement. “Where have you been?” Li asked. “Did you leave the hotel?”

  Göttsch said, “Dr. Maggiesdaughter has called a press conference for tomorrow at the Materials lab. She promises to reveal the reason for the information embargo.”

  Erno sat in one of the armchairs. “You’ll have to go without me.”

  “What? You’re a member of this team.”

  “I’m discredited by my association with terrorism. You’ll do better not to have me there.”

  Göttsch seemed prepared to argue, but Beason pulled her aside. While they discussed it Erno retreated to his room. He put the cryocase with the samples in a desk drawer, slumped in the chair, and called up a poem he had been working on.

  Lemmy’s scornful words weighed on him. Erno had come here interested only in getting the genomes, and now he had them. He wanted out. He imagined himself walking back to Amestris, alone, under the black sky and indifferent stars.

  He asked his Aide, “How far is it from here to Persepolis?”

  • • • • •

  Eva hadn’t told Carey why she needed him to meet her. Maybe she would ask him to reconsider leaving the family. He wasn’t going to change his mind, but it would not hurt to talk, so before he was due at Aquaculture that morning he found himself at her door.

  When it opened, instead of Eva it was Roz.

  “Where’s Eva?” Carey asked.

  “She had to work at the lab overnight—getting ready for a press conference. She’ll be here. But first I need to speak with you.” Roz led him into the uncommonly quiet living room. Dawn light filtered in from the terrace.

  “What’s this about?” Carey asked.

  She looked at him, looked away again. Her shoulders were stiff with tension, and she fussed about the room while he stood waiting. He’d seen her like this: She had something that she needed to tell him but didn’t want to. The same look she’d had twenty years ago, at the moment he had fallen in love with her.

  Jack Baldwin was Eva’s lover, and he and Roz had been living with the Green family. The sexual tension was thick between Carey and Roz, but Jack seemed oblivious to it. Roz was an Earth girl, raised by a man, miserably awkward, uncomfortable among Cousins and clearly, Carey could tell, in love with him. That hadn’t kept Carey from sleeping with her, but he hadn’t taken her too seriously.

  Until the afternoon he’d come to consciousness, hauled out of the assembler coughing and blinking, moments, he thought, after his mother scanned him with her new invention. The lab was empty except for Eva and Roz. They rinsed the nanodevices off his naked body, gave him a robe to wear, sat him down, and made him drink something warm. Slowly, quietly, Eva explained that he had not just been scanned; that had happened months ago. Some time between then and this moment, she told him, he had died. They had just reassembled him from the scan.

  Carey made them explain it again. Then, when he did get it, the world tilted and he felt as if he might never regain his balance.

  “It’s okay,” Roz had said, holding his hand. “You’re fine.”

  He felt befuddled, a beat slow. He looked into her face. Her eyes glistened.

  “Where’s Jack?” he asked.

  He vividly remembered how stricken Roz had looked when he’d said that. It anchored him. He stopped thinking about himself. Roz was suffering. He wondered how the world seemed through her eyes; he wondered what went on behind them.

  Later they told him that Jack had killed himself. In the face of that, how could Roz be worrying about Carey? Some people had bigger problems than he did. He had seen Roz and himself, for the first time, from the outside. That was when he’d fallen in love.

  There was no corresponding moment when his love for Roz had worn itself out. Years later. Some time after the birth of Val, for sure. Val meant everything to Roz. She pointed out to Carey that Val was the one person she knew who was genetically related to her. At the time he thought that Val had little to do with him; he’d been wrong about that.

  Now he saw that Roz was as troubled as she had been that day they’d resurrected him from the dead.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Is it about Val?”

  Roz held out her hand. In her palm rested a man’s ring. He picked it up: titanium with inlaid green vines twining around it. It was his ring. He hadn’t seen it in more than twenty years. “Where did you find this?”

  “I got it from Eva, who got it from Mira.”

  His nightmare had come true. “Mira found my body?”

  “She found this ring behind my old desk at the Materials lab. Where I lost it.”

  “You had it?” He was genuinely mystified. They’d told him he had died out on the lunar surface, lost someplace no one had ever discovered. Roz couldn’t have the ring unless she had found his body. Or unless he—that earlier Carey, his predecessor—had given it to her before he got lost. “If you had it, why did you keep it a secret? Did I give it to you?”

  Tears filled her eyes. “You didn’t give it to me. I had it because I know what really happened to you—I mean to that Carey, the one who died. He wasn’t lost on the surface. That’s why none of the searches found him: He was never out there. He was killed by my father.”

  “What?”

  Roz sat on the sofa, leaned forward, arms crossed over her stomach. “Dad was working at the Biotech lab on his soil project. It was Founders’ Week and the place was deserted; everybody was celebrating. Carey came out there to talk to him—about me, about us.” Her voice was choked. “They got into an argument. Dad pushed Carey and he hit his head. It was an accident.”

  “You were there?”

  “I got there just after it happened,” Roz said.

  “How do you know it was an accident?”

  “He told me it was. He wouldn’t lie to me. You never understood him. I—I couldn’t turn him in. I was a stranger here, I didn’t know what would happen to me, with no parent; it would ruin everything. I was sick, scared.”

  “You didn’t care that he killed me?”

  “I was destroyed by it! Still, I helped him dispose of the body. I buried Carey’s clothes and surface suit out in the Esnault rubble field. But I forgot to bury the ring, and when I got back I still had it in my pocket. I kept it. But then I lost it.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  “Father burned it, and added the ashes to his soil cultivation batch. He used t
hat soil when he planted his new junipers on the crater slope.” Roz pointed out the terrace. “Out there.”

  Carey walked out onto the terrace. The dome was brighter now; it was full day. He leaned on the balcony rail and looked over the woods. The pear trees were white with blossoms.

  “I thought when we were able to bring you back, everything would be all right,” Roz said. “But Dad never got over it. Eva and I kept her plan to use the scan to recreate you a secret from him; there was no guarantee it would work. Before we succeeded, he killed himself.”

  He turned to face her. “You should have told me.”

  “I was fifteen. I didn’t know how you’d react,” she pleaded. “My father was dead, and telling you wasn’t going to bring him back. You’d only hate him for it—and hate me, I thought. I’m sorry I never told you.”

  Carey looked at the ring again. It was as if it belonged to a different person. He almost laughed: It had belonged to a different person, a person who just happened to be him. He slipped it onto his finger. A little tight. His fingers were thicker than they’d been when he was a boy. He was the age now that Jack had been when he killed himself.

  “Why did he do it? Kill me.”

  “It was an accident! He lost his temper. You had a temper, too, you know. He couldn’t deal with us being a couple.”

  Carey tried to grasp it. All his nightmares, his worry that his body might be found—pointless, and Roz had known it, and kept silent.

  “No wonder,” Carey said. “The way you looked at me in bed sometimes. So desperate. So clinging. You saw me dead.”

  “You saved my life, you and Eva, after he was gone.” Roz blinked away tears. “And then, after Val was born, you discarded me. You discarded me as if I were nothing.”

  This was the tone that made him crazy. This was the Roz he’d known for the last decade, the protector of her great grievance, the story of his abandoning her. “I couldn’t throw you away,” Carey said. “I never owned you. But you were lying to me.”