by John Kessel
A dozen flyers circled the park now, too many for her comfort, but she was not ready to land. Maybe in an hour or so, once she had gotten a workout. So Sarah twisted her tail foils and steered herself away, beating her wings, climbing. Her shoulders worked; she drew deep, strong breaths and felt the sweat cool on her skin where the breeze evaporated it. Her visual display told her that her blood was highly oxygenated, but she knew that already by the feeling of strength that coursed through her.
Higher and higher Sarah climbed, headed for the other side of the crater, then banked and followed the perimeter road, spiraling gradually upward toward the roof of the world. The music and noise faded in the distance. She passed over the university; below her people in the plazas and courtyards looked very small. Thermals above the pavement lifted her higher still.
The rally was in full force when Sarah soared over the park again. Maybe ten thousand people down there now. She was so high that she could not make out individuals, and even the flyers below her seemed to be almost on the ground in comparison to how high she had climbed. She glided a hundred meters below the face of the dome, where she could see the sunlit sky as an illusion of the optical surface. She felt great solitude, complete vibrant life, a fullness of being that could only be called joy.
From above and behind Sarah came a flash of light, then an immense sound, astonishingly loud. A blast of air swatted her like the hand of a giant. Something tore in her shoulder. She tumbled, pain searing, her ears deafened and ringing. Something struck her helmet. Shards of metal and fiberglass shot past her; something hit her leg. A large metal fragment tore through her left wing.
All her readouts were red; she was spinning, and she saw a fan of blood arcing away from her calf. She pulled her wings in, crying out with the shoulder pain, and folded them back, letting herself fall to get away from the explosion. Clouds of debris surrounded her, glittering and dark. Larger, tumbling fragments as big as she was fell toward the ground below, toward the crowds of people who surged, moving like a single living thing.
Sarah spread her wings, shoulder screaming, and regained her equilibrium. Only then, banking, did she get a glimpse of what had happened, at the same time that she felt the tug of a great wind.
In the dome above her yawned a vast, gaping blackness. A hole in the sky. Huge—fifty, a hundred meters wide, it had to be—and through it, creating a gale that she fought helplessly, poured the air she swam in, an irresistible force dragging her upward. She curled into a ball, wrapping her wings around her legs, willing herself to be dense, to fall, but the moon’s gentle gravity was helpless against the torrent blowing her out into nothingness.
• • • • •
Mira and Carey had spent much of the night looking for Val. The Glass Institute, the university commons, the places where he hung out with friends. Nothing. They’d vowed to resume the next day and gone to bed.
Early, early in the morning Mira woke and watched Carey asleep on the pillow, his face placid. Mira stroked the hair at his temple lightly with the tips of her fingers, pushing it behind his ear. He had died—and yet here he was. Did what had happened to him even count as a death?
She remembered the way he’d smudged dirt on his face in the Oxygen Warehouse, that night when she’d shot the video she’d used to betray him. He was playing a game, trusting her to play along. Back then, Carey had offered her connection to social acceptance. At some level she’d hated that it took a man to draw her within the circle of normality, and she’d resented him for it.
What a fool she’d been. She lay against him, their hearts ten centimeters apart. She would not assume that this night implied anything going forward—but it did. It would go forward, not easily, but that didn’t matter. Years would pass, and their hearts would be connected throughout those years, no matter whether the Society changed, whether the OLS intervened, whether they were in the same family or not. She knew it. What astonished her most of all was that he knew it, too.
Carey’s eyes fluttered open.
“Hello,” he said softly. He kissed her on the cheek. His eyes were very somber. “You look—happy.”
“I am happy.”
“Is that possible?”
Mira poked him in the ribs, and they wrestled until he pinned her to the bed and kissed her again. “I love you,” he said.
Her heart rose, and she let it. “Go easy on that word.”
“Wait around, you’ll see.”
They got up and dressed. They went directly to the university, where the rally organizers were meeting. Carey rolled his eyes at the numbers of people wearing red shirts that said One, or the Other? In the green room they found Hypatia at the center of a chaos of students and allies, dressed to kill and full of energy. Her face lifted when she saw Carey. If she was surprised to see Mira with him, she didn’t show it.
She held a hand up to stop the young woman who was speaking with her.
“I’m so glad to see you both,” she said.
Mira’s distrust must have showed on her face.
“No, I mean it,” Hypatia said. “Mira, I know you did what you did for what you thought were good reasons. I respect your ability to see past politics. It doesn’t matter if we don’t always agree.”
“I thought you were all about solidarity.”
“You and Carey are together despite what happened. That’s solidarity. You’ll see I’m right someday.”
“I’ll be sure to come by and apologize.”
“There’s still time for you to get on the list of speakers,” Hypatia told Carey. “You don’t have to prepare anything. You don’t have to agree with me, and I won’t try to steer you. Just a word or two would mean a lot to all the men looking to you for leadership.”
“We’re trying to find Val,” Carey said. “He was in tight with Dora Aikosdaughter and some of her boyfriends.”
“You shouldn’t worry about them,” Hypatia said. “They’re a minor distraction.”
“And Val?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea where he might be. I was under the impression his mother had him on a short leash.” For a second Hypatia’s eyes looked away from Carey, and Mira followed them. Erno Pamelasson stood at the door. Hypatia went on, “You’re sure you won’t speak?”
“No, thank you,” Carey said. Mira touched his arm and he turned. Erno was approaching. Mira and Carey left.
“Do you think she’s lying?” Carey asked.
“Can Hypatia tell when she is lying?” They were out in the crowded courtyard. A man in a red pullover, one of Mira’s old professors, was instructing students on how to behave at the rally. “What now?” Mira asked.
“We should split up. You go to the park. I’ll try Aikosdaughter’s apartment. If we don’t find him, let’s meet at the fountain at fifteen hundred.”
She didn’t want to let him go. “All right,” she said. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. He squeezed her tightly, so much taller than she, his chin resting on her head.
“No words needed,” he whispered into her ear. He let her go and moved off through the crowd.
Mira made her way down the crater slope. She was not alone: From all quarters of the colony people were gathering. Couples and families, teachers with school groups in tow, workers taking time from their jobs, people in the omnipresent red shirts. A bell tinkled behind her, and three young men rode past her on bicycles. None of them was Val. Between the buildings she glimpsed the park. Old-fashioned music floated up on the air. Flyers circled above.
Once she reached the amphitheater she moved around the perimeter, then struck out down one of the aisles, searching the faces. There were so many young people that she wondered if she would spot Val even if he were there. She looked for the characteristic hunch of his shoulders, his bright red hair.
She had her back to the stage when, to a chorus of cheers, Hypatia opened the rally. Mira turned to watch for a moment, until someone asked her to move or sit down.
Hypatia didn’t say anything Mira hadn�
�t heard before.
Mira moved around to the side of the stage. The parade of speakers began: some gender theorist from the university, a young mother who worked in colony administration, a helium-3 miner, the coach of the hockey team. Through all this she moved through the crowd without glimpsing Val, and she began to wonder if they weren’t overreacting in their concern for him. She looked toward the fountain, but it was way too early for her meeting with Carey.
When Erno took the podium, Mira was on the lawn above the amphitheater. It was a long way down to the stage, but speaker midges in the air carried his voice clearly. Erno’s speech wasn’t very well organized; he seemed to be working up to a warning about the intentions of the OLS. He left out Cyrus Eskander’s search for the IQSA and his own role in it, but at least he was willing to speak. She couldn’t figure Erno out; he seemed so fatally conflicted. She supposed there were worse things to be than conflicted.
Then she spotted Val, across the amphitheater from her, moving between the people standing beyond the top row of seats. He was taller than the others, and his red hair stood out. He paid no attention to Erno’s speech.
She set out toward him, but once she moved into the crowd she was too short to see him anymore.
“—I believe,” Erno was saying, “despite my chastening experiences in that patriarchal world, change is necessary. I guess most of you think that, too, or you wouldn’t be here today.
“But the changes they hope to bring in the aftermath of their report—”
A flash of light came from above, and three seconds later the crack of an explosion. Mira felt the sound in her chest. She looked up.
A smudge of dust and smoke marred the sky. Someone near her said, in disgust, “Not again.”
But this smoke did not resolve itself into words. It wasn’t smoke at all—it was a cloud of debris, pieces of the material that made up the dome, falling now, growing in size as they fell. Metal fragments, titanium struts, tonnes of regolith from the exterior, structural members, and pieces of the projection screen, tumbling and spinning as they fell toward the people gathered in the park.
Above them they left a hole in the sky. A black hole, larger than a speck, smaller than a blot, a crow’s eye staring down. It didn’t look very large. Mira wanted to brush it off the blue dome. She couldn’t feel any breeze, but she imagined she heard a thin howl, the sound of life being sucked out of the colony.
Mira tried to push through the crowd. It would take a long time, thirty seconds or more, for anything to fall the kilometer from the dome to the surface, but people cried in panic. The sound system squealed. The debris was coming down—that was the first thing they realized, and they scattered, leaping like startled deer, knocking each other over, shouting.
Erno’s voice came over the sound system: “The tower! Get to the tower. Don’t panic. There’s time. Go anywhere that can be pressure sealed!”
A woman near Mira cried out and pointed up. Mira looked up in time to see a struggling flyer in blue and white wings, tiny at this distance, sucked through the hole into the airless nothing on the other side.
Leaping people collided in midair and bounced off others trying to escape. Mira pushed between those around her. The debris began to hit. It was all raining down: fiberoptic sheets. Metal plates. Insulation. An avalanche of regolith. The sound was immense and horrifying: crashing, squealing, the thud of metal and rocks hitting turf, crushing stone benches, trees, bodies. Screams, cries, shouts. In horror, Mira saw a ten-meter reinforcement strut crush a woman tugging a child.
Mira dashed through momentary spaces in the roiling crowd. A boulder landed a couple of meters away, splattering the pavement as if it were water. A shard of concrete cut her cheek. People fled the rain of junk, but it spread as it fell. The density of the debris swelled. The air grew thick with dust and rocks. For a billion years it had existed in a vacuum; now it was within an atmosphere.
But not for long.
People knocked over and trampled one another. Some few tried to pull the injured from beneath the rubble. She saw a man pinned under a slab of concrete, leg pulped. Another lay with his head severed by a sheet of titanium. Some cowered under trees that might as well have been made of tissue paper.
Mira passed a broken-backed flyer lying on the ground, feathers of his orange wings still fluttering under the malfunctioning servos. Mira thought he was dead until he pulled his hand free of his control glove. Mira crouched beside him and began to unfasten the straps of his wings.
“Don’t worry,” she told him. Blood trickled from the corner of the man’s mouth. Something struck her shoulder. Dirt rained down around her. People’s legs flashed by in the corner of her vision. An insistent voice began in her ear: There has been a dome containment breach. Please proceed immediately to the nearest designated pressure shelter.
A man knelt down beside her and freed the flyer’s other arm. The flyer groaned, eyes opened wide—they were pale blue—and stopped breathing. Mira tried to feel his throat for a pulse, but the other man grabbed her arm and tugged her to her feet.
“Come away, now!”
A falling metal strut speared through one of the wings, pinning it. Mira let the man pull her away.
They got out from under the rain of deadly junk onto the green turf several hundred meters from the amphitheater. The man who had pulled her away was in his sixties, maybe. He looked like he might once have been an athlete, but he wore the coveralls of an Ag worker. His scalp was cut and blood flowed down his temple. The rain of falling debris lessened, stopped.
The blackbird’s eye still marred the sky. The self-sealing mechanisms weren’t working, yet the air still felt dense enough to breathe. How long had it been since the explosion? Eight, ten minutes? How long would it take before the air escaped and the pressure doors of the tunnel entrances closed? They had to get away.
People headed for the Diana Tower, for the cable train station, or the nearest tunnels in the crater wall. Others turned back to the amphitheater where hundreds lay buried in the rubble, many still alive. Mira looked toward the tower longingly, hoping that Val, that Carey, had found shelter.
She told the bleeding Ag worker, “You’re hurt. The air’s going. Get to the tower.” She ran back toward the people trapped in the debris.
• • • • •
From the Executive Summary, Commission on the Society of Cousins Dome Disaster (aka “The Fowler Report”)
The safety devices of the Society of Cousins dome were designed to seal a breach of up to twenty meters in diameter. The explosion that occurred during the Reform Party protest blew a hole in the dome one hundred meters across.
The volume of air contained within the crater was just over ten billion cubic meters. The Cousins pressurized their home at 0.8 atmospheres with 25 percent oxygen content, the equivalent of air pressure at an altitude of 2,100 meters on Earth, about that of Mexico City.
At 0.5 atmospheres, the partial pressure of oxygen becomes low enough that most human beings begin to experience hypoxia, lose consciousness, and die.
Given the volume of the Fowler crater and the size of the hole in the dome, the pressure within would fall from 0.8 to 0.5 atmospheres in about forty-five minutes.
• • • • •
Sixty-seven-year-old Micah Avasson lived in the singles dorms. He worked in the rack farms, as he had for twenty-five years, harvesting tomatoes, leaf lettuce, cucumbers, and kale from towering walls of hydroponic trays under grow lights. In his youth he had been a gymnast, a member of the Cirque Jacinthe, but he had long ago aged out of that. He’d never been a star anyway, just a strong back and shoulders, holding a rope, bracing a pyramid. Force, not grace, was his hallmark, and in truth he was not even that strong.
They had once toured the other lunar colonies; Micah remembered it as if it had happened to a different man. Out there they got as much attention because they were Cousins as they did for their performances, and every night men and women waited for them in the hotels, the clubs
, the theaters, all interested in sleeping with the exotic strangers. These people inevitably found the experience disappointing, though Micah had been gratified by the crooked energy the patriarchal men and women brought to bed with them.
Back in Fowler he’d married into the Rust family for a few years and had fathered a son, but once the son was born his wife did not seem to have much use for Micah, and he left. His wife had been Pamela Megsdaughter. His son was Erno Pamelasson.
After the divorce Micah had fallen back into his birth family, the Snows, for a while, and had not seen much of Erno beyond the age of three. When his performing career ended Micah forsook the male privilege, took a job in Agriculture, and against the protests of his mother moved out of the family. One of those rare solitary males. He had his girlfriends, his co-workers, his circle of acquaintances, but few permanent connections. That was fine. To Micah the Society of Cousins meant the freedom to do as he pleased with the time he did not spend on his tedious job.
He was heading alone into the dark pit that waited at the end of every life. But everybody went down alone, even if children and wives and brothers crowded around the hospice bed, a lover holding one hand and a best friend the other. Sometimes the lover and the friend were even the same person. It didn’t matter. You broke through into that final blackness unaccompanied. Why pretend that it could be otherwise?
But as the number of the years behind him began to exceed the number he could reasonably expect ahead, Micah began to feel vulnerable in a way he never had before. So when Erno came back to the Society, he could not help but take an interest—from a distance.