by John Kessel
He was at the rally not because he thought the condition of men in the Society required change—thank you, madam, I’m fine just the way I am—but because he wanted to see the face and hear the voice of his son.
In videos Erno looked much older than he had before his exile, when he had come to see Micah before the events that got him kicked out of the Society. On the Reform Party stage Erno looked still older: baby fat gone, his jawline sharp as a chisel, his eyes drawn. Micah sat in the front row and studied his son’s face, the way he lifted and lowered his hands as he spoke, the timbre of his voice. The sentiments of Erno’s speech—well, Micah didn’t pay much attention to that.
When the explosion came, Micah flinched, looked up, and ran. This was no fake. While others stood stunned, he dodged his way between people. He avoided leaping, for fear of landing in some chaotic mess. When people were too densely packed to squeeze through, he pushed them out of his way. Most stared upward dumbly. Some pushed back. Others jumped, not getting any forward momentum, wasting precious seconds floating, and coming down not far from where they’d started, usually on someone’s head. Micah worked his way up the steps of the amphitheater as the debris started to fall around him. Screams and blood. When he hit the park grass at the top, he bounded toward the cable train station.
Something knocked him to his knees. He didn’t know how long he knelt there, stunned—probably no more than a minute—but when he came back to himself the crowd was fleeing all around him.
He got up and headed toward the Diana Tower. The debris rained down. His Aide spoke in his ear: There has been a dome containment breach. Please proceed immediately to the nearest designated pressure shelter.
A flyer in broken orange wings lay on the turf. A small woman fumbled with his straps, trying to get him out of his gear. Micah looked at the tower a couple of hundred meters away through the trees, then got down beside her and worked to free the flyer’s other arm. The man groaned. The woman put her cheek to his mouth. Metal and rock still fell around them. Micah grabbed the woman’s arm. “Come away, now!”
A falling strut speared one of the wings. The woman came with him.
They reached relative safety, outside the shadow of wreckage. Instead of heading for the cable station or the tower, Micah looked back. The rain of debris gradually came to an end, though the air was filled with choking powder from the lunar surface. The black-haired young woman looked up at the dome. The hole was still there. The insistent voice in their ears told them to take shelter.
The woman said, “You’re hurt. The air’s going. Get to the tower.” Then she ran back toward the amphitheater and the injured, trapped, and dead.
Micah felt something trickle down his face, and when he touched his hand to his temple it came away bloody. He felt no pain. Aside from the dust, the air was still breathable.
Nearby a man collapsed while carrying a boy in his arms. They both wore red T-shirts that asked, One, or the Other?
Micah bent over the man. “Can you stand?” he asked.
The man looked at him, dazed. “What?”
The boy was up, rubbing grit out of his eyes. Micah got his arm under the man’s and helped him stand. “Come on,” he said.
The man’s legs were rubbery and Micah had to take most of his weight, but it wasn’t much. The boy followed them to the tower. A couple of constables at the door helped people into the lobby. Micah passed the man and boy off and turned back toward the park.
Water still splashed in the fountain, and escaping air rustled the leaves of the trees. Back at the amphitheater Micah helped two women trying to free a third trapped under a girder. They couldn’t budge it, but Micah squatted, got a grip on one end, and lifted it enough so they could pull the woman free. They carried her away.
Out of shape for this kind of work, he was breathing hard. Someone called, “Over here!” and Micah went to work with another man trying to free an unconscious person half buried in regolith. “Is she alive?”
“We have to get her out!” the man said.
The woman’s arm was exposed. Micah felt for her pulse.
“She’s gone,” Micah said. “You need to get to shelter.”
The man’s face crumpled. He let Micah help him between the dead and dying toward the tower. Micah bounced back to help others. Emergency workers wearing respirators were out now. One of them shouted, voice muffled, for Micah to go back, but he stayed. He freed two women, then a teenaged boy who turned out to be dead. The boy had an erection poking up under his shorts.
The cries of the wounded got sparser. Micah’s heart beat fast. He felt a headache coming on. When he got the next person out, he pointed her off in the wrong direction; he had to chase after her to send her toward the tower.
The air had grown thin and cold. He gasped.
He started climbing the amphitheater steps. Normally he could leap up three at a time, but his legs were not responding so well, and he had to detour around a pile of sheet metal, rock, and girders. He saw a man’s legs sticking out from under a piece of the sky. This one had an erection, too. Bad timing, pal.
He reached the top of the bowl and made his way toward the cable station. Between the bodies and debris, fluttering birds lay on the turf. He had gone a hundred meters when he realized this was stupid—the cable station was at least half a kilometer away, while the tower was closer. He turned and started back. The tower rose up in front of him, beyond the treetops. Biggest erection of all. The sky was still blue. The black hole was still there.
He moved through the trees. Ahead of him two men, leaning on each other, stumbled toward the doors. Micah had to stop. His heart raced and he felt dizzy. He couldn’t think. His pulse sounded in his ears. A voice was calling him, a thin voice in the thin air, but he could not tell where it came from. He knelt down in the grass.
• • • • •
The student neighborhood was deserted; most who lived here were at the rally. Carey leaned on the door chime, and eventually someone answered. It was the guy who had been there when Carey came the last time. He wore one of those idiot One, or the Other? shirts.
Carey thought again about how pretentious he had been when he was fifteen, showing off his pathetic French. “I’m looking for Val—”
“Seems you look for him a lot,” the kid said.
Carey restrained himself. “Have you seen him?”
“I have not seen him, and he’s not here, and no, he hasn’t been here since that day you came before. I think you need a new hobby. He’s not even your responsibility anymore, is he?”
“Don’t be a dick about this,” Carey said.
“Right. I’m a dick. And you’re not even the original.”
Carey grabbed the boy’s shirt and yanked him close. “It would be a betrayal of everything we believe in for me to resort to physical violence. Where is Val?”
The kid looked scared. “Dora met with him last night. They were going to the rally.”
In the concourse behind Carey, a flashing light came on and a klaxon sounded. Carey let go of the boy. “What’s that?” the kid said.
“A pressure breach,” Carey said. He moved away from the door. A couple of people out in the concourse stopped to stare.
“If you have any self-respect, you’ll call me if you see Val,” Carey said, and ran back toward the crater. The air pressure felt normal. At the concourse’s pressure doors, yellow emergency lights flashed but the doors were still open. Nearer the tunnel’s exit the people streamed in from the crater; Carey had to dodge men and women rushing toward him. He passed a teacher with a class of fearful school kids holding hands two-by-two in rehearsed emergency procedure.
He grabbed a fleeing man. “What is it?”
“The dome!” the man said, glancing back over his shoulder. “They blasted a hole in the dome!”
Where East Six joined the crater, a broad plaza looked out over a district of schools and offices that stretched halfway down the interior slope. Fleeing people ran toward the tunnel e
ntrance. On a wall of apartments people were out on their terraces, hands on railings, peering upward.
There was a hole in the sky. Carey could see a cloud of white near the hole—moisture in the air freezing into crystals as it escaped.
And down in Sobieski Park, the amphitheater and surrounding turf was a boiling chaos, people leaping like kernels of popcorn in their eagerness to escape. Most of the seats and the stage lay buried by a mass of rubble, below clouds of dust and grit that filled the air.
A voice sounded in his ear: There has been a dome containment breach. Please proceed immediately to the nearest designated pressure shelter.
He tried calling Mira but the system was overloaded. Cursing, he moved toward the park against the mass of fleeing people. Vehicles careened up the roads from the crater floor. Constables waved people toward East Six. Carey fought the torrent.
A constable grabbed him. “Back into the tunnel! Air pressure’s dropping. The doors will close!”
Carey tore out of his grasp. He got behind an emergency vehicle headed toward the park. When it reached the bottom and the road was blocked by fallen wreckage, three emergency workers wearing respirators jumped out. Carey followed them.
The stage was obliterated by heaps of regolith and structural materials. Grim results lay everywhere; people crushed, trapped. Val could be buried beneath this debris. Carey climbed over some twisted girders and slipped, with a sickening lurch, on a woman’s arm protruding from beneath a fragment of the dome screen. It might be Mira’s arm—but no, this had the words “Si vis amari, ama” tattooed on the forearm.
He gasped for breath. How long before the air got too thin to breathe?
“Help me, help me, help me . . . ,” a voice groaned from beneath the rubble. A man in a dark suit was bent over, trying to lift a strut. Carey grabbed hold of the strut and crouched. “On three,” he said.
The man turned to look at him. It was Erno Pamelasson.
“One, two, three!” They both strained, shoulders and backs working. The strut came up a few centimeters. An emergency worker crawled forward and dragged a young man out from under. Another bloody One, or the Other? shirt.
“Okay,” she said, and Carey and Erno let the strut drop.
Carey breathed hard. The wounded kid had an erection. Carey laughed. “A hard way to go,” he said.
“Priapism from hypoxia,” the EMT said, voice muffled by her respirator. She looked up at them. “Take shelter. Get to the tower.”
Erno tugged Carey’s arm. “Over here,” he said.
A few meters away some others were trying to lift a big titanium sheet, but it was covered with regolith. Erno found a broken beam and levered it under one end, and Carey shoved a block of concrete under it for a fulcrum. After minutes of fumbling, leaning on the beam with all their weight, they managed to raise it. One of the EMTs got down on her belly to reach the person trapped underneath. She backed out, sat back on her haunches.
“She’s dead,” the EMT said.
They let the plate fall back. Carey’s heart would not slow its racing; he felt dizzy. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t Mira who lay under there. Erno grabbed Carey’s arm to steady himself. Erno’s pants leg was plastered to his skin with blood.
Another emergency worker yelled at them through his respirator. It took a moment before Carey understood. “Into the tower! Now! We don’t need two more dead!”
Erno leaning on his shoulder, they started climbing over the rubble and bodies. “Have you seen my son?” Carey gasped. “My son, Valentin?”
“I think—no,” Erno said. “I think”—he gasped—“I think I know . . .”
A vicious headache throbbed in Carey’s temples.
Dead and dying lay all around them, buried and half-buried among the debris. Carey thought he saw the fingers of one woman twitch as they climbed by. He stopped but could find no pulse at her throat. Erno tugged his arm and they kept climbing. He wanted to close his eyes so he wouldn’t risk seeing Val, dead.
They reached the park and staggered through the trees toward the tower. The air was cold. The amount of rubble on the ground diminished. They passed a flyer lying dead on the grass, strapped into broken orange wings. The only people outside now were emergency workers with respirators. Carey was amazed that the doors of the tower were still open. They must have over-ridden the automatic pressure sensors, but soon someone would make the call to seal the building.
Fifty meters, twenty-five. Past the big fountain, still functioning, Carey felt a spray of ice crystals on his cheek. He looked up at the tower, thinking of the night he’d caught Val out here trying to affix the paint bomb.
Erno tugged on him. “Come on.”
A couple of women ran out and helped them the last few meters into the tower. A wind of escaping air blew into their faces through the doorway. Inside, Carey and Erno crumpled to the floor. “Okay,” someone called out. Almost immediately the doors slid shut behind them.
Carey leaned back against the glass of the lobby wall. People crowded everywhere on the polished stone floor, several hundred it had to be, crammed in there. Many were injured. Office workers with first aid kits worked on people dulled by shock. A man held his hand over his lips. A woman clutched the arm of another woman, weeping. Others gathered at the glass wall overlooking the park, the trees, the pond.
Carey’s heart slowed, and he could breathe again. Erno sat crumpled beside him, his leg bleeding. Carey leaned his head against the window. The emergency workers were still out there, but even they would have to give up soon unless they donned pressure suits. By that time anyone trapped in the wreckage would already be dead.
A bird fell to the grass, fluttered a little, and lay an arm’s length away on the other side of the glass, its beak opening and closing. Carey had learned the names of all the birds living in Fowler when he was a kid. This one was small, with brown and gray feathers, a rusty cap, and a white stripe above each eye: a sparrow—a chipping sparrow.
“Everything’s going to die,” Erno said.
Carey was desperately thirsty. The thought that Mira might be lying buried out there made him sick. He saw her face from the night before, when they had argued outside the Men’s House. And that morning, watching him as he awoke. He could not stand the thought that her fierce heart might be stopped.
“Look!” someone cried, and Carey lifted his head to see something none of them had ever experienced: Outside, flakes of snow swirled in the air, moisture condensing in the rapidly cooling interior.
“It makes no sense,” Carey said. “Who would do this?” Some of the Matrons hated the protesters, but they wouldn’t destroy their own home. The Spartans—they’d be killing their own people. But some men had always been capable of suicidal rage. Val ranting about emasculation. His attempted prank with the paint bomb.
Erno swallowed. He moved his leg, and grimaced in pain. “The dog,” he said.
“What?”
“Sirius. He has reasons, or the people behind him do.” Erno surveyed the crowded atrium. Office workers had come down from the floors above. “I don’t think this is over yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sirius—when BYD happened he talked about an explosion as a diversion to distract people from a second attack. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, blow it up again.’ ”
Carey’s mind seemed to clear. “Another bomb? Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not,” Erno said, trying to stand, slipping back down. Blood was smeared on the floor beneath his leg.
Carey looked around the lobby, jammed with the stunned and injured. “There must be a couple of thousand people in this building. We’ve got to get everyone out.”
“He’d plant it in the SCOCOM offices,” Erno said, “on the forty-second floor.” On his second try, Erno managed to find his feet. “You don’t know him. I’ll—”
Erno was in no shape to take on anyone. “Stay here,” Carey said. He looked around. “Tell the constables. Get the people down to t
he metro station. Find Val—and Mira.”
“It’ll be planted against an exterior wall,” Erno said, limping with Carey toward the elevators.
They stumbled their way between groups of people on the floor. Carey hit the elevator call button. When a constable came toward them, Erno called to her. “Officer! Thank the Goddess!” Erno limped toward her, putting himself between her and Carey.
The elevator opened. Carey stepped in and hit the button for forty-two.
“Just a minute,” the constable said.
“Officer,” Erno said, losing his balance so that the constable had to catch him. “We need to get—”
The doors slid closed.
Nicely done. Carey felt the weight of acceleration as the car rushed upward. Maybe Erno was wrong, deluded by shock and paranoia, and Carey would find nothing on the forty-second floor but an empty office suite. He hoped so. He hadn’t been in the tower since the custody hearing. He regretted the icy hostility of his last meeting with Roz. He wondered where she was, where Eva was, where Thabo and his friends from the Salon were. Val and Mira. Any of them could be dead.
He looked at the ring on his finger. He had imagined it lost and dreaded finding it. Two vines, intertwining, never meeting. Men and women, men and men, women and women. The one and the other, the living and the dead, irrevocably woven together, never touching. Was that true? He felt different, older than he had ever felt, completely aware of the past and future yet more present in the tragic, hopeful moment than he had ever been.
The elevator slowed. Forty-two, the indicator read. The doors opened and he stepped out. On the wall a discreet sign: “Organization of Lunar States, Special Committee on the Condition of Men.”
Carey opened the door to a wedge-shaped room that ran from the spine of the building out to the walls. The exterior was one huge window looking out over the crater. Most of the false sky was still functioning. The snow had diminished to just a few hard flakes. The hole in the dome was clearly visible from this side of the building; Carey could see the ragged edges of the gap, the black border of nanofluid flowing in to close the gap, futilely, fragments blown upward by escaping air the second they solidified.