The Moon and the Other

by John Kessel

  Erno’s first feeling was betrayal. He wanted to protest, but then something in his heart flipped. It was like finding out that the team you had bet on had lost when you already suspected that they would lose. The chance of their winning had been a long shot. Maybe you hoped for the win, but the loss did not come as any real surprise.

  “You don’t need to explain,” he said.

  He didn’t need any explanation. It had been good for Amestris to come to the Society; it freed her from her family. She had played the part of spouse of a prominent political figure as it might never have been played in Persepolis. She found her own voice, independent of her father, of Erno, of Sam. She made friends, served in the legislature, and managed the uneasy cultural space between Persepolis and Fowler with grace and wit. The love between her and Erno was real, but it was as much the product of their shared lives as of any passion. She didn’t need Erno the way she had when he’d shown up in her office at the Persepolis Water Corporation.

  Amestris’s dark eyes were steady on him. “If you were here,” she said, “you’d need only touch me to know what’s in my heart. We’ll speak again soon, right?”

  At one time Erno would have asked her to come home, to lie beside him, to hold him in her arms, as she had a thousand times.

  “Yes, sure,” Erno said. “Whatever you do, Amestris, I don’t want you to dwell on this.”

  “Always asking for the impossible.” She smiled.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  He ended the call.

  On the living room shelf stood the battered twenty-first-century edition of Stories for Men that Tyler had given Erno in the deserted tunnel behind the Oxygen Warehouse. Alicia had handed it back to him when he’d sat in the Administrator’s office. Next to it on the shelf rested Erno’s book of poems. A real, physical book, published in those same early days of his administration, when he was a novelty, a promise for a different future. When people had thought there was something to him, when even he thought there might be something in him worth attending. His poems. Some of them weren’t bad.

  He drained the last of the tea, then brewed another cup and sat out on the balcony. He would go deep into regret, indulge his sadness, let it carry him away. As he often did, he let his eyes follow up the tower to the place where Sirius had blown the hole in the building. Erno wished sometimes that it had been he and not Carey who had gone up there, so that their lives might have been reversed. Carey was the man of charisma whom everyone liked. Carey might have done a better job of it, even if he did not have a magic hand.

  The door chime sounded.

  Erno considered not answering, but it came again. At last he got out of the chair, passed through the living room, and opened the door.

  Mira stood there.

  “May I come in?” she said.

  “Why are you here?” he asked. “Don’t you have more important things to do?”

  “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Mira stepped toward him, and he yielded the doorway. She swept past him into the room. She saw the tea on the table. “Do you have anything for me?”

  “It’s late.”

  “You’re still up.”

  “You win.” He went to the little kitchen. “What kind do you want?”

  “What are you having?”

  “You don’t want what I’m having.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re right about that. Make it some Equanimity. You should try it yourself.”

  She sat and watched as he set it to brewing. Small and dark, her face a little more lined—she had not spent much effort on anti-aging treatments. “Have you figured out what you’ll say at the memorial?”

  “Nothing. Nobody wants to hear what I have to say.”

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “The Renewalists rejected your offer—with bad grace. They aren’t interested in being graceful. It was still a worthy offer, and I for one thank you for it.”

  “You didn’t have much to say this afternoon.” He felt his temper rise. “You let me hang there as if I were everything they think I am. You know me better than that.”

  “I do. But I’m surprised you still have such a thin skin after being in politics for so many years. Actually, that was always one of your weaknesses as a politician.”

  “If you came here to cheer me up, you could be doing a better job.”

  Mira laughed. “And that was one of your strong points—a sense of humor. Maybe I should have said something, but it’s not my duty to tell them what they ought to do. They’re making lots of mistakes, it seems to me, but you and I have had thirty years to make mistakes. They deserve their own chance.”

  “Maybe they should learn from our mistakes,” Erno said.

  “Do you think what Greta said was wrong? If you were to join them, it would become just as huge a distraction as she said.”

  He poured her tea and handed it to her, then poured one for himself. “Yes, she was right,” he said. “Let’s sit down.”

  They went into the living room. Erno felt embarrassed at the luxury of the place. Though the Greens were not exactly poor.

  Mira drank some of the tea and sighed. “Nice.”

  “My specialty.”

  “As for Val and Carey,” she said, “they have their own problems. I’m sorry that it’s come to this. They’ve both blamed Eva and me and Roz for everything that’s ever gone wrong for them. The rest of the people who were there are suspicious of anyone who’s not of their generation.”

  “They have no right to be suspicious of you, or Lemmy. You fought me on every issue I was wrong on. Lemmy—Lemmy’s a saint.”

  “Yes, Lemmy’s a saint. But you’re not finished yet. You can’t publically speak for Renewal? Well, let’s figure out some other way you can help. There must be one. We have to go forward.”

  Forward? Erno’s heart couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Mira, there is no forward for me. I’ve wasted all my future. I made too many wrong choices.”

  He wanted to make her look at him. To see him at last the way he saw himself, the way that he was, the secret weaknesses—hell, secret, they were written on his face—the rage, the failure to live up to his convictions, the despair, the self-indulgence. The pain he felt whenever he thought about his mother. His dead father. The trees he had stolen that had been turned into another way for rich men to get money they didn’t need. The machine he’d given Cyrus. The things he had lost that would never come back. All behind him, every thing he’d felt or done frozen forever, inscribed in his eyes whenever he studied them in the mirror. The words he spoke that didn’t mean anything. The ideals he believed in that he had not lived by, the suffering people he could not save, that he didn’t even want to save, like the man in the bar who had knocked him down.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Erno said. “You should go away.”

  “You’ve done as much as you could. You tried. Don’t let what other people say determine what you think about yourself.”

  “It’s not what they say! I know what they think!” He thrust his hand out at her. “This fucking hand. It’s a curse. I stole it, and it will not leave me in peace. Every day it proves to me what a failure I am.”

  “Erno, you have to let the world be the world. You’re a person of merit.”

  He lowered his head into his hands. The bruise on his forehead smarted. He felt his skull in the palms of both the real hand and the artificial. Such a small space—a liter and a half of neurons—to contain all that he was. All the memories crammed into that skull, how could he let them go?

  He looked up at her. She stood very close. “Please, Mira, you don’t have to do this. You’re kind, but you don’t mean it.”

  “I don’t mean it?” She took his left hand and pressed it to her heart.

  • • • • •

  A person may live in a place for a long time, may see it every day in all its particularity, and still not know it. You see what you see beca
use you are who you are, and who you are is shaped by forces genetic, environmental, and cultural that, despite a century’s effort to escape them, still prevail. Long ago it was proven to most people’s satisfaction that the word “know” is such a chimera that to apply it to anything is an act of hubris, or of faith.

  On this particular afternoon, Mira and Erno met for their evening walk at the cable train station, the place where, thirty years ago, they had seen each other for the first time in a decade. They embraced in the Cousins way, a kiss on the cheek, the brief impress of another’s body. Not inescapably sexual. Public affection was supposed to defuse alienation, distract from the isolation of the human condition. Sometimes it worked. They crossed the road and descended the slope, down flights of steps and switchback paths to the crater floor, into Sobieski Park.

  On these long walks, which they had been taking regularly of late, they talked about many things: their childhoods, Mira’s mother, people they had grown up with, family gossip, the prospects in the legislature for the Renewalist constitutional amendments, the many species of songbirds that filled the trees, the intricacies of balancing a closed ecology, whether Amestris and Erno should turn Eskander Environmental Design into a nonprofit, the latest play at the Black Box Theater, their favorite books, Carey and Val, Mira’s A Brief History of Anger, what was next on the agenda of the Fowler Project. Spaces fell open in these conversations in which they walked for minutes without speaking at all.

  As they threaded their way through the park, sunlight and shadows flirted with one another on the crushed regolith path. All these trees had been planted since the destruction of the original biosphere: The park was more densely wooded than it had been in the days of the Society, a temperate broadleaf mixed forest microbiome. Beneath the trees lay pine needles, last year’s leaves, old spiked sycamore pods, dried half-winged maple seeds.

  But there were still clearings, and flowers, and the pond, and a landing field for flyers, and the amphitheater. The smell of cut grass filled the air. As Erno and Mira came out from among the trees, they heard voices. Across the lawn a crowd of people had gathered. There had been spontaneous protests in the wake of the memorial ceremonies, and tensions still ran high. Mira stepped off the path to see what was happening, and Erno followed.

  A knot of thirty or forty men, women, and children gathered in a rough circle. From the outside Erno and Mira could not see to their center. The people were silent, but somewhere in their midst a woman was speaking in a public voice.

  The men wore bright embroidered shirts or old-fashioned suits that might have come from some European city. Women wore saris with purple sashes, colorful dresses, their hair pulled back or piled high and glistening. A young ungendered person wore a video suit with shoes that changed color. A group of four in matching black shirts carried acoustic instruments: fiddle, guitar, flute, mandolin.

  As they got closer Mira recognized Cleo among the standing people, and Juliette.

  “It’s the Amarillos,” Erno said.

  Some of the people at the edges noticed Erno and Mira. The Amarillos, one of the old families, had survived the transition to the post-Matrons Society. There had always been a rivalry between them and the Greens, and although Amestris was friends with Juliette, Erno had crossed them more than once as Administrator.

  They got close enough to see within the circle of those standing. Some people sat in chairs. At their center, three stood on a low platform: an old woman in a spotless white robe, and a young woman and man in matching yellow dashikis. The man and woman faced each other, holding hands, eyes shining.

  It wasn’t a political protest. It was a wedding.

  The old woman said some things about unity and diversity and family and self, all very wise if you indulged your hubris, or faith. The couple looked into each other’s eyes, positively glowing with love, at least as far as the onlookers, observing through the veil of their own selves, could tell. The words the woman spoke called forth a variety of deep emotional responses from everyone gathered—the ones who listened, anyway.

  The matriarch finished. The couple spoke to each other, in unison:

  “I am the one.

  You are the other.”

  And then:

  “I am the other.

  You are the one.”

  The young woman had a warm contralto voice; the young man spoke with an accent not native to Fowler.

  When they had finished, the matriarch, smiling, said, “Go ahead, then!”

  The couple kissed, making a display of their passion before their families and friends. They then turned, beaming, to face the crowd, raising their joined hands.

  “We are the moon!” they cried out.

  “You are?” someone shouted. “What about the rest of us?”

  The people laughed.

  The matriarch waited until the laughter died, and said, “Let us welcome Federico Petraglia into our family!”

  The wedding party cheered, accompanied by shouts of “Welcome, Federico!”

  An aisle opened in the crowd and the musicians strode forward playing a sprightly tune. The couple began to dance, and as the music flowed, the wedding guests got out of their seats and joined them. From high above the clearing a flyer swooped out of the darkening sky trailing a banner with a slogan on it: No Life Unblessed.

  Mira looked up at the banner, following it for a space of seconds. She turned her head to watch the flyer be eclipsed by the trees. Her wedding to the Greens, entered into at a time of almost overwhelming grief, had not been like this. Erno’s wedding to Amestris had been half a matter of desperate stratagem. Who could say what mixture of emotion, need, and politics might stand behind this one?

  Cleo spotted Mira and came over. “We didn’t expect the Greens to send a delegation. And the government,” she said, nodding to Erno.

  “Hello, Cleo,” Mira said.

  “We don’t want to intrude,” Erno said.

  “Stay,” Cleo said. “If you like.” She hugged them both, then turned back to where the matriarch, still on the platform, her white robe glowing against the green of the evening trees, was about to lead a toast to the newlyweds.

  “No life unblessed,” Mira said, so softly that Erno could hardly hear her, as Cleo walked away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I began thinking about the Society of Cousins in the late 1990s after reading a number of speculative books about anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and the differences between the great apes, including the provocative Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Over a period of years this led to the publication of four stories set on the moon: “The Juniper Tree,” “Stories for Men,” “Under the Lunchbox Tree,” and “Sunlight or Rock.” “Stories for Men” was so fortunate as to share the 2002 James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award with M. John Harrison’s remarkable novel Light.

  Those who have read these stories will recognize that many of the characters in The Moon and the Other appeared originally in them. But it’s my intention that a reader need not be familiar with those stories in order to understand this novel, and I have felt free to alter some details and dates, among other things, that result in the novel being inconsistent with the stories.

  A word about the title: In 2008, Éditions Gallimard editor Pascal Godbillon produced a collection of these four stories in a French translation, publishing them under the title Lune et l’autre. Since that book never appeared in the United States, I have chosen to use the English version of Pascal’s wonderfully punning title for this novel, but my novel does not contain any of those stories, except for a retelling of some of the incidents of “Sunlight or Rock” in a chapter five flashback. I hope Pascal will forgive my repurposing his title and that bibliographers will excuse any confusion this may cause.

  A book that took as long as this one did to find its final form owes its existence to more people and influences than it is possible to name, but let me take a crack at acknowledging the many who have helped me along the way.


  Thanks to my colleagues and students in the English department of North Carolina State University, and to Antony Harrison, department head, who offered steady support of the creative writing program and my own work. Over the years the participants in the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, to whom I brought portions of the novel, gave me encouragement and cogent criticism. I am grateful for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, where parts of the novel were written.

  I must thank Gregory Frost, Janine Latus, Monica Byrne, and Jill McCorkle for moral support; Fariba Parvisi for a voice from Iran; Benjamin Rosenbaum for urging me, early on, to return to the Society of Cousins; Cat Warren for dog lore; Bruce Sterling and Olaf Stapledon for Sirius; Geoffrey Landis for vacuum blowout equations; Heidi Klumpe for bioengineering; Robin Rogers for glassblowing; and Emma Hall Kessel for translating Niccolò for me.

  A number of friends and colleagues read the manuscript and gave me invaluable suggestions: Wilton Barnhardt, Richard Butner, Karen Joy Fowler, Therese Anne Fowler, Kij Johnson, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Millar, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lewis Shiner. In particular, the law firm of Barnhardt, Butner, and Shiner, members of the storied Salon, were with me every step of the way.

  I am lucky in my agent John Silbersack, a consummate professional.

  I must thank my editor Joe Monti who, although I thought I was done, gently asked a few questions that ended up making this a much better book.

  And finally, I must thank Therese, for reasons practical, literary, and personal.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN PAGILUCA

  JOHN KESSEL, who was born in Buffalo, New York, is the author of the novels Good News from Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice, and in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. His shortstory collections are Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book), The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence.