Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He loves it because it's where he needs it to be.

  An instant of frenzied calculation and he puts on the speed, focusing on that boulder as if it's the most important thing in the known universe.

  Again, it's not a graceful run. There is no such thing for men born elsewhere, wearing moonsuits that render their every move ponderous, in gravity that turns the steadiest gallop into a series of unwanted headlong leaps. But Bell, widely considered one of the clumsiest bastards employed in the construction project, finds himself calculating every step with a clarity that always eluded him before. And a good thing, too: for even as he covered half the distance between himself and that wonderful rock, he sees a spot on its surface pop in a little silent burst of dust, and knows that his paranoia has served him well. Ken Destry is behind him, shooting, and survival depends on pulling off this next move perfectly.

  Bell leaps to the surface of the boulder, then kicks off to the right, aiming himself at the open cab of the barge, hoping to pass through the threshold and into the cage. It's a dangerous move, and not just because falling short is a good way to be ground to red pulp in the treads. It's a dangerous move because even a minor mishap can be fatal. All he needs to become history is to scrape the edge of the hatch the wrong way, and rip a hole in his suit.

  Bell threads the needle, bouncing along the corrugated floor of the cab like a stone, tossed slow-motion across the surface of a lake.

  His momentum inevitably carries him through the other open hatch on the other side of the cab.

  That's okay.

  Because he pulls off another slick maneuver while passing through.

  He grabs his handmade weapon and carries it with him as he sails out the other side and back onto lunar soil.

  There.

  Now the odds are even.

  * * * *

  Malcolm Bell had disappeared.

  There had been no puff of smoke, no flash of light, no pop of displaced air.

  Had there been any visual manifestation of his disappearance, I'd missed it. By accident or design he'd picked the one moment when I would not be able to add any other sensory cues to my general store of knowledge.

  But he was no longer sitting on his bed.

  Nor was there any question of him using my momentary inattention to dart out of sight and hide. This was a Farside hermit's habitat. There was a sonic shower (unoccupied) next to a head (unoccupied), storage cabinets (still sealed), a few alcoves too small to cast shadows sufficient to hide a human being (all within my direct line of sight).

  I could argue a silent sliding panel of some kind, one that hid a closet-sized space just large enough to house an old man who wanted to play Houdini with the visiting rube. But I had an uncle once, a math teacher, who taught me the best way to avoid panic when facing insoluble problems. He said: Break them down into logic trees. At the very least, you'll separate what you can figure out from what you can't.

  There were only two possibilities here. Or, at least, two different categories of possibility, each the central root of a thousand more specific explanations that branched out from those central assumptions.

  First category: Bell's disappearance had nothing to do with personal volition. He'd popped out of existence, or to another plane of existence, or just to the roulette table at the Fantazi Casino in Grissom Center, not because he'd wanted to shock and distress the busybody in his living room, but because of other forces beyond his control: say, some three-headed alien inputting the wrong coordinates in his personal teleportation booth a few hundred thousand light years away. Or maybe there'd been a Rapture. Whatever. However you constructed it, maybe he hadn't expected anything to happen, and was now sitting under a polka-dotted sky, wondering about the fresh madness that had just given his life a brand new dose of surreality.

  The chief drawback of every theory that fit under this umbrella was that if it was beyond his control it was also beyond my control, and I'd just exchanged one set of mysteries for another, a billion times bigger, that I couldn't resolve just by asking a cranky old man a few intrusive questions. So I might as well not even try to explore any of the possibilities that sprung from this particular root. There was no point. By definition, they were beyond me.

  So that left the only subcategory of possibility worth worrying about: that Bell had disappeared deliberately, on cue, whether by clever magic trick or extraordinary capability unknown to me.

  If I followed that theory to the next set of branching possibilities, I was left with two more. Either he'd vanished knowing that I'd never be able to determine how, or he'd vanished knowing that I could.

  If the first was true, I'd reached the deadest of all possible dead ends, and a life-ruining catastrophe as well, as I'd now have to explain why I'd be sending a distress signal from the home of a missing hero. If I took that route, I was in for weeks, maybe even a lifetime, of interrogation by investigators duty-bound to assume that I'd done something to the old man. But again, there was no real profit in exploring that possibility either. If it was just bigger than me, there was nothing I could do to ameliorate it.

  But if he'd vanished knowing that I could figure out how...

  ...well, in that case, he'd left me everything I needed to figure out how.

  So I took a deep breath and forced myself to examine his habitat inch by inch.

  If there was one word that could have described the ambience, it was functional. There was not a single furnishing, not a single line, that deviated from the practical. He had no art, no knickknacks, no books beyond those he could call up using his links to the hytex network. His home was as austere as a monk's cell, and from all available evidence he wanted it that way.

  Why would a man with a loving family and a sterling reputation do this to himself?

  He had been sitting in plain sight, and had disappeared during the length of an eye blink. There'd been no time for him to secrete himself anywhere.

  He had not gotten past me. That's the thing about sitting around in your moonsuit, in a chamber as small as a Farside hermit's habitat. You're big and bulky enough to block the entire central passageway. He couldn't have gotten past me without shoving me aside or bowling me over.

  Occam's Razor held that explanations became more likely the closer I searched the areas nearest the bed. So I searched the bed.

  Bell slept on a permafoam mattress, of the sort extruded by a liquid reservoir in the housing below him. The mattress never had to be cleaned, replaced, or hauled away, because the top layer evaporated on a daily basis, replaced by fresh foam as the reservoir extruded more foam to replace it. I'd never used one myself, but had heard that they were well worth the price for anybody with lower back problems. One touch with the palm of my hand and I sighed with envy, despite being half-crazy from other pressing concerns. A night on one of these, whether asleep or engaged in other activities, would be heaven. But its presence meant that he hadn't found some way to hide under the bed, because the only “under the bed” here would be a vacuum-sealed bladder and a reservoir filled with liquid solution.

  The bulkhead that surrounded the bed on three sides was similarly unhelpful. It was solid metal, cold to the touch and absent any obvious seams, even at the corners. There were no sliding panels, no hidden doors, no places that rang hollow in a way that suggested hidden storage spaces behind them. When I took off my right glove and placed my bare hand on that wall, I felt the light vibration that all lunar residents look for, the one indicating that the machinery that makes all our lives possible was still humming away, still doing everything it could to provide the next breath, and the breath after that. This was no surprise. It was what I'd expected to feel. But it still left a serious shortage of answers.

  I went back to my chair and sat down again, my eyes fixed on the slight depression his body had left on the permafoam.

  Had there been a rug, I would have pulled it up, expecting to find a vertical shaft with a ladder, leading downward into darkness. Had there been any wall hangings, I
would have searched for hidden passageways behind those. Had his food dispensary involved a refrigerator rather than a pair of spigots, I would have moved it aside. In any place that showed the touch of a human personality, there would have been any number of blind alleys to search. But this was just a tin box that had once contained an old man, that had then contained me as well, and that now contained only me.

  The only anomaly in the entire habitat was the one thing he owned that showed any appreciation for form over function: that uncharacteristically gaudy vase.

  What the hell. I picked it up.

  It felt like glass, but softer. My fingers left indentations that popped back out and disappeared as soon as I let go. It was also cold to the touch, almost as if it had been refrigerated. I tilted it one way, then the other, watching the substance inside shift like the soil I'd supposed it to be. I sniffed the narrow opening and made a face. Whatever it was smelled like nothing else I'd ever encountered. It wasn't bad, but rather unfamiliar. I had no referent. After a moment I tilted the bottle further and poured a little, about a spoonful, onto the previously pristine countertop.

  It wasn't lunar soil.

  Whatever it was, it was as purple as the vessel that contained it and reflected the overhead light in the same eccentric manner. Most of it had the same texture as talc, but there were also luminescent crystals of some kind. Old-fashioned laundry powder was my first and most hopeless guess, but he was not likely to need it in a habitat that used sonics for cleansing.

  I impaled the little pile with my index finger, and then, for no particular reason, just messing around as I tried to figure out what I was looking at, drew a little furrow along the countertop, my fingertip turning the mound into two ridges of approximately equal length.

  I remember thinking, This is pointless.

  Then the two ridges shifted, on their own, crossing the path I'd drawn between them to reunite into one contiguous pile.

  What the hell?

  Now one fat ridge, the pile waited for one heartbeat before contracting again, to reform the same irregular cone it had been when I first poured the powder onto the countertop. And I mean the same, exact cone. I would have been willing to bet that not a grain remained out of place, with respect to the places they had occupied before.

  I cut the pile in half, moved one pile to the extreme far left of Bell's countertop, and moved the other to the extreme far right, carving both into S-shapes before leaving them alone to see what they would do.

  The two powdery snakes retained their serpentine shapes and slithered toward one another, undulating exactly as a genuine sidewinder might, until coiling together in an exaggerated embrace, at the precise midway point between them. Then their outlines blurred, their substances mixed, and they became, once again, the same dull mound the stuff seemed to prefer, between rounds.

  A toy. Like modeling clay, except with a reset button.

  I poured out a little more, doubling the size of the mound, and separated the two halves again, this time creating a dam between them by the simple expedient of resting my arm on the countertop between them. This time the whatever-the-hell-it-was showed adaptability. The two piles approached each other, found my arm between them interfering in the happy reunion, and after a moment I could only describe as careful consideration, marched in unison along the length of my arm, to the place where I'd left a centimeter's clearance between the bulkhead and the tip of my finger. The two halves met and melded at that narrow crossing, reminding me of nothing so much as two long-lost travelers, scaling opposing faces of the same mountain, for a joyous reunion at the summit.

  Behind me, Malcolm Bell said, “Yes, it's alive.”

  I whirled and spotted him, returned to the same bed where he'd been sitting before his disappearance. He was exactly the same man he'd been a few minutes earlier, except that the few strands of remaining hair now looked windblown and the furrows on his face now shone with sweat. He was grinning ear to ear, deeply entertained by my confusion.

  “And intelligent,” he added.

  The room spun. I stared down at the powder on the counter, now circling the base of the vase it had come from as if searching for the opening that would allow it to return home, and managed a weak, “What are you saying?”

  He shook his head. “Your mind's big enough to accommodate it. You just have to throw out enough clutter to make room.”

  I glanced back at the counter. The powder was now streaming up the sheer side of the vase, scaling that slick surface as if wholly undeterred by gravity or common sense. My knees had turned to water. I backed away, lowered myself into the guest chair, and stared at him with something approaching awe. “It's alien, isn't it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Y-you've made First Contact?”

  Now he looked a little disappointed in me. “No, that pre-dated me. This stuff came from the fourth or fifth contact. Less than twenty years ago.”

  “What what what what what!?"

  “Look, I'm an old man. I don't have time to break it gently. You came for the truth as I understand it, and I'm giving you the truth as I understand it. You're just going to have to keep up with me. Suffice it to say everybody working on the Moon at the time of the gunfight was already involved in a historic First Contact situation, one that had absolutely nothing to do with the much more unusual phenomenon Destry represented. We know it was unrelated because when it happened we trucked out by the homestead occupied by those other visitors—we called them Minnie and Earl, and they were two of the nicest folks you'd ever want to meet—and asked them what was up. They could only shrug and say it was a new one on them.”

  “What you're telling me ... it's not in the history books.”

  He shrugged. “Well, that's the thing about history. The people who put it down in books are so concerned about accuracy that they come to give what they're doing the weight of an exact science. When in truth it's nothing of the kind. It's the best available estimate.”

  I sipped some more water from my suit reservoir. It had cooled only a little, but its acrid warmth helped anchor me to the here and now in a way that a more palatable drink might not have. I held it in my mouth for several seconds before swallowing, and then faced the old man on the bed with something approaching calm. “Maybe you better just tell me the bottom line.”

  “The bottom line? Two moon rats shooting at each other was the very least important thing that happened that day. The bottom line below that? All of us old-timers with Farside hermitages are working on a project with unprecedented implications for the future of humanity. Everything else is footnote.” He lay back on his bed, cradling the back of his head in a basket formed of his own linked fingers. “If you want, you can leave it at that. I'll call you a ride back to civilization and we can pretend this never happened. Or I can explain the rest of it and you can say goodbye to any ambitions you might have of ending your days surrounded by fat grandchildren, because you will someday lock yourself up in a habitat just like mine. Whatever. It's your choice. I'll be outside, waiting.”

  Outside?

  Before I could ask what he meant by that, he disappeared again.

  And this time I was looking directly at him when he went.

  It was no conjurer's illusion.

  He lost dimensions one at a time, first going as flat as a photograph printed on poster board, then folding up again to become a straight up-and-down line, then becoming a single bright dot that subsequently disappeared itself, leaving a purple afterimage on my retina.

  I need to confess something here.

  I've only fainted once in my entire life. Just once. I don't recommend the experience, but I do understand it. It happens when your mind or body or emotions reach a point of absolute saturation and you can only benefit from being turned off for a while.

  I'll bet you're assuming that this was the moment.

  It wasn't, actually, but I came damn close. I felt my balance go, felt the world turn gray at the edges, felt my eyes start to roll up ... an
d thought to myself, Dammit, no.

  It was that simple. I just refused to go. I gripped the edge of the countertop and squeezed, just hard enough to reassure myself of its solidity. I got my breathing back under control, devoted about ten seconds to figuring out what I was going to do next, and did the only sensible thing.

  I sat back down in his chair and waited for him to return.

  Because of his uncanny luck surviving gunfights, Wyatt Earp is generally imagined to have been a spectacular quick-draw artist and an even better shot. Many of the dramatizations of his adventures feature scenes where he performs ballistic miracles, like gallantly letting some desperado slap leather first, going for his own weapon only then, somehow taking aim before the desperado can get a bead on him, and more often than not showing enough mercy to wound and not kill. In some versions he literally shoots the gun out of the other guy's hand, without drawing blood.

  This is the picture you see in the dictionary if you look up the word nonsense.

  In the first place, the handguns of the era were nowhere near that accurate; quick-draw artists and master marksmen did exist, but the skill-set was specialized, and there weren't many folks willing to risk their own skins drawing down in contests with fixed rules. Nobody, not even Earp, would risk his life pulling a damned fool stunt like trying to shoot a gun out of an enemy's hand, not even if it was possible. Not when missing and getting gutshot in those years before effective surgery was a good way to spend your last few days sweating in agony on some filthy mattress, entering hell long before you actually died and found out for certain whether you were actually going down or up. The rule then was the same rule that still applies in contests where people find themselves obliged to shoot at one another: If you must pull the trigger, then put the bastard down.