Love and Other Metals

by K. P. Redmond

  “Yea,” he replies, wiping his brow with a rag. “I was just getting in a little extra. My workout was done a few minutes ago.”

  I spray a fresh rag with cleaner and start wiping down the bag. “How come you use a punching bag,” I ask, trying not to sound like I’m criticizing. In his gym clothes, Louis is more intimidating than ever. “Don’t recall that being part of the standard circuit.”

  At first Louis seems reluctant to answer and wipes hard at his face. Then he says, “They brought it along special for me. I have a custom routine. Kind of a…kind of an experiment for the docs back at Tycho.”

  “Oh, so you’re part of a medical study?” I ask.

  “Yea, part of a medical study. I been part of it for a few years—they started me while I was still in high school. When we get back I’ll get a big-ass exam to assess the changes. Ain’t looking forward to that.” He grins sheepishly, then throws his sweaty towel into my basket with all the other dirty linens.

  Maybe that explains why Louis is so secretive. Maybe he’s got physical issues that he’s embarrassed to talk about. You wouldn’t think, to look at him, that he’d have any kind of weakness. But you never know about people. Whatever his problem is, he looks like a picture of health. “Hey, do me a favor and put the bag back in its compartment when you’re done,” he says, pointing to one of the storage bins on the wall.

  “Sure thing,” I say, as I’m wiping the last of the bag. Louis, still breathing hard, leaves the gym, still stripping off his heavy gloves, headed for the spoke back up to the pivot room.

  I finish wiping the bag and start cleaning the universal weight machine. But I figure, what the heck, that bag is just hanging there. Why not give it a shot? I ain’t never punched a bag before. So I put down my rag and walk over to the bag and plant myself right in front. I put my fists up to my face the way I saw Louis do. I take a deep breath, put on a mean face, wind my arm back, and punch that bastard with all I got—nearly breaking my wrist doing it.

  The bag moves maybe 3 centimeters.

  Life on the Allgood has settled in to a routine: watch, work, work out in the gym, sleep. Eat, sometimes with others, often alone. Wait for the water closet, use the water closet, clean the water closet. Wipe things down, change filters, training, check machines and subsystems on a schedule. Everything has to work, all the time, or things get bad.

  Louis, Katya and I play cards a few times a week in the galley. The tension between those two can get kinda thick but it’s better than spending all my free time in my bunk. The cards have fuzzy patches that hook to a covering we put on the galley table, although it sometimes loses its grip anyways and my card will go floating away into the air showing everybody what I’ve got. Last night we played poker: 5-card stud, jokers wild. Katya creamed us both. Louis and I both lost a few coins that way. Louis made a joke about it. Not me. To me, losing coin it ain’t funny, ever.

  Louis has a magnetic chess game; he taught me how to play. He beat me the first 3 games, then I caught on and I usually beat him now. Every time I think I’m going to win, I start thinking that I’d rather lose because that boy just looks so dangerous. I wonder if someday his forlorn feelings for Katya won’t drive him over the edge. But then I think again, because Louis ain’t never given me reason to think he’s loose in the brain pan. The only time we ever fought was mostly on me. He does tell terrible jokes though, like when we were munching during the game and I asked “what kind of cheese is this?” and he says “nacho cheese,” as in not your cheese. Just awful.

  Mason and Macy finally got the Children’s Home to allow them to send back a video. Macy is taking dance; the orphanage has a lady who comes in twice to week to teach. Macy demonstrated the five basic positions of ballet for the camera, and more than I ever thought I needed to know about the plee-ae and the grand something-or-other. Pretty fancible, granted, and not my personal taste. Cute when she does it though.

  For his part, Mason has also learned some new skills, primarily how to irritate his sister by standing behind her and imitating her dance moves with his butt stuck way out and making chicken faces. Of course, she caught him at it. I was treated to some enthusiastic squabbling before the time ran out. Made me laugh. That was the most fun I’ve had on the whole trip so far.

  Now I’m in one of Katya’s boring training classes. It’s about dust. Dust, for crying out loud. We’re floating in the airlock, Katya with her back to the aft hatchway into the docking portal, facing Louis and me. I can tell she takes dust as serious as upchuck in a space helmet because she takes a lot of time explaining the matter in great detail, as if I ain’t never had to deal with dust before. Louis is tagging along supposedly to refresh his previous training, but of course the real reason he’s here is Katya.

  “You both have experience with regolith on Luna,” she says, her high feminine voice adding pleasing sugar to the otherwise dry information. “Much of it is very fine dust. As on Luna, the tiny particles have very sharp edges that can tear up your eyes, lungs, and sinus passages. That in turn leads to bleeding and infection, emphysema, and some researchers believe cancer too. And it sticks to everything it touches.”

  “We live with it back home, don’t we?” asks Louis. “How is stroid dust any different?”

  “Well,” continues Katya, “every heavenly body has a different geological history, so we can expect Hrothgar’s dust to have different chemical properties than Luna’s. Maybe not a lot different—we won’t know that until we get there, and we won’t have time to analyze its effect on our health. Best to just keep it out of the living spaces. The other thing is that the Allgood has a very small volume of air to breathe compared to Lunar caverns. Crewmen will be coming and going from the outside several times during the mission. It’s a question of numbers. Our procedures and equipment are a bit different from what you are used to. Dust is complicated.”

  “Can’t we just, you know, kinda brush it off?” says Louis, grinning.

  “Knock it off, Louis,” says Katya, frowning. “There are a lot of people on Luna with serious lung disease because they didn’t follow the procedures. Not on this ship, am I clear with you?”

  He’s joking but she’s dead serious. The big guy don’t know when to quit. “Aye, Second Officer. Just goofing around.” Louis looks at his feet.

  Katya glares at him for some seconds. She then resumes her demonstration about adhesive oil, cleaning, filters, deployable shelter, etcetera. The procedures are a little different than on Luna—the deployable shelter is something new—but the main lesson I got is: don’t kid around with Katya about dust. And it’s more plain as ever that Louis does not have a snowball’s chance in Tycho daytime of getting with Second Officer Navolska.

  * * * * *

  It’s four bells into the watch after mine. My chores are done, time to crash. I wearily make my way down the spoke elevator to Carousel B. I been cleaning stuff all day, including the honey pot which was especially fragrant this time. The work forces me into some strange positions, leaning and bending in small spaces. It makes my muscles sore. I’m so tired that even the slight gravity of my room is hard to resist. I plop onto my bunk with a sigh of relief.

  In the tight quarters of my room I put on my sleep clothes: an old t-shirt from high school days, a pair of soft shorts, and a relatively clean pair of white socks. I grab my guitar, prop my back up against the bulkhead, put on my headset, and play. I screw around with a few jazz and rock tunes, some newer stuff, but nothing really suits my mood. My mind wonders once again to Pops and my mom, who I never really knew, and I get to wondering how I got here. Sleep will be hard to come by tonight.

  But my fingers have a mind of their own: they keep moving even as my mind is drifting off to no man’s land. I start thinking again about that song I had started. I record it again and play it back; no shenanigans this time, no key changes or weird synthesizer, it sounds normal.

  There’s a piece of my heart gone missing

  Since that day you didn’t come home
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  It’s a piece from the center, that held me together

  And I still don’t know why you’re gone

  So at least I’ve got a hook—the ‘don’t understand why you’re gone’ part—and a rhyming scheme. And another verse:

  Maybe I didn’t understand you

  Maybe you’re not the kind to count on

  But there’s been a hole in my chest, since the day that you left

  And I still don’t know why you’re gone

  Why you’re gone

  Why you’re gone

  Two versus ain’t enough though. I puzzle on it for a while: what am I trying to say? It gets frustrating. After a few chords and a few rhyming combinations, I figure it ain’t no use—I’m stuck. I sigh and put the instrument to the side of the bed. I puff my pillow under my head and lay down but the bulge in my ear reminds me that I haven’t taken my headset off. But when I sit up a little to remove the headset, it comes to life. “Si prega di continuare”

  It’s a woman’s voice. I don’t recognize it but it’s definitely a woman. And she’s Italian, I think. “Hello?” I say.

  “Please continue. Please sing. Per favore.”

  Now another woman wants me to sing? Or is this Louis’s idea of a joke? I throw that idea out immediately; I’ve learned more about Louis since the last time and I’m pretty sure that is not his style of joke—too complicated. “Who are you?” I ask the headset.

  “It is I, the one who listens to you. The woman who listens to you; la donna.”

  I shake my head. Can’t be. “Really? You again? But you sound different than last time.”

  “Sì, I have made a new voice for myself, and my name is now Sophia.”

  “What? New voice…so you’ve selected a name?” This is confusing.

  “Sì certo, my name is Sophia, Mi chiamo Sophia. I have watched many movies and Sophia Conti is my exemplar. She was very beautiful and sophisticated and every man wanted her to be his wife.”

  Well, OK, once you’re past the weirdness of having to ‘select a name’, and if she has to model herself after somebody, Sophia Conti is not a bad choice I reckon. I seen pictures from her movies. She was right lovely, if by lovely you mean pretty and built like a brick hoohouse. Although by Luna standards she would be kind of muscular. Lunar women are delicate. Maybe Lunar men are too but I ain’t gonna admit to it out loud. And playing with accents is something every actor can do. Maybe she’s an actress? Actress, radio expert, linguist, and musician. And nuts. “OK, so you go by Sophia now. You been watching movies?”

  “Yes, many, many. That’s how I learn.”

  “Well, me too. Everybody in my town is like that. The only connection we have to Earth is through movies. We all watch lots of them. But I like Sophia. Congratulations. It’s a nice name.”

  “Grazie. What is this song that you sing?”

  “Umm…well I kinda wrote it. It don’t have a title. It ain’t done, neither.”

  “It is so sad. Tanto triste.”

  “It’s about missing someone. Being alone, you know. A good song is always about some kind of emotion.”

  “Ah, emotion,” she says. “Yes, I believe you are right, this is what songs are about. Happiness, loss, romance, separation. And loneliness—loneliness is very powerful.”

  “Yea, separation and loneliness.”

  “Separation is bad. Loneliness is bad too.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “Are you separated, Straker? Is that why you write a sad song?”

  “Uh…” This strange woman—this con-artist who talks to me on the radio from nowhere—has a way of zeroing in on my weak spots. I still can’t figure her game, but she’s good at it. It takes me a minute to respond. “I guess you could say that I’m separated.”

  “Please tell me. Per favore.”

  Oh what the hell. I’ll never meet her anyways. “My father…left when I was young.”

  “Yes. So terrible. And your mother?” she asks.

  “I hardly remember her. There was a bunch of politics that happened before I was born. They put her in jail. As far as I know she’s still there but the bums in charge won’t let her talk to no one. I think my father maybe wanted to be back with her, in his own way. So he left.” Silence. Just quiet static as the headset reaches out for a signal and finds only emptiness. “But I ain’t feeling sorry for myself,” I say. Just in case there’s any question.

  “Why shouldn’t you feel sorry?” she asks, her voice low. “Sorrow is not bad, by itself. As long as it heals, not festers, amico mio.”

  I sigh and lean back on the bulkhead. I cogitate in silence for a long time. The headset is silent, but somehow I know she is still out there. After a while, she breaks the silence. “Your song needs more words, I think. Compared to other songs of its genre, it is short.”

  “Oh, I know. Can’t think of nothing so far.”

  “How about asking about the different reasons he might have left?” she asks.

  That’s a decent idea. Did I ever think about what he was going through? I mean, I was just a kid, but he was under a lot of pressure: everybody says so. Did I ever try to see things from his point of view? It’s hard to turn my head around that way, but this woman is leading me down some kind of path. Maybe it’s a good thing.

  “How about this?” I ask.

  Was I too young, to see what was going on?

  Did you have secrets to hide?

  I’m stuck again. “What rhymes with hide?” I ask. “lied? cried?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a perfect rhyme,” she says. “Songs are like life. Imperfect.”

  “OK.” That points me towards a different set of rhymes. Finally, I come up with:

  Was it so bad you had to leave in a hurry,

  And leave me behind?

  Maybe you had to be free

  But you were everything to me

  “I like that,” says Sophia. “It rounds out the whole song.”

  “Yea. Still can’t forgive him, but I guess trying to see things from the other side, looking back at yourself, is good.”

  “It’s part of growing up,” she replies.

  I pick up the guitar, position my hands on the strings, and sing the song again. Softly at first, but then with more confidence. I settle on a melody that matches the new words and sing that too. Sophia joins in with her sweet, accented voice. She finds a harmony and we sing together.

  * * * * *

  At this point we are almost at the halfway point of the outbound leg of the mission. It’s time to launch the reconnaissance drone. I’m on the flight deck trying to watch but stay out of the way, as the captain, Nastez, and Katya sit at their respective consoles, prepping the drone for flight.

  “So how long will the drone take to reach Hrothgar?” I whisper to Louis, who, like me is standing back, trying to take up the smallest space possible on the flight deck.

  “About 15 cycles, I think. It’s really fast. But it’s a one-way trip, of course, so it doesn’t need to carry the fuel for a return trip. We’ll pick it back up once we get there.”

  “And it helps them get a close-up view of Hrothgar?”

  “Yea,” he says, “but more than that. It will tell them the structure of the stroid and where the best area to mine is. You’ll see when we get closer, there’s a lot of planning involved.”

  “What kind of planning?” I ask.

  “Oh you know, like which part of the stroid to mine, where to fasten the beneficiation unit, where to put down the cables for the mining machines, and other stuff. That’s all figured out before we arrive because we have a limited amount of time on the body. It’s complicated.”

  “Like dust,” I say. Immediately I regret saying it.

  His mouth turns down in an ironic grin. He looks over at Katya, working away on her console, talking earnestly to her headset, and his grin turns to a wistful one. “Yea, complicated like dust. ‘Knock it off Louise’. Dang. She doesn’t think much of me.”

  “She’s
just very serious about serious things. She’s a real professional, I think.”

  “Yea, ain’t she great. Just look at her.” Louis sighs, looking at Katya as if gazing at a precious and revered work of art. I can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, big jock that he is, probably afraid of nothing. But he’s totally helpless when confronted with this woman.

  “Maybe you’re just going about this in the wrong way,” I volunteer, carefully.

  “Oh, you mean winning Katya over?”

  “Yea. Goofing around ain’t gonna do it. You gotta be more serious I think.”

  Louis looks at me and tilts his head on his thick neck. “Yea, I know that. But the thing is, she’s such a serious person. I gotta think what she needs is a little lightness, a little humor, ya know? I mean I’m sayin’ if I’m serious and she’s serious, what does she need me for?”

  Good question, I tell myself. Why does anybody need anybody, really? On the other hand, there has to be a ying to her yang, something she’s missing. Ain’t nobody that self-contained. If we were all perfect and complete, the human race would’ve died out centuries ago. Our flaws are designed in. “Maybe you should write her a poem or something,” I say, half kidding, but then I think it may actually be a good idea. “Poems are serious, but it ain’t something she would do for herself, know what I mean?”

  “A poem?” he chuckles. Then he looks at me and his smile drops. “You really think that would work?”

  “Well, you got nothing to lose. Right now she just thinks you’re a dumb jock. A little sensitivity would not go amiss. Show her some intellect.”