Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She slid the chair back into position. She was suddenly tired and in need of a seat. Maybe she would just close her eyes for a few minutes, and when she did, this long and terrible morning would be over.

  She was reaching for the chair when the floor shook. The chair skittered away from her—bounced away from her—and she was having trouble staying on her feet.

  A couple of the Disty fell off their tables. Two of the Peyti’s chairs toppled sideways. The Rev’s weird arms came out and caught the walls.

  The shaking seemed to go on forever, but she knew it only lasted a few seconds.

  People were screaming and shouting. A number of them had fallen, but she hadn’t.

  She’d been through worse.

  She even knew what this was.

  The dome had sectioned. For the third time in her life, the dome had sectioned.

  She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked up at the screens.

  All the images of the governor-general and Arek were gone, replaced by images of burned-out buildings and smoke rising out of the center of domes. Only the areas didn’t look familiar. When the bomb had exploded four years ago, that area had still looked like itself. Like a horrible disgusting terrible rendering of a once-lovely place.

  She didn’t recognize these places.

  Voices around her, still shouting, were talking about the sectioning, but she didn’t care.

  She was looking at those images.

  Was she looking at Littrow? Or somewhere else? She thought she saw smoke rising out of one of the craters—Tycho Crater? Damn the Moonscape. It was impossible to tell exactly where the images were coming from.

  She was spinning, slowly, staring at the screens, trying to make sense of them, and knowing, deep down, exactly what they were showing her.

  The Moon. All of it. Looking like that little section of Armstrong had not four years ago.

  The entire Moon.

  Torkild reached her side. He grabbed for her, but she didn’t let him touch her. He looked panicked.

  She didn’t need someone who panicked.

  Not right now.

  Still, her gaze met his.

  “Do you know what this means?” she asked—softly, she thought, but with all the chatter, she probably hadn’t spoken softly at all.

  He shook his head. All the color had leached from his skin. He still didn’t look like Arek, though. No one looked like those images of Arek.

  “Nothing is going to be the same,” she said. “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.”

  ONE WEEK LATER

  NINE

  FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, most everyone went outside after dark and stared up at the sky. The moon was full, or near full, and some of the destruction was visible to the naked eye.

  Pippa Landau had been to the Moon more times than she wanted to think about, usually to Armstrong, which was mostly spared. But she had lived on Earth long enough to adopt some of Earth’s customs. Or maybe some of the customs of where she lived, a place that proudly called itself the Midwest, even though it was in the middle of no part of the west as she knew it, a place that liked its old names even better, even though the regions it referred to had less meaning than they historically did.

  She lived in Iowa.

  For a while she had lived near the flat farmland in the center of the region, but she had moved to the bluffs near the Mississippi River after her second son was born. She hadn’t thought of those farmlands until the night she learned about what the media was now calling Anniversary Day.

  In those farmlands, the darkness would be richer, and the Moon even brighter.

  But here in Davenport, right after Anniversary Day, the residents had started turning off lights at dusk, even the automated ones. Everyone gathered in the historic Prospect Terrace Park overlooking the river, where some major treaty, now completely unimportant, had been signed long ago, and she found herself part of “everyone.”

  She hadn’t been to Prospect Terrace Park in more than a decade, and not at night since her children were little and wanted to attend the July summer fireworks party that had continued for centuries, unbroken, from a barge on the Mississippi.

  The Anniversary Day gatherings didn’t have the festive feel of the fireworks parties or even the annual park blues festival, held in September just before the weather changed.

  In fact, she had never in her life experienced anything like these gatherings. She had come to the park on a whim. Her backyard was small and not set up for stargazing. Usually, she didn’t look up at night at all. She didn’t like to think about what was out there in the known universe, the things that could come for her—and hadn’t so far.

  So, when she heard about Anniversary Day, she thought about the best place to look at the night sky, and decided on the least developed park, the one that some historical society deemed too important for “services.” There were bathrooms at the end of the road, near the very controversial parking lot, but nothing more except benches that were replaced every decade or so as they wore out.

  When she drove up the first night after the bombings, she was surprised to see that dozens of others had the same idea. Human, Peyti, Disty—it didn’t seem to matter. People from all species had gathered and were looking up, some with real telescopes and some using the scoping feature in their eyes.

  She hadn’t even thought of a scope. Her eldest son Takumi would have brought one—something high tech and modern. He probably would have been able to see the recovery effort that was going on in all of the ruined domes, down to the broken bits of buildings.

  But she hadn’t spoken to him or her other children, not since the day after Anniversary Day. All of her children—grown now—lived on Earth, for which she was very grateful. They had their own lives and their own careers, and if they needed her, they would contact her on their links.

  She had raised them to be self-sufficient, and they had become so, but they didn’t ignore her either. Right now, they were probably dealing with the fallout from the Moon’s disaster in their various businesses, not to mention dealing with the friends they might have lost in all of the bombings.

  No one outside of Earth seemed to realize just how close Earth and the Moon really were. Their cultures were linked, primarily because the Moon operated as the gateway into Earth itself.

  Still, she had learned that the Moon, as perceived by the people on Earth, was more than a gateway, more than yet another civilized place. The Moon controlled the tides. It had an ancient mythical component. Her youngest daughter Toshie had studied the Moon extensively for years, and loved the ancient portraits of the uninhabited Moon as seen from Earth. Toshie particularly loved the purported Man in the Moon.

  It had taken Pippa months to see the image that the ancients believed resembled a face. The Moon she knew looked nothing like that. She could see the domes, glinting in the reflected sunlight, looking like pockmarks on the Moon’s whitish grayness. She sometimes imagined that she could see all of the activity around the Moon from Earth, even when she couldn’t.

  But she tried not to think of the Moon or anywhere else outside of Earth. Hell, outside of Iowa, or even Davenport. She had taken a teaching position at a local high school decades ago, and she continued it even now, nurturing the young minds, preparing them for a long life in a complicated universe.

  Davenport was exactly the right size for her. She had disliked the small farm communities—they had been too small, and everyone had known everyone else’s business—but she liked this medium-sized city, with its humid, continental climate. She loved a climate, period. She had grown up on starbases at the far end of the Alliance, something she never talked about, and had lived in a controlled environment until she was twenty-six years old.

  Varied weather—from the deep cold of the plains winter to the hot humid summer—had come as a surprise to her, and had taken her years to adjust to. Now she loved it.

  Even on this night, she loved it. The smell of freshly cut grass, the faint scent of
roses, the muddy wet odor of the Mississippi herself, gave the park a fragrance all its own. She’d recognized that fragrance as Davenport summer evening, and it comforted her.

  Just being outside comforted her. The air was warm and humid, the sounds of the river lapping against its banks soft and gentle. There were no ships on the river that she could see—they were probably docked or anchored for the evening.

  And the lights were off, even here, which she had not expected. Nor had she expected the crowd, all looking up, all silent. No one spoke. No one greeted her—unusual in this community, even if no one knew her.

  It was as if everyone wanted to be alone and yet together with this inexplicable disaster.

  They could have watched it unfold on the nets. They probably were. She knew her second oldest son Tenkou would have had several windows open in his vision even as he stared at the Moon itself. He had always processed more information at one time than anyone else she had ever met.

  She hated that practice of his. She had received a hard-fought lesson when she was his age that silence and focus saved more lives than any information ever could. She had learned that her intuition was as important as the facts she had gleaned over time.

  Her intuition had brought her here.

  Pippa found a spot near a young elm tree. She was certain this area was empty because the others probably believed the small copse of trees would interfere with their view.

  She was tiny. Other people would interfere with her view as much as any tree would.

  For a moment she was tempted to climb it, but signs appeared in her vision as she looked at it, warning her that the elm had been specially grown from an ancient, nearly extinct stock, and was an experiment, and would she please allow it to live undisturbed?

  Any other place would tell her not to climb the damn thing, rather than plead for its continued peaceful coexistence.

  She loved that sideways attitude she found in the Midwest. It tried—politely—to convince her that its rules were her ideas.

  And it worked. Instead of climbing the tree, she stood as close to it as she could before she looked up.

  The Moon seemed larger than usual, or maybe that was just because she was focused on it. The Moon was larger in all of the Earth’s imagination at the moment, or maybe in all of the Alliance’s. Everyone was thinking about the Moon.

  She looked at it unfiltered at first, and saw small black spots she knew she had never seen before. It looked different, darker and grimmer. She wasn’t certain if that was because she knew about all the bombs that had gone off, all the destruction and panic that were still continuing, all the lives ended, the lives disrupted, the change thrust upon an entire place, something that would never ever be the same again.

  She was glad her children were grown and her husband had passed away. She needed to see this alone.

  She took a deep breath of the fresh air, felt the wind blow softly over her, and closed her eyes for just a moment. Then she squared her shoulders, raised her face to the sky, and opened her eyes.

  Without thinking about it too much, she telescoped her vision, centering in on one of the dark patches.

  It took a moment for the images to coalesce. She saw vast expanses of Moon landscape, and then she saw tiny buildings near what appeared to be a road. Finally, she looked at the darkest area, and gasped.

  A dome—she didn’t know which one—broken and dark, its jagged edges visible even from this distance. She thought she saw smoke rising from it, but she knew that wasn’t possible. Was it dust, escaping from the opening? Dust or ash or something else?

  Or was she imagining it, based on all the news coverage she had been trying to ignore?

  Her stomach turned, but she made herself look. She looked at the other domes, not quite in the center of her vision. They weren’t as round and smooth as they had been. They appeared broken. Or maybe that was how her mind interpreted the data.

  Because she could see lights around center pools of darkness, darkness where there hadn’t been any before.

  She stared at the Moon for the longest time, shuddering, thinking about debris fields and the force that exploded materials exerted as they spiraled outward, away from the explosion.

  Even in zero-G.

  She closed her eyes, felt her eyelashes, wet and spikey, against her cheek.

  “Mrs. Landau?” The voice speaking to her seemed faint and far away. “Mrs. Landau, are you okay?”

  She made herself open her eyes. Her cheeks and chin were wet. She blinked, shutting off the telescope, and looked at the sound of the voice.

  One of her students. A boy, his face half in shadow. She couldn’t think of his name at the moment, which spoke to the depth of her distress. Because she had always been good with names.

  Always.

  She swallowed so that her throat was lubricated before she tried to speak.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He didn’t move. He was peering at her. She knew who he was; his name just wasn’t coming to her. He was the boy who, at the start of the school year, had asked her why she insisted on being called “Mrs.” when none of the other married female teachers did.

  It’s an old-fashioned honorific, she had said, lying a bit. I like the sense of history.

  He hadn’t understood it then, and she doubted he would understand it now. She did like the sense of history, but not the history of the title. The history it spoke of with her husband, a man who had loved her in spite of everything. They had been happy together. They had spent years raising children and being traditional and learning how to live in an old-fashioned world when the rest of the universe seemed to thrive on the edges, on the new.

  She had loved that, and even though it was gone, even though she was the only one of her family remaining in Davenport, she wanted to honor it.

  “You don’t look all right,” the boy said after a moment.

  “It’s just disturbing, that’s all,” she said, as if destroyed cities were a small thing. “Have you ever been to the Moon?”

  He shook his head. “My dad wanted us to come out and look. For the history, you know. He said you’ll never forget this.”

  “He’s right,” she said softly, then looked up. “None of us ever will.”

  TEN

  DESHIN SAT AT the desk in his office, surrounded by screens. He felt like his son Paavo, trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem.

  Not that Paavo would have needed a ring of screens to see everything. That boy could see numbers in his mind’s eye.

  Deshin envied that. He envied his boy’s brilliance, and he reveled in it as well.

  He shut the screens down for a moment, feeling overloaded, then pushed his chair back. He stood, but kept his back to the wall.

  Ever since Anniversary Day, he had felt vulnerable in his office. He had arrived home to Armstrong to find his wife and child worried, but in good health. His city was fine as well, thanks to quick thinking by that security chief, Noelle DeRicci.

  In fact, some believed—and he was one of them—that DeRicci had saved millions of lives by ordering the domes all over the Moon to section. Some whack jobs were starting to complain that her order was illegal. It was, but who the hell cared? She took action.

  She saved lives.

  Hell, she had saved his life.

  He shuddered when he thought about that. He had stepped outside that building, looked up, and in an instant, he would have been dust and molecules, floating because of the Moon’s lighter gravity. He would have vaporized, just like his two staff members had.

  Just like thousands of his employees had. Employees, friends, people he knew.

  The loss he’d suffered—his businesses had suffered—was staggering.

  And every day, he thought about how it all could have been worse.

  It wasn’t like him to dwell on anything bad, and he’d been through a lot of bad in his life. But he’d never been through anything like this.

  Hell,
the Moon had never been through anything like this—not in its entire history.

  Some cultures went through this kind of devastation, but usually as a prelude to some war. He’d studied it in school and promptly forgot it, like all the useless school information that had come his way.

  But Paavo was reminding him every night at dinner.

  Deshin had made a point to go home every day, to spend time with his beautiful wife and his precious if inexplicable kid. Paavo, who was usually quiet and living inside his brain more than Deshin sometimes thought healthy, seemed to be trying to deal with the crisis in his own unusual way.

  Paavo had been talking—Gerda actually said “discoursing”—on all the history he could find. War, after war, after war, displaced cultures, bombed cities, certainly not something that Deshin wanted a child of seven (“almost eight,” Paavo would say defensively) to spend his time thinking about.

  But if Deshin could, he’d wrap Paavo in expensive gauze and protect him from the world. The boy had suffered enough, thanks to his biological parents (the flaming assholes), and then, after that got settled, this happens.

  At least Deshin got to play the conquering hero for his boy. He had gotten the train back to Armstrong in time to pick up Paavo and take him home, reassuring him that all would be fine.

  Deshin hated lying to his child.

  Nothing was going to be fine. And aspects of all of this bothered him more than he could say.

  The math didn’t work. Which was what he’d been staring at for the past hour now.

  The math bothered the hell out of him, and when something bothered him, he needed to pace.

  He collapsed some of the screens and stepped into the main part of his office.

  He’d seen this building, this office, as the jewel in the crown of his empire. Not that it was an empire. It was a confederation of businesses, friends, and enemies. He held it together through his will and his considerable fortune.

  Although even the confederation was ragged these days. Everything was ragged, like Armstrong itself. He barely recognized it, although he studied it daily from this office.