Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  “What?”

  “She really knows some tricks. Mme. d’Annecy really educates her girls. You been kissing and cooing with her, Relke?”

  “I’m sick, Joe. Don’t—”

  “By the way, you better not go back. The Madame’s pretty sore at you.”

  “Why?”

  “For keeping the wench gone so long. There was going to be a show. You know, a circus. Giselle was supposed to be in it. You might say she had the lead role.”

  “Who?”

  “Giselle. Still feel like calling her Fran?—Hey! if you’re going to vomit, get out of bed.”

  Relke staggered into the latrine. He was gone a long time.

  “Better hurry up,” Novotny called. “Our shift goes on in half an hour.”

  “I can’t go on, Joe.”

  “The hell you can’t. Unless you want to be sent up N.L.D. You know what they do to N.L.D. cases.”

  “You wouldn’t report me N.L.D.”

  “The hell I wouldn’t, but I don’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Parkeson’s coming, with a team of inspectors. They’re probably already here, and plenty sore.”

  “About the ship? The women?”

  “I don’t know. If the Commission hear about those bats, there’ll be hell to pay. But who’ll pay it is something else.”

  Relke buried his face in his hands and tried to think. “Joe, listen. I only half remember, but… there was a cell meeting here.”

  “When?”

  “After Larkin and Kunz worked me over. Some guys came in, and…”

  “Well?”

  “It’s foggy. Something about Parkeson taking the women back to Crater City.”

  “Hell, that’s a screwy idea. Who thinks that?”

  Relke shook his head and tried to think. He came out of the latrine mopping his face on a towel. “I’m trying to remember.”

  Joe got up. “All right. Better get your suit. Let’s go pull cable.”

  The lineman breathed deeply a few times and winced at the effect. He went to get his suit out of the hangar, started the routine safety check, and stopped halfway through. “Joe, my suit’s been cut.”

  Novotny came to look. He pinched the thick corded plastic until the incision opened like a mouth. “Knife,” he grunted.

  “Those sons of—”

  “Yah.” He fingered the cut. “They meant for you to find it, though. It’s too conspicuous. It’s a threat.”

  “Well, I’m fed up with their threats. I’m going to—”

  “You’re not going to do anything, Relke. I’m going to do it. Larkin and Kunz have messed around with my men one time too often.”

  “What have you got in mind, Joe?”

  “Henderson and I will handle it. We’ll go over and have a little conference with them, that’s all.”

  “Why Henderson? Look, Joe, if you’re going to stomp them, it’s my grudge, not Lije’s.”

  “That’s just it. If I take you, it’s a grudge. If Lije and I do it, it’s just politics. I’ve told you guys before—leave the politics to me. Come on, we’ll get you a suit from the emergency locker.”

  They went out into the transformer vault. Two men wearing blue armbands were bending over Brodanovitch’s corpse. One of them was fluently cursing unknown parties who had brought the body to a warm place and allowed it to thaw.

  “Investigating team,” Novotny muttered. “Means Parkeson is already here.” He hiked off toward the emergency lockers.

  “Hey, are you the guy that left this stiff near a stove?” one of the investigators called out to Relke.

  “No, but I’ll be glad to rat on the guys that did, if it’ll get them in trouble,” the lineman told him.

  “Never mind. You can’t hang them for being stupid.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Relke asked, nodding at the corpse.

  “Promote him to supervisory engineer and give him a raise.”

  “Christ but they hire smart boys for the snooper team, don’t they? What’s your I.Q., friend? I bet they had to breed you to get smart.”

  The checker grinned. “You looking for an argument, Slim?”

  Relke shook his head. “No, I just asked a question.”

  “We’re going to take him back to Copernicus and bury him, friend. It takes a lot of imagination to figure that out, doesn’t it?”

  “If he was a class three laborer, you wouldn’t take him back to Copernicus. You wouldn’t even bury him. You’d just chuck him in a fissure and dynamite the lip.”

  The man smiled. Patient cynicism was in his tone. “But he’s not a class three laborer, Slim. He’s Mister S.K. Brodanovitch. Does that make everything nice and clear?”

  “Sure. Is Parkeson around?”

  The checker glanced up and snickered. “You’re a chum of his, I guess? Hear that, Clyde? We’re talking to a wheel.”

  Relke reddened. “Shove it, chum. I just wondered if he’s here.”

  “Sure, he’s out here. He went over to see that flying bordello you guys have been hiding out here.”

  “What’s he going to do about it?”

  “Couldn’t say, friend.”

  Novotny came back with an extra suit.

  “Joe, I just remembered something.”

  “Tell me about it on the way back.”

  They suited up and went out to the runabout. Relke told what he could remember about the cell meeting.

  “It sounds crazy in a way,” Novotny said thoughtfully. “Or maybe it doesn’t. It could mess up the Party’s strike plans if Parkeson brought those women back before sundown. The men want women back on the moon project. If they can get women bootlegged in, they won’t be quite so ready to start a riot on the No Work Without a Wife theme.”

  “But Parkeson’d get fired in a flash if—”

  “If Parliament got wind of it, sure. Unless he raised the squawk later himself. UCOJE doesn’t mention prostitution. Parkeson could point out that some national codes on Earth tolerate it. Nations with delegates in the Parliament, and with work teams on the moon. Take the African team at Tycho. And the Japanese team. Parkeson himself is an Aussie. Whose law is he supposed to enforce?”

  “You mean maybe they can’t keep ships like that from visiting us?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. It won’t last long. But maybe long enough. If it goes on long enough, and builds up, the general public will find out. You think that wouldn’t cause some screaming back home?”

  “Yeah. That’ll be the end.”

  “I’m wondering. If there turns out to be a profit in it for whoever’s backing d’Annecy, well—anything that brings a profit is pretty hard to put a stop to. There’s only one sure way to stop it. Kill the demand.”

  “For women? Are you crazy, Joe?”

  “They could bring in decent women. Women to marry. That’ll stop it.”

  “But the kids. They can’t have kids.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s the problem, and they’ve got to start solving it sometime. Hell, up to now, they haven’t been trying to solve it. When the problem came up, and the kids were dying, everybody got hysterical and jerked the women back to Earth. That wasn’t a solution, it was an evasion. The problem is growth-control—in low gravity. It ought to have a medical answer. If this d’Annecy dame gets a chance to keep peddling her wares under the counter, well—she’ll force them to start looking for a solution.”

  “I don’t know, Joe. Everybody said homosexuality would force them to start looking for it—after Doc Reiber made his survey. The statistics looked pretty black, but they didn’t do anything about it except send us a shipful of ministers. The fairies just tried to make the ministers.”

  “Yeah, but this is different.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Half the voters are women.”

  “So? They didn’t do anything about homosex—”

  “Relke, wise up. Listen, did you ever see a couple of Lesbians necking in a
bar?”

  Relke snickered. “Sure, once or twice.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “Well, this once was kind of funny. You see, this one babe had on—”

  “Never mind. You thought it was funny. Do you think it’s funny the way MacMillian and Wickers bill and coo?”

  “That gets pretty damn nauseating, Joe.”

  “Uh-huh, but the Lesbians just gave you a giggle. Why?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Joe, it’s—”

  “I’ll tell you why. You like dames. You can understand other guys liking dames. You like dames so much that you can even understand two dames liking each other. You can see what they see in each other. But it’s incongruous, so it’s funny. But you can’t see what two fairies see in each other, so that just gives you a bellyache. Isn’t that it?”

  “Maybe, but what’s that got to do with the voters?”

  “Ever think that maybe a woman would feel the same way in reverse? A dame could see what MacMillian and Wickers see in each other. The dame might morally disapprove, but at the same time she could sympathize. What’s more, she’d be plenty sure that she could handle that kind of competition if she ever needed to. She’s a woman, and wotthehell, Wickers is only a substitute woman. It wouldn’t worry her too much. Worry her morally, but not as a personal threat. Relke, Mme. d’Annecy’s racket is a personal threat to the home girl and the womenfolk.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Half the voters are women.”

  Relke chuckled. “Migod, Joe, if Ellen heard about that ship…”

  “Ellen?”

  “My older sister. Old maid. Grim.”

  “You’ve got the idea. If Parkeson thinks of all this…” His voice trailed off. “When is Larkin talking about crippling that ship?”

  “About sundown, why?”

  “Somebody better warn the d’Annecy dame.”

  The cosmic gunfire had diminished. The Perseid shrapnel still pelted the dusty face of the plain, but the gram-impact-per-acre-second had dropped by a significant fraction, and with it fell the statistician’s estimate of dead men per square mile. There was an ion storm during the first half of B-shift, and the energized spans of high voltage cable danced with fluttering demon light as the trace-pressure of the lunar “atmosphere” increased enough to start a glow discharge between conductors. High current surges sucked at the line, causing the breakers to hiccup. The breakers tried the line three times, then left the circuit dead and waited for the storm to pass. The storm meant nothing to the construction crews except an increase in headset noise.

  Parkeson’s voice came drawling on the general call frequency, wading waist-deep through the interference caused by the storm. Relke leaned back against his safety strap atop the trusswork of the last tower and tried to listen. Parkeson was reading the Articles of Discipline, and listening was compulsory. All teams on the job had stopped work to hear him. Relke gazed across the plain toward the slender nacelles of the bird from Algiers in the distance. He had gotten used to the ache in his side where Kunz had kicked him, but it was good to rest for a time and watch the rocket and remember brown legs and a yellow dress. Properties of Earth. Properties belonging to the communion of humanity, from which fellowship a Looney was somehow cut off by 238,000 miles of physical separation.

  “We’ve got a job to finish here,” Parkeson was telling the men.

  Why? What was in space that was worth the wanting? What followed from its conquest? What came of finishing the job?

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing anybody ever dreamed of or hoped for.

  Parkeson scolded on. “I know the question that’s foremost in your minds,” his voice continued, “but you’d better forget it. Let me tell you what happens if this line isn’t finished by sundown. (But by God, it will be finished!) Listen, you wanted women. All right, now you’ve all been over to visit the uh—‘affectionate institution’—and you got what you wanted; and now the work is behind schedule. Who gives a damn about the project, eh? I know what you’re thinking. ‘That’s Parkeson’s worry.’ OK, so let’s talk about what you’re going to breathe for the next couple of periods. Let’s talk about how many men will wind up in the psycho-respiratory ward, about the overload on the algae tanks. That’s not your responsibility either, is it? You don’t have to breathe and eat. Hell, let Nature take care of air and water, eh? Sure. Now look around. Take a good look. All that’s between you and that hungry vacuum out there is ten pounds of man-made air and a little reinforced plastic. All that keeps you eating and drinking and breathing is that precarious life-cycle of ours at Copernicus. That plant-animal feedback loop is so delicately balanced that the biology team gets the cold shakes every time somebody sneezes or passes gas. It has to be constantly nursed. It has to be planned and kept on schedule. On Earth, Nature’s a plenum. You can chop down her forests, kill of her deer and buffalo, and fill her air with smog and hot isotopes; the worst you can do is cause a few new deserts and dust bowls, and make things a little unpleasant for a while.

  “Up here, we’ve got a little, bit of Nature cooped up in a bottle, and we’re in the bottle too. We’re cultured like mold on agar. The biology team has to chart the ecology for months in advance. It has to know the construction and survey teams are going to deliver exactly what they promise to deliver, and do it on schedule. If you don’t deliver, the ecology gets sick. If the ecology gets sick, you get sick.

  “Do you want another epidemic of the chokers like we had three years back? That’s what’ll happen if there’s a work slowdown while everybody goes off on a sex binge at that ship. If the line isn’t finished before sundown, the ecology gets bled for another two weeks to keep that mine colony going, and the colony can’t return wastes to our cycle. Think it over, but think fast. There’s not much time. ‘We all breathe the same air’—on Earth, that’s just a political slogan. Here, we all breathe it or we all choke in it. How do you want it, men?”

  Relke shifted restlessly on the tower. He glanced down at Novotny and the others who lounged around the foot of the steel skeleton listening to Parkeson. Lije caught his eye. He waved at Relke to haul up the hoist-bucket. Relke shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. Henderson gestured insistently for him to haul it up. Relke reeled the bucket in. It was empty, but chalked on the sides and bottom was a note from Lije: “They toll me what L and K did to you and your girl. I and Joe will take care of it, right after this sermon. You can spit on my fist first if you want. Lije.”

  Relke gave him a half-hearted screw-twist signal and let the bucket go. Revenge was no good, and vicarious revenge was worse than no good; it was hollow. He thought of asking Joe to forget it, but he knew Joe wouldn’t listen. The pusher felt his own integrity was involved, and a matter of jurisdictional ethics: nobody can push my men around but me. It was gang ethics, but it seemed inevitable somehow. Where there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. In the absence of the family, there had to be the gang, and fear made it quarrelsome, jealous, and proud.

  Relke leaned back against his strap and glanced up toward Earth. The planet was between quarter and half phase, for the sun was lower in the west. He watched it and tried to feel something more than a vague envy. Sometimes the heartsick nostalgia reached the proportions of idolatrous adoration of Gaea’s orb overhead, only to subside into a grudging resentment of the gulf between worlds. Earth—it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about short-horn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.

  Watching her crescent, he felt again that vague anger of separation, that resentment against those who stayed at home, who had no cause for constant fear, who could live without the tense expectancy of sudden death h
aunting every moment. One of them was Fran, and another was the one who had taken her from him. He looked away quickly and tried to listen to the coordinator.

  “This is no threat,” Parkeson was saying. “If the line isn’t finished on time, then the consequences will just happen, that’s all. Nobody’s going to punish you, but there are a few thousand men back at the Crater who have to breathe air with you. If they have to breathe stink next period—because you guys were out having one helluva party with Madame d’Annecy’s girls—you can figure how popular you’ll be. That’s all I’ve got to say. There’s still time to get the work back on schedule. Let’s use it.”

  Parkeson signed off. The new engineer who was replacing Brodanovitch gave them a brief pep-talk, implying that Parkeson was a skunk and would be forced to eat his own words before sundown. It was the old hard-guy-soft-guy routine: first a bawling-out and then a buttering-up. The new boss offered half of his salary to the first team to forge ahead of its own work schedule. It was not stated nor even implied that Parkeson was paying him back.

  The work was resumed. After half an hour, the safety beeper sounded on all frequencies, and men switched back to general call. Parkeson and his party were already heading back toward Copernicus.

  “Blasting operation at the next tower site will occur in ten minutes,” came the announcement. “Demol team requests safety clearance over all of zones two and three, from four forty to five hundred hours. There will be scatter-glass in both zones. Zone two is to be evacuated immediately, and all personnel in zone three take line-of-sight cover from the red marker. I repeat: there will be scatter-glass…”

  “That’s us,” said Novotny when it was over. “Everybody come on. Brax, Relke, climb down.”

  Braxton swore softly in a honeysuckle drawl. It never sounded like cursing, which it wasn’t, but like a man marveling at the variety of vicissitudes invented by an ingenious universe for the bedevilment of men. “I sweah, when the angels ahn’t shootin’ at us from up in Perseus, it’s the demol boys. Demol says froggie, and eve’body jumps. It gives ’em that suhtain feelin’ of impohtance. Y’all know what I think? I got a thee-orry. I think weah all really dead, and they don’ tell us it’s hell weah in, because not tellin’ us is paht of the tohture.”