As the final moon rotated nearer to us, previously unseen details brought the gigantic scale of the project into focus. Tiny scaffolding bordered the carved surfaces, scaffolding built for fleas, for gnats, for microbes. Only two of the immense triangular facets seemed to be finished: polished to an exquisite luster. Three more were in various stages of reduction. Dust and detritus sparkled in the space above the work areas. Insignificant flashes signaled where rock was being cut with coherent light. As the moon continued to turn machined precision was replaced by random desolation, a surface pulverized for thousands of thousands of thousands of years.
In a larger crater a Quonset hut covered in regolith was our destination. From altitude it looked little more than a dust worm on the floor of the impression, but grew as we descended to a hangar capable of housing more than one of the little balls in which we flew.
Marcus said, “I hope he has everything ready. We still need to refuel and resupply consumables before we head out.” He didn’t say it but we all knew he meant ‘head out to Brainard’s Planet.’ This was our last stop. There was nothing else we could do to delay the trip to our final destination. “Did he tell you where we would be picking up the lasers?” he asked Yuri.
“Yeah. I mean, no he didn’t, but I’m sure he’ll have them all ... you know, he’ll have them. Eddie’s all right. It’ll be fine.” Yuri seemed distracted still, outside of himself somehow, but he didn’t seem worried about Eddie coming through. “It’ll be fine.”
Marcus regarded him with what seemed to be concern, then turned his gaze forward as huge pressure doors opened and we entered the squat structure. After they closed behind us we could hear air filling the compartment before a second set of doors opened and we moved forward into the interior. Our shuttle didn’t land so much as it was grappled to the surface. We heard and felt machinery attach to us.
Yuri said, “Hmm. I just thought of something.”
“What?” Tamika asked.
His expression attained some of his old quizzical amusement. It was good to see. He said, “I just realized: we’re taking ray guns to a planet full of hostile aliens. Hah,” he kind of laughed, “Where’s Buster Crabbe when you need him, huh?”
We all stared at him blankly.
He looked around at us, “C’mon!” He looked for recognition, but we had none. “Buck Rogers! Flash Gordon! You gotta know who—” But we didn’t. He shook his head in despair, “I’m surrounded by philistines.”
Maybe he was. We had no idea what he was talking about: some ancient movie? Who knows. He abandoned us as lost causes and hopped online. “Eddie? We’re here. Are you around? Eddie?” He waited. And waited.
“Well?” Marcus asked.
“Eddie’s okay. It’ll be all right.” He hopped online again. “Hey, Eddie, pick up. We’re here.” He listened for a while. “Oh, okay.” Then to us, “It’s okay. He just forgot we were coming. He’s been working. He’s on his way.”
Marcus rolled his eyes. “Well, what are we supposed to do while we wait?” he asked.
“I dunno. I suppose we could unstrap.”
So we did. And the compartment was immediately filled with bouncing bodies. The smallest shove by foot or hand or elbow against anything at all sent us floating into the air to turn and twist and fall ever so slowly back down.
“Ham! Ham, it’s all right. It’s all right.” Steel stroked his head, gazed into his eyes. His panic subsided. “It’s all right.”
“It’ll be all right,” Yuri repeated, “Eddie’ll be here in a minute.”
A hatch opened in the floor of the hangar and a very strange being glided out. Gangly to the point of being spider-like, his hair matted in dreadlocks a meter long that floated out in a starburst around his angular face, a full body tattoo had rendered his skin the color of ripe cherries.
“Eddie!” Yuri shouted and went through the hatch that Jemal had opened. As he hit the floor of the hangar he took a little excited hop that sent him soaring into the air. “Whoa!” he said as he turned completely over before starting to settle back to the decking, “How do you move in this place?”
“Takes practice,” Eddie replied with a broad, toothy smile as the rest of us carefully made our way out. As he got closer we could see two little skeletal cages on each of his shoulders, actual bone that had been genetically modified to pierce his skin, like teeth, and form small display cases for scale models of his artwork: tetrahedron and cube floating on the left shoulder, octahedron and dodecahedron on the right.
Yuri noticed this as he came back to earth and grabbed Eddie by the arms. “Hey, nice jewelry! Where you gonna put the fifth one, on your head?” He laughed.
“No, no,” Eddie replied, “When the fifth one’s finished, I’m leaving. Somebody else can do the advertising. I’ve been up here for almost two centuries.” His voice was broken, patchy, a sustained growl.
“Two?” Yuri asked, “I thought it was only one.”
“Where have you been?” Eddie asked.
“Oh, you know, here and there.” They laughed and hugged each other. “It’s great to see you, man.”
“Great to see you, too. Come on inside. I’ll show you around. Who are your friends? I wasn’t expecting so many people.”
Yuri introduced us as we skid-floated toward the hatch in the floor. We had barely enough weight to gain any traction. When we’d exchanged names Yuri said, “I can’t believe you’re actually going to pull this off. How much was the original bet?”
“What, with Soraia?” Yuri nodded. Eddie replied, “Ten DCUs. I’m gonna make her pay up, too.”
Yuri cast an assessing eye toward Eddie. “How is Soraia, anyway?”
Eddie’s visage darkened a little, not much. “She’s all right. I guess she got into astrophysics or something. Went back to school somewhere down in the home worlds. Last I heard she was out beyond Monoceros, studying the Rosette Nebula, I think.”
We entered the hatch and started down a descending passageway lased out of the metal interior of the moon. We floated, fell, occasionally putting a hand or foot to wall, ceiling or floor, pushing ourselves along.
“Ten DCUs, huh?” Yuri asked, “How much is this place costing to make?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s up around four or five trillion now. You’d be surprised at the different groups that got interested in the project, though. Fundraising’s been pretty good. Most of it’s being paid for by mining proceeds.”
“Oh, right,” Yuri answered. “Shaving the surface off these rocks must bring in a nice chunk of change.”
“Incredibly high-grade ores, yeah. But it’s not just the surface.”
“Oh?”
“We hollowed out this whole moon. I’ll show you.” We’d arrived at the doors of a Musadhi lift. Eddie ushered us inside. “You might want to turn upside down.” He did so, pointing his feet at the nominal ceiling. “The lift descends a lot faster than you’d fall here.”
As we followed suit Marcus said, “Where are the lasers?”
“Lasers?” Eddie replied. “We got ’em all over the place. Why?”
“Well ...” Marcus looked to Yuri.
Yuri said, “You said we could have some, remember?”
The lift started to descend and we settled to the ceiling. A faint sensation of actual weight became apparent, but it was upside-down weight; our heads were pointed at the center of the moon, yet our weight was on our feet.
“Oh, yeah,” Eddie responded, “we ought to have some that will fit your purposes. What are you using them for again?”
This time Steel and Marcus both glared at Yuri. But Yuri was on it: “Come on, Eddie, I told you this. It’s this crazy project we’re doing. I can’t talk about it. It’s all proprietary, you know, syndicate stuff. Remember?”
“Right, right,” Eddie grabbed a handrail and turned himself over as the lift began to slow. We did the same but not nearly as gracefully. “Sorry, I’ve been in a million meetings this morning, besides actually trying to g
et some sculpting done. I’ll tell you; this is more like running a corp than making art.” He smiled. “I knew I was taking you down to the shop for some reason, I just couldn’t remember what it was.”
The lift doors opened and we walked out onto a polished metal floor about fifty meters wide. A ceiling of the same material angled away from us, but there were no walls. Eddie led us over to the edge of the floor and we stared into the abyss at the exclamation point marking the end of his geometric thesis. We were standing at the acute junction of three huge structural beams and the interior of the icosohedron. The ceiling faceted gargantuanly away from us in polished triangles five kilometers on a side. Over the edge of the beam and down we saw ... what? A nest, a maze, an Escher etching rendered Brobdingnagian. The beam we were on defined one edge of a dodecahedron that had no sides, a cage of empty pentagons that had been fitted or carved to touch the inside of the icosohedral moon at each apex. And inside that the triangles of an octahedral cage, and inside that a cube and then a tetrahedron and inside them all a shimmering, undulating, transparent crystal sphere a kilometer across that bulged and trembled, wobbled and rippled.
“That’s our water supply.” Eddie pointed to the sphere far below. “Come on, the shop’s this way,” and he glided off, skimming the surface of the beam.
There was a tow cable running down the edge of it, nothing more than a metal rope a half-meter off the deck with little hand holds to pull you along. As we made our way through Eddie’s masterpiece, floating along from one member to the next, descending into the center of his colossal mathematical filigree, his overpowering expression of symmetry, balance and peace, something odd struck me. Odd not only in what it was but in how it occurred to me. It struck me that not everyone was going with us to face the dangers of Brainard’s Planet. Almost everyone wasn’t. They were involved in something else, something trivial or profound, stultifying or ecstatic, boringly routine or startlingly unique. Whatever it was, it wasn’t fatal or even potentially fatal. They were going on with their lives, which would go on. They were in no danger, none at all. They might be injured or get sick, but they would be fixed, healed, repaired, put back together. They were okay, would be okay, always and forever. How happy, I thought. How happy to be okay, just to be okay. We could all join Eddie and help him finish his sculpture, or go down to New Moorea and find jobs somewhere or run away and join the circus or do something really important but safe, all of us safe.
But Alice wasn’t safe. She was under sentence of death and we were going to place ourselves in danger to save her. We wanted Alice to be okay, needed her to be okay.
Had I been okay on Vesper? Shacked up with Sheila, drinking on credit at ’Burbs’ place? I had been safe. I had been in no danger, but was I okay? How do we know if we’re okay? Was Matessa okay as she was taken away from the people she loved by the uncaring suits at Planetary Tectonics to be brutalized and used for six decades and then released back into the gentle, welcoming arms of Kindu? Was she okay? And what of the poor man on the dock who was so upset at seeing her go?
And what of Alice? What of her genesis? What if what I thought and what Archie had implied was correct? That Steel had, through her wealth and connections, implanted stocked, functioning ovaries in her body, deliberately placing herself in a position to be, to be fertilized, impregnated, to be filled with life and swell with life and bring life into the world. Did that make any difference? What if her motives were noble and enlightened? What if they were self-serving and cynical? Did it make any difference? Would I prefer to have never met Alice? Would I prefer it if Alice had never been brought into the world? Would I be okay now if Steel had never found me? I looked over at her as we floated along, her body so relaxed and fluid, her face so taut with worry or recrimination or anguish.
And the worry and anguish were real. What if something happened on the Lightdancer with Alice there all alone? What if something happened? What if a meteoroid struck or the pressure hull failed or the heating system or the cooling system or the carbon dioxide scrubbers or what if the food on board was tainted or the water recycling system broke down and she was poisoned or sickened and we couldn’t get back to her in time? If she ... if she died ... if she died, that would be it. She would be gone forever and we couldn’t bring her back. We couldn’t ever, ever bring her back no matter how much we loved her or how hard we tried. Lost to us. Like John Cheatham, like Louise, like Drake. Like my wife. Lost. Forever.
The friendly banter between Yuri and Eddie seemed more surreal to me than our angular surroundings. Yuri was saying, “Do you realize that not one of these people knows who Buster Crabbe is?”
“You’re kidding me. Buster Crabbe? He was one of the first serial stars.”
“You don’t have to tell me. The only actor of his time to play all three top comic book heroes—”
“You can see his influence throughout the whole century, on Johnny Weissmuller, Steve Reeves, Christopher Reeve, even Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford ...”
And yet, why shouldn’t Yuri get to chat with his friend about this and that and nothing much? Why not one last pleasant, idle conversation before we plunged into the toxic, lethal soup of Brainard’s Planet?
“They don’t watch movies. They don’t watch television shows, none of the ancient art forms.”
“That’s the problem with our culture today. No foundation, no sense of history. I mean the twentieth century was so pivotal. It’s the earliest time we have that’s actually recorded. We can actually see and hear people who aren’t on the net, were never on the net, who had no conception of it, no conception of consciousness or astronomy or mathematics or ethics or even their own perspective, never mind anyone else’s.”
“That’s what I keep saying ...”
It occurred to me that I probably should know more about these people. Buster Crabbe, Dotie Foster, Annette—who was it? Yuri’s dream woman. If I was ever going to get serious about acting, if I was ever going to catch up with Shaughnessy again, rejoin the troupe, maybe get into reality acting ...
What was I thinking? Would any of that matter? If we lost people on Brainard’s Planet or if what we found there couldn’t save Alice, would any of the rest of it matter?
We’d made it down to the deepest part of the moon, deposited at the center of one of the beams defining the tetrahedron. We were close enough to the water sphere to hear the slow motion waves tumble and merge. A huge black shape flashed past me to arch up into the air above me, tapered, the white belly ribbed, flukes trailing water.
“Is that—is that a WHALE?” I asked as I watched it slowly tumble end over end, arching through the air, diminishing as it rose.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Eddie replied. “I shoulda warned you. We have three pods of humpbacks here.” It continued to rise and tumble, throwing off slowly wobbling drops of water as it arched over and started to descend. “Of course, they can jump a lot higher under this gravity. They have a lot of fun.”
“But, I thought, I mean,” I watched it slowly drift downward, down toward the surface of the roiling sphere, “I thought this was fresh water,” and enter it, sending out concentric waves that rose and peaked and released sheets and ropes and undulating globes of water that rose and spread and hit the side of the beam we were on and thinned and divided into smaller sheets, thinner ropes, smaller globes.
“Oh, no. Think of it as our ocean. We have a whole hydrologic system here. A climate, if you want to call it that. Look up there.” We did. Looking up, you could see that each beam in the nest of shapes had a light trough running down the center of its lower surface. “That’s sunlight fed in from ports on the outside. It’s the only way you could light a space fifteen kilometers across. The sunlight evaporates the water, gives us weather. It rains in here. Gets cloudy, foggy sometimes. You happened to catch us on a clear day. But when it rains we collect it, use it, clean it, then flush it back into the ocean.”
“What do they eat?” Tamika asked.
“What they usually
eat. We have a whole marine ecosystem in the sphere. Waste and remains rain down to the center where we collect them to fertilize our hydroponics farms.”
Yuri clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re insane, Eddie. You’ve always been insane.”
“Yeah, a couple of my artisans want me to put floating gardens at different levels. I mean, they wouldn’t actually be floating—we’d have to put little Musadhi filters in each one—but in this gravity it wouldn’t take much.”
“You mean little islands in the air?” Steel asked. I was almost startled that she would offer that much conversation on any topic other than Alice or the mission.
“Yeah. It might be fun. Dive from an upper beam to a little floating jungle, then soar over to another one. Finally take a long dive into the ocean. Might be fun.”
‘Fun.’ How alien that concept had become to us. I could see it on the rest of the crew’s faces, too: a longing for simpler times, easier decisions. All except Steel.
“Anyway, the shop’s over here.”
Eddie led us to a spot indistinguishable from any other. An elliptical piece of the deck opened and let us descend inside. As we did I asked Steel, “How’s Alice doing?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “She’s not picking up.” She didn’t make eye contact with me. I don’t know what she was looking at, but it wasn’t anything visible to me. Surrounded by people who were risking everything to help her, she was utterly alone.
“Try not to worry. We’ll be back there soon.”
She didn’t respond.
“So, lasers,” Eddie was saying. “We got lasers. We got lots of lasers. What were you looking for?” Equipment of all kinds was organized on long tables and shelves. If there were any lasers there you could have fooled me.
“Well,” Yuri replied, “something light, portable, handheld. Something we can aim.”
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