Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  They were Minnie and Earl, dammit.

  And anybody who wasn’t there in the early days couldn’t possibly understand how much that meant.

  * * *

  It’s a funny thing, about frontiers: they’re not as enchanting as the folks who work them like you to believe. And there was a lot that they didn’t tell the early recruits about the joys of working on the Moon.

  They didn’t tell you that the air systems gave off a nasal hum that kept you from sleeping soundly at any point during your first six weeks on rotation; that the vents were considerately located directly above the bunks to eliminate any way of shutting it out; that just when you found yourself actually needing that hum to sleep something in the circulators decided to change the pitch, rendering it just a tad higher or lower so that instead of lying in bed begging that hum to shut up shut up SHUT UP you sat there instead wondering if the new version denoted a serious mechanical difficulty capable of asphyxiating you in your sleep.

  They didn’t tell you that the recycled air was a paradise for bacteria, which kept any cold or flu or ear infection constantly circulating between you and your coworkers; that the disinfectants regularly released into the atmosphere smelled bad but otherwise did nothing; that when you started sneezing and coughing it was a sure bet that everybody around you would soon be sneezing and coughing; and that it was not just colds but stomach viruses, contagious rashes and even more unpleasant things that got shared as generously as a bottle of a wine at one of the parties you had time to go to back on Earth when you were able to work only sixty or seventy hours a week. They didn’t tell you that work took so very much of your time that the pleasures and concerns of normal life were no longer valid experiential input; that without that input you eventually ran out of non-work-related subjects to talk about, and found your personality withering away like an atrophied limb.

  They didn’t tell you about the whimsical random shortages in the bimonthly supply drops and the ensuing shortages of staples like toothpaste and toilet paper. They didn’t tell you about the days when all the systems seemed to conk out at once and your deadening routine suddenly became hours of all-out frantic terror. They didn’t tell you that after a while you forgot you were on the Moon and stopped sneaking looks at the battered blue marble. They didn’t tell you that after a while it stopped being a dream and became instead just a dirty and backbreaking job; one that drained you of your enthusiasm faster than you could possibly guess, and one that replaced your ambitions of building a new future with more mundane longings, like feeling once again what it was like to stand unencumbered beneath a midday sun, breathing air that tasted like air and not canned sweat.

  They waited until you were done learning all of this on your own before they told you about Minnie and Earl.

  I learned on a Sunday—not that I had any reason to keep track of the day; the early development teams were way too short-staffed to enjoy luxuries like days off. There were instead days when you got the shitty jobs and the days when you got the jobs slightly less shitty than the others. On that particular Sunday I had repair duty, the worst job on the Moon but for another twenty or thirty possible candidates. It involved, among them, inspecting, cleaning, and replacing the panels on the solar collectors. There were a lot of panels, since the early collector fields were five kilometers on a side, and each panel was only half a meter square. They tended to collect meteor dust (at best) and get scarred and pitted from micrometeor impacts (at worst). We’d just lost a number of them from heavier rock precipitation, which meant that in addition to replacing those, I had to examine even those that remained intact. Since the panels swiveled to follow the Sun across the sky, even a small amount of dust debris threatened to fall through the joints into the machinery below. There was never a lot of dust—sometimes it was not even visible. But it had to be removed one panel at a time.

  To overhaul the assembly, you spent the whole day on your belly, crawling along the catwalks between them, removing each panel in turn, inspecting them beneath a canopy with nothing but suit light, magnifiers, and micro-thin air jet. (A vacuum, of course, would have been redundant.) You replaced the panels pitted beyond repair, brought the ruined ones back to the sled for disposal, and then started all over again.

  The romance of space travel? Try nine hours of hideously tedious stoop labor, in a moonsuit. Try hating every minute of it. Try hating where you are and what you’re doing and how hard you worked to qualify for this privilege. Try also hating yourself just for feeling that way—but not having any idea how to turn those feelings off.

  I was muttering to myself, conjugating some of the more colorful expressions for excrement, when Phil Jacoby called. He was one of the more annoying people on the Moon: a perpetual smiler who always looked on the bright side of things and refused to react to even the most acidic sarcasm. Appropriately enough, his carrot hair and freckled cheeks always made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He might have been our morale officer, if we’d possessed enough bad taste to have somebody with that job title; but that would have made him even more the kind of guy you grow to hate when you really want to be in a bad mood. I dearly appreciated how distant his voice sounded, as he called my name over the radio: “Max! You bored yet, Max?”

  “Sorry,” I said tiredly. “Max went home.”

  “Home as in his quarters? Or Home as in Earth?”

  “There is no home here,” I said. “Of course Home as on Earth.”

  “No return shuttles today,” Phil noted. “Or any time this month. How would he manage that trick?”

  “He was so fed up he decided to walk.”

  “Hope he took a picnic lunch or four. That’s got to be a major hike.”

  In another mood, I might have smiled. “What’s the bad news, Phil?”

  “Why? You expecting bad news?”

  There was a hidden glee to his tone that sounded excessive even from Jacoby. “Surprise me.”

  “You’re quitting early. The barge will be by to pick you up in five minutes.”

  According to the digital readout inside my helmet, it was only 13:38 LT. The news that I wouldn’t have to devote another three hours to painstaking cleanup should have cheered me considerably; instead, it rendered me about twenty times more suspicious. I said, “Phil, it will take me at least three times that long just to secure—”

  “A relief shift will arrive on another barge within the hour. Don’t do another minute of work. Just go back to the sled and wait for pickup. That’s an order.”

  Which was especially strange because Jacoby was not technically my superior. Sure, he’d been on the Moon all of one hundred and twenty days longer than me—and sure, that meant any advice he had to give me needed to be treated like an order, if I wanted to do my job—but even so, he was not the kind of guy who ever ended anything with an authoritarian That’s An Order. My first reaction was the certainty that I must have been in some kind of serious trouble. Somewhere, sometime, I forgot or neglected one of the safety protocols, and did something suicidally, crazily wrong—the kind of thing that once discovered would lead to me being relieved for incompetence. But I was still new on the Moon, and I couldn’t think of any recent occasion where I’d been given enough responsibility for that to be a factor. My next words were especially cautious: “Uh, Phil, did I—”

  “Go to the sled,” he repeated, even more sternly this time. “And, Max?”

  “What?” I asked.

  The ebullient side of his personality returned. “I envy you, man.”

  The connection clicked off before I could ask him why.

  * * *

  A lunar barge was a lot like its terrestrial equivalent, in that it had no motive power of its very own, but needed to be pulled by another vehicle. Ours were pulled by tractors. They had no atmospheric enclosures, since ninety percent of the time they were just used for the slow-motion hauling of construction equipment; whenever they were needed to move personnel, we bolted in a number of forward-facing seats with o
xygen feeds and canvas straps to prevent folks imprisoned by clumsy moonsuits from being knocked out of their chairs every time the flatbed dipped in the terrain. It was an extremely low-tech method of travel, not much faster than a human being could sprint, and we didn’t often use it for long distances.

  There were four other passengers on this one, all identical behind mirrored facemasks; I had to read their nametags to see who they were. Nikki Hollander, Oscar Desalvo, George Peterson, and Carrie Aldrin No Relation (the last two words a nigh-permanent part of her name, up here). All four of them had been on-site at least a year more than I had, and to my eyes had always seemed to be dealing with a routine a lot better than I had been. As I strapped in, and the tractor started up, and the barge began its glacial progress toward a set of lumpy peaks on the horizon, I wished my coworkers had something other than distorted reflections of the lunar landscape for faces; it would be nice to be able to judge from their expressions just what was going on here. I said: “So what’s the story, people? Where we headed?”

  Then Carrie Aldrin No Relation began to sing: “Over the river and through the woods/to grandmother’s house we go . . .”

  George Peterson snorted. Oscar Desalvo, a man not known for his giddy sense of humor, who was in fact even grimmer than me most of the time—(not from disenchantment with his work, but out of personal inclination)—giggled; it was like watching one of the figures on Mount Rushmore stick its tongue out. Nikki Hollander joined in, her considerably less-than-perfect pitch turning the rest of the song into a nails-on-blackboard cacophony. The helmet speakers, which distorted anyway, did not help.

  I said, “Excuse me?”

  Nikki Hollander said something so blatantly ridiculous that I couldn’t force myself to believe I’d heard her correctly.

  “Come again? I lost that.”

  “No you didn’t.” Her voice seemed strained, almost hysterical.

  One of the men was choking with poorly repressed laughter. I couldn’t tell who.

  “You want to know if I like yams?”

  Nikki’s response was a burlesque parody of astronautic stoicism. “That’s an affirmative, Houston.”

  “Yams, the vegetable yams?”

  “A-ffirmative.” The A emphasized and italicized so broadly that it was not so much a separate syllable as a sovereign country.

  This time I recognized the strangulated noises. They were coming from George Peterson, and they were the sounds made by a man who was trying very hard not to laugh. It was several seconds before I could summon enough dignity to answer. “Yeah, I like yams. How is that relevant?”

  “Classified,” she said, and then her signal cut off.

  In fact, all their signals cut off, though I could tell from the red indicators on my internal display that they were all still broadcasting.

  That was not unusual. Coded frequencies were one of the few genuine amenities allowed us; they allowed those of us who absolutely needed a few seconds to discuss personal matters with coworkers to do so without sharing their affairs with anybody else who might be listening. We’re not supposed to spend more than a couple of minutes at a time on those channels because it’s safer to stay monitored. Being shut out of four signals simultaneously—in a manner that could only mean raucous laughter at my expense—was unprecedented, and it pissed me off. Hell, I’ll freely admit that it did more than that; it frightened me. I was on the verge of suspecting brain damage caused by something wrong with the air supply.

  Then George Peterson’s voice clicked: “Sorry about that, old buddy.” (I’d never been his old buddy.) “We usually do a better job keeping a straight face.”

  “At what? Mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  “One minute.” He performed the series of maneuvers necessary to cut off the oxygen provided by the barge, and restore his dependence on the supply contained in his suit, then unstrapped his harnesses, stood, and moved toward me, swaying slightly from the bumps and jars of our imperfectly smooth ride across the lunar surface.

  It was, of course, against all safety regulations for him to be on his feet while the barge was in motion; after all, even as glacially slow as that was, it wouldn’t have taken all that great an imperfection in the road before us to knock him down and perhaps inflict the kind of hairline puncture capable of leaving him with a slight case of death. We had all disobeyed that particular rule from time to time; there were just too many practical advantages in being able to move around at will, without first ordering the tractor to stop. But it made no sense for him to come over now, just to talk, as if it really made a difference for us to be face-to-face. After all, we weren’t faces. We were a pair of convex mirrors, reflecting each other while the men behind them spoke on radios too powerful to be noticeably improved by a few less meters of distance.

  Even so, he sat down on a steel crate lashed to the deck before me, and positioned his faceplate opposite mine, his body language suggesting meaningful eye contact. He held that position for almost a minute, not saying anything, not moving, behaving exactly like a man who believed he was staring me down.

  It made no sense. I could have gone to sleep and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  Instead, I said: “What?”

  He spoke quietly: “Am I correct in observing that you’ve felt less than, shall we say . . . ‘inspired’, by your responsibilities here?”

  Oh, Christ. This was about something I’d done.

  “Is there some kind of problem?”

  George’s helmet trembled enough to suggest a man theatrically shaking his head inside it. “Lighten up, Max. Nobody has any complaints about your work. We think you’re one of the best people we have here, and your next evaluation is going to give you straight A’s in every department . . . except enthusiasm. You just don’t seem to believe in the work anymore.”

  As much as I tried to avoid it, my answer still reeked with denial. “I believe in it.”

  “You believe in the idea of it,” George said. “But the reality has worn you down.”

  I was stiff, proper, absolutely correct, and absolutely transparent. “I was trained. I spent a full year in simulation, doing all the same jobs. I knew what it was going to be like. I knew what to expect.”

  “No amount of training can prepare you for the moment when you think you can’t feel the magic anymore.”

  “And you can?” I asked, unable to keep the scorn from my voice.

  The speakers inside lunar helmets were still pretty tinny in those days; they no longer transformed everything we said into the monotones that once upon a time helped get an entire country fed up with the forced badinage of Apollo, but neither were they much good at conveying the most precise of emotional cues. And yet I was able to pick up something in George’s tone that was, given my mood, capable of profoundly disturbing me: a strange, transcendent joy. “Oh, yes. Max. I can.”

  I was just unnerved enough to ask: “How?”

  “I’m swimming in it,” he said—and even as long as he’d been part of the secret, his voice still quavered, as if there was some seven-year-old part of him that remained unwilling to believe that it could possibly be. “We’re all swimming in it.”

  “I’m not.”

  And he laughed out loud. “Don’t worry. We’re going to gang up and shove you into the deep end of the pool.”

  * * *

  That was seventy years ago.

  Seventy years. I think about how old that makes me and I cringe. Seventy years ago, the vast majority of old farts who somehow managed to make it to the age I am now were almost always living on the outer edges of decrepitude. The physical problems were nothing compared with the senility. What’s that? You don’t remember senile dementia? Really? I guess there’s a joke in there somewhere, but it’s not that funny for those of us who can remember actually considering it a possible future. Trust me, it was a nightmare. And the day they licked that one was one hell of an advertisement for progress.

  But still, seventy years. You want to kn
ow how long ago that was? Seventy years ago it was still possible to find people who had heard of Bruce Springsteen. There were even some who remembered the Beatles. Stephen King was still coming out with his last few books, Kate Emma Brenner hadn’t yet come out with any, Exxon was still in business, the reconstruction of the ice packs hadn’t even been proposed, India and Pakistan hadn’t reconciled, and the idea of astronauts going out into space to blow up a giant asteroid before it impacted with Earth was not an anecdote from recent history but a half-remembered image from a movie your father talked about going to see when he was a kid. Seventy years ago the most pressing headlines had to do with the worldwide ecological threat posed by the population explosion among escaped sugar gliders.

  Seventy years ago, I hadn’t met Claire. She was still married to her first husband, the one she described as the nice mistake. She had no idea I was anywhere in her future. I had no idea she was anywhere in mine. The void hadn’t been defined yet, let alone filled. (Nor had it been cruelly emptied again—and wasn’t it sad how the void I’d lived with for so long seemed a lot larger, once I needed to endure it again?)

  Seventy years ago I thought Faisal Awad was an old man. He may have been in his mid-thirties then, at most ten years older than I was. That, to me, was old. These days it seems one step removed from the crib.

  I haven’t mentioned Faisal yet; he wasn’t along the day George and the others picked me up in the barge, and we didn’t become friends till later. But he was a major member of the development team, back then—the kind of fixitall adventurer who could use the coffee machine in the common room to repair the heating system in the clinic. If you don’t think that’s a valuable skill, try living under 24-7 life support in a hostile environment where any requisitions for spare parts had to be debated and voted upon by a government committee during election years. It’s the time of my life when I first developed my deep abiding hatred of Senators. Faisal was our life-saver, our miracle worker, and our biggest local authority on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, though back then we were all too busy to listen to music and much more likely to listen to that 15-minute wonder Polka Thug anyway. After I left the Moon, and the decades of my life fluttered by faster than I once could have imagined possible, I used to think about Faisal and decide that I really ought to look him up, someday, maybe, as soon as I had the chance. But he had stayed on Luna, and I had gone back to Earth, and what with one thing or another that resolution had worked out as well as such oughtas always do: a lesson that old men have learned too late for as long as there have been old men to learn it.