Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  I was totally ignored until the dog stood up on its hind legs to sniff at, then snort nasal condensation on, my faceplate. His ears went back. He whined, then scratched at his reflection, then looked over his shoulder at the rest of his pack, long pink tongue lolling plaintively. Look, guys. There’s somebody in this thing.

  I didn’t know I was going to take the leap of faith until I actually placed the cake cylinder on the ground, then reached up and undid my helmet locks. The hiss of escaping air made my blood freeze in my chest; for a second I was absolutely certain that all of this was a hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation, and that I’d just committed suicide by opening my suit to vacuum. But the hiss subsided, and I realized that it was just pressure equalization; the atmosphere in this environment must have been slightly less than that provided by the suit. A second later, as I removed my helmet, I tasted golden retriever breath as the dog leaned in close and said hello by licking me on the lips. I also smelled freshly mowed grass and the perfume of nearby flowers: I heard a bird not too far away go whoot-toot-toot-weet; and I felt direct sunlight on my face, even though the Sun itself was nowhere to be seen. The air itself was pleasantly warm, like summer before it gets obnoxious with heat and humidity.

  “Miles!” the old man said. “Get down!”

  The dog gave me one last lick for the road and sat down, gazing up at me with that species of tongue-lolling amusement known only to large canines.

  The old woman clutched the elbow of George’s suit. “Oh, you didn’t tell me you were bringing somebody new this time! How wonderful!”

  “What is this place?” I managed.

  The old man raised his eyebrows. “It’s our front yard, son. What does it look like?”

  The old woman slapped his hand lightly. “Be nice, dear. You can see he’s taking it hard.”

  He grunted. “Always did beat me how you can tell what a guy’s thinking and feeling just by looking at him.”

  She patted his arm again. “It’s not all that unusual, apricot. I’m a woman.”

  George ambled on over, pulling the two oldsters along. “All right, I’ll get it started. Max Fischer, I want you to meet two of the best people on this world or any other—Minnie and Earl. Minnie and Earl, I want you to meet a guy who’s not quite as hopeless as he probably seems on first impression—Max Fischer. You’ll like him.”

  “I like him already,” Minnie said. “I’ve yet to dislike anybody the dog took such an immediate shine to. Hi, Max.”

  “Hello,” I said. After a moment: “Minnie. Earl.”

  “Wonderful to meet you, young man. Your friends have said so much about you.”

  “Thanks.” Shock lent honesty to my response: “They’ve said absolutely nothing about you.”

  “They never do,” she said, with infinite sadness, as George smirked at me over her back. She glanced down at the metal cylinder at my feet, and cooed: “Is that cake?”

  Suddenly, absurdly, the first rule of family visits popped unbidden into my head, blaring its commandment in flaming letters twenty miles high: THOU SHALT NOT PUT THE CAKE YOU BROUGHT ON THE GROUND—ESPECIALLY NOT WHEN A DOG IS PRESENT. Never mind that the container was sealed against vacuum, and that the dog would have needed twenty minutes to get in with an industrial drill: the lessons of everyday American socialization still applied. I picked it up and handed it to her; she took it with her bare hands, reacting not at all to what hindsight later informed me should have been a painfully cold exterior. I said: “Sorry.”

  “It’s pie,” said George. “Deep-dish apple pie. Direct from my grandma’s orchard.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet of her. She still having those back problems?”

  “She’s getting on in years,” George allowed. “But she says that soup of yours really helped.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, her smile as sunny as the entire month of July. “Meanwhile, why don’t you take your friend upstairs and get him out of that horrid suit? I’m sure he’ll feel a lot better once he’s had a chance to freshen up. Earl can have a drink set for him by the time you come down.”

  “I’ll fix a Sea of Tranquility,” Earl said, with enthusiasm.

  “Maybe once he has his feet under him. A beer should be fine for now.”

  “All rightee,” said Earl, with the kind of wink that established he knew quite well I was going to need something a lot more substantial than beer.

  As for Minnie, she seized my hand, and said: “It’ll be all right, apricot. Once you get past this stage, I’m sure we’re all going to be great friends.”

  “Um,” I replied, with perfect eloquence, wondering just what stage I was being expected to pass.

  Sanity?

  * * *

  Dying inside, I did what seemed to be appropriate. I followed George through the front door (first stamping my moonboots on the mat, as he specified) and up the narrow, creaky wooden staircase.

  You ever go to parties where the guests leave their coats in a heap on the bed of the master bedroom? Minnie and Earl’s was like that. Except it wasn’t a pile of coats, but a pile of disassembled moonsuits. There were actually two bedrooms upstairs—the women changed in the master bedroom that evidently belonged to the oldsters themselves, the men in a smaller room that felt like it belonged to a teenage boy. The wallpaper was a pattern of galloping horses, and the bookcases were filled with mint-edition paperback thrillers that must have been a hundred years old even then. (Or more: there was a complete collection of the hardcover Hardy Boys Mysteries, by Franklin W. Dixon.) The desk was a genuine antique rolltop, with a green blotter; no computer or hytex. The bed was just big enough to hold one gangly teenager, or three moonsuits disassembled into their component parts, with a special towel provided so our boots wouldn’t get moon-dust all over the bedspread. By the time George and I got up there, Oscar and Pete had already changed into slacks, dress shoes with black socks, and button-down shirts with red bowties; Pete had even put some shiny gunk in his hair to slick it back. They winked at me as they left.

  I didn’t change, not immediately; nor did I speak, not even as George doffed his own moonsuit and jumpers in favor of a similarly earthbound outfit he blithely salvaged from the closet. The conviction that I was being tested, somehow, was so overwhelming that the interior of my suit must have been a puddle of flop sweat.

  Then George said: “You going to be comfortable, dressed like that all night?”

  I stirred. “Clothes?”

  He pulled an outfit my size from the closet—tan pants, a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt, gleaming black shoes, and a red bowtie identical to the ones Oscar and Pete had donned. “No problem borrowing. Minnie keeps an ample supply. You don’t like the selection, you want to pick something more your style, you can always have something snazzier sent up on the next supply drop. I promise you, she’ll appreciate the extra effort. It makes her day when—”

  “George,” I said softly.

  “Have trouble with bowties? No problem. They’re optional. You can—”

  “George,” I said again, and this time my voice was a little louder, a little deeper, a little more For Christ’s Sake Shut Up I’m Sick Of This Shit.

  He batted his eyes, all innocence and naivete. “Yes, Max?”

  My look, by contrast, must have been half-murderous. “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  It was very hard not to yell. “You know what!”

  He fingered an old issue of some garishly-colored turn-of-the-millennium science fiction magazine. “Oh. That mixed drink Earl mentioned. The Sea of Tranquility. It’s his own invention, and he calls it that because your first sip is one small step for Man, and your second is one giant leap for Mankind. There’s peppermint in it. Give it a try and I promise you you’ll be on his good side for life. He—”

  I squeezed the words through clenched teeth. “I. Don’t. Care. About. The. Bloody. Drink.”

  “Then I’m afraid I don’t see your problem.”

  “My proble
m,” I said, slowly, and with carefully repressed frustration, “is that all of this is downright impossible.”

  “Apparently not,” he noted.

  “I want to know who these people are, and what they’re doing here.”

  “They’re Minnie and Earl, and they’re having some friends over for dinner.”

  If I’d been five years old, I might have pouted and stamped my foot. (Sometimes, remembering, I think I did anyway.) “Dammit, George!”

  He remained supernaturally calm. “No cursing in this house, Max. Minnie doesn’t like it. She won’t throw you out for doing it—she’s too nice for that—but it does make her uncomfortable.”

  This is the point where I absolutely know I stamped my foot. “That makes her uncomfortable!?”

  He put down the skiffy magazine. “Really. I don’t see why you’re having such a problem with this. They’re just this great old couple who happen to live in a little country house on the Moon, and their favorite thing is getting together with friends, and we’re here to have Sunday night dinner with them. Easy to understand . . . especially if you accept that it’s all there is.”

  “That can’t be all there is!” I cried, my exasperation reaching critical mass.

  “Why not? Can’t ‘Just Because’ qualify as a proper scientific theory?”

  “No! It doesn’t!—How come you never told me about this place before?”

  “You never asked before.” He adjusted his tie, glanced at the outfit laid out for me on the bed, and went to the door. “Don’t worry; it didn’t for me, either. Something close to an explanation is forthcoming. Just get dressed and come downstairs already. We don’t want the folks to think you’re antisocial . . .”

  * * *

  I’d been exasperated, way back then, because Minnie and Earl were there and had no right to be. I was exasperated now because the more I looked the more impossible it became to find any indication that they’d ever been there at all.

  I had started looking for them, if only in a desultory, abstracted way, shortly after Claire died. She’d been the only person on Earth who had ever believed my stories about them. Even now, I think it’s a small miracle that she did. I had told her the story of Minnie and Earl before we even became man and wife—sometime after I knew I was going to propose, but before I found the right time and place for the question. I was just back from a couple of years of Outer-System work, had grown weary of the life, and had met this spectacularly kind and funny and beautiful person whose interests were all on Earth, and who had no real desire to go out into space herself. That was just fine with me. It was what I wanted too. And of course I rarely talked to her about my years in space, because I didn’t want to become an old bore with a suitcase full of old stories. Even so, I still knew, at the beginning, that knowing about a real-life miracle and not mentioning it to her, ever, just because she was not likely to believe me, was tantamount to cheating. So I sat her down one day, even before the proposal, and told her about Minnie and Earl. And she believed me. She didn’t humor me. She didn’t just say she believed me. She didn’t just believe me to be nice. She believed me. She said she always knew when I was shoveling manure and when I was not—a boast that turned out to be an integral strength of our marriage—and that it was impossible for her to hear me tell the story without knowing that Minnie and Earl were real. She said that if we had children I would have to tell the story to them, too, to pass it on.

  That was one of the special things about Claire: she had faith when faith was needed.

  But our son and our daughter, and later the grandkids, outgrew believing me. For them, Minnie and Earl were whimsical space-age versions of Santa.

  I didn’t mind that, not really.

  But when she died, finding Minnie and Earl again seemed very important.

  It wasn’t just that their house was gone, or that Minnie and Earl seemed to have departed for regions unknown; and it wasn’t just that the official histories of the early development teams now completely omitted any mention of the secret hoarded by everybody who had ever spent time on the Moon in those days. It wasn’t just that the classified files I had read and eventually contributed to had disappeared, flushed down the same hole that sends all embarrassing government secrets down the pipe to their final resting place in the sea. But for more years than I’d ever wanted to count, Minnie and Earl had been the secret history nobody ever talked about. I had spoken to those of my old colleagues who still remained alive, and they had all said, what are you talking about, what do you mean, are you feeling all right, nothing like that ever happened.

  It was tempting to believe that my kids were right: that it had been a fairy tale: a little harmless personal fantasy I’d been carrying around with me for most of my life.

  But I knew it wasn’t.

  Because Claire had believed me.

  Because whenever I did drag out the old stories one more time, she always said, “I wish I’d known them.” Not like an indulgent wife allowing the old man his delusions, but like a woman well acquainted with miracles. And because even if I was getting too old to always trust my own judgement, nothing would ever make me doubt hers.

  I searched with phone calls, with letters, with hytex research, with the calling-in of old favors, with every tool available to me. I found nothing.

  And then one day I was told that I didn’t have much more time to look. It wasn’t a tragedy; I’d lived a long and happy life. And it wasn’t as bad as it could have been; I’d been assured that there wouldn’t be much pain. But I did have that one little unresolved question still hanging over my head.

  That was the day I overcame decades of resistance and booked return passage to the world I had once helped to build.

  The day after I spoke to Janine Seuss, I followed her advice and took a commuter tram to the Michael Collins Museum of Early Lunar Settlement. It was a popular tourist spot with all the tableaus and reenactments and, you should only excuse the expression, cheesy souvenirs you’d expect from such an establishment; I’d avoided it up until now mostly because I’d seen and heard most of it before, and much of what was left was the kind of crowd-pleasing foofaraw that tames and diminishes the actual experience I lived through for the consumption of folks who are primarily interested in tiring out their hyperactive kids. The dumbest of those was a pile of real Earth rocks, replacing the weight various early astronauts had taken from the Moon; ha ha ha, stop, I’m dying here. The most offensive was a kids’ exhibit narrated by a cartoon-character early development engineer; he spoke with a cornball rural accent, had comic-opera patches on the knees of his moonsuit, and seemed to have an I.Q. of about five.

  Another annoying thing about frontiers: when they’re not frontiers anymore, the civilizations that move in like to think that the people who came first were stupid.

  But when I found pictures of myself, in an exhibit on the development programs, and pointed them out to an attendant, it was fairly easy to talk the curators into letting me into their archives for a look at certain other materials that hadn’t seen the light of day for almost twenty years. They were taped interviews, thirty years old now, with a number of the old guys and gals, talking about their experiences in the days of early development: the majority of those had been conducted here on the Moon, but others had taken place on Earth or Mars or wherever else any of those old farts ended up. I felt vaguely insulted that they hadn’t tried to contact me; maybe they had, and my wife, anticipating my reluctance, had turned them away. I wondered if I should have felt annoyed by that. I wondered too if my annoyance at the taming of the Moon had something to do with the disquieting sensation of becoming ancient history while you’re still alive to remember it.

  There were about ten thousand hours of interviews; even if my health remained stable long enough for me to listen to them all, my savings would run out far sooner. But they were indexed, and audio-search is a wonderful thing. I typed in “Minnie” and got several dozen references to small things, almost as many references t
o Mickey’s rodent girlfriend, and a bunch of stories about a project engineer, from after my time, who had also been blessed with that particular first name. (To believe the transcripts, she spent all her waking hours saying impossibly cute things that her friends and colleagues would remember and be compelled to repeat decades later; what a bloody pixie.) I typed in “Earl” and, though it felt silly, “Miles”, and got a similar collection of irrelevancies—many references to miles, thus proving conclusively that as recently as thirty years ago the adoption of the metric system hadn’t yet succeeded in wiping out any less elegant but still fondly remembered forms of measurement. After that, temporarily stuck, I typed in my own name, first and last, and was rewarded with a fine selection of embarrassing anecdotes from folks who recalled what a humorless little pissant I had been way back then. All of this took hours; I had to listen to each of these references, if only for a second or two, just to know for sure what was being talked about, and I confess that, in between a number of bathroom breaks I would have considered unlikely as a younger man, I more than once forgot what I was supposedly looking for long enough to enjoy a few moments with old voices I hadn’t heard for longer than most lunar residents had been alive.

  I then cross-referenced by the names of the various people who were along on that first Sunday night trip to Minnie and Earl’s. “George Peterson” got me nothing of obvious value. “Carrie Aldrin” and “Peter Rawlik”, ditto. Nor did the other names. There were references, but nothing I particularly needed.