Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “I checked your records,” I said. “You’ve been on the Moon continuously since those days; you went straight from the development teams to the early settlements to the colonies that followed. You’ve probably been here nonstop longer than anybody else living or dead. If anybody can give me an idea what happened to them, it’s you.”

  More silence.

  “Please,” I said.

  And then he muttered a cuss word that had passed out of the vernacular forty years earlier. “All right, damn you. But you won’t find them. I don’t think anybody will ever find them.”

  * * *

  Seventy years earlier:

  We were there for about two more hours before George took me aside, said he needed to speak to me in private, and directed me to wait for him in the backyard.

  The backyard was nice.

  I’ve always hated that word. Nice. It means nothing. Describing people, it can mean the most distant politeness, or the most compassionate warmth; it can mean civility and it can mean charity and it can mean grace and it can mean friendship. Those things may be similar, but they’re not synonyms; when the same word is used to describe all of them, then that word means nothing. It means even less when describing places. So what if the backyard was nice? Was it just comfortable, and well-tended, or was it a place that reinvigorated you with every breath? How can you leave it at “nice” and possibly imagine that you’ve done the job?

  Nice. Feh.

  But that’s exactly what this backyard was.

  It was a couple of acres of trimmed green lawn, bordered by the white picket fence that signalled the beginning of vacuum. A quarter-circle of bright red roses marked each of the two rear corners; between them, bees hovered lazily over a semicircular garden heavy on towering orchids and sunflowers. The painted white rocks which bordered that garden were arranged in a perfect line, none of them even a millimeter out of place, none of them irregular enough to shame the conformity that characterized the relationship between all the others. There was a single apple tree, which hugged the rear of the house so tightly that the occupants of the second floor might have been able to reach out their windows and grab their breakfast before they trudged off to the shower; there were enough fallen green apples to look picturesque, but not enough to look sloppy. There was a bench of multicolored polished stone at the base of the porch steps, duplicating the porch swing up above but somehow absolutely right in its position; and as I sat on that bench facing the nice backyard I breathed deep and I smelled things that I had almost forgotten I could smell—not just the distant charcoal reek of neighbors burning hamburgers in their own backyards, but lilacs, freshly cut grass, horse scent, and a cleansing whiff of rain. I sat there and I spotted squirrels, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, and a belled calico cat that ran by, stopped, saw me, looked terribly confused in the way cats have, and then went on. I sat there and I breathed and after months of inhaling foot odor and antiseptics I found myself getting a buzz. It was intoxicating. It was invigorating. It was a shot of pure energy. It was joy. God help me, it was nice.

  But it was also surrounded on all sides by a pitiless vacuum that, if real physics meant anything, should have claimed it in an instant. Perhaps it shouldn’t have bothered me that much, by then; but it did.

  The screen door slammed. Miles the dog bounded down the porch steps and, panting furiously, nudged my folded hands. I scratched him under the ears. He gave me the usual unconditional adoration of the golden retriever—I petted him, therefore I was God. Most panting dogs look like they’re smiling (it’s a major reason humans react so strongly to the species), but Miles, the canine slave to context, looked like he was enjoying the grand joke that everybody was playing at my expense. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t even really a dog . . .

  The screen door opened and slammed. This time it was George, carrying a couple of tall glasses filled with pink stuff and ice. He handed me one of the glasses; it was lemonade, of course. He sipped from the other one and said: “Minnie’s cooking yams again. She’s a miracle worker when it comes to yams. She does something with them, I don’t know, but it’s really—”

  “You,” I said wryly, “are enjoying this way too much.”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  Miles the dog stared at the lemonade as if it was the most wondrous sight in the Universe. George dipped a finger into his drink and held it out so the mutt could have a taste. Miles adored him now. I was so off-center I almost felt betrayed. “Yeah. I guess I am. I like them.”

  “Pretty hard not to like them. They’re nice people.”

  “But the situation is so insane—”

  “Sanity,” George said, “is a fluid concept. Think about how nuts Relativity sounded, the first time somebody explained it to you. Hell, think back to when you were a kid, and somebody first explained the mechanics of sex.”

  “George—”

  He gave Miles another taste. “I can see you trying like mad to work this out. Compiling data, forming and rejecting theories, even concocting little experiments to test the accuracy of your senses. I know because I was once in your position, when I was brought out here for the first time, and I remember doing all the same things. But I now have a lot of experience in walking people through this, and I can probably save you a great deal of time and energy by completing your data and summarizing all of your likely theories.”

  I was too tired to glare at him anymore. “You can skip the data and theories and move on to the explanation. I promise you I won’t mind.”

  “Yes, you would,” he said, with absolute certainty. “Trust me, dealing with the established lines of inquiry is the only real way to get there.

  “First, providing the raw data. One: This little homestead cannot be detected from Earth; our most powerful telescopes see nothing but dead moonscape here. Two: It, and the two old folks, have been here since at least Apollo; those photos of them with Armstrong and Aldrin are genuine. Three: There is nothing you can ask them that will get any kind of straight answer about who or what they are and why they’re here. Four: We have no idea how they knew Asimov, Sagan, or Bradbury—but I promise you that those are not the most startling names you will hear them drop if you stick around long enough to get to know them. Five: We don’t know how they maintain an earth-like environment in here. Six: About that mailbox—they do get delivery, on a daily basis, though no actual mailman has ever been detected, and none of the mail we’ve ever managed to sneak a peek at is the slightest bit interesting. It’s all senior citizen magazines and grocery store circulars. Seven: They never seem to go shopping, but they always have an ample supply of food and other provisions. Eight (I am up to eight, right?): They haven’t noticeably aged, not even the dog. Nine: They do understand every language we’ve sprung on them, but they give all their answers in Midwestern-American English. And ten: We have a group of folks from our project coming out here to visit just about every night of the week, on a rotating schedule that works out to just about once a week for each of us.

  “So much for the raw data. The theories take longer to deal with. Let me go through all the ones you’re likely to formulate.” He peeled back a finger. “One: This is all just a practical joke perpetrated by your friends and colleagues in an all-out attempt to shock you out of your funk. We put it all together with spit and baling wire and some kind of elaborate special-effects trickery that’s going to seem ridiculously obvious just as soon as you’re done figuring it out. We went to all this effort, and spent the many billions of dollars it would have cost to get all these construction materials here, and developed entirely new technologies capable of holding in an atmosphere, and put it all together while you weren’t looking, and along the way brought in a couple of convincing old folks from Central Casting, just so we could enjoy the look on your face. What a zany bunch of folks we are, huh?”

  I felt myself blushing. “I’d considered that.”

  “And why not? It’s a legitimate theory. Also a ridiculous one, but let’s mov
e on.” He peeled back another finger. “Two: This is not a practical joke, but a test or psychological experiment of some kind, arranged by the brain boys back home. They put together all of this trickery, just to see how the average astronaut, isolated from home and normal societal context, reacts to situations that defy easy explanation and cannot be foreseen by even the most exhaustively-planned training. This particular explanation works especially well if you also factor in what we cleverly call the McGoohan Corollary—that is, the idea that we’re not really on the Moon at all, but somewhere on Earth, possibly underground, where the real practical difficulty would lie in simulating not a quaint rural setting on a warm summer day, but instead the low-g, high-radiation, temperature-extreme vacuum that you gullibly believed you were walking around in, every single time you suited up. This theory is, of course, equally ridiculous, for many reasons—but we did have one guy about a year ago who stubbornly held on to it for almost a full week. Something about his psychological makeup just made it easier for him to accept that, over all the others, and we had to keep a close watch on him to stop him from trying to prove it with a nice unsuited walk. But from the way you’re looking at me right now I don’t think we’re going to have the same problem with you. So.

  “Assuming that this is not a joke, or a trick, or an experiment, or some lame phenomenon like that, that this situation you’re experiencing is precisely what we have represented to you, then we are definitely looking at something beyond all terrestrial experience. Which brings us to Three.” He peeled back another finger. “This is a first-contact situation. Minnie and Earl, and possibly Miles here, are aliens in disguise, or simulations constructed by aliens. They have created a friendly environment inside this picket fence, using technology we can only guess at—let’s say an invisible bubble capable of filtering out radiation and retaining a breathable atmosphere while remaining permeable to confused bipeds in big clumsy moonsuits. And they have done so—why? To hide their true nature while they observe our progress? Possibly. But if so, it would be a lot more subtle to place their little farmhouse in Kansas, where it wouldn’t seem so crazily out of place. To communicate us in terms we can accept? Possibly—except that couching those terms in such an insane context seems as counterproductive to genuine communication as their apparent decision to limit the substance of that communication to geriatric small talk. To make us comfortable with something familiar? Possibly—except that this kind of small mid-American home is familiar to only a small fraction of humanity, and it seems downright exotic to the many observers we’ve shuttled in from China, or India, or Saudi Arabia, or for that matter Manhattan. To present us with a puzzle that we have to solve? Again, possibly—but since Minnie and Earl and Miles won’t confirm or deny, it’s also a possibility we won’t be able to test unless somebody like yourself actually does come up with the great big magic epiphany. I’m not holding my breath. But I do reject any theory that they’re hostile, including the “Mars Is Heaven” theory you already cited. Anybody capable of pulling this off must have resources that could mash us flat in the time it takes to sneeze.”

  Miles woofed. In context it seemed vaguely threatening.

  “Four.” Another finger. “Minnie and Earl are actually human, and Miles is actually canine. They come here from the future, or from an alternate universe, or from some previously-unknown subset of humanity that’s been living among us all this time, hiding great and unfathomable powers that, blaaah blaah blaah, fill in the blank. And they’re here, making their presence known—why? All the same subtheories that applied to alien visitors also apply to human agencies, and all the same objections as well. Nothing explains why they would deliberately couch such a maddening enigma in such, for lack of a more appropriate word, banal terms. It’s a little like coming face to face with God and discovering that He really does look like an bearded old white guy in a robe; He might, for all I know, but I’m more religious than you probably think, and there’s some part of me that absolutely refuses to believe it. He, or She, if you prefer, could do better than that. And so could anybody, human or alien, whose main purpose in coming here is to study us, or test us, or put on a show for us.

  “You still with me?” he inquired.

  “Go on,” I growled. “I’ll let you know if you leave anything out.”

  He peeled back another finger. “Five: I kind of like this one—Minnie and Earl, and by extension Miles, are not creatures of advanced technology, but of a completely different kind of natural phenomenon—let’s say, for the sake of argument, a bizarre jog in the space-time continuum that allows a friendly but otherwise unremarkable couple living in Kansas or Wyoming or someplace like that to continue experiencing life down on the farm while in some way as miraculous to them as it seems to us, projecting an interactive version of themselves to this otherwise barren spot on the Moon. Since, as your little conversation with Earl established, they clearly know they’re on the Moon, we would have to accept that they’re unflappable enough to take this phenomenon at face value, but I’ve known enough Midwesterners to know that this is a genuine possibility.

  “Six.” Starting now on another hand. “Mentioned only so you can be assured I’m providing you an exhaustive list—a phenomenon one of your predecessors called the Law of Preservation of Home. He theorized that whenever human beings penetrate too far past their own natural habitat, into places sufficiently inhospitable to life, the Universe is forced to spontaneously generate something a little more congenial to compensate—the equivalent, I suppose, of magically whomping up a Holiday Inn with a swimming pool, to greet explorers lost in the coldest reaches of Antarctica. He even said that the only reason we hadn’t ever received reliable reports of this phenomenon on Earth is that we weren’t ever sufficiently far from our natural habitat to activate it . . . but I can tell from the look on your face that you don’t exactly buy this one either, so I’ll set it aside and let you read the paper he wrote on the subject at your leisure.”

  “I don’t think I will,” I said.

  “You ought to. It’s a real hoot. But if you want to, I’ll skip all the way to the end of the list, to the only explanation that ultimately makes any sense. Ready?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “All right. That explanation is—” he paused dramatically “—it doesn’t matter.”

  There was a moment of pregnant silence.

  I didn’t explode; I was too shell-shocked to explode. Instead, I just said: “I sat through half a dozen bullshit theories for ‘It doesn’t matter’?”

  “You had to, Max; it’s the only way to get there. You had to learn the hard way that all of these propositions are either completely impossible or, for the time being, completely impossible to test—and we know this because the best minds on Earth have been working on the problem for as long as there’s been a sustained human presence on the Moon. We’ve taken hair samples from Minnie’s hairbrush. We’ve smuggled out stool samples from the dog. We’ve recorded our conversations with the old folks and studied every second of every tape from every possible angle. We’ve monitored the house for years on end, analyzed samples of the food and drink served in there, and exhaustively charted the health of everybody to go in or out. And all it’s ever gotten us, in all these years of being frantic about it, is this—that as far as we can determine, Minnie and Earl are just a couple of friendly old folks who like having visitors.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Why can’t it be? Whether aliens, time travellers, displaced human beings, or natural phenomena—they’re good listeners, and fine people, and they sure serve a good Sunday dinner. And if there must be things in the Universe we can’t understand—well, then, it’s sure comforting to know that some of them just want to be good neighbors. That’s what I mean by saying, It doesn’t matter.”

  He stood up, stretched, took the kind of deep breath people only indulge in when they’re truly luxuriating in the freshness of the air around them, and said: “Minnie and Earl expect some of the n
ew folks to be a little pokey, getting used to the idea. They won’t mind if you stay out here and smell the roses a while. Maybe when you come in, we’ll talk a little more ’bout getting you scheduled for regular visitation. Minnie’s already asked me about it—she seems to like you. God knows why.” He winked, shot me in the chest with a pair of pretend six-shooters made from the index fingers of both hands, and went back inside, taking the dog with him. And I was alone in the nice backyard, serenaded by birdsong as I tried to decide how to reconcile my own rational hunger for explanations with the unquestioning acceptance that was being required of me.

  * * *

  Eventually, I came to the same conclusion George had; the only conclusion that was possible under the circumstances. It was a genuine phenomenon, that conclusion: a community of skeptics and rationalists and followers of the scientific method deciding that there were some things Man was having too good a time to know. Coming to think of Minnie and Earl as family didn’t take much longer than that. For the next three years, until I left for my new job in the outer system, I went out to their place at least once, sometimes twice a week; I shot pool with Earl and chatted about relatives back home with Minnie; I’d tussled with Miles and helped with the dishes and joined them for long all-nighters talking about nothing in particular. I learned how to bake with the limited facilities we had at Base, so I could bring my own cookies to her feasts. I came to revel in standing on a creaky front porch beneath a bug lamp, sipping grape juice as I joined Minnie in yet another awful rendition of “Anatevka.” Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune. I came to think of Minnie and Earl as the real reason we were on the Moon, and I came to understand one of the major reasons we were all so bloody careful to keep it a secret—because the needy masses of Earth, who were at that point still agitating about all the time and money spent on the space program, would not have been mollified by the knowledge that all those billions were being spent, in part, so that a few of the best and the brightest could indulge themselves in sing-alongs and wiener dog cookouts.