I know it doesn’t sound much like a frontier. It wasn’t, not inside the picket fence. Outside, it remained dangerous and back-breaking work. We lost five separate people while I was there; two to blowouts, one to a collapsing crane, one to a careless tumble off a crater rim, and one to suicide (she, alas, had not been to Minnie and Earl’s yet). We had injuries every week, shortages every day, and crises just about every hour. Most of the time, we seemed to lose ground—and even when we didn’t, we lived with the knowledge that all of our work and all of our dedication could be thrown in the toilet the first time there was a political shift back home. There was no reason for any of us to believe that we were actually accomplishing what we were there to do—but somehow, with Minnie and Earl there, hosting a different group every night, it was impossible to come to any other conclusion. They liked us. They believed in us. They were sure that we were worth their time and effort. And they expected us to be around for a long, long time . . . just like they had been.
I suppose that’s another reason why I was so determined to find them now. Because I didn’t know what it said about the people we’d become that they weren’t around keeping us company anymore.
* * *
I was in a jail cell for forty-eight hours once. Never mind why; it’s a stupid story. The cell itself wasn’t the sort of thing I expected from movies and television; it was brightly lit, free of vermin, and devoid of any steel bars to grip obsessively while cursing the guards and bemoaning the injustice that had brought me there. It was just a locked room with a steel door, a working toilet, a clean sink, a soft bed, and absolutely nothing else. If I had been able to come and go at will it might have been an acceptable cheap hotel room. Since I was stuck there, without anything to do or anybody to talk to, I spent those forty-eight hours going very quietly insane.
The habitat module of Walter Stearns was a lot like that cell, expanded to accommodate a storage closet, a food locker, and a kitchenette; it was that stark, that empty. There were no decorations on the walls, no personal items, no hytex or music system I could see, nothing to read and nothing to do. It lost its charm for me within thirty seconds. Stearns had been living there for sixteen years: a self-imposed prison sentence that might have been expiation for the sin of living past his era.
The man himself moved with what seemed glacial slowness, like a wind-up toy about to stop and fall over. He dragged one leg, but if that was a legacy of a stroke—and an explanation for why he chose to live as he did—there was no telltale slur to his speech to corroborate it. Whatever the reason might have been, I couldn’t help regarding him with the embarrassed pity one old man feels toward another the same age who hasn’t weathered his own years nearly as well.
He accepted my proffered can of yams with a sour grin and gave me a mug of some foul-smelling brown stuff in return. Then he poured some for himself and shuffled to the edge of his bed and sat down with a grunt. “I’m not a hermit,” he said, defensively.
“I didn’t use the word,” I told him.
“I didn’t set out to be a hermit,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Nobody sets out to be a hermit. Nobody turns his back on the damned race unless he has some reason to be fed up. I’m not fed up. I just don’t know any alternative. It’s the only way I know to let the Moon be the Moon.”
He sipped some of the foul-smelling brown stuff and gestured for me to do the same. Out of politeness, I sipped from my own cup. It tasted worse than it smelled, and had a consistency like sand floating in vinegar. Somehow I didn’t choke. “Let the Moon be the Moon?”
“They opened a casino in Shepardsville. I went to see it. It’s a big luxury hotel with a floor show; trained white tigers jumping through flaming hoops for the pleasure of a pretty young trainer in a spangled bra and panties. The casino room is oval-shaped, and the walls are alive with animated holography of wild horses running around and around and around and around, without stop, twenty-four hours a day. There are night clubs with singers and dancers, and an amusement park with rides for the kids. I sat there and I watched the gamblers bent over their tables and the barflies bent over their drinks and I had to remind myself that I was on the Moon—that just being here at all was a miracle that would have had most past civilizations consider us gods. But all these people, all around me, couldn’t feel it. They’d built a palace in a place where no palace had ever been and they’d sucked all the magic and all the wonder all the way out of it.” He took a deep breath, and sipped some more of his contemptible drink. “It scared me. It made me want to live somewhere where I could still feel the Moon being the Moon. So I wouldn’t be some useless . . . relic who didn’t know where he was half the time.”
The self-pity had wormed its way into his voice so late that I almost didn’t catch it. “It must get lonely,” I ventured.
“Annnh. Sometimes I put on my moonsuit and go outside, just to stand there. It’s so silent there that I can almost hear the breath of God. And I remember that it’s the Moon—the Moon, dammit. Not some five-star hotel. The Moon. A little bit of that and I don’t mind being a little lonely the rest of the time. Is that crazy? Is that being a hermit?”
I gave the only answer I could. “I don’t know.”
He made a hmmmph noise, got up, and carried his mug over to the sink. A few moments cleaning it out and he returned, his lips curled into a half-smile, his eyes focused on some far-off time and place. “The breath of God,” he murmured.
“Yams,” I prompted.
“You caught that, huh? Been a while since somebody caught that. It’s not the sort of thing people catch unless they were there. Unless they remember her.”
“Was that by design?”
“You mean, was it some kind of fiendish secret code? Naah. More like a shared joke. We knew by then that nobody would believe us if we actually talked about Minnie and Earl. They were that forgotten. So we dropped yams into our early-settlement stories. A little way of saying, hey, we remember the old lady. She sure did love to cook those yams.”
“With her special seasoning.” I said. “And those rolls she baked.”
“Uh-huh.” He licked his lips, and I almost fell into the trap of considering that unutterably sad . . . until I realized that I was doing the same thing. “Used to try to mix one of Earl’s special cocktails, but I never could get them right. Got all the ingredients. Mixed ’em the way he showed me. Never got ’em to taste right. Figure he had some kind of technological edge he wasn’t showing us. Real alien superscience, applied to bartending. Or maybe I just can’t replace the personality of the bartender. But they were good drinks. I’ve got to give him that.”
We sat together in silence for a while, each lost in the sights and sounds of a day long gone. After a long time, I almost whispered it: “Where did they go, Walter?”
His eyes didn’t focus: “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Start with when you last visited them.”
“Oh, that was years and years and years ago.” He lowered his head and addressed the floor. “But you know how it is. You have relatives, friends, old folks very important to you. Folks you see every week or so, folks who become a major part of who you are. Then you get busy with other things and you lose touch. I lost touch when the settlement boom hit, and there was always some other place to be, some other job that needed to be done; I couldn’t spare one night a week gabbing with old folks just because I happened to love them. After all, they’d always be there, right? By the time I thought of looking them up again, it turned out that everybody else had neglected them too. There was no sign of the house and no way of knowing how long they’d been gone.”
I was appalled. “So you’re saying that Minnie and Earl moved away because of . . . neglect?”
“Naaah. That’s only why they didn’t say goodbye. I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with why they moved away; just why we didn’t notice. I guess that’s another reason why nobody likes to talk about them. We’re all j
ust too damn ashamed.”
“Why do you think they moved, Walter?”
He swallowed another mouthful of his vile brew, and addressed the floor some more, not seeing me, not seeing the exile he’d chosen for himself, not seeing anything but a tiny little window of his past. “I keep thinking of that casino,” he murmured. “There was a rotating restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. Showed you the landscape, with all the billboards and amusement parks—and above it all, in the place where all the advertisers hope you’re going to forget to look, Mother Earth herself. It was a burlesque and it was boring. And I also keep thinking of that little house, out in the middle of nowhere, with the picket fence and the golden retriever dog . . . and the two sweet old people . . . and the more I compare one thought to the other, the more I realize that I don’t blame them for going away. They saw that on the Moon we were building, they wouldn’t be miraculous anymore.”
“They had a perfectly maintained little environment—”
“We have a perfectly maintained little environment. We have parks with grass. We have roller coasters and golf courses. We have people with dogs. We even got rotating restaurants and magic acts with tigers. Give us a few more years up here and we’ll probably work out some kind of magic trick to do away with the domes and the bulkheads and keep in an atmosphere with nothing but a picket fence. We’ll have houses like theirs springing up all over the place. The one thing we don’t have is the Moon being the Moon. Why would they want to stay here?” His voice, which had been rising throughout his little tirade, rose to a shriek with that last question; he hurled his mug against the wall, but it was made of some indestructible ceramic that refused to shatter. It just tumbled to the floor, and skittered under the bunk, spinning in place just long enough to mock him for his empty display of anger. He looked at me, focused, and let me know with a look that our audience was over. “What would be left for them?”
* * *
I searched some more, tracking down another five or six oldsters still capable of talking about the old days, as well as half a dozen children or grandchildren of same willing to speak to me about the memories the old folks had left behind, but my interview with Walter Stearns was really the end of it; by the time I left his habitat, I knew that my efforts were futile. I saw that even those willing to talk to me weren’t going to be able to tell me more than he had . . . and I turned out to be correct about that. Minnie and Earl had moved out, all right, and there was no forwarding address to be had.
I was also tired: bone-weary in a way that could have been just a normal symptom of age and could have been despair that I had not found what I so desperately needed to find and could have been the harbinger of my last remaining days. Whatever it was, I just didn’t have the energy to keep going that much longer . . . and I knew that the only real place for me was the bed I had shared with my dear Claire.
On the night before I flew back I had some money left over, so I went to see the musical Ceres at New Broadway. I confess I found it dreadful—like most old farts, I can’t fathom music produced after the first three decades of my life—but it was definitely elaborate, with a cast of lithe and gymnastic young dancers in silvery jumpsuits leaping about in a slow-motion ballet that took full advantage of the special opportunities afforded by lunar gravity. At one point the show even simulated free fall, thanks to invisible filaments that crisscrossed the stage allowing the dancers to glide from place to place like objects ruled only by their own mass and momentum. The playbill said that one of the performers, never mind which one, was not a real human being, but a holographic projection artfully integrated with the rest of the performers. I couldn’t discern the fake, but I couldn’t find it in myself to be impressed. We were a few flimsy bulkheads and half a kilometer from lunar vacuum, and to me, that was the real story . . . even if nobody else in the audience of hundreds could see it.
I moved out of my hotel. I tipped my concierge, who hadn’t found me anything about Minnie and Earl but had provided all the other amenities I’d asked for. I bought some stupid souvenirs for the grandchildren, and boarded my flight back to Earth.
After about an hour I went up to the passenger lounge, occupied by two intensely-arguing businesswomen, a child playing a handheld hytex game, and a bored-looking thin man with a shiny head. Nobody was looking out the panoramic window, not even me. I closed my eyes and pretended that the view wasn’t there. Instead I thought of the time Earl had decided he wanted to fly a kite. That was a major moment. He built it out of newspapers he got from somewhere, and sat in his backyard letting out more than five hundred meters of line; though the string and the kite extended far beyond the atmospheric picket-fence perimeter, it had still swooped and sailed like an object enjoying the robust winds it would have known, achieving that altitude on Earth. That, of course, had been another impossibility . . . but my colleagues and I had been so inured to such things by then that we simply shrugged and enjoyed the moment as it came.
I badly wanted to fly a kite.
I badly wanted to know that Minnie and Earl had not left thinking poorly of us.
I didn’t think they were dead. They weren’t the kind of people who died. But they were living somewhere else, someplace far away—and if the human race was lucky it was somewhere in the solar system. Maybe, even now, while I rode back to face however much time I had left, there was a mindboggling little secret being kept by the construction teams building those habitats out near the Jovian moons; maybe some of those physicists and engineers were taking time out from a week of dangerous and backbreaking labor to spend a few hours in the company of an old man and old woman whose deepest spoken insight about the massive planet that graces their sky was how it presented one hell of a lovely view. Maybe the same thing happened when Anderson and Santiago hitched a ride on the comet that now bears their names—and maybe there’s a little cottage halfway up the slope of Olympus Mons where the Mars colonists go whenever they need a little down-home hospitality. I would have been happy with all of those possibilities. I would have felt the weight of years fall from my bones in an instant, if I just knew that there was still room for Minnie and Earl in the theme-park future we seemed to be building.
Then something, maybe chance, maybe instinct, made me look out the window.
And my poor, slowly failing heart almost stopped right then.
Because Miles, the golden retriever, was pacing us.
He ran alongside the shuttle, keeping up with the lounge window, his lolling pink tongue and long floppy ears trailing behind him like banners driven by some unseen (and patently impossible) breeze. He ran if in slow motion, his feet pawing a ground that wasn’t there, his muscles rippling along his side, his muzzle foaming with perspiration. His perpetually laughing expression, so typical of his breed, was not so much the look of an animal merely panting with exertion, but the genuine mirth of a creature aware that it has just pulled off a joke of truly epic proportions. As I stared at him, too dumbstruck to whoop and holler and point him out to my fellow passengers, he turned his head, met my gaze with soulful brown eyes, and did something I’ve never seen any other golden retriever do, before or since.
He winked.
Then he faced forward, lowered his head, and sped up, leaving us far behind.
I whirled and scanned the lounge, to see if any of my fellow passengers had seen him. The two businesswomen had stopped arguing, and were now giggling over a private joke of some kind. The kid was still intently focused on his game. But the eyes of the man with the shiny head were very large and very round. He stared at me, found in my broad smile confirmation that he hadn’t been hallucinating, and tried to speak. “That,” he said. And “Was.” And after several attempts, “A dog.”
He might have gone on from there given another hour or so of trying.
I knew exactly how he felt, of course. I had been in the same place, once, seventy years ago.
Now, for a while, I felt like I was twelve again.
I rose from my seat, cross
ed the lounge, and took the chair facing the man with the shiny head. He was wide-eyed, like a man who saw me, a total stranger, as the only fixed constant in his universe. That made me feel young, too.
I said, “Let me tell you a little bit about some old friends of mine.”
* * *
This one’s for Jerry and Kathy Oltion, the Minnie and Earl of the future.
MOLLY GLOSS
Molly is the author of The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day (winner of the PENWest Fiction Prize), and Wild Life (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award). Wild Life was chosen for “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book.” Her short story “Lambing Season” was a 2003 Hugo nominee. She was a student of Ursula K. Le Guin’s in a 1981 writing workshop.
Her Web site is at http://www.mollygloss.com/.
A FEW THINGS I KNOW ABOUT URSULA
MOLLY GLOSS
Upon meeting Ursula Le Guin for the first time, more than a few people have been heard to say somewhat sheepishly, “I don’t read science fiction, but I’ve heard your work is good.” Of course it can be embarrassing when you’re introduced to an actual writer of one of those books you know you ought to have read but haven’t—there’s just no graceful way to say, “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten around to reading your books yet.” These people might be thinking it’s more politic to say that they don’t read science fiction. There is some trouble with this tack, though, if it’s meant as an explanation, as an apology, to a writer known above all as a writer of science fiction. Here’s the problem: When someone says they don’t read science fiction, they seem to be saying they haven’t, in fact, read any science fiction. They seem to be saying they’ve crossed off the whole field, not on the basis of considerate, careful reading of the texts, but on the basis of bad press, of which science fiction has had more than its share.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 Page 20