by D. F. Lovett
“Thank you,” I said, a sense of dread rising at the premise of memorizing and reciting a poem in the impending future.
“Now,” he said. “I have another book for you. This, this right here, this is what matters.”
He reached over and handed a book to me that had been sitting on a stack of books next to his armchair. I looked at the cover. Moby-Dick. The author’s name, the book said, was Herman Melville. I had heard of it but I struggled to remember why, tried to recall what made this book famous.
“Moby-Dick,” I said.
“Have you read it?” he asked, staring at me.
“Of course,” I answered.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Starboy said. “But the tailor is here. And we all need to get moving. We have a timeline to maintain.”
I still held the book in my hands. Another artifact made of paper and leather, a foreign object to me that Moonborn seemed to accept as just a staple of living. Moby-Dick. I wondered what this one was about.
Three
They sat me near the front of the banquet hall when I reached the gala.
It had been a whirlwind of activity. First, the tailor in Moonborn’s library, then the limo ride to the Coleridge Inn on the fifth hole of the Richard Brandt Golf Links, where Starboy showed me to my room, asked if I needed anything, and left me alone for the first time since I’d landed.
The solitude did not last. The Inn delivered first some complimentary coffee, then a tray of meats and cheeses, all apparently lunar-grown, then the freshly printed tuxedo. I drank the coffee, looked at the meats and cheeses, quickly showered and dressed, and admired myself in the mirror, trying to understand the appeal of the bizarre clothing they had provided to me.
I had never worn a tuxedo before. I don’t think I’d ever seen one. I can only remember seeing my father in one suit coat, a patched and mangy thing that he wore to interviews in his final days.
But before I could spend much time admiring the tuxedo and myself in it, a knock at the door again.
“Who is it?”
“Q,” a harsh female voice said.
“Who?”
“What, you think you might know me? Open the door.”
I opened the door. A woman with a shaved head stood there, looking irritated. She wore a tuxedo cut similar to mine.
“We need to go,” she said.
“Where?” This frightened me. I couldn’t handle being given another book to read or another person to meet. I needed sleep, I realized. I needed to sit down, to lie down, to have a moment to myself that wasn’t spent trying to understand assigned literature or putting on foreign clothing.
“The gala,” she said. “It’s about to start.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But one more thing,” she said. “You carry an OurGlass, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “On a wristband.”
“Leave it here, please. We have a GamelGlass for you. Starboy told me to give it to you. I’m a little surprised, based on your name alone, that you would ever use anything other than Gamelan, but whatever.”
Another limousine ride, endured in silence. We entered the country club on a red carpet, all the guests taking photographs of one another. It reminded me of the stories I’d read about events like this. The days of paparazzi, that extinct breed, days of hunted celebrities and parasite photographers killing one another in car chases.
I neither wanted a self-photograph, nor to ask a stranger to take my photograph, so I walked through without capturing the moment.
As I said, they sat us at a table near the front, the event being in a large banquet hall. They sat Q there too, to my left. The rest of the table looked uncomfortable in their clothes, bored in their seats. Q began a conversation with the older man to my right, talking across me as if I didn’t exist. I couldn’t understand it—something about a machine and its specs. The man looked familiar and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t place him until I realized he had driven Starboy and me in the LUV just a few hours earlier. Jordan, the grizzled displaced Earthling, had gone from chauffeuring to attending a gala.
I did not speak. This is my tendency.
And it was a good event at which not to speak, because noises and signs and symbols occupied the air as we waited for Moonborn. I looked around the room: lots of noise, lots of attractive people, crowded tables, vibrant conversations. I tried to understand what the vibe would be. When I say we sat near the front, I mean we sat close to the stage and the podium. Something would be happening here, something grand, something overwhelming.
An octet played jazz in the corner, some haunting and forgettable song. Waiters walked the room, holding trays of small, dainty food. Behind the stage were white curtains and draped flags of all countries. Almost every Earthling nation was represented. I identified the flags of the Euro-American Union, the Unified Middle East, the People’s Republic of Asia, along with Fennario, Brazil, Australia, and dozens more. The only flags conspicuous in their absence were the Sovereign States of America and the various flags of the Martian Colonies.
There are those who would attend something like this, in these tailored clothes, these polished shoes, and think I have arrived.
And then there are those like me, who wear these clothes and these shoes and sit in this place and feel like an impostor, an interloper, an enemy waiting to be discovered.
These were my thoughts—this fear, this cowering, this sense of drowning as the room filled up with people around me, dangerous beautiful strangers. This complete lack of control. This wondering, this wandering, this coldness. How had I gotten so far away from anything I ever knew? Why would anyone want to be here? I recognized faces from the reading, Sara West and Eleanor Lewis and Katherine Rumford, Louise and Lucius Jest. I saw famous humans from Earth, senators and governors, actors and actresses, but it seemed predominantly to be planarians. I saw no Brandts, no family of Adam Moonborn at this party.
And then the lights dimmed. People took their seats, the applause started, and a man walked out on stage.
Four
The long-haired, bearded, smiling man approached the podium, and my first thought was that he looked so much younger. Moonborn had lost forty pounds, ten years, and all the lines in his face, I thought, before realizing, of course, that it wasn’t Adam Moonborn.
“Hello, hello, hello,” the man breathed into the microphone, his voice heavy, smooth. He looked and sounded as if he’d done this a thousand times. Entirely comfortable, almost bored with the entire thing. “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”
“Who is that?” I whispered to Q, who promptly shushed me.
“This is fun, isn’t it?” He grinned as he said it, and a few whoops and hurrahs broke out in the crowd. “We’re celebrating a great man who has done great things. A man who makes us proud to be who we are, proud to do what we do. A man who makes us proud to be where we are. We are here to celebrate Adam Moonborn and his forty-seven years in this universe.”
Cheers broke out again, although my table seemed simply bored. Q clapped politely. Jordan nibbled one of the appetizers he had stacked on his plate.
“For those of you wondering who I am and where the birthday boy is, have no fear, no fear at all. I’m Neil Fern, Manager of the Domes of Gamelan, and I am a Lunatic.”
This time, the cheers were either entirely absent or enthusiastic screams and shouts, coming most noticeably from a few of the tables. I looked around again and saw irritation on many faces, particularly among the older members of the crowd.
“I’m so proud to say that,” he continued. “Adam’s contributions to the pride of being a Lunatic cannot be exaggerated, nor forgotten, nor ignored, on this rock or the other. I could talk for hours—hell, I could talk for days—about what Adam has done for the civic pride of these domes and our neighboring bases.”
I tried to focus on the speech, although Jordan shifted in his seat once again. He appeared to be trying to flag down a waiter, needing a refill on his red wine.
“When
I was a kid,” Fern continued, “we had no name for ourselves. The Earthstream media labeled us Moonlings, a name that, sure, sounds fun, but what adult wants to call him- or herself a Moonling? Of course, some people tried to use the Moonborn as a catch-all term. And while I, like anyone, appreciate being lumped into the same category as our pioneering birthday boy, that’s not quite fair.”
This one got some laughs, some looks of appreciation.
“And then Adam not only figured it out, but solved another problem as well. People on Earth used to label anyone who obsessed over the Moon as a crazy person. Not just a crazy person, but a very special kind of crazy person. A Lunatic. They decried lunacy, mocked dedication to the beautiful orb in their sky. But no, folks, no, Adam Moonborn was not to tolerate that. And so it is that we have embraced it. Whether born here or not, anyone can be a Lunatic. We are all Lunatics. As Shakespeare said: the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are all the same. But let’s admire the multitude-containing man who is all three at all times!
“And thus, with no further ado, I present Captain Adam Moonborn, the First Man of the Moon, Chief Disruption Officer of Gamelan Corporation, Mayor of the Domes of Gamelan, and Champion of the Lunatics!”
Five
Remember when we were in America? he says, once the applause dies down. Not us, the people in this room, not literally. Although maybe some of you once were. I visited America, as a child and as a young man. I was born an American, when that country still existed.
But that’s not what I ask you to remember. I want you to remember when humans invaded and stole that continent from the humans who had lived alongside it.
There are two ways to be human: to share or to own. All the cultures in which sharing could thrive, those have been lost, eaten by the dominant ones, lost and washed away.
The colonizers throughout history have been so determined to conquer that they did not look at what they did to themselves when they stole and conquered. And there is a reason that the moment man first walked on this rock, he bored of it. There was no one to take it away from.
The American continents were taken from the Ojibway, the Lakota, the Dand and the Cherokee. The Aztecs and the Mayans and the Piraha. Then there was Australia, taken from its indigenous people. And across the planet, the Romans and the Vikings before that. The Japanese taking from the Chinese, the English taking from the Irish. The story of man is the story of one man seeing something and taking it from his fellow man.
But the Moon? This place? This beautiful home, this brilliant canvas? There was no one to take it from and so it bored us, before my father and his other pioneers started putting down their roots.
But you know what? There was someone to take it away from, and I don’t just mean the lovers and the poets. Yes, the collective imaginations of society owned the Moon, and they lost it when people started giving birth up here, started raising their children here, started making this a living, breathing home. Shakespeare and Shelley, Coleridge and Kubrick, they never owned the Moon, not the way we own it now.
But someone did.
They came up here and they conquered it.
They took the Moon from God.
Six
Later conversations, along with my reading, revealed that this was not the first time Adam Moonborn had given a speech about stealing the Moon from God. It had been a theme of his for years, particularly during his days of heavy drugs and drinking.
According to Katharine Lubbock’s Eden Lost, he obsessed over it, at times confessing to those nearest to him that humans did not belong on the Moon. She claims this became a pronounced fear during his brief time at the University of Northern Eisenhower, an anxiety related to his dreaded trip back to the Moon and the loss of his parents and sister.
It remains, for me at least, unconfirmed that this speech had even taken a pessimistic twist in its message. The conclusion, delivered by Moonborn at his forty-seventh birthday, was one of optimism, hope, radiance, and a brightest, boldest future. Or, at least, that’s how he intended it.
Seven
“This puts a terrible weight on us,” Moonborn continued. “We’ve stolen something once again, like every immigrating and conquering and pioneering culture before us. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, as always, but this time the giant truly is the ineffable and unconquerable God. And what can we do with such a responsibility? We must protect it, but from ourselves and our creations. And in that duty, we have failed. We have lost so many things, so many wonderful things.”
He stopped speaking for a moment. I stared at him, pondering if it was an act or if he really did find himself on the verge of tears, overwhelmed with grief and emotion, his losses dancing before his eyes once again.
“I have created something with the brilliant Peter Teller. Doctor Teller is here with us this evening, and he deserves your recognition. Doctor Teller, please stand up.”
Two tables from us, a man stood, thin and gaunt, his face devoid of anything resembling humor or joy.
Moonborn leaned into the podium, rolling up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket.
“Okay, folks,” he said. “Open the curtains.”
The curtains behind him dropped, revealing a patch of the green golf course. We had a great view from here, hundreds of yards. And there, at the edge of the course, a great silver something. I squinted, trying to understand what I saw.
It looked just like a flying saucer from an old science fiction movie, something you would see only in a nostalgic telestream about entertainments of the past. I would never expect to see it in person, moving toward me across a great green expanse.
Shock rippled through the crowd. This provided extraordinary reassurance that: yes, what I saw was real and, yes, my befuddlement at it was justified. The entire room shared one reaction, aside from the bored tablemates, who had apparently been in on the secret.
“That magnificent ship is piloted, as it approaches us, by its first mate, none other than Dunn Heinemann, known to his friends and associates as Starboy. And he’s earned that title, I tell you, as he is an extraordinary pilot.
“But I want to clarify something about this ship. It has no autopilot. It has no machine learning, no artificial intelligence, and there is nothing robotic in its mind. It has no mind. It is only a ship, and there is a reason for that, a damned important reason. I mentioned my family, my lost family. Few of you know what it is that took their lives. It was a malfunctioning machine, here on Moon. They had gone for a groundbreaking voyage, seeking out, on the far side of the Moon, a place for Dome H. It was to be the second Gamelan Base, a beautiful notion.
“My father was known for his unchecked ambitions, and it’s one of many things that made him a great man. I’m the result of those unchecked ambitions. You think anyone would be comfortable having children on the Moon, had my mother and father not been the pioneers? I’m probably one of the least impressive results, to be entirely honest.
“But he had one program that failed entirely. How many of you are familiar with Gamelan Mines? How many of you know that he entrusted a fleet of robots to finish the job of conquering this place for him, and that it was this fleet that took him down? Unchecked intelligence, unchecked learning. These are beautiful traits in humans but terrible traits in machines. Dangerous and frightening traits in machines.
“This is what killed my mother, my father, my sister. They had set the machines to work, on the other side of the Moon from here, and the machines destroyed their ship when they went to check on them. And not just them, but others, too. Their entire crew.
“The machines, we made them too smart, too clever. They cannot be remotely tracked, cannot be traced, cannot be disarmed without confronting them head-on. Until now, it is something that I have allowed to fester, like all of us have. And this is partially because they have stuck to their side and we have stuck to ours. I know this is no surprise to many in here, this reason that Armstrong, Lucas, Aldrin, and Gamelan are all on the side of the Moon that faces the Earth.
The other side is a wild world, overrun by these deranged machines.”
None of this made sense to me, not the words he said, not the context in which he said them, with a flying saucer approaching us behind him.
“No one minds a secret, as long as they are in on the secret. And here’s the secret, folks: no one is safe. These machines are still out there, and they’re still dangerous. But I’m going to take care of them. I’m going to rid the Moon of the evil that took my parents’ lives and my sister’s life.”
The flying saucer came to a halt behind him. He gestured at it, stepping back from the microphone. It lowered to the ground, and feet descended from its lower half, eight legs that allowed it to rest on the green lawn below it. A hatch opened in what appeared to be the front—the closest part to us, at any rate. A ladder descended from this hatch. Down climbed a figure, apparently Starboy, wearing an all-blue space suit with a bubble resembling a tinted, old-fashioned fish tank over his head. They appeared to have gone all-out in creating the desired aesthetics for this spaceship and its crew.
“Behold, the Ozymandias,” Moonborn proclaimed. “This ship is the answer. But no, it’s not a flying saucer. It’s a hovering saucer. This saucer is a birthday gift, from me to myself. And it’s also a gift to all of you. I give you, I give myself, I give us a peaceful future.”
Applause and cheers.
Eight
The dinner program did not stop there. I would have expected the keynote to be Adam Moonborn’s gift to himself and the world, but instead the evening became an array of speeches and jokes, japes and roasts, celebrating Adam Moonborn and his contributions to Lunatics everywhere. And, apparently in typical Adam Moonborn fashion, he seemed to be serving as the Master of Ceremonies for his own roasts and toasts, calling people up, shaking their hands, slapping them on the back before they launched into reciting their birthday wishes for him.