But trying to build those self-contained starships taught us how to do this instead.
Earthside, you walk out of your door, you see birds fly. Just after the sun sets and the bushes bloom with bugs, you will see bats flitter, silhouetted as they neep. In hot afternoons the bees waver, heavy with pollen, and I swear even fishes fly. But nothing flies between the stars except energy. You wanna be converted into energy, like Arizona?
So we Go Down.
Instead of up.
“The first thing you will see is the main hall. That should cheer up you claustrophobics,” says my Embezzler. “It is the biggest open space we have in the Singapore facility. And as you will see, that’s damn big!” The travelers chuckle in appreciation. I wonder if they don’t pipe in some of that cheerful sound.
And poor Gerda, she will wake up for a second time in another new world. I fear it will be too much for her.
The lift walls turn like stiles, reflecting yet more light in shards, and we step out.
Ten stories of brand names go down in circles—polished marble floors, air-conditioning, little murmuring carts, robot pets that don’t poop, kids in the latest balloon shoes.
“What do you think of that!” the Malay Network demands of me. All its heads turn, including the women wearing modest headscarves.
“I think it looks like Kuala Lumpur on a rainy afternoon.”
The corridors of the emporia go off into infinity as well, as if you could shop all the way to Alpha Centauri. An illusion of course, like standing in a hall of mirrors.
It’s darn good, this technology, it fools the eye for all of thirty seconds. To be fooled longer than that, you have to want to be fooled. At the end of the corridor, reaching out for somewhere beyond, distant and pure, there is only light.
We have remade the world.
Agnete looks worn. “I need a drink, where’s a bar?”
I need to be away too, away from these people who know that I have a wife for whom my only value has now been spent.
Our little trolley finds us, calls our name enthusiastically, and advises us. In Ramlee Mall, level ten, Central Tower we have the choice of Bar Infinity, the Malacca Club (share the Maugham experience), British India, the Kuala Lumpur Tower View….
Agnete chooses the Seaside Pier; I cannot tell if out of kindness or irony.
I step inside the bar with its high ceiling and for just a moment my heart leaps with hope. There is the sea, the islands, the bridges, the sails, the gulls, and the sunlight dancing. Wafts of sugar vapor inside the bar imitate sea mist, and the breathable sugar makes you high. At the other end of the bar is what looks like a giant orange orb (half of one, the other half is just reflected). People lounge on the brand-name sand (guaranteed to brush away and evaporate.) Fifty meters overhead, there is a virtual mirror that doubles distance so you can look up and see yourself from what appears to be a hundred meters up, as if you are flying. A Network on its collective back is busy spelling the word HOME with their bodies.
We sip martinis. Gerda still sleeps and I now fear she always will.
“So,” says Agnete, her voice suddenly catching up with her butt, and plonking down to Earth and relative calm. “Sorry about that back there. It was a tense moment for both of us. I have doubts too. About coming here, I mean.”
She puts her hand on mine.
“I will always be so grateful to you,” she says and really means it. I play with one of her fingers. I seem to have purchased loyalty.
“Thank you,” I say, and I realize that she has lost mine.
She tries to bring love back by squeezing my hand. “I know you didn’t want to come. I know you came because of us.”
Even the boys know there is something radically wrong. Sampul and Tharum stare in silence, wide brown eyes. Did something similar happen with Dad number one?
Rith the eldest chortles with scorn. He needs to hate us so that he can fly the nest.
My heart is so sore I cannot speak.
“What will you do?” she asks. That sounds forlorn, so she then tries to sound perky. “Any ideas?”
“Open a casino,” I say, feeling deadly.
“Oh! Channa! What a wonderful idea, it’s just perfect!”
“Isn’t it? All those people with nothing to do.” Someplace they can bring their powder. I look out at the sea.
Rith rolls his eyes. Where is there for Rith to go from here? I wonder. I see that he too will have to destroy his inheritance. What will he do, drill the rock? Dive down into the lava? Or maybe out of pure rebellion ascend to Earth again?
The drug wears off and Gerda awakes, but her eyes are calm and she takes an interest in the table and the food. She walks outside onto the mall floor, and suddenly squeals with laughter and runs to the railing to look out. She points at the glowing yellow sign with black ears and says “Disney.” She says all the brand names aloud, as if they are all old friends.
I was wrong. Gerda is at home here.
I can see myself wandering the whispering marble halls like a ghost, listening for something that is dead.
We go to our suite. It’s just like the damn casino, but there are no boats outside to push slivers of wood into your hands, no sand too hot for your feet. Cambodia has ceased to exist, for us.
Agnete is beside herself with delight. “What window do you want?”
I ask for downtown Phnom Penh. A forest of gray, streaked skyscrapers to the horizon. “In the rain,” I ask.
“Can’t we have something a bit more cheerful?”
“Sure. How about Tuol Sleng prison?”
I know she doesn’t want me. I know how to hurt her. I go for a walk.
Overhead in the dome is the Horsehead Nebula. Radiant, wonderful, deadly, thirty years to cross at the speed of light.
I go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist looks like a phony doctor in an ad. I ask, “Is…is there some way out?”
“You can go Earthside with no ID. People do. They end up living in huts on Sentosa. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
I just shake my head. It’s like we’ve been edited to ensure that nothing disturbing actually gets said. He gives me a tiny white bag with blue lettering on it.
Instant, painless, like all my flopping guests at the casino.
“Not here,” he warns me. “You take it and go somewhere else, like the public toilets.”
Terrifyingly, the pack isn’t sealed properly. I’ve picked it up, I could have the dust of it on my hands; I don’t want to wipe them anywhere. What if one of the children licks it?
I know then I don’t want to die. I just want to go home, and always will. I am a son of Kambu, Kampuchea.
“Ah,” he says and looks pleased. “You know, the Buddha says that we must accept.”
“So why didn’t we accept the Earth?” I ask him.
The pharmacist in his white lab coat shrugs. “We always want something different.”
We always must move on and if we can’t leave home, it drives us mad. Blocked and driven mad, we do something new.
There was one final phase to becoming a man. I remember my uncle. The moment his children and his brother’s children were all somewhat grown, he left us to become a monk. That was how a man was completed, in the old days.
I stand with a merit bowl in front of the wat. I wear orange robes with a few others. Curiously enough, Rith has joined me. He thinks he has rebelled. People from Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma, and my own land give us food for their dead. We bless it and chant in Pali.
All component things are indeed transient.
They are of the nature of arising and decaying.
Having come into being, they cease to be.
The cessation of this process is bliss.
Uninvited he has come hither
He has departed hence without approval
Even as he came, just so he went
What lamentation then could there be?
We got what we wanted. We always do, don’t we, as a species? One way or an
other.
The Last Apostle
MICHAEL CASSUTT
Michael Cassutt is a television producer and screenwriter who lives in Studio City, California, with his wife, Cindy, and two children, Ryan and Alexandra. He has published five novels, most recently Tango Midnight (2003). He began publishing short fiction in the mid-70s, and novels in the mid-80s. Since 1985, he has worked in writing and producing for television, and has had an extensive association with SF and fantasy shows (including Outer Limits, Max Headroom, The Twilight Zone). He is also a noted space historian, who has published two large volumes of the biographical encyclopedia Who’s Who in Space, and collaborated on the biography Deke! with astronaut Deke Slayton. He is currently completing Heaven’s Shadow, the first volume of an SF trilogy, with screenwriter David S. Goyer. In an interview he remarks, “My desire to do “realistic” space novels pretty much forced me to make them contemporary. But I’ve always wanted to write ‘pure,’ far future science fiction at book length.”
“The Last Apostle” was published in Asimov’s. Cassutt’s knowledge of astronauts and space programs is so extensive that this alternate universe story of astronauts has the feel of naturalism and conviction, that made us want to include it in this volume. It is a fine example of space program fiction that looks back at the twentieth century without a sense of lingering failure.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.
—Matthew 10:26
“Heart attack?”
“No. Took a spill on his mountain bike. Hit a patch of sand barreling down some crappy road up near Flagstaff.”
Spell-check smoothed the errors of the e-mail exchange while failing to add texture or emotion. Nevertheless, Joe Liquori could not help smiling at the inescapable perfection of the news. Chuck Behrens’ death had all the elements of his life: the outdoors, excess speed, and a total disregard for other people’s rules and expectations.
For God’s sake, Chuck had been eighty-nine last April thirteenth. (The birth date was easy to remember; he and Joe shared it, three years apart.) Joe could not possibly have gotten his ancient ass onto a mountain bike, much less ridden it up, around or down some twisty road.
“He was a good man,” he typed, as tears came to his eyes and his breathing quickened. Thank God this was text, not voice. These sudden, uncontrollable swells of emotion had afflicted Joe for forty years. But they still annoyed him.
“It’s okay, Dad.” Jason, his son, was fifty-nine, with children and grandchildren of his own: did he find himself growing more teary?
“Is there going to be a service?” Not that there was any chance Joe would be able to attend.
“Family says only a private memorial. Possibly going to want his ashes on the Moon.” Jason added an emoticon for irony.
“So I’m the last one.”
“And the best.” Thank you for that, son. Joe logged off with a goodbye for now, then sat back.
There had been twelve of them on the six lunar landing missions. Twelve who experienced the terrifying, exhilarating, barely controlled fall from sixty miles altitude to the gunpowder gray dust of the lunar surface. Twelve who opened a flimsy metal door to a harsh world of blinding sunlight. Twelve who had the explorer’s privilege of uttering first words. Twelve who left footprints where no one had gone before.
More accurately, twelve who, years later, would experience trouble with eyes, heart, hands, lungs, all traceable to time spent slogging across the lunar surface wearing a rigid metallic cloth balloon. Twelve who bathed in varying degrees of acclaim while suffering varying degrees of guilt over those who died along the way—and those who did the real work on the ground.
Twelve Apostles, according to that stupid book.
Joe knew them all, of course. There was the Aviator—the classic American kid from the heartland, standing outside a grass airfield watching planes take off…the Preacher, the reformed drunkard and womanizer who found Jesus not on the Moon, not during the death march of booze and babes that followed, but years later after, a bumpy airplane ride as a passenger…the Visionary, who used his lunar celebrity to give unjustified weight to everything from spoon-bending to geomancy…
There was the Businessman, and his shadier, less successful twin, the Shark. The Mystic. The Doctor. The Politician. The Good Old Boy. The Lifer.
Then, as always, there was the Alpha Male of Apollo—Chuck Behrens.
Joseph Liquori, ninety-four, lunar module pilot for Apollo 506 and known, by the same scheme, as Omega—the Last Apostle—sipped his carefully rationed vodka and let himself weep, for a fallen comrade and an old friend, and for himself.
An hour later, Joe decided to take a walk.
This was not a casual decision. He had reached a stage in his life where exiting his living quarters required preparation. The facility he now called home provided him with a tiny bedroom and shared common area, roughly the same living space he had as a graduate student in Minneapolis’ Dinky Town in the 1950s. He could afford better—a palace in northern California, with vistas, gardens, rows of books, servants, and possibly a big-breasted “nurse.”
In fact, Joe had once possessed a mansion as well as several attractive, attentive nurses. But the nurses were gone, and the palace in Marin County had already been torn down, another lesson in the ephemeral nature of earthly existence. Or so the Preacher had informed Joe, the last time they shared a meal.
In order to take a walk, Joe faced the usual agonizing hygienic and mechanical procedures typical of advanced age—the mechanisms to assure continence, the visual and aural aids, the medical monitoring hardware, all bringing to mind the phrase he had over-used since his arrival: “It’s easier to walk on the Moon than it is to walk down my driveway.”
He was not required to get permission, but it was always smart to have help. Kari Schiff, the fresh-faced pixie from Kansas who called herself Joe’s “co-pilot,” didn’t think he should be going outside at all.
Until he told her about the Alpha’s death. “Then let me come with you,” she said.
“I won’t be going far.” It wasn’t a big lie, by NASA astronaut standards.
“You’re sure?” Kari looked at her two colleagues, Jeffords and Bock. Bock had medical training, but he was also a passionate Libertarian. Any doubts about Joe’s ability to take a walk in these circumstances were subordinate to his conviction that each man had the inalienable right to choose the time and place of his death.
Not that a walk would necessarily be fatal. “Okay,” Kari said, “let’s put on your armor.”
The “armor” was an EVA suit, a rigid exo-skeleton that split in two at the waist, and in the best of circumstances could never be donned by a single person working alone. Especially not a man in his nineties, even if said senior was working in lunar gravity. Checking the life-support fittings and operation took more time.
Finally Joe was buttoned up, much as he had been that day in April 1973, when he had emerged from the front hatch of the lunar module Pathfinder on the Apollo 506 mission.
Five hours after receiving the instant message from his son about the Alpha’s death, Joe Liquori emerged from the thirty-foot tall habitat (nicknamed the Comfort Inn) that he shared with three other astronauts at Aitken Base, on the far side of the Moon, to complete the last mission of Apollo.
The Preacher died of age-related illnesses at a facility in Colorado Springs in 2011.
The names had been bestowed on them by Maxine Felice, a famously confrontational Swiss journalist who tracked them relentlessly for a decade, ultimately publishing a controversial bestseller called The Apostles. (Chuck hated the title, as he made clear to Joe the next time they met. “Apostles? Remember what happened to those guys? Crucified upside down? Boiled in oil? No, thanks!”)
Felice had persisted: it was no coincidence, she said, that their number was twelve. “Our mission is slightly different,” the Aviator had said. “And so is the God we serve.”
The woman dismi
ssed that. “What is Apollo if not a god?”
Joe’s agreement with Aitken Enterprises entitled him to a ninety-day stay with “possible” extensions. In truth, the company’s laughable inability to maintain a regular launch schedule ensured at least one automatic “extension” to 180. And when an earlier Aitken Station crewmember required return to earth soonest, Joe offered to buy his seat; his hand-picked crew ops panel magically agreed; and Aitken’s cash flow problems eased for a month.
On the day the Alpha Apostle ran off that road in Arizona, Joe Liquori was in his 196th day at Aitken Base, where his time was largely spent blogging to the public—and telling sea stories. (The station trio especially loved the “true” story behind the Mystic’s death.)
Kari Schiff, the real space cadet of the three, even played the Maxine Felice game, asking Joe, “If you guys were the Apostles, what are we?”
“‘The three who can’t find ice’?” Bock said, sneering. “Weren’t they in the Letter to the Corinthians?” Jeffords howled with laughter as Kari punched him in the arm. It was true that the Aitken team had yet to find significant water ice, the primary goal of the whole enterprise. But they had found traces, and they continued to search, spending most of their time preparing for each EVA, then actually performing the ten-hour job in armor, then recovering. They were lucky to accomplish two cycles every eight days.
In between, they managed the Virtual Moonwalks, driving mini-rovers across the surface to give paying customers back on Earth their own Aitken Experience. Now and then they made test runs of the processing gear from the Ops Shack, a second habitat connected to the Comfort Inn by an inflatable tunnel.
Year’s Best SF 15 Page 37