Bouncing Off the Moon

by David Gerrold

  Crosshatch decking had been laid along the bottom of the pod to provide a level floor. Underneath the floor, several plastic bags served as impromptu water tanks—another use for inflatable airlocks; waste not, want not. Above us, identical mesh decking provided the ceiling to this level and the floor to the next; we could see up through the crosshatch to the level above. It was just like being in a tube-town again, only this time with lighter gravity.

  I sprawled on my back, with my eyes closed, watching the purple glares fade into mottling blue-and-gray fractalizations, watching the fabric of unreality unravel in my imagination, occasionally sipping at the water bag that Alexei was holding for me. Every so often, he'd tip it to my lips, let me suck a few swallows, then pull it away before I could start gulping greedily.

  It didn't make sense. Why was he being so nice to me now if he wanted to kill us? Maybe because he needed our deaths to look natural?

  Sure. That was it. Because he knew the monkey would be a witness to whatever he did. The testimony of robots had been used before in court cases, especially when they had stored audio and video records pertinent to the legal matter at hand. Most robots above Class 6—and that included the monkey—were continually sorting and storing their records. Cheap memory made it possible for a robot to retain a lot of information; it turned out to be useful for a lot of things—family albums, long-term health records, behavioral records, insurance tracking, consumer tracking, the census, stuff like that. Anyone who wanted to track "lifestyle information" could poll the international robot database for specifically correlated information.

  It was rumored that robots were also good for amateur pornography, because they also tracked human sexual behavior. Which is why Mom had always said, "Don't do anything in front of a robot that you wouldn't want God to see you doing." Which meant never do anything in front of a robot, if you didn't want to get caught. There were so many robots in some neighborhoods that getting away with a crime was impossible.

  This didn't mean that crime didn't happen. It just meant that enforcement was more about finding where the criminal was than who he was.

  So, if Alexei were planning to kill us, he had to make it look like an accident. Because the monkey was watching everything. That would explain leaving us on the rim and taking us into the sunlight to get to Prospector's Station.

  Alexei couldn't just take the monkey from us, because he knew I'd programmed it to be loyal to me first, then Douglas, and finally Stinky. It was emotionally linked. It wouldn't go with anyone else unless we told it to—or unless we were dead. If we were dead, its loyalty programming would store all pertinent information about us and our deaths in unerasable files—and without further instructions of who it should report to, it would shut down and wait for the next person to open it up and assign ownership to himself. Alexei? Probably. Most certainly.

  Unless I had been out in the sun too long and was still making up crazy paranoid fantasies … I had to consider that too. Alexei put the water bag to my lips again. I took another sip. Around me, I could hear everyone else breathing softly, catching their breaths, sucking at water bags. I could smell their sweat in the air. It smelled like a locker room in here. We all stank. I didn't care. It was cool. Blessedly cool. Almost too cold. I was evaporating excess heat as rapidly as my body could carry my overheated blood to my skin.

  What was in the monkey that was so valuable it was worth killing for?

  I was pretty sure it wasn't information. Whatever data was packed into the memory bars would have already been piped to its recipient some other way by now. Probably the moment we were served with our first subpoena at Geostationary somebody somewhere was saying "Oh, merde!" and then, "All right. Switch to Plan B. Code it in the least significant bit of each pixel of the local news and let them download it off the web." Or whatever. There were just too many ways to smuggle bits from here to there. So it wasn't the information. It had to be something physical.

  Money? No. Codes for money? No, that was more information. They'd have found another way to send it by now. Physical ID keys that unlocked money? Maybe. But if that's what it was, they wouldn't have trusted Dad with it. It had to be something so unique that this was the only way to move it from here to there. Wherever there was.

  So it wasn't information. And it wasn't money. What else was there?

  Power.

  I took another sip of water. I was feeling better, but I wasn't ready to open my eyes yet.

  Power was a good answer. People would kill for power, wouldn't they? Of course they would. If they wanted it badly enough.

  But what kind of power?

  Processing power.

  If you had processing power, you had every kind of power. It all depended how you applied the processing power.

  Quantum processing?

  Could you pack a quantum CPU into a memory bar?

  I'd have to ask Douglas that.

  He'd probably tell me I was crazy.

  It was an outrageous idea.

  Alexei trying to kill us—then saving us—then holding the water bag for me. Yeah, sure. The monkey wasn't sentient. It hadn't done anything at all to help us survive.

  No. There had to be a simpler explanation.

  I laughed at my own paranoia and opened my eyes, blinking and squinting. I could almost see again. I lifted up on my elbow to thank Alexei for saving me—and almost choked in horror.

  It wasn't Alexei holding the water bag.

  It was the monkey. It curled back both its lips to show its teeth and gave me its goofiest smile.

  CHANGES

  We had to get away from Alexei.

  I had to convince Douglas and Mickey that we had to get away from Alexei.

  I had to get them in a room away from Alexei so I could tell them why we had to get away from Alexei. I doubted that they would believe me. Heck, even I didn't believe me.

  Alexei had stripped off his Scuba suit, finally, and was giving himself a "space-bath." A space-bath is where you strip naked and wipe yourself all over with alcohol pads and moisturizer sponges. It stings a lot, but it gets you mostly clean. He tossed bath bags at everyone else and told us to do the same. "Worst thing on Luna is nose crime. Don't make big stink on Luna. Very bad manners. Wash every six hours. When you wake up and when you go to bed. Before you put on space suit, after you take it off. Before sex, after sex. Use moisturizers on skin so you don't dry out and flake and make dust. Shave body hair regularly, same reason. Use deodorants. Others should not have to breathe your effluvia. Also slows down disease germs."

  So I opened the bag and took a bath. I stripped out of my jumpsuit and sat skinny and apart and wiped as much of myself as I could reach. Mickey and Douglas and Stinky were all washing each other, scrubbing each other's backsides and behind the knees and backs of the ears and places like that. The places I couldn't reach, I handed the cloth to the monkey and let him do it. Alexei offered, but I didn't want him touching me anymore.

  The thing was, the cleaner I got, the better I felt, and the sillier the whole thing began to feel. It was just me listening too much to my own thoughts again—like Mom always said. She said that too much silence wasn't good for a person. "Your mind goes go off into never-never land and never comes back. Just like your father. He went off, did too much thinking for his own good, and he never came back either." Yeah, right, Mom.

  But Mom didn't say all that stuff just because she believed it. She said it because she thought it was true and she didn't want us to make the same stupid mistakes that she and Dad had made. So she figured if she told us the punch lines, we wouldn't have to live through the jokes. Ha ha. We saw how that worked out. I had the fastest divorce in the family.

  I finished wiping myself—even in places that most people don't talk about—and pushed the soiled cloth back into its bag. I tucked it into a larger bag for waste, hanging from the inevitable wall webbing. I was beginning to suspect that everything on Luna was made from cargo pods, and there would be wall webbing everywhere.


  Alexei glanced over to me and said, "Hokay, girls—let's go upstairs. Are you ready for your disguises?"

  "Huh?"

  "You do not think you can ride the train as the Dingillian family, do you? Ah, from the looks on your faces, I can see you have not thought about this at all. You are lucky I am so foresighted. Come upstairs. Follow me, all of you. Hurry now."

  We shrugged and followed him up the ladder to the top level of the station—we went hand over hand, feet were redundant. His endless monologue continued. "Douglas, you will be Samm Brengle-Tucker, famous hermit prospector. Everybody knows Brengle-Tucker, he is very famous because nobody knows him. You ask, if no one has ever met him, what proof do you have that nobody knows him? There is none, of course, because you cannot prove a negative. We had that in logic class at Lunatic U. Prove that you cannot prove a negative. Very confusing, very clever—Loonies like word games, logic puzzles. But you understand the problem, da?. How can everyone know him if nobody knows him? That is because he never comes in from the cold. Or the hot. He only sends e-mail. He orders supplies, he pays in cash. He picks up supplies when he gets around to it. He lives in self-sufficient tunnels. He has ice claim registered somewhere in Superstition Crater. Sometimes he sells water and soil with earthworms, only here they are Luna worms, because they can't be earthworms on moon, can they? Never mind. We are all Lunatics here. But Brengle-Tucker keeps to himself. Why? Because Brengle-Tucker does not exist. Not at all. He is made-up person, one of many. He is 'imaginary companion,' one of the unborn-again. Very convenient to have fictitious friends. They can do many things you can't. And they are always not-there for you, da! But today Samm Brengle-Tucker and his new wife and daughter will be there for us. Samm Brengle-Tucker has married mail-order bride from"—Alexei took my chin in his hand and tilted my face upward—"Nunovit Province in Canada. She does not speak much English. What shall his new wife be named, eh? I think Maura Lore-Fields. Da. And lovely daughter?" He turned to Stinky. "What is good name for cute little Luna girl?"

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  Alexei turned back to me, very serious. "Marshals are looking for two young men, a teener-boy and a boy-child. And a monkey. Marshals are not looking for an old hermit prospector, his young wife, and her daughter by a previous marriage. You'll have to leave the monkey behind, you know. Is instant giveaway."

  "No, we won't. And I'm not putting on a dress either." Although part of me was thinking that the disguises were a pretty smart idea, another part was muttering darkly that I shouldn't agree too easily no matter what I thought. I had to give a performance of saying no, so they wouldn't think I was—like Douglas and Mickey. And why did that matter anymore, anyway? It didn't seem to matter to anybody else, so why should it matter to me? This whole business was very confusing.

  "Listen, Charles Dingillian," Alexei said, almost angrily. "You told me, didn't you, how J'mee, the boy, was really J'mee, the girl? The one with the implant who turned you in at Geostationary? If cross-dressing worked for her, why not you?"

  "Except it didn't work for her," I pointed out.

  "Of course not. She opened her big mouth. You are too smart for that, da? Come with me; I have just the dress for you." He led the way aft.

  I followed, still complaining. "I'll look silly."

  "You'll look pretty. You'll feel pretty. You have lovely tenor voice. Everyone will believe. You will have fun."

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  There was a row of lockers along one wall of the machine-shop pod. One of them had the name BRENGLE-TUCKER on it. There were also several interesting-looking crates stacked against the wall, stenciled for delivery to BRENGLE-TUCKER. Alexei counted them off and pulled one out, setting it aside for the moment, then turned back to the lockers.

  He showed his card to the door of the BRENGLE-TUCKER locker, and it clicked and swung open; he pulled out a roll of labels with Russian and English lettering and began pasting new destination labels over all of the BRENGLE-TUCKER labels on the crates. When he finished, he pushed the boxes into a transfer tube connected to the aft hatch. "Outgoing mail," he explained. "Incoming is delivered at other end."

  He unlocked the one remaining crate to reveal a rack of clothing, all kinds, some very ugly wigs, and a makeup kit. "I order this special from Luna City." He held up an ugly-looking dress. "Just for you, Charles. While floating in ballast tank, I am thinking Dingillians might need disguises on Luna, so my lifelong friend Samm Brengle-Tucker sends in order before we jump off Line. Or do you like this one better? I did not know your size, I had to guess."

  I didn't say anything in response. I just scowled at the oversized dress and the awful wigs. Alexei's story didn't make sense. Not if you thought about it. He'd said he'd been listening to the channel chatter. As soon as he'd heard about the marshals waiting at Whirlaway, he came to get us. When would he have had time to phone ahead to Luna? He wouldn't. We launched off the Line almost immediately after we'd climbed into the pod. He couldn't have made the call after we were en route, so he'd have had to have made this plan and ordered these disguises before we left Geostationary—or at least before he came to get us. In which case … his story about the channel chatter and the marshals might be false.

  Alexei was chattering too much to notice my silence. He tossed the makeup kit to Mickey. "Here, you get started. You and Douglas, use suntan number nine, da? You are Lunar prospectors. Douglas, you are here longer; use a lot, get very dark. Not to worry. Is permanent color. Takes at least a month to fade. Face and neck only. Mickey, you will not need as much. You have only been here a year. You do not work outside so much. Only some."

  Then he went burrowing through silky nylon things, sorting and tossing. "Brengle-Tucker is good man. He order everything for his pretty wife. Even fancy underwear. Just in case someone looks up receipts, this shows he adores her, leaves nothing out. First rule of smuggling, Charles—do not give reason for someone to be suspicious; always give them something else to look at. Like underwear. Most people do not look under underwear, that is why you hide your dirty books under it. So here is nice underwear. Don't look funny at me, Charles. You are not your panties. And clean underwear is always welcome, even if it is pink and has lace trim. Is Loonie lesson, never look gift underwear in crotch. Clean underwear is as valuable as water. Sometimes more. Here, this will fit you too. You are not much bigger in the chest than I am." He tossed me a padded bra. Stinky giggled. I glowered at him.

  "Is this really necessary—?" I started to object.

  "Da!" he nodded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Is good disguise. I have wear it myself sometimes."

  I looked at all the unfamiliar clothes he had pushed into my arms, with a feeling of dismay. "Why can't you just call your Mr. Bagel?"

  "Is Beagle, not Bagel, and is not good idea. Not from here. Is too much expensive. Costs much fuel. Emergency is over. And will make more risk."

  "But I don't want to do this!"

  "Oh? You will run across moon, naked to the sunlight, risking death with every step, all without question—but you will not wear a bra even if it means saving your life?"

  I looked to my older brother. "Douglas—?"

  "Hey, I have to pretend I'm your husband."

  "Can't Mickey be my husband?"

  "No. He's already mine."

  "You know what I mean—"

  "Come on, Charles. Please?" Douglas gave me the impatient Mommy look. "Pretend it's Halloween."

  "No," Mickey interrupted, in a voice like he was giving orders. "That's the wrong approach. Chigger, pretend it's a play. And you're the star. Everyone is watching your every move and listening to your every line. So you have to get into your character and stay there, because all our lives might depend on it."

  "Oh, that's good," said Douglas. "Make him self-conscious."

  "Her," corrected Mickey. "And you too, Douglas. You have to stay in character too. All of us. From now on, this is Maura, and you're Samm. And Bobby is … "

 
"Valerie," I suggested.

  "No, I'm not!" he snapped right back. "I'm Patty."

  "Patty—?"

  "Yes, Patty !"

  "Okay. Then I'm going to call you Pattycakes."

  "And I'm going to call you Mommy."

  It must have been the startled look on my face—both Mickey and Douglas laughed out loud. Alexei said, "Hokay, then it's settled. Now, hurry and dress."

  Mommy?

  ALL ABOARD

  There was no official record of Janos, Maura, and Patty arriving on Luna, but that wasn't unusual. Luna didn't police her borders; thousands of illegal immigrants dropped off the Line every year, riding cargo pods to various hard-to-reach locations. No one knew how many hidden colonies there were, although satellite-based observatories had mapped over eleven thousand cargo pods, unmanned stations, and automated industrial installations capable of sustaining human life. It was estimated there could be as many as two thousand more habitats, either buried or camouflaged.

  Another way to estimate the total number of human beings on Luna was to measure total power consumption. The entire moon took its power through the cable system. Superconducting wires carried power from the bright side to the dark side, wherever it was needed. Because the Loonies believed in wasting nothing, everything was monitored. The numbers on water usage, heat radiation, oxygen recycling, waste production, and food consumption were all part of the economic balance. How much did Luna need for her own people? How much could she export to Mars and the asteroids? Once all the various industrial and agricultural processes were factored out, once the exports were subtracted, there was still a considerable discrepancy between projected and actual consumption of resources.