by Neil Clarke
It wasn’t empty.
A woman, frowning and holding up a protective hand, cringed from his helmet lamp. “Turn that thing off,” she said.
He obeyed. In the soft light that ensued he saw: stark white flattop, pink scalp visible through the sides. High cheekbones. Eyelids lifted slightly, like wings, by carefully sculpted eye shadow. Dark lips, full mouth. He had to admire the character it took to make up a face so carefully, only to hide it beneath a helmet. Then he saw her red and orange Studio Volga suit.
It was Izmailova.
To cover his embarrassment, he took his time removing his gloves and helmet. Izmailova moved her own helmet from the cot to make room, and he sat down beside her. Extending a hand, he stiffly said, “We’ve met before. My name is—”
“I know. It’s written on your suit.”
“Oh yeah. Right.”
For an uncomfortably long moment, neither spoke. At last Izmailova cleared her throat and briskly said, “This is ridiculous. There’s no reason we should—”
CLANG.
Their heads jerked toward the door in unison. The sound was harsh, loud, metallic. Gunther slammed his helmet on, grabbed for his gloves. Izmailova, also suiting up as rapidly as she could, tensely subvocalized into her trance chip: “What is it?”
Methodically snapping his wrist latches shut one by one, Gunther said, “I think it’s a metal punch.” Then, because the helmet muffled his words, he repeated them over the chip.
CLANG. This second time, they were waiting for the sound. Now there could be no doubt. Something was trying to break open the outer airlock door.
“A what?!”
“Might be a hammer of some type, or a blacksmith unit. Just be thankful it’s not a laser jig.” He held up his hands before him. “Give me a safety check.”
She turned his wrists one way, back, took his helmet in her hands and gave it a twist to test its seal. “You pass.” She held up her own wrists. “But what is it trying to do?”
Her gloves were sealed perfectly. One helmet dog had a bit of give in it, but not enough to breach integrity. He shrugged. “It’s deranged—it could want anything. It might even be trying to repair a weak hinge.”
CLANG.
“It’s trying to get in here!”
“That’s another possibility, yes.”
Izmailova’s voice rose slightly. “But even scrambled, there can’t possibly be any programs in its memory to make it do that. How can random input make it act this way?”
“It doesn’t work like that. You’re thinking of the kind of robotics they had when you were a kid. These units are state of the art: They don’t manipulate instructions, they manipulate concepts. See, that makes them more flexible. You don’t have to program in every little step when you want one to do something new. You just give it a goal—”
CLANG.
“—like, to Disassemble a Rotary Drill. It’s got a bank of available skills, like Cutting and Unbolting and Gross Manipulation, which it then fits together in various configurations until it has a path that will bring it to the goal.” He was talking for the sake of talking now, talking to keep himself from panic. “Which normally works out fine. But when one of these things malfunctions, it does so on the conceptual level. See? So that—”
“So that it decides we’re rotary drills that need to be disassembled.”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
CLANG.
“So what do we do when it gets in here?” They had both involuntarily risen to their feet, and stood facing the door. There was not much space, and what little there was they filled. Gunther was acutely aware that there was not enough room here to either fight or flee.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m going to hit that sucker over the head with the toilet.”
She turned to look at him.
CLA— The noise was cut in half by a breathy, whooshing explosion. Abrupt, total silence. “It’s through the outer door,” Gunther said flatly.
They waited.
Much later, Izmailova said, “Is it possible it’s gone away?”
“I don’t know.” Gunther undogged his helmet, knelt and put an ear to the floor. The stone was almost painfully cold. “Maybe the explosion damaged it.” He could hear the faint vibrations of the assemblers, the heavier rumblings of machines roving the factory floor. None of it sounded close. He silently counted to a hundred. Nothing. He counted to a hundred again.
Finally he straightened. “It’s gone.”
They both sat down. Izmailova took off her helmet, and Gunther clumsily began undoing his gloves. He fumbled at the latches. “Look at me.” He laughed shakily. “I’m all thumbs. I can’t even handle this, I’m so unnerved.”
“Let me help you with that.” Izmailova flipped up the latches, tugged at his glove. It came free. “Where’s your other hand?”
Then, somehow, they were each removing the other’s suit, tugging at the latches, undoing the seals. They began slowly but sped up with each latch undogged, until they were yanking and pulling with frantic haste. Gunther opened up the front of Izmailova’s suit, revealing a red silk camisole. He slid his hands beneath it, and pushed the cloth up over her breasts. Her nipples were hard. He let her breasts fill his hands and squeezed.
Izmailova made a low, groaning sound in the back of her throat. She had Gunther’s suit open. Now she pushed down his leggings and reached within to seize his cock. He was already erect. She tugged it out and impatiently shoved him down on the cot. Then she was kneeling on top of him and guiding him inside her.
Her mouth met his, warm and moist.
Half in and half out of their suits, they made love. Gunther managed to struggle one arm free, and reached within Izmailova’s suit to run a hand up her long back and over the back of her head. The short hairs of her buzz cut stung and tickled his palm.
She rode him roughly, her flesh slippery with sweat against his. “Are you coming yet?” she murmured. “Are you coming yet? Tell me when you’re about to come.” She bit his shoulder, the side of his neck, his chin, his lower lip. Her nails dug into his flesh.
“Now,” he whispered. Possibly he only subvocalized it, and she caught it on her trance chip. But then she clutched him tighter than ever, as if she were trying to crack his ribs, and her whole body shuddered with orgasm. Then he came too, riding her passion down into spiraling desperation, ecstasy and release.
It was better than anything he had ever experienced before.
Afterward, they finally kicked free of their suits. They shoved and pushed the things off the cot. Gunther pulled the blanket out from beneath them, and with Izmailova’s help wrapped it about the both of them. They lay together, relaxed, not speaking.
He listened to her breathe for a while. The noise was soft. When she turned her face toward him, he could feel it, a warm little tickle in the hollow of his throat. The smell of her permeated the room. This stranger beside him.
Gunther felt weary, warm, at ease. “How long have you been here?” he asked. “Not here in the shelter, I mean, but . . .”
“Five days.”
“That little.” He smiled. “Welcome to the Moon, Ms. Izmailova.”
“Ekatarina,” she said sleepily. “Call me Ekatarina.”
Whooping, they soared high and south, over Herschel. The Ptolemaeus road bent and doubled below them, winding out of sight, always returning. “This is great!” Hiro crowed. “This is—I should’ve talked you into taking me out here a year ago.”
Gunther checked his bearings and throttled down, sinking eastward. The other two hoppers, slaved to his own, followed in tight formation. Two days had passed since the flare storm and Gunther, still on mandatory recoop, had promised to guide his friends into the highlands as soon as the surface advisory was dropped. “We’re coming in now. Better triplecheck your safety harnesses. You doing okay back there, Kreesh?”
“I am quite comfortable, yes.”
Then they were down on the Seething Bay Company landing
pad.
Hiro was the second down and the first on the surface. He bounded about like a collie off its leash, chasing upslope and down, looking for new vantage points. “I can’t believe I’m here! I work out this way every day, but you know what? This is the first time I’ve actually been out here. Physically, I mean.”
“Watch your footing,” Gunther warned. “This isn’t like telepresence—if you break a leg, it’ll be up to Krishna and me to carry you out.”
“I trust you. Man, anybody who can get caught out in a flare storm, and end up nailing—”
“Hey, watch your language, okay?”
“Everybody’s heard the story. I mean, we all thought you were dead, and then they found the two of you asleep. They’ll be talking about it a hundred years from now.” Hiro was practically choking on his laughter. “You’re a legend!”
“Just give it a rest.” To change the subject, Gunther said, “I can’t believe you want to take a photo of this mess.” The Seething Bay operation was a strip mine. Robot bulldozers scooped up the regolith and fed it to a processing plant that rested on enormous skids. They were after the thorium here, and the output was small enough that it could be transported to the breeder reactor by hopper. There was no need for a railgun and the tailings were piled in artificial mountains in the wake of the factory.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hiro swept an arm southward, toward Ptolemaeus. “There!” The crater wall caught the sun, while the lowest parts of the surrounding land were still in shadow. The gentle slopes seemed to tower; the crater itself was a cathedral, blazing white.
“Where is your camera?” Krishna asked.
“Don’t need one. I’ll just take the data down on my helmet.”
“I’m not too clear on this mosaic project of yours,” Gunther said. “Explain to me one more time how it’s supposed to work.”
“Anya came up with it. She’s renting an assembler to cut hexagonal floor tiles in black, white, and fourteen intermediate shades of grey. I provide the pictures. We choose the one we like best, scan it in black and white, screen for values of intensity, and then have the assembler lay the floor, one tile per pixel. It’ll look great—come by tomorrow and see.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.”
Chattering like a squirrel, Hiro led them away from the edge of the mine. They bounded westward, across the slope.
Krishna’s voice came over Gunther’s trance chip. It was an old groundrat trick. The chips had an effective transmission radius of fifteen yards—you could turn off the radio and talk chip-to-chip, if you were close enough. “You sound troubled, my friend.”
He listened for a second carrier tone, heard nothing. Hiro was out of range. “It’s Izmailova. I sort of—”
“Fell in love with her.”
“How’d you know that?”
They were spaced out across the rising slope, Hiro in the lead. For a time neither spoke. There was a calm, confidential quality to that shared silence, like the anonymous stillness of the confessional. “Please don’t take this wrong,” Krishna said.
“Take what wrong?”
“Gunther, if you take two sexually compatible people, place them in close proximity, isolate them and scare the hell out of them, they will fall in love. That’s a given. It’s a survival mechanism, something that was wired into your basic makeup long before you were born. When billions of years of evolution say it’s bonding time, your brain doesn’t have much choice but to obey.”
“Hey, come on over here!” Hiro cried over the radio. “You’ve got to see this.”
“We’re coming,” Gunther said. Then, over his chip, “You make me out to be one of Sally Chang’s machines.”
“In some ways we are machines. That’s not so bad. We feel thirsty when we need water, adrenaline pumps into the bloodstream when we need an extra boost of aggressive energy. You can’t fight your own nature. What would be the point of it?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Is this great or what?” Hiro was clambering over a boulder field. “It just goes on and on. And look up there!” Upslope, they saw that what they were climbing over was the spillage from a narrow cleft entirely filled with boulders. They were huge, as big as hoppers, some of them large as prefab oxysheds. “Hey, Krishna, I been meaning to ask you—just what is it that you do out there at the Center?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Aw, come on.” Hiro lifted a rock the size of his head to his shoulder and shoved it away, like a shot-putter. The rock soared slowly, landed far down-slope in a white explosion of dust. “You’re among friends here. You can trust us.” Krishna shook his head. Sunlight flashed from the visor. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Hiro hoisted a second rock, bigger than the first. Gunther knew him in this mood, nasty-faced and grinning. “My point exactly. The two of us know zip about neurobiology. You could spent the next ten hours lecturing us, and we couldn’t catch enough to compromise security.” Another burst of dust.
“You don’t understand. The Center for Self-Replicating Technologies is here for a reason. The lab work could be done back on Earth for a fraction of what a lunar facility costs. Our sponsors only move projects here that they’re genuinely afraid of.”
“So what can you tell us about? Just the open stuff, the video magazine stuff. Nothing secret.”
“Well . . . okay.” Now it was Krishna’s turn. He picked up a small rock, wound up like a baseball player and threw. It dwindled and disappeared in the distance. A puff of white sprouted from the surface. “You know Sally Chang? She has just finished mapping the neurotransmitter functions.”
They waited. When Krishna added nothing further, Hiro dryly said, “Wow.”
“Details, Kreesh. Some of us aren’t so fast to see the universe in a grain of sand as you are.”
“It should be obvious. We’ve had a complete genetic map of the brain for almost a decade. Now add to that Sally Chang’s chemical map, and it’s analogous to being given the keys to the library. No, better than that. Imagine that you’ve spent your entire life within an enormous library filled with books in a language you neither read nor speak, and that you’ve just found the dictionary and a picture reader.”
“So what are you saying? That we’ll have complete understanding of how the brain operates?”
“We’ll have complete control over how the brain operates. With chemical therapy, it will be possible to make anyone think or feel anything we want. We will have an immediate cure for all nontraumatic mental illness. We’ll be able to fine-tune aggression, passion, creativity—bring them up, damp them down, it’ll be all the same. You can see why our sponsors are so afraid of what our research might produce.”
“Not really, no. The world could use more sanity,” Gunther said.
“I agree. But who defines sanity? Many governments consider political dissent grounds for mental incarceration. This would open the doors of the brain, allowing it to be examined from the outside. For the first time, it would be possible to discover unexpressed rebellion. Modes of thought could be outlawed. The potential for abuse is not inconsiderable.
“Consider also the military applications. This knowledge combined with some of the new nanoweaponry might produce a berserker gas, allowing you to turn the enemy’s armies upon their own populace. Or, easier, to throw them into a psychotic frenzy and let them turn on themselves. Cities could be pacified by rendering the citizenry catatonic. A secondary, internal reality could then be created, allowing the conqueror to use the masses as slave labor. The possibilities are endless.”
They digested this in silence. At last Hiro said, “Jeez, Krishna, if that’s the open goods, what the hell kind of stuff do you have to hide?”
“I can’t tell you.”
A minute later, Hiro was haring off again. At the foot of a nearby hill he found an immense boulder standing atilt on its small end. He danced about, trying to get good shots past it without catching his own footprints in them.
&nbs
p; “So what’s the problem?” Krishna said over his chip.
“The problem is, I can’t arrange to see her. Ekatarina. I’ve left messages, but she won’t answer them. And you know how it is in Bootstrap—it takes a real effort to avoid somebody who wants to see you. But she’s managed it.”
Krishna said nothing.
“All I want to know is, just what’s going on here?”
“She’s avoiding you.”
“But why? I fell in love and she didn’t, is that what you’re telling me? I mean, is that a crock or what?”
“Without hearing her side of the story, I can’t really say how she feels. But the odds are excellent she fell every bit as hard as you did. The difference is that you think it’s a good idea, and she doesn’t. So of course she’s avoiding you. Contact would just make it more difficult for her to master her feelings for you.”
“Shit!”
An unexpected touch of wryness entered Krishna’s voice. “What do you want? A minute ago you were complaining that I think you’re a machine. Now you’re unhappy that Izmailova thinks she’s not.”
“Hey, you guys! Come over here. I’ve found the perfect shot. You’ve got to see this.”
They turned to see Hiro waving at them from the hilltop. “I thought you were leaving,” Gunther grumbled. “You said you were sick of the Moon, and going away and never coming back. So how come you’re upgrading your digs all of a sudden?”
“That was yesterday! Today, I’m a pioneer, a builder of worlds, a founder of dynasties!”
“This is getting tedious. What does it take to get a straight answer out of you?”
Hiro bounded high and struck a pose, arms wide and a little ridiculous. He staggered a bit on landing. “Anya and I are getting married!”
Gunther and Krishna looked at each other, blank visor to blank visor. Forcing enthusiasm into his voice, Gunther said, “Hey, no shit? Really! Congratu—” A scream of static howled up from nowhere. Gunther winced and cut down the gain. “My stupid radio is—”