by Neil Clarke
One of the other two—they had moved together and he couldn’t tell them apart at this distance—was pointing upward. Gunther tilted back his head, to look at the Earth. For a second he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Then he saw it: a diamond pinprick of light in the middle of the night. It was like a small, bright hole in reality, somewhere in continental Asia. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
Softly, Hiro said, “I think it’s Vladivostok.”
By the time they were back over the Sinus Medii, that first light had reddened and faded away, and two more had blossomed. The news jockey at the Observatory was working overtime splicing together reports from the major news feeds into a montage of rumor and fear. The radio was full of talk about hits on Seoul and Buenos Aires. Those seemed certain. Strikes against Panama, Iraq, Denver, and Cairo were disputed. A stealth missile had flown low over Hokkaido and been deflected into the Sea of Japan. The Swiss Orbitals had lost some factories to fragmentation satellites. There was no agreement as to the source aggressor, and though most suspicions trended in one direction, Tokyo denied everything.
Gunther was most impressed by the sound feed from a British video essayist, who said that it did not matter who had fired the first shot, or why. “Who shall we blame? The Southern Alliance, Tokyo, General Kim, or possibly some Grey terrorist group that nobody has ever heard of before? In a world whose weapons were wired to hair triggers, the question is irrelevant. When the first device exploded, it activated autonomous programs which launched what is officially labeled ‘a measured response.’ Gorshov himself could not have prevented it. His tactical programs chose this week’s three most likely aggressors—at least two of which were certainly innocent—and launched a response. Human beings had no say over it.
“Those three nations in turn had their own reflexive ‘measured responses.’ The results of which we are just beginning to learn. Now we will pause for five days, while all concerned parties negotiate. How do we know this? Abstracts of all major defense programs are available on any public data net. They are no secret. Openness is in fact what deterrence is all about.
“We have five days to avert a war that literally nobody wants. The question is, in five days can the military and political powers seize control of their own defense programming? Will they? Given the pain and anger involved, the traditional hatreds, national chauvinism, and the natural reactions of those who number loved ones among the already dead, can those in charge overcome their own natures in time to pull back from final and total war? Our best informed guess is no. No, they cannot.
“Good night, and may God have mercy on us all.”
They flew northward in silence. Even when the broadcast cut off in midword, nobody spoke. It was the end of the world, and there was nothing they could say that did not shrink to insignificance before that fact. They simply headed home.
The land about Bootstrap was dotted with graffiti, great block letters traced out in boulders: KARL OPS—EINDHOVEN ‘49 and LOUISE MCTIGHE ALBUQUERQUE NM. An enormous eye in a pyramid. ARSENAL WORLD RUGBY CHAMPS with a crown over it. CORNPONE. Pi Lambda Phi. MOTORHEADS. A giant with a club. Coming down over them, Gunther reflected that they all referred to places and things in the world overhead, not a one of them indigenous to the Moon. What had always seemed pointless now struck him as unspeakably sad.
It was only a short walk from the hopper pad to the vacuum garage. They didn’t bother to summon a jitney.
The garage seemed strangely unfamiliar to Gunther now, though he had passed through it a thousand times. It seemed to float in its own mystery, as if everything had been removed and replaced by its exact double, rendering it different and somehow unknowable. Row upon row of parked vehicles were slanted by type within the painted lines. Ceiling lights strained to reach the floor, and could not.
“Boy, is this place still!” Hiro’s voice seemed unnaturally loud.
It was true. In all the cavernous reaches of the garage, not a single remote or robot service unit stirred. Not so much as a pressure-leak sniffer moved.
“Must be because of the news,” Gunther muttered. He found he was not ready to speak of the war directly. To the back of the garage, five airlocks stood all in a row. Above them a warm, yellow strip of window shone in the rock. In the room beyond, he could see the overseer moving about.
Hiro waved an arm, and the small figure within leaned forward to wave back. They trudged to the nearest lock and waited.
Nothing happened.
After a few minutes, they stepped back and away from the lock to peer up through the window. The overseer was still there, moving unhurriedly. “Hey!” Hiro shouted over open frequency. “You up there! Are you on the job?”
The man smiled, nodded and waved again.
“Then open the goddamned door!” Hiro strode forward, and with a final, nodding wave, the overseer bent over his controls.
“Uh, Hiro,” Gunther said, “there’s something odd about . . .”
The door exploded open.
It slammed open so hard and fast the door was half torn off its hinges. The air within blasted out like a charge from a cannon. For a moment the garage was filled with loose tools, parts of vacuum suits and shreds of cloth. A wrench struck Gunther a glancing blow on his arm, spinning him around and knocking him to the floor.
He stared up in shock. Bits and pieces of things hung suspended for a long, surreal instant. Then, the air fled, they began to slowly shower down. He got up awkwardly, massaging his arm through the suit. “Hiro, are you all right? Kreesh?”
“Oh my God,” Krishna said.
Gunther spun around. He saw Krishna crouched in the shadow of a flatbed, over something that could not possibly be Hiro, because it bent the wrong way. He walked through shimmering unreality and knelt beside Krishna. He stared down at Hiro’s corpse.
Hiro had been standing directly before the door when the overseer opened it without depressurizing the corridor within first. He had caught the blast straight on. It had lifted him and smashed him against the side of a flatbed, snapping his spine and shattering his helmet visor with the backlash. He must have died instantaneously.
“Who’s there?” a woman said.
A jitney had entered the garage without Gunther’s noticing it. He looked up in time to see a second enter, and then a third. People began piling out. Soon there were some twenty individuals advancing across the garage. They broke into two groups. One headed straight toward the locks and the smaller group advanced on Gunther and his friends. It looked for all the world like a military operation. “Who’s there?” the woman repeated.
Gunther lifted his friend’s corpse in his arms and stood. “It’s Hiro,” he said flatly. “Hiro.”
They floated forward cautiously, a semicircle of blank-visored suits like so many kachinas. He could make out the corporate logos. Mitsubishi. Westinghouse. Hoist Orbital. Izmailova’s red-and-orange suit was among them, and a vivid Mondrian pattern he didn’t recognize. The woman spoke again, tensely, warily. “Tell me how you’re feeling, Hiro.”
It was Beth Hamilton.
“That’s not Hiro,” Krishna said. “It’s Gunther. That’s Hiro. That he’s carrying. We were out in the highlands and—” His voice cracked and collapsed in confusion.
“Is that you, Krishna?” someone asked. “There’s a touch of luck. Send him up front, we’re going to need him when we get in.” Somebody else slapped an arm over Krishna’s shoulders and led him away.
Over the radio, a clear voice spoke to the overseer. “Dmitri, is that you? It’s Signe. You remember me, don’t you, Dmitri? Signe Ohmstede. I’m your friend.”
“Sure I remember you, Signe. I remember you. How could I ever forget my friend? Sure I do.”
“Oh, good. I’m so happy. Listen carefully, Dmitri. Everything’s fine.”
Indignantly, Gunther chinned his radio to send. “The hell it is! That fool up there—!”
A burly man in a Westinghouse suit grabbed Gunther’s bad arm and shook him. “
Shut the fuck up!” he growled. “This is serious, damn you. We don’t have the time to baby you.”
Hamilton shoved between them. “For God’s sake, Posner, he’s just seen—” She stopped. “Let me take care of him. I’ll get him calmed down. Just give us half an hour, okay?”
The others traded glances, nodded, and turned away.
To Gunther’s surprise, Ekatarina spoke over his trance chip. “I’m sorry Gunther,” she murmured. Then she was gone.
He was still holding Hiro’s corpse. He found himself staring down at his friend’s ruined face. The flesh was bruised and as puffy-looking as an overboiled hot dog. He couldn’t look away.
“Come on.” Beth gave him a little shove to get him going. “Put the body in the back of that pick-up and give us a drive out to the cliff.”
At Hamilton’s insistence, Gunther drove. He found it helped, having something to do. Hands afloat on the steering wheel, he stared ahead looking for the Mausoleum road cut-off. His eyes felt scratchy, and inhumanly dry.
“There was a preemptive strike against us,” Hamilton said. “Sabotage. We’re just now starting to put the pieces together. Nobody knew you were out on the surface or we would’ve sent somebody out to meet you. It’s all been something of a shambles here.”
He drove on in silence, cushioned and protected by all those miles of hard vacuum wrapped about him. He could feel the presence of Hiro’s corpse in the back of the truck, a constant psychic itch between his shoulder blades. But so long as he didn’t speak, he was safe; he could hold himself aloof from the universe that held the pain. It couldn’t touch him. He waited, but Beth didn’t add anything to what she’d already said.
Finally he said, “Sabotage?”
“A software meltdown at the radio station. Explosions at all the railguns.
Three guys from Microspacecraft Applications bought it when the Boitsovij Kot railgun blew. I suppose it was inevitable. All the military industry up here, it’s not surprising somebody would want to knock us out of the equation. But that’s not all. Something’s happened to the people in Bootstrap. Something really horrible. I was out at the Observatory when it happened. The newsjay called back to see if there was any backup software to get the station going again, and she got nothing but gibberish. Crazy stuff. I mean, really crazy. We had to disconnect the Observatory’s remotes, because the operators were . . .” She was crying now, softly and insistently, and it was a minute before she could speak again. “Some sort of biological weapon. That’s all we know.”
“We’re here.”
As he pulled up to the foot of the Mausoleum cliff, it occurred to Gunther that they hadn’t thought to bring a drilling rig. Then he counted ten black niches in the rockface, and realized that somebody had been thinking ahead.
“The only people who weren’t hit were those who were working at the Center or the Observatory, or out on the surface. Maybe a hundred of us all told.”
They walked around to the back of the pick-up. Gunther waited, but Hamilton didn’t offer to carry the body. For some reason that made him feel angry and resentful. He unlatched the gate, hopped up on the treads, and hoisted the suited corpse. “Let’s get this over with.”
Before today, only six people had ever died on the Moon. They walked past the caves in which their bodies awaited eternity. Gunther knew their names by heart: Heisse, Yasuda, Spehalski, Dubinin, Mikami, Castillo. And now Hiro. It seemed incomprehensible that the day should ever come when there would be too many dead to know them all by name.
Daisies and tiger lilies had been scattered before the vaults in such profusion that he couldn’t help crushing some underfoot.
They entered the first empty niche, and he laid Hiro down upon a stone table cut into the rock. In the halo of his helmet lamp the body looked piteously twisted and uncomfortable. Gunther found that he was crying, large hot tears that crawled down his face and got into his mouth when he inhaled. He cut off the radio until he had managed to blink the tears away. “Shit.” He wiped a hand across his helmet. “I suppose we ought to say something.” Hamilton took his hand and squeezed.
“I’ve never seen him as happy as he was today. He was going to get married. He was jumping around, laughing and talking about raising a family. And now he’s dead, and I don’t even know what his religion was.” A thought occurred to him, and he turned helplessly toward Hamilton. “What are we going to tell Anya?”
“She’s got problems of her own. Come on, say a prayer and let’s go. You’ll run out of oxygen.”
“Yeah, okay.” He bowed his head. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...”
Back at Bootstrap, the surface party had seized the airlocks and led the overseer away from the controls. The man from Westinghouse, Posner, looked down on them from the observation window. “Don’t crack your suits,” he warned. “Keep them sealed tight at all times. Whatever hit the bastards here is still around. Might be in the water, might be in the air. One whiff and you’re out of here! You got that?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gunther grumbled. “Keep your shirt on.”
Posner’s hand froze on the controls. “Let’s get serious here. I’m not letting you in until you acknowledge the gravity of the situation. This isn’t a picnic outing. If you’re not prepared to help, we don’t need you. Is that understood?”
“We understand completely, and we’ll cooperate to the fullest,” Hamilton said quickly. “Wont we, Weil?”
He nodded miserably.
Only the one lock had been breached, and there were five more sets of pressurized doors between it and the bulk of Bootstrap’s air. The city’s designers had been cautious.
Overseen by Posner, they passed through the corridors, locks and changing rooms and up the cargo escalators. Finally they emerged into the city interior.
They stood blinking on the lip of Hell.
At first, it was impossible to pinpoint any source for the pervasive sense of wrongness gnawing at the edge of consciousness. The parks were dotted with people, the fill lights at the juncture of crater walls and canopy were bright, and the waterfalls still fell gracefully from terrace to terrace. Button quail bobbed comically in the grass.
Then small details intruded. A man staggered about the fourth level, head jerking, arms waving stiffly. A plump woman waddled by, pulling an empty cart made from a wheeled microfactory stand, quacking like a duck. Someone sat in the kneehigh forest by Noguchi Park, tearing out the trees one by one.
But it was the still figures that were on examination more profoundly disturbing. Here a man lay half in and half out of a tunnel entrance, as unselfconscious as a dog. There, three women stood in extreme postures of lassitude, bordering on despair. Everywhere, people did not touch or speak or show in any way that they were aware of one other. They shared an absolute and universal isolation.
“What shall—” Something slammed onto Gunther’s back. He was knocked forward, off his feet. Tumbling, he became aware that fists were striking him, again and again, and then that a lean man was kneeling atop his chest, hysterically shouting, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
Hamilton seized the man’s shoulders and pulled him away. Gunther got to his knees. He looked into the face of madness: eyes round and fearful, expression full of panic. The man was terrified of Gunther.
With an abrupt wrench, the man broke free. He ran as if pursued by demons. Hamilton stared after him. “You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Gunther adjusted his tool harness. “Let’s see if we can find the others.”
They walked toward the lake, staring about at the self-absorbed figures scattered about the grass. Nobody attempted to speak to them. A woman ran by, barefooted. Her arms were filled with flowers. “Hey!” Hamilton called after her. She smiled fleetingly over her shoulder, but did not slow. Gunther knew her vaguely, an executive supervisor for Martin Marietta.
“Is everybody here crazy?” he asked.
“Sure looks that way.”
The woman had reached
the shore and was flinging the blossoms into the water with great sweeps of her arm. They littered the surface.
“Damned waste.” Gunther had come to Bootstrap before the flowers; he knew the effort involved getting permission to plant them and rewriting the city’s ecologies. A man in a blue-striped Krupp suit was running along the verge of the lake.
The woman, flowers gone, threw herself into the water.
At first it appeared she’d suddenly decided to take a dip. But from the struggling, floundering way she thrashed deeper into the water it was clear that she could not swim.
In the time it took Gunther to realize this, Hamilton had leaped forward, running for the lake. Belatedly, he started after her. But the man in the Krupp suit was ahead of them both. He splashed in after the woman. An outstretched hand seized her shoulder and then he fell, pulling her under. She was red-faced and choking when he emerged again, arm across her chest.
By then Gunther and Beth were wading into the lake, and together they three got the woman to shore. When she was released, the woman calmly turned and walked away, as if nothing had happened.
“Gone for more flowers,” the Krupp component explained. “This is the third time fair Ophelia there’s tried to drown herself. She’s not the only one. I’ve been hanging around, hauling ‘em out when they stumble in.”
“Do you know where everybody else is? Is there anyone in charge? Somebody giving out orders?”
“Do you need any help?” Gunther asked.
The Krupp man shrugged. “I’m fine. No idea where the others are, though. My friends were going on to the second level when I decided I ought to stay here. If you see them, you might tell ‘em I’d appreciate hearing back from them. Three guys in Krupp suits.”
“We’ll do that,” Gunther said.
Hamilton was already walking away.
On a step just beneath the top of the stairs sprawled one of Gunther’s fellow G5 components. “Sidney,” he said carefully. “How’s it going?”
Sidney giggled. “I’m making the effort, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see that the ‘how’ of it makes much difference.”