by Neil Clarke
Erno tried to regain his cool. “Mr. Durden, I presume.”
“Switch your suit to Channel Six,” Tyler said. “Encrypted.” He pulled away and touched the pad on his arm, and pointed to Erno’s. When Erno did the same, his radio found Tyler’s wavelength, and he heard Tyler’s voice in his ear.
“I thought I might catch you out here.”
The other workers had all passed by; they were alone. “What are you doing here?”
“You want adventure? We got adventure.”
“What adventure?”
“Come along with me.”
Instead of heading in through the maze, Tyler led Erno back out to the surface. The fan of concrete was deserted, the shuttle bus already gone back to the lab and factories. From around a corner, Tyler hauled out a backpack, settled it over his shoulders, and struck off east, along the graded road that encircled Fowler. The mountainous rim rose to their right, topped by the beginnings of the dome; to their left was the rubble of the broken highlands. Tyler moved along at a quick pace, taking long strides in the low G with a minimum of effort.
After a while Tyler asked him, “So, how about the book? Have you read it?”
“Some. It’s a collection of stories, all about men.”
“Learning anything?”
“They seem so primitive. I guess it was a different world back then.”
“What’s so different?”
Erno told him the story about the prizefighter. “Did they really do that?”
“Yes. Men have always engaged in combat.”
“For money?”
“The money is just an excuse. They do it anyway.”
“But why did the writer tell that story? What’s the point?”
“It’s about elemental manhood. The fighters were men. The promoter was not.”
“Because he didn’t pay the boxer?”
“Because he knew the boxer had fought his heart out, but he pretended that the boxer was a coward in order to keep the audience from getting mad at him. The promoter preserved his own credibility by trashing the boxer’s. The author wants you to be like the boxer, not the promoter.”
“But the boxer dies—for twenty-five bucks.”
“He died a man. Nobody can take that away from him.”
“But nobody knows that. In fact, they all think he died a coward.”
“The promoter knows he wasn’t. The other fighter knows, probably. And thanks to the story, now you know, too.”
Erno still had trouble grasping exactly the metaphor Tyler intended when he used the term “man.” It had nothing to do with genetics. But before he could quiz Tyler, the older man stopped. By this time they had circled a quarter of the colony and were in the shadow of the crater wall. Tyler switched on his helmet light and Erno did likewise. Erno’s thermoregulator pumped heat along the microfibers buried in his suit’s skin, compensating for the sudden shift from the brutal heat of lunar sunlight to the brutal cold of lunar darkness.
“Here we are,” Tyler said, looking up the crater wall. “See that path?”
It wasn’t much of a path, just a jumble of rocks leading up the side of the crater, but once they reached it Erno could see that, by following patches of luminescent paint on boulders, you could climb the rim mountain to the top. “Where are we going?” Erno asked.
“To the top of the world,” Tyler said. “From up there I’ll show you the empire I’ll give you if you follow me.”
“You’re kidding.”
Tyler said nothing.
It was a hard climb to the crater’s lip, where a concrete rim formed the foundation of the dome. From here, the dome looked like an unnaturally swollen stretch of mare, absurdly regular, covered in lunar regolith. Once the dome had been constructed over the crater, about six meters of lunar soil had been spread evenly over its surface to provide a radiation shield for the interior. Concentric rings every ten meters kept the soil from sliding down the pitch of the dome. It was easier climbing here, but surreal. The horizon of the dome moved ahead of them as they progressed, and it was hard to judge distances. “There’s a solar storm warning,” Erno said. “Aren’t you worried?”
“We’re not going to be out long.”
“I was at the meeting,” Erno said.
“I saw you,” Tyler said. “Cute girl, the dark skinned one. Watch out. You know what they used to say on Earth?”
“What?”
“If women didn’t have control of all the pussy, they’d have bounties on their heads.”
Erno laughed. “How can you say that? They’re our sisters, our mothers.”
“And they still have control of all the pussy.”
They climbed the outside of the dome.
“What are you going to do to keep from being made invisible?” Erno asked. “What makes you think they’re going to try?”
“I don’t think your speech changed anybody’s mind.”
“So? No matter what they teach you, my visibility is not socially constructed. That’s the lesson for today.”
“What are we doing out here?”
“We’re going to do demonstrate this fact.”
Ahead of them a structure hove into sight. At the apex of the dome, just above the central spire, stood a maintenance airlock. Normally, this would be the way workers would exit to inspect or repair the dome’s exterior—not the way Erno and Tyler had come. This was not a public airlock, and the entrance code would be encrypted.
Tyler led them up to the door. From his belt pouch he took a key card and stuck it into the reader. Erno could hear him humming a song over his earphones. After a moment, the door slid open.
“In we go, Erno,” Tyler said.
They entered the airlock and waited for the air to recycle. “This could get us into trouble,” Erno said.
“Yes, it could.”
“If you can break into the airlock you can sabotage it. An airlock breach could kill hundreds of people.”
“You’re absolutely right, Erno. That’s why only completely responsible people like us should break into airlocks.”
The interior door opened into a small chamber facing an elevator. Tyler put down his backpack, cracked the seal on his helmet and began stripping off his garish suit. Underneath he wore only briefs. Rust-colored pubic hair curled from around the edges of the briefs. Tyler’s skin was pale, the muscles in his arms and chest well developed, but his belly soft. His skin was crisscrossed with a web of pink lines where the thermoregulator system of the suit had marked him.
Feeling self-conscious, Erno took off his own suit. They were the same height, but Tyler outweighed him by twenty kilos. “What’s in the backpack?” Erno asked.
“Rappelling equipment.” Tyler gathered up his suit and the pack and, ignoring the elevator, opened the door beside it to a stairwell. “Leave your suit here,” he said, ditching his own in a corner.
The stairwell was steep and the cold air tasted stale; it raised goose bumps on Erno’s skin. Clutching the pack to his chest, Tyler hopped down the stairs to the next level. The wall beside them was sprayed with gray insulation. The light from bioluminescents turned their skin greenish yellow.
Instead of continuing down the well all the way to the top of the spire, Tyler stopped at a door on the side of the stairwell. He punched in a code. The door opened into a vast darkness, the space between the exterior and interior shells of the dome. Tyler shone his light inside: Three meters high, broken by reinforcing struts, the cavity stretched out from them into the darkness, curving slightly as it fell away. Tyler closed the door behind them and, in the light of his flash, pulled a notebook from the pack and called up a map. He studied it for a minute, and then led Erno into the darkness.
To the right about ten meters, an impenetrable wall was one of the great cermet ribs of the dome that stretched like the frame of an umbrella from the central spire to the distant crater rim.
Before long Tyler stopped, shining his light on the floor. “Here it is.”
&nbs
p; “What?”
“Maintenance port. Periodically they have to inspect the interior of the dome, repair the fiberoptics.” Tyler squatted down and began to open the lock. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to hang from the roof like little spiders, Erno, and leave a gift for our cousins.”
The port opened and Erno got a glimpse of the space that yawned below. A thousand meters below them the semicircular ranks of seats of the Sobieski Park amphitheater glowed ghostly white in the lights of the artificial night. Tyler drew ropes and carabineers from his pack, and from the bottom, an oblong device, perhaps fifty centimeters square, wrapped in fiberoptic cloth that glinted in the light of the flashlight. At one end was a timer. The object gave off an aura of threat that was both frightening and instantly attractive. “What is that thing? Is it a bomb?”
“A bomb, Erno? Are you crazy?” Tyler snapped one of the lines around a reinforcing strut. He donned a harness and handed an identical one to Erno. “Put this on.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“Don’t be silly. This is safe as a kiss. Safer, maybe.”
“What are we trying to accomplish?”
“That’s something of a metaphysical question.”
“That thing doesn’t look metaphysical to me.”
“Nonetheless, it is. Call it the Philosopher’s Stone. We’re going to attach it to the inside of the dome.”
“I’m not going to blow any hole in the dome.”
“Erno, I couldn’t blow a hole in the dome without killing myself. I guarantee you that, as a result of what we do here, I will suffer whatever consequences anyone else suffers. More than anyone else, even. Do I look suicidal to you, Erno?”
“To tell the truth, I don’t know. You sure do some risky things. Why don’t you tell me what you intend?”
“This is a test. I want to see whether you trust me.”
“You don’t trust me enough to tell me anything.”
“Trust isn’t about being persuaded. Trust is when you do something because your brother asks you to. I didn’t have to ask you along on this adventure, Erno. I trusted you.” Tyler crouched there, calmly watching Erno. “So, do you have the balls for this?”
The moment stretched. Erno pulled on the climbing harness.
Tyler ran the ropes through the harness, gave him a pair of gloves, and showed Erno how to brake the rope behind his back. Then, with the maybe-bomb Philosopher’s Stone slung over his shoulder, Tyler dropped through the port. Feeling like he was about to take a step he could never take back, Erno edged out after him.
Tyler helped him let out three or four meters of rope. Erno’s weight made the rope twist, and the world began to spin dizzily. They were so close to the dome’s inner surface that the “stars” shining there were huge fuzzy patches of light in the braided fiberglass surface. The farmlands of the crater floor were swathed in shadow, but around the crater’s rim, oddly twisted from this god’seye perspective, the lights of apartment districts cast fans of illumination on the hanging gardens and switchbacked perimeter road. Erno could make out a few microscopic figures down there. Not far from Tyler and him, the top of the central spire obscured their view to the west. The flying stage, thirty meters down from where the spire met the roof, was closed for the night, but an owl nesting underneath flew out at their appearance and circled below them.
Tyler began to swing himself back and forth at the end of his line, gradually picking up amplitude until, at the apex of one of his swings, he latched himself onto the dome’s inner surface. “C’mon, Erno! Time’s wasting!”
Erno steeled himself to copy Tyler’s performance. It took effort to get himself swinging and once he did the arcs were ponderous and slow. He had trouble orienting himself so that one end of his oscillation left him close to Tyler. At the top of every swing gravity disappeared and his stomach lurched. Finally, after what seemed an eternity of trying, Erno swung close enough for Tyler to reach out and snag his leg.
He pulled Erno up beside him and attached Erno’s belt line to a ringbolt in the dome’s surface. Erno’s heart beat fast.
“Now you know you’re alive,” Tyler said.
“If anyone catches us up here, our asses are fried.”
“Our asses are everywhere and always fried. That’s the human condition. Let’s work.”
While Tyler pulled the device out of the bag he had Erno spread glue onto the dome’s surface. When the glue was set, the two of them pressed the Philosopher’s Stone into it until it was firmly fixed. Because of its reflective surface it would be invisible from the crater floor. “Now, what time did Debra Debrasdaughter say that meeting was tomorrow?”
“1600,” Erno said. “You knew that.”
Tyler flipped open the lid over the Stone’s timer and punched some keys. “Yes, I did.”
“And you didn’t need my help to do this. Why did you make me come?”
The timer beeped; the digital readout began counting down. Tyler flipped the lid closed. “To give you the opportunity to betray me. And if you want to, you still have—” he looked at his wristward, “—fourteen hours and thirteen minutes.”
Male Dominance Behavior
Erno had begun building his store of resentment when he was twelve, in Eva Evasdaughter’s molecular biotechnology class. Eva Evasdaughter came from an illustrious family: her mother had been the longest serving member of the colony council. Her grandmother, Eva Kabatsumi, jailed with Nora Sobieski in California, had originated the matronymic system.
It took Erno a while to figure out that that didn’t make Evasdaughter a good teacher. He was the brightest boy in the class. He believed in the cousins, respected authority, and worshipped women like his mother and Evasdaughter.
Evasdaughter was a tall woman who wore tight short-sleeved tunics that emphasized her small breasts. Erno had begun to notice such things; sex play was everyone’s interest that semester, and he had recently had several erotic fondling sessions with girls in the class.
One day they were studying protein engineering. Erno loved it. He liked how you could make a gene jump through hoops if you were clever enough. He got ahead in the reading. That day he asked Eva Evasdaughter about directed protein mutagenesis, a topic they were not due to study until next semester.
“Can you make macro-modifications in proteins—I mean replace entire sequences to get new enzymes?” He was genuinely curious, but at some level he also was seeking Evasdaughter’s approval of his doing extra work.
She turned on him coolly. ‘“Areyou talking about using site-directed mutagenesis, or chemical synthesis of oligonucleotides?”
He had never heard of site-directed mutagenesis. “Imean using oligonucleotides to change the genes. “
“I cant answer unless I know ifwe’re talking about site-directed or synthesized oligonucleotides. Which is it?”
Erno felt his face color. The other students were watching him. “I—I don’t know. “
“Yes, you don’t,” Evasdaughter said cheerfully. And instead of explaining, she turned back to the lesson.
Erno didn’t remember another thing for the rest of that class, except looking at his shoes. Why had she treated him like that? She made him feel stupid. Yes, she knew more biotech than he did, but she was the teacher! Of course she knew more! Did that mean she had to put him down?
When he complained to his mother, she only said that he needed to listen to the teacher.
Only slowly did he realize that Evasdaughter had exhibited what he had always been taught was male dominance behavior. He had presented a challenge to her superiority, and she had smashed him flat. After he was, smashed, she could afford to treat him kindly. But she would teach him only after he admitted that he was her inferior.
Now that his eyes were opened, he saw this behavior everywhere. Every day cousins asserted their superiority in order to hurt others. He had been lied to, and his elders were hypocrites.
Yet when he tried to show his superiority, h
e was told to behave himself. Superior / inferior is wrong, they said. Difference is all.
FIVE
One thing Tyler had said was undoubtedly true: this was a test. How devoted was Erno to the Society of Cousins? How good a judge was he of Tyler’s character? How eager was he to see his mother and the rest of his world made uncomfortable, and how large a discomfort did he think was justified? Just how angry was Erno?
After Erno got back to his room, he lay awake, unable to sleep. He ran every moment of his night with Tyler over in his mind, parsed every sentence, and examined every ambiguous word. Tyler had never denied that the Philosopher’s Stone was a bomb. Erno looked up the term in the dictionary: a philosopher’s stone was “an imaginary substance sought by alchemists in the belief that it would change base metals into gold or silver.”
He did not think the change that Tyler’s stone would bring had anything to do with gold or silver.
He looked at his palm, long since washed clean, where Alicia had written her number. She’d asked him to call her before he did anything stupid.
At 1545 the next day Erno was seated in the amphitheater among the crowds of cousins. More people were here than had come the previous week, and the buzz of their conversation, broken by occasional laughter, filled the air. He squinted up at the dome to try to figure out just where they had placed the stone. The dome had automatic safety devices to seal any minor air leak. But it couldn’t survive a hole blasted in it. Against the artificial blue sky Erno watched a couple of flyers circling like hawks.
1552. Tyler arrived, trailing a gaggle of followers, mostly young men trying to look insolent. He’d showed up—what did that mean? Erno noted that this time, Tyler wore black. He seemed as calm as he had before, and he chatted easily with the others, then left them to take a seat on the stage.
At 1559 Debra Debrasdaughter took her place. Erno looked at his watch. 1600.
Nothing happened.
Was that the test? To see whether Erno would panic and fall for a ruse? He tried to catch Tyler’s eye, but got nothing.
Debrasdaughter rapped for order. The ranks of cousins began to quiet, to sit up straighter. Near silence had fallen, and Debrasdaughter began to speak.