by Neil Clarke
They were almost there when Erno realized that Tyler had slowed, and was no longer keeping up. He willed himself to stop, awkwardly, almost pitching face first into the regolith. He looked back. Tyler had slowed to a stroll.
“What’s wrong?” Erno gasped.
“Nothing,” Tyler said. Though Erno could hear Tyler’s ragged breath, there was no hurry in his voice.
“Come on!” Erno shouted.
Tyler stopped completely. “Women and children first.”
Erno tried to catch his breath. His clock read 0304. “What?”
“You go ahead. Save your pathetic life.”
“Are you crazy? Do you want to die?”
“Of course not. I want you to go in first.”
“Why?”
“If you can’t figure it out by now, I can’t explain it, Erno. It’s a story for a man.”
Erno stood dumbstruck.
“Come out here into the sunshine with me,” Tyler said. “It’s nice out here.” Erno laughed. He took a step back toward Tyler. He took another. They stood side by side.
“That’s my man Erno. Now, how long can you stay out here?”
The sun beat brightly down. The tunnel mouth gaped five meters in front of them. 0307. 0309. Each watched the other, neither budged.
“My life isn’t pathetic,” Erno said.
“Depends on how you look at it,” Tyler replied.
“Don’t you think yours is worth saving?”
“What makes you think this is a real radiation alert, Erno? The broadcast could be a trick to make us come back.”
“There have been warnings posted for weeks.”
“That only makes it a more plausible trick.”
“That’s no reason for us to risk our lives—on the chance it is.”
“I don’t think it’s a trick, Erno. I’ll go into that tunnel. After you.”
Erno stared at the dark tunnel ahead. 0311. A single leap from safety. Even now lethal levels of radiation might be sluicing through their bodies. A bead of sweat stung his eye.
“So this is what it means to be a man?” Erno said softly, as much to himself as to Tyler.
“This is it,” Tyler said. “And I’m a better man than you are.”
Erno felt an adrenaline surge. “You’re not better than me.”
“We’ll find out.”
“You haven’t accomplished anything.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I’ve accomplished. Go ahead, Erno. Back to your cave.”
0312. 0313. Erno could feel the radiation. It was shattering proteins and DNA throughout his body, rupturing cell walls, turning the miraculously ordered organic molecules of his brain into sludge. He thought about Alicia, the curve of her breast, the light in her eyes. Had she told her friends that he had hit her? And his mother. He saw the shock and surprise in her face when the book hit her. How angry he had been. He wanted to explain to her why he had thrown it. It shouldn’t be that hard to explain.
He saw his shadow reaching out beside him, sharp and steady, two arms, two legs and a head, an ape somehow transported to the moon. No, not an ape—a man. What a miracle that a man could keep himself alive in this harsh place—not just keep alive, but make a home of it. All the intellect and planning and work that had gone to put him here, standing out under the brutal sun, letting it exterminate him.
He looked at Tyler, fixed as stone.
“This is insane,” Erno said—then ran for the tunnel.
A second after he sheltered inside, Tyler was there beside him.
FOURTEEN
They found the radiation shelter midway through the tunnel, closed themselves inside, stripped off their suits, drank some water, breathed the cool air. They crowded in the tiny stone room together, smelling each other’s sweat. Erno started to get sick: he had chills, he felt nausea. Tyler made him sip water, put his arm around Erno’s shoulders.
Tyler said it was radiation poisoning, but Erno said it was not. He sat wordless in the corner the nine hours it took until the all-clear came. Then, ignoring Tyler, he suited up and headed back to the colony.
FIFTEEN
So that is the story of how Erno discovered that he was not a man. That, indeed, Tyler was right, and there was no place for men in the Society of Cousins. And that he, Erno, despite his grievances and rage, was a cousin.
The cost of this discovery was Erno’s own banishment, and one thing more.
When Erno turned himself in at the constabulary headquarters, eager to tell them about GROSS and ready to help them find Tyler, he was surprised at their subdued reaction. They asked him no questions. They looked at him funny, eyes full of rage and something besides rage. Horror? Loathing? Pity? They put him in the same white room where he had sat before, and left him there alone. After a while the blond interrogator, Mona, came in and told him that three people had been injured when Tyler and Erno had blown the vacuum seal while escaping. One, who had insisted on crawling after them through the escape tunnel, had been caught in there and died: Erno’s mother.
Erno and Tyler were given separate trials, and the colony voted: they were to be expelled. Tyler’s banishment was permanent; Erno was free to apply for readmission in ten years.
The night before he left, Erno, accompanied by a constable, was allowed to visit his home. Knowing how completely inadequate it was, he apologized to his sister, his aunt and cousins. Aunt Sophie and Nick treated him with stiff rectitude. Celeste, who somehow did not feel the rage against him that he deserved, cried and embraced him. They let him pack a duffel with a number of items from his room.
After leaving, he asked the constable if he could stop a moment on the terrace outside the apartment before going back to jail. He took a last look at the vista of the domed crater from the place where he had lived every day of his life. He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. His mother seemed everywhere around him. All he could see was her crawling, on hands and knees in the dark, desperately trying to save him from himself. How angry she must have been, and how afraid. What must she have thought, as the air flew away and she felt her coming death? Did she regret giving birth to him?
He opened his eyes. There on the terrace stood the recycler he had thrown pebbles at for years. He reached into his pack, pulled out Stories for Men, and stepped toward the bin.
Alicia came around a corner. “Hello, Erno,” she said.
A step from the trash bin, Erno held the book awkwardly in his hand, trying to think of something to say. The constable watched them.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he told Alicia.
“I know you didn’t mean this to happen,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what I meant. It happened.”
On impulse, he handed her the copy of Stories for Men. “I don’t know what to do with this,” he said. “Will you keep it for me?”
The next morning they put him on the cable car for Tsander. His exile had begun.
2002
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.He has published forty-two books, mostly novels.
THE CLEAR BLUE SEAS OF LUNA
Gregory Benford
You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.
Or especially, what we all tell to all those others—those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.
I cannot be what you are, you the larger.
Not that we are not somehow also the same, wedded to our memories of the centuries we have been wedded and grown together.
For we are like you and him and I, a life form that evolution could not produce on the rich loam of Earth. To birth forth and then burst forth a thing—a great, sprawling metallo-b
io-cyber-thing such as we and you— takes grander musics, such as I know.
Only by shrinking down to the narrow chasms of the single view can you know the intricate slick fineness, the reek and tingle and chime of this silky symphony of self.
But bigness blunders, thumb-fingered.
Smallness can enchant. So let us to go an oddment of him, and me, and you:
He saw:
A long thin hard room, fluorescent white, without shadows.
Metal on ceramo-glass on fake wood on woven nylon rug.
A granite desk. A man whose name he could not recall.
A neat uniform, so familiar he looked beyond it by reflex.
He felt: light gravity (Mars? the moon?); rough cloth at a cuff of his work shirt; a chill dry air-conditioned breeze along his neck. A red flash of anger. Benjan smiled slightly. He had just seen what he must do.
“Gray was free when we began work, centuries ago,” Benjan said, his black eyes fixed steadily on the man across the desk. Katonji, that was the man’s name. His commander, once, a very long time ago.
“It had been planned that way, yes,” his superior said haltingly, begrudging the words.
“That was the only reason I took the assignment,” Benjan said.
“I know. Unfortunately—”
“I have spent many decades on it.”
“Fleet Control certainly appreciates—”
“World-scaping isn’t just a job, damn it! It’s an art, a discipline, a craft that saps a man’s energies.”
“And you have done quite well. Personally, I—”
“When you asked me to do this I wanted to know what Fleet Control planned for Gray.”
“You can recall an ancient conversation?”
A verbal maneuver, no more. Katonji was an amplified human and already well over two centuries old, but the Earthside social convention was to pretend that the past faded away, leaving a young psyche. “A ‘grand experiment in human society,’ I remember your words.”
“True, that was the original plan—”
“But now you tell me a single faction needs it? The whole moon?”
“The council has reconsidered.”
“Reconsidered, hell.” Benjan’s bronze face crinkled with disdain. “Somebody pressured them and they gave in. Who was it?”
“I would not put it that way,” Katonji said coldly.
“I know you wouldn’t. Far easier to hide behind words.” He smiled wryly and compressed his thin lips. The view-screen near him looked out on a cold silver landscape and he studied it, smoldering inside. An artificial viewscape from Gray itself. Earth, a crescent concerto in blue and white, hung in a creamy sky over the insect working of robotractors and men. Gray’s air was unusually clear today, the normal haze swept away by a front blowing in from the equator near Mare Chrisum.
The milling minions were hollowing out another cavern for Fleet Control to fill with cubicles and screens and memos. Great Gray above, mere gray below. Earth swam above high fleecy cirrus and for a moment Benjan dreamed of the day when birds, easily adapted to the light gravity and high atmospheric density, would flap lazily across such views.
“Officer Tozenji—”
“I am no longer an officer. I resigned before you were born.”
“By your leave, I meant it solely as an honorific. Surely you still have some loyalty to the fleet.”
Benjan laughed. The deep bass notes echoed from the office walls with a curious emptiness. “So it’s an appeal to the honor of the crest, is it? I see I spent too long on Gray. Back here you have forgotten what I am like,” Benjan said. But where is “here”? I could not take Earth full gravity anymore, so this must be an orbiting Fleet cylinder, spinning gravity.
A frown. “I had hoped that working once more with Fleet officers would change you, even though you remained a civilian on Gray. A man isn’t—”
“A man is what he is,” Benjan said.
Katonji leaned back in his shiftchair and made a tent of his fingers. “You . . . played the Sabal Game during those years?” he asked slowly.
Benjan’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I did.” The game was ancient, revered, simplicity itself. It taught that the greater gain lay in working with others, rather than in self-seeking. He had always enjoyed it, but only a fool believed that such moral lessons extended to the cut and thrust of Fleet matters.
“It did not . . . bring you to community?”
“I got on well enough with the members of my team,” Benjan said evenly. “I hoped such isolation with a small group would calm your . . . spirit. Fleet is a community of men and women seeking enlightenment in the missions, just as you do. You are an exceptional person, anchored as you are in the station, using linkages we have not used—”
“Permitted, you mean.”
“Those old techniques were deemed . . . too risky.”
Benjan felt his many links like a background hum, in concert and warm. What could this man know of such methods time-savored by those who lived them? “And not easy to direct from above.”
The man fastidiously raised a finger and persisted: “We still sit at the game, and while you are here would welcome your—”
“Can we leave my spiritual progress aside?”
“Of course, if you desire.”
“Fine. Now tell me who is getting my planet.”
“Gray is not your planet.”
“I speak for the station and all the intelligences who link with it: We made Gray. Through many decades, we hammered the crust, released the gases, planted the spores, damped the winds.”
“With help.”
“Three hundred of us at the start, and eleven heavy spacecraft. A puny beginning that blossomed into millions.”
“Helped by the entire staff of Earthside—”
“They were Fleet men. They take orders, I don’t. I work by contract.”
“A contract spanning centuries?”
“It is still valid, though those who wrote it are dust.”
“Let us treat this in a gentlemanly fashion, sir. Any contract can be renegotiated.”
“The paper I—we, but I am here to speak for all—signed for Gray said it was to be an open colony. That’s the only reason I worked on it,” he said sharply.
“I would not advise you to pursue that point,” Katonji said. He turned and studied the viewscreen, his broad, southern Chinese nose flaring at the nostrils. But the rest of his face remained an impassive mask. For a long moment there was only the thin whine of air circulation in the room.
“Sir,” the other man said abruptly, “I can only tell you what the council has granted. Men of your talents are rare. We know that, had you undertaken the formation of Gray for a, uh, private interest, you would have demanded more payment.”
“Wrong. I wouldn’t have done it at all.”
“Nonetheless, the council is willing to pay you a double fee. The Majiken Clan, who have been invested with Primacy Rights to Gray—”
“What!”
“—have seen fit to contribute the amount necessary to reimburse you—”
“So that’s who—”
“—and all others of the station, to whom I have been authorized to release funds immediately.”
Benjan stared blankly ahead for a short moment. “I believe I’ll do a bit of releasing myself,” he murmured, almost to himself.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Information?”
“Infor—oh.”
“The Clans have a stranglehold on the council, but not the 3D. People might be interested to know how it came about that a new planet—a rich one, too—was handed over—”
“Officer Tozenji—”
Best to pause. Think. He shrugged, tried on a thin smile. “I was only jesting. Even idealists are not always stupid.”
“Um. I am glad of that.”
“Lodge the Majiken draft in my account. I want to wash my hands of this.” The other man said something, but Benjan was not listening. He made the ri
tual of leaving. They exchanged only perfunctory hand gestures. He turned to go, and wondered at the naked, flat room this man had chosen to work in: It carried no soft tones, no humanity, none of the feel of a room that is used, a place where men do work that interests them, so that they embody it with something of themselves. This office was empty in the most profound sense. It was a room for men who lived by taking orders. He hoped never to see such a place again.
Benjan turned. Stepped—the slow slide of falling, then catching himself, stepped—
You fall over Gray.
Skating down the steep banks of young clouds, searching, driving.
Luna you know as Gray, as all in station know it, because pearly clouds deck high in its thick air. It had been gray long before, as well—the aged pewter of rock hard-hammered for billions of years by the relentless sun. Now its air was like soft slate, cloaking the greatest of human handiworks.
You raise a hand, gaze at it. So much could come from so small an instrument. You marvel. A small tool, five-fingered slab, working over great stretches of centuries. Seen against the canopy of your craft, it seems an unlikely tool to heft worlds with—
And the thought alone sends you plunging—
Luna was born small, too small.
So the sun had readily stripped it of its early shroud of gas. Luna came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch—how you wish you could have seen that!—spun a disk, and from that churn, Luna condensed red-hot. The heat of that birth stripped away the moon’s water and gases, leaving it bare to the sun’s glower.
So amend that:
You steer a comet from the chilly freezer beyond Pluto, swing it around Jupiter, and smack it into the bleak fields of Mare Chrisium. In bits.
For a century, all hell breaks loose. You wait, patient in your station. It is a craft of fractions: Luna is smaller, so needs less to build an atmosphere.