by Neil Clarke
“What do you think?” asked my mother, her hands pressed together.
“It seems pleasant. No view?”
“Not from the rooms, no.”
“Why is that?”
“Something about radiation,” she said, and a line of sickness formed through the middle of my body, running from my throat to my crotch. I forced myself to continue pleasantly.
“Looks like you have everything in place. Comfortable.”
“I can’t get used to the gravity.”
“Oh.”
“Pretty much everything you see was made here. It’s amazing what they’re producing. These new plastics. It’s really something.”
I intended to mention the absence of familiar objects, then found something. A framed photo of my father and me tilted slightly backward on a set of shelves largely empty of books, the few books there—six?—making the point of the others’ absence.
“That old picture,” I said, and went to pick it up, bobbling it some as I did so. Old wasn’t the right word, my mother had taken the shot outside our Pennsylvania house a few months before they’d moved to Arizona, but the picture did seem old somehow. The frame, at least, was the former frame. Wood, even.
“We couldn’t bring much.” Her voice collapsed on the final word, and she started crying.
“Hey,” I said.
We sat together on the sofa. Having never comforted my mother before, I drew on the repertoire of gestures I used with Cyndi and the girls. I kept saying “Hey,” alternately rubbing and gripping her far shoulder with my enveloping arm. So acutely did I feel my father’s absence from the scene, I imagined briefly that he was dead.
He called my name excitedly as soon as he came in, before he even saw me.
“In here,” I said. Soft words seemed loud, as if gravity’s weakness left them too powerful.
My mother patted my leg and extricated herself from my grip. I understood that we weren’t letting him in on her sorrow.
He gave me a tour of the facilities, ending back at the gym. The walls there were like the walls of other gyms, blue pads up to a certain height—higher than on Earth—and white walls above that. Metal beams, or perhaps a shaped plastic, crossed the high ceiling.
“Give this a look,” said my father. He still wore his workout suit. After a few preparatory breaths, he loped in slow motion across the spongy red floor, then performed an awkward Fosbury flop over an absurdly elevated rubber high jump bar. He tumbled into a stack of pads, rolling about for some seconds before settling. His head came up, flushed and smiling. “Great, huh?”
“I imagine everybody can do that.”
He clambered from the pads. “No. No. That’s not true. People get lazy. You’ve got to work out to keep your muscles fit up here. I mean, look around.” We were the only ones there. He tapped two fingers to his head, distressingly hard. “I’ve got the right attitude. Not everyone’s got it. This is a new thing. You can’t let retirement be about waiting for death. There are new opportunities.”
I nearly said, The high jump? But I couldn’t have a real conversation with him. Something wasn’t right.
“Do you get . . . out much?” I asked.
“Outside? No. You can, there are excursions, but it’s not a great idea every day. The radiation.”
Again.
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, no one said this was totally safe. You want to limit your exposure to solar radiation.” His hands went to his hips. “Maybe if they built another facility on the Dark Side. I’d go there. Then you could get out.”
“Dad. The Dark Side isn’t dark. You just can’t see it from Earth. It gets the same solar exposure.”
I thought he was going to say it: “Why do you tell people things they already know,” but he just sucked in his cheeks and blinked.
“Huh,” he said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet, lifting off the ground and settling, like someone practicing for flight.
While my father took a nap, my mother explained. He’d blacked out on the rocket, and there’d been some struggle to revive him, a period when he lacked oxygen. After they brought him around, he was euphoric, and the feeling had stuck. The doctor had a term for it, but my mother hadn’t cared enough about labeling the problem to hang on to the tag. Test pilots used to experience the same thing. For a decent percentage of those who went deeply black, they emerged altered, unafraid of death, seeing a universe suffused with joy. I could see how that unintended consequence might be useful for a test pilot. For a retiree . . .
“Maybe you could both come home,” I said.
“Is that why you came here?” She’d been chopping carrots with undue care, and now she stopped.
“Probably,” I said. I breathed a few times; no words came into my head. “I suppose so. I think I thought I was just coming to see you.”
“It’s all right. But we can’t leave.”
She resumed chopping, and I let it drop. Despite what she’d said, their leaving now seemed possible. I was mistaken, not knowing then what she’d meant.
I hadn’t done my research.
I slept much of one day and was sick for a good part of another. My mother touched my forehead in search of my true temperature, recalling for me days I’d spent home with an ear infection in elementary school. She’d sat on my bed, her added weight on the cushion somehow a further comfort. The mattresses on the moon were too soft; she sank right in. It didn’t have the same effect. I just wanted more than ever to return home.
I recovered enough by the fourth day, the day before my flight back, to join my father for a trip outside—outside, not “outdoors.” Outdoors was for Earth. Three others, all elderly, went with us. A team of four attendants swarmed each person in turn. I watched them lock the seals on my boots and gloves; my breathing quickened as four hands lowered the helmet. Sliding noises, sharp snaps, a sour taste in my mouth, and a thumbs-up from outside. I returned the gesture, but didn’t believe I was safe.
You didn’t simply walk from the complex. We climbed aboard two fatwheeled rovers, a series of wide doors lifted into the ceiling, and we rolled out. Immediately around the facility, the landscape had been scoured flat, but a hundred yards farther on, you hit the real thing, and the vehicles bounced in overreaction at each irregularity.
“Just stay strapped in and enjoy!” shouted a voice in both my ears, one of the two drivers. Like any nervous passenger, I watched the path ahead. My father had to remind me what I’d come out here to see, hitting my arm with the back of his hand, pointing skyward, then flipping back my sun visor. I looked up, but gripped the seat as if nothing, really, could have held me. The unorganized and unfamiliar sprawl of stars, the denser band of the galaxy’s horizon, pressed down and drew me in.
My father’s voice surprised me.”It never fails,” he said. I saw he’d been watching me. “Never fails.”
I touched the switch on my arm that let me speak directly back, and touched another that cut me off from everyone else.
“Too many stars,” I said, and he nodded. “Where’s Earth?”
He jabbed ahead of us. “After the rim!” he cried, as if a wind might take away his words.
With every terrific bounce, he whooped in my ear, and I hoped he’d remembered, in his delight, to spare others the joy.
The vehicles slowed some at the crater’s edge, but the ascent, though steep, was steady. At that angle, I felt us launching toward the farthest stars.
Then the Earth hove up before me, three-quarters lit by the sun, and I stared at that until we stopped moving.
I staggered from my seat, now looking too little at the ground. “Watch your step,” said a voice, though I figured it was directed at everyone. Then my father was talking directly to me.
“Can you believe it?”
“Not yet.”
He laughed, a huge bark. He moved like an inflated penguin, bouncing side to side from one stiff leg to the other. I heard him breathing and humming; thinking of what my mot
her had told me, I tried to share his openness, his joy. Then he came between me and the Earth, as if he were running home.
Through whorls of cloud, I saw North America. I saw where I’d grown up and where I lived now. It all felt deeply wrong, and the planet seemed wrapped in thick silence. Momentarily, I panicked, thinking my suit had lost its air, but I calmed myself and found my breath had just become terribly shallow. My father must have turned off his link to me, because now I could not hear him breathe at all.
I headed immediately for my seat when a guide announced it was time to turn back.
“Let me ask you about the radiation,” I said to my father on the rough return ride. I kept looking between my boots at the white floor of the rover.
“Are you going to ask me something or tell me something?” I turned to find him smiling impishly.
“Ask,” I said.
He leaned closer. “Am I going to tell you something you don’t know or something you do know?”
I lost the energy to say more.
They did see me off for the trip home, my mother’s show of happiness so false I couldn’t believe my father, even in his ecstatic state, didn’t see it. But their relationship was their own, and it wasn’t about what I perceived or even what I knew. They stood by the moving walkway, waving and waving, strings of green and blue light rolling on the walls behind them, while I slid backwards away. They stopped waving before I did, and then I watched them go.
I ended up with an empty seat beside me and two men, both ten years younger than I, across the aisle. One day out, when the one nearest woke briefly, I tried talking with him. He had several days’ worth of beard, a wide, fleshy face, and looked open to conversation. I explained the purpose of my trip. He turned out to be a construction worker; this was his second moon jaunt. It paid well.
“They recommend only a month at a time,” he said. “Any more, and you can’t get insured, due to the radiation. Plus, you’d be stupid. I mean, you won’t turn stupid, which is what one guy I know thinks, he won’t come up here for anything, but you’d be stupid to do that to your genes.”
“Too much damage.”
“Yeah.” He faced forward as he talked, letting his head roll my way every sentence or so to catch my eyes, then rolling back. He didn’t talk loudly, probably out of deference to his sleeping companion. “Now, I’ve had my kids, have three kids, so it’s not like I’m damaging my genetic inheritance. But cancer’s a risk. That’d take a longer exposure, and the safety regs are pretty conservative.”
“But what about the people living there?”
“The shielding’s not useless. But it’s not like it really blocks much. Some rays pour right on through. Human exposure’s never been tested, and now that you can’t test animals, it’s a bit of a crap shoot. That’s why people don’t spend more than a few months up there. It’s a stepping-stone to better work back on the big blue marble. Even for the administrators. Though I’ll tell you, they’ve got experimental shielding on the quarters of some bigwigs. The government people especially. I helped install some last year.”
“My parents . . .” I said, but didn’t know how to finish the thought. They’d been there half a year already.
“How old are they?” I told him. “See, again, it’s not like they’re going to have more kids. Nobody in the retirement facilities is. I mean, I suppose something bizarre could happen, but nobody’s planning for kids. And people are pretty old, most of them older than your parents. The low grav feels good. The radiation . . . I’m repeating myself, but it’s a crap shoot.
“In any case,” he said, “they can’t leave now.”
I waited for him to turn my way again. When he did, he saw that I didn’t follow his thinking.
“You know.”
“Maybe I don’t,” I said.
“Their muscles. They couldn’t handle Earth gravity now. It’s been too long, or it’s pretty near to too long. You lose muscle mass, I don’t care how much you work out. And your bones get fragile, like bird bones. Your heart, that’s the big one. It gets accustomed to pumping on the moon. You take it back to Earth . . .” He saw I hadn’t thought about any of this; his eyes had trouble rising to mine. “Well, they’d probably not survive the trip anyway.”
After that, I couldn’t talk. I requested more “passage medication” to put me out. When I woke many hours later, terribly hungry, I remembered a dream of the moon’s surface: people without spacesuits shoveled at the gray dust, hurling it skyward.
Were they burying people up there? With nothing organic to devour them, nothing to grow from their decay, the bodies would remain unchanged under the dust. Or perhaps they folded the bodies into the soil of the farms. When the time came, regardless of the cost, I’d have to see about bringing them home.
My old hometown lay only two hours away by car, but I’d not visited since my parents’ departure for Arizona. One day mid-February I called my wife’s office from work, told her where I was going, not to wait on me for dinner, and left calmly and urgently.
The landscape grew hillier as I traveled south; the hills rolled, never loomed. They lay under snow, a thin snow that let yellow grasses poke through in the rare fields that abutted the narrow road. Once, long ago now, there’d been farms here, but the whole region was overrun with identical houses that obscured the landscape and threatened to cover the hilltops. For all the changes, the roads were still two-lanes with no shoulders. Every old stone house belonged to a law firm. Leaving on the heat, I wastefully cracked open the windows as well, letting in the smell of the cold, which did something at least to make me feel like I was in the country.
I wore boots. I planned to walk along my old town’s main street, where the houses lay close to the sidewalk. I’d cut up through the blacktop lot of my old elementary school. From there I’d continue uphill, under tall trees, to the baseball lot, where my parents had watched me play Little League games, even then a nostalgic activity. I’d walk the bases. Above the baseball field stood Whitting Manor, a nursing home. Summer days, you could see through the wide bedroom windows old people propped up in their beds. Those who could venture outside were wheeled out to the porch that ran the length of the old main house. In winter, kids sledded from the main building down the sharp hill toward the ball field, bordered by a cedar hedgerow. I couldn’t bring back the exact feeling of being on a sled, but I could see the other kids heading down the same hill or trudging back up, I could hear the screams of delight. The frigid air coming in the windows helped me remember.
Two deer leapt from behind a bush directly onto the road, not fifty feet away. Large and oblivious, they hesitated even as they landed. I jammed on the brakes. The car’s computer made decisions about how to stop; sensing no other cars around, it cut briskly back and forth before leaving me to rest sideways. The deer stood just to my left, looking askance at me. The closer one flicked its ears, and I heard the flutter through the half-open window. I studied the fur where I would have struck the animal, the brown laced with black and white.
I backed the car to straighten out, and the animals continued, unhurried, across the street, their enormous black eyes watching but unafraid. They hopped a bank and headed toward another housing development. I heard their hooves breaking the snow’s icy crust.
My arms, locked in place on the steering wheel, shook. Unsteady, I left the car and took in air. The deer were gone.
Where could deer live now?—Their woods were vanishing, what little bits of forest remained cut off by encroaching developments. And in winter, the landscape buried and frozen, they came out of their private places in search of food. But there were fewer fields, more cars to encounter, and their time was running out.
I remembered then that Whitting Manor had expanded when I was a kid, adding a retirement center that ate up most of the sledding hill. My elementary school had been shut down; condemned, though still beautiful on the outside, the school district couldn’t even use it for offices. The traffic would be horrible in downtown.
Were there even places to park?
I watched my hands shake and filled myself with a cold breath. I saw a car coming from a long way off under the bright winter sky. I thought to look: no moon.
Suddenly I didn’t want to make the long trip to a place that no longer existed, or that existed perfectly only in my memory. I wanted to sit at home on my floor, playing a board game with the girls. I wanted to sit in that close living room with my wife warm nearby, her legs under a quilt. In the middle of all this cold emptiness, I felt my parents embrace me and let me go.
2008
Like so many kids of her generation, Kristine Kathryn Rusch wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up. But she had trouble with math. Serious trouble. (Turns out that she’s dyslexic.) So, with actual astronaut training out of the question, she turned to fiction. The moon factors into much of her fiction, and from her Retrieval Artist series (mysteries set on the Moon) to her awardwinning “Recovering Apollo 8,” her fiction has reflected her interest in the stars. In addition to the Retrieval Artist series, she has written a series set in the far future called the Diving series. She also writes under a number of pen names, including (but not limited to) Kris Nelscott and Kristine Grayson. She puts a free short story on her website every Monday. Go to kriswrites.com to read more of her work.
SENIORSOURCE
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The little boy lay facedown in the dirt. Because the brown dirt was fine, loose, and powdery, I thought he had landed outside the dome, but that didn’t quite match with what I was seeing. His body was intact, which it would not have been if it had been exposed to the harshness of the actual Moon.
Then something wet collided with my shirt, spoiling the you-are-there illusion, pulling me back into my workstation at SeniorSource.
I yanked off my goggles and made sure I let go of them gently so that they’d float beside me. I also let go of my workstation so I floated as well. A half a dozen other people were clinging to their stations, their faces hidden beneath the goggles that covered their eyes, ears, and nose. A few folks had strapped themselves in so that, in their excitement, they wouldn’t let go and drift into some equipment on the other side of the work area.