by M.A. Harris
Passages
Paul sat on the fold out seat of his walking stick and looked out over Luna Haven letting the faint hum of his life support system fade into the background. Against the sun blasted moonscape with its knife sharp horizon the bustle around Luna Haven was disconcertingly unreal.
He was out here for exercise, to fulfill his monthly suit checkout time and to think. It was Wednesday, five days since the Alexis Aurora had landed and they were still cut off from news, and there had been no Moonships full of new colonists. People were upset, particularly those who were just now realizing how much they had been depending on control of the Moonships. Trouble with alcohol and other drugs had spiked along with claustrophobia, things that had been unheard of till a week ago.
They all agreed that some kind of infighting regarding control of the Stack and space was ongoing. But given that, Olarik seemed to be acting strangely. He had done nothing about the refugees Paul had brought up from Earth. He had even turned a blind eye to the weapons the refugees had brought up. A military crew had flown the Alexis back to Earth but the Moonship was back on the moon again, just not at Luna Haven.
Human history was at a pivot point but they were in the dark as to the events unfolding on Earth. Conti had a crew of techs putting together a portable listening post and covert fiber optic cable, it was supposed to be ready for deployment later today. But the exterior of the town was certainly under observation; they couldn’t simply drive over the horizon in one of the moon buggies without getting spotted.
There was the Luna Truck, which he’d been working on with ‘kids’ from ‘Luna Tech.’ Luna Tech was what they called the education system here, the system used a lot of computer aided teaching with a wide range of tutors providing support. Kids were anyone who wanted to take a particular course. Paul had started the design projects class he’d taken on with the Truck, and it had, sort of, gotten out of hand.
The truck was a Stack propelled freight hauler. It had an open cockpit, a triangular hull with three legs, three stacks and a small railed deck on its top surface, but it was mainly intended to lift cargo in slings. They already had three locations on the dark side and using the Moonships for small cargos was a waste and ground transport wasn’t practical over more than a few miles.
It had started out as a design study; then some of his ‘kids’, including Steve, had turned up with parts. Now the frame of the Truck, along with most of the parts needed to finish it, were in the small dome they used as a repair hanger. At current progress they’d probably be ready for a test hop in a few weeks.
He’d thought about using it to try and get to Earth or at least get into contact with Earth. But the Truck had no long range navigation system, no cabin, and wasn’t the least bit stealthy. It seemed more like a way to get someone killed than a solution, to this problem anyway.
His mind drifted back to the overall problem then on to a lot more pleasant subject, Julia Chisholm, her smile, her brilliant blue eyes. Then his mind hopped to Cooper Paaly, blue eyes wide with shock, utterly speechless at the sight of Julia.
Now he had seen the two of them together Paul had found it hard to believe that he hadn’t realized who she had to be long before. The similarities to her grandfather were clear but relatively minor, while she had her father’s eyes, nose and cheekbones, and probably the same hair, though Coop’s hair had been silver white as long as Paul had known him. As far as he could tell the similarity mostly stopped at the skin, she might be fearless, smart, quick and stubborn, but she was not arrogant, cocksure and blind to the feelings of others.
It also explained the odd relationship between Paaly and Aristide. Julia’s mother, Aristides daughter had all of both parents headstrong independence, as an undergraduate she had met, and essentially seduced Cooper, then dumped him before she knew she was pregnant.
Later, a single mother, having never told Cooper about his daughter, she had met, fallen in love with, and married Chisholm. It was the rancher who had convinced her to tell Paaly and Aristide about Julia.
Of course one of the things that rubbed Richard Aristide the wrong way was that he had, almost by accident, introduced his daughter to Cooper, who had already been doing contract research for Aristide by then.
Paul shook his head, to say the least Richard and Cooper were interesting case studies in being too smart and self centered for your own good. Thankfully, the worst aspects appeared to have been civilized over the years, his mind wandered back to Julia.
-Friday-
Stepping outside of her, hopefully, temporary apartment Julia rubbed her head ruefully, she decided once more that she was an outdoorswoman and a bit too impetuous for Luna gravity mixed with Earth scale doorways and concrete and steel door frames. That was on top of the fact that she felt a little claustrophobic even with brightly colored walls and ceilings with cunning lighting that gave a sense of space.
She strolled down the passageway to a connector and turned, she smiled at a small group of men and women standing chatting quietly in one of the corner spaces. One of the men, from the repair shop where she had been helping out part time, waved to her with a tight smile, nerves were getting out of hand. As she strode down the hallway there was an approaching buzz, an electric cart passed her, this wasn’t one of the main thoroughfares, those were getting almost dangerously clogged.
Heading towards where she thought the Clinic was, she’d been there a couple of times but never from her apartment and the directions Janice had given the previous night at dinner had been rather vague.
She felt sad, she’d been feeling this way since she’d found out that Cooper, her father, was dying. When she had first seen him here, haranguing Paul in his unworldly, if good natured, way she had not realized how changed he was. Only later had she seen how bone thin he was, how he sagged tiredly, even in the light gravity of Luna.
She hadn’t met Cooper till she was six and didn’t know him well but he’d been an oddly comforting icon as she grew up, she loved her dad and the ranch but she loved technology and machines in a way Sam Chisholm could never understand but Cooper Paaly had instantly recognized. She’d loved and revered him a bit like a personal deity, that he was the inventor of the Stack had seemed dazzlingly right. Finding out that he was dying, had weeks, months at most, to live, was a blow to the underpinnings of her world.
Yesterday evening she had dinner with Cooper, Janice, Conti and Conti’s wife. Cooper had been at his best, regaling them with his eccentrically self-centered view of the world and events. She’d decided the only reason no one had ever killed the old reprobate was that he didn’t take himself terribly seriously. It seemed that sometimes he almost had to take the positions he did just because it irritated other people.
A bit surprisingly she realized she had reached her destination and walked through the automatic sliding door into the clinic. The main part was an open office area and Janice Jones was sitting at a desk, she smiled kindly. “Hey Julia, I enjoyed dinner last night.”
Julia nodded, “So did I.”
Janice looked down at her hands, “How was your day?”
“Conti asked me to help out in operations then I substituted in a high school level math course. I talked to the repair shop, they want me to help out tomorrow morning again. I guess they like my work with the micro-soldering station.”
“I can see why, you have the hands of a surgeon.” Janice wiped her eyes.
Julia perched on the desk and reached over, “You OK?”
“Yeah,” the older woman said quietly, “I left him at the coffee shop, he’d dozed off in his chair after he’d had his cup of tea.”
Julia squeezed Janice’s shoulder, the older woman closed her eyes and sighed, “It’s a miracle he’s still alive Julia. The statistics say he should have died months ago, he’s so far beyond the tail of the statistical curve he’s a walking miracle. The Doc, and Doc Fleck for that matter, both think that medical facilities will be a huge growth industry for the Moon.
We could beat out Florida and Japan for the oldest average population in next to no time.”
Julia hesitated, shrugged, “I suppose. But the man who gave us that will be gone.”
“Yes…not that he’d ever think much of old age homes and clinics on ‘his’ moon. He’s much more interested in telescopes, experiments on his invention, building starships, even mines. People and their needs are more a distraction than anything else, unless they help him directly you know.”
Julia couldn’t help smiling faintly at this clear-eyed assessment of her father’s foibles. She knew that Janice slept with Cooper; they also bickered like a comfortable old couple. Julia could tell that Janice loved the old rascal for all his irritating inability to relate well with the rest of the world.
She whispered, “I didn’t get to know him when I was growing up and soon he’ll be gone.”
Janice sighed and nodded, closing her own eyes, squeezing tears back, “I know…damn the bastard, I’ll miss him a lot.”
Julia got up and went around the table to hug the older woman.
-Monday-
Nothing was ever easy Paul decided as he sat watching the scroll panel display in Cooper’s lab. Nearby a short fat cylinder sat and hummed, it had thick bundles of fiber optics protruding from six vacuum sealed ports at its waist. It was the latest version of the sensor stack and it was doing something, Cooper thought it was sensing, Paul agreed, he just wasn’t sure that it was sensing what Cooper thought it was.
Since coming back to his Luna exile and the blackout Cooper had all but frozen him out of the sensor stack work. At first Paul had thought it was because he was upset with Paul about Julia but now was fairly sure that Cooper had been doubting himself and unwilling to talk about it.
Then last night Cooper had called to leave a message. “Paul I’ve made a breakthrough with the detector. I left the prototype running in my lab, collecting data, my latest set of notes are in your in box. It works Paul, I saw Earth on the display the other day, since then I’m almost certain I’ve seen Venus, Mars and the Sun. But more importantly, after letting it gather enough referential data the parsing system was showing things I’m almost certain are Earth orbiting satellites.” There had been a long silence, then he’d spoken again in a near whisper, “I’m tired Paul, I know the end is near, and I know I’m just a cranky old man, always have been, I think my part’s done in this...it’s your time to shine again.” Then he had hung up.
The lab had opened to his touch and as Cooper had said the equipment had been running. Paul had resisted looking at the old image records and data files until he’d finished reading the notes and going over the equipment setup. It was best to check that what his old friend thought he was doing and what the equipment had been set up to do were the same, they weren’t always, but Cooper’s mistakes were often as interesting as his intentions. Paul was fairly confident that this rig was doing what Cooper intended. However the software had been patched so many times no one could know what it was doing.
Paul closed his eyes, then glanced at the scroll screen. It showed code as well as a processor matrix and a dynamic process map, the system was adaptive recursive, trying to learn from the data set and model in stability. With the huge data set it was working with it appeared an impossible problem, until one realized that there were big chunks of repetitive data and the system was actually making progress.
He glanced at another screen, it showed a misty cube in space with the location of the Earth embedded inside and a shimmery sheet bisecting both. This was the target set that Cooper thought he had set up. But the sensor ‘saw’ the universe from a different perspective than normal, range to a certain extent was unimportant, its center point was the center point of overall mass within its ‘view’ and locally that was very near the center of the Sun. What Cooper had been looking at was Sol and probably Venus.
A pure software bug he’d found was a cycle counter that had been resetting the system almost randomly, because it thought the processors were trapped in loops. Another problem was that the processors kept over running the data storage capability of the local hardware which also caused resets.
One by one he’d tracked down the problems and either fixed them or had people he knew fix them, though the centering wasn’t so much a bug as an irritating feature. So now the processor was working on the stored data from the earlier runs while he gathered new data.
He’d been here for almost twenty four hours straight, a couple of times he thought he’d been on the edge and then found something else wrong. The sensor stack and processors took the better part of eight hours to ‘model’ the ‘look’ volume to a point where the data could be pulled out as anything more than apparently random noise. He now had the one apparently clean set of Cooper’s old data being worked on by a separate processor while the stack system built up a new one.
A little while later he jerked awake, blinking groggily, confused, a moment before he’d been about to kiss Julia when something had beeped loudly. He realized he’d been asleep, dreaming. His eyes took a moment to focus and then his heart leaped. One of the screens had shifted to show something that looked a lot like the cross cut of a tree trunk, growth rings and all, they were colored to represent density. The closer he looked the more complexity became evident, what looked like convective cells and the variations in density were immense. The core was a disk of white with speckles of other colors.
Cooper had ‘centered’ the system, he thought he’d been looking at the moon, but his notes said the best image he’d gotten was very vague. With this new look it was obvious that this wasn’t the moon. It was the sun, he was looking at the operation of the sun in some detail in near real time.
He changed the point of view, an external view ‘looking’ at the outer layer as if from outside. Now it was obvious that he was looking at the sun, the vast flames one saw in science programs could just be made out. The field of view hadn’t been big enough to capture anything beyond the sun.
Paul pulled up the active data set to check on its status and realized that it must have beeped. His hands danced on the keyboard and another image replaced the targeting image. Now the screen was black with two rendered spheres. One had an odd mottled appearance but the mottling pattern was familiar, he could see Eurasia and Africa, the other was a bland orange with a faint stippling. He scrolled over and expanded the image of the smaller sphere. The orange golf ball expanded, and Paul felt his smile almost hurting as the cratered surface features of Luna emerged. Another change of view showed him a cross section, in a second he had more details about Luna’s internal structure than decades of previous probing had gathered.
He swung Earth into the center of the image. He could see the continents and the geography of his birth world in considerable detail. A faint haze of atmosphere smeared the surface; the oceans were semi transparent mirrors. A cross section showed the interior of the living Earth in startling detail.
His let his hands rest on the edge of the keyboard and thought then typed in some search parameters. The world vanished leaving blackness, he frowned and typed in a few more commands, suddenly sparks lit up. One much brighter than the rest, he rolled in on it, after a point it wouldn’t magnify any more, but he was looking at a faint sprawl of lines around a tiny thorax, almost like some kind of bug, he smiled, it was the International Space Station, its solar arrays and radiators spread out like the wings and legs of some space going insect.
With a sigh he leaned back into the chair closing his eyes, resting them for a moment before getting started on the next stage of the work.
-Tuesday-
That was how Julia found him in the morning, asleep, surrounded by glowing screens with enigmatic images and scrolling text.
She knew, though the details were unclear to her, that Paul and her father had been working together for years on the Stack, that while Cooper was the inventor it was Paul’s genius to turn concepts into practical hardware
, hardware that had given humanity the solar system. In the week and a few days she had been ‘up’ she had heard a dozen stories about Paul and her father. They were the founding myths of this new society, every one needed its founding legends, and those she’d already heard about Cooper and Paul were better than most. She was fairly sure that the only reason that this place hadn’t collapsed into chaos yet was that people believed Cooper and Paul would pull another rabbit out of their hat.
She felt tears trickle down her cheek at the news she had to wake him to.
He woke up instantly when she touched his shoulder, he looked at her with something warm, and then he saw her expression and his grew tight and grim, “Coop?”
“He’s just hanging on, he had a relapse overnight, it won’t be long.”
Fifteen minutes later they entered the dispensary. There was a small crowd already there, Conti among them, he waved Paul and Julia upstairs. The doctor was standing near the head of the stairs; he looked up as they appeared, “Paul, Julia.”
“How is he Doc?” Paul asked softly
“Janice found him unresponsive this morning. She’s beating herself up over it, for no reason, Coop’s been on the edge of a collapse for weeks now.”
“In there?” Paul pointed to the sound deadening curtains surrounding one of the ward’s six beds.
The doctor nodded, “Janice is with him.”
The lights inside the cloth walled room were dim and restful. Janice rose to hug Julia when they entered. “You doing alright Janice?” Paul asked giving her a gentle hug, she smiled through the tears, “Yes, thank you, Paul.”
Cooper’s still bright blue eyes opened, and the head shifted very slightly, “Ah, there you are you flighty young wastrel. Why all the long faces? Wondering what you’re going to do without me?” The voice was thin, querulous, and very much Cooper Paaly. Janice and Julia turned with soft cries almost as if the dead had risen.
Paul took a step forward and settled down on the edge of the bed, “Always need to have the final word, don’t you Coop?” His hand rested on the terribly bony shoulder.
“Because I’m always so obviously right,” his lips curled faintly as his blue eyes closed again. But consciousness animated the features, the thin voice spoke again, “I wish I could spend more time with you Paul, with you and Julia…and with Janice …but I think my time’s up this turn of the circle.”
Paul felt a knot rise in his throat and he couldn’t think of anything to say. He could feel Julia standing behind him, her hand settled on his shoulder.
Cooper’s eyes opened, focused over Paul’s shoulder, “Hey daughter.”
“Hello Father.” Her voice was choked.
He smiled, shook his head weakly, “Don’t cry for me Julia, I had a life, a good one by most measures, though I didn’t always do as I should have by people. I was lucky to be able to meet you once more before I died. Tell your mother goodbye for me; give her my love and appreciation for raising you so well.” His eyes were closed again. Paul felt the soft wetness of her tears on his neck.
“Janice?” Coopers eyes were closed still.
She sat on the other side of the bed, “Yes dear?”
“Thank you for a good last year, I wouldn’t have lasted this long without you to support me, love me, and make life worth bearing during the bad times. Thank you for loving me, even though I know I’m not the most loveable of people.” Janice leaned forward and carefully, wordlessly hugged him.
Time flowed past, Paul could see his friend was still alive, thought he was still conscious but couldn’t be sure until the brilliant blue eyes opened again, and focused on him. The voice was even weaker now, “Paul the detector...”
Paul squeezed his arm, “It’s working Coop, as usual there were a couple of minor things you’d overlooked, I’m already thinking of how to use it to pull our chestnuts out of the fire.”
Cooper smiled faintly his eyes closing, “We were always the best team, it’s a pity we didn’t meet earlier. Or maybe fate just saved the best for last...” The words at the end were faint wisps of sound, only intelligible because of their inevitability.
This time the eyes stayed closed, and the faint intimations of consciousness faded from the sunken face. The three mourners sat on the old man’s bed as his life faded. Fifty minutes after his last words the thin chest had stopped lifting and falling. Paul stood up; Janice took one thin wrist in her hand for a moment, and then folded it over the stilled chest.
“I’ll make the announcement.” Paul said softy, Janice and Julia nodded. He turned and parted the heavy curtains.
-Wednesday-
Paul stood and watched as the moon suited figures strode towards the town, Julia and Paul had spoken about Cooper the father and the friend before the pastor had said his conventional words aimed at soothing the grieving, and they had closed with a couple of old hymns. Now those who had taken the trouble to come out to the memorial were making their way back to the safety of their new home. They’d had a wake last night and arranged the service for the mid day break today so as many people could attend or at least watch, as possible.
He found it interesting that he could tell many of them apart even in their suites. People were personalizing them more and more, but also there were cues in general shape and how people moved that the human brain was designed to spot.
Then he turned to look at the simple memorial, a red granite obelisk they had brought with them and raised when the first person had died on the moon. Cooper hadn’t been the first, there were three graves now. The first had been a sixty year old grandmother who’d died in her sleep. The other had died in a stupid industrial accident. A container had bounced off the forks of a high lift and fallen on her. Her suit had stayed sealed and operational but she’d died instantly with a caved in rib cage and broken neck, about the same as if it had happened on Earth.
The memorial was just that, a memorial to those who died during the first push to colonize a place other than the Earth. As with the others a glassified cylinder of Cooper’s ashes was slotted into the memorial behind a steel plate with his name and dates, the rest of the ashes were recycling in one of the garden domes.
“Mr. Richards.” Paul blinked at the sound of his name, looked around, saw the bulky shape he had spotted earlier.
“Colonel Olarik, thank you for attending.”
“Doctor Paaly will be remembered, hopefully for the right things.”
“Yes I hope he will, I think we need to try and make sure it happens, Colonel.”
“Colonel now is it?” The figure came to a stop, somehow looking thoughtful
“I think so, we’ll have to see if I’m right won’t we?”
“Yes you will Mr. Richards. Will you walk with me?” The other man made an oddly courtly sweep of the arm back to the town.
“Certainly Colonel,” Paul said moving forward.
Olarik angled to walk around the bulk of the settlement, Paul just went along. After a few moments the mercenary spoke. “Paul, do you trust me enough to tell me what you have guessed of the situation we find ourselves in?”
Paul thought about this, “Why not? Our lives are in your hands, Arkan.” He paused, then, “Let’s see, my guess is that the cat’s out of the bag and in the canaries on Earth. We were spotted taking off from Palalo Sadong and that nearly deserted valley with its port, airport etc. has to have pointed a finger at Aristide Industries, which will eventually lead back to the canal project and Ship Plateau. Howard Conrad may have been working for Aristide but he’s part of the mercenary organization called the Crimson Staff, probably for many years. It seems likely that Palalo Sadong’s Admiral General is also involved. And I think that there is a power struggle going on between factions, at least two, possibly four. They all want control of the Stack, perhaps near earth space as well, and if the Admiral General knows, he’s dreaming of empire.”
Olarik chuckled grimly, “I do so like working with people who pay atte
ntion and are succinct. I assume that you’ve talked this over with Conti and Captain Chisholm?”
Paul hesitated, a bit startled by the title he’d attached to Julia’s name. Then he went on, “What’s been going on, on Earth, since the blackout Arkan? What has happened to the rest of the people at the Plateau? Nothing good, it’s gone on too long. Originally I thought perhaps the Admiral General had tried to grab us, was out flanked by Aristide or Conrad, who were playing the space control card soft. Now the silence has got me worried. They know that attacking the US, especially by surprise, is a ticket to oblivion don’t they? Space control or not, Paaly Stacks or not, they’ll hit back eventually, might not be this year or next but they don’t forgive that sort of thing.”
There was a long silence, he didn’t answer the question directly, “I want to consult with you, Conti and Miss Chisholm, probably Major Sukala as well, possibly Dr. Fleck.”
“You could order us around if you wanted Colonel, why ask?”
This elicited a sigh, “Isn’t it obvious? Because I need your fire and heart not just your brains, you are quite right there are factions, or maybe prime actors.”
Even through the suit coveralls Paul saw the shrug, “Your guesses are right, mostly. There is a multi way split but I think, pray, that not all of the fracture lines are visible. Aristide Industries is no longer a player; no one has seen Richard Aristide for a week now. The Admiral General is playing for Empire. Conrad’s trying to play Mindow but who’s playing who is unclear. The Crimson Staff, if there is such an organization, is probably supporting both of them and waiting to see who wins. The Chinese have to be angling for access to the Stacks.”
Paul groaned, “What about Primus Junction, the others who were coming up?”
A grunt, “Things aren’t good but the other colonists are fine. They are one of the things we need to talk about but first I have to decide what to do here. We’re not a part of their calculus right now, we’re so vulnerable they are sure I’ll do what I’m told, be the good little garrison commandant.”
Paul sighed, “Do we even have a way of getting supplies up?”
“The Alexis Aurora is commanded by a crew loyal to me and they’re on their way up.”
Paul asked, “Do you really have space weapons Arkan?”
“Nothing like the rumors. There were missiles but they were only passing through. As far as I know there are no space suitable missiles in inventory, yet. We have six fighters and a couple of heavy lasers on mobile mounts as well as some rapid fire cannons with vacuum stabilized ammo. The living quarters are pretty well protected; we need to prepare for the worst, heavier cover layers, disaster redoubts, emergency drills.”
“Arkan, defending a fixed point against rocks launched at orbital velocities is near impossible. They’ll probably have to get pretty close in to drop rocks accurately enough, you may hurt the bombers but won’t stop the rocks and it’s all pointless if we don’t have a chance at relief; we can’t stand off a siege.”
Another grunt, “Nice to know you’ve got a feel for military realities.”
“So you want to discuss our helping defend Luna Haven, create a base for you, what’s in it for us.”
“You mistake my intent Paul,” The big Kazak laughed, “You see I’ve never really been in this for the money or the power. I am in my way, quite the romantic.” There was a great deal of self directed sarcasm in that last, “While I could support either Aristide or Conrad the Admiral General is the most likely victor and while I’m a bloody handed realist I’m no lover of tyranny. I need a Luna civilian government to work for, and you and Conti are the only leaders who count right now, and the other three are both smart and highly connected in various ways.”