2020 (14 page)
Authors: Robert Onopa
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
The experience seemed to last for hours. He found himself finally a hundred meters away from his bedroll, standing with the single beam of his emergency light shooting off into the darkness. It still moved, ever so slightly, to the new rhythm in his mind, and he felt utterly grand, a new man, excited and transformed.
He ran back to the ship and banged on the hatch. “Captain Blake! The lights, the lights!”
He had to bang away for a full three minutes. Finally the hatch popped open and the Captain swayed woozily into the hatchway, his flight uniform rumpled, his hair awry, one eye closed. Even from three meters away, Jackson caught the sour odor of his breath. Captain Blake held his head in his hands, groaning.
“Sir, I’ve seen the lights again.”
“Jackson, you scum,” Captain Blake croaked, “if you bother me before daybreak, I’ll . . . I’ll have you executed.”
“But sir . . . the lights, they were right here.”
“Probes,” he heard the Flight Vane Engineer mumble behind the Captain. “. . . ’as why probes. Cannu unnerstan’?”
Jackson squeezed his eyes shut in frustration and found he could still see the lights with crystalline clarity, a miraculous rainbow of pink and lime and orange. He snapped his eyes open. “Sir, you don’t under . . .”
“
Ex
ecuted,” Captain Blake cut him off. “It’s my right.” And then the Captain slammed the hatch shut with a clang.
At first it frightened him that he could call the lights back when he closed his eyes, but it wasn’t hard to get used to the new rhythm in his bones, the new bounce to his step. He considered recording some notes on his specimen analyzer, but he free danced for a while again. He could swear his coordination had improved, that his nervous system was responding to some new intelligence. When he lay back down on his bedroll an hour later, wondering if he was too excited to sleep, another wonderful thing happened: the lights in his mind turned pastel, dimmed as if in consideration, and he fell immediately into a deep, sound slumber, the kind of sleep he hadn’t had since he’d been hiking to collect new plant diseases as a graduate student.
* * *
The crew didn’t emerge from the shuttle until three hours after sunrise, Captain Blake’s face ashen, the Flight Vane Engineer with his T-shirt on backwards, the vet stumbling down the ladder and sprawling cursing in the dust. For a full ten minutes the men communicated in a variety of debauched moans, relieved only when the vet found one last brown bottle and popped it open with a spasm of his wrist.
“A dop, I meana drop, of the fuel that launched ’ya. Thassa only cure,” he said.
“I’m telling you, Captain,” Jackson said, “the lights became a part of me. Not ten meters from my bedroll.”
“Had to be drunker than the rest of us,” Blake growled. “You oughta leave that stuff alone. An’ stop shouting.”
“But sir, if you just check the probes, you’ll see. . . .” He wasn’t shouting and what was strange too was the new confidence he felt. He’d had an inkling of it early that morning when he’d walked to the edge of the cliff and hadn’t been afraid in the slightest.
His explanation was cut short by the Flight Vane Engineer’s rapid cursing: he’d caught one of the probe leads in the shoelace he’d been tying and knocked the computer off its tripod. Jackson felt sorry for the man, then embarrassed for him when it turned out that he had connected two of the probes to the wrong inputs before turning in the night before. “Think ’is Jackson did it,” the Flight Vane Engineer tried to maintain, but the Captain pointed out that the engineer had drunk half a case himself before he’d set the probes. Then he demanded the partial data.
“Issinany,” the Flight Vane Engineer muttered.
“What?”
“Isn’t any,” the Flight Vane Engineer spit out. “An’ don’t shout, please. Tol’ you two probes wrong. Crashed alla data.”
Captain Blake laughed wildly, hysterically. “No data? No data?” Then he abruptly shook his head, his expression flat, and glared at Jackson. “You were hallucinating. That’s what you saw, hallucinations. You drank too much.”
“No I didn’t and I wasn’t hallucinating. The lights were right here.”
“Garg,” Blake choked. “Whata we gonna . . . What time is it?” He tried to focus on his watch, but he’d strapped it on upside-down, then he looked up at the huge red sun, already thirty degrees high. The shock of the bright light brought his hands up over his eyes. “Jesus, wonner if I can fly.”
“But . . .”
“Gotta. Behind already.” He brought his hands down. His eyes were bleary but the resolution in them was unmistakable. “All of you: forget what’s happened here. Wipe it from your minds. We’re packing it in, unnerstan’ me? We got a schedule to make. I don’ want you sayin’ a word about what happened here or all our asses are cooked.”
“Please don’ shout,” the vet pleaded.
Jackson looked frantically over the plain for a sign of light, but he saw only the dun-colored desert, not a twinkle.
The lights were there only when he closed his eyes.
* * *
There was a plant he’d seen once, while doing his graduate research in plant pathology, not a diseased plant but a diphrangium with star-shaped blossoms whose beauty had taken his breath away. Even though Miika looked a little funny now—she was wearing a cap to hide the stubble until her hair grew completely back, and her eyebrows looked like tiny hedges—she gave him the same feeling those star-shaped blossoms had, an awe at the delicacy of the shape he beheld, a liquid weakness at his knees, an unwillingness to blink lest the sight of her disappear in the instant. She led him over to the large port at the end of the rec pod where other lovers were watching Ganymede grow as they approached, a blue-white world of swirling clouds. The second planet from sun A5848, the planet the research team had briefly explored, was two weeks behind them.
“You make my toes tingle just to watch you
walk
now,” Miika whispered. “And when you dance! Even the other girls tingle all over. Jackson, I’d do anything for you.” She self-consciously picked at the last remaining trace of silver polish on her little finger. “I look so ugly. But when my hair does grow back . . .”
“You’ll be even more beautiful than you are now,” he smiled.
“You’re so nice. The best free dancer on the ship. I’m so in love with you.”
“And I’d do anything for you.”
She gazed at the growing planet for a long moment, the fertile globe where they would be spending the rest of their lives together. “Will you tell me what really happened back there? You know when those lights started flashing at the ship, all the farm animals started rutting.”
“The data’s supposed to be, um, classified,” he said, but when she leaned against him and he felt the warmth of her body, he knew he was going to be indiscreet.
“Did the team find a new form of life? Did you communicate with it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“What did it say?”
“Nothing really. It was light, light itself.”
“Oh, Jackson.”
“Still, I think it was friendly.”
She giggled. “All right,” she said. “I won’t bother you about it any more. Just so you kiss me at least once every day for the next fifty years. I can’t believe I see stars when you do. Stars and rainbows and flashes of color—I thought they just made that up. Nobody ever told me it would really be like this.”
Name that Moon
T
HE LUNAR LANDER DESCENDED
onto the dusty pad, the fading blue crescent on its side—the Blue Moon Resort’s logo—lost in the rising dust. As the lander touched the pad, it yawed unsteadily before bumping gently back down.
Please
, I prayed,
no glitches
. I looked at my watch: the media conference was scheduled to begin in two hours.
Finally the lunar dust, the regolith, settled in low-grav slo-mo and the small Menelaus Crater that defined the equatorial end of the Sea of Serenity reemerged behind the pad, bright with sunlight, crisp with detail. That was my personal signal that I could safely proceed. I licked my lips and pushed the unfamiliar joystick to propel the transfer vehicle Stewart had assigned me for the event, a kind of pressurized minivan, into a docking with the lander. By docking, we bring our guests to the resort without the hassle of an EVA.
The treads of the transfer vehicle crunched satisfyingly over the regolith and onto the pad. When the docking collars started to engage at a meter’s distance I checked my softscreen one last time. To my dismay, Karl Pope, the Chief Editor of
Condé Nast Space Travel
, the man I’d come to pick up, was now listed as “scrubbed.” I hurriedly called up the new data.
They’d sent his assistant, a woman named Claire Albricht.
Netsearch flashed a list of projects she’d been involved in—for Linux/Hilton, for The Aston Mazda Group. She was apparently a marketing whiz, but it was Karl Pope himself, one of the travel media’s heavy hitters, we’d been counting on to give credibility to our press conference.
His loss was another blow. If our new marketing campaign couldn’t raise our occupancy rate, Blue Moon would have to close. I pictured myself being fitted for one of those yellow helmets they wore at the mining camp, breathing dusty air, shoveling ore to be fired for Helium 3.
I peered out across the landscape through the big van window and took a deep breath. Above the rocky plain that formed the Sea of Serenity, Earth hung in the black sky like a milk-swirled pearl, immense and bright. Yet it was the sight of
Mare Serenitatis
itself, its vast rolling face cupped by bright far cliffs, that brought me peace, that settled and centered me.
Then a wild mass of strawberry blonde hair pushed through the docking membrane. She was in her mid-thirties, a bit shaky. My heart skipped a beat. Claire Albricht’s bleary green eyes had a wounded quality, and her expression was unhappy, but none of that, not even her baggy radiation suit or her black lipstick, could hide the fact that she was an attractive woman.
“Welcome to Hyatt Regency Fiat Blue Moon,” I said, helping her stow her spacecase. “I’m Charley Shackleton. Hyatt PR. Call me Shack.”
“Claire Albricht.
Ough,
” she grunted, grabbing the armrest with one pale hand, bracing the other against the headliner.
“You’re not going to float away,” I reassured her. “There’s gravity here.”
“That was worse than flying to Australia.”
“You’ll feel better,” I said. “Give it a day.”
She glared out the big side window as I started up the transfer vehicle. “Where’s the resort?” Claire Albricht asked.
She could keep the lipstick—too New York—but I liked her silver earrings, her long neck. “Ninety percent of the resort’s below the surface,” I explained, telling her something most guests know before they get here. “Protects everybody from impacts and temperature extremes—nights here get down to 240 below.”
She closed her eyes. “What do you mean, impacts?”
I wondered if she’d even glanced at her information packet. “Without an atmosphere to burn it up,” I said, “space debris comes right in.” I waved ahead at the pocked surface, the craters and scattered pits. “Which gives us our, um, moonscape.”
“There’s nothing here but rocks,” she said flatly. “Nothing at all.”
I bit my tongue. As we rounded the foot of the Menelaus Crater, the near folded cliffs of the Montes Haemus Range rose to form the equatorial border of the Sea. With Earth high behind us now, the shadowed curtains of rock were crowned by a sky brilliant with stars, all the colors of the rainbow shot through with white. “How about that?” I asked.
She frowned at the cliffs and blinked. “This has got to be the most desolate place I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, there’s lots to do,” I said, feeling my jaw go tight. “Ice skating, swimming, golf. Three restaurants, a spa. We’ve got everything an Earthside resort’s got.”
The big dome sheltering our lobby swung into view, marked with the Blue Moon crescent. We passed a couple in pressurized suits riding a treaded golf cart toward the course inside the crater, a sign of life which only seemed to call attention to the twenty empty carts at the starter’s pod. It was hard to hide our problem.
“I’ve been trying to imagine what would make it worthwhile for Hyatt to fly us all up. I mean, in these days of virtuality, a
press
conference?”
I docked at the canopied port without comment and let the valets take over. Truth to tell, it was United’s extra-orbital division that was eating the expense of flying up the media. The new promotion was a last-ditch effort to keep business going for them, too.
Once inside, as the desk clerk took a retinal scan for room entry, I noticed how red-rimmed her eyes were, how watery. Wads of Kleenex stuck out of her pockets. As much as she annoyed me, I felt a wave of pity and restrained my impulse to book her next to the rattling icy machine in the Kepler Wing.
At least she noticed the Waterfall of Diana in the lobby, the one you walk behind on the way to the Atrium. “You’d never guess this was even possible,” she said above its soft thunder as we passed into the big atrium. “And there’s so much light.”
There was vegetation too, and I directed her to a meandering path among leggy ferns and palms. “All thanks to our fusion plant up at the pole—we’ve got a great supply of Helium 3.”
She extracted a wad of Kleenex the size of a baseball from a pocket and buried her nose in it. “This is such an awful day for me,” she sniffled. I stood there, waiting for her to say something else, but she just kept blowing her nose, and so I took her by the elbow and led her toward her room, telling her about our flock of pigeons.
At the brass-doored elevators down I looked over and she was glaring at me suspiciously. Head case, I decided. “Media presentation at two,” I said brightly. “I’ll bet you can’t wait to get online and tell the world when you hear what this is about.”
* * *
Barry Stewart—Blue Moon Resort’s General Manager—adjusted his blazer and glowered nervously, sweat beading just below his hairline. We had refitted our unused Copernicus Ballroom as a media center, complete with VR cameras for Earthside realtime holocast, full wall screens on three sides, net guides and browser pages windowed in. A full-screen hi-D/3D moonmap hovered behind the dais, the resort keyed in with bright colors. The techs had done a wonderful job.
The media reps we’d shuttled up were augmented by an equal number of our own employees to flesh out the crowd. Still, it was a disappointing sight: interns instead of editors (from
Orbit/Extrageo
), location scouts instead of producers (from
The Virtual Travel Channel
), small crews instead of live feeds (from
Extreme Outside and Space
), our fitness instructor instead of anybody from
Offworld
. At the side door I was trying to keep Stewart from taking another hit from the silver flask he’d started carrying.
“Barry,” I said, “We’re going to change history. Tell them that.”
“This better goddamned work,” he muttered.
Claire Albricht walked unsteadily into the room, creases in her jumpsuit, wild strands rising from her blonde hair. I sat her beside a giggling couple whom I introduced as prizewinners from
Osakahoneymoon
and she bared her teeth.
As usual, when the crunch came, Stewart was great. He paced back and forth on the little stage, first warming up the audience with stories from the Apollo landings, a holographic full moon radiant behind him. He told us of the resort’s conception and heyday, how in the ten years it had been in operation we employees had developed a special relationship with “this dear old rock.” Over the past few years, he explained, like a kindly uncle relating how a family had drifted apart, the residents of Earth seemed to forget about the moon and the amazingly engineered resort and spa through which it can be experienced. “Nowadays the traffic goes to the orbiting hotels, right? Sheraton Geosync, Caesar’s Sky Palace, Satellite 6? Well, I’m here to tell you it’s time to think
moon
again.”
He took a deep breath and said, “I’ve had a vision.”
According to Stewart—and this was the first time I’d heard
this
version of the story—he’d been out on an extended EVA surveying the Apollo 11 site for a potential hotel excursion. Out there alone, he’d found himself thinking about the moon not just as a compelling landscape but as a presence, a spirit, though a spirit that lacked a face, some way to evoke it. He’d wanted to speak to it, he said, but there was no name to call it by.
It was a testament to his charm that a hush fell over the sixty cynical media people in that room.
“. . . leading me to the reason we’ve brought you here today. In cooperation with United Space, Hyatt Regency Fiat Blue Moon is proud to announce a marketing campaign that will change the way humans will see the heavens—the way lovers and sailors and astronauts and astronomers will see the night sky—until the end of time.”
Now he really had everyone’s attention.
“Out there at Apollo Site, I realized that, unlike every other body in the solar system—unlike every planet, unlike
their
moons, Titan, Phobos and Io, say—or even unlike asteroids Chiron, Hermes and Neseus—
Earth’s
moon—now listen carefully—
Earth’s moon does not have a name
.”
“Let me repeat:
the only completely natural satellite of Earth has no proper, formal name.
” He let the information sink in—it was one of those obvious arrangements that went unnoticed. “All through history, we haven’t been using a ‘name,’ we’ve been using a ‘term,’ a
generic term
, ‘moon’ ”—Stewart made the word sound cowlike, repulsive—“to signify a very unique place.”
“It’s time to correct this oversight. With the full compliance and authority of the International Astronomical Union, the official naming body for asteroids, comets, and stars, Hyatt Regency Fiat has secured rights in perpetuity to a proper name for Earth’s moon.” Stewart smiled. “I see from the dataprompters that our audience is building Earthside,” he observed.
The girl from
The Space Channel
, a chubby brunette with a battered headset, was scurrying around to check her live feed; all around the Copernicus Room equipment was being touched and tweaked.
“Of course, the
choice
of a name for the moon belongs to the human race as a whole. And so—listen carefully again—we’ve created a contest with a few simple rules. From the moment I initialize our dedicated netsite,
NAME THAT MOON
, we will take nominations and votes for a name for the moon. Individuals logging onto the site will be entitled to one vote per Earth day. The voting will continue around the clock for seven days. At the end of the week, the moon will have a new, official name.”
Contest regs scrolled behind him as Stewart raised his right arm. “Please join us, citizens of Earth, as we NAME THAT MOON!”
When his arm came down the new Netsite washed over all the screens and the crowd in the Copernicus Room flitted around like carp at feeding time. Correspondents shouted questions, bumped one another, waved their arms to be recognized, shouldered their way to the center aisle. The
Osaka
couple stood on their chairs. It must have been too much for Claire Albricht, who I saw with her head in her hands.
Candace Yuen, from our marketing department, joined Stewart, describing how random voters would be chosen to win trips, mylar excursion suits, even have their names assigned to darkside craters. Above the din she started touting VR tours of the resort for the Earthside audience.
On the wallscreen behind the dais a list of names started to grow: Artemis, Hoku, Luna, New America. . . . In the tally window, numbers were already starting to rise like the bounce from the audience. An excited crowd in low grav is distinctive: gestures are more expansive, heads bob, people move more. Stewart was taking questions, Candace was laughing, and I zeroed in on the tall Chinese editor from
Hyperwire
, who’d promised a week-long feature in real-time holo in exchange for the golf pass I had in my pocket.
* * *
I saw Claire Albricht again on my way out. She was alone against the back wall, looking dazed, her wad of Kleenex in her fist. Her lipstick was faded.
“What do you think?” I asked, sitting beside her, trying to be friendly.
She looked at me sideways. “This is a really bizarre idea. Who does Hyatt Fiat think it is? All the names here are so ancient. Greek. Roman.”
“As a matter of
fact
,” I informed her, “farside names are modern—craters named Oppenheimer and Fermi, the Sea of Moscow.”
“Well, it’s still pretty amazing.” She shook her head. “When’s my flight back?”
“What?”
“I’m ready to leave. When’s my flight back?”
I exhaled through my teeth. “The deal with
Condé Nast
is, you’re
supposed
to be putting together a story based on live reports. A
week’s
worth. You’re up here for the duration. Didn’t you even know
that
?”
A dark look crossed her face. The largest wad of Kleenex I’d ever seen came out of her pocket and floated to her eyes like one of the plump misty cumulus that condense up in the dome.
This time my sympathy ran out. “You don’t know the first thing about us,” I told her. “You don’t know why you’re here. You’re with us three hours and you already want to leave. Couldn’t
Condé Nast
have spared someone who was at least remotely interested?”