One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (2 page)

Hieronymus had paid special attention to this story, and to the others like it. He was aware of the details during his grueling ride. It made him a little bit paranoid. The man with the plucked-out eyes? He was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Man. What really interested the detectives — and the press — was the fact that the man’s eyes were nowhere to be found. The murderers had stolen them. They did not take any money or valuables, but they took his eyes. They even left behind the fellow’s goggles.

The police knew what it was all about, and it was not too difficult to figure out. The color of those eyes were the exact same as all the eyes covered by all the goggles that all the One Hundred Percent Lunar People were forced to wear. The color was highly unusual — the only place one could find it was in those eyes. It was not just any color or any mix of colors — it was something altogether new. It was the fourth primary color. And because of the extreme and hysterical reactions exhibited by anyone who actually saw this eye color, the color itself was illegal.

Hieronymus Rexaphin’s eyes needed to be covered up because they were the fourth primary color. And simply looking at the fourth primary color caused profound temporary disruptions in the cerebral cortex. And so many people wanted to experience that…

I’ll pay you fifty dollars if you let me have a peek at those eyes beneath your goggles.

Go away.

Listen, Hieronymus, I won’t tell anyone if you just allow your goggles to slip off. I just can’t imagine what a fourth primary color looks like. You have to let me see…

No way.

I’ll kick your ass, goggle-freak, if you don’t let us see what’s behind those goggles!

Leave me alone!

That girl from Earth had also turned out to be a bit too curious for her own good.

He lay back in his bed. Certainly, if the police had found out, they’d be here by now.

He had kissed her.
Why couldn’t it have just stayed at that?
Like normal people who just kissed each other and then maybe a bit more, but certainly not something as extreme and as unlawful as what then transpired?

They kissed. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him.

And then it was ruined.

She kept insisting. She was not just beautiful, she was everything beautiful should be, and she was from another world, and she seemed to be so intellectually together, and the sound of her voice drove shooting stars through his heart, and there was a quality to her that made him think she would be strong enough to see the color of his eyes with no consequence, but he was dreadfully wrong. He wanted to be a normal young man just this once. He was not, and life had seen fit to remind him of it. He allowed her to lift his goggles off, and then it happened, and it took hours for her to return to normal. It nearly destroyed them both. He thought about that part. How she went completely insane and it was his fault. And while it was happening he felt so horribly helpless.

Windows Falling On Sparrows.

He buried his head in his hands.

What had happened to her? She was a mess. Had her parents believed her? Was he a coward not to explain to them himself? Yes. He was a coward. He’d endangered her life, he should have turned himself in to the police, but, what the Hell, he had to catch his train, so he walked her safely back to her hotel, and then ran as fast as possible to the subway station. He was a very fast runner. He was so fast that, unknown to him until yesterday, some students called him
The Phantom
because he would always sprint to his classes at a remarkable speed. And last night, he ran from her hotel as if his life depended on it. He was convinced the police knew all about the evening’s illegal transgressions — and that they were hunting him. All he needed was to get to the train. As fast as he could. He did not even have the time to call his father, who would be furious by this time anyway for not knowing where the Hell Hieronymus was. He had to get on that train! He sprinted past the drunk-filled casinos and prostitute-infested bars, past the shambled buzz houses and junkie dens, past the decrepit remains of the first LEM to ever land on the Moon — it was over two thousand years old — past partying crowds, past beautiful models out on the town with rich boyfriends, limousines, intersections of crowded traffic, flashing cinemas, clubs where loud bands inside played rhythmic and insanely noisy music, he almost stopped when he saw the taxi stand but he remembered that he had almost no money left so he had no choice, it would be the Lunar Subway System, Sea of Tranquility Branch, the most notorious of them all, a dreadful train his father always told him to avoid, but he had to take it and he had to run if he was going to catch the last train back to Sun King towers, where he lived.

He succeeded. But the ride back was a slow-moving disaster. A hot and suffocating disgraceful wreck of worn-out plastic and cracked aluminum. He arrived home at five o’clock in the morning.

Windows Falling On Sparrows lay in the strange bed. The police had been both rude and kind to her, especially that strange detective with the face that looked like a plastic doll with mismatched eyes. Of course they were rude because she did not cooperate, and the doll-policeman knew she was lying before she had even opened her mouth. She stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. She would begin to doze of, then…that color…would nudge her from the place where her dreams began, and she would sit up in her bed breathing heavily, trying desperately to see it again. She was in a state of both terror and bliss. Then she would remember him and start to cry.

Her parents had been outraged when she showed up late and looking like she’d been hit by a leaking oil truck. Her behavior was erratic — she could not finish sentences, and she refused to answer her parents when they asked her what in Pixie Hades had happened to her. Her mother began to scream at her father for allowing her to wander out by herself on this dreadful, horrible Moon. Her father called the police because he was certain she had been attacked or some sinister gang-types had forced her to take drugs. When the police arrived, they spotted the signs immediately — she had been exposed to the fourth primary color. She refused to admit it, and the evening for this poor family from Earth went from awful to extremely terrible as the police became vicious and highly disrespectful. They had heard there was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy at the amusement park with a girl who fit her description. The police always kept tabs on One Hundred Percenters — just in case something like this happened.

If I had not shown you my eyes, none of this would have happened
.

I don’t care.

Are you sure
?

Yes. And besides, I talked you into it. It was my idea. I can’t say I remember everything that happened. I can’t remember your eye color. I wish I could.

It’s impossible to remember. Your mind won’t allow you to remember
.

That’s sad.

No. What is sad is that we will never see each other ever again
.

I don’t believe you.

That is what I saw when you took my goggles off
.

Then you are wrong.

I can’t be wrong, but I wish I was
.

We should test this out.

What do you mean?

Let’s agree to meet here, in this very spot, tomorrow night at eight o’clock.

You won’t even be on the Moon by that time. You will be on a Mega Cruiser going back to Earth.

You are wrong. My parents and I are not scheduled to leave the Moon until Sunday morning. We are not going to Earth — we are traveling out toward the rings of Saturn. I will still be here tomorrow evening. Come back and meet me here.

It will never happen. Instead, there will be an event that you cannot imagine that will force you and your parents to return to Earth.

You are wrong. Your prediction of the future cannot possibly come true.

It is not a prediction. It is a fact. The color I see does not exist in linear time. What I can see is the same thing as a shadow from the future. It cannot be changed…

Agree to meet me here tomorrow night.

I cannot agree to what I know is false.

Agree anyway. Agree because we kissed.

I agree to be here tomorrow night at eight o’clock.

Sitting up in her bed, she covered her face with her hands. Nearly all of the things he’d told her had come true. Since that terrible episode between her parents and the police, everything had changed. Their vacation faded into nothing. Cancelled. Hieronymus was correct — they were going back to Earth. If only she had not insulted that detective with the sweaty plastic face, they might have let her stay with her parents. Instead, she was here — in this steel room. Machinery all around. She will never tell them his name. Never. His wonderful, unusual name. They knew she had seen the eyes of a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy; she wore it on her face as clear as the anguish of a star-crossed lover. They knew. This was their world and they knew, but they would never get his name from her. She was a woman from the Motherworld, and the secret of his name became her all-protected child, never to be given away to these diluted people of the artificial terraformed satellite, and especially that strange, confused man with the artificial skin and the nervous eyes, of which only one was real. Back to Earth she had to go. Expelled.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember it.

The color. Equal to red. Equal to blue. Equal to yellow. But with no name.

The memory was gone.

She could not remember the color, but she remembered how they kissed. And now that was ruined, too.

Before she left for her trip to the Moon, a friend of hers sent her an article that was making the rounds in the media. It was written by a journalist who was known for his infammatory rhetoric…

Your mind will short circuit. Your eyes, the rods and cones of each retina, will scramble to accept a color outside the normal spectrum of red and yellow and blue. You will experience temporary psychosis. You will hallucinate. You will be reduced to a state of extreme helplessness akin to that of a newborn child at the moment of birth. This is what will happen to anyone who attempts to view the fourth primary color. The only known examples of this color can be found in the eyes of a certain minority of lunar inhabitants commonly referred to as One Hundred Percent Lunar People. These people, if they can even be called that, have a questionable place in the human race. Not only do their eyes have this abominable color that is crippling to look at, but these agents of the devil, these demons, have the ability to see the fourth primary color all around us. The governments of both Earth and the Moon don’t want you to know this. They have declared that the fourth primary color is a myth, that it does not even exist. The lunar authorities are confused in their application of this law, as they require this inhuman segment of their population to wear goggles that filter out a color that they claim does not exist. At least these goggles serve as a warning — should you be unfortunate enough to visit the Moon, you must avoid all contact with those wearing them. These people have no place mixing in with the general population. Just one quick look at the hideous color of their eyes will result in a mental and physical seizure that will shut down your brain. You will suffer temporary madness.

The viewing of this color is so traumatic that your mind will have to reboot itself and, in the process, erase and reject all memory of it to carry on with its previously normal functions.

And these devils — that is only a part of it. It has been documented, and proven, that because these dangerous creatures have the ability to see the fourth primary color, they can also see projections of future movement. This new color exists in a dimension unrestrained by time. They can see how the fourth primary color leaves trailings and shadows of all movement, backward as well as forward.

Avoid them. It is an outrage that the government does not simply round up these abominations and destroy them. They should all be destroyed — before they destroy the rest of us.

She did not finish reading it, as it was nothing more than a paranoid hateful diatribe. And if anything, it helped to fuel her curiosity on the subject. After all, there was that other rumor — the one claiming only One Hundred Percent Lunar People had the ability to pilot Mega Cruisers.

Hieronymus got up from his bed again. He had a terrible headache. His room was not very big — a bed, a desk, four blank walls, a window. As he turned his head to look outside at the neighboring towers, a shadow fell upon him. It was another Mega Cruiser from Earth passing above. He wondered if she was on it until he realized it was most likely heading in, looking for a place to dock. The sky behind it was red. On the Moon, the sky was always the exact same tone of red. The artificial atmosphere was only a thousand years old but somebody had mucked it up good when they terraformed the Moon back then. He knew that on Earth, it was possible to guess the time of day simply by the character of the sky — its lightness, its darkness, its in-between. But the Moon’s sky was always the same — a bland netherworld red. A red sky with a landscape covered in neon lights — every building on the near side of the Moon was covered in neon tube lighting, including the tower he lived in with his family. Exactly why it was neon, he had no idea — it was an aesthetic decided upon hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Everyone forgot why that was. The reason became lost through the centuries, like so many other things.