One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (9 page)

They stood frozen. They were about to talk about it, she wanted to, she wanted to tell him
we will not die if we look at each other with our eyes uncovered
but he stopped her — how long could humanity live on the Moon and remain human? There was no percentage below One Hundred. Either you were human or you were something else entirely. The Moon was a stone in space. The air they breathed was artificial. The water they drank came from melted comets. She dyed her hair blue. They were working on a project together. She stood. They were always told never to look at each other, never to speak to one another, but that was a lie from somewhere and Slue knew things he did not know and he was afraid to find out. It was obvious by the silence they fell into. The other students were staring at them. Her hands were still in fists. The lenses over their eyes prevented the subject from progressing. He savored this sight of her…

He was about to confess that everything in his life revolved around her, and
Ha, I’ll bet you didn’t know that, Slue — I myself could not grasp it, not till now, the moment you stood, your fists clenched, the slow reactive movement of your hair, you spun, I revolved with you, I had no idea that I was your satellite, but I am, there is no gravity in my life without you...

Hieronymus spoke in a voice she could hardly hear. He looked at the place where her shoes met the floor.

“My mother stays in bed all day. And all she does there is cry.”

Slue’s fists relaxed.

“She’s done that for sixteen years. I’ve never had a conversation with her.”

Her fingers extended and pointed to the floor.

“She wears a raincoat to bed. A plastic raincoat.”

Slue sat down.

She looked straight ahead. He was all wound up. All his own details he kept to himself. She knew nothing about his mother — she had assumed his mother was gone. Dead, or far away on Earth; she never saw her, and she never asked because Hieronymus always behaved as if it was only himself and his father.

The Regime of Blindness. She will tell him. He knows it’s true.

Slue sat there for a long time looking at him. Through his goggles, she saw him blink both his eyes. She knew he was not looking at anything, and she waited for him to speak again, and his lips did move, but nothing came out. He reached up and brushed something imaginary from his hair. He was about to apologize, but he couldn’t.
I’m sorry, I’m just jealous, those boys don’t have goggles covering their eyes...

Dear Hieronymus, I did not know this about your mother. It was your secret. I have a secret, too. But I can’t tell you. Not yet. It’s about my older brother, Raskar. You remember him? He lives in the District of Copernicus. He’s an attorney, and he works in the Lunar Federal Court, and he has accidently discovered some things that are unimaginable. Things that have direct consequences for you and I. What the government and its corporate partners are doing. My parents are terrified that he is going to get arrested, but they are even more terrified of what may happen to me if his ear and eye on the truth are disrupted. He has joined an underground society, secretly gathering evidence that all is not right here on the Moon. All is not right, but one thing is for certain: The lies began when they told us all we can never look at each other. That’s what they fear the most. You and I, and others like us, looking at each other.

Eventually, she asked him a question. It had to do with their project.

“You really aren’t reading
The Random Treewolf
, are you?”

Hieronymus shook himself out of his wandering mind. Of course. Their school project. His page was still illuminated and hanging in midair only inches away, next to her page. The texts were entirely different.

“It was a surprise I wanted to show you. We really are reading the same book by the same author, but…” He paused. “My copy is a direct translation of the original edition. What we have in the library here in school is the standard version that students have been studying for at least one hundred and thirty years. I found out that this book has been ‘updated’ three hundred and forty-eight times in the past nine hundred years.”

Slue was astonished, and she reacted in her usual manner whenever she was astonished at anything — she shrugged her shoulders with a noncommittal “So?”

“It is a completely different book,” he replied. “It is evidence of the crime of ‘updating’.”

“The crime of ‘updating’?” she whispered. With her stylo-point, she flipped the book imagery back to the title page. It read:
The Random Treewolf
by Naac Koonx (Natalie Koolmahn) Translated from the Ancient American English by Reno Rexaphin.

“Reno Rexaphin? Any relation?”

“My uncle. He’s a Professor of Ancient Literature at Quadroff-Maxant University on Earth. But he comes to the Moon quite often for research. He’s here now, as a matter of fact. I saw him two days ago.”

“He comes to the Moon — to research ancient literature?”

“Of course. The Moon has the largest paper book library in human history.”

“Paper books? Here on the Moon?”

“Yes. You didn’t know that?”

“I never imagined such a thing.”

“It’s not exactly a secret, but it’s not open to the general public either. Only researchers like my Uncle Reno have access.”

“Where is this library?”

“On the far side. Inside of a mountain. It’s more like a vault, from what I hear. But it was the only way to save all of these ancient books from being lost forever.”

“They sent them here to the Moon?”

Hieronymus recalled the long conversation he had had with his Uncle Reno. Reno Rexaphin had made a name for himself in the tiny world of academics by discovering most of the current editions of classic literature made available to the public today bore almost no resemblance to their original editions that had one time existed on paper in their original languages.

Reno concluded that gradual laziness, anti-intellectualism, and fuel consumption were to blame for what he considered to be this colossal human tragedy.

“Hundreds of years ago, the Earth ran out of fuel,” he’d explained to Hieronymus during his last visit. “Then some idiot discovered that old paper books, with their highly combustible paper sheets, made a fine substitute. No one cared that this meant destroying millions of copies of novels — because nobody read them anymore. Literature itself had been transferred to a digital format, but it was done badly and carelessly and the experience of picking up a book and flipping through the pages was lost. Books were considered these archaic things, taking up space, no longer readable because the general vocabulary of humanity had diminished to such a pathetic level that nobody understood them anyway. Great works of literature were lumped together with common magazines and newspapers. Burned as fuel. And nobody, absolutely nobody, cared. Books became akin to the organic matter of dinosaurs and prehistoric forests that eventually became oil. Those who protested this were openly mocked.”

Slue looked at Hieronymus as he explained what his uncle had told him — how, at last, a movement was begun to bring the last copies of books to the far side of the Moon, how the hidden library was constructed, how through the centuries that followed, it grew into the largest vault of human endeavor and archiving in history. They kept millions — maybe even billions — of paper books there. Many of them written in languages that didn’t even exist anymore.

“Do you think your uncle would let us come and see this place?” she asked.

“As long as he’s there, I don’t think there would be any problem at all.”

“I have never seen a real paper book in my life,” she half-whispered.

“Nor I,” replied Hieronymus.

They looked at the image of the title page again.

“When did your uncle translate this one?” Slue asked.

Hieronymus smiled. “My uncle did this while he was in graduate school, twenty-something years ago. It was one of his first. He was surprised when I told him you and I were assigned to make an exposé on
The Random Treewolf
. It is a book he knows backward and forward — and then he suggested, because he was able to get me this copy right here, that if we really wanted to have fun and get an outstanding grade, we should use the original-original-original version that he translated himself from the first twelve-hundred-year-old paper edition.”

“Paper edition?” Slue sighed almost dreamily. “Extraordinary. He knows what it’s like to read a book where the words are printed on paper pages…”

“I guess it must be a little like having rain on the Moon,” added Hieronymus.

They looked at the two sets of text in front of them. Slue’s copy suddenly appeared to be very plain, short, and uninteresting when compared to the image floating in front of Hieronymus, where the sentences described things they did not fully understand, and passages appeared to be written for the beauty of themselves, and the images they provoked, and the sounds they made as the words were echoed in the reader’s mind.

The version translated by his uncle had three times the number of pages. There were entire chapters and numerous characters nowhere to be found in the modern version. The more they directly compared the two, the blander and more superficial the standard version became. Slue pointed out an idiomatic expression she knew for a fact was invented only a century earlier. As they directly compared the two texts, their task, which started out as a type of detective game, soon evolved into a tragic comprehension of cultural and intellectual loss.

“According to my uncle, the real interesting part is not so much the physical condition of the paper books, but the gradual deterioration of their meaning through the centuries. Meaning, that as languages changed, ever so slightly, literature itself became less understandable — as vocabularies shrunk, and as generations passed, entire novels became incomprehensible.

“There was a hemorrhaging of words and meaning, and instead of publishers protecting their original works, they began to slightly ’update’ novels for younger generations. Entire books were shrunk to accommodate the dumbed-down, shrinking vocabularies of the population. And once they started chopping words, they started chopping paragraphs. Then they started chopping pages. Novels by this time were no longer produced on paper, so it was easier to cut them in half without having anyone notice. And nobody cared anyway.

“Nobody cares now. You and I care because we’re in the smart kid section — but all those students who passed through here on their way to the auditorium? Would they be the least bit curious to know that the original version of
The Random Treewolf
is three hundred and fortynine pages and the copy we all read in school is just under a hundred?”

Before Slue had a moment to contemplate this amazing discovery, there was a rude interruption. The disturbing ruckus of a desk falling over.

The Loopies entered the rotunda. About fifteen of them. All of them loud, shouting, laughing, and fighting.

Hieronymus froze.

His two worlds collided with a cacophony of smashing glass and crashing furniture. He had never been cornered in one room with both Toppers and Loopies at the same time. They didn’t mix.

“Look!” one of them shouted — this was a shaggy little guy named Plennim. “Look who’s here! It’s Mus!” Plennim had a scratchy voice, and his eyes were bloodshot. He wore a white shirt with a sizeable oil stain on its front.

“Mus! Muuuuuss!” bellowed a fellow whose long beard reached the middle of his chest. Jessker — one of the worst. He had a tattoo of a third eye on his forehead and he carried around his neck a small silver box on a chain. He had the annoying habit of going up to people and opening the top of the box just under their noses, insisting that they "Smell! Smell!” and the odor that wafted up out from the inside of this cube was, without fail, always horrendous.

Within seconds, two Loopies started wrestling, and another table was smashed when one boy jumped up on it for no apparent reason other than to check and see how the traction under his shoes would grip.

In front of Slue’s disbelieving eyes, Hieronymus, with a wave of his stylo-point, quickly shut down the floating image of the book project he had been eagerly discussing with her just seconds before and stood up. Two very attractive girls walked over to him. One was dressed in a fannel pajama, and she wore rollers in her hair. Her large eyes had the most unusual allure to them, unfortunately spoiled by the bruise on her face. This was Clellen. The young lady just next to her was shorter and her name was Tseehop. Tseehop had long black hair to her knees. She wore white jeans with red polka dots. On her black t-shirt was a drawing of a man on a horse holding a submachine gun. The man’s eyes were plucked out. So were the horse’s.

“Mus!” Clellen cooed, batting her eyelids as soon as she came face to face with Hieronymus. “Mus, we missed you in math today.”

“Yeah, Mus, where were you?” added Tseehop. “Debbie and Johndon were thrown out of class for making out — ”

“They were doing a lot more than making out, Tseehop,” Clellen said, her eyebrow raised. “He had her shirt up over her neck and she had her hand in his — ”

But Tseehop didn’t let Clellen finish her sentence.

“Did you cut class?” she abruptly asked Hieronymus, fake-inquisitor style.

Hieronymus’s grin widened. He then said with an enthusiasm Slue had never heard before, “Yes! I always cut math on Tuesday. You know that!”