Alien Contact (35 page)

I said, “Excuse me?”

Nikki Hollander said something so blatantly ridiculous that I couldn’t force myself to believe I’d heard her correctly.

“Come again? I lost that.”

“No you didn’t.” Her voice seemed strained, almost hysterical.

One of the men was choking with poorly repressed laughter. I couldn’t tell who.

“You want to know if I like yams?”

Nikki’s response was a burlesque parody of astronautic stoicism. “That’s an a-ffirmative, Houston.”

“Yams, the vegetable yams?”

“A-ffirmative.” The A emphasized and italicized so broadly that it was not so much a separate syllable as a sovereign country.

This time I recognized the strangulated noises. They were coming from George Peterson, and they were the sounds made by a man who was trying very hard not to laugh. It was several seconds before I could summon enough dignity to answer. “Yeah, I like yams. How is that relevant?”

“Classified,” she said, and then her signal cut off.

In fact, all their signals cut off, though I could tell from the red indicators on my internal display that they were all still broadcasting.

That was not unusual. Coded frequencies were one of the few genuine amenities allowed us; they allowed those of us who absolutely needed a few seconds to discuss personal matters with co-workers to do so without sharing their affairs with anybody else who might be listening. We’re not supposed to spend more than a couple of minutes at a time on those channels because it’s safer to stay monitored. Being shut out of four signals simultaneously, in a manner that could only mean raucous laughter at my expense, was unprecedented, and it pissed me off. Hell, I’ll freely admit that it did more than that; it frightened me. I was on the verge of suspecting brain damage caused by something wrong with the air supply.

Then George Peterson’s voice clicked: “Sorry about that, old buddy.” (I’d never been his old buddy.) “We usually do a better job keeping a straight face.”

“At what? Mind telling me what’s going on here?”

“One minute.” He performed the series of maneuvers necessary to cut off the oxygen provided by the barge, and restore his dependence on the supply contained in his suit, then unstrapped his harnesses, stood, and moved toward me, swaying slightly from the bumps and jars of our imperfectly smooth ride across the lunar surface.

It was, of course, against all safety regulations for him to be on his feet while the barge was in motion; after all, even as glacially slow as that was, it wouldn’t have taken all that great an imperfection in the road before us to knock him down and perhaps inflict the kind of hairline puncture capable of leaving him with a slight case of death. We had all disobeyed that particular rule from time to time; there were just too many practical advantages in being able to move around at will, without first ordering the tractor to stop. But it made no sense for him to come over now, just to talk, as if it really made a difference for us to be face-to-face. We weren’t faces. We were a pair of convex mirrors, reflecting each other while the men behind them spoke on radios too powerful to be noticeably improved by a few less meters of distance.

Even so, he sat down on a steel crate lashed to the deck before me, and positioned his faceplate opposite mine, his body language suggesting meaningful eye contact. He held that position for almost a minute, not saying anything, not moving, behaving exactly like a man who believed he was staring me down.

It made no sense. I could have gone to sleep and he wouldn’t have noticed.

Instead, I said: “What?”

He spoke quietly: “Am I correct in observing that you’ve felt less than, shall we say…‘inspired,’ by your responsibilities here?”

Oh, Christ. This was about something I’d done.

“Is there some kind of problem?”

George’s helmet trembled enough to suggest a man theatrically shaking his head inside it. “Lighten up, Max. Nobody has any complaints about your work. We think you’re one of the best people we have here, and your next evaluation is going to give you straight A’s in every department…except enthusiasm. You just don’t seem to believe in the work anymore.”

As much as I tried to avoid it, my answer still reeked with denial. “I believe in it.”

“You believe in the idea of it,” George said. “But the reality has worn you down.”

I was stiff, proper, absolutely correct, and absolutely transparent. “I was trained. I spent a full year in simulation, doing all the same jobs. I knew what it was going to be like. I knew what to expect.”

“No amount of training can prepare you for the moment when you think you can’t feel the magic anymore.”

“And you can?” I asked, unable to keep the scorn from my voice.

The speakers inside lunar helmets were still pretty tinny, in those days; they no longer transformed everything we said into the monotones that once upon a time helped get an entire country fed up with the forced badinage of Apollo, but neither were they much good at conveying the most precise of emotional cues. And yet I was able to pick up something in George’s tone that was, given my mood, capable of profoundly disturbing me: a strange, transcendent joy. “Oh, yes, Max. I can.”

I was just unnerved enough to ask: “How?”

“I’m swimming in it,” he said—and even as long as he’d been part of the secret, his voice still quavered, as if there was some seven-year-old part of him that remained unwilling to believe that it could possibly be. “We’re all swimming in it.”

“I’m not.”

And he laughed out loud. “Don’t worry. We’re going to gang up and shove you into the deep end of the pool.”

That was seventy years ago.

Seventy years. I think about how old that makes me and I cringe. Seventy years ago, the vast majority of old farts who somehow managed to make it to the age I am now were almost always living on the outer edges of decrepitude. The physical problems were nothing compared with the senility. What’s that? You don’t remember senile dementia? Really? I guess there’s a joke in there somewhere, but it’s not that funny for those of us who can remember actually considering it a possible future. Trust me, it was a nightmare. And the day they licked that one was one hell of an advertisement for progress.

But still, seventy years. You want to know how long ago that was? Seventy years ago it was still possible to find people who had heard of Bruce Springsteen. There were even some who remembered the Beatles. Stephen King was still coming out with his last few books, Kate Emma Brenner hadn’t yet come out with any, Exxon was still in business, the reconstruction of the ice packs hadn’t even been proposed, India and Pakistan hadn’t reconciled, and the idea of astronauts going out into space to blow up a giant asteroid before it impacted with Earth was not an anecdote from recent history but a half-remembered image from a movie your father talked about going to see when he was a kid. Seventy years ago the most pressing headlines had to do with the worldwide ecological threat posed by the population explosion among escaped sugar gliders.

Seventy years ago, I hadn’t met Claire. She was still married to her first husband, the one she described as the nice mistake. She had no idea I was anywhere in her future. I had no idea she was anywhere in mine. The void hadn’t been defined yet, let alone filled. (Nor had it been cruelly emptied again—and wasn’t it sad how the void I’d lived with for so long seemed a lot larger, once I needed to endure it again?)

Seventy years ago I thought Faisal Awad was an old man. He may have been in his mid-thirties then, at most ten years older than I was. That, to me, was old. These days it seems one step removed from the crib.

I haven’t mentioned Faisal yet; he wasn’t along the day George and the others picked me up in the barge, and we didn’t become friends till later. But he was a major member of the development team, back then—the kind of fixitall adventurer who could use the coffee machine in the common room to repair the heating system in the clinic. If you don’t think that’s a valuable skill, try living under 24-7 life support in a hostile environment where any requisitions for spare parts had to be debated and voted upon by a government committee during election years. It’s the time of my life when I first developed my deep abiding hatred of Senators. Faisal was our life-saver, our miracle worker, and our biggest local authority on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, though back then we were all too busy to listen to music and much more likely to listen to that fifteen-minute wonder Polka Thug anyway. After I left the moon, and the decades of my life fluttered by faster than I once could have imagined possible, I used to think about Faisal and decide that I really ought to look him up, someday, maybe, as soon as I had the chance. But he had stayed on Luna, and I had gone back to Earth, and what with one thing or another that resolution had worked out as well as such oughtas always do: a lesson that old men have learned too late for as long as there have been old men to learn it.

I didn’t even know how long he’d been dead until I heard it from his granddaughter Janine Seuss, a third-generation lunar I was able to track down with the help of the Selene Historical Society. She was a slightly built thirty-seven-year-old with stylishly mismatched eye color and hair micro-styled into infinitesimal pixels that, when combed correctly, formed the famous old black-and-white news photograph of that doomed young girl giving the finger to the cops at the San Diego riots of some thirty years ago. Though she had graciously agreed to meet me, she hadn’t had time to arrange her hair properly, and the photo was eerily distorted, like an image captured and then distorted on putty. She served coffee, which I can’t drink anymore but which I accepted anyway, then sat down on her couch with the frantically miaowing Siamese.

“There were still blowouts then,” she said. “Some genuine accidents, some bombings arranged by the Flat-Mooners. It was one of the Flat-Mooners who got Poppy. He was taking Mermer—our name for Grandma—to the movies up on topside; back then, they used to project them on this big white screen a couple of kilometers outside, though it was always some damn thing fifty or a hundred years old with dialogue that didn’t make sense and stories you had to be older than Moses to appreciate. Anyway, the commuter tram they were riding just went boom and opened up into pure vacuum. Poppy and Mermer and about fourteen others got sucked out.” She took a deep breath, then let it out all at once. “That was almost twenty years ago.”

What else can you say, when you hear a story like that? “I’m sorry.”

She acknowledged that with an equally ritual response. “Thanks.”

“Did they catch the people responsible?”

“Right away. They were a bunch of losers. Unemployed idiots.”

I remembered the days when the only idiots on the moon were highly educated and overworked ones. After a moment, I said: “Did he ever talk about the early days? The development teams?”

She smiled. “Ever? It was practically all he ever did talk about. You kids don’t, bleh bleh bleh. He used to get mad at the vids that made it look like a time of sheriffs and saloons and gunfights—he guessed they probably made good stories for kids who didn’t know any better, but kept complaining that life back then wasn’t anything like that. He said there was always too much work to do to strap on six-guns and go gunning for each other.”

“He was right,” I said. (There was a grand total of one gunfight in the first thirty years of lunar settlement—and it’s not part of this story.)

“Most of his stories about those days had to do with things breaking down and him being the only person who could fix them in the nick of time. He told reconditioned-software anecdotes. Finding the rotten air filter anecdotes. Improvised joint-lubricant anecdotes. Lots of them.”

“That was Faisal.”

She petted the cat. (It was a heavy-lidded, meatloaf-shaped thing that probably bestirred itself only at the sound of a can opener: we’d tamed the moon so utterly that people like Janine were able to spare some pampering for their pets.) “Bleh. I prefer the gunfights.”

I leaned forward and asked the important question. “Did he ever mention anybody named Minnie and Earl?”

“Were those a couple of folks from way back then?”

“You could say that.”

“No last names?”

“None they ever used.”

She thought about that, and said: “Would they have been folks he knew only slightly? Or important people?”

“Very important people,” I said. “It’s vital that I reach them.”

She frowned. “It was a long time ago. Can you be sure they’re still alive?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

She considered that for a second. “No, I’m sorry. But you have to realize it was a long time ago for me too. I don’t remember him mentioning anybody.”

Faisal was the last of the people I’d known from my days on the moon. There were a couple on Earth, but both had flatly denied any knowledge of Minnie and Earl. Casting about for last straws, I said: “Do you have anything that belonged to him?”

“No, I don’t. But I know where you can go to look further.”