The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  Henry found himself drawing in his breath at the beauty of what his wife had conceived. Then a small hand wiped the sweat from his brow, and Nell wound her arm around him and crooked herself under his shoulder.

  “Do you think it’s pretty?” she asked shyly. Henry knew that this was no put-on. Nell was, herself, constantly surprised by what her gift allowed her to do.

  “You done yourself proud,” Henry whispered, and Nell hugged him tighter.

  “I’m glad you like it,” she said. “That means more to me than anything.” Henry looked down into her hazel eyes and felt pure love. Like the love he felt for the Earth, for the way things grew and changed. Her eyes were the color of good fertile soil. They were the color of fine wood and thick prairie sage. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, and she drew him down to her lips. Good. Right. Beautiful.

  They made love in the terrace garden, as Henry had always wanted to. If there was any artistry in sex, they caught it that day, twisting amid the tomato plants. Sex was supposedly the pattern and rhythm that the sonnet followed, but Henry was convinced theirs was itself the symbol of a sonnet, the gift that art was giving back to the world for giving it someone like Nell Branigan.

  Henry made love to her with abandon. Her responding movements dug her deeper into the dirt of the terrace until she was partially buried, and Henry was lowering himself deeper than soil level with each thrust. Her hands smeared his back and sides with loam, and their kisses began to get muddy.

  Before he came, Nell turned him over into the depression they had carved and, sitting on him, wiped herself clean with tomato vines. He pushed up into her. She caressed his face with hands smelling of vegetable tang, and rubbed her clit with the pith and juice of his crushed plants. Henry felt himself on the verge but held back, held back. He tried to reach up into Nell with feeling, with an understanding and admiration for her—the woman in her, the artist, the subtle combination of the two that was her soul.

  And he must have touched it, set it to pulsing, for she came all over him, more than ever before, dampening his stomach and thighs with a thin sheen of herself. His climax was just as hard and complete, and they collapsed in the garden. Henry spoke on some nearby heating elements, and fell fast asleep, his love in his arms.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Henry was offered a visiting professorship at Stanford that would not involve teaching, but only a bit of consulting work with graduate students in writing. It was a dream slot, lucrative and freeing. Henry suspected the offer was partly due to the reflected glamour of his association with Nell, for Nell and the Lakebridge Edifice had made the opening screen of the general newsourceVirtual with the heading Architectural Renaissance Woman. Nell was, of course, receiving project proposals from right and left.“It appears I can live practically anywhere and do my work,” she said. When Henry told her about the Stanford opportunity, she encouraged him to accept. They prepared to move to San Francisco in the autumn.

  From: Living on the Moon

  An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities

  by Nell Branigan

  I conceive of structures that create a human space within themselves, and yet are not closed off from the grandeur of the setting—the wonder of where the people are and what they are doing. This is the moon, and we have come to this new world to live! We must take into account Earth-rise and moon mountain vistas. I imagine an architecture that moves and accommodates itself to take advantage of the best synergies and juxtapositions of the landscape.And yet the forms that we conceive to give us the spaces that will move us must, themselves, be beautiful.

  What follows is merely my idea of such an architecture. It is intended as an acorn, and not as the oak-tree entire. Space is broad and empty, and where there are humans, there will be places humans live. And where there are places to live, there will be architects.

  Henry was writing a poem about briar patches when Nell came in to tell him about the moon. He knew it must be important, otherwise she would never have interrupted him at his work. In those days, his hair was closely cropped, and Nell had enjoyed running her fingers through its crispness. She did so this time, but halfheartedly—more of a swat—and then sat down across the table from him.“Dobrovnik interfaxed in yesterday, full virtual,” she said.

  Dobrovnik was a partner in Nell’s firm. He had given up his own design work to serve as principal agent and negotiator for the other partners—most importantly, Nell.

  “That must have been incredibly expensive,” Henry replied, still a little blank from having been yanked out of the poem. “It must have been important?”

  “Yes. I’ve been offered a wonderful project.”

  “Really?”

  “Reallywonderful.”

  “That’s great.”

  Nell slumped, and looked around the room. Henry was not used to such odd body language from her. He forced thoughts of thorns and briars from his mind, and concentrated.

  “So,” he said. “You aren’t going to be able to go to San Francisco? Is that it?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  Something else, but Nell was being very quiet. “Nell, you know I support you completely.”

  “I know, Henry.” She sobbed.Nell sobbed. “My Henry.”

  “Nell, what is it?”

  “The Subcommittee on Exploration has approved my proposal for a lunar colony.”

  “The United Nations General Assembly?” Nell nodded. “Nell, that’s amazing news!”

  And she was crying. Henry was entirely nonplussed.

  “I have to go,” Nell said. “I have to go to the moon for five years. Maybe longer.”

  Henry stood up, sat down. San Francisco. He pictured San Francisco’s gardens and fogs, its graceful spans and temperate clime. But fog. And more fog, like dead vines.Un dead vines. Covering, obscuring, eating the city away, fog, until there was nothing, nothing but depthless gray.

  “You can come, Henry. That would all be part of the arrangement. They’ll pay your way, and more.”

  “To the moon?”

  “Yes.”

  All he could picture was a blank. A blank expanse.

  “But there’s nothing there.”

  “There will be. We are going to build it.”

  “No, there’s no . . . air. No manure. No briar patches.”

  “I know. I understood that from the moment Dobrovnik told me about the offer, and I truly began to consider what it would involve to actually do it.”

  Henry felt a trickle of sweat down his forehead. Where had that come from? Nell was too far away to wipe it. He pawed it off, continued down his face with his hand, and kneaded his own shoulder.

  “Are you going to accept?”

  “I don’t know. To build a city, practically from scratch—it’s the chance of the century for an architect.” Nell wiped her tears, sat up straight. “I want you with me, Henry.”

  Did she? Or was she just doing the right thing? What was he, after all, when compared with her art? Had Nell ever really cared for him at all, except in the abstract? Jesus, he felt like Rick at the end ofCasablanca , letting Ilsa go off with Victor Laszlo. What in God’s name had gotten into him? Why was he thinking like this? Was he that jealous of her gift? Of her fucking acclaim? He loved Nell. Heloved Nell, and he wanted to be with her, too.

  But didn’t she know what it would do to him? To his work? The moon. The bone-dead moon.

  “I have to think. I don’t know if I can go with you. I have to think.”

  And, as always, Nell knew that it was time to leave him alone and let him do so. She had perfect instincts about such things. Or perhaps it was art. Henry could never tell the difference as far as Nell was concerned.

  She Hangs Mute and Bright

  by Henry Colterman

  Blank hole, like a fresh cigarette scar.

  I like the stars better; they don’t

  care or not care, but the moon

  doesn’t care and makes you think

  she
does. It is the light, I think,

  the queered shadows, as subtle as lips,

  the tease of incomplete revelation.

  I have climbed up to small branches

  on full moon nights and pressed

  my face to the dark

  while the wind chapped my eyes open.

  I was without tears,

  as empty as an orbit,

  but she did not fill me.

  She moved on.

  She never lived.

  She cannot die.

  She hangs mute and bright.

  I do not understand the moon.

  Henry did not decide that day, or the next. He rented a car the following morning and went for a drive into the Cascade Mountains. There was a chilly rain above four thousand feet, and the drying elements in the roads steamed in long, thin lines up, up toward the passes.Henry stopped at a waterfall, and stood a long time in the mist. There was no thought in his head for several minutes, and then he became aware that he had been tessellating the fall between being a single stationary entity and a torrential intermingling of chaotic patterns.

  I ought to make a poem about this, he thought. But no words came. Just the blank stare of nature, incomprehensible. One or many, it didn’t matter. Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.

  This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.

  The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there—and nothing comes.Nothing . I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn’t any life there.

  He must stay.

  But Nell.

  What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flames, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes.

  “I have to have life for my work,” he told her when he returned. “I can’t work up there.”

  “Henry, I’ll stay—”

  “No.”

  “There must be a way,” she whispered. Her words sounded like the falling of distant rain.

  “No.”

  He must stay, and Nell must go. To the moon.

  The preparations were enormous, and Nell did not leave for five more months. They lived in Seattle, but Henry saw very little of her during that time. He was lucky to spend one night a week with her.

  Nell tried to make their time together meaningful; Henry could tell she was working hard at it. But now there was The Project—The Project, always hulking over her mind like an eclipse. During their last week together, Henry called up the plans, the drawings and algorithms that had won the commission, for the first time, to see what was taking his love away.

  As usual, the blueprints communicated little to him, despite the time Nell had spent teaching him the rudiments of envisioning structures from them. The three-dimensional CAD perspectives were better, but, whether there was some mental block operating in his head, or the fact that the perspectives were idealized and ultimately out of their otherworldly context, Henry could not see what the fuss was over. Just buildings. Only another city. Why not just build it in Arizona or something and pretend it was the moon? Why not—

  Stop kidding yourself. Nell was going. He was staying here.

  Nell spent her last four days on Earth with Henry. At this time, a little of the passion returned to their love. It was ragged and hurried, but the immediacy of their predicament added a fury to their sex, so that it blazed like blown coals.

  Nell left on the Tuesday shuttle from SeaTac. Henry had thought that he would not see it off, but found himself getting up and getting ready long before Nell had to go. They drove to the airport in silence. Nell would take an orbital scramjet to Stevenson Station, geosynchronous over North America, then depart on the weekly moon run on Thursday.

  Their final kiss was passionate and complete. The desperation of the previous week was gone, and in its place was a timeless togetherness, as if they always had and always would be sharing that kiss. And Henry understood, in the throes of that kiss, that this timelessness totally encompassed his desire, past and future. I mate for life, Henry thought, and I have found my mate.

  And then the scramjet carried Henry’s love away.

  From: Living on the Moon

  An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities

  by Nell Branigan

  My artistic model for this city is the living cell.I envision smooth, warm walls curving to low-arched ceilings, whose opacity will change with the changing light and landscape. I imagine the environmental support systems and operating machinery of the cell showing bluntly here and there, but incorporated—literally—into the function and form of the whole, just as mitochondria and chloroplasts are in living cells.

  I imagine a city of light and subtle colors, stretching out and up in graceful curves, runners, and points, stretching like a neuron, with neurotransmitters sparking off the end of dendrites and axons, sparking back to the Earth—or outward, into the greater emptiness beyond.

  Mornings were not so bad. Henry had not taken the Stanford position after all, but had moved back to Georgia, to a log cabin that had once been his grandfather’s hobby project. He scratched out poems and within six months had another book ready. He was mildly famous now—or so he supposed, for he had stopped paying attention to such things—and the book brought an unprecedented advance. For the first time in his career, Henry would not need to teach or live off of one grant or another. And Nell regularly sent home an enormous sum from her paycheck, since she had very little to spend it on and wanted him to use whatever he might need of it.The Project would provide him a trip to the moon and back once a year. Henry counted the days until the trip with alternating hope and trepidation. It wouldn’t be the same as being together with Nell. It might be worse than not being with her at all. He couldn’t say when, but after a while he realized that he had decided not to go.

  Nights were terrible. Nell would call often and once a week use the full-virtual interfax. Henry imagined his grandfather coming back to life and entering the cabin—only to find the cabin haunted by a ghost. Nell’s form moved and spoke with Henry on these weekly visitations, and then was gone. But the short transmission delay was enough to tell him it was not Nell, there, on Earth, Georgia. He could not smell her hair or kiss her face. They could only stare into one another’s eyes over 384,000 kilometers.

  Henry prided himself on not breaking down in front of Nell, but some nights he stayed awake, crying until morning. Especially during the full moon. It hung oppressively in the dark, shone as if it had reason, as if it had passion. But all of its brightness was just a reflection. The moon was distant and dead, only a virtual world, an apparition of meaning, tricking the eye. Henry tried to be brave, to not pull the curtains on it, but many times he could not stand the light, and yanked them closed.

  But he forced himself to watch the news reports, and follow the more accessible architectural journals. Progress on the moon was quick, but there was an enormous amount of work to be done in transforming the pre-existing colony into a real city, with the attendant support structures and contingencies for change. It soon became obvious that the Project was going to run into delays, perhaps lengthy ones.

  But the city was going to be built. Lower-cost trips up and down Earth’s gravity well, and the new micro construction techniques had made the economics of low gravity manufacturing feasible, and the communications and transportation base the moon was already providing meant the colony had long been breaking even financially. The moon had begun to turn a profit. And soon, skilled and semiskilled workers would be needed, by the thousands. The moon was going to become many an emigra
nt’s destination.

  So they were building a city, both for those already there, and for those who would come. Sophisticated systems had to grow, and grow together precisely. Changes must be made to accommodate small miscalculations or the random aberrations of molecules. Myriad design problems must be met and mastered, and Nell had to be out on the surface, constantly consulting with contractors and crafters as to changes and adaptations, or inside watching command and control simulations in virtual. Yet enclosures of unprecedented physical security were being built, for paper-thin walls could shield against vacuum and meteor strike. And, with one-sixth the gravity, there were long arches, massive lintels, never possible on Earth. A city of cathedrals, it seemed to Henry.

  As Nell’s city took shape, Henry began truly to see the magnitude and wonder of the work his wife had envisioned. Yet still, it was the moon, and the only life was human life—human life on a grand scale, he must admit. But no wild waterfalls. No briar patches giving life to form, bringing form to life.

  * * *

  And then, one day before Nell’s weekly visit, Henry received a signal from Lunar Administration.He immediately knew something was wrong, for this was a day that Nell expected to be too busy even to call.

  He flicked his virtual fax to full interactive, expecting Nell to explain to him what the big deal was.

  Instead, a chubby, professionally dressed woman appeared before him.