The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “Dr. Colterman?”

  “Just Mister.” Henry blinked to see her. There was dust in the room, and some particles danced brightly in her image, as they might in sunlight.

  “I’m Elmira Honner.”

  “You’re—” Henry vaguely remembered the name.

  “Supervisor of the Lunar Project.”

  “Ah. Nell’s boss. Yes. What?” He realized he sounded curt. Why was this woman calling him in Georgia, reminding him of the moon?

  “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

  Oh, God. The vacuum. The lifeless stretches. But maybe not—

  “Your wife was killed this afternoon, Mr. Colterman. Nell Branigan is dead.”

  She had been killed in a construction accident while supervising the foundations for a communications center. The micromachines had thought she was debris and had—almost instantaneously—disassembled and transported Nell and two others, molecule by molecule, to be spread out over a twenty-kilometer stretch. The algorithm that had caused the harm had not been one of Nell’s, but a standard Earth program modified by one of the contractors without previous clearance. The glitch was based on the fact that the moon’s surface was lifeless. The algorithm hadn’t needed to recognize life on the lunar surface before, had done its job in directing the microconstruction elementals, and so the bug had gone undetected. Until now.

  Henry said nothing. He bowed his head and let pain slosh over him, into him, like the tide. Nell, dead on the dead moon. Nell.

  Honner waited a respectful moment. Henry was vaguely aware that she hadn’t signed off.

  “Mr. Colterman?” she said. “Mr. Colterman, there is something else.”

  Henry’s eyes began to tear, but he was not crying yet. Brief transmission delay. Three-hundred-eighty-four-thousand kilometers. Not yet. Not even grief was faster than light. “What?” he said. “What else do you want?”

  “Your wife left something. Something for you. It’s on the edge of a secluded crater, some kilometers away from the colony.”

  Something? Henry could not think. “What is it?”

  “We’re not exactly sure. We thought you could, perhaps, tell us.”

  “Yes?”

  Honner seemed more uncomfortable now, unsure of herself, and not used to the feeling.

  “You’ll have to come, Mr. Colterman. It isn’t something that even full virtual can really . . . encompass. Also, we’re not exactly sure what to do about this thing—”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Colterman, sir, respectfully, I—”

  “Don’t you see that Ican’t . Not now. There’s nothing—” His voice broke into a sob. He didn’t care. He was crying.

  “Mr. Colterman, I’m sorry. Mr. Colterman, Nell told me she wanted you to come and see it. She said it was the only way she could ever get you to visit the moon.”

  “She told you that?”

  “I was her friend.”

  “She wants me to come to the moon.”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Colterman. If there’s anything we can do—”

  “Nell wants me to come to the moon.”

  He spent most of the scramjet ride to Stevenson Station gazing numbly at the Earth, and most of the lunar transport time working and reworking a poem. He called it “The Big Empty,” and it was done just before the transport landed.

  Honner met him at the dock, and together they took a skimmer to the crater where Nell had left . . . whatever it was that remained. Henry watched the gray-black dust skirt underneath the skimmer, and thought: That is Nell. Now this dust has a name.

  When they got to the crater, at first Henry did not understand what he was seeing. Honner suggested they debark, and they both donned the thin-skinned surface suits that Henry had seen in virtual, and never believed would be real protection. Apparently they were. He walked to the edge of the crater, to a beacon that was flashing faintly against the black sky. The beacon was attached to a greenish stone, with one side chiseled flat. On that face was the simple inscription

  For Henry

  He gazed out over the crater, down its bumps and declivities, trying to discern—

  “It isn’t actually a crater,” Honner said. Her voice seemed pitched for the distance she stood away from him, and it took Henry a moment to realize his headgear had some sort of sophisticated transceiver embedded in it. There was, of course, no air here.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve begun a search of her notes, but so far we have no explanation. Nell . . . grew this, as far as we can tell.”

  “Grew?”

  “In a manner of speaking. There was no crater here before. Also, it changes. We don’t think it’s getting bigger, but we do have our concerns. As you’re aware, microinstantiation poses certain risks—” Honner appeared to have run out of tactful ways of expressing her misgivings. She came to stand beside Henry at the crater’s edge. “It seems to be powered by earthshine, if you can believe such a thing—”

  Nell grew this. The words resonated in Henry’s mind. And then he saw it for what it was. Portions and rows. The undulations of corn and wheat, the tangle of tomatoes, the wispy irony of weeds, here and there. Not a copy, not even an imitation.

  For it was made from the rocks and dust of the moon, inhabited by microconstruction machines, and animated by Nell’s algorithms. Nell’s vision. Nell. An expression. An evocation. Of course, of course. Life on the moon.

  “It’s a garden.”

  “What? I don’t see that.”

  “It’s a sculpture. No. It’s a garden. I think people are meant to go down in there.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  Art is the symbol of life, and the embodiment of the life it symbolizes, Nell had said. This was not a real garden, any more than the painting of a tomato was a real tomato. But it was the way gardensfelt . And if anybody knows how gardens feel, what it is like to lie down among the tomatoes, it is me and Nell, Henry thought.

  Henry touched the carved letters on the green stone. “Yes, I think it’s pretty, Nell,” he said.

  Life on the Moon

  by Henry Colterman

  After I ventured into the Big Empty,

  a smaller movement between hard

  and fast stars,

  after I ventured to the moon, and the

  dust of the moon,

  and to those smooth ceramic halls,

  those lustrous and benign

  spaces, and to the evaporated surface,

  the empty mineral stretch and score,

  I could not find you.

  You moved on.

  Yet you are still there.

  You are in the valence between spaces.

  I cannot kiss the fall of your hair;

  I cannot lie

  beside you in the silence.

  Not yet.

  You hang mute and bright.

  You rise gently from the undermass,

  the crystal and stone, like a sleeper

  half-waking, then back to dreams

  of the moon, subtle as lips,

  now harsh and warm as breath.

  Rise and fall.

  Nell, for love,

  you have given the moon seasons.

  A Dry, Quiet War

  I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years. I passed my cabin to the pump well, and taking a metal cup from where it hung from a set-pin, I worked the handle three times. At first it creaked, and I believed it was rusted tight, but then it loosened, and within fifteen pulls I had a cup of water.Someone had kept the pump up. Someone had seen to the house and the land while I was away at the war. For me, it had been fifteen years; I wasn’t sure how long it had been for Ferro. The water was tinged red and tasted of iron. Good. I drank it all in a long draught, then put the cup back onto its hanger. When the big sun, Hemingway, set, a slight breeze kicked up. Then Fitzgerald went down and a cold cloudless night spanked down onto the p
lateau. I shivered a little, adjusted my internals, and stood motionless, waiting for the last of twilight to pass and the stars—my stars—to come out. Steiner, the planet that is Ferro’s evening star, was the first to emerge, low in the west, methane blue. Then the constellations. Ngal. Gilgamesh. The Big Snake, half-coiled over the southwestern horizon. There was no moon tonight. There was never a moon on Ferro, and that was right.

  After a time, I walked to the house, climbed up the porch, and the house recognized me and turned on the lights. I went inside. The place was dusty, the furniture covered with sheets, but there were no signs of rats or jinjas, and all seemed in repair. I sighed, blinked, tried to feel something. Too early, probably. I started to take a covering from a chair, then let it be. I went to the kitchen and checked the cupboard. An old malt whiskey bottle, some dry cereal, some spices. The spices had been my mother’s, and I seldom used them before I left for the end of time. I considered that the whiskey might be perfectly aged by now. But, as the saying goes on Ferro, we like a bit of food with our drink, so I left the house and took the road to town, to Heidel.

  It was a five-mile walk, and though I could have enhanced and covered the ground in ten minutes or so, I walked at a regular pace under my homeworld stars. The road was dirt, of course, and my pant legs were dusted red when I stopped under the outside light of Thredmartin’s Pub. I took a last breath of cold air, then went inside to the warm.

  It was a good night at Thredmartin’s. There were men and women gathered around the fire hearth, usas and splices in the cold corners. The regulars were at the bar, a couple of whom I recognized—so old now, wizened like stored apples in a barrel. I looked around for a particular face, but she was not there. A jukebox sputtered some core-cloud deak, and the air was thick with smoke and conversation. Or was, until I walked in. Nobody turned to face me. Most of them couldn’t have seen me. But a signal passed, and conversation fell to a quiet murmur. Somebody quickly killed the jukebox.

  I blinked up an internals menu into my peripheral vision and adjusted to the room’s temperature. Then I went to the edge of the bar. The room got even quieter . . .

  The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked me.

  I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes, and cans on display behind him. “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “Eh?” He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at me.

  “Bone’s Barley,” I said.

  “We don’t have any more of that,” Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone.

  “Why not?”

  “The man who made it died.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Twenty years, more or less. I don’t see what business of—”

  “What about his son?”

  Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. “Henry,” he whispered. “Henry Bone.”

  “Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin,” I said. “In fact, I’d like to buy everybody a round on me.”

  “Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad ’un indeed when you walked in here. I took you for one of them glims, I did,” Thredmartin said. I did not know what he was talking about. Then he smiled an old devil’s crooked smile. “Your money’s no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of your old dad’s whiskey stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house.”

  And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I’d left behind, it seemed as if I’d never really gone. My neighbors hadn’t changed much in the twenty years local that had passed, and, of course, they had no conception of what had happened to me. They only knew that I’d been to the war—the Big War at the End of Time—and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back in my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro’s desert barley, brought in peat from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from my hard groundwater, and got ready for making whiskey once again. Most of the inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whiskey families and beer families. Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations before.

  It wasn’t until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the troubles that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under the floor planks of her father’s hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I left for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at forty, five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my house, a week after I returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro, and she might be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy, and she wore a khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she came toward me. I stood on the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.

  “Well, this is a load off of me,” she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her hand on it to keep it from blowing from her head. “This damn ranch has been one big thankless task.”

  “So it was you who kept it up,” I said.

  “Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise,” she replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were green. Now that I had seen an ocean, I could understand the kind of green they were.

  “Well then,” I finally said. “Come on in.”

  * * *

  I offered her some sweetcake I’d fried up, and some beer that my neighbor, Shin, had brought by, both of which she declined. We sat in the living room, on furniture covered with the white sheets I had yet to remove. Bex and I took it slow, getting to know each other again. She ran her father’s place now. For years, the only way to get to Heidel was by freighter, but we had finally gotten a node on the Flash, and even though Ferro was still a backwater planet, there were more strangers passing through than there ever had been—usually en route to other places. But they sometimes stayed a night or two in the Bexter Hotel. Its reputation was spreading, Bex claimed, and I believed her. Even when she was young, she had been shrewd but honest, a combination you don’t often find in an innkeeper. She was a quiet woman—that is, until she got to know you well—and some most likely thought her conceited. I got the feeling that she hadn’t let down her reserve for a long time. When I knew her before, Bex did not have many close friends, but for the ones she had, such as me, she poured out her thoughts, and her heart. I found that she hadn’t changed much in that way.“Did you marry?” I asked her, after hearing about the hotel and her father’s bad health.

  “No,” she said. “No, I very nearly did, but then I did not. Did you?”

  “No. Who was it?”

  “Rall Kenton.”

  “Rall Kenton? Rall Kenton whose parents run the hops market?” He was a quarter-splice, a tall man on a world of tall men. Yet when I knew him, his long shadow had been deceptive. There was no spark or force in him. “I can’t see that, Bex.”

  “Tom Kenton died ten years ago,” she said. “Marjorie retired, and Rall owned the business until just last year. Rall did all right; you’d be surprised. Something about his father’s passing gave him a backbone. Too much of one, maybe.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died,” she said. “He died, too, just as I thought you had.” Now she told me she would like a beer after all, and I went to get her a bottle of Shin’s ale. When I returned, I could tell that she’d been crying a little.

  “The glims killed Rall,” said Bex before I could ask her about him. “That’s their name for themselves, anyway. Humans, repons, kaliwaks, and I don’t know what else. They passed through last year and stayed for a week in Heidel. Very bad. They made my father give over the whole hotel to them, and then they had a . . . trial, they called it. Every house was called and made to pay a tithe. The glims decided how much. Rall refused to pay. He brought along a pistol—Lord knows where he got it—and tried to shoot one of them. They just laughed and took it from him.�
� Now the tears started again.

  “And then they hauled him out into the street in front of the hotel.” Bex took a moment and got control of herself. “They burnt him up with a p-gun. Burned his legs off first, then his arms, then the rest of him after they’d let him lie there awhile. There wasn’t a trace of him after that; we couldn’t even bury him.”

  I couldn’t take her to me, hold her, not after she’d told me about Rall. Needing something to do, I took some tangled banwood from the tinderbox and struggled to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. “Didn’t anybody fight?” I asked.

  “Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don’t know. It was bad for everybody, not just Rall.” Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I, and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat back down and watched it flicker.

  “Sounds like war-ghosts,” I said.

  “The glims?”

  “Soldiers who don’t go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they don’t want to give it up, or can’t. Sometimes they have . . . modifications that won’t let them give it up. They wander the timeways—and since they don’t belong to the time they show up in, they’re hard to kill. In the early times, where people don’t know about the war or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”

  “What can you do?”

  I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed deeply, serenely.

  “Hope they don’t come back,” I said. “They are bad ones. Not the worst, but bad.”

  We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney’s top, made the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.

  “Did you love him, Bex?” I asked. “Rall?”

  She didn’t even hesitate in her answer this time. “Of course not, Henry Bone. How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now tell me about the future.”