Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But he's not alone on that journey.

  * * * *

  By the time I entered Malcolm Bell's story, the Moon had become a crowded world, crammed pole to pole with resorts, cities, factories, and the folly of mankind. But not all of it was crowded equally. All the places where tourists wanted to go were on Nearside, with all the lovely views of the battered blue marble, still shiny and bright despite the scars well visible from the observation domes at Armstrong. Even those of us who'd grown up on Luna and had never set foot on the homeworld still suffering the woes of the last centuries preferred to see the ancestral cradle in our sky.

  We weren't always that philosophical about it, of course. Most of the time, we just liked it there because it was pretty. (There's a reason lunar residents sometimes called it The Chandelier.) But whatever our reasons, its presence made Nearside prime real estate. Everybody you could deal with wanted to live on Nearside.

  Farside was a different story.

  On Farside, facing nothing but distant stars and a sun that seemed less than the source of all light than a cruel beacon existing to bring the forbidding landscape into sharp relief, it was easy to feel cut off from all of human history. It therefore became the home of choice for the kind of people who saw that as a selling point. At the time I visited, it was a collection of industries too dangerous to be set down anywhere people lived, and a few scattered homesteads belonging to all the weirdos, misfits, misanthropes, and creeps who preferred solitude to people. It was crazy country, then and now, and the main reason it's been allowed to stay that way is the general consensus that anybody twisted enough to actually want to live out there was better off living in their self-imposed quarantine anyway.

  Of course, humanity being the animal it is, the rest of us sometimes have trouble leaving them the hell alone.

  On the day I'm talking about, I arranged for the skimmer to drop me off with less than two hour's worth of oxygen and not come back for me for at least five.

  Bell's habitat, only a short walk away, was an unlovely oblong metal box, much like the one I live in as an old woman. It was marked only by the usual ten-digit registration number and a series of dents it had collected in its earlier, stupider home at the base of a ridge much given to spontaneous rockslides. The recycling systems and supply dumps in the back took up much more space than his living area could have. The absence of any parked vehicle confirmed what I'd heard about him, which is that it had been a good thirteen years since he'd last bothered to visit the nearest center of population. That was about typical for some of the folks living on Farside. At the time, it made no sense to me, which should tell you a lot about how long ago this was.

  I was halfway to his airlock, my ridged boots causing miniature avalanches as I slid down the gentle grade, when an automated signal with absolutely no trace of static came in over my helmet speakers: “...trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will result in the activation of security measures, which may result in injury or death. The owner values his privacy and will not suffer a single night's missed sleep blaming himself for your probably genetic stupidity. Please turn back. Message repeats: this is private property and you are trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will...”

  I toggled the transmit button. “This is a distress signal. Stranded surveyor, running out of oxygen. Cannot hold out while awaiting relief. Need shelter immediately. Over.”

  The signal loop cut off in mid-sentence, replaced by a gravelly voice with a distinct Texas twang. “Now that's just bullcrap, young lady. I watched that skimmer drop you off. You came here deliberately and you're hoping to blackmail me into opening my door for you. Isn't that true? Over.”

  I'm afraid I grinned. “It's true, sir. I did come here deliberately, because I'm hoping to speak to you, but my distress is very real. I am running out of oxygen and I am in imminent danger of death and I do need you to save me. Over.”

  “Why would you put yourself in such a brain-dead situation? Over.”

  “It's actually a pretty smart situation, Mr. Bell. Just about everybody I've spoken to about you, and everything I've read about you, says there's no real possibility of you allowing me to die. But they also say I need the threat in order for you to let me in. It's the only way I could think of to speak to you.”

  The anger communicated by the next five seconds of absolute silence was an object lesson in the potential information content of dead air. There was none, however, in his voice. “I've now recorded your admission that you placed yourself in this position for the express purpose of invading my privacy. Under the circumstances, the crimes you've committed just coming here trump all of Farside's Good Samaritan laws. If I did let you die, no court would convict me.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but I'm still pretty confident it won't come to that.”

  He cut the connection. A second later, the warning loop returned, reminding me once again that I was headed directly toward a violent and messy death.

  I had nothing to lose by continuing to walk forward, the pebbles and dust dislodged by my boots forming a silent cataract that preceded me into the pockmarked valley below. I had chosen lunar daylight over lunar night as the best time to make this approach, mostly because it had struck me as less threatening ... but now I wondered if this had been a bad idea. The landscape, which had now had a good week and a half to bake, was radiating the heat of the unfiltered Sun back at me ... and though my suit could take this and worse, there's a major difference between being protected from a hostile environment and not being able to feel the sweat pooling at the base of my spine.

  I reached the bottom of the slope, faced the habitat a mere fifty paces away, and sucked a water tube for a minute or so, as I contemplated the best approach. I wasn't sure I believed him about the booby traps, but where would I put them, were I an antisocial old coot with a mania for privacy? He wouldn't put them too near his own walls, lest the shrapnel leave him spilling atmosphere faster than he could lay a patch. Nor would he put them anywhere near his airlock door. He might be just crabby enough to lie in his bunk all day, but he needed the main egress intact so he could get to the supply drops set down no further than twenty meters away, five times a month. Nor would he set his triggers too far from home, out here at the edge of his bowl where the standard warning was still playing in infinite loop. He'd need to be able to justify such extreme measures, if it came to that—and the best way to do that was to give potential trespassers every possible chance to heed his warnings.

  No need in tempting fate. I'd be better off sitting still and relying on his sense of humanity. So I sat, turned the cooling unit to the lowest power I could tolerate, and waited, thinking (among other things) of Wyatt Earp.

  * * * *

  Four days before I had that skimmer drop me off in front of that tin-can habitat on Farside, I watched half-a-dozen action holos set in the early days of lunar settlement. They made that pioneering time, when the Moon's entire population was comprised of Ph.D.s and engineers, look like the province of murderers and sociopaths, pursuing blood feuds and exchanging gunfire in the tiny little outposts those early pioneers had dug into the lunar rock. It was, we're told, a time of outlaws, a time of heroes, a time when only the quick reflexes of a few brave men maintained the fragile order that allowed Luna to become a fit home for millions.

  Like most of the stories told about Wyatt Earp, it's total bullshit.

  The truth is that those early engineers were all subjected to exhaustive psych testing before they left the Big Blue. There weren't any outlaws or crazies among them. If they presented any danger at all to the colleagues who worked alongside them, it was in the very real likelihood that they'd bore each other to death with conversations that had already been recycled past all reasonable usefulness.

  There was, in fact, only one actual gunfight in the entire first thirty years of lunar settlement.

  Only one.

 
* * * *

  “What's your name?”

  The signal amplified by my helmet speakers was punctuated by crackles and hiss, a noise ratio not quite bad enough to obscure the old man's words, but enough to establish that he used antiquated equipment and couldn't be bothered with tuning his signal enough to ensure clear transmission. I couldn't help thinking of my great-grandfather, who had always removed his teeth before dealing with anybody outside the family. If anybody had trouble understanding him, that was their problem. As long as they wanted to waste his time, he saw every advantage of making them work for it.

  I said, “Jessie James.”

  The pause that followed was entirely familiar to me. I heard something like it just about every time I gave a stranger my name, and its Wild West resonances had to hit him harder than just about anybody I'd ever met. “You're kidding me.”

  I shrugged, an absolutely pointless gesture given that it disturbed the broad outlines of my moonsuit not at all. “My parents were history nerds.”

  “Were?”

  “Sorry. Are.” They were both members of the Lunar History Department at the State University at Grissom, as well as American history buffs by inclination.

  “So they're both alive, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they neglect you?”

  That surprised me. “No.”

  “Abuse you?”

  “No.”

  “Emotionally abuse you?”

  “No.”

  “They're good parents, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “They love you.”

  I didn't understand this line of questioning at all. “Yes.”

  “Do you have a lover, Jessie? Maybe a husband or wife?”

  “Nobody that serious.” Though there might have been, before a certain obsession had started taking up too many of my waking hours.

  “But people who care about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet,” he said, his voice rising just enough to establish frustration, “you care so little for them that you're willing to risk breaking both their hearts by throwing your life away on a pointless mission to harass an old man who hasn't given an interview in decades or even left his home in thirteen years. Forget the way I want to live my life. Think about what your parents want out of theirs. Did they get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their crazy daughter's been found, spam in a spacesuit, just ten meters from an old recluse's home on Farside?”

  Damn, he was good. There was no way I could hear that question without feeling a twinge. But I had spoken or corresponded with all five of the people still alive who had begun their own lives as Bell's children: the two sons living and working on Luna, the pair of daughters working contract work out on the Belt, even the eccentric writer best known for his weekly rides up the Central African Space Elevator, to regale the world with renewed confirmation that the horizon still curved. All five had described themselves as baffled by their long exile from the old man's life. All five had testified that, the last times they'd spoken to him, he'd still cared about his legacy and place in history. So I countered, “Did your children get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their heroic old man will always be remembered as the unconscionable son of a bitch who let me die?”

  It's funny. Sometimes you can hear more in a man's silence than in his angriest words. I heard him stew, heard him thinking of the way the news would spread throughout the system, heard him remembering what it was like to have a legacy, and heard him contemplating the human costs of shitting on it.

  He was silent for so long that I felt mortal for the first time today, wondering if I might have guessed wrong. There were, after all, any number of things that could happen to a man's mind and soul in thirty years of self-imposed solitary confinement. Forget how embittered he must have been just to lock himself away. How insane would he have become in the decades since?

  Then the crackle returned. “I don't appreciate emotional blackmail.”

  “Neither do I, sir. That's not what this is.”

  “You don't know what you're messing with, here.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Another pause, too lengthy for comfort.

  Then a burst of grudging profanity, and: “Walk where I tell you and only where I tell you.”

  I stood up, wincing as my knees creaked. “So there are mines.”

  He barked a derisive laugh. “Explosives are weapons for people incapable of arranging precision, who see advantage in laying waste to everything within a given radius. My explosives are nowhere near that wasteful. If you take any wrong step in the next ten meters you'll find yourself wearing a suit with a clean circular leak about the size of a quarter. If it's within reach, you might be able to cover it with one hand and survive long enough to walk the rest of the way ... but that's only if you see it in time, and correcting for further missteps would become difficult indeed once both hands were occupied. If that happened, I would not have time to suit up and rescue you, and I move too slowly these days to arrive in a hurry. So back up a few steps and follow my instructions. Right now, you're surrounded by pressure plates on three sides....”

  * * * *

  In one of the most popular but least accurate Hollywood versions of the Wyatt Earp story, John Ford's My Darling Clementine, Tombstone stands against the distinctive formations of Monument Valley.

  This must have come as a complete puzzlement to moviegoers who happened to live in the real-life town.

  Moreover, the film ends with Earp's friend Doc Holliday dying from wounds suffered during the gunfight ... a development that must come as an equal surprise to those who know that Holliday died years afterward, not peacefully but certainly not from violence, in the hospital where he'd retreated to cough away what remained of his tubercular lungs.

  Like many versions of the tale, My Darling Clementine had less to do with what actually happened than with the story the people in question wanted to tell.

  The same goes with Airless Fury, the most famous fictional treatment of the famous First Gunfight On The Moon. It's famous now as one of the first non-documentary holos ever filmed by a Moon-based production company. Malcolm Bell, who was at that point naive enough to sign away the rights to his story without any assurances regarding accuracy of content, always credited it (or, more accurately, blamed it) for his unwanted status as legend. Frankly, it makes My Darling Clementine look like a documentary. My father saw it as a bookish child already versed in the history of his world, and later told me that he started choking on his soda five minutes in and didn't regain control of his breathing until he left the theatre with friends willing to miss the best part in favor of spending ten minutes pounding on his back.

  This is the way Airless Fury tells the story.

  Malcolm Bell is a grizzled veteran of the Trans-Tibetan conflict, sick of war, and unable to cope with the memories as long as he remains on Earth. The instant the lunar colonies open up for terrestrial settlers, he applies for a spot and is approved for emigration. He settles in at Li-Tsiu, the first town to accept families, with no ambitions grander than finding work as an environmental engineer, and perhaps meeting a nice girl so he can start the family he's always wanted.

  Then Ken Destry, who had fought alongside Bell during the war, moves in, bringing his vicious streak with him. Destry steals what he wants, bullies whoever he wants, and flouts the law whenever he wants.

  Bell, a peaceable sort, tries to reason with the man, but doesn't take matters into his own hands until Destry, by now wholly out of control, unleashes the full force of his own violent lusts on Connie Perkins, who has only hours earlier accepted Bell's proposal of marriage. Enraged, doing “what a man's gotta do,” Bell dons a moonsuit and tracks Destry across the pitted surface, in a quest that ends with both men firing at one another with the home-made projectile weapons that both have improvised from construction materials left lying around during the construction of the Armstrong dome.

  Cold Roses
, filmed years after Bell entered his self-imposed exile, presented the actual facts of the story, at the expense of much dramatic tension, but failed to erase the lies already set in place. Long before then, he'd come up with a famous response for admirers who wanted to know how much of Airless Fury was accurate. That consisted of a pained look and the simple understatement, “It's true that we were all on the Moon.” In real life, Bell had never seen combat, in the Trans-Tibetan War or any other. He had never met Ken Destry, either in his previous life on Earth or at any point prior to the incident that planted the seeds of his enduring fame. He went to the Moon not as a refugee winning a lottery, but as a qualified professional with a long resume in his field, who got the job in part because his wife Connie was already working there and was able to pull the strings that found him a position ahead of several applicants with better test scores. Both were on the Moon long before the powers-that-be decided it was time to start recruiting settlers.

  Destry's erratic behavior did render him a menace, but had less to do with any innate meanness in his personal makeup than with degenerative brain damage caused by industrial contaminants in the air supply of the barge he drove back and forth between construction sites, twelve hours a day. He certainly bears no resemblance to the sneering villain familiar from so many versions of his story. Free will was so much not a factor in his conduct that his parents back on Earth received not only his full pension from the Lunar Authority, but also a hefty cash settlement from the company that produced the faulty canisters. In fact, five other lunar residents, who were also exposed to the toxic air but were pulled from their assignments before they suffered permanent damage, received smaller settlements. All had reported feeling on edge lately, though how much that was due to the contamination and how much was just the extreme stress of their duties, remains open to debate.