Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Bell was born on Earth.

  In Tombstone, Arizona.

  Running alongside the barge is a stopgap solution at best. True, it does not have a dead man's switch. That safety measure had long ago been deemed more dangerous than the vehicle could possibly be even as a runaway, since on the Moon it's far more important to get a failing or incapacitated operator who's at least headed in the right direction back to base and under air. Truth is, the barge is currently following buried magnetic markers that guide it along a preprogrammed route. But it moves slowly enough for any halfway intelligent sniper, even he's also a deranged one, to scramble down from his position and take a shot from another angle. Staying close won't keep Bell out of the line of fire for long.

  McRae returns. “Bell? Do you read?"

  "I'm working on it."

  "We have three units converging on your position, and are working on getting more. Earliest ETA is thirty minutes. You are advised to keep moving and not attempt to engage Destry unless he forces the confrontation. Do you read?"

  "I read,” Bell says. He has a bad thought. “Listen, he might be monitoring this. We better observe radio silence until your people get closer. I wouldn't want to lead him right to me."

  "Good thinking, Bell. Signing off now."

  Bell regrets the silence the instant the signal cuts out. After all, that might have been the last conversation he'll ever have with another human being. Would it be that bad to stay on the line? After all, if Destry is monitoring him, the crazy fool now knows that he's had a chance to call help. Wouldn't that send him running? Is he that crazy, to stick around and expose himself to an army of rescuers?

  It seems unlikely. Mad, even.

  Living in the moment, Bell feels the truth anyway.

  Destry is exactly that mad, and stalking him.

  * * * *

  I didn't know what to expect in Bell's habitat. I had been to a number of other tin cans in the last few months, and had seen interiors that pinged every graph point from pig-sty to robotically antiseptic. I'd even dealt with one well-known figure from the early colonization days, never mind who, whose place was draped with enough pink diaphanous cloth to outfit the classical Turkish harem—and he even dressed the part, though not, I'm sorry to say, playing the part of the sultan. I don't care how curious you are. You honestly don't want to know the name.

  As if in contrast, Bell's place was austere to the point of sterility. Function was all. The only real concessions were to comfort, as in the sonic shower with emitters mounted not only on the ceiling, but also along the walls and even in the floor tiles. The bed was made, but configured to recliner outline. There were no artifacts I didn't recognize, except for a purplish vase shiny enough to cast starbursts wherever it captured the overhead light. It was translucent enough to reveal that it held a substance I supposed to be lunar soil. Not unusual: the stuff is way fertile, and this wouldn't be the first time a lunar resident collected some for use in his indoor garden.

  Bell himself was ancient. That I'd expected. He'd been seventy when he acquired this place as his forwarding address, and well into his eighties the last time he ventured as far as the nearest center of population. The last photograph I had of him had been taken by one member of the appreciative crowd that had followed him around on that occasion. He'd been so rail-thin he'd seemed more vertical slash than man, so hesitant in his gait that my eyewitness reported half-expecting those brittle bones to shatter with every step. His few strands of remaining hair, allowed to grow long as if out of disdain for the waste of time trimming them would be, floated above his dark, liver-spotted scalp like cirrus clouds passing above the curvature of the Earth.

  Bell hadn't answered any questions on that day. From all reports, he'd seemed so overwhelmed by all the attention, so upset by all the questions shouted his way by a crowd that insisted on demanding details about his legendary past, that any intelligence still at play behind those dark brown eyes had disappeared behind a fog of age and confusion. My witness to his visit, groping for a way to describe Bell's demeanor, on that sad, pathetic visit, seized on stories his grandparents had told him, about a degenerative disease called Alzheimer's, often associated with advanced years, that had once upon a time been notorious for robbing its victims of thought, memory, and any connection to the people they once were. There was no way Bell could have that. The syndrome didn't exist any more. But my witness had wondered if he could have something like it. He said that it was the only way to reconcile the icon Bell had been with the shuffling, frightened figure Bell had become.

  The Bell I saw now was clearly a man approaching the end of his first century, but his eyes were bright, his movements sure, his speech clear and unslurred by stroke. The son of a bitch even had hair: a full head of dirty cotton wool, a sharp contrast to the light tan of his skin. Some of the old bastards I'd met went days without shaving, but his chin was smooth, his clothing laundered and unfrayed at the seams.

  Old. Like I said, ancient. But not decrepit. He was still taking care of himself.

  Either he'd gotten better, or his prior fragility had been one hell of an act.

  I knew he had to be looking at me. From all available records, he had liked his women, and I was his first female visitor in decades. There was not much to ogle, considering that everything I had was still hidden beneath the bulky lines of my moonsuit. But I had a cute face in those days, if you're willing to count that eccentric form of cuteness that comes only when the right combination of otherwise awkward features collide in ways that cannot be predicted from even the most exhaustive list of the ways they're less than ideal when described one at a time. I used to thank God for my big brown eyes, which bound them all together in one acceptable package. They sometimes fooled people into thinking I was beautiful. Without them compensating as heroically as they did, I might have needed to take up residence in a zoo.

  He pulled a modular chair from its housing under the retractable desk, indicated that I should make myself comfortable there, and sat on the edge of his bed, his spine as straight as a rod. He gave a doleful shake of his head. “I declare, young lady. In some enlightened societies you'd be boiled in oil.”

  “That's never happened, sir. But I have been stoned, from time to time.”

  His lips twitched. “Charming. Gutsy. Well-read enough to possess a working knowledge of antiquarian slang. And a hell of lot prettier than the old photos I've seen of your badman namesake. Were I eighty years younger, I might be honestly tempted by you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “It's not a compliment. Just the simple truth.” He appraised me some more. “You said you're not a historian, meaning that whatever you seek to learn from me you don't expect to teach a seminar of yawning, blank-eyed students. You're also not a reporter. I get that from the fact that reporters are generally only interested in the most obvious thing and you've already said you have no interest in discussing the most obvious thing. For pretty much the same reason, I'm also fairly confident in declaring that you're not some starry-eyed hero worshipper who's been just aching to meet me since childhood. Am I correct so far?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I must confess bafflement. So what are you professionally?”

  “I'm a junior auditor for the Lunar Internal Revenue Service.”

  His eyes widened just enough to reveal the white surrounding all sides of those lucid brown irises. Something that might have been hilarity tugged at his jaw muscles, as he ventured, “Am I going to be sorry I allowed you in here? Are you really just a third-rate functionary intent on impressing her bosses by shining your mighty proctoscope into the moribund finances of a crazy old man?”

  “No, sir. My bosses have no idea I'm here.”

  “I should say so. I know damn well I owe no stupid taxes.”

  I gave him a measured look. “None at all, sir. Not for thirty years.”

  Without so much as a single line filling in, he seemed to shed a decade in a heartbeat. Once again, the smi
le tugged at the corners of his lips. “Continue.”

  “Can I have some water first?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Rather than get up and avail myself to his own supplies I sipped from the straw built into my suit's collar ring, wincing at the unpleasant warmth of the water—which was a lot like hot coffee, only without flavor. It was pretty piss-poor testimony to the efficacy of my reservoir's insulated lining, but it was enough to clear the dust from my throat. “Well, you've got to understand. I'm the fresh meat in the office, so I get all the busywork, doing reports nobody's ever going to read.”

  “Bureaucracy being the same animal it always was.”

  “Right. Well, about a year ago, they assigned me to do a study on the differences between the tax burdens carried by Luna's various centers of population. There are always differences, you know, no matter how much the powers that be try to keep things equitable.”

  “Or looking that way,” he said.

  “Right,” I said again. “We all know the system can't be fixed. It's always going to be unfair to somebody. Fix one inequity and you cause another one for someone else. The study was a total waste of time that was never going to lead to any substantive change ... but it was my assignment, so I dove into it, getting all the expected answers until I found one anomaly that just wouldn't let me go.”

  “Better come out with it, then. I'm an old man. Talking about taxes is taking up far too much of the time I have left.”

  He was not going to make me stammer. I'd spent too much time rehearsing this. “It came up when I encountered a small number of people who have been handed lifelong tax exemptions, people who don't have to pay a cent no matter how long they live. Some of them are members of the clergy, grandfathered in when the churches lost their exempt status. They're all elderly and beside the point. The rest are all Farside hermits like yourself. The usual explanation has always been that you're self-sufficient, have no declarable income, and use no government services. But I looked closer and found that it's not quite as simple as that. The Lunar Authority deeded your plots to you, in perpetuity. It paid for your habitats and continues to pay for your food drops, your oxygen, your maintenance, and your medical care. It also provides you with an income—a quite comfortable income—far in excess of anything you'd need for decades spent avoiding centers of population. That income is paid into an escrow account off-world, which few of you even touch, though some have it paid to family members or favorite charities, and one or two of you have finally given up on living the way you do in order to enjoy a well-funded retirement.”

  I took a deep breath. “Those are the cases I find interesting, sir. Whenever one of you rejoins humanity, your tax status reverts to normal. This is a clear indication that the Lunar Authority is paying you to live the way you do. Moreover, it also takes significant pains to ensure that the regions housing you remain undeveloped and that you are not pestered by any bureaucratic interference.”

  He favored me with another wry grin. “Current company excluded.”

  “Oh, did I give you the impression that there's anything at all official about this visit? Forgive me, sir. This is me being a private citizen. It has to be. Any questions I asked about your status were either deflected or discouraged. I went to my highest-ranking supervisor to ask about you and was told that pressing the matter was a good way to torpedo my career.”

  “Which was,” he guessed, “absolutely the wrong way to handle you.”

  I gave him the best shrug I could, which wasn't a very good one in my moonsuit. “Unfortunately, the best way to make sure I remain interested in something is to warn me it's none of my business.”

  He could only respond with the most doleful headshake possible. “Idiots. Five minutes with you and I could have told them that.”

  “So I investigated further and found that the vast majority of the crazy old men, and a few crazier old women, who have given up the company of other human beings in order to lock themselves up in tin cans on Farside, worked those early construction projects at the same time you did. About 60 percent of them lived in the temporary warrens during the same five-year period. Considering that there were, at most, a few thousand people cycling in and out at the time, the odds of that many people from a single population segment all deciding to become hermits in their dotage become downright astronomical. It only got worse once I examined the records more closely and determined that the chances of any first-generation moon rat taking the same late-life path you did only increased the closer their respective tours of duty coincided with one particular day.

  “Once I identified that date and found the one element that made it unique, I found a certain clever way to test my results. I researched moon rats who worked the construction sites before and after that day but who happened to be on leave, or off-world, or even incapacitated due to illness or injury, on the day itself. There were about thirty of them. Not one of them became a Farside hermit. But of all the people who were on duty, on that particular day? More than fifty have.

  “And it's not just a time correlation we're talking about. The chances of one of your co-workers becoming a Farside hermit increases exponentially with their proximity to a certain location on that date. Of the six men and two women who were first on the scene, answering a famous distress call, five lived to age eighty—and all became Farside hermits at about that age. Of all the hundreds of moon rats working Station C, some two hundred kilometers away, none of whom had any direct contact with that prior group until some fourteen days later ... maybe twenty did. So what we're talking about here, sir, is a pair of overlapping bell curves, both centered on the same time and location. The same event.”

  I realized my heart was pounding. The shape of this thing I saw was that big, and I had now come close enough to feel its gravity, pulling on my skin. I had to take another sip of unpleasantly warm water, and take another deep breath, before continuing. “Forgive me, Mr. Bell. If it was just you, I'd understand. Post-traumatic stress disorder. If it was just you and a couple of others, I'd understand that too. People get bitter in their old age. If it was just more than a thousand with no apparent connection between them, I'd write that off as well. Humanity's a funny beast. But when all the evidence indicates a single common denominator ... and when you consider the active collaboration of the Lunar Authority itself ... then all those rationalizations fail. What we have, sir, is a mystery too big to put down, no matter how much I try. And you're at the center of it.”

  I spread my arms. “I need to know. What else happened on the day of the gunfight?”

  It took me a second to realize that I was alone in the habitat.

  I'd been talking for five minutes, all in preparation for the question that had taken over my life, over the last year. But at the actual moment I asked the critical question, I'd gathered up all my hope and fear and all my need to know ... and looked down at my own lap, afraid to face him now that the issue was out in the open between us.

  It must have happened during that moment.

  But it was only after I perceived the silence, maybe a full second later, that I looked up, registered what I was looking at, and felt a great black pit open up underneath me.

  Malcolm Bell was gone.

  * * * *

  Paranoia can be a survival mechanism.

  It's especially so on the Moon, where a lone man being stalked by a deranged colleague cannot be alerted by the sound of boots scraping across soil only a few meters behind him.

  Jogging alongside the barge, his field of vision already truncated by the dimensions of his faceplate, Malcolm Bell is more paranoid than most. He whirls every few seconds or so, each time certain that the action is about to reveal the approaching figure of Ken Destry, drawing down on him from point-blank range. Each time he whirls, surveying the dead landscape behind him and the dead landscape to his left and just to be sure the dead road stretching out before him, he knows that he's too late, and that he's accomplishing nothing but a close look at the man det
ermined to kill him.

  This is not terror. Not exactly. Malcolm Bell works in a dangerous environment alongside other men and women who risk death just by being there, and though like most of them he wonders in his private moments whether he's truly up to it, he's determined to be as brave about this as they'd want him to be.

  If he must die, it won't be as a coward.

  So it's not terror Bell feels. It's something else, and it takes him several minutes of this silliness to finally identify it. It's instinct, trying to save his life.

  There is no particular reason he should listen to it. He doesn't have enough data to map where Destry is, relative to his own position, and cannot say for sure whether walking alongside the barge is more or less dangerous than any other plan. But he knows it as well as he knows his own name. Destry is nearby, working his way around the rear of the barge. Continuing onward, in this position, gives Bell a life expectancy of minutes.

  He doesn't want to be separated from the barge, because it offers the only protection he can count on, until help arrives. But while it is moving slowly enough for him to keep up with it, and even overtake it if he has to, climbing aboard in these conditions is going to cost him precious seconds. Bell finds himself eerily certain that if he simply grabs a rung and pulls himself up, it will be then that Destry comes jogging around the rear of the barge to blow a hole in him.

  So he scans the landscape up ahead, looking for an advantage. And he spots one, in the form of a small rise, maybe half his own height, some twenty meters ahead of him. As he draws closer, he sees it's a freestanding boulder of some kind, maybe meteor debris, maybe the tumbled remains of some rockslide off one of the nearby ridges. There's nothing to distinguish it from any other of the other geological crap that makes day-to-day sightseeing on the lunar surface so nonstop delightful. He's passed it a thousand times, following this route, without ever noticing it. Now, he finds that he loves it about as much as any man could possibly love a rock, so much in fact that had he the time to be giddy about this he might actually offer to marry it.