Analog SFF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Her bed was soaked with tears when she awoke. She was feverish and had to urinate. As she lifted herself onto her side, she saw streaks of blood on her half-deflated faux fleece pillow, dried, except where the tears had melted together with them.

  She felt herself breathe, but her breath stopped short, as if she had suddenly inhaled the burning air of Earth. An avalanche of claustrophobia fell over her, paradoxically giving her the urge to close herself away in the washroom. As the administrator, she had a private bath. She sat on the tiny toilet and threw up on the floor. Months of dread broke from her soul, twisting her stomach, cracking her bones. “It's all over,” she repeated, convulsing with dry retches and sobs. Mother Earth had passed away.

  * * * *

  The cameras on Earth had gone out—all the broadcasts cut off at nearly the same time—and no satellites were responding. Only fifteen were even picked out of the flotsam by passive radar, and they were all dead. The plan was that if anyone in bunkers beneath the Earth survived, they would wait until it was safe to raise an antenna. The seven lunar bases waited in agony to receive some signal that there were survivors. No signal came.

  The next step was to send probes to Earth orbit on reconnaissance, once it was determined that there were no dangerous obstacles to spaceflight. In fact, there were tens of thousands of rocky fragments streaking through space, heading away or falling back to Earth in tangled paths. Some struck the Moon, forcing the refugees to hunker down even longer.

  During those torturous days of dark thoughts and blaring alarms, Netty stitched herself together. Except for losing herself during Earth Zero, she had comported herself with all the dignity and professionalism she had learned as mayor of Washington, D.C. Now it was time to defer contemplation and grieving and to focus on the many critical, immediate tasks in her oversight.

  She walked to work, taking a brief moment to wonder whose idea it had been to make the tubular ceilings a sky blue. She sighed. It was not time yet to think about her grand vision: to take advantage of the holocaust and rebuild a more idyllic society.

  "How are you, Miss Washington?"

  Netty turned to see the genteel African with the freckled, boyish face. He seemed an unabashedly simple man, wonderfully out of place in this dangerous, complex prison of theirs. For reasons she did not understand, he reminded her of home. More than that; the home of all homes, she thought. He was a mystery.

  "Hendrik Izaaks, how are you?” she said with practiced but genuine cheer.

  "I am fine,” Izaaks said. He jerked slightly, as if suppressing a cough. “And you?"

  "I could complain, but it wouldn't do any good,” she said. “I was just heading for the diner. Would you care to join me?"

  "I am happy to accept."

  They entered the mess hall together. People had dubbed the room the Double-wide Diner, since it was made from two modules put together, forming the largest single public space in Pod 4. The name seemed appropriate to the quality of the food as well. Lunch was rehydrated soup that looked like dishwater, for lack of artificial colors. It tasted better than it looked, and Netty sipped as if to savor it. The GP had advised her to eat slowly, to help prevent digestive problems. Her companion ate heartily.

  "It's good,” he said.

  "So, Hendrik. Tell me about yourself. You're from Africa, right?"

  "Yes, I am from Khomasdal, Namibia. But my name is Oscar. Hendrix is one of my roommates."

  "Oh, then the roster must be wrong. I have a Hendrik Izaaks listed. I remember distinctly, because there is another person on the roster named Hendrix, with an ‘x.’”

  "That's my roommate. My name is Oscar. Hendrik was my father. He was meant to come here, but sent me instead."

  Netty's head grew hot. “Excuse me?” she said with restrained indignation. There was to be no seat substitution whatsoever on the starfish that brought the refugees to the Moon, and this was the first irregularity of which she had heard. It was not her job to decide on those rules or to verify identities, but she was tasked with keeping the peace now. If news of this got out, it could create a textbook problem: intense, escalating personal resentment. There would be jealousy, suspicion, accusations of rigging, irrational actions, and possibly violence. Most everyone had lost all of their family and friends, and any hint of rule breaking would undermine the tenuous sense of fair play that gave some little rest to the dead.

  "My father was very lucky to have received passage,” Oscar said. He stared at the table, a faraway look on his face. His eyes were red, not abnormally so, but she perceived him as a very sensitive man, since he was holding back tears. “In the end, he could not leave my mother behind. So he gave his luck to me."

  "Your father sounds like a remarkable man,” she said. “Tell me about him."

  "Whew!” Oscar said. “He was a good man and a very good father. But he did some bad things."

  "Oh. I'm sorry to hear that."

  Oscar's faintly Asian-looking eyes widened, and he coughed. “Not that bad,” he said. “I must now tell you what he did, or you will think worse of him."

  "We've all done bad things, I think."

  Oscar looked down again. “Yes, we have. My father killed a lot of elephants. There were very few left, and he killed the rest of them."

  "So that's how he bought a seat on a starfish,” she said. “I heard people were paying a lot of money for odd things like elephant tusks, in the last few years."

  "Ah, people are very superstitious when there is trouble. They look to anything for luck. The price of their superstition bought me my seat."

  She finished her soup and sucked once on the plastic spoon to get the last bit of flavor from it. “Oscar, it's not your father's fault the elephants are gone. Maybe someday we can atone for that, by growing new ones."

  "There are elephants on the Moon?"

  "No, there's no room for animals like that. But they do have a DNA bank, so it's possible, if we can recreate their habitat."

  A repeating pattern of three long honks and one short over the sound system signaled a possible emergency.

  Netty stood up. “Excuse me. That's a meteor alert. I have to go, but next time, I'd like to hear a story about how Hendrik Izaaks was a good father.” She got up off the tiny stool, and Oscar motioned that he would return her food tray. She bounded through the open bulkhead and into the main corridor. She'd learned to jog in the Moon's feeble gravity and recalled rushing about Washington like this. There was one thing she did not regret leaving behind: heels.

  The command center looked like Houston Control, but was really more of an office, linked to similar offices in all of the pods, except China's Chi Yue base. Her pod was one of four cobbled onto the slopes of Shoemaker Crater, near the larger base at Shackleton, at the lunar South Pole. The Shoemaker pod group was one of seven such bases, not including the independent Chi Yue. While the modules in her pod were connected by various types of corridors, the four pods were each separated by a mile, on average. The bases were scattered for statistical safety—a deliberate diaspora around the Moon, built in anticipation of deadly debris from the asteroid collision with Earth. Each campus was self-sufficient, but with the full complement of around ninety people each, plus some livestock, they could survive for only about a year.

  If all went well. The alarm was subdued in the control room.

  "Incoming!” Molyneux told her as she arrived at her desk. He was a middle-aged man, old by refugee standards, who still had a beer belly, despite the anorexic rations.

  "How big? How close?"

  "Looks like it will hit close to SMP3. It's about four meters long."

  "Oh, God."

  There were thousands of fragments of Big Bastard and shattered Earth still looking for things to smash, and a direct hit could be devastating, even to the buried parts of the pods. There were many near misses, and one hit that caused irreparable damage to one of the pods over on the far side. Warnings were very brief, and this meteor impacted a few hund
red yards from Shoemaker Pod 3 before they could converse further. Without knowing exactly where the debris might hit, there was little effective preparation, other than battening down.

  A camera feed showed an overexposed flash and a rush of dust. Divots of lunar rock and soil shot miles in all directions, and frantic voices in the Pod 3 command center shouted of impacts and pressure drops.

  "There are people in there!” said one voice, and another demanded “Who?” while still more drowned out the reply.

  It took extraordinary effort for Netty to screen the voices out, but her immediate concern was her own Pod 4. A meteor could break into pieces, spread out for miles, and a really big one could make a new crater out of the whole complex. All reports showed green for SMP4. Shoemaker Pod 3 was a mile away, and this hit was a minor one.

  Still, as the reports became more coherent and rescue parties reported in, she learned that three people were known dead, killed when a large hole tore through a dirt mound and then the thin-walled corridor beneath. The people had been behind a strong door, but it had jolted loose, and there had been no emergency oxygen nearby. Five other people had been injured on the other side of the smashed corridor, and although they reached an oxygen cache, they had each suffered blunt force trauma, decompression, and near suffocation.

  "We'll send a medical team over to assist,” Netty promised. She dispatched the team—all of her medical professionals except one. She kept a general practitioner home, in case they needed him. She saw the team off as they left an airlock and boarded a pair of battery-powered jaw rattlers.

  Later, there was a series of virtual briefings. During the final meeting, the administrator of SMP3 had a nervous breakdown in front of everyone. Not only were there casualties in his pod, but one of his starfish was damaged beyond repair. That meant not all the refugees would be able to return to Earth, but no one was willing to discuss that ramification of the incident. Netty failed to see how a mental meltdown would help anything. We can't have that, she thought, when we're rebuilding a world.

  After the ordeal, Netty headed to her room for a rest. She took a deep breath and let her shoulders slump as she veered wearily through a dark service corridor that paralleled the main corridor. Sometimes she just wanted a little privacy in this sardine can. The deaths pricked at her heart like hot voodoo needles, and radar anigraphs—animated graphics—haunted her thoughts. The network was tracking an awful lot of debris that could fall down on them, and the anigraphs were sick cartoons, forecasting hails of rocky bullets.

  The main corridor was an interior one, but this narrow outside hall was exposed, never having been completely covered by protective soil. It had been part of the original fragile structure that housed the construction crew and now served only the purpose of redundancy.

  Halfway down, she halted. A shutter was open—a breach of rules. Netty cursed and went to the window. Probably someone was curious to see the meteor—the window did face roughly toward SMP3—but opening a shutter was expressly against the rules, especially when the alert was sounding.

  "How the hell do they think we're going to make it, if they can't follow a simple rule?” she nearly shouted.

  This was the kind of thing she had no patience for. Couldn't people put their curiosity aside for just a few months? Their home world was gone, and their pod was little more than a silk tent in a war zone. Any mistake could be fatal. Even if they were able to return to Earth, they'd be very lucky to survive there for long. Humanity had had thousands of years to learn to rise to occasions like this one, and the command staff, at least, had been carefully hand-picked. There was no excuse. She would get nothing less than perfection out of her pod.

  Before she closed the metal plate, she chanced a look out herself. Pod 3 was not visible because of an intervening rise, but she did see the Earth. It was the first time she'd seen it with her own eyes since the hit. Mother Earth hung in the air like a cat's plaything, having been batted about and left for later. Brown clouds shrouded the planet, and she could not make out any distinct features at all—not a single ocean or continent. In another month or two, they'd send orbiters to begin scanning the ground.

  She closed the shutter and tightened the wing nuts. She was spent, but needed to talk to someone, so she turned into the B Ring to see if her friend LaDonna was home. The “door” to most rooms was the ubiquitous Mylar sheet, so the custom was to stand back and announce oneself.

  "Knock knock?"

  LaDonna drew back the curtain. She was a tall black woman, her once-glorious hair shorn into a no-fuss brown halo. She was wearing her pajamas—standard issue fleece, plus size narrow, white.

  "Bless my stars, if it isn't Antoinette Washington, the woman they named Washington, D.C. after. Come on in!"

  "Stop that. How can you be so ... so..."

  "Happy? I insist on happiness, that's how.” She waved an arm around her tiny room. “If I don't have that, what do I have?"

  "You have Derrick."

  "Derrick is my happiness, but he's on duty, so you can have his chair."

  LaDonna sat on her hammock, letting Netty take the rocking chair. This was a short-backed aluminum frame, padded with a thin white bath towel. LaDonna's husband had bolted a bent scrap of metal plating to the bottom to form the rocker. The chair felt good, and rocking in the reduced gravity was slow and soothing. Maybe she should try sleeping on a hammock, too.

  "I don't know how you do it,” Netty said.

  "Me either. Just you keep coming around, and maybe a little will rub off on you."

  Netty smiled and patted LaDonna's hand, marveling at her strength.

  "You're all wound up, girl,” LaDonna said. “Relax!"

  "I'm all right. Some other PA just had a nervous breakdown, so now I don't need to."

  "Whoever screened your psychological profile knew what they were doing,” LaDonna said, smiling. “But I'll tell you what. If men can break down and blubber like I seen them do, we can fix ourselves for a little cry, too, can't we, child?"

  "Does that include a good scream? The big things make people cry, but it's the little ones that make me pull my hair out. Listen to this. On my way here, I found a window open—the shutter, I mean—of course, the windows don't open. This was right after a meteor shower! How could anyone be so careless?"

  "I guess it's hard not to rubberneck."

  Netty beseeched with open palms. “Just imagine you had the chance to eliminate world hunger. You could wipe things out, like racism, poverty, and war.” Her arms lifted, as if in benediction. “That's the silver lining here, isn't it? We can start over and do it right. But the world will be a precarious place to live, just like here. We can't afford to have any fools screwing things up."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm thinking to set up a series of come-to-Jesus meetings. There's just no excuse for second best right now."

  "We just lost all the people and places and things we ever loved. That's about the best excuse you could ask for. You can't go around all idealistic, all the time."

  "With everything we love gone, our ideals are all that we have left."

  LaDonna scrunched her eyebrows, indicating that she did not buy that reasoning. “And just how far are you willing to go to reach this ideal of yours?"

  As far as I need to, Netty thought, but it was too audacious a thing to say, even to LaDonna. “We're going to build the world over, and get it right this time."

  They sat quietly for a moment, and Netty did relax, her thoughts wandering. She smiled to herself and chuckled.

  "What is it?” said LaDonna, leaning forward.

  "Oh, I was just thinking about something else."

  "Is this something else a man?"

  "How on Earth did you know that?” Netty said, immediately feeling the word “Earth” boomerang back to slice through her midsection.

  "I saw you in the diner with that African. What's his name?"

  "Oscar Izaaks. And you're right. He's cute, with all those freckles." />
  "Cute? Lady, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but ‘cute’ just ain't you."

  "No, he really isn't my type. But under the circumstances, I don't have the luxury of choosing my type. Besides, there's something so—I don't know—endearing about him. He comes from a simpler time, a simpler place."

  LaDonna sat back in her chair and nodded slowly. “We're all refugees, here, aren't we? Sounds like your Oscar is something of a refuge."

  Netty nodded, and moisture oozed from her eyes. That got LaDonna started, and they shared a tearful hug.

  * * * *

  Netty had never seriously considered marriage. As a girl, she was told marriage was a custom that worked only for white people. Now, to rebuild Earth, it seemed dutiful to consider children, and trying to find a man and build a relationship while also building a world would be overly complicated. With so few eligible men around, she would marry out of duty and convenience. Fondness or love would be welcome, though not required. She inhaled deeply. In a way, a no-strings model of marriage was liberating.

  Oscar coughed as he sat with Netty in a corner of the Double-wide Diner. “I heard that some people died in one of the pods,” he said.

  "Three,” said Netty. “But just now, I'd like to get my mind off all that. Tell me about your father."

  "Well, he was very proud of his people, you see. Of our mixed blood. I am the only one left from our line, and he expects me to continue our legacy."

  "It's a wonderful gift."

  "A gift with a price. My father was not so proud of me. I was the dark one in the family."

  "Excuse me?"

  "My skin is darker. It's a very dangerous pride, you see, to be what they called ‘colored.’ You must not be too dark."

  "Well,” she said, trying not to look as aghast as she felt. “We're going to end all that. When we return home, there won't be any racism."

  "That is good. I am not like my father."