Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  “Sir? Ma’am? Could you come over this way, please?”

  Stormie glanced up at a big woman in firefighter gear. Frank stood, and gently pulled Stormie after him. All her motions seemed sluggish, unreal, as if she was watching someone else make them. She vaguely registered that her cheeks were itchy and her nose runny, and realized that she was crying. She turned toward Frank, who leaned in and gently kissed her.

  * * *

  Frank pulled Stormie a little closer and led her away from the scene. Tears had left salty trails down her ebony cheeks. Around them the chaos of response continued, with clusters of medical technicians and firefighters and now police officers moving with urgent purpose. Frank noted that Augustus, the boy he had pulled from the back seat of the Nissan, now had a blanket around his shoulders. In the opposite direction, a team huddled around the prone form of the second motorcyclist; Frank had forgotten there had been two.

  “Here we go,” said the lady firefighter. “Let’s get you folks cleaned up.”

  Frank looked down at Stormie’s hands in his, and beyond to the bloody streaks on his wife’s cream-colored slacks. He slowly traced his gaze back up from her knees to her hands and the blood that trailed away toward her elbows. It looked as if Stormie had dipped her hands into a bucket of blood and raised them to heaven in some barbaric ritual.

  Sweet baby Jesus in the manger.

  His own hand now sticky with a stranger’s blood, Frank pulled gently to turn Stormie toward him. He smiled softly, but her expression was guarded, as if she was not quite sure whether he might chastise her. Tears pooled in her eyes, and though they could be so hard when she radiated determination, in them now he didn’t see his adult wife: he saw the frightened thirteen-year-old girl who had watched as her mother was struck and killed by two teenagers fleeing their abortive bank robbery—and behind that the nine-year-old who had seen her brother drown. Frank was certain that if she had it to do over again, she would do the same thing, because to fail to do so would be false, a rejection of everything she believed about herself.

  “I had to try,” she said. “I had to.”

  “I know,” he said, and pulled her close to him.

  * * *

  Strangers and emergency vehicles moved in and out of Stormie’s vision, and gradually she became aware that she had moved. Frank had gotten her up and steered her over to the sidewalk, a few meters away from the wide-eyed boy she’d noticed before. The boy was swaddled in a blanket, holding hands with a college-aged girl, probably his sister. Stormie nodded at him, and he nodded back.

  She turned to Frank. She said, “This isn’t exactly the way I had hoped our evening would end.”

  He chuckled, and kissed her temple. “Well, you have always been able to count on me for an exciting time.”

  Stormie snuggled a little deeper into Frank’s embrace, and wished they were still down on the beach. She looked back out to sea. When they’d sat on the beach earlier, she had tried to imagine the oil well flares as candles for the two of them. The feel of cool sand in her fingers had been so much more pleasant than the sticky blood.

  It seemed only moments ago that she had scooped up a handful of sand, said, “Hold out your hand,” and drizzled some into Frank’s palm. She had held her fingers together like the throat of an hourglass, and let the grains trickle through.

  “And what is this for?” he’d asked.

  She’d shrugged, and picked up another scoopful and let it drain out of her hand into his. “I don’t know. This sand feels different from the sand back home. Heavier, maybe. But it’s basically the same stuff. And I know we’re not going to find ‘sand’ where we’re going, and the whole concept of ‘outside’ will be gone, but I guess I hope it’s not going to be such a different place.”

  “Well, that will be up to us, will it not?”

  “Yeah.” The colony’s air and water supplies would be their responsibility; every breath of air, every drink of water would be dispensed from their hands as she was dispensing sand into Frank’s. But it wouldn’t be like picking it up off the beach and dropping it like milk and honey into the others’ palms. As excited as she was at the prospect, sometimes the sheer scope of the effort daunted her. “I hope we’re up to it,” she’d said.

  He had kissed her forehead. “We will be, my sweet.”

  The big firewoman interrupted Stormie’s memory. “Folks, we have some bleach solution over here, and we need to make sure you wash your hands. You did a good thing, ma’am, but … you don’t have any open wounds on your hands, do you?”

  Stormie resisted the urge to tell her she had been trained on the precautions and had tried to abide by them. She shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  Frank’s embrace suddenly tightened. “What is it?” she asked him.

  He leaned back and opened his hands. “I slipped, after I checked on the driver of that Ford, and put my hand down in some of the broken glass. I think I may still have some splinters.” He shrugged. “My dress shoes were not made for running.”

  Frank’s palm was coated in blood, but dotted here and there with glints of silver-white.

  “Then I’ll have an EMT come take a look,” the woman said. “Meantime, Victor here will take care of you.”

  Stormie and Frank stayed next to the puke-yellow tanker for a long time. Stormie washed her hands until they hurt, washed up her arms to the elbows and beyond. Frank borrowed a tweezer from one of the firemen, plucked shards of glass from his palm, then scrubbed his hands as thoroughly as she had hers. They did not joke, they did not make small talk, and Stormie knew it was because he was afraid of the same thing she was: that the barest hint of a possibility of catching a major illness might invalidate their contract with the Asteroid Consortium and ground them forever.

  The medical technician brought Frank’s coat, itself darkened with the rider’s blood, when he came over to look at Frank’s hand. The two of them stepped away from the fire truck, but Stormie stayed and scrubbed her hands again.

  The blood was gone, Stormie could see that under the bright lights, but she kept scrubbing. The backs of her hands were glossy, wet-looking and nearly as dark as dyed leather. She had scrubbed her palms almost pink; she studied the lines of her palms to ensure no speck of blood darkened them.

  Her eyes and nose stung from the bleach, but to her it wasn’t a strong enough solution. It didn’t burn, and it needed to burn, to burn away her arrogance, her stupidity, her pride.

  “That should be enough, ma’am,” the fireman said as he doused her hands with clean water for the fifth time.

  Stormie shook her head. “Have to be sure.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. His voice was clear and firm, and when she looked at him so were his eyes. “You keep going at this rate, you won’t have any skin left on your hands.”

  The fireman—Victor, she remembered—was young, blond and tanned, as opposite from her as he could be. Did he spend his off days surfing? She’d never tried. If they kicked her off the mission, maybe she’d get to.

  Stormie shut down that line of thought. She wouldn’t give up hope, not after coming this far. She would do anything to stay in the program, scrub her hands down to the bones if she had to.

  Stormie looked her hands over once more. They were clean. Nothing she could do would get them cleaner. If she were a surgeon, she could do an open-heart procedure without gloves.

  A few meters away, the EMT bandaged Frank’s hand. If he hadn’t held her hands, if she hadn’t needed to hold on to him … if he caught something because of her impulsiveness, could she forgive herself?

  She resisted the urge to wash her own hands again. She was afraid they weren’t clean enough, and never would be.

  Chapter Four

  The Rumorsphere Has Picked Up on It

  Sunday, 29 October 2034

  Frank touched Stormie on the arm. “It appears the police want to speak to us,” he said.

  Vertigo stabbed Stormie in the back. She felt alternatel
y as if everything had happened in an instant, and then that they’d been working at the scene for hours. Time was fluid, and the thought of talking with the police distorted her internal clock until it seemed like one of Dali’s melting timepieces. Who needed Einstein and relativistic speeds to achieve time dilation?

  A grey-haired police officer walked up and spoke briefly to Victor, the young blond fireman. Idly Stormie wondered if Victor was his first or last name. By the time the policeman got to Stormie and Frank he had his datapad ready to take their statements. Frank held out his own device, one of the newer-model CommPacts they had laid in for the mission, and as it transmitted his personal information the policeman looked at his readout for a long moment. “Pastorelli? You don’t look Italian.”

  It was a comment they heard from time to time, usually with levity. Frank normally laughed it off, but now his voice sliced the air with a sharp edge. He said, “No, I suppose not.” He leaned in and studied the policeman’s nametag for a second. “In America, I find that heritage is not always apparent. Just as, Officer MacNeil, you do not sound Scottish. Our—”

  “Okay, then, smartass. You don’t sound Italian, either. Maybe I should be asking you for a green card.”

  “I do not understand why,” Frank said. “You can verify with that data store that I am a citizen of the United States.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see about that—”

  Stormie pitched her voice in as close a match to her grandmother’s as she could—one of the things she had picked up from Mother Mac that she most appreciated. “Officer? I presume your pad is recording our conversation—I’m certain my husband’s is. You seem surprised that my husband would have an Italian family name. You don’t mean to indicate any latent prejudice by that, do you? That would be … inappropriate, don’t you think?”

  Actually, she wasn’t sure Frank was recording but it was worth the bluff. Officer MacNeil looked back and forth between the two of them, and snuck a look down at Frank’s datapad as well.

  The policeman said, “No, ma’am, that was just a poor joke on my part. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Frank shook his head, and Stormie said, “No, I’m sure you didn’t. My husband’s father was a missionary. How they came by their name is a long story, but Frank came to this country when he was a teenager and his family still lives up in San Luis Obispo.

  “We’d like to keep this interview brief, if possible. We’re staying at the hotel down the street, and we’re supposed to meet our business partner tomorrow morning.”

  “Your partner’s name?”

  Frank said, “James Fennerling, of The Paszek Group.”

  The officer made a note on his computer. He asked for Stormie’s information, and Frank transmitted it from his CommPact because hers was in their hotel room.

  Officer MacNeil asked, “Gale Pastorelli? That right?”

  “Yes. But people call me ‘Stormie.’” She hoped Frank wouldn’t chime in with one of his many variations. Sometimes it was “Abbey Gale,” sometimes “Gaelic,” sometimes “Gale Force”—but Frank stayed silent.

  The officer looked as if he wanted to ask about the spelling. Stormie clenched her stomach a little, and Frank tensed as well, but she took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. She’d told the story a thousand times, that she was born when her mother had evacuated from Charleston because of yet another hurricane, and one more telling wouldn’t hurt. But Officer MacNeil just shrugged and said, “I guess I can see that.” He made another notation on his datapad.

  “Did either of you see the accident?”

  Stormie and Frank said, “No,” and “Yes,” simultaneously. She looked at Frank, who shrugged.

  “I was dancing around you, and watched it happen,” he said. He described the action with quick movements of his hands. “I saw the first motorcycle swing into the oncoming lane—it was trying to pass the silver Ford. The second motorcycle followed, but the blue car was approaching. The car started to its right, to give them room, but the lead motorcycle sped up and went the same direction, toward the sidewalk. The car turned back, but the trailing motorcycle had split off and the car caught it in the rear wheel.

  “I lost sight of the motorcycle then, because the blue car hit the Ford almost head-on. Then it looked as if the lead rider turned back to see what had happened. In the process, it pulled right into the path of that small van. The van tried to swerve, and after it hit the rider it ended up on the sidewalk there.”

  Officer MacNeil made another notation and asked what happened next. They explained what they had done, and the policeman was proper and polite through the rest of the interview. Relief sighed out of Stormie when Officer MacNeil said, “Okay, I think that’s about it. The address and numbers are current, right? I heard you say you go back to Houston in a few days. If we have any more questions, I want to be able to get in touch with you.”

  “We had meetings earlier this week in San Diego,” Frank said, “but we will be here in Santa Barbara until Wednesday.”

  “San Diego, huh?” The officer raised an eyebrow and began accessing his datapad faster. After a few seconds, he said, “Well, hell, if I’d checked the newsblogs I would’ve known who you were sooner.” He turned his pad in their direction, so Stormie could see the screen.

  MacNeil had pulled up an image of Stormie with her hands on the motorcycle rider’s leg, over a caption that read, Lunar Colony Candidate Molests Injured Motorcyclist.

  * * *

  Jim Fennerling, Stormie and Frank’s partner in Lunar Life Engineering and the primary champion and backer of their crazy venture, set aside his book and rubbed his eyes. Fatigue crept over him like a crawling insect, and though he couldn’t quite fathom why, his stomach writhed as if something had crawled into it.

  He closed his eyes, and the quick nausea spread up and down from just below his breastbone. Around him his home produced only its usual noises: the refrigerator hummed, the escapement of the old clock on the bookshelf ticked its mechanical tick. He breathed deep and nearly gagged on a waft of Kung Pao shrimp from the kitchen counter. Gradually the nausea spread enough that it thinned a little, the way ripples die out as they move across the surface of a pond. He took another deep breath and the nausea dissipated, and left him with only a general unease.

  He looked around his living room to see if he could spot something wrong. Frozen faces stared back at him from all the same pictures, his retirement plaque from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory silently lauded his quarter century of service, his near-antique books and discs and magazines stood regimented in their precise, orderly rows.

  A click, the furnace kicked on, and in the blast from the vent Meredith’s Moon wobbled in its frozen orbit.

  Jim wheeled over to the fake fireplace and looked up at the half-meter-wide silver-and-gold model spacecraft. Its gossamer web spread out from a silvered sphere, a pea-sized Sputnik, at its center; that central core crouched like a legless spider, ready to crawl out and snag some unsuspecting twenty-first century fly.

  Tiny plastic dewdrops shimmered along the web’s slender gold threads; the sheer veil suspended from the threads caught the breeze. The model strained against its moorings, anchored to the fake wooden ceiling beams and the cup hook screwed into the wallboard. It rocked back and forth and the thin film billowed in places, as if the craft flew while motionless. In a way, the real spacecraft did fly motionless: elevated above the Earth’s orbit, suspended by light pressure, it led the Earth in its path around the Sun but always moved in lock step with the planet’s motion. The real spacecraft’s meter-wide central core controlled thousands of power collectors and sensors arrayed across the kilometers-wide solar sail web, as the vehicle maintained vigilant watch over the near-earth orbital environment.

  Only Jim referred to the Solar Levitated Out-of-Ecliptic Forward Orbiter—“Forward” in the sense that it preceded the Earth as they orbited the Sun, and in tribute to the twentieth century space pioneer who originated the idea—as Meredith’s Moon. Me
redith worked out most of the orbital insertion and stationkeeping routines as part of her doctoral work, with partial differential matrices and other advanced mathematics that Jim could never fathom. She took him once to see the vehicle under construction: the thin anti-static coveralls itched against his arm hairs, the papery booties crinkled as they walked, and the antiseptic isopropyl alcohol smell permeated the El Segundo factory. Meredith’s pride shone in her eyes as she showed him the open silver globe and explained its mission in terms even an accountant could understand. Jim smiled so much at the wonder of seeing his daughter’s dream made real before their eyes that his face hurt at the end of the tour.

  Meredith never saw the launch. The brain tumor took her before the spacecraft even got into sine-vibration testing. Jim had brought the model of her artificial Moon back home when he cleaned out her student apartment.

  The model shuddered in the air currents. Some dust dislodged from its lacy webbing, and the falling motes sparkled like tiny snowflakes in the light. Jim’s eyes swam as dust fell into them.

  He looked away, right into Meredith’s happy eyes in her picture as Gale Pastorelli’s maid of honor. She was only weeks away from dying, then, but she radiated joy all the same. If Meredith were still alive, Jim knew, she’d find a way to ship out with Gale and Frank. She’d stow away in their luggage if she couldn’t wrangle a colony position for herself. So what if the Consortium only let married couples apply? Meredith would’ve snagged a suitable husband in order to land a spot in the program.

  Maybe if Meredith was alive, Alyson wouldn’t have gone the way she did.

  Jim smacked the arm of his wheelchair. Where did this sudden attack of melancholy come from? What was he worried about? About seeing Gale and Frank tomorrow? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost himself in pointless contemplations.

  Meredith and Alyson smiled at him from inside another frame. From the time Meredith was fifteen, people who met them mistook them for sisters. They both enjoyed that, for altogether different reasons. And then Meredith faded, and Alyson followed.