Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  The darkness around the shafts of light seemed a thing alive as he made his way meter by meter back along his path. It wasn’t the absence of light, to be dispelled by the lumens from headlamps or flashlights, but a choking presence trying to reach into the light, to extinguish it, to smother it. To smother him.

  By the time he reached the main road, sweat clung to him no matter how he adjusted his suit’s environment. It was a cold, clammy sweat, as if he’d run a marathon inside a freezer. He shivered, a single violent shake, and it hurt as if his leg had snapped in two at the knee.

  He cried out, and the darkness claimed him.

  * * *

  The MPV rode up and over something, dropping with an impulse that dwarfed the usual turbine and road vibrations and broke through Van’s stupor. A half-second of panic and adrenaline dampened the pain in his leg. A rock, he figured; it must have been a rock. He slowed the truck and turned it left until his headlights found one of the reflectors. He was fifteen or twenty meters off the path.

  How long was I out? He couldn’t answer the question, because he couldn’t remember what his helmet clock read before.

  Good thing I was back on the flats, instead of still coming down the hills.

  Van moderated his breathing until it was under control, then held his breath until he got the truck back on the road. Once clearly on the path again, he sighed so fully that the motion sent another radiating wave of agony out from his knee. He winced, gritted his teeth, and spent the next few minutes arranging himself on the truck seat so his leg was splayed out on the seat and loosely strapped in position. Once he was sure he could still reach the main controls and operate the steering yoke, he started off again.

  He concentrated on reaching the nearest reflector, and the next, and the one after that. In fifty-meter intervals, he crept down the path toward the colony, focused like the team’s surveying laser and moving slow enough that the Sun might rise before he got back. He stifled a laugh, afraid the slightest movement would send him back into the black.

  Shay would chide him for getting back late, and throwing the schedule into chaos again. As if it ever came out of chaos.

  Barbara would scold him for trying to do more, sooner, than he could.

  But neither compared with the scorn he heaped upon himself. The slightest vibrations rippling through his leg cried out to him for more of the blessed codeine, and he answered every cry with a grimace and a growl. Van had endured pain many times, but had never been fond of it; he didn’t understand the people whose bodies craved the extra endorphins generated by tattoo needles or knives or whips, but for the moment he wished for a little of that macabre gift.

  He didn’t get his wish. But he bore the pain manfully the rest of the long drive back.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Good Argument

  Tuesday, 2 January 2035

  Lunar Colonist Group 2, Training Day 30

  Stormie twisted herself around on the small bunk; it wobbled and creaked as she settled her back against Frank’s chest. He reached around her in a full embrace, nuzzled her neck and nibbled her earlobe. Within seconds he was asleep, his slow and regular breathing a hot, comfortable breeze against her neck.

  She ached to feel his love completely, but tried contenting herself with his strong arms around her and his body heat on her back. Even if they were quiet, she was sure someone would hear; the rooms were too small and the walls too thin to keep even a yawn secret. Most of the couples seemed to have given up coupling, though Stormie suspected they were finding out-of-the-way places and opportune times out of a modern sense of propriety. When she and Frank had first come underground, they’d talked about using their laboratory space, except that it was more crowded and less comfortable than their cabin—but it was the place they spent the most time together.

  Their routine had evolved into overlapping fourteen- to sixteen-hour shifts, with Frank—who attributed his habits to his namesake’s “early to bed, early to rise” dictum but who Stormie believed was simply cursed with an inability to sleep late—working from six a.m. to eight p.m. or later. Stormie’s ten a.m. to midnight shifts suited her much better, even though by the time she crawled into their bunk Frank was fast asleep.

  Since their quarters in the colony would be just as cramped and crowded as their quarters in the training area, they would eventually have to return to an older sense of propriety: specifically, the mores of the day when extended families lived together in the same poorly-built buildings and tactfully ignored any amorous encounters they overheard.

  Stormie hoped Frank’s comforting embrace would help her sleep, but that hope gradually fell to pieces. She was too irritated to sleep.

  Being Tuesday, she and Frank had received another visit from a Consortium medical technician from outside the training area who drew more of their blood for testing, gave them shots of interferon, and left them with a week’s supply of pills they each took twice a day. It was so beyond overkill that Stormie wanted to scream. Sure, the mystery princess had been exposed to her prince’s hepatitis-C, but the AC seemed not to care that Stormie and Frank had gone through the picophage treatment and insisted on this useless prophylaxis. If they actually had the disease, sure, pump them full of the stuff, but not after what they’d gone through. And Stormie was sure they were either billing LLE or withholding payments to cover the cost—she hadn’t generated the nerve to ask Jim yet.

  The more she stewed on it, the madder she got: at herself, at the Consortium, at the reckless woman and her infected husband.

  The AC had talked about putting her and Frank in isolation, as though they thought the two of them had actually developed full-blown hepatitis. Thankfully, they dropped that idea pretty quickly and just quarantined them from all food preparation. Stormie couldn’t even make herself a cup of tea; or, more precisely, she wasn’t supposed to. She managed to brew a cup now and then in the privacy of their laboratory.

  After a half hour of lying abed, fuming, Stormie got up and went to the lab to do just that.

  She checked her e-mail while the water boiled. It was so soon after she last checked that she hadn’t even received any spam messages.

  She called up the respiration estimates for the training habitat and began reworking her calculations. She sipped her tea and hoped the math would make her drowsy. She had rebalanced everything four times as their numbers dwindled, and two days ago had run the numbers for twenty-two candidates. The Purcells had dropped out of the program on New Year’s Eve.

  A soft, repetitive tapping sounded at the sliding partition. Maggie Stewart looked in the half-open door. “I saw the light on,” she said. “Didn’t expect anyone else to be up this late. Is everything okay?”

  Maggie was almost forty, a couple of centimeters shorter than Stormie and in excellent shape. Only a few strands of grey showed in her brown hair, and her eyes were bright and alive. She spied the mug of tea on the lab bench, and smiled at Stormie’s half-hearted attempt to hide it. Maggie stepped into the cramped lab and looked closely at Stormie. “No, I can see it’s not. What’s the matter?”

  Stormie’s impulse was to tell her to mind her own business, but she checked it. Maggie exuded sincerity like the aroma of a fresh-baked peach cobbler, so strong it almost made Stormie’s head swim. Because of the AC’s paranoia, no one else would give her the time of day if they didn’t have to, and she missed friendly human contact. “Don’t you know?” she asked.

  Maggie stepped around the little table and sat on the other stool. “What should I know?”

  “What everyone is saying about us. About me and Frank.”

  Maggie smiled. “People say lots of things, dear, that’s why I try not to listen to gossip. But if you want to talk about it, make me a cup of that tea and I’ll be happy to listen.”

  Are you legit? Stormie wanted to ask, but didn’t. She wondered if she was being tested to see if she would stick with the quarantine. She didn’t think Maggie was the type to spy or squeal, but she couldn’t tak
e any chances.

  “I’m not supposed to make anything food-related,” she said. “Even making this for myself is probably against the rules. But there’s hot water in that beaker and tea in the little tin, if you want some. That’s Frank’s mug there, but we can find you something else.”

  Maggie looked over at the apparatus for a second. She patted Stormie’s hand as she got up. “That’s okay, I don’t want to make you break your word. How much tea do you have left? Not much, I see. What’ll you do when you run out?”

  “I guess I’ll go without for a while.”

  “Yes, and so will we all. I don’t know if I trust all the promises the geneticists are making, that all their crops will produce what they say.”

  “Wait a minute,” Stormie said. “That’s your field. How can you not trust them?”

  “Actually, I’m more on the animal side of things—I’ll be tending the chickens and the rabbits and the fish, more than the bushes and the little miniaturized trees they’re going to plant. I hope the plants yield a good crop, certainly, but I don’t know that they will. And if they don’t, then we’re all in trouble.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I mean, it’s a lot to ask of a poor plant: small size, fast growth, and high yield.” Maggie sat back down with a steaming mug of tea—in Frank’s mug, that she had simply wiped out with a cloth. “Small and fast, that makes sense to me, but trying to get a high yield seems like breaking a law of thermodynamics or something. And it’s not like we can just walk outside and scrape up some good topsoil for each crop rotation. Keeping the soil chemistry right is going to be baffling, and I don’t know how well Fukuoka farming is going to work in a closed environment. I’m glad I’m not responsible for it, but I’m relying on them to get it right just like everyone else.

  “They’re going to charge me enough for what I feed the animals, I know that much. And of course everything starts with staples, so luxuries,” she lifted her mug in a small salute, “like tea and coffee will have to wait.

  “So I hope they can produce what they promise, but I’m not sure yet. They’re human, after all, and bound to make human-type mistakes. I’m not too concerned about a catastrophe, but if they don’t come through I’m not sure how long it’ll be before my little venture breaks even.”

  Stormie fought away a yawn and resisted the urge to look at the time. It was probably close to two in the morning. “Your venture? You’re not going up as a Consortium employee?”

  “No, I’m an independent. Rex is AC, though, so you probably figured I would be, too. Most people do. He’ll be digging tunnels for the underground habitats—he calls it ‘Phase Two,’ unofficially, of course—and I put in a bid to do animal husbandry, such as it is.

  “But never mind that,” Maggie said. “I’m more worried about how you’re doing. So I ask you again, what should I know?”

  Maybe it was learning that Maggie was an independent contractor like her, but Stormie was comfortable enough telling the older woman about the accident, and the picophage treatment, and the current regimen of shots and pills. As Stormie talked, she got the impression that Maggie knew a lot more than she claimed. Stormie tried to wax philosophical about the whole thing—tried to show that she understood it could be worse—but she sounded unconvincing to herself.

  Maggie listened, and more than listened: she seemed to attend every word, as if Stormie were telling a fascinating story. As Stormie wound down her narrative of fear and frustration, Maggie swirled her tea in her mug, and when she spoke she drew each sentence out as if it were a fine wire extruded from a die. “That is a difficult situation you and Frank are in. It’s funny to me sometimes, how you can do the right thing and still have it turn out bad. Or, at least, not very good. I don’t suppose it’s very funny to you, though.”

  “No, not really,” Stormie said, and drank the last of her tea.

  “Have you thought about praying for healing?” Maggie asked.

  Stormie sputtered around and through the tea; a few droplets caught the very back of her nose, and she fought not to sneeze or spray. She choked a little instead, and her mug sounded very loud as she set it on the table.

  “Sorry,” Maggie said. “I didn’t realize that would be so funny.”

  “No,” Stormie said as she caught her breath. “That’s okay. But that’s one thing I haven’t thought about doing.”

  Maggie looked at the door and around the lab, something between a smile and a smirk on her lips. “You might try it,” she said. “I think the Lord does miracles every day, and most of them we never even realize.”

  Stormie’s face suddenly warmed. Maggie sounded … too much like Mother MacGinnis. “That’s okay,” she repeated, a little surprised at the venom in her own voice.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  Stormie grew hotter. Maggie had no right. No right to act like the woman who opened her home to Stormie and raised her, and no right to suggest the same kind of useless course of action Mother Mac would’ve recommended. Stranger things have happened? “Not to me,” Stormie said, in as dark a tone as she could produce.

  Maggie didn’t flinch away from Stormie’s gaze; in fact, she held her ground so securely and yet so softly that Stormie’s hot anger drained away like propellant pushed out of a tank by a nitrogen purge. Maggie smiled, and again the impression of sincerity washed over Stormie. “I’m sorry if I was out of line, Stormie. I would call your ‘picophage’ treatment a medical miracle of sorts, but I suppose two miracles might be too much to ask for.” She finished her own tea and set the mug on the table. “Thank you for the tea, it was very good. I’ll leave you to your work, or to get some sleep.” She touched Stormie on the shoulder as she walked to the sliding door, where she paused and said, “I didn’t come to get into a fight, dear, but I wouldn’t mind a good argument sometime.”

  Fatigue wrapped itself around Stormie now that the momentary tension had faded. Her thoughts were so unfocused and confused, she didn’t understand what Maggie had said. “What?”

  “It doesn’t have to be tonight, but I heard someone say that if you can’t get in a good discussion, get in a good argument. We’ll have to have one, one of these days, about life, the universe …”

  Stormie cocked her head. “And everything?”

  Maggie smiled again, and this time her eyes sparkled with a touch of mischief. “Very good,” she said.

  Stormie smiled, too. “I guess we’re all geeks here.”

  Maggie said, “I prefer ‘fen.’” She gave a little wave before she slipped quietly down the corridor.

  Stormie shivered, as if her grandmother’s ghost had just touched her on the shoulder. Mother MacGinnis would tell her to take Maggie’s advice; Stormie could almost hear her singing “Take it to the Lord in prayer” as if it were hymn time inside her skull. She shook her head to clear it, and as she tried to shut out the noise she half-idly wondered: if humans made human-type mistakes, did God make God-type mistakes?

  * * *

  Thursday, 11 January 2035

  It was long after hours, but Jim Fennerling was still working. He had until Monday to make Lunar Life Engineering’s estimated tax payment for the last quarter of the previous year. Beware the Ides of January, not March—and the Ides of April, June, and September.

  He rubbed his eyes and went over the balance sheet again. It wasn’t pretty. He’d front-loaded the payments on Stormie and Frank’s treatment, so that was paid off and could be deducted appropriately, but the interferon regimen demanded by the Consortium was like a weekly fiscal earthquake, eroding their company’s foundation and making their shaky financials practically precarious. And the damn shots would go on for a year unless they could get the AC to admit that the picophage regimen had been enough.

  Stubborn assholes.

  It wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Jim knew it as surely as he knew the Sun would rise, as he knew the current interest rate or the hard reality of his wheelchair. He didn’t believe in insurmountable pr
oblems. He couldn’t. He would find a way. He might be able to cut the cash reserve some more, though it was so thin it was practically transparent. First things first, he could look for ways to trim the budget.

  It was too late, unfortunately, to do anything about the long-lead laboratory equipment that was shipped up as part of module eight. At least it hadn’t been part of shipment three, the one that crashed on the north side of Campanus Crater; the Consortium wouldn’t have helped LLE come up with money to replace a single sample kit. Any savings would have to come out of equipment yet to be shipped. Jim thumbed through the electronic binder, skimming over the manifest without studying it since so much of it was technobabble to him. What the hell is a spectrophotometer? Do they really need that? Meredith would have known what it was … but he didn’t have time to go down that road.

  He slid the tablet onto the desk. They’d definitely run at a loss for a while … could possibly spread the loss over a couple of years … he’d have to dig up some new investors to stay solvent …

  The phone beeped, and he found he was more glad than irritated at the interruption. He punched the talk button without identifying the caller. “Hello, Jim Fennerling speaking.”

  An automated voice said, “Stand by for delayed transmission.”

  Jim’s momentary gladness vanished.

  “James, it is Frank. Stormie is here also.” He was talking on a speaker phone, which added as much to the impression of distance as the artificial time delay the AC was enforcing.

  “What’s gone wrong now?” he asked.

  “Why do you assume something is wrong?” Frank said.

  Because we can’t afford what the AC is charging us for this call. That was one part of the training simulation their customer didn’t simulate: charging for communications as if they were really over Earth-to-Moon satellite links. Jim bit back his first impulse and said, “It’s unusual to hear from you at an unscheduled time, that’s all. What’s got you so excited—good or bad—that you decided to call?”