Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Herbert was forceful, usually loud and obnoxious, and his brusque manner always put Frank on guard. It did not seem to matter to the man that people tolerated him more than they actually liked him, or that his main criterion for being accepted as a colonist was having married the alternate power engineer. Again Frank mourned Chu Liquan and wondered how Marilyn was doing.

  Frank wiped crumbs off his hand and slowly extended it. Herbert shook hands with his usual over-exuberance, as if they had not recently spent three months in the same underground facility. He said, “Who’d have thought that two years later we’d be together here on the Moon, huh? I mean, what were the odds?”

  Frank had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m sorry?” he asked.

  “You don’t remember? Sure you do. Today’s still the ninth, right? You and your wife were at the AC orientation with me two years ago about this time, remember?”

  Frank realized he did remember. It was not that he had suppressed the memory because it was bad, just that he did not find it particularly memorable. But he had actually met Herbert at one of their initial briefings at the San Diego office.

  Frank smiled, not at the memory—let Herbert think so, if he wanted—but at a memory-within-the-memory.

  Herbert’s first words to Frank at that July meeting had been, “So how long you been married, Frank?” It was not an uncommon question among the colonists, as Frank learned; Herbert and Angela Beacon had one of the many marriages of convenience brought on by the Consortium’s policy. The Consortium had caught some flak for its insistence that the first fifty lunar colonists be married couples, men and women. Commentators and activists had editorialized against and shouted down the policy since the announcement in late 2026, but the AC stuck with the program despite all interference attempts. Stormie had once done a search and uncovered an online dating service with several listings to the effect of, “Single male engineer seeks female scientist/engineer for quick marriage and possible emigration off-planet.”

  But Frank always smiled at that question for a different reason. The first two years of his marriage to Stormie, he always answered in terms of days. It had started just after their honeymoon. A store clerk asked him and he said with just a moment’s thought, “Thirty-two days.”

  Stormie had chastised him. “Why can’t you just say, ‘a month,’ like a normal person?” she said. “No one’s that precise. When someone asks you a year from now, are you going to say, ‘Three hundred ninety-seven days’?” But he knew her rage was all bluster.

  He had continued answering in terms of days—and sometimes down to the minute—until it became harder to calculate on the spur of the moment. The temptation hit him when Herbert asked, but Stormie was no longer close enough to react so he refrained from doing the calculation. “Four years,” he said. Herbert had expressed some surprise, but Frank found himself marveling that so much time had passed.

  Frank rarely played his little game anymore of calculating the elapsed time of their marriage, but the memory amused him because Stormie’s “no one is that precise” excluded her. She often vied with him in terms of the precision of her calculations. In fact, they each took a bit of pleasure in finding small errors in the other’s work. And small errors were usually all they found.

  Frank extricated himself from the memory, reluctantly, and let go of Herbert’s hand as if in a dream. He registered that the man was speaking but did not even try to perceive the words.

  He was in his own world, a world he had built together with his wife, and he was content to stay in it a little longer.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Something Has to Break

  Monday, 3 September 2035

  Stormie usually couldn’t keep track of the days of the week. She knew the date only because her datapad told her, and only vaguely comprehended that the Stewarts organized worship services and social events a few times a week. Even after LLE’s temporary forced labor campaign ended, she found that her regular work filled almost all her waking hours.

  So she went halfway through the first Monday in September before it dawned on her that she used to get Labor Day off as a holiday.

  Colony life was a routine of long stretches of constant, repetitive work broken up by occasional minor emergencies, usually involving sewage—which, thankfully, was Frank’s specialty. Once or twice since their arrival the colonists had also staged special events, some of which they invented to add significance to what would otherwise have been normal events and what should, one day, be routine. They were still eating through the stores of prepackaged foods—and looked forward to every one of the dwindling shipments of consumables—but the first harvest of the first carrot crop had become a mini-celebration. Now every new vegetable harvested was cause for excitement, though Stormie doubted the first rabbit slaughter would be celebrated as widely. The rails for the launch system were starting to creep across the plains of Mare Nubium, and she suspected every hundred meters would become a reason to celebrate. Every time the catfish or the shrimp were moved from the spawning pool to a circulation tank, every cycle of asteroid miners who arrived and then departed, every out-of-the-ordinary occurrence would be a reason to gather whoever was available to commemorate the occasion.

  Maggie had become the de facto social coordinator among all the colonists, organizing little parties and remembering everyone’s birthdays. Stormie would’ve enjoyed more of the impromptu festivities had she not been so tired so much of the time.

  Stormie had known she would encounter a learning curve associated with the real habitats and the real air and water systems, but experience in the training facility hadn’t prepared her quite well enough for the dynamics in the actual colony. The output of the ARPOES oxygen plant varied depending on the quality of the ilmenite brought in by the scavenging robots, and even depending on what type of alloy the metal-processing plant was trying to produce at a given time. The uptake of carbon dioxide varied as the plants in the farm modules matured, and Frank needed to confer with Maggie and the agronomists about the crop cycles once there were enough crops to cycle: balancing the air-purifying effect of the farms according to the different stages of growth among the available species was going to be a difficult prospect. And the bioreactive air filters turned out to require even more maintenance than they had anticipated in the training facility.

  Stormie might have suggested hiring one of the other colonists on a part-time basis to help with cleaning filters and other tasks, but their company couldn’t afford it. So she worked longer hours and did more herself. Frank did, too, balancing the water systems—which seemed at times more complex than the air systems—and dealing with the same kinds of issues with respect to the varying life cycles of the aquatic animals that filtered the water before they fed the colonists.

  So much of their learning, so much of their advancement up their respective learning curves, had to do with balancing out the peaks and troughs in all of these natural cycles. Sometimes it was as if she were trying to adjust a thousand individual signals patched into a single mental oscilloscope: as long as she kept the signals out of phase with one another enough that they didn’t all synch up at the same time, they wouldn’t be in danger of losing a vital resource at an inopportune moment. Not that there would ever be a good time to lose a vital resource, but it might be possible to handle a shortage if some other resource were available to take up the slack. The problem was, she was responsible for maintaining air, upon which everyone depended and the supply of which could be affected by a huge number of variables. Part of her mental fatigue came from trying to figure out which of those variables she could ignore and which of them she had to pay attention to all the time.

  Frank’s availability also depended on how much financial work he was still doing. Jim had moved back in to his apartment weeks ago, but he still required a lot of assistance with just the basics of living so Frank hadn’t turned over business matters to him yet. Stormie had backed out of the financial morass again after the initia
l shock of finding out that they were overextended and undercapitalized; now, she only asked Frank about once a week if the bills were being paid and if any money was going into their account. She knew the answers before she asked the questions, of course—not that she needed to check up on him, but she had as much right to see the account balances as anyone else. She just wanted to see how he answered the question.

  The creditors Jim had enticed into investing in their little company—even the most recent batch he had tapped—had, so far, been content to be silent partners. She had seen a few recent messages that worried her a little bit, because they sounded as if some of them might want to cash out their investments sooner than she, Frank, and Jim were ready for them to. That was one reason she was happy to let Jim and Frank take care of the business end; she wasn’t comfortable with, nor was she confident in, those kinds of negotiations.

  Where she had become surprisingly comfortable and confident was with some of the other women in the colony. Beverly Needham had organized a rotating women’s bridge game, and Stormie occasionally squeezed a couple of rubbers into her schedule even though bridge was not her favorite.

  Her schedule was as tight as a B-nut, and her work kept her isolated much of the time, but Stormie tried to build in an extended break when she needed one and at least stop in long enough to say hello. In this manmade microcosm, where she traversed the same corridors and saw the same people over and over, she balanced between needing human contact and wanting to stay as far away from people as possible. Sometimes the card games or just being in the same area as the other ladies were perfect, and other times she wanted to be alone with music or a movie.

  Occasionally one of the ladies would be watching the others play and Stormie would join her for a quick game of cribbage. She enjoyed those times even better than when she sat in for bridge: her job required enough mental energy, and cribbage took less than bridge. She missed having a real pegboard—their respective datapads tallied the scores automatically—but even so, after a quick game she could return to her little workspace and get back into whatever calculations or analysis she needed to do, with a fresh perspective.

  She needed a fresh perspective, and looked forward to the evening after she realized it was Monday and Labor Day. Since it was the first Labor Day at the colony, Maggie had arranged a small party featuring the first colony-grown cucumbers, after which the Ladies’ Bridge Club was going to play.

  Stormie’s CommPact buzzed. She finished annotating the predictive curve she had built of the rate of consumption of ethylene and other byproduct gases by the biofilters; before she finished, it buzzed two more times. She put in her earpiece and said hello before it could buzz a fourth time.

  “Stormie, this is Harmony. What’ve you got going on the rest of the day?”

  “Just the usual,” Stormie said.

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve been tapped for,” she paused, “an unpleasant detail.”

  Stormie looked around the tiny workspace as if the answer to the obvious question would be in plain sight. “What kind of detail?” she asked.

  “You know the rotator is coming in today, right?”

  Of course Stormie knew. A dozen miners would rotate in for what they had started calling a “gravity break,” and if the manifests were correct the dozen who were in the colony now would rotate out. If she and Frank were lucky, the net effect on the air and water systems would be zero—at least, after the miners took their first showers in however many days.

  “Yeah,” she said, “and I’ve already done the air consumption calculations, including the flight crew.”

  “That’s good,” Harmony said. “But what you don’t know is that they’re bringing back a body.”

  The words sank in slowly, but they sank deep. Stormie guessed where this was going, and she didn’t like it a bit. She said nothing, the way a child who doesn’t want to be noticed will make themselves very small and very quiet.

  Harmony only let the silence go on for a moment. “Guy’s been dead for four days,” she said. “They just wrapped him up and secured him in place until they had a flight coming this way. His family’s been notified, but we didn’t announce it or anything yet.”

  “What happened to him?” Stormie asked, surprised that she wanted to know. It wasn’t morbid fascination, she decided, but data-gathering: it would help her be prepared.

  “The guy was a digger, and he’d just come off a long shift,” Harmony said, “and was heading back to the pressure bubble to sleep. Instead of taking the main route out of the shaft he was in, and going overland, so to speak, he decided to cut through a fissure where they’d already excavated a vein of ammonia ice. It’s not well marked, apparently, and there are a lot of cracks that look alike—he got lost, and then he got stuck.”

  “Did he run out of air?”

  “No. And he didn’t run out of power, either: his suit was still warm and pressurized when they found him, but he was gone.”

  “How does that happen?” Stormie asked.

  “They figure he panicked when he saw he was stuck. He keyed his beacon, but inside the asteroid the signal got all confused. Nobody received it until he was overdue and they started looking for him. Anyway, they’re not sure if he had a heart attack or if his blood pressure spiked and he stroked out—oh, sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Stormie frowned, even though Harmony couldn’t see her. “That’s okay. Why me, though?”

  “Gary had me run the selector,” Harmony said, “and your name came up along with Barbara Richards. I already called her, and she’s on her way to the Gateway.”

  Stormie remembered the feel of the scalpel in her gloved hand when she eviscerated the dead Labrador retriever in training. Now she had to do that on a person? Why couldn’t somebody else do it? She said, “I thought only Consortium employees were supposed to be included in those lotteries.”

  “Well, I put everybody’s name in the program, myself included, because I figured we all have the possibility of dying up here, so we all ought to have the possibility of taking care of somebody who’s died.”

  Stormie did not argue the point; the strain in Harmony’s voice told her this wasn’t the time. She needed to call Frank—or, better yet, walk over to the module he was working in—to tell him what was going on. She could recite their statement of work almost verbatim, but she would still have him verify that it didn’t require this type of extra duty. And since they hadn’t volunteered for this duty, the way they had volunteered for the habitat-unpacking duty when they first arrived, maybe they could bill the AC at a premium rate for these out-of-scope hours.

  And for this … oh, yeah, there’ll be a premium.

  * * *

  “What do you mean, you charged them a basic hourly rate?”

  Frank cringed at Stormie’s question. She was not yelling, not quite, but her voice was pitched a few notes higher than usual.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “James and I discussed it, and felt the rate was appropriate.” His conversation with James had been brief: a quick call to confirm verbally what they had tossed back and forth in text form. James was not yet up to carrying on long conversations, just as he still was not up to working at the keyboard for long periods. His brain worked faster than his mouth or his hands, and he got frustrated quickly. Frank still hoped for more progress in their friend’s recovery.

  Stormie shook her head. “I can’t believe you. Jim … okay, I can see how he wouldn’t get it. But you’ve done that procedure, Frank, you know what it’s like! Surely you can imagine what it was like to do it on a person. I won’t be able to sleep for a month.

  “It would be one thing if it was in our contract to do that kind of work, but,” she paused, “oh, they really couldn’t pay anyone enough to do it.”

  “As I said, I am sorry—”

  “Sorry? It’s one thing that you didn’t volunteer to do it for me—I don’t expect you to ever have to do my share of the work—but did you e
ven think about the precedent we’re setting? We’ve got enough work to do, our own work, without them coming to us every time they have something extra needing to be done. We ought to be making them pay through the nose for anything we do that’s out of scope.”

  Stormie crossed her arms across her body as if she were cold. Frank recognized a cultural element in her distress; her background, like his, did not involve handling the dead. His mother’s tribe had its own specific death rituals that he knew more from stories than observation; he had been fascinated one day to learn that some cultures like the Irish and the Japanese took great care to bathe their dead, but his mother had been appalled when he told her about them. Her people, she said, used to take dying people into the bush and leave them for the hyenas and the leopards because of the uncleanness of a dead body; she would never have participated in the solemn ceremonial washing of a Jewish corpse, for instance. Now was not the time to discuss anthropology, however.

  Frank wanted to go to Stormie, to wrap his arms around her and try to comfort her, but it was unlikely to assuage her anger. He should be able to think of an appropriate poem, but he feared there was little he could say that would not seem flippant. She would not accept his advances or his pity, and he could not blame her, but his heart began to break at her vulnerability, at the way she was backed into that little corner, trapped where her only recourse was to attack because she had no room to escape. And he had placed her in that position.

  Yes, he had agreed with James that exacting a death tax of sorts against the Consortium would be in poor taste. But he had not thought of it from Stormie’s point of view, and as a result he had both disappointed and hurt her. And that terrified him.

  In some ways, Frank had always been afraid: afraid of disappointing Stormie, afraid of hurting her, afraid of losing her. Now he did what he thought he should not do, though he expected she would reject it. He stepped quickly and hugged her so fast that her arms were pinned between their two bodies. She struggled against him for a few seconds, almost moaning, but to his surprise she stopped struggling and gasped a little for air.