Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  He could almost run the kilometer to where they were faster than he could drive it, but it wouldn’t do any good to get there empty-handed. He couldn’t carry a K-bottle, even in low gravity; the thing would be too awkward.

  Van hit the yoke again as the turbine labored to get up to speed. Frank told Stormie he loved her.

  The hell with this.

  He jumped down from the cab, stumbled a little in the powdery dust, and started loping in their direction as fast as he could carry himself. He might not be able to get the oxygen to them, but he could get to them and maybe carry them to some oxygen. He radioed Jake to follow when they could.

  Time spread out in front of him. It seemed as if he ran through gelatin. Halfway there, as he crested a small rise, he decided this might not have been the best idea. His knee screamed at him that he was an idiot. He didn’t disagree.

  He stopped by the cab of their MPV, slick with sweat and breathing hard, and looked around. It took him a moment to find them, over by the scavenger corral, because they were both prone. With the angle of the Sun and the crazy shadows, it was hard at first to pick them out against the backdrop of dozens of scavengers waiting patiently to be sent back out to gather more lunar soil for processing.

  Van landed next to them, and took in the situation with a glance.

  “Jake,” he said, “this is bad.” He knelt down and checked their suit status and continued, “Looks like Frank rigged a dead man circuit here.”

  “Say again?” Jake’s voice was too loud in Van’s helmet; he wished they would rig the suits to mute the voice a little the farther away the speaker was.

  Van worked while he talked. “Frank’s got Stormie’s suit rigged to scavenge off his oh-two supply. He bypassed his own intake, the way you would in the ELSPAP.”

  “Can you put him back on line? We’re right behind you with a bottle of oxygen.”

  “No,” Van said, and swallowed hard at the finality of his pronouncement. He didn’t want to say any more, but Jake had to know the situation. “He’s got no vitals, and his tank’s down to almost unbreatheable anyway. I get barely anything on Stormie. We’ll be lucky to save her.”

  “Well, get ready to unhook her from him. We’re rolling up, only about thirty meters behind you now.”

  Van told Jake to get two big stickypatches ready, then he disconnected Stormie from Frank’s suit, picked her up and carried her to the truck. He didn’t notice who hooked her suit up to the oxygen bottle, because he grabbed the stickypatches from Jake and applied them to Stormie’s suit over and around the patch that was already on her shoulder.

  The pressure in Stormie’s suit rose, stabilized, and held.

  A hand touched his arm. “Good work,” Jake said.

  Inside his helmet, Van shook his head. “No such thing as good work on a bad day.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Salient Details

  Thursday, 24 January 2036

  Jim was still a little nervous behind the wheel of his van, even when it was driving for him. This was the farthest out from Santa Barbara that he had gone in many weeks, and he could think of a thousand and one other places he would rather be.

  He was grateful at least that he wasn’t on a timetable. He took the scenic route, avoiding the Pacific Coast Highway in favor of the much smaller, slower roads. He drove through rolling hills on the other side of the mountains from the ocean, where dry brown stalks of winter grass waved lazily in the breeze. He passed towering eucalyptus trees that guarded the road and sheltered modest, mission-style homes. He wanted to drive forever and never stop.

  It was almost midday when the van pulled up in front of the Pastorellis’ house. A number of cars were parked along the street and in the driveway, but they had thoughtfully put up a sign designating a handicapped space for him.

  A cold wind whipped through the van as the door opened and his ramp lowered. He shivered, perhaps feeling the breeze more keenly than usual, or maybe, along with it, the freezing stares of unseen eyes in the windows of the house. They were watching; people always did, whether he dismounted the van on the street or in the hospital parking lot or at the mall. They meant nothing by it. People were programmed to pay attention to the unusual, from millennia of learning that the unusual could be dangerous.

  He hated the turns his mind was taking these days. As if Frank’s parents needed to be reminded of the dangers of the world, here came his paralyzed friend and financier to express his condolences.

  Jim paused at the bottom of the ramp, tempted to turn around and drive back up and away. He shivered again, turned his chair up the entryway, and pushed the button on his remote to make the van lift the ramp and close the door.

  Frank’s parents received him cordially, and about as warmly as he had any right to expect. Frank’s father, Benjamin, was only a few years older than Jim; he was a little stooped, but still a big man. He was well experienced in the difficulties of the world, having seen workers die on job sites where he was an engineer and having dealt with all manner of hardships in his years as a missionary. Ishigu, Frank’s mother, was polite but not kind. Small and straight-backed, she had an accent much thicker than Frank’s and eyes that did not cry, but hid none of their sorrow.

  They took the pecan pie Jim had brought—he thought he remembered it being one of Frank’s favorites—and retreated into the throng of family. They left Jim alone in the front room, and he wheeled himself into an unobtrusive spot and sat in silence.

  When Jim had told Stormie he planned to come visit Frank’s parents, she quietly and sadly warned him against it. He would not be welcome, she said.

  He was content to be ignored. To the Pastorellis, he facilitated their son’s demise, not their son’s dream. They didn’t understand—possibly they couldn’t understand, and certainly had not shared—that dream. They would not want to hear, and Jim would not want to explain, that Frank’s loss blasted a profound depth of grief in him that might come close to their own, because it reminded him of Meredith’s death before her similar dream had a chance to be achieved.

  Jim tried not to pay too much attention to the conversations taking place in the next room. He heard Stormie’s name two or three times, and his own name once. The time passed more slowly than the creeping progress of any freeway traffic jam. As the silence lengthened, Jim picked up a book off the table next to him; it was a heavy, dense text, entitled The Gospel of John. He thumbed through it, wondering how someone could write a book so thick about a part of the Bible that was only a few pages long.

  “Are you familiar with the Gospel of John?” Benjamin Pastorelli asked. Frank’s father stood over Jim, not in a menacing way but in a manner that exuded authority.

  Jim shrugged and lifted the little book. “Not this familiar,” he said.

  “In the beginning was the Word,” Benjamin said. He tilted his head and looked at Jim expectantly.

  That emphasis on “word” reminded Jim of something. His frustration with his broken brain returned full force, because it seemed to be something that should have come to mind immediately. He looked past Frank’s father and struggled to pull the knowledge out of his mental quicksand. It was something he had learned at Pepperdine before he transferred.…

  “And the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God,” Jim said.

  Benjamin nodded approval. “My son knew the Gospels, Mr. Fennerling, and the Epistles, and the Psalms, and the Proverbs and the Prophets and the Law. I had begun to think that he had abandoned all of it, because his wife would have none of it.”

  “And then you read his last message.”

  “Yes. ‘Forgive me, Father.’” The big man shuddered. He closed his eyes. For a long moment he held still; he took a deep breath and stretched his arms as if he wanted to brace himself against anything or nothing. “I suppose,” he said, “I must take some small comfort that he expressed at the end what he had seemed to deny for so long.”

  Another phrase occurred to Jim, with a quickness that surprised him.
“Train up a child in the way he should go.”

  Benjamin shook his head. “That is where I failed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Pastorelli took the book from Jim, passed it from hand to hand and fanned through the pages. “There is training in righteousness,” he said, “that is, in right living, that we all need. But the word ‘train’ has another meaning. I don’t know if you were ever in the military, but you may have heard the expression to ‘train your sights’ on something. To aim at something.

  “I don’t think I aimed my son in the right direction,” he said. “I saw his destiny differently than he saw it. I did not train him up in the way he should go, but in the way I thought he should go. I failed. I failed to convince him to take another path, a path which would have left him alive right now. That itself would have been a different kind of failure, because even though he might be alive he would be miserable.

  “But I also failed to tell him how proud I was of him.”

  He paused, closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again, wet and shiny, and said, “No. How proud I am that he had the courage to have a dream and to follow it. And to achieve it, even for a short time.” He hung his head.

  Jim rehearsed and discarded in quick succession half a dozen platitudes. The silence stretched, and he was afraid to break it because it would come back to the fact that he was the one who helped Frank achieve that dream, and his father was the one who tried to talk him out of it.

  Jim realized that he should not have been allowed in the house at all. His attendance must hurt Frank’s family as much as it would for a skydiving instructor to show up at the funeral of a novice who had been killed because of a faulty parachute. His very presence must increase their sorrow and discomfort, yet they tolerated him.

  Jim turned his chair toward the door, in such a way that he could slide by Frank’s father without him having to move. Benjamin looked up at the motion.

  “I know this is no consolation,” Jim said, “but Frank had courage and character, and he had to learn them from somewhere. I think he learned them from you. He learned what was right, and how to do what was right no matter the consequences or the cost. And no matter where he went or what he decided to do—no matter what dream he chose to pursue—he would always have the courage and the character that he learned from you. And that, sir, is not a failure.”

  * * *

  Sunday, 27 January 2036

  Stormie laid her hand on Frank’s pillow. Even in the low light her dark hand contrasted with the white pillowcase. Tomorrow would be a week since Frank’s death, and she was still searching in her jumbled memory for salient details about that day.

  She hadn’t fully understood what had happened when they got her out of her suit. She’d been groggy and disoriented when they got her inside, and not much more cognizant when they pulled Frank out of his suit; she had held Frank’s still-warm hand and muttered at him to wake up, wake up, until someone pulled her away. She didn’t comprehend until later that Frank’s hand had been warm from being in his insulated suit rather than from its own warmth.

  Yvette had given her sedatives on that first day, and dreaming and waking mixed in Stormie’s mind in uncomfortable ways. She did not work, and a sense of guilt burdened her as the days passed; she thought of sampling and testing and maintenance that she was neglecting, but she could not bring herself to do it. She must have eaten, but she remembered no meals, no drinks, no conversations. She remembered hugs from various crying, sadly-smiling ladies, and the vague discomfort of knowing she hadn’t properly bathed and must smell overripe. The Stewarts had convened a memorial service, but Stormie remembered the event as if it was a story someone had told her, not something she had attended; even the tunes of the songs Maggie played out of her datapad were so mixed up in Stormie’s head that she didn’t recognize them.

  Stormie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, held it, and pushed her face deeper into her pillow. The pillowcase was cold and damp. She exhaled into it and warmth bathed her face. Against the backdrop of darkness, in either memory or dream, tiny, scintillating lights arced across her field of vision. She didn’t know what they were or what they meant.

  She rolled back over and looked up at the curving bulkhead. On the other side of that thin layer lay a meter or so of lunar soil, and beyond that, practically nothing but radiation and elemental hydrogen and the single oasis of life that was the Moon’s big sister. Stormie turned her head toward the direction where the Earth was and counted off the days that had passed. The Earth should be almost full now. Was it shining down in approval of what they were building here, or in mockery for their attempt to tame this desert of dust?

  Stormie shook her head. Part of her wanted to hide away from both the world she was in and the world she had come from. She was still technically under observation, and had a ready supply of Yvette’s little pills, but if she let herself escape that way too often she would want to escape permanently.

  She crawled to the edge of the bed and sat up. After a little bout of vertigo, she pulled on a blue jumpsuit and went to the Lunar Life Engineering laboratory.

  The lab wasn’t as clean as she’d expected it to be. Frank had a habit of cleaning everything twice and he would’ve been the last person in it, but the small bench was disorderly enough that Stormie knew someone had been working there within the last couple of days. The casing and guts of a water filter lay on a pale green towel on the bench; next to the towel, a tray held the screws from the case and three sizes of jeweler’s screwdrivers.

  On the big monitor, the digital triptych she and Frank had bought in Santa Barbara seemed to mock her as it transitioned from one frame to another. It was a fantasy landscape in vivid hues, with an unexpected sense of depth and distance, and Stormie watched it cycle twice, resisting the urge to sweep the water filter pieces onto the floor. The low gravity probably wouldn’t break anything, anyway.

  She wiped a sudden tear from the corner of her eye and sat down at the main terminal. She plugged her CommPact in, accessed the company’s memory module, and opened the logs on the big monitor. She breathed a little easier when text replaced the images.

  She went back three weeks, to the day of their pre-briefing for the ice run, skimmed her own entries and read Frank’s. She became accustomed to wiping away additional tears when the words on the screen began to blur.

  Starting the day she left, Frank quoted her reports from the Turtle verbatim in their company log—adding little commentaries of his own to what he cut and pasted. His log entries were routine until he was laid low by food poisoning along with a good proportion of the rest of the colony. Stormie had forgotten about that; it seemed so long ago.

  She expected to see a sizeable gap in the timeline, but instead found a series of very brief entries signed by Barbara Richards. They covered filter maintenance and some water sampling while Frank was sick … but they continued after Frank’s entries began again. He had mentioned getting help when he was incapacitated, and even suggested it as a rationale for exempting their company from future ice lotteries, but he hadn’t said anything about Barbara continuing to help after he was better.

  Stormie frowned. She would have to contact Jim to see how he and Frank paid Barbara for her time. All of Barbara’s log entries were time-stamped late in the evening, so she was doing work for LLE after her Consortium shifts were over; it wouldn’t be fair not to pay her.

  She decided to figure it out later, and read on.

  But there was so little to read. So few entries, so short, and so hard to read through tears she no longer tried to stop.

  She paused at the last entry, sat back on the stool, wiped her nose, and stared into the bright little light above her. She wasn’t sure she could read it again; the first time, when she was on the line with Jim, had been hard enough. It made her want to scream, so she did—but she kept the sound behind clenched teeth. The noise built inside her head, and pain and heat built along with it, and she did not care. She
held on to the heat as if it were a coal from the damn burning bush, always hot and never consumed, and she fed the fire with all of her anger at Frank for what he did, and her anger at herself for being angry at him. But no matter how much pain and frustration she fed to it, no matter that it grew so hot that she could barely differentiate her tears from her sweat, it wasn’t enough to fill the aching crater that Frank’s loss had blown into her soul.

  She shivered, licked salty residue from her lips, and then shook herself more vigorously to try to bring herself back to the present.

  An amber box emblazoned “NOTAC”—“Notice to All Colonists”—flashed in the upper left corner of the monitor. Gary Needham periodically issued such reports on hazardous conditions or procedural changes or other important topics. Stormie clicked on the box and the notice filled the screen.

  Nausea added to the pain and heat in her body.

  The notice required all colonists to increase vigilance on pressure suit contamination and maintenance, based on analysis of her suit’s failure.

  An unnamed investigative team had concluded that the joints of her suit, and those of the other three ice run participants, were badly degraded from excess exposure to abrasive lunar dust. After examining the joint on Stormie’s suit, they pressure-checked the other three. Bruce Lindsey’s sprang major leaks in both knees and one elbow, and the others performed nearly as badly. The investigators concluded that fatigue, excessive EVAs, and insufficient time and space in the LVN combined to make proper suit decontamination impractical.

  Stormie noted the word: not impossible, but impractical. Implying that they could’ve done better at keeping their suits clean if they’d wanted to. The notice stopped short of saying she and the others had been negligent, but the insinuation aggravated her. It was more fuel on her emotional fire.