Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  A jazz club had bought space, and a tiny government office matched its grander counterpart in Luna. And there was Xanadu, which was a co-op of five wealthy families. Along with a scattering of individuals who dealt in rare or hand-crafted goods.

  There was always music there, and it had enough reputation for being dangerous that all but a few tourists steered clear.

  His name was Star. He would be alright with me. I knew enough to keep him safe.

  We ate berries and sat beside rippling water. He told me about Earth—never about the people, but the landscape. Trees, pines and sycamores and madrona, maples and honey locusts and cedar. He talked about cliffs that were bound with color: yellows and reds and deep browns. Everything grew there, it seemed.

  He talked about rain, about slow gray clouds and tearing nor'easters. Rain drumming on a tin roof versus its sound on slate. Fine spring mist and the hot rain that fell during drought, coin-sized and evaporating too quickly. Rain on sand, echoed by waves. Thunderheads, gathering themselves over the ocean. He had lived beside the sea for a few years, he said.

  I wondered who he had lived with.

  So much was unsaid. It was like a cloud in the room. We relaxed despite it.

  He didn't know where he was staying. He had no luggage. I approved of that. I stick to plas-wear and carry no souvenirs other than the rooms inside my head. Even my ship, where I spend more time than anywhere else, is unpersonalized. I liked it that way.

  I was staying with Pippi. Star had money, or so he said, and asked where a clean hotel was. I steered him to Blizz, which caters to the Gate regulars, and went back to Pippi's.

  She was surprised to see me. I hadn't felt like going out on a trip, I said, and offered to take her out to dinner.

  All the time we were eating sweet potato fries and tempeh steaks, I tried to figure out how to tell her about Star.

  I don't know what kept me from just blurting it out. That was usually the level we communicated at. Straightforward and without pretense.

  I felt like a shit keeping quiet. Eventually it would come out and the longer it took, the worse it would be.

  I wasn't prepared to see him at the door the next day.

  Pippi answered the door. "Bless you, my dear little friend!" she shouted over her shoulder.

  "What?" I scooted back in my chair, glimpsed his hat.

  "You got me a present!" She reached out her hands, "Come in, come in."

  Her place is tiny. Three of us made it feel crowded. We stood around the table, bumping it with our hips.

  "How much do you cost?" Pippi asked Star.

  He looked at me. "I don't do that anymore."

  "Then why are you here?"

  "I came to see Podkayne."

  Pippi was unembarrassed. She shrugged and said, "Okay."

  He wanted advice about buying into the colony, where to pick a spot. I made him buy me lunch in return for my advice, and we took Pippi along since she knew better than I where the good deals were.

  "Over there in Cluster, someone told me a month or two ago," she said. "He was saying the Church is going to sell off more space, and it's going to get gentrified. It's a long ways off though, over an hour by tram." She licked barbecue sauce off her fingers. Star pushed a wipe across the table towards her.

  "I don't think he likes me much," she said to me, later.

  "I don't think he likes humans much," I said. "He makes allowances, but I think he'd be just as happy dealing with mechanicals only."

  "Not many mechs up here," she said.

  "Why?" I said. "You'd think it would be ideal for them. No rust. Less dirt. Fewer pollutants in the air."

  "It would make sense," she said. "What does it say about us, we're so crazy we pick a place even mechanicals don't want to live?"

  Maybe ten thousand on the face of the moon. The space stations ranged in size from a few hundred to a few thousand. Twenty thousand on the surface of Mars. I didn't go back there much, even though it was where I had grown up, after my parents died in a crash. Maybe two or three thousand existing around the bounty of the Gate, another hundred pilots and vagabonds and Parasite-ridden.

  The few, the proud, the crazy.

  Why had Star chosen to come up here?

  I asked.

  He said, "There's too many living things on the planet."

  "Why not Mars? It's enough people to qualify as civilization."

  "They're spread out and it's dusty. Here it's clean."

  "You like the sterility up here," I said. "Then why think about living over in the Cluster? It's the most organic spot on the moon."

  His face never smiled, just tilted from one degree to another. "It's a controlled organic."

  "But what do you want to do?"

  "Live," he said. "By myself, with a few friends." He nodded toward me. "According to my own devices."

  "What about sex?" I blurted out.

  He froze like a stuck strut's shadow. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to intrude. It's just that I was somewhat interested, but only if you were."

  He shook his head, mere centimeters of rejection. "I'm afraid not."

  Words I'd heard before. Including what he said next. "We can be friends, though."

  "He's not interested," I told Pippi.

  "Screw him," she said. "Let's go play Sex Rangers."

  We climbed into the virtual suits and tapped in. I found someone interested in fooling around on a rocky shore, underneath fuzzy pines. The suit's as good as sex, any day—releases all the tensions you need released, in my opinion—and a lot cleaner.

  Afterwards we logged out and ate pizza and watched a deck about boxing. Pippi said the guy had an 87 percent chance of winning (he did), 54 percent chance by knock-out (he did not).

  "I asked Star to come mining with us," I said to her when we were getting ready for bed. I took the couch; she had a fold-down bunk.

  "You did what?"

  "He'll be an extra pair of eyes. Not like he'll take up oxygen."

  She paused. "Fair enough."

  He was good enough at spotting. He learned the difference between ice and metal fast enough to satisfy impatient Pippi, who hated explaining things. I focused on getting us close to the debris that swirled in and out of the Gate. You never knew what you might find. One guy picked up a device that fueled a company in food replication and yielded over forty patents. One pilot found a singing harp. Another the greasy lump that ended up becoming snipship fuel.

  You never knew.

  Pippi and I had a routine. Star didn't intrude on it much, went to the secondary display and focused on looking for mineral spikes.

  Usually we chatted back and forth. There, Star was an intrusive, if silent, presence. Pippi ended up thumbing on the usual newschat channel. Nothing much. An outbreak on Mars, but small and well-contained. An ambassador stricken but rallying in order to continue his mission through the Gate. How much he looked forward to being the fifth human through the interstellar passage that allowed us access to the wild and varied universe. How much he looked forward to opening new trade channels.

  Who knew what he might find out there?

  "What's this?" Star said.

  From afar just a glitter. Then, closer, a silver-sided chest, the size of a foot locker but covered with golden triangles. An odd, glittery powder encrusted the hinges and catch as it spun in space.

  We brought it in.

  Pippi's gloved hand reached to undo the latch. I waited, holding my breath.

  Nothing hissed out. A glass sphere inside, clouded with bubbles and occlusions. As Pippi slipped it out of the gray material surrounding it, we could see oily liquid filling it.

  "Could be useless," Pippi said, her voice unhappy. "Plenty of stories like that before."

  "Could be beaucoup bucks," I pointed out.

  "Of course," Pippi said, her voice loud and angry, "it's the time you bring someone along, to split it three ways, that we actually hit a lode."

 
"I don't want any claim," Star said.

  Flummoxed, I stared at him. What must it be like, to have enough to not need more, to have just that one extra layer against yourself and poverty? My parents had left me enough to buy my snipship, but all my capital was tied up in that rig.

  "I just wanted the company," he said. "I thought it would be interesting."

  "Fucking tourist," Pippi said. "Want to watch the monkeys dance? We'll kiss for another five grand."

  He backed up, raising his hands. His feet clattered on the deck. Before he had moved quietly. Did he choose to make that sound to remind us he was a machine?

  "Thought we'd just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?" Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. "See, it doesn't have anything to say to that."

  "He," he said.

  "He? What makes you a he, that you've got a sticky-out bit? I bet you've got a sticky-in bit or two as well." She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.

  "Enough," I said. "Let's tag the find, in our names, Pippi."

  She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward. "Let me, it's faster." Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, "Get us all home quicker that way."

  I took over after she'd tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.

  Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.

  "Why not a place where there's rain?" I said.

  "That could only be Earth," he said. "Do you know the worst thing about rain there?"

  "What?"

  Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.

  "Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin."

  I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.

  "I'm sorry about Pippi."

  She honked the horn.

  "Go ahead. I'm taking the tram over to the Cluster," he said.

  I hesitated. "Meet me later?"

  "I'll call you."

  He didn't, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company's R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.

  I texted him, "Come celebrate with us, we're dockside and buying dumplings." But he didn't reply until three days later. "Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it."

  "When?"

  "Tomorrow morning. I'll make you breakfast."

  I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.

  His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.

  "I was programmed that way," he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.

  The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.

  He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he'd draw back.

  He didn't.

  "I'm programmed a certain way," he said.

  "How is that?"

  "I want to please you. But at the same time I know it's just the way I'm programmed."

  "It can't be something more than that?" My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn't have told the difference.

  He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.

  I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?

  As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he'd fed her.

  "Pasta," she said, rolling the words out. "And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink."

  She said they'd fucked. I believed her. It wouldn't be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.

  So I did and said I'd fucked him too. She didn't respond, not right off the bat, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.

  It wasn't the first time I'd slept in there, not by a long shot.

  I wished them both happiness, I supposed.

  Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi's panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.

  We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from her, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.

  "Who is that?" Pippi said.

  "A journalist. She's going to help me tell my story, back on Earth."

  "I see," Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.

  Pippi said, "Is this because you don't want to fuck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don't have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay."

  He averted his face, looking at the ship. "That's not it."

  "Then what?"

  "I want to go back to the rain."

  "Earth's acid rain?" I said. "The rain that will destroy you?"

  Now he was looking at neither of us.

  "What about your place?" Pippi said.

  "You can have it," he said. "It never felt like home."

  "Will anyplace?" I asked. "Anywhere?"

  "When I'm telling my story, it feels like home," he said. "I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That's what I need to do."

  "Good luck," I said. What else could I say?

  Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they'd played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.

  We didn't look at each other. I didn't know how long Star's shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.

  Afternotes

  A central source of inspiration for this piece was a combination of Robert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars and "The Menace From Earth"—indeed, the plot is shamelessly stolen from the latter, mainly because that story always infuriated me with its assumptions about teen-age girls. It was originally written for a contest focusing on disabilities in science fiction, but Sean Wallace snagged it after taking an early look.

  The title is taken from a favorite e.e. cummings poem, "as freedom is a breakfastfood."

  The story appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, the same year the story "Amid the Words of War", which is included in + Far.

  LEGENDS OF THE GONE

  My neighbor makes robotic cats.

  Perhaps cyborg cats would be a better term, since they're an amalgam of metal and plastic parts he took from Microsoft Research Labs a few blocks away, and fur and flesh from the home kit he used to clone his own cat, a one-eyed, lop-jawed male.

  His creations haunt our landscape of condominiums and ruin. They ratchet and swivel their way through the desiccated cedar bushes after the squirrels and Stellar's Jays they cannot catch. There are three of them so far.

  He offered to make one for me, in return for my picking up his supplies each week, but I declined and said it was no trouble. He is elderly, and his two false legs make it difficult to travel. As the youngest man in the complex, I felt obliged to help him out.

  He thanked me. His immense cat rubbed against his legs, watching its
two descendents out in the parking lot, circling each other on the cracked asphalt. Up on a telephone pole leaning at an angle, victim of a windstorm ten years past, three crows sat at angles and cawed in slanted commentary. We stood with our arms folded, men discussing the world as it faded around us.

  "I'm going to make a kitten next," he said.

  "A kitten?"

  "Yep. I'll make the brain pan small. Juice it up a bit."

  "Juice it up how?"

  He squinted at me. At one point he worked for a large company, and the habit of secrecy has stuck with him. I half expected him to say, "Have you signed an NDA?" He hawked and spat instead.

  "There's chemicals," he said.

  "I think it's a bad idea, Joe."

  "Why?"

  The two Frankenstein cats traced slow loops around each other. They purred and spat, confused by their own proximity, caught between longing and antipathy.

  "Just do," I said.

  "The ladies might like 'em."

  "Maybe."

  "Yer gal might like one."

  "Celeste? Yeah, she might. I dunno."

  "Always seems such a sad girl. A kitten would cheer her up."

  "We're all sad, Joe. We're living at the end of the world."

  He squinted up at the immaculate, cloudless sky, then looked back at the cats grooming themselves. "Least we're living," he said.

  "Do you ever think about what might have happened to them?"

  "Ain't like wondering will make us find out any sooner."

  We turned to look at the parking lot. Past it lay the cabana and boat docks, the wood long since fallen into decay, overgrown with water lilies except where we had cut them back to keep the fish pens clear. Two golden eagles circled the lake in slow loops and a heron worked its way along the shore.

  "I guess it won't," I said. "Still."

  "I ain't saying it wouldn't be nice to know."

  He named the first robotic cat Gaston Le Deux, after its progenitor. Its skeleton, supplemented with outside struts and ribs made from red plastic, gave it a macabre toy's appearance. It had something wrong with its ears, which stayed in the same position always, never flicking back or forward in the subtle language cats employ. This stillness gave it an uncanny appearance, dead but blinking.