Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  Thus, in late 2022, Gagarin took the Cheap Thrills—now whimsically rechristened the Vincent’s Ear—and migrated to a small base camp in the Descartes highlands of the Moon, about fifteen miles northeast of Descartes Station. He received his supplies on a regular basis from the base; in return, the base received refurbished equipment collected from his salvage missions. Otherwise, Gagarin kept out of contact, rarely if ever to be seen at the base itself. For most of four years, Gregor Gagarin—now known by the inhabitants of the base only as “Honest Yuri”—isolated himself on the Moon, producing the first true collection of painted and sculptural art to be made o the planet Earth.

  He was also considered by his closest neighbors, the moondogs of Descartes Station, to be completely insane.…

  14. The Night Gallery

  As the lunar truck rounded the side of the last hillock, the beams of its headlights fell across the nine-foot-tall figure of a man standing alone on the plain. His outstretched right arm hovered menacingly above the tread-worn road in a gesture which unmistakably signified Go back.

  Seeing it, Anne Noonan jerked in her seat. “Gaaagh!” she yelped, the Thermos mug of coffee in her hand dancing out of her grasp. The coffee spilled in her lap—she was still wearing her hardsuit, fortunately, or she might have been scalded—and the cup landed at her feet, unnoticed, as she stared through the canopy at the giant that seemed to have materialized in front of the vehicle.

  Mighty Joe was laughing in the driver’s seat next to her. He stopped the truck and looked over at her. “Kinda takes you by surprise, doesn’t it?”

  Noonan reflexively put her hands over her chest and sucked in a deep breath, trying to steady her thudding heart. “What the hell is that thing?” she demanded. Then she glared angrily at Joe. “You knew it was there? Why didn’t you warn me? Look what I did!”

  “Hey, you spilled your coffee, not me.” Joe stopped laughing, but he was unable to hide his grin. He searched under the seat for a rag and handed it to her. “If I had told you, it would have taken all the fun out of it.” He dodged as she swatted at him with the rag. “C’mon, Annie, don’t take it so seriously. Didn’t you ever go into the funhouse when you were a kid?”

  “Yeah,” she murmured irritably, mopping up the coffee on her suit. “I ran screaming out of there when Dracula jumped out of the ceiling and never went to a carnival again. I’ve got a low threshold for being scared.”

  She looked out through the canopy windows again, examining the statue more carefully. The figure was made of discarded scraps of aluminum and steel and graphite-plastic polymer; the limbs were landing struts, the torso reconfigured parts of spacecraft fuselage, the head a battered half of an oxygen tank, all crisscrossed with pieces of rebars and wrapped with wiring. It was hauntingly beautiful … but nonethless unsettling, even on second glance. “That’s one of Yuri’s works?” she asked. “He’s got some kinda sick sense of humor.”

  “Don’t feel alone,” Joe confessed. “I just about dropped a load in my shorts the first time I saw that thing.” He grabbed the gearshift and put the truck into drive again. “And if you think that’s weird, wait’ll you see what’s up ahead.”

  The truck slowly trundled forward again on its huge wire-mesh wheels, towing behind it the tandem-trailer for the auxiliary fuel pump Mighty Joe intended to collect from Honest Yuri’s junkyard. They were in the heavily cratered region northwest of Descartes Station, on the other side of Stone Mountain: wilderness area on the edge of the Descartes plateau, where hardly anyone ever ventured. Yet there were signs of habitation here. As they passed the statue, they could now see in the distance the glimmering lights of a couple of old-fashioned habitat modules. Between them and the base camp, vague forms were scattered like humps along the roadway, the distant lights reflecting dully off their surfaces.

  As Noonan peered into the darkness, trying to make them out in the deep lunar night, Joe touched the node of his headset mike. “Hey, Yuri,” he said. “It’s Joe. I’ve got a visitor, like I told you. We’ve just passed the Sentry. ETA in five minutes. Okay?”

  Noonan touched her own headset, expecting to hear a reply, yet heard only the patter of static. She was about to say something, but Mighty Joe reached out to the dashboard to click off the radio. “He knows we’re here,” he said softly. “Now let’s see if he wants to—”

  All at once, on either side of the roadway, lights suddenly flashed on; navigational beacons from old spacecraft, red and blue and white and gold, buried in the regolith and concealed behind rocks, forming a runway a half-mile long straight to the distant habitat. “I guess he does,” Joe finished.

  Annie glanced sharply at her boyfriend. “What does he want to do?”

  Mighty Joe reached up and switched off the cab’s interior lights, then the front headlights. Now the only light came from the varicolored beacons before them and the weak purple glow of the dashboard panels, which illuminated the mysterious smile on his face. Despite a continual blast of hot air from the floor vents, the pressurized cab seemed colder now. “Show off the Night Gallery,” he replied in a hushed voice. “Enjoy. This is all for you.”

  She was about to make a nervous reply, but the words caught in her throat as she looked to her right. Bathed in the bright red glare of a beacon, a gargoyle crouched by the side of the road. Catlike legs of aluminum seemed to ripple with restrained fury, claws of junked RWS manipulators dug into the dry gray soil, dagger-toothed jaws of welded titanium snarled agape, round eyes of glass seethed murderously at her. A cyborg monster from her worst nightmares, dead metal yet uncannily alive … she was not comfortable again until it was past them.

  Annie looked away, only to find another life-size statue on her left. In a dim gold sheen of light, a human-shaped robot—sticklike arms and legs with landing gear pods for its feet and manipulator claws for its hands, a narrow, boxy torso and skeletal hips, a sleek metallic skull with cantilevered jaws and multifaceted eyes thrown back on a high neck made of a single steel bar—was impaled on a crucifix made of a narrow mooncrete slab. Jesus Christ as a robot as a mortal in pain; the crystal eyes, reflecting the gold light, searched the star-filled sky in eternal suffering: Father, why hast thou forsaken me? It had been many years since Noonan had set foot in a church; seeing this, lines from ancient hymns echoed in her mind, and she suddenly remembered the horror she’d felt as a child when a rather sadistic Sunday School teacher told her the grisly details of the Crucifixion. Like the biblical event which inspired it, the sculpture was both beautiful and gut-wrenching.

  “What the hell is—” She stopped herself, consciously amending her words. “What is this, Joe?”

  Mighty Joe said nothing. The truck rolled past the Christ-robot. On the right, out of the corner of her eye, Annie could see a blue glow illuminating another sculpture. She didn’t want to look at it … nonetheless, her eyes were drawn to the next work.…

  “He makes these out of old spacecraft,” Joe said. Annie almost jumped again at the unexpected sound of his voice, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Much of the stuff that he salvages from space he refurbishes and sells back to the company. Even the Dreamer’s got some used parts from Honest Yuri’s junkyard. The rest he brings out here, welds together into what you’re looking at.…”

  Two humanoid figures—lacking exact detail and androgynously shaped, yet undoubtedly a man and a woman—were copulating on the side of the road. Both were standing; she held on to his hips as her thighs thrust against his pelvis, he was balanced in the opposite direction, legs spread wide apart. His hands clasped the small of her back as she arched her spine backwards, her mouth perpetually agape in the first instant of an orgasm forever suspended in time and space. It resembled, in a strangely familiar way, the time she and Joe had first made love in the shower room. Annie blushed and giggled despite herself.…

  “Like that, huh?” Joe said drily. “He paints, too, but that stuff gets sent back to Earth for exhibition. He’s got a reputation for his astronomical art. But this �
�� well, this is his private work. Only a few photos have been sent to Earth, and not many people from the base come out here. Yuri tends to be too weird for most folks. Maybe that’s the way it should be. You shouldn’t see what goes on in an artist’s head. Sometimes it’s a little scary.…”

  Now, on the left: A small platoon of robotic soldiers, all sharp angles of metal and glass like a three-dimensional Picasso painting, stood at attention by the side of the road as if in perpetual review for a spectral general. At first each burnished soldier seemed exactly alike, but as the truck moved closer, Noonan could see subtle differences in each androidal form: a slouch here, a stray piece of wiring there, a misshapen head which seemed to be discreetly checking the polish on its boots. Ten-hut!

  Annie watched the soldiers pass by them. In the red glow of the beacons, for the first time, she could perceive the vague forms of other, half-visible sculptures set back from the roadway. There were more statues lurking out there in this airless, lightless gallery of the night; other erotic dreams, other forgotten nightmares, other monsters and martyrs and phantom armies. She had the urge to make Mighty Joe stop the truck, to allow her to put on her helmet and gloves, to make him depressurize the cab and guide her through this strange landscape. At the same time, she was frightened of what else she might find out there. Things which no person—no sane person, at least-should ever see.

  Joe seemed to be reading her mind. “Have you ever checked the map of this area?” She shook her head. “The old Apollo 16 landing site is right over there,” he continued. “Yuri took me out to see it once.”

  “Did he … uh, use some of that stuff to …?”

  “For the sculptures? No, he’s got the place perfectly preserved.” He chuckled. “It’s incredible. The old LEM descent stage, all the experiment packages, even the rover … right where they were left behind. There’s not even a footprint around it which wasn’t made by John Young or Charlie Duke. He went back and raked over the ones which other folks have made since then. Not even Tranquillity Base is so well-kept.” He smiled again. “That’s why he chose this particular place. Says there’s a lot of great power in these hills.”

  They were almost at the habitat now. She could make out the tilted rows of the solar collectors and a communications dish within a tangled lot strewn with rubbish and junk: half-disassembled OTV’s, stripped-down satellites, the huge cylindrical form of what looked like an old third-stage rocket booster. Beyond the habitat she could make out the hulking mass of Honest Yuri’s spacecraft, squatting on its tripod landing gear. Near the edge of the junkyard was a final sculpture: a single anthropomorphic form, a hunchback with his right arm raised straight forward to the road. His right hand was curled into a gnarled, wiry fist, except for the upraised middle finger. Sort of a no-welcome mat, she guessed. Or a gesture of defiance. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  Mighty Joe stopped talking. He looked at her appraisingly before he grabbed the gearshift and pulled it back to neutral. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe I’m just trying to prepare you for meeting Yuri.”

  He switched on the interior lights again, then unbuckled his harness and reached behind his seat for the shelf where his helmet and gloves rested. Noonan hesitated, then unbuckled herself and reached for her own gear. “Do you take all your girlfriends out here?” she asked.

  Joe favored her with a gentle smile. “Got no other girlfriends, babe.” Then his smile faded. “Yuri and I … well, we understand each other and we get along, but I’m not ready to call us friends. Just keep your mouth shut and follow my lead, okay?”

  Noonao raised an eyebrow. “Mad genius type, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Joe pulled on his gloves. “He’s a genius. And he might be mad.”

  Mighty Joe was surprised: Yuri had cleaned up the place since the last time he had been here. On his previous visit, two months ago, the floors had been littered with discarded sketchbook pages and blotched with oil paint; the counters and chairs had been buried beneath paper plates, logbooks, and welding torches, and the head had smelled as if one of Yuri’s gargoyles had crawled in there to die. Just before they opened the airlock, Joe had warned Annie not to say anything about Honest Yuri’s sloppy housekeeping (“Breathe through your mouth if you think it’ll help”). Once inside, however, he found the two habitat modules as shipshape as one could reasonably expect of a hermit artist’s domicile. Cluttered, yes—for all of Yuri’s skill with scrap-metal sculpture, it had apparently never occurred to him to build a couple of extra shelves—but at least it no longer looked like the Studio That Time Forgot. Yuri must have gone on a cleaning jag recently.

  Yuri himself was nowhere in sight. Holding their helmets and gloves in their hands but still wearing their hardsuits, Joe and Annie stood in the narrow entryway just beyond the airlock and looked around. “Maybe he’s out making another sculpture,” Noonan whispered. She studied a poster-print of Monet’s “Poplars (Autumn),” which was magnetically tacked above the kitchen counter and nodded appreciatively. “At least he’s got good taste.”

  “Yeah, well, wait’ll you see his collection of Penthouse centerfolds,” Joe murmured. “He’s got to be here, because he turned on the gallery lights.” He raised his voice and yelled, “Hey, Yuri!”

  In reply, a voice barked from the lateral hatch leading to the adjacent module: “Here!” A pause, then: “In the studio! Leave your stuff at the door!”

  Mighty Joe raised his eyebrows. Another change in attitude; Honest Yuri usually never invited first-time visitors into his studio. Either it had skipped his mind that Joe had brought a stranger with him, or Yuri was getting a little more mellow with age. Or maybe the isolation is finally getting to him, Joe thought as he laid his helmet and gloves down on top of a pile of oversized art books. He might be hungry for company, just for once.…

  They ducked their heads and Joe led Annie through the connector sleeve into the second module. Once it had been a lab module, but Yuri had removed most of the fixtures and even a few bulkheads to transform it into a combination garage and studio. One end was dominated by scrap metal, bits and pieces of half-assembled electronics, tools, and torches; the other half was covered with paint-splattered tarps on which lay dozens of cans of oil paint, all imported at considerable expense from Earth. Parked on a large easel at the rear end of the room was a half-finished moonscape; it looked like a view of a sunrise over the Night Gallery. More paintings were stacked upright in the corner: astronomical art which, one day, would grace the walls of the private galleries in Leningrad and New York, where Yuri’s work was sold at outrageous prices.

  A tall, gaunt figure in a soiled white smock was bent over a workbench in the garage half of the room, back turned to them as they entered. A welder’s mask was pulled down over his face, and white-hot sparks shot from an unseen object on which a mini-torch was being directed, emitting a harsh high whine as acetylene coaxed metal into place. The figure was concentrating wholly on his work; he didn’t turn until Mighty Joe, grinning hugely, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Yuri!”

  Honest Yuri jerked erect, half-turned to peer at them through the opaque visor, then quickly shut down the torch and ripped off his gloves. “Joe!” he yelled heartily as he shoved back his mask and stalked across the room to greet them. “Good to see you again!”

  Before Mighty Joe could react, Yuri grabbed him in a Russian-style bear hug, kissing both cheeks and slapping his back with his big, callused hands … and then, as Annie tentatively raised her hand to offer him a courteous, conventional handshake, Yuri pounced on her in the same way, including the kisses and the back slaps, as if she were an old friend whom he had not seen in months. If Honest Yuri had cleaned up his living quarters, he had certainly not extended the same care to his appearance. He had let his hair and beard grow out again, and it was difficult to tell which was more filthy, his hands or his teeth. The last time Joe had seen him, Yuri had resembled Peter the Great; now he looked like Rasputin the Mad Monk.

  Noona
n looked as if she had just been licked by an over-friendly stray dog. Although she turned a little green, she didn’t say anything, much to Joe’s relief. He had forgotten to tell her how mercurial Honest Yuri’s moods could be. Mighty Joe grinned. He wondered how many eccentrics like Honest Yuri she had encountered before.

  “Come over here!” Yuri said, backing away from Noonan and excitedly waving them to the workbench. “Something for you to take back to the base with you when you return! A gift!” As Yuri whirled around, Joe shot a querying glance at Annie. She gave him a completely blank look, although her mouth was twitching at the corners.

  A life-size bust, cast from pieces of scrap steel, rested on a polished aluminum pedestal. The sculpture was abstract enough that it lacked fine details, but it was apparently of an elderly, bearded man. It was beautiful, and entirely meaningless to both Joe and Annie. Yuri posed next to it proudly, hands tucked into the pockets of his smock, head smugly tilted back. He raised an eyebrow and waited expectantly for a response.

  “Umm … pretty neat, Yuri,” Joe said. Still Yuri waited. “Looks great,” he added. Yuri’s eyebrow arched just a little higher, but he said nothing. The pilot shrugged. “Who is it?” he asked.

  Suddenly, Yuri’s temperament changed entirely. The smile left his face, the twinkle escaped from his eyes; he hunched his shoulders slightly and glowered at Joe; then his dark eyes swept to Noonan. “Surely your companion has a better eye than you,” he said, fixing Annie with his baleful gaze.