As they left the vein behind, Solly picked up a piece of the ore and stared at it curiously, lower eyes shut, face contorted as he struggled to focus his third eye. Suddenly he dashed the chunk to the ground, turned and marched to the head of their tunnel, attacked it with a drill. “I’ve given my whole life to the blue,” he said, voice thick. “And what is it but a Goddamned rock.”
Jakob laughed shortly. They tunneled on, away from the precious metal that now represented to them only a softer material to dig through. “Pick up the pace!” Jakob cried, slapping Solly on the back and leaping over the blocks beside the robot. “This rock has melted and melted again, changing over eons to the stones we see. Metamorphosis,” he chanted, stretching the word out, lingering on the syllable mor until the word became a kind of song. “Metamorphosis. Meta-mor-pho-sis.” Naomi and Hester took up the chant, and mute Elijah tapped his drill against the robot in double time. Jakob chanted over it. “Soon we will come to the city of the masters, the domes of Xanadu with their glass and fruit and steaming pools, and their vases and sports and their fine aged wines. And then there will be a—”
“Metamorphosis.”
And they tunneled ever faster.
Sitting in the sleeping car, chewing on a cheese, Oliver regarded the bulk of Jakob lying beside him. Jakob breathed deeply, very tired, almost asleep. “How do you know about the domes?” Oliver asked him softly. “How do you know all the things that you know?”
“Don’t know,” Jakob muttered. “Everyone knows. Less they burn your brain. Put you in a hole to live out your life. I don’t know much, boy. Make most of it up. Love of a moon. Whatever we need….” And he slept.
They came up through a layer of marble—white marble all laced with quartz, so that it gleamed and sparkled in their lightless sight, and made them feel as though they dug through stone made of their cows’ good milk, mixed with water like diamonds. This went on for a long time, until it filled them up and they became intoxicated with its smooth muscly texture, with the sparks of light lazing out of it. “I remember once we went to see a jazz band,” Jakob said to all of them. Puffing as he ran the white rock along the cars to the rear, stacked it ever so carefully. “It was in Richmond among all the docks and refineries and giant oil tanks and we were so drunk we kept getting lost. But finally we found it—huh!—and it was just this broken-down trumpeter and a back line. He played sitting in a chair and you could just see in his face that his life had been a tough scuffle. His hat covered his whole household. And trumpet is a young man’s instrument, too, it tears your lip to tatters. So we sat down to drink not expecting a thing, and they started up the last song of a set. ‘Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.’ Four bar blues, as simple as a song can get.”
“Metamorphosis,” rasped Hester.
“Yeah! Like that. And this trumpeter started to play it. And they went through it over and over and over. Huh! They must have done it a hundred times. Two hundred times. And sure enough this trumpeter was playing low and half the time in his hat, using all the tricks a broken-down trumpeter uses to save his lip, to hide the fact that it went west thirty years before. But after a while that didn’t matter, because he was playing. He was playing! Everything he had learned in all his life, all the music and all the sorry rest of it, all that was jammed into the poor old ‘Bucket’ and by God it was mind over matter time, because that old song began to roll. And still on the run he broke into it:
“Oh the buck-et’s got a hole in it
Yeah the buck-et’s got a hole in it
Say the buck-et’s got a hole in it.
Can’t buy no beer!”
And over again. Oliver, Solly, Freeman, Hester, Naomi—they couldn’t help laughing. What Jakob came up with out of his unburnt past! Mute Elijah banged a car wall happily, then squeezed the udder of a cow between one verse and the next— “Can’t buy no beer!—Moo!”
They all joined in, breathing or singing it. It fit the pace of their work perfectly: fast but not too fast, regular, repetitive, simple, endless. All the syllables got the same length, a bit syncopated, except “hole,” which was stretched out, and “can’t buy no beer,” which was high and all stretched out, stretched into a great shout of triumph, which was crazy since what it was saying was bad news, or should have been. But the song made it a cry of joy, and every time it rolled around they sang it louder, more stretched out. Jakob scatted up and down and around the tune, and Hester found all kinds of higher harmonics in a voice like a saw cutting steel, and the old tune rocked over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, in a great passacaglia, in the crucible where all poverty is wrenched to delight: the blues. Metamorphosis. They sang it continuously for two shifts running, until they were all completely hypnotized by it; and then frequently, for long spells, for the rest of their time together.
It was sheer bad luck that they broke into a shaft from below, and that the shaft was filled with armed foremen; and worse luck that Jakob was working the robot, so that he was the first to leap out firing his hand drill like a weapon, and the only one to get struck by return fire before Naomi threw a knotchopper past him and blew the foremen to shreds. They got him on a car and rolled the robot back and pulled up the track and cut off in a new direction, leaving another Boesman behind to destroy evidence of their passing.
So they were all racing around with the blood and stuff still covering them and the cows mooing in distress and Jakob breathing through clenched teeth in double time, and only Hester and Oliver could sit in the car with him and try to tend him, ripping away the pants from a leg that was all cut up. Hester took a hand drill to cauterize the wounds that were bleeding hard, but Jakob shook his head at her, neck muscles bulging out. “Got the big artery inside of the thigh,” he said through his teeth.
Hester hissed. “Come here,” she croaked at Solly and the rest. “Stop that and come here!”
They were in a mass of broken quartz, the fractured clear crystals all pink with oxidation. The robot continued drilling away, the air cylinder hissed, the cows mooed. Jakob’s breathing was harsh and somehow all of them were also breathing in the same way, irregularly, too fast; so that as his breathing slowed and calmed, theirs did too. He was lying back in the sleeping car, on a bed of hay, staring up at the fractured sparkling quartz ceiling of their tunnel, as if he could see far into it. “All these different kinds of rock,” he said, his voice filled with wonder and pain. “You see, the moon itself was the world, once upon a time, and the Earth its moon; but there was an impact, and everything changed.”
They cut a small side passage in the quartz and left Jakob there, so that when they filled in their tunnel as they moved on he was left behind, in his own deep crypt. And from then on the moon for them was only his big tomb, rolling through space till the sun itself died, as he had said it someday would.
Oliver got them back on a course, feeling radically uncertain of his navigational calculations now that Jakob was not there to nod over his shoulder to approve them. Dully he gave Naomi and Freeman the coordinates for Selene. “But what will we do when we get there?” Jakob had never actually made that clear. Find the leaders of the city, demand justice for the miners? Kill them? Get to the rockets of the great magnetic rail accelerators, and hijack one to Earth? Try to slip unnoticed into the populace?
“You leave that to us,” Naomi said. “Just get us there.” And he saw a light in Naomi’s and Freeman’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. It reminded him of the thing that had chased him in the dark, the thing that even Jakob hadn’t been able to explain; it frightened him.
So he set the course and they tunneled on as fast as they ever had. They never sang and they rarely talked; they threw themselves at the rock, hurt themselves in the effort, returned to attack it more fiercely than before. When he could not stave off sleep Oliver lay down on Jakob’s dried blood, and bitterness filled him like a block of the anorthosite they wrestled with.
They were running out of hay. They ki
lled a cow, ate its roasted flesh. The water recycler’s filters were clogging, and their water smelled of urine. Hester listened to the seismometer as often as she could now, and she thought they were being pursued. But she also thought they were approaching Selene’s underside.
Naomi laughed, but it wasn’t like her old laugh. “You got us there, Oliver. Good work.”
Oliver bit back a cry.
“Is it big?” Solly asked.
Hester shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like it. Maybe twice the diameter of the Great Bole, not more.”
“Good,” Freeman said, looking at Naomi.
“But what will we do?” Oliver said.
Hester and Naomi and Freeman and Solly all turned to look at him, eyes blazing like twelve chunks of pure promethium. “We’ve got eight Boesmans left,” Freeman said in a low voice. “All the rest of the explosives add up to a couple more. I’m going to set them just right. It’ll be my best work ever, my masterpiece. And we’ll blow Selene right off into space.”
It took them ten shifts to get all the Boesmans placed to Freeman’s and Naomi’s satisfaction, and then another three to get far enough down and to one side to be protected from the shock of the blast, which luckily for them was directly upward against something that would give, and therefore would have less recoil.
Finally they were set, and they sat in the sleeping car in a circle of six, around the pile of components that sat under the master detonator. For a long time they just sat there cross-legged, breathing slowly and staring at it. Staring at each other, in the dark, in perfect redblack clarity. Then Naomi put both arms out, placed her hands carefully on the detonator’s button. Mute Elijah put his hands on hers—then Freeman, Hester, Solly, finally Oliver—just in the order that Jakob had taken them. Oliver hesitated, feeling the flesh and bone under his hands, the warmth of his companions. He felt they should say something but he didn’t know what it was.
“Seven,” Hester croaked suddenly.
“Six,” Freeman said.
Elijah blew air through his teeth, hard.
“Four,” said Naomi.
“Three!” Solly cried.
“Two,” Oliver said.
And they all waited a beat, swallowing hard, waiting for the moon and the man in the moon to speak to them. Then they pressed down on the button. They smashed at it with their fists, hit it so violently they scarcely felt the shock of the explosion.
They had put on vacuum suits and were breathing pure oxygen as they came up the last tunnel, clearing it of rubble. A great number of other shafts were revealed as they moved into the huge conical cavity left by the Boesmans; tunnels snaked away from the cavity in all directions, so that they had sudden long vistas of blasted tubes extending off into the depths of the moon they had come out of. And at the top of the cavity, struggling over its broken edge, over the rounded wall of a new crater….
It was black. It was not like rock. Spread across it was a spill of white points, some bright, some so faint that they disappeared into the black if you looked straight at them. There were thousands of these white points, scattered over a black dome that was not a dome…. And there in the middle, almost directly overhead: a blue and white ball. Big, bright, blue, distant, rounded; half of it bright as a foreman’s flash, the other half just a shadow…. It was clearly round, a big ball in the… sky. In the sky.
Wordlessly they stood on the great pile of rubble ringing the edge of their hole. Half buried in the broken anorthosite were shards of clear plastic, steel struts, patches of green grass, fragments of metal, an arm, broken branches, a bit of orange ceramic. Heads back to stare at the ball in the sky, at the astonishing fact of the void, they scarcely noticed these things.
A long time passed, and none of them moved except to look around. Past the jumble of dark trash that had mostly been thrown off in a single direction, the surface of the moon was an immense expanse of white hills, as strange and glorious as the stars above. The size of it all! Oliver had never dreamed that everything could be so big.
“The blue must be promethium,” Solly said, pointing up at the Earth. “They’ve covered the whole Earth with the blue we mined.”
Their mouths hung open as they stared at it. “How far away is it?” Freeman asked. No one answered.
“There they all are,” Solly said. He laughed harshly. “I wish I could blow up the Earth too!”
He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater’s rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and glass. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver’s ears, it strained the intercom: “Too bad we can’t fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!”
And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. “Almost got it, didn’t you!” Freeman and Solly tried themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through space, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again…. It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.
After a while they sat down on the new crater’s rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of “Bucket” and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight—earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.
“What do you think they’ll do with us when they get here?” Solly asked.
“Kill us,” Hester croaked.
“Or put us back to work,” Naomi added.
Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.
The Lunatics © 1988 Kim Stanley Robinson
Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson sold his first story in 1976 and quickly established himself as one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of his generation. His story “Black Air” won the World Fantasy Award in 1984, and his novella The Blind Geometer won the Nebula Award in 1987. His novel The Wild Shore was published in 1984 and was quickly followed up by other novels such as Icehenge, The Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock, The Gold Coast, and The Pacific Shore and by collections such as The Planet on the Table, Escape from Kathmandu, and Remaking History.
Robinson’s already distinguished literary reputation would take a quantum jump in the decade of the ’90s, though, with the publication of his acclaimed “Mars” trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars; Red Mars would win a Nebula Award, both Green Mars and Blue Mars would win Hugo Awards, and the trilogy would be widely recognized as the genre’s most accomplished, detailed, sustained, and substantial look at the colonization and terraforming of another world, rivaled only by Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars. Robinson’s latest books are the novel An
tarctica, and a collection of stories and poems set on his fictional Mars, The Martians. He lives with his family in Davis, California.
The “Mars” trilogy will probably associate Robinson’s name forever with the Red Planet. Here he takes us to a future terra-formed Mars for a charming little story that’s about just what it says it’s about, and that shows us that, where baseball is concerned, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
* * *
He was a tall, skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing shortstop and I’m left-handed. And can’t field grounders. But I’m American, so there I was. That’s what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.
So there we were, me and this kid Gregor, butchering the left side of the infield. He looked so young I asked him how old he was, and he said eight and I thought Jeez you’re not that young, but realized he meant Martian years of course, so he was about sixteen or seventeen, but he seemed younger. He had recently moved to Argyre from somewhere else, and was staying at the local house of his co-op with relatives or friends, I never got that straight, but he seemed pretty lonely to me. He never missed practice even though he was the worst of a terrible team, and clearly he got frustrated at all his errors and strikeouts. I used to wonder why he came out at all. And so shy; and that stoop; and the acne; and the tripping over his own feet, the blushing, the mumbling—he was a classic.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 182
