I tried to break the pull of the scent-pack, but couldn’t step far enough away from my fellow losers to get within talking distance of Purple-chick. When the train arrived, I watched her step inside, then waited until the last second before I climbed aboard, to make sure we were both on the same train.
The cars were so empty that I could see her, way ahead.
Standing near the doors, she held a pole while she swayed back and forth. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t sit down, especially after a long night at the club. The rest of us were sprawled on benches, crashing more than sitting.
I considered the long trek up to her car, but I didn’t trust my balance. Instead, I watched her. Waited until she stepped in front of the doors, announcing her intention to disembark.
Once again, I waited until the last second to leave the train, in case she decided to duck back on without me. I could tell that she knew I was watching. Following.
Okay, stalking.
She hurried up the stairs. Either she was training for a marathon, or her samples had all worn off, because I couldn’t keep up. When she reached the top, she turned around and said, “What?”
Instead of rushing off, she stood there, at the top of the stairs. Waiting.
Her eyes were blue.
Not purple.
I hurried until I stood in front of her, nose to nose. “You took the waffle?”
She nodded.
“Tell me.”
She shook her head. “Can’t.”
“Figures.” I turned away.
“But I can show you.”
“Yeah?”
“Kiss me,” she said.
I sure as hell didn’t wait for her to change her mind. We shared it all: tongues, saliva, even our teeth scraped against each other, making an awful sound that knocked my sample completely out of my head.
What filled the void wasn’t the pounding of my heartbeat. Or hers. Or any song that I had ever heard. Instead, I could hear her thoughts, as visible as a black blanket on a white sand beach.
“Wow,” I said.
Isn’t it?
Her words, not spoken but thought into me. They reverberated around my skull like noise bouncing in an empty club.
I lost my footing and fell. Down. In. Far away. Suddenly I was six years old and my father leaned over and hauled me back up onto my skate-clad feet. We skated together, him holding me, his back stooped over in that awkward way that would make him curse all evening.
“Find your balance, Alex. Bend your knees. Skate!”
I had forgotten how much I loved him. Forgotten what it felt like to be young and innocent, to enjoy the thrill of exercise for its own sake, and feel a connection that didn’t cost the price of a sample.
“I love you.” But when I looked up at him, he had morphed back into Purple-chick, now Purple-and-blue-chick. She held me, preventing my crash down the stairs.
“Cool, huh?” she said.
“A total mind-fuck.”
“That’s why it’s so expensive.”
“How much? I mean, you’re on the subway, so if I save—”
“In my experience, those who ask the price can’t afford it.”
“Why me?” I said.
She smiled. “Marketing.”
I needed a better answer, so I listened for her thoughts. All I sensed was the wind from another subway, blowing up the stairs at me.
She turned and hurried for an exit.
“Wait!” My head buzzed, confused by the difference between waffle and real, trapped by the synch-into-memory-lane-trip that lingered on my tongue like bad breath.
Her boots stopped clapping against the lobby of the subway station, but she didn’t look back. I was glad of it, because my memories were still swimming in my head. I wanted her to be Dad.
Not Dad. Rain. My former date’s cute outfit lingered in my synapses, replacing nostalgia with guilt. I wondered if Rain had made it home okay in the cab.
Then naked Jessica filled my head, and it was October again.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said aloud, my voice echoing against the tile walls. “The high confused it all. I’ll do another year of parole. I’ll spend my sample money on flowers for your grave. Please, forgive me?”
Still with her back to me, and in a voice that sounded eerily like Jessica’s, she said, “What about Rain?”
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t possibly see me. “She’ll understand.”
Far ahead, Purple-and-blue-chick turned to face me. I saw her as them, she had somehow merged with Jessica, the two of them existing in perfect synch, like a sample and the club music stitching together; twins in a corrupted womb. They both saw me for what I was, a lame guy who would always be about eight hundred shy of a right and proper sample. Whose love would always be shallow, too broke to buy modern intimacy.
“You’ve got less than ten minutes to clock in your parole.” She started walking again, and I watched her leave, one synched step at a time until she exited the station and disappeared along the ever-brightening-street.
Drop.
Only this drop, waffle-back-to-real, felt like nails screeching on a blackboard. I wasn’t in my usual subway station, and I had no idea where to find the nearest parole scanner. The station booth was empty, too early for a human. The only person in sight was an older woman with the classic European-widow black-scarf-plus-coat-plus-dress that broadcast, Leave me alone, young scum.
So I did.
I hurried onto the street, and looked towards the sun. It was well above the horizon now, but mostly hidden behind a couple of apartment buildings.
“Fuck,” I told the concealed ball of reddish-yellow light. “How’d it get so late?”
The judiciary alarm buzzed inside my head.
For a moment, I could feel a drop, the biggest, most intense and amazing drop I would ever experience. The sort of nirvana that people pursue ineffectually for a lifetime. Or two.
I had less than ten minutes until the final warning.
Rushing for the nearest, busiest street, I tried to wave down car after car, hoping someone would point me to the nearest scanner. Or maybe they had a portable one, the kind I should’ve brought with me, had I been thinking about more than getting into Rain’s pants when I left.
People ignored me.
Shunned me.
I smelled of trouble. Which, technically, I was. But I didn’t mean to be. It wasn’t my fault.
It was never my fault.
One cab slowed, but didn’t stop. The driver made eye contact, and then rushed away.
“Hey!” I considered swearing at him, but I didn’t want to draw the cops.
I’m not sure why the cabbie stiffed me. Maybe he read my desperation. Maybe he was Rain’s cabbie and he knew I was broke. In any case, he probably broadcast a warning to his buddies, because the next cab that got remotely close made a fast U-turn and took off.
Choosing a direction, I took off down one street, then hung a right at the next, jogging, skidding, almost falling on my ass. Every direction felt wrong.
I didn’t see a single person. No one. Not even a pigeon for fuck’s sake. All I needed was a phone.
With one hand on a pole, I leaned over, trying to catch my breath. To think.
My heart was pounding now, no synch in sight. The song was long gone, the link to Purple-chick disconnected. No one had my back.
I turned in a circle, then another, scanning far and near for anything of value: an ATM, a phone booth, a coffee shop, a diner, any place where I could access the judicial database. Plead my case.
The final warning buzzed.
“Fuck!” My spit froze when it hit the ground.
I hit full blown panic. My heart tripped like the back-bass before the drop. Only this time, the other side was built of misery not ecstasy.
If only I had paid my cell bill. If only my father was still alive, to catch my sorry ass. If only I had lied to Rain, shared her cab. If only Jessica hadn’t called it a drop.
When you’re panicked, it’s tough as hell to keep any rational sense of time. I figured I was cooked. So I closed my eyes. But when the pain didn’t come, I sat down on the cold curb, and felt the chill seep through my clothes.
I bit my lip. Tasted blood.
The first jolt ripped through my body. I wanted to writhe in pain on the sidewalk, but my body was stuck in shock-rigor. An immobile gift for the cops.
I imagined Rain beside me.
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“Sorry.”
She morphed into Jessica, her purple eyes wide with fear. “I’m lost,” she said.
“Take my hand.” I wanted to reach out, but I couldn’t move. My fingers looked nearly white in the cold. Her fingers seemed to shiver around mine, as though they were made of joy, not flesh. Then she touched my hand and I knew in that moment that life existed outside of stimulation, in a place where reality wasn’t lame or boring. Life danced to an irregular rhythm that couldn’t synch to any sample.
She let go.
The judiciary pulse jolted again. I flopped to the pavement, distantly aware that my skull would remind me for a long time after about its current state of squishage.
The parole-board must have lived for irony, because the jolt lasted for so long that I welcomed the release. A pants-wetting, please-make-it-stop, urgent need for the end.
Drop.
About the Author
Suzanne Church lives near Toronto, Ontario with her two teenaged sons. She is a 2011 and 2012 Aurora Award finalist for her short fiction. She writes Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror because she enjoys them all and hates to play favorites. When cornered she becomes fiercely Canadian. Her stories have appeared in Cicada and On Spec, and in several anthologies including Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live and Tesseracts 14.
All the Things the Moon is Not
Alexander Lumans
A call comes over the vidchannel: “Murph, you sitting down?”
“Always.” At the moment I’m standing in my darkened cabin at base camp in Mare Nubium. By headlamp only I carve a chess piece—a knight—out of moon rock. I’d crushed one earlier after Tchaikovsky called me out on a dumb move.
The screen and radio cut out. I switch channels, then switch back to hear: “Get up. You need to see this.” Tamsen sounds serious. She always sounds serious. It’s one of the things I like most about her.
“I’m busy.” I keep sanding the knight’s head. When no response follows, just space static, I give in. “What is it?”
More static, then: “The Russians.”
I blow on the knight. Moondust reels through the headlamp’s beam. I think it beautiful. I’d carved this set my first month here on the moon. The dust I compare to stars. The space between them, too, is beautiful. And the same old lines are running through my head—Goodnight room, goodnight moon—the ones I’d read in bed to my daughters. I grab the mic: “Tell Tchaikovsky he needs to ready his Nastoyka supply.”
Tchaikovsky is a mold pirate, the one thing we have in the way of a rival. But he’s also a good chess player. He studied his masters. Knew openings I’d never heard of. He’s the only distraction here that keeps me honest. Down on earth, who has the calm or the fire for chess anymore? Since our four-man crew arrived late last August to harvest the Dreammold!, I’ve been in two modes: defend and defend again. Whether it’s harvesting, carving, or playing, give it 98%. I’ve always been one to open my games with the tried and true; Sicilian Defense all the way. Only recently have I begun to wonder if this is the right way to go about it. Tchaikovsky and I have an unfriendly wager: loser ponies up a bottle of their nation’s choicest liquor. By my count, I’ve handed over seventeen handles of Maker’s Mark. And he? Not a drop of vodka.
In four weeks the transport will be here to take us home. I want to win, for once. I want things to go my way.
“We found their ship.”
“There’s plenty of mold out there,” I tell her. “Let the little cosmonaut stake his claim.” I’ve given up playing moon ranger. A year in one-sixth gravity and white rooms and the company of little love does that to good intentions.
This time, not even static.
“Tamsen.” I set the knight on d5. “Tamsen?”
“—the problem.” I only catch this last part. But I am busy. A good kind of busy. In eight moves, I’ll have the Russian mated—Rg2++—even after losing my queen early on. And now Tamsen, with whatever problem there is, has carved that good feeling out of me.
In Buggy 2, I zoom south to her position at the edge of Tycho Crater. It’s where we go for the best mold harvesting. I can throw a rock into the crater and watch the moldripples go on for miles: yellowyellowyellow. “Twenty-eight days,” I remind myself.
Tamsen’s standing by Buggy 1, big gloved hands on her big suited hips. She’s radioed the rest of the crew too. Bouncing around in our suits, the four of us resemble primitive undersea divers with portholes for masks and twin oxygen tanks. Spitzer’s busy poking the mold. When I used to hear the Rockies’ announcer describe a batter with “warning track power,” I didn’t realize I was imagining Spitzer. Long-limbed and morally impulsive, he’s always asking me, “When do I get to stab the flagpole into something?” Vinegar Tom—he’s just staring into the crater. I’m thankful for our helmets. Yesterday, I’d walked in on him and Tamsen fucking in her room—they didn’t see me—and now I don’t want to look him in the face for the rest of the mission. Not out of shame, but because he got to her first, because it made me realize I’ve always hated this planet. Him. His copy of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West that he intently flips through in the mess hall like he’s studying one of the buggies’ operation manuals.
Tamsen taps her helmet. I tap mine back. The vidchannel and radio have been fritzing. We haven’t talked with mission control since Tuesday and we don’t know what’s wrong with the transmitter. All we hear back is fuzz.
Beyond her and the others, at the crater’s edge, I see Tchaikovsky’s ship. And I see the mold; that is the problem. What had been his illegal operation is now covered in the Dreammold!, utterly and completely. It’s as if Tycho burped up some fantastic wave that came crashing down mid-ops. The scene reminds me of Denver, the day after.
I draw a finger across my neck, point at the Russians’ ship, and then shrug. We bounce over to it and pry open the bay door. The vessel’s guts are clogged with as much yellow gunk as the outer shell is coated.
A flash in me of something Tchaikovsky’d said after taking my queen: “Ze bigger zey are, Afraham Lincoln, ze more it rains rats and clogs.” He was forever butchering Americanisms, but sometimes I had to admire the results. They made as much sense on the moon as anything else did back home.
Fifty feet from the Russian’s ship, Tamsen’s waving me over. She stands calf-deep in mold on the crater’s rim. At her feet is a single set of boot-tracks. It leads from the ruined ship out into Tycho’s depths.
Back at base camp, I stare at the same game from before.
“So the mold is moving,” says Vinegar Tom from behind me. His voice always sounds surprisingly nasal; surprising because he’s missing his nose. It makes his bucked teeth stand out all the more. “Now we don’t have to drive as far to get it.”
I’m too preoccupied to respond and too besieged to care.
“You had your games with the Commie, I know. It’s terrible. A bad way to go. But we’ve all seen terrible things on the news.” I can hear the smirk in his voice, smell the vinegar on his breath. He’d quit the space program to be a butcher in Ohio, but when The Drought killed that industry, he came trudging back to Cape Canaveral. “Though I suppose some of us have seen it up close,” he goes on. “Been able to smell the terrible.” He reaches around from behind me and flicks over the white king.
“That’s my king, asshole.”
“I know.”
After I finish wiping the blood from Vinegar Tom’s lip off my elbow, I say,
“Touch my game again, see what happens.”
He looks down at the board, then at me, as if considering it. He’s short and brash and sporadically clean-shaven. Exactly the kind of man I can picture behind a meat counter. The skinfolds where his nose should be remind me of how the Rocky Mountains look on military raised-relief maps. “If we have to eat each other at some point between now and the 30th,” he says, “I’m going to make you eat me.”
An hour later, I set the white king upright. Eight moves: 37. Qb3 Rd1+ 38. Kg2 Rd2+ 39. Kg3 Ne3 40. Qxe3 Rg2++. I pick up my newest knight. The jawline is clean, the eyes sharp notches. Calmly, I hurl it at the cabin wall. It hits hard and slowly fragments.
I imagine the conversation at NASA went something like this:
“Sir, the moon is shiny.”
“It’s always been shiny.”
“No, sir, there are shiny parts.”
“Today is not April Fool’s Day.”
“Telescope Two picked them up.”
“Shiny parts?”
“We thought it was silver.”
“Moonsilver. That has a good ring to it.”
“It’s not silver.”
“Okay. Mercury, rhodium, zinc, what isn’t it?”
“Telescope Two is a very good telescope.”
“Moonsilver.”
“First, sir, it’s important that we keep this a secret.”
“I agree. Everyone likes jewelry. Everyone’s a magpie.”
“That’s not what we mean.”
“Tell me already. You’re killing me here!”
“It’s water.”
“Is water shiny?”
“We found shiny water. On the moon.”
“Shit.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to say: ’shit.’ We said you wouldn’t say that.”
“Who knows about this?”
“Everyone. Everyone’s a magpie for this kind of news.”
“And you’re sure it’s not April Fool’s?”
“We’re sure it’s not silver.”
“Shit.”
By then, The Drought had settled in, five long years and still holding strong. Ice, Aquafina, and public pools were all things of the past. The U.S.’s initial investigative moonlanding found plenty of water. And it found what was growing in the water, too: the mold. We sampled it, brought it to Florida, found it useful. So the U.S. pushed through amendments to the TRIPS agreement to include protections for other planets’ resources. And they shipped the four of us up here to harvest it for a year until the next round of crewmen arrives.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 34
