Saving the Moon

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  We had a holo of it. I’d set it up because I thought it was something Jode might like to watch when he came back. He could pretend it was him in the circle, blowing out the candles, and not Joe.

  “More cake,” said Toft, after two full pieces.

  “No more cake,” I said firmly.

  Joe took him to bed and I did the dishes. It was a strange sensation, to have my hands soaked in water again.

  I spent my days now helping at a local animal shelter as much as I could manage without feeling guilty about abandoning Toft. Joe made enough money that I didn’t need to work. I’d married him young, too young maybe, like Mother said.

  I thought now about going back to school to be a veterinarian. I didn’t know how Jode would feel about it, though. On the other hand, he couldn’t expect life to be standing still for him while he was away. We’d all change in four years.

  “Thank you for the cake,” said Joe when he came back into the kitchen. His footsteps were very quiet on the tile floor. Quieter than Jode’s. It bothered me suddenly, to think that he could be so quiet, that I would not hear him if he came on me unawares.

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “You call me Joe,” he said. “Not Jode.”

  “Yes.” Though not so much out loud anymore as in my head.

  “A birthday is the anniversary of birth. I was not born a year ago today.”

  “Well, perhaps born is not the right word for it.”

  “It was four days before that I first became aware of myself.”

  Oh, that was what he meant.

  “It hurt,” said Joe.

  “Becoming aware?”

  “No. Everything hurt. I grew so fast, it hurt.”

  Now was my chance to ask him questions. The company wouldn’t tell me the details. Proprietary information. Secrets they didn’t want the public to know.

  But Joe would tell me whatever I wanted. He was loyal to me, not them. Unless he had some wiring in his head that made him stop talking about what they decided he should not tell.

  “You grew. So, you’re organic?”

  Joe tilted his head to the side. “I saw the others, in rows beside me. They were made of shells with cells spread on top. The cells grew and the shells degraded naturally. Most were full grown. Where I was, they were all male. Is that what you wish to know?” His eyes were pained.

  I recoiled from my vampirish curiosity. It seemed cruel to make him relive that time. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “If you wish to know, I will tell you,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No.” This was supposed to be a birthday party.

  “It was loud, the crying from those who first woke up. I didn’t notice the sound until I was the one crying,” he went on.

  “When did it stop hurting?” I asked.

  There was a long pause.

  He looked down at himself, staring at one arm held out at an angle. “It hurts less now,” he said softly.

  God, I thought. He was like a one-year old. When had Toft stopped crying half of his waking time? About one.

  “Can I do anything?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “But—” I thought of the others like him. The company did not allow contact between them. He had no one he could ask about his development.

  “I’ll remember next year,” I promised. “Four days before today. We can have another party then. If you’d like that.”

  “I’d like that,” he said.

  And I would ask Mother about the woman she knew, who had one like Joe. Maybe we could get them together, let them talk.

  #

  Mother arranged for us to meet at the Media Blitz. The constant noise from the advert walls, combined with the holos and passing vendors on the carousel gave me a headache, but Toft loved it. All I had to do was fingerprint us both on entry and sign off on activities he was allowed to do and not do, and he could roam freely. We both had alert buttons tagged onto our collars, in case of emergency, which would go red hot to call us back to the entry, but I couldn’t think of the last time a child had been hurt at one of these places.

  I told Joe to wander around for fifteen minutes, give me a chance to talk first.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked him.

  “I feel tired,” he said. “And hungry.”

  I gave him my debit chit to buy some food if he wanted.

  “There’s really nothing to worry about. That’s why we’re meeting here. No danger of having to keep up the acquaintance if we don’t want to.”

  “I wonder how many of them are like me?” Joe said, looking out over the thousands of people milling around.

  “You mean, you can’t tell?” I guess I figured they had some antennae for each other or something. “There have to be some here. They quoted us a figure of ten thousand or more in use.” And probably more in an area like this, with a Space Base. There were some others in Jode’s unit who had made the same choice we had, but I hadn’t wanted to meet with them.

  He came and I watched him and Joe walk together. They seemed uncomfortable with each other. As if they were humans meeting for the first time, under duress.

  I spoke to Mother’s friend, Michaela. She looked good for her age. Unlike Mother, she had no objections to the nanobytes that cleaned the complexion and kept the hair cut and curled to specification. She had a dangling curl in front and it was nearly shaved all around her skull.

  “I appreciate you doing this for Joe,” I said, nodding to the two of them, still walking and talking together.

  “Joe your husband?”

  “No. Jode is my husband. But he’s a soldier. An officer in the war. He’ll be gone for four years. So I figured I needed a replacement.”

  “Four year replacement? I’d say he’s your husband more than the other one,” said Luja.

  “Does he ever talk about what’s it like to be—different?”

  “Not to me,” said Michaela.

  “You don’t think he’s unhappy? He never talks to you about pain?”

  Michaela made a face. “We never talked about that before he died. Why would we talk about it now?”

  I nodded. She didn’t see him at all, I thought. She only saw her husband.

  “You don’t think about what will happen to him—when you die?”

  “Recycling,” she said. “That’s what I signed on the papers. They gave me a discount because of it.”

  And it obviously did not bother her.

  Joe was waiting for me, at a discreet distance, when I turned around. “Thank you,” he said.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “He wishes to forget,” said Joe. “I wish to remember.”

  #

  I woke up a couple months later and found the blanket on the couch rumpled. Joe was in the shower. I couldn’t remember him showering before.

  I made breakfast for Toft, citrus tofu bites with milk, and sat down. My feet tapped the tiles as I waited.

  Joe came out, his hair wet, dressed in an outfit I remembered Jode wearing before he left.

  I gaped at him. Joe had worn the same outfit every day for the last year and a half. It had become so much a part of him that I had stopped noticing it. He never sweated that I had seen, and he never smelled. I figured there was something in his system that took care of it, nanytes.

  “Daddy!” said Toft, and leaped into his arms.

  Joe swung him around so fast that Toft shrieked and I could hardly breathe.

  Then he set him down.

  “Again, Daddy!” shouted Toft.

  Joe told Toft to eat his breakfast.

  He went back to the couch and folded his blanket up.

  I slipped away from Toft for a moment and stood at the doorway. “How long have you been sleeping?” I asked.

  “A week or so,” said Joe.

  “And the shower?”

  He shrugged. “I just felt like it. Nothing wrong
with that, is there?”

  “No, of course not. But—why now? Don’t you think it means something?”

  “Not everything has to mean something,” said Joe.

  “Well, you seem happier,” I said.

  “Maybe I should have been sleeping all along and I didn’t know it.”

  “Do you dream?” I asked him.

  “I have flashes of memory that are processed by my brain in random bits,” said Joe. “Is that a dream?”

  “What memories?”

  “Of you. And Toft.”

  “And the days before you came to us?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I should never have spoken to you about that. It disturbed you. I am here to help you to feel better. It was what I was created for.”

  “You’re allowed to have your own memories, your own dreams,” I said. “No one owns another person that much.”

  “Perhaps. But I should not speak to you about them.”

  Toft ran in then, pulling Joe off towards an adventure they had planned together the day before.

  I went into the bathroom for my own shower, and closed my eyes as the water ran through the pipes and filtering system and up again.

  I could smell him in the air here. The bathroom smelled almost exactly the way it had when Jode had been here. He felt so real, I could put out a hand and touch him.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the steamy mirror. I could not see myself in it. Was this how Joe felt? As if he only existed in his own mind, and not in the outside world? I did not want that for him. He had been made to be Jode, but he had a right to his own life.

  That afternoon, I skipped my scheduled appointments and made some inquiries at home. I was surprised at what I discovered. The government would pay for a portion of almost anything that a soldier could argue had been deprived of him because of his time spent on duty.

  I thought about it for a long time. I had checked our finances and found that if I took some money out of Toft’s college fund, there would be enough. I got out Joe’s crayon drawing of the sunset and looked at it. I closed my eyes and ran over it with my fingertips, feeling the greasy residue of the pastels.

  Then I went and had it done, before I changed my mind. And before I spoke to Joe about it. It was painless, just like they say it will be. They pricked my finger, took a tiny sample of blood, and imaged me. It took two hours in total, and they had me sprayed with a light drug so that my fears were also subdued. It was the most relaxing two hours I had spent in many years.

  Afterwards, I remained for a few minutes in a small apartment like the one we had picked Joe up from, while the drug wore off.

  But it was all done then. I’d paid the fee. The procedure had begun.

  Right then, in that very building, my cells were being painted on a shell. They would begin to grow. And “I” would awaken in pain.

  I drove home in time for dinner.

  I told Jode what I had done after Toft was asleep.

  “Why would you do this to her?” he asked.

  “You should have someone who knows what it is like.”

  “Not at that price.”

  “Well, it’s done and it can’t be undone.”

  “She isn’t human. She can’t get a job, except as being you. She can’t marry. She can’t have a child,” he said.

  I winced. He was right. I had not thought that far ahead. “I will help,” I said. “I can give you money to start with. And maybe there’s a way I can help you get some status. Be legal.”

  Joe laughed. It was a laugh that sounded very much like Jode’s. “You think that any humans will allow that? They need us too much. They can’t have us become ourselves instead of them. The President of the United States. He has over two hundred of himself. Every member of Congress. The generals who send men to war.”

  “I wanted to help you.”

  “I was helping myself. I was learning to be him. Why didn’t you let me? You love him, don’t you?”

  But I love Joe more.

  “And if Jode dies? What happens then? Will you leave Toft to grow up without a father? Or will you call me back and leave her alone—or have her recycled?”

  “I can make another of him,” I said. “From you.” I wasn’t sure if I could, but it should be possible. Or perhaps the company still had samples from Jode. There might be reasons for them to keep them on hand, though the thought made me uncomfortable. If they had extra samples from me, what would they do with them?

  Joe clamped his hand around my wrist.

  I was surprised at first and gasped, but the pain grew from cold to hot. “Stop it! Let me go! You’re hurting me, Jode,” I said. It was the first time I’d called him that, and he let go of me as suddenly as if he had died.

  “Swear to me you won’t do it,” he said. “Swear it.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Two months,” I said. I said the date I was supposed to pick her up.

  We both knew what it meant. It was the date I had picked up Joe. I had planned for them to have the same birthday, the real one, four days before the pick up, even if it was two years apart.

  I had been thinking so carefully for him, wanting to show him that he did not have to forget.

  “The pain,” he whispered.

  #

  Jode didn’t die in space. He returned home from his four year tour of duty right on schedule. Joe was gone by then. It was hard on Toft, but not as hard as it was on me.

  Jode did not even think to ask about him until two days after we had picked him up and brought him home.

  “We should ask for a refund,” he said, when I told him that it hadn’t worked, that Joe hadn’t been him.

  “No,” I said. “No!” I didn’t want to draw the company’s attention to us anymore than I already had. I was shaking against Joe and he could feel it.

  “OK,” he said. “OK. We won’t. God, what did he do to you, Kooa? Did he hurt you?”

  I glanced down at my wrist, but the bruises had faded long ago. “He just wasn’t like you,” I said. “Not enough to make me believe you hadn’t gone.”

  “The old tricks save me again,” said Jode.

  I let him think that, too.

  Two days later, I kissed Toft especially hard when I dropped him off at school.

  “Mommy,” he said. “Don’t. I don’t like it when you do that in front of my friends.”

  He was his father’s son, I thought.

  I knew where Joe was living with it. With her. I didn’t help pay for it anymore, but I had the first few months. I didn’t know what Joe did for a living, or her, either, but they did something that worked.

  I knocked on the door.

  He opened it.

  Not her. I was glad it was not her.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I told him. The only thing I had brought from the house was his drawing of the sunset. She could have everything else.

  “Will she do it?” I asked.

  “If I ask her to. She loves me. She calls me Jode.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked her to, when she started to forget.”

  He knew, I thought. He knew that this was what I would do, maybe before I did. That was how well he knew me. Us.

  “Is she very like me?” I asked.

  Joe tilted his head to one side. “Too much and not enough,” he said.

  “I want a child,” I told him as he kissed me for the first time. It was a good kiss, but I suppose he’d had practice.

  He started. “You promised,” he said.

  “Not Toft,” I said. “Not that way.”

  Fun with Dick and Jane Austen

  Look, Mr. Darcy. Look, look. Elizabeth is sassy. Very sassy. Sassy, sassy, sassy. She wants to dance with you. Dance, Mr. Darcy, dance.

  Oh, Mr. Darcy will not dance. Oh, oh. Mr. Bingley tells Mr. Darcy to dance. But Mr. Darcy does not like to dance. Mr. Bingley is dancing. Mr. Bing
ley likes to dance.

  Look, Mr. Darcy. See Elizabeth. She is a good dancer. She will dance with you, if you will ask her.

  Mr. Darcy says he does not like her face. Her face is not pretty enough. Not pretty enough to tempt him. For shame, Mr. Darcy. For shame.

  Look at Elizabeth. Look, look. She is sad now. She is sad and mad. Mad at you, Mr. Darcy. Her eyes are very mad. She has fine eyes. Fine, mad eyes.

  Elizabeth's sister is named Jane. See Jane. Jane is very pretty. Mr. Bingley likes Jane. Jane likes Mr. Bringley. But Mr. Bingley's sister Caroline does not like Jane. And Mr. Darcy does not like Jane.

  Mr. Darcy and Caroline make Mr. Bingley go away. Now Mr. Bingley is sad. And Jane is sad. Elizabeth is sad and mad. Mad at Mr. Darcy again.

  Look, Elizabeth. Here is Mr. Wickham. Mr. Wickham is handsome. Mr. Wickham does not like Mr. Darcy. But Mr. Wickham likes Elizabeth. And Elizabeth likes Mr. Wickham.

  Mr. Wickham will dance with Elizabeth. Dance, Mr. Wickham, dance. Mr. Wickham dances with Elizabeth's sister, Lydia. Dance, Lydia dance.

  Look, Elizabeth. Here is Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins wants to marry Elizabeth. Marry me, Elizabeth, says Mr. Collins. Yes, marry him, says Elizabeth's mother, Mrs. Bennet.

  Don't marry him, says Elizabeth's father Mr. Bennet. I won't marry him, says Elizabeth.

  I don't like Elizabeth, says Mr. Collins. I will marry someone else. Someone who wants to marry me. I will marry Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte Lucas is happy to marry me.

  We are both happy now, says Mrs. Collins. Come and visit us at Rosings. Do you see how happy we are, Elizabeth?

  Mr. Darcy comes to visit Elizabeth at Rosings. Play the piano, Elizabeth. Play. Lady Catherine de Burgh wants you to play. I will play, says Elizabeth. But I don't play well.

  No, Elizabeth, you don't play well. Lady de Burgh would have played better, if she had learned. So would her daughter, Anne. They would play very well. Very, very well.