by Neil Clarke
SUNDAY NIGHT YAMS AT MINNIE AND EARL’S
Adam-Troy Castro
Frontiers never die. They just become theme parks.
I spent most of my shuttle ride to Nearside mulling sour thoughts about that. It’s the kind of thing that only bothers lonely and nostalgic old men, especially when we’re old enough to remember the days when a trip to Luna was not a routine commuter run, but instead a never-ending series of course corrections, systems checks, best-and-worst case simulations, and random unexpected crises ranging from ominous burning smells to the surreal balls of floating upchuck that got into everywhere if we didn’t get over our nausea fast enough to clean them up. Folks of my vintage remember what it was to spend half their lives in passionate competition with dozens of other frighteningly qualified people, just to earn themselves seats on cramped rigs outfitted by the lowest corporate bidders—and then to look down at the ragged landscape of Sister Moon and know that the sight itself was a privilege well worth the effort. But that’s old news now: before the first development crews gave way to the first settlements; before the first settlements became large enough to be called the first cities; before the first city held a parade in honor of its first confirmed mugging; before Independence and the Corporate Communities and the opening of Lunar Disney on the Sea of Tranquility. These days, the Moon itself is no big deal except for rubes and old-timers. Nobody looks out the windows; they’re far too interested in their sims, or their virts, or their newspads or (for a vanishingly literate few) their paperback novels, to care about the sight of the airless world waxing large in the darkness outside.
I wanted to shout at them. I wanted to make a great big eloquent speech about what they were missing by taking it all for granted, and about their total failure to appreciate what others had gone through to pave the way. But that wouldn’t have moved anybody. It just would have established me as just another boring old fart.
So I stayed quiet until we landed, and then I rolled my overnighter down the aisle, and I made my way through the vast carpeted terminal at Armstrong Interplanetary (thinking all the while carpet, carpet, why is there carpet, dammit, there shouldn’t be carpeting on the Moon). Then I hopped a tram to my hotel, and I confirmed that the front desk had followed instructions and provided me one of their few (hideously expensive) rooms with an outside view. Then I went upstairs and thought it all again when I saw that the view was just an alien distortion of the Moon I had known. Though it was night, and the landscape was as dark as the constellations of manmade illumination peppered across its cratered surface would now ever allow it to be, I still saw marquee-sized advertisements for soy houses, strip clubs, rotating restaurants, golden arches, miniature golf courses, and the one-sixth-g Biggest Rollercoaster In the Solar System. The Earth, with Europe and Africa centered, hung silently above the blight.
I tried to imagine two gentle old people, and a golden retriever dog, wandering around somewhere in the garish paradise framed by that window.
I failed.
I wondered whether it felt good or bad to be here. I wasn’t tired, which I supposed I could attribute to the sensation of renewed strength and vigor that older people are supposed to feel after making the transition to lower gravities. Certainly, my knees, which had been bothering me for more than a decade now, weren’t giving me a single twinge here. But I was also here alone, a decade after burying my dear wife—and though I’d traveled around a little in the last few years, I had never really grown used to the way the silence of a strange room, experienced alone, tastes like the death that waited for me too.
After about half an hour of feeling sorry for myself, I dressed in one of my best blue suits—an old one Claire had picked out in better days, with a cut now two styles out of date—and went to the lobby to see the concierge. I found him in the center of a lobby occupied not by adventurers or pioneers but by businessmen and tourists. He was a sallow-faced young man seated behind a flat slab of a desk, constructed from some material made to resemble polished black marble. It might have been intended to represent a Kubrick monolith lying on its side, a touch that would have been appropriate enough for the Moon but might have given the decorator too much credit for classical allusions. I found more Kubrick material in the man himself, in that he was a typical hotel functionary: courteous, professional, friendly, and as cold as a plain white wall. Beaming, he said: “Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for Minnie and Earl,” I told him.
His smile was an unfaltering, professional thing, that might have been scissored out of a magazine ad and Scotch-taped to the bottom half of his face. “Do you have their full names, sir?”
“Those are their full names.” I confess I smiled with reminiscence. “They’re both one of a kind.”
“I see. And they’re registered at the hotel?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “They’re lunar residents. I just don’t have their address.”
“Did you try the directory?”
“I tried that before I left Earth,” I said. “They’re not listed. Didn’t expect them to be, either.”
He hesitated a fraction of a second before continuing: “I’m not sure I know what to suggest, then—”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I said, unwillingly raising my voice just enough to give him a little taste of the anger and frustration and dire need that had fueled this entire trip. Being a true professional, used to dealing with obnoxious and arrogant tourists, the concierge didn’t react at all: just politely waited for me to get on with it. I, on the other hand, winced before continuing: “They’re before your time. Probably way before your time. But there have to be people around—old people, mostly—who know who I’m talking about. Maybe you can ask around for me? Just a little? And pass around the word that I need to talk?”
The professional smile did not change a whit, but it still acquired a distinctively dubious flavor. “Minnie and Earl, sir?”
“Minnie and Earl.” I then showed him the size of the tip he’d earn if he accomplished it—big enough to make certain that he’d take the request seriously, but not so large that he’d be tempted to concoct false leads. It impressed him exactly as much as I needed it to. Too bad there was almost no chance of it accomplishing anything; I’d been making inquiries about the old folks for years. But the chances of me giving up were even smaller: not when I now knew I only had a few months left before the heart stopped beating in my chest.
They were Minnie and Earl, dammit.
And anybody who wasn’t there in the early days couldn’t possibly understand how much that meant.
It’s a funny thing, about frontiers: they’re not as enchanting as the folks who work them like you to believe. And there was a lot that they didn’t tell the early recruits about the joys of working on the Moon.
They didn’t tell you that the air systems gave off a nasal hum that kept you from sleeping soundly at any point during your first six weeks on rotation; that the vents were considerately located directly above the bunks to eliminate any way of shutting it out; that just when you found yourself actually needing that hum to sleep something in the circulators decided to change the pitch, rendering it just a tad higher or lower so that instead of lying in bed begging that hum to shut up shut up SHUT UP you sat there instead wondering if the new version denoted a serious mechanical difficulty capable of asphyxiating you in your sleep.
They didn’t tell you that the recycled air was a paradise for bacteria, which kept any cold or flu or ear infection constantly circulating between you and your coworkers; that the disinfectants regularly released into the atmosphere smelled bad but otherwise did nothing; that when you started sneezing and coughing it was a sure bet that everybody around you would soon be sneezing and coughing; and that it was not just colds but stomach viruses, contagious rashes and even more unpleasant things that got shared as generously as a bottle of a wine at one of the parties you had time to go to back on Earth when you were able to work only sixty or seventy hours a week. They did
n’t tell you that work took so very much of your time that the pleasures and concerns of normal life were no longer valid experiential input; that without that input you eventually ran out of non-work-related subjects to talk about, and found your personality withering away like an atrophied limb.
They didn’t tell you about the whimsical random shortages in the bimonthly supply drops and the ensuing shortages of staples like toothpaste and toilet paper. They didn’t tell you about the days when all the systems seemed to conk out at once and your deadening routine suddenly became hours of all-out frantic terror. They didn’t tell you that after a while you forgot you were on the Moon and stopped sneaking looks at the battered blue marble. They didn’t tell you that after a while it stopped being a dream and became instead just a dirty and backbreaking job; one that drained you of your enthusiasm faster than you could possibly guess, and one that replaced your ambitions of building a new future with more mundane longings, like feeling once again what it was like to stand unencumbered beneath a midday sun, breathing air that tasted like air and not canned sweat.
They waited until you were done learning all of this on your own before they told you about Minnie and Earl.
I learned on a Sunday—not that I had any reason to keep track of the day; the early development teams were way too short-staffed to enjoy luxuries like days off. There were instead days when you got the shitty jobs and the days when you got the jobs slightly less shitty than the others. On that particular Sunday I had repair duty, the worst job on the Moon but for another twenty or thirty possible candidates. It involved, among them, inspecting, cleaning, and replacing the panels on the solar collectors. There were a lot of panels, since the early collector fields were five kilometers on a side, and each panel was only half a meter square. They tended to collect meteor dust (at best) and get scarred and pitted from micrometeor impacts (at worst). We’d just lost a number of them from heavier rock precipitation, which meant that in addition to replacing those, I had to examine even those that remained intact. Since the panels swiveled to follow the Sun across the sky, even a small amount of dust debris threatened to fall through the joints into the machinery below. There was never a lot of dust—sometimes it was not even visible. But it had to be removed one panel at a time.
To overhaul the assembly, you spent the whole day on your belly, crawling along the catwalks between them, removing each panel in turn, inspecting them beneath a canopy with nothing but suit light, magnifiers, and micro-thin air jet. (A vacuum, of course, would have been redundant.) You replaced the panels pitted beyond repair, brought the ruined ones back to the sled for disposal, and then started all over again.
The romance of space travel? Try nine hours of hideously tedious stoop labor, in a moonsuit. Try hating every minute of it. Try hating where you are and what you’re doing and how hard you worked to qualify for this privilege. Try also hating yourself just for feeling that way—but not having any idea how to turn those feelings off.
I was muttering to myself, conjugating some of the more colorful expressions for excrement, when Phil Jacoby called. He was one of the more annoying people on the Moon: a perpetual smiler who always looked on the bright side of things and refused to react to even the most acidic sarcasm. Appropriately enough, his carrot hair and freckled cheeks always made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He might have been our morale officer, if we’d possessed enough bad taste to have somebody with that job title; but that would have made him even more the kind of guy you grow to hate when you really want to be in a bad mood. I dearly appreciated how distant his voice sounded, as he called my name over the radio: “Max! You bored yet, Max?”
“Sorry,” I said tiredly. “Max went home.”
“Home as in his quarters? Or Home as in Earth?”
“There is no home here,” I said. “Of course Home as on Earth.”
“No return shuttles today,” Phil noted. “Or any time this month. How would he manage that trick?”
“He was so fed up he decided to walk.”
“Hope he took a picnic lunch or four. That’s got to be a major hike.”
In another mood, I might have smiled. “What’s the bad news, Phil?”
“Why? You expecting bad news?”
There was a hidden glee to his tone that sounded excessive even from Jacoby. “Surprise me.”
“You’re quitting early. The barge will be by to pick you up in five minutes.” According to the digital readout inside my helmet, it was only 13:38 LT. The news that I wouldn’t have to devote another three hours to painstaking cleanup should have cheered me considerably; instead, it rendered me about twenty times more suspicious. I said, “Phil, it will take me at least three times that long just to secure—”
“A relief shift will arrive on another barge within the hour. Don’t do another minute of work. Just go back to the sled and wait for pickup. That’s an order.” Which was especially strange because Jacoby was not technically my superior. Sure, he’d been on the Moon all of one hundred and twenty days longer than me—and sure, that meant any advice he had to give me needed to be treated like an order, if I wanted to do my job—but even so, he was not the kind of guy who ever ended anything with an authoritarian That’s An Order. My first reaction was the certainty that I must have been in some kind of serious trouble. Somewhere, sometime, I forgot or neglected one of the safety protocols, and did something suicidally, crazily wrong—the kind of thing that once discovered would lead to me being relieved for incompetence. But I was still new on the Moon, and I couldn’t think of any recent occasion where I’d been given enough responsibility for that to be a factor. My next words were especially cautious: “Uh, Phil, did I—”
“Go to the sled,” he repeated, even more sternly this time. “And, Max?”
“What?” I asked.
The ebullient side of his personality returned. “I envy you, man.”
The connection clicked off before I could ask him why.
A lunar barge was a lot like its terrestrial equivalent, in that it had no motive power of its very own, but needed to be pulled by another vehicle. Ours were pulled by tractors. They had no atmospheric enclosures, since ninety percent of the time they were just used for the slow-motion hauling of construction equipment; whenever they were needed to move personnel, we bolted in a number of forward-facing seats with oxygen feeds and canvas straps to prevent folks imprisoned by clumsy moonsuits from being knocked out of their chairs every time the flatbed dipped in the terrain. It was an extremely low-tech method of travel, not much faster than a human being could sprint, and we didn’t often use it for long distances.
There were four other passengers on this one, all identical behind mirrored facemasks; I had to read their nametags to see who they were. Nikki Hollander, Oscar Desalvo, George Peterson, and Carrie Aldrin No Relation (the last two words a nigh-permanent part of her name, up here). All four of them had been on-site at least a year more than I had, and to my eyes had always seemed to be dealing with a routine a lot better than I had been. As I strapped in, and the tractor started up, and the barge began its glacial progress toward a set of lumpy peaks on the horizon, I wished my coworkers had something other than distorted reflections of the lunar landscape for faces; it would be nice to be able to judge from their expressions just what was going on here. I said: “So what’s the story, people? Where we headed?”
Then Carrie Aldrin No Relation began to sing: “Over the river and through the woods/to grandmother’s house we go . . .”
George Peterson snorted. Oscar Desalvo, a man not known for his giddy sense of humor, who was in fact even grimmer than me most of the time— (not from disenchantment with his work, but out of personal inclination)— giggled; it was like watching one of the figures on Mount Rushmore stick its tongue out. Nikki Hollander joined in, her considerably less-than-perfect pitch turning the rest of the song into a nails-on-blackboard cacophony. The helmet speakers, which distorted anyway, did not help.
I said, “Excuse me?
”
Nikki Hollander said something so blatantly ridiculous that I couldn’t force myself to believe I’d heard her correctly.
“Come again? I lost that.”
“No you didn’t.” Her voice seemed strained, almost hysterical.
One of the men was choking with poorly repressed laughter. I couldn’t tell who.
“You want to know if I like yams?”
Nikki’s response was a burlesque parody of astronautic stoicism. “That’s an affirmative, Houston.”
“Yams, the vegetable yams?”
“^-ffirmative.” The A emphasized and italicized so broadly that it was not so much a separate syllable as a sovereign country.
This time I recognized the strangulated noises. They were coming from George Peterson, and they were the sounds made by a man who was trying very hard not to laugh. It was several seconds before I could summon enough dignity to answer. “Yeah, I like yams. How is that relevant?”
“Classified,” she said, and then her signal cut off.
In fact, all their signals cut off, though I could tell from the red indicators on my internal display that they were all still broadcasting.
