by Neil Clarke
Miles woofed. In context it seemed vaguely threatening.
“Four.” Another finger. “Minnie and Earl are actually human, and Miles is actually canine. They come here from the future, or from an alternate universe, or from some previously-unknown subset of humanity that’s been living among us all this time, hiding great and unfathomable powers that, blaaah blaah blaah, fill in the blank. And they’re here, making their presence known—why? All the same subtheories that applied to alien visitors also apply to human agencies, and all the same objections as well. Nothing explains why they would deliberately couch such a maddening enigma in such, for lack of a more appropriate word, banal terms. It’s a little like coming face to face with God and discovering that He really does look like an bearded old white guy in a robe; He might, for all I know, but I’m more religious than you probably think, and there’s some part of me that absolutely refuses to believe it. He, or She, if you prefer, could do better than that. And so could anybody, human or alien, whose main purpose in coming here is to study us, or test us, or put on a show for us.
“You still with me?” he inquired.
“Go on,” I growled. “I’ll let you know if you leave anything out.”
He peeled back another finger. “Five: I kind of like this one—Minnie and Earl, and by extension Miles, are not creatures of advanced technology, but of a completely different kind of natural phenomenon—let’s say, for the sake of argument, a bizarre jog in the space-time continuum that allows a friendly but otherwise unremarkable couple living in Kansas or Wyoming or someplace like that to continue experiencing life down on the farm while in some way as miraculous to them as it seems to us, projecting an interactive version of themselves to this otherwise barren spot on the Moon. Since, as your little conversation with Earl established, they clearly know they’re on the Moon, we would have to accept that they’re unflappable enough to take this phenomenon at face value, but I’ve known enough Midwesterners to know that this is a genuine possibility.
“Six.” Starting now on another hand. “Mentioned only so you can be assured I’m providing you an exhaustive list—a phenomenon one of your predecessors called the Law of Preservation of Home. He theorized that whenever human beings penetrate too far past their own natural habitat, into places sufficiently inhospitable to life, the Universe is forced to spontaneously generate something a little more congenial to compensate—the equivalent, I suppose, of magically whomping up a Holiday Inn with a swimming pool, to greet explorers lost in the coldest reaches of Antarctica. He even said that the only reason we hadn’t ever received reliable reports of this phenomenon on Earth is that we weren’t ever sufficiently far from our natural habitat to activate it . . . but I can tell from the look on your face that you don’t exactly buy this one either, so I’ll set it aside and let you read the paper he wrote on the subject at your leisure.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“You ought to. It’s a real hoot. But if you want to, I’ll skip all the way to the end of the list, to the only explanation that ultimately makes any sense. Ready?”
“I’m waiting.”
“All right. That explanation is—” he paused dramatically “—it doesn’t matter.”
There was a moment of pregnant silence.
I didn’t explode; I was too shell-shocked to explode. Instead, I just said: “I sat through half a dozen bullshit theories for ‘It doesn’t matter’?”
“You had to, Max; it’s the only way to get there. You had to learn the hard way that all of these propositions are either completely impossible or, for the time being, completely impossible to test—and we know this because the best minds on Earth have been working on the problem for as long as there’s been a sustained human presence on the Moon. We’ve taken hair samples from Minnie’s hairbrush. We’ve smuggled out stool samples from the dog. We’ve recorded our conversations with the old folks and studied every second of every tape from every possible angle. We’ve monitored the house for years on end, analyzed samples of the food and drink served in there, and exhaustively charted the health of everybody to go in or out. And all it’s ever gotten us, in all these years of being frantic about it, is this—that as far as we can determine, Minnie and Earl are just a couple of friendly old folks who like having visitors.”
“And that’s it?”
“Why can’t it be? Whether aliens, time travellers, displaced human beings, or natural phenomena—they’re good listeners, and fine people, and they sure serve a good Sunday dinner. And if there must be things in the Universe we can’t understand—well, then, it’s sure comforting to know that some of them just want to be good neighbors. That’s what I mean by saying, It doesn’t matter.” He stood up, stretched, took the kind of deep breath people only indulge in when they’re truly luxuriating in the freshness of the air around them, and said: “Minnie and Earl expect some of the new folks to be a little pokey, getting used to the idea. They won’t mind if you stay out here and smell the roses a while. Maybe when you come in, we’ll talk a little more ‘bout getting you scheduled for regular visitation. Minnie’s already asked me about it—she seems to like you. God knows why.” He winked, shot me in the chest with a pair of pretend six-shooters made from the index fingers of both hands, and went back inside, taking the dog with him. And I was alone in the nice backyard, serenaded by birdsong as I tried to decide how to reconcile my own rational hunger for explanations with the unquestioning acceptance that was being required of me.
Eventually, I came to the same conclusion George had; the only conclusion that was possible under the circumstances. It was a genuine phenomenon, that conclusion: a community of skeptics and rationalists and followers of the scientific method deciding that there were some things Man was having too good a time to know. Coming to think of Minnie and Earl as family didn’t take much longer than that. For the next three years, until I left for my new job in the outer system, I went out to their place at least once, sometimes twice a week; I shot pool with Earl and chatted about relatives back home with Minnie; I’d tussled with Miles and helped with the dishes and joined them for long all-nighters talking about nothing in particular. I learned how to bake with the limited facilities we had at Base, so I could bring my own cookies to her feasts. I came to revel in standing on a creaky front porch beneath a bug lamp, sipping grape juice as I joined Minnie in yet another awful rendition of “Anatevka.” Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune. I came to think of Minnie and Earl as the real reason we were on the Moon, and I came to understand one of the major reasons we were all so bloody careful to keep it a secret—because the needy masses of Earth, who were at that point still agitating about all the time and money spent on the space program, would not have been mollified by the knowledge that all those billions were being spent, in part, so that a few of the best and the brightest could indulge themselves in sing-alongs and wiener dog cookouts.
I know it doesn’t sound much like a frontier. It wasn’t, not inside the picket fence. Outside, it remained dangerous and back-breaking work. We lost five separate people while I was there; two to blowouts, one to a collapsing crane, one to a careless tumble off a crater rim, and one to suicide (she, alas, had not been to Minnie and Earl’s yet). We had injuries every week, shortages every day, and crises just about every hour. Most of the time, we seemed to lose ground—and even when we didn’t, we lived with the knowledge that all of our work and all of our dedication could be thrown in the toilet the first time there was a political shift back home. There was no reason for any of us to believe that we were actually accomplishing what we were there to do— but somehow, with Minnie and Earl there, hosting a different group every night, it was impossible to come to any other conclusion. They liked us. They believe
d in us. They were sure that we were worth their time and effort. And they expected us to be around for a long, long time . . . just like they had been.
I suppose that’s another reason why I was so determined to find them now. Because I didn’t know what it said about the people we’d become that they weren’t around keeping us company anymore.
I was in a jail cell for forty-eight hours once. Never mind why; it’s a stupid story. The cell itself wasn’t the sort of thing I expected from movies and television; it was brightly lit, free of vermin, and devoid of any steel bars to grip obsessively while cursing the guards and bemoaning the injustice that had brought me there. It was just a locked room with a steel door, a working toilet, a clean sink, a soft bed, and absolutely nothing else. If I had been able to come and go at will it might have been an acceptable cheap hotel room. Since I was stuck there, without anything to do or anybody to talk to, I spent those forty-eight hours going very quietly insane.
The habitat module of Walter Stearns was a lot like that cell, expanded to accommodate a storage closet, a food locker, and a kitchenette; it was that stark, that empty. There were no decorations on the walls, no personal items, no hytex or music system I could see, nothing to read and nothing to do. It lost its charm for me within thirty seconds. Stearns had been living there for sixteen years: a self-imposed prison sentence that might have been expiation for the sin of living past his era.
The man himself moved with what seemed glacial slowness, like a windup toy about to stop and fall over. He dragged one leg, but if that was a legacy of a stroke—and an explanation for why he chose to live as he did—there was no telltale slur to his speech to corroborate it. Whatever the reason might have been, I couldn’t help regarding him with the embarrassed pity one old man feels toward another the same age who hasn’t weathered his own years nearly as well.
He accepted my proffered can of yams with a sour grin and gave me a mug of some foul-smelling brown stuff in return. Then he poured some for himself and shuffled to the edge of his bed and sat down with a grunt. “I’m not a hermit,” he said, defensively.
“I didn’t use the word,” I told him.
“I didn’t set out to be a hermit,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Nobody sets out to be a hermit. Nobody turns his back on the damned race unless he has some reason to be fed up. I’m not fed up. I just don’t know any alternative. It’s the only way I know to let the Moon be the Moon.”
He sipped some of the foul-smelling brown stuff and gestured for me to do the same. Out of politeness, I sipped from my own cup. It tasted worse than it smelled, and had a consistency like sand floating in vinegar. Somehow I didn’t choke. “Let the Moon be the Moon?”
“They opened a casino in Shepardsville. I went to see it. It’s a big luxury hotel with a floor show; trained white tigers jumping through flaming hoops for the pleasure of a pretty young trainer in a spangled bra and panties. The casino room is oval-shaped, and the walls are alive with animated holography of wild horses running around and around and around and around, without stop, twenty-four hours a day. There are night clubs with singers and dancers, and an amusement park with rides for the kids. I sat there and I watched the gamblers bent over their tables and the barflies bent over their drinks and I had to remind myself that I was on the Moon—that just being here at all was a miracle that would have had most past civilizations consider us gods. But all these people, all around me, couldn’t feel it. They’d built a palace in a place where no palace had ever been and they’d sucked all the magic and all the wonder all the way out of it.” He took a deep breath, and sipped some more of his contemptible drink. “It scared me. It made me want to live somewhere where I could still feel the Moon being the Moon. So I wouldn’t be some useless . . . relic who didn’t know where he was half the time.”
The self-pity had wormed its way into his voice so late that I almost didn’t catch it. “It must get lonely,” I ventured.
“Annnh. Sometimes I put on my moonsuit and go outside, just to stand there. It’s so silent there that I can almost hear the breath of God. And I remember that it’s the Moon—the Moon, dammit. Not some five-star hotel. The Moon. A little bit of that and I don’t mind being a little lonely the rest of the time. Is that crazy? Is that being a hermit?”
I gave the only answer I could. “I don’t know.”
He made a hmmmph noise, got up, and carried his mug over to the sink. A few moments pouring another and he returned, his lips curled into a halfsmile, his eyes focused on some far-off time and place. “The breath of God,” he murmured.
“Yams,” I prompted.
“You caught that, huh? Been a while since somebody caught that. It’s not the sort of thing people catch unless they were there. Unless they remember her.”
“Was that by design?”
“You mean, was it some kind of fiendish secret code? Naah. More like a shared joke. We knew by then that nobody would believe us if we actually talked about Minnie and Earl. They were that forgotten. So we dropped yams into our early-settlement stories. A little way of saying, hey, we remember the old lady. She sure did love to cook those yams.”
“With her special seasoning.” I said. “And those rolls she baked.”
“Uh-huh.” He licked his lips, and I almost fell into the trap of considering that unutterably sad . . . until I realized that I was doing the same thing. “Used to try to mix one of Earl’s special cocktails, but I never could get them right. Got all the ingredients. Mixed ‘em the way he showed me. Never got ‘em to taste right. Figure he had some kind of technological edge he wasn’t showing us. Real alien superscience, applied to bartending. Or maybe I just can’t replace the personality of the bartender. But they were good drinks. I’ve got to give him that.”
We sat together in silence for a while, each lost in the sights and sounds of a day long gone. After a long time, I almost whispered it: “Where did they go, Walter?”
His eyes didn’t focus: “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Start with when you last visited them.”
“Oh, that was years and years and years ago.” He lowered his head and addressed the floor. “But you know how it is. You have relatives, friends, old folks very important to you. Folks you see every week or so, folks who become a major part of who you are. Then you get busy with other things and you lose touch. I lost touch when the settlement boom hit, and there was always some other place to be, some other job that needed to be done; I couldn’t spare one night a week gabbing with old folks just because I happened to love them. After all, they’d always be there, right? By the time I thought of looking them up again, it turned out that everybody else had neglected them too. There was no sign of the house and no way of knowing how long they’d been gone.”
I was appalled. “So you’re saying that Minnie and Earl moved away because of . . . neglect?”
“Naaah. That’s only why they didn’t say goodbye. I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with why they moved away; just why we didn’t notice. I guess that’s another reason why nobody likes to talk about them. We’re all just too damn ashamed.”
“Why do you think they moved, Walter?”
He swallowed another mouthful of his vile brew, and addressed the floor some more, not seeing me, not seeing the exile he’d chosen for himself, not seeing anything but a tiny little window of his past. “I keep thinking of that casino,” he murmured. “There was a rotating restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. Showed you the landscape, with all the billboards and amusement parks—and above it all, in the place where all the advertisers hope you’re going to forget to look, Mother Earth herself. It was a burlesque and it was boring. And I also keep thinking of that little house, out in the middle of nowhere, with the picket fence and the golden retriever dog . . . and the two sweet old people . . . and the more I compare one thought to the other, the more I realize that I don’t blame them for going away. They saw that on the Moon we were building, th
ey wouldn’t be miraculous anymore.”
“They had a perfectly maintained little environment—”
“We have a perfectly maintained little environment. We have parks with grass. We have roller coasters and golf courses. We have people with dogs. We even got rotating restaurants and magic acts with tigers. Give us a few more years up here and we’ll probably work out some kind of magic trick to do away with the domes and the bulkheads and keep in an atmosphere with nothing but a picket fence. We’ll have houses like theirs springing up all over the place. The one thing we don’t have is the Moon being the Moon. Why would they want to stay here?” His voice, which had been rising throughout his little tirade, rose to a shriek with that last question; he hurled his mug against the wall, but it was made of some indestructible ceramic that refused to shatter. It just tumbled to the floor, and skittered under the bunk, spinning in place just long enough to mock him for his empty display of anger. He looked at me, focused, and let me know with a look that our audience was over. “What would be left for them?”
I searched some more, tracking down another five or six oldsters still capable of talking about the old days, as well as half a dozen children or grandchildren of same willing to speak to me about the memories the old folks had left behind, but my interview with Walter Stearns was really the end of it; by the time I left his habitat, I knew that my efforts were futile. I saw that even those willing to talk to me weren’t going to be able to tell me more than he had . . . and I turned out to be correct about that. Minnie and Earl had moved out, all right, and there was no forwarding address to be had.
I was also tired: bone-weary in a way that could have been just a normal symptom of age and could have been despair that I had not found what I so desperately needed to find and could have been the harbinger of my last remaining days. Whatever it was, I just didn’t have the energy to keep going that much longer . . . and I knew that the only real place for me was the bed I had shared with my dear Claire.
