The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  No windows in moon trains but the seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And I thought, this is the moon.

  Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold, the last few things while we were on the train.

  Eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors. No one left the moon alone and I was glad of that. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies, fear of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one was drinking it.

  “Open this when I’m gone,” Achi said. The gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. The departure was fast, the way I imagine executions must be. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her begin to mouth a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

  The moonloop was virtually invisible: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether down into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would I see the white cable seeming to descend vertically from the star filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was lifted from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched the images, the bamboo document tube slung over my back, until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the close horizon.

  The price was outrageous. I dug into my bonds. For that sacrifice it had to be the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. I was sent from printer to dealer to private importer. She let me sniff it. Memories exploded like New Year fireworks and I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

  I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it.

  While it brewed I opened Achi’s gift. Rolled paper: drawings. Concept art for the habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces, like an inverted Mount Rushmore. The faces of the orixas, the Umbanda pantheon, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies—she loved balconies— galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it: a habitation for a dynasty.

  I thought of her, spinning away across the sky.

  The grounds began to settle. I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee. Santos Gold. Gold would have been cheaper. Gold was the dirt we threw away, together with the Helium 3.

  When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me.

  When I smelled the coffee I had bought and ground and prepared, I experienced something different. I had a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

  I drank my coffee.

  It never tastes the way it smells.

  My granddaughter adores that red dress. When it gets dirty and worn, we print her a new one. She wants never to wear anything else. Luna, running barefoot through the pools, splashing and scaring the fish, leaping from stepping stone, stepping in a complex pattern of stones that must be landed on left footed, right-footed, two footed or skipped over entirely. The Orixas watch her. The Orixas watch me, on my veranda, drinking tea.

  I am old bones now. I haven’t thought of you for years, Achi. The last time was when I finally turned those drawings into reality. But these last lunes I find my thoughts folding back, not just to you, but to all the ones from those dangerous, daring days. There were more loves than you, Achi. You always knew that. I treated most of them as badly as I treated you. It’s the proper pursuit of elderly ladies, remembering and trying not to regret.

  I never heard from you again. That was right, I think. You went back to your green and growing world, I stayed in the land in the sky. Hey! I built your palace and filled it with that dynasty I promised. Sons and daughters, amors, okos, madrinhas, retainers. Corta is not such a strange name to you now, or most of Earth’s population. Mackenzie, Sun, Vorontsov, Asamoah. Corta. We are Dragons now.

  Here comes little Luna, running to her grandmother. I sip my tea. It’s mint. I still loathe mint tea. I always will. But there is only mint tea on the moon.

  2015

  Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia. He teaches high school Literature and Composition with a Southern accent. Berrien’s writing has appeared in such diverse venues as The Journal of Asian Martial Arts, The Doctor TJ. Eckleburg Review, The DeadMule School of Southern Literature, Abyss & Apex, Kaleidotrope, and Bloody Knuckles: The MMAnthology.His mini-collection of Southern magical realism, Old Souls and the Grammar of Their Wanderings, is available from Papaveria Press. In his not-so-copious free time, Berrien practices martial arts.

  LET BASER THINGS DEVISE

  Berrien C. Henderson

  1: PIERRE

  Before Clockwork Corp.’s space ape project heads managed to uplift the chimpanzee, he was simply known as No. 157. Some anonymous lab assistant nicknamed him Pierre, and the moniker stuck. After Pierre survived the rigors of testing and training, his world went dark for a time once the Neuroscience Division got their needles and scalpels and computer-brain interfaces onto and into him.

  He was a child again. A sponge. Malleable. He had dreams and remembered them—the great ape facility from which he’d come, the jungle before that. A troop. He had flirted with moonlight and squinted against sunshine while his troop loped through the undergrowth and scampered up the trees and foraged amid the generous loam where he groomed and was groomed. Various Shes were there in limbo, too, between dream and memory. Pierre’s mind reached out, clutching at phantoms from a blurry past and running into the long now—all of it oozing and hrmmm-ing like fluorescent lights with faulty ballasts. He weighed his new life amid antiseptic halls, an institution’s sterility and scientists’ data points and vagaries of conditioning against the harsher realities of death, quick in its smiting, in the tropics and faces framed with their own intelligence. He yearned for a place absent this new awareness—signals of higher and greater thoughts like thunder at the hem of distant mountains.

  Inside a year, he learned to speak with his newly acquired vocal cords— 3D bio-printed wonders of Clockwork Corp.’s NuFlesh(tm) proprietary systems—and, thus, No. 157 became the first uplifted articulate chimpanzee.

  And he was going to the moon.

  2: COMPED

  Pierre received the ping of an incoming message on his way out the door. He had a mandatory conditioning session and made to ignore the message to queue up later, then fell short of his initial plans.


  Bureau of Personhood.

  He caught himself wanting to oohoohooh in anxiety and excitement but tamped down those impulses. Some quirks hadn’t quite ironed out since uplift, and his human handlers and colleagues overlooked much, thank goodness.

  “This is Pierre.”

  A woman’s face greeted him with a sliver of a smile that bespoke scores of such practiced smiles daily and the beginnings of crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes. Pierre wondered what kind of punishment the poor liaison had done to deserve shuffling files and contacting various hominids and none too few uplifted canines (a recent development) along with some advanced NuEmote(tm) Model Mark robots. Still, he was glad she had contacted him.

  “Pierre, I have good news.”

  Finally.

  “I’ve sent you a message with a printable, watermarked certificate of personhood.”

  “Thank you, Sarah, for all your help.”

  “Thank the lawyers at Clockwork Corp.,” she said. “They saw the handwriting on the wall. You had the virtue of many legal precedents on your side.”

  “I”—the words sometimes wouldn’t come—”appreciate your taking time to-oohooh face-contact me.”

  The practiced smile widened, and he saw the glimmers of a few teeth. “Why, thank you kindly, Pierre.”

  “At least I’m not working basic municipal services,” he said. The majority of uplifted apes ended up employed in recycling facilities or treatment plants unless, of course, one was part of an R&D department for the largest corporation in the world and a handy PR football tossed around in the mining claims wars raging on the moon.

  “Well, there’s that,” she said. “You realize how fortunate you are.”

  “Yes.” And he felt immediately unlucky to be condescended to. Or complimented. He still had trouble navigating social mores. “Thank you.”

  “Have a good day, Pierre.”

  “You, too-ooh, Sarah.”

  As her image faded, Pierre stared at the screen and considered his newfound reality.

  Personhood.

  The company wanted a poster child for the new wave of lunar exploration. All he had to do was make a loathsome trip to Human Resources and request an addendum to his work contract for this upcoming expedition. The concept of money didn’t escape him, but he had little use for it. He banked a pittance for little things like sodas. Sodas he loved.

  The ideas grew. Humans talked with anticipation about taking vacations, and he wanted vacation time, which was not a component of his old contract. No more day passes into the city. No more permission requests for visits to museums or . . . or . . .

  The possibilities unfurled in his mind, and Pierre smiled.

  3: HUMAN RESOURCES

  “Well, this is a first,” said the HR rep. “Wonder if the company ought to consider changing the name of the department now?”

  Pierre didn’t laugh during the man’s pregnant pause. “New territory.”

  “In more ways than one. First, congratulations on your official personhood status. You’ve come a long way, Pierre.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  A flash ofjungle memory stung him: sunlight lancing the canopy and the screams of another chimpanzee caught in a great cat’s jaws. He could expect a headache—the single and sometimes debilitating side effect of the CBI gear in his head.

  “You still have a week before launch. It takes three days to process a contract addendum request. I can message you.”

  “Do you see any reason it might be denied?”

  “No more than any other request.”

  “Ooh.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean, ‘Oh.’”

  They shuffled through several documents that required e-signatures, eyestamps, and DNA proofs as Pierre did his best to maneuver the platitudes of small talk.

  “Is this what they meant by signing in blood?”

  The fat man chuckled. “I suppose so.” He offered his hand to Pierre, who hesitated, then shook. A rarity. All of his physical reinforcement and interactions had consisted of claps on the shoulder and good-natured squeezes of the upper arm—even one high five. Very few handshakes. His hand met the clammy palmflesh of the fat man, who seemed quite appreciative.

  When Pierre excused himself, he left with the distinct impression that the fat man was lonely despite dealing with other humans on a daily basis. Alone in a troop. Pierre was stung again as he walked the fluorescent-lit halls to the Fitness and Conditioning wing, signed out, and trained outside. A hard workout in the obstacle course would boost his endorphins and help him fight the headache. He hated the humans’ pain relievers while understanding their necessity.

  A bright yellow sun bathed him. A great eye whose warmth slithered down through a noisy canopy. Pierre allowed himself thoughts of trees and courting and earth and night-nesting, and the daydream became a nightmare Klaxon calling out his buried limbic fears of being hunted. Captured.

  FLEE!

  He scaled trunks and brachiated vines and limbs, missed one and plummeted to earth. He became a caged thing in a preserve; the trees were not the same—constructs for primates to climb and maintain their facade of health and activity. A group of handlers seized him and parleyed him to an alien, antiseptic landscape full of hooting and yowling.

  The real nightmare, the waking one, happened when he fell asleep and woke to the reality of his uplifting and a flood of information, a cascade of new schema expanding exponentially—the synaptic flood churning and frothing in his mind from the cerebral implant. He understood the cries of the other animals the way an adult understands a child’s cries—a mixture of sympathy tinged with the patina of intellectual distance.

  The memory remained, still blunted by time and his uplifting—a photo fading from color to monochrome or perhaps spackled brightly, overexposed and portions blotted out.

  He needed to get away.

  4: TSUKI

  The susurration of servos and hissing of actuators alerted Pierre as he finished his gymnastics and, planning to warm down with yoga, dropped to the ground.

  The Model Mark II lunar-bot approached him in hexapod form, and Pierre couldn’t help thinking of a gigantic arachnid, some mutant lurking and emerging from the shadows of the thick foliage of once-home, ready to snatch baby chimps from the troop. Still, Pierre’s edginess softened when he saw Tsuki.

  “Good afternoon, Pierre. News travels fast.”

  “Of?”

  “Your having been granted personhood. How does that make you feel?”

  Tendrils of the headache coiled around his brain. “I put in for a vacation after we revised the contract.”

  “A reward. I see.” She skittered alongside him and used one of her four arms to retrieve his water bottle and hand it to him.

  “Thank you, Tsuki. It still seems a mere formality.”

  “While conferring you wider latitude of rights and privileges.”

  “Today would have been the same regardless.”

  “A rather cynical view, if perhaps a valid observation.”

  His head echoed with the ghost-strains of the headache. A ripple from the back of his neck straight-lined from the CBI’s scar and to his eyes.

  “If you say so-ooh.”

  “Would you care to run through a mission simulation with me in the Augmentation Array?”

  “Hold on a moment.” Pierre retrieved his wafer tablet, which buzzed slightly, and he queued up his meager bank account. It had already been flagged for a deposit. “Huh. They actually did it.”

  “‘They’?”

  “The company. Given today’s news, I’ve received dividends on shares retroactively for the duration of my employment. Good faith call on their part.”

  “That was charitable if manipulative.”

  “At least I have more money to put toward that vacation.”

  “And sodas.”

  Pierre smiled. “Good idea. Care to join me for a cafeteria pit stop?”

  “Gladly.”

 
5: “APOLLO’S DEATH (AND PERHAPS A RESURRECTION)”

  REUTERS

  OP-ED

  Byron Pettigrew

  The Apollo program ended in 1975 with the catastrophic failure of the Apollo 20 mission. Col. William “Memphis” Cato and geologist Dr. Angela Phelps had the unfortunate encounter with Mr. Murphy in the form of a cascade of failures. A dying retro-thruster. On the same side as the thruster—since the module came down harder—a leg collapsed. Other than the rough landing (and thankfully the LRV suffered no damage), Cato and Phelps had every reason to believe they could return to the orbiter. They could do what the stalwart trio of Apollo 13 did. Or the crew of Apollo 19.

  Only, they couldn’t, especially not when, after five hours of work, a baseball-sized meteor ripped through the top of the lunar module. The duo awaited the inevitable.

  NASA held its memorial with the rest of the nation. The Cato and Phelps families held their respective memorials while Mission Control decided to close the Apollo program with this disaster and move on.

  There is no better time to return to the moon than the fiftieth anniversary of the mission. Consider the time and tide of change: The joint venture featuring a Russian multistage rocket along with a United States orbiter and a Japanese lunar module that could only be capped with Clockwork Corp.’s lunar-bot, a Tsuki Model 2, and Pierre the Uplifted Chimp (so labeled by at least one children’s book spinning out of the affair).