by Neil Clarke
“We already tried once for the original,” says the Director, “and got this. It would be too dangerous to the timestream to try again, I think, even if the original turns up in a Square. Given the math, that might happen.”
The head physicist stares hard at Cran. Cran has already been removed from the Project for failing to file clearances, which he has explained with “the memory lapses of age—I’m getting them more frequently now.” He will never be allowed near a Square again.
A handler says, “What shall I do with this forgery?”
The Director is bleak with disappointment. “It’s useless to us now.”
Cran says humbly, “May I have it?”
“Oh, why not. Take it, if you like fakery.”
“Thank you,” Cran says.
He hangs the Vermeer on the wall of his room. The sad lady sewing a bonnet, disappointed in her life—the broken toy, flung-aside pearls, drooping head, of course she is disappointed—glows in unearthly beauty. Cran spends an entire hour just gazing at the painting. When there is a knock on his door, he doesn’t jump. The picture is legitimately his.
It is Tulia. “Cran, I heard that—”
She stops cold.
Cran turns slowly.
Tulia is staring at the picture, and she knows. Cran understands that. He understands—too late—that she is the one person who would know. Why didn’t he think of this? He says, “Tulia . . .”
“That’s not a forgery.”
“Yes, it is. A skillful one, but . . . they did forensic tests, it’s not even ten years old, not aged enough to—”
“I don’t care. That’s not a copy, not even one by a forger better than I am. That’s the original Vermeer.”
“No,” Cran says desperately. But Tulia has stepped closer to the painting and is examining every detail. Seeing things he cannot, could never learn to see. She knows.
He debases himself to plead. “Tulia, you’re an artist. The real thing. For centuries to come, people will be collecting and cherishing your work. I am nothing. Please—leave me this. Please.”
She doesn’t even look at him. Her eyes never leave the painting.
“I’m an old man. You can tell them the truth after I’m dead. But please, for now . . . let me have this. Please.”
After an aeon, she nods, just once, still not looking at him. She leaves the room. Cran knows she will never speak to him again. But she won’t tell.
He turns back to the Vermeer, drinking in the artistry, the emotion, the humanity.
1672
Johannes walked through the Square beside the Hague, toward the water. In a few minutes, he would go inside—they could wait for him a few minutes longer. He studied the reflection of the stone castle, over four hundred years old, in the still waters of the Hofvijer. The soft light of a May morning gives the reflected Hague a shimmer that the actual government building did not have.
He came here to judge twelve paintings. They originally belonged to a great collector, Gerrit Reynst, who’d died fourteen years ago by drowning in the canal in front of his own house. Johannes couldn’t imagine how that had happened, but since then, the collection had known nothing but chaos. Parts of it had been sold, parts gifted to the king of England, parts bequeathed to various relatives. A noted art dealer offered twelve of the paintings to Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg, who at first accepted them. Then the Grand Elector’s art advisor said the pictures were forgeries and should be sent back. The art dealer refused to accept them. Now they hung in the Hague while thirty-five painters—thirty-five!—gave learned opinions on the pictures’ authenticity. One will be Vermeer.
He was curious to see the paintings. They were all attributed to great masters, including Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein. Vermeer, who had never left the Netherlands, would not have another chance to see such works.
If they were genuine.
Opinions so far had been divided. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish copies from originals. Consider, for instance, his own Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet . . .
He hadn’t thought about that picture in years. Always, his intensity centered on what he was painting now. That, and on his growing, impossible debts. He was being paid for this opinion, or he could not have afforded the trip to give it.
A skillful forger could fool almost everyone. Johannes, who seldom left Delft and so had seen few Italian paintings, was not even sure that he would be able to tell the difference between a forged Titian and an original, unless the copy was very bad. And a good forgery often gave its owners the same pleasure as an original. Still, he would try. Deceivers should not be able to replace the real thing with imitations. Truth mattered.
But first he lingered by the Hofvijer, studying the shifting light on the water.
2018
Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. His work appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015, 2016, and possibly 2017 as well. His debut novel, Annex, was published by Orbit Books in July 2018, and his debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, followed in October 2018 from Talos Press.
IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER
Rich Larson
Sol is so intent on the fizzing comm channel that he doesn’t notice Laurie is back until her gloved fist raps against the airlock window, sending shivery vibrations through the whole hopper.
“Sunnuvabitch.”
He snaps out of his seat, pulling the headset down around his neck. Laurie is standing in front of the airlock, arms folded. She taps her foot for effect, but in the stiff suit and low gravity it looks more like she’s keeping time to a slow-mo banjo. Sol gives her a few exaggerated claps as he dances over to the lever and heaves the exterior door open. Laurie gives him the finger and steps inside.
As soon as the atmosphere reader dings green, she hits the release on her helmet. It levers up off her face with a hiss, revealing her sharp chin, snub nose, dark eyes under knitted brows. She looks unnaturally pale in the airlock light, and her dirty blonde hair is matted with sweat.
Sol opens the interior door. “Well? You all right? I was about to suit up and go after you, Laurie, Christ.” He jams his headset against one ear and buzzes Control, but gets silence again. “Still can’t raise Control. Something’s messing with the radio.”
“I only lost transmitting functions,” she says, stowing her helmet on the hook. “I could hear you just fine the whole time. What the hell were you chewing on?”
“Peanuts.” Sol grabs the package off his seat’s armrest and checks the label. “Honey-roasted. They’re honey-roasted and pretty damn good. You want some?”
“No. Yeah. Give ‘em.” She clambers out of the suit and holds out her hand. Sol sees it shake a bit as he pours peanuts into her palm, but pretends not to notice. She scoops them into her mouth.
“So? You going to tell me what was down there, Laurie?”
She points to her fUll mouth.
“Oh, I get it. Revenge chewing. You’re revenge chewing at me. I’m a nervous eater, Laurie, and you were in that crack with no radio contact for twenty-seven whole minutes.”
Laurie swallows. “There was nothing,” she says. “I took the readings. Big electromagnetic spike, like we saw from orbit, but no physical source that I could detect. No sign of the drone we sent down there. I don’t know. It’s fucking weird, is what it is.” She runs her hands back along her hair. “I’m shot.”
Sol makes a gun with two fingers. “Bang.”
“As in I’m tired.” Laurie pinches the bridge of her nose, then goes to her hanging helmet and pulls out the datastick. “Here, have a look. I start singing, at one point. To drown out the chewing. Ignore the song choice and the high notes.”
Sol takes the stick. “All right. Hey, take a nap if you need it. Pickup window’s in
two-and-a-half hours.”
“Thanks,” Laurie mutters. She starts to slide past him, toward her chair, then stops. “There was nothing down there, Solly. But it was weird.”
“Hey.” He pats her on the shoulder. “We’re on the fucking Moon.”
“That is true,” Laurie says, clambering past him into her chair. She unrolls a vacuum-packed blanket and pulls it over her head. Her voice comes muffled. “That is a fact.”
Sol watches out of the corner of his eye, making sure she’s breathing normally, as he verifies the pickup window and runs another engine diagnostic. Before long she’s snoring, which seems like a good sign. He claps the headset on, plugs the datastick in, and reaches for the honey-roasted peanuts.
Sol has the feed from Laurie’s helmet up on his screen, watching through her eyes as she makes her way along the bottom of the crevasse. She’s right. There’s no sign of whatever unidentified body struck the Moon’s eastern hemisphere and plowed a half-kilometer crack through the dust and rock. No sign of the drone they sent to investigate. Just an empty, eerie tunnel.
Eerie, but he can’t quite put his finger on why. Something about the juts and whorls of rock seems slightly off to him, something about their angles. He’s leaning in for a closer look when someone knocks twice against the airlock window.
Sol bolts upright, heart hammering his ribs. Laurie shifts under her blanket. He claps both hands over his chest and exhales and tries to think of possible explanations. The best he comes up with is debris. Nothing more specific than that, just the word. Debris.
He goes to the airlock. Cold sweat drips from his armpits down his sides. Someone in a spacesuit is standing in the dust outside, shifting from foot to foot.
“You are not debris,” Sol mutters.
The astronaut taps their helmet and signs a radio malfunction, then taps their padded wrist where a watch would be. Someone else is trying to investigate the impact. A rogue state, or some private corp, somehow got here first without anyone knowing. And somehow they are wearing Laurie’s suit, with the distinctive smiley decal on the oxygen tank.
Sol suddenly gets chatter on his headset. He pulls it back up, dazed. Laurie’s voice.
“Sol, don’t fuck around, Sol, I blacked out down there,” she says, sounding more panicked than he’s ever heard her before. “I lost you on the radio, I blacked out and something happened. Let me in, Sol, goddamn you.”
The astronaut thunks their helmet up against the window and he can see Laurie’s mouth through the faceplate, lips moving as she cusses him out.
Sol yanks his headset off. A convulsion runs up and down his body; for a second he thinks he’s going to vomit. Then he strides back to the dash, to the chair where Laurie’s snores are fluttering her blanket. He grips the corner with one sweaty hand, braces himself, and pulls.
Laurie’s still there, splayed back in the chair. She raises an arm and drapes it over her face. “Go time?” she mutters.
“Uh.” Sol shakes his head. “Don’t know.” He looks back at the airlock, where Laurie now has both gloved hands splayed against the window. He pulls his headset back up, but hears only hyperventilating, and he realizes Laurie can see herself in the chair.
A crackling sob comes through the radio. “Sol, who is that? Sol? Who’s that in my . . . in the chair?”
In front of him, Laurie swings herself upright, rubbing her eyes. “You go through the footage?” she asks. “I did warn you, right? About the high notes.”
“Oh, you were great,” Sol says faintly. “Operatic, even. But. Laurie.”
“That is not me, Sol,” Laurie begs through the headset. “That is not fucking me! Let me in, Sol, something happened down there, and you have to let me in, please, please, please—”
Laurie in front of him sees the Laurie waiting at the airlock window. Her eyes widen. Sol remembers her taking off her suit in the airlock. How her face looked pale, almost waxy. When she goes to get up from the chair, he pushes her back down. Not hard, but hard enough.
“Who the hell’s that?” she demands.
“Just. Stay seated, okay? Stay there for now. I’m calling Control.” Sol keys his headset. “Control, we have a situation. We have, uh, a third party present.”
“Sol, is that me? That sounded like me.”
He waits the ten-second delay, clutching the headset hard to his ear. Still nothing. Nobody on the channel except Laurie, outside, begging to be let in.
“This is so fucked,” Sol says. “I think her oxy’s low. I have to at least let her into the airlock.”
Laurie shakes her head side to side, side to side. Her eyes are glassy with shock. “Yeah,” she finally says. “Yeah, you better.”
“And then, you know, I have to figure out which of you is a shapeshifting alien parasite,” Sol says, trying to wrench his mouth into a smile.
Laurie looks dead at him and flicks her tongue like a lizard.
“Don’t do that, Laurie,” Sol says. “Don’t do stuff just to mess with me, okay? Please?”
He gives them numbers: Laurie One, who returned to the hopper at 0629 hours, and Laurie Two, who returned to the hopper at 0712 hours.
Laurie Two is significantly calmer now that she’s in the airlock and has her helmet off. Her dirty blonde hair is sweat-starched into spikes, and her eyes have dark circles underneath them. She’s taking deep gulps of the recycled air, pushing it out her nose. But she won’t take her eyes off Laurie One, who is sitting on the other side of the inner airlock door.
“Just don’t let her near the levers,” Laurie Two reiterates, voice coming through tinny. “I don’t want to get vented by my creepy alien doppelganger.”
“Says the creepy alien doppelganger,” Laurie One finishes. “I’m trying to keep an open mind about what’s going on here. You could do the same.”
“It’s probably easier to be open-minded when you’re on that side of the airlock, all wrapped up in my blanket,” Laurie Two says.
“Laurie, maybe give her the blanket,” Sol mutters. “As a peace offering.”
“Sol, she doesn’t want the . . .”
“I don’t want the fucking blanket, Sol.” Laurie Two sighs. “I want to know what’s going on. I want to know who that is and how she beat me back to the hopper. I was only blacked out for a minute, tops.” She holds up her helmet, then the helmet Laurie One shed earlier, comparing them. Shakes her head.
“She’s been back for forty-five minutes already,” Sol says. “If you blacked out, it was longer than a minute. Way longer.”
Laurie Two digs the datastick out of her helmet. “See for yourself, Sol.”
Sol goes to trigger the interior door, then pauses. “Just hand it to me, okay? Don’t try to come in.”
Laurie Two’s face falls, and Sol feels it like a gut punch. “Solly, you really think . . . think I’m some kind of . . .” She blinks hard. “Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. I’ll pass it through.”
Laurie One looks away, grimacing.
“You get it, right?” Sol asks.
“I get it,” Laurie Two says. “Wish I didn’t.”
“I’ll wait over here,” Laurie One says, pointing to the corner. “Away from the airlock controls.”
“That’s real considerate, alien Laurie,” Laurie Two says.
Sol cracks the interior door. Laurie Two passes the datastick through, and he pretends not to notice how her hand is trembling. She tries to smile, but gives up halfway, leaving her mouth all stretched. Sol mouths the word sorryto her as he relocks the interior door, leaving her in limbo.
He slots the datastick into the dash and pulls up the video, playing it side-by-side with Laurie One’s. The prep, the entry, the descent—all identical, down to the millisecond. Sol tries to concentrate on the footage, tries to ignore Laurie One biting her thumbnail in the corner and Laurie Two squatting in the airlock, head in her hands.
“Hallucination,” Laurie One says. “We’re all thinking that, right? Air filter’s compromised. We’re breathing carbon and ta
lking to my empty spacesuit in the airlock.”
“Or I’m still blacked out in the crevasse,” Laurie Two says. “Contaminant in my oxygen tank.”
“Under other circumstances, you know, I think you two would really hit it off,” Sol says, but he runs a diagnostic on the air filter in a side window. Oxygen levels are green. He fumbles for the last of the peanuts and crunches them between his molars one at a time.
The footage is playing at triple time, a blur of identical motion, identical rock formations. Then, at the thirty-two minute mark, the computer detects divergence and slows it back down. Both helmets’ owners are clambering back out of the crack, but taking slightly different routes. Sol rewinds, plays halfspeed. Laurie Two never falters, never freezes. As far as he can tell, there’s no blackout at all, but the timestamp has jumped forward forty minutes.
“You said you were only out for a minute,” Laurie One says. “It jumps forty.”
“Impossible,” Laurie Two says. “That’s impossible. If I was down there an extra forty minutes I’d have run out of oxygen.”
Sol shakes the empty peanut bag, desperately licks the salt and sugar off his palm. If he’s the one hallucinating, maybe Laurie never came back at all. Maybe she’s stuck down there while he argues with figments of his own imagination. He raps his knuckles against his temple and peers closer at the footage as it keeps playing, as both Lauries make their way out of the crevasse.
Then he sees it.
“That crag in the rock,” he blurts. “It repeats. That whole stretch of tunnel, it repeats.”
He restarts the video and claws the playback speed down to half, watching through Laurie’s eyes as she descends. She’s more focused on her footing than on the walls, but there’s enough. The cracks and whorls in the tunnel hit an invisible marker and start to repeat themselves. Shifted, slightly condensed, but the same pattern. As Laurie goes deeper, it happens again.
