Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

  It was an Apollo 8 photograph, one of the Earthrise pictures taken from the external camera's high-speed series on the first and third lunar orbits. The picture had once captured the imagination of the world but had been so overused during the intervening years that Baedecker no longer took any notice of it. But here it was different. The photo had been enlarged to make a supergraphic, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper stretching the width of the room. The earth was a bold blue and white, the sky black, the foreground a dull gray. It was as if the boy's basement room opened onto the lunar surface. The dark walls and dim track lighting added to the illusion.

  "Mom's idea," mumbled the boy. He tapped nervously at a stack of tape cassettes on his desk. "I think she got it on sale."

  "Did you make the models?" asked Baedecker. Shelves were filled with gray plastic dreadnoughts from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. Two large space shuttles hung from dark thread in a corner.

  The boy made a motion with shoulders and hand, an abbreviated half shrug that reminded Baedecker of his son Scott when he had struck out in a Little League game.

  "Dad helped."

  "Are you interested in space, Terry?"

  "Yeah." The boy hesitated and looked up at Baedecker. In his dark eyes there was a brief panic of summoned courage. "I mean, I useta be. You know, when I was younger. I mean, I still like it and all, but that's sort of kid stuff, you know? What I'd really like to be is, well, like a lead guitarist in a group like Twisted Sister." He stopped talking and looked steadily at Baedecker.

  Baedecker could not stop a wide grin. He touched the boy's shoulder briefly, firmly. "Good. Good. Let's go upstairs, shall we?"

  The streets were dark except for occasional streetlights and the blue flicker of televisions through windows. Baedecker breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and unseen fields. The stars were hesitant to appear. Except for an occasional car passing on the hardroad a block west, the only noise was the muted but excited gabble of the hidden televisions. Baedecker remembered the sound of console radios through some of these same screen doors and windows. He thought that the radio voices had held more authority and depth.

  Glen Oak had never had many oak trees, but in the forties it had been resplendent with giant elms, incredibly massive trees arcing their heavy limbs in a latticework of branches which turned even the widest side street into a tunnel of dappled light and shadow. The elms were Glen Oak. Even a ten-year-old boy had realized that as he rode his bike toward the town on a summer evening, pedaling furiously toward the oasis of trees and Saturday dinner.

  Now most of the elms were gone. Baedecker assumed that various epidemics of disease had claimed them. The wide streets were open to the sky. There was still a proliferation of smaller trees. Given the slightest breeze, leaves danced in front of streetlights and threw shadows across the sidewalk. Large old homes set far back from the sidewalks still had their upper stories guarded by gently rustling foliage. But the giant elms of Baedecker's childhood were gone. He wondered if people returning to former homes in small towns all over the nation had noticed this loss. Like the smell of burning leaves in the autumn, it was something that gnawed at his generation by its absence.

  The bats danced and dodged against a violet sky. A few stars had come out. Baedecker crossed into a schoolyard, which occupied an entire block. The tall, old elementary school, its shuttered belfry the home for the ancestors of many of this night's crop of bats, had long since been torn down and replaced by a cluster of brick-and-glass boxes huddled at the base of a larger brick-and-glass box, which filled much of the square block. Baedecker guessed that the larger structure was the gymnasium for the consolidated school. There had been no elementary school gym in his day; when they needed one, they walked the two blocks to the high school. Baedecker remembered the old school as being the centerpiece of acres of grass, half a dozen baseball diamonds, and two playground areas—one for the small children and another boasting the high, three-humped slide for the upper grades. All of this had been guarded by the sentinel-silent line of tall trees along the perimeter of the block. Now the low buildings and monstrous gymnasium claimed most of the space. There were no trees. The playgrounds had been reduced to a strip of asphalt and a wooden, stockadelike structure built in a square of sand. Baedecker walked over and sat on a lower level of the thing. It made him think of a poorly designed gallows.

  He could see his old home across the street. Even in the fading twilight he could tell that little had been done to change it. Light spilled from the bay windows on both floors. There was siding now where once there had been old clapboard. A garage and asphalt drive had been added where the gravel driveway had once curved around to the backyard. Baedecker guessed that the barn was no longer behind the house. Near the front walk a tall birch grew where none had been before. For a moment Baedecker searched his memory, trying in vain to remember a sapling there. Then he realized that it could have been planted after he had moved away and the tree still would be forty years old.

  Baedecker felt no nostalgia, only a slight vertigo of wonder that such an alien shell of stone and board in such an alien part of the world could once have been home to a boy who felt himself the center of creation. A light went on in a second-story room. Baedecker could almost see his old wallpaper in which clipper ships were locked in endlessly repeating squares of rope, each corner complicated by impossible nautical knots. He remembered lying awake during nights of fever, trying again and again to mentally untie those knots. He also remembered the hanging light bulb and cord, the yellow coffin of a closet in one corner, and the huge Rand McNally world map on the wall by the door where the earnest boy had nightly moved colored pins from one unpronounceable Pacific island to another.

  Baedecker shook his head, rose, and walked north, away from the school and house. Full night had come, but the stars were hidden by low clouds. Baedecker did not look up again.

  "Hey, Dick, how was it? See the old places?" called Ackroyd as Baedecker crossed the yard to the man's home. The couple were sitting in a small, screened porch between the house and garage.

  "Yes. It's cooling off very nicely, isn't it?"

  "See anybody you knew?"

  "The streets were pretty empty," said Baedecker. "I could see the lights of Old Settlers—at least I presume it was Old Settlers—out southeast of the high school. Sounded like everyone was out there." For Baedecker as a boy, the Old Settlers carnival weekend had been three days that marked the very heart of summer while simultaneously being the last joyous event before the sickening countdown to the resumption of school. Old Settlers had meant the recognition of entropy.

  "Oh, heck, yeah," said Ackroyd. "It'll be going strong tonight with the Jaycees barbecue and all. There's still plenty of time to run out there if you want. The American Legion tent serves beer till eleven."

  "No, thanks, Bill. Actually I am pretty tired. Thought I might turn in. Say good night to Terry for me, would you?"

  Ackroyd led the way inside and turned on the light above the stairs. "Actually, Terry's gone over to his friend Donnie Peterson's. They've been spending Old Settlers Weekend together since they were in kindergarten."

  Mrs. Ackroyd bustled around making sure that Baedecker had extra blankets even though the night was warm. The guest room had a comfortably familiar motel room smell to it. Mrs. Ackroyd smiled at him, softly closed the door, and Baedecker was alone.

  The room was almost pitch black except for the glow of his digital travel alarm-calculator. Baedecker lay back and stared into the darkness. When the softly glowing digits read 2:32, he rose and went out into the empty, carpeted room. There was no sound from the upper stories. Someone had left a light on over the short stairway in case Baedecker wanted to find his way to the kitchen. Instead, Baedecker crossed to the boy's room, hesitated a second outside the half-opened door, and then stepped inside. The light from the stairway dimly illuminated the pockmarked lunar surface and the blue-and-white rising crescent of earth. Baedecker stood there a minute a
nd was turning to go when something caught his eye. He closed the door and sat down on Terry's bed. For a minute there was no light at all and Baedecker was blind. Then he became aware of a hundred softly glowing sparks on the walls and ceiling. The stars were coming out. The boy—Baedecker felt sure it was the boy—had speckled the room with dots of phosphorescent paint. The half globe of the earth began to glow with a milky radiance, which illuminated the lunar highlands and crater rims. Baedecker had never seen a lunar night from the surface—no Apollo astronaut had—but he sat on the boy's tightly made bed until the stars burned into his eyes and he thought yes, yes.

  After a while Baedecker rose, crossed silently to his own room, and slept.

  Richard M. Baedecker Day dawned warm and clear. The street outside Ackroyd's home hissed to the sound of Saturday traffic. The sky was so blue that cornstalks in the fields visible beyond the new houses seemed brittle with light.

  Baedecker had two breakfasts. The first was with Ackroyd and his wife in their spacious kitchen. The second was with the mayor and city council at a long table in the Parkside Café. Marjorie Seaton struck Baedecker as a small-town version of Chicago's ex-mayor, Jane Byrne. He wasn't sure where the resemblance lay—Seaton's face was as broad and reddened by weather as Byrne's was narrow and pale. Marge Seaton had an open, hearty laugh that bore no similarity

  to what he remembered of Byrne's tight-lipped chuckles. But there was something about the eyes of both women that made Baedecker think of Apache squaws waiting for the male prisoners to be pegged out for their pleasure.

  "The whole town's excited about you being here, Dick," Seaton said and beamed at him. "I should say the entire county. We're going to get folks from as far away as Galesburg today."

  "I'm looking forward to meeting them," said Baedecker. He toyed with his hash browns. Next to him, Ackroyd was mopping up runny eggs with a piece of toast. The waitress, a small, bleak-faced woman named Minnie, returned every other moment to refill their coffee cups as if she had distilled the entire definition of hostess down to the dogged completion of that single act.

  "Do you have an agenda . . . a schedule?" asked Baedecker. "Some sort of outline for the day?"

  "Oh, yeah," said a thin man in a green polyester suit. He had been introduced as Kyle Gibbons or Gibson. "Here you go." He pulled out a folded sheet of mimeograph paper and smoothed it down in front of Baedecker.

  "Thanks."

  9:00—COUNCIL MTG.—Pksd. (Astronaut?)

  10:00—HDBL. TNMT.—(AM. LEG. BALL)

  11:30—PARADE FORMS UP (W. 5)

  12:00—OLD SETTLERS PARADE

  1:00—J.G.C. WEENIE ROAST AND SHOOTOFF (Sh. Meehan)

  1:30—SFTBL. TNMT.

  2:30—VLT. FIRE DPT. WATERFIGHTS

  5:00—OPTIMISTS BARBECUE

  6:00—UP WITH PEOPLE HOUR (Camp. Cr. Singers)

  7:00—RAFFLE DRAWING (M. Seaton—H. Sch. Gym)

  7:30—STARS OF TOMORROW (H. Sch. Gym)

  8:00—ASTRONAUT'S SPEECH (H. Sch. Gym)

  10:00—J.G.C. FIREWORKS

  Baedecker looked up. "Speech?"

  Marge Seaton sipped coffee and smiled at him. "Anything you say'd be just fine, Dick. Don't go to any trouble about it. We'd all like to hear you talk about space or what it was like to walk on the moon or something. Just keep it to twenty minutes or so, okay?"

  Baedecker nodded and listened through the open windows as a listless morning breeze moved a few leaves against each other. Some children entered and loudly demanded soft drinks at the counter. Minnie ignored them and hurried over to refill everyone's coffee cups.

  The discussion at the table turned to city council matters and Baedecker excused himself. Outside, the midmorning heat was already reflecting up from the sidewalks and beginning to soften the asphalt of the highway. Baedecker blinked and tugged his aviator sunglasses out of his shirt pocket. He was wearing the white linen safari shirt, tan cotton slacks, and desert boots he had worn in Calcutta a few weeks earlier. He found it hard to believe that this world of scalded blue sky, flat white storefronts, and empty highway could coexist with the monsoon mud, endless slums, and crowded insanity of India.

  The city park was much smaller than he remembered. In Baedecker's mind the bandstand had been an elaborate Victorian gazebo, but all that stood there now was a flat-topped slab of concrete raised on cinder blocks. He doubted if the gazebo had ever existed.

  On Saturday evenings during Baedecker's two summers there, some rich resident of Glen Oak—he had no idea who it had been—had shown free movies in this park, projecting them onto

  three sheets nailed high on the side of the Parkside Café. Baedecker remembered watching the Movietone Newsreels, cartoons where no lesser personages than Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck sold war bonds, and such film classics as Fly by Night, Saps at Sea, Broadway Limited, and Once Upon a Honeymoon. Baedecker could close his eyes and almost recapture the flickering images, the faces of the farm families sitting on benches, blankets, and new-mown grass, the sounds of children running through the bushes near the bandstand and climbing trees, and at least once, memorably, the silent flashes of heat lightning rippling above trees and storefronts, coming closer, the heavy branches of the elms dancing to the breeze fleeing before the coming storm. Baedecker could remember the sweetness of that breeze, coming as it did across so many miles of ripening fields. Baedecker could remember the first real crash of lightning, which, in an uncanny instant of suspended time before everyone ran for shelter, froze people, cars, benches, grass, buildings, and Baedecker himself in a stroboscopic flash of light that briefly made all the world a single frozen frame in an unwatched film.

  Baedecker cleared his throat, spit, and walked over to a small boulder on a stone pedestal. Three bronze plaques listed the names of men from Glen Oak who had fought in conflicts ranging from the War with Mexico through Vietnam. Stars designated those who had died during their service. Eight had died during the Civil War, three in World War II, and none in Vietnam. Baedecker glanced at fourteen names listed under Korea, but his name was not among them. He recognized none of the others even though he must have gone to school with some of them. The Vietnam plaque was hardly weathered and only a third filled in. There was room for more wars.

  Across the street a farm family had poured out of a pickup truck and were staring into the window of Helmann's Variety Store. Baedecker remembered the place as Jensen's Dry Goods, a long, dark building where fans turned slowly fifteen feet above dusty wood floors. The family was excited, pointing and laughing. More people began filling the sidewalks. Somewhere nearby but out of sight, a band started playing, stopped abruptly, and began again only to halt in mid-cymbal crash.

  Baedecker sat down on a park bench. His shoulders ached with the weight of things. He closed his eyes again and tried to summon the often-retrieved sensation of bouncing across a glaring, pockmarked plain, the light throwing a corona around Dave's white suit and PLS pack, gravity a lessened foe, each movement as fluid and effortless as moving tiptoe across the bottom of a sunlit lagoon.

  The lightness did not come. Baedecker opened his eyes and squinted at the polarized clarity of things.

  The Old Settlers Parade moved out fifteen minutes behind schedule. The consolidated high school's marching band led the way, followed by several rows of unidentified horsemen, then came five homemade floats representing chapters of the FFA, 4-H, Boy Scouts (Creve Coeur Council), the county historical society, and the Jubilee Gun Club. Following the floats came the junior high school band consisting of nine youngsters, then an American Legion contingent on foot, and then Baedecker. He rode in a twenty-year-old white Mustang convertible. Mayor Seaton sat to his right, Mr. Gibbons or Gibson to his left, and Bill Ackroyd rode up front next to the teenaged driver. Ackroyd insisted that the three in back sit up on the trunk with their feet on the red vinyl upholstery. Banners on the sides of the Mustang proclaimed RICHARD M. BAEDECKER—GLEN OAK'S ENVOY TO THE MOON. Beneath the lettering there were Magic-Markered representatio
ns of his crew's mission patch. The sun behind the symbolic command-module-with-sails looked like one of the egg yolks Ackroyd had mopped up with such vigor that morning.

  The parade flowed out of west Fifth Street by the park and marched proudly down Main Street. Sheriff Meehan's green-and-white Plymouth cleared the way. People lined the high, three-leveled sidewalks that seemed designed for viewing parades. Small American flags were in evidence and Baedecker noticed that a banner had been hung between two light poles above the street: GLEN OAK CELEBRATES RICHARD M. BAEDECKER DAY—OLD SETTLERS PARADE—JUBILEE GUN CLUB SHOOTOFF SAT., AUG. 8.

  The high school band turned left on Second Street and took another left by the schoolyard just a block east. Children playing on the wooden gallows-structure waved and shouted. One boy made a pistol of his hand and began firing. Without hesitation, Baedecker pointed his finger and fired back. The boy clutched at his chest, rolled his eyes back in his head, and did a complete somersault off a beam to land on his back in the sandbox six feet below.

  They turned right on Fifth Street only a block from where they had started and went east. Baedecker noticed a small white building to his right, which he was sure had once been the library. He remembered the hot attic-smell of the little room on a summer day and the slight frown on the lady-librarian's face when he would check out John Carter, Mars for the eighth or tenth or fifteenth time.

  Fifth Street was wide enough to carry the parade and still allow two lanes of traffic to move by on their left. There was no traffic. Baedecker again felt the absence of the great elms, especially now that the sun was beating down on the crowned expanse of pavement. Small Chinese elms grew near the grassy drainage ditches, but they seemed out of scale in comparison to the absurdly wide street, long lawns, and large homes. People sat on porches and lawn chairs and waved. Children and dogs ran alongside the horses and dodged back and forth ahead of the band's color guard. Behind Baedecker's Mustang, an informal procession of bicycles, children pulling wagons, and a few gaily bedecked riding lawn mowers added another fifty feet of tail to the parade.