Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

  And remembered another ride.

  They had come down feet forward, faces up toward the half disk of the earth, the LM engines flaming before them in a 260-mile-long braking burn. They were standing in their bulky pressure suits, minus helmets and gloves, restrained by straps and stirrups while their strange device kicked and clattered and pushed up against their booted feet like the deck of a small boat on an uncertain sea. Dave was to his left, right hand on the ACS stick, left hand poised over the thrust translator, while Baedecker watched the six hundred instrument dials and readouts, spoke to controllers 219,000 miles away across static-filled emptiness, and tried to anticipate every whim and alarm of the overworked PGNS guidance computer. Then they were pitching over, upright at last, eight thousand feet above the lunar highlands and still descending, their trajectory as certain and unrelenting as a falling arrow's, and just then, in spite of the demands of the moment, he and Dave had both lifted their eyes from the instruments and stared for five eternal seconds out the triangular windows at the glaring peaks, death black canyons, and earthlit foothills of the moon's mountains. "Okay," Dave had whispered then, with the peaks drifting toward them like teeth, the hills coming up at them like frozen, white waves of rock, "I could use some help here, amigo."

  The music ended and the Huey emerged from the canyon and then they were crossing a wide river, which Baedecker realized must be the Columbia. Wind buffeted the ship, and Dave rode the pedals, compensating easily. They climbed to a hundred feet as a dam flashed underneath. Baedecker looked down through the chin bubble and watched a string of lights go by, saw moonlight on whitecaps. They climbed to five hundred feet and banked right, still climbing. Baedecker saw the north shore pass under them, noticed a steep cliff to their right, and then they climbed again, spun on the Huey's axis, and hovered.

  They hovered. There was no sound. The wind pushed once at the stationary aircraft and then relented. Dave pointed, and Baedecker slid his window back and leaned out for a better view.

  A hundred feet below them, the only structure on a hill high above the wind-tossed Columbia, the stone circle of Stonehenge sat milk-white and shadow-bound in the light of the full moon.

  "Okay," said Dave, "I could use some help here, amigo."

  Dust billowed up as they descended through thirty feet. The landing light extended and flashed on, illuminating the interior of a swirling cloud. Baedecker caught a glimpse of a graveled parking lot set on an uneven patch of hilltop below, and then dust surrounded them again and pebbles beat like hailstones on the belly of their craft.

  "Talk to me," Dave said calmly.

  "Twenty-five feet and drifting forward," said Baedecker. "Fifteen feet. Looks all right. Ten feet. Wait, back up ten, there's a boulder there. Right. Okay. Down. Five feet. You're okay. Two feet. Okay. Ten inches. Contact."

  The Huey rocked slightly and settled firmly on its skids. Dust surrounded them and then dissipated in the strong breeze. Dave shut down the ship, the red cockpit glow disappeared, and Baedecker realized that they were in gravity's realm once again. He took off his helmet, undid his straps, and opened the door. Baedecker stepped off the skid and walked around the front of the helicopter to where Dave stood, his dark hair damp with sweat, his eyes alive. The wind was stronger now, ruffling Baedecker's thin hair and cooling him quickly. Together he and Dave walked to the circle of stones.

  "Who built this?" Baedecker asked after several minutes of silence. The full moon hung just above the tallest arch. Shadows fell across the large stone lying in the center of the circle. This was Stonehenge as it must have looked shortly after the druids finished their labors, before time and tourists took their toll on the pillars and stones.

  "A guy named Sam Hill," said Dave. "He was a road builder. Came out here early in the century to found a town and vineyards. A sort of Utopian colony. He had a theory that this section of the Columbia Gorge was perfect for wine grapes—rain from the west, sunlight from the east slopes. Perfect harmony."

  "Was he right?"

  "Nope. Missed it by about twenty miles," said Dave. "The town's lying in ruins over the hill there. Sam's buried down there." He pointed to a narrow trail leading down a steep section of hillside.

  "Why Stonehenge?" asked Baedecker.

  Dave shrugged. "We all want to leave monuments. Sam borrowed his. He was in England during World War I when the experts thought that Stonehenge had been a sacrificial altar. Sam made this into a sort of antiwar memorial."

  Baedecker went closer and could see names set into the stones. What first had appeared to be rock was actually cement.

  They walked to the south of the circle and looked out over the river. The lights of a town and bridge glowed several miles to the west. The wind gusted strongly, bending brittle spears of grass on the hillside, carrying the cold scent of autumn with it.

  "The Oregon Trail ends a few miles down there," said Dave, pointing toward the lights. A little later he said, "Did you ever wonder why they would come so far, pass up two thousand miles of perfectly good land, just to follow a dream?"

  "No," said Baedecker. "I don't think I have."

  "I do," said Dave. "I've wondered that since I was a kid. Christ, Richard, I drive across this country and can't imagine crossing it on foot or in those pissant wagons, at an ox's pace. The more I see of it, the more I realize that any man who wants to be president of the United States is committing the ultimate hubris. Wait here a minute, I'll be right back."

  Dave walked back through the circle of stones, and Baedecker stood at the edge of the cliff, letting the breeze cool him, listening to the sounds of some night bird far below. When Dave returned, he was carrying a Frisbee that glowed slightly from its own fluorescence.

  "Jesus," said Baedecker, "that's not the Frisbee, is it?"

  "Sure enough," said Dave. During their last EVA, while performing for the TV camera on the rover, Dave had produced a Frisbee from his contingency collection bag, and he and Baedecker had tossed it back and forth, laughing at its tumbling in a vacuum and its odd trajectory in one-sixth g. Great fun at the time. When they came home four days later, they returned to the Great Frisbee Controversy. NASA was upset because Dave had used the term Frisbee—a brand name—thus providing priceless advertising to a company not affiliated with NASA. Media

  newscasters and commentators generally approved of the frivolity, one calling it "a rare human touch in an otherwise heartless undertaking," but questioned the need for a manned lunar exploration program and pointed to the Soviet robot probes as a cheaper and more sensible approach. A Connecticut senator had discussed "the six-billion-dollar Frisbee tournament," and black leaders were incensed, calling the event both callous and insensitive to the needs of millions. "Two white college boys playing games in space at the taxpayers' expense," said one black leader on the Today show, "while black babies die of rat bites in the ghettos."

  Capcom had radioed up some of this during their daily news update at the end of their sleep period four hours before reentry. Then the communicator asked if any of them had any opinion on the whole affair or any suggestions for mollifying the agency's critics.

  "This channel secure?" Dave had asked.

  Houston assured him that it was.

  "Well, fuck 'em all," Dave had said laconically, thus going down—at least for the astronaut corps—into the program record books for the first live-mike use of that particular pilot's term. It had also almost certainly cost Dave a future ride in the Skylab program. Nonetheless, he had waited five more years for a flight, watching Skylab end and the single, obsolete gesture of Apollo-Soyuz go by before finally resigning.

  Now Dave tossed the Frisbee to Baedecker. The phosphorescent plastic glowed green-white in the bright moonlight. Baedecker backed up ten steps and snapped it back.

  "Works better in air," said Dave.

  They threw the glowing disk back and forth silently for several minutes. Baedecker felt a tide of affection tug at him.

  "Do you know what I think?" Dave said
after a while.

  "What do you think?"

  "I think old Sam and all those others had the right idea. You pass all those other places by and keep on going because the place you're headed is perfect." He caught the Frisbee and held it two-handed. "But what they didn't understand is that you make it that way just by dreaming about it."

  Dave walked to the edge of the cliff and briefly held the Frisbee toward the stars, an offering. "Everything ends," he said and pulled back, pivoted, and threw the disk hard out over the drop-off. Baedecker stepped up next to him and the two watched as the Frisbee soared an impossible distance, banked gracefully in the moonlight, and silently fell into the darkness above the river.

  Baedecker walked from the cabin to the dock where his son sat on the railing looking out over the lake. The radio had been filled with commentary about the grace of Nixon's resignation and speculation about Gerald Ford. Several reporters had commented glowingly about a statement by Ford that after all of his years in Congress, he had not made a single enemy. Baedecker understood the reporters' relief—after years of abiding with Nixon's obvious belief that he was surrounded by enemies, the change was welcome—but Baedecker remembered his father telling him that you can judge a man by his choice of enemies as well as or better than by his choice of friends, and he wondered if Ford's disclaimer was truly a recommendation of integrity.

  Scott was sitting on the railing at the far end of the dock. His white T-shirt glowed slightly in the light from the waning moon. The dock itself sagged in several places and had a stretch of missing railing. Baedecker remembered the new-wood smell of it when he had stood there talking to his own father seventeen years before.

  "Hello," said Baedecker.

  "Hi." Scott's voice was no longer sullen, only distant.

  "Let's forget that blowup, okay?"

  "Okay."

  Baedecker leaned against the railing and the two looked out at the lake for several minutes. Somewhere an outboard motor growled, the sound coming flat and pure across the still water, but no running lights showed. Baedecker could see lightning bugs flickering on the far shore like the flash of small arms fire.

  "I visited your granddad here once not long before he died," said Baedecker. "The lake was smaller then."

  "Yeah?" There was little interest in Scott's voice. He had been born eight years after Baedecker's father had died and rarely showed any curiosity about him or his grandmother. Scott's other grandparents were both alive and well in a Florida retirement community and had happily spoiled the boy since birth.

  "Tomorrow I thought we'd clear out the last of the old furniture in the morning and take the afternoon off. Want to go fishing?"

  "Not especially," said Scott.

  Baedecker nodded, trying not to give in to his sudden flush of anger. "All right," he said. "We'll work on the driveway in the afternoon."

  Scott shrugged and said, "Are you and Mom going to get divorced?"

  Baedecker looked at his ten-year-old son. "No," he said. "What on earth gave you that idea?"

  "You don't like each other," said Scott, still assertive but with a slight quaver in his voice.

  "That's not true," said Baedecker. "Your mother and I love each other very much. Why are you saying these things, Scott?"

  The boy shrugged again, the same one-shouldered little motion Baedecker had seen too many times when Scott had been hurt by a friend or had failed at some simple task. "I don't know," he said.

  "You know why you said it," Baedecker said. "Tell me what you're talking about."

  Scott looked away and flipped the hair out of his eyes with a snap of his head. His voice was high but not yet a whine. "You're never home."

  "My job made me travel, you know that," said Baedecker. "That's going to change now."

  "Yeah, sure," said Scott. "But that's not it anyway. Mom's never happy, and you don't even notice. She hates Houston, she hates the Agency, she hates your friends, and she hates my friends. She doesn't like anything but her goddamn clubs."

  "Watch what you're saying, Scott."

  "It's true."

  "Watch how you say it anyway."

  Scott snapped his head away and silently stared out at the lake. Baedecker took a deep breath and tried to focus on the August evening. The smell of water and fish and oil on the water reminded him of his own summers of childhood. He closed his eyes and remembered the time after the war when he was about thirteen and he and his father had gone up to Big Pine Lake in Minnesota for three weeks of hunting and fishing. Baedecker had been shooting at cans with the .22 on his Savage over-and-under, but when it came time to clean the weapon, he realized that he had left his cleaning rod at home. His father had only shaken his head in that unexpressed disappointment that was more painful than a slap to the young Baedecker, but then his father put down the fishing tackle he was working with, tied a small lead sinker to a string, dropped it through the barrel of his son's .22, and tied a cloth to the string. Baedecker was ready to clean the rifle by himself, but his father kept the other end of the string and the two had pulled the rag through, back and forth, speaking softly about nothing important. They had continued long after

  the barrel was clean. Baedecker remembered it all: his father's red-and-tan plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the mole on his father's sun-browned left arm, the soap and tobacco smell of him, the pitch of his voice—and he remembered more than that—he remembered the sad, insistent awareness of everything he was feeling at the moment, his inability, even then, simply to experience it. Even while cleaning the rifle in near-perfect contentment, he had been aware of that contentment, aware that someday his father would be dead and he would remember everything about the moment, even his own awareness.

  "You know what I hate?" said Scott and his voice was calm.

  "What do you hate?" asked Baedecker.

  The boy pointed. "I hate the fucking moon."

  "The moon?" said Baedecker. "Why?"

  Scott turned so that he was straddling the railing. He flipped the hair out of his eyes. "When I was in first grade? I told the class during sharing time that you'd been put on the primary crew for the mission? Miss Taryton, she said that was great, but there was this kid named Michael Bizmuth? He was a shit, nobody'd play with him or anything. He came up to me during recess and said, 'Hey, your Dad's gonna die up there and they're gonna bury him and you're gonna have to look at it your whole life.' So I hit him in the mouth and got in trouble and Mom wouldn't let me watch TV for two weeks. But every night for a year before you went, I'd get down on my knees and pray an hour. An hour each night. My knees'd hurt but I'd stay the whole hour."

  "You never told me this, Scott," said Baedecker. He wanted to say something else but could think of nothing.

  Scott did not seem to be listening. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned in concentration. "Sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't go, and sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't die up there . . ." Scott paused and looked right at his father. "But most of the time, you know what I prayed? I prayed that when you did die there, they'd bring you back and bury you in Houston or Washington, D.C., or somewhere so I wouldn't have to look up at night and see your grave hanging up there for the rest of my life."

  "Do you ever think about suicide, Richard?" asked Dave.

  It was Sunday morning. They had risen early, eaten a large breakfast, and were taking a pickup truck borrowed from Kink into the hills above Lonerock to cut firewood.

  "No," said Baedecker. "At least not much."

  "I do," said Dave. "Not my own, of course, but about the concept."

  "What's there to think about?" said Baedecker.

  Dave slowed the pickup to ford a small stream. The road up Sunshine Canyon had gone from gravel to dirt to ruts to a vague, two-pronged path between the trees. "A lot of things to think about," said Dave. "Why, when, where, and—maybe most important—how."

  "I don't see why it would matter too much about the how," said Baedecker.

  "But it does!"
cried Dave. "One of my few heroes is J. Seltzer Sherman. You've heard of him . . ."

  "No."

  "Sure you have. Sherman was a proctologist in Buffalo, New York, who got deeply depressed about his life in 1965. Said he couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Flew out to Arizona, bought a telephone pole, sharpened it on one end, took it by mule down into the Grand Canyon. Surely you remember that."

  "No."

  "It was in all the papers. It took him ten hours going down. He buried that pole sharp end up, spent fourteen hours coming back up the trail, took aim, and jumped off the south rim."

  "And?" said Baedecker.

  "Missed it by that much," said Dave, showing half an inch of space between finger and thumb.

  "I suppose it's still there as a challenge," said Baedecker.

  "Exactly," said Dave. "Although old J. Seltzer himself says that he might try it again someday."

  "Uh-huh," said Baedecker.

  "When Di was a social worker in Dallas, she used to see lots of teenage suicide attempts," said Dave. "She said that boys were a lot more efficient than girls. Their methods were more final—guns, hanging, that sort of thing. Girls tended to take overdoses of Midol after calling their boyfriends to say good-bye. Di says that a lot of kids classified as gifted kill themselves. They're almost always successful when they try, she says."

  "Makes sense," said Baedecker. "Can we slow down a little? This ride's killing my kidneys."

  "The two men I admired most killed themselves with guns," said Dave. "One was Ernest Hemingway. I guess the why was because he couldn't write anymore. The when was July '61. The where was the foyer of his house in Ketchum, Idaho. The how was a double-barreled Boss shotgun he'd used to shoot pigeons. He used both barrels against his forehead."