Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82 Read online

  As the meeting had progressed and the science become more in-depth, those with least to contribute had drifted towards the peripheries. Hank now stood halfway through the bunk hall door, a position that was playing havoc with its sensors. Every few seconds the door would attempt to close, bump against his foot, and offer a sad mechanical sigh. Liang Lei was leaning against the wall, deftly protecting her glass from the darts of elbows and shoulders.

  Hank took a careful sip of his mystery alcohol, avocado paste, and rehydrated lime sling, and said, “I thought I knew what they were talking about an hour ago. I’m not even sure it’s English anymore. Is it Chinese?”

  She offered the smile that had made such an impact on him earlier. “I was educated in Community Management. I am just as confused as you, Henry.”

  Feeling his cheeks flush warmly, he said, “Please, it’s Hank. No one but Fasbender calls me Henry, and I think he only does it to annoy me.”

  “Hank,” she said, as if testing the sound. “Aren’t you bothered by that door hitting your foot?”

  “Sure. How are you enjoying dodging elbows?”

  “Very little.”

  “Perhaps it’s time we moved then.”

  He stepped back into the bunkroom, sat down and waved toward the opposite beds. She perched on the edge of the lowest. He couldn’t help noticing how her nose wrinkled. “We’ve had trouble with the air recycling, and the new tanks have been delayed,” he explained apologetically. “Also, Fasbender seems to think that changing his overall every day is a luxury.”

  “It must be strange to have volunteered for this life,” she said.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I was chosen. It was a great honor.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Even if the worst happens, even if . . . ” He faltered. He’d said more than he’d meant to. In fact, he’d strayed onto a subject he would never have deliberately raised.

  “I spoke a little with your Mister Landeimer,” Lei said. “He mentioned that you’ve been troubled. That you’ve been watching all the time for news from Earth and worrying they have forgotten you.”

  Unable to read her tone, he nodded. He felt oddly guilty, as though his earlier excitement had soured like old milk.

  “I have been troubled too,” Lei said, almost in a whisper.

  Hank started. “Really?”

  “We were put here to—” She struggled to find the right phrase in the less familiar language. “To make a point. We were sent here to prove how superior our science was, just as you were sent to prove that anything we could do, you could better. Now both points have been made. We are no longer news, and at home they wonder what to do with us.”

  Astonished to hear his own anxieties summed up so perfectly, Hank could only nod.

  “Mister Landeimer also said that you have been looking for ways to survive on your own here, if the need should come. What I wanted to tell you is that so have we. We are growing a little food and generating our own power. We have improved our air filters. While the doctors investigate their discovery, would you work on this with me?”

  Hank felt such relief that he fought an urge to cry or, perhaps more rationally, to lean forward and kiss her. Instead, he smiled tiredly and said, “Lei, I’d be very glad to.”

  The next few days were the best he’d spent on the Moon—better even than those first weeks when it was all new and all exciting, a marathon endeavor driven by seemingly inexhaustible supplies of adrenalin.

  Almost effortlessly, the lunar population—for suddenly, amazingly, that was what they were—split into two new factions, without any hint of discord. Fasbender and the Chinese bacteriologist Shen Tao pursued their science project. Everyone else worked under Hank and Lei, developing ways to prolong their survival should the worst happen.

  That had been a gloomy and paranoid occupation when it had been just the three of them. Now, with the two camps combined, it seemed no more than a sensible precaution, about which they could talk openly and even joke. It felt like a holiday, or an exchange project between two ramshackle schools. New friendships were made. A weight lifted.

  Hank noticed not only a change in himself, but in Landeimer’s and Fasbender’s behavior as well. Landeimer was drinking less, and when he did, it was because he’d arranged a poker game with new acquaintances from the Chinese base. Fasbender seemed younger and walked without a stoop that Hank had never consciously noticed him develop. He was as enthusiastic as he’d been in the days before the launch, and considerably more focused.

  Hank knew, however, without pride or modesty, that he’d changed more than either of the others. For months, the responsibility of leadership had been a weight holding him uselessly in place. Now it was an opportunity. They were the first citizens of a new world. How had he failed to see that?

  He also realized quickly, even without Landeimer’s conspiratorial glances and frequently inappropriate comments, that Lei was a part of that. It wasn’t just attraction, though he was grown-up enough to admit it was partly that. More, it was the sharing of a burden that had nearly crushed him, and the discovery that it had always been shared. He’d imagined—as the peoples of Earth had imagined—a conflict between the two hemispheres of Shackleton Crater, where in fact there had only been mirror images fighting the same weary fight.

  They tweaked the air filters in Blue Glacier using adaptations the Chinese had developed, extending the filters’ lifetime by at least two years. The Americans were awed by the garden of cress and fungi growing in one wing of Yang Liwei, and Landeimer—revealing a hobbyist’s interest in botany that Hank would never have guessed at in a million years—made a number of useful suggestions to increase their yield. They calculated that Bessie, working at full capacity from a suitable reservoir of ice, could keep them all in water for four months or more. There was even talk of devising a well and a pipeline, though that might take upwards of a year.

  Behind it all, like a persistent rumor, was Fasbender’s sample of Glacier Grass. For a long while, Hank felt no need to discuss it with Lei, but by the third week—when it became abundantly clear that nothing else they did could match the possibilities of Bessie’s chance find—he found himself forced to raise the subject. They had slipped away and come to rest in the garden, with its mottled splotches of khaki and empires of fungal grey.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this,” Hank said wonderingly.

  “I remember when the first seed broke through. I don’t think I’ve ever been more happy.”

  “If what Fasbender and Tao are saying is right, then this may only be the beginning. Have you heard the latest?”

  “Yes. Doctor Fasbender is sure now that it could be processed into food.”

  “I’ve had to forbid him from trying to eat the stuff. They still don’t really understand its growth mechanism. We’d have to bring in Earth before we thought about that angle seriously.”

  “Yes,” Lei agreed, and the note of melancholy in her voice surprised him.

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh . . . ” She looked up at him quizzically, and tugged unconsciously at a coil of hair. Just when he was certain she wouldn’t answer, she said, “Back in China, they would call me a traitor.”

  Hank considered. “Probably.”

  “I wish it wasn’t like this. I hope that things will get better between our countries. I hope that one day they will be glad of what we’ve done. Perhaps then they will look at this place with hope and not as a playground to fight in.”

  “Nothing lasts forever. In the meantime, we’re just going to have to live with the possibility of being branded traitors. With that in mind,” he said, and then halted, suddenly unsure if he wasn’t too bashful to ask what he’d maneuvered Lei in here to ask. He’d never been good at things like this.

  You’re standing in a garden on the Moon. Perhaps it’s time to start adjusting your ideas of what you can and can’t do.

  He gulped. “How would you fee
l about conspiring with me over dinner tonight?”

  “What do you think we’re going to do all night, go for a walk outside? Man, I can’t believe you’d organize this without even asking us.”

  “Paul, I’m really sorry.” It had been hard enough just revealing his plans for the evening to the others, let alone asking if they’d be okay with vacating the base for a few hours. What kind of a date would it be, though, with Landeimer thrusting peculiar cocktails at them and Fasbender regaling them with his latest discoveries? Still, it was true that he hadn’t thought the details through. If he had, he would never have got around to saying anything. “I’ll absolutely owe you one. I’ll return the favour or—”

  Landeimer’s poker face cracked into a wicked grin. “Hank, you’re so easy. Who’s the one who’s been telling you that you should make a move? Anyway, I’ve got a game organized and Fasbender, to everyone’s surprise, is doing science stuff with his new best pal.”

  Fasbender nodded sagely. “We’re trialing a half-dozen samples with different nutrient bases, seeing if we can’t stimulate a better growth rate.”

  “Damn. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “Well, why would you have?”

  “No . . . I mean, what are we going to eat tonight? What kind of a romantic dinner can you have over ham and pea nutrient tubes?”

  “I have some cookies,” Fasbender said. “I was saving them for a special occasion, and this is as good as any.”

  “Albert, you’re a bona fide saint. I—”

  He was cut off by the raucous screech of the airlock alarm. Surely Lei wouldn’t turn up two hours early . . .

  When he went to the screen, he saw—not from the anonymous bulk of the suit, but by the familiar nametag on its shoulder—that it was her. Surprised and suddenly anxious, he hammered the button marked ‘cycle’ and ducked through the door, leaving Fasbender and Landeimer exchanging puzzled glances.

  For safety reasons, the airlock was a short distance from the base proper. By the time Hank had reached the other end and the huge doors had whirred open, Lei already had her helmet off and tucked beneath one arm. Though her face was perfectly composed, something in her expression made him certain that she’d been crying.

  Before he could ask what was wrong, she said, “They’re taking us back.”

  “What?” He stared at her in horror, willing the words back into her mouth.

  “In a few hours. They’re coming to take us back. The shuttle has already been dispatched.”

  The words barely seemed to penetrate the fog that had suddenly seeped into his brain. “Is it because of—of us, the last few weeks?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know everything, but there has been some change in Beijing. They say now that Yang Liwei is wasteful, that only America chooses to be wasteful in such a way. They say we have no purpose here. It must have been planned for weeks, for months, but they only told us now.”

  “Will you be in trouble?”

  “Perhaps for a while. Then perhaps they will call us heroes. It doesn’t matter.” Lei drew a hand across her face. “I came to say goodbye, Hank. We haven’t much time, and there’s so much to do. They told us to destroy whatever we can.”

  For a moment, her voice faltered. In that instant, Hank remembered the garden in precise detail, every dull grey orb and spike of muted green, and as though they were joined by some momentary telepathy, he knew she was thinking of it too. He wanted urgently to hold her, and realized that any physical connection would be impossible through the bloated mass of her suit.

  The moment passed.

  Her surface calm restored, Lei said, “I have something to return to you.”

  She unzipped one of the suit’s flabby pockets and drew out a flask of some unhealthy-looking liquid. Hank stared in confusion until he recognized it as Fasbender’s original sample of Glacier Grass. He took it from her carefully.

  “Goodbye, Hank,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have dinner with you. I hope that one day, when things are different, you will ask me again.”

  Then she replaced her helmet, and he could no longer see her face.

  It was almost a relief.

  Hank had watched the shuttle, though it was only visible as occasional glints of light depending on the angle of its solar panels, and the effect had been like staring at an empty bottle perched just in sight on a very bright day.

  He’d finally given up and glanced around Shackleton Crater instead. He found nothing in its stark horizons to reassure him, even though this might be the last time he saw it properly. Its walls hung like sheet iron lain upon some colossal scrap heap. Its shadows seemed sinister and unreal.

  An hour ago, two hours after he’d last seen Lei, their own orders had come through. Prepare for recovery at 22:00. Destroy all paper records, electronic memory, organics.

  Among other things, it confirmed what he’d sometimes suspected. The two governments were quite capable of putting aside their hostilities when it suited them. This mutual retreat from the moon had probably been agreed upon months ago.

  Landeimer had taken it well, perhaps had even been pleased. He’d always had the most difficulty with the combination of extreme isolation and constant companionship imposed by lunar living. Fasbender had been stoic, though there had been something heartbreaking in his expression as he fed his samples and data piece by piece into the incinerator.

  When Landeimer had been absent, he’d asked Hank, “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you? You’re not thinking of defecting?”

  “It would kill my folks,” he’d replied, only then realizing that on some level he had been considering it.

  For an instant, anger made him clench his hands until his palms stung. He’d been happy when Lei was around, happier than he ever remembered feeling. Now, most likely, he would never see her again.

  He hadn’t consciously planned to go outside. He had drifted towards the airlock and clambered into his suit with barely a hint of conscious purpose. He’d only remembered the flask in the pocket of his overall at the last minute. The only remaining sample of Glacier Grass, perhaps all that remained in the solar system—maybe the entire galaxy. Still with no real intention, he’d transferred it to a pouch of the suit.

  He’d stared skyward for a long while, observing the Chinese shuttle in its delicate pirouette against the blackness. During that time, a realization had struck him. All those days ago, Lei had never revealed what it was that frightened her. He’d assumed she shared his phobia of abandonment. Perhaps the truth was that, despite his months-long obsession with the barrage of often-contradictory messages their nations sent out, she’d understood the politics between them better than he ever had. Perhaps she’d simply been afraid of this day, and of saying goodbye to her bleak, magnificent foster home.

  Only now, glancing with dissatisfaction around Shackleton Crater, did he remember the flask. He took it out and gazed at it, watching the dark flakes that swirled inside, and realized why he’d come out here in the first place. He remembered what he’d asked Fasbender as he watched his friend cramming the last of his handwritten notes into the incinerator.

  “You really think Glacier Grass could have survived out there? In that dark and cold? It really could have grown?”

  “Yes, I believe so. Of course, we’ll never know for sure.”

  Hank opened his fingers. In the low gravity, the flask fell slowly and settled lazily into the dust. Only when he stamped with his weighted boot did it break, and its contents burst free. An instant later, there was nothing to see but glistening shards of glass and ice.

  Yet amid the debris was something that could grow without air—without atmosphere. Something that had traveled an unimaginably long way. Something that one day might be food, might be fuel, or might be turned to other undreamed-of uses if it survived to be rediscovered.

  It had made it this far. Maybe the odds weren’t so bad.

  He wanted to say something though there was no one to hear. No
thing came to mind. He tried to remember what Lei had told him in the garden that day, and found he couldn’t even manage that. The words jumbled. All he could hear was the specific lilt of her voice.

  In desperation, Hank paraphrased. “Well, we screwed up today. Here’s hoping we get it right tomorrow.”

  About the Author

  David Tallerman is the author of the comic fantasy novels Giant Thief and Crown Thief, as well as the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science. A second sequel to Giant Thief, Prince Thief, is due for release later this year. David’s short science fiction, fantasy and horror has appeared in over fifty markets, including Lightspeed, Bull Spec, Nightmare and Flash Fiction Online.

  The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm

  Daryl Gregory

  The 22nd Invasion of Trovenia began with a streak of scarlet against a gray sky fast as the flick of a paintbrush. The red blur zipped across the length of the island, moving west to east, and shot out to sea. The sonic boom a moment later scattered the birds that wheeled above the fish processing plant and sent them squealing and plummeting.

  Elena said, “Was that—it was, wasn’t it?”

  “You’ve never seen a U-Man, Elena?” Jürgo said.

  “Not in person.” At nineteen, Elena Pendareva was the youngest of the crew by at least two decades, and the only female. She and the other five members of the heavy plate welding unit were perched 110 meters in the air, taking their lunch upon the great steel shoulder of the Slaybot Prime. The giant robot, latest in a long series of ultimate weapons, was unfinished, its unpainted skin speckled with bird shit, its chest turrets empty, the open dome of its head covered only by a tarp.

  It had been Jürgo’s idea to ride up the gantry for lunch. They had plenty of time: for the fifth day in a row, steel plate for the Slaybot’s skin had failed to arrive from the foundry, and the welding crew had nothing to do but clean their equipment and play cards until the guards let them go home.