Chapter One - Pickup
Thursday Nov 18, 2117
Boris Levsky was not an impressive specimen.
In other times, he would have been considered an ancient, his life ebbing, ripe for discard. In the new age, he was one of a cohort still needed to do the work of society. That was because, on Earth, many women had declined to bring children into their world.
That left the world with fewer young people. They needed the older ones, still able. For want of younger folks, they even sent them to the Moon.
Boris was a man past middling years, older than young, yet younger than old. His skin was grey with fatigue. His reddened eyes were unfocused. He nervously rubbed at his scalp, irritating the skin under his stubs of unshaven white hair. He leaned unsteadily against the thin railing behind him. He looked exhausted, hardly able to stand.
Those eyes were open but they did not see. Instead, they looked inward, at an altered world that offered makeshift sanctuary. Under pressure too great for him to bear, he withdrew, and cowered within.
They had chained him up against that moon-dark wall to await exile. He had been battered by a week with little sleep, constant pressure, and mortal fear for those dear to him. He had been forced to kill. All that, concentrated in a brief span of time, had finally upended him.
He was a grown man, but that shuttered mind remade the child in him, instilling juvenile imagination and juvenile fears. It was recess in his schoolyard. His captors became children playing alongside him, menacing one another in phony mortal combat. The light reflecting off the hard surface of the treeless yard was intense, a Mesozoic afternoon in summer. He imagined himself a powerful raptor, growling to alarm his tormentors.
His protective use of that linkage was not original. People had not missed the bond the Impact had forged between them and the Dinosaurs, the last top predators. The two impacts and the two species were welded together in the popular imagination.
After a few moments,he was finally able to conjure his lizard protector, but it lacked comforting definition. He struggled to clothe it, to lend it substance.
How would it have looked standing there instead of him? What kind of clothes would it have worn? Would they have been of leather? Would its hat mimic the ridge on its crested head? Would it lisp when it spoke its reptile tongue? Would it have its own Moon lenses in its black, bird’s eyes? For it would be a civilized dinosaur. A creature more capable than him, certainly, better able to deal with his troubles.
All that was triggered when Matt Morrison aggressively affixed his chains.
Matt was gloating, a sneer twisting his broad, sullen face:
“This is what you deserve, snitch. For what you did. We weren’t hurting anybody. No call for the nuke, jerk. Finally, you’re history, you old fart.”
Boris, locked in his fantasy, could only manage an indecipherable grunt in reaction.
The padlock was grotesquely big, barely fitting through the links of the absurdly heavy chain that completed the set. That, on a planet that had no need for locks. He was the first prisoner they had ever had, unless one counted occasional drunks confined for a few hours on the weekend. None of them were chained.
The heavy links seemed built to restrain his imaginary raptor, a creature who would have dwarfed him. That being would have been powerful enough to have required such restraints. One who might be standing there if its species had lived through that day sixty-six million years previous. The day that had erased its kind and promoted our species in replacement. That process drove humans to the Moon instead of them.
Ours could easily have been another world. One where the first of those two impactor strikes, that one that destroyed them, had never happened. A miniscule change in its path would have caused their species killer to miss the Earth entirely. The second Impact, that came so close to exterminating humanity, just decades previous, would have come to them instead. Intelligent, they could have journeyed there, instead of Homo ‘sapiens’.
Man’s mammalian ancestors would have remained underfoot, mouse-sized, and mouse-smart. The Human species would never have been. After enduring untold millions of years at the bottom of the food chain, our tiny forebears would have died unnoticed in the extinction that followed the Impact. They would have been just more exposed wild animals eradicated with their fellows. That would have left the dinosaurs to struggle for survival, as Humans were struggling. An insignificant change in an endless universe, yet it was all to Earth’s existing inhabitants.
His mind couldn’t hold that bizarre fantasy for long against the insistent demands of reality. His interior perspective cleared, despite itself, and the shield dissolved. His eyes came into full focus again. Of course, both strikes did happen. One to them, and one to us. The dinosaurs were gone, and we were there. They did not survive.
Mankind, just barely, had. The Dinosaurs had lost their world. We had hung on to ours, just fingertip tight. They had not been lucky. We had been just lucky enough. Humans were the ones who stood on the Moon. Temporary winners in a cosmic crapshoot where beings were and still remain the dice. There was no way to ignore that.
Humanity’s homestead on the Moon was certainly unlikely. Who would have freely chosen to live there? Yet the threat of repetition of the Impact effectively precluded choice. Proximity and resources drew them. Fear for the survival of mankind kept them. Growing love of their barren home bound them.
Cyra’s eons-old dark asteroid promised to supply their needs, but its offerings, too, were mixed. Cyra’s discovery had set the previous week’s events in motion, and it had cost her.
Of course, the whole scene that confronted Boris was theatrical overkill. It fit the fancy, though. They could have as effectively confined him with a bow-tied doily. But the chain made a statement. He was a threat.
Matt had probably volunteered for the assignment to chain Boris. Matt was still pissed at Boris. He did have a reason for his venomous overture. As legal officer on a busy Saturday night a few years previous, the old man had sucker-punched him in front of his buddies. That was at a party that grew too loud and strayed too far. Boris was too busy that night to get to the peace part of peace officer. It would have been better to sit down with him and explain it, after. Boris never got around to it.
So, the sore remained open. Matt was decked by a codger, in public, and never quite got over it. A vengeful smile played over his face. It revealed that he was pleased with the idea of humiliation in return, although it didn’t really touch his prisoner. He was bemused at the time, and soon he would be far beyond Matt’s resentment.
Because then, he was the creature at bay.
He was later sure his father would have found a way to keep his head down and do the job without attracting too much attention, and he then felt that paternal example should have informed him, but it didn’t take. He had banked on celebrity to ensure safety for his friends and associates. So much for that.
His father would have known better. He was the sometime manager of a prominent hotel in his hometown with an equally prominent watering hole favored by entertainers, news reporters, and their malodorous hangers on. Some small celebrity would have been easy for him.
Some of his less thoughtful associates took it and shriveled in its glare. He stayed low and lived a quiet, and mostly happy life, and his family were kept sheltered. Boris wished that he had heard his father’s voice to remind him yet again. His father could have told him what to do. Unhappily, he let the echo of his father’s memory, and his sage advice, fade over the twenty odd years since his death.
Boris had depended on his own judgement and made others do the same. He wondered whether he could have done it differently. It was really a pointless question. He hadn’t figured it out then, and it was open whether he ever would.
The chain had him shackled to one of the lockers, wound about his waist to leave his hands free. Chained like a dangerous animal, but preferable to arm and leg irons. Displayed in darkened hues on the wall behind him was some Moonscape, perhaps the one on the other side of the hab wall, unnecessarily reminding him that there was no place to escape to.
After all, he was a killer, and the label did fit. He had taken life, in defiance, technically, of established authority. He was an extremely dangerous geezer with gimpy knees.
On the other side of the room, a Plaser in her hand, stood his embarrassed and tearful friend Gloria, leaning against a virtual palm tree in a dazzling virtual jungle, outlined in a harsh light amped to hurt the eyes. He had to look away, and that was intended also. She was the Constable, and she was assigned to guard him along with the ‘deputies’ who so recently helped him kill Rudy. Seven of them, all armed.
And somehow, they had thought to get a uniform jumper on her, so she looked like a proper policewoman and matched the guys in the posse.
He was out of the same bed as her twenty minutes previous. They had cut his sweats’ waistband. That left him standing there trying to hold up his pants with the one hand, stuffing the cut ends under the chain. His personals, in a dirty yellow plastic carryall, were suspended by the other one. A ridiculous figure, at best. A little at odds with the threatening theme they had set with the padlock.
Gloria was then subdued, watchful, and reticent.
Even though she was nominally in charge, she didn’t speak. She was silent and remained pensive. He hoped she was already rationalizing her separation from him. They were going to be disconnected by an unbridgeable distance for the rest of their lives. He was being exiled, and unless his captors relented, there was no return. A clean break was better.
Of course, they sent her to pick him up. As he slept, the familiar spicy sweet perfume came off her body and he reached for her unconsciously. Awakening, he became aware of her presence, and the logic of it fell into place. She could never have gotten past the recognition circuit on the door unless someone had enabled her. They still had those locks, and he had never disabled his. A relic from a previous life preserved because he remained as formlessly anxious as all his fellows.
It was obvious that she was there for something significant. She had never before entered his apartment without consent. So, he just rolled over and held her against him for a while. He didn’t even express the deep satisfaction he felt just to be holding her. He didn’t have the nerve to ask her exactly what was in store. He was fearful of what she would have to answer. No need to make her feel the betrayer. He would find out soon enough.
His feelings for her hadn’t changed and he let his body tell the truth of it. It said that he was grateful for their time together, fond of her, and thankful for the intimacy and grace she had given. It didn’t even enter his mind to blame her for being an instrument of whatever change awaited him. He had passed that stage in life. Someone had to do it, and who better than her, who was softened by some affection?
Gloria never had told him different than that she cared for him too. Both had enjoyed happy, loving marriages. Neither of them would have disclosed that theirs was a tepid, second-time affair, reminding them more of what they had lost than what they had, with none of that magical connection. The understanding, built from a lifetime of knowledge and sharing, the union of souls, was not there. But what little there was, was so much better than nothing.
He had only known two women intimately in his life and you could not describe him as a great lover or at all knowledgeable in the ways of women. Yet the range of his affection was offset by its intensity. He had never regretted not having wider experience. Love, under a microscope, has as much complexity in its miniature as does the whole wide world in its perspective. There is a universe inside each one of us. He had always preferred to know more about less rather than less about more. And he had been fortunate enough to know women who thought the same.
Gloria, his second love, had a remarkable likeness to his first wife that he never dared mention to her. No fem can appreciate being valued by a lover because of her similarity to another. Although not sharing any overt physical similarities with his wife Esther, who was small and dark, where she was tall and fair, there was one telling singularity. They were both quiet people, liking conversation and books, though both were more outgoing than him. They both enjoyed sitting in company with another, and he valued that. But how could you tell that to a fem? That, it was the intimate, silent times, that were treasured? I like you because you are boring? Yet, it was not that to him.
He didn’t take that resemblance as a reminder or replacement for Esther, but he was grateful that those two women, so different in most ways, could be so alike valuation of that one quality he prized so highly. He marveled how lucky he was to come upon two such sweet women. It reflected the variability and the continuity of life. That bond of humanity was one of life’s greatest comforts to him.
Even though he knew that his pages recounting the week’s events would be read, at least, by those close to him, he didn’t think his children, or Gloria, for that matter, would be embarrassed by them. He didn’t think their estimation of him would be diminished by knowing that his loves were passionate as well as mundane. Isn’t the ability to love the true measure of humanity? When someone truly loves, he or she wants to share the full scope of that person’s being. That is how people come to know others. There can be no shame in it.
When they had laid at rest for a few minutes, they rose and washed, and she motioned him with the yellow bag she had brought to help him to choose the few things he could take. The mere act told him precisely what was to happen to him. He was going away. Certainly not back to Earth with its dangers and its instant notoriety. So, in the other direction, then – Mars.
When she talked, notwithstanding their recent intimacy, she didn’t go out of her way to be kind. He knew he deserved no better on parting. It is the emotional betrayal that stings, and he had stung her.
“Well, lover, you are an exile now, and I’m not so sure I am all in mourning. I won’t need to fight a dead fem. Marion called me, just before she died, after that last soup tête-à-tête you had with her. She was all rhapsodic about the look, the connection. You and I know it. That poor girl didn’t.
“Never had it in her poor deprived life, so maybe you did some good sharing it with her, even if ever so briefly. I don’t know, but it was Earth-shaking to her. She was - giggly.
“You and I weren’t any Romeo and Juliet, but I thought we were exclusive. That thing with Marion was supposed to be playacting. Changed, didn’t it? You just can’t leave well enough alone in anything. If you had gone along, and done what you were told, most of this wouldn’t have happened.”Then a pause. The look on her face changed from scathing to serious.
“No, that isn’t fair. We all wanted to do something for Cyra. That’s not your fault.”
And then she added “Entirely. Asshole.” With a straight face, no smile to soften it. An uncompromising goodbye.
He knew he was wrong to say it. He did, though. Honest to the fault, he was. He said: “How could I ignore it? How many times does it happen for two people? Just one other time, in my life.”
In retrospect, he regretted anew the cruelty of telling her that explicitly. She knew already, why did he drill it in? He judged he was still not mature enough, even at his age, to overlook a rebuke, however justified. To tell her that she didn’t measure up to his ideal of true love, when he should have known it mattered to her at least a little. He could have held his tongue. But how often, he reflected, did he think to do that? He had been raised to be cruel in order to be kind. He had been trained to tell the unvarnished truth. As if people wanted to know the truth. He should have known better.
Then, without another word, she waited for him to bag his stuff, wearing an expression he couldn’t quite decipher that he sensed was mixed anger and regret. And fairly considered, it should have been, too. He had upset her life as much as his, without any prior consultation. And insulted her into the bargain. He deserved no better.
When he had finished, she took him to the departure room to wait for the shuttle. It was a long walk, longer than it had ever been before. The last one. He went quietly. He could not refuse her, but they armed her anyway, later, to set the scene.
By that time, the vid of Rudy’s hopeless standoff was all over the nets on Earth and he had gone from failed detective to conquering, killer, sheriff in one step. He was a hero!
He waited for the shuttle to take him up to the Rockship for Mars with his 18 kilograms of stuff. His clothes, a few old real books, some toiletries, and, strangely, his father’s tefillin, the Jewish ceremonial prayer boxes that he never used, were among them. He couldn’t leave them behind because they were freighted with history, that still stung with loss and yet seduced with pleasant memories. He brought Ben’s old yarmulke, its worn cloth peeking out behind the stars, burdened as well.
And, not the least, the two scraps of canvas he had had imprinted with his favorites among Esther’s paintings. They were the sea eggs, the one with the red house on her shoulders, and that hawkish self-portrait, along with the framee telescoping stretchers to hang them. Yes, those were personals always with him. The pics of his beloveds and all the rest of Esther’s stuff were on the cloud store accessed by his ever-present fon, but he couldn’t see them then.
They had cut his COMM, although the op system still worked. It’s disorienting to group beings to be unconnected, and it unsettled him to look at the display panel. Its emptiness, a precipice of its own, made him feel dizzy and almost sick to his stomach.
Every person has that fon tat always. Like eyes and ears. His forearm felt bare without the flickering messages crawling across the panel. So rarely was this done that they probably didn’t realize that the COMM cut alone would have been enough to subdue him.
In the previous week, events had set the capstone to his losses. Marion had followed Ben and just earlier, Milton. He had alienated Gloria. That was his fault, he knew. And Fin, his last friend, was hunkering in his own dungeon. His was a leaving without parting, and it made him overwhelmingly sad. He already had lost his first family when he came to the Moon. That was his choice, as well. When he had lost a second, he was overwhelmed.
Behind him, the displayscreen still showed a lunar night in black and white. Fused stone regolith pavers led off into a regolith field that faded into a regolith blackness. LED status beams punctuated the residual darkness. Its contrast, set against the aggressive jungle scene on the other wall, split the room and unsettled the senses to produce a residue of anxiety. That was incremental to the unsettling events that were being imposed on him.
The Lunar backdrop set the mood. Yet it told him that another scenario had been created. It was still daytime there for almost another two weeks. They had a talented vid director on that job.
Gloria would follow her instructions. They watched. There was no point even thinking of causing trouble then. Even if he were minded to, there was no way to make any, restrained as he was.
He looked at the guys he had with him when they tried to arrest Rudy, again with their Plasers and KO collars. They were not there to deter violence. Just having taken part in a demonstration of the futility of resistance to weapons, he was unlikely to try to battle seven armed people. Was he going to fight them off and grab a surfacesuit to scoot off over some lunar hill? To where? They were there to dress the scene, just like the padlocks and chains.
They were banishing him from the austere world that was his home; from the people he loved, the place he had lived, and the things he loved to do. He would never see their new city Rubin built.
They had chosen to let him live. Easy to kill him, and finish it, but maybe, they just concluded that too many deaths close together would make them look -overzealous.
Of course, their killer was dead. There would be no embarrassing confessions from him. And Boris guessed his laughable efforts as investigator gave their actions a gloss of legality. It might be a bit awkward if the investigator died.
And too, when the LSA was making so much money, the UN might be thinking it would not be undesirable if they had an excuse to revoke their license. They could take it all for themselves because order was ‘breaking down’ under the Authority. He didn’t think their counterparts in the Lunar enterprise, the shareholders of the LSA, the largest companies on Earth, would want that.
And maybe his name, all over the nets as the famous investigator, the champion of public order, did lend him a little extra bit of insurance.
Whatever the reason, he remained alive, even though his knowledge remained dangerous, and his mere existence exasperating. He would not be free to reveal it where he was going. Lucky for him too, it was not exclusive knowledge. Zeinab knew, and they couldn’t do without her. And Fin, and Gloria. A lot of useful people to kill. They made it inconvenient, and impractical.
So maybe it was just that there was no more immediate benefit from violence. They had what they wanted. He wouldn’t be able to talk, and Zeinab wouldn’t want to. And the others, well, they were tied to him. Moreover, their Boris problem would be simultaneously displaced twenty-something light minutes from Earth. He would be isolated in a separate, cached networld, and under surveillance. Much different than 1.5 seconds and almost immediate access to the nets. He couldn’t make more trouble.
And he was going willingly because he had come to comprehend his sin. He had been careless with at least one life and he was just lucky that the others he put at risk were still alive. He had known that serious and ruthless people were at work. Unintended consequences certainly, but not unforeseeable.
He knew that people would eventually discover the truth about him. And he was enough of a coward not to be eager to be there when they did. He was content to be bundled away. He had lost a lot less than some others. Yet he couldn’t see how he could have acted much different. He couldn’t have just ignored Cyra, denying her ghost even the poor reckoning he could offer. And he couldn’t have done anything effective without the skills of his friends.
Even so, he wished that he could have found a way to use them without risking them. Unhappily, he had felt the power. At his age and experience, dangerously naïve. He should have husbanded his friends - events had warned him from the beginning that there was danger. It was weakness, the more seductive because he thought it was strength. He was the one who created the provocation to kill Marion.
It all kept playing in his head, sweeping through the previous week over and over. Scene after scene he could not stop. Like an excruciating vid that can’t be turned off, repeating continuously, ending in death and destruction.
By some strange mental process, he remembered every detail, rare for him. It was like it was happening again, each time it played. Considering the events, it was an unpleasant experience. Even his random thoughts, in all their aberrant irrelevance, returned in lockstep with the searing trials of the week.
Those last days had wrung him out. His mind was still disordered. So much had happened. He was just so tired; all he wanted to do was rest. He couldn’t, though. His mind wouldn’t stop. So right then, it was OK to remain inert, and let others decide what to do with his life while that story pounded through his head.
