Year’s Best SF 15 (40 page)

And so I Go Down.

They take your ID and keep it. It is a safety measure to hold as many of humankind safely below as possible. I realize I will never see the sun again. No sunset cumulonimbus, no shushing of the sea, no schools of sardines swimming like veils of silver in clear water, no unreliable songbirds that may fail to appear, no more brown grass, no more dusty wild flowers unregarded by the roadside. No thunder to strike the
neak ta
, no chants at midnight, no smells of fish frying, no rice on the floor of the temple.

I am a son of Kambu. Kampuchea.

I slope into the elevator.

“Hey, Boss,” says a voice. The sound of it makes me unhappy before I recognize who it is. Ah yes, with his lucky mustache. It is someone who used to work in my hotel. My Embezzler. He looks delighted, pleased to see me. “Isn't this great? Wait till you see it!”

“Yeah, great,” I murmur.

“Listen,” says an intervener to my little thief. “Nothing you can say will make this guy happy.”

“He's a nice guy,” says the Embezzler. “I used to work for him. Didn't I, Boss?”

This is my legacy thug, inherited from my boss. He embezzled his fare from me and disappeared, oh, two years ago. These people may think he's a friend, but I bet he still has his stolen guns, in case there is trouble.

“Good to see you,” I lie. I know when I am outnumbered.

For some reason that makes him chuckle, and I can see
his silver-outlined teeth. I am ashamed that this unpunished thief is now my only friend.

Agnete knows the story, sniffs and looks away. “I should have married a genetic man,” she murmurs.

Never, ever tread on someone else's dream.

The lift is mirrored, and there are holograms of light as if we stood inside an infinite diamond, glistering all the way up to a blinding heaven. And dancing in the fire, brand names.

Gucci.

Armani.

Sony.

Yamomoto.

Hugo Boss.

And above us, clear to the end and the beginning, the stars. The lift goes down.

Those stars have cost us dearly. All around me, the faces look up in unison.

Whole nations were bankrupted trying to get there, to dwarf stars and planets of methane ice. Arizona disappeared in an annihilation as matter and antimatter finally met, trying to build an engine. Massive junk still orbits half-assembled, and will one day fall. The saps who are left behind on Ground Zero will probably think it's the comet.

But trying to build those self-contained starships taught us how to do this instead.

Earthside, you walk out of your door, you see birds fly. Just after the sun sets and the bushes bloom with bugs, you will see bats flitter, silhouetted as they neep. In hot afternoons the bees waver, heavy with pollen, and I swear even fishes fly. But nothing flies between the stars except energy. You wanna be converted into energy, like Arizona?

So we Go Down.

Instead of up.

“The first thing you will see is the main hall. That should cheer up you claustrophobics,” says my Embezzler. “It is the biggest open space we have in the Singapore facility. And as you will see, that's damn big!” The travelers chuckle in appreciation. I wonder if they don't pipe in some of that cheerful sound.

And poor Gerda, she will wake up for a second time in another new world. I fear it will be too much for her.

The lift walls turn like stiles, reflecting yet more light in shards, and we step out.

 

Ten stories of brand names go down in circles—polished marble floors, air-conditioning, little murmuring carts, robot pets that don't poop, kids in the latest balloon shoes.

“What do you think of that!” the Malay Network demands of me. All its heads turn, including the women wearing modest headscarves.

“I think it looks like Kuala Lumpur on a rainy afternoon.”

The corridors of the emporia go off into infinity as well, as if you could shop all the way to Alpha Centauri. An illusion of course, like standing in a hall of mirrors.

It's darn good, this technology, it fools the eye for all of thirty seconds. To be fooled longer than that, you have to want to be fooled. At the end of the corridor, reaching out for somewhere beyond, distant and pure, there is only light.

We have remade the world.

Agnete looks worn. “I need a drink, where's a bar?”

I need to be away too, away from these people who know that I have a wife for whom my only value has now been spent.

Our little trolley finds us, calls our name enthusiastically, and advises us. In Ramlee Mall, level ten, Central Tower we have the choice of Bar Infinity, the Malacca Club (share the Maugham experience), British India, the Kuala Lumpur Tower View….

Agnete chooses the Seaside Pier; I cannot tell if out of kindness or irony.

I step inside the bar with its high ceiling and for just a moment my heart leaps with hope. There is the sea, the islands, the bridges, the sails, the gulls, and the sunlight dancing. Wafts of sugar vapor inside the bar imitate sea mist, and the breathable sugar makes you high. At the other end of the bar is what looks like a giant orange orb (half of one, the other half is just reflected). People lounge on the brand-name sand (guaranteed to brush away and evaporate.) Fifty meters
overhead, there is a virtual mirror that doubles distance so you can look up and see yourself from what appears to be a hundred meters up, as if you are flying. A Network on its collective back is busy spelling the word HOME with their bodies.

We sip martinis. Gerda still sleeps and I now fear she always will.

“So,” says Agnete, her voice suddenly catching up with her butt, and plonking down to Earth and relative calm. “Sorry about that back there. It was a tense moment for both of us. I have doubts too. About coming here, I mean.”

She puts her hand on mine.

“I will always be so grateful to you,” she says and really means it. I play with one of her fingers. I seem to have purchased loyalty.

“Thank you,” I say, and I realize that she has lost mine.

She tries to bring love back by squeezing my hand. “I know you didn't want to come. I know you came because of us.”

Even the boys know there is something radically wrong. Sampul and Tharum stare in silence, wide brown eyes. Did something similar happen with Dad number one?

Rith the eldest chortles with scorn. He needs to hate us so that he can fly the nest.

My heart is so sore I cannot speak.

“What will you do?” she asks. That sounds forlorn, so she then tries to sound perky. “Any ideas?”

“Open a casino,” I say, feeling deadly.

“Oh! Channa! What a wonderful idea, it's just perfect!”

“Isn't it? All those people with nothing to do.” Someplace they can bring their powder. I look out at the sea.

Rith rolls his eyes. Where is there for Rith to go from here? I wonder. I see that he too will have to destroy his inheritance. What will he do, drill the rock? Dive down into the lava? Or maybe out of pure rebellion ascend to Earth again?

The drug wears off and Gerda awakes, but her eyes are calm and she takes an interest in the table and the food. She walks outside onto the mall floor, and suddenly squeals with
laughter and runs to the railing to look out. She points at the glowing yellow sign with black ears and says “Disney.” She says all the brand names aloud, as if they are all old friends.

I was wrong. Gerda is at home here.

I can see myself wandering the whispering marble halls like a ghost, listening for something that is dead.

We go to our suite. It's just like the damn casino, but there are no boats outside to push slivers of wood into your hands, no sand too hot for your feet. Cambodia has ceased to exist, for us.

Agnete is beside herself with delight. “What window do you want?”

I ask for downtown Phnom Penh. A forest of gray, streaked skyscrapers to the horizon. “In the rain,” I ask.

“Can't we have something a bit more cheerful?”

“Sure. How about Tuol Sleng prison?”

I know she doesn't want me. I know how to hurt her. I go for a walk.

Overhead in the dome is the Horsehead Nebula. Radiant, wonderful, deadly, thirty years to cross at the speed of light.

I go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist looks like a phony doctor in an ad. I ask, “Is…is there some way out?”

“You can go Earthside with no ID. People do. They end up living in huts on Sentosa. But that's not what you mean, is it?”

I just shake my head. It's like we've been edited to ensure that nothing disturbing actually gets said. He gives me a tiny white bag with blue lettering on it.

Instant, painless, like all my flopping guests at the casino.

“Not here,” he warns me. “You take it and go somewhere else, like the public toilets.”

Terrifyingly, the pack isn't sealed properly. I've picked it up, I could have the dust of it on my hands; I don't want to wipe them anywhere. What if one of the children licks it?

I know then I don't want to die. I just want to go home, and always will. I am a son of Kambu, Kampuchea.

“Ah,” he says and looks pleased. “You know, the Buddha says that we must accept.”

“So why didn't we accept the Earth?” I ask him.

The pharmacist in his white lab coat shrugs. “We always want something different.”

We always must move on and if we can't leave home, it drives us mad. Blocked and driven mad, we do something new.

 

There was one final phase to becoming a man. I remember my uncle. The moment his children and his brother's children were all somewhat grown, he left us to become a monk. That was how a man was completed, in the old days.

I stand with a merit bowl in front of the wat. I wear orange robes with a few others. Curiously enough, Rith has joined me. He thinks he has rebelled. People from Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma, and my own land give us food for their dead. We bless it and chant in Pali.

We got what we wanted. We always do, don't we, as a species? One way or another.

Michael Cassutt is a television producer and screenwriter who lives in Studio City, California, with his wife, Cindy, and two children, Ryan and Alexandra. He has published five novels, most recently
Tango Midnight
(2003). He began publishing short fiction in the mid-70s, and novels in the mid-80s. Since 1985, he has worked in writing and producing for television, and has had an extensive association with SF and fantasy shows (including
Outer Limits, Max Headroom, The Twilight Zone).
He is also a noted space historian, who has published two large volumes of the biographical encyclopedia
Who's Who in Space,
and collaborated on the biography
Deke!
with astronaut Deke Slayton. He is currently completing
Heaven's Shadow,
the first volume of an SF trilogy, with screenwriter David S. Goyer. In an interview he remarks, “My desire to do “realistic” space novels pretty much forced me to make them contemporary. But I've always wanted to write ‘pure,' far future science fiction at book length.”

“The Last Apostle” was published in
Asimov's.
Cassutt's knowledge of astronauts and space programs is so extensive that this alternate universe story of astronauts has the feel of naturalism and conviction, that made us want to include it in this volume. It is a fine example of space program fiction that looks back at the twentieth century without a sense of lingering failure.

Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.

—Matthew 10:26

“H
eart attack?”

“No. Took a spill on his mountain bike. Hit a patch of sand barreling down some crappy road up near Flagstaff.”

Spell-check smoothed the errors of the e-mail exchange while failing to add texture or emotion. Nevertheless, Joe Liquori could not help smiling at the inescapable perfection of the news. Chuck Behrens' death had all the elements of his life: the outdoors, excess speed, and a total disregard for other people's rules and expectations.

For God's sake, Chuck had been eighty-nine last April thirteenth. (The birth date was easy to remember; he and Joe shared it, three years apart.) Joe could not possibly have gotten his ancient ass
onto
a mountain bike, much less ridden it up, around or down some twisty road.

“He was a good man,” he typed, as tears came to his eyes and his breathing quickened. Thank God this was text, not voice. These sudden, uncontrollable swells of emotion had afflicted Joe for forty years. But they still annoyed him.

“It's okay, Dad.” Jason, his son, was fifty-nine, with children and grandchildren of his own: did he find himself growing more teary?

“Is there going to be a service?” Not that there was any chance Joe would be able to attend.

“Family says only a private memorial. Possibly going to want his ashes on the Moon.” Jason added an emoticon for irony.

“So I'm the last one.”

“And the best.”
Thank you for that, son
. Joe logged off with a goodbye for now, then sat back.

There had been twelve of them on the six lunar landing missions. Twelve who experienced the terrifying, exhilarating, barely controlled fall from sixty miles altitude to the gunpowder gray dust of the lunar surface. Twelve who opened a flimsy metal door to a harsh world of blinding sunlight. Twelve who had the explorer's privilege of uttering first words. Twelve who left footprints where no one had gone before.

More accurately, twelve who, years later, would experience trouble with eyes, heart, hands, lungs, all traceable to time spent slogging across the lunar surface wearing a rigid metallic cloth balloon. Twelve who bathed in varying degrees of acclaim while suffering varying degrees of guilt over those who died along the way—and those who did the real work on the ground.

Twelve Apostles
, according to that stupid book.

Joe knew them all, of course. There was the Aviator—the classic American kid from the heartland, standing outside a grass airfield watching planes take off…the Preacher, the reformed drunkard and womanizer who found Jesus not on the Moon, not during the death march of booze and babes that followed, but years later after, a bumpy airplane ride as a passenger…the Visionary, who used his lunar celebrity to give unjustified weight to everything from spoon-bending to geomancy…

There was the Businessman, and his shadier, less successful twin, the Shark. The Mystic. The Doctor. The Politician. The Good Old Boy. The Lifer.

Then, as always, there was the Alpha Male of Apollo—Chuck Behrens.

Joseph Liquori, ninety-four, lunar module pilot for Apollo 506 and known, by the same scheme, as Omega—the Last Apostle—sipped his carefully rationed vodka and let himself
weep, for a fallen comrade and an old friend, and for himself.

 

An hour later, Joe decided to take a walk.

This was not a casual decision. He had reached a stage in his life where exiting his living quarters required preparation. The facility he now called home provided him with a tiny bedroom and shared common area, roughly the same living space he had as a graduate student in Minneapolis' Dinky Town in the 1950s. He could afford better—a palace in northern California, with vistas, gardens, rows of books, servants, and possibly a big-breasted “nurse.”

In fact, Joe had once possessed a mansion as well as several attractive, attentive nurses. But the nurses were gone, and the palace in Marin County had already been torn down, another lesson in the ephemeral nature of earthly existence. Or so the Preacher had informed Joe, the last time they shared a meal.

In order to take a walk, Joe faced the usual agonizing hygienic and mechanical procedures typical of advanced age—the mechanisms to assure continence, the visual and aural aids, the medical monitoring hardware, all bringing to mind the phrase he had over-used since his arrival: “It's easier to walk on the Moon than it is to walk down my driveway.”

He was not required to get permission, but it was always smart to have help. Kari Schiff, the fresh-faced pixie from Kansas who called herself Joe's “co-pilot,” didn't think he should be going outside at all.

Until he told her about the Alpha's death. “Then let me come with you,” she said.

“I won't be going far.” It wasn't a big lie, by NASA astronaut standards.

“You're sure?” Kari looked at her two colleagues, Jeffords and Bock. Bock had medical training, but he was also a passionate Libertarian. Any doubts about Joe's ability to take a walk in these circumstances were subordinate to his conviction that each man had the inalienable right to choose the time and place of his death.

Not that a walk would
necessarily
be fatal. “Okay,” Kari said, “let's put on your armor.”

The “armor” was an EVA suit, a rigid exo-skeleton that split in two at the waist, and in the best of circumstances could never be donned by a single person working alone. Especially not a man in his nineties, even if said senior was working in lunar gravity. Checking the life-support fittings and operation took more time.

Finally Joe was buttoned up, much as he had been that day in April 1973, when he had emerged from the front hatch of the lunar module Pathfinder on the Apollo 506 mission.

Five hours after receiving the instant message from his son about the Alpha's death, Joe Liquori emerged from the thirty-foot tall habitat (nicknamed the Comfort Inn) that he shared with three other astronauts at Aitken Base, on the far side of the Moon, to complete the last mission of Apollo.

The names had been bestowed on them by Maxine Felice, a famously confrontational Swiss journalist who tracked them relentlessly for a decade, ultimately publishing a controversial bestseller called
The Apostles
. (Chuck hated the title, as he made clear to Joe the next time they met. “Apostles? Remember what happened to those guys? Crucified upside down? Boiled in oil? No, thanks!”)

Felice had persisted: it was no coincidence, she said, that their number was twelve. “Our mission is slightly different,” the Aviator had said. “And so is the God we serve.”

The woman dismissed that. “What is Apollo if not a god?”

Joe's agreement with Aitken Enterprises entitled him to a ninety-day stay with “possible” extensions. In truth, the company's laughable inability to maintain a regular launch schedule ensured at least one automatic “extension” to 180. And when an earlier Aitken Station crewmember required return to earth soonest, Joe offered to buy his seat; his hand-picked crew ops panel magically agreed; and Aitken's cash flow problems eased for a month.

On the day the Alpha Apostle ran off that road in Arizona, Joe Liquori was in his 196th day at Aitken Base, where his time was largely spent blogging to the public—and telling sea stories. (The station trio especially loved the “true” story behind the Mystic's death.)

Kari Schiff, the real space cadet of the three, even played the Maxine Felice game, asking Joe, “If you guys were the Apostles, what are we?”

“‘The three who can't find ice'?” Bock said, sneering. “Weren't they in the Letter to the Corinthians?” Jeffords howled with laughter as Kari punched him in the arm. It was true that the Aitken team had yet to find significant water ice, the primary goal of the whole enterprise. But they had found traces, and they continued to search, spending most of their time preparing for each EVA, then actually performing the ten-hour job in armor, then recovering. They were lucky to accomplish two cycles every eight days.

In between, they managed the Virtual Moonwalks, driving mini-rovers across the surface to give paying customers back on Earth their own Aitken Experience. Now and then they made test runs of the processing gear from the Ops Shack, a second habitat connected to the Comfort Inn by an inflatable tunnel.

Emerging from the habitat, Joe ran through the perfunctory communications checks, which ended with a question from Kari: “So, just in case anyone asks…where are you headed?”

“Where else?” he said. “Where Pathfinder landed.”

Joe had come back to the Moon in order to revisit a key moment in his own life that, based on other accounts, he either misremembered or missed altogether. He likened himself to a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne returning to Normandy fifty years after D-Day.

It was possible, of course, that the discovery he and the Alpha made on their second EVA had distorted the experience for him.

What ever the reason, his only firm memories of those three days on the Moon were constant nervousness about the timeline, dull fear, total exhaustion. The fear started with the hiccup of the lunar module's descent engine during pitchover—so anomalous that it caused cool, calm Chuck Behrens, the Alpha Apostle, to turn his head inside his fish-bowl helmet, eyes wide with alarm, mouthing a simple, expressive, “Wow.”

But, in classic Alpha fashion, doing nothing. The engine resumed full thrust and the landing proceeded and, powered by adrenaline and relief, the two astronauts zoomed through their checklist to their first EVA. (Chuck's first words were, “Hey, Mom and Dad, look at me.” Then Joe's more mundane, “A lovely day for a walk.”)

Even though there were three relay satellites in orbit around the Moon the day Alpha and Omega landed, comm from the far side was still intermittent. Nevertheless, the first seven-hour jaunt went by the numbers. Flag erected. Rover deployed. Scientific instruments sited.

After what turned out to be twenty hours of wakefulness and extreme stress, neither astronaut needed a sleeping pill to sack out in the cramped, uncomfortable Pathfinder.

The next day—the public relations ceremonies and contingency sampling behind them—they were able to board the rover quickly and be on the road, just the way the Alpha loved to fire up a T-38 aircraft and bolt into the Texas sky. This was to be their long traverse, if circumstances and terrain permitted, reaching a straight-line distance from Pathfinder of six kilometers. (“Close enough so we can walk back if the rover conks on us.”)

The target location was known as Great Salt Lake, named by a geologist from Utah. GSL was a kidney-shaped mini-mare a kilometer wide and three high, marked by a rich variety of clustered craters and crevasses.

By the three-hour point of the EVA, the astronauts were
deploying instruments at the first of their two planned stops when they faced a forty-minute gap in the link to Houston. The Alpha said, “Hey, Joe, let's hike over there.”

There
was a shadowed cleft in a rock face a dozen meters high, about fifty meters to the south. It appeared to be the mouth of a cave in the low hills inside GSL. Joe knew it, of course. His memory for the Aitken Basin Site was photographic. The passage was narrow, jagged, but did not lead to a cave, just an open area the geologists called the Atrium.

Had the Alpha asked, “What do you think?” Joe would have said,
Every minute of this EVA has been planned. This site is one the geologists have been aching to visit for a decade. And we're supposed to take a spelunking detour?
But the question was never offered.

The Alpha entered first, stopped (a bit of a trick, given his high center of gravity and forward momentum) and said, “See anything?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Color. Anything but black or gray.”

“What, some kind of oxidized soil? Shit.” Here Joe slipped and fell to his hands. Even with the suit and life-support pack, which together weighed more than he did, he was easily able to push himself back to standing without help.

“This guy I know at JPL saw a flash of color in a single frame of film that he was processing.” Chuck stopped and turned left, then right, sweeping with his hand, each motion severely constrained by the suit. “Here.”

Joe blinked. Then raised his mylarized visor to give himself an unfiltered look. “You mean
there
.”

Joe wasn't sure what he'd seen—a flash of pink, just as likely the result of some fast-moving solar particle ripping through his optic nerve—but he felt compelled to check it out. Hell, this was the one un-programmed moment in all of the Apollo EVAs. Enjoy it!

They hopped and shuffled toward the shadowed face of a boulder the size of a bus. “Maybe it's ice,” Chuck said.

In the shadows, protected by a shelf of granite for God knew how many thousands, millions, possibly billions of
years, was what looked to Joe to be a jumbled collection of pink pillars and related rubble—like the ruins of a Roman villa seen on a college trip to Herculaneum.

The substance had flat surfaces…not just crystalline facets, though even in the first adrenalized flush of discovery he was ready to consider that it might be natural. But each time he blinked, breathed, and counted, the material looked…artificial. Certainly it was like nothing they expected to find on the lunar surface. (Years later, seeing the destruction of the planet Krypton in the first
Superman
movie, Joe would literally stand up in the theater, thinking he was looking at the Aitken Coral.)

The Alpha broke the silence. “How much longer to AOS?” Acquisition of signal, the return of contact with mission control.