The Moon and the Other Page 13

  He looked down the alley where Alois had met his own reckoning. Something moved there. A dog was nosing around amid the trash. Erno lifted his head, got to his feet, and went over to it. It was his neighbor Brian.

  “What are you doing here?” Erno asked.

  The dog raised his narrow white face. “Good evening, sir,” he muttered. “I smell something.”

  On the ground, a discarded paper twitched. There were few small animals in this colony, not even birds—not in this misbegotten place, where they didn’t even have a real ecology, just people. Brian tensed, ears laid back. “Stay!” Erno said, grabbing the dog’s shirt collar. He reached forward, pushed aside the paper, and there, clenched into a fist, lay Alois’s artificial hand.

  “May I have it?” the dog whined.

  “No. It’s all right—I’ll take care of it.” Erno reached into his pocket, pulled out his last quarter, and slipped it into Brian’s breast pocket. “Buy yourself a biscuit.”

  The dog looked uncertain, then raised his ears and walked away, nails clicking on the pavement.

  Erno poked the hand with his finger. As soon as he touched it, it fell open. In the dim light Erno could make out that the wrist was sticky with some fluid that was not blood. This was not some cheap servo. For one thing, it had independent power.

  Erno picked the hand up and shoved it inside his shirt. Limp, it made a bulge that he hid by holding his arm against his side. It was warm. He could feel the fluid against his skin.

  Behind the hotel desk Anadem sprawled on the chaise in her office. He was crossing the lobby as quietly as he could when she called out to him, “Your rent!”

  “Back in five!” he said.

  He raced up the steps. Laughter floated from Tessa and Therese’s room. Outside of Alois’s suite he took out the hand and held its palm against the doorplate. The latch sounded and Erno went inside. The lights came up.

  He’d expected some degree of comfort, even luxury. Instead, soycake wrappers lay scattered on the floor amid the stale smell of cigarettes. A single chair, a designer piece that once must have cost a lot of money, stood in the center of the living room beside a small table and a lamp. The bedroom held a gel mat and some boxes. Searching, Erno found a tray of jewelry, some of which he recognized Alois having worn. In the bathroom were a bottle of expensive cologne and several blisters of over-the-counter anti-aging drugs. On the table beside the chair in the living room lay a journal. Erno tabbed it open to the most recent entry.

  From this is born a debate: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. It may be answered that one should want to be both; but because it is difficult to unite those emotions, when you must have one of the two it is much safer to be feared than loved . . . because love is kept through a bond of obligation which men, being corruptible, may break at the first whisper of private interest; but fear is kept by a dread of punishment, which never fails.

  The closet was filled with suits, shirts, pants. When Erno pulled them out he noticed how many had patched linings and frayed cuffs. He put on one of the least worn jackets—a little large in the chest, but a decent fit. Shoes stood ranked along the floor. He rummaged through them. The ones he’d thought were leather just had a microlayer over synthetics.

  In the toe of a worn slipper, Erno found sixty-three ducats in cash.

  As he got off his knees, stuffing the money into an inside jacket pocket, he noticed three bugs, fixed motionless on the wall, their microcams trained on him. He had a bad moment before he assured himself no one cared enough to be watching.

  He loaded Alois’s jewelry into his pockets. It would be better if he did not stay in the hotel that night; Alois might return, and Erno certainly did not want to face him. Good-bye, Hotel Gijon. In the morning he would pawn Alois’s jewelry and catch the next train out of Mayer.

  As he surveyed the suite before leaving, he saw the artificial hand on the table where he had laid it. At the last minute, on impulse, he wrapped it in a cravat, put it inside his shirt, and buttoned his jacket over it.

  When he came down the stairs, Anadem blocked his path. “Your rent, Erno. Now.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a twenty-ducat note. “Does that cover it?”

  Anadem raised an eyebrow. “Where did you—”

  Over her shoulder, Erno saw two people enter the lobby: Luis and the woman. The woman had a bruise on her temple.

  Anadem noticed Erno looking past her and turned.

  “Does Alois Reuther live here?” Luis asked.

  “Who wants to know?” Anadem said.

  The man studied her calmly. “Some friends of Monsieur Blanc.” He locked eyes with Erno for a moment. If he remembered Erno from the alley, his face did not reveal it. “Don’t you have something else to do?”

  Erno lowered his gaze and headed for the door.

  “Your change?” Anadem said.

  “Keep it, on account—for next week,” Erno said.

  They’d be in Alois’s room in minutes. They’d find the rifled jewelry box, and maybe they’d put two and two together. Or the bugs—maybe they’d tap them and see that he had the hand. It was seven hours until the pawn shop opened. By then, they would surely be watching the train station.

  Erno walked down to the Port Authority. The station was not busy at this hour, a few passengers waiting for the night train and the homeless preparing to catch an hour or two’s sleep in dark corners. On the board were listed the biweekly cable car to Rima Sitsalis, another to Le Vernier, and the overnight maglev to the southern colonies—Hestodus, Tycho, Clavius, all the way down to Persepolis. A second class ticket to Hestodus cost twenty ducats.

  He went to the machine and bought passage for Hestodus and stuck what he had left into his pocket with the stolen jewelry. He kept the hand under his shirt, pinned between his left arm and his ribs.

  At the entrance to the maglev platform, he tried to act like he knew exactly where he was going and had not the slightest worry in the world. A businessman, his carry-on trotting along behind him, passed through the portal, and Erno followed. He pressed the hand inside his shirt against his belly. As they approached the portal, its fingers twitched.

  He strode down the tube to the train waiting in its airless tunnel. Most of the compartments were occupied. He slid open the door of an empty one and took a seat by the window. Against his belly he felt the warmth of the artificial hand.

  He wondered what Alois was doing at that moment. He’d be dumped out of the clinic as soon as they’d patched him up. He could not know he was penniless. Back at Hotel Gijon, they would be waiting.

  Ten minutes later the doors closed, the umbilicus pulled away, and the maglev began to move. It passed out of the tunnel into the bright lunar day, and as it swooped down from the Carpathians, the Earth, in its first quarter, swung into sight high above them. Erno still was not used to it; on the cable train from Tsander he had been fascinated to see the planet rise above the horizon as they came from the far side to the near.

  That first sight of it had seemed heavy with promise. He was moving into a new world, one where he might take control of his life and make something of himself. It hadn’t happened yet, but there was still time. The Earth hung there still, turquoise and silver, shining with organic life, as it had for several billion years. Imagine a world with air and water on the outside, where you could stand naked and the sun shining down was not an enemy but an embrace.

  But the Earth’s gravity would drag down a lunar-bred boy like Erno—a person of merit—flatten him, and leave him gasping for breath.

  • • • • •

  For ten years Erno had preserved the hand in a sealed, room-temperature cryogenic box, wondering if he should discard it. In moments of fantasy he imagined he might cross paths with Alois again and give it back. He’d been close to broke more than once and had contemplated selling it, if he could find a buyer. He never tried. He could say he was wary of the men who had come seeking it, but in the end that was
n’t why he kept it, and there was certainly no reason why he could not throw it away.

  No, it was something else. The hand was a marker, the physical token of a turning point in his life, the moment when he went from naive boy—though it was a mystery how he might still have considered himself naive after his mother’s death and his exile—to something more. A traitor? A thief? A man?

  It really would have been better for all concerned if he had never stolen it, but that choice was behind him.

  And then fate had arranged it so that Erno found himself in need of a left hand. Absurd. Some people might say this proved there was an order to human events. Erno knew better. But a coincidence so colossal must have some meaning, though he could not imagine what.

  After the surgery Erno felt some pain. Inflammation of his wrist, which at first made him think his body was rejecting the graft, subsided after three days. Within a week he had full function.

  He was not certain about that, however, because he did not know the hand’s functions. The temporary prosthesis he had worn was nothing like this. Mechanical limbs typically were poor substitutes for cloned replacements. Though this one was not exactly mechanical, it did not seem to be biological either. He wondered anew where Alois had gotten it—and what the thugs who had beaten him would do if they were ever to encounter it again.

  On this particular morning Erno crossed the concourse to the office of Eskander Environmental Design & Reconstruction. Behind a brilliant white colonnade in the Iranian style, chrome and black glass and airy floating lights gleamed in the small but luxuriant foyer.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pamson,” said Jamshid. They had hired a young man to take calls and make appointments. He sat at a sleek black desk tucked among the bamboo, bromeliads, and laurel and did next to nothing. The waiting room held a saltwater tidal pool with miniature mangrove, surf grass, sea urchins in the shallows, and blenny swimming between the roots. Above the sofa, pix displayed various Lunar colonies in their full glory—the park at Mayer, the Tycho grassland, the juniper forest of the Society of Cousins. The scent of earth and flowers hung on the air.

  “Good morning, Jamshid. I’m expecting a conference call at fourteen hundred from Mr. Richard of Aristarchus Environment Management and Mr. Lewis of Biological Instantiations. Please put them through to me as soon as they link. Don’t disturb me while I am engaged with them.”

  “Certainly.”

  Erno retreated to his office. He had research to do. He called up a paper titled “Atmospheric Dynamics and Bioregenerative Technologies in Chaparral Mesosystem Type 2 Hydrologic Cycles” and tried to get up to speed.

  Their first client, the Aristillus Water Authority, had come to them with a problem of increased concentrations of selenium and thallium in the water supply. The Cousins engineers Erno had studied under had a relatively simple fix: a Witt algae that ingested heavy metals that could then be filtered out of the water. Erno had engineered the algae and seeded it in the Aristillus recycling plant. Problem solved.

  Their second client was Rima Huygens, where nitrous oxide levels in the air had spiked. The Huygens engineers could find no change in practices to account for it. Erno spent two weeks visiting the colony, and another month frantically running simulations before he figured out that the increase was a matter of a synergy from mutated nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the agricultural soils and a reduction in ozone production because of an olefinic bonded polymer used in construction. He prescribed abandoning the polymer and a wholesale switch to engineered crops that fixed nitrogen themselves.

  So far, so good. The problem was that managing environments was an art—an art based in a century of research—but not a science. Even a closed microenvironment like a lunar colony, designed from scratch, was too complex to regulate solely by computer models. With the help of AIs and moment-to-moment monitoring of air, water, and soil, most colonies could be adjusted day-to-day. But AIs had no ingenuity: When things went sour it took an intuitive understanding of system complexity to figure out the cause. Usually there were remedies, and the Cousins had developed biological interventions more effective than the thud-and-blunder methods of the other colonies. Rather than using chemical testing and substitution, for instance, they created biosensins bacteria to monitor the elements in a biosphere and react when something began to get unbalanced, activating other bacteria to compensate.

  Certain people had the knack for biosphere design. His teachers had decided Erno had this potential, and he’d apprenticed to the premiere ecological designer of his generation, Lemmy Odillesson. But Erno’s exile had ended that training. In truth, he was flying blind half the time, scrambling to keep a step ahead of the problems Amestris’s clients set him. Anxious work, buttressing his lies with actions, but he could honestly say that he had never been happier.

  Amestris had something to do with that. The marriage had been accomplished easily enough, a simple civil ceremony for a ten-year contract. She resigned her position in Persepolis Water and used her savings to establish Eskander Environmental Design.

  Coming from one of Persepolis’s foremost families, and having spent many years working in the largest water mining firm on the moon, which had dealings with virtually every lunar colony, Amestris knew a lot of people. She was full of energy and ideas. She found an apartment for them on Sohrab Square. She took Erno to the best tailor in Persepolis and bought him a wardrobe. She made all the choices, creating for him the image of a slightly unworldly but well-dressed stranger. He was her environmental genius from the Society of Cousins, slender and sexy and weird. At parties she urged him to talk less and touch people on the arm or shoulder. “Physical contact is your trademark,” she told him. “You are Cousins-trained in sex and environmental engineering.”

  “We don’t invade each other’s personal space,” he protested.

  “Neither do we. It’s a social taboo.”

  “How is this going to get us contracts, if I’m alienating people?”

  “You are an alien. That’s your strength.”

  When it came to the work, for the first time in his life Erno possessed genuine authority. He hired two young environmental engineers from the university and set them to executing the plans he designed. He told them what to do, and they did it. Some few men back in the Society might manage a lab or colony service, but here he dealt on equal terms with people of power and influence, the majority of them men, in circumstances no Cousins man had ever encountered. He made decisions. He commanded resources, drew up plans. His mysterious background gave him cachet. When he walked into any room, it was taken for granted that he was superior to those who sought his expertise. Women deferred to him in a dozen ways. He casually wielded the personal power that Tyler had always preached was the essence of being a man.

  The only problem with his new life was that just about everything he had told Amestris about his design experience was fabricated. Every day pushed him further into pretense. He spent nights on databases researching recovery techniques, sweated out presentations, acted like a project was elementary and then buried himself for weeks in desperate analyses. Fixing an environment that had gone out of balance, dealing with bizarre interconnected out-of-control feedback loops, was like dancing on the brink of a canyon.

  He was loading some notes from the paper when Jamshid blinked into sight on his Aide. “Mr. Richard and Mr. Lewis ask the honor of your confidence.”

  “Thank you, Jamshid. Put them through. Once we are in conference, I don’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Yes, Mr. Pamson.” Jamshid disappeared from the window and the entire wall dissolved. Erno was looking into an office lounge. Two men sat in armchairs.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. Erno came out from behind his desk and sat down within the conference envelope.

  Mr. Richard had chosen to appear as a young man in a conservative suit. Lewis was older, handsome, with graying hair. “Good morning,” Richard said. “I hope you won’t mind if we get right down to business.”

>   Aristarchus had invested its agricultural resources in a system of high-CO2 greenhouses in order to increase crop yields. The sealed greenhouses ran at a lower overall atmospheric pressure but higher partial pressure of CO2; cultivators who worked in these environments wore respirators. Erno was familiar with such greenhouses—the only time Erno had met his biological father, he was working in one—but they were a crude way to boost agricultural production.

  Over the last year the atmosphere in Aristarchus had seen an increase in carbon dioxide. Normally this was one of the simplest feedback loops to track down and remedy, but the engineers had not been able to find the cause and the colony had to resort to carbon scrubbers to keep the atmosphere stable.

  “Let me tell you the good news first,” Erno said. “I have found the source of the CO2 imbalance. We may correct that relatively simply.”

  “Excellent. What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is that your ecology is obsolete. You are running a system that was state-of-the-art thirty years ago, but it is a cookbook environment, oversimplified for the size and complexity of your colony. It is terribly out of date.”

  Lewis crossed his arms. “Are you going to lecture us on basic science?”

  “I beg your pardon. The fact remains that your ecology would be fine if you had a population of five hundred or even five thousand people. Instead you have fifty thousand. You have made repeated poor decisions in its expansion, and though I can solve the current carbon dioxide crisis, in six months or a year your system will produce some other problem.”

  In the middle of this speech, the door to Erno’s office opened and Amestris came in.